Joe Duarte

Political Diversity Will Improve Psychological Science cambridge.org/core/journals/…

I'm not sure that I've heard much. I'm just inferring from your posts, and Matt's. I'm not sure anyone on the outside knows what happened. All I heard was that you were upset that he hired Emily Kopp. The vibe has been that you're angry and Matt is confused/disoriented. If that's totally bogus, my apologies – it's all so confusing. Racket is the only Substack that I pay for. It was such a bummer to see this breakup.

@ValidScience You heard wrong.

Somehow I don't think my replacement on the podcast I used to do is still on it.

I was stunned that the NYT ran that story about Gazan children being shot in the head by IDF soldiers, where the "scans" showed a perfectly intact bullet in the exact center of the brain, with no entry wound. A 5.56 NATO round would be devastating to an adult brain and would go all the way through most of the time. It's implausible that it would stop midway through a child's brain, and of course there has to be an entry wound.

Reuters won a Pulitzer in “Breaking News Photography” in 2024 for their coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. As you might imagine from Reuters, it was a “both sides’ gallery of 15 images. Only 1 graphic of the October 7 victims. @HonestReporting broke a report that some of the Reuters Palestinian photo-journalists had advance notice of the October 7 attack and embedded themselves with the Hamas terrorists. Reuters denied it.

NYT wins Pulitzer for Gaza photos by Palestinian photographer. There will never be a Pulitzer awarded for photographs of Israeli civilians kidnapped or killed by Hamas. Journalism isn’t supposed to have a preferred side. #PulitzerBias

The reality Yglesias is evading is that there isn't much daylight between a Nazi and "progressive populist". Not when it comes to Jews. We've seen the roiling leftist antisemitism on campuses, the people tearing down hostage flyers. And "Democratic" vs National Socialists are both socialists. This is a classic horseshoe.

@dailystoic This is pretty trashy. You're not making a credible argument against Trump here and you have no basis to go after anyone based on their family. The message here is that you're a bad person and a bad philosopher.

Ryan Holiday's Response to Ivanka Trump

@annbauerwriter I don't understand what that means. The cohort didn't read only 5.8 books. The way to lock this down is to give the formula used. The way you broke it down with the 20 vs 0 example implies that it's the average per person, but you said it's not.

@ValidScience It's not the average per person, it's for the entire generational cohort. There are a handful (maybe 20%) of book reading Gen Zers who read 20 books a year; the remainder read one, or nothing.

"Americans aged 18 to 29 read an average of 5.8 books in 2025, the lowest of any generation." The industry has responded with "companion books" - AI summaries that allow people to pretend they've read. They're pushing you toward illiteracy. Push back! kristinmctiernan.com/companion-book…

One thing that is striking is that Android users are second class citizens. It never occurred to me before that using Android would be a disadvantage for getting app features. I wish you guys would hire enough people so that you can fix search, have Android parity, restore proper link formatting / Twitter Card metadata consumption, etc.

The most snoozed (i.e., muted) topics since launching the snooze feature: 1. Crypto 2. Politics 3. Iran Conflict 4. Sports 5. Business & Finance 6. Gaming 7. Artificial Intelligence 8. Videos 9. Science & Technology 10. Entertainment & Arts

He has the authority, multiple authorities, as @AGHuff enumerated, but he wasn't willing to terminate these or any of the many ideologically driven, scientifically invalid grants either. Jay falsely claimed that the courts wouldn't let him, but the California ruling he cited (Thakur v. Trump) only required NIH to give specific reasons for a terminating grants, instead of the generic DEI boilerplate that DOGE pasted in all the notices (and DOGE missed most of the ideologically rigged grants anyway). The fact that he made that false claim about the courts, and repeated it in the bizarre Spectator article he published with Memoli, is very strange. He just seems unwilling to do stuff, to implement an anti-ideology framework, etc. They just gave a grant to a Colorado researcher to give trans-identified girls (minors, not adults) testosterone (which is sterilizing) to see if it helps with headaches.

