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In the previous installment of this impromptu series, I asked somewhat facetiously if it’s “time to bring back New Atheism.” The shrewdly-crafted headline made it especially easy to catch those of you who decided to respond without bothering to read the actual article first, because in the literal opening sentence, I clarified that no, I am not seriously advocating that “we” should somehow magically re-import the peculiar “New Atheism” of the mid-2000s — now a relic of a bygone era anyways. Because whatever “discourse” correction might be necessary today, it would bear little practical resemblance to that obsolete mini-phenomenon of two decades ago. At the same time, plenty of worrying “discursive” trends can be observed in 2026 that are in some sense successors to what “New Atheism” once identified, and in theory assembled itself to counteract. These maladies have only grown more pervasive, updated for recent political and technological developments. Namely the escalating flurry of unchallenged superstition that’s constantly billowing all around us, with increasingly overt political applications, and with no appreciable barrier really existing anymore between the digital and tactile realms. The present predicament would thus seem to cry out for a newly invigorated “secular” intervention, notwithstanding the inherent difficulties in delineating how this “intervention” would even work, or if it’s even possible at all.

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Take, for instance, a 2021 survey of Americans’ religious attitudes, which found that the demographic by far the most likely to agree with the statement “Top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings” were self-described Biblical Literalists. Note that this survey was conducted during a relatively more embryonic phase of what has since fully blossomed into a mass-scale Pedo Panic — centered, of course, on the belief that the levers of societal power are fundamentally controlled by elite pedophile rings, the ghastly members of which conspire to rule over us all, in furtherance of their pedophilic interests. Systematic mass rape of children, accordingly, is omni-present and deliberately unpunished, as the evildoers are forever shielded from “accountability.” You know the drill — it’s the defining mythos of our age!

Just a few years ago — 2021! — this sort of belief was mainly seen through the lens of wild-eyed internet manias such as QAnon, and therefore understood as the province of the “Populist Right” — an admittedly nebulous political category, but one which, broadly construed, could be reasonably said to correlate with what one might call the more fervid styles of “grassroots” Christianity. Or more specifically, the unlimited varieties of homegrown American Protestantism, subject as they are to no hierarchical constraints around proper biblical exegesis, with no formal clerical authority promulgating any binding doctrinal decrees. Your average local pastor can be his own supreme theologian. The ensuing beliefs are often aggressively “political,” in the sense of Americanized partisan self-sorting — and commonly preached with a distinctively frantic, catastrophist urgency. Disdain for cultural liberalism is the default, and by extension, disdain for the modern Democratic Party. So it’s not a huge stretch for avowed believers in Biblical Literalism to infer that if Democrats are already wreckers of traditional Christian morality, and thus already doing Satan’s bidding, it would naturally follow that they’d likewise be running occult pedo rings out of the Clinton Foundation basement.

Hence, the loose political logic weaving together Biblical Literalism and Pedo Panic is easily explicable. But surely it would have to go deeper than just standard partisan expedience? Surely there must be some more elemental epistemic overlap between 1) Believing in floridly unregulated incarnations of Christianity and 2) Being primed to believe in floridly unregulated theories around demonic pedophile networks. The habits of mind inculcated by the former must be doing something to inculcate the latter… right? Because if you’re willing to accept the literal truth of various primeval myths — such as that millennia ago, after an earthquake purportedly struck ancient Palestine, masses of graves suddenly opened, corpses arose from their eternal slumber, gained some sort of sentience, and were spotted traversing around Jerusalem — you would seem to have embraced certain habits of mind that would foreseeably incline you to embrace myriad modern-day myths, without much regard for the soundness of their evidentiary basis.

A funny thing happened in the years following that 2021 survey: Democrats started embracing their own politically expedient version of QAnon! The DNC and similar organs now routinely taunt Republicans as the “Pedophile Protection Party,” as though that’s their core, animating mission. What to make of this development from the standpoint of religious versus secular epistemology? Because although religious belief has by no means been expurgated from Left-liberal precincts, Democrats do have the relatively more secularized coalition, among which there are relatively few Biblical Literalists. Yet increasingly, we see even loud-and-proud liberal atheist pundits like Bill Maher starting to proclaim that as of 2026, they have no choice but to agree that QAnon was fundamentally right all along — even if Bill might continue to have marginal reservations about the more extravagant side-plots, i.e. the cannibalism and infant sacrifice stuff. Nonetheless, whatever mode of information-processing Bill’s been employing as of late has evidently led him to conclude that yes, wow, it turns out there really are these deviously hidden networks of villainous pedo-traffickers that run everything.

You might reasonably ask: Wait, doesn’t this throw a monkey wrench into my whole thesis? That there’s an overriding need for some full-throated “secular” corrective, in view of the baleful discursive problems currently plaguing us? Because I certainly couldn’t blame “religion” as such for Bill Maher and his liberal fellow-travelers, themselves (mostly) irreligious — or at least not traditionally “religious” — peddling such crank conspiratard nonsense. Right?

