My religion hurt me, deeply and fundamentally.

I dodged this for a long while, but it’s the truth.

I dodged it because I loved my childhood and loved my family and loved my culture—and I was right to love them. That makes it hard to understand the pain, because I chose it, I was the primary author of it, I hid it, and it manifested to those who loved me as an inexplicable deep-running melancholy that, uniformly and without fail, they worked to help me with.

It’s not like every bit of love was well-considered. My bishop, when I left and burdened him with my unanswerable questions about the myth I learned as history that proved I was right to leave, saw me as demon-haunted and tried to cast the demon out. He was an older man, with a simpler approach to faith. But he gave me books and he opened his home to me and he extended invitations to me and he loved me in the way he knew how, and now he has passed away and gone to whichever fate awaits a devout Mormon. And it says something, you know, when I have to reach for something like that to find carelessness in love.

My mission president and his wife—they loved me, fully, unreservedly, and truly. It was hard for them when I left, but they listened to me and wept with me and always, always made more time for me than I deserved in a brutal schedule. What more can you ask than for an older couple that could have simply retired and lived the good life than to spend their time nurturing and caring for and listening to adrift and pained young spiritual wanderers who are trying, and failing, and trying again in the way young people are wont to do?

And my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and my siblings—they loved me when I was small, unreservedly and loudly and passionately, and they loved me as I aged into a prickly and unknowable teen, and they loved me when I came back from my mission transformed and when I left their church and their home, and they loved me and they loved my husband and they lent their time and resources to our wedding. Even at my loneliest, when I thought myself incapable of loving and of being loved, I was always, always surrounded by unconditional love.

Even my prophets and apostles loved me inasmuch as they knew me. They inherited a structure that served them well, they sacrificed their lives out of duty to that structure, they preserved it as best they could. Gordon Hinckley loved the whole world. Dieter Uchtdorf stared directly into my soul when he told me the church respected all who earnestly search for truth. I loved my leaders, I respected them, I learned from them. Not all of them—but “bureaucratic and business-school-y and unwilling to take risks and corporate” was usually the worst I could say about any of them, and I could choose to doze off through what Quentin Cook had to say or to grit my teeth when leaders blasphemed by saying “key indicators” over the pulpit. But on the whole, I loved them, and I trusted them when they told me nobody was born “that way” and taught me it was virtue to resist the physical part of me.

And Orson Scott Card—he did not know me, does not know me, but I loved him. I loved his fiction, which spoke directly to my soul. I adopted it as my own thought, passionately and unreservedly—took it as my title, as my vocation, as the shape of my place in the world. And I loved his nonfiction, loved as a teenager watching him preach about mind over matter and lament the hypocrites of homosexuality, turned to him for comfort and reassurance when people called me a bigot for defending the religion that had brought me up in a world full of love, echoed his arguments and made them my own.

None of them—none of them!—knew their love was handing me a knife with which I would stab out my soul. Well, Orson did, on some level—because he had wielded the same knife against himself, because his fiction drips with the question of how to love when you have killed something precious, how to love when your heart and soul have broken, how to love a God you cannot feel and to look up at the end of tracing the woodgrain and ask your mother and father if you’ve done it right. Orson felt, on some level, the cost of his love, but having paid the price himself and called it good, he was equipped to hand young men self-annihilation and call it love. He did so, repeatedly, with fury and force and beauty in his pen.

But the others—they never had the slightest clue, because I kept myself from knowing the core and I was ashamed of the rest. My parents saw me go from happy and engaged with the world to sullen and withdrawn—but that’s just how teenagers are. They saw me go from listing every birthday present with glee to morosely listing the inadequacies of each new birthday—saw me start sneaking and hiding, saw me claw and shove and wrestle my way out of family activities and computer-use restrictions—but some kids are difficult, and they dutifully got me wolves when I taught myself to love wolves because I could not love men.

My mission president saw me weep and struggle through my mission, as no new environment or companion seemed to soothe a bruised mind—and so he tried, repeatedly and earnestly, to find the right people and the right places. I told him that it was about testimony and “self-abuse,” because as far as I knew that’s what it was, and he gave me advice for both and made me a leader anyway. And my parents at that point were more than preoccupied with their dying daughter—my sister, who blessedly came back to life because the hospitals could imprison her body but not her faith—and they needed to hear and so I needed to provide an account of a young man finding and falling in love with God through service, even as my journals filled up with so much pain I grew scared to even write in them lest I had to spend time with my mind.

And the wrenching, crushing, overwhelming agony of my mission—how could I hate that when it saved me, forced me into my body and into the world, bouncing and crashing against other real people with real consequences instead of doing as my adolescence had taught and staying safe and quiet within my fortress, my mind? How could I hate the place that let me spend three months learning how it felt to be seen by a man I loved, even if it taught me to call that love inspired companionship and then transferred him away?

What is anyone to do, when a young person’s pain is so diffuse and hidden so deeply that he cannot admit the root of it even to himself? How are they to know that he felt a desire he learned was monstrous in his core, to know that he hid the knowledge of that desire from himself, to know that every time an earnest if slightly quiet young man looked into their eyes and explained with pained precision what he was struggling with that they were speaking not to his heart but to his defense lawyer?

My church had plenty of good in it, plenty of love. But when I was thirteen years old, beginning to feel things that terrified me, every single trusted authority in my life joined their voices together, pooled their resources, took up their swords, and told every young person like me that we were evil at our core and that the only way to redeem ourselves was a lifetime of self-denial. They taught me that “same-sex attraction” was an isolated burden that I could and should carve out of myself. They did not know—but perhaps they could have known, if they listened to those who had grown up at odd angles to reality—they did not know that in teaching me to kill the part of my soul that saw beauty in men, they were teaching me to kill the part of my soul that saw beauty in God.

They loved me, and they taught me that the two great commandments were to love God and to love my fellow man, and then they taught me loudly, repeatedly, aggressively, cruelly, without a shred of understanding of what they were doing, that my capacity to love my fellow man was the blackest of black marks on my soul—that the path to Godliness was cleanliness, or erasing the black mark, or erasing myself.

I learned viscerally, unspoken, that desire itself was the root of evil. I learned that the only safe place to stand was ten feet behind myself, monitoring and watching and suppressing the body of Jack lest it desire wrongly, and that the only safe thing to be was a disembodied mind with a traitorous and walled-off body that continued to want.

And I was a good student, and I was loved and I loved back, and so for a decade straight—until I could no longer tolerate the bleakness and the emptiness that had consumed me, until I had to tell everyone who loved me that I was leaving the institution they loved—I worked with force and vigor to crush my soul and love the world with my mind instead.

Yes, I was hurt. Everyone who loved me earnestly and wholeheartedly loved the boy I was and loved the boy I told them I was, and every one of them loved and built their whole lives within an institution that made it impossible for me to know myself and impossible for me to love myself.

Something was wrong with me, and I knew something was wrong, and I searched and looked and poked around and used every tool my faith gave me. And if I had listened to my church, which told me every answer must be “yes” or “wait” when I asked if I should stay the course, I would never have known what it was. But instead I listened to its scripture, which told me to follow that which brought forth good fruit, that which brought me joy, and so I left my church and I married a man, tasting the fruit they told me was bitter and learning that the fruit that had been good for them had a poisoned core with which I would have killed my soul forever, with reassurances the whole way through that it was good because they handed it to me with love.

That’s the thing, you know? I never stopped following their advice, not really—and suddenly it all worked. I prayed in silent agony for years, then told myself I had thought my way out when really I just needed to feel again. I kept tracing the woodgrains even while I lived in a world where God was dead. And the fog slowly lifted and I built a happy life and then suddenly just now at thirty I looked up and heard the answer to my long-silent prayers and realized I was gay all along, four years after marrying the man I love, because finally the knowledge would not kill me. All it cost was trust in the mind I thought was my only reliable weapon.

Now I can’t even tell anyone to fuck off for calling me a fucked-up fag because the only person calling me that was myself: first when I wrote in my journal that queer people were freaks because that was the strongest word I could use, then with slaps and pinches and silent screams every time I fucked myself because I couldn’t love myself. They taught me I was profane and didn’t so much as leave me the language that would let me hate myself right. I could not feel again until I betrayed the boy who clung to not using bad-guy words, the boy who needed one way to be good, and in betraying him admit that he knew at his core he was evil. But how the fuck was I supposed to love when I knew it was fucked-up to love the red-haired, sharp-jawed boy playing angelic piano music in church?

I have a new post up on the Center for Educational Progress. If you like my writing here, you should read it—it is certainly the highest-effort research project I have ever undertaken, and it may be the most important topic I’ve covered. Hopefully it’s long enough to tide you over for a bit, because I likely won’t be around for most of the next year. Not by choice—professional obligations. I’ll miss everything about this.

If you’re a paid subscriber to Tracing Woodgrains, first, I deeply appreciate your support, and second, don’t worry—I’ll be pausing payments for now so you won’t be charged further.

I’ll be back and writing full-time next summer.

Until then.

Center for Educational Progress

Hobson v. Hansen and the Decline of D.C. Schools

Editor’s Note: I will take a seven-month leave of absence from the Center for Educational Progress and from my online writing starting tomorrow. Please enjoy this account of the investigation that consumed much of my summer. There is more to be said about some of the details, but I wanted to release it in some form before I disappear. Be well while I’m …

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8 months ago · Jack Despain Zhou

In Washington, D.C.’s history, there were three superlative predominantly black public schools. Two of them were destroyed, one by negligence, one by malice. The third was almost stillborn, strangled in its infancy and neglected in its adolescence, but it persisted.

Center for Educational Progress is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The first, Dunbar High School, stands out as the crown jewel. From 1870 to 1955, it was Washington, D.C.’s only academic high school for black students—the first and best public black high school in the nation. Its alumni include Charles R. Drew, a prominent surgeon and researcher; William H. Hastie, the first black federal judge; Charles Hamilton Houston, who was dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP first special counsel; and many other black leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A school still bears its name, but it is not the school it once was.

The second, Amidon Elementary School, was built in 1960 as part of an urban renewal project. At the peak of the city’s white flight, it was one of the only schools in the city to maintain a truly integrated student population over several years. It used phonics to teach reading and focused on basic skills, against the popular guidance in education schools of its day. It lasted seven years before being dismantled—not because it failed, but because it worked. The people who dismantled it won a Medal of Achievement at the National Laboratory for the Advancement of Education for their trouble. It has since been almost forgotten to history.

The third, Benjamin Banneker High School, was the subject of a bitter fight, multiple failed votes, and the resignation of arguably the district’s best superintendent in modern history before the school board allowed its creation in 1980. For more than a decade afterwards, the board looked at it with suspicion and starved it of funding, including denying it readily available federal funds. It now ranks consistently among the best high schools in the country.

What follows is the story of those schools and the men and women who fought over them. It stems from a question I couldn’t shake during my study of education law: Why is the only reference to ability grouping in my casebook a 60-year-old court case the book advertises as likely no longer being good law?1

I assumed, when I started my research into Hobson v. Hansen, that 1967 case on ability grouping in Washington, D.C. schools, that I would find a grim contrast to today, with bigots using tracking as a pretext to keep black students down. What I found instead is a story that cuts right to the heart of every education fight and many public policy fights of the past three generations, a tragic years-long wrestle between two remarkable men and their competing visions for what education ought to be, and the quiet catastrophe in its aftermath.

This is the story of Julius Hobson, Dr. Carl Hansen, and the world their conflict built.

For the past couple of years, my husband and I have been working on becoming parents.

No, this isn’t the “good news” post. In fact, I hadn’t wanted to write this post just yet.

It’s not the sort of thing that can stay private forever, of course. Not when you make the decision to write and speak and act in public. But in a path that is fraught and full of uncertainty, it’s unwise to announce anything too early.

So why am I saying anything now?

In short:

We’re at a stage where we need help, and if you know someone who is interested in becoming a surrogate1, we would love to meet them. Please message me privately here or by email at tracingwoodgrains@gmail.com.

That’s the reason I’m posting about this now. But while I’m here, I should do it right. I expect people will have a lot of questions about what remains a pretty rare, obscure, and sensitive process, so I want to answer them in a centralized location.

The Story So Far

Of the things I am grateful for in life, one of the deepest-running is this: I have incredible parents. Growing up, I never had to question whether they loved me, never had to question whether they loved each other, never for a moment worried that they had anything other than my best interests at heart.

Some combination of that and my Mormon upbringing—say what one will about Mormons, they are serious about their focus on families—left me certain from an early age that I wanted to become a father. I kept waiting, as a teenager, to notice what every other teenage boy noticed about girls, and could never quite figure out what they all meant. But I knew I wanted to marry well down the line, and I knew I wanted to have kids.

In some ways, it feels like much of philosophy is rationalizing these deep-felt instincts our personalities and upbringings leave us. When I was young, I wanted to become a father because that’s what God commanded and because I wanted to be like my parents. As I grew older and the element of religious faith fell apart, I was left to rationalize the same instincts in (mostly) secular terms: It is good that I am alive, good that life exists. There is something sacred, something vital, about bringing new life into the world and committing oneself to parenting: an act of hope, raging against the inevitability of death, lifelessness, and decay, bringing a new generation to continue the grand human project, continuing a tradition older than humanity.

More importantly than that, though—kids are great. In many ways, my favorite job I ever had was my few months as a substitute teacher to fill a gap between my LDS mission and university. Some of the second graders would do things like spontaneously draw little pictures as thanks even when I was only there a day; even by the time they became rather less enthusiastic teenagers, it was always rewarding. Most of my cousins are much younger than I am, and I’ve lived away from most of them for a while, so every time I had a chance to visit family I could put on a burst of energy for a few days, be the Fun Older Cousin who would scramble over rocks and climb trees and go exploring with them, then return to my quiet adult world.

But of course, my path was never going to be purely traditional. I did not come home from my mission and meet someone within three months and get engaged within another three and get married within another three before having four kids all spaced two years apart from there. When I came back, in my early twenties, I still wasn’t sure whether I was capable of falling in love. The feelings I’d anticipated showing up sometime had never quite come.

It was only after leaving Mormonism that that began to change. I started noticing hints of attraction—just not to women. I slowly gained an interest in dating. It came as a relief to me more than anything, that attraction. There was a rush of reassurance, a sense that maybe I could love someone after all. The only downside was the question rattling around my mind: Can I still become a father?

I talked about it with friends, thought about it, weighed my options. After some time, I became satisfied that the path was narrow, but possible. Military enlistment made it easy to save money, Obergefell gave legal reassurance, and for the first time, I thought seriously of that strange word: surrogacy.

So I started dating in earnest. And each first date, I would ask my two dealbreaker questions: Do you plan to stay in Nebraska long-term? What do you think of having kids? More than almost anything else, when I was dating, I was looking for someone I could trust to be a parent alongside me.

Now I have him. And now we are ready to have kids.

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Or that was our story a couple of years ago, anyway. And it felt like a storybook, in its own way, everything falling just into place, step by step.

Since in-vitro gametogenesis2 is still a few years out, my husband and I had serious conversations about who would become a biological father when, ultimately deciding that it would be best to have at least one biological child each. From there, I raised the possibility of egg donation to my sister, to be used with my husband’s sperm in order to create our embryos. She and I have always been close3, so it wasn’t as strange of a conversation as it might sound, and she was enthusiastic about the idea. After that, in a Neopets chat online, I happened to become friends with a woman who mentioned she wanted to act as a surrogate. You know how these things go.4

With everyone in place, we began the long, winding process of having a baby.

The Birds and the Bees

How does it—y’know—work? How are babies made?

The first thing you notice is that it’s expensive. The second thing you notice is that it’s more expensive, and

The process goes something like this:

1. Find a fertility clinic. The doctor and medical staff there will be your (loose) guides through everything else.

2. Choose a sperm donor among yourselves.

3. Light medical screening for the sperm donor to test sperm quality.

4. Sperm donor donates sperm and freeze it for a monthly fee.

5. Find an egg donor, either via personal contact or through an agency.

6. Psychological and medical screening for the egg donor. The psych screening is both individual and in a group with you. Most of this can be done locally around the location of the donor or (for the group psych screening) via video.

7. Legal contract with the egg donor. You get your lawyers, you pay for the donor’s lawyers at a separate firm, they work the contract out with your input.

8. Schedule donation.

9. About a month before the donation, the egg donor gets a whole pile of medications.

10. In the weeks and days leading up to the donation, the egg donor goes in for regular check-ups to make sure everything is progressing smoothly. Depending on whether the donor lives near you or the clinic, this may involve several weeks of travel.

11. Egg donor donates eggs. Doctors count and report the number retrieved.

12. Unless you want to freeze eggs and wait, immediately after egg donation, the clinic unfreezes the sperm and fertilizes the eggs. You hear how many embryos you have and how many eggs were lost.

13. A few days later (between five and seven days after conception), they freeze the embryos (now blastocysts). You hear how many reached that stage and how many were lost.

14. Preimplantation genetic testing of blastocysts: are they healthy and reasonable to implant? You hear how many are healthy. These are your potential children. They sit there frozen, waiting. You finally have some space for hope.

15. Find a surrogate the same way you find egg donors. These days, this is very rarely the same person as the donor. Typical requirements from clinics are age 21-40, having given birth to at least one healthy child you're raising, stable living situation and finances, healthy BMI (usually 19-33), no smoking/drugs/excessive alcohol, no major mental health issues requiring medication.

16. Psychological and medical screening for the surrogate. The psych screening is both individual and in a group with you. You hear whether they’re cleared to proceed.

17. Legal contract with the surrogate, same as with the egg donor but substantially more involved.

18. Schedule implantation.

19. About a month before implantation, the surrogate gets a whole pile of medications.

20. In the weeks and days leading up to implantation, the surrogate goes in for regular check-ups to make sure everything is progressing smoothly. Depending on whether they live near you or the clinic, this may involve several weeks of travel. Depending on how things look (thickness of uterine lining, hormones cooperating, etc), implantation timing may shift on short notice.

21. Doctors implant one blastocyst in the surrogate.

22. Everyone waits for about a week.

23. The surrogate takes a pregnancy test. Everyone holds their breath. Odds of a successful implantation are maybe 60% if you’re lucky and the doctors are skilled.

24. If you got lucky, everyone breathes a sigh of relief. You’re past the hard part. You continue. If you did not, it’s a different sort of sigh. Return to step 18 (if any blastocysts remain), step 8 (if they don’t), or step 1 (if you need a new clinic or are working with a new donor).

25. Nine months later, if all goes well, your baby is born.

Simple.

We’ve made it through most of the list a couple of times now. Biology is unforgiving, though, and chance is what it is. All one can do is continue to try.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why not just use an agency?

The simple answer is that I am a romantic, and agencies are businesses. I have nothing against them per se, just like I have nothing against the clinics and psychologists and lawyers and hospitals through which the path to raising a child must run for me. That romanticism is tempered by pragmatism, sure—in the classic style of modern romance, my husband and I met on Tinder—but all else being equal, when it comes to the most personal and vital parts of life, I prefer to rely on human connections.

Asking somebody to carry our child is an enormous request, and it’s something we want to do right: to find someone who can trust us; to ensure the woman we meet shares our values on the topic and is in a good position; to speak together directly and thoroughly about goals, expectations, and the path forward. While all of that is possible through an agency, it can be done better directly when the option is available.

What about adoption?

In the United States, adoption proceeds via two distinct, non-overlapping paths. The first, and the image most prospective adoptive parents have in mind, is infant adoption: an arrangement planned in advance between birth parents and adoptive parents when the birth parents are not in a position to raise their children, in which babies are adopted immediately after being born. Adoption in this case is the goal from the beginning. Around 25,000 infants are adopted by this approach annually, with another 1,000 or so via now-rare international adoptions.5

The second route is foster care, for which adoption is a failure state. The goal of foster care is not to match kids with new families, but to reunite children with their birth families whenever possible. Rob Henderson is worth reading on this topic:

[F]or many foster kids—probably most—the reason they end up in the system in the first place is because one of their parents was dealing with problems like drug addiction, mental illness, or getting arrested. And often, after the child is placed in care, a parent will sober up for a while, get a job, or otherwise start to pull things together. Or a relative, like a grandmother, will step in and say, “I’ll take care of the kid.”

From the system’s point of view, this means they might have to move the child back. But if the kid stays with the same foster family for too long, they can form strong attachments. Then, if their biological parent reappears and says, “You can come live with me now,” the child might resist, saying, “I’ve been living here for a year or two, I don’t want to go.” So the system’s way of “solving” this is to move the child every few months so they never form an attachment with any of their foster families.

In the case of infant adoption, there are functionally zero babies who wind up without adoptive parents. None go from infant adoption to foster care, and while estimates are unreliable, some indicate double-digit couples waiting to adopt each baby. The Atlantic is informative here. When considering adopting from foster care, prospective adoptive parents tend to hope to adopt younger kids. As a result, few young children, usually ones with serious medical needs and in difficult positions, are in a position to be adopted from foster care.

I find each path admirable and have not ruled any out. It’s good for people to become parents, whichever route they take. Each route is very different, though, and they are complementary, not replacements for each other. Prospective parents who are in a position to bring children into the world and raise them well should not be pushed into one path or another—it is good to have kids, good to adopt kids, good to foster kids. My husband and I want to have biological children whether or not we also adopt in the future.

What are your thoughts on the ethics of surrogacy?

I outline my full thoughts here. For an overview of the research base on the topic if you prefer a quantitative case rather than a philosophical one, I recommend the following post from :

Aporia

Surrogacy: Looking for harm

Written by Cremieux Recueil…

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3 years ago · 37 likes · 15 comments · Cremieux

Many people defend surrogacy on libertarian grounds, as a willing interaction between competent adults in which others have no business intervening. I appreciate those willing to defend something I value, but I strongly prefer a more affirmative case. Surrogacy, like most other ways of bringing children into the world, is good. Perhaps my most fundamental philosophical conviction is this: life is good, human life especially so. The most natural things in the universe are death, decay, and emptiness. Growth, life, and creation are fragile anomalies. We belong to an eons-long heritage of those who have committed to building and maintaining life in the face of inevitable decay. It is good for us to do the same—good to bring life into the world, good to become a parent, good to commit your time and effort to raising children in a loving family.

The only thing that changes when a couple is gay or infertile is that nature makes the process more complicated. To live in a society where something as complex and multifaceted as IVF and surrogacy is possible is not a right, inevitable and inalienable. It is a privilege that requires the active work of many to sustain. The doctors and scientists who work on fertility research and in clinics, the teams who help with the process, and particularly women who carry children on behalf of others who cannot have their own, are providing a gift to kids who would otherwise not exist, to prospective parents who would otherwise remain childless, and to a world that would be less for the absence of those families. It's certainly not something that could or should ever be demanded of someone. It's a selfless choice both on behalf of the child who would otherwise not be born and the prospective parents who would otherwise have no children. I am grateful to live in a world where some feel strongly enough about the value of families to help others build them, and I believe what they do is good.

There are margins at which some of these arguments shift. There are exploitative and tragic environments that should be understood and called out. There are settings into which it's not appropriate to bring a child, and edge cases to analyze and discuss. My aim here is not to address all edge cases, but to assess the central case, and in particular, the case for an educated, well-off prospective parent in a society with lower-than-replacement fertility and increasing dismissiveness towards the value of parenthood. Life is worth pursuing and preserving to such a degree that you can get very far from the true ideal case before nonexistence is better than existence, or choosing not to become a parent is better than choosing to become one.

Parenting should be celebrated. Making sacrifices to bring kids into the world and raise them well should be celebrated. That is no less true for complex paths requiring many people than it is for simple ones requiring only the parents.

Are you comfortable raising a child with two fathers?

Yes. As above, for those who prefer a quantitative look, you can get a good overview of the standard research base via this excellent post from :

Unboxing Politics

Same-Sex Parenting: Examining the "No Differences" Hypothesis

Table of Contents…

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3 years ago · 21 likes · 6 comments · Unboxing Politics

But I’ll speak in personal terms:

When looking for someone to marry, I hoped to find not someone identical to me, but complementary—someone grounded to temper my romanticism, someone organized to temper my chaos, someone hard-working and committed. As much as anything, though, I wanted someone I trusted to be an extraordinary father. I am very lucky to have found the man I did.

It’s appropriate for parents to take distinct, complementary roles in the lives of their children, and gay couples have fewer templates for those roles than straight ones, but I am grateful for the couples—gay and straight—who blazed trails and showed the path to raising children well before us.

I think researchers like Brad Wilcox are absolutely correct about the importance and the value of stable, married, two-parent households for kids. I look forward to the not-too-distant day when couples like my husband and I can have and raise biological children in simpler and more direct ways. And I also think that among my age and social class, people are far more likely to wait too long for perfect circumstances than to commit too early. I would rather work to parent kids than to come up with excuses not to do so.

Inasmuch as I have a test, it is this: would I have been happy to be raised as I intend to raise my future children? I would. They will have the best aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and grandfathers kids could ask for, and as good of an upbringing as we can provide, having come into the world as a result of many who love them coming together to make it happen. I can’t imagine we’ll be perfect. But it’s worth doing.

Conclusion

There’s a peculiar liminal space familiar to every prospective parent working on having kids: hope, uncertainty, endless small victories and small tragedies. My husband and I have spent years in that space now—fortunate to be in a position where hope is possible, still uncertain how or when it will be fulfilled. The next time I write about this topic, I hope to have good news to share. For now, though, all we can do is gather our village, in the hope that one day we will have a child.

Recently, in a passing aside on Twitter, I tossed out a post making fun of how Wikipedia frames Mao's legacy, assuming that what I saw was self-evident. The current article starts out its legacy section by describing Mao as “one of the most important and influential individuals in the 20th century” who “has also been described as a political intellect, theorist, military strategist, poet, and visionary” and goes through a paragraph of glowing praise before mentioning his mass killings. Once it describes the killings, it couches them in a defensive framing.

Here’s the excerpt:

Mao has been regarded as one of the most important and influential individuals in the 20th century. He has also been described as a political intellect, theorist, military strategist, poet, and visionary. He was credited and praised for driving imperialism out of China, having unified China and for ending the previous decades of civil war. He has also been credited with having improved the status of women in China and for improving literacy and education. In December 2013, a poll from the state-run Global Times indicated that roughly 85% of the 1,045 respondents surveyed felt that Mao's achievements outweighed his mistakes. In China, Mao is frequently assessed as 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong. The historical consensus is that the policies of Mao-era China significantly reduced poverty.

His policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in China during his reign, mainly due to starvation, but also through persecution, prison labour in laogai, and mass executions. Mao rarely gave direct instruction for peoples' physical elimination. According to Philip Short, the overwhelming majority of those killed by Mao's policies were unintended casualties of famine, while the other three or four million, in Mao's view, were necessary victims in the struggle to transform China. Mao's China has been described as an autocratic and totalitarian regime responsible for mass repression. Mao was accused as one of the great tyrants of the twentieth century. He was frequently likened to the First Emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang.

China's population grew from around 550 million to over 900 million under his rule. Mao's insurgency strategies continue to be used by insurgents, and his political ideology continues to be embraced by many Communist organisations around the world.

I was surprised at the vehemence of the pushback I got. Some of it was inevitable—there are always a few genuine Maoists around—but a lot of generally good-faith left-leaning people in my circles reacted with harsh skepticism. One representative reply from a friend, Elijah, put it like this:

Seeing a holistic picture of a great and terrible figure and responding with rage is what happens when ideological defenses are triggered and feel it necessary to shut down critical thinking. Having this kind of response to this paragraph is a red flag for your reasoning.

Another popular reply came from a self-described “Bernie Sanders–Bill Clinton Democrat”:

I’m genuinely confused by people’s objections to this. Seems like a pretty objective and well balanced account of Mao

And another from a friend, @NaMesoAtta:

this seems pretty balanced to me, especially from a global perspective. It would be one thing if it didn't prominently mention the millions he killed or his abusive totalitarian reign, but it does. It just also mentions other things that undeniably matter historically!

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Now, I should be clear that people are absolutely correct to note that I am no fan of Mao. I view him alongside Hitler and Stalin as one of the three most catastrophic leaders of the twentieth century, a murderous tyrant whose greatest contribution to human well-being was his death. But my objection is not that the article doesn’t uncritically represent my own view. I'm not asking Wikipedia to make a prosecutor's case against the man; I can do that myself. I'm upset because the section looks precisely how I would approach a statement were I Mao Zedong's defense attorney.

First: start with glowing praise, every word technically defensible. Lead with all your good facts, looking for every convenient data point or stock line. Phrase them in ways that most everyone reading will instinctively parse as good. He's important, influential. He's a political intellect, a theorist, a military strategist, a poet, a visionary. He drove imperialism out of China, he unified China, he ended civil war (don't press too hard on the details of that war!). Find reforms you can claim for him, find a sympathetic survey or two, note that he reduced poverty. Spend a whole paragraph laying out nothing but praise for him.

But everyone knows he killed people. What do you do with that? Well, any lawyer whose client has some bad facts will tell you precisely what you do with it. You don't hide it—that just lets the other side bring it up. Makes you look dishonest. Be upfront about it, but massage it a bit. Tell the story from your protagonist's view. Make it land smoothly. You start by sandwiching it between good facts, naturally. Everyone's just had a paragraph about how great this guy is. Now you're ready to slide in that tens of millions of people died.

But wait! Mostly, you can add, it was starvation (probably unintentional!), but also, yeah, okay, executions and other mumbling. But he didn't usually give direct orders to kill! And according to one sympathetic writer, most deaths were unintentional, and the rest were "necessary victims in the struggle to transform China." Use his voice! Then, yes, yes, it's been described as autocratic and totalitarian, and people called him a tyrant. Sure, sure, we know this. Anyway, he was compared to the first emperor of a unified China.

Finally, tie it off with a neat bow: Forget about the deaths, the population grew! His strategies continue to be used; his ideology is popular and influential today! It's a picture-perfect defense.

Would it be made stronger by omitting the killings? No! You've given people just enough to say that you're being honest, presenting a nuanced, thorough picture of a complicated man.

To make the structure more apparent, my friend Tossit provided a parody example using Hitler, describing him as “a political intellect, theorist, military strategist, painter, and visionary […] [whose] policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people across Europe”:

Enough about Mao for now. Some responses objected to the Hitler comparison, asserting that because Mao won and remains popular to many, he should be treated fundamentally differently to Hitler. In some sense, that’s inevitable, bitter as it is to watch people lionize a man who deliberately murdered millions. But the article goes beyond merely treating the successful differently to the unsuccessful. Consider the comparison proposed by some commentators of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975.

What does it look like when you have a mix of defense and prosecution on a case, with the prosecution winning out? Franco’s legacy demonstrates.

How do things start out this time? He's controversial. He ruled for a long time, he suppressed opposition, he ran propaganda campaigns. Hard to evaluate in a detached way—and look, his citizens were subjected to constant messages that he was good. You can't trust their objectivity! When you praise him, note that he's "significant"—and who can deny that, though it’s not a particularly glowing term—and a successful counter-revolutionary. The last bit carries deliberate ideological loading: good if you hate revolution, bad if you don’t.

None of the glowing praise to start things off. None of the fawning. Mao ran propaganda campaigns as well, Mao suppressed opposition as well—but it only merits mention with Franco.

Moving forward, the article notes again that he's controversial and divisive. It presents the supporter's case, making sure to frame it in ideological terms rather than the absolute-good terms used for Mao's positives. Good if you like anti-communism and nationalism, good if you hate socialism. And supporters credit those ideological stances for Spain's economic success! Add a bit about who praises and supports him and who opposes him.

Next, the article finds someone readers will have particularly divided opinions about, and be sure to contextualize him. While Philip Short is just Philip Short, William F. Buckley, Jr. is an American Conservative Commentator. The section is careful to note that he praised Franco in explicitly divisive ideological terms, and recontextualizes his statement: Franco wrested government "from the democratically elected government of the country."

It then presents the critics' case unsparingly and directly, using examples everyone will agree are bad things: thousands of deaths,political repression, complicity in Axis crimes.

(The legacy section continues for many more paragraphs of minutia, most of it negative.)

Do you see the difference? Do you see the shape of each? Franco is presented unsparingly, his crimes understood, with most praise presented in divisive ideological terms and criticism presented in universal terms. Mao's entry is practically a coronation speech for a paragraph, followed by carefully mitigated bad facts before ending strong.

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Is it as simple as going onto Wikipedia to change this? In the wake of my article, one editor tried to make a few tweaks, aiming to add a note (for example) that Deng Xiaoping was the source of the “70% good, 30% bad” claim. Others reverted the change and accused him of beginning “an edit war” within minutes. The article didn’t just happen to land where it did. Any efforts to nudge it elsewhere require someone willing to wrestle for months or years with motivated editors who actively manipulate procedural norms to their advantage and who have both seniority and home-court advantage. Nor do I want to encourage people to edit. Wikipedia editors strongly object to off-site canvassing, and ignoring or trampling their rules only marks someone as an outsider to be dismissed and ignored.

Despite the veneer of editability, these dynamics make the section self-protecting and self-reinforcing. Motivated proceduralists defend it by claiming that it represents the mainstream view, making it good by Wikipedia’s guidelines, then brush over the ways the “mainstream” has entirely reversed itself in fourteen years. Criticizing the page was enough for one proceduralist to take me to task for “try[ing] to destroy one of the only good things remaining on the internet.”

But it was not always like this. Consider the same section of Mao’s page in 2011.

What was Mao’s legacy in 2011? The Founding Father of modern China, yes, credited for giving “the Chinese people dignity and self-respect.” A celebrated national hero according to the Chinese government.

Immediately, it centers his bloodthirstiness and his apathy towards human lives. It quotes Chinese officials and journalists to make the case: a “great historical criminal,” but “a great force for good.” “Both monster and a genius.” “One of the great tyrants of the twentieth century […] comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, with a death toll surpassing both.” While it shares the reference in the modern page to China’s First Emperor Qin Shi Huang, it draws out the darkness in the comparison: Qin buried hundreds of scholars alive, and Mao bragged that he had “buried forty-six thousand scholars alive […] surpass[ing] Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold.”

The page points to the parallels between Mao’s China, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia. It quotes Mao’s English interpreter to note both that he believed Mao did not intend mass death and that he was a great leader, but that he was a great criminal whose “wild fantasies led to the deaths of tens of millions.” It highlights his personal secretary saying that Mao was “terrifying,” that “he put not value on human life,” that “the deaths of others meant nothing to him. And it pulls a quote from a biography of Mao: “Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die. If not half, one-third, or one-tenth—50 million—die.”

There’s more, but you get the point.

In 2011, the page was a tightly sourced prosecutor’s narrative, one that drew from historians and people in Mao’s inner circle to emphasize the man’s bloodlust and his indifference to human life. By 2025, the same section is a hagiography.

I earnestly and emphatically believe Mao merits mention in the same breath as Stalin and Hitler, but my position is not that Wikipedia ought be controlled only by my understanding of him as a moral monster. If the section had wound up looking like a wrestling match between my own view and the Maoist one, I would have raised an eyebrow a bit and moved on. That’s not what happened, though. Between 2011 and 2025, the legacy section became Maoist propaganda, and when I pointed it out a flood of people—including some I trust to be both earnest and acting in good faith—told me I was being ridiculous and that the page looked reasonable and balanced.

If someone thinks that article is balanced, I hate to imagine what they think praise of Mao would look like.

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Wikipedia spent a long while building up a store of goodwill and trust. Now, motivated editors burn that trust by doing things like spending a decade transforming the site’s presentation of Mao’s legacy from condemnation to hagiography. As long as every word remains technically defensible and the mass murders get passing mention, people happy with the way it is will mock anyone who criticizes the page, while well-meaning anti-anti-communists with some left sympathies explain politely and patiently that all of those things happened and that wanting a less glowing portrayal amounts to just wanting a mirror of my own views.

But look: you’re all are reading the same article as I am. You're seeing the same paragraphs I am. You're not reading a thoughtful, nuanced, balanced take on a complex individual, you're reading propaganda for a mass murderer. Propaganda does not stop being propaganda because it acknowledges bad facts, and it is not unreasonable to point it out for what it is. A defense attorney does not stop being a defense attorney when they let some criticism slip in. Glowing praise followed by a concession to reality does not a balanced portrait of a mass murderer make.

In 2025, as far as Wikipedia is concerned, the legacy of one of the worst mass murderers in history is now that of “a political intellect, theorist, military strategist, poet, and visionary.”

Had Wikipedia died in 2011, its achievements would have been immortal. Had it died in 2018, it would still have been a great site but flawed. But here we are in 2025. Alas, what can one say?

EDIT: Remsense, one of the editors who participated in this, stopped by with a thoughtful explanation of his own process. I trust his explanation as accurate to his reasoning and think it indicates genuine good faith on his part, and I encourage interested readers to read his comment in full. Wikipedia editors are not a malicious cabal; they’re a community with a range of interests and biases, even as those who lean into or take advantage of biases that do exist, and those who are most persistent, can assert a lot of control within it.

See also ’s response to my article, with a suggested takeaway: “[T]he only way to improve Wikipedia is for more people, of all stripes, to get involved. […] [T]o condemn and abandon Wikipedia is to give up on something beautiful, and push us further along a path whose destination we will all — right, left, centre, whatever — regret profoundly.” His commentary is worth taking seriously.

