Benjamin Franklin once observed that a lightning rod saves the house by absorbing the strike. What follows is written in that spirit. The analysis applied here to the left will be applied equally to the right—to a movement many of my readers consider their own, including me. I’m not equivocating. I think it’s the only honest way to do this. A mind that applies critical standards only to its opponents is not thinking. It is performing.
If that makes this piece a lightning rod, then so be it.
The Problem Beneath the Problem
We tend to discuss the absence of critical thinking as an intellectual failure. We believe people don’t know how to evaluate evidence being presented. They defer too readily to credentialed experts. They mistake the complicated problems that have solutions with the complex problems that require ongoing navigation. All of that is true as far as it goes.
But it doesn’t go far enough.
The deeper failure is emotional. And until we reckon with that, the intellectual remedies such as teaching logic, distrusting authority, and asking better questions will continue to bounce off the problem without penetrating it.
Human beings are tribal animals at a level that precedes cognition. The terror of being cast out of the group, of being marked as the person who doesn’t accept what everyone else accepts, is not a rational calculation. It’s closer to a survival instinct. For most of human history, exile from the group was a death sentence. That ancient wiring does not disappear because we live in suburbs and consume our consensus through smartphones.
In his book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, Joel Kotkin coined the term Clerisy to describe the credentialed class of academics, journalists, nonprofit administrators, and credentialed commentators who legitimatize elite consensus. In the vein of the notion that “modern technology creates modern monsters,” the Clerisy has become extraordinarily sophisticated at weaponizing their fear of shaming. Social shaming is driven less by intellectual judgment than by emotional impulse. The labels, the credential signaling, the manufactured consensus are designed to trigger ancient fear before the mind has a chance to engage.
Consider how the argument for NAFTA was actually delivered to ordinary Americans in the 1990s. The intellectual case was it would enable us to maximize comparative advantage, efficiency gains, aggregate growth was almost secondary. Whereas the primary message was tribal: sophisticated, educated, cosmopolitan people support free trade. If you oppose it, you are revealing yourself to be unsophisticated, parochial, probably fearful of change. You are not one of us. Those of us who opposed NAFTA and supported Ross Perot were mocked as rubes who didn’t understand how trade worked. However, we were correct and we were correct about the substance decades before the credentialed consensus admitted it. The tragedy being we paid a social cost for being correct while the people who mocked us paid nothing.
That asymmetry where being right costs you and being wrong costs the credentialed class nothing drives the problem. Economists call this a perverse incentive structure and our grandfathers called this a racket.
Critical thinking, genuinely practiced, therefore requires not just intellectual tools but emotional ones. Specifically, it requires a cultivated indifference to the approval of people whose approval we have been trained to seek. That indifference, however, is not natural. It is not comfortable. It has to be built, usually through experience that makes the cost of conformity viscerally and personally clear.
Mental acuity must be teamed with mental toughness. Some people just get smart. Some people just get tough. Not enough get both.
What We Lost
The generations who built this country operated in a brutal but effective epistemological environment. Bad judgment produced immediate and concrete consequences. The farmer sizing up a land deal, the union man reading the company’s wage offer, the Coxey’s Army marcher asking who actually benefited from the gold standard while he went hungry — these were people for whom signaling was a luxury they could not afford. They needed to think because the cost of not thinking was immediate and personal.
What replaced that environment was modernity’s freedom from consequences caused in part by social safety nets and credential insulation. We became a very wealthy country off the backs of past generations that created a store of virtue that today is being drained faster than it is being replenished.
The mass credentialing of the twentieth century promised to substitute hands on expertise for certified competence. What it delivered, at scale, was a class of people whose livelihoods depend on believing the right things — and who are therefore structurally protected from the consequences of being wrong.
Nassim Taleb named this figure the Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI.) Credentialed, consensus-affirming, fluent in the correct vocabulary, yet catastrophically wrong about anything requiring genuine skin in the game — trade policy, financial risk, public health, labor economics. The IYI’s defining characteristic is not stupidity but insulation. He is never in the room where the consequences land. Someone else absorbs those.
