Darkness over America
Update (September 24): A sympathetic correspondent wrote to tip me off that this blog post has caused me to get added to a list, maintained by MAGA activists and circulated by email, of academics and others who ought to “[face] some consequences for maligning the patriotic MAGA movement.” Needless to say, not only did this post unequivocally condemn Charlie Kirk’s murder, it even mentioned areas of common ground between me and Kirk, and my beefs with the social-justice left. If someone wants to go to the Texas Legislature to get me fired, literally the only thing they’ll have on me is that I “maligned the patriotic MAGA movement,” i.e. expressed political views shared by the majority of Americans.
Still, it’s a strange honor to have had people on both extremes of the ideological spectrum wanting to cancel me for stuff I’ve written on this blog. What is tenure for, if not this?
Another Update: In a dark and polarized age like ours, one thing that gives hope is the prospect of rational agents updating on each others’ knowledge to come to agreement. On that note, please enjoy this recent podcast, in which a 95-year-old Robert Aumann explains Aumann’s agreement theorem in his own words (see here for my old post about it, one of the most popular in the history of this blog).
From 2016 until last week, as the Trump movement dismantled one after another of the obvious bipartisan norms of the United States that I’d taken for granted since my childhood—e.g., the loser conceding an election and attending the winner’s inauguration, America being proudly a nation of immigrants, science being good, vaccines being good, Russia invading its neighbors being bad, corruption (when it occurred) not openly boasted about—I often consoled myself that at least the First Amendment, the motor of our whole system since 1791, was still in effect. At least you could still call Trump a thug and a conman without fear. Yes, Trump constantly railed against hostile journalists and comedians and protesters, threatened them at his rallies, filed frivolous lawsuits against them, but none of it seemed to lead to any serious program to shut them down. Oceans of anti-Trump content remained a click away.
I even wondered whether this was Trump’s central innovation in the annals of authoritarianism: proving that, in the age of streaming and podcasts and social media, you no longer needed to bother with censorship in order to build a regime of lies. You could simply ensure that the truth remained one narrative among others, that it never penetrated the epistemic bubble of your core supporters, who’d continue to be algorithmically fed whatever most flattered their prejudices.
Last week, that all changed. Another pillar of the previous world fell. According to the new norm, if you’re a late-night comedian who says anything Trump doesn’t like, he’ll have the FCC threaten your station’s affiliates’ broadcast licenses, and they’ll cave, and you’ll be off the air, and he’ll gloat about it. We ought to be clear that, even conditioned on everything else, this is a huge further step toward how things work in Erdogan’s Turkey or Orban’s Hungary, and how they were never supposed to work in America.
At risk of stating the obvious:
- I was horrified by the murder of Charlie Kirk. Political murder burns our societal commons and makes the world worse in every way. I’d barely been aware of Kirk before the murder, but it seems clear he was someone with whom I’d have countless disagreements, but also some common ground, for example about Israel. Agree or disagree is beside the point, though. One thing we can all hopefully take from the example of Kirk’s short life, regardless of our beliefs, is his commitment to “Prove Me Wrong” and “Change My Mind”: to showing up on campus (or wherever people are likeliest to disagree with us) and exchanging words rather than bullets.
- I’m horrified that there are fringe figures on social media who’ve celebrated Kirk’s murder or made light of it. I’m fine with such people losing their jobs, as I’d be with those who celebrate any political murder.
- It looks like Kirk’s murderer was a vaguely left-wing lunatic, with emphasis on the “lunatic” part (as often with these assassins, his worldview wasn’t particularly coherent). Jimmy Kimmel was wrong to insinuate that the murderer was a MAGA conservative. But he was “merely” wrong. By no stretch of the imagination did Kimmel justify or celebrate Kirk’s murder.
- If the new rule is that anyone who spreads misinformation gets cancelled by force of government, then certainly Fox News, One America News, Joe Rogan, and MAGA’s other organs of support should all go dark immediately.
- Yes, I’m aware (to put it mildly) that, especially between 2015 and 2020, the left often used its power in media, academia, and nonprofits to try to silence those with whom it disagreed, by publicly shaming them and getting them blacklisted and fired. That was terrible too. I opposed it at the time, and in the comment-171 affair, I even risked my career to stand up to it.
- But censorship backed by the machinery of state is even worse than social-media shaming mobs. As I and many others discovered back then, to our surprised relief, there are severe limits to the practical power of angry leftists on Twitter and Reddit. That was true then, and it’s even truer today. But there are far fewer limits to the power of a government, especially one that’s been reorganized on the principle of obedience to one man’s will. The point here goes far beyond “two wrongs don’t make a right.” As pointed out by that bleeding-heart woke, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, new weapons are being introduced that the other side will also be tempted to use when it retakes power. The First Amendment now has a knife to its throat, as it didn’t even at the height of the 2015-2020 moral panic.
- Yes, five years ago, the federal government pressured Facebook and other social media platforms to take down COVID ‘misinformation,’ some of which turned out not to be misinformation at all. That was also bad, and indeed it dramatically backfired. But let’s come out and say it: censoring medical misinformation because you’re desperately trying to save lives during a global pandemic is a hundred times more forgivable than censoring comedians because they made fun of you. And no one can deny that the latter is the actual issue here, because Trump and his henchmen keep saying the quiet part out loud.
Anyway, I keep hoping that my next post will be about quantum complexity theory or AI alignment or Busy Beaver 6 or whatever. Whenever I feel backed into a corner, however, I will risk my career, and the Internet’s wrath, to blog my nutty, extreme, embarrassing, totally anodyne liberal beliefs that half or more of Americans actually share.
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Comment #1 September 22nd, 2025 at 7:16 am
Having listened to the Kimmel lines a few times, I can’t see that he is insinuating which ‘side’ the gunman came from, only noting that the ‘Right’ were quick to claim he wasn’t one of theirs. Whatever the gunman’s individual political beliefs, his reflexive way of dealing with them was born out of the gun culture he was steeped in.
Comment #2 September 22nd, 2025 at 8:20 am
As person from country where all media (except internet) are under government control I’m afraid of all this in US. I’m not afraid though that Trump will totaly destroy freedom of speech, but it could happen gradualy later with either democrats or republicans.
On the other hand I still want too give little consolation. America is still very far from dictatorship, let alone fascism, in my opinion. Even Russia needed at least 15+ years of one-man rule to achieve this, while free society there has almost never existed in its entire history.
Comment #3 September 22nd, 2025 at 8:20 am
I come here for Quantum Computing, but we always find more urgent things to discuss, so here we are.
I agree with you that this is substantially worse than anything before. Yet, if one looks at the social forces in the same way as one looks at physics (which I do), it was inevitable, like inevitable seems to me that it will become *even much* worse.
The way that I see it, is that like the radio contributed to give us Hitler, social media is (even more strongly) the driving force behind the current situation. At face value everything seems fine: people get a service for free, which is paid by advertisement; to maximize profits, social medias need to improve “engagement”, in other words need to propose you posts which you will read and like. And here comes the problem: you will read and like the most shocking posts in a higher proportion than the regular ones (and social media employs psychologists to make sure they feed you exactly this sort of “crap”, tailored for you — I know some of these people and it’s really scary what they tell me). So you get most shocking posts. This was true since forever, let’s consider only the printing press as one example: first page shocking news boosted sales. What is different now is that instead of a handful of publishers, which needed to balance a somewhat diverse audience, we have a basically infinite number of virtual publishers, one for each reader. So each reader gets its dedicated publisher with its dedicated scoops of shocking news. This alone drives each and every one of the readers to his or her extremes. We are basically “educated to extremism”.
As you said the far-left started this trend and Trump perfected it, but it was brewing since before and it continues to march forward.
And it gets even worse! Face-to-face human encounters dwindle and online interactions become increasingly more hostile and de-humanized (e.g. easier to write f* off to a logo than saying it out loud to somebody looking at your eyes). This also trains us all not only to disrespect, but to see the people who disagree not as Voltaire’s interlocutors, but as dregs of the enemies, not worth of life.
I hope I’m wrong (and Erica Kirk’s forgiveness of the killer may be an example of me being wrong and a glimmer of light in the darkness), but if I’m right things will get much worse before they get better. Sadly I don’t see a way for things to get better, because even with some glimmers of light here and there, the big forces of social media will continue to push as apart. I can only wish social media never happened.
Comment #4 September 22nd, 2025 at 8:24 am
Scott,
“Jimmy Kimmel was wrong to insinuate that the murderer was a MAGA conservative.”
Let’s look at what he said:
“MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them”
This shooter was raised by a MAGA family by all accounts. The father is MAGA. The mother is MAGA. The Grandfather – who owned the gun used to kill Kirk – is MAGA. He is a product of a very MAGA family and the gun culture that goes with it. He was raised and shaped in solid red Utah by a MAGA family and culture.
Yes, it does seem that the shooter departed from his MAGA roots and was objecting to Kirk’s politics from “the left”, but the question of what tribe this kid belonged to is considerably more nuanced than what the MAGA crowd would have us believe.
Jimmy Kimmel is just a comedian. I don’t _expect_ him to have the most nuanced and balanced speech on questions like this. But he didn’t out and out LIE about this shooter coming from MAGA culture. The shooter unquestionably was raised/reared/influenced quite deeply by a very MAGA family.