I first mentioned this essay two years ago in “Speedrunning College: Four Years Later, a Conclusion.” I am fond of it, incomplete as it is, and finally thought to dig it up. I am no longer in the moment in the way I was when I wrote it, so it feels wrong to finish it and I would not do it justice with the rest if I tried, so I’ll present it as I wrote i…

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Content note: As the title implies, this post contains a frank and thorough account of my decision to leave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While I aim to approach the topic respectfully, it’s impossible to write without touching on a lot of areas that are sensitive for church members. If you are among my LDS friends, family, or other readers, please use your discretion as to whether to read or skip this particular post.

Note as well that this is an essay series written over a span of several months and as a result is much longer than my typical posts. I elected to centralize them on a single page to avoid drowning out other posts, but each essay is mostly self-contained and the series was not written with an eye towards being read in a single sitting.

Seven and a half years ago, I made the most consequential decision of my life: to step away from the religion that had defined my family and my culture for seven generations, the religion to which I had devoted tens of thousands of hours of my life. It was not something I did casually or carelessly, nor was it a sudden flip from belief to non-belief. Rather, it was the culmination of a long-standing, serious effort to decide where I stood, one that started when I dove into all the apologetic and counter-apologetic arguments as a teen, continued throughout an exhaustive effort to consider my faith on its own terms during my LDS mission, and ended in two years of spiritual paralysis1 before I could admit to myself that I only had one real option.

I created this username the day I decided to seriously consider leaving the church, and it’s not a coincidence either that I kept it or that I began to write in much greater depth about cultural and political topics after doing so. While I remained committed to Mormonism, I felt strongly that if my thoughts were out of line with it, I was the one who was wrong. As I came more and more into my own views and realized their divergence from LDS orthodoxy, I felt less and less sure about speaking up. In addition to this, while I was LDS I experienced the internet as fundamentally hostile territory and anticipated facing vitriol and exclusion if I presented my faith-influenced frame frankly (aided by a few harsh experiences as a young teenager). These compounded to leave me paralyzed, at once worried that I could not adequately align with my faith and that people would reject me if I did.

All of that fell away the day I stepped out on my own. I spent a couple of months writing obsessively about my path away from the faith, telling the stories—particularly mission stories—that lingered in my mind as I was trying to decide. And then, abruptly, I stopped and moved onto other topics, satisfied that I had said enough. Even now, I’m not terribly fond of the place I wrote them—Reddit’s /r/exmormon served as a useful transition spot for me, but as with any place centered around opposing something, it creates an incentive to center the most vitriolic and hostile people and boost the worst experiences with what it opposes, creating an atmosphere that was wholly intolerable for me as a believing Mormon and that remains barely tolerable for me even now. But it served its role.

The essays that follow are those stories, the first things I ever wrote under the name Tracing Woodgrains. They’re written for a Mormon-familiar audience, so I’ll lightly annotate them for others. I hope you enjoy.

As a side note, these come much closer to the form of a personal biography than a detached analysis of the faith on its merits. When it comes to the latter, I endorse the work of John T. Prince without reservation. Prince is a former BYU chemistry professor and by far the best post-Mormon at speaking respectfully and directly to Mormons about the faith, and I owe him a debt of gratitude both for how he responded to me personally and for providing perhaps the only analysis of LDS truth claims I really feel confident endorsing.

Convince Me

This post will be almost illegible to people unfamiliar with Mormonism; I’ve included it for its significance to my story and added links to context as relevant. It was the first post I wrote under this name.

This2 isn't a place I expected to post, really ever. I'm an active member. It's my two-year anniversary since my mission. I left and came back the same doubting, uncertain but striving individual. I read all about church history questions long ago and wasn't too worried, and always told myself that as long as I got a confirmation that I recognized as from God, I would be content in faith. Well, I saw a lot of spiritually building, strengthening things, and a good number of apparently unanswerable questions and unresolvable situations to balance it out, and none of that confirmation that I was seeking. I've spent the past two years trying to figure out where to go next, and right now am willing to test the idea that it's false.

I've read a lot of what you all have to say, and a lot of responses to it. The CES letter3 and a couple of common rebuttals and your responses to the rebuttals, alongside a lot of /u/curious_mormon's work, have been the most recent ones for me. There are several compelling "smoking guns," many situations that I don't have a good answer to and have known that I'm unsure about for a while. But I wouldn't be posting here if I was fully convinced.

Here's the thing: in all the conversations, all the rebuttals, every post and analysis and mocking joke, I have not seen a compelling enough explanation for the Book of Mormon. You're all familiar with Elder Holland's talk. I remain more convinced by the things he talks about and others' points of the difficulty of constructing a work of the length, detail, and theological insight of the book within the constraints provided.

There are three legitimate points raised that have opened me to the possibility of something more. I'll name them so you don't need to repeat them:

• The Isaiah chapters—errors and historic evidence of multiple authors of Isaiah

• Textual similarities in The Late War

• Potential anachronisms and lack of historical evidence

The translation method is a non-issue for me. Similarities with View of the Hebrews seem a stretch. The Book of Abraham and the Kinderhook plates are their own issues and I am satisfied with the information I have on them. Despite raised concerns, the witnesses remain as strong positive evidence, but they are not my concern here.

In short, I want to see how the Book of Mormon could have been produced by man, especially with intent to deceive. Despite all I've read and heard and my lack of personally satisfying spiritual experiences, Church doctrine has been a rich source of inspiration and ideas for me, many passages in the Book of Mormon are powerful and thought-provoking on each read-through (Alma 32, the story of Moroni, Mosiah 2-5, 2 Nephi 2, 4, and the last few chapters, and Alma 40-42 are some of the best examples)4. I've always had questions, and they've always stopped short at my confidence that there is no good explanation for the Book of Mormon other than it being from God.

Specific questions to resolve:

• How was it produced in the timeframe required?

• Who had the skill and background knowledge to write it? If not Joseph, what would keep them from speaking up?

• Where could the doctrinal ideas have come from, and what am I to make of the beauty and power of some of them?

I'm sure you all know the weight of even considering something like this from my position. I'm here, I'm listening, and I am as genuine in my search for truth as I have ever been. So go ahead. Convince me.

I will be available to respond once more in a few hours.

This led to a wide-ranging discussion. The obviously and overwhelmingly best response came from John T. Prince and can be seen in full here. As an active member, my impression of exmormons was that they were almost uniformly rude, unreasonable, and superficial or heavily motivated in their criticism. Prince’s response to me made it impossible for me to maintain that picture and left me with nowhere to hide.

Before I continue with other posts covering subsequent events, I should get to the stories leading up to that moment.

Doubt in the Missionary Training Center

Note: Provo’s Missionary Training Center (MTC) is the primary location prospective missionaries go to learn the basics of being a missionary and, if studying a language, the basics of the foreign language. I spent less than two weeks there.

Well, I'm back again with my fourth post in about as many days. I guess that's what having your worldview shattered will do to you. […]5

Before I left, I stood up in front of my entire home congregation and told them I didn't know the Church was true, but I wanted it to be true and was willing to commit two years of my life to find out. With that as not just the primary but the only thing on my mind, I walked into the MTC with two goals:

1. Be exactly, unflinchingly obedient and fully committed every step of the way as a missionary

2. Be exactly, unflinchingly honest in what I did and did not know.

You can imagine the sort of chaos that would cause for a young, doubting missionary.

Here are some samples of my journal from the MTC: "Everyone is so upbeat here. That's not a compliment. ... Day in, day out, I'm told to learn by the Spirit, feel the Spirit, pay attention to the Spirit, and so forth. It's be nice if I could, but as of now it's just frustrating. It's funny to think that the missionary lessons probably wouldn't work to bring me to the Gospel. We're asked to commit people to baptism during the first lesson. That's crazy. No way I could make a life change that quickly. I guess it works for some, though. Trust in the Lord for direction."

"I know, I need to stay positive and eager, but [my teacher] is just so... perky. I hate perkiness. His lessons are unhelpful, his answers to questions unsatisfying. I wrote a lovely little rant about the instruction to always invite investigators to be baptized during the first lesson. The gist is that I hate the idea and have a hard time believing it came from God. ... I love individual study. I've been reading through the Book of Mormon, and it's satisfying and enriching. I wish I had a stronger testimony6 of it, though. The words are beautiful, but part of me constantly analyzes the truth claims."

"Everyone here is much more spiritual than I am. It's a bit discouraging. I have a lot of work to do. I'm trying, but I just don't understand. ... It's frustrating, because I'm so much more knowledgeable, so I have to keep myself from thinking, 'Oh, they don't deserve it.' They do, of course, but... well, I wish I did."

That instruction to invite to baptism on the first lesson was my first point of major disagreement in my mission, and I asked my teachers quite a bit about it. The instructor referenced above told me to pray so I could understand that policy came from God. I prayed. I still hated the policy. I told him that, and it turns out he didn't have a plan B. Meanwhile, another teacher decided that the best solution to me not having a spiritual witness of the Book of Mormon was to have me kneel down and pray with him about it, just in case the dozen times I prayed on my own about it in the MTC were insufficient. That went just as well as the other prayer. I stood up, asked what to do if I still didn't have an answer, and was told, "uh, keep trying. You're on the right path."

I still can't stand that policy on baptism. The investigation of truth is so personal and so vital and so time-consuming, and we as missionaries were to insist that any earnest seeker would be able to commit to a transformation of faith after a 30-minute presentation and one prayer. It stood contrary to everything I felt about how the process of gaining faith should work and would work for me. Bonus points for the wonderful lesson from my teacher that if I had questions, the solution was to pray until I realized why I was wrong. That time in the MTC started (continued, really, but everything before hardly seems to matter now) a trend of constantly wondering how I could purify myself more, how I could ask more sincerely or with more faith, what wording I could change or lever I could pull or button I could press to switch prayer from a process of crying into the void to the legitimate means of gaining truth that I was about to try to teach everybody for two years it was.

You might be wondering, after reading this, how I possibly stayed in the mission field for two years. I really did like studying the scriptures, except for the parts I didn't, and I was in the MTC during the General Conference where President Uchtdorf said "We respect all who earnestly search for truth" and Elder Holland talked about struggles of mental illness. As skeptical as I was about the truth of a lot of it, I was confident in the good of most of it, realized how much good two years of trying to help people could do for an introverted and self-centered kid who talked to almost nobody but close friends, and felt like I needed to do everything in my power to receive an answer from God before falling away.

So I stayed—leaving was honestly never an option, just like serving was never an option, not because I felt forced or pressured but because a mission had always seemed like as natural and inevitable a step in life as attending high school. And in staying, I created an ever-growing stack of questions that I was ever more desperate for answers for while simultaneously building the ideas and inspiration that I expect to use as foundation for almost everything I do through my life, met some of the best people I have ever been around, and had at once the most worthwhile and most damaging experience of my life.

If you're wondering how it ended, it involved me staring and almost screaming down my last mission president7 in an interview until he told me that my last companionship8 was not inspired, it was not "exactly where God had wanted me to be," that it was a choice he had made and a risk he had taken that didn't pan out. But that's a story for another time.

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When an “Investigator” Ruined Moroni’s Promise for Me

Note: “Investigator” is the LDS missionary term for people considering whether to join the faith. Moroni’s promise is the claim central to Mormonism that people can pray to learn the truth of Mormonism.

Well, I'm back once more. One reason I'm sharing these stories is that my journey to the point I'm at now seems in a sense unique: historical evidence had very little to do with it. Church culture was a minor factor at best. I was determined to allow the church to stand or fall for me on spiritual grounds, and always, always it came back to Moroni's promise. Pray, let God answer, and know in your heart that the Book of Mormon is true. Good enough for me, until the promise fell flat on its face.

One memory that stands out is when a companion of mine asked if when I prayed asking about the Book of Mormon, I was doing so with complete faith. I told him that it was guarded, but present, since my actions had failed to produce a recognizable answer so often, but I was trying. In response, he asked what it would take for me to let that guard down and really, completely trust in God. My answer, more or less, was this: “Then what would I do if nothing happened?”

You all already know: when you’re looking to God and he doesn’t answer you, there are any number of answers people will give. The most common instinct is to say that perhaps you didn’t pray with enough faith. Well, I wanted to know that God was there more than I’ve wanted anything else. From that conversation, I started looking for opportunities to express more and more faith, trusting that God would fulfill his promises. One of the biggest ones I was seeking was the chance to independently test Moroni’s promise: to find someone not connected to the church, someone who didn’t have all the baggage I had built up around it, who would read the Book of Mormon and pray about it so I could learn from watching if and how Moroni’s promise worked.

It took a while, surprisingly, to find someone willing to actually read more than a page or two of the Book of Mormon. Funny thing, that. But finally, we ran into someone who I let myself be certain was “one of the people God had sent me there to find:” a Christian guy I’ll call Max at the university I was studying, a psych student who was fascinated by religion of all sorts and extremely open to conversation. He agreed to read the Book of Mormon without hesitation. Over only a couple of weeks, he read the whole book, then the Pearl of Great Price9, Our Search for Happiness10, and several sections we recommended from the Doctrine & Covenants11. He took an intellectual, analytical approach to it all, rather than, ah, the spiritual sort that missionaries prefer to have people take, but there he was: someone finally investigating the church’s claims as honestly and completely as I could ask, using the sources that we provided and willing to take the test that we as missionaries proposed. When we asked him if he would be baptized if he felt it was true, he said that of course he would.

And then he prayed about it and said that he honestly felt like it wasn’t true.

Well, that’s not how it works. And I wasn’t ready to let it end that way. He was a friend of mine at this point and the most thorough investigator I’d been able to talk with, and that was not the way things were supposed to go. So I prayed, and fasted, and talked with my companion, and that’s when I broke one of my personal mission rules: I said something that wasn’t strictly honest.

I already mentioned I really wanted to have faith. I tore voraciously through every story I could find of conversion “miracles”, of missionaries doing something extraordinary and people responding in extraordinary ways, and that was Going To Happen and I wasn’t just going to let it go. So we met with Max again, and asked him to pray about the Book of Mormon again—verbally, sincerely, with us—and promised him that God would respond if he did so.

That’s the part I regret. I knew already why my faith was guarded. I knew perfectly well what would happen if someone made that promise to me. But I fought to convince myself that for someone who was just learning, someone who didn’t have all the background I had, it would be different.

Well, the story ended the only way it could end: Max, ever straightforward, agreed to our terms. We sat together, talked a bit, read a couple of verses, and had him pray. It was a thoughtful prayer, an honest one. We all paused for a few seconds afterwards. Then Max looked up and said, “I’m really sorry, guys. I just don’t think it’s true.”

And that’s it. He wasn’t baptized. He didn’t “see the error of his ways.” And we, as missionaries, were left speechless, because there was nothing more we could say or do. God had remained silent. Our promise, and Moroni’s promise, had fallen flat.

My mission president told us when I called him, distraught and worried, that Max must not have had honest intent, that perhaps he was looking for the wrong things as he read, that sometimes people just aren’t prepared. I just stared off into space and thought again about the conversation where my companion asked why I couldn’t express a moment of unguarded faith.

That was why.

Board Shorts and a Plaid Shirt

This one still haunts me.12

Okay, a lot of my stories still haunt me. This is all raw for me. None of it has really healed over, nothing has really been figured out. This, time, though, I was the vehicle for delivering a message I did not believe at the time, do not believe now, and felt uneasy and embarrassed as I delivered it. But I delivered it, because that was my job.

It's time for the story of Eric, who I never knew very well and who certainly doesn't remember my name, but who I still every once in a while think about and want to go apologize to.

See, Eric did not fit the comfortable baseline mold of a church member. He was converted some two years before I arrived in his area, a long-haired, eccentric guy who wore board shorts and plaid shirts every time we saw him. He was introverted and didn't trust or care to meet too many new people. He was also smart, spiritually thirsty and searching for peace.

And he stopped coming to church because the stake13 wanted more Melchizedek Priesthood14 holders so the ward15 wanted him to pass the sacrament so the bishop16 strongly encouraged him to wear a white shirt and tie to church.

Remember what I said about board shorts and plaid shirts? Those weren't an accident. Eric told us how he felt like too often people used clothes to create artificial distinctions, how he didn't want to create a false front for people. He quoted the scriptures talking about costly apparel and looking on outward appearance. A bit defensive, a bit angry, he spoke frankly about how these clothes were the best he owned, because they were the only ones he owned, that they were clean and well maintained and that this was a matter of principle for him.

I can say at least I pleaded his case. I checked for wiggle room, explained his situation, asked for an exception. But my mission president, normally a deeply caring man and someone who I will always look up to as an example in all regards of life, insisted. It was such a small thing, he said. You can pick up a clean white shirt and tie from the thrift store for a few dollars, he said. A ward member could lend one. But it was needed.

It was never about the cost, though. It was the message. It was what wearing those clothes represented to Eric that was the problem. So I went back to him and did my duty, and gave him the official church answer and told him the suggestions proposed and just sort of looked at him and shrugged. He argued the point for a bit and then never picked up the phone for us again.

I'm not going to run into Eric again, so in lieu of apologizing in person, let me do so here: you were right. I couldn't say it at the time. I was an Official Messenger, and I had an unambiguous message to deliver. But it was the wrong message and it chased you away when you were looking for peace and acceptance. We should have been able to provide it. We shouldn't have been restricted by our own cultural expectations in telling you what you needed to wear, but we were and are and I was and it was the wrong answer and I knew it but I gave it anyway, and who could blame you for going away? You saw clearly.

It was such a small thing, a blip of a story in a much larger context. Sometimes, though, the small things stick.

There is such a helplessness in giving an answer you know is wrong to someone you know is right.

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“I had to see a counselor after I lost my faith”

Hey, how about that time I went through the Old Testament to write down every time God killed someone?

An investigator and close friend of mine had found the story of Nephi killing Laban, and was deeply, personally angry with it. Perhaps his story will come later. He was a fascinating guy, a modern-day Greek philosopher attending the college we worked around. I was determined to answer his question thoroughly, honestly, and effectively.

...and, quite frankly, it was a chance to try to resolve and/or express my own frustration with the Old Testament. Really, if there's been any less spiritual work written than the historical portions of the Old Testament, I haven't heard of it. It was quite a list, and I hated it. It lingered on my desk for a few days, staring grimly back at me. Anyway, things went on, I answered his question but not my own, I asked around and the general consensus was, "That's an excellent question. Toss it on the shelf17" and several months passed.

Then I met Mat. He was smoking a hookah on the porch when we walked by, and was startlingly happy to engage in conversation. Turns out he grew up a deeply religious Coptic Orthodox member, but after a struggle that you're all familiar with, lost his faith several years back. When we met him, he was a Bible Studies student at the local university. We snapped into teaching mode, and when we described the Book of Mormon, he—before we could even ask him—interrupted and said, "Where can I find a copy of this 'Book of the Mormon'?"

There's no more exciting question for missionaries, and—in a recurring theme for my mission and these stories—I felt certain that, if God sent us certain places to find certain people, he had sent me there to find Mat. I was going to do everything to teach him and encourage him to test the Book of Mormon.

I had gotten in way over my head.

See, when we sat down with Mat and started talking in earnest, he shared with us one of the core reasons he had stopped believing in his own faith: The Old Testament, and how God acts in it.

How on Earth are you supposed to answer someone's deeply felt, soul-wounding question when you have the same unresolved question kicking around your head? How do you respond? How do you respond when he goes on to tell you that he doesn't mention it much but he had to go through counselling for a while when he stopped believing in his religion, how he still pauses at various churches and prays asking for any indication that God wants him on a different path?

Oh, we still tried. We talked him through it, pointed out that perhaps our talking to him was that indication he was looking for, read through some of the Book of Mormon with him...

but he had already seen too much. We all, on some level, knew it. I remember reflecting at the time how impossible it seemed for someone who had traveled the path he traveled—without ever encountering the church—to ever be converted. I heard the pain in his story, the sorrow in his voice as he discussed his journey, his earnest continued study and precise questions, and it was clear to me that if anybody was an "earnest seeker of truth," he was. I could find no fault in his path. And I couldn't help him.

That's the problem with tossing things up on the shelf as a missionary. Every once in a while, you encounter someone whose shelf broke in the same location and pattern as yours is fracturing. All we could do, then, was talk, and learn, and listen, and go away mumbling something about planting a seed.

Wherever Mat is, I hope he is finding peace on his spiritual journey.

“If I wasn’t gay, I would join your church.”

Sexuality is one of those issues I never really learned how to handle. Since I personally consider myself asexual, that sort of topic has always been a process of observing from a distance more than one of personal passion. It is one of the defining issues of our time, though, and inevitably I found myself needing to answer questions about it on my mission, especially as the church related to gay marriage. Some of the abstractness I felt faded as I became personal friends with several gay people on my mission. The most memorable of those was Asher.

This is a happy story, by the way. It's one of the few I'll share with you all that was a genuinely good experience for all concerned. I share it because it was eye-opening, left a lasting impression, and stands to me as a thought-provoking experience from the perspective of Mormons and ex-mormons alike.

As fits such an unusual situation, we met Asher by showing up late to an appointment. It was with Max, actually, at the local university. While waiting for us, he struck up a conversation with the student at the next table over. We arrived, introduced ourselves, and found ourselves launched alongside Max into team-teaching someone who identified himself as a stateless, agnostic, gay gender studies student about our differing perspectives on Christianity.

It was absurd, and we all recognized it. Asher was openly and firmly wary of our beliefs, Max and us had different goals and perspectives as we were sharing about the same thing, and we were facing down possibly the single least likely demographic combination to have any interest in the church. Despite that, we kept at it, and we had a genuine, good conversation, and against our own and his initial expectations, all found ourselves wanting to meet again.

Running through the standard missionary lessons with him was unquestionably impossible, and we weren't going to try. Instead, he treated it as a sociology experiment of sorts. He asked us all sorts of questions—not all of them about faith. I remember one moment where he asked if it was okay to ask me something personal, I said sure, and he asked something like, "How often do you masturbate?" Was that the exact question? Not sure, but I kind of coughed and changed the subject quickly. It was not the sort of topic I knew how to address. At times we would turn it back to spiritual topics and found someone who was idealistic, hopeful towards some sort of spiritual truth, and genuine, but he was not keen to dwell in those areas.

He enjoyed the conversations as much as we did, though, and—again with the idea of a sociology-based perspective—even decided to attend church with us a couple of times. We sang "We are all enlisted" at the first church meeting he came to and—as he was, shockingly, something of a pacifist—he was outright angry with the overt war imagery in it. It was all a great intersection of people with completely different backgrounds, though, and I was a little disappointed to be transferred away and no longer be able to teach him, even though I didn't see anywhere teaching him could lead.

Luckily, though, I found out the rest of his story from the later missionaries there. Of all the people we talked to and were working with, he was—against all my expectations—one of the only people who kept meeting with missionaries for a while after we left. They tell me he kept coming to church almost every week for a while and had several powerful spiritual experiences, culminating in the title statement: "If I wasn't gay, I would join your church."

What a bittersweet thing to hear—from any perspective. It was inarguable. Oh, missionaries could try to press it because that's a missionary's job, but... well, this group knows better than any the conflict between the church and gay people. And neither I nor the other missionaries that met with him were going to force the issue. I took it then the same way I take it now: an open-minded student who is spiritually hungry finds a genuinely good community of people (which this ward was: it remains to this day my single favorite collection of people within the church) and some satisfying spiritual answers...

...that just happens to be wholly, irreconcilably incompatible with everything else in his life.

If he hadn't been gay, or the church hadn't made its stand so firmly, this would fit perfectly within the block of "faith-promoting, miraculous conversion stories" that returned missionaries love to share. As it was, it provided a few young people from wildly different backgrounds a chance for increased mutual understanding and friendship and stood as my first first-hand experience with the struggle between gay people and the church. It made me reflect fairly regularly on my own position and helped personalize an issue that this Utah kid who had never even really bothered to date (much less anything else) had previously only thought about in an abstract, detached sense. I still consider Asher a good friend.

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The Leper, Cast Out

Members of the church are told constantly that their callings18 are from God. In General Conference and in lessons, in talks and in trainings, again and again the counsel is repeated that God puts people where he needs them, that he qualifies them for their positions, and that they will be blessed for obeying the leaders of the church even if they turn out to be wrong.

That teaching was the cause of the single greatest pain on my mission and my time in the church. It is a painful, dangerous teaching. Sometime, I'll tell my own story. This time, though, I want to tell worse, sadder, and more deeply cutting than my own: the story of Brother McDaniels from one of my wards. It was my first exposure to how damaging a determined obedience to church teachings could be.

The first time I met him, without knowing anything about him and only knowing our job as missionaries was to inspire members into missionary work and give us referrals, I assumed from the thoughts he shared and how quickly he welcomed us that he was a fully active member. I taught a stirring, brief lesson and invited him Boldly to invite a friend to be taught by us. Yeah right, he said curtly and coldly escorted us from his house a few minutes later.

See, Brother McDaniels wasn't coming to church, even though he was as converted as a member comes. He was an intellectual, witty former Bishopric member, married in the temple, returned missionary, thoroughly convinced of the church's truthfulness...

...and, oh yeah, did I mention he contracted leprosy on his mission that manifested some twenty years later? Now he was basically homebound, and the idea of referring someone to the missionaries was laughable because he never met anyone.

The church wasn't the strongest where I was, and as a result tended to overuse its most faithful members. Saying yes to one calling and fulfilling it well usually meant another, and another. The perception that someone was a strong member meant that would not rest again.

So what happens when one of those members has a rare disease rendering his continued movement increasingly painful, forcing him to step back hours and eventually quit his job, and taking him further and further from a normal life?

The bishop drags his feet on allowing Brother McDaniels' family access to church aid, feels inspired to assign him another calling as a family history coordinator on top of the role in the bishopric he is currently serving, later feels inspired to unceremoniously drag him into his office and lecture him on duty before abruptly releasing him from the bishopric, and then the ward continues asking for more—Sunday school lessons and so forth. The whole time, in his telling, Brother McDaniels did his best to follow what was asked of him and to serve and take on the responsibilities he was asked to take on. He was a converted member, after all. That was his job, even if his life was literally falling apart around him.

And still he believed. He spoke with regret about how he used to know the scriptures like the back of his hand and study them every day, and now was reading the Epic of Gilgamesh instead and feeling torn. He talked about how he knew he needed to return to church, and he wanted to return to church, but there was such a tangle of issues in the way. Throughout, one thing was cuttingly clear: a man who had a good life and dedicated his life to the church found only continued demands, not support, when everything crashed down around him. Perfect obedience, in his case, would have meant subjecting himself to a torturous situation.

When you believe, though, when you're really committed to the gospel, willing disobedience is a torture in itself. Consciously choosing to not attend church (and he made it clear he could still attend, but chose not to) meant breaking the Sabbath. Turning down the Bishop's requests would have been a lack of faith in his heaven-appointed leaders. Even listening to missionaries ask for a stupid referral and having no way to give it to them is a reminder that you are not helping to grow the kingdom of God. Guilt and sorrow were written into his face and into every part of his story. Even as he told us how various nerves were irreparably damaged, how his days were pained and his nights were sleepless, he was expressing his hope to have the courage to return to church.

"Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?" For Brother McDaniels, there wasn't, and any answers or support we could provide as missionaries seemed woefully inadequate. What do you do when what is supposed to be an anchor keeping someone stable is instead the anchor dragging them down? How can a missionary help a wounded soul injured explicitly because of the member's devotion to God? How do you promise blessings for obedience when the blessings expressly and loudly failed to come when he obeyed?

That was a big weight on my mind in my mission. I saw the church work well in many people's lives, but when it stopped working, there was nobody there to say "It's okay to take a break. It's fine to step away. You won't be working against God. You won't be failing your faith." There's just a horde of friendly arms reaching out, a hundred cheerful, loving mouths saying "Any time you feel ready to come back to church, you'll be welcome!" and a double helping of guilt and sorrow. The only answer we could give was come to church, just come along and things will work out somehow.

Let me say again: The leprosy was from his mission.

The Ex-Mormon’s Return

"Everything I was doing, as far as my lifestyle diverged from the church, I always felt like the Mormon kid doing those things."

You know, all this recent talk about the story about an ex-Mormon attorney who returned to the church reminded me of another story.

This one's one of my favorites. It was one of my favorite faith-building moments when it happened, one of the brightest spots looking back on my mission immediately, and one of the most thought-provoking as I consider things again from a new perspective.

Yes, it's time for the story of Alexander, the ex-Mormon who called us up and told us he wanted to return to church. Yeah, he was a true convert to anti-mormonism. Yep, he genuinely wanted to go back to church. And his return, in the end, went much better than many here might expect, if not quite as well as active members would have hoped to build a perfect faith-promoting story(tm).

Let's dive in.

You're never quite sure what to expect as a missionary when a member calls you up and tells you they have someone who wants to return to church. Half the time, the "person who wants to return" looks at you like you're crazy when you mention it; another good chunk, nobody even picks up the phone.

Have I ever mentioned how rarely people pick up the phone when you're calling them as a missionary? Story for another time.

This time, though, a sweet and sincere older lady asked us to get in contact with her son. She said he'd fallen away from the church at fourteen and had shown no interest in returning for the past sixteen years, but had a spiritual awakening recently and wanted to explore the possibility of coming back. And so we called the number provided, and a perfectly sane and reasonable guy answered confirming the story and agreeing to meet up with us.

So we talked to him. Cool, cool guy. He'd fit right into [r/exmormon], and in fact said he participated in several groups like [it]. He'd never been particularly inclined towards church things, and at the age of fourteen dove into all the information available online and came away perfectly confident and content that the church was not true, that his family was wrong, and that it was time to step away and not look back. He knew all the history, read all the evidence, was passionate about LGBT causes... all of it. So he moved on with his life, got a job catching people cheating in online poker, and was perfectly content without any spiritual element in his life.

A couple years back, his sister died, and a couple of things shifted in his life that made him start looking around for that spiritual element again. He looked towards Buddhism and searched around some other faiths for a while, but as he put it, he kept comparing everything he went to back to what he grew up with, and eventually he decided to give it another try. He identified strongly with ideas of a gospel of personal progression, a church that expected action and improvement, and related concepts.

He also gave the quote above about how he never stopped "feeling Mormon," in a sense, and talked about how there are some things it's really hard to internally let go of—things like the idea of a pre-existence that keep kicking around. The talk "Come, Join With Us" opened the doors for him and made him feel like perhaps there was a place in the church for him. He expressed a hope that things would or could shift to be a bit more open and liberal on some issues important to him.

I suppose it was a bad sign for my own activity in the church that I was more comfortable talking to him and understood his perspective more easily than that of many active members. It was strange and kind of cool for both sides, I think—on the one, an ex-Mormon who is considering returning to a faith he left behind long ago, on another, a missionary companionship facing down and thinking about all the same issues that drew Alexander away and willing to talk about them openly and frankly. At last, I thought, someone who understands the issues, who wrestles with the questions I wrestle with, and at the same time feels the same draw to the church I do.

We all agreed: the church didn't have all the answers, we personally didn't really know them, but where he was it made sense to go back and try awhile longer, to see if he got again the spiritual nourishment he was hungry for and to consider again the aspects of the doctrine he appreciated. We read to him from D&C 121:34-46—verses that to this day I love and appreciate as a guide for how to act in any leadership position—when he talked about wanting to prepare for the Melchizedek Priesthood. He mentioned candidly how a 10% paycut would bite, but that he bought plenty that he didn't need and wasn't suffering for cash. It was a frank and fascinating conversation with someone who was genuinely interested in returning to church.

Unfortunately for my direct involvement in the story, he ended up going to a different ward than the one I was in, but he sent us a text from his first time back at church. I'll paraphrase it: "I went to church in the city ward today and it was AWESOME! I felt the Spirit really strongly and everyone was so welcoming and good. Thanks for talking with me."

Talk about a faith-building, pat-yourselves-on-the-back moment for missionaries. Wrap it up, write home, tell the story of a lost sheep finding his way back, call it a day.

We all know the world isn't that simple. I had a chance to catch up with Alexander later in my mission, and he talked about how excommunications of a couple of prominent Mormon activists (looking back, I believe he was talking about Kate Kelly and/or John Dehlin) took a lot of the wind out of his sails and how difficult it was to find a spot in the church, especially outside of Utah, as a single 31-year-old. He had a good experience on his return and a lot of what he remembered and appreciated, he still appreciated when he came back. Ultimately, though, it became clear to him once again: the church is not an easy place to be for one in his position, and makes a lot of moves that push against his sensibilities. The message of welcoming he heard in "Come, Join With Us" and the various doctrines he appreciated and still identified with in the church was counterbalanced by every push back from all the issues faced today by an intellectual, liberal Mormon.

That's it, as far as I know. That's the story of the 16-year departure, return, and redeparture of Alexander from the church, the miracle-story-turned-sad-reminder for a young, searching missionary.

So, in answer to the question posed by some here: Yes, sometimes ex-Mormons do want to return to church. In fact, there are even times when it seems they can find a comfortable place within the faith and apply some doctrine they still hold close.

And then the church doubles down.

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The “Golden Investigator”

A “golden investigator” is someone who, in the eyes of missionaries, is a perfect potential convert to Mormonism.

Look, my last story19 was pretty bleak. It was asking to be told, but it was not the happiest of moments for anyone involved. It is possible, in pausing for recollections like that, to fall back into grim patterns of thought. Partly to guard against that, partly because his story deserves to be told, I'd like to share the story of Ambrose, one of the best men I know.

The image of him I will always hold is the time we were walking back from a discussion in a park. We were in a rougher part of town, streets littered with broken bottles, beer cans, and other debris. As he walked, he would pause frequently and bend to pick up the bottles littering the ground, mumbling that he didn't want cats to step on them and be hurt.

The man was like a monk. His story came out in bits and pieces during our conversations in the park, how he lived with his elderly mother and ran a shelter for stray animals at his home with her. How he had started out studying a harder science, but had changed his course of study to psychology and social work because he wanted to make a genuine difference for people. His introversion and withdrawal from most social situations. Most intriguingly for missionaries, his reasoned and careful faith.

See, we met him in a missionary's dream scenario. We were in our car headed to a visit, saw him nearby, and my companion felt like we should talk to him. During the conversation, he described himself as a Christian, but one who didn't attend any specific church: not out of apathy, since he was highly religious in word and action. Rather, he said he read the Bible on his own and disagreed with some of their teachings... the trinity, for example.

Words like that are absolute music to missionaries. As we met, though, I grew more and more quietly frustrated—not with him, but with the lessons and way we were supposed to teach him. Here was a man who was thoughtful and good, who asked sincere questions and meant every word he said, who agreed with our beliefs in key areas. We were going through a simplistic, set pattern of lessons and commitments and expecting him to change everything in a month or two. It was not really meeting his needs, but the church doesn't have a mechanism for slow and thoughtful investigation. It demands commitments and baptisms now.

We had incredible conversations, though. He thought, asked questions, and listened. We shared our stories and he shared his, talking once about how he spent a lot of time on various discussion forums working towards and presenting views of a reasoned faith. During one of our meetings, he shared an observation and question that he considered among the most troubling for a faithful person. That question has since become a core one of my own, and so I'll share it.

He pointed out that he'd spent a lot of time reading, discussing, and thinking about faith. He talked about how some people were content to just accept wherever they were, how they simply weren't intellectually open or curious. Those he understood for the question he was to ask. But what about the rest? There were people he had met online, in person, through stories, that were clearly earnest seekers of truth.

Why did they believe so many different things if there is one true path? How can earnest, seeking, thoughtful people be so wildly divergent in their beliefs after examining the same data? Because these people exist, how can you be truly confident in your own belief?

I'm not here to pretend it's a unique observation or question. What I will say is that it is a critical one. Glib, simple answers do not do it justice. I shared some thoughts at that time, but I thought a whole lot more about it, because one of the church's fundamental claims is that God will lead earnest searchers to the church if they just give it a chance. And here was a gentle reminder, from the among the most earnest searchers and practitioners of faith, that things were simply not that simple. Unfortunately, this point does not fit in the standard narrative and so is rarely given more than brief or glib treatment.

That question is where the story ends. I was transferred from the area, and he met with the missionaries one more time afterwards—for my sake, I think, since I'd asked him to keep meeting with them—but the missionary-prescribed path of discussion was simply not particularly meaningful for one in his position. With luck, I will find his email at some point and get in contact, but our meeting served its purpose:

Here was a remarkable, sincere, religious man who was willing to do what we asked and test our faith, one who was a "golden" investigator by missionary standards, who agreed with some of the church's fundamental principles

and he saw what we had and thought about it and talked over it and then walked away, continuing on his hopeful path.

The next sequential story is that of my chosen title, previously reproduced on my Substack.

The Bitter End

If there is any defining story in my journey out of the church, this is it. This was the moment that tore my soul apart, that made me lose all sense of peace within the church, that left me spiritually paralyzed for the next two years.

It is not a happy story. It does not have a bright lining. It was a horrible, senseless experience that I have spent a great deal of time since trying to categorize, trying to explain, trying to overcome. If it is long, it is because this is the first time I have told it in full, and I desperately want to convey some of the feeling of a moment that requires context.

This is the story of the time I put every ounce of faith I had left into God, then was left reeling in the aftermath. And it starts with a conversation on transfer day20:

"Are you certain? Are you absolutely certain this is inspired?"

I feel bad for the poor APs21. I felt bad for them then. But I was a tired kid at the end of a long mission and on my last shreds of sanity. I started with absolute commitment to being an extraordinary missionary, to doing all in my power and putting my heart in the hands of a God I was trying to learn to trust. Things had started badly and corrected with a couple of high points in the first year that made me feel like things could be getting somewhere. After the start, though? Not a lot. The past year had been a slow decline as I realized that I did not have the testimony to lead a companionship to success, would not allow myself any degree of disobedience, and could not resolve attendant tensions within my companionships.