Well, here’s one way to think about it: certain haywire beliefs, and the habits of mind underpinning them, have a way of percolating outward from their religious progenitors, especially when aided by the pulsating vortex of modern techno-innovation. All must bow before the Almighty Algorithm. Or in other words, beliefs which might have once been largely confined to a Biblical Literalist fringe can progressively infiltrate other sectors of the epistemic landscape. And the next thing you know, nominally “secular” folk end up just as blinkered by scatterbrain “religious” prophecies — perhaps with some light modifications added to accommodate their pre-existing worldviews. Presumably, Bill Maher has not yet come to believe that the harrowing elite pedo-rings are supernaturally engineered by Satan in a grand cosmic plot to sabotage Christianity. However, the basic elements of the belief Bill has adopted can still be traced back to the dysregulated patterns of thought that strongly correlate with, and in large measure derive from, exactly the sorts of fervid religiosity that Bill would otherwise claim to deplore.

Maybe a healthy dose of irreligiosity, or at least aversion to disordered mythological thinking, would’ve been helpful as the internet frenetically trawled through the latest rounds of “Epstein Files.” Because yeah, that definitely felt like a situation where widespread impairment of critical faculties was less than ideal. Scores of social media users were flooded with a tsunami of scandalous-seeming government records, and voila: an overnight online consensus emerged that these “files” contained rock-solid proof of rampant pedo-raping activities. Everyone’s worst fears about secret occult sex rituals were true! Email participants were totally speaking in code — communicating their depraved plans by winking reference to random foodstuffs. Yadda yadda yadda.

How might some “irreligious” intervention have supplied a useful corrective here? The “files,” of course, did not contain the sensational pedo-crime evidence that the internet uniformly agreed they contained. But what’s that got to do with monotheism, you ask? How does this have any connection to the tenets of Christianity or Islam? Well, for one thing, if you were delving into those poorly-organized archives with an eye toward rooting out material that would validate your pre-existing belief in a certain supernatural mythos — such as that Satan is actively interceding in human affairs, and can take possession of corporeal bodies, whereby the demonically-possessed hosts are beguiled into performing graphic child sex rituals — you’re probably not starting off on the soundest empirical footing as you embark on your document analysis journey.

Given the reality of algorithmic incentives, and the baseline human credulity that exists anyway since time immemorial, foregrounding a “religious” analytical method for evaluating Epstein Files can bleed out rather easily into “non-religious” interpretive paradigms — that is, sublimated by people who may not even consciously affirm any belief in a supernatural “Satan” entity. But they still encounter and absorb, at extraordinarily high volumes, the epistemic habits of the quintessentially “religious” — insofar as it’s a quintessentially religious conviction that demons are the proximate cause of perceived political and social troubles. A well-founded “corrective” intervention would thus undertake to explain the rather big flaws in a Satan-based framework for processing important information, such as the evidentiary prerequisites for bringing criminal charges. Emphasis might be placed on the special pitfalls of this uninhibited superstition amidst a giant free-for-all social media firestorm. The resulting lessons would be applicable whether or not any particular individual is a conscious believer in monotheism. Because legions of unsuspecting internet users are consuming these ascendant Podcastological theories — their habits of mind increasingly molded by epistemic tendencies which are “religious” in the first instance, even if those individuals would never personally self-describe as believers in Biblical Literalism.

I should also confide my longstanding intuition that there’s something especially salutary about the “atheistic” impulse when it comes to journalistic pursuits. Not that journalists (or anyone else) ought to be going around “evangelizing” for atheism, or flamboyantly confronting monotheism-believers about their illogical religious commitments. It’s simply that atheism — or perhaps more accurately, the non-subscription to any totalizing systems of supernatural belief — is manifestly the superior starting point if one has set out to observe, document, and synthesize earthly phenomena. Let’s say you hear about some unusual event that’s purportedly happening, and you want to go discover the truth of it, to the best of your ability. Isn’t your discovery process going to be severely hampered if you start off by assuming that the event in question can, or even must, be explainable by reference to some unprovable supernatural force? Believing things on “faith” is generally not a reliable heuristic for conducting journalism. Quite the opposite, in fact: it can egregiously distort your capacity to accurately ascertain things, weigh competing evidential claims, assess credibility, and so forth. The building blocks of journalism! When what you’re looking for is evidence, hunches of divine authorship cannot suffice. Neither can invoking some holy writ you’ve already assumed the truth of since childhood. Because if the relevant truth-conferring authority is uniquely not subject to the same standards of empirical corroboration you’d apply to any other “non-religious” phenomena, haven’t you suspended your truth-seeking rigor in a way that journalism obviously cannot countenance?

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Trump sent his stooges Jughead Jared, Witless Witkoff, and Jittery JD to Islamabad last weekend to deliver surrender terms under the pretense of “negotiations” — immediately upon the conclusion of which, he ordered a Naval Blockade, right in the middle of the supposedly ongoing “ceasefire” that had been declared a few days prior, with conspicuously unspecified terms.

US military assets have been arrayed against Iran in a holding-pattern posture since the onset of this so-called “ceasefire” — “locked and loaded” — with thousands more troops deployed in the meantime. The “ceasefire” has not brought de-escalation, as the term would seem to superficially imply, but escalation — a Naval Blockade is an act of war by any intelligible definition, and Trump brags this one is even more powerful than the Blockade he previously imposed on Venezuela. Hopefully most of us still retain the capacity to remember things that happened more than five seconds ago, and can summon the memory of what the Venezuela Blockade was a precursor to.