MAGA often resorts to violence as a means of attacking its perceived enemy. He learned from this.
Comment #5 September 22nd, 2025 at 8:28 am
Thanks Scott.
Comment #6 September 22nd, 2025 at 8:30 am
At the risk of also stating the obvious, half of Americans agreeing with you will not suffice. In 1933, roughly one third of the population agreed with the Nazis, one third disagreed (many of these favoring Stalin instead), and one third chose to remain silent, muddle through, or make arrangements with whoever wins. We all know the final outcome.
I don’t wish being stuck between Gaza nutters and Maga nutters, and each will say that they are the ‘good ones’. Truly religious might pray for a tidal wave of wisdom, but most prayers seem for crusades and jihads instead. Red, black, and white color schemes seem to become ever more popular. And the world seems more on fire every year. Where do we go from here?
Comment #7 September 22nd, 2025 at 8:45 am
Well said. We are descending into Temu fascism, where there is always “one simple trick” to advance authoritarian control. Don’t like Kimmel making fun of you? Oh! Just falsely claim that he celebrated political murder. Want to make trans peoples’ lives harder, just out of hate? Easy! Just bring an emergency shadow docket case about the immediate, irreparable harm the government faces from letters on a passport.
It’s all disingenuous, and nobody actually believes the claims. They’re just incantations to get the desired outcomes. It’s as absurd as the “she turned me into a newt” guy in Holy Grail, but not nearly as funny because it is an intentional attack on classical liberal democracy. These people will pretend to believe anything as long as it provides a fig leaf for the brutality they have already decided to engage in.
Comment #8 September 22nd, 2025 at 8:53 am
Hi Scott,
Just wanted to wish you and your family Shana Tova and Chag Sameach. I hope the year ahead will be a good one and that the current darkness in the world will begin to recede.
Comment #9 September 22nd, 2025 at 9:30 am
The leftist hysteria over Kimmel’s cancellation completely misinterprets first amendment jurisprudence.
At risk of stating the obvious:
Legally, the electromagnetic spectrum is a “commons.” It is a public resource managed by the United States. No TV station or news channel or entertainment company “owns” the frequency they broadcast on. They essentially “lease” it from the United States government. So: I can’t just set up my own TV or radio broadcast tower and start broadcasting without a license. That’s not an infringement on my speech rights. Freedom of speech does not protect you in broadcasting however and whatever you want over radio or TV frequencies, because those frequencies are a limited public resource.
The first amendment protects saying the word “fuck.” It protects pornography. It does not protect saying “fuck” on broadcast TV or broadcasting pornographic content. That’s because no one owns the airwaves. The electromagnetic spectrum is a public resource managed by the United States; use of it is a licensed privilege conditioned on serving the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” The Communications Act requires a license to “use or operate any apparatus” for radio transmission and authorizes the FCC to grant and renew licenses only if the public interest will be served. That legal structure (license in lieu of ownership) means broadcasters are public trustees of a scarce, publicly controlled medium, not proprietors of a private platform.
Here’s a few Supreme Court cases on speech rights as they relate to broadcast media:
FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978): upheld the FCC’s ability to sanction daytime broadcast of “indecent” (not legally obscene) material because broadcasting is uniquely pervasive and accessible to children.
Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969): affirmed that, due to spectrum scarcity and public-licensing, broadcasters do not enjoy the same unabridgeable editorial rights as print; the government may impose public-interest obligations (there, the fairness doctrine rules).
National Broadcasting Co. v. United States (1943): confirmed that no one has a First Amendment right to use radio facilities without a license; the Communications Act’s “public interest, convenience, or necessity” standard and related FCC rules are constitutional.
Columbia Broadcasting System v. Democratic National Committee (1973): rejected a claimed First Amendment “right of access” to purchase editorial ads on broadcast stations, emphasizing the different First Amendment balance for a government-licensed medium.
FCC v. League of Women Voters (1984): struck down one overbroad ban on editorializing by public broadcasters that took federal funds, but reiterated that broadcast is subject to a distinct (more regulable) First Amendment framework tied to spectrum management and licensing.
Now, the execrable Jimmy Kimmel is free to post his obscene rants on the internet. He’s even free to say them on cable. But he does not have an unalienable right to broadcast them on the public airwaves. Shortly after a horrific assassination, he used his platform to make light of the dead, to attack Charlie’s politics, and to spread dangerous and divisive lies about the assassin. Political violence poses a severe threat to the civic fabric of America. It’s entirely within the FCC’s purview to stop divisive actors from spreading lies on public broadcasts in the aftermath of political terrorism. For instance, after Bill Maher said the 9/11 hijackers were brave (while the US military were the real cowards) shortly after 9/11, Bush’s FCC exerted similar pressure to get ABC to take him off the air.
Comment #10 September 22nd, 2025 at 9:37 am
Actually, this particular darkness dates from 1934 when the FCC was created in the first place. Power corrupts, and the power to regulate what people can say would appear to be directly in violation of the First Amendment.
Comment #11 September 22nd, 2025 at 9:42 am
Cowboy #9,
Trump just said that inordinate criticism of him should be illegal.
“I’m a very strong person for free speech…The newscasts are against me…they’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. I think that’s really illegal, personally…When somebody is given, 97% of the stories are bad about a person, that’s no longer free speech. That’s just cheating.”
https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/president-trump-on-free-speech/5172635
Give it up. Trump never cared about free speech and neither do his supporters. It’s all a con and always has been.
Comment #12 September 22nd, 2025 at 9:45 am
Aron #8: Shana Tova to your family as well!
Comment #13 September 22nd, 2025 at 9:52 am
Angry cowboy #9: The issue, again, is that there’s not even a pretense of these rules being applied evenhandedly. To take one of 10,000 examples, no right-wing broadcaster was threatened with losing broadcast rights for laughing about the murderous attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which is much worse than what Kimmel did. Indeed, this is so obvious that I can no more treat your arguments in good faith than I’d treat the schoolyard bully’s “stop punching yourself.”
I’m open to the argument, along the lines of J Storrs Hall #10, that in an age of limitless streaming, the FCC no longer serves an essential function at all and should be disbanded.
Comment #14 September 22nd, 2025 at 10:10 am
Nick Fuentes leads a band that refer to themselves as “groypers”. They are alt-right, and their one departure from mainstream MAGA is that they are interested in alternative sexuality. Fuentes himself is probably gay, and is famous for publicly going on a date with a publicly out furry.
There are quite a few trans people born to conservative families. Because being trans is not a political statement or a whim, or even an ideology. It’s just something that happens to human beings.
Robinson was involved with someone who is trans, and took offense at what Kirk said about trans people, is what it seems.
Meanwhile, Fuentes avowed goal, stated openly, is to drag the Republican Party further to the right, and to end all elections, among a few statements of his.
Comment #15 September 22nd, 2025 at 10:14 am
WRT “that the other side will also be tempted to use when it retakes power”.
Don’t hold your breath. The rightwing nuts show no limits on cementing in thier power. Anyone taking bets on if the 2026 elections will be held at all?
Comment #16 September 22nd, 2025 at 11:12 am
I’d rather been hoping to read your review of ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everybody Dies’.
Nothing in it you haven’t heard before, I imagine, but the very fact that Eliezer’s given up on trying to be friends with the AI industry and pivoted to trying to start a public panic seems important.
If there’s any important barrier left now between us and superintelligence I’d love to know what you think it is.
I agree that your politics seems to be falling apart in a really nasty way, but it probably won’t have time to go that wrong! Even if y’all manage to cause a full-scale global thermonuclear war at least there’ll probably be some people alive somewhere at the end of it, and maybe it will take them a while to restart the computer industry.
That might actually be the best outcome we can hope for now.
Comment #17 September 22nd, 2025 at 11:39 am
John Lawrence Aspden #16: Already reviewed it, see here.
Comment #18 September 22nd, 2025 at 11:51 am
You write “I’m fine with such people [who celebrated the murder] losing their jobs” but also that the cancel culture “was terrible too”. I agree that the cancel culture is terrible as it undermines free exchange of ideas. However, stopping it must rely on a general principle rather separating normal ideas subject to debate from terrible ideas subject to cancellation; the authorities cannot be relied to tell which is which. Otherwise, you might have no protection from getting fired for (for example) verbally supporting Israel in conducting what your employer considers to be the genocide of Gaza.
Comment #19 September 22nd, 2025 at 11:54 am
To say the obvious:
1. Trump wasn’t president when Paul Pelosi was attacked. The current FCC head wasn’t in charge. So the argument that different FCC attitudes between these two cases reflect bias by the current administration falls flat on its face.
2. “Whataboutism” is a bad argument (it might even be a logical fallacy). “But your side did this” is not a cogent argument about this specific case of Kimmel saying untrue, divisive, and offensive things about a sensitive matter of national importance.