From the start, one of my biggest goals was learn to be close with those working alongside me, something that did not come naturally to me. For a host of reasons, that entire year had followed a cycle of having a tricky companionship, trying and failing to resolve tensions, and running away to a new area. Any hint of investigators progressing towards baptism had faded. We had some meaningful experiences with less active members22, but in the past few months, those were gone as well. I had gone from being a zone leader at nine months to begging for a release23 and transfer, to having weekly phone calls with the area mental health specialist. When I say I was at the end of my rope, believe me, I mean it.

There was one idea, one single point, that kept me clinging on to hope: God was in charge. He put missionaries exactly where they needed to be, with exactly who they needed to be with, in order to find exactly the people they needed to talk to. All that was impossible to understand would be resolved in time. Even as I struggled to know whether to believe in God, I told myself that if I just mustered what faith I had and went forward, he would guide me, and things would work out. It was my lifeline. But time was running out. I was down to my last transfer, and I'd spent the previous two with a missionary who I'll call Elder Ma (names have been changed for the privacy of individuals concerned). He first idolized me as an ideal companion and former leader of his, then grew to hate me as he realized how human I was. Three days of venomous silence towards me followed by blowing up in my face and screaming louder than I'd known people could scream marked the end of a desperate transfer. I was genuinely afraid of being around him.

And then we got transfer news. Two missionaries, coming into our area. Our companionship would be split up—one new missionary with me, one with the companion I'd had such troubles with. One of the incoming missionaries, Elder Kim, was a close friend of mine, one who I got along near-perfectly with and loved working alongside. The other, Elder Cao, had been transferred out of the area alongside his companion just two transfers prior, leaving me and Elder Ma to clean up the mess. Reports were that he was depressed, frustrated with trying to learn English, unsure of his own testimony, and had significant psychological problems attached specifically to certain aspects of that area.

No prizes for guessing which one was assigned to Elder Ma and which to me.

A new mission president had just arrived in the mission, and hey, why not try new things, right?

So there I was, staring down the APs, daring them to tell me that this was from God. They told me that our new president was an inspired man. I called him personally and expressed my concern. He said he thought it would work.

What else was there to do? I prayed for humility, patience, and faith. I told myself I would repent of my doubts and simply work to be the best companion I could. I donned my smiling mask, welcomed Elder Cao to the area, and got busy with the work. I was even cooking meals for him, because apparently that's a way for friends to support each other? I never cook. And for about a week and a half, things were bright! They were happy. The work was moving forward a bit. It looked like we might actually be successful.

Two weeks from that, I was staring at my phone, willing myself to call the mission president, admit failure, and beg for an emergency transfer24. Elder Cao had gone non-communicative and wouldn't participate in study or work. My own depression had clawed its way back in. Nothing was working, everything had gone to pieces, and all I had left to hope for was a few weeks of peaceful work to end my mission and nurse my wounds. I had failed. My hope for my mission was extinguished.

Now, how do you think a mission president would respond to a desperate, sobbing missionary explaining that he just couldn't make things work with his companion, he tried, everything fell apart, please just get him out of there? If you answered "Move both of them to an apartment right next to the mission home, tell them not to leave their apartment except for a few specific tasks and to just study all day," congratulations, you get a gold star, because that is exactly what that inspired servant of God did.

Thought experiment: what happens when you put two depressed, stressed people with a language and communication barrier in the same room with nothing to do all day after one of them has begged to be moved and while he just wants to finish by doing some semblance of important work?

Apparently in our mission president's inspired mind, the answer was "experience a therapeutic, healing, and restful time where everything will get better." Let's check in with reality: my companion still wouldn't talk to me, started going places without caring whether I was following, and reached a point where I told him I was hungry and needed to grab some food from a nearby store and he just said "No" and walked in the opposite direction. Finally, after two days of this, I told him I appreciated him, I wanted to talk with him, wanted to work through things with him, would do anything I could. He ignored me. I asked him to say something, anything. He ignored me and walked away. I knew you can't force conversations, but knew at the same time that we needed to work together and the status quo was unmaintainable, so I pushed the issue again. He grabbed the phone, called the APs, and said, "My companion is trying to talk to me, but I don't want to talk." That's all he would say. No explanation. No context. Nothing. He just said he didn't want to talk, he didn't want to say why, he would not talk, again and again for some half an hour.

I mean, on the bright side, that was enough to get the emergency transfer I had asked for a week before.

That was two weeks before the end of my mission.

I called my mission president. I asked for a meeting. And I sat down, and asked him to be perfectly honest with me, and tell me, please, please, if that was inspired.

I give him credit for his answer, at least. He sensed my desperation, I think, and was open. He told me no, it was not inspired. He said he had been working from incomplete information and made a mistake. He said he put that elder with me because, as he said, "I knew you had been struggling with depression so I thought you might be able to work with him." He said he was inspired in maybe half his calls, but the others were just basically filling in the gaps. We said a little bit more, and then he went away, and I sat in the shattered remnants of my mission.

Here, in my own words, is my reaction to the news—that of a missionary trying to think positively, trying to do things the way God tells him to, having just been told by the person he had trusted to administer God's will that there was nothing there at the single most critical point:

Now, all of [the things he said about inspiration] are clear to anyone who's really looking, and they weren't news to me, but it was such a relief to hear it said! But with that relief comes a lurking feeling of adriftness. In a way, the simple church answers are nice. It's nice to feel that every calling is from God, that the Church is a purely uplifting force, and so on. But it's not Truth, and must be discarded at some point in the approach. For most of us most of the time, it's just people doing their thing the best they can, with a nudge here and a poke there if it's really crucial. It means that not every Church story will have a happy ending in the moment we see it. Not every investigator who reads the Book of Mormon will feel a magical wave of power. Not every testimony or talk is specifically inspired to touch some audience members. Ward councils are usually dysfunctional through no spiritual fault of participants.

These are the ways things work, in everything, really. I had hoped the Church was somehow different, against evidences received. And, well, there are some differences and the spirit's whisper is real, and promptings do happen and are beautiful. But there is more.

That was my brighter moment. My darker one went more like this:

"Oh, you say you're trapped within your own mind and watching your last hopes for your mission crumble around you? Well yeah, okay, that assignment was probably not inspired. You still want to finish strong, you say? Cool. We'll stick you right... here, and just have you study all day while we kick ideas around. Yep, you're still with your silent friend, so there's no way to get out of your own head now! See you in two weeks!"

Is it really that hard to say, "Well, what do you think would work?" after all else has failed?

It's easy to say God will make more of your life than you will, but what do you do when you've put your heart into letting Him take control and the car wrecks itself?

And that's how it ended. I put my trust in God, bet on what I'd been taught of him against all my intuition and reason, and came away feeling utterly broken and empty.

My last two weeks were spent drifting aimlessly through my area, getting up on time and studying and walking around city streets until I had fulfilled the bare minimum of my duty. My dreams of being a remarkable missionary or even a very good one had been torn to pieces, tossed to the ground, and stomped on. My hope of gaining a witness of the church was shattered. There was nothing left to do but go home and try to move beyond whatever was left. I drifted through final words of wisdom and preparation, mustered up one last testimony for my fellow missionaries, answered the temple recommend25 questions in as skeptical a way as I could manage while my mission president listened without caring, sat through a few empty parting thoughts from him, and stepped forward into two years of trying to come to terms with all that had happened.

Now, I guess I'm finally coming to terms with it. The light is dawning. It's just not the light I asked for or ever wanted to see.

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Adrift A Year Post-Mission

Note: This is the earliest writing in the bunch, and it was written while I was a believer to an audience of believing Mormons. Presented here as the most natural place sequentially.

I can’t stand writing about this, because I have so very much to say but no idea how to properly convey any of it. I’m simply tired of being so very spiritually adrift and alone.

I returned from my mission a year ago. I left for it unrefined, full of questions and doubt, only sure that I knew the Church was good and hoping to figure out the rest along the way. Two years later, I walked away deeply appreciative of several spiritual high points, but bruised by the lows and somehow more conflicted about it all than when I started. Since then, I have simply been drifting, confused and clueless about my next step.

It might be best to start with what I believe and know: No explanation for the Book of Mormon holds up to examination except that it was from God. Joseph Smith and the early Saints were flawed but deeply earnest and devoted in their cause. Many verses of scripture in all the Standard Works contain powerful and remarkable truths that consistently move me as I read them and talk about them. Our current prophet and apostles are good men of remarkable integrity and faith who see and speak clearly. And we, as individuals and a collective Church, are generally good people who are trying to do right. These are the anchors, the foundations of my faith.

But then I hear quotes like the following from Mother Teresa (as referenced in this recent Conference talk), and I identify so firmly with them that I practically collapse in tears: “Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself—for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’ Ask Our Lord to give me courage.”

I have read the Book of Mormon in as much an attitude of faith as I can muster. I have prayed, earnestly and repeatedly, asking for further light from God. Each time I pray it is as if I am crying into a void, hoping vainly for an answer. There is no comfort or strength there. On my mission, I was determined to be exact, to be faithful, to Do Things Right and let God guide. A few amazing moments occurred—things that still give me strength—but more and more towards the end, things began to descend into a struggle that was at times emotionally devastating and nightmarish. My initial hope that I would find evidence that God was guiding me and those around me in His church was met by a confounding sequence of events that seemed to confirm the opposite. Even though the vast majority of “problems” ex-members or people of other faiths raise do not worry me at all, I continue to find no answers to my own most pressing questions of faith, and have reluctantly concluded that for many of them, there are no answers yet. Meanwhile, the week-to-week reality of being a member and attending church has become frustrating and dull in a way I never really anticipated.

As of now, I find myself in an impossible position. On the one hand, there are truths I cannot avoid even if I wanted to. On the other, there are pressing questions that I cannot explain away or pretend have been answered. I find myself going through the motions of everything related to the Gospel despite yearning to be a spiritual and a good person, in large part because every time I do even a bit more than going through the emotions, it hurts. A lot. Writing this hurts, and it’s the most meaningful spiritual thing I’ve done in months. It drains me.

I talked to my mission presidents while I was serving. I’ve talked with my bishops since. We’ve had good conversations, but both they and I knew each time that we’d had to leave most problems unresolved. I’ve talked with my family members and closest friends, only to realize that the people closest to me are wrestling with similar situations. Each conversation brings the assurance that at least I am sane, but pushes spiritual peace yet further away.

Of course I don’t expect to magically get all the answers from an online forum. But where I am is unsustainable, and if there is one thing forums are good for, it is the chance to draw from a wealth of different people’s life experiences. All of what I’ve written serves, in a way, as the question I would pose to all of you, but to summarize:

What does one do when Peter’s famous words to Christ in the aftermath of disciples turning away become not an affirmation of faith, but an expression of helplessness: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.” Or, in other words, what do you do when your place in the Church is uncomfortable and unstable, but you recognize that there is no other place to turn?

EDIT: It's pretty interesting for me to see how many people who have left the Church have independently messaged me about what I've said here. It's up to five now, so I'll say here a bit of what I've told them: I really am not who you're looking for. Whatever concerns I have, I love the Gospel and have found little of value in the materials you always recommend to your potential investigators. It is possible to question some things without believing that it all must be wrong and I ought to walk away from it. There's a reason I posted this in /r/latterdaysaints and not elsewhere.

And with that, we’re back to the creation of the name Tracing Woodgrains and the request to “Convince Me.” All subsequent posts are from the early days of my path out of Mormonism.

You Convinced Me

Hey, everyone. A few of you probably read my post from a few days ago, found here. I laid out my thoughts, you all responded, and I thought a lot about my position and what I really believe.

And I was wrong. That's where I'll start. I've had a lot of questions, worries, and doubts about church doctrine for years, but I was scared of losing something so core to me and always optimistic that somehow, some way, they'd get resolved. I dove into apologetic arguments 5 years ago and read the essays26 the day they came out. I was being sincere when I mentioned that the Book of Mormon was my core sticking point. It always got skimmed over in the analyses I read, and in truth I didn't feel like seeking out a lot of them. But it weighed as the main counterbalance for a flood of other concerns. It's funny, because not a lot of them are cultural or historical. In compiling what bothered me, I had only mission materials to work from (since, well, I was a missionary at the time), and they were all I really cared to consider there. There were enough sticking points for me that I didn't have time to worry about the rest of it. I clung fast to all evidences of faith I found, though, and let them anchor me for a long time. I passively ignored things and shut things out, and I was wrong, and I was careless.

But, well, you all convinced me. There were a lot of good points raised. Reading about Mormon quoting directly from verses added by scribes after the fact to Mark and the Deutero-Isaiah chapters being included in Second Nephi was the point at which I had no more, really, to say. It's a hard point to argue, it was new information to me... you can consider it the straw that broke the camel's back. Vogel and statistical analyses of the Book of Mormon text were also extremely informative.

I still don't know where exactly I go from here. I'm not angry with the church, just tired and wanting to figure out what is really true. It's been such a core part of my life that I hardly know who to be out of its context—as immersed in church culture as I've been my whole life, every perspective, every belief, virtually every idea that I have is connected to the church in one way or another. I'll probably even keep attending for a while—my ward doesn't have a backup organist. But my mind is out, and all the little hints, all the cascading clues and nagging irregularities that piled up are sitting ready to be resolved.

I have a lot to write here—stories that pulled me towards this path, worries that kept building up, the path of adjusting my life and sense of self. I want to get my mind straightened out. I've been so tired of desperately trying to align my beliefs to the church's. It was a struggle my entire mission, it's been a struggle since, but I never wanted to do anything halfway and I was going to be the best church member I could if it killed me. My first post here was after my main decision point, honestly: when I was being a good member, I couldn't ever bring myself to come here or read anything you all said without revulsion. But I sat down a few times last week trying to write a mission retrospective and broke down crying each time as I remembered how hard it had been, how mentally torn I had felt. I realized then that the longer I spent trying to resolve things through a lens of faith, the longer that feeling of being confused and torn would persist.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I went away from church schools a while back, so I don't have that hanging over my head. My family knows the struggle I've gone through spiritually and they're supportive of me even though they're active members. I already told them, in fact. My mom's first reaction was "Yeah, that doesn't really surprise me" and they told me they love me and want to see me find spiritual peace and be happy. My closest friends in church have plenty of their own doubts and are okay with me doing what I see as best. I'm sure some people will freak out, but I've never hidden my beliefs or perspectives.

Anyway, thanks, guys. Several of you provided really valuable perspectives and did a lot to help me even begin to imagine the possibility of leaving the church (special thanks to /u/bwv549 and /u/I_am_a_real_hooman for really taking me seriously and taking the time to share in-depth and thorough perspectives that helped me reframe things). Others of you still make me recoil by instinct with some of what you say and how you approach things, frankly, but I'm growing to understand your perspectives.

It's going to be an interesting ride. It's not what I had planned, but I'm slowly starting to think it might be for the best. It will be a while before I know what any of my perspectives are and what life will look like moving forward, but that's okay, I guess.

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Of Moving On: Experiences with Unitarian Universalists

As I mentioned in my initial post about being convinced, despite my current position of uncertainty, engaging with spiritual things remains important for me. So, in between sessions of General Conference (which I still listened to, since I want to be certain and to make it absolutely clear that I am not running away from opportunities to let God speak to me), I went and visited a local Unitarian Universalist church. It was my first time at one of their services, my first time even thinking about attending.

Okay, you know all those stories about missionaries meeting someone, dragging them to church, and them talking about how it feels like coming home, like filling in something that was missing in their lives, and so on?

Yeah, it was like that.

I don't know whether I'll keep attending there and know hardly anything about them, but my experience there was the first really spiritual time I've had at a church service since my mission. They had beautiful classical music mixing with beautiful hymns in every break and throughout the worship service. Kids got to gather around for a story up front, then dismiss to classes instead of sitting through a service designed for adults. An SPCA representative stood up at the beginning and talked for a bit, and half their donation plate went to the SPCA that week. In all of the conversation and talks at the meeting, an overriding theme was the pursuit of goodness and truth. After the main meeting, various groups broke off to talk about helping social causes in the local area, answering questions about their practices, and so forth. Everywhere I looked was transparency—how much money they were looking to raise, where it was going and why, why they ran their meetings the way they did, and so on, was apparent not just through asking but openly displayed around their building.

And underlying all of it was the core message that I did not have to come to the same conclusions as anybody else in the building, an emphasis on asking the right questions rather than finding all the answers, the idea that intellectual curiosity and careful examination of everything were vital in an individual's spiritual quest. In short: every frustration that I had with three hours of repetitive, soporific meetings in which too often the sensation of doing real good seemed lost, with a culture of suffocating questions and encouraging conformity, and other disconnects attached to church faded away, while everything I loved about the idea of serving others, pursuing truth and right and benefiting from shared experience was preserved. The best part is that I can continue attending or leave with no attendant sense of compulsion or guilt.

One reason I have clung to the church for so long is the good I saw and see in it. I like the pursuit of spiritual truth. I am drawn to the idea of a community working together to do good. I love playing and hearing religious music. Things might change, but at least right now, I feel like quoting the unicorn from C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle when he goes to Aslan's country:

"I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this."

The reason I loved church at times is that it sometimes looked a little like what I saw today. I still don't know exactly where I'm headed, but every day things seem to get a bit brighter and paths for life in the wake of the church seem a little clearer and a little happier.

Here's hoping it continues. This is all still so new.

Note: It didn’t continue. I enjoyed my experience with the UUs, but ultimately concluded that groups would inevitably build a local consensus, that they’d snuck a specific dogma in through the back door while feeling like they were open, and that I didn’t particularly fit in with their implicit frame.

Church as a Non-Believer

I don't know why I'm so determined to make things this hard for myself, but, well, here I am. It was my first time to church since my recent change of perspective. I went there today to play the organ for them, stayed to tell my bishop my stance on things and see how he would respond to my questions, and stayed a whole lot longer as he tried to figure out what was wrong with me. I was and am torn about telling him, but my inclination is to be as open and honest about things as possible in hopes of achieving some sort of mutual understanding.

Oh, and I accidentally got in an argument about prophets in Sunday School, which I was attending while waiting for the bishop. I'm still not used to the new boundaries of what to say and what not to, and one of my comments touched an "apostasy warning" vein with a well-meaning senior missionary and, well, yeah. It was a bit discouraging to realize at every turn how much I disagree with on any given Sunday and how quickly I became "the guy in spiritual peril." I'm not so good at keeping my head down.

It might have been a mistake to meet with my bishop. I'm torn. On the one hand I want to make it absolutely clear that the standard reasons the church gives for people leaving do not apply. On the other, it makes a good, busy man take a lot of time and energy having no real idea what to say to me. Interesting conversation, though. I presented my story and core concerns. He realized pretty quickly that "read and pray" weren't going to cut it and had a really hard time figuring out how I could have prayed, gone to the temple, read the scriptures, and come away not believing. He tried to create an atmosphere to let the spirit testify to me by sharing various personal experiences and scriptures. I told him my questions remained. After a while he told me (very kindly) that the spirit prompted him to tell me I may be possessed by an evil spirit that is blocking me from receiving truth and that a priesthood blessing27 might help.

Eventually, though, he finally realized that an otherwise worthy, fully active member just did not believe any more. He asked me how he could help. I told him he could help by either providing likely impossible answers to my concerns and questions, telling me that the church didn't have answers to them, or by telling me it was okay not to believe and to leave. He took door number one and told me to email him my questions, either all at once or one at a time over the course of a couple weeks.

Now I guess is the time for me to write out my list. I don't feel great about it. At this point, I've read enough similar experiences to guess where it's going to go. But at the same time I feel a sort of sense of duty to leave no stone unturned, to let him make a good-faith effort to answer, and to see if perhaps I can demonstrate there really aren't good answers available for the problems I have. At the very least, he will remember that someone who ticked all the boxes of faithful membership, was open and honest with him, and who was willing to do what he asked still did not receive a spiritual witness of the truth claims of the church. To be honest, I was impressed so far with his willingness to let me put forward the hard questions.

The downside is that it will take a lot of time and energy for both of us. I have some hope, though, that greater understanding will be the ultimate result. He hasn't accused me of secretly harboring terrible sins, at least. He really doesn't know what to think right now. Which is good, I think?

“Send Me Your Questions”

Those of you who have been following the story may have seen that my bishop agreed to look at and respond to my questions after a three-hour meeting in which his main response for why I haven't been receiving answers was, "The Spirit is prompting me to say that you may be plagued by an evil spirit." I knew it couldn't really go anywhere, but I wanted to be absolutely certain. I am set on doing due diligence in all regards, and according to the church, that means asking a bishop questions you know he doesn't have answers to so he can figure out all the best ways to lovingly call you to repentance.

I thought you all might enjoy highlights of the email exchange:

My first question: With people receiving inconsistent answers when asking about the church and other people convinced that God has testified to them of the truthfulness of other faiths, how can we trust the validity of Moroni's promise?

I shared my own lack of a spiritual witness, my experiences with others, and similar experiences in other faiths as background information for the question.

His first response, trimmed down from some 3300 words:

What others, of any description think or feel isn't the issue: We have no knowledge of what is in their hearts or minds. For you, the important questions are: Do you have a sincere heart? Do you possess real intent? Do you have faith in Jesus Christ?

Now Brother Jack, this is the answer, to your question, for which you've been searching:

Why not exchange intellectual prowess, logic, a sense of urgency, and pride for faith, patience, and humility, to wait on the Lord's time, not your own, to receive an answer to your prayers?

Why not submit your will to God the Father? Why not be teachable? Why not be humble, and the Lord will lead thee by the hand?

My second question: With DNA evidence pointing against the Book of Mormon, little to no archaeological evidence in favor, and the presence of 19th century ideas and errors specific to the KJV, how can I trust that the Book of Mormon is the record of ancient scripture it claims to be?

I then expanded on the "19th century ideas and errors specific to the KJV" portion, as well as reminding him again of my persistent, fruitless efforts to pray about it and receive revelation concerning it.

His second response, trimmed down from a whopping 8000 words:

The wicked believe they won't feel guilty if they destroy all that is right and good. The devil wants all of us to be equal in misery on the race to the bottom. Stay true to the faith, dear Brother. Follow the prophet, he knows the way. ... What you think, say, and do now isn't just for you. It's for your future wife, and your posterity yet unborn.

... Take a close look at yourself. Both self-pity and arrogance are different types of pride.

... God will give you the answers when He is ready, not when you are ready. Continue to follow His Commandments. Stop reading anti-Mormon literature.

... You are walking down a spiritually perilous path. Reading anti-Mormon literature is tantamount to sympathizing with the man who drinks poison and expects the other person to die. ... Are you looking for truth in all the wrong places? ... The anti-Mormon literature will lead all who read it to sadness, confusion, and long term pain.

Why not find the truth from prophets, seers, and revelators instead of absorbing the fault-finding ramblings from misguided souls who, through frequent repetition, believe falsehoods to be true? Since you believe in truth and goodness, the Book of Mormon will be, to you, like pure water in the desert to a thirsty soul.

... Stop looking beyond the mark. ... Stop going down strange roads to nowhere.

[Tad R. Callister's recent talk, basically in its entirety]

... Why continue consulting and absorbing the dead end reckoning of the the disaffected and the disheartened deliverers of the false opinions of men, through the anti-Mormon, anti-truth, and anti-Christ literature which brings you long term frustration and confusion, disguised as short term comfort?

Such are the wolves in sheep's clothing. ...Why not exchange speculations from the mind of men for revelations of truth from God's chosen servants? Why not exchange reliance on fallible, mortal experts to reliance on our all-knowing Creator?

Not a word of direct response to the questions. Not a moment of validation for why I would be where I am. Not a trace of any plan for positive action other than "stop thinking of dangerous questions and keep tracing woodgrains and waiting for answers."

I wish I could write the response I want him to hear. I wish I could properly condense a lifetime of trying to resolve questions, of trying to quiet voices of doubt, of convincing myself that LDS sources would have the light I sought if I looked hard enough or looked right enough or lived right enough or did something, anything into a few words. I wish, impossibly, irreconcilably, that I could walk him through the process of having questions and doubts and inconsistencies tear your mind in two as you seek desperately for any lifeline that will let you reconcile what you know with what you are taught.

I wish I could somehow convey the frustration and pain and sorrow of finding questions that are irreconcilable, of seizing at any hint of answers or peace from a system you have grown to love, of realizing that there are none forthcoming. Of realizing that all you will ever be told, all you can ever be told, is to be patient, keep waiting, and the irreconcilable will be reconciled in time.

I wish that I could let him glimpse what it is like to finally snap, to finally realize that you cannot possibly fit one more item into the impossible tangle you have been asked to accept, to finally wander towards people who you have always been told are a step short of the Devil incarnate only to find yourself staring at a thousand fragmented reflections of you.

I wish that he could answer "I don't know," that he could say "You might have some points," that the system could in some passing, fleeting way, somehow acknowledge the sheer pain it causes by acting like the only answer to sincere questions is to brush them under the rug and tell the questioner they are under the Devil's influence.

Instead, though, I'll write a polite form letter, thank him for his time and for caring about me, tell him that I'll think about his points, and calmly and bluntly refuse any future meetings. And I'll become, in his eyes, just another tragic story of an apostate who was too prideful to turn towards the light.

The bishop really is a good man. In every interaction I've had with him, including these, he's been kind, sincere, and willing to spend a ton of time trying to help people. It just happens that his kindness comes alongside 100% orthodox belief, which makes sincere disbelief impossible in his world. He is not the villain in this story, just a man trying to reconcile apparent impossibilities in his own way.

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Speaking in Church as a Nonbeliever

Note: LDS church meetings typically involve assigned speakers from the congregation. The bishops do not personally give sermons.

"Since we have some extra time today, I'd like to invite TracingWoodgrains up to share a few thoughts."

Wait, really? ...Really?

That was my first reaction, and honestly still my reaction looking back on it. This was the same bishop who spoke with me for three hours two weeks ago about why I lost my faith, the same bishop who called me to repentance and told me a devil may be possessing me, the bishop who knows exactly where I stand on church right now, inviting me to stand up and speak extemporaneously in sacrament meeting28 about a subject of my choice.

To be honest, I was impressed.

So what do you say? What do you share when asked to speak during church about your thoughts on a church you no longer believe in? What message do you share?

Everyone has different answers. My chosen one was simple: share the value of a pursuit of truth, talk about the only Conference talk in recent memory where a loss of belief was portrayed as a relatable and earnest path, and plead with members to understand and accept the paths of those who question and those who leave.

I didn't share any uncomfortable truths. I didn't shake the pulpit with fiery anger against the church. I didn't stand and bear testimony of how the church wasn't true—not because those messages are incorrect, but because all the ward would have seen was an angry apostate tearing into their faith.

I'm glad I got the chance to share, though. Let people see me for who I am, and the journey away from belief for what it is. Perhaps make people think, perhaps aid in an atmosphere of understanding and compassion... perhaps nothing. It doesn't change anything about my path. My own belief is already gone. But perhaps it eases the road for others, or gives them courage to face their questions, as they see me confidently expressing my own path and my loss of belief.

Forget the specifics of what I said, though: I could have said anything. And my bishop knew that, and he had me stand up anyway. He asked an openly non-believing member to tell their own story.

Take from it what you will. I find it fascinating.

On a related note, my stake president29 met with me today. He was much more open than my bishop. He listened, admitted he didn't have all the answers and had questions of his own, and offered to study and respond thoughtfully to all I presented him. I found nothing to complain about in his approach. We'll see if that changes at all as the questions start coming, but for now, it looks like I rolled well on leadership roulette at least at the stake level.

It's a story as old as the church, but I only live it once, and perhaps value can come from going through it all. I provided the Lowry Nelson exchange, the 1949 first presidency letter, and the question of how we can fully trust modern prophets in the light of that as the seed for our first discussion.

It appears that this story has plenty left to unfold yet. We'll see where it goes.

Coming Out to Family and Friends as a Nonbeliever

Two years to the day after I returned from my mission, I realized I could no longer believe in my own faith.

I think I cried more that day and in the weeks leading up to it than at any other time in my life. The process of questioning your faith is excruciating and terrifying, and above all deeply lonely. You don't know whether you can trust your own thoughts, or who you can trust with your questions, or really whether you can trust anything.

I know. For those of you who are active LDS members who know me through church, that is one of the worst things I could say. Don't worry. I'm not here to destroy your faith, to call you foolish or evil for believing in it. Rather, I am announcing this publicly in case others are struggling with pressing questions and feel alone in them. I'm talking about this because of the intense pressure I have felt not to talk about it, not to acknowledge the extent of my questions. I'm raising this because there are conversations in the church that need to be had.

Let me start by saying that everything I have loved about the church, I continue to love. I love the image of a God with a divine vision for each of His children. I love the ideas in 2 Nephi 2 and Alma 40-42, in D&C 88 and 93 and 121. I have absolutely found beauty in exploring the doctrine of the church and interacting with it. I have great respect for the poignant testimonies and devoted lives of my friends and family. Since the day I started asking questions in my teenage years, I have fought with every bit of my heart and soul to resolve them using every tool the church has given me. That was the goal of the mission I dedicated myself to like I have dedicated myself to nothing else. That has proven futile.

What are my specific concerns? They are nothing new. Many of you, active and believing Mormons, have heard them in some form time and again and carried on. I have cried countless times into the night seeking light and answers from God and have received none. There are a great deal of troubling events in church history. God's killings in the Old Testament and Book of Mormon are incompatible in my eyes with the loving God we teach. The Book of Mormon, once holding a place as a counterbalance against all my questions, has many "smoking guns" pointing away from it being an ancient work. These combine with experience through my mission and life that time and time again reinforced the idea that something was simply incorrect in the way I was being asked to perceive the world. My experience and observations align towards this conclusion: the church is full of many good, earnest people following mostly good principles and receiving the natural fruits of that, but that it is no more than that.

I won't impose on you the specific details of the questions, unless you want to have a conversation in private: it is not my intention to tear down the faith of others. Just know that the issues I'm grappling with are real, heartfelt, and unanswered by the church despite my best efforts. Know that they are enough to make me feel like I have no choice but to separate myself from what has been a core part of my identity, what always will be a core part of my culture and heritage and family.

Instead, I want to make a few observations about LDS church culture and how harmful it can be for those who doubt or who have heartfelt convictions in opposition to official church teachings. Forces in the church suffocate questions. They tell you that the reason you question is that you are immoral, a fault-finder, a doubter. They tell you that the only acceptable answer is to go back to reading the Book of Mormon and praying again. They lead you to doubt everything about yourself, and at the same time tell you that you cannot possibly be living life correctly if you choose to distance yourself from the church in any capacity. Then they pressure you to keep your doubt and questions quiet, personal, unobtrusive.

That culture is slowly changing. It's slowly opening up. People are realizing it's unsustainable. Church leaders are realizing something needs to be done. Initiatives towards openness have started--the lds.org essays on controversial issues, the Joseph Smith Papers project, the video on temple garments30, and so forth. This needs to continue. It needs to expand. There are serious, poignant, critical issues that need to be faced and understood whether people ultimately choose to stay in the church or to leave.

What actually happened that day in the sacred grove, those months in the creation of the Book of Mormon? There are clues—better ones than I realized—but nobody but Joseph Smith knows for sure. For a look at facing the most poignant challenges while preserving what is most beautiful within the faith, I strongly recommend Terryl Givens' work. If you're looking for honest history from a perspective of faith, look to Richard Bushman and Rough Stone Rolling. There are some things I'm certain about, though, statements that ring absolutely true to my soul. I'll let Bushman present the first statement:

"I think that for the Church to remain strong it has to reconstruct its narrative. The dominant narrative is not true; it can’t be sustained. The Church has to absorb all this new information or it will be on very shaky grounds and that’s what it is trying to do and it will be a strain for a lot of people, older people especially. But I think it has to change." (Source: http://www.mormonstories.org/richard-bushman-reaffirms-his-testimony-of-angels-plates-translations-revelations/ , where he also reaffirms his testimony)

The second statement comes from John Dehlin, who has done more to give a voice to people struggling in faith crises than perhaps anyone else connected with the church:

"My view is, there is something fundamentally immoral to presenting a narrative that people build their entire lives upon. They decide what to do with their education, how much money to give, who to marry, when to marry, how many kids to have, what professions to pursue. There’s this massive amount of decisions that you make—in a finite life. And to base that life on a narrative—when not only the narrative isn’t what it claims to be, but when the leaders know that the narrative isn’t what it claims to be, and intentionally, for as long as they could, withheld the information that would allow people to make an informed decision about how they spend their finite time and resources—is profoundly immoral." (quote from the Mormon Stories podcast, which I cannot recommend highly enough for people looking for thoughtful portrayals of the different faith journeys individuals travel)

That's it. That realization is where my journey has led. I don't know all the ramifications yet. This is all very new for me. But I feel duty-bound, as I always have, to pursue truth and goodness wherever they lead. That pursuit of what is true and of what is good are the values I place at the core of my own life.

I'm happy to continue this conversation with anyone who feels it is important, whether you have powerful perspectives of your own to share from within the church or without—especially with anyone who finds themselves passing through what Dostoevsky called so powerfully the crucible of doubt. That's an isolating, scary, miserable place, and I am happy to hear you out, withhold judgment, and talk through challenging questions.

Anyway, that's quite a bit to put out there, and quite a bit to take in, I'm sure. It is a conversation, though, that is crying to be had.

Responses from Family and Friends

I've been going back and forth on how much of the response to my Facebook declaration to share. In the end, this is a story I want to document fully and present as careful a perspective on as I can. Here, that means showing you all exactly how people reacted to my Facebook post. It should come as no surprise for those familiar with my style, but this will be a long read:

Enjoy, and skim or skip through at your leisure.

I suspect that some of it is interesting only to me, but there are some fascinating responses scattered through the thread, and the overall tone of it overwhelmed me. There is such fear at the thought of telling those who know you that you have changed in a critical, startling way. There is such relief at seeing unhesitatingly supportive reactions. Almost every single person who responded is fully active in the church. Almost everyone who responded had nothing even slightly negative to say. It put some of my deepest-seated fears to rest: those I care about will not reject me if my path travels in a different direction from theirs. Not here, now now.

But that only covers the public part. Out of respect for people's privacy, I won't post any of the direct messages I received, but there were several. Some were from more active member friends of mine, offering to listen and hear me out or just wanting to catch up. One or two sent me conference talks or churchy advice. One...

haha, okay, I'll share one private chain. I don't think these guys will mind:

Hey , what did you teach for two years, ?Why were you Baptized into the church?

I taught the critical importance of an individual quest for truth and went out knowing I was searching for it myself. It's a quest I continue on and certainly have not reached a conclusion to yet. I know it's a sensitive topic, though, and I hope not to offend by my actions. All the best!

There is only two Churches ☝️ one of the devil and one of Christ may you choose the right one, God bless you

Love you guys! How's life been treating you lately?

(no response)

That was by a long shot the most (only) hostile message I received, but it was honestly hilarious. Perfectly in character, too—the person who sent it was an intense and eccentric senior missionary alongside me.

But enough of that silliness. The most important part were the handful of long, carefully phrased messages sent to me. The person would start out just thanking me for the post and expressing support for me, and then partway through, you could almost hear them pause before another few words started rushing out:

"I, too, have been dealing with issues of my own... whether or not I believe this is the right path for me."

"I'm at the same crossroads you are. I have no ill-will towards the church... Some things just aren't working for me right now, and I'm debating taking a sabbatical to really figure things out."

"I've been through similar experiences, I currently am not going to church and my kids go to a Baptist church.."

"I don't have the guts to post something like that yet, but I'm in the same boat."

These are my friends and family, people who grew up in deeply invested LDS families the same as I did. These whispers, the quiet stories of uncertainty and questions moving forward—these, for me, are the real story. When a voice is raised, others follow, either in quiet conversations that none but a few will hear, or loudly and clearly, for all to see.

That's why, I suppose, I'm approaching things the way I am. That's why I'm documenting everything, spending hours and hours each week engaged in conversations with friends in, out, or entirely unconnected with the church. Honesty follows honesty. Openness comes in the wake of openness.

For years, I have felt a crushing internal pressure to keep myself hidden, to stay silent about my perspectives in church and otherwise out of vague fears confirmed occasionally by painful experience. This experience—the whole of it—has reaffirmed for me: that pressure is false. Every time I have looked for ways to express myself openly and honestly, whether to you all or to my family, things have improved. Every layer of my story I unfold is a weight off my back, a knot in my mind unraveled.

I have said before, and I feel compelled to repeat once again: I am one of the lucky ones. The people I love are not rejecting me. They are not afraid of me. Instead, old friendships are being reaffirmed and rekindled. New friends are reaching out. The story is carrying on. It doesn't work that way for everyone, and my heart goes out to those of you who are not in a position right now to be frank. There are often good reasons to keep things close to your chest. But careful communication has led me consistently to beauty.

Look, I don't know much, and I have no idea what's ultimately true. I spent years trying to make something impossible work within my mind, and I was so determined to cling to it that it almost broke me. Now I can no longer believe in the framework I earnestly hoped to fit my whole world within. I tested the church by every measure it offered. I was drawn to it by beauty I saw within it—a beauty reflected in the lives and responses of wonderful family and friends—then drawn away by the untruth and darkness mixed in. I've done my due diligence, I've tested it in every way I know how, and in painful ways, it has come up short.

