Canada has lost its measles elimination status, meaning the highly infectious virus is considered endemic once again in the country, The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) announced Monday.

The determination was made by a committee of PAHO experts, who spent last week poring over disease data to assess the measles status of countries across the entire region. The fact that Canada has lost its elimination status means that the region of the Americas overall has also lost the status, which it achieved in 2016. Of the 35 countries and territories in the region—a health region designated by the World Health Organization—Canada is currently the only country where measles is considered to be spreading endemically, though other countries, namely the US and Mexico, are headed in the same direction.

Measles is considered eliminated when a country can go 12 months without continuous local spread. Sporadic cases brought in from international travel can continue to occur, potentially causing limited outbreaks. But elimination is lost and endemicity is declared only when transmission is sustained over the course of a year.

Canada achieved elimination in 1998. The US did the same in 2000. Elimination was achieved through hard-fought vaccination campaigns, as two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is 97 percent protective against the virus, and that protection is considered lifelong. But, since that time, vaccine misinformation and potent rhetoric from anti-vaccine activists—including current US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—have taken hold, driving vaccination rates down on a population level. While the vast majority of American and Canadian parents continue to vaccinate their children, certain pockets and close-knit communities have become dramatically undervaccinated, providing potential footholds for the virus.

That is the case in Canada, where a massive outbreak began in October 2024. It started in Canada’s province of New Brunswick, and cases linked to the outbreak have since been detected across the country. As of November 1, the Government of Canada has tallied 5,162 measles cases since the start of the year. In the PAHO meeting last week, experts evaluated genetic data from the cases and determined that the same strain that sparked the outbreak last October has continued to spread, surpassing the 12-month threshold. Although transmission has slowed, the virus is still spreading. There were 23 cases identified in the week of October 26 to November 1.

“This loss represents a setback, of course, but it is also reversible,” Jarbas Barbosa, director of PAHO, said in a press briefing Monday.

Call to action

Barbosa was optimistic that Canada could regain its elimination status. He highlighted that such setbacks have happened before. “In 2018 and 2019, Venezuela and Brazil temporarily lost their elimination status following large outbreaks,” Barbosa noted. “Thanks to coordinated action by governments, civil society, and regional cooperation, those outbreaks were contained, and the Region of the Americas regained its measles-free status in 2024.”

On Monday, the Public Health Agency of Canada released a statement confirming that it received notification from PAHO that it had lost its measles elimination status, while reporting that it is already getting to work on earning it back. “PHAC is collaborating with the PAHO and working with federal, provincial, territorial, and community partners to implement coordinated actions—focused on improving vaccination coverage, strengthening data sharing, enabling better overall surveillance efforts, and providing evidence-based guidance,” the agency said.

However, Canada isn’t the only country facing an uphill battle against measles—the most infectious virus known to humankind. Outbreaks and sustained spread are also active in the US and Mexico. To date, the US has documented at least 1,618 measles cases since the start of the year, while Mexico has tallied at least 5,185. Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Belize also have ongoing outbreaks, PAHO reported.

As of November 7, PAHO has collected reports of 12,593 confirmed measles cases from 10 countries, but approximately 95 percent of them are in Canada, Mexico, and the US. That total is a 30-fold increase compared to 2024, PAHO notes, and the rise has led to at least 28 deaths: 23 in Mexico, three in the United States, and two in Canada.

The PAHO used Canada’s loss as a call to action not just in the northern country, but the rest of the region. “Every case we prevent, every outbreak we stop saves lives, protects families, and makes communities healthier,” Barbosa said. “Today, rather than lamenting the loss of a regional status, we call on all countries to redouble their efforts to strengthen vaccination rates, surveillance, and timely response to suspected cases—reaching every corner of the Americas. As a Region, we have eliminated measles twice. We can do it a third time.”

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Over the weekend, the President of the United States fell for obvious satire from a website literally called “The Dunning Kruger Times.”