3. The media is overwhelmingly biased against President Trump. Every statistic backs this up (e.g., 90% of cable coverage of Trump is negative). It’s entirely reasonable for the FCC to mandate more viewpoint diversity in broadcast media. Constitutionally as I already explained, broadcast is not treated like newspapers or the internet. In Red Lion, the Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” rules (including a right of reply for personal attacks) on the ground that spectrum scarcity and public licensing justify content obligations that would be impermissible for print. The Court emphasized listeners’ rights to a diversity of views and held that such rules “enhanced rather than abridged” First Amendment interests. In NBC v. United States, the Court had already approved far-reaching “public interest” regulation of programming arrangements as a lawful outgrowth of the licensing regime. Together, these precedents permit viewpoint-diversity obligations in broadcasting that would fail for other media.
The media is sick. It’s overwhelmingly politically biased, and broadcasts divisive, dangerous lies about our President. It’s high time the FCC step in and exercise its constitutional authority to protect public interest in broadcasting. I hope this is not a “schoolyard bully comment!”
Comment #20 September 22nd, 2025 at 12:42 pm
#10, #13
I’m open to the endless streaming argument too, but how long before they come for that?
I wouldn’t even be surprised to find the Supreme Court would somehow find some law that applies to the Internet too.
But even that might hardly matter since all of the big players are self-censoring anyway.
Comment #21 September 22nd, 2025 at 1:22 pm
Raoul #15: I strongly advise against using the language of “the 2026 elections will not be held at all”. Looking at backsliding democracies such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, even Russia, it is clear that elections are being held regularly. They are not being cancelled, and often are still free, “just” are no longer fair.
Why morally it may seem that the distinction between unfair elections and no elections is a technicality, it is important to have a very precise message in these issues. I see the consequences of imprecise language regarding the risk for elections play out in Israel: while the government has ambitious plans to hollow out Israel’s democracy, they will be content with making the minimal amount of changes to the election system which will ensure they stay in power (and which turns out to be crucial but not too big changes). People in the opposition keeps saying that “there will be no elections”, which is answered by: “this is nonsense, of course there will be an election” — a true statement. And the result is fatigue in a large swaths of the population that see the opposition as delusional alarmists.
Explaining that there will be elections but these will not be fair is harder than saying “elections will be cancelled”. But imprecise language hurts your credibility and eventually your goal.
Comment #22 September 22nd, 2025 at 1:35 pm
Angry cowboy #9: Good comment. I didn’t know that about Bill Maher. Lately I like some of his videos but now I understand why half the comments express shock that he’s actually talking sense.
Comment #23 September 22nd, 2025 at 1:48 pm
Ori #21:
What is imprecise? Various people have predicted that Trump will cancel elections. I am not one of them, but it certainly would not surprise me. Thus those that are into gambling have probably set odds that Trump will or will not cancel elections in 2026 or some other time.
Anyway, I agree with you that the Republicians are having so much success with rigging elections that it might be overkill and a bad look to actually cancel them. Or, how about getting a law passed that he can run for a third term, but Obama cannot?
Anyone know if Las Vegas bookies have posted odds on such events?
Comment #24 September 22nd, 2025 at 1:56 pm
Angry cowboy #9 and Martin Mertens #22: Bill Maher has been so reasonable about almost everything that I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt with his long-ago comments. It’s true that, in sacrificing their own lives for religious eschatology, the Sept. 11 hijackers showed a twisted form of “courage” that secular Westerners can barely even understand, and that this was a crucial thing to understand about them. That obviously doesn’t make them right or worth emulating (!), and I’m sure Maher, who often goes out on a limb to condemn jihadist ideology, didn’t mean to say as much.
Comment #25 September 22nd, 2025 at 2:48 pm
Kimmel Live returns tomorrow …
Comment #26 September 22nd, 2025 at 2:52 pm
Angry Cowboy #19
To say the obvious:
1. On Paul Pelosi, Trump has said “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco — how’s her husband doing, anybody know?… And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house — which obviously didn’t do a very good job.” Ha-ha; good one. Wherever the line is for acceptability of late-night comedy, SURELY it must be short of political comments made by the sitting President while he ran for office.
2. Freedom of speech explicitly protects government action against untrue, divisive statements of “national sensitivity,” particularly by comedians. This was a bipartisan position until literally last week. If you want news shows to have more conservative opinions represented that’s fine; it’s not the same topic as pulling a comedian’s broadcast license due to criticizing Trump’s political party too much.
3. Reagan was who got rid of the fairness doctrine, paving the way for the current status quo–where most of mainstream media is noticeably left-wing, with right-wingers gravitating to a very small number of very conservative sources. I think wanting to bring back some sort of normalcy is an extremely popular position, though it’s unclear if that’s in any way possible.
But, the FCC threatening to pull the broadcast license of people who Trump feels are “unfair” to him is textbook authoritarianism, and has nothing to do with any kind of fairness doctrine.
I can’t help but point out that Trump’s poor performance isn’t helping him any. The headline news for this past weekend (especially for anyone vaguely involved in tech, science, or academia) was a sudden, extreme change in H1B visa policy , followed by panic as H1B holders tried to get back into the country, followed by the administration releasing that actually current H1B holders aren’t affected. That’s not good policy or good leadership; leaving out that crucial detail is just a massive administrative mistake regardless of your political leanings. Who’s going to praise him for that?
To answer my own question, I just checked Fox news. No H1B news; their pro-Trump article is an announcement that he’s going to announce the “answer to autism.” Boy we’re really missing out on the mainstream media not giving that thoughtful position enough attention…
Comment #27 September 22nd, 2025 at 2:53 pm
Raoul Ohio #23
This histerical hyperbolization is one of the main reasons US has this troubles now. No US isn’t dictatorship, it isn’t “falling empire” (it is neither empire, nor falling), no it isn’t faschist, no it isn’t communist or socialist. This nonsensical takes from both sides is what creates society divide and pushes most crazy and radical politicians forward. It helped Trump a lot when both sides push this vision of “America is dying becouse everywhere are faschists/communists”
Ori #21
It is also interesting how you put Poland and Russia in one cathegory as “backsliding” democracy. Poland is perfect democracy without any reason to expect it becoming anything else in near future and Russia is 100% faschist dictatorship. People in US simply can not understand what is dictatorship is I think.
Comment #28 September 22nd, 2025 at 3:58 pm
Scott, notice how Cowboy just ignores that Trump literally said that inordinate criticism of him is “illegal” in his mind? He’s obviously not operating in good faith. Trump gives two shits about the First Amendment. People still supporting him after he said criticizing him is illegal? They give two shits too.
Comment #29 September 22nd, 2025 at 4:02 pm
Wireless spectrum is still a scarce resource. We will probably use less and less of it for broadcast TV but you still have to make sure that different groups aren’t transmitting on the some frequencies. There was a libertarian proposal to “privatize” it which I didn’t read, but I imagine it’d look like when a city sells off the right to collect highway tolls or parking meter fees. It might make it a bit harder for the government to censor speech it doesn’t like, but it might also make it less transparent.
Comment #30 September 22nd, 2025 at 7:21 pm
Dear Scott,
You said it yourself:
“between 2015 and 2020, the left often used its power in media, academia, and nonprofits to try to silence those with whom it disagreed, by publicly shaming them and getting them blacklisted and fired”
Thus Trump did not invent firing (and now, apparently, hiring back) a comedian for tasteless comments. This is neither the first nor the worst time this happened. Ask Bill Maher about that.
“five years ago, the federal government pressured Facebook and other social media platforms to take down COVID ‘misinformation,’ some of which turned out not to be misinformation at all”
Thus Trump didn’t invent government pressure either. Facebook and Twitter were pressured by FBI to suppress not only COVID data but also Hunter Biden’s notebook on the eve of elections, thus affecting the outcome. If you ask me, FBI pressuring media and social media to suppress evidence on the eve of elections was much worse (and, apparently, more effective) than Trump’s meager attempts to suppress the tasteless schadenfreude. This is how dictatorship really emerge, by using misinformation and censorship to fool people into voting one way or another. In contrast, what Trump did is counterproductive for his cause: Kimmel’s firing diverted the public outrage about the leftists’ joy of someone’s death into the outrage about somebody getting fired for that.
What’s happening now is no worse than what leftists have been doing for years. I’d rather not speculate why even reasonable Democrats react much stronger to what Trump is doing than to what leftists were doing since 2015, even though leftists were, and still are, far more extreme and more effective in media manipulation.
Comment #31 September 22nd, 2025 at 8:50 pm
I am calling BS on the meme that mainstream media is left oriented. Most media is center oriented, sometimes with a progressive (as opposed to leftist) slant, but surely nothing compared to the hard right stuff from Fox News. In fact, most mainstream media are now totally afraid to even report on astounding events in the administration that a decade ago would have been showstoppers.
Comment #32 September 22nd, 2025 at 8:57 pm
Media history 1925 — 2025:
For around a century, most media were in a mainstream that included most Democrat and Republician positions. For the last few decades, well organized and funded organizations, such as the Heritage Fundation, Fox Media, etc., have worked tirelessly to shift the mainstream. The goal is transfering a larger fraction of wealth to themselves. It is hard to get people to vote to screw themselves, so groups that are willing to vote to give away their money have been targeted. This plan worked moderately well all along, and has really taken off lately.