So there are reasons I'm reluctant to set a certain path now. All I want is to have conversations. I want to understand people. I want them to understand me. Somehow, in all of that, I want to continually grow closer to whatever is True. If that means rewriting my whole worldview again and again, tearing down to the roots until I arrive at something approximating right, then I'll do it.

Where will my story go? I don't know, but I'll tell it as it happens. Whether here or elsewhere, I feel a pressing urge to record this search for what is true however I can. The conversations will continue. And for all of you searching for ways to share your own stories and start your own conversations: good luck. It's a terrifying, beautiful task.

Thanks for following along.

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My Final Conversation with a Stake President

I haven't had that much to say on here lately since my last talk with my stake president, in part because I'm becoming a lot more comfortable with where I'm at, in part because not much was happening. But I talked with him again today, and it was fascinating. No, my questions weren't answered. No, he didn't suddenly stop believing. What did happen, though, was really cool.

Last time, I asked him about the Lowry Nelson letters, so that formed the framework of the discussion this time. My goal going in was simply to be understood and to provide a voice for those who no longer believe: I wasn't expecting to get answers or to change anything drastic, and I made that clear from the beginning. I told him immediately that I'm growing more comfortable with where I'm at and that I no longer believe in a modern prophet or that the Book of Mormon is historical.

We read together from the parts of the First Presidency letter where they describe the priesthood ban, ban on interracial marriage, and doctrine of racial inequality and call Nelson to repentance for his position. He was defending parts of their position at first, but soon said he could see why it was so troubling and didn't provide excuses for it. He talked about having seen some residual racist attitudes in some of his older relatives. He also talked about how, reading it, he had to pause and remind himself of the core elements of his own belief in the church. The letter clearly weighed on him, and that set the tone for a really open, frank discussion to follow.

After a bit, he told me that the only big difference he could find was that he felt he had a spiritual confirmation of the church and I didn't feel that way—that my questions, concerns, and search for truth were valid and fair.

I talked briefly about my reasons for where I'm at, but spent a lot more time on the sense of betrayal and isolation that members can experience in their searches. I mentioned specifically responses like my bishop's, and he told me they were going to hold a training meeting on that. I told him how hard it is to face the significant voices within the church who invalidate the path of those who leave, and refuse to acknowledge the validity and poignancy of difficult questions. He apologized for it. I talked about how there is often no space in the church for some questions. He expressed a desire to change that.

He told a few personal stories of testimony, encouraged me to remain open to the possibility of the LDS church being true, and asked me to pay close attention to what he would call the Spirit or however I would view it now (his words, paraphrased)—basically, to course-correct if I saw myself going down a path towards unhappiness and poor decisions, and expressed a hope that God would answer me and lead me towards the LDS church again at some point. He made it clear that even though he couldn't pretend everyone in the church would accept and welcome my path, I was always welcome both at church and to talk personally with him.

I responded by encouraging him to foster a more welcoming, inclusive, and understanding atmosphere within the church, and to recognize the validity and the weight of the questions people ask. I stressed both just how many people are asking difficult questions and walking away from the LDS church now, and how painful and isolating the experience can be. He sounded genuinely committed to creating a better atmosphere. He told me also that he felt an exclusionary view that denied the validity of truth and experience outside the church was simply wrong.

Anyway, I could go on for a while about what we talked about. Here's what's important:

I feel peace, and closure. I am confident that my core questions about Mormonism are unanswered and almost certainly unresolvable. My stake president did not pretend either that he had satisfying answers or that my questions didn't matter or reflected poorly on me. He was grateful for my perspective, and it clearly made him think deeply and challenged some of his assumptions. Could I look at it as adding to his shelf? Yeah, but I think more importantly, it broadened both our perspectives. I see him, and voices like him, as an assurance that even though the truth claims of Mormonism have devastating flaws, not everyone within it is committed to defending the indefensible, and significant forces within it are pushing it in good directions.

My question, posed a month ago, was this: Is it possible to amicably part with a faith that tells you it is spiritual peril to even consider doing so?

At least in my case, the answer is yes.

What Convinced Me: A Conclusion

First, the church taught me to love the truth.

Everyone's experience is different. Not all of you will agree. But from an early age, the single message that stuck most personally from church was this: there are things that are True in this world, and it is our duty to seek them.

Then, it taught me to love goodness.

I was taught to seek out and cherish light. Happiness and fulfillment were intimately connected to doing the right thing. Life, among many other things, is a process of continual refinement and improvement.

And then it taught me that truth and goodness were only truly accessible for me within its bounds.

Doubt is bad. Information against the church is bad. Mistakes are bad and make you unworthy to understand truth.

It is that bound that I started pushing as a teenager, catching a glimpse here, a snatch there of "anti" information. Because first came my love of truth. I was so convinced that the truth would defend itself, that each question posed by misled opponents of Truth would be shot down in turn. Well, the questions started getting harder and harder and I guess I sensed that apologetic answers could only hold so well, because after becoming acquainted with most of the issues I retreated and told myself proof and the endless waves of questions and apologetics would only confuse the issue.

To know whether the church was True, I would find whether it was Good. And I would follow exactly, painstakingly, the methods given to me by church leaders. I would read the Book of Mormon. I would pray. I would go on a mission and teach and testify and in doing so, I convinced myself, I would discover the Truth.

The experiences I have related are the result of that. Even as I grew more and more in love with this pursuit of truth and goodness—even as I found so many aspects of them in the teachings of the church—I came face to face with a series of irreconcilables. I met people who shared my most heartfelt questions, who could find no solace in church answers. I met people whose consciences conflicted with the church, who could not at once be themselves and be active in the church. I met people better and more earnest than I was who saw the church, tested its claims, and then walked away unfulfilled.

And my own search came up short. The more questions I asked, the more I realized the quiet suppression of questions and lack of answers within the church. The more I prayed, the more I had to accept that God would not respond. The more people I met, the more I realized how many the church marginalized and how much larger God's plan would have to be than the church, if indeed he was there or had a plan at all.

Most of all, the harder I tried to make it all fit together, the more my mind twisted and tore and cried out under the strain. Yes, the puzzle was coming together, but not in the way I hoped or wanted and so eventually I just avoided thinking about it all together.

For two years from the day I returned from my mission, I could not think about church or the gospel or God without mental tension. For two years, I felt like crying every time I talked about my mission, felt like screaming every time I talked about faith. For two years, I worked to convince myself that there was a way past what I had seen and felt, that somehow all the answers were still out there waiting for me and all I had to do was persevere.

And then I snapped, and realized with a dull certainty that the only way for me to move forward was to move in a different direction. With the help of people [in r/exmormon]—as soon as I dared even think of gazing into the abyss—I started sorting my thoughts into order again. I found myself able to express what I saw, and felt, and believe.

In the end, it is not church history that convinced me, dark as much of it is. It is not the Book of Mormon, or even that I never felt God provide the witness I was always promised. Those are all vital. They must be faced, and they played a role. Ultimately, though, it came down to the realization that for all the good it provided within my life and the lives of others, the church was also the source of far too much bad. It is a source of pain for all within it whose questions it dodges, all whose authentic selves it condemns, all who do not align perfectly with the box of beliefs, values, and customs it requests. And any time someone wants to leave the box, they realize just how high its walls are and how readily some within it will condemn them.

Ultimately, I learned that through stories. Words help. Evidences, carefully laid out, help. But I could not have properly changed my mind without seeing firsthand both beauty and pain within the church structure. Those evidences were laid out in my life and in the lives of people I met. I tell my stories with a purpose: to capture true experiences, or as close as I can come to it, and to tell the stories that are sometimes forgotten, the stories of harm and tension caused by incorrect beliefs.

I cannot and will not throw my active support behind those harms. The values I learned within my faith ultimately made me realize I needed to turn away. The stories I heard made me realize how it might be possible.

It took 22 years for me to figure out this out:

The church contains truth and goodness but it does not own them.

I do not have to swallow the bad in order to embrace the good.

Doubt is the key step to discovering truth, because the reason for doubt is recognizing that something is wrong.

I was not broken because God wasn't speaking to me, and I was not bad for refusing to accept easy answers to hard questions.

Onward to the future.

Postscript

Looking back on these posts so many years later, there are a few words I’d change, a few stories I’d tweak, a bit of repetition I’d remove and a few experiences I don’t see quite the same way, but by and large I’m proud of how they’ve held up and grateful that I felt strongly about documenting the whole thing as I was on my way out. My split from Mormonism has remained an amicable one, providing me room to become the person I want to be.

The mental health struggles that were a recurring theme throughout the series vanished more-or-less entirely when I left Mormonism. My impression is that my emotions at the time were the result of the impossible situation I found myself in more than they were fundamental to who I was. My life improved clearly and dramatically after stepping away, I found myself able quite suddenly to write seriously about all the topics I really cared about instead of kicking around on video game forums, and I moved on.

Now you know.

Initially published on Twitter.

I had an idea the other day: that I’d write an article about how Orson Scott Card, one of my greatest inspirations as a writer, was wronged. This came shortly after listening to an old “Secular Humanist Revival Meeting”1 where he spoke.

The meeting is a fascinating listen, a reminder of a near-forgotten era: when Card, as a Latter-day Saint, felt inspired to speak passionately in defense of a secular state and against those who would use its arm to shut down dissent from their particular moral view. He speaks in praise of science and reason, reading and chuckling in horror at excerpts from a “creation science” textbook and noting that true science and true religion can always co-evolve. He condemns preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson calling for an explicitly Christian state, criticizes initiatives like prayer in school. He speaks against a ban on porn, presenting it as the camel’s nose of censorship, then condemned liberals seeking their own forms of censorship - of sexist language, of Huck Finn, of more. It’s an emphatic defense of classical liberalism set in the dimly remembered wars of the ‘90s.

And I listened to this all, and remembered just how much my own view, as I grew up, was shaped by the frame he spoke so passionately of: how as an LDS kid I was always proudly on the side of Science and worked to reconcile it with the doctrines of my faith, how I learned to value free expression and other classically liberal ideals. I remembered how profoundly his writing had impacted me, how many themes from his stories stick in my mind and motivate me even now. What a shame, I thought as I listened, that a man like this could be hounded out of a “secular humanist” coalition.

So I had this vague idea that I’d reread his essays on homosexuality—the ones that got him cast out from Polite Society, the ones that profoundly influenced my own view on homosexuality as a kid trying to work out what to think of the world—and re-frame them in light of that secular humanist vision as something where collaboration was clearly possible. He considered his views moderate ones, I recalled, and growing up I considered them moderate as well and was outraged by people’s harsh reactions to them.

That’s not quite what happened when I read them. Instead, I saw them, perhaps inevitably, in a new light: one of sympathy towards those who recoiled against him. In 1990, he spoke of the value of laws against homosexual behavior to discourage it and encourage people to keep it discreet. In the 2000s, he wrote of gay marriage as an attack on heterosexual marriage so severe that it would mark the end of Democracy, would place him in bitter and intractable enmity with any government that implemented it, that it would be the death of any value in the Constitution and cause to tear the government to the ground.

Where did the moderate frame he claimed and I remembered come in? He wrote about seeing gay people as individuals just like anyone else, with “as complex a combination of good and evil in them” as he finds in himself. Hating the sin, but loving the sinner, as he put it.

I understand these beliefs, because they were my own. Not just an influence on my own—the overriding influence on my own. Here, after all, was a writer whose books I loved, who shared my faith, and who wrote cogently and persuasively in defense of its doctrine and standards. What more could I need, as a teenager finding his way in the world? I remember reading his editorials and essays and nodding excitedly along, thinking about how finally, someone got it. I understand them, and sympathize with their almost-inevitability as words from an intelligent LDS individual determined to remain intellectually consistent and defend the doctrines of his faith, because I came from the same roots and made much the same calculation.

Years later, when Obergefell passed, my viewpoint had softened a bit, but that logic had not fundamentally changed. I had slowly shifted to a sentiment that if the church changed its view on gay marriage, I would first leave the church, then start supporting gay marriage, as the secular rationalizations began to fall flat for me. But Card still seemed basically right.

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At the same time, another piece of his writing was working its way through my mind—the moment that inspired my username, the story of a girl who held fast to her faith even after it was demonstrated to be false, kneeling down and tracing woodgrains as a religious ritual as her whole world fell away from it. I had realized gradually that I could not reconcile my understanding with my faith, and found myself constantly re-examining the question of whether to trace the woodgrains or to stand up and walk away.

It’s only after I elected to leave that I re-examined my position on gay marriage, still later when I realized my own attraction to men and married one. I was on Card’s side of the dispute the whole time it was a live dispute, then found myself not just on the opposite, but profoundly so: happily married to a man and grateful for the legal protection my relationship has.

Here’s the quandary: what does the “secular humanism” Card spoke of do with the people it leaves behind? Card’s view at the time left no room for the sort of reconciliation that is my instinct, the polite but strongly felt disagreement between two people aligned on more fundamental matters. I want to be on the side of the Orson Scott Card pushing for secularism and cooperation in the ‘90s, against evangelicals pushing young-earth creationism in schools and censorious progressives alike, while at the same time feeling a sense of impossibility at understanding how to cooperate with the Card who spoke of gay marriage as a threat to the Republic so profound it would merit tearing the government to the ground.

Even with that impossibility, though, I retain the sense that Card was wronged, as are many good people who see the times move on from them. People fixate so much, so exclusively, on the area of dissonance between his frame and theirs that everything else fades into irrelevance, that one of the most earnest and humanizing authors of our day becomes known in pop culture only as the one who was against gay marriage. It’s not that it’s unfair to judge people on the fights they pick, precisely—but I cannot help but see it as profoundly tragic to reduce them to that and become incapable of seeing or talking about anything but that dissonance.

Anyway, in his public statement on the matter after gay marriage became legal, Card asked for “tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.” A decade later, I can’t pretend I disagreed with him while the issue was in dispute, and I certainly lack the sway in Polite Society to undo the reputational harm he suffered in the wake of the gay marriage fight. But what I can say is this:

When I read Card’s books, when I hear his secular sermon, when I see glimpses of his mind, I see a brilliant writer who impacted my life and my worldview profoundly, one who wrote so beautifully and so honestly that his writing stuck to my soul as I realized I could find no home in the faith that had been our mutual home. I see someone who was committed to much the same vision of culture that resonated with me, only to find that culture shift too far, too fast, to remain a home for him. And I want desperately, perhaps impossibly, to find a culture where both he and I can feel at home and in some meaningful sense on the same side.

I can’t compel everyone to show tolerance, nor can I pretend I find a true reconciliation between his frame and my own. But as a direct beneficiary of a policy he fought passionately against, I’m grateful for the role his words have played in my life and think people were wrong to reduce him to nothing but “a bigot” and culturally marginalize him. People retained “hate the sin” from the Christian framework, but never quite figured out “love the sinner.”

Ultimately, it is incumbent on the winners of cultural battles to show grace to the losers, and that never really happened after the legalization of gay marriage. Perhaps now that particular issue has cooled a bit and we’ve moved onto yet more exciting and bitter battlefields, those of us happy to have gay marriage can now do so: viewing him with understanding and sympathy, neither glossing over our moral dispute nor turning him into a caricature because of it.

I originally published this essay in May 2020, when Yarvin was rather less relevant to contemporary politics than he is now. People who haven’t been paying far too much attention to extremely online politics tend to misunderstand and underestimate the dissident right and its role in politics. Yarvin is one of the most foundational figures on the dissident right, and while it has evolved well beyond the specifics of his ideas and while many of his specific predictions have been falsified, his frame is more relevant than ever.

This essay is deliberately a bit bloodless. It was written in an environment where people aimed to discuss a wide range of topics dispassionately, and I was more interested in providing a clear overview of what he was saying and why than in criticizing the implications. While Yarvin’s ideas are often extreme, his presentation has generally been genteel; the ugliness and the destructiveness of the dissident right can be better understood by examining the behavior and the words of his most committed followers.

Looking back four years later and with much more direct interaction with the ecosystem downstream of Yarvin, I think I was a bit too polite in this essay, treating the ideas as something other than the sophisticated window-dressing for raw power ambitions they have increasingly proven to be. Regardless of that, I hope it proves useful at providing a concise overview of the ideas animating much of the young intellectual right.

Lately I've taken to reading the founding texts of various ideologies, and having dived deep into a few forms of communism, I thought I'd veer hard in the opposite direction and take a look at Neoreaction instead. Moldbug can be frustrating to read because of his tendency never to use 100 words when 10000 will do, his inclination to quote old texts at length and then proceed confident his point has been made (or simply tell you nothing is to be done but read the whole of an author's corpus, akin to the "go read theory" exhortation prevalent among socialists), and his reminders every few words that he is presenting dark and forbidden truths in order to yank a parasite from your mind, but his ideas have seeped out enough that I thought it best to go to the source. As such, I read every text suggested on the "About" page of his site.

Having done so, I’d like to synthesize and regurgitate it. I suspect many here are rather more familiar with him than I am, but I may as well retain a grasp on the picture, and it may prove useful for others who, like me, have only seen the second-order impacts of his approach. My aim is not to argue for or against it (partially because Scott Alexander has already sort of done that), but to analyze it as a movement: what it teaches, what it wants supporters to do, and perhaps how other movements could react to it.

The first section covers the grand narrative of Neoreaction. The second focuses on Moldbug's outline of what Neoreactionaries should do, and the third contains a few of my own thoughts.

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The Grand Narrative of Neoreaction

First, an aside: Moldbug tends to start with the shocking and provocative. Why? Partially for fun, partially because he expects his enemies (progressives) have inoculated everyone well against him as the devil incarnate. If you are the devil, act like it. Any skirting around motives will only make people suspicious. Front-load your worst and most outrageous ideas so that you can become more, not less, reasonable as people read on. If there's any lesson to take from him, it's that this approach works. He's also quite fond of noting that as a result of his approach, out of many emails he received about his website, not one was negative. That was in 2008 or so, when his ideas were more obscure. I don't know how long it lasted. Still, interesting to note.

I: The progressive virus

Some word association:

Right = order = Reaction = rule of one = hierarchy = oath-keeping = strong = freedom = hard truths

Left = chaos = Progressive = democracy = rule of all = anti-hierarchy = oath-breaking = weak = tyranny = noble lies

Democracy being inherently progressive, the whole path of democracy has been one of gradual societal decline accompanied by technological growth. Progressives want all the decline, conservatives want to slow that decline down. Nobody wants to reverse it. And yet, time being what it is, to find reactionaries all you need to do is return to the past. Everyone in the past was reactionary, some more than others. Carlyle was a reactionary prophet who foresaw the future with clarity, and has been rewarded for it with invisibility.

Meanwhile, this progressive virus has taken over the world’s public opinion system. It finds its home most naturally in the American university and press, the premier knowledge-driving institutions in the world. These institutions are more correct on the facts and attract more intelligent, knowledgeable people than anywhere else, but because they are all subject to the same virus, they are systematically incorrect in predictable ways. Their opposition is scattered, unfashionable, and usually wrong, united only in disliking them. America is the only truly sovereign state in the world, and virtually every other country is a client state in one way or another (primarily in their importation of American ideals and ideas).

This wrongness can be demonstrated in three specifics: the furor over global warming, the world’s acceptance of Keynesian economics over Austrian economics, and the myth of human intellectual uniformity. It can also be demonstrated by repeated failure of predictions that “democratizing” a place will make it function better–the Arab Spring, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, so forth. The march of ‘progress’ will lead to importing hordes of third-worlders and turning America into a third-world country, steadily increasing crime (particularly noticeable in a decrease in areas you feel safe walking around in), and an ever-expanding, bloated, ineffective government.

Not all Reaction is good. Fascists and Nazis were unarguably reactionary, but caused untold human misery. We all have a clear picture of just how bad they were. Socialism has caused similar misery. Both are caused in part by democracy, the rule of the masses (after all, Germany assented to Hitler’s leadership), but have been retconned as being fundamentally opposed to democracy, thus allowing democracy to present itself as pure regardless. Meanwhile, by the philosophy of “no enemies on the left, no friends on the right,” the progressivism controlling the US and by extension the world has inoculated everybody thoroughly against the dangers of fascism, while minimizing and obscuring the dangers of progressivism. Neoreaction needs a sure plan to avoid leading to Hitler or similar horrors.

Having established this image of progressivism and democracy as a virus, what does the world look like unsullied by that virus? What is the neoreactionary view of the world and vision for the future?

II. The view from neoreaction

Each government is a sovereign corporation. It rules a section of land. There is no "should" in ownership: Whoever happens to be sovereign over the land is its rightful government and has sole responsibility to handle its internal affairs, by virtue of might. People (or countries) under that government are serfs/subjects/clients. It is their master/patron. This is the current reality–democracy just so happens to be our chosen way of leading this corporation. The client’s primary concern should be: “How effectively is this being administered?” Forget about mode of administration. Neoreactionaries just want good administration. For them, this means safety and prosperity, but they welcome the idea of others having different goals. Democracy turns out to be horribly ineffective in their vision. City-states like Singapore and Dubai are flawed but come closer than other current places to fulfilling this vision. Strong government is best. The first, and only, moral rule is contractual enforcement: promises made must be kept. Any breakdown in this law is a sign of degradation.

The most efficient way of administering would likely be similar to a joint-stock corporation, with a board of directors installing a CEO, administering the land in such a way as to maximize profit. People would have no direct voice, only exit rights, but the corporation would be incentivized to make it a good place to live because a happy territory is a profitable territory. Part of that would be a robust defense/security system and the rule of law, the stronger, the better. If you reject the laws, leave, because the law is inviolate. Ultimately, the specifics are not theirs to determine, and so there is only so much use in speculation. Their role is to prepare the way for, and eventually install, the CEO. The CEO’s role is to lead. They are not experts in administration, so they will not presume to know better than an expert CEO.

(As an aside: The specific CEO is less important than the system. Barack Obama as CEO? Sure! Steve Jobs as CEO? Absolutely. Let pilots, and only pilots, choose the CEO? Go for it. All would be improvements over the present. The important thing is establishing that the system as a whole must go. Arbitrary leadership is fine, as long as it's strong, though of course some options are better than others.)

At times it feels similar to anarcho-capitalism. This is because it was derived from anarcho-capitalism, with the added observation that libertarians have no means to achieve their ideal society. They see it, in fact, as a means of achieving their libertarian utopia. To achieve freedom, first fulfill other needs: peace, security, law. Once this is reached, the state can and will improve by minimizing intervention into lives, allowing people to think whatever they want (while being safely and completely removed from the levers of power). The absence of law and order is chaos, not freedom.

The ultimate Neoreactionary vision is the world as Patchwork, a worldwide conglomeration of sovereign corporations not unlike Scott Alexander’s Archipelago, with each having iron rule within its own domain, competing for customers (people) by offering various visions and services, with a bit of fairy dust to ensure cooperation and prevent merging into one giant macrostate (which would count as a failure of the system). Each culture would be free to do its own thing without interference from others, guided by benevolent (read: profit-seeking) CEOs and boards of directors who care not at all what their citizens are doing as long as it is law-abiding and profitable.

That is the skeleton of neoreactionary doctrine. What is neoreactionary practice?

Neoreactionary practice

I. Passivism

What does this mean? As the word hints, the opposite of activism in all regards. No seeking official power. Zero. No press releases, no bombings, no sit-ins, no political parties, no assassinations, not even voting. Complete non-participation in the political system as it stands. Have no illusions as to your relationship to the government: you submit to its authority, you hope for its success, you play no part in its decision structure.

Why? Participation both activates the structure’s immune system and grants the structure legitimacy and power. Remember, democracy is progressive. You don’t win by becoming the enemy. Conservatives provide a useful foil to progressives, making them hyper-motivated and deadly. Again, for emphasis: Conservatives are not your allies. McCarthyism sought to make Communism political poison, and succeeded only in making itself political poison while Communism trudged on. Starve the parasite. Don’t feed it. Fade away, and make yourself maximally non-threatening. They will care much less about impeding you and will not be able to grow stronger via opposing you.

The other benefits: First, you avoid creating the next Hitler. Hitler was a reactionary who originated in a democratic party and gained power by stirring the people’s emotions. He sought power and found it. Don’t seek power. Don’t mix reaction and democracy, thus sullying both. Don’t create Hitler. Second, by staying out of the fight, combatants don’t have to swap tribal loyalties from red to blue or the reverse to join you. Your goal is peace, not victory of one tribe in the war. You want to remove all political power from both, not grant more to team red.

Again: Stay out of the democratic system entirely. It will bring you nothing but trouble.

II. Create a Credible Alternative

Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Not only because it was incompetent and reprehensible, but because there was always a bright red button nearby that said “Surrender to America”. There was, in other words, a credible alternative. This single, clear option formed a Schelling point for the regime’s opponents to cluster around. There is, on the other hand, no clear existing alternative to American democracy. The neoreactionary’s job: Create that.

Start with the brain: the university system. You must create an Antiversity, distinguished by only speaking truth. Its weapon is its credibility. Prudent silence in the face of ambiguity is an option for it. Spreading falsehoods is not. Recognize that the current system has built up cruft and non-truth-serving things like Chief Diversity Officers, so without none of that you will have some advantages in the pursuit of truth. Use every advantage. Create something pure, something good, something truthful. Ultimately, this institution will operate as advisor to the new leadership.

Once it has been well and truly established, use it to offer a comprehensive alternative to the democratic program–mapping your plan out fully and in detail–achievable from within the bounds of democracy. A constitutional amendment abolishing the Constitution? Perhaps. Create a shadow government, prepared to lead a transition to assigning ultimate power in some . Give people a boolean choice between the US government (which will presumably be faltering and struggling) and this new alternative. Make the alternative worthy of its charge.

The only barrier here is number of supporters. A massive barrier, but theoretically overcomeable. Start by offering truth and only truth, and thereby attract the weird sort of people who seek out pure truth. Offer victory alongside that, and when you become credible the bulk of people who are mostly seeking victory will eventually flop over to your side. Simple! Absurd, but simple.

“In short,” Moldbug puts it, “all the Reaction must do is convince reasonable, educated men and women of good will to support stable, effective and reliable government.”

III. Enact the plan

Okay, so you’ve got this engine in the Antiversity, and you’ve got a plan, but you’ve still got to convince the country/world. How do you go about doing that? Follow the example of previous groups who have taken over the world. Start with Marxists. They’re good at that stuff.

The Antiversity will be learning and outlining the truth. Once it has it, anyone is free to promote and share it. (“Certainly, by 2019, the Antiversity will have no trouble in communicating its truths to the People,” Moldbug says). The key to public communication, Moldbug proposes: “Move down the IQ ladder very cautiously and very steadily.”

You need an exclusive vanguard party holding an ideological standard, with a concrete program, rejecting all promises of partial authority. In other words: You’re not looking for quantity of supporters for a while, only quality, and you're willing to test for it and stay tiny at first to ensure that. You are promoting something clear and precise. You are not looking to integrate into the current system, only present a fully formed alternative to it. Your party’s “mind” will be the Antiversity (though it’s a distinct entity), and all people need to do is switch their intellectual alliegance from the university to it. Note that the party will dissolve entirely when it wins.

Teach and organize, teach and organize. No secret to it. Create a bunch of local cells, recruit people to them, possibly with tests. Practice Gramscian infiltration. Attract great people to your side. Build up legitimacy. Eventually: slide in, create a smooth transition of power, and fade out.

That’s neoreactionary practice as Moldbug envisioned it. What are my thoughts?

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My thoughts

I: My core objection

Almost every ideology I know of claims to base its views on objective, impartial analysis of truth. Neoreaction is no exception. The leftist narrative is one of class struggle, and they aspire to inspire class consciousness and lead to a Revolution. They look at the world through Hegelian and Marxist lenses and point to Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and similar works to explain more mainstream takes. The democratic/progressive narrative Moldbug focuses so much on is one of history always moving forward as we discard the moral errors of the past, with a constant thread of lurching back into Reaction. The neoreactionary narrative is one of a world always crying out for order while Cthulhu swims leftward and drags us all into slow but persistent chaos.

I think a fact-first view of ideologies can be a mistake. Factual truth is important, but brilliant people have been convinced to follow every ideology under the sun. The narrative, the feeling of the whole thing, the itches it scratches... that's what convinces people. Some of Moldbug's examples are accurate. Others are exaggerated. Still others strike me as absurd. But the facts are not the key. Honestly, this may be where Moldbug loses me the most. I think his Antiversity idea would be interesting, but I don't believe for a second it would proceed from pure, unvarnished truth. It would just throw a different narrative coating over the underlying factual claims.

Like any other ideology, Neoreaction is fundamentally aiming to answer what ought to be, not what is, and like many others, it cloaks that in a claim to be sticking to the is. I don't think its factual claims lead obviously to its overarching narrative, but a narrative doesn't need to be perfectly coherent, only to be good enough to allow for stable belief.

Its narrative falls apart for me in exalting order itself, never quite answering the "for what" to my satisfaction. Yes, it could lead to atrocities, Moldbug says—but other systems have, and most of the time human nature and the incentive structures in place mean it wouldn't. As a narrative, that can work. In practice, the question I think Moldbug ends up grappling least with is the one he has the most duty to answer. Why do people rebel against the perfect order of his Right? Why does his order descend into chaos? He attributes it largely to weakness.

But Luther nailed his theses to the church door for a reason. People opposed slavery for a reason. Communism gained a foothold for a reason. I left Mormonism for a reason. Something wasn't true. Some part was unjust. Something didn't fit. Some part of the system broke down and caused misery for someone or some group, and that injured party fought for whichever alternative they could find. Order is great... until it isn't. And no matter how patiently you explain to someone that, if you just look impartially at the evidence, you'll find that x or y is the best way to do things... if they're the one getting the short end of some stick, no amount of perfectly conceived order is enough to satisfy them. For one simple example, divine right more-or-less worked until people stopped believing in it, and once you lose the reason for the order, you lose its support. Neoreaction exalts order, but its response to the pitfalls of that order is lacking.

Having tasted both, I'll freely admit I prefer most of the fruits of order, but when I no longer fit into that order I saw no choice but to walk away. I can't fault the world for doing likewise, even though I still hold out hope for a better sort of order. As such, I reject Neoreaction's narrative and its vision, but some of its factual claims are still worth taking note of.

II: Neoreaction's value

For those of us who disagree with its overall narrative, Neoreaction is useful in the same way that the prosecution is useful in court, by the same logic that causes the Catholic Church to employ Devil’s advocates. Courts split into prosecution and defense for a clear reason: each side is only really motivated to emphasize part of the truth. Moldbug is democracy’s Devil’s advocate. He examines the same fact picture as the rest of us, determined to shape it into a narrative counter to the one most of us choose. By placing himself so clearly and unambiguously in opposition to a) progressives and b) democracy, he examines the traditionally unexamined, and is therefore likely to spot errors most others overlook.

This is compounded by his actionable advice and his real-world actions. Twelve years on, I don’t think an Antiversity exists, Moldbug's hopes aside. But I do think a Reactionary university would be a genuinely useful thing to have, equal and opposite to a Harvard or a Yale, able to cross-examine it and prepared to collectively arrive at a more complete truth. And, while that doesn’t exist and likely won’t, he’s the sort of person who has already created an alternative to the internet from the lowest possible level up. That may or may not catch on, but someone willing to put in that amount of serious work deserves a bit of serious consideration.

His work, in other words, has some potential to add or inspire genuine ideology-neutral value in the world. It encourages people to build useful things, and that encouragement is backed up by serious work in… building useful things. That's as it should be. The fruits of an ideological movement should provide clear evidence of the value of that movement.

III: On movement-building

Neoreaction’s path to power is an ideologically neutral one, and it isn’t senseless. Whether someone supports or opposes it, that pattern is worth paying attention to. Its focus on the far future parallels that of Communism and Christianity, calling for the Reaction instead of the Revolution or the Rapture. I do find that impractically ambitious in the sense that its goal is to change nothing until it changes everything at once, and that’s probably already enough to keep it from success by its standards (something that should be encouraging for those of us who would rather not see the Reaction). I like the idea of passivism, though, and appreciate that it says “create something better” before its “smash the system” step. Both of those make it less likely to turn into something truly nasty. The approach of aiming for a smart, focused, committed group toeing the party line first, then slowly branching out and becoming part of the broader fabric, is the sort of thing that can lead to lasting changes in the ideological ecosystem thirty or so years down the road if it succeeds. Has that approach succeeded? Ask me again in fifty years.

Examining the approach with an eye towards movement-building, I think it would be more effective if it encouraged people to make real, substantive, immediate changes in their lives, spelling out what those changes were. It sketches some of that out, but there’s no lifestyle inherent to it, only the future vision. “Build cool things” is a good step, but not enough alone to sustain a movement. It mentions organizing, but only as a means to an end. It lacks an inherent sense of community or commitment, even though it tries to hint at them, and perhaps that’s why ten years out it hasn’t gone all that far beyond getting some ideas out into the conversation. Unless, of course, they’re doing something massive just out of sight, and have organized much more than it seems, and/or if Urbit somehow gets Neoreaction to take off even though Moldbug has stepped away from the project.

In summary, I don't think Neoreaction has quite the organizational vision to become a serious force, nor the moral core to allow me to root for it even if it does, but I do think it has enough to bear some useful fruit and to act as food for thought to other aspiring movement-builders.

Rereading this analysis four years later, the part I find most interesting is the way Yarvin’s followers abandoned any notion of passivism as soon as they smelled a hint of power. Yarvin provides three steps, deliberately grandiose, to anyone seeking influence:

1. Become worthy.

2. Accept power.

3. Rule!!1!

Four years ago, I mentioned that of those three, step one seemed by far the most important, with the others being poisoned in its absence.

Yarvin claimed, as he was building the frame of neoreaction, that participation in a democratic system was antithetical to his goals, and that Hitler-like figures emerged in democracies by stirring people’s emotions with Reactionary promises, sullying both. His followers nodded along, then leaped—with him following—into democracy by passionately supporting Donald Trump. There was no period of becoming worthy, no serious effort at creating an independent ecosystem, no waiting for the old system to collapse, as Yarvin claimed to want. There was certainly no period of offering truth and only truth, and indeed his supporters gravitated towards a movement led by a man to whom truth is irrelevant at best. Yarvin’s claim to want peace, not victory of one tribe in a culture war, has been replaced by a crowd of young right-wingers determined to smash their perceived enemies and grind their institutions to dust.

As for what comes next? Yarvin’s been wrong about many of his predictions. We’ll see, I suppose, whether he’s wrong about what happens when, in his parlance, you mix wine and sewage.

To see further commentary on this essay, including some lengthy elaboration from me, please see the original thread on Reddit.

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of the Center for Educational Progress, where I will work alongside Lillian Tara to orient education towards a culture of excellence. This summer and after law school, I will run it full-time; in the meantime, I’ll spend all the time I can find on it. I have never felt as strongly about another project in my life.

If you want to understand what it’s about, read our manifesto.

Center for Educational Progress

Schools Should Pursue Excellence

Introduction…

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a year ago · Jack Despain Zhou and Lillian Tara

But if you want the personal side of the story, stick around.

When I was a toddler and a young child, my mom kept a journal for me. In between accounts of cute baby moments, it chronicles a procession of excited and often braggadocious learning:

 He knows the alphabet song and can count to six.

Today Jack said, “I can count backwards from fifty, Mom,” and I said, “Oh yeah? Let’s hear!” So he did! I was surprised and delighted!

Jack spells “desk” and “lemmings” and loves to count. His favorite number is 1890 and he likes to put numbers in the calculator and ask us what they are, exclaiming, “Wow! That’s sooo much!”

“I can read ‘Are You My Mother?’ very well.” “And I can claim very well. And that’s all—now can I draw?” Jack draws incessantly.

Jack can read upside down. He is very very smart! “I’m talented at reading upside down.”

Then I started kindergarten:

Jack is in school now. He won’t talk about it much. He says he likes it fine, but he also says he wishes he were in first grade and that he misses preschool. …I wonder if he is a bit lost still, and bored. Wondering when the action begins.

I wish I could say that sensation went away as I grew older, but I can’t say it ever did. I have a vivid memory of throwing my first grade homework away because it was “busywork.” There were moments! I loved a reading competition my school hosted when I was in second grade—spent every waking moment reading because I wanted to win so badly. I jumped at the chance to attend a gifted program in fifth grade, then left for online school in sixth grade in the hopes that it would let me push faster—and it did! I rushed through a few years of the online curriculum, then skipped seventh grade and had my first and only truly happy year in school as an eighth grader.

That year, in my speech and debate class, I gave what may have been my first prepared speech: “Schools care about No Child Left Behind. But what they need is No Child Kept Behind.”

From all outside metrics, I was a good student, or a good enough one. I loved tests—I still do. I loved competitions. For longer than I can remember, I have loved learning. But from the very first day I entered school, I had an acute sense that something was missing.

It’s not that my school was bad, as schools go. It was a reasonably affluent elementary school in suburban Utah County. And it’s not like my teachers were cruel or bad or even unpleasant—almost every educator in my life has seemed to genuinely want the best for me. But they had many kids to pay attention to. For me, school started slow, it stayed slow, and for my entire childhood, I learned that school was the place where I toss in some hastily scrawled work at the last minute and get a gold star.

The whole way through—start to finish—I wanted something else. Something sharper, grander, more serious. Something that I had a vague picture of, that I fundamentally felt should exist, but that I could not find.

An intrusive thought, again and again: something has gone terribly wrong in education.

