AZ native, son of immigrants, ex-Navy PhD Social Psychology – dissertation on envy and antisemitism Data science, media reliability, bias in academic research
Arizona
Joined July 2014
- Tweets51.2K
- Following3.1K
- Followers5.4K
- Likes94.8K
Incredible hoax. Nafisa Fai is a leftist running for office in Oregon.
She gave a speech in front of an upside-down US flag -- everyone at this Somali event did. (She's a Somali immigrant.)
End Wokeness posted the video.
Her campaign said it was a fake video, that the flag was actually right-side-up, and provided a "screenshot" image purportedly from the video.
Leftist media reported that the video was a deepfake. They just asserted that it was fake because a leftist Democratic candidate said it was...
On the contrary, the image the campaign supplied was generated or edited by OpenAI, which anyone can confirm at SynthID.
We have independent confirmation that the flag was upside-down from Google image search because Somali TV Minnesota posted the videos on its FB page (they have a national focus on Somalis, not just MN), before deleting them after End Wokeness exposed them, and a thumbnail is now on Google image search (attached).
The Oregon Journalism Project (@OregonJournProj) started this hoax. They're a group of leftist activists who cosplay as journalists, which describes most journalism in the US today.
Incredibly, they just *asserted* that the video was AI. They didn't report any testing on it whatsoever. They just asserted it. It's amazing what "journalists" can get away with. They literally did nothing, no investigation, no testing. They just acted as PR for a leftist, America-hating politician and planted this hoax about a purported hoax.
From the OJP, the hoax spread. It's been reported by leftist media outlets like @axios, Willamette Week, Lookout Eugene-Springfield, the Hillsboro Herald, and News in the Grove.
Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Dexter fell for it, and called the imagined deepfake but actually real video a "racist, disgusting attack".
The media did no work here. They didn't even bother checking the image that Fai gave them. They spread a hoax based on the word of a leftist and America-hating politician, perhaps *because* she's a leftist, America-hating politician.
She lied to them. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Will the Oregon Journalism Project try to salvage any notion that they're journalists and run a retraction and apology? They only seem to employ radical leftists, which is not going to work for journalism. No one with pronouns in their bios should be employed as a journalist on political topics -- they're members of a cult and cannot possibly be impartial in left-right politics.
Axios deserves special mention. They're an absurdly unreliable outlet that regularly makes false claims, and the nature of those false claims is consistently aligned with a leftist bias. None of these outlets seem to have an anti-bias framework, which is incredible. Their journalists aren't trained to not embed their ideology or to be impartial in their story selection. It still surprises me that this is where we are at this point in history. I thought @JimVandeHei was trying to do something else.
Since @elonmusk is taking such a bold approach to the Roadster's features, I want to put in a plug for a periscope.
I've always thought cars needed periscopes to see what in tarnation is going on up ahead in traffic jams.
It should be thinner and the sensor package much smaller than Grok's imagining here, or could even be a tethered micro-drone.
With the intel provided by the 'scope, the driver could make an informed decision to fly-vault out of the jam or not.
🤖 Made with AI
This is the variable I care about (and the deficit). Notice that there's no noticeable effect of DOGE. In fact, according to the OMB and Grok, spending is *increasing*, and it was already obscenely high.
Notice that we never returned to baseline after the pandemic spending explosion. Why? This needs explaining, and more importantly, action.
New site is up!
MASSIVE improvement over the WordPress version I ran for two months, which was an improvement over the Weebly site I had for 12+ years.
1. This is a static site – every man's dream – built with the Astro static site generator. No more WordPress cruft – no database, PHP, the incredibly bloated page weight WP forces, etc.
NIH is still funding a puberty blockers trial that will sterilize children, as well as:
- a project to get more illegals on Medicaid in California
- a grant to FIGHT state bans on sterilizing and mutilating children
- a grant about trans-asserting men and AIDS in Ecuador...
At the same time, NIH struggles to defend itself against lawsuits over the few ideological grants it DID terminate.
A systematic, rigorous anti-ideology framework solves both problems:
1. It reliably identifies all the ideologically driven and scientifically invalid grants. It goes much further than DOGE's DEI keyword search, and avoids false positives.
2. It gives NIH staff and the attorneys at DOJ and HHS a much stronger toolkit to defend against these lawsuits. A good framework will objectively and impartially define ideology, and provide the tools to explain how a given grant inappropriately embedded ideology, how this makes it scientifically invalid, etc.
Judges will like it – I guarantee it. Well, most judges.
Right now, NIH is missing a lot of bogus grants, continuing to fund them and even awarding new ones, and it can't robustly defend the termination decisions it already made.
At NIH, I told Jay that one of the reasons we needed a Clean Science, anti-ideology framework was to defend against these sorts of lawsuits. Unfortunately, he didn't listen.
What's the issue? The issue is that leftists embed their ideology in research in ways that make it scientifically invalid, or otherwise inappropriate for taxpayer funding.