Comment #33 September 22nd, 2025 at 9:29 pm
A bigger point is that legacy media isn’t all that important anyway. Most people get their “news” and political discussion from X, Rogan and the like, which are decidedly *not* left wing. Even in the dying work of TV, Fox rules supreme. The idea that the left controls the media is wrong-at least with regard from the ascendant media sources.
Comment #34 September 22nd, 2025 at 10:50 pm
Tyler Robinson engraved groyper and homophobic slogans on shell casings. The groypers were angry at Charlie Kirk for not being *further* to the right, and for even holding these “debates”. I’m not sure where you’re getting the left-wing thing from, except for early Republican reactions that were entirely speculative.
Some more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groypers#Groyper_War
(I suspect he deviates from the groypers on some matters of sexual politics, but the rest seems to be hard-right stuff.)
Left-wing people do sometimes commit gun violence but it is *way* less common.
Comment #35 September 23rd, 2025 at 3:12 am
Hey Scott, I recently learned about “U±”. It’s the unitary group with the additional requirement that elements must have real determinant, eg their determinant must be +1 or -1.
Not much of a difference. But it strikes me as metaphysically more accurate to think of the (practical) QC **as a whole** as implementing it, not U, because global phase is unobservable. There’s another nice thing which is that I believe “unitary reflections” can be used to construct U± but not U.
I appreciate one needs to teach U anyway because when you stick on one extra qubit, “global” (not really global anymore) phase becomes relevant to the interaction with that qubit. Though apart from that, I know of no other reason not to use U±. Is there one?
Comment #36 September 23rd, 2025 at 3:44 am
> Whenever I feel backed into a corner, however, I will risk my career
Well, you always can go to Poland, as some of our pseudo-left friends advice to do to all Jews. Funny enough, despite political turbulence, at the moment Poland seems to have one of the highest levels of freedom of speech among western countries. So you are welcome (I think, Warsaw university would be more than happy).
Comment #37 September 23rd, 2025 at 7:32 am
Raul #15 and Ori #21
I agree with Ori that the wrong rhetoric is hurtful. Yet the situation is dire. Even Erik Siebert (former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, nominated by Trump in early 2025), who had worked closely with Trump’s top DOJ leaders this year, was basically forced to resign since he could not legally charge people “at random” as the president wanted.
This is obviously even worse than people being fired for freedom of speech since now we are talking about prosecution!!!
Comment #38 September 23rd, 2025 at 8:11 am
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/entertainment/jimmy-kimmel-returning
Hurray, fascism has been defeated! Or was it never there in the first place?
Comment #39 September 23rd, 2025 at 9:49 am
Vladimir #38: Popular outrage worked this time, and made the cost to Disney of capitulating to the FCC higher than the cost of defying it. They’ll obviously try again.
(If you don’t believe me, believe Garry Kasparov, who knows something about authoritarian regimes, is no woke, and has been explaining this to anyone who’ll listen.)
Comment #40 September 23rd, 2025 at 11:03 am
Scott #39
It seems quite unlikely to me that a wink from the FCC sufficed to get a $200b company to instantly capitulate, only to reverse course a couple of days later. Perhaps it tipped the scales when combined with Sinclair, declining viewership, public outrage over Kimmel’s comments, and him talking back to his bosses.
Comment #41 September 23rd, 2025 at 11:10 am
Angry Cowbody #9
Amid all your rationalizing legal citations, this is the bit that reveals the truth: it’s about hurt feelings. Naturally when somebody on your side is murdered it’s a horrific political assassination and beyond the pale to treat with anything other than the utmost seriousness. When it’s the other side they should get a sense of humour. Similarly, when a liberal comedian makes a statement that turns out to be inaccurate it’s “dangerous and divisive lies”; when Trump talks about immigrants eating cats & dogs or any of the numerous other slanders he speaks daily we should stop being such snowflakes. I’m not buying it. Why the hell shouldn’t Kimmel attack Kirk’s politics? That’s what freedom of speech is about. Kirk’s politics were shitty in the extreme and I won’t be cowed into pretending I have to respect his opinions just because he got shot defending them. No MAGA supporter I know of would ever show respect to the views of liberals gunned down by right wing extremists, least of of Charlie Kirk.
Comment #42 September 23rd, 2025 at 11:30 am
Hamish Todd #35: It is true that the global phase of a unitary operator has no physical significance in QM, and therefore its determinant doesn’t either. But that doesn’t imply that there’s any reason to restrict the determinant to the real values ±1. You could go further and restrict it to only +1, which would give you the special unitary group. But even then, you would still have some unphysical phase freedom remaining: multiplying a unitary operator in $SU(n)$ by any $n$th root of unity returns another, (potentially) formally distinct but always physically equivalent element of $SU(n)$. So restricting to real determinants seems quite arbitrary and pointless.
If you want to completely get rid of the phase freedom and get a unique representation for all physical equivalent unitary operators, then you need to use elements of the projective unitary group, which is derived from the usual unitary group via a more subtle construction than just restricting the allowed values of the determinant. Each element of the projective unitary group gives a unique mapping between projective rays in the Hilbert space (i.e. physical states).
Comment #43 September 23rd, 2025 at 11:39 am
Scott,
Before US takes many more steps towards the abyss, you might consider relocating to Switzerland, which is not bad at all, especially for scientists.
All the best wishes,
Marco
Comment #44 September 23rd, 2025 at 12:15 pm
Everyone: “Angry Cowboy” has submitted a long comment about how Charlie Kirk’s murder changes all the rules, the First Amendment is not a suicide pact, and the only chance for America to survive is for the government to completely dominate and destroy the left. He says that any comparison to (eg) all the right-wing commentators who made light of the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi is obscene, since those commentators were obviously just joking. I’ve left the comment in moderation, although if other readers tell me they want to see it, I might display it for your edification.
Yes, this seems to be where MAGA World’s headspace is right now, which sort of makes my point for me.
Comment #45 September 23rd, 2025 at 12:20 pm
Marco #43: Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve enjoyed all my visits to Switzerland and have wonderful friends there. Until I see my family in danger, though, my preference is to stay here in Austin and try to do my small part for the return to sanity that America and the world need.
Comment #46 September 23rd, 2025 at 7:16 pm
Cowboy,
Yes, broadcast media is not constitutionally protected speech in the same way as newspapers, films, internet posts, the spoken word, etc. Censorship of profanity is the obvious example.
I’m familiar with the legal arguments surrounding TV and radio frequencies as a public resource.
That said, please step outside the world of legal technicalities for a moment, and imagine a world in which late-night comedians and news anchors are stripped of their broadcast licenses for criticizing the President.
In such a world, broadcast media effectively becomes state media. And then we look like every third-world country with shitty press freedom. Do you want to live in that America? I don’t.
A free media is one of the institutions that makes America great. If you believe in American greatness, if you don’t want us to deteriorate and become one of the “shithole countries,” if you don’t want us to be like Russia or China or Iran, if you believe in the rule of law and our institutions, please support a free media.
I agree that there are problems with media bias in the US, and I’m no fan of Kimmel! But there are ways to address this that won’t hurt American freedoms and our standing in the world. For instance, the free market! Cable news channels are becoming increasingly unpopular, and executives at MSNBC and CBS have already started hiring people with more diverse politics to appeal to a broader audience. To survive, networks will have to broaden their appeal with the public. That’s the free market, which is the American way.
Comment #47 September 23rd, 2025 at 8:06 pm
Colbert and Kimmel are still on the air. The sky is not falling. It is still legal to criticize the President. Most newspapers and TV channels attack Trump on a regular basis. Meanwhile YouTube is just now reinstating creators who were banned in 2021 for covid content that met with disapproval from the Biden administration.
Comment #48 September 23rd, 2025 at 8:55 pm
Roger Schlafly #47: Yes, it’s still legal to criticize the president, but not for any lack of trying on this president’s part—possibly the first time one needs to add that qualification in the 250-year history of the republic, or at least since the Alien and Sedition Acts (or during major wars, with the restrictions ending after the wars). All the same, I appreciate that you, unlike your comrade “Angry Cowboy,” at least implicitly accept that it ought to be legal to criticize this president.
Comment #49 September 23rd, 2025 at 11:11 pm
Roger Schlafly,
“Most newspapers and TV channels attack Trump on a regular basis”.
Are you tripping? Trump does 100 things a day that a decade ago would been stop the press, banner headline events, and now they are barely mentioned. This is largely due to the press bending over backwards to avoid attacks from people such as you.
Comment #50 September 23rd, 2025 at 11:32 pm
Tim #34, groypers are not anti-fascist, whereas the slogans on the shell casings included “catch this, fascist”, and the chorus of the anti-fascist song “Bella ciao”.
Comment #51 September 24th, 2025 at 5:20 am
While your caveats are appreciated, the fact that the widely-celebrated cold blooded murder of a national political speaker is merely a footnote in your post, whereas Jimmy Kimmel being off the air got you sufficiently incensed to make a blog post, is highly salient of why MAGA are so pissed right now.
Turning the temperature down would’ve required focusing on a sustained message of “don’t murder people over minor political disagreements”. But the left couldn’t do that for even a week. Nope, now it’s Disney boycotts for Jimmy Kimmel! I don’t know how to proceed towards reconciliation here. First I need my opponents to really care about my life, but they reveal they don’t.