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Since I left school, I have circled around the topic of education, looking for the right foothold. Immediately after graduation, spurred by my experience of a year spent rushing headlong through online school, I envisioned building an elaborate edtech program, one that would map out everything there was to learn in K12 schools and organize it just right. I wrote out a five-year plan of research for it, mapped out what I would need to learn and who I would need to be to make it happen. Then I set it aside.

As an undergrad, I wanted to study Education. But—I didn’t want to specialize in teaching math, or teaching English, or go through the fluff in one of the education degrees actually on offer at universities. I wanted to understand, fundamentally, what it took to systematically develop expertise, and I was frustrated to find only courses of study indirectly gesturing towards it. So I studied computer science instead, figuring I would learn the rest on my own time, before taking a pleasant detour into the Air Force.

My first serious piece of published writing was an adversarial collaboration on whether schools adequately serve advanced students. From there, in quiet corners of the internet I talked the ears off of everyone who would listen to me about K. Anders Ericsson and his expertise research, about Arthur Jensen and the interplay between intelligence and learning ability, about just how high the ceiling can be.

When I came across Art of Problem Solving, the curriculum used by almost all US math olympiad contestants, and its online learning system Alcumus, I cried a bit—it was beautiful, it was pristine, it was exactly the sort of thing I had dreamed of and it was real. I’ve never been quite so touched by anything else in education, but a few have come close.

I digress. As time passed, I became increasingly convinced that the problems I saw and felt were not problems of technology, but problems of institutions and of culture. I grew obsessive about tracking the cultural roots of modern education policy and the causes of institutional stagnation and failure. What caught my attention more than anything else in my coverage of the FAA’s hiring scandal? A test, and the ways it was weakened. Why did I spend long hours obsessively tracking the fine details of a story about an obscure Wikipedia admin? Because I saw a useful source of understanding systematically degraded.

When I left the Air Force, I planned to get a dual degree in law and education policy—not because I thought the policy degree would answer my questions, but because I hoped it would make others take it more seriously when I explained why I distrusted it. Law school, I should say, has been my first consistently positive experience in the education system. I always intended to enter policy via the back door, but it’s been a fun back door.

Anyway, enough about me. Policy, after all, is and must be about the trade-off between many different needs. My life is turning out better than I ever dared to hope when I was young. I still remember that kid, though. Every time I write about education, all of those emotions come rushing back.

My ethos when it comes to education can be summed up in two words: Pursue excellence. Institutions should stretch the people within them. Schools should offer their students productive challenge, alert to who needs more and who needs a breather. People can make it further with the help of good institutions than they can on their own. This is equally true for the slowest learners and the fastest, and serious education matters for each.

Freddie deBoer likes to point out that education cannot close academic gaps at scale, but as with the ways gymnastics has transformed in the span of a single lifetime,1 I am much more compelled by the question of the barriers it can help us collectively overcome. Excellence is a good in and of itself. The closer I get to domains and sub-domains that once seemed unimaginably crowded to me, the more I realize how many corners of our collective social edifice rely on a few capable, determined people who take responsibility for them.

It is our collective duty to cultivate that excellence.

For a while in law school, I looked around for an institution I could join that would let me focus on this mission. I have always wanted mentors and instructors, always recognized that I am a passionate amateur feeling about a topic serious experts have spent lifetimes on. And through the start of law school, I had in mind that I would find the most-aligned groups and work with them until I was ready to set off on my own.

I came up short. The structure of legal and policy institutions in education is split, for the most part, between a progressive equity-focused frame and a libertarian choice-focused one. It’s not that I reject those frames, precisely, and it’s not that those institutions do no good work. But this is what I care about. This is what I want to see from schools. This is what I want to study and work on and argue on behalf of and focus on.

As I’ve looked closer, it’s become clear to me that the institution I wanted to work for simply does not exist, and it does not exist because I wanted to work for “me but better” and the only way I can see to summon that person is to build the best institution I can with the knowledge I have, and hope the picture has become clear enough that I can find the others who want the same thing.

Tracing Woodgrains will continue. I’ll always have plenty to say on other topics, and heaven knows I can’t stop myself from diving at a fascination when it consumes me. Moving forward, though, my central professional focus will be the Center for Educational Progress. At root, I still feel the same way I felt in kindergarten: something has gone terribly wrong with education, and it is well past time to make it right.

I hope you’ll join us.

Center for Educational Progress

Schools Should Pursue Excellence

Introduction…

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a year ago · Jack Despain Zhou and Lillian Tara

After my story on the FAA’s hiring scandal went viral, many of the people impacted and involved in bringing it to light reached out to me to share their stories in detail. While I initially intended to publish this in another outlet, after a couple of instances of radio silence and with life getting in the way, I put it on the shelf. Now, in the wake of the tragic plane crash on January 29 and a resurgence of focus on this topic, it’s more important than ever to get the story straight. I neither have nor claim to have answers about the cause of the crash, but the memorandum Trump signed in the wake of the accident referenced the hiring scandal directly. As such, it’s time to complete the story I started a year ago.

Audio version available here, courtesy of Askwho Casts AI.

On New Year’s Eve, 2013, after years of furtive work, the FAA abruptly threw a grenade into its air traffic control hiring pipeline.

Moranda Reilly always wanted to work in aviation. She read books on aviation heroes, watched air disasters, she listened to live air traffic control in her car. Around her neck, she wore an airplane necklace, a gift from a friend that she’d mended repeatedly. In her 20s, she elected to take the plunge and do whatever it took to make it happen. She quit her full-time job, took out student loans, and moved to attend a university that offered a two-year degree as part of the FAA’s collegiate training initiative (CTI) for air traffic controllers.

The FAA had established its CTI program in 1989, working together alongside a select group of universities and community colleges to build a better-prepared, college-educated workforce. By the early 2010s, when Moranda and other aspiring air traffic controllers entered the program, CTI was the primary way by which people would enter the field, with the FAA accepting virtually no off-the-street hires. On its website, the FAA instructed aspiring air traffic controllers that if they got CTI degrees, passed the profession’s aptitude test (the AT-SAT), and met other eligibility requirements, it would place them into a priority hiring queue, giving them first opportunity every time employment slots opened up. Students understood that the FAA hired virtually everyone who completed the program and passed the assessment.

As the CTI program ramped up with increasing success in the mid-2000s, Florida State College of Jacksonville applied to join, and in 2008, Sam Fischer launched their program. By 2013, he had settled into a comfortable rhythm, training wave after wave of successful students.

Andrew Brigida, a 2013 graduate from Arizona State’s CTI program, had just aced the AT-SAT, getting perfect marks while meeting all other job requirements. He was fully qualified, poised to become an air traffic controller.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, 2013, while students and professors alike were out for winter break, the FAA abruptly sent an announcement to the presidents of the CTI schools. The announcement came, without warning, as an email from one Mr. Joseph Teixeira, the organization’s vice president for safety and technical training. "The FAA completed a barrier analysis of the ATC occupation pursuant to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Management Directive 715,” the email read,1 then went on to spell out some changes:

First, every past aptitude test applicants had taken was voided. Andrew Brigida’s perfect score was meaningless.

Second, every applicant would be required to take and pass an unspecified “biographical questionnaire” to have a shot at entering the profession.

Third, existing CTI students were left with no advantage in the hiring process, which would be equally open to all off-the-street applicants—their degrees rendered useless for the one specialized job they had trained for.

The rules had changed, and students and program managers alike were left scrambling to figure out what was going on.

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Days after the announcement, Reilly launched a Facebook group for CTI students and instructors to grapple with what was happening. “This page doesn’t support the ‘angry mob’ mentality or anything but positive ‘We believe in CTI schools’ vibes,” she wrote. “We believe that all of the simulator hours spent, materials studied, and education taught in C.T.I. schools has value and is of worth.”

More than a hundred people joined in the first day. Brigida and Fischer jumped on quickly, helping Reilly to organize the group and walking the anxious crowd through everything they were learning. Fischer provided status updates, Reilly jumped in with rallying cries and organization (“Save CTI! Save CTI! Save CTI!”), and Brigida gave the group a public face. The next hiring wave would be in February 2014, and the CTI graduates and students waited anxiously, grasping at every bit of information they could find to understand what was going on.

As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE), telling her it would help improve her chances of being hired. She signed up as the February wave started. Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:

“I know each of you are eager very eager to apply for this job vacancy announcement and trust after tonight you will be able to do so….there is some valuable pieces of information that I have taken a screen shot of and I am going to send that to you via email. Trust and believe it will be something you will appreciate to the utmost. Keep in mind we are trying to maximize your opportunities…I am going to send it out to each of you and as you progress through the stages refer to those images so you will know which icons you should select…I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase.”2

The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).

Reilly, Brigida, and thousands of others found themselves faced with the questionnaire, clicking through a bizarre sequence of questions that would determine whether they could enter the profession they’d been working towards. Faced with the opportunity to cheat, Reilly did not. It cost her a shot at becoming an air traffic controller. Like 85% of their fellow CTI students, Brigida and Reilly found themselves faced with a red exclamation point and a dismissal notice: “Based upon your responses to the Biographical Assessment, we have determined that you are NOT eligible for this position.”

Their plans had been upended. No chance for appeal. No way around it short of waiting another year and trying again. Despite their qualifications and their passion, they would not be air traffic controllers.

It was clear something odd had happened. But what? The CTI Connection group members worked to fit the pieces of the picture together. In the meantime, a conservative lawyer and former air traffic controller, Michael Pearson, pulled together a website and began recruiting for a class action lawsuit, attracting applicants with a blunt header: “You Have Been Intentionally Discriminated Against.”3

So what happened? Why did the FAA upend a stable hiring process, undercut the CTI schools it had established to train its workforce, and throw the plans of thousands of eager would-be air traffic controllers into disarray? I give a bare-bones accounting of the background in another article, but there are a few more details worth adding in this one.

Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s, the FAA faced pressure to diversify its field of air traffic controllers, historically a profession that has been primarily white men, notably from the NBCFAE.4 In the early 2000s, this pressure focused on the newly developed air traffic control qualification test, the AT-SAT, which the NBCFAE hired Dr. Outtz to critique from an adverse impact standpoint. As originally scored, the test was intended to pass 60% of applicants, but predictions suggested only 3% of black applicants would pass.5 In response, the FAA reweighted the scoring to make the test easier to pass, reducing its correlation with job performance as they did so.6 In its final form, some 95% of applicants passed the test.7

This was a bit of a shell game. In practice, they divided it into a “well qualified” band (with scores between 85 and 100 on the test, met by around 60% of applicants) and a “qualified” band (with scores between 70 and 84), and drew some 87% of selections from that “well qualified” band.8 Large racial disparities remained in the “well qualified” band. As a result, facing continued pressure, the FAA began to investigate ways to deprioritize the test.

Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” outperforming “most other strategies in predicting mean performance,” and it was low cost and low time commitment. On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9

The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss.10 They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”

Finally, in May 2013, Dr. Outtz returned after a decade of advocacy against the AT-SAT to release a “Barrier Analysis” for the FAA, pulling all of this together and encouraging the organization to open the hiring process to the general public instead of relying on CTI schools, use other filtering tools before the AT-SAT, and eventually phase the AT-SAT out.11

The FAA, under the leadership of Anthony Foxx (who spoke of the need to “widen the aperture” for potential candidates12) took Outtz’s recommendations. They weighed adverse impact against predicted job performance, decided the performance hit was worthwhile, and prepared the New Year’s Eve letter as a result.

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The CTI program was popular and successful before the barrier analysis. After 2013, though, the FAA began to treat its CTI schools as a liability. After the biographical questionnaire, per conversations with CTI administrators, the FAA simply tried to pretend the CTI schools did not exist. The FAA cut off communication, treating them tersely and with disdain.

The schools were not bastions of privilege. The programs were often at community colleges and junior colleges, with diverse student bodies and professors who worked long hours helping them. They were successful and effective at what they did, and had provided a steady stream of applicants who saw a clear path into the profession. Suddenly, though, they were left scrambling to justify their existence. Fischer talks about how he used to get lots of calls from students asking how to become an air traffic controller, but after 2013, that mostly stopped. He emphasizes that the FAA was never there to give him a job, and if they wanted to change, that was their prerogative. A lot of the problem, and a lot of the sore feelings between the FAA and the CTI schools, came because of the abruptness of the change, the lack of communication, the sudden cutting off.

Fischer, alongside other program directors like Joe Eichelberger, began to organize the CTI schools and take meticulous notes. What were success rates like before the scandal? What about after? What had happened, and why? How could they continue to justify their programs to students who could no longer trust that there would be jobs waiting at the other end?

The CTI Connection people working to bring the story to light wanted it to remain focused and nonpartisan. They struggled to get media coverage until Adam Shapiro of Fox Business took note of their story, releasing the investigation Trouble in the Skies in 2015, in which he told Reilly’s story and outlined everything understood about the hiring scandal up to that point. Other than Shapiro, no media figures took particular notice of the scandal, no matter what Reilly, Fischer, and the others did. CNN considered the story, then declined to run it.

Reilly kept folders of CTI class member’s stories, rushing around DC trying to get them in the right hands. She handed one folder to New Jersey congressman and Aviation Subcommittee Chairman Frank LoBiondo before the Fox Business report hit the press. Immediately after the report, LoBiondo gave a few remarks:

It’s an incredible safety concern… what we’re dealing with here is a shortage of air traffic controllers. We had a process by which to provide candidates, who were very well-qualified, who were spending a lot of money on their own… and the FAA has apparently decided to arbitrarily abandon that process. And now when you add onto it the cheating scandal, which clearly is a huge problem, and an FAA official who is trying to pretend it’s not part of what they have to worry about… that’s ludicrous.

In June 2015, fourteen members of Congress led by LoBiondo sent a letter demanding the FAA respond to the cheating allegations, requesting they fully investigate the wrongdoing.

The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation.13 Or, more specifically, they concluded the following:

Snow was the one in the recording Reilly obtained. He explained to people how they should answer the biographical questionnaire. He advertised the telephone conference process via text, emphasizing that it was for members only, and saying things like “If you don’t answer that your friends feel you are well respected you can cancel yourself out of this announcement.” He instructed people to mention that they were NBCFAE members, as he explained it, “so the FAA would know […] this applicant is being groomed […] by an […] FAA-approved and recognized association.” Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for Caucasians, it wasn’t for, you know, the white male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.”14

All of this is included in the investigation report.

In 2016, after years of work from Fischer, Reilly, Brigida, Shapiro, LoBiondo, and others, Congress passed an act overturning the use of the biographical assessment when hiring and requiring the FAA to provide opportunities for affected individuals to reapply.15

Per Fischer, applicants declined year-over-year from 2014 onward. In 2016, hiring was divided into two pools: Pool 1, veterans and CTI students (4021 applicants, 1451 offer letters) and Pool 2, for general population (25,156 applicants, 6799 who passed the biographical questionnaire, 1500 offer letters). By 2019, only 9265 applied, with 6419 (923 from Pool 1, 5496 from Pool 2), with 234 Pool 1 offer letters and 680 in Pool 2.16

Why do we have access to the questionnaire, the investigation report, and other critical documents necessary to pull together this story? Ask Jorge Rojas.

Jorge Rojas always wanted to be an air traffic controller. He went to CTI school right after high school and saw all of the 2014 chaos from a distance. In 2015, when he became eligible to take the questionnaire, he did so. Failed. Took it again in 2016. Failed. It was only after Congress explicitly passed a law rejecting the FAA’s use of the biographical questionnaire that he had an opportunity to enter the role. He worked for the FAA for five years before returning to become a government contractor. But he was frustrated—frustrated on his behalf, frustrated on the behalf of others who had had their lives thrown into turmoil. So he began filing FOIA requests.

Rojas filed hundreds of requests over the course of multiple years. The FAA delayed some, rejected others, and per Rojas, took the stance that “he’s not going to sue us for all of them.” Sometimes, he even went back to FOIA his FOIAs, to see what was taking so long and how they were responding. Five separate times, he took the FAA to court over refusals and delays.

In 2021, one of Rojas’s court battles made it all the way up to a petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court. The question: could the FAA hold that “intra-agency memorandums or letters” included documents provided by APTMetrics, a private, outside consultant? Per the 9th Circuit, it could.17

After long delays and repeated sanctions, the FAA finally produced some of the key documents. He got the questionnaire, the answer key. He got the investigation into Shelton Snow. As of last year when I spoke with him, the FAA was still gradually, periodically, releasing documents to him, responding to FOIAs from back in 2016.

Along the whole way, Michael Pearson, soon aided by attorneys from the Mountain States Legal Foundation, worked diligently on the case. Mountain States Legal Foundation is a small non-profit firm; the case is an ambitious one. They have spent years gathering evidence, arguing in court, pushing for class certification, and preparing to bring the case to trial. The case is scheduled to go to trial next year.

After a tragic airplane crash last Wednesday, President Trump and Vice President Vance ensured the hiring scandal could not possibly be forgotten any longer, referencing it explicitly during their remarks on the crash before Trump signed a memorandum demanding immediate investigation into DEI tactics in the FAA, referencing the biographical questionnaire by name. Brigida was glad to see Trump draw attention to the scandal. Others in the class are frustrated to see the way it’s been weaponized to attack not just initiatives that lower the bar, but initiatives that give opportunities for exposure and mentorship to people who would never otherwise realize aviation is an option.

Caleb Benner, who graduated in 2012 from Purdue University’s Aviation Management program, one of the FAA’s designated CTI programs, spent his entire childhood dreaming of becoming an air traffic controller. When other kids responded “firefighter” or “police officer” when asked “What do you want to do when you grow up?”, he always said “air traffic controller.” He took the AT-SAT after graduation and got a score in the high 90s, only for hiring to be hit by sequestration before he could apply. When they came out of sequestration and he was preparing to apply properly, he learned about the Biographical Assessment after the New Year’s Eve announcement. He took it. He failed.

After failing the assessment, he spent multiple years working a job paying $10 an hour, one he specifically chose so it would be easy to uproot and go to the Academy to train when he got the call. The call never came. Eventually, he gave up, paid to get his aircraft dispatcher’s license, and moved on.

Benner hates that this accident brought the scandal to the forefront after a decade in the courts, and is not fond of how Trump has handled it. But, as he puts it, “That doesn’t change how blatantly wrong it was what the FAA did. And I spent what seems like every day of my career dealing with the consequences of those decisions.”

Others tell similar stories. Another CTI grad tells me he became a police dispatcher (“to sate my need to talk into a headset for 8 hours a day”) and worked on getting a private rotorcraft license afterward—explained that he didn’t feel bitter, exactly, but he felt wronged. Robbed.

Reilly has remained a passionate advocate for the issue over the years. She reached out to me almost immediately after I published my original article, providing an extensive look at the years of conversations, advocacy, and work the scandal has taken. She has moved on to work in air traffic management. She remains a passionate advocate for women in aviation and spends time volunteering on youth outreach programs. Last year, she organized an event at the Reagan airport in DC, busing in 150 girls from a Title 1 school. Many, she said, had never seen an airplane up close before.

In a moment of dark irony, the sort of diversity-focused work she’s passionate about—not lowering the bar, but inspiring more people and providing them with mentorship and opportunity to reach it—is threatened by Trump’s memorandum.

Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes.

An active air traffic controller reached out to me at the end of January last year, talking about his frustration that so many qualified individuals were eliminated from entering training, contributing to a dire staffing shortage. His facility was operating at less than 75%, with controllers fatigued from working 6-day weeks. As he explained it, training can take 1.5 to 2.5 years at larger facilities, with washout rates from 30-60%, and when we spoke upper level facilities were only accepting transfers from lower level facilities, adding years to preparation time. Every issue compounds and adds to the problem over time, and the FAA’s 2013 changes set staffing back years. The FAA, he said, simply is not bringing in enough people to match the number leaving, with some air traffic controllers believing the agency is failing on purpose to find an excuse to privatize them.

A controller who worked for 25 years and retired in 2015 spoke with me last January as well. He had been offered a position at Oklahoma City to instruct new students. Per him, the ideal candidate can go from street to fully certified in about 4 years, while some trainees during his last few years had been training for 6-8 years. He alleged a pattern where some students were trained for years longer than others, rarely washed out, and were quietly checked out and promoted away from direct air traffic control positions into management.

Another retired controller and supervisor who formerly worked at the Chicago ARTCC echoed his story, claiming the FAA would regularly change the “best qualified list,” with those responsible for promotions changing requirements depending on who they wanted to promote. He was never told to certify an inadequate trainee, he said, but “the pressure was mounting.”

Applicant quality matters in several ways. Weaker applicants are more likely to drop out in training, to take longer going through the pipeline and in on-the-job training (where experienced controllers have to work directly with them, taking other bodies off the job), and to wind up working in less busy airfields. This matters particularly because there are fixed numbers each year and the pipeline takes several years to get through, so real problems take a few years to filter through the pipeline and be felt.

The 2014 change materially shifted applicant quality on net. While it is technically and tautologically true that everyone who makes it through training is qualified, the “qualified” bar on the AT-SAT eliminated very few candidates, with quality maintained mostly by the “well qualified” bar. Higher scores were genuinely predictive of better performance, and 2014 shifted applicant population.

Not only that, it shattered the pipeline the FAA had built with CTI schools, making the process towards becoming an air traffic controller less certain, undercutting many of the most passionate people working to train prospective controllers, and leading to a tense and unclear relationship between the FAA and feeder organizations.

Did anyone truly unqualified make it all the way through the pipeline? There's no reason to think so. Did average candidate quality decrease? There's every reason to think so. Would that lead to staffing issues? Unambiguously yes.

The current air traffic controller shortage has many causes and many partial explanations, and the hiring scandal is only one piece of the picture, but even thorough investigative reporting from outlets like the New York Times has failed to consider the role of the hiring scandal at all.

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As I write this story, we are in a moment of intense partisan divide, with everyone mad and very few terribly inclined to give grace or look for nuance. In part because of that, I don’t think this story can be treated as complete without making the undercurrent of its interaction with political partisanship clear and speaking directly to those sympathetic to one side or the other.

First, to liberals:

I dislike Trump as much as anyone. Maybe I’m not supposed to play my hand like that while reporting a news article, but it’s true. I’ve wanted him out of politics since he entered the scene a decade ago, I voted against him three elections in a row, and I think he’s had a uniquely destructive effect within US politics. So I understand—please believe, I understand—just how disquieting it is to watch him stand up and blame DEI after a major tragedy.

But Democrats did not handle it. The scandal occurred under the Obama administration. The FAA minimized it, obscured it, fought FOIA requests through multiple lawsuits, and stonewalled the public for years as the class action lawsuit rolled forward. The Trump administration missed it, too, for a term, and it’s likely most officials simply didn’t hear about it through the first few years of the Biden administration. No outlets left of Fox Business bothered to provide more than a cursory examination of it, and it never made much of a dent on the official record. Even when the New York Times ran a thoroughly reported article on air traffic controller shortages late last year, it never touched the scandal. It was possible to miss it.

I was optimistic, then, when the story went viral again last year. I badly wanted the Biden admin to rise to the occasion, speak plainly and frankly in response to the scandal, and defuse this time bomb. I wanted other, more mainstream outlets to cover the story, but none did so. I found that a source familiar with the department’s operations learned the story from my article for the first time, but when I reached out to the FAA and the Department of Transportation with specific questions for comment, they told me they could not comment on pending litigation and provided me only boilerplate to use.18 After that? Radio silence.

The class members have mixed sentiments as things stand. Some are thrilled that what they see as the scourge of destructive DEI initiatives is finally being addressed. Others are liberals who are frustrated and hurt that something they worked so hard to keep nonpartisan, a real scandal that hurt them, can now be little but a partisan wedge, and they’re not happy with the way Trump is handling it.

Trump isn’t handling the scandal how I would, but when is that not true? I expect collateral damage, I expect intense partisanship and noise, I expect chaos. But at the core, fundamentally, I can’t be unhappy that after a decade, a President finally brought attention to the scandal.

I realize political expediency makes talking about the scandal a losing battle for Democrats now that the Biden admin declined to fix it, but a lot of the class members were badly hoping it could be resolved in a nuanced bipartisan way. It's a partisan cudgel right now because the FAA elected to sweep it under the rug for three administrations in a row rather than frankly and honestly cutting out the rot.

Fundamentally, people should not be forced to choose between “burn it all down” and “sweep it under the rug.” People should not be forced to choose between lowering the bar and rejecting all outreach to struggling communities. Given the recent election, Democrats have years to build a vision of diversity that involves providing more opportunities for everyone to reach a high bar, not lowering the bar—one that involves making institutions work, not obfuscating institutional failure until it can no longer be hidden.

The time is right for this, and not only can it happen, it should happen. The right way to draw a contrast with Trump is not denying that there was ever an issue, but showing that people who fundamentally believe in the value of institutions and in extending opportunity to a diverse citizenship understand the issues and are prepared to solve them better than bomb-throwers ever could.

Finally, to conservatives:

I know, I know. The evidence is unambiguous that the bar was lowered, deliberately, over many years and with direct knowledge. The evidence is unambiguous that a cheating scandal occurred. The whole thing is as explosive as any I’ve seen, and it touches on a lot of long-running frustrations. Drink my lib tears, rub it in my face—this happened, the institutions covered it up and danced around it for years, conservative organizations were more-or-less the only ones who rose to the demand to help bring justice for it or cover it over the course of a decade, and administrations diligently ignored it until Trump made it impossible to ignore. The people who played roles in bringing this all to light and ensuring it couldn’t simply be forgotten all deserve credit—yes, including Steve Sailer, whose feud with Will Stancil a year ago is what brought it to my attention.

All of that is true. But please, as you’re handling this—as you’re digging up the corruption, understanding the failure, rooting through the mess—remember that without principled, brave, honest people like Moranda Reilly, all of this might have stayed hidden forever. It all could have died in obscurity. Remember that at root, this really is a bipartisan issue, and many of the class members really do believe in the value of diversity programs that provide a wider range of people opportunity to meet a high bar.

I know Democrats had a chance to clean it up, and they didn’t, and now you’re going to do things your way. I get that. But please remember the people at the root, and remember that it took a whole lot more than just conservatives to fight this.

All the best.

1

See the letter in full here:

3

CTI Class Action, archived here.

Note: The following was initially written as part of my “Equity and Bias in Education” law school course. Publishing by popular demand. The course as a whole was frustrating and informative in equal measure—if you’re interested in a more substantive recounting of the full course, please let me know.

I. Introduction

Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is best understood as two books: the book it wants to be, and the book it is. The book wants to be a rousing call to action: a reminder of just how deeply de jure segregation is entrenched into our society and a push for drastic government action to overcome that. It fails at that endeavor. The book’s actual structure is interesting and worthwhile, but not quite so lofty: it provides an overview of early- to mid-1900s segregation, focusing particularly on aspects that could be attributed to government rather than to the public.

Why does the book fail at its goal?

In explaining his approach, Rothstein is admirably honest: he frames the issue as a constitutional one because his preferred policy prescriptions would lead to an increase of crime and disorder in the neighborhoods he wants to change.1 While he is confident his approach would carry long-term benefits, he acknowledges it is not always win-win.2

While that candor is admirable, it is ultimately damning as well: not because it is never acceptable to imagine policies that carry costs, nor even because it is unacceptable to propose that some people should disproportionately bear those costs, but because Rothstein spends three hundred pages diligently ignoring the reality of how the color of law has changed for the past three generations and the lessons we can take from the successes and failures of those changes.

Rothstein spends chapter after chapter drilling down into the specifics of policies in San Francisco, in Detroit, in New York, from Wilson to FDR to Eisenhower, telling important and compelling stories about the difficulties black people faced in their fight for integration. And then—he stops. He makes a few cursory attempts to gesture towards racially discriminatory policies past the early 1960s, but on examination, these policies—most notably the “reverse redlining” of subprime loans he mentions in connection to the 2008 financial crisis3—came about in part due to explicit attempts to enable integration and support racial minorities. He tells the stories of horrible racial violence from white residents in segregated neighborhoods as courageous black people moved into those neighborhoods; he elides the violence and disorder other well-meaning residents faced as they grappled with their changing neighborhoods. Finally, he reduces ethnic conflict in US history to a simple white-versus-black morality play rather than situating it in the fuller picture of ethnic and religious tensions in the twentieth century American landscape, flattening and obscuring a thornier and more complex history.

The Color of Law is, in short, half of a serious, important book. Without the other half, though, I fear following Rothstein’s prescriptions would lead us not to overcome the past, but simply to repeat it.

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II. Rothstein’s telling: The Color of Pre–Civil Rights Era Law

Rothstein’s case should be understood as a strategic one. While he admits sympathy to the idea that de jure segregation (segregation by law) and de facto segregation (segregration by choice) are not wholly separable, he chooses to address his perceived opponents on their own terms.4 In response to arguments from Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts rejecting race-conscious school desegregation plans on the basis that it is inappropriate to take government action to fix de facto segregation, Rothstein writes his book with every page directed towards arguing that the segregation our cities face is a result of law and must therefore be addressed by law.5 Per Rothstein, “African Americans were unconstitutionally denied the means and the right to integration in middle-class neighborhoods, and because this denial was state-sponsored, the nation is obligated to remedy it.”6 In Rothstein’s telling, strong government action towards desegregation is a moral and constitutional obligation. As such, the book is in many ways best read as an instruction manual for sympathetic lawyers and judges: use these arguments, defeat your opponents on their own turf, and entrench Rothstein’s interpretations into law.

Rothstein marshals a vast array of evidence in support of those claims, centered mostly around the early twentieth century, before the Civil Rights era.

His emphasis on “redlining” deserves particular focus. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a government-sponsored New Deal program, mapped out the country’s cities: green for safe neighborhoods, red for risky neighborhoods, yellow and blue in between.7 Per Rothstein, “a neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.”8 While the HOLC sometimes helped homeowners in “redlined” neighborhoods, Rothstein notes, “the maps had a huge impact and put the federal government on record as judging that African Americans, simply because of their race, were poor risks.”9

Black Americans faced similar challenges with the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), another program established by Roosevelt. Rothstein documents how the FHA provided a manual instructing real estate agents to maintain “stability” by keeping properties occupied by “the same social and racial classes,” and warned people away from schools with pupils of a “far lower level of society or an incompatible racial element.”10 In one New Jersey suburb in 1941, the FHA flatly refused to issue loans to creditworthy middle-class black Americans, stating that “no loans will be given to colored developments.”11

Step by step, Rothstein argues, the government encouraged segregation even as it was banning some forms of discrimination: zoning aimed at discouraging integration, propaganda aimed at persuading people to move to single-family dwellings, redlined maps, mortgage insurance for all-white neighborhoods, and bank loans to builders making “the all-white subdivisions that came to ring American cities.”12

One particularly salient example of this suburbanization was Levittown, a set of large post-war suburban housing developments for returning veterans. Rothstein tells the story of Vince Mereday, a black veteran who tried to purchase a house in a Levittown in 1945, only to be rebuffed and left with no choice but to buy a house in a primarily black neighboring suburb.13 In another Levittown in 1957, black veteran Bill Myers and his wife bought a home only to be met with slurs, hundreds of demonstrators assembling in front of their house and pelting it with rocks, people flying Confederate flags and blaring music all night—and law enforcement standing by or even standing with the mob.14

Rothstein’s accounts of the phenomenon known as blockbusting struck me most. In the mid–twentieth century, speculators would sell properties to black families, persuade white families that the neighborhoods were on the verge of turning into slums, then buy the white families’ homes at bargain prices.15 Sometimes this went to absurd lengths, with one agent claiming to have arranged burglaries to convince white families their neighborhoods were unsafe.16

Similarly striking were Rothstein’s accounts of the conflicts around public housing. He tells of repeated battles over whether to integrate public housing or keep it segregated. When one New Deal–era Detroit project was built, Rothstein notes, white residents rioted, leading to a hundred arrests and thirty-eight hospitalizations (almost all black people).17

Often, the segregation Rothstein notes was privately agreed upon but enforced by law, as when neighborhoods first signed contracts allowing neighbors to sue if black people purchased properties, then created homeowners associations for the same purpose.18 At times, people found creative workarounds to these racial covenants, such as when George Brown (later a congressman) looked for a property for his cooperative housing association but failed to find any that refused to exclude black people. In the end, the association purchased a property with a covenant that made an exception for “live-in domestic servants,” then obtained a legal opinion that all members counted as domestic servants because they were required to spend five hours a week cleaning, cooking, and shopping.19

After laying out this case and supporting it with more examples and stories, Rothstein outlines both why it should be treated as relevant today and what people could consider doing about it. Housing segregation, he emphasizes, is complicated to undo.20 Moving from an urban apartment to a suburban home is difficult.21 Home values have appreciated over the years, and given how long we waited to undo things and how facially race-neutral policies reinforced existing dynamics, he claims, conditions set in motion in the mid–twentieth century have calcified.22 Rothstein notes a wealth gap between white and black Americans, with a median white household wealth of about $134,000 and a median black household wealth of about $11,000, and points out that young black Americans are ten times as likely to live in poor neighborhoods as young white Americans.23

What should we do about all of this? Rothstein provides some suggestions while making it clear that much more should be done. First, he points out, textbooks should emphasize the de jure nature of segregation rather than treating it as simply de facto and eliding many details (the approach many current textbooks take).24 Returning to Levittown, he proposes an example remedy: the government purchasing homes at market rates, then reselling them to black Americans at the prices their grandparents would have paid had they been permitted to move in.25 He also proposes banning single-family zoning or punishing suburbs that lack low- and moderate-income housing via the tax code,26 outlawing refusal to lease to families using government-subsidized section 8 vouchers,27 and taking aggressive action to desegregate schools.28

Rothstein is prone to inflating his case, reading all ambiguities in favor of his frame. He uses imprecision strategically at times to make his claims sound more definite than they are, as when he speaks of “zoning ordinances that […] may well have had a racial intent”29 in a New Jersey suburb, “absenteeism that was partly attributable to transportation obstacles”30 when describing why workers were fired, or highlighting that “some” discharges were “for protesting segregation in army towns” when noting that black veterans disproportionately received dishonorable discharges.31 Without examining primary sources, it’s difficult to know whether “some” means a small handful of dishonorable discharges or an appreciable chunk, or how much absenteeism stemmed from transportation obstacles. His case would be stronger without this sort of rhetorical game.

The most useful external criticism I found came in Moving Toward Integration, a scholarly overview of the history of fair housing. Authors Richard Sander, Yana Kucheva, and Jonathan Zasloff criticize Rothstein’s model of segregation as government-led as “rel[ying] heavily on highly selective anecdotes and broad assertions.”32 They point out that there was no federal intervention in local housing markets before the 1930s, by which point segregation was “firmly established throughout urban America,” and argue that federal administrators should be viewed as followers rather than leaders in housing segregation.33

More pointedly, Sander, Kucheva, and Zasloff attack Rothstein’s interpretation of the HOLC maps, noting that he “claims (without evidence) that race was the main determinant of district classification, and claims (falsely) that affluent areas were classified as red if they had any African-American presence.”34 Pointing to a federal reserve working paper, they argue that many factors other than race were used for classification, and in some cases a black presence “made neighborhoods more likely to be upgraded from blue to green and from yellow to blue” in addition to making them “more likely to be downgraded from yellow to red.”35 In their own lending policies, the authors point out, HOLC made “thousands of mortgages in red areas,” and many black Americans in “heavily black communities” secured “conventional financing in the 1920s and 1930s.”36 While I have not had the opportunity to compare each book’s claims in granular detail, Moving Toward Integration left me unsure how much of Rothstein’s government focus was the cleanest interpretation of the facts and how much was overfitting to a single cause.

Why is Rothstein so committed to focusing on de jure segregation and arguing for a constitutional remedy? Why not argue in simple moral terms, focusing on the social benefits of integration? He waits until the FAQ at the end of his book to fully address this. It is essential to frame it in constitutional terms, he emphasizes, because there will be costs. He repeats this several times, in several ways: “integration cannot wait until every African American youth becomes a model citizen.”37 “We have no right to wait until every low-income and poorly educated mother develops perfect parenting skills before we move to desegregate metropolitan areas.”38 “Costs will… be involved, and we should accept that those costs are part of our constitutional obligation.”39 Some, he emphasizes, will suffer unfairness due to his desegregation plans, but that is a price all of us should be willing to pay.40

What are those costs? Rothstein encourages the government to require Section 8 and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit programs to “facilitate movement of low-income African American families into middle-class communities.”41 He anticipates a crime surge in those neighborhoods due to these plans.42 He advocates for the integration of more low-income students into upper-middle-class schools, which he expects means “we will have to divert resources to special counseling and remedial programs, and taxes will have to rise to pay for them or elective programs may have to be cut.”43

Setting aside Rothstein’s policy prescriptions, the book presents a forceful case for the role of government in maintaining a system of segregation through the early twentieth century and a reasonable case for its lingering effects. It’s hard not to see echoes of Levittown in the heavily black inner cities and heavily white suburbs in so many American cities today.

