I’m going to do some free advertising for a trans-rights organization. (Never let it be said that I am not an ally.) Please read the following event description:

Mia Hughes, Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, director of Genspect Canada, and prominent opponent of trans ideology, registered. Then she received the following email:

I believe in the right of places to deny entry to others based on their values. In fact, it is the backbone of my stance on immigration. I do not believe, however, in advertising that you welcome challenges, and then filtering for the opposite under the guise of “good faith.” (It’s worth noting that their “refund” was symbolic as the ticket was free.)

Mia’s experience was not a one-off. Freelance columnist Amy Hamm was turned away at the Vancouver stop of the “Ask a Trans Person Anything” tour after her ticket was rescinded; security said organizers had a list of people who would not be “coming with the right intentions.” Toronto lawyer Caryma Sa’d was excluded from the Toronto event two months earlier via the same “refund” email.

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After Hamm was barred, Fae Johnstone (one of the trans-rights activists) wrote that the events were “not an open invitation for prominent anti-trans people to come and argue with us.” I want to ignore for a moment the fact that this was actually, literally, exactly what the event was, and instead I want to focus on the rationale behind the bans: “Good faith.”

Fae Johnstone decided that to be allowed to ask questions at an event that prides itself on answering “tough questions,” one must ask questions in good faith.

This is fallacious. And it’s reasoning I see everywhere, on the left and the right.

There are many wicked reasons to ask questions: To trick someone, to make respondents look foolish, to make oneself look good, as part of an ideological crusade, and I could go on. However, it is fallacious to think that any intent, no matter how wicked or virtuous, has any bearing on the veracity of that question’s answer. A question stands independent of its intent, and so does its answer. (I published a paper that thematically addressed this idea, found here.)

At an event that bills itself as, “… your chance to get your questions answered - yes, even the tough ones,” the intent of the questioner is irrelevant. (If intent is useful for anything, it could be for deciding how much time to give someone, not for deciding whether a proposition is true.) This is even more so the case because this particular event had “two of Canada’s most prominent trans activists”.

To be clear, the trans part is irrelevant. Asking experts difficult questions should have nothing to do with their area of expertise or their identity characteristics. This should be the case in every domain of expertise, trans or not. At scientific conferences, hard questions are the norm. It’s a way to stress test ideas. Organizers at a scientific conference would never market an open Q&A and then pre-clear named critics. If anything, this would show that the presenters did not have sufficient reason to justify confidence in their claims.

I was recently at an event in which a young academic accused pro-life “right-wingers” of not actually caring about the lives of babies. If they truly cared, he argued, they would have overturned the Second Amendment and mandated all eligible citizens receive the Covid vaccine. I could have argued back and said that his question wasn’t in good faith: Why is he pro-choice when it comes to abortion but pro-federal-government-making-medical-decisions-for-you when it comes to vaccines? But I didn’t. I didn’t because his question was a good one, and it had merit regardless of his intent or how well thought out his position was. I wanted the individuals to whom he posed the question to have to answer it, and I wanted the audience to hear their answer. That is how you behave when you actually believe what you are saying. You expose your ideas to reality.

One of the things I’ve learned from moving in this space for well over a decade is that those in the orbit of this ideology in general do not believe the methods they advertise. I am not being hyperbolic: They literally do not believe what they are saying. It is all verbal behavior. If they meant what they said, then they would not disinvite people who disagreed with their positions.

In fact, quite the contrary. They’d do what I’ve done at my public events for over a decade: Highlight dissenting voices and ask people who disagree to move to the front of the queue. (They would also readily engage people with whom they have significant disagreements.) But they do not do this.

Years ago, I asked my mentor a question about why a university I will not name claimed to champion “inclusion” but then acted in ways that actively worked against that idea. In a thick German accent, he responded, “Ack, thems just words”.

Peter

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Villiers Hotel, Buckingham.

The incident occurred in this restaurant.

I celebrated my 60^th birthday in Buckingham, England with Reid Nicewonder, Elizabeth Weiss, and Frances Widdowson. While we were eating dinner at a semi-posh hotel restaurant, a prim 50ish year-old woman at the next table approached us and scowled, “There are other people in this restaurant.” Her husband was glowering at us.

We were stunned. Here’s what we were talking about that elicited this reaction…

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I’m staying in a tiny studio apartment in a capital city in Eastern Europe. My neighbor, a chain smoking, overweight Roma who I’ve never seen wear a shirt, approached me one night. “I see rat in you house. Big rat,” he told me as he indicated its length with his hands, almost as if he was taking me into his confidence.

“A big rat?”, I asked. “Yeah, big rat,” and he made a wiggling motion with his hand and pointed to my door. Then his son, who appears chronically malnourished and grossly underdeveloped, emerged from his apartment with a very large woman I assume to be the boy’s mother. The boy meandered around the courtyard while we spoke.

It’s difficult to gauge the age of his son, who may have a disability. He’s very thin, looks sickly, is always in a diaper, and constantly has a nipple in his mouth. Best guess: 7.

“Thanks for telling me. I appreciate it,” I told him. He nodded and walked into his apartment.

Smoking

For me to exit the building, I need to walk by my neighbor’s equally tiny apartment. Every time I do, cigarette smoke billows out of their cracked door. I sometimes hear their son crying, and when he begins crying, they always shut the door.

Then I walk out of the foyer, my mind turning to other things. And I quickly forget.

Before my neighbor approached me about the rat, I thought about speaking with him about the dangers of secondhand smoke to his son. I don’t know exactly how much he and his partner smoke, but I’ve almost never seen either of them without a lit cigarette.

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Source: https://www.mdanderson.org/cancer-types/lung-cancer.html

Dozens of times, I rehearsed what I’d say. In super basic English: “Smoking [I’d gesture with my hands as if I held an invisible cigarette] not good for kids. Bad.” Then I’d wait to see how he’d respond.

I don’t think anything would have ever come from my attempts to talk with him. If I did, I’d have spoken to him already.

Who Am I?

Who am I to tell him he shouldn’t smoke in front of his child? What gives me the right?

Perhaps more importantly, who am I not to tell him to smoke in front of his child? Who am I to ignore what I consider to be a monstrous and easily preventable health disaster? Who am I to pretend that I don’t know any better?

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Abracadabra

There are magic words. But unlike fake, childish words like “Abracadabra,” “Open Sesame,” or “Presto Chango,” these magic words actually and immediately affect people’s behavior.

When you utter these magic words, you silence and smear your ideological enemies, relieve yourself of the burden of thinking and making arguments, signal your righteousness to others, and shut down opposition, among other useful spell effects.