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This whole Iran “ceasefire” period since April 7, slated to expire after a two-week window on April 21, has been an extremely transparent ruse. The point of the ruse, as can be observed over and over again with Trump’s policy on Iran, is to justify further military action — an almost identical reprise of what transpired in February 2026 and June 2025. That is: send Steve Wiktoff and Jared Kushner to conduct ostensible “negotiations,” and declare that the only acceptable “negotiated” outcome is one that would require Iran to submit, humiliatingly, to maximalist US dictates. That was the M.O. when Witkoff was “negotiating” at Trump’s behest in April/May/June 2025, at which time he similarly sauntered in with demands that Iran renounce all uranium enrichment, and dismantle their nuclear facilities under US and Israeli supervision. In other words, self-inflict an abject national humiliation. Anyone who’s followed the Iran nuclear issue for any length of time, including pre-Trump, would have instantly recognized that even the most “moderate” Iranian political factions could never accept such a “deal.” And so, predictably — as had been resoundingly telegraphed — the outcome was war.

Fast-forward to February 2026, and Kushner has been inserted into the diplomatic mix, following the great triumphs he supposedly achieved with his management of the Russia/Ukraine portfolio (whatever happened with that?) and his business-savvy development of a new governance strategy for Gaza, whereby his father-in-law had been appointed the territory’s new Supreme Leader — with Jared himself organizing the new Gazan police force, among other innovative nation-building projects. That “ceasefire” was also not quite a “ceasefire,” in the sense that fire has not ceased in Gaza, even if the outright pulverization offensive was temporarily dialed back. Lo and behold, the ceasefire also served as a perfect opportunity for Israel to regroup and prepare for the Big Enchilada, Iran, without being interminably bogged down by the nuisance of Hamas.

In early 2026, Jared and Wiktoff continued right where Trump left off in Summer 2025, repeating the “zero enrichment” surrender condition in the new round of Oman-mediated “negotiations.” In short order, per blindingly obvious recurring pattern, the bombing would soon again re-commence.

And now we’re in another phase of the alleged “negotiations,” with Vance shoehorned in for the Pakistan junket, bearing demands that were just as maximalist as ever, perhaps even more so, with the Strait of Hormuz added as another “diplomatic” flashpoint. Despite triumphantly announcing a few days ago that the Strait was gloriously open for business, Trump now says Iran has “Totally Violated” the agreement that had supposedly been reached, as the IRGC began firing on commercial vessels. Notably unresolved: the paradox that the Strait was somehow “open,” even as Trump forcefully clarified that his Blockade would continue unabated, barring usage of the relevant Iranian ports. So that was another jumble of gibberish, which of course never made any sense as a sustainable resolution to the conflict. What made far more sense: it was another precursor to aggressive military action, since Trump could surely claim, as he has this morning, that Iran was in “violation” of some agreement that he mostly seems to have conjured in his own head.

So today he declares “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY” and repeats his threats from two weeks ago to blow up the entire country if Iran does not capitulate within approximately 72 hours, pursuant to the “negotiations” he’s sending off Jared and Witkoff to oversee. (Kiss of Death.) And some people will still treat this whole charade with unwavering credulity. How much more data could you possibly need?!?! For Christ’s sake. (Sorry for taking the Lord’s name in vain. I disavow.)

But seriously, do you think Trump is just kidding around when he demands “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”? And threatens to blow up the whole of Iran, so as to destroy the existing state apparatus? (Destruction of which would seem to be a necessary precondition for imposing “unconditional surrender” — the same condition imposed on Japan and Germany in WWII.)

Most of the stuff Trump has threatened to do with respect to Iran, he’s ultimately done! It’s not just a “bluff,” or run-of-the-mill “Art of the Deal” bravado.

— In March 2025, he said if Iran did not capitulate within 60 days, “there will be bombing.” There was in fact the promised bombing, in June 2025, the minute the 60 day ultimatum window expired.

— In June 2025, he threatened to assassinate the Supreme Leader. In February 2026, he did it. “I got him before he got me,” Trump said, hours after “Operation Epic Fury” was launched. “They tried twice. Well I got him first."

— In September 2024, he gave a prepared speech threatening to bomb the entirety of Iran to “smithereens,” and destroy “the country itself.” That’s currently in progress. “If they don’t sign this deal, the whole country is going to get blown up,” Trump said today, April 19.

— He’s called for “regime change” (or more accurately, “regime destruction”) in June 2025, January 2026, and February 2026 (non-exhaustive). That is also currently in progress.

— In April 2026, he threatened to wipe out all of Iranian civilization, which he seemingly defines as bombing their remaining national infrastructure, perhaps with some ancient Persian cultural sites thrown in for good measure. Since issuing this threat, he and his stooges have been laying the groundwork to effectuate it. (Pete Hegseth must be prayerfully salivating at the prospect.)

Is it really so implausible to fathom that he’d actually go ahead with this oft-threatened plan, and bomb the entire country back to the “Stone Age,” just as he’s been vowing to do over and over? That’s where this policy trajectory has always been headed. There was a time when it seemed just as extreme and implausible that he would actually go ahead and assassinate the Supreme Leader. Threats to that effect were just his standard hardball “negotiating,” we were assured.