Donald Trump—a man with access to the best, most accurate information on basically any subject—posted to Truth Social a screenshot claiming that “DOGE halts yearly payments of $2.5 million to Barack Obama for ‘royalties linked to Obamacare.’ Obama has collected this payment since 2010, for a total of $40 million in taxpayer dollars.”

Trump’s comment on this fabrication? “WOW!”

This is, obviously, complete and utter nonsense. It’s so stupid it almost feels silly to debunk it, but: Obama does not and has never received “royalties” for the Affordable Care Act. That’s not how legislation works. That’s not how royalties work. That’s not how anything works. The only person clearly profiting millions of dollars off the Presidency is the guy in the Oval Office right now.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how people with low competence in a particular domain drastically overestimate their abilities in that domain. A site called “The Dunning Kruger Times” is essentially a warning label: this is bait for extremely overconfident idiots.

And the President of the United States fell for it.

The article itself is from months ago and regularly makes the rounds among the most credulous corners of X. But even a cursory glance reveals obvious red flags. The byline? “Flagg Eagleton – Patriot,” with this bio:

Flagg Eagleton is the son of an American potato farmer and a patriot. After spending 4 years in the Navy and 7 on welfare picking himself up by the bootstraps, Flagg finally got his HVAC certificate and is hard at work keeping the mobile homes of Tallahassee at a comfy 83 degrees.

This is not subtle satire. Seven years on welfare picking himself up by the bootstraps? Keeping mobile homes in Tallahassee a comfy 83 degrees?

This is what the President of the United States falls for?

And just to remove any possible doubt about what kind of operation this is, here’s what the site says about itself:

Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined.

They’re quite explicit about their target audience:

They are fragile, frightened, mostly older caucasian Americans. They believe nearly anything. While we go out of our way to educate them that not everything they agree with is true, they are still old, typically ignorant, and again — very afraid of everything.

Our mission is to do our best to show them the light, through shame if necessary, and to have a good time doing it, because…old and afraid or not, these people are responsible for the patriarchy we’re railing so hard against. They don’t understand logic and they couldn’t care less about reason. Facts are irrelevant. BUT…they do understand shame.

The site’s entire premise is that its targets “believe nearly anything” and that “facts are irrelevant” to them.

Congratulations, Mr. President. You’re the mark.

Tragically, it’s not at all clear that Donald Trump does understand shame. His superpower is his shamelessness.

But remember all the fuss earlier this year about how no one was willing to seriously discuss the apparent mental decline of Joe Biden while he was President? Remember how people like Jake Tapper insisted that the lesson they learned from that was to be more willing to call out such things in the future?

Well, where is Jake Tapper now?

The President of the United States, with access to the best information and advisors in the world, just fell for obvious satire from a website literally called “The Dunning Kruger Times”—a site that explicitly states anyone who believes its content “should have your head examined.”

If that’s not evidence of a profound cognitive failure that warrants serious discussion about fitness for office, what is?

A Fullerton police officer told the agent he couldn't help 'with someone following or recording him if no crime had occurred.' Under state law, local police cannot enforce federal immigration law.

In 2023, California adopted a law that raised the minimum wage to $20 per hour. It also created a Fast Food Council with the power to further increase wages by dictate every year. Twenty bucks an hour is a nice, round number which is probably why state lawmakers picked it—though it's not clear why they stopped there. After all, if you're going to create prosperity by command, why not shoot for the moon and make all the Golden State's fry cooks millionaires? But it's just as well that they didn't go further—that hike to $20 per hour is killing jobs as it is.

One Law Kills 18,000 Jobs

"On April 1, 2024, California raised its minimum wage from $16 to $20 per hour for fast-food workers employed at chains with more than 60 locations nationwide," Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, and Jonathan Meer write in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that was first addressed by Reason's Peter Suderman in the November print issue. "Our median estimate suggests that California lost about 18,000 jobs that could have been retained if AB 1228 had not been passed."