In the West, this modern arcana is geographically anchored; that is, the spell works better in some places than others. Here’s a brief list of those words and their seats of power:

Word: Far Right*
Geographical Seat of Power: Western Europe

Word: Racist
GSP: North America

Word: Bigot
GSP: North America

Word: Nazi
GSP: North America and Western Europe (esp. Germany, Austria)

Word: Homophobe
GSP: North America and Western Europe

Word: Islamophobe/Islamophobic
GSP: North America and especially Western Europe

Word: Fascist
GSP: North America and Western Europe

Word: I’m offended
GSP: North America

*The most powerful and felling of words in Western Europe

Of course, the right has its own repertoire of conversation-ending spells. The dynamic is the same; only the vocabulary and the geographic distribution change. In the US especially, words like “woke,” “groomer,” “Marxist,” “deep stater,” “RINO,” “cuck,” and “globalist” are routinely cast to silence opponents, signal tribal loyalty, and end discussion without engaging the actual argument.

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Magic words can be uttered at any time. However, there are certain instances when adepts find them most useful. For example, they are especially useful when the caster is directly confronted with facts and evidence but does not know enough about a topic to speak intelligently about it; when other people who share their ideological commitments are present and the caster wants to elevate their status among them (virtue signaling); or when the caster simply seeks the dopamine rush of righteousness.

Kazam!

What is particularly remarkable about these words is that even people who reject the fundamental assumptions embedded in them (for example, those who are not fearful of gay people yet are still labeled homophobes) still yield or fall silent when the words are cast. Here’s what that looks like:

[WORD] [Kazam!] [Silence. Or sustained bitter denials. Or frustration and lost tempers.]

Behold their power! They cause otherwise reasonable people to act in unbecoming ways or to become bizarrely deferential. If nonmagical words like “mollusk,” or “meteor,” or “bicycle,” were cast against the same people in the same accusatory tone, perhaps they would pause out of confusion, but they would not stop presenting their argument or openly conversing about an issue. They would not be cowed. They would polymorph into sheep.

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Alakazam

Most people do not know that there are ways to increase your saving throws or even counter the debilitating effects of these incantations (when the smear is offered as a substitute for argument rather than the product of one). If magic words are cast against you, here’s a simple Do and Don’t list.

Do

● Recognize that the person is likely prioritizing tribal signaling over evidence.

● Keep talking, unabated. You may also look directly at them and say something like, “Who I am or am not has no bearing on my argument. If you’d like to participate in the conversation, address the argument directly.” Then continue speaking.

● Shift your focus and speak to others present.

● Keep your composure.

Don’t

● Stop speaking.

● Ask for evidence of you being “far right” or “Islamophobic” or whatever other aspersion. These accusations are not about evidence. They’re about silencing you.

● Attempt to change the other person’s mind.

● Lose your temper or show frustration.

● Adopt a posture of superiority. Just because someone levels a baseless accusation against you, that does not mean your position is correct.

● Pity the caster. Just carry on.

Imagine this: You’re mid-sentence explaining recent immigration data when someone interjects, “That’s far-right!”. You look at them and calmly reply, “I’ll give that response no countenance.” Then you turn to the rest of the room and keep making your point about the numbers without missing a beat.

If you follow these basic Dos and Don’ts, you will radically decrease the likelihood these words will affect you. However, like anything else, practice is required. Finally, if you forget everything on this list, just remember one thing. Keep your cool.

P.S. Hocus Pocus, Sim Sala Bim, Shazam

How to deal with magic words is just one of the things I’ll be talking about in my upcoming university tour, Rationality Under Pressure. The tour is scheduled for November 2026. I’ll be conducting Spectrum Street Epistemology, offering tools for productive conversations, and giving specific techniques for keeping your cool when you’re under stress.

If you’re a member of a student group or an administrator and you’re interested in hosting us, please visit

https://www.nationalprogressalliance.org/contact/.

This is just a teaser. I’ll write more about this as the date approaches.

In the end, the point of these Dos and Don’ts is not to “win” against the caster or to score a moral victory. It’s simply to refuse to let the spell dictate the terms of the conversation. When the magic words are uttered, rationality under pressure means keeping your composure, continuing to speak, and insisting that ideas, not labels, remain the subject. That discipline is exactly what we will practice on the Rationality Under Pressure tour.

Peter

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On July 25, 2026, 21-year-old Abdul Ballout drove a van into the crowd at Berlin Pride, killing one woman and injuring 29 people.

Three days later, I listened to The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, speak at a vigil for the victims, held by London’s LGBT community. Khan began by saying that he was honored to be there, but devastated, because he had stood in that very spot four times before, at four other vigils for murdered gay people. He listed them, year by year. Pulse was on the list. Oslo was on the list. Khan urged unity. He reminded us to face hate with love.

I wished I could not believe my ears: A European leader preaching acceptance of the people who murder gay people, to gay people, at a vigil to commemorate the murders of gay people, by the very people European leaders accepted!

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At Least We Agree Some Terrorism Is Bad

In 1999, a neo-Nazi named David Copeland bombed the Admiral Duncan, a gay pub in London, killing three people.

The day after it happened, every politician, every newspaper, every institution in Britain named the ideology, named the group, and named the pipeline that produced Copeland. Nobody stood at that vigil and told victims they needed to welcome more neo-Nazis. There is no policy by which Britain actively imports more neo-Nazis. No politician calls welcoming them a moral duty, and nobody gets called a bigot for noticing what neo-Nazis believe.

The opposite is true when the mass-murderer is a Muslim. Pulse, 2016: Forty-nine dead, killed by a man who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State as he fired. Oslo, 2022: Two dead, twenty-one wounded outside a gay bar the night before Pride, by a man convicted of aggravated terrorism on behalf of the Islamic State. Berlin, 2026: One dead, 29 wounded by an attempted ISIS convert who had been convicted by a German court just two months earlier of preparing to commit terrorism.

And at every one of these vigils, the same speech: Hate has no place here. Love wins. We stand together. Each time a condemnation carefully engineered to have no object of condemnation.

What is the function of a condemnation that names nothing? Who is it for?

The Purpose of a System is What it Does

One of my favorite phrases is POSIWID, or, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” Not what political leaders say it should do, not what it might one day live up to, but what it does.

Let’s apply POSIWID to Germany. Here is everything Germany’s institutions did with Abdul Ballout, in order:

Ballout tried to join ISIS and was arrested for doing so while in Lebanon. In November 2025, Germany flew him home and detained him at the airport. In May 2026, a Berlin court convicted him of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state and of publishing ISIS propaganda. Prosecutors asked for two years and ten months in prison. The court gave him one year and ten months, as a youth sentence, though he was twenty, and then, lest that be too harsh for a man convicted of preparing a terrorist attack, declined to make him serve it. The court deferred the decision on suspending the sentence for six months, lifted the arrest warrant over prosecutors’ objections, and sent him home under the conditions that he book a careers-counseling appointment and attend 26 sessions of deradicalization counseling. No, that is not a joke. It is a German court ruling.