UPDATE BECAUSE I FORGOT TO INCLUDE THIS: “To the victor belong the spoils,” Trump said on April 6. That’s his declared intention for the ultimate end-state in Iran. As he’s explained, this vision includes him personally selecting the next Iranian political leadership (as with Venezuela) and also personally controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Because he would love to “take the oil” — one of his few consistently-articulated (and increasingly, implemented) foreign policy convictions. None of these Trump-declared goals are attainable if the current governmental structure of the Islamic Republic remains in place.

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This is Part One in a multi-part ad hoc series. I don’t know how many parts there will ultimately be, so relax.

No, I’m not going to seriously argue that “we” should somehow “bring back” the particular brand of “New Atheism” that briefly gained popularity in the mid-to-late 2000s — mostly as a function of its association with a handful of high-profile figures like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, etc. Whatever that phenomenon was exactly, it was very much specific to a bygone political and cultural era. Partly what catalyzed it was a burgeoning sense that various flavors of monotheistic zealotry had been allowed far too much sway in matters of “public discourse,” without any satisfactory rebuttal. This felt all the more irritating, because Americans who considered themselves atheists, agnostics, or otherwise irreligious had for some time been a rapidly growing demographic, and yet were conspicuously under-represented in the public arena, which still valorized traditional religiosity as a moral model to which all should aspire. The related idea that religious belief must be treated as sacrosanct, and therefore uniquely immunized from critique — even blistering critique where appropriate — was a taboo many saw as long overdue for some unapologetic jettisoning. Even if it might come at the expense of offending “people of faith,” another weird Bush-era coinage. And so into that void swept the “New Atheists” — with their brash personalities, media fluency, above-average vocabularies, and knack for stirring up rancor.

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Some of the latent grievances that gave rise to “New Atheism” were perfectly defensible. I’ll admit that I personally harbored many of them, and eagerly inhaled all the best-selling “New Atheist” books. Yes, I have a signed copy of “God Is Not Great” by Hitchens. Yes, I watched all the early YouTube “debate” videos. And why shouldn’t I have? Questions around the existence or non-existence of God are always going to be thrilling on some level to contemplate, and publicly joust over. Because by golly, aren’t these supposed to be the most profound questions of all? Beyond the age-old philosophical arguments, it struck me as eminently sensible that reintroducing some form of muscular “secularism” to popular consciousness was a worthy endeavor, despite the unavoidable vagaries of what exactly that would entail.

Remember, this was a period when George W. Bush was seen to have turbo-charged the influence of politically-domineering Evangelical Christianity — with all its moralizing bluster, hostility to scientific advancement (“stem-cell research” was a big flashpoint then) and signature hypocritical censoriousness. Not to mention the War on Terror, and the Iraq War in particular, being routinely framed as a titanic “Clash of Civilizations” with apocalyptic religious overtones. Although ironically, it should be said that even during the headiest days of the G. W. Bush years, there was hardly anything as extreme as the Pete Hegseth prayer-tirades of late, in which the self-proclaimed “War Secretary” showily beseeches the Almighty to “pour out your wrath” on the Nation of Iran, and unleash “overwhelming violence” on their infrastructural assets, so that the United States Military might be empowered to “break the teeth of the ungodly.” It’s doubly ironic that this stuff is so in-our-faces today, because although Bush was himself a professing Evangelical, it’s almost impossible to imagine him countenancing such garish displays of blood-thirsty zeal, especially as sermonized with the imprimatur of the Pentagon. Conversely, no one in their right mind would associate Donald Trump with earnest piety of any sort, but he’s clearly got no issue allowing the Hegseth Holy War talk to flourish under his Administration. Perhaps this is in part because of Trump’s own personal apathy toward matters of the divine. I mean, for Christ’s sake, here’s a guy who just casually posted a brazen idolatry meme of himself in the visage of Jesus Christ — a straightforwardly heretical act if there ever was one, at least if you subscribe to a doctrine that regards such things as “heresy.”

Back in the “New Atheist” heyday, tracts like “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” were emblematic. I read that book, by the left-wing journalist Chris Hedges, around the time it came out in 2007; the thesis was basically that a menacing new Fascism was taking hold in America, and if we right-minded citizens didn’t get our act together, shock troops would soon be marching down Main Street USA with a Bible in one hand and an AK-47 in the other. We were warned, in essence, that the country was on the brink of full-blown militarized theocracy. It should be said, however, that Hedges rejected any common cause with the most visible “New Atheists,” insisting that his own immersion in theological study had shown him the problem was not religion itself, only the politicized perversion of it — notwithstanding the wholesale anti-religious repudiation favored by “New Atheists.” Hedges also took exception with Hitchens, Harris, et al. making a big stink about the purported crisis of “Islamofascism” — a curious portmanteau that grew out of their mounting frustration that Islamist suicide-bombers were complicating what they viewed as the otherwise virtuous efforts by the Bush Administration to administer a fruitful US military occupation in Iraq.

So if not “New Atheism” per se, what exactly might we want to “bring back” in 2026? Well, we could start by identifying certain problems that seem painfully characteristic of the current era, at least when it comes to “public discourse.” (Perceived flaws in “public discourse” having been what catalyzed that earlier iteration of “New Atheism.”) Because it seems many of these present-day problems are traceable to a worrisome trend of accelerating tolerance/validation/embrace of wild and crazy superstition as a heuristic for apprehending the world. Accordingly, the disordered habits of mind that invariably accompany such superstitious belief have been allowed to proliferate across the board, without any real challenge.