They then leverage the results of this invalid research to advance their power and defeat conservatives and other non-leftists. They use complicit media to report false/invalid "findings", which affect policy and voter behavior. And they embed their ideology everywhere else, including the workplace, peppered with false claims about "the science" backing HR's claims on "implicit bias", "transphobia", "systemic racism", the harms of stereotyping, etc.
The outcome: thousands of chemically sterilized kids, the dramatic reversal in perceptions of racism, toxic delusions about a "climate crisis", and thousands of leftist activists cosplaying as scientists subsidized by you, the taxpayer.
It's a big mistake for Republicans and the Trump administration to not end this.
NIH and NSF need to understand *validity* and in this context that means defining "ideology" and explaining how it can be embedded in research in inappropriate ways.
It's not enough to point to a study and say "DEI!" or "woke!".
No, that's not nearly good enough and it won't answer the complaints leftists make or accomplish anything in a courtroom. You have to use your words. You have to make a rigorous case for why "Ecological Momentary Assessment of Racial/Ethnic Microaggressions and Cannabis Use among Black Adults" (actual NIH grant) is an invalid embedding of a political ideology and that this embedding makes it scientifically invalid.
I provisionally defined ideology for NIH purposes as "any construct that pertains to justice or oppression", and we can add that the "usage stems from a specific political ideology like leftism/liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, etc."
All the MAGA-adjacent influencers commenting on biased science have so far been unable to drill into the problem. They're just ranting about bias at the journals, over and over, but we need real insight into the epistemological problem here. What's the nature of what leftists are doing? What do we call it? We need a taxonomy and a framework. We need to integrate applied epistemology and philosophy of science. Conservatives haven't funded that work and it's extremely important because this is how leftists win – they rig the game. They embed the ideological assumptions and constructs in the research from the start – "systemic racism" as real and as the cause of arbitrary outcomes unfavorable to certain groups (and they only think in terms of groups), "microaggressions", all their made-up, nonexistent x-phobia terms,
Leftists are able to get away with sweeping empirical claims without evidence. No one at NIH or NSF or the journals stop them, because they're all controlled by leftists. Leftists are able to get away with trafficking in a cult ideology with ridiculous cult constructs and Soviet-style enforcement for the same reasons.
With a framework, NIH can answer these lawsuits by saying "We define ideology, neutrally and objectively, as constructs that pertain to justice or oppression, especially where the usage stems from a specific political ideology like leftism/liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, etc. In this grant, they embed the new leftist construct of "microaggression", which asserts that various mundane acts like a white person denying that he's racist, someone advocating color blindness, or disputing that "systemic racism" against blacks exists currently and pervades all our institutions – itself a tenet of leftist ideology, so we're talking about simply disagreeing with leftism – are acts of aggression and oppression."
Right now, NIH can't say that because they don't have a definition of ideology and they don't have a framework. Jay wouldn't implement anything. They're just winging it, and that's unlikely to work. As it stands, they're going to hand everything back to the left in two years, with no framework or deep reforms having been implemented. That would be an incredible waste.
As a graduate student in 2014, I exposed the Cook et al. (2013) 97% climate consensus fraud and the Lewandowsky et al. (2012) fraud.
They each had their department chair or dean send coordinated letters to my department chair. Here are the letters.
It's a rigged and invalid study, as usual – rigged against Republicans with an imbalance of questions targeting them, e.g. returning Trump to power, preserving the American way of life, preserving the American way of life based on Western values (yes they duplicated the previous question and just added the Western values bit), and seizure of private property for public purposes.
There are no symmetric questions targeting the left/Democrats. No question about using violence to keep Trump from returning to power, for example, or anything to balance the other three. This rigs the math, making the study invalid.
They also rigged it by asking about the use of "force or violence", which comes into play for questions like "to reinforce the police" and to "stop illegal immigration". Reinforcing the police sounds legal and like it's an emergency scenario where they *need* reinforcement, say because of leftist riots of the sort we saw nationwide in 2020. Using "force" to reinforce the police is not "violence" by our usual reckoning.
We DO use force to stop illegal immigration. Government is force. The Border Patrol is force. The question stem is "What do you think about the use of force or violence in the following situations?"
Someone who thinks it's justified for **the government** to use force to stop illegal immigration is being scored as "supporting political violence" by this ridiculous study.
They rigged and vacated the study by saying "force or violence" to get Republicans to endorse normal state uses of force.
The authors are amateurs – strangely, they're a bunch of MDs and MPHs in the Emergency Medicine Department at UC-Davis (@RickAddante), not social psychologists, though admittedly it wouldn't help much if they were. Anything coming from academia is likely to be invalid and rigged, much like the recent HHS survey that tried to link gender-affirming beliefs to support for left-wing authoritarianism and justification of political violence. The HHS study was rigged in the other direction, which was incredibly disappointing, didn't disclose the actual results, using items like "All conservatives are fools" to measure "authoritarianism", etc.
The authors give away their partisan mission with this bit in the conclusion:
"There are stark differences across the political spectrum on matters involving race and ethnicity and the distribution of power in the US. High prevalences of strong or very strong belief in the QAnon and great replacement delusions among strong Republicans and extreme conservatives are particularly striking. Both have been linked to violence in specific cases [52–54] and are plausible antecedents to political violence."