This was not a man who slipped through the cracks. In January 2026, Berlin police formally classified him as a Gefährder: Someone capable of committing politically motivated violence. His phone was monitored. His case was discussed at Germany’s Joint Counter-Terrorism Center. As a condition of his freedom, he was ordered into a deradicalization program. That’s right: Who needs to put ISIS members in jail when we have talk therapy? He attended two sessions. The program’s own advisers described him as “friendly” and “compliant,” though “inscrutable,” and were planning to notify the government of their worries on Monday. (Even stopping a terror plot won’t get Europeans to work weekends.)

Let’s take a moment and think about how many opportunities there were to stop a man already convicted of attempting a terrorist attack, of attempting—who would have guessed!?—another terrorist attack. The courts knew—they convicted him. The police knew—they classified him as dangerous. The counter-terrorism apparatus knew—they had a dedicated file on him. The therapists knew—they were going to report him. And the sum total of all this knowing was a suspended sentence and a counseling schedule.

So here is the question, and please sit with it rather than reach for your tribe’s answer: What is the purpose of a system when its stated understanding is, “This man is dangerous” and its revealed action is, “No further action required”?

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The Man at the Podium

I recently wrote about the Barista Fallacy: Reasoning about a population from the friendly individuals you happen to know. Sadiq Khan is the most extraordinary case study of that fallacy I have ever encountered, because he commits it against himself.

When Khan, a Muslim, voted for same-sex marriage in 2013, a mufti in Bradford issued a fatwa declaring him an apostate. He received death threats. These are his own words, to a gay magazine: “I did need to discuss with my daughters issues around police protection, and there are still people who don’t talk to me because of these issues.”

In that same interview, Khan was asked about the 2016 ICM survey (the most comprehensive face-to-face poll of British Muslims ever conducted). It found that 52% of British Muslims believe homosexuality should be illegal—in Britain!

Khan’s response to the poll: “[It] doesn’t represent the people I know.”

A man who required police protection from Islamist rage over gay rights, who paid the price in his own family’s safety, is shown data describing the belief system that threatened him, and he answers with his personal acquaintances, his “lived experience.” Unfortunately, his lived experience was insufficient to shield from Islamist violence the 15 people who were murdered and 134 people who were injured in London during his tenure as mayor.

I don’t know why he does it. Maybe he genuinely doesn’t accept the data. Maybe he accepts it and calculates that saying so would do more harm than good. Maybe he’s afraid. Maybe it’s a noble lie he considers the price of social peace. But notice that every one of those explanations is deepening public distrust because each one means the person in Britain with the best evidence, both anecdotal and data-based, cannot honestly state the conclusion that the evidence supports.

Two Honest Positions and One Dishonest One

Attitudes are not violence. The overwhelming majority of the people captured in that 52 percent will never hurt anyone. But massacres are not committed by averages. They are committed by the tail of a distribution, and the size of the tail scales with the size and shape of the whole. A country that admits a population admits its distribution of belief, and not for one generation, but for all of them. You can vet an immigrant. You cannot vet her unborn children. Ballout was born in Berlin. Mateen was born in New York.

According to a German newspaper, Abdul held only German citizenship, attended local schools, played football in neighborhood youth competitions, and grew up in the multicultural district of Tiergarten. He was as German as a child of immigrants can be. That didn’t deter him from attempting to mass murder his countrymen.

Which leaves exactly two honest positions.

Position One: The risk is unacceptable. Ban all immigration from populations whose belief distributions include a violent tail, because no downstream benefit justifies the recurring murder of your own citizens.

Position Two: The occasional massacre of gay people is worth it to have more Muslims in your society. Millions of peaceful people get better lives; a wealthy society can absorb rare atrocities the way it absorbs highway deaths: As a known cost of a policy it has chosen with open eyes.

This position carries a corollary: You must manage the tail. Ruthlessly. If you have knowingly accepted that some people are just going to be mass-murdered in the streets with semi-regular frequency and that’s a price you’re willing to pay, then the question is simply how many and how frequently. You have the responsibility to ensure the scale and frequency of those mass-murders are both as limited as possible. This means you cannot do things like giving convicted terror aspirants suspended sentences because you want them to have talk-therapy instead.

Arguably, reasonable people can hold either position. What nobody can honestly hold is Position Three, which is the one that European elites actually hold: Deny that a disproportionate share of recent Islamist-motivated murders and anti-gay hate attacks exists, preach “welcome” as a moral axiom rather than a policy with costs, call anyone who notices Muslims killing people a bigot, and then, when the population tail arrives driving a van into a Pride parade, hold a vigil and condemn “hate.”

I have one last question:

What would that vigil speech have sounded like if it were written by someone whose actual goal was preventing the next vigil?

I know what I would say.

Peter

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References

● Berlin Police and Germany’s Federal Ministry of the Interior, public statements (25–26 July 2026), as reported by BBC News, NPR, and Al Jazeera. One woman killed and twenty-nine injured when a van was driven into the Christopher Street Day crowd in the Tiergarten; the perpetrator, armed with a bladed weapon, was shot dead by police in Spandau the following day; Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt described a suspected Islamist attack.

● Central Criminal Court, R v. David Copeland (June 2000), and contemporaneous BBC reporting. Copeland, a neo-Nazi, carried out the April 1999 nail bombings targeting Brixton’s Black community, the Bengali community on Brick Lane, and the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, where three people were killed, one of them a pregnant woman.

● United States v. Noor Salman (M.D. Fla., 2018), trial coverage by the New York Times and Slate (March 2018). Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State during the Pulse attack; trial evidence indicated he had scouted other targets, including Disney Springs, and may not have known Pulse was a gay venue when he selected it.

● Oslo District Court, judgment against Zaniar Matapour (2024). Convicted of aggravated terrorism for the 25 June 2022 shooting outside the London Pub on the eve of Oslo Pride—two killed, twenty-one wounded—carried out on behalf of the Islamic State.

● Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office and Berlin juvenile court judgment (May 2026), as reported by NPR, CBS News, and the BBC (26–28 July 2026). Conviction for preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state and disseminating Islamic State propaganda; prosecutors sought two years and ten months; the court imposed a suspended youth sentence of one year and ten months, crediting pre-trial detention in Germany and Lebanon; the prosecution’s appeal against the suspension was pending on the night of the attack.

● Der Spiegel (July 2026). Berlin’s State Criminal Police Office formally classified Ballout as a Gefährder—an individual assessed as capable of committing politically motivated violence—in January 2026.

● CBS News (28 July 2026). A leader of the court-ordered deradicalization program said Ballout’s cooperation appeared feigned and that staff were preparing to alert the authorities; Berlin prosecutors confirmed a 3 July search of his apartment on a weapons tip that recovered only a toy gun.

● Die Welt (July 2026). Program advisers described Ballout as friendly and compliant but impossible to read; he attended two sessions, with a third scheduled for the Monday after the attack.

● Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, public remarks (late July 2026), widely reported. Described the suspended sentence as defying comprehension given the assessed danger; the federal government has opened a review of whether terrorism convictions should remain eligible for suspended sentences.

● PinkNews, “Labour MP Sadiq Khan receives death threats for supporting same-sex marriage” (18 February 2013). Mufti Muhammad Aslam Naqshbandi of the Jamia Islamia Rizvia mosque, Bradford, issued a fatwa declaring Khan an apostate after his vote for the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill; police advised Khan to review the security around himself and his family.

● Attitude, “Sadiq Khan interview: ‘That British Muslim attitudes poll doesn’t represent the people I know’” (2016). Khan described the fatwa that followed his equal-marriage vote, discussing police protection with his daughters, and acquaintances who no longer speak to him because of the vote.

● ICM Unlimited for Channel 4, What British Muslims Really Think (April 2016), face-to-face survey of a representative sample of 1,000+ British Muslims with a general-population control sample, https://www.channel4.com/press/news/c4-survey-and-documentary-reveals-what-british-muslims-really-think. Asked whether homosexuality should be legal in Britain: Net disagree 52% (strongly disagree 38%, tend to disagree 14%); net agree 18%. The Muslim Council of Britain criticized the sampling of areas at least 20% Muslim; ICM director Martin Boon defended it as the most rigorous survey of its kind outside government research, and British Polling Council president John Curtice said the methods were standard for polling ethnic minorities (CNN and HuffPost UK, April 2016).

Social media is awash with Muslims in Western Europe doing and saying murderous, incendiary things. On the other hand, Mohammad, who makes me coffee every day, is a really friendly, good guy. How should I reconcile hordes of angry, threatening Muslims with my barista and other chill Muslims I know, especially as it relates to immigration policies?

Muslim jihadis—of which there are many—who live in the West, usually on public welfare, while screaming about death to the West and sawing the heads off of infidels, are obviously not representative of all Muslims. But what about my barista? Is he representative of all Muslims? And should the answer to this question influence my stance on immigration policy?

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On July 13, someone I’ve never heard of posted this to X: “In America, you are more likely to be killed by ICE than by an immigrant.”

In case you were wondering, this is untrue. Rough estimates indicate a US citizen is far more likely to be killed by an immigrant (documented or undocumented) than by an ICE agent or in ICE custody. Most deaths associated with ICE involve detainees in custody (often due to medical issues), while direct killings of civilians by ICE agents are rare. By contrast, undocumented immigrants alone are responsible for hundreds of homicides per year. We don’t know the precise ratio because the US doesn’t systematically track homicide rates by immigration status, but the gap is very large in the direction opposite to the claim.

But an obviously contradictory reality didn’t stop this poster from proudly stating this lie. How should we understand and respond to the mass phenomenon of people who make claims that are obviously untrue?

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I’ll reason through a taboo claim:

Race and IQ

While there appears to be overwhelming evidence of racial (for lack of a better word) differences in IQ, I’m not going to wade into this debate. Rather, let’s begin with the assumption that the differences are real. Regardless of the veracity of this assumption, it is a vital thought experiment because eventually scientists will find the genetic bases for intelligence. It doesn’t matter if those bases correlate with skin color. They will correlate with something, and we must have a moral infrastructure ready to preempt the chaos and division this will wreak upon society.

For the purpose of this specific thought experiment, we are going to assume that sub-Saharan African populations have lower average IQs, while Jews and cold-climate Asians have higher average IQs, with Whites falling in between. What follows from this?

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Two weeks ago, in Seattle, I was waiting at a makeshift bus stop. The original bus stop had been moved due to construction, and I found myself surrounded by ~40 protesters who were chanting and holding signs. After a few minutes, I struck up a conversation with a protester standing next to me. He was white, in his late 40s, angry, and he held a large sign demanding, “End War NOW.”

I asked him what he was protesting and he said, “War, oppression, fascism.” He asked me what I’m doing, and I told him the truth: “I’m waiting for the bus. The bus stop was moved due to construction.” He nodded and got back to yelling at cars and signaling them to honk in support, which many did.

I asked him how long he’d been protesting and he responded, “Two hours, today.” Then I asked him where he got his news, and he said, “YouTube and podcasts.” I said, “Cool, what podcasts do you listen to?” He stopped yelling, looked at me, and said, “A lot of different ones.” “Cool,” I said, “I listen to a lot of podcasts, too. What are your favorites?” He froze, stared at me, and said, “I don’t have to tell you shit.” Then he got back to yelling at cars.

I asked, “Why are you upset? Was my question unreasonable?” He responded, “I think you don’t believe what I do.” I said, “Even if that’s true, isn’t that more and not less reason to talk to me? You’re out here with signs yelling at people in cars and I assume it’s because you want support for your message. I’m just a guy waiting for the bus. Isn’t this a great opportunity for you and for me to learn?”

He ignored me and began screaming at cars again.

Other protesters then surrounded me, not in a threatening way, but they physically encircled me. They asked me what was going on and I told them. They agreed with the protester, “He doesn’t have to tell you anything,” a young man told me, to which I responded, “That’s true. He certainly does not. And yet, I truly don’t understand the hostility. Is my question unreasonable? Why is that question so disturbing?”

Then the bus arrived.

That refusal to engage, even when the cost was zero, struck me as a small but telling example of the same pattern I had seen for decades in academia.

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Questions Without Answers

For over three decades, I’ve been respectfully asking people questions. When I taught at a university I will not name, I saw bizarre claims (“citation justice,” the claim that in peer-reviewed papers, academics should cite minorities more than non-minorities; racial disparities in outcomes are entirely caused by systems; it is possible to change biological sex) increasingly creeping into policy decisions. I politely and respectfully asked supporters and administrators what the rationale and evidence for the new policies were, and instead of providing clear answers, I was consistently met with hostility, formal complaints, anger, and accusations of microaggressions.

Nobody would respond this way to claims about electricity or gravity. They’d just provide evidence. And yet otherwise intelligent and highly educated people were making really strange claims about reality that up until very recently almost everyone would think were completely absurd if not morally suspect. One of the reasons why questioning these claims was important is that once they became institutionalized, the policies would govern how people behaved, including the threat of sanction, punishment, and even loss of employment.

One of the things that was so striking to me about this hostility was that years prior I was involved in the New Atheist movement. When I would ask Christians or those of other faiths about their reasoning and evidence, they were more than happy to speak with me at length about why they believed what they believed. While spirited, these conversations were almost universally friendly and often ended in one of us taking the other to dinner or drinks. I still maintain many of these friendships.

My First Mistake

For years, I’ve attempted to get leftists on my show. I’ve largely failed. (We’ve recently begun making our invitation list public. As to why, see here.)