This trend is encouraged and amplified, of course, by the Goliath of social media — which was barely a blip on the radar two decades ago, but today infuses everything. For instance, more and more people (with larger and larger followings) seem to think it’s totally cool, and not at all embarrassing, to attribute what they see as troublesome political and social developments to the alleged existence of demons. And we’re not just talking about “soft demonology” here — an abstract supposition that metaphysical “evil” always lurks in the background, tempting humanity with its wicked lure. No, we’re talking about the unabashed belief in active and identifiable demonic intercession in the earthly realm, and even in the corridors of government, such that anything which might go awry — politically, socially, militarily, or otherwise — is best understood as the nefarious intrusion of Satan, and/or his council of demon assistants. (Really.)

That this stuff now rockets around the internet virtually unchallenged is not just crazy-making in its own right, I’d argue — it’s very damaging to society. Much of it you might call Tuckerology, since he’s definitely one of the foremost proselytizers, having apparently convinced himself that he’s undergone some major religious epiphany since departing Fox News. Recently, he avowed that the United States is under “greater demonic attack” than ever before in our history. And he’s not being metaphorical about it. Especially disturbing was his latest foray into revival of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” claims — it was only a matter of time — which he conveyed to his mass audience with deadly seriousness, alongside a Catholic priest purporting to specialize in exorcism procedures. So we can almost certainly expect a marked uptick in podcast listeners reporting new cases of demonically-induced child sex crime, whether by “recovering” their own long-lost memories of such, or claiming to observe it contemporaneously among children exhibiting various behavioral problems.

According to the priest, the prevalence of Satanic child sex abuse surged in the 1980s, but then inexplicably “plateaued” for awhile, and is now back with a vengeance. Neither he nor Tucker appear to wonder what the explanation for this strange cyclicality might be: did Satan and his subordinate demons (such as Baal, the demon of fornication, and Loki, the demon of mischief) randomly decide to take a break in the 1990s, maybe because the economy was booming and the Soviet Union just collapsed? Or perhaps it has something to do with recurring cycles of media-fomented hype around scary demonological dangers? Because there definitely was such a cycle in the 1980s, and another one is now ramping up in the 2020s. But maybe that’s just a big coincidence. Maybe that’s what Satan wants us to think.

When this bunk gets commercialized and shoveled out for mass consumption — no doubt, there’s a huge market for such garbage — it gets packaged with a kind of baked-in conceit that to challenge any of these beliefs, no matter how loopy and brain-melted, would be an affront to Christianity itself. And would therefore be deeply wrong, because we dare not offend the sincere Christian believers by denigrating a long-established tenet of their “faith.” Christians believe in demons, and have since antiquity, we’re told — so just DEAL WITH IT. Rebuking this resurgent demonological worldview would be tantamount to rebuking Christianity itself, or at least Catholicism, depending on how you care to taxonomize the demon-belief chart.

OK… fine. I suppose we have to rebuke Christianity itself then. Not because every Christian must subscribe to the wackiest podcast spin that Tucker puts on his own demon blather, but because with or without Tucker, there has never been any good reason to believe that demons are roaming the land, infiltrating corporeal vessels at Satan’s direction. (If you believe in a conception of “demons” that is more metaphorical in nature, you are of less immediate concern, but the latest surge in demonological frenzy does not seem remotely confined to figurative expressions of “evil” or whatever.)

A reasonable person might ask: Huh? What does any this have to do with “religion” per se? Aren’t you just complaining about Tucker again? Didn’t you just get done telling us that “New Atheists” always said the real problem was religion itself — not just the most whacked-out manifestations of religious belief? And if we’re not “bringing back” New Atheism, surely we’re also not “bringing back” their blanket excoriations of all religion! Right?!?! Aaaahhhh!!!

Well, for one thing, this explosion of peasant-like superstition goes far beyond the digital walls of the Tucker Carlson Network, even though there are legions of impressionable “influencers” and politicians eagerly taking cues from Tucker’s own supernatural “journey,” and then subsuming its features into their own “content.” Case in point: JD Vance proclaiming his newfound belief that UFOs are actually “celestial beings” ordered by Satan to “fly around doing weird things to people.” This stuff is propagating to the public at a preposterous scale, thanks to the one supernatural entity we’re all forced to worship: the Almighty Algorithm.

But sure, there’s nothing new about an outsized demand for divinely-inspired nutbaggery among the denizens of the internet, and among humans in general. Crank eschatological prophecies, medical quack cures, ascription of misfortunes to Satanic interference, and so forth — this has all been around for ages. What’s new is that the “podcast sphere” — also known as Podcastistan, home of the Podcast Creatures — has become so unavoidably dominant in terms of audience reach and political leverage. And in this ascendant loon-infested sphere, any barrier that may have previously existed between the fixations of the freakoid fringes and the biggest bullhorns in the entire media ecosystem has been thoroughly evaporated.

