The "Freethinkers" Who Aren't

How the “heterodox” became what they hated

There’s an alarmingly common pattern in politics.

Step 1: Some non-mainstream view will be labeled a dangerous conspiracy theory and suppressed.

Step 2: Those who think of themselves as heterodox defend the theory to the death.

Step 3: Popular support builds for that view, until it’s the majority view. Even after most people believe it, the view is still considered edgy, heterodox, and non-mainstream. The view shambles along, zombie-like, no matter how weak the case for it is.

Two recent examples of this are the lab-leak theory of COVID origins and the Hunter Biden laptop story. Lab leak was originally suppressed. It was unfairly called an outrageous conspiracy theory, and treated with disdain by the mainstream. For this reason, heterodox critics of the mainstream media flocked to defend lab leak. Shows and podcasts were built complaining about the cover up of lab leak. Those critical of mainstream medical institutions are in almost complete agreement about the truth of lab leak.

There was just one problem.

Lab leak isn’t true! It’s not some outrageous conspiracy theory, and lab leak advocates aren’t crazy liars the way opponents of the COVID vaccine tend to be. Nor are they automatically racist or xenophobic for believing lab leak. But they are wrong! I plan to soon write a more detailed debunking of lab leak, but for now, I’ll just point you in the direction of quite thorough takedowns by Scott Alexander and Peter Miller.

Or take the Hunter Biden laptop story as another example. After Hunter Biden’s entire hard-drive leaked—decades of every photo and text message ever sent—the shocking discovery was something we already knew: Hunter was a drug addict. All the other accusations fell apart. Hunter was ultimately convicted of lying on a form and filing his taxes late.

There was a real Hunter Biden scandal, but it went in precisely the opposite way commonly thought. Hunter was prosecuted for violating laws that no one ever gets prosecuted for violating, after being subjected to an unfair and insane witch hunt. The worst things that Hunter was accused of were both false and insignificant compared to what Trump does in broad daylight—with Don Junior running the most expensive nightclub in the world where people can pay for access to Trump, Trump getting a private jet from Qatar, and Trump flagrantly engaging in hideously corrupt crypto dealings.

If you watch the recent Hunter interview, he comes off as a thoughtful, decent, and articulate guy who’s faced a decades-long struggle with addiction—nothing like the criminal mastermind he’s been painted as. He is a man who did not deserve to be reduced to a national punchline surrounded by a vague penumbra of scandal.

On the one hand, it looks like the laptop owner genuinely had access to Hunter’s hard drive. That part was true and it was suppressed (though there’s a reasonable case for suppression: normally you’re not allowed to share other people’s leaked naked photographs across the internet). The “mainstream” opinion that the laptop was pure fabrication wasn’t correct, but neither were the hyperbolic claims of rampant corruption. The truth was in the middle.

Often the heterodox opinions that become mainstream have a grain of truth to them. The hard drive was genuine, and it was surprising that COVID broke out in a city with a lab doing coronavirus research (though note: the earliest cases were at the wet market and slightly later cases were clustered around the wet market which is about a half hour drive from the lab). But then people overextrapolate from the minimum inkling of truth to believe wholesale positions that aren’t supported by the evidence.

Now it’s true, there are some people who set out to debunk these views. For example, Steve Kirsch, one of the primary spreaders of COVID vaccine misinformation, was completely eviscerated in a five-hour-long nightmare debate by Avi Bitterman, a medical doctor who did considerable research debunking Kirsch’s claims. And similar debunking has come from various others including Peter Miller and Yuri Deigin.

But peddling misinformation is a far more lucrative business than debunking it. Steve Kirsch, despite peddling such a quantity of bullshit that it’s a serious threat to the biosecurity of surrounding waterways, has about 250,000 substack subscribers. Brett Weinstein, a prolific liar of almost unfathomable proportions, has half a million YouTube subscribers. Peter Miller, a judicious and thoughtful investigator of COVID origins and vaccines, has 1,600 medium subscribers. While there are people with full-time jobs producing COVID misinformation, there are, to the best of my knowledge, no people with full-time jobs debunking COVID misinformation. Nor are there people with substacks dedicated solely to disproving outrageous claims about Hunter Biden. Though Brett Weinstein is a crazy liar and his critics are not, Weinstein is much richer than his critics.

People like hearing what they perceive to be opaque knowledge that’s being covered up by the mainstream. Even if they’re not full-on conspiracy theorists, they want to hear interesting things. The heterodox view is sexy and interesting, the view coded as mainstream is not.