Comment #52 September 24th, 2025 at 7:01 am
For the record, these were the right-wing reactions after the slaughter of Minnesota lawmakers in June 2025 (state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, both died. State senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were seriously injured).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_legislators#Right-wing_misinformation
Many prominent right-wing and far-right figures falsely claimed that the suspect, Vance Boelter, was left-wing, a Democrat, and an ally of Governor Tim Walz:
Elon Musk shared tweets saying that “the left” had killed Hortman and tweeted, “The far left is murderously violent.”
U.S. senator Mike Lee tweeted multiple times that the suspect was a “Marxist” and blamed the assassination on Walz.
Donald Trump Jr. claimed the suspect “seems to be a leftist” and “was a Democrat”.
U.S. senator Bernie Moreno and U.S. representative Derrick Van Orden both suggested that the shooter was a far-left extremist.
Large right-wing social media accounts began spreading similar misinformation:
Right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich suggested that Walz had ordered the assassinations.
Laura Loomer called Boelter one of “Walz’s goons” and called for Walz to be “detained” and “interrogated” by the FBI.
YouTuber Benny Johnson claimed the suspect was a “Tim Walz associate”.
Other posts falsely claimed that a photo of a man at a No Kings protest in Texas was that of the suspect
Comment #53 September 24th, 2025 at 7:09 am
Anonymous Ocelot #51: From my perspective, the daily news is an endless litany of horrific and tragic and often enraging events of varying political valences. School shootings, terrorist attacks, wildfires, plane crashes, and in this case, the assassination of a right-wing influencer who I was vaguely aware of by a lone evil lunatic. I don’t normally issue public statements on these tragedies because I’m not a politician or a news organization, I’m a quantum computing theorist with a blog. With essentially every mainstream figure correctly denouncing the murder, I don’t see any sense in which “the left” as a class has declared open season to murder “the right” as a class, any more than I saw the opposite with the multiple lone-wolf murderous attacks on Democratic politicians that we also saw over the last few years, and which I also didn’t blog about when they happened. What I am seeing, on the other hand, is the MAGA movement constructing a fantasy that this is happening in order to further erode the norms and liberties that have made America an exceptional nation.
Comment #54 September 24th, 2025 at 8:10 am
“What I am seeing, on the other hand, is the MAGA movement constructing a fantasy that this is happening”
Exactly. Part of the fantasy is constructing lies or conspiracy theories when the facts don’t conform to the fantasy. Take the example of the killing of Melissa Hortman this last year (for which MAGA *did* make light of, and for whom Republicans did nothing to honor after her death). MAGA still tries to claim that her murderer, Vance Boelter, was a left winger, appointed by Walz, who shot her and her husband because they voted with Republicans on an immigration issue. In fact, he wasn’t appointed by Walz, he applied and was granted an unpaid advisory role by Dayton which was renewed by Walz (neither had any interactions with him-these positions were meaningless CV stuffers of no consequence that many of both parties applied for and were granted). He also was a registered Republican who his best buddy said was hardcore MAGA, had a list of dozens of Democrats to kill found in his car (so no, this had nothing to do with the immigration vote that Boelter probably didn’t even know about), and can be found railing against abortion and transgender people on video. Or we can point to Jan. 6 where police officers like Brian Sicknick died, but of course that as a false flag operation by the left. Or the guy who shot at Trump in the summer of 2024-a registered Republican from a Republican family…but that was left wing violence because he (seemingly in response to a solicitation) donated a small amount of $ to a democratic cause. Never mind that he unsubscribed to the group he donated to, had more online searches about Biden and Democrats wrt to his attempted violence, had posted anti-Immigrant things on X etc.
And Kimmel was right about one thing-in a very real sense Robinson was “one of them” in that he came from a gun loving MAGA family. He may have done the awful thing he did from a left-wing perspective, but the means to do what he did were forged in the cauldron of the right.
Comment #55 September 24th, 2025 at 8:19 am
Scott 52,
I haven’t seen any evidence that Tyler Robinson was a “lunatic,” like John Hinckley or something. All the evidence points in one direction, that Tyler was of sound mind, and he was genuinely enraged at Kirk because of Kirk’s anti-LGBT stances. Tyler was gay, in a relationship with a transgender person, and believed that Charlie Kirk was spreading hate towards gay and transgender people. None of this suggests the mental world of a paranoid schizophrenic; it all makes logical sense: Charlie Kirk was anti-LGBT, and that’s why Tyler killed him.
Comment #56 September 24th, 2025 at 8:37 am
Sorry for being hyperbolic in my last post. My ire is not really with you.
(Though I must quibble that your two examples are irrelevant. The Minnesota politicians were not national figures, and I saw no one on the right celebrating their seats. Paul Pelosi was not killed, and yes, that matters. That’s what makes this more significant even than the Trump assassination attempts).
According to a recent survey, 22% of young people under 30 think the murder was justified. I know you can relate to the feeling this gives me, as the number of people in that cohort who support Hamas is probably 100%.
This is after the decades of discrimination and ostracism that conservatives have faced in academia and white-collar workplaces.
And for what? For not wanting Asians to be discriminated against in admissions/hiring? For wanting a closed border and limited immigration? For supporting the continued existence of one of the most scientifically productive state in the world and its people (that’s Israel)?
Yes, there are multiple dangers here. Eroding constitutional norms damages our republic greatly. But for that, I primarily blame a doddering congress that couldn’t legislate its way out of a paper bag (but was happy to legislate us into a straitjacket of regulatory red tape). The border really was an emergency and the actions Trump has taken there were absolutely necessary. Other of his actions are less necessary, and I don’t support them. But as I said, there are multiple dangers, and right now I’m much more afraid of the Islamist forces that are trying to destroy this country.
Anyway. There’s my rant. I hold no ire for you and respect you a lot. I just wish you’d take our common for more seriously as a threat.
Comment #57 September 24th, 2025 at 9:00 am
Mitchell Porter #50
“groypers are not anti-fascist, whereas the slogans on the shell casings included “catch this, fascist”, and the chorus of the anti-fascist song “Bella ciao”.”
The assassin was an enthusiastic player of the video game “Helldivers 2”, a third-person coop shooter where one plays as a storm-trooper part of a futuristic fascist state. That game’s community is steeped in anti-fascist memes, and, as usual, the true motivation of memes and role playing is always up for endless debate (*):
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1jgl87q/helldivers_2_receiving_negative_reviews/
(*) This is nothing new, the 1997 parody sci-fi movie “Starship Troopers” (which clearly inspired the game Helldivers) was already interpreted in contradictory ways:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)#Politics_and_propaganda
Starship Troopers explores themes including patriotism, authoritarianism, militarism, colonialism, and xenophobia.[n] Verhoeven interpreted Heinlein’s novel as fascistic, nationalistic, totalitarian, and in favor of military rule, something antithetical to the director’s own wartime experiences, and used Starship Troopers to deconstruct and undermine these themes.[…] Although some contemporary critics and audiences considered Starship Troopers to be an endorsement of fascism, Verhoeven said, “whenever you see something that you think is fascist, you should know that the filmmakers agree with your opinion” […] Other retrospective analyses, from the early 2000s to the 2020s, described it as among the most subversive and misunderstood Hollywood studio films ever made, undermined by critics and audiences who misinterpreted the anti-fascist satire as an endorsement
Comment #58 September 24th, 2025 at 10:21 am
Anonymous Ocelot #56 and #51
I don’t agree with you that “this murder was different” because it is the same as any other murder (political or otherwise).
In fact, Kirk himself said “I think it’s worth it, I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment”. I personally think that we should instead abolish the second amendment, and I can only find ironic that he died by gunshot, a thing he considered “a worth cost” to pay when the ones who died were other people.
Comment #59 September 24th, 2025 at 10:41 am
Anonymous Ocelot #56: I confess I hadn’t seen the result that 22% of young adults in the US believe that Charlie Kirk’s murder was justified. If that’s true, then yes, it’s horrifying, and yes, it’s reminiscent of the shocking levels of support in that demographic for e.g. Hamas (though that thankfully falls far short of the 100% you claimed!), or for Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson.
But relevant context would also be: what percentage of MAGA supporters say in polls that they support Trump declaring himself dictator-for-life? What percentage support him jailing his political opponents—or even the so-called “Day of the Rope,” in which all the “leftist filth who betrayed America” are to be executed by hanging? I don’t expect that either of us will like the answer.
In any case, lone-wolf assassinations are unfortunately very far from new, in a country with as strong a gun culture and as many deranged individuals as the US has. What does strike me as new in this era is the shocking percentage of Americans, on both sides (though the MAGA side holds nearly all official power right now), who no longer even pay lip service to the ideals of liberal democracy, like nonviolence and independent courts and freedom of speech. I hope you and I are on the same side in standing against that development.
Comment #60 September 24th, 2025 at 10:51 am
Anonymous Ocelot #56 and #51 and Scott #59 and to clarify my previous comment #58 which can be mis-interpreted give what Scott wrote after me.
I am definitely against violence FIRST and then for all things that Scott wrote.