So now we have this giant engine of madcap religious fervor bellowing at us 24/7, inculcating all kinds of warped pathologies, which are quite ominous, at least if you’d prefer for society’s mechanisms of knowledge-production to be somewhat anchored in reason. The feeble-minded magical thinking, bestowal of political and professional rewards for indulging in the craziest shit, the ballooning susceptibility to mass hysteria and moral panic, etc. — these are the fruits of the current infotainment environment. Not to mention genuinely grave matters of public concern being reduced to the equivalent of voodoo, as demonstrated by Tucker blaming the Iran War on a spooky “spell” that has tragically overtaken Donald Trump, whom Tucker claims to have recently discovered has no control over the Executive Branch.

Mind you, when Tucker starts declaring that Trump is “enslaved” by Israel, he isn’t making an evidence-based argument about Israel wielding too much power in the American political system. He’s positing that a supernatural curse has befallen the Commander-in-Chief, and if salvation doesn’t arrive soon, we’ll all be hurtling headfirst into the apocalypse. For example, after Trump issued his especially unhinged Easter threat to annihilate all of Iranian civilization, Tucker’s immediate response was to unsubtly theorize that Trump might actually be the Anti-Christ — without asserting this directly, of course. But everyone who was clued-in got the message: Trump is being manipulated by Satan (via Israel) as part of some grand cosmic plot to exterminate Christianity. That this could be interpreted by huge swaths of the citizenry as a non-insane diagnosis of US foreign policy just speaks to how outlandishly contaminated everything has gotten — which, yes, does strongly suggest some need for a full-throated corrective. Maybe not by importing obsolete “New Atheism” from the 2000s, but something. Something that could muscularly combat this campaign to disastrously impair the critical faculties of millions. No one in their right mind should welcome the mass-adoption of hallucinatory short-cuts for reasoning about consequential public affairs. There’s nothing positive to be gained by telling the average YouTube viewer that defaulting to vaguely mystical “conspiracism” is a solid means by which to process information, even if it’s being advertised under the banner of Christianity, or “religion” in general — which of course we’re supposed to solemnly respect, and withhold any rudeness toward, as a matter of common decency. But wait: what if it’s true that the origins of such fallacious thinking can be traced back to religious belief itself? And not just Tucker’s latest haywire capitulation of it?

Here’s where I have no choice but to get a bit edgy. I’m certainly not calling for anyone to go around evangelizing “atheism” per se. But I do think that a rational corrective to this insanity would have to include some resolute defense of the atheistic instinct — or at least of irreligiosity in some form or fashion. A few qualifiers: No, I don’t plan on obnoxiously confronting or “debating” anyone about their private religious views, just for the hell of it, and especially not ordinary people just going about their lives. (When it comes to woefully influential Podcast Creatures, the calculus necessarily changes.) I’m not going to lecture you, or anyone, to suddenly renounce your long-held religious convictions, merely because doing so would give me some sniveling self-satisfaction, because I’m so pompously sure that your religious convictions are dumb. I won’t be barreling into the Ozarks to upbraid local townsfolk who believe in demons. I won’t even tell the Podcast Creatures that they’re stupid if they don’t abandon the religious doctrines they’ve probably accepted to one degree or another since childhood.

But I’m also not going to arbitrarily credit this stuff as a rational heuristic for evaluating worldly affairs, or ascertaining moral wisdom, or deciphering political developments, just because certain people might take offense. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” or to be more precise, a thoroughgoing defense of empiricism and reasoned, evidence-based inquiry — abundantly supported by a centuries-old corpus of philosophical and scientific pursuit — does not arbitrarily get negated because you like to chant “Christ is King” on the internet, or because you have fond memories of attending Church on Sundays with your grandma. Or even because you presently attend Church (or a Mosque or a Synagogue or whatever). The sincerity of your beliefs does not obviate the need to explain why totalizing monotheistic belief systems contain a direct route to the risible windbaggery now dominating the podcast circuit.

It’s also not a sufficient rebuttal to barrage me with the “Shrek wearing a fedora” meme, which for years I’ve had hurled my way whenever (on rare occasion!) I happen to evince some sign that I do not affirm, or accept the substantive validity of, whatever monotheistic dogma you’ve endorsed, based on ancient texts purporting to describe supernatural phenomena that took place in the Middle East thousands of years ago. Yeah, I know it’s trendy to deride as “cringe” anyone skeptical of grandiose supernatural claims. And that it’s really “based” to submit to the rule of some claimed supernatural authority. Failure to do so will result in you being instantly typecast as a smug, Cheeto-eating Reddit user.

I admit the following throwaway tweet of mine from nine years ago was kind of frivolous, and even needlessly provocative. Still, the basic point stands:

This article got much longer than I expected when I first started writing it, so I chopped off the (forthcoming) second half. Please do not take this initial entry as any kind of fully comprehensive treatise, intended to address every conceivable counter-argument. I haven’t even really made the argument yet! (And maybe never will!) I wrote this partially as a self-serving exercise in “thinking aloud” — gathering my thoughts about something that’s been irking me, but which I couldn’t quite articulate in any succinct way. “Part Two,” to be published soon, will delve into my own personal trajectory of religiosity and irreligiosity. I will propose that an “irreligious” disposition — baseline skepticism toward any kind of totalizing supernatural worldview — is especially helpful (even imperative?) when it comes to the practice of journalism. I will also distinguish “traditional” forms of religiosity from the more “secular” forms that also arise all-too-frequently in the modern era. (I’m against the latter, too.) The increasing secularization of the populace should by no means be taken to imply any sort of renaissance in rational thought. For the purposes of keeping this endeavor somewhat contained, I’m not going to branch out into any significant discussion of “Eastern” religions; I will stick with “monotheism,” which I define for practical purposes as encompassing Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. And yes, I’m aware that each of these three contains infinite multitudes and irresolvable internal debates. Again, this isn’t intended as an all-inclusive treatment of what is quite possibly the “biggest” subject that humanity has ever grappled with. It’s about locating an unwelcome trend in “public discourse,” and pondering what might be most profitably done as a corrective. The next “part” of this ad hoc series will be paywalled, so please consider subscribing if you’ve found this at all interesting. (If you haven’t found it interesting, I bear no grudge.) And yes, I of course came up with a way to shoehorn in Epstein.

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Anyway, following his resignation, Joe Kent jumped immediately onto the Podcast Circuit. Which is rife with epistemic problems, as we’ve often discussed. So I wanted to get into some things with him that maybe he has not addressed yet, or at least hadn’t addressed from the angle that I wanted to approach from.

Matt Taibbi was supposed to co-pilot the interview, but his hotel Wifi crapped out and he had to abort. Don’t fret though, because Joe Kent has graciously agreed to join the two of us on a forthcoming expeditionary mission to Greenland.

Let me know what you think.

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I had an item today in Unherd about the unceremonious sacking of Pam Bondi, our dearly-departed Attorney General, and the installation of Todd Blanche to that role in an acting capacity. Of course, I examine the development with a particular eye toward the “Epstein Files.” Remember those?

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British etiquette standards apparently precluded me from referring to her as “Pam Blondi,” even though I was merely quoting the nickname once impolitely bestowed by the famed online bomb-thrower Laura Loomer. Laura, always a firecracker, was certainly not wrong when she complained that “Pam Blondi’s disastrous handling of the Epstein Files created a PR nightmare for the admin.”

My point, though, is that whatever outlandish incompetencies may have been characteristic of Blondi herself, culminating in Trump opting to fire her “like a dog” this week, the basic contours of the nutball controversy Laura was grousing about, and which has continuously “dogged” the Second Trump Administration — despite a detour over the past month for a “little excursion” to Iran — will never be fundamentally resolved with a simple personnel swap. Even if Blanche, the new Big Dog in town, does constitute an appreciable upgrade in the “bare-minimum competency” department. (I suspect Trump will eventually want to nominate Blanche for AG on a permanent basis.)

According to the WSJ, Trump had grown progressively “frustrated” that Blondi “didn’t do more to contain fallout from the DOJ’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files.” Well, OK. There were a handful of especially comical PR flops that might’ve been peculiar to Blondi, most notably the notorious Binders from Hell incident, in which a posse of right-wing “influencers” sauntered down to the White House and were presented with some dopey prop binders — the idea being they supposedly contained explosive new Epstein revelations. This was quickly discovered to be a total ruse; it was mostly just stuff anyone could’ve easily found on Google. (Which didn’t stop the dopey “influencers” from hoisting the binders over their heads like Superbowl trophies.) One of the lucky Bondi Binder recipients, an odd fellow named Mike Cernovich, continues to insist that he “never saw Pam Bondi as trying to do people dirty. I was there. The picture stuff was pure accident.” If so, it remains doubly odd that Cerno appeared to be trying to hide his face in the resultant photographs. But maybe we can chalk that up to another odd “accident.”

“I never saw the binders as a betrayal,” Cerno added. “Bondi was trying to do something good, but didn’t know the backstory.”

Aaaand… therein lies the problem. Yeah, Blondi was just as clueless as any Joe or Jane Schmo when it came to the larger Epstein issue. What little she did know seemed to stem mostly from her vague awareness that the right-wing social media id was highly exercised by the topic, and had built up a widespread expectation (thanks to hucksters on the podcast circuit, like the current FBI Director) that Trump and his Anti-Establishment™ Avengers Squad was going to triumphantly storm into office for the Big, Beautiful Second Term and vanquish the Deep State Pedos, by way of which, something called the “Epstein Client List” would be dramatically unveiled. And at long last, all those Demonic Child Rapin’ Democrats would get exposed, then frog-marched straight to the slammer.

This was always an impossibly braindead fantasy, but Blondi herself was in no position to dispel such algo-slop theories in any sort of cogent or articulate way. Because the political incentives circa the first year of Trump 2.0 all gravitated toward ostentatiously placating the right-wing social media masses — hence a Botched Binder Spectacle with hand-picked “influencers.”

Blondi lacked the intellect/acumen/cleverness to navigate these competing imperatives: to rein in the Wild Epstein Delusions that had long been stoked across the Trump-aligned media landscape, with numbskulls like Elon Musk leading the charge, while also somehow remaining in good standing with this all-important constituency. Because if they ever loudly revolt, the Based Right millennial staffers in the White House are going to be absurdly over-attuned to it, and the bad news will eventually reach the Big Guy. An impossible conundrum, even if Blondi was a majestic PR maestro. Which she clearly wasn’t. Hence, her shrill tactic of pivoting obnoxiously to “The Dow” at a Congressional hearing nominally focused on recent Epstein-related conduct of the DOJ — which predictably became an instant and decidedly unflattering “viral moment.” Because actually addressing the substance of Epstein mania, and refuting the overwrought public misconceptions flowing from it, would’ve created an even bigger political nightmare, even if it happened to be grounded in some approximate version of reality. But sadly, Blondi was too much of a ditz to thread that needle. She still might not be fluent enough in the relevant facts/evidence/arguments to convey a properly reality-based representation, even if she were inclined to do so.