Only three leftists have accepted my invitation (Destiny, David Pakman, and Jonathan Rauch). These were not particularly interesting conversations, and that’s entirely my fault. I made the mistake of softballing questions in the hope that eventually I’d get more leftists on the show. This approach was grossly mistaken and ultimately failed. It made the conversations less robust than they could have been and I shortchanged my guests. For that, I am sorry.

One reason I did this was that I was particularly susceptible to the criticism that Conversations with Peter Boghossian (Apple, YouTube, Amazon) was a center-right show that did not have leftists on. I was and am someone who values the truth, and I am not egotistical enough to believe the truth lies entirely with those in the same tribes as me.

But most of the individuals who are in service to opposing tribes and ideologies have shown little willingness to add substantive arguments to the conversation when challenged. If they did have such a willingness, quite simply, they’d have already added it. We’d see them routinely appear on longform shows where they substantively engage people who hold opposing views or who question their views. Think Kamala Harris going on Joe Rogan. (Destiny is the exception to this, but while Destiny is a self-described leftist he’s not an identitarian.)

This used to be the standard among disagreeing tribes in the United States. Christians and atheists did this for decades prior. Specific examples include Richard Dawkins debating John Lennox and Alister McGrath, Sam Harris debating William Lane Craig, and Christopher Hitchens debating Frank Turek. But this was neither new nor confined to the realm of culture wars. Politically, William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal engaged in similar public dialogues and debates in the late 60s. As a bare minimum, they’d furnish their reasoning and evidence in writing and invite others to a back-and-forth.

It’s important to not “what about” the issue of an unwillingness to engage those with whom one disagrees. Unwillingness to engage opposing views in good faith has become especially pronounced on the contemporary left, particularly within academic and activist institutions. With the exception of a few isolated examples on the right, those on the center and to the right of center are more than willing to engage those they disagree with.

Think Charlie Kirk, who was willing to debate people across the political spectrum. Reactions to his assassination in 2025 revealed how many on the left celebrated political violence rather than condemning it. Although this is ahistorical, unwillingness to engage opposing views in good faith remains a notable feature of the modern left. Saying otherwise is profoundly dishonest.

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I Was Wrong, Again

Realizing my mistake, that I could get leftists on the show if I softballed people with similar worldviews, I decided to change course. On June 24, 2026, I tweeted:

“I miscalculated. Softballing leftists did not draw more leftists to the show. That approach ends now.

All future in-person interviews on Conversations with Peter Boghossian will be hardball. Guests will face direct pressure and rigorous examination of their claims.

Edited interviews already in progress remain unchanged.”

Consequently, I was confident that it would be more difficult for me to get noteworthy people of any political orientation to come on the show. After all, who would want to endure a sustained Socratic grilling? It turns out, quite a few people.

After I posted the above tweet, we were deluged with requests to come on the show. While we rarely accept self-invitations, the fact still stands: More, and not fewer, people wanted to come on the show. And, as far as I can tell, not a single person on the left was among them.

Potential guests’ enthusiasm did not wane when we informed people we’d already invited on the show about the new format change. One person even responded, “Great! I was looking forward to it before but now I can’t wait!!”

This reaction confirmed something I had already begun to suspect: Avoiding rigorous disagreement doesn’t just limit conversation, it actively damages people’s ability to think clearly.

Cognitive Pits

Failure to engage people with whom you have significant disagreements will, eventually, deepen and entrench your delusions about the nature of reality. This does not mean that engaging others will necessarily lead you to truth, but by not engaging others you’ll have no way to figure out if what you believe corresponds to reality. You’ll have no corrective mechanism or way to falsify what you believe.

But it’s even worse than this. Over time, you’ll come to believe you’re a better person because you’ve not engaged others. You believe the true things, which makes you a good person, and so those who disagree must be bad people. (You’ll do this because the confidence you have that your beliefs are true will increase because your beliefs have not been stress tested. A similar phenomenon can be found in fantasy-based martial arts, where practitioners do not engage resisting opponents.)

The solutions sound simple: “Engage people you disagree with. Listen with the goal of understanding. Really understand why someone believes what they believe. Be willing to revise your beliefs,” but they’re not easy to achieve. Complicating your ability to do this are institutional structures, tribalism, and our evolved moral systems. Briefly, here are a few obstacles that put conversations across divides into hard mode:

• Thinking that because one has a different political orientation, engaging them morally sullies you

• Failing to understand that not being exposed to people who hold different views causes you to “other” them and thus view them as bad or immoral

• Avoiding engage long enough, and you’ll not know how to engage and cease to understand why you should

• Thinking you can immediately write off a person or an idea because of a particular label (“far right,” “racist,” “bigot,” “[something]phobic,” etc.)

• Thinking that not revising your beliefs makes you a better person

• Using the fact that you don’t engage others as an excuse to not do the intellectual work to understand the reasoning behind their positions

• Fearing ostracism or outcast from your moral community if you engage different beliefs, and fear of losing moral status if you’re verbally bested

• Believing that being offended is a justified response to your beliefs being challenged

These can be mitigated to a certain extent, but not entirely. My number one recommendation for how to start is to just listen. That’s it, listen. Listen to someone whose beliefs don’t align with yours, and focus on why they believe what they believe. I’d also suggest keeping these interactions brief, to start. Eventually you can work yourself up to listening for longer periods of time and asking targeted epistemological questions.

To entirely mitigate these obstacles, you need a certain disposition. Basically, the willingness to lose friends, to lose the respect of those in your community, and to be lonely. Indeed, a heavy price to pay when truth is not guaranteed and when you prioritize other, more primal instincts.

There Are No Guarantees

If someone does not want to talk to you, there’s not a lot you can do about it. The protester at the bus stop was hellbent on not talking to me, despite my best efforts to build rapport and be mindful of my tone. But this doesn’t prevent you from engaging others. It just means that it’s not always possible.

I’ll be 60 this month, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. One of those mistakes was believing that softening my approach would encourage more and better engagement. I will not make that mistake again.

Peter

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And then there’s this:

Thirty-year-old Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese asylum seeker, mounted and stabbed Stephen Ogilvie repeatedly in the face, head, neck, and back with a kitchen knife in north Belfast. Ogilvie lost his left eye and sustained serious injuries but survived.

There’s been a characteristic silence around the attack from left-wing media. The New York Times did cover it, but only in the context of the anti-immigration sentiment that ensued. Same with the other mainstream outlets I checked (BBC, NBC, Washington Post, CNN, etc.). This is a shame, not merely because it is gross journalistic malpractice to frame the event only in terms of its backlash, but because it deprives everyone (left, right, and center) of hearing what the intelligent left-wing critic has to say about the issue.

After the attack I called a few leftist friends to get their perspectives on the attempted beheading. Not a single person had even heard of the attack. Not one.

Maybe there is a reasonable way of interpreting this asylum seeker’s savagery that doesn’t lead one to think, as I did: “Jesus Christ, we’re long overdue to shut the borders and deport these people.” But because of the mainstream’s silence on the issue, we will never know what intelligent leftists have to say.