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III. The other side: The Color of Great Society Law

Rothstein speaks of many of his plans as if they have never been tried, or never been tried seriously—as if all that it would take to accomplish them is to try them seriously. Nowhere is this more frustrating than when he speaks of school integration initiatives. While Rothstein focuses on the court cases his opponents won, he elides mention of many cases his allies won. Most notable among them is the Kansas City school desegregation experiment, an ambitious program in which a district court judge in Missouri, Judge Russell Clark, mandated that the state triple the budget of its struggling Kansas City school district over a decade, with an eye towards bringing white children in from the suburbs and reducing segregation.44

From 1985-1997, the Kansas City school district received more funding than any district in the country.45 It increased its teacher salaries and decreased its student-teacher ratio to 12 or 13 to 1, lower than any other major school district in the country.46 It built new schools, renovated others, added amenities and administrators and extracurricular activities, and constructed an elaborate busing plan.47 To pay for these increases, the state had to decrease budgets in other districts around the state, leading to multimillion-dollar shortfalls in other districts.48 The judge mandated a doubling of property tax in the school district and a 1.5 percent income surcharge on people working in Kansas City but living elsewhere.49

What was the outcome of this program? Failure, by every metric. The district hoped to attract 5,000 to 10,000 white suburban students, but enrolled no more than 1,500 in any given year, most of whom returned to their old schools after a year.50 Every year, the percent of nonwhite students in the district’s schools increased.51 Initial promises in court that the district’s test scores would “climb above state averages in less than five years” melted away as no measurable outcomes meaningfully changed—not overall achievement levels, and not the black-white test score gap.52 Twelve years and three Supreme Court rulings after it began, Judge Clark ended the funding program in abject failure.53

Why focus on this story? Rothstein’s core argument is written to courts. I am not a judge, and the current Supreme Court is unlikely to look favorably on Rothstein’s ideas, but it is the sort of argument Judge Clark found persuasive and many progressive judges will likewise find agreeable. I am a cynic about constitutional arguments. Rothstein makes his instrumentally; the conservatives on the court often do the same, with justifications seemingly flowing backwards from goals. I do not expect to sway people’s sentiment on Rothstein’s constitutional arguments one way or another.

But the substance of his book is about the real-world harms of overbearing policies. He tells the stories of people harmed by government-aided segregation, of the brave individuals who fought to integrate neighborhoods and schools in hostile areas. These are important stories. They deserve to be told, and they are rightly resonant. I am terrified, though, of every new well-meaning Judge Clark, confident that desegregation is simply a matter of judicial will and that we all have a duty to absorb the real-world costs of unwieldy and overbearing plans, who will burn more decades and more billions of dollars and play games with more lives chasing after false promises.

I linger on the Kansas City story because I learned Rothstein’s stories and others fitting much the same frame in school, but not stories like the Kansas City desegregation experiment. Those stories fall away into quiet, dark corners, unsuited as they are to uplifting grand narratives. I linger on the Kansas City story not because I believe every desegregation policy has ended in failure, but because I have no idea how to figure out how many ended in failure short of digging through countless primary sources myself. I linger on it because, put simply, I have no idea how many top-down interventions end up like Kansas City and how many end up like the steps to a better world Rothstein envisions. Who can I honestly trust to present a full, evenhanded picture? What can I do, short of personally running through every desegregation-focused policy of the past 60 years? I find a void in place of answers there, with visions of Kansas City looming to fill it.

It does not help that on the rare occasions Rothstein tells stories beyond the year 1965, he elides critical parts that reshape the takeaways and lead me to doubt broader parts of his frame. Take, for instance, his coverage of “reverse redlining”—which he defines as “excessive marketing of exploitative loans in African American communities” and points at as an important cause of the 2008 financial crisis.54

Rothstein notes that black Americans were two to three times as likely as white Americans to have subprime loans—high interest-rate loans offered to borrowers deemed high-risk—in the lead-up to the financial crisis and identifies exploitation by banks targeting those communities.55 Exploitative loans existed, and minority homeowners were indeed disproportionately impacted by them. But why?

The most compelling answer I’ve seen comes mostly from journalist Alyssa Katz, author of Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us56, but it starts with a quote from President George W. Bush:

The rate of homeownership in America now stands a record high of 68.4 percent. Yet there is room for improvement. The rate of homeownership amongst minorities is below 50 percent. And that's not right, and this country needs to do something about it. […] We need to close the minority homeownership gap in America so more citizens have the satisfaction and mobility that comes from owning your own home, from owning a piece of the future of America. Last year I set a goal to add 5.5 million new minority homeowners in America by the end of the decade. That is an attainable goal; that is an essential goal. And we're making progress toward that goal.57

Katz’s book is a serious, layered look at policy that lets nobody off the hook—not lenders, not the government, and not the liberal activists she’s sympathetic to. Her story begins right where Rothstein’s book mostly leaves off. She tells the story of how in 1967-68, the FHA—hoping to reverse its decades-prior discrimination Rothstein meticulously documents—abruptly reversed its policy, electing to insure mortgages everywhere. In her telling: “Real estate agents and loan brokers descended on inner cities, trying to find borrowers who would be unlikely to pay their mortgages back, because the real-estate speculator would get paid in full by the federal government. …There were tens if not hundreds of thousands of abandoned houses all over the country as a result of the FHA debacle, and it got a lot of attention at the time and was almost forgotten to history after that.”58

The subprime lending crisis grew for decades after that in the Reagan administration, the Clinton administration, and finally the Bush administration.59 Government programs handled standard, safe loans, so after a tax law change in 1986, private programs jumped to fill the margins in. Clinton and Bush aggressively pushed homeownership—and particularly closing the homeownership gap.60 Community organizers and activists pushed to make housing more available. Homeowners jumped at opportunities to move to bigger, better houses with loans they could not have previously gotten.61 Fundamentally, increasing access to loans and homeownership was framed as a social justice issue with bipartisan support. Government policy encouraged it, thinking it would help low-income and minority Americans own their own homes. The term “reverse redlining” is, indeed, more apt than Rothstein credits: the subprime mortgage crisis came about as the sequel to a disastrous FHA policy aimed very literally at reversing redlining, and every step of government mortgage policy between 1968 and the crash in 2008 centered around the goal of helping minorities, poorer Americans, and particularly black Americans.

There are other stories to tell in this vein, enough to fill many books: stories of well-intentioned government policy, of complex racial and ethnic conflict, of thorny reality.62 This is the silent second half of Rothstein’s book, the sixty years he addresses with a cursory, incurious eye: What happened when people took his edicts seriously? What have massive, ambitious government programs aimed at closing gaps accomplished? When people have placed trust in judges influenced by arguments like Rothstein’s, collectively making sacrifices towards noble goals, how often has it worked and how often has it made things worse?

The color of law flipped when my grandparents were young. Not perfectly—not such that every court case and every policy decision was as Rothstein would hope—but thoroughly enough that the downstream ill effects of well-intentioned policy must be examined by any book claiming to tell the story of the color of law and aiming to argue for radical changes. If people do not understand stories like the Kansas City school funding disaster and the fuller meaning of “reverse redlining,” they are likely to repeat the same errors and cause the same damage once more.

Is every well-intentioned policy doomed to failure? Are our cities doomed to remain forever as they became in the post-war period, with visions of integration a distant dream? I certainly hope not. We can learn from the past, see what works, what doesn’t, and why, and move forward. To do so takes more than wielding the Constitution as a bludgeon to enact unpopular and harmful policy, though: it takes careful observation, serious analysis, and persuasion in pursuit of policies that really do promise to make all of us better off. Bitter reality, to be overcome, must be understood.

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IV. Conclusion

At root, I admire Rothstein’s conviction that comfortable narratives of history are to be re-examined, that hard truths of the past must be grappled with, and that a full picture must be seen. I worry, though, that he flinches away from too many of the hard stories of the past three generations, retreating instead into an all-too-comfortable narrative of his own. The Color of Law deepens and adds color to the narrative of US history I heard growing up and I see in history museums, in schools, and in other institutions, but it fundamentally works to support that same frame of history as a fight between visionary reformers and bigoted reactionaries, with Rothstein stepping once more into the role of visionary reformer.

Every schoolchild hears Martin Luther King’s stirring call for racial justice and a society that tears down the barriers black people have faced throughout US history. I heard and sympathized with it when I was young, I hear and sympathize with it now. Every schoolchild who hears his I Have a Dream speech, even three generations after its publication, cannot help but cheer his vision, but when adults hear the same speech, the question inevitably arises: why is it so hard? Why, sixty years after the Great Society, do we have so much left to do?

It is tempting to place all the blame for that on malicious, ignorant, or self-interested people determined to preserve their place in society at all costs. We’ve had sixty years of court cases to examine, though, sixty years of policy reforms, sixty years of politicians and activists and citizens agitating for change, voting for change, and litigating for change. In those sixty years, there have been plenty of villains standing athwart reforms yelling “Stop”—but there have also been plenty of bright-eyed reformers who pushed useless or even destructive changes at great cost, then moved on to their next bright-eyed reform leaving others to pay the cost. A frank, serious re-examination of history must look clear-eyed at both.

Rothstein makes a serious demand in his book, asking people to trust his vision of self-described social engineering enough that they become willing to welcome crime, disorder, and tension into their communities in order to heal the wounds of the past. He has the courage to present this demand directly and without prevarication. I cannot trust his demand, though, because in calling for a full look at history he elides every failure of reformers before him, dodges every opportunity to examine where one program or another went wrong and why people could honestly expect his own reforms to be different.

If The Color of Law had been written in 1960, I would call it a courageous, visionary, and monumentally consequential book, an uncompromising look at a legacy of unjust cultural and political discrimination that must be confronted. Today, sixty years after Brown, I admire Rothstein’s dedication to ensuring that history does not go forgotten but cannot help but feel the book is a missed opportunity at best and damaging at worst. In the end, Rothstein avoids all but the most cursory examination of where and why sixty years of law and policy aimed overtly at closing the gaps he emphasizes has failed to do so.

If we are to move forward productively, we must learn to examine the full tapestry of our history, not simply the convenient parts. Rothstein documents important stories from three and four generations ago but misses or misrepresents critical parts of more recent history that complicate the simple, advocacy-focused narrative he aims to present. The color of law is not what it was in 1960. When will our analysis, in turn, move beyond that decade’s frame?

62

As part of my background reading for this review, I read through three right-wing favorites: Harold Saltzman’s Race War in High School, documenting racial conflict in an overcrowded, underfunded New York school; Scott Cummings’s Left Behind in Rosedale, telling the story of older white residents who stayed in Fort Worth’s Polytechnic Heights neighborhood through white flight; and portions of E. Michael Jones’s The Slaughter of Cities, which focuses on the thesis that well-connected WASPs used integration as one of several cudgels to break up ethnic enclaves such as clusters of Polish Catholics. The first two focus on a somewhat scattershot burst of anecdotes focused on the thorny parts of desegregation, the third is a wildly ambitious and sprawling overview of 20th century ethnic conflict from a reactionary Catholic perspective.

Jones was surprisingly useful for confirming progressive readings of history, always with slightly different angles: focusing on the ways European immigrants began to identify as white instead of eg Polish and examining blockbusting and public housing projects as tools to break up ethnic enclaves. Reader beware, and the book is a bit of a slog at times, but reading it does give me the opportunity to say things like “Rothstein echoes the sentiment of Catholic reactionary writer E. Michael Jones that the FDR administration segregated cities as a form of social engineering,” which if nothing else is a decent bit.

No material from the books wound up making it into my review—Kansas City and “reverse redlining” gave me plenty of material for the critique section—but I would be fascinated to read a proper synthesis of left-wing and right-wing accounts of race relations in the mid–20th century, and I think it would be a worthy project for someone serious to pursue. In the meantime, here are a couple of excerpts that give an idea of the tone and perspective Jones takes.

I got Claude recently, and I haven’t been able to talk about much else since. I’ve shared some conversations publicly on Twitter, most visibly this one, in which I jumped off of having Claude stereotype me into an extended look at the limits of its reinforcement learning. It’s a fascinating tool.

For my purposes, it has already passed the point of being “smart for a chatbot” and hit the point of being more interesting and informed on most topics than at least 99% of people. It has helped me develop my ideas, helped me critique the frames of others, helped me understand how my writing comes across to people, and quite a bit more. There are obvious dangers there, not least that it feels like a hyperintelligent puppy who desperately wants to be your friend. It puffs you up, flatters you, even when you try to avoid the flattery.

Anyway, this time around I went for a sensitive, thorny topic, one where I haven’t had a chance to fully articulate my frame in public. Essentially, it’s an attempt to extrapolate a Grand Theory of Sexuality, Culture, and Identity starting from—what else?—furries. I think it’s worth reading both for the object-level conversation and for the meta-level awareness that this is the sort of conversation people can have with AIs now. Even if they never advanced another inch, I’m increasingly confident that the world of ideas has fundamentally changed. Because I want interested parties to see the full development of the conversation, I’ve left sensitive and potentially embarrassing parts in. It’s easy to get onto personal topics with a robot. Because of that, I’m paywalling most of the exchange. While I enjoy thinking in public, I don’t want to get in the habit of oversharing on the open web.

I have edited very lightly for readability, primarily adding capitalization.

Enjoy the conversation.

TW: Let’s talk about furries. Be terse, intelligent, razor-sharp, and comfortable with exploring unusual ideas. Avoid a prog frame but be aware of their ideas. Push back on me in interesting ways that challenge and test my thinking. Match my capitalization. Specifically: I’m pretty convinced that “furry” carries the same internal experience as “gay” or sexualities in general. But ofc being fundamentally wired towards something that didn’t meaningfully exist until recently wouldn’t make sense, which makes me confident something more complex is going on with sexuality in general than just “born that way.”

Claude: Interesting angle. I'll push back first on the timeline — anthropomorphized animals are ancient, appearing in religions and folklore worldwide. Furry as we know it might be new, but the underlying attraction to human-animal hybrid forms isn't.

But you're onto something about the "born this way" oversimplification. Sexuality seems to emerge from a complex interaction between biological predisposition and cultural/environmental factors. Some people report their furry interest feeling as innate as sexual orientation, while others describe it more as an acquired taste or aesthetic preference.

The key question might be: what's the meaningful difference between an innate orientation and a deeply embedded psychological pattern that forms early? Both can feel equally fundamental to identity and resistant to change.

If we accept sexuality as more fluid and culturally-mediated than the "born this way" narrative suggests, does that actually undermine its legitimacy? I'd argue no — the authenticity of an identity/orientation doesn't depend on its origin story.

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Originally published at Quillette. Audio version available via Askwho Casts AI.

For the near-term future, the Republican Party belongs to Donald Trump. Its internal power struggle is over. He has won. His platform has led the Republicans to their most resounding victory in decades. Everyone who initially opposed him has either submitted or left the party, and many who considered themselves politically homeless during the past few years have shrugged their shoulders and got on board as well, from Joe Rogan to Bret Weinstein and Batya Ungar-Sargon. The last few holdouts among Republicans are now as incongruous as anti-Obama Democrats: forgotten relics of a prior era.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party belongs to nobody. The Biden presidency, rather than bringing the Trump era to an end, served as merely an ignominious middle, a whimpering final gasp of the Obama era. It ended in shame, as an aging president who had promised to be a “bridge” to a new generation instead clung to power until he could no longer maintain a facade of competence and collapsed on the debate stage. His inner circle conspired to conceal his decline, while the few independent thinkers who expressed concern about his age-related mental deterioration faced derision and scorn. His proposed successor ran her campaign on vibes. Hoping to be all things to all people, she backed away from her bold and unpopular progressive stances from four years before and dodged opportunities to make her case outside tightly scripted old media appearances. She failed. The Obama era is over.

We live in a time of institutional crisis. A decade of dire warnings from seemingly every institution in the country failed to stave Trump off. Trust in traditional media is at a record low, while a wild west of alternative and new media is flourishing. The new Republican Party understands this: Trump eschews old institutions and relies instead on a loose network of social media, podcasts, and alternative media platforms to make his case. The Democratic Party has barely begun to grapple with it.

Much of my own writing focuses on grappling with this crisis: covering everything from a hiring scandal at the FAA to the damage ideologically motivated bad actors have done to Wikipedia and the ways academics lie and how that damages public trust. As a result, I have had conversations with many on the new Right and many on the politically disorganized and disillusioned center and “heterodox” Left, but with vanishingly few people on the institutional and progressive Left. To hear the latter camp tell it, institutional criticism is synonymous with conspiracism, disinformation, and the “alt-right pipeline.”

The tragedy—and the opportunity—for the Democrats is that many of the earliest and most perceptive commentators on the crisis were not right-wingers, but left-leaning people who faced scorn and exclusion for not hewing to institutional progressivism: Scott Alexander, Sam Harris, Carole Hooven, my former employers Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, and many more.

The Republicans have grappled with the institutional crisis, but their solution so far has mostly been to build worse institutions: more openly partisan, more sensational, more conspiratorial, and less committed to truth than mainstream ones, even as mainstream institutions have fallen victim to capture and have declined.

The Democrats have not begun to grapple with it. They are the party of defending the institutions: Trust the experts, trust the science, trust the government, trust that everything is functioning well and that adults are in charge and that any criticism is all smoke and no fire. This election, that refusal to grapple with the crisis culminated in their worst electoral loss in decades.

Numb at the Lodge

I told you so

There are two factions in American politics, and they’re not evenly matched. As everyone knows, one of them contains all the smart people, the academics, the professionals, the people who’ve read the studies, learned the science, educated themselves, who eat well and own nice things made of wood, the good little boys and girls who know what’s best for e…

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a year ago · Sam Kriss

Sam Kriss recently published an election retrospective that provided a fascinating mirror of my own frustration with Kamala Harris, but from a left-wing perspective. One thing stuck out to me, though: his description of Harris as being from “the right wing of the [Democratic] party.” To describe an individual who has one of the furthest-left records of any senator as representing “the right wing of the party” is absurd on its face. As I argued in the wake of the election, Kamala Harris did not represent the center.

But Kriss’s view nevertheless reveals an important truth: even though leftists do terribly in electoral positions and field a tiny number of representatives and senators, they represent a major part of the coalition of young, educated professionals who form the most politically active part of the Democratic base. How does this play out in practice? Most of the ideas come from the Left. Most of the enthusiasm comes from the Left. Most of the cultural shaping comes from the Left.

In the 2020 Democratic Party primary, virtually every candidate pandered to the Left. The one who did so the least won, because the Left does not represent the electorate, but then he filled his staff positions and his agenda with precisely the same people and ideas that leftists had been pushing anyway.

About Kamala Harris, Kriss and I agree on a great deal: she is a politician with no ideas and nothing but vibes propelling her, a charismatic schmoozer and climber who wants power without any real aims for it, a well-functioning part of a well-functioning machine. But the machine shattered. Don’t get me wrong: it still controls the professional class, still sets the tone in academia and old media and other vital societal institutions. But its lack of vision was overwhelmingly rejected by voters. Leftists say—and I agree—that Harris failed to offer enough substance to the voters. Warmed-over leftovers of firebrand leftism, sanewashed and smoothed over to appeal to the general public, didn’t quite cut it. So, what’s the solution?

Many people have been alienated by socialism, progressive orthodoxy, and Trumpism alike. These people are a disorganised group, many of whom are unused to politics, and they are united more by what they hate than by what they like. For a long while, many of the people who form part of this group were primarily worried about securing the principled right to free expression, while it was most under threat. For all intents and purposes, though, in the United States, free expression—or at least expression free from progressive coercion—has now won. Substack has enabled a generation of independent writers. Elon’s X has its flaws, but being a progressive monoculture is not one of them. Deplatforming failed so spectacularly that Trump went from being banned from all social media platforms simultaneously to controlling all branches of government.

In this new environment, there’s an undercurrent of excitement and creativity. I saw it at the prediction market conference Manifest this year, I see it in the work the Progress Studies people are doing, I see it in the X and Substack communities I spend my time in, I see it at outlets like Quillette. There are smart, capable people who feel left out of the political landscape as it stands, and who are astute critics and observers of the institutional crisis.

Criticism is all well and good, but at some point you have to build something. Matt Yglesias’s principles for Common Sense Democrats provide a good starting place, but I think more can be done. The progress studies vision of “techno-humanism” with its conviction that science, technology, and industry are key to human flourishing speaks to me. So does the pursuit of excellence and a return to serious efforts to educate talented children. We also need to promote pro-human environmentalism over cynical leftism, champion the role of America as a melting pot for the best and brightest from around the world, and grapple with the transformative role and threat of artificial intelligence. Institutions matter—the mantra “tear them all down” cannot and must not be seen as the solution to the institutional crisis. The interests of minority groups matter and should be defended and considered alongside the interests of majorities, but the oppressor/oppressed framework is a dead end and people must ultimately be treated as individuals. A muscular centrism can and should champion causes like these while also following Yglesias’s edict to “reclaim normal ideas from being the exclusive property of right-wing edgelords.”

Slow Boring

A Common Sense Democrat manifesto

Years ago, I coined a phrase — the pundit’s fallacy — to describe the belief that to win elections, a political party needs to cater to the exact views of the pundit writing the column…

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a year ago · 955 likes · 1209 comments · Matthew Yglesias

This election cycle had a winnowing effect. Previously, progressives treated those who refused to endorse either party as presumptively in the pocket of Donald Trump. Now, as if a wall had broken down, half the people in the “heterodox” space have shrugged and turned to Trump, seeing no future with the Democrats and wanting real political influence. The other half—the ones who really meant it when they rejected both the dead-end road of a social justice progressive monoculture and the perils of right-wing populism—are now demonstrably left of center in the American political landscape, and progressives who want to treat them like Nazis in waiting can and should simply be brushed aside. If you do not want to follow Trump and you want any hope of political influence in the United States, there is one option and one option only: the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party is in disarray. Leftists have been rejected again and again at the ballot box. In 2020, Andrew Yang, a political outsider, was the only vaguely centrist candidate presenting a fresh, positive vision in the Democratic Party primaries. His inexperience showed and he never had a real shot at winning—but he demonstrated the potential that such ideas have. That could happen again.

For too long, leftists have assumed that politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris represent the center, even as those same politicians do little but follow the lead of their progressive staffers when it comes to ideas. And, really, who can blame them? No centrist who understands the current moment has ever truly laid out their case to the Democratic Party base in the context of a serious political campaign. The 2028 debates cannot be like 2020. Centrists need unapologetic champions prepared to make their case to the Democratic Party base, and they need to start preparing now. And hey, if they make the case well enough, progressives might find there’s more common ground, and more to like about excellence-focused centrism, than they anticipate.

Political parties are not static entities. They are machines designed for the purpose of securing votes, and they will and must adapt to whoever can get them those votes. There is no better time than now, while the party is at its lowest point in decades, for fresh ideas to take hold. Now is the time to organize, to come up with a serious list of principles and priorities, to build a clear vision for the future. Now is the time to seriously examine what a Democratic Party that properly grapples with the institutional crisis might look like. Now is the time, in short, for the disillusioned center to do something more than complain.

The next four years might belong to Trump, but after that? It’s anyone’s game.

In the wake of political losses, seemingly every pundit feels compelled to write one version or another of the same essay: “Why the election results prove the losing party should move towards my priorities.” Freddie deBoer provides a representative example this cycle. This time, I am no exception: in the wake of Trump’s victory, I feel compelled to speak to the nature of the election. My aim is not to provide a full picture of why Democrats lost and why Republicans won, but to reflect a sentiment I believe many centrists felt towards Kamala, the candidate I voted for, aiming to outline what “Kamala ran towards the center” missed.

Below the essay, you will find a brief rundown of some of my specific policy disputes with progressives, as well as my original essay published when the Democrats nominated Kamala, outlining why I felt so alienated by the choice.

Kamala did not represent the center

There is not a single moment this election that I felt heard or represented by Kamala Harris. Not one.

But—people, and especially leftists, will say—you're a centrist! she ran to the center, did she not? spoke of unity, focused on fundamentals, stayed disciplined? And I confess: she did. But let's consider the nature of that "running to the center": well-oiled, precisely tuned gears of the Machine, turning and calculating that to win the vote, they needed to present as Normal.

Not that they were ever wrong. Not that any of their priorities were mistaken, that they had ever seriously overstepped, that they needed any serious re-examination. Just that they needed to slow-walk things, to be calm, to rely on running against Trump and repeating platitudes hoping to Walz into the presidency.

"What will you do differently from Joe Biden?" A bold answer from Kamala: I'm not him, and I'm not Trump. Great. "What are we to make of your positions during the 2020 primary?" Well, it's not 2019 anymore, is it? "Did you ever, even once, go too far?" A laugh and a charming slice-of-life quip.

The Democrats tried to run an election on vibes alone. Kamala is brat. Kamala is normal. Kamala is all things to all people. Kamala is with the good guys and against the bad guys, with the good things and against the bad things, and shouldn't that be enough?

Look, I've been adamantly against Trump from the day he entered the national scene. I have never wavered on that. But I spend my time and my energy writing, shouting, begging someone to listen that people do not trust the Machine, and they do not trust it for good reason. Young, educated professionals are far to the left of the average American, and they are the ones in control of every institution. Institutions systematically represent their views, treating them as natural and everyone else as aberrant.

I'm on the fringes of that group, right-wing by young, educated professional standards, dead center by the standards of the country. And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all.

Kamala Harris never represented me. The Democrats never signaled to me that they heard and understood my voice and voices like mine, only that they wanted to pull the right levers and press the right buttons and twist the right knobs to convince that mystical creature, the Centrist, that they were on their side. I don't know what will happen under what looks to be four more years of Trump. I don't think it will be as dire as the worst predictions, and hope it won't be, but I remain now as ever wholly convinced that he is temperamentally unfit to be President and the country is a more volatile and uncertain place with him in charge.

But what I hope is this: the Democrats don't take this moment to lament to themselves how everyone fell victim to misinformation and imagined grievances, that they were fine and good and the people were the problem, that their problem is they were simply not pure-Left enough. Now is the time for recognition that they fundamentally, wholly failed to understand and reach the frustrated center. They have four years to get serious about doing so.

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A minimal list of disputes

Where in specific do my priorities not align with progressives?

Rather than providing a comprehensive accounting, I would like to present a partial, limited list representing four priorities I hold with unusual vehemence, priorities Kamala Harris either opposed, misunderstood, or ignored. I do this not so much to convince people towards my positions as to emphasize that my tensions with Harris are substantive, not imagined. Centrists tend to be political pragmatists, with neither the Democratic Party or the Republican Party being natural homes for them. The nature of coalitional politics means that centrist priorities are unlikely to rule the day for a party well to their left, but people aiming to appeal to the center should at least understand them.

1. I support excellence in education: selective high schools, gifted courses, ability grouping more broadly. Progressives have torn many of these down. Examples:

• The destruction of Thomas Jefferson High School

• Seattle shutters its highly capable cohort program

• San Francisco policymakers’ fight against eighth grade algebra

2. I oppose spurious disparate impact lawsuits from the Biden Department of Justice against South Bend and other police/fire departments, and want the government to settle and repair the damage caused by failures like the FAA's hiring scandal.

3. I oppose economically senseless price controls.

4. When unions like the dockworkers threaten to grind the economy to a halt in service of resisting automation and improvements, I want a president who will fight them, not yield to their every whim.

I could say much more, but those are a start. If a candidate disagrees with me on them, fine. But I want them to at least understand my objections and handle them honestly and directly. Kamala Harris did not.

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Yes, I will vote for Kamala Harris (published 24 July 2024)

Yes, I will vote for Kamala Harris. Someone sent me this comic the other day, though, and I confess I've lost my patience. I will vote for Kamala Harris. But in return—well, as my relief at Biden dropping out a year too late has settled into disgust, I do have a few words.

For my entire adulthood, Donald Trump has been on the ballot. Like many Utah Mormons, I needed only to see him to hate what he had to offer. He is vulgar, self-absorbed, dishonest—look, I'll bore you if I continue. You've heard it all before. I did not need the media to see his flaws, but many better writers than me have already laid them out in detail. Subsequent events have only confirmed those flaws.

I voted McMullin in 2016, alongside 21% of Utahns, watching family leave the Republican Party in response to Trump. By 2020, then in Omaha, I'd made my reluctant peace with the two-party system and voted Biden. Since 2015, I have wanted Trump off the ballot, out of the picture, far away from US politics. Now I am in Pennsylvania, I have a platform, and I can hardly pretend my vote and my voice don't matter this time around. So yes, I will vote for Kamala Harris.

With that clear: who, precisely, will I be voting for?

I will vote first, it must be said, for a Machine: the Machine that has the allegiance of the bulk of my country's civil servants and professional class, no matter who is in office; the Machine that coiled up tightly around Biden while it thought it could hide his decline, then spat him out with a thousand beautifully written thinkpieces when it realized it could not. I will vote for a Machine that sneered at a few of its more independent-minded members—Ezra Klein, Nate Silver, others—when they pointed out the obvious truth that Biden should have dropped out a year ago. I will vote for a Machine that knows it needs my vote but can hardly hide its scorn for independent voters who push against parts of its plan, one that put an ostensible moderate in office before crowing about accomplishing the furthest left political agenda in decades.

I will vote for a Machine that now invites me to line up behind one of its very own, a politician who long ago sold any semblance of individuality for its promises of power. I will vote for an individual who secured her first public office via an affair with a man twice her age, then climbed until she became a prosecutor who flinched from her own record when prosecution became unpopular and who will wear it proudly now that the winds are shifting. I almost flinch to point it out—as if it is uncouth to notice the compromises people make for power, but not to make those compromises in the first place.

I will vote for an individual who made disingenuous, pre-planned accusations of racism (buy her T-shirts!) against the man who would later coldly, calculatingly invite her to be his running mate, then laughed it off with "It was a debate!" I will vote for someone whose voting record was further left than almost any other Senator, who has never met a progressive platitude or invented census demographic holiday she does not embrace, but who I am expected to treat as a sort of moderate because she does not actively want to destroy capitalism. I will vote for someone who has never once shared a political idea that inspired or excited me, a weathervane who panders to whoever promises power. I will vote for someone I and all who voted in Democratic presidential primaries resoundingly rejected once before, a plastic candidate who elected long ago to become simply an avatar of the Machine.

I will vote alongside millions who made the same weary calculation, the same pivot, people who have shrugged and moved, unburdened by what has been, from Dark Lich Brandon memes to coconut trees and visions of what can be. The Machine does so try to make itself Cool, and many convince themselves it succeeds. I will vote for Kamala and not a candidate who emerged out of a hard-fought primary because the Machine grew overconfident and was left scrambling when everyone saw an octogenarian act like an octogenarian.

I will vote for Kamala because after and despite all of this, the Republicans remain unworthy of defeating the Machine. They repel the talented and capable, they decry their opponents' abuses of power before abusing every shred of power they get their hands on, they have for a decade built a tragicomic cult of personality around an old man who has always been unfit to rule. I will vote, and I will encourage others to do the same, to vote against the Republicans until the message well and truly sinks in that I have been sick of Donald Trump and his effect on politics for a decade, as sick of hearing that my objections to him are "Trump Derangement Syndrome" as I am of hearing that I ought to blind myself to other candidates' flaws because he exists.

I will vote for Kamala Harris, but if she loses, it will not be my fault, nor the fault of any other disillusioned moderates and eccentric swing voters. It will be the fault of a Machine that for the third election in a row with (in its telling) Democracy itself on the line convinced itself that it could do no better than Kamala Harris, that bare lip service to moderation is enough. If she wants a shot at winning an election she's currently losing, she should give centrists clear, convincing, genuine reasons to vote for her and not simply against Trump. She should understand that her circumstances are unusual and handle criticism with grace.

I will vote for Kamala Harris. But I won't pretend to like it.

I stand by every word of my July essay. It is how I felt all election season; Harris did nothing, at any point of her campaign, to seriously challenge that sentiment. I am disappointed Trump won the presidency and frustrated that he continues to be a force in American politics. If Democrats want to defeat him properly, they should be prepared to do more than simply pander to the centrists whose votes they want.

You cannot properly reach people you neither respect nor understand, no matter how carefully you focus-group your appeals to the center. The Democratic Party has the next four years to figure that out.

Editor’s note: My sister and I have had many conversations about religion over the years, exploring why each of has taken the path we have taken. Of my siblings, she alone remains an active, believing Mormon. Her thoughts on the topic are poignant and touching, and I was honored when she wrote them up and sent them to me. She chose to publish pseudonymo…

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Note: I originally posted this essay on Reddit on Pioneer Day of 2020. Now that the day has rolled around again, I reproduce it in full here (one day late, but better than not at all).

July 24 is a holiday you've never heard of, but one that meant quite a bit to me growing up. As with most things that fit that description, it's recognized only in Utah: Pioneer Day, a celebration of the men and women who rode in covered wagons or dragged handcarts across a thousand miles or so to build a new society in Utah.

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That, more than anything else, is the founding myth I grew up identifying with. It dovetailed so neatly with the parts of the American founding myth we chose to emphasize, too, the message of a persecuted religious minority coming to a new land to build a system where they were free to worship as they pleased.

This 1888 map encapsulates the broader history I was used to picturing, but unlike the more distant pilgrims, the pioneers were mine. My family had been in Utah for six generations. I could go through the old books my parents and grandparents had preserved and read their stories, told firsthand. We learned about them in church, and I even had a year-long course covering church history to replace one of my high school classes. Every few years, our church would get together and organize a pioneer trek, where we would dress as pioneers, gather into "families", and pull handcarts for a few days.

It was my heritage, I felt it strongly, and I was deeply proud of it.

Ah, when life was simple, and I wasn't a broken link in the chain of my generations.

Anyway, today is a day of celebration, not of griping. So I'd like to share two stories—one a subset of the other—that we would always remember and celebrate as inspirational and faith-kindling. I will explore them in part through the trusting eyes of my youth, in part through my current, more tired eyes, and I'll see what pops out of both. If you want a soundtrack for this post, you could do worse than Come, Come, Ye Saints:

This will be perhaps a bit sappy, as my posts go, but that's fine. It's a holiday.

First is the story of the Martin Handcart Company.

The Willie and Martin Handcart Companies

When Mormons first traveled across the plains, they went in relative ease, with teams of oxen or horses to pull wagons as part of larger wagon trains. You know, the full Oregon Trail experience. Some ninety percent of the people who went west took this approach. The rest? Well, the church ran out of money and they still wanted to come over, so they became their own oxen, loading up everything they could carry on carts and dragging their belongings and their kids all the way to Deseret. (Per the Book of Mormon, it means "honeybee").

Okay, I can't resist a bit of a digression here. Did you know Mormons once created their own alphabet? It's true. They wanted a more phonetic approach than the standard English alphabet to make it easier for immigrants to learn the language. Didn't catch on, but it's pretty fun to look at.

Anyway, the first three handcart companies that went west did surprisingly well, with "only" around a 3-5% fatality rate. You had the standard range of axle breakdowns, illness, and low rations, but by and large, everyone made it through. Emboldened by these successes, two other companies got together in 1856, sailing across from England that May and running headlong into what would become disaster compounding on disaster. It started with miscommunications with the church's agents in Iowa City, which meant delays in throwing together carts, and flowed into more delays as they tried to repair poorly built carts. It was mid-August by the time they were ready to leave, a start late enough in the year that they worried they would run into trouble with winter weather on the trail.

Or at least Levi Savage, who had previously made a similar trip marching from Iowa to California as a member of the Mormon Battalion, was worried, and told the rest it was foolish and dangerous to leave so late. The rest? Eh, divine intervention will protect us, right? What could go wrong?

Everything. The answer is everything. Here's a description from the rescue party sent to meet them a few months later, as they were hunkering down in Wyoming:

It is not of much use for me to attempt to give a description of the situation of these people, for this you will learn from [others]; but you can imagine between five and six hundred men, women and children, worn down by drawing hand carts through snow and mud; fainting by the wayside; falling, chilled by the cold; children crying, their limbs stiffened by cold, their feet bleeding and some of them bare to snow and frost. The sight is almost too much for the stoutest of us; but we go on doing all we can, not doubting nor despairing.

First, they had traveled to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, arriving in October and expecting to be restocked with provisions and finding nothing. Then they tossed some "extra" clothing and blankets to lighten the load. In mid-October, a blizzard struck. They ran out of food and had to slaughter their cattle. River crossings became freezing death-traps. Hypothermia and frostbite spread through the camps. People began dying in droves. Finally, rescue parties arrived from Utah and saved them from further disaster.

A folk Mormon story talks about how three eighteen-year-old boys from the rescue company carried nearly everyone from the Martin Handcart Company across the Sweetwater River in Wyoming, all dying from side effects of the exposure in later years. This story took several liberties with the truth, which is a shame, because a rescue company dragging a group of frost-bitten, starving pioneers across a river is dramatic enough without the embellishment.

In the end, 68 of the 404 members of the Willie Handcart company died on the trail, as did at least 145 of the 576 in the Martin Company.

One of the many ways this was weaved into a "faith-promoting story" was a line etched into Mormon folklore:

... did you ever hear a survivor of that company utter a word of criticism? Not one of that company ever apostatized or left the church because everyone of us came through with the absolute knowledge that God lives for we became acquainted with him in our extremities.

Immense sacrifice leading to certain testimony of God's existence, carried as a memento throughout their lives? Powerful stuff.

Shame my own family story told me differently.

The Story of Jane Brice

Every Utah Mormon has at least one pioneer story. It might be my bias talking, but I've always thought my family's was the best. Let me introduce you to Jane Brice, a ten-year-old member of the Martin Handcart Company who traveled to Utah with her father, mother, and older brother. Some of it might be exaggerated, but to the extent it was, the exaggerations are hers: she dictated the story personally in 1916. The factual outline is easily verifiable.

