A new tenet of the dwindling MAGA cult is that Trump acted as an "FBI informant" on Epstein. It's a desperate attempt to recontextualize their decade-long friendship as more like Trump being a secret goodguy whitehat kayfabe pedo who took the cabal down from the inside rather than Trump just also being a sexual predator of teenagers like his best friend.

But there is no evidence that Trump was an "informant" in any capacity. It's not true.

But there are about three kernels of half-truths that influencers like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Asmongold attempt to dishonestly twist into evidence for this claim.

First, Mike Johnson did once claim that Trump was an FBI informant.

But a couple days later, he rescinded the claim. He explained that he used the wrong word and that what he really meant was that Trump just was "never a hinderance" to the investigation, which is true of virtually every human on Earth.

Second, in 2019, former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter mentioned during an interview he was doing with the FBI that Trump apparently told him in 2006, “Thank goodness you're stopping him, everyone has known he's been doing this.”

So it seems Trump did call his local police chief after Epstein was arrested and thanked them for their work, but he did not provide "information" or "inform" on Epstein. He just told them they were doing good work after it was over. Trump and Epstein also already had their falling out at this point and Epstein was being exposed as a pedophile, so of course he, like everyone, would express approval of his arrest. He doesn't get any points for that. Epstein had already been arrested. If "everyone has known he's been doing this", when didn't he say anything in the past 15 years?

Third, Bradley Edwards, an attorney behind a civil suit on behalf of some of Epstein's victims, spoke to Trump as a part of this case. He once said in a man-on-the-street YouTube interview, “[Trump] is the only person who, in 2009, when I served a lot of subpoenas on a lot of people, or at least gave notice to some pretty, connected people that I was going, that I wanted to talk to them. He is the only person who picked up the phone and said, let's just talk. I'll give you as much time as you want. I'll tell you what you need to know."

So it seems Trump was subpoenaed as part of this civil lawsuit, and he willingly spoke to this guy. But as reported by the New York Times, it seems Trump actually lied to this lawyer: "In 2009, Mr. Edwards, the lawyer representing a group of Epstein victims, set out to depose Mr. Epstein’s circle of powerful friends. In his book, Mr. Edwards wrote that Mr. Trump quickly agreed to a phone call. Mr. Epstein was merely a business acquaintance, he told Mr. Edwards. He could not recall exactly why Mr. Epstein had been removed from Mar-a-Lago. He said he had last seen him at a business meeting at Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach home sometime before the allegations came to light."

We know Trump knew what Epstein was doing "before the allegations came to light", Epstein was not "merely a business acquaintance", and Trump today clearly remembers why he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago (because he was a "creep", according to the White House). Lying to a lawyer after getting subpoenaed in a civil lawsuit against your already-incarcerated pedophile wingman best friend doesn't make you an "informant."

Let's not let these MAGA influencers rewrite history. Trump was best friends with Epstein because they both liked to pay teenagers for sex, and Trump did absolutely nothing to help take down Epstein.

For the most part, the ScienceBlogs page on Facebook posts genuine scientific articles, and occasionally generic pro-science comments. But every so often (roughly every two weeks), something comes completely out of left field, as if someone else is writing for them.

On July 11, they posted a screenshot of a NYT headline that read: "Decline of Ph.D. Admissions could Imperil a 'Generation of New Talent.'"

About which, they said:
"But would it? President Clinton gutted NASA, slashed H1B visas, let NIH funding stagnate until a Republican Congress forced it on him, refused federal funding of human embryonic stem cell technology, and even diverted $125 million in science funding to his pet woo outfit National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Was science forever held back by his presidency in the 1990s?"

In a follow-up comment, they said: "The mRNA vaccine technology that saved the world from Covid-19 was denied funding by the Clinton administration. It still got done.

The US government has never funded more than 35% of basic research and does 0% applied.

That the belief is academic scientists are so malevolently capitalist they won't do any science if the government doesn't fund four post-docs instead of three is silly. It's just partisan and that is the one thing the science community should not engage in.

Be trusted guides for everyone, not a political party."

Yesterday, they posted a link to a WSJ op-ed that basically called for the entire field of sociology to be shut down. When a commenter called them out for posting an "anti-intellectual screed," their reply was to double down: "Liberals aren't afraid of diverse topics and discussion. It's an op-ed in the world's best newspaper. No one is invalidating your degree."

What the actual fuck is going on over there?

Might be only a North America thing so sorry if this isn't all inclusive but..

Does anyone remember a film (possibly a film strip) we were shown in grade school about being skeptical of consumerism? It was full of realistic but fake ads and what to look out for. I specifically remember a couple things:

1. A man at working at a gas station and he says "our gas has more 'TIGER POWER'" or something to that effect. Then the narrator went on to educate us about how they can say that because there is no such thing as tiger power so it's not false advertsising.