Whether or not I agree with the left or the right on any given issue, I think the presence of differing opinions and the resulting debate is an inherently good thing for a democracy. If people with whom you disagree are unwilling or incapable of forming arguments for their positions, and if you value truth and intellectual integrity then you should make their arguments better than they could. This is part of being an intellectually responsible adult: Understanding that you cannot be correct about everything and those who have substantive disagreements with you are almost certainly correct some of the time.

So, in the absence of intelligent left-wing discussion on this issue, I’m going to steelman the opposition and tell you what I think the intelligent left-wing response to this issue should be:

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I am not asking you to agree with this perspective. I do not agree with it. My disagreement stems from the idea that we have an obligation to take in asylum seekers because we are relatively well off. This is an assertion. It’s not derived. Moreover, there is overwhelming evidence that large, rapid inflows from high-violence, low-trust source regions produce measurable downstream costs in crime, welfare, and trust.**

With that said, I am asking you to consider this argument, and indeed, to rebut it to the extent to which you disagree. We are made stronger as a society when there is public debate on matters of abiding significance. This is my contribution.

Peter

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**Citations

• Statistics Denmark, Indvandrere i Danmark 2025 (Copenhagen: Statistics Denmark, 2025). Male descendants crime indices relative to Danish-origin baseline: Lebanon 386, Somali 316, Syrian 312, Iraqi 268.

• Statistics Denmark, conviction tables (STRAFNA4 series), penal code convictions per 100,000 residents aged 15–79 by country of origin, 2021–2025. Somali-origin rate 7.8 times Danish-origin baseline (428 per 100,000); 40 of 65 tracked origin groups exceeded the native rate.

• Ministry of Justice (UK), prison population statistics, June 2021–June 2025, analyzed in Migration Observatory, “How do conviction rates and prison populations differ between migrants and the UK-born population?” (30 September 2025). Prisoner numbers from Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan increased over the period concurrent with higher asylum inflows from those countries.

• Migration Advisory Committee, Migration Advisory Committee Annual Report 2025 (London: Migration Advisory Committee, 17 December 2025), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisory-committee-annual-report-2025/migration-advisory-committee-mac-annual-report-2025-accessible. “We expect the lifetime net fiscal impact of those entering through asylum and refugee routes to be unambiguously negative.”

• Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), Police Crime Statistics 2025 (Wiesbaden: BKA, 2025). Non-German suspects accounted for roughly 34% of total suspects while comprising approximately 16% of the population, with elevated representation in violent crime categories among asylum-linked migrant cohorts.

• Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA), Registered offendings among persons of native and non-native backgrounds (Stockholm: BRA, September 2021). Foreign-born show relative risk of 3.2 for rape offences and up to 4.0 for homicide. Those born in Sweden to two non-native parents show relative risks of 11.2 for homicide and 11.5 for robbery.

#1:

#2:

#3:

There are many good answers to this question, and the one you offer is a litmus test. Some right-wing readers are likely disgusted by all three, and identify them as the results of left-wing policy failures. Left-wing readers may instead see three groups resisting various tendrils of America’s power, be they patriarchy, white supremacy, or cultural erasure.

I offer a different answer: All three are a result of the demise of shame as a cultural force in America.

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In order to shame someone, you have to share a basic moral and cultural framework with them. Put more simply, you have to think the same things are bad. This is why shame was such an efficient cudgel during the Woke era: There was a shared understanding of what constituted wrongthink (even among the minority who disagreed that it was wrongthink) and this shared understanding enabled the Woke to efficiently identify, shame, and punish transgressors.

My suspicion is that Wokeness was likely the last mono-morality that will ever exist in America; peak-Woke is over and we are too diverse a nation for any one moral system to hold purchase over everyone. Now, different moral tribes compete and coexist: Urban Black, conservative Muslim, Woke, WASP, conservative Christian, and those of various immigrant groups, to name a few.

It’s easy to see the good that freeing people from shame does. I am now more able to speak my mind without fear of social, professional, and legal reprisal than I was during peak-woke. Two men in love can hold hands while walking down the street, something much harder during the 1950s era of conservative Christian cultural domination. These are positive, liberal developments. They bring our society closer to Enlightenment ideals that form the beating heart of Western civilization.

But shame is also an important tool of social control. Without shame, we will become forced to default to carceral solutions, which leaves everyone, from taxpaying shamers to those whose behavior is immune to their shaming, worse off.

Decades ago, when I was still teaching at a university I will not name, I taught an ethics class. I asked students to raise their hands if they believed we should shame other people for things they do. Nobody raised their hands. I then offered a specific example: What if, in the park just outside our classroom, we saw a man call his girlfriend a “stupid bitch,” and then spit on her? Should we shame that behavior? Most hands went up.

Shame is an integral part of a well-functioning society. We should shame smoking in front of children. We should shame littering. But shame stops functioning as a mechanism to control behavior in morally diverse societies. For instance, urban Black youth culture does not consider public disorder to be shameful (as evidenced by video #2, filmed gleefully by participants). WASPs, meanwhile, do find public disorder shameful. That sets up an incommensurable cultural conflict that no amount of shaming will solve, because the former group doesn’t give a shit about what the latter thinks is proper. (And to be fair, neither do the latter about the former.)

The post-Woke era is also the post-shame era. Some groups—Christian LARPers, Marxists, those who aspire to institute Sharia Law—believe that they will be the ones to enforce the next dominant moral orthodoxy. They are all wrong. It is too late for that. Diversity (our strength!) has triumphed over a shared sense of right and wrong.

But I’m not writing this essay to mourn the past. I’m writing it to build the future. We need to create the moral, legal, and physical infrastructure that will allow the United States to continue to function efficiently even as it becomes an increasingly diverse society. This is a simple idea in the opening salvo of what will hopefully be a longer conversation:

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We inoculate our society against those who would take advantage of it by pre-emptively making ourselves lower-trust.

A common thread among low-trust cultural and moral groups is a disrespect toward the commons. Examples include littering, welfare fraud, playing music loudly on public transportation, and riding motorized bikes on pedestrian sidewalks. Some of these can be easily remedied by intelligent public policy: Increase the number of trash cans in public spaces, or make it physically impossible to enter public transit without paying. (For more on the latter, see Lessig’s Code 2.0.)

Both of these have already been implemented in large blue cities to tremendous effect. Let’s look at one example: In August of 2025, San Francisco installed 6ft tall plexiglass fare gates in BART (their public transit system) that made it almost impossible to enter without paying. In tandem, they also increased the number of police. The result? A 41% decrease in crime relative to the year before, 961 fewer hours spent cleaning up graffiti and vandalism in just the first 6 months after installing the gates, and $10,000,000 in annual revenue recovered. This is an excellent example of how even minimal selection against low-trust behavior (fare evasion) in public spaces pays dividends. As the United States becomes more culturally and morally diverse, and low-trust behavior becomes more common, the returns from enforcing socially productive behavior increase.