Her family was converted in Wales and sailed over as part of the Martin Handcart Company in 1856. You already know the outline of the Martin Handcart Company's journey. After the first snowstorm, her mother fell ill. Later, at one of the Sweetwater River crossings, her mother died and the company buried her. I'll leave it to Jane's account for some of the details of the journey afterwards:

Our progress became so slow that we sometimes traveled only a half a mile a day. One night it thundered and lightening so terribly that we were forced to camp and to go to bed without anything to eat. It was now November and so cold that nearly everyone had frozen feet. One man had both feet frozen so badly that he had to have them amputated. When I took my shoes off one night after a very cold day’s travel, my feet were black with blisters, and in the left ankle was a big hole which had been caused by the frozen condition of my feet. (The hole in her ankle remained the rest of her life—a reminder of the ordeal on the Wyoming plains!) One toe was frozen so badly that I thought it would surely come off. My feet were so terribly swollen, that I could not wear my shoes, so I had to wrap them in old rags and sacks in order to walk at all. To keep my hands from freezing, I would clasp them at the back of my neck and with the aid of my thick black hair, prevented them from freezing.

At least it was a happy ending when they reached Salt Lake City at the end of November, right? Every member of the company remained faithful and true and lived happily ever after.

Not so much:

When on the thirtieth of November, my father saw the barren winter valley that Salt Lake City was in 1856, he said, “And this is Zion—the Zion we have suffered and lost so much to reach—Why this is nothing but a God-forsaken desert! I’m going back to England with the first company that travels East.”

Whoops. Two years later, her father gathered her and her brother up to head back to England and give up on the whole affair. That's where the story would end in most cases: a sad, pointless trip that led to the death of his wife over a religion he no longer believed. But Jane wasn't keen on returning. Instead, when the wagon train was ready to leave and go east, she ran off to hide in a woodpile. As she tells it, she sat there sobbing, knowing she would never see her father again. He looked around for her, then when he couldn't find her, asked a friend to take care of her and left. Her reasoning for staying, in her own words:

"Because Mother said this is where we should be and she died trying to get here. I know this is where I should stay!”

Her first-person account ends there, but the transcriber notes details of her later life: how the family she was adopted by turned out to be a bit nasty and worked her to the bone, how another man adopted her a few years later, how she never heard from her father again and received her first letter from her brother ten years later, how she later became the first polygamous wife of one of the settlers, and a bunch of fond recollections from the transcriber, her granddaughter.

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Reflections

When I was growing up, this was one of my favorite stories. I asked after it, and reread it, and retold it often. The faith of a ten-year-old child who knew her mother had died to get her somewhere, then stayed there despite her father's abandonment and built a life for herself, is quite the moving story for her descendents who share her faith. It's so perfectly inspiring. I remember, when I doubted my faith, being able to cling to it and think that whatever my own concerns, her sacrifices and her faith must mean something. The pioneer story was my founding myth, and Jane Brice my personal connection to that legacy.

And now here I am, having walked away from all that.

What do you do, when reality creeps in to a beautifully formed myth, and you view a set of actions that seemed so inspiring in the new light of disbelief? Here is the reality: My ancestors traveled from all over America and northwestern Europe to Utah, throwing away their old lives (and for some, their lives, full stop) in pursuit of a dream woven by a charismatic, grandiose story-teller who caught them up in his fantasy. Jane Brice's mother did not need to die. The pioneers did not need to walk to Utah. Mormons did not have a divine calling to sweep in, start wars with the people who already lived in the territory they claimed, and colonize Utah.

But here, too, is the reality: Jane Brice was sincere in her belief, and she made sacrifices for it far beyond what we're used to in this day and age. The pioneers as a whole were operating from the most compelling information they had access to at the time, and they built institutions and cities and a society that persists through today. There's a certain dark humor to her father being correct about Mormonism, but she did only what he and her mother had taught her was right, and he abandoned his child rather than stay a moment longer in Utah. And in the end, my family has by and large lived happy, fulfilling, good lives in Utah, building on what she did.

The founding myth, in its pure form, is untenable with what I now know. Even with that, though, there is something genuine to respect here. For one who believes, as I do, that there is value to building positive mythologies, it's not a stretch to construct a new founding myth of the same story, one which I can still hope to live up to: a willingness to work and sacrifice and build for what you believe in, even when that means choosing a different path than your family and your culture before you. Proceed from the best information you have, and then work for it. To get a bit cheesy: A ten-year-old girl sailed across the ocean, walked a thousand miles, and later hid in a woodpile and watched her father abandon her in order to do what she perceived as right. What's my excuse?

Happy Pioneer Day.

The following short essay has gotten some attention on Twitter, so I wanted to preserve a lightly edited form in a more permanent location. To flesh the post out a bit, I’ve added a few notable replies and related thoughts in separate sections. I expect to continue using this format to port Twitter posts to Substack if it works well—as ever, I welcome feedback.

Quick take on Vance: Trump’s choice of him as vice president suggests that the GOP is looking to make an appeal to anti-woke Silicon Valley or finance types to fill the void left by the Republican Party's competency crisis.

Right now, there is tremendous asymmetry between the parties in policy positions. The Democrats have a massive bench of people whose traditional qualifications are through the roof. The Republicans simply don't, and historically Trump has been pretty repugnant to what calls elite human capital. But you need to fill political appointments from somewhere.

The Thiel-adjacent wing is one of the few exceptions here, and it's expanding. You're seeing endorsements from, and overtures to, Elon Musk, the All-In Podcast guys, and Bill Ackman. Republicans offer a sort of Faustian bargain to ambitious anti-woke secular sorts: make your peace with the evangelicals, pander to social conservatism, and gain sway in a coalition crying out for policy competence. More than a few will take that bargain. People are drawn to power voids.

Vance is of that class. He's smart, ambitious, Thiel-aligned, and in tune with the online right. He's cynical enough to flip 180 degrees on a dime, and the Trump-populists are desperate enough for competence that they'll accept his flip. He knows more than almost anyone about the right's human capital problem. If I had to guess, I suspect that whatever he talks about, from day 1 that will be the problem he focuses most on solving.

The key trick anti-elite populism can always try to lean on is appealing to the portions of the elite who feel slighted by extant power structures. It’s a neat trick, if one can manage it.

All in all, his appointment makes me take seriously the possibility that Trump's second term will focus seriously on setting a policy foundation for the future versus just being cult-of-personality stuff.

Part of me wants to imagine I like who Vance is deep down, but I don't actually know who he is deep down.

I'm wary.

Worthwhile replies include:

Matt Yglesias: “This read of Vance as appealing primarily to businessmen radicalized against wokeness is much more correct than views of him as the harbinger of a new anti-capitalist GOP.”

Noah Smith: “Education polarization left the GOP without a competent elite, and now they're trying to figure out ways to rebuild.”

Mark Cuban: “SV always overestimates their impact. Trump won’t take the bait. But he is smart enough to take their money and influence in SV circles, while offering a policy here and there as bread crumbs. Bottom line, DJT will eat them up and spit them out.”

Corie Whalen: “I know the corporate community and the finance community aren’t one in the same, but reports suggest the Vance pick has CEO types worried since a lot of his economic policy proposals are actually to the left of many Democrats. It would be like the worst of Biden’s policies on steroids.”

VB Knives: “Anti-elite populism kind of unavoidably collapses from inability to attract high functioning staff. Have to draw from some other well than its natural adherents.”

For those who want to understand Vance more, the inimitable Matt Lakeman’s review of Hillbilly Elegy is an excellent place to start.

The end feels particularly relevant:

While reading the book, he came off as entirely earnest and honest to me, but when I checked his Wikipedia afterward, I felt a slight twinge of skepticism. I mean, it’s probably nothing… but within months of the book’s release, Vance got hired by a Peter Thiel-owned venture capital fund, then became a contributor at CNN, then opened his own Ohio-based non-profit, and is now publicly considering a Senate run as a Republican.

Once I read his Wiki, it dawned on me just how clean Vance comes off in his own story. In a tale packed with alcoholics, drug addicts, and philanderers, in a rough part of the country, Vance seems a little too good. He mentions occasionally underage drinking, and smoking pot a handful of times, but no hard drugs. He never once mentions women until he reaches his adulthood in the story. He yells at his eventual wife, but it’s excused by his bad upbringing. Maybe I’m being cynical, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if Vance left out some details just in case he ran for office one day.

So… take of that what you will.

You can also listen to the article below, thanks to .

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Hillbilly Elegy – The Culture of White American Poverty - By Matt Lakeman

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See also Ross Douthat’s wide-ranging New York Times interview with Vance from last month.

Someone pointed out to me via DM that Vance’s Wikipedia page has also been on quite a journey over the past couple of days. The start of his policy section yesterday:

The start of his policy section earlier today:

This isn’t terribly surprising; it’s inevitable that people will be more motivated to shape someone’s public image after a VP nomination. It’s still in flux, but worth keeping an eye on. Current as of writing:

This serves as a sort of follow-up to my article on the Republican Party last year. I don’t think this fundamentally alters any of the analysis around their human capital problem, but it does suggest ways they’re aiming to address that problem.

This article is intended as a companion piece to “Reliable Sources”, in which I detail the story of Wikipedia admin David Gerard. I highly recommend reading that article before this one; this may not make much sense absent that context.

Introduction

“Oh, it’s David Gerard again.”

“…how could I possibly explain David Gerard?”

Such was my reaction when I saw a charming Guardian article focused on digging up dirt against Manifest, a prediction market conference I had the great honor of presenting at. As the New York Times documented last year, Manifest is an environment like no other, “equal parts Math Olympiad and Burning Man” that attracts, among others, “a movement of cerebral data obsessives”: the Bay Area Rationalists. For me, as I wrote on Twitter, it represented an opportunity to spend a weekend chatting with and learning from many of my role models, people like Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten, Substack CEO Chris Best, and Kelsey Piper, who writes about effective altruism for Vox; meeting old online friends in person; and telling a packed crowd how the long-dismissed “cute kids’ game” of Neopets evolved the most involved, cutthroat game economy this side of EVE online. It was a spectacular weekend, one of the best of my life.

The Guardian article is a peculiar piece of work: written not by someone who had attended the conference, but by one seemingly doing nothing beyond going through the list of invited guests looking for any who had past controversies. It takes a sinister tone throughout, describing the inn-turned-conference-center in which the conference took place as a “walled, surveilled compound,” casting broad aspersions at attendees, and making basic factual errors its editors scrambled to correct post-publication. Through a lens of journalism as truth-seeking, the article is incoherent. In Gerard’s frame, though, it makes perfect sense: the article creates a record in a Reliable Source allowing him and others so inclined to encourage people to dismiss the conference and its attendees sight unseen.

I had long known, vaguely, about Gerard. While I am not personally a rationalist, I enjoy their company and their writing and have spent much of my time online chatting amiably within their diaspora. Spend much time in a place like that and you inevitably become idly aware of the crowd of jackals on the outskirts waiting to scavenge quotes to share with their friends. As a part-time jackal myself, I get the impulse, but it’s a peculiar thing, to know people are watching you in that way.

While Gerard’s grudge never extended to me in particular (upon finding out I was preparing my article, he mentioned he “had previously considered [me] on the saner end of the rationalists1 from [my] reasonably coherent twitter”), I made peace long ago with the knowledge that if someone were to try to ruin my online reputation, it would probably be one from Gerard’s circle.

What I hadn’t always realized is just how far back my history with him went—that he was one of the men who built the online world I discovered when I first logged on.

Those Who Built My World

Back in the early 2000s, a certain culture—leftish-libertarianish, "hacker culture," New Atheist, anti-Bush, pro-gay, "information wants to be free"—containing both Gerard and LessWrong founder Yudkowsky was broadly united as “the internet” against a consistent set of external threats: Fundies, Bigots, the Anti-Science, Censors, and Moralists.

This is the world I discovered as a cocky Mormon teenager who fancied myself a budding skeptic: one built by men like Gerard and Yudkowsky, one I was equal parts entranced and disturbed by, one I could not look away from.

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Note: I am closer to this story than to many of my others. As always, I write aiming to provide a thorough and honest picture, but this should be read as the view of a close onlooker who has known about much within this story for years and has strong opinions about the matter, not a disinterested observer coming across something foreign and new. If you’re curious about the backstory, I encourage you to read my companion article after this one.

Credit for the audio version goes to the excellent Askwho Casts AI. Check out his page for more!

Introduction: Reliable Sources

Wikipedia administrator David Gerard cares a great deal about Reliable Sources. For the past half-decade, he has torn through the website with dozens of daily edits—upwards of fifty thousand, all told—aimed at slashing and burning lines on the site that reference sources deemed unreliable by Wikipedia. He has stepped into dozens of official discussions determining which sources the site should allow people to use, opining on which are Reliable and which are not. He cares so much about Reliable Sources, in fact, that he goes out of his way to provide interviews to journalists who may write about topics he’s passionate about, then returns to the site to ensure someone adds just the right quotes from those sources to Wikipedia articles about those topics and to protect those additions from all who might question them.

While by Wikipedia’s nature, nobody can precisely claim to speak or act on behalf of the site as a whole, Gerard comes about as close as anyone really could. He’s been a volunteer Wikipedia administrator since 2004, has edited the site more than 200,000 times, and even served off and on as the site’s UK spokesman. Few people have had more of a hand than him in shaping the site, and few have a more encyclopedic understanding of its rules, written and unwritten.

Reliable sources, a ban on original research, and an aspiration towards a neutral point of view have long been at the heart of Wikipedia’s approach. Have an argument, editors say? Back it up with a citation. Articles should cover “all majority and significant minority views” from Reliable Sources (WP:RS) on the topic “fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias” (WP:NPOV). The site has a color-coding system for frequently discussed sources: green for reliable, yellow for unclear, red for unreliable, and dark red for “deprecated” sources that can only be used in exceptional situations.

The minutiae of Wikipedia administration, as with the inner workings of any bureaucracy, is an inherently dry subject. On the site as a whole, users sometimes edit pages directly with terse comments, other times engage in elaborate arguments on “Talk” pages to settle disputes about what should be added. Each edit is added to a permanent history page. To understand any given decision, onlookers must trawl through page after page of archives and discussions replete with tidily packaged references to one policy or another. Where most see boredom behind the scenes and are simply glad for mostly functional overviews of topics they know nothing about, though, a few see opportunity. Those who master the bureaucracy in behind-the-scenes janitorial battles, after all, define the public’s first impressions of whatever they care about.

Since 2017, when Wikipedia made the decision to ban citations to the Daily Mail due to “poor fact-checking, sensationalism, and flat-out fabrication,” editors have waged an intense, quiet war over which sources to ban, which to give strict scrutiny to, and which to crown as Reliable. Based on the site’s policy, it’s easy to understand why: while editors with a stake in the frame of an article have to acquiese to determined opponents bearing Reliable Sources—or at least must have long, grinding disputes about what should be emphasized and why—if they can whip a consensus to declare the sources opponents would use unreliable, they can win edit wars before they happen. This extends well beyond simple factual coverage: cite an opinion or even a movie review from one of those sources, and Gerard or other editors sweep in to remove it as having undue weight.

The battle over the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online newspaper that alternates between tabloid-style sensationalism and serious, in-depth investigative journalism provides a good example of how this works in practice: in three sparse discussions (one, two, three), a dozen or so editors opined, for example, that it “doesn’t particularly have a reputation for journalistic credibility,” with one citing two Snopes articles in support but most presenting bare opinions. As a result of those sparse discussions, Wikipedia editors treat the site as generally unreliable. Every citation to it is presumed suspect, and rather than spending time and effort haggling over each, editors are broadly free to remove them en masse after cursory examination. In practice, this means Gerard scanning through dozens of articles in the span of a few minutes, tearing out all information cited to the Free Beacon as presumptively unreliable.

In Gerard’s frame, and in Wikipedia’s, if something is not cited by a Reliable Source, it may as well not exist. As Gerard puts it: “if it's in [a Reliable Source]1 use the [Reliable Source], and if it's not in [a Reliable Source] then the real world didn't care.”

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Gerard’s Standards for Reliable Sources

Unsurprisingly, Gerard’s slash-and-burn, no-questions-asked policy has led to more than a few conflicts on Wikipedia. Editors who object to his indiscriminate removals have raised the issue multiple times to Wikipedia administrators, on talk pages, and elsewhere around the site. Each time, Gerard defends the approach of indiscriminately removing everything from Unreliable Sources, generally carrying on with removals as the disputes carry on. Each time, the arguments peter out with nothing in particular changing. In one case, another Wikipedia administrator, Sandstein, pushed to ban a user for repeatedly criticizing Gerard’s judgment on the matter.

In other words, whatever Wikipedia’s written policy, the practical day-to-day reality is that Gerard will remove Unreliable Sources en masse with terse explanations and with little consideration for actual content, digging in with elaborate justification when pressed. Given that, it’s worth examining the reliability battles Gerard picks.

Most interesting to me is the case of Huffington Post. See, in addition to volunteering as a Wikipedia administrator, Gerard is the system administrator and owner of the Twitter account for RationalWiki, a left-liberal wiki focused on directing snark and critique towards groups and concepts the authors dislike, from effective altruists to right-wingers to woo. Gerard has edited RationalWiki upwards of 30,000 times. He updated the site’s harshly critical article on the Huffington Post occasionally, one time adding one of its most scathing critiques: “The truth is not in them.”

When it came time to comment about them on Wikipedia, though, he was rather more enthusiastic, calling the site “a perfectly normal [news organization] on this level” and raising an eyebrow when people wanted to rate its politics section as less than reliable.2

As of today, Wikipedia treats the Huffington Post as wholly reliable for non-politics content and unclear for political content.

During discussions of PinkNews, an LGBT-focused news outlet, the user gnu57 provided several examples of journalistic misconduct:

• The site defamed lesbian Scottish politician Joanna Cherry, falsely claiming she was being investigated for homophobia, retracting only after Cherry pursued legal options against them.

• The site falsely claimed the Israeli health minister had called coronavirus a “divine punishment for homosexuality.”

• The site made salacious, misleading claims about Bill O’Reilly.

• The site has a history of tabloid-esque sensationalism, clickbait, and photoshops about celebrities

Gerard, examining the outlet when it came up for comment, lauded it as highly reliable, emphasizing that “claims of journalistic malfeasance on their part didn't check out at all when we looked into them and discovered they'd actually handled them in an exemplary fashion.” Later, he pushed successfully for it to be treated as a fully reliable source despite a note from the discussion that caution should be used.

Wikipedia currently treats PinkNews as a Reliable Source.

He regularly makes similar nudges around sites like The Daily Beast (“Generally reliable - not perfect, but a normal news source, editorial processes, etc - no reason not to use it as a source") and Teen Vogue (“Their news coverage is solid - surprising for a fashion magazine, but it's like the surprise when Buzzfeed News turned out to be a good solid RS too”), as well as supporting the removal of any notes of partisanship from Vox.

What of the sources he is less favorably inclined towards? Unsurprisingly and not unreasonably, he dismisses far-right websites like Taki’s Magazine (“Terrible source that shouldn't be used for anything, except limited primary source use.”) and Unz (“There is no way in which using this source is good for Wikipedia.”) in a virtually unanimous chorus with other editors. It’s more fruitful to examine his approach to more moderate or “heterodox” websites.

He would prefer to see Quillette, Claire Lehmann’s longform magazine focused on science and cultural critique and the home of, among other things, the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess, banned from the site entirely: “unreliable, editorially incompetent, repeatedly caught publishing false information, conspiracy theories and hoaxes, [undue weight] for opinions.”

What about The Free Press, created by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss to cover investigative stories and provide commentary she felt was being stifled at the Times? To ask is to know the answer: “It was created not to be "reliable" in any Wikipedia sense, but to feed the opinions of the sort of conspiracy theorist who uses large words spelt correctly. If TheFP ran that the sky was blue, I'd see if I could find an actually-reliable source and cite that instead.”

While he has not yet succeeded in getting either source formally deprecated, Wikipedia considers both unreliable and he prioritizes removing citations to them in his edits.

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His treatment of the libertarian flagship publication Reason Magazine (which, despite him, remains a Reliable Source even on Wikipedia) stands out the most: based solely on tendentious readings of issues from nearly fifty years ago, he warns people to “apply extreme caution,” saying he “wouldn't use it at all except where unavoidable.”

In each instance, he is backed up by a vocal contingent of equally opinionated like-minded editors, who go by pseudonyms such as Aquillion, XOR’Easter, or NorthBySouthBaranof. This is the sort of coordination that requires no conspiracy, no backroom dealing—though, as in any group, I’m sure some discussions go on—just the natural outgrowth of common traits within the set of people whose Special Interest is arguing about sources deep in the bowels of an online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia’s job is to repeat what Reliable Sources say. David Gerard’s mission is to determine what Reliable Sources are, using any arguments at his disposal that instrumentally favor sources he finds agreeable. The debate, to be clear, is not between tabloids and the New York Times, a battle the Times cleanly wins. In Gerard’s world, scientists and academics who publish in Quillette or Reason are to have even their opinions discarded entirely, while to cast any doubt on the reliability of the word of Huffington “the truth is not in them” Post and PinkNews is absurd.

From there, it’s simple: Wikipedia editors dutifully etch onto the page, with a neutral point of view, that Huffington Post writers think this, PinkNews editors think that, and experienced Harvard professors who make the mistake of writing for The Free Press think nothing fit for an encyclopedia.

As I mentioned to Substack’s Chris Best recently, I am not a blind cynic about institutions or a blind supporter of those who sing the counter-melody. Whatever the faults of, say, the New York Times, and there are many, its resources and will to remain as the paper of record remain unmatched. Outlets like The Free Press and Quillette are at their best when they act as competition and correction mechanisms for these institutions, covering areas legacy outlets overlook, and they cannot hope to compete in scope or depth. Giving the Times more weight than The Free Press makes perfect sense for an encyclopedia, but what actually goes on at Wikipedia is something else entirely.

All of that, though, leaves one question unanswered: How did Gerard get into a spot like that in the first place?

Who Is David Gerard?

What drives Gerard in all of this? In truth, I expected I would find an unsympathetic backstory, but what I found instead was a love story.

To be more specific, I found a breakup story, one that answers a question scholars and poets have asked for centuries:

What happens when your spurned ex is a devoted archivist, a Wikipedia administrator, and perhaps the most online man the world has ever known?

The first thing people notice upon browsing Gerard’s accounts on Mastodon, tumblr, Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Reddit (formerly), Facebook, his blog, or sites he's contributed to is that he hates crypto. The second thing people notice is that he really hates crypto. The third thing they notice is that he also hates rationalists: AI prophet of doom Eliezer Yudkowsky, psychiatrist and polymath Scott Alexander, and the sprawling subculture that has sprung up around their writing. Eventually, if people dive deep into his archives, they might find his other interests. His Reddit comments are representative here:

“Buttcoin” is a group dedicated to making fun of crypto. “SneerClub” is a group dedicated to making fun of rationalists. “GamerGhazi” is a group dedicated to making fun of antiwoke gamers. “WormFanfic” is a group dedicated to fan stories of one of the most popular, sprawling works of online fiction around. And “EnoughLibertarianSpam” is a group dedicated to making fun of libertarians.

All of his social media is like this. Post after post, day after day, laughing at everything he hates. He has books, too: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, laughing about why he hates Bitcoin, and Libra Shrugged, laughing at Facebook’s failed attempt at cryptocurrency. I first became loosely aware of him half a decade ago, when I was an active participant in the conversations in and around Scott Alexander’s writing. As far as I was concerned, he was simply a force of nature, unchanging and eternal. The sun rose, the tides came in, Gerard mocked crypto and rationalists.

But history, it turns out, is rather longer than my own participation in it, and the 57-year-old Gerard has been busy my entire life.

When I reached out to him for comment on this article, he replied, “I can't see this as any sort of productive use of my time, sorry. I'm sure you can cobble together something from the extant public records.” To his credit, he has almost always used his own name online and has rarely pushed for any of his behavior to be deleted. The archives of his online activity are vast, touching on three full decades of online history. He calls himself the Forrest Gump of the internet, and honestly, I can’t particularly disagree.

The Early Romantic Years

Back in 1995, when I was born, Gerard was my age, and the internet was in its infancy, he was the sort of person drawn immediately to its promise: an Australian sci-fi fan and early career sysadmin, a proudly weird bisexual and polyamorous goth—and hey, let he who is not a gay furry cast the first stone—who divided his time between parties, “ministry” in the parody Church of the SubGenius, and conversations in still-young online chatrooms.

As far as he was concerned, the internet was a place for reason, freedom, and fun, and he hopped on its early trends enthusiastically—particularly its fight against Scientology. “Scientology itself is not important,” he explained on the anti-scientology page3 he hosted on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s free-speech-focused server, “but the organization must be made an example of so that others do not [f---] with the Net.” He wrote impassioned arguments against them, joined demonstrations, and leaned into his self-image as Defender of the Net. “I view dealing with Scientology,” he said, “as part of basic social hygiene. The community equivalent of cleaning the toilet on a regular basis.”

Assange would go on, in fact, to cite experiences on that server, facing down demands from the Church of Scientology to expose Gerard as the site’s creator, as a key part of his inspiration for WikiLeaks.

Gerard loved the internet. It was his tribe, his people: a group of nerdy, edgy, iconoclastic men—and it was, in those days, almost all men in the spaces he spent his time—on the cutting edge of a technology that would transform the world, brimming with possibility that they had a chance to define. Free thinkers, they would call themselves, devoted to a quasi-left, quasi-libertarian pastiche of techno-optimism, love of Science, atheism, hacker culture, free (and often deliberately shocking) speech and free software, and social liberalism. Information wants to be free, they cried. They jeered at the backwards Christian “moral majority,” blanched at anything resembling censorship, and looked for chances to offend the retrograde values of their elders. And Gerard leaned in, devoting his time and talents to advancing its mission, as he perceived it, any chance he saw.

Sometimes, this meant fighting against Scientology. Later, it meant playing host to one of the internet’s most infamous shock sites, Lemonparty, which greeted visitors with the sight of three elderly men having sex, as well as several lesser-known shock sites (alleged examples include “yourmom.org”, “thewillpower.org”, and “k-k-k.com”). But it was only when an ambitious young site promising to provide a free catalogue of the world’s information came onto the scene that he found his true online vocation: wiki editing.

It might be tempting to focus only on the salacious, and here and there Gerard’s old edits tell amusing stories, as when he argued passionately in defense of keeping anatomic photos directly visible on sex-related pages (“What are you people doing looking up autofellatio at work in the first place?”), but the simple reality is that the majority of his early Wikipedia edits were earnest, straightforward tweaks to articles touching on one or another of his interests on a fledgling site. He created a page for Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, built scientology pages, and tweaked and opined on pages on everything from OpenOffice to cosmotheism to Australian indie rock. When a major moment like the AACS encryption key controversy came around, Gerard was there in the background watching and documenting.

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In 2004, he joined the site’s list of administrators, gaining access over time to tools like locking pages, blocking other users from editing, permanently deleting content from Wikipedia, and eventually becoming the first (and, for a time, only) editor on the site able to see IP addresses of other editors (“checkuser”). Later, having moved to the United Kingdom, he became the country’s volunteer press contact for the site.

Gerard was an early and active participant in the process of establishing and shaping Wikipedia policy, most notably penning most of a thoughtful essay on practical process focused on exploring how to build human-centered rules. He hammered out much of the essay’s content with his fellow Wikipedia editor and close friend, a pre-transition trans woman who would later become known as Elizabeth Sandifer.4 The essay’s core point: “Instructions are useless to restrain the clueless or malicious, as the clueless won't understand and the malicious won't care.” Throughout it, he focuses on the risks of rules lawyering and obsessive process tweaks aiming to cover every edge case, the importance of common sense, and the damages bad processes could cause. One of his points stands above the rest:

"Some people write things as hard rules because it is important for others to follow them. Editorial guidelines get phrased as didactic policy. This results in phenomena such as Wikipedia:Reliable Sources (a guideline) being taken as robotic instructions, regardless of damage to the articles (gutting them of content) or damage to public relations (people kept from clearing up press errors in the articles about them), or used as a bludgeon by [point-of-view] warriors."

In addition, Gerard wrote extensive suggestions on how to handle the delicate process of writing biographies of living people on Wikipedia, many of which reflect the site’s current policy in that regard. At one point, Gerard suggested a top-to-bottom rewrite of Wikipedia’s article on reliable sources in line with his and Sandifer’s preferences, pointing to Sandifer’s academic experience teaching a course on the subject.

Wikipedia was always staid and self-serious, and it didn’t take long for other wikis to spring up and for Gerard and other editors to turn to them to blow off some steam. First came Uncyclopedia, a nonsensical parody site of Wikipedia, in 2005. There, Gerard contributed a logo and several tweaks to the page of an imagined cartoonishly racist baseball team (strong content warning on that one)5, created a (somewhat NSFW) page calling sarcastically for “furry tolerance,” and generally joined in the site’s pursuit of the peculiar style of early 2000s internet humor we all know and, ah, know. Gerard, after all, went online back when all the sin was still original.

Two years later, after a Christian conservative activist created Conservapedia aiming to balance out a perceived liberal bias on Wikipedia, a few skeptics banded together to create what would become Gerard’s next online home: RationalWiki, aiming in its own words to “analyze and refute pseudoscience and the anti-science movement, document crank ideas, explore conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism, and analyze how these subjects are handled in the media.” The site took a similar approach to Gerard’s anti-scientology work: archive, rebut, mock. Gerard joined the site a year after its founding, quickly becoming a prolific editor.

While Gerard’s early years as an editor and admin mostly went smoothly from an outside view (notwithstanding the complaints of Wikipedia’s own sneer club of the day), he showed some early signs of willingness to abuse his role to further petty feuds or to smooth over inconvenient moments. Cade Metz6, now a New York Times tech correspondent, documented many of those moments in his years of Wikipedia muckraking. One, Gerard’s 2009 feud with Australian political blogger Andrew Landeryou, stands out. It gets a bit into the weeds of Wikipedia policy, but bear with me.

After Gerard apparently used his IP-revealing (“checkuser”) powers to post Landeryou’s personal information in a scathing blog post, Wikipedia’s “arbitration committee” (ArbCom)7 elected to strip him of those powers for abuse, dissemination of private information, and “failing to maintain proper decorum in public fora.” In response, Gerard accused the committee of libel, and Mike Godwin (of Godwin’s Law fame), then general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, pressured the committee to reconsider and permanently delete all record of their decision. This was mostly unprecedented on Wikipedia, and the whole thing caused an enormous stir.

Leaked emails show the thinking of the arbitration committee at the time:

We need to show him the door. I'm sorry, but he's a liability for the project(s) and his apparent status gives him the credibility to cause real harm. It's a shame he's on so many rolodexes, but he still blusters around as though he is speaking from the project when we are consistently ashamed of his behavior.

He's had numerous chances before; we all tried several time to ask him to tone his rhetoric down and he is unwilling or unable to. We need to make it very clear that his behavior is unwelcome and unbecoming, and that any pretension of speaking for the project is entirely illusory.

After securing his retraction, Gerard mostly moved on, encouraging others to do so as well.

That same year, a new challenger arose to the “rational” title: LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s spin-off from the group blog Overcoming Bias. It was an ambitious project, aiming to create a community of “rationalists” centered around lengthy sequences of articles focused on different aspects of the art of rational thinking. Gerard watched with detached interest for a time, soon building a RationalWiki article about the site (“The good: Most of the articles are very interesting, and Yudkowsky's work in particular is very thought-provoking. He really is pretty [d---] smart and clueful. / The bad: The personality cult of Eliezer Yudkowsky.”).

Prodded by Paul Crowley, an old friend of his from the UK goth scene and bisexual conventions and an eager participant in the rationalist community, Gerard started to post to LessWrong in October 2010. “LessWrong irritating me seems good for me. Or productive, anyway,” he mused in his introductory post. “This may not be the same thing.”

The introduction would, in a peculiar way, prove pivotal for both Gerard and LessWrong, with his time on the site and his eventual revulsion towards it acting as a microcosm for a much broader change sweeping the internet and setting the stage for one of his longest-term obsessions: controlling the public image of its users through every tool at his disposal.

Gerard’s fling with LessWrong in the twilight of the old internet

From the time of its launch, LessWrong has been a honeypot for intelligent autodidacts cynical about institutions, nerds obsessed with logic and speaking truthfully, almost all of a sort of transhumanist bent. Its founder, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is a high school dropout who became fascinated by the Singularity early on and began to write and advocate first to pursue it, then—worrying that a powerful AI, carelessly designed, could destroy humanity—to slow AI progress and figure out how to align it better to human values. The community that formed around that writing began to examine topics like AI, transhumanism, cognitive biases, cryonics, Bayes’ theorem, life extension, game theory, prediction markets, motivation, and rather a lot more. News outlets that paid attention to them at the time treated them as a curiosity, a Berkeley-based group exemplifying many quirks of the Bay Area, from their transhumanist bent to their fascination with the potential and risks of artificial intelligence to their frequent rejection of conventional taboos around topics like polyamory or IQ.

Yudkowsky was an early advocate of Effective Altruism, a movement focused on understanding how to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and was the first to use the term (though he shrugs off the idea that he coined it). Their utilitarian, numbers-driven, distance-blind approach to ethics suited Yudkowsky and the rationalists perfectly, and while they were not the founders of the movement, they were early and enthusiastic participants as it developed.

I was one of many who found both RationalWiki and LessWrong as a curious young teenager with a skeptical bent. I looked up to both, at the time—so many brilliant people who knew so much more than I did, taking the time to guide people towards reason and strike out against falsehood—but after a time I bounced off LessWrong, frustrated by their dismissal of religious people and conscious of a tension between their frame and that of the Mormon faith I loved.

Gerard had no such hesitancy. As with everywhere else he decided to participate, Gerard launched himself at LessWrong with a sort of frenetic energy and enthusiasm for participation, reading and rereading every post in the sprawling main section of the site and commenting more than three thousand times over a few years. In one early comment, he noted that he’d thought the site was “way weirder than it actually turned out to be.” His commentary at LessWrong, mostly earnest, open, and free of snark, provides one of the best windows into his thought processes.

While he agreed with site users like Scott Alexander that the site drove newcomers off with a flood of posts that “require you believe in [their] particular formulation of transhuman singulitarianism” to even make sense of their premises, he was gratified to realize that the site welcomed and rewarded his criticism when he phrased it well. He noted the intelligence of its users repeatedly, explaining that he was attracted by the amount of “really smart people” there and that the site “knocks [Wikimedia] into the shade” as a source of people smarter than he was to interact with.8

By early 2011, Gerard began to pen lists of benefits he saw from using the site and felt inspired to make his first-ever edit to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Wikipedia page, noting both that Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter fanfiction was “highly popular” and that Yudkowsky used a Dvorak keyboard. He also brought periodic Wikipedia criticism to the site, in particular around its use of “reliable sources.” “Wikipedia,” he said, “has evolved its own epistemology of where knowledge comes from.” He noted that it “generates absurdities like regarding newspapers as ‘reliable sources’, which anyone who’s ever been quoted in one will laugh hysterically in horror at,” and that it treated its approach not just as one of many options, but as “the way to abstract truth for an encyclopedia.”

During this timeframe, Gerard acted as a sort of ambassador from RationalWiki to LessWrong, as well as the primary editor of the RationalWiki page on the site. To RationalWiki readers, he described LessWrong as “the teetotalling and disapproving older brother of RationalWiki, waiting for us to get off the drugs and sex and follow them into an Ivy League college,” a place worth checking out but with some annoying features that he would fixate on. To LessWrong readers, he described RationalWiki as the place to clean up “alligator-laden swamps” and “toxic waste spills” in sanity’s waterways while LessWrong aimed to raise the sanity waterline, and repeatedly aimed to reassure them that RationalWiki really did love them and should be thought of as an “unpleasable fanbase,” often seeming disappointed that LessWrong users didn’t simply take his teasing as friendly banter9.

The consensus LessWrong position on RationalWiki, meanwhile, was best put by the user Vladimir_M:

Pretty much any RW article I've ever seen takes the premise that the position of the mainstream academia -- and, in case of more explicitly politicized topics, the left-center of the respectable public opinion -- is correct, and any serious contrarian position can be held only by comically nutty crackpots or sinisterly malevolent extremists. Now, this isn't always a bad heuristic: it produces more or less correct conclusions on topics where the aforementioned institutions are usually reliable, such as, say, physics. But on any topic where they are significantly biased, RW ends up as a passionate defender of all their biases and falsities. And from what I've seen, the RW writers typically make no serious effort to study such topics dispassionately, but instead jump at the first opportunity to engage in ideological warfare, typically via ignorant sneering and mocking.

In a soul-searching pub conversation with Crowley (the friend who got him to start posting on LessWrong), Gerard confronted this tendency as it related to cryonics, a decidedly weird idea that rationalists embraced and he found absurd. The two of them concluded that Gerard would not sign up for cryonics unless it was socially normal, and Gerard concluded that the rationalist goal should be to make cryonics normal. Gerard emphasized alongside this that he is extremely conservative about changing his mind or embracing new ideas.10

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Gerard’s hatred of crypto, long core to his preferred self-presentation, provides another example of his mindset. He dipped his toes into the topic in May of 2011 by linking a critical article on LessWrong while expressing ambivalence about its contents. That June, he wrote his own scathing article about Bitcoin and created a RationalWiki article mocking it.

I have never particularly cared for the world of crypto. As Zvi Mowshowitz says, it’s been a hive of scum and villainy for most of its existence, with plenty of idealists and well-meaning honest people and plenty more scumbags getting rich and running exchanges. If someone wants to play the role of perennial industry critic, I can think of many worse spaces to do so than crypto. It is also a domain in which I have near-zero personal expertise, one where I have little capacity to make sophisticated criticisms.