They repeatedly refer to Republican "delusions", but there's no mention of Democratic delusions. That's a stark giveaway that they're not interested in rigorously getting at reality here, and are likely not cognitively or scientifically equipped to do so. They almost certainly wouldn't be able to refer to any Democratic delusions if asked. (e.g. Trump-Russia hoax, the new one of Trump-as-pedophile, various beliefs about "trans kids", that climate change threatens human extinction, that Trump is deporting citizens, that Trump is going to "cancel" the midterms, that Israel committed "genocide" in Gaza, that The Handmaid's Tale portrays the world Republicans want to create, etc.)
Also note that the "Great Replacement" thesis is true if we mean whether Dems have let in millions of illegals and want more mass migration, and that Dems want them to be able to vote. It can't be characterized as a "delusion" – it can only be argued at the edges or impacts. Their item was “in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants.”
That's somewhat or mildly true – we can look at university admissions, or just point at the jobs that we recently discovered were only open to immigrants. I'm referring to jobs **in America**. Christina Buttons at City Journal found some lower level labor like that and there are recent examples in tech. It's just true – the argument would be on the scale and impact, and people can have a different sense of that.
It's frustrating that we're getting rigged study after rigged study on political violence. (At least these guys released their results and their data, unlike the HHS team.) Am I going to have to conduct a serious, valid, rigorous, neutral study? I think you really need to pay participants to get the best, valid samples. A few bucks at least, maybe $10+, so we might have to do a funding thing to get this going. I'm deeply annoyed with all the invalid, junk, partisan studies.
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to support political violence
Support for political violence “in general” is bipartisanly uncommon, a 2022 survey suggests
Republicans and conservatives are more likely than Democrats or liberals to justify political violence in 17 surveyed situations, according to a study published September 16, 2026, in the open access journal PLOS One by Garen J. Wintemute from the University of California Davis and colleagues.
Political violence, defined as “the use of physical force to advance political objectives,” includes targeted and terrorist violence. Researchers recognize troubling levels of support for political violence in the US but do not fully understand how political affiliation may inform these beliefs.
Wintemute and colleagues conducted a survey of 8,620 US adults from May 13 to June 2, 2022. The survey gathered respondents’ political affiliations, ranging from Strong Republican to Strong Democrat; their general beliefs about democracy and American society; and their willingness to support or engage in political violence.
In the survey, political violence (represented by the phrase “force or violence”) was defined as “physical force strong enough that it could cause pain or injury to a person.” Participants decided whether violence was justified in general and across 17 specific situations (e.g., “to return Donald Trump to the presidency this year”). Those who justified political violence rated their willingness to engage in it personally. All respondents also reported the likelihood that they would someday use firearms in connection with political violence.
Results indicated that higher percentages of Republicans (35.3%-49.5%) than Democrats (24.7%-26.7%) considered violence to be justified to advance at least one of the political objectives. Republicans endorsed violence for a greater number of specific political objectives than Democrats.
Strong Republicans were more likely than strong Democrats to anticipate being armed in a future politically violent situation. However, Republicans were not more willing than Democrats to engage in political violence personally; in fact, few respondents (<3%) were “very or completely willing” to use violence on another person for political purposes.
The researchers made statistical adjustments to reduce errors from false positive or negative results. They importantly emphasize that these results were extracted from a sample comprising roughly 0.0025% of the US population and that all conclusions must be contextualized within the 17 political situations provided in the study materials. The US’s political climate in 2022 — including the war against Ukraine and widely publicized mass shootings in New York and Texas — likely impacted these results as well.
The authors add: “These aren’t one-off findings. We’ve seen quite similar results in subsequent iterations of the survey, through mid-2026. Perhaps most important: right across the political spectrum, most Americans reject political violence completely. We can work together to create a culture in which political violence is unacceptable.”
This reminds me of how the NYT wrapped "transgender" in quotes as recently as 1996, because it was a new, ideological construct. It's fascinating how it emerged so recently and spread so rapidly. Here's an example from 95, with spunky hermaphrodites resisting the movement.
Letterman's statement on the first show after Sep 11, on Sep 17. Powerful praise for @RudyGiuliani.
youtu.be/rDDkKmem8ng?is=mAKx…
Hours after a leftist murdered Charlie Kirk, the Washington Post's Karen Attiah slandered him:
“Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is…. not the same as violence.”
Charlie did not espouse violence.
Misrepresenting him became a gleeful sport across social media in the days after he was taken, often pulling this quote out of context:
"I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights."
In this report, I dive into the misconceptions leftists and many other Americans have about "gun violence" in America, a topic on which Charlie was impressively rigorous and knowledgeable. In fact, he was answering a question about mass shootings when he was murdered.
I also provide the FULL quote from which leftists took the above snippet, where Charlie talked about how to save lives and **reduce** gun deaths.
If I tap on my post within the flagging notice, it just gives me a busted black screen with a broken image icon in the upper left. On desktop browser, it's similar, just a blank screen with "Twitter.com refused to connect". So there's nowhere for me to appeal.