It’s easy to blame low-trust behavior on people in low-trust societies, but in fact, in most places, our public policy actually incentivizes low-trust behavior. Why would you pay for the subway when you know that (a) fares are not enforced, and (b) you’re going to be harassed during your ride by (c) other people didn’t pay the fare! It’s effortless to imagine how one would think it’s illogical and unfair to pay.

This too is a downstream effect of, among other things, decreased shame. Harassing innocent people used to be shameful behavior—it was done in dark alleys and at night—now, it’s done in subway cars in New York City by the criminally mentally ill. And if you stop them from harassing others (Daniel Penny) the justice system—the very people who are entrusted to ensure your safety—shame and attempt to punish you.

A dream scenario would be for cultural and moral homogeneity simply to the extent of a respect of public spaces. I won’t hold my breath. Absent this, I’ll take enforcing laws (whether through rebuilding physical infrastructure, increased police presence, or harsher legislation) designed to compel behavior that was once largely self-enforced. This will necessarily mean increased state presence in the lives of citizens, something which I am (generally) against. There may, however, be no other realistic options.

If you have further ideas for preparing the United States for increasing low-trust behavior I would love to hear them. I think this will be one of the defining questions of the next few decades of American life.

Peter

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I traveled to Hawke’s Bay to have conversations with Black Power’s leadership. They’re New Zealand’s second-largest gang, after their rivals, the Mongrel Mob.

As we (Reid and Guy) pulled up to our humble Airbnb in a shiny SUV rental, an older white V8 Mercedes was in our driveway. I got out, approached the men standing outside their car with my hand outstretched. Rather than shake my hand, one by one they pressed their foreheads against ours and looked into our eyes. I liked them immediately.

Denis, an older white guy, is a Black Power life member. Munz, an older Māori man, is the president. And Grub, who sported moko kanohi (a full-face tattoo), is the vice president. After those brief and intimate introductions, we went into our living room, sipped water together for 90 minutes, and talked about how we wanted to proceed.

I felt a connection to these three men. These are people who do not bullshit, who’ll have your back in times of crisis, and whose word means something. They are men of a bygone era, when your word was your bond, and your honor was sacred. These are men you can have an honest conversation with, who’ll look you in the eyes and tell you how they see it, and they won’t hesitate to call you out. Spending time with them felt familiar.

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I’ve made a lot of predictions, on record, about New York City under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. How it’s going to be insolvent. Crime-ridden. Dysfunctional. You can find them, timestamped, here, here, here, and here. But a few days ago, Mamdani’s office announced that he had reduced New York’s deficit from $12 billion to $0. Amazing!

Here’s Mamdani’s video where he explicitly makes this claim:

Only one of us can be correct, and we now have the evidence to determine who that is. So, I thought I’d take this moment to pit my predictions—and Mamdani’s claims—against reality.

Who got it right? Who got it wrong? And do I Mamdani an apology?

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First, I want to acknowledge the distinct disadvantage Mamdani faced: Eric Adams was, unfortunately, as incompetent as he was corrupt. (He’ll feel right at home in Albania.) His budget failed to accurately reflect how much money the city needed by about $12 billion dollars. That is: He claimed that New York City only needed X dollars to fund the city’s expenses, and he received X dollars, but in fact the city actually needed X + $12 BILLION dollars. Now the bill is coming due, and Mamdani’s stuck with it.

Second, feel not the slightest sympathy for Mamdani: When he was an assemblyman, he voted for the precise spending increases that inflated the budget past what New York City could afford; when Eric Adams vetoed them, arguing (correctly) that the city didn’t have the money, Mamdani and other members overrode the veto. Now Mamdani is claiming to have “uncovered” the $12 billion “Adams gap.” Hmmm. How did that gap get there, Assemblyman Mamdani?

Nonetheless, I’d be willing to look the other way if Mamdani did actually balance the budget. There’s nothing wrong with funding things you can pay for.

So, can he? Or rather, can you, taxpayer?

Essentially, Mamdani’s task was to find $12 billion dollars. There are really only two ways to do this: You cut services, or raise taxes. (The federal govt. prints money.) Both make people hate you, and every politician knows that. Mamdani found a neat way around this: Make your children pay for it! (This works because his devoted base of downwardly mobile and over-educated yuppies have none.) Let’s look at how he accomplished this.

NYC has pension funds from which it draws to pay the pensions of current retirees and future retirees. At current spending levels, however, the fund is on an unsustainable decline. If NYC doesn’t put more money into it, the city won’t be able to afford future retirees’ pensions, and the system collapses. In short: They’re fucked. To prevent system-collapse, every year NYC is required to pay money in so that, hopefully, by 2032, the fund will have enough money that it can self-sustain.

Mr. Mamdani, however, decided that he’d rather not put all that money in this year. It’s expensive to prevent system-collapse! Instead, he increased the amount of time the city has to repay the debt from 2032 to 2037, which reduces the amount the city needs to pay each year. This year, specifically, it allows New York to pay $1.64 billion fewer dollars into the fund. Mamdani, who I’m coming to realize really is an excellent politician (pejorative), has claimed that $1.64 billion as a credit against the $12 billion he has to come up with.

So what? He plays with numbers. What’s the big deal?

The problem with this is that delaying pension contributions doesn’t make costs go away, in fact, it dramatically increases them in the long term. This is because the pension fund expects to earn investment returns on the money that NYC puts in this year, so when contributions are reduced, the city eventually has to pay back the difference plus the investment growth the fund would have generated. That missing money then compounds at 7% per year, which, annualized across 5 extra years, is about $4 billion dollars missing. So, Mamdani really did “save” NYC from having to pay $1.64 billion dollars this year, and all it cost was $4 billion dollars from your children, taken when Mamdani is no longer mayor.

That’s $1.64 billion. What about the rest? The lion’s share of $12 billion comes from a $4 billion New York State aid package ($8 billion over two years). A one-off hand out that is, in effect, a wealth transfer from upstate New York to New York City. Very equitable!

But in truth, there’s nothing wrong with an aid package. Sometimes you’re in deep shit and you need some help to dig yourself out. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with providing temporary budget relief, provided that money is used to fix structural problems. But fear not! Mamdani has actually found a way to use this money to create even more structural problems.

The perfect example: Mamdani is using $1.6 billion in New York State funding to expand free pre-k for 3-year-olds and begin free pre-k for 4-year-olds. But he only secured funding for 2.5 years. So when the time is up there will be a political crisis: NYC will either have to come up with an extra $1.6 billion a year (at least, that number assumes no costs grow), or cut the program and kick children out of pre-k, disrupting tens of thousands of families that have structured jobs, commutes, and childcare around the service. So, it is true that Mamdani secured $8 billion in funding across two years (no small feat!), he just decided to use that money to lock in an extra $1.6 billion dollars of spending, every year, in perpetuity.