For this reason, you can get a very puzzling situation: some view is considered mainstream, but almost no one puts serious effort into defending it. The “mainstream view” isn’t believed by most people. It’s only mainstream in the sense that at one point some mainstream outlets would sneer at you if you denied it. And the heterodox people who claim to challenge mainstream sloppiness are themselves sloppy. Even lab leak, one of the more respectable heterodox theories, was constantly peddling claims that didn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Most Americans believe in lab leak. But I doubt most of these people could explain the argument for zoonosis that convinced so many public health officials that COVID didn’t come from a lab. Instead, they’ve just heard vague pro-lab-leak stuff from sources they trust. They learned about the cover-up and probably saw a deluge of misleading headlines suggesting lab leak. But they’re utterly ignorant of the main points of contention between experts on both sides. They believe lab leak because of the whiff of scandal associated with it and not because they’ve carefully investigated the subject.

I don’t mean to criticize such people. You can’t investigate every single topic on the planet! It’s fine to believe things because the people that you trust advocate them. For a while, I tentatively believed lab leak before I’d investigated it, because the people who did a Bayesian analysis of the subject seemed to favor it!

But this does mean that in practice, there’s an asymmetry between the evidence you’ll hear that favors a heterodox view and the evidence you’ll hear that favors the orthodox view. All too often, the advocacy you’ll hear for the orthodox view will be “however, experts claim [orthodox view]” while the evidence for the heterodox view will be from specific well-informed contrarians whose day job is to advocate for the heterodox view. If you want to learn the evidence against the heterodox view, you’ll often have to read obscure and boring bloggers or academic papers. You won’t just passively pick up the relevant information.

There are lots of people who consider themselves politically heterodox. They read Andrew Sullivan, Michael Shellenberger, Bill Maher, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Loury, and perhaps Matt Yglesias (to be clear, I really like Sullivan, Maher, and Yglesias, and Loury is fine too!) They pride themselves on eschewing mainstream dogma—on having identified Biden’s failing health long before the New York Times reading class did. But as a consequence of becoming disillusioned with the mainstream, they pick up their own collection of dogma.

In heterodox circles, the orthodoxy isn’t the same as the orthodoxy in mainstream circles. But there is orthodoxy nonetheless. The orthodox opinion is that the public health establishment messed up egregiously on COVID, Joe Biden screwed up by allowing in so many illegal migrants, COVID was lab leak, and so on. Other heterodox circles have even more dangerous brands of orthodoxy, like that the vaccines are harmful. Some heterodox positions may very well be correct (not the ones about vaccines, of course). But you shouldn’t treat the fact that you don’t believe the same dogma as everyone else as meaning you’re immune from dogma.

Getting to the truth is hard! The mainstream media of course is not perfect. But incentives are far worse in alternative media, which often does minimal fact-checking and doesn’t even bother correcting lies when called out. For instance, when I criticized alternative media YouTuber ShoeOnHead for her video criticizing USAID being full of lies, despite acknowledging the error, she doubled down and never even bothered to issue a correction. Complain all you want about the New York Times, but if they published the ridiculous lie that John Bolton was the head of USAID, they wouldn’t refuse to correct it and call the people criticizing them feds!

There are some false beliefs that the typical consumer of mainstream media will likely uncritically adopt. In most cases, these won’t be things that the media says, but things that they imply. For instance, largely as a result of reading constantly about shootings of black men, about half of Democrats think thousands of unarmed black men are shot and killed by police each year. The real number is around 20.

But this is far worse in alternative media. If you get your news from alternative media, odds are you’ll come to believe many false things. This is because alternative media will assert things that are simply false, in a way the mainstream media doesn’t do. Heterodox bloggers rise to the top by being good writers—whether what they say is true or not has little bearing on their success. Over the years, I’ve been surprised by the degree to which so much of alternative media’s claims collapse under even basic fact-checking. Lots of articles contain more than 50% claims that can be disproven by five minutes of googling.

The unthinking positions that you believe just because the people around you say them, despite there being no real consensus of experts in favor of them, are irrational even if you get your news from “heterodox” Substack blogs. Freethinking isn’t about who you get your information from, but about being the sort of person who investigates controversial claims before confidently believing them. Many of the “freethinkers,” in this sense, are not really freethinkers, but merely uncritical purveyors of a different kind of orthodoxy.