I don’t want to put words in Ocelot’s mouth, but based on what is written in the comment it feels to me that some people life is more worth of others (like Kirk seemed to believe, given his own comment which I quoted). I think this is wrong and all violence must be condemned. If one wanted to “rate” some violence as more grave than others, then the ones against elected official it’s that, because they hold an official role, and in a sense such violence in not only against the human beings (which is horrific already) but *also* against all the democratic institutions which our father worked so hard to build.
In fact I am disgusted by Ocelot’s sentence “the Minnesota politicians were not national figures” whereas Kirk was. Frankly to me this sounds like a fig leaf cover for a “if one of mine is killed I’m mad, if it’s one of yours I don’t care”
Comment #61 September 24th, 2025 at 10:58 am
is jimmy kimmel’s rehiring a hopeful sign or just a blip on the radar?
Comment #62 September 24th, 2025 at 11:04 am
The double standard is something to behold.
Calling the actions of a lone-assassin an existential political threat that requires the total and final shutdown of the only opposition political party…
when thousands of lunatics attacked the Capitol in the biggest act of political violence in US history, with hundreds sent to jail by the courts, then released by the very person who incited them.
And we’re supposed to be surprised that the youth of this country is terminally cynical? 😀
Comment #63 September 24th, 2025 at 11:45 am
Scott #59
Keeping this short so as not to pollute the thread. Sorry, I meant 100% of the 22% likely support Hamas. I know the youth is not so far gone yet. I do stand against the erosion of liberal democracy and want our nation and norms to endure going forward. I want the first amendment and second amendments both respected. I condemn the FCC letter.
Comment #64 September 24th, 2025 at 11:57 am
Speaking of “Busy Beaver 6 or whatever”, I was looking at the article in BusyBeaverWiki about BB(n) values unprovable in ZF, and noticed that BB(432) has been proven to be independent in August 19.
Comment #65 September 24th, 2025 at 12:42 pm
Bo-gyu Jeong #64: Wow, that’s really cool; I hadn’t seen it. Thanks!
Given all the recent claims there have been to lower the n for which BB(n) is known to be independent of ZFC, though, I would like to establish a ground rule that a claim needs either a prose writeup explaining what was done or independent verification of its correctness, ideally both but certainly at least one, rather than just someone’s GitHub repo.
Comment #66 September 24th, 2025 at 5:30 pm
Pressuring facebook doesn’t ring the same as threatening ABC’s broadcast license, unless they made a threat to bring the law against them somehow. If it was something like the bully pulpit, do this or I’ll use my presidential platform to speak against you, I don’t think that’s enough.
I don’t know what all we have one that one aside from Zuckerberg’s claims made when sucking up to the new incoming admin, but we do know from emails that they were getting approval from the admin before banning posts. Maybe that crosses over some legal line but I’m not sure, Facebook also worked similarly with the Obama, Biden, and Trump governments in removing Isis propaganda.
Another one that is often brought up is Facebook banning the president after he incited J6 violence: can anyone actually imagine a shareholder owned non government-controlled forum banning the sitting president in a country in a moment like that *without* something strong backing them like the first amendment?
Comment #67 September 24th, 2025 at 10:36 pm
Scott 53:
You say “essentially every mainstream figure correctly denouncing the murder.” But prominent progressives have said some truly disgusting and nasty stuff about Charlie in the wake of his death. I saw this article in Salon, for example, cruelly mocking Charlie’s widow and spitting on her dead husband.
https://www.salon.com/2025/09/24/dont-worry-erika-kirk-will-never-replace-her-husband/
Comment #68 September 24th, 2025 at 11:25 pm
Julian #67: Oh, it’s our old friend Amanda Marcotte! The one who pops up again and again as a counterexample to statements of the form, “no feminist writing for mainstream magazines would be quite so cruel, vindictive, tasteless, or performatively evil as to [X], if for no other reason than fear of inspiring an antifeminist backlash.”
Comment #69 September 25th, 2025 at 1:02 am
“Still, it’s a strange honor to have had people on both extremes of the ideological spectrum wanting to cancel me for stuff I’ve written on this blog. What is tenure for, if not this?”
tenure serves other purposes as well. in my case, it allowed me to give up my research grants which i used to develop paper and pencil theories and switch to writing books on developing computer simulations in the Wolfram programming language. This was strongly opposed by my dept. head who wanted the overhead funds provided by grants.
Comment #70 September 25th, 2025 at 3:57 am
The late great commentator Bernard Levin remarked that he was honoured to be banned by both the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa, and that he was always suspicious of people who were only banned by one of them.
Comment #71 September 25th, 2025 at 10:15 am
Scott 68:
Oh haha, I didn’t even put it together that the author of this piece was the same one!
This raises an interesting question, which I’m sure isn’t just relevant to me, but is also relevant to the tens of millions of people who support Trump.
Despite voting for Trump in 2024 (because of his support for Israel, Operation Warp Speed which saved millions of lives during COVID, “right to try” experimental medications, tax cuts, AI alignment, etc.), I’ve become horrified by his policies and his behavior since retaking the White House. AI alignment was a joke (I thought his friendship with Elon Musk meant he would take existential AI risk more seriously than Kamala, but of course that didn’t pan out). He turned his back on science and vaccines, hiring anti-vaxx idiots into the CDC and the FDA, and slashing science funding across the board. His threatening the broadcast licenses of TV comedians and news anchors was the last straw for me—that has no place in America. About the only thing he’s done right so far has been his Israel policy and cracking down on anti-semitism at universities.
But—as embarrassed as I am to admit this—there’s still part of me that is attracted to Trump, that is excited by what Trump is doing, that rejoices at the latest norm-breaking insanity that comes out of the White House.
Why?
Because my social media feed is full of left-wing people who hate me. Feminists who think I’m a disgusting, creepy, dangerous male whose sexual desires are a threat to women. I read stories of lonely men like me being sent to HR or shamed online just for asking a woman out or trying to flirt with a woman at a bar, and it makes me depressed and enraged. I read feminist after feminist who think men are disgusting, male desires are invalid, the “male loneliness epidemic” is hilarious and deserved. These aren’t all randoms on the internet—many write for mainstream publications, and many get thousands of likes or upvotes from fellow left-wing feminists.
My social media feed is also full of left-wing anti-semite after left-wing anti-semite who hate me for being a Zionist Jew, who think Israel shouldn’t exist, the brutalities of October 7 were righteous and deserved. Like the feminists, they also want me to suffer because of who I am. They share the same hysterical hatred and also the same acceptance by progressive institutions.
And then there’s any number of other left-wing or progressive commentators who express contempt, hatred, and loathing towards the half of the country that voted for Trump, and it disgusts me.
So: When Trump goes after these progressives who hate me—even extralegally—by having them deported or fired from their universities or (potentially now) taken off TV—part of me celebrates. I’m not proud of it, I don’t like it, but I can’t help it. It takes a lot of strength to stand up against what Trump is doing when many of the people also opposing him hate you, and many of the people you’ll have to defend, hate you. How do you do this? How do you maintain your principles in the face of this? How do you avoid the temptation to slip into Schadenfreude when many of the people being brutalized by the Trump administrarion are themselves people who bullied you and laughed at your suffering?
Comment #72 September 25th, 2025 at 10:47 am
Julian #71: Yes, it takes strength to stand up for your principles in the face of people who openly hate you.
And it takes even more strength to stand up for your principles in the face of people who claim to be your allies, but who you know to be making the world worse.
May you have that strength.
Comment #73 September 25th, 2025 at 11:33 am
You have that strength, and that’s clear to everybody who’s followed your blog for a long time; and who knows your history.
I often doubt I have that strength.
And many of the men my age who I know personally support Trump because they don’t have that strength—because they’re miserable and they feel hated by society and they’re seduced by the chaos and the violence and the authoritarianism.I could give you anecdotes if you’re curious.
I think if you find the time, energy, and emotional capacity to write a blog post on how to find this strength, it would be the best possible use of your talents to put a dent in Trumpism.A blog post that, unlike most of the mainsteam media, acknowledges the suffering of priviledged techbro nerdy males, and gives them a reason to live that isn’t revenge, but about something greater. If you write this, I’ll send it to my Trump-supporting acquaintances, and I’ll post it in the forums where the lost men of my generation congregate.
Best,
Julian
Comment #74 September 25th, 2025 at 11:59 am
Julian
me, me, me, me, ….
honestly, for someone who supposedly hates the “left-wing” identify politics so much, you sure sound like them with all that obsessive navel-gazing.
stop blaming others for all that’s going on in your head.
you’re not special: they call it the “human condition “ for a reason, all people (from past, present, and future) have their own struggles, just as challenging as yours.
everyone has to find a way to deal with it, hopefully with some degree of class and style, rather than constant whining and hatred.
that game is called life.
maybe something like Stoicism could help you grow out of this…
read something like Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius.
Comment #75 September 25th, 2025 at 1:19 pm
Julian #73: It’s not a bad idea.
Maybe contra Bobby K. #74, rather than trying to overcome the self-centeredness that’s intrinsic to the human condition, in my experience maybe the key is to lean in to self-centeredness to become a better person.