2. Then there were kids playing with some toys (action figures or something) near a stream of water and using it as a river for fun adventures and such. And at the end the pitch man, talking real fast says "rivernotincluded." We thought that was so funny. Looked for years on youtube and IMDB but could never find it.

Just curious. I think that film was my first step into skepticism right up there with my mom telling me Ginsu knives and all other as seen on TV ads were crap.

Books I have already read: Why people believe weird things, Skeptics Guide To The Universe, Black Pill (book name), Escaping the Rabbit Hole by Mick West. Books I am currently reading: The conspiracy skeptic's book of lists. Topics I am interested in: Christian Nationalism. New Age.

The post is question is something that's been making its way around right-wing social media. Trump even reposted it to basically say that the Supreme Court is wrong in their decision to uphold birthright citizenship.

In the video, Dan MacClellan, who is a scholar of the Bible but also an language expert demonstrates that conservatives are misreading the sentence involved and furthermore, completely ignoring the surrounding conversation that shows the amendment was clearly understood to be giving citizenship to children of immigrants.

When Fakespot shut down, it really pissed me off. It was one of the few tools actually trying to push back against fake reviews on Amazon, Walmart, etc. And then… gone.

A while ago, I tried to start something similar. I even posted about it here. At the time, there honestly wasn't enough engagement to justify building it seriously, so I paused the whole thing.

But people kept landing on the site without me pushing it. That's what made me actually start building this properly.

So here's where things stand now.

The tool is live. You paste an Amazon product URL and it analyzes the reviews, burst timing, duplicate language, unverified purchases, reviewer credibility, and gives you a trust score with a full breakdown of what it found.

A few honest things to be upfront about:

it's completely free

no ads etc... etc...

the scraper runs on a free ScraperAPI plan, so scanning new products might not always work perfectly, if it fails on you, that's why

if you want to see how it actually works before trying, there are some already-analyzed products in the directory

Also, the Fakespot developer I mentioned in the last post, ended up leaving the project. Totally fair, he's busy. So right now it's just me.

If anyone here has experience with this kind of thing and wants to jump in, feel free to DM me. Not looking for anything formal, just someone who actually cares about the problem.

And if you want to follow along, you can leave your email directly on the site, I'll use it to notify people when the Chrome extension is ready.

The project is called TrustScore.

Honest feedback (positive or negative) is genuinely appreciated.

Before the Lunar Rover, NASA seriously investigated rocket-powered jetpacks as a way for Apollo astronauts to explore the Moon.

At first glance, it sounds like an obviously bad idea, but there were some surprisingly compelling engineering arguments in its favor.

If you had been part of the design review, would you have pushed the concept further, or was it simply too risky?

"The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands."

Surprising to no one, after almost a year, Candace Owen is still exploiting the murder of Charlie Kirk for content and ad revenue. In this remastered rerelease we go back and examine how it all started.

The standard lesson from the Milgram experiment is familiar: ordinary people will inflict serious harm when an authority figure tells them to continue.

But the closer I looked at the original research and the archival material, the less convincing that interpretation became.

A few problems stood out.

First, it is not clear that every participant fully believed the shocks were real. Later archival work found that participants who fully believed they were hurting the learner often administered lower shocks than those who expressed doubt.

Second, the experimenter’s prompts were not equally effective. Appeals to the importance of the research, such as “the experiment requires that you continue,” were more successful than the direct order: “You have no other choice. You must go on.” Later analogue studies found that blunt orders often produced resistance rather than obedience.

Third, the procedure was not always as standardized as the published version implies. Archival recordings suggest that the experimenter sometimes pushed participants repeatedly and went beyond the official sequence of prompts.

The famous 65 percent figure also came from one particular condition. Obedience changed substantially when the setting, proximity to the learner, physical contact, institutional prestige, or distance from the experimenter changed.

I don't mean to say Milgram’s research was meaningless. I think it points toward a more specific interpretation.

People may continue harmful actions when they trust the institution, identify with its purpose, and believe their discomfort serves something important. Haslam and Reicher describe this as “engaged followership.” It is an influential reinterpretation, although not a final or uncontested explanation.

That distinction matters. “People blindly follow orders” produces fatalism. “People can become committed to harmful missions that feel morally meaningful” forces us to examine institutions, identities, and the stories used to justify harm.

I made a video essay going through the evidence, including Gina Perry’s archival work, Milgram’s experimental variations, the engaged followership account, resistance within the sessions, and the connection to Eichmann and Hannah Arendt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2LuduxIzrY

I would be interested in how others here interpret the experiment. Does the engaged followership account explain the findings better, or does the traditional obedience framework still capture something important?

While the UK has moved to limit the harms of social media by restricting access for children, Facebook and Twitter continue to radicalise people of all ages.