The authors initially calculate that "employment in California's fast-food sector declined by 2.7 percent between September 2023 and September 2024 relative to fast-food employment elsewhere in the United States." But they make the point that, prior to the passage of A.B. 1228, the bill hiking the minimum wage, fast-food employment was rising faster in the state than elsewhere in the country. Allowing for that, and for changes in the overall labor market, they estimated the real decline in California's fast-food employment at 3.6 percent to arrive at 18,000 lost jobs.

That's a lot of missing opportunities for Californians to get a foothold in the work world, make money, and pay their bills. It also squares with other estimates of the attempt to legislate prosperity.

In September, the Employment Policies Institute (EPI) drew on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data to estimate "15,988 fast food jobs lost since the law went into effect in April 2024." The group added, "California's fast food job loss rate (-3.3% of jobs lost) more than doubled the losses in fast food restaurants nationally (-1.6% of jobs lost) since September 2023."

That EPI memo built on a November 2024 study that found "more than 4,400 California fast food jobs have been lost since January," based on federal data. That study also found "10.1 percent menu price increases by April 2024 since the law's passage in 2023."

A February 2025 paper from the Berkeley Research Group (BRG) found the fast-food sector "lost 10,700 jobs (-1.9%) between June 2023 and June 2024." The researchers added, "this decline sharply contrasts with the sector's historically compounded annual growth rate of 2.5% and marks the only December year-over-year decline in fast food employment this century–excluding the Great Recession (2009) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020)." That report also found that "menu prices at California's fast food restaurants increased by 14.5% between September 2023 (the month AB 1228 was signed into law) and October 2024, nearly double the national average (8.2%)."

But Didn't One Study Say the Law Did No Harm?

Not every look at the minimum wage hike has been negative. In particular, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) at the University of California-Berkeley concluded the minimum wage hike "did not affect employment adversely" and only slightly increased prices for consumers.

But as New York University statistics instructor Aaron Brown pointed out for Reason, "you'll find that the results celebrated in the press release and echoed by the media aren't in the paper. In fact, it barely addresses the effect of the minimum wage increase on fast-food employment in California." Additionally, Brown noted, IRLE's data showed California fast-food employment lagging national employment. And, confusingly, IRLE didn't separate out fast-food employment; the researchers included fast-food restaurants with casual-dining restaurants, buffets, and delis, some of which might have picked up customers and hired new workers to meet demand as prices rose at fast-food restaurants.

A Big Boost for Robots

It should be obvious by now that using the law to forcibly raise the price of something reduces demand for that thing and can raise other prices down the line. That's true as much for labor as it is for milk or steel. In terms of labor, our high-tech age is making it easier than ever to replace hourly workers with increasingly affordable robots.

"California fast food restaurants also increased automation and technology adoption to offset rising labor costs," the BRG paper also found. "Therefore it should not be surprising that the number of employees per restaurant is declining."

Last year, Don Lee of the Los Angeles Times reported on Harshraj Ghai, an owner of 180 fast-food restaurants across California. The first thing Ghai did after the new minimum wage took effect "was to start capping workers' hours to avoid overtime pay." Lee added that "the biggest thing Ghai and his family are doing does not directly involve workers at all: They've speeded up and expanded their use of technology, especially AI" to replace workers with self-service kiosks and to automate drive-thru ordering.

Technology has come to the back of the house, too. BurgerBots, a burger joint with a largely automated kitchen, opened this year in Los Gatos, California. It showcases technology from ABB Robotics, which hopes to minimize the human role in commercial food preparation.

You Can't Legislate Prosperity

California officials may be grappling with the bad news from the minimum wage hike. The law established a Fast Food Council which has the power to further increase wages every year by the lesser of 3.5 percent or inflation. The council is supposed to hold public meetings "no less than every six months" but the last meeting on the schedule was back in February. The position of chair is currently vacant.

"Fox26 has sent emails to the Department of Industrial Relations asking when the next meeting will be," the news station reported last month. "We started emailing the department back in May and have still not gotten a date for the next meeting."