In other words, you say to yourself: “I am the kind of person who, even when he’s suffering, even when he’s shunned and denounced and facing injustice, still finds space in his heart to worry about other people’s suffering, about the injustices they’re facing — whether that means migrant workers sent to torture prisons in El Salvador with no due process, or thousands dying of easily treatable diseases because of the war on vaccines and humanitarian aid, or whatever else. That is who I am.”
But then, in addition to your own conscience and self-conception, there’s the fact that Trump is a walking affront to every ideal nerds like you and me have ever had for how the world should be. He’s a gleeful bully. He’s a totally unashamed liar and bullshit artist. He’s monumentally incurious. He feels not a twinge of regret at destroying universities and scientific research that it took generations to build — the only question is how it will play with his base. He’s a serial sexual assaulter. He rambles incoherently with a fourth-grade vocabulary. He’s a catalogue of every human failing. The thought of voting for such a person is, or should be, viscerally disgusting.
Comment #76 September 25th, 2025 at 2:10 pm
@Ted #42
> You could go further and restrict it to only +1, which would give you the special unitary group
The pauli matrices have determinant -1…
> multiplying a unitary operator in $SU(n)$ by any $n$th root of unity returns another, (potentially) formally distinct but always physically equivalent element of $SU(n)$
…and each pauli matrix squares to 1 so is a root of unity. But pauli matrices have observable effects, they’re not just like multiplying the qubit by a complex multiple of the identity. So this seems to me a qualitatively different thing from what I said?
> Each element of the projective unitary group gives a unique mapping between projective rays in the Hilbert space
This is very interesting. Indeed PU is the more interesting thing. U± seems to me plausibly nicer to work with numerically than PU but perhaps I’m wrong. I also might have thought PU and U± to have a relationship but I’m not seeing anything so maybe my intuitions are faulty.
Comment #77 September 25th, 2025 at 2:50 pm
NOTE: I’m going to be more candid in this comment than I’ve possibly ever been before in my life. I think this is important to understand the mentality of very many people who support Trump. That said, I may have gone too far and feel free to remove this comment if it’s too much for your blog. (Also, I was inspired to write this because of some particularly cruel and enraging feminist content I saw on my feed, which I can email to you if you like)
———-
“The thought of voting for such a person is, or should be, viscerally disgusting.”
Ah, but of course! It is viscerally disgusting! And that’s a huge part of the appeal!
I’m going to use an odd, and perhaps somewhat distasteful and crude analogy, but from my own experience I think it comes close to capturing the “I love Trump even though he’s disgusting” phenomenon. Feel free not to post this comment if it goes too far.
Tony is a lawyer. He’s a corporate litigation attorney and is partner at a big firm. He goes to Church. He has a wife and two young kids. He lives in the suburbs and goes to PTO meetings and is a staple of the local community.
But he’s hiding something. What? He has a sexual fetish. He loves feet. Oh, he loves filthy feet. He loves filthy feet of other men—the filthier, the better. He wants to lick an athelete’s filthy feet after a marathon. He watches gay foot porn on the internet.
Of course it’s disgusting! In his normal, waking life the thought of having a sexual encounter with another man is disgusting, it’s foul. Feet??? What?! He has no interest in such things in the daytime. But when he’s alone with his thoughts, when he’s on a business trip and he’s in a hotel room away from his wife, something about the concept titillates him. The disgust is still there, but the disgust actually turns him on. Yeah, the feet are disgusting, that’s part of the thrill. When he’s really turned on, the disgust turns him on even more. He masturbates to filthy male feet on the internet. When he’s aroused the disgust actually makes the concept more titillating. And then after he climaxes, he’s disgusted by the pornographic videos on his computer screen, and he hates himself.
How does this story end? On one of these business trips he hires a male prostitute and sucks his feet. And then his wife finds out. And his life is blown up.
For Tony, the disgust is part of the thrill. He’s a highly intelligent, conscientious guy, with a life that seems so calm and “normal” from the outside, but inside, there’s something missing in his soul, something that gives him the urge to seek out filthy, disgusting stuff in the spaces between the words of his life.
Ditto with young male nerds and their support for Trump. I know maybe a dozen nerdy young American guys who support Trump. Most of them are intelligent and conscientious and pro-science and pro-knowledge and you would never suspect they’d support the pussy-grabbing anti-vaxxing wannabe-dictator—much like you’d never suspect Tony wants to suck the feet of athletes in his free time. But something about the disgusting, filthy Trumpism titillates you, speaks to you in the lonely hours between dusk and dawn, until it reaches a crescendo in an almost intellectual rage-filled sexual climax—in the same way that that filthy pornography that’s so nasty in the daytime activates something inside you at night…
“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah baby, put those fucking feminist cunts in concentration camps, these fucks who have treated me like SHIT my whole fucking life, who scream at me and mock me and belittle me, oh yeah, daddy Trump’s making them cry, hahaha, it’s so disgusting, fuck all my principles, I love it, oh yeah, oh it’s so filthy, I’m gonna cum…”
And maybe you regret it after you voted GOP in the 2026 midterm elections, in precisely the same way you regret it after watching some fucked-up porn and climaxing and you see the bizarre, filthy video in front of you that you would never, ever watch in your daytime life…
But when you’re treated like shit, and treated so unfairly—when you internalize that the dominant culture views you as some kind of sexual subhuman nonentity, and your attempts to alleviate your perpetual loneliness are pathetic and/or creepy and/or hilariously inept—when you feel like a whole dimension of life has been stolen from you, and if you try to take it back, you’ll be shamed before the whole world—then it does something to your brain. Ressentiment breeds in the dark corners of your soul. Hatred grows like a cancer in the spaces between thoughts, and before you know it, the Trumpian rage and chaos and destruction, the Trumpian filth and disgust titillates you, activates some part of your soul you hoped was never there…But the attraction is undeniable, the disgust -> pleasure is undeniable, something inside you loves the idea of chaos and destruction, because the world is already so cruel and hostile and unforgiving, so why not make it apparent with real chaos?
As I said, having known almost a dozen intelligent, conscientious, science and tech nerds, who once believed in progress and now love Trump,and having known them for years, I know that this is what they’re feeling, beneath the rationalizations. This quasi-sexual id-urge for filthy chaos, in the face of a world that has given you nothing but pain.
And that’s just the educated tech-nerds, who’d you imagine would be the Democrat party’s biggest supporters!—think about how many millions more feel left behind by the economy, live in shitholes addicted to fentanyl, feel rightly that progressive media are spitting down on them and their suffering…and you understand why Trump’s disgusting features are actually his biggest electoral asset. It’s the ID-POLITICS, to use the Freudian/Jungian terminology (I can’t stand Freud, but the concept of the Id speaks to me…)
Comment #78 September 25th, 2025 at 2:58 pm
Yes, some MAGA people make bad lists. But most stand for free speech, both out of principle and because their opponents are so badly wrong.
This points to the real problem: over the past decades, the left has inflicted such deep damage on Western countries, undermining free speech and democratic institutions, that repairing it (if it can be repaired) now needs and justifies strong governments from the opposite side, even at some cost.
Comment #79 September 25th, 2025 at 3:58 pm
Julian #77: Rather than burning everything you value in life for the brief, erotically-charged thrill of going over to the Dark Side, just to spite those who show contempt for you, I’d argue that a superior option is to keep your values, while also succeeding in your career and making friends and getting laid. Better for you, better for the world, and it even spites your enemies a nonzero amount. 😀
Comment #80 September 25th, 2025 at 4:04 pm
Alessandro,
I think you have this all wrong. Not the point about why people have become turned off by the left enough support what I would call really bad ideas of governance. Where you have it wrong is that those in power simply want to correct the left’s misdeeds. In fact, they are no different in the left, and in both cases, this is simply about power and control. As you see now the “free speech” thing is a sham, in both cases it is “free speech I like, banned speech I do not.” You can go on down the line here. Another example is “meritocracy.” Now we see that Trump isn’t for meritocracy, unless by meritocracy you mean boot licking loyalty. Look at the people he has surrounded himself with-people like RFK jr. and those who he is angling for the FED-who have less than zero expertise, and in the end will lead to extreme damage. It’s not “hard medicine,” it is kakistocracy with a healthy dose of hypocrisy. One difference however is with Trump it is top down-meaning it is coming entirely from elected officials and those appointed around them. When it is the left it is mostly (not entirely), at least for now, bottom up in terms of things like censorship.
Comment #81 September 25th, 2025 at 4:09 pm
I voted for Trump, but I still got a laugh out the line: “He’s monumentally incurious.”
and
“He feels not a twinge of regret at destroying universities and scientific research that it took generations to build …”
Probably also true to a large degree. But, in my opinion, the DEI people—and that’s most people at most US universities and at NSF—did their part for many years beforehand. I can sympathize with people who weren’t enthusiastic about their tax dollars funding “CAREER: Black Girl Brilliance and STEM Identity Development”.
Comment #82 September 26th, 2025 at 5:15 am
Dave 80,
sure. But:
The right side is not saints, just normal faulty people with a reasonable understanding of human nature, who aims at preserving good faulty Western civilisation.
The left side believes they are saints, lost in a wrong ideology that makes them feel morally superior, while imposing a radical change more dangerous than communism.