Todd Blanche, on the other hand, has been thoroughly immersed in this mayhem for many months now, whether he’s liked it or not. And according to things I’ve heard through the grapevine, he is quite well-versed in the swirling phantasm that is “Epstein” — namely, how popular perceptions do not correlate much with reality. Based Blanche is definitely better at communicating than Blundering Bondi — which is why he’s already been on TV quite a bit in lieu of his ostensible superior. I’ve also heard his personal views are somewhere in the same ballpark as mine on certain facets of the “Epstein saga,” as he tellingly calls it. But does he have the stomach to actually drill down into specifics in any public-facing manner? Probably not. More likely, he’ll just be marginally more adept at changing the subject than Blondi was, and at lawyering his way out of tricky PR situations. Though that hasn’t worked out too well thus far, because he already got sandbagged with “so who did Epstein spy for????” questions last night, in his very first interview as acting AG, on Fox News of all places.

Speaking of the rampant cluelessness that has so dominated this fiasco, it’s amazing how clueless Thomas Massie still fundamentally is about the “Epstein Files” — even though it’s all he can ever talk about. There is perhaps nobody in Congress, apart from his loyal compatriot Ro Khanna, whom the media loves to amplify more these days. Massie went on the BBC last week and claimed melodramatically that important emails and memoranda from the 2006-2008 federal investigation of Epstein have still suspiciously not been released. Yo, Thomas — there is literally a gargantuan volume of exactly those records available right now in the public domain. I wrote about a bunch of them last summer, and a huge quantity of additional records have since been produced by the DOJ. I even took the liberty of showcasing a small cross-section of such “files” via handy short-form video, for those of you with limited attention spans:

Massie just doesn’t bother to actually read of any of this stuff. He’s not on the lookout for any genuine insights to be gleaned from the vaunted “files” he loves to pontificate about so relentlessly. Instead, he’s on a single-minded political mission to vindicate the peremptory suppositions he already made nine months ago, and which he’s shrewdly been leveraging into national political stardom. So why bother going through the actually-existing “Epstein Files”? Boring! Waste of time! After all, he’s got a Republican primary to win in Kentucky, and the Epstein Main Character Quest has generated lots of helpful donations to that end. Especially with Trump & Co. looking to get rid of him. (I’m planning on a “little excursion” myself to Kentucky next month to cover that race.) In the meantime, there’s simply no downside for this top Epstein Evangelist to demonstrate a grasp of the underlying source material which resembles, tellingly, that of a poorly-informed YouTube pundit.

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I happened to be in Miami anyway last week, so when I heard about this rally, I figured I certainly must go.

One thing that was interesting: the rally was conducted almost entirely in Spanish. And mind you, this was an almost uniformly Republican constituency. Ardently pro-Trump, in fact. Which you’d think might provoke some cognitive dissonance in certain quarters, but as usual with US politics, everyone just kind of barrels blithely ahead, glossing over any pesky contradictions.

Another interesting feature of the rally: it was organized and funded by the municipal government of Hialeah, Florida. So this wasn’t a matter of some enterprising local citizens deciding to hold a Cuban regime change rally. It was a matter of actual government agencies deciding it was time for taxpayers to subsidize such a rally. Which of course was wildly popular in Hialeah, home to one of the largest (perhaps the largest) population of Cuban Americans anywhere in the country. Still, it’s always interesting when a contested political controversy garners such a universal consensus that it takes on the transcendent character of “apolitical” civic culture. It almost reminded me of the George Floyd rallies I covered/attended in 2020, when overnight, local governments decided to convene “Black Lives Matter” events, as though they were as run-of-the-mill as a Fourth of July Parade or Christmas Tree lighting. (As I mentioned to Matt Taibbi during one of our recent chats, a rally in my otherwise sleepy hometown of Caldwell / West Caldwell, New Jersey featured a cop singing the National Anthem.)

Obviously, the desire to topple the Cuban Government wasn’t something that came about through a sudden explosion of societal mania, akin to the Floyd uproar of 2020. I actually covered a similar rally/march in Hudson County, NJ, home to a smaller yet sizable enclave of Cuban Americans, for this very Substack in 2021. These events tend to correlate with political developments in Cuba, and with Trump now declaring that he’s set his next regime-change sights on the island, it’s no surprise that this virulently Trump-loving constituency would want to summon public displays of support.

Nonetheless, it’s illuminating what kind of political messaging gets subsidized by taxpayer dollars. The majority of people I spoke to were calling for outright US military intervention — even annexation! — and hoping that Trump would do something to Cuba on the order of what he’s doing right now to Iran.

I also couldn’t resist the opportunity to shoehorn in some random questions about Jeffrey Epstein.

So, enjoy the video. Or don’t.

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