Jane Jacobs, in her underappreciated work on civilizational decline, identified credentialization itself as a symptom of stagnation. Healthy, dynamic societies transmit practical knowledge through doing — through apprenticeship, craft, trial and error, and the feedback loops that punish bad judgment swiftly. When credentials begin substituting for demonstrated competence, it signals that genuine knowledge transfer has already broken down. The certificate fills the void left by the collapse of the real thing.
We are living in that void. And the people most insulated from its consequences are the ones most confidently telling us there is nothing to worry about.
The Left Case Study: What the SPLC Taught Us
The Southern Poverty Law Center is the cleanest available case study in what happens when signaling substitutes for thinking at scale — and what it costs the people who trusted in that institution.
Founded in 1971 with a genuine civil rights mission, the SPLC discovered somewhere along the way that fear is more reliable than justice as a fundraising instrument. The formula was elegant in its cynicism. Identify threats. Amplify them. Monetize the anxiety of people who wanted to believe they were fighting hatred from the safety of a checkbook. Muckracker journalists were raising alarms by the late 1990s. Former employees described internal cultures that contradicted the organization’s stated mission. Financial disclosures showed hundreds of millions accumulating while the urgent direct mail kept arriving.
Thousands of decent, educated, genuinely motivated Americans kept writing checks.
They were not stupid. What they lacked was the habit of asking cui bono — not from the hatred the SPLC claimed to fight, but from the fear of it remaining permanently present. Not from solutions, but from the problem staying perpetually, profitably unsolved.
The signal was clean and compelling: this organization fights hatred, therefore supporting it makes you a person who fights hatred. That felt true. It felt good. It substituted for the harder question — is this organization actually fighting hatred effectively, or is it farming your moral anxiety for institutional profit?
The recent revelations have confirmed what the skeptics argued for decades. The gap between the signal and the reality was vast. And the people who paid for that gap were the donors who trusted, not the executives who collected.
Signaling is not thinking. And someone always pays.
The Right Case Study: The Capture You’re Not Supposed to Notice
The same machinery operates on the right. It wears different clothes. It speaks a different language. But the underlying mechanism — emotional capture through tribal signaling, followed by the extraction of trust, energy, and money — is identical.
The America First movement has achieved something genuinely significant. It cracked a credentialing consensus that had gone unchallenged for decades. It made trade skepticism, immigration restriction as labor policy, and hostility to endless foreign military adventures not merely sayable but politically dominant. It gave millions of ordinary Americans permission to name what had been done to them, in language the credentialed class had worked hard to make unspeakable. That is a real achievement against enormous institutional resistance, and it deserves honest acknowledgment.
But genuine movements are always targets for capture. The institutional right has decades of experience converting populist energy into votes while delivering for the donor class. The Tea Party is the recent cautionary tale: a genuine grassroots insurgency substantially absorbed into conventional Republican donor politics within a few election cycles, its energy harvested and its structural demands quietly shelved.
The capture of America First energy by Silicon Valley money represents a more sophisticated version of the same operation. Peter Thiel understood before most that the old donor class such as the Chamber of Commerce establishment and the defense contractor network was losing legitimacy with the populist base. Rather than defend that establishment, he moved early to position his network as the insurgency while pursuing fundamentally similar objectives that included access, contracts, favorable regulation, and a labor market kept artificially loose by visa pipelines that suppress wages for American workers.
Palantir’s deliberate embedding into the new conservative movement is not America First. What it is is surveillance capitalism wearing a nationalist costume. Their core business is data integration and intelligence infrastructure for governments. They don’t want a more limited government — they simply want to be the ones running the pipes. The H-1B policy dilution under donor pressure early in the current administration signaled whose interests are actually being protected.
Ask cui bono. Not what does this person say. Not what does this person perform. What structures and interests are actually being protected by their actions over time.