Fwiw, I don’t think this is @DrJBhattacharya’s decision to make, and in any case he will be up against multiple layers of bureaucratic hurdles and resistance, both human and institutional. But it is an absolute indictment of the entire government grants and funding system that someone caught dead to rights publishing a totally fraudulent paper, while admitting the opposite in private, can continue drawing huge amounts of taxpayer money as if nothing happened. That too is part of the deep state, just a different part of it, and it is alive and well.

@Ayjchan @HansMahncke Did you check RePORTER for UNC grants in general? He doesn't have to be listed as PI for grants to be going to the same lab/research. UNC will have tons of grants, but there are ways to narrow it down, keywords, etc.

@HansMahncke The absence of new NIH projects doesn't mean that NIH specifically took Baric off NIH grants and that his university put him on leave. He very well could've shifted to funding from other gov depts/agencies and biotech/pharma given his IP & the companies he founded.

Technically it is true that Baric still has two grants, but those are legacy holdovers, one expiring tomorrow and the other in July. Over the years he has drawn roughly a quarter of a billion dollars in taxpayer funding, and his grant page used to run as long as a toilet roll, so seeing it reduced to this is a huge improvement and a credit to @DrJBhattacharya or whoever pushed this through. That said, the fact that the same people who peddled the fraudulent proximal origin paper are still receiving taxpayer money is completely untenable. To be fair, it may not be straightforward for NIH to unwind grants, especially when the crooked journal has not even withdrawn the fraudulent paper, despite the authors being caught dead to rights in their own chat messages discussing its fraudulent nature.

This was great. And Johnny wasn't joking when he said that President Reagan wrote "All things considered, I'd rather be in Philadelphia" while lying in the hospital bed. He really wrote that. He was intubated, couldn't speak, and he was quoting W.C. Fields.

I don't know about all these allegations, like the construction contractors, but the claim of thousands of lies is extremely dubious. The WaPo repo in particular is full of false fact checks. That is, false claims of falsity. This is true of all the leftist "fact check" operations, like Politifact, NYT, et al. Some of the fact checks are invalid, like @factcheckdotorg deigning to fact check Trump saying that he felt great after recovering from COVID, where they presented his doctor's boilerplate statement that he wasn't "out of the woods" yet as though it was remotely relevant to a man's professed feelings. A great example of WaPo/Kessler incompetence is arguably the funniest fact check of all time. It's false and invalid, and it remains uncorrected and in their repo: open.substack.com/pub/validscien…

To @CathyYoung63 many comments I will add that Trump's Hollywood Access "grab 'em by the pussy" tape comment would have disqualified any other candidate had they said it (along with his thousands of lies documented by the WaPo, etc.), the way he treated his construction contractors, the use of bankruptcy laws to cover his bad business dealings, etc. That said (and much more just as bad besides about Trump's character), my larger point is that he's our POTUS & that isn't going to change until January 20, 2029, and it isn't good that protesters are calling him a pedo, racist, and rapist when the claims of such are regularly refuted but it leads to political violence. Additional points: I think the E. Jean Carroll trial, along with the 34 felony counts of falsifying business records when he paid off porn star Stormy Daniels (why wasn't THAT alone disqualifying years before?!), were pure politics and never would have happened had Trump quietly retired after losing the 2020 election. As for E. Jean Carroll's decades-old claims in particular, I found them weak and wanting, inconsistent and fuzzy, and I'm not alone as did a great many non-MAGA observers of the trial. Is Trump actually a racist & antisemite inside (as is claimed)? I don't think so. Not any more than, say, many people of his age. But I don't know what's in his mind. But my larger point, again, is that there are endless reasons to criticize Trump without having to smear him with poster-short labels that lead ideologues like Cole Allen to take these accusations literally and violently: "I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes." As Voltaire famously said, "those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Truth matters.

@donoharm One of the cites in the AMA doc that led me to this was nejm.org/doi/full/10.10… I think they then cited the VBAC paper. That AMA/AAMC doc is breathtaking. It's wildly inappropriate for any medical body, just saturated in leftist ideology, and in a very cultish manner. No political ideology has any place in science or medicine.