There is an argument to be made that free pre-k for 3- and 4-year-olds will actually save the city money: If parents decide to work instead of staying home to take care of children, that increase in earnings will translate into increased tax revenue. This argument, of course, is not the one Mamdani is making however, because he does not care if New York City is fiscally sound.

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Another element of his budget is the infamous pied-à-terre tax, or the tax on second homes. Though there’s been a lot of faff about it, and of course Mamdani has already claimed the predicted $500 million in annual revenue as a further credit against his $12 billion deficit, the law hasn’t actually passed.

That $500 million also seems suspiciously high to me because it assumes that no rich people move out as a result of the tax. Famously, Mamdani announced his tax in front of Citadel-CEO Ken Griffin’s home; the CEO, incensed, announced that Citadel would be expanding and adding 400 new jobs in Miami instead of New York. Not a smart move, Mamdani. Although to be fair to the mayor, the most-cited work on this subject (by Stanford researcher Cristobal Young) suggests that millionaire flight is real but small: Per 1% increase in taxes, about 0.3% of millionaires will move away.

Listen to the mayor, in his own words:

youtube.com/watch?v=FLKZnVB4F9k&themeRefresh=1

The lesson I don’t want readers to take away from this is that socialists aren’t fiscally responsible. Because—while true—it’s irrelevant. American politicians, red, blue, and purple, are not fiscally responsible. Since Trump came into office just over a year ago the deficit has grown 2.8 TRILLION dollars. (That was a serious point of contention between Musk and Trump.) Biden, in his four years, oversaw a 7.9 trillion dollar increase (to be fair, much of this was as a result of Trump-era COVID stimulus). Obama and Bush were hardly better.

We are not serious about the future of our nation. At every step we have prioritized gluttony over discipline, and our kids will pay the price. Mamdani is a symptom of this, not the cause.

So no, I do not owe Mamdani an apology. But I do owe my kids one.

Peter

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I have a problem.

For years now, I’ve been unable to get people on our show who disagree with me. Not all people, just those committed to identity-first frameworks on the left.

I’m currently in New Zealand. As this is a remarkably chill place, I invited, both by email and on X, a few of New Zealand’s prominent progressives to come on the show.

Crickets.

But getting them to have conversations with me is only half the problem. The more corrosive half is the pattern of denying invitations ever occurred, which undermines any claim to good-faith disagreement. After years of thinking about how to solve these problems, I finally have the best solution I could think of: Make a public registry of who we invited for a conversation, when they were invited, how they were invited, and what their response has been.

You can find our invitation list here:

https://www.nationalprogressalliance.org/who-weve-invited/

We just began this on April 28, and we will be adding to this list accordingly.

To understand why I think this is important, I want to offer a brief background and a few words about the show.

Background

From the right, I’ve had a lot of people on who disagree with me about issues—for example, abortion (I’m pro-choice in the first trimester), the death penalty (I’m against it), religion (both Muslim and Christian apologists have come on the show), immigration (guests have been both pro and con), marijuana legalization (I’m pro legalization), metaphysics, morality more broadly, etc. These conversations have been extremely civil, and they’ve nudged some of my views. I’ve even had non-identitarian leftists on the show, like David Pakman, Destiny (five times), Jonathan Rauch, and others.

But I simply cannot get identitarian leftists to come on the show and speak with me. This is one of the Achilles’ heels of my book that Lindsay and I acknowledge early on: You cannot force a person to have a conversation with you. If they agree to converse, the book is, in my opinion, the ultimate tool. If they do not agree, there is literally nothing you can do. But not having a conversation and (in at least one case) lying about the fact that you were ever invited is different.

I want to be crystal clear: Nobody is under any obligation to speak with me, just as I’m under none to speak with anyone. The invitations to conversation are not about beating anyone down, tricking people, or humiliating them, and I offer ~240 episodes of the show as evidence of this.

Conversations with Peter Boghossian: “No dogma. Just dialogue.”

My 45–90 minutes conversations are long-form, unscripted, and candid.

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I explicitly aim to model productive conversation. My goal is to foster candid, intellectually rigorous dialogues grounded in reason, civility, and curiosity. Yes, I want to challenge ideological conformity and reclaim open inquiry amid polarization. And yes, I do test assumptions, push guests for clarity, and Socratically explore ideas while doing my best to minimize my own orthodoxies. And yes, I do have first principles like free expression, civil discourse, and Enlightenment rationalism.

I attempt to demonstrate, in practice, how to have difficult conversations across divides, reduce tribalism, and defend habits of open, evidence-based inquiry that are essential to democracy and human progress. I don’t just talk about the problem of polarization. I try to model a solution.

In short, I’m trying to show that serious conversation about difficult topics is still possible, and doing so is essential for a healthy liberal democracy. My conversations are not about “winning” but about clarifying ideas, exposing weak reasoning, and fostering intellectual courage in the audience.

Finally

It is difficult to discharge this mission when the people who have radical disagreements with most (all?) of my positions refuse to converse. It is more difficult still when they lie about not being invited to converse. Hence, in the spirit of transparency, we are making our outreach list public. If you know anyone who disagrees with any of my views and you think we should invite them, please write their name(s) in the comments below along with their X handles if they have one. Or if you believe someone was improperly listed as non-responsive, please provide counter-evidence.

Thanks, and I’m hoping that making our invitation list public will make it easier to hold both sides accountable whether impossible conversations actually happen.

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I prefer the dictionary definition of “conspiracy theory” because it does neither of those: “A belief that an event or situation is the result of a secret plan made by powerful people” (Cambridge Dictionary). Unfortunately, sometimes events are the results of a secret plan made by powerful people, and as such conspiracy theories deserve to be evaluated with the same rigor that any other idea is due.

The SPLC

Famously, in 2017, Alex Jones accused the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of funding neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. Even though I’ve long known the SPLC to be ideologically captured and wholly corrupt, at the time I considered this a “conspiracy theory.” It was so outside the bounds of likelihood I simply ignored it. This month, however, the SPLC was indicted for wiring over 3 million dollars to members of those groups.

I was wrong. I believed it was a false claim, and I did not give this “conspiracy theory” the scrutiny it deserved.

The SPLC revelation came on the heels of another assassination attempt on President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Reading commentary about the attempt, it struck me that conspiracy theories have become increasingly mainstream. There are two reasons why this may be true: 1) situations are increasingly the result of secret plans made by powerful people, and Americans are recalibrating their beliefs accordingly, or 2) we are becoming increasingly ill equipped to evaluate the merits of theories, and in absence of critical evaluation are deciding what to believe by defaulting to signals of whether theories align with our ideologies. I prioritize the latter as the best explanation.

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