Steve Bannon could articulate the critique of the managerial class more clearly than almost anyone in American political life. He had read Samuel Francis. He understood James Burnham. He could name the disease with precision. He was also, we now know, quietly working to rehabilitate Jeffrey Epstein’s public image while publicly performing populist outrage. The gap between the signal and the reality is not a left-wing phenomenon. It is a human one.
This is not a reason for despair. It is not a reason to conclude that the movement is corrupt and nothing matters. It is a reason to apply the same question your grandparents would have asked immediately, without instruction, as a matter of survival: who benefits from my enthusiasm, my trust, my donated energy, my suspended judgment?
The Standard
The answer to capture can not and should not be paralysis. It is not the cynical conclusion that all movements are equally compromised and the honest citizen should simply withdraw. That conclusion serves the people doing the capturing. Disengaging is basically surrender with better aesthetics.
The answer should be having a standard, applied consistently, without tribal exception.
Ed Dowd, the former BlackRock fund manager whose actuarial analysis of excess mortality and disability data has made him one of the more significant heterodox voices of the past several years, has demonstrated what that standard looks like in practice. On the occasions when his analysis of financial topics was wrong, he said so publicly, explained his reasoning, and accepted the reputational cost of the admission. That is rarer than it should be, and it matters more than it might appear. A person who can admit error publicly has demonstrated that their relationship to truth is more important than their relationship to their own image. That is a meaningful signal.
The Whitefield principle is useful here. When Benjamin Franklin confronted the Reverend George Whitefield about the contradictions between his preaching and his conduct that included his use of slave labor to build an orphanage in Georgia, Whitefield responded with something approaching genuine humility: do not judge the teachings of Christ by a failed human like myself. It was an honest answer. It points toward the only workable standard available to us: judge the ideas on their merits, judge the person on their actions over time, and hold both assessments simultaneously without letting either collapse into the other.
A movement that can ask hard questions of itself is more trustworthy than one that cannot. The willingness to be a lightning rod which is to say true things that cost you something among people whose approval you value should not be taken as disloyalty to the cause. It is the highest form of investment in what the cause claims to be fighting for. Movements that cannot tolerate internal scrutiny do not get reformed. They get captured, and then they get harvested.
Apply cui bono before you donate. Before you march. Before you repeat the talking point. Before you suppress the doubt that flickered for a moment before the tribal instinct closed it down. Apply it to the people asking for your trust on the left. Apply it equally to the people asking for your trust on the right.
The Leash
The conformity instinct is a leash. It is not worn around the neck where it can be seen and removed. It is worn around the imagination. It operates before the thought is fully formed, suppressing heterodoxy not through argument but through the ancient fear of exile — the whispered warning that thinking this, saying this, will mark you as the kind of person who thinks and says things like that. In short, not a good fella.
Most people never consciously decide to wear it. It is fitted early, tightened gradually, and eventually becomes indistinguishable from the shape of one’s own thinking. The manufactured consensus feels like common sense. The approved narrative feels like reality. The boundaries of acceptable thought feel like the boundaries of thought itself.
Slipping that leash requires an act of will. It’s forged through experience and through the personal discovery that conformity’s promised protection is a lie; that the approval you performed for does not actually keep you safe and that the cost of being wrong alongside everyone else is paid in the same currency as the cost of being right alone.
Freedom from consequences made forgetting possible. The frontier generated feedback. Bad judgment had a price that was immediate, personal, and non-negotiable. That price was brutal, but it was honest, and it produced generations of people who asked cui bono not as a rhetorical flourish but as a survival reflex.
We have insulated ourselves from that feedback so thoroughly that the reflex has atrophied in most people. The credentialed class promises safety. The approved narrative promises belonging. The signal promises identity without the labor of thought.
The critical thinker is not the person with the highest credentials or the most sophisticated vocabulary. It is the person who has consciously decided, at some cost, that being right matters more than being approved of. Who has looked at the leash, recognized it for what it is, and chosen not to wear it.
That person is rarer than they should be. And more necessary than they have ever been.
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