Comment #83 September 26th, 2025 at 7:16 am
Alessandro,
the right no more want to preserve Western civilization than the left believe they are saints. In fact the right want to invoke tenants of the worst of 20th century failed governments. The difference is that the “communism” of the left is mostly for now coming from the most left-wing believers, the autocracy from the right is coming from the government itself.
Comment #84 September 26th, 2025 at 9:36 am
Hi Scott, since you added an update on bringing Aumann’s theorem to a wider audience, it may worth mentioning that Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast now also has a very much related episode with Steven Pinker:
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/09/22/329-steven-pinker-on-rationality-and-common-knowledge/
Comment #85 September 26th, 2025 at 9:41 am
The murder of Charlie Kirk is a horrific tragedy, and your reflections on the simultaneous decay of free speech norms alongside the weaponization of that tragedy touch on the darkness many of us feel. To draw the ire of the MAGA crowd for this is extremely strange; I think they missed some of your points. A common-ground framing may come from a national security perspective. The following is a bi-partisan critique and, as a medically retired US Marine, I’ll find it quite surprising if anyone tries to question my patriotism.
It seems the core of the problem isn’t just that we disagree as Americans, but that our disagreements are now housed in powerful, mutually exclusive ideological enclaves. Each side has its own trusted institutions that create and reinforce a separate reality. On the right, this is a highly disciplined and insular media ecosystem, with think tanks like The Heritage Foundation acting as a “policy network ready to govern,” and a network of conservative Christian churches providing the moral and spiritual justification for a specific political vision. On the left, the structure is more diffuse but culturally dominant. It’s a networked ecosystem of trusted media sources, anchored by agenda-setting institutions like the New York Times and PBS, with its intellectual and moral authority flowing from the incentive-driven clustering within academia and Hollywood. It’s difficult to touch on all this with a few words, but it bears mentioning that the outrage-industrial complex feeds into both information ecosystems.
The very architecture of our republic as envisioned by Madison in the Federalist Papers is being short-circuited. His design in Papers 10, 14, and 51 relied on the friction of distance and a multiplicity of factions to cool passions and force compromise. Technology has erased that friction and consolidated us into two mega-factions. Ambition no longer counteracts ambition between branches of government and partisanship may align vertically across them, paralyzing the system from time to time. It’s nothing new, but trends indicate that the very notion of compromise is becoming more and more rare.
This internal issue is then exploited by external actors. Malign foreign states don’t need to create our divisions; they use a myriad of influence operations to pour gasoline on the ideological fires that fuel the forge of compromise, turning our own information infrastructure against us. The problem here is that our national immune system against such threats, the “rally ’round the flag” effect that unified the country after 9/11, has been weakened by the polarization they propagate. The fractured response to the COVID-19 pandemic showed this in what the WHO called an “infodemic.” The lockdown, necessary to protect healthcare infrastructure, drastically increased online activity and created more opportunities for malign actors. Our country is simply too strong to make other options palatable, so our enemies have invested heavily in ways to sow internal discord. The big ones are obvious: Russia, China, and Iran.
This all feels like a grim outlook, but it also points toward a grounded and hopeful path forward. The core problem isn’t that everyone disagrees on policy; it’s that some have come to see each other as malevolent enemies. This is affective polarization and it’s the fuel for the entire crisis. While top-down solutions seem impossible right now with legislatures gridlocked and disincentived to stop gerrymandering or endorse ranked-choice voting in primaries, bottom-up interventions aimed at reducing this animosity have been remarkably successful. While it’s not the best name regarding optics, organizations like Braver Angels have shown that good-faith dialogue can dramatically reduce affective polarization. Their workshops don’t aim to change views but to re-humanize the other side. Overwhelming majorities of participants leave feeling less angry and more understanding.
Psychological Inoculation Theory also offers scalable solutions to bolster America’s immune system from the rampant virality of memetic warfare. This is where the hope lies. The Madisonian system is stressed, but the character of the people remains through our ability to connect and see the good in one another when we step outside the outrage machine. Rebuilding our civic fabric is a long, slow, and distributed task, but it’s one that is demonstrably possible. It starts with the fundamentals of engagement Charlie Kirk stood by as well as what is modeled here in this blog. It’s a commitment to exchanging words rather than bullets and a belief that even in the darkest times we can still, with effort, change each other’s minds for the better. And if we can’t change the minds of others, compromise can be just as good. Our enemies only want us distracted and despaired by our disagreements. If better sentiments catch fire, they lose.
Comment #86 September 26th, 2025 at 11:25 am
I realize that I don’t really like the look of my comment I submitted last night. It gives the impression that I haven’t resisted the temptation to “join the Dark Side.” To make it clear, I no longer support Trump, and I am resisting the temptation to join the Dark Side. The purpose of the comment was to give a window into the psychology of people I know who support Trump (and who you’d never suspect would support Trump from the outside). Could you please add a disclaimer to my comment to that effect? Thanks!
Comment #87 September 26th, 2025 at 11:43 am
Julian #86: Good! I hope that you continue to resist the Dark Side, and indeed that you use your understanding of the Dark Side to help others resist it. Not only is this 100% consistent with succeeding in your career, enjoying your life, getting laid, finding love, etc etc, the goals are actually synergistic.
Comment #88 September 26th, 2025 at 12:38 pm
Scott 48,
You say that the right to criticize the president has never been weaker today than at any point since the Alien and Sedition Acts. I think the right to criticize the president has been weaker under every war than today. The clearest example is Eugene Debbs. There were also plenty of periods of peacetime persecution (and prosecution) of political speech that was worse than today, although not focused on the president and perhaps not as bad as the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Comment #89 September 26th, 2025 at 1:29 pm
Douglas Knight #88: Thanks, I added that qualification to my comment.
Comment #90 October 3rd, 2025 at 6:31 pm
I appreciate your due skepticism of quantum advantage claims.
However, I think you should apply this same type of skepticism to claims of artificial intelligence.
I’m still not convinced that these claims of useful artifical intelligence are not mere cherrypicks and artifacts of overfitting.
We need a Scott Aaronson, but for picking apart claims of useful AI.
Comment #91 October 3rd, 2025 at 9:13 pm
Chris #90: A cursory search would pull up tons of people who are publicly skeptical of claims of useful AI — Gary Marcus, Emily Bender, and many more. Sometimes these people perform a valuable service. Other times, however, their predictions have been rapidly overtaken by events.
For me, the overwhelming difference between QC and AI is that for QC, but not for AI, we have a well-developed mathematical theory that gives us detailed information about when to expect an advantage and when not to. So, even without being able to evaluate all the details of the latest quantum advantage claim, experts like me are often pretty sure it’s bullshit because
(1) it would totally upend the mathematical theory if it were true, and
(2) far from having a response to that fact, the people making the claim seem blissfully unaware of it.
I’m not aware of anything similar for AI. There, the best we can say from abstract considerations is often “if the human brain does it, then yeah, presumably some appropriate computer program can do it too, but who knows how.” One really does need to defer to the empirical people.
Comment #92 October 8th, 2025 at 2:48 am
Scott #59, Anonymous Ocelot #56: About that rumored poll finding 22% of young adults say something shocking about a murder: happily there’s good reason to be skeptical of a polling result like that. It turns out that the nature of low-quality Internet polls these days is that they tend to end up “finding” that a large swath, specifically of young people, do or say something you’d expect to be very rare.
There was a good study on this last year at the Pew Research Center: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/05/online-opt-in-polls-can-produce-misleading-results-especially-for-young-people-and-hispanic-adults/ .
Their normal work is doing good-quality polls, but some researchers there did a few of the easy cheap kind to demonstrate the effect.
One fun “finding”, for example, was that 12% of US adults under 30 claim to be “licensed to operate a class SSGN submarine”. That compares to 5% ages 30-60, and 1% over 60. (The authors drily add: In reality, the share of Americans with this type of submarine license rounds to 0%.)
What’s happening is that the easiest and cheapest way to run a “poll” these days is online, with whoever shows up when you plaster the link over social media or run a few banner ads (an “online opt-in poll”), and with perhaps some Amazon gift cards as a reward. The trouble is that the people who answer such a poll not only aren’t a representative sample… but have a large fraction of people just entering nonsense in order to finish the survey as quickly as possible, to try to get the reward. And then for whatever reason, the “bogus respondents” who do that disproportionately tend to say they’re under 30.
Part of what prompted that study was the highly publicized survey in late 2023, by YouGov, that claimed 20% of that same group — US adults under 30 — believed “the Holocaust is a myth”. (I remember being shocked by a result or two like that around that time.) It turns out if you do a survey with a properly randomized sample — as Pew did a month later, in January 2024 — then the result you get is 3%, not 20%.
So when another survey claims to show 22% of adults under 30 believe some other shocking thing like that a murder was justified, it’s almost surely another instance of the same pattern. (Though it’d always be interesting to confirm who the pollster was and how they got their sample.)
Comment #93 November 1st, 2025 at 1:15 am
Trump didn’t destroy science. Scientists destroyed science by hitching themselves to a single political party. Corporate America donates to both parties. Corporations are smart. Academics are dumb, no street smarts! SAD!