At NIH, I discovered how the APA and AAMC are endangering pregnant black women, for example, by supporting deletion of their higher risk of complications in vaginal births after a cesarean (VBAC) from a calculator used to inform delivery decisions. This (new) leftist ideology treats race as a "social construct" and will undermine patient care. I discovered it by going through this Orwellian document they released. You'll love the language guide: aamc.org/media/58066/do…

The catastrophic consequences of prioritizing anti-racism in surgical training will go mostly undetected by the general public. It's only when your wife or mother is hemorrhaging to death on an operating room table - you will not see the paralyzing fear causing them to lose control but you will be the one to bear the weight of their failure.

Good point. It's very strange that van Bavel thinks that the claim "climate change is happening" is interesting, alarming, and should spur political action. I often see leftists say that it's "happening" or "real" and then just stop, as though they're done talking and their point is made. It marks a striking lack of rigor, intellect, and a suitable philosophical framework. We'd need a reason to care about climate change and the usual stuff they furnish is more junky academic work presuming to predict the "costs" of climate change by 2100, without any grounding in the context of a human life, where these "costs" land, the impossibility of a human being noticing a 1 °C warming over the course of 70 years (assuming they remain in the same place their entire lives), and a lack of rigor on the methodology and validity of such extremely long-term macro projections.

@ValidScience In my mind, the issue of whether the experts think anthropogenic climate change is happening is less vital to the political domain. What's more relevant is that most of the experts apparently *don't* think the repercussions of climate change are likely to be severe.

Lots of social psychology research is focused on why everyone isn't a leftist, what's wrong with people that makes them not be leftists, and how to get people to agitate for leftist causes. Last week, NYU activist Jay van Bavel announced a study that tries to trick people into taking "climate action". The study is laced with false claims that it presents to participants to turn them into activists, but they don't debrief participants and inform them that they'd been given false information (an ethical requirement). The authors probably don't know that their claims are false, and it's unlikely that anyone can successfully communicate with them given their ideological commitments. 1/x

Yes, van Bavel routinely makes false claims, like in a recent paper on "polarization" (which seems to mean the existence of non-leftists) where he falsely claimed that more state gun laws (literally the number of discrete laws) causes people to live longer: validscience.substack.com/p/nyu-social-p…

@ValidScience The author’s research is invalidated by his unapologetic political bias. He’s most known for flagging “misinformation” when it occurs on the right but not on the left (this is an example). He works to promote his own biases and suppress debate about claims he disagrees with.

@geraldposner Note that they severely understate leftist violence here, both because their variable is so narrow (attacks on the US government specifically) and because CSIS is left-leaning and conceals lots of leftist violence. See @bungarsargon's article today on that.

🚨 WSJ bombshell: Antigovernment violence in America just hit a 30-year high—the “Year of the Molotov Cocktail.” For the first time in 20 years, the progressive Left is the most violent side. By a considerable margin. The data doesn’t lie. The radical left has a serious violence problem. Paywall-free 🔗 wsj.com/politics/polic…

@MatthewGNagler @jt_kerwin @ryanbedwards Hilarious. I always wondered what Stata was like and why every economist seems to use it.

@jt_kerwin @ryanbedwards What’s going on at PNAS is you can decide whether you want to buy a Stata license or submit there.

What is going on at PNAS This doesn’t make it past the desk at an econ journal

@glukianoff Your principles just go away when it comes to Trump. It's ridiculous.

Are we really doing this again? Of course we are. Under the first amendment, the White House may not pressure ABC to fire a comedian because of his jokes. Melania is entitled to her opinion, of course, but unfortunately, this administration has shown itself more than willing to pursue their enemies for their speech.

She can be pretty knifey. She randomly attacked me a couple years ago when we were mutuals and I was a big fan. I was so confused that I did that thing where you look around the room as though there could be any answers in it. She's locked on to a "siding with abusers" narrative, but I didn't understand what that had to with me or anything I was talking about.

So @KaeleyT is lying here. I have never intentionally used a burner account to reply to anyone. I have used my burner account to look for things that were not viewable before Elon made changes to the blocking feature (a reason many journalist sometimes use burner accounts) and I accidentally replied to her with that account. And I told her immediately at the time. (See full screenshot here of our exchange in next tweet.) I’m not sure why she’s suddenly being dishonest about this except for attention.