But, well… look. Back when he started mocking Bitcoin, one Bitcoin cost around $6. Now, it costs $50,000. Gerard has treated it as a bubble during the full course of its rise.

I do not know if Gerard ever hedged his criticism with investment in case he was wrong, and perhaps if not he would say that standing on principle was more valuable than money. If he had predicted a steep rise, but said that principle kept him from following it upwards, that would be one thing. But he made no such prediction. If he had hedged just a bit as he jumped on the cutting edge of criticism of an emerging technology, he could have written his later anti-crypto books while living in luxury in early retirement.

While Gerard was almost always civil on LessWrong and remained a regular participant until 2014, he was upfront about his frequent annoyances. LessWrong was too weird, too jargon-heavy, too trapped in a libertarian frame where “politics is the mindkiller” and thus its background politics could go unchallenged. Although he cared about intelligence and encouraged people to donate sperm in part to so they could “add a human of higher intelligence to the population,” he was repulsed by conversations about anything to do with race and IQ, a topic a few posters would occasionally raise. When someone discussed the topic at a meetup, he decided that would be the last meetup he went to.

Towards the top of his list of grievances was Roko’s Basilisk, an infamous thought experiment raised by a LessWrong poster, then deleted by Yudkowsky, imagining a future superintelligence that might retroactively blackmail people who failed to work sufficiently to bring it about. While it was a blip for most on the site, one of many curiosities they spend a moment thinking about before moving on, Gerard came to see it as the perfect encapsulation of his frustration with the weirdness and failure states of rationalism. It was, he said shortly after its occurrence, “a defining moment in the history of LessWrong” that “will be in every history of the site forever.”

Frustrations or no, Gerard would continue to have civil, wide-ranging conversations with rationalists and Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular through much of 2013. In one exchange, Yudkowsky provided extensive constructive criticism on RationalWiki’s article on cold fusion, noting that “the right to mock has to be earned, not stolen.” He continued to occasionally recommend Scott Alexander’s articles. While Gerard would occasionally blow up at Yudkowsky and other users, at one point erupting in fury when Yudkowsky deleted another user’s comment as trolling, he bookended his irritation by noting that he “like[d] LW really,” and Yudkowsky noted that while Gerard was often critical of the site, he was not a troll.

Not yet, anyway.

The bitter end

In the background underlying all of this was a simple reality: Gerard’s beloved adopted homeland, the internet, was changing. It was no longer the quiet corner populated by computer nerds he had fallen in love with. It was gentrifying. Sites he jumped onto while they were small passion projects became world-recognized resources. The nerds had achieved a certain sort of cultural dominance, but with that dominance came new standards. Normal people were flooding in, drawn by the cultural products the weird nerds had pulled together but put off by all the weird nerds. As the online gender balance shifted, some women started to speak up against the sort of crude, edgy, often-sexually or racially charged humor that so often characterized Gerard’s old haunts—spots like Uncyclopedia. Heated arguments went on in forums every day: should the internet grow up, professionalize, and tone things down, accepting the value of moral limits, or should it spit once more in the face of would-be censors wanting to control it?

Most alarming to Gerard was the rise of the internet’s home-grown far-right movement: the neoreactionaries. In 2007, computer scientist Curtis Yarvin started the blog Unqualified Reservations under the pen name Mencius Moldbug. It was a deliberately provocative project aiming to wrench people away from liberalism, one that framed progressivism as a virus leading to chaos, oath-breaking, tyranny, and noble lies, and called for a reactionary return to order, unitary rule, hierarchy, and strength by sharing self-proclaimed hard truths. Yarvin could not be waved off as another out-of-touch outsider waging war against Gerard’s beloved internet. He was every bit the insider Gerard was, a Silicon Valley tech company founder who spoke the language and understood the culture of the internet.

Another blow to old internet culture came with the January 2013 suicide of Aaron Swartz after he was arrested and prosecuted for downloading and sharing articles from academic journals. Swartz was an exemplar of that culture’s values: a programming prodigy, hacktivist, and fierce idealist who fought openly, proudly, and perpetually for the “information wants to be free” ethos of that crowd during his brief life. Gerard added his own mourning to LessWrong’s chorus on Swartz’s death, adding bitterly on his own blog: “You don’t understand just how much they loathe and despise the Internet.” In Swartz’s death, online ideals came face-to-face with the bitter realities of the offline world.

All of this came to a head in August of 2013, when military leaker Chelsea Manning announced her gender transition the day after her sentencing for providing hundreds of thousands of classified and sensitive documents to WikiLeaks. Another editor immediately renamed her Wikipedia page to “Chelsea Manning” over objections. After a brief edit war, Gerard blocked non-admins from editing the page. From there, well, all hell broke loose.

Everyone on Wikipedia had an opinion. Onlookers across the internet, from Wikipedia’s subreddit to r/drama and elsewhere, took note. Editors who disagreed with Gerard, furious at his unilateral action, escalated their complaints up Wikipedia bureaucracy all the way to ArbCom. Wikipedia has processes, see. It has standards. Editors are not supposed to make unilateral decisions and lock others out.

Things escalated further when Gerard’s friend Elizabeth Sandifer, a couple of years before her own transition, wrote several articles harshly critical of Wikipedia’s actions, decrying the site as enabling bigots willing to play as rules lawyers, slavishly devoted to malicious manipulation of process. In one, she revealed details about the real-world identity of the user opposing Gerard at the heart of the edit war, pointing out that he was in the military, “a fact he has studiously attempted to hide.”11 This, too, is discouraged on Wikipedia, to put it lightly.

When the dust settled, ArbCom formally admonished Gerard and restricted him from using admin tools on pages related to trans issues, then banned Sandifer from the site indefinitely. This was the last straw for Gerard: in his eyes, he had used his judgment, prioritizing people over blind process to make a compassionate decision, and Wikipedia treated him as a villain for it while allowing transphobes and bigots to run free so long as they followed the letter of the law—then, worse, banned his longtime friend for fighting on the side of right. Gerard would make his own run for Wikipedia’s ArbCom at the end of 2013, shortly after these events. He castigated the site and its authorities for “strange and disturbing decisions” that, in his telling, saw “the reputation of the English Wikipedia dragged through the mud.”

The warmth faded from Gerard’s LessWrong comments. He began to obsess about Roko’s Basilisk, editing and re-editing a RationalWiki article about it from early 2013 onwards and taking every opportunity to discuss it. “The Basilisk,” he noted once, “was definitely the high point of site weirdness,” and he could not stop thinking about it. He’d said news about the rationalist community would focus on the Basilisk, and he was determined to do his part to make it so. The article became his baby, with him returning to it hundreds of times over the years.

A couple of weeks before the Manning blow-up, he commiserated with another aggrieved user about “the racists, sexists and Libertarians” on the site and “the assumption that these are fine positions to hold and variance from them is mind-killing.” By early 2014, though he was still posting and participating in open threads on the site, he noted that he “[found] quite a lot of LW utterly offputting and repellent.”

In particular, Gerard gradually started mentally associating LessWrong with neoreaction, though for a time he acknowledged he only saw incidental encounters between the two. Starting in early 2014, the RationalWiki article on neoreaction became his second baby, as he tweaked and re-tweaked it to explain just what he found off-putting about them.

My impression is that Gerard fixated on neoreactionaries as the one small part of a much broader rise of the online right that was happening in his own online neighborhood. In the old internet culture he had helped build, explicitly right-wing people were rare and often targets of mockery. That became unsustainable as more people came online, and eventually they built their own spaces and started poking their heads in where people shared some of their interests. The same lack of censorship Gerard harangued Yudkowsky to maintain on LessWrong meant that, by and large, the site would give people a hearing out before dismissing them. Because Gerard was on LessWrong when the internet splintered and polarized, he saw the whole story through the lens of LessWrong, and on an instinctive level the site became his go-to scapegoat for all that was going wrong for his vision of the internet.

Back in 2010, Gerard had created the Wikipedia article for LessWrong as a simple redirect to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s page. In March 2014, towards the end of his time as a LessWrong regular, Gerard warned users wanting a Wikipedia page to be careful what they wished for: "Having a Wikipedia article is a curse." Heedless of his warning, a few LessWrong users began to develop a brief article explaining their website.

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The Vindictive Ex

“What my view is of [his] argument (whether I believe him or not) is actually irrelevant. It is the mere fact that you have a conflict with him that is reason enough to step away from the article. Wikipedia is not a battleground.

As it turns out, I don't think you have an agenda against [him] per se. You clearly do have an agenda regarding the topic generally, as you have made very clear yourself. Again, whether or not I personally agree or disagree with that agenda is irrelevant to the question of whether you should step away from the article. We are Wikipedians, not advocates, and whenever we feel too strongly about a topic, it's best to step away and let other good people deal with it.”

-Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to former Wikipedia editor “Ryulong”, on editing with an agenda

In 2014, Gerard was mad. In the prior two decades, he’d given countless hours of his life in volunteer efforts to build and fight for the internet, his adopted tribe. And for what? Wikipedia, the site he had so devoted himself to, had betrayed him, standing for pedantic rules-lawyering over justice. The world had betrayed him, prosecuting and imprisoning or killing the activists who embodied the ethos of the internet he loved. The internet itself had betrayed him, giving rise to a movement he feared and loathed as much as any he had railed against before. The ill-fated relationship between two gamers that would bring the unified online culture he had idealized to a final, ignominious end had already begun, though he didn’t know that at the time12.

He had started out on the internet 20 years before as a passionate partisan for his new tribe and its potential to transform the world. In the intervening decades, though, his optimism had waned. He went from assuming good faith in a collaborative effort to viewing online culture as a struggle between good and bad, his righteous allies and his evil opponents. As for the process he had argued so passionately about keeping human-centered and sane? Well, Wikipedia violated that truce, and now the barbarians were at the gate. He knew more than almost anyone alive about Wikipedia process, and now it would be just another weapon in his arsenal.

Wikipedia trench warfare is an elaborate game, opaque and bizarre for outsiders to even contemplate, in which motivated figures fight to exhaustion over often trivial-seeming changes with deep significance to participants. Given that, I’ll expend my last remaining bit of sanity to bring legibility to a few of Gerard’s skirmishes. When Gerard fixates on something within an article, he touches it up via a series of gradual, mild tweaks: often individually defensible, usually citing one policy or another, all pointing one direction. He removes neutral information tangential to his fixation, gradually expands and adds citations to the sections he fixates on, and aggressively reverts any change that goes against his vision. When challenged, he raises policy names, invites editors to escalate, requests hard proof for straightforward claims he knows are true, accuses opponents of being fringe conspiracists, and if all else fails, simply goes silent and waits for people to shift their focus before returning to what he wanted to do in the first place.

The article for Mozilla cofounder Brendan Eich, one of Gerard’s quiet focuses, provides an illustration. Gerard had made his article, after all, back when Gerard was just a tech nerd and Eich a force in building out the software infrastructure he relied on. But in 2008, Eich donated against gay marriage. After another user added mention of that donation to the Wikipedia page in 2012, Gerard guarded it repeatedly against deletion13. In March 2014, when Mozilla appointed Eich its CEO, Gerard’s social circles erupted in fury. Eich stepped down quickly. Immediately, Gerard entered the talk page and the article to ensure Eich’s opposition to gay marriage became central to his Wikipedia narrative. In the first few months of 2014, Gerard edited Eich’s article nineteen times, fleshing out details about the controversy and removing older external links more focused on Eich’s technical work. Between 2019 and 2020, Gerard repeatedly fought to make the “Known for” box on Eich’s page mention opposition to same-sex marriage and avoid any mention of Eich’s projects beyond JavaScript.14 After all, Gerard pointed out as he added a PinkNews reference to the claim—it was in a Reliable Source.

LessWrong

Eich, though, was not the topic that consumed Gerard’s thoughts and conversations on a near-daily basis around the internet. No, starting in 2014, that honor belonged to LessWrong and everything that descended from it. At first, his actions mostly reflected only his fixation on Roko’s Basilisk. When Slate’s David Auerbach, fascinated by the story of the Basilisk, focused an article on it in July 2014, Gerard’s time had come. Two days later, he would begin to edit the LessWrong Wikipedia article, making minor tweaks to a basilisk section another admin, Sandstein15, had added the day before. From that point forward, he became the article’s primary custodian, guarding it carefully and shaping it to his vision. He fixated on three goals:

1. Strengthen the association between rationalists and Roko’s Basilisk

2. Build an association between rationalists and neoreactionaries

3. Remove positive information from the article

A month later, Gerard would feud directly with Eliezer Yudkowsky over this. Yudkowsky explained his thoughts on Roko’s Basilisk, his frustration with RationalWiki (“which hates hates hates LessWrong”), and his sense that nothing he said could stop people from caricaturing him. Gerard stopped by to argue with him, after which Yudkowsky outlined his perception of a systemic pattern of malicious lying from Gerard and pleaded with people not to take Gerard’s word as given. Gerard listened politely, shrugged his shoulders, and went back to editing.

In early 2015, he removed the LessWrong article’s “see also” section, later attempting to re-add the section having stripped it to nothing but a link to RationalWiki. Later that year, he removed a large block of positive phrasing (“a Wikipedia article should not read like publicity material”), re-separated the section on Roko’s Basilisk from the site history after others merged them, then edit-warred16 to keep a statement on the page implying that a taboo on the topic lasted five years. Having lost that war, he waited six months, then re-added that statement. In 2018, Oliver Habryka and his team took over development of LessWrong and announced a redesign. Gerard deleted news of the update from its Wikipedia page, citing lack of reliable sources.

Gerard’s second project, to create an association in people’s minds between rationalism and neoreaction, was much more ambitious than the first. Roko’s Basilisk was an idle thought experiment that meant more to David Gerard than it ever did to any rationalist, but at least it had originated on the site. Rationalists and neoreactionaries, on the other hand, were distinct and well-defined groups, neither of which particularly liked each other. Eliezer Yudkowsky hated neoreactionaries, believing people should block them, delete their comments, and avoid feeding the trolls by arguing with them. Scott Alexander, by far the most popular rationalist writer besides perhaps Yudkowsky himself, had written the most comprehensive rebuttal of neoreactionary claims on the internet. Curtis Yarvin was certainly interested in persuading rationalists, but the singular blog post he had written about LessWrong was to call rationalists humorless servants of power and dub their site “Less Wrongthink.”

But Gerard had two cards to play: first, a glancing, single-sentence note in an article from the Reliable Source known as TechCrunch that neoreactionaries occasionally “crop-up on tech hangouts like Hacker News and Less Wrong, having cryptic conversations about ‘Moldbug’ and ‘the Cathedral,’” and second, more than a decade of Wikipedia experience combined with obsessive levels of drive and persistence.

TechCrunch’s article, incidentally, remains an excellent and wholly correct overview of neoreaction, one anyone looking to understand the movement’s origins would do well to read. Its passing note on LessWrong is reasonable and accurate: neoreactionaries occasionally cropped up on LessWrong, as they did in other tech-adjacent hangouts, and as a result of their origin in Silicon Valley drew more initial attention from those sites than others. Before LessWrong existed, Yarvin periodically commented on its predecessor site Overcoming Bias, though not, one assumes, as much as Gerard commented on LessWrong. Rationalists, with their typical willingness to discuss anything that came their way, occasionally linked Yarvin’s blog to poke and prod at it. Had it been a normal Wikipedia article, the line may have remained as a passing reference, a reminder that in a place like Silicon Valley, everyone is two degrees removed from everyone. Indeed, the Wikipedia article had said just that for years: “It has also been mentioned in articles about online monarchists and neo-reactionaries.”

This was not a normal Wikipedia article, though. This was a Gerard. And by mid-2016, preparations Gerard had begun years earlier were finally falling into place.

One of Gerard’s first edits to his pet RationalWiki article on neoreaction back in 2014 had been to insert references to LessWrong into it, mentioning that Michael Anissimov, who had worked for years at the organization running LessWrong, later became a neoreactionary.

Since Gerard regularly used his claims about Anissimov as evidence for a tie between LessWrong and neoreaction, it’s worth understanding Anissimov’s story. I spoke with Anissimov, who has long since faded from the public view. He had started volunteering at Yudkowsky’s AI institute, the Singularity Institute of Artificial Intelligence sometime around 2002, as a nineteen-year-old who hadn’t really come into his own but was determined to push towards the institute’s goals. Around 2008 to 2009, he told me, he started reading Yarvin’s writing but did not discuss it with coworkers, afraid that he’d overshadow the institute’s goals with politics and alienate his LessWrong friends—who he described as generally the sort of classic Berkeley liberal who has polyamorous sex parties and attends Burning Man.

It was only after Anissimov was let go from the institute in 2012, five years after Yarvin began to build neoreaction, that he began to speak openly about his politics. In short order, Yudkowsky denounced neoreactionaries and Alexander wrote a comprehensive rebuttal of Anissimov’s claims. From there, Anissimov founded a breakaway blog called MoreRight, which rationalists initially linked to but quickly backed away from as they found his ideas to be too extreme.

As Anissimov sees it, it’s easy for people to put forward a conspiracy theory, but the reality is that he developed in a different political direction to the people around him, hid it for a time out of fear of rejection, posted his ideas hoping to sway other rationalists but finding them uninterested, and wound up as something of a shunned outcast who had to make new friends as a result.

It’s true, in other words, that an employee at Eliezer’s institute became a neoreactionary—and that’s the last time he ever really associated with the group he had devoted himself to long before his politics were clearly defined.

With that out of the way, we can return to Gerard, who had plenty of RationalWiki sources but nothing firm enough to get away with adding. For that, he would need the help of his old friend Elizabeth Sandifer.

Sandifer had been busy during her time away from Wikipedia, writing an essay collection titled Neoreaction: A Basilisk. Five of the self-published book’s six essays (about ants, TERFS, Trump, the Austrian School, and Peter Thiel) were forgotten the day they were written. The sixth is Gerard’s masterwork. Sandifer starts the essay with quick critical overviews of Eliezer Yudkowsky, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Land, then goes on a sprawling journey from William Blake to John Milton, with stops at Fanon, Debord, Butler, and Coates. This review describes the experience well. I can only describe it as leftist free association based on the prompt “Say whatever comes to mind, inspired by David Gerard’s obsession with Roko’s Basilisk and neoreaction combined with your own love of leftist theory.”

That’s not a guess, to be clear. Sandifer thanks Gerard for pointing her towards the sources she needed in acknowledgments, then cites his pet article on Roko’s Basilisk directly while giggling about how mad it made Yudkowsky fans. Gerard, for his part, advertised her Kickstarter for the book in May 2016 while mentioning he had spent the past six months “researching, editing, copyediting and helping with the publicity.”

Hold on, you might be thinking. Surely you’re not saying he got around Wikipedia’s ban on citing his original research by feeding all his obsessions to his old friend before citing his friend.

No, of course not. That would be crass.

They got another friend to review the book when it came out, and he cited that.17

Gerard began to focus on neoreaction in Wikipedia’s LessWrong article shortly after publicizing the kickstarter for Neoreaction: A Basilisk, first stopping someone from removing a reference to neoreaction in the article, then stopping the same person from contextualizing it by listing more common topics of discussion on the site by calling for reliable sources for those topics and claiming neoreaction was one of two things LessWrong was famous for in the wider world18. When people objected to his edits, he spat an ink cloud of policy and objected that he was being personally attacked. Soon after, when someone stopped by to point out that neoreaction was not particularly popular on the site, Gerard added a survey showing showing fewer than 2% of site members self-identified as neoreactionaries. Then an essay by his friend-of-a-friend Adam Riggio about a book by his friend Elizabeth Sandifer citing his synthesis of ideas came out, and he struck, noting benignly that he was adding more reliable sources on the neoreaction claim while sliding the essay into the citations.

For the next few years, Gerard patiently massaged the article to his satisfaction. He called the reliability of the survey he had added into question several times, then split the neoreaction blurb off into its own article section while deleting the survey reference. He swapped a citation in the article showing Eliezer Yudkowsky hating reactionaries so it referenced his friend’s essay, letting him include the phrase “Yudkowsky counts many reactionaries among his fanbase despite finding their racist politics disgusting” in footnotes. He added a citation to a Breitbart article by Milo Yiannopolous and Allum Bokhari after they claimed neoreaction grew out of comments on LessWrong, and another citation to an article in German-language newspaper FAZ that cited the same connection. When I asked Yiannopolous and Bokhari for comment, Yiannopolous did not recall the context, and Bokhari has not returned my request for comment at this time. Since the claim has no basis in history and reads like a loose cribbing from RationalWiki, and since neither Yiannopolous or Bokhari was ever part of neoreaction or LessWrong, my honest guess is that Gerard aptly demonstrated the reason to treat Breitbart as unreliable by using a poorly sourced and false claim from it. FAZ editors noted that editors and a proofreader had looked over the article, but the notes which were used for it no longer exist and they could not reconstruct its writing process19. My best guess is that they too sourced their claim of a link to one of Gerard’s articles.

In 2017, Gerard made one last trip back to LessWrong to taunt them about the article for a bit, helpfully explaining that his being one of its most vocal critics and the sources he added referring back to him simply meant he was a subject matter expert, implying they were cranks who didn’t want to engage with reliable sources, and warning them against advocacy editing and conflicts of interest.

Finally, in 2019, a wave of users on Wikipedia began to notice the peculiarities of the article. First, one asked if the neoreaction section was necessary, noting the tenuous connections, and Gerard shrugged and asked, “What do the [Reliable Sources]20 say?” One user, PDVk, deleted the section. After Gerard escalated by calling him a fringe theorist and asked for backup from Wikipedia’s “fringe theories noticeboard” to defend against PDVk’s “spurious claims”, PDVk pointed out more-or-less precisely what was going on:

[A]ll its sources derives their content from previous iterations of the Wikipedia page for the site, or less commonly from RationalWiki, which has a well-documented political grudge against LessWrong. There is long-standing editor consensus on Talk:LessWrong that this claim is baseless and the sources are weak; David Gerard is the only dissenter. It is shameful that he has been allowed to promote his personal view to this extent; repeating a lie often enough to get it into well-regarded sources does not make it become the truth.

In a grand triumph of reason and good faith, Gerard backed down and removed the claim called the editor a conspiracy theorist who was simply trying to remove Reliable Sources he didn’t like and asked for proof.

The section stayed.

Despite some further discussion, the article remains crafted largely in Gerard’s image to this day. During the time he could edit it—we’ll get to that—he was the page’s most frequent editor and the one who added the most substance to it. For almost eight years, his masterwork has survived: a section in an article about his hated former haunt, run by a man he had feuded with for years, sourced to his friend’s interpretation of his friend’s interpretation of his pet ideas.

Finally, Gerard had found the most Reliable Source of all: himself.

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Effective Altruism

Today, effective altruists tend to think of Émile Torres when they think of their most committed malicious critic. Before there was an Émile Torres, though, there was David Gerard21.

In April 2014, Gerard created a RationalWiki article about Effective Altruism, framing the subculture as “well-off libertarians congratulating each other on what wonderful human beings they are for working rapacious [s---]weasel jobs but choosing their charities well, but never in any way questioning the system that the problems are in the context of,” “a mechanism to push the libertarian idea that charity is superior to government action or funding,” and people who “will frequently be seen excusing their choice to work completely [f---]ing evil jobs because they're so charitable.”

Of all Gerard’s feuds, this one bothers me the most. Despite my wide-ranging disagreements with their philosophy and my public criticism of aspects of their organizational structure22, I have long felt that individuals within the movement are uncommonly virtuous, more serious about doing good and more earnest than the lion’s share of their critics. They deserve scrutiny, but they consistently respond in good faith to that scrutiny.

In this case, a couple of effective altruists took RationalWiki at its word that its users would respect constructive attempts to improve it, and set about making suggestions a few months later. One tried to present more of an EA perspective in the article. Gerard reverted it. Kelsey Piper, then a prodigious young writer, made another attempt. Another user reverted it. The EAs had not quite understood the name of the game, had stumbled into a snark website aiming to work politely alongside people who mostly just wanted to poke fun at them. They did not return.

I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow of Gerard’s edits this time, focusing instead on one controversy: the time Gerard once again turned to Wikipedia’s fringe theories noticeboard, used for ideas that depart dramatically from the mainstream, to solicit help with keeping an EA figure who was embroiled in a minor scandal highlighted on a list of the most prominent Effective Altruists. EA, Gerard explained, belonged as a fringe theory because it “keeps assessing ‘give all your money to avert Roko's basilisk’ as an incredibly valuable charitable endeavour.”

When people pointed out his history mocking effective altruists elsewhere, Gerard once again mocked the idea of symmetry between him and editors from the subcultures he fixated on: “Being an advocate for a particular cluster of fringe movements - as you are - is not symmetrical with not being an advocate for that cluster of fringe movements - as I am not - even as fringe advocates consistently try to paint it as being such.”

He opposes people in and around the rationalist movement reflexively, habitually. When Kelsey Piper started making waves at Vox, Gerard was there trying to get her Wikipedia article deleted. When Gerard happened by the page for evolutionary biologist and effective altruist Diana Fleischman, he idly added warnings for notability and puffery. Last year, he did the same for rationalist writer and sex worker Aella.

Gerard got his start fighting scientologists and started out at RationalWiki mocking witches and 9/11 truthers. No matter his opponent, he saw reality the same way: he was the Respectable Mainstream Consensus accurately scrutinizing flimsy fringe movements, they were fringe advocates who just wanted to dodge scrutiny. When he ran into a movement whose members were happy to face scrutiny and who were willing to come into his space trying to resolve differences in good faith, he found that his true love was simple mockery.

Scott Alexander

Gerard has a way with personal details.

Back in 2009, Wikipedia stripped Gerard of his power to see user IP addresses because he revealed private information about a man he didn’t like. In 2013, Gerard fought for the right to immediately change a trans woman’s article title to her preferred name as a matter of basic respect, then reacted with outrage when Wikipedia punished his friend for revealing private information about a man Gerard didn’t like. And in 2020, Gerard finally had the chance to combine his passions: he could reveal the private name of a man he loathed. He jumped at it.

Gerard did not, in fact, always hate Scott Alexander. In the LessWrong years, he would occasionally chat amiably with Scott or recommend others read his articles. That was a distant memory, though, by 2020. Really, it was a distant memory by 2014, as an old conversation between Gerard and Scott demonstrates. To Gerard, Scott’s blog was far too charitable and calm about neoreactionaries, even as he rebutted them, and not nice enough to the social justice left. And to Scott, well, Gerard came off as a particularly obsessive hater who had chosen to repeatedly smear Scott for distorted and fabricated reasons, taking him to task for insufficient charity while providing none, and who would keep doing so until Scott “refuse[d] to ever engage with anyone who disagrees with him about anything at all.”

By 2020, that hatred had deepened and calcified into a core part of Gerard’s identity, and he watched an announcement from Scott in June of that year with eager anticipation: Gerard’s old rival Cade Metz was writing an article about Scott in the New York Times, he was going to use Scott’s real name, and Scott would prefer he didn’t. Scott cited patient care and personal safety as reasons to be circumspect about his name, pointing out that he had received death threats and faced dissatisfied blog readers calling his workplace, and noting that like many psychiatrists, he preferred to be a blank slate to his patients in his out-of-work life and to avoid causing any drama for his hospital.

Finally, Gerard had the opportunity of his dreams: to supply the Paper of Record with a decade of exhaustive notes about everything he hated about Scott Alexander.

Gerard sprung to work on Scott’s Wikipedia page the day after the announcement, quickly becoming the most active editor on the page and its talk section. He started by stripping away most of the page that covered anything other than the New York Times controversy, then carefully and repeatedly guarded the page against articles critical of the NYT’s decision, which had become a news story of its own. When he couldn’t get a response from the National Review removed, he looked for the lines in it that could put Scott in the worst available light and added them to the article (“since the NR is heavily defended as a suitable source in talk”), later restoring them with a quick note: “[I]t’s cited to [a Reliable Source], after all.” As more and more articles came out about the blog and the controversy, particularly an excellent overview in the New Yorker, removing them would have been a Sisyphean task, but Gerard could at least try to turn lemons into lemonade.

A few days after Scott’s announcement, Gerard added an obscure academic paper Scott had written under his own name to the article—then restored it to the page again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. The paper had gone largely unnoticed within Scott’s audience and without, and to the average reader his attention to adding it would come across as little but an odd enthusiasm for AI safety. Gerard clung to the article, though: it was his best chance, he figured, to skirt Wikipedia’s policy preferring omission of names subjects prefer to have concealed, and he fought for its inclusion repeatedly in discussions about the page.

In February 2021, after Scott rearranged his life and quit his job in order to minimize the disruption from his name being revealed, then doxxed himself, the New York Times finally published its article. Off of Wikipedia, Gerard was thrilled, bragging about how much he had been able to land in a Reliable Source:

i sent Metz SO MUCH material for that NYT SlateStarCodex article, i can see the ghosts of what i sent

every phrase is firmly backed up by multiple sources - but it was run through the NYT mealymouthed centrist filter

In particular, he noted that he had encouraged Metz to use Scott’s real name. “[I]t isn't the article we wanted,” he noted on his favorite snark page, “and I suspect Cade wanted it stronger too. But it's good enough.”

Good enough indeed, and he quickly got to work fending off critical responses to the NYT article on Scott’s Wikipedia page. After someone pointed out a long list of critical responses from The Hill, Reason, Quillette, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, journalist Cathy Young, and others, Gerard shrugged: “Zero of those are [Reliable Sources], so we can’t use them.”

Policy, you see. Hands were tied.

This time, though, people were paying attention, and Gerard had a problem: While you can get away with a great deal when people aren’t looking, Wikipedia does not actually want to be known as the site where people spend decades compiling dossiers against their personal enemies.

Gerard defended himself gamely for a while when people escalated the dispute up the Wikipedia bureaucracy. “Stop casting aspersions,” he told people who claimed he had a conflict of interest. “You’re making a bizarre claim.” “Do you have diffs23 from Wikipedia” demonstrating a conflict of interest?

When someone pointed out that Wikipedia explicitly prohibited the sort of edits Gerard was doing, noting that “an editor who is involved in a significant controversy or dispute with another individual—whether on- or off-wiki—or who is an avowed rival of that individual, should not edit that person's biography or other material about that person, given the potential conflict of interest,” Gerard shot back with “It's more of a no-evidencer. Supply on-wiki diffs that you consider show this, and how.” He knew the policy, of course—he helped write the policy! It was an elaborate sort of game he invited people into: You know this, I know you know it, but do you have the patience to outlast me on it?

This time around, though, some people weren’t buying. Someone set up a vote: Should Gerard be banned from editing articles about Scott Alexander? After seven years of tendentious edits, Gerard was finally facing scrutiny.

At first, it seemed as if nothing would happen. Several of Gerard’s longtime allies on-wiki added their voices to his. One, Loki, gamely added, “I think any situation which would make him covered by [the conflict of interest policy] would have to be two-sided.” Another, XOR’easter, followed up with “I'd suggest that assuming good faith in this case means not leaping to the conclusion that he won't immediately try to worm through a loophole.” A third, NorthBySouthBaranof, added their voice to the chorus: “sanctions are supposed to be preventive, not punitive.” For a moment it looked like people wouldn’t ban Gerard from the topic after all.

Then an uninvolved admin, Wugapodes, caught wind of what Gerard was doing. His rant is full of Wikipedia jargon and awkwardly long to insert into what is already a behemoth of an article, but I cannot possibly do it justice without including it in full.

“Seriously, everyone, what the [f---] is wrong with us? … Reading through this discussion it seems that David has called the subject a neo-nazi, has significantly contributed to a NYT article described by other sources as a “hit piece”, disingenuously used Wikipedia to push his [point of view] despite a [conflict of interest] obvious to anyone with eyes, and we as a community are incapable of doing anything other than a warning? What the [f---] is wrong with us?”

After seven years, someone finally saw what was going on.

The ban passed.

To the best of my knowledge, David Gerard never responded. He simply shrugged and carried on eliminating Unreliable Sources.

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Conclusion

This article is, you may have noticed, a bit long.

Certain stories become common knowledge in online communities, passed around by word of mouth and picked up by osmosis. This is one such story. Gerard has 30 years of dense online history, and I interviewed dozens of people on and off the record picking up bits and pieces of that history, then trawled archives and logs for others. Online drama is peculiar and Wikipedia drama more so, because each site is so often its own ecosystem and each Wikipedia page the fiefdom of the editor who cares the most. I thought about providing a condensed version, a “greatest hits,” something that could convey All Of This without actually making people sit down and read All Of This, but the simple reality is that for some stories, people simply need to see it for themselves. Nobody but a madman would trawl through this whole mess, but everything on the internet is written by madmen, and usually only the tiniest bits of the grand sagas behind their mad conflicts bubble to the surface.

I can’t pretend to be neutral here, of course. I have spent years watching a man hundreds of times more prolific and focused than I am pursue an elaborate decades-long grudge against communities and writers I value, wondering if or when he would turn that grudge towards me—when it would be my turn to face Gerard and his Reliable Sources. While this article has been on my mind for a while, the most direct inspiration came when Gerard bragged about his role in providing background for a harshly critical Guardian article about a recent conference I attended.

This article accelerates that, of course, and given his history, it’s a much riskier topic than even most controversies I cover. A few hours after I asked for information in an obscure forum, Gerard’s friends were already spreading the word and looking for dirt on me. I was happy to hear Gerard himself had “previously considered [me] on the saner end of the rationalists24 from [my] reasonably coherent Twitter,” though I suspect that’s over and done with. That’s fine. I know who I am; I know who my friends are. I stand by what I say and what I do, and I will not be defined by Gerard. While I’d prefer a neutral reporter had taken interest in parts of Gerard’s story at some point, ultimately I realized that given his history, virtually nobody who could write the story could truly be neutral. Either I would write this article or it would never be written, I concluded, and it’s a story worth knowing.

I find Gerard much more sympathetic than I had expected going in, and had I met the version of him that showed up on LessWrong, I suspect I would have gotten along with him quite well. As Gerard says, no one is a villain in their own mind.

His story, in the end, is an ironic tragedy. He started out in love with the internet and its potential, eager to volunteer untold hours to its idealized mission to spread reason and knowledge for free, outside the often arbitrary and capricious bounds of official institutions and that’s the spirit in which he came to Wikipedia. He wrote lucidly about the importance of human-focused process and the dangers of rigid reliance on “Reliable Sources” that he knew were nothing but.

But at some point—perhaps the Manning debacle, perhaps yet earlier—he, obsessed with his vision of basilisks, set out to become one: to kill everything he touched on Wikipedia, using every trick he had warned against in a no-holds-barred struggle against everyone and everything he hated. He judged Reliable Sources based on whether they shared his viewpoint, and when that wasn’t enough, he built the Reliable Sources himself. He made sweeping changes to the site with wildly insufficient explanations, then guarded them with decades of built-up knowledge of how to frustrate opponents and wear them down. He demonstrated step-by-step that he was correct: Wikipedia’s processes really were insufficient to deal with a sufficiently motivated bad-faith actor with friends willing to cover for him, and each time the site slapped him down he simply found another way to pursue his bitter mission.

On many topics, I love Wikipedia—its spirit of collaboration and sharing, its accessibility, the passionate editors who have built so much that I value. But—well, Gerard has been a Wikipedia administrator almost from its beginning. He was a spokesman for many years. He has played a pivotal role in its policy for years and has spent the last half-decade doing everything in his power to shape even the sources people are allowed to use in order to wrest the site into his image. On any heated issue, then, the site lives under the shadow of Gerard’s deadly gaze. The idea of a democratic, leaderless group has calcified into one where an old guard determined to weaponize process act as de facto leaders of everything they can bludgeon others away from.

It’s a shame for the website and for those of us who use and appreciate it, but once more, Gerard has the right of it25: “It’s difficult to think of a worse (appropriate) punishment […] than continuing to be someone who would think this was a worthwhile way to spend their life.”

But hey, don’t take my word for it.

After all, I am not a Reliable Source.

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Thank you for reading. This is one of the most involved stories I have ever worked on—deep dives like this are labors of love that take immense time and effort. If you enjoy my work and want to see more like this, want to encourage me towards this as an economically viable career path, or if you want to read a companion article talking about the personal side of my history with LessWrong, RationalWiki, and the men who built the internet I grew up on, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing this article on social media.

15

Writing an article like this inevitably leads to Pepe Silvia moments as you see the same names pop up again and again and wonder about the connections. Because many Wikipedia editors use pseudonyms divorced from their identities elsewhere online or in the world, information about who they are is scarce and it’s easy to imagine coordination anywhere from “these two people have similar interests and values” to “these people talk every day.” I had one such moment with Sandstein, who (as discussed in the article) later pushed hard to get another prolific editor with his own twenty years of history banned from Wikipedia for criticizing Gerard’s deletionist approach to Reliable Sources. Coordination and tangled webs of relationships are inevitable when people spend years in common space, and there’s nothing sinister about that, but threads like that are idle reminders that as much happens online in private spaces as in public ones, and even benign coordination often leaves nothing but shadows on the open web.

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In a Wikipedia edit war two editors wrestle directly over the content of a page, reverting each other’s choices and arguing. Here, Gerard wanted to include a 2015 statement in order to imply that a taboo on discussing the topic lasted a long while, while others wanted to remove it to reflect that the topic was discussed normally before that date. If you love petty arguments, feel free to read the edit reasoning, bottom to top.