The truth is that if creating prosperity was as easy as passing another law, we'd all be rich. But laws, more often than not, get in the way of jobs, business, and building wealth. Passing legislation is no substitute for the hard work of hard work. To create prosperity you have to come up with ideas, produce goods and services, match buyers and sellers, and keep everybody reasonably satisfied.

Minimum-wage laws are appealing because they promise to make us richer with no extra effort. Instead, though, they get in the way of the labor and business that really can make us more prosperous.

The post California's Fast-Food Minimum Wage Hike Is Killing Jobs appeared first on Reason.com.

When confronted with the growing popularity of populist, extremist, and generally destructive ideas over the past decade or so, many establishment politicians, journalists, and experts have blamed “misinformation” (see also “disinformation,” “fake news” “information disorder,” and “post-truth”).

Although this narrative comes in different forms, it typically involves three core ideas: (1) misinformation is widespread, (2) it is much worse than in the recent past, and (3) it is highly impactful in driving worrying political trends and developments.

But there is much to question about this narrative. For example, this narrative exaggerates both the quality of the past information environment and the gullibility of ordinary voters. The narrative is also self-serving. By explaining support for populism as a result of manipulation and misinformation, it exempts establishment institutions from any blame for anti-establishment politics. Finally, the idea that “misinformation” is the kind of thing that mainstream journalists and experts can detect and regulate presupposes that misinformation is not a significant problem within their institutions. As many have pointed out, this assumption is highly questionable. There is a substantial amount of what Matt Yglesias calls “elite misinformation,” although there are good reasons to prefer Joseph Heath’s “highbrow misinformation” as an adaptation of that term.

Now is a good time for those in “elite” or “highbrow” circles to look to their own houses before casting stones, and to consider how the dissemination of “misinformation” can be an issue even in credentialed, institutionalized settings.

Let’s take a few examples of these patterns:

Climate change

A vast amount of energy and funding is directed at addressing the problems of climate misinformation. The overwhelming majority of the focus here is on climate denialism, a category of misinformation prevalent on the political right. This focus therefore overlooks highbrow misinformation surrounding climate change skewed in favor of mainstream progressive narratives, which tend towards alarmism and catastrophism, as well as simplistic morality tales aimed at condemning capitalism and corporations.

This highbrow misinformation includes reporting and punditry that encourage the widespread but mistaken ideas that climate change is likely to cause human extinction or civilizational collapse, that it is forecast to make the world poorer than it is now, that deaths from natural disasters have increased as a consequence of climate change, that a small number of corporations produce the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions, and that fossil fuel companies receive vast state subsidies. To the extent that large numbers of people hold such beliefs, it is not because of right-wing denialists. It is because mainstream reporting on the topic is often highly misleading.

Such misleading reporting is not immaterial. For example, one survey from 2023 suggested that nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 16-25 endorsed the statement that “Humanity is doomed” due to climate change, with more than half (52%) claiming that they are hesitant to have children as a result. A study in the same year in Canada reported nearly half (48%) of young people saying that they also think humanity is doomed.

Gender Parity

Several years ago, Jordan Peterson went extremely viral in part due to his Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman. One of the simple points that Peterson made in the interview is that the widely reported gender pay gap (e.g., that women earn 85 cents for every dollar a man earns) refers to an average pay disparity that doesn’t control for differences such as industry, occupation, experience, education, working hours, and so on. This means that the mere existence of the pay disparity doesn’t prove discrimination.

In the aftermath, I spoke to many ordinary people (especially guys) who were blown away by Peterson’s observation and felt that they had been lied to by mainstream media and politicians on this issue. On the one hand, this was a surprising reaction because the points that he made were obvious to anyone even moderately knowledgeable about these things, not to mention anyone familiar with what conservatives think. On the other hand, the feeling was understandable, given that the mainstream presentation of this issue is highly misleading.

By presenting the pay gap as proof of gender-based discrimination, or as part of an argument for why women deserve “equal pay for equal work,” the mainstream presentation often falsely implies that men and women are being paid radically different amounts for doing the same job. This likely explains why so many people seem to be misinformed about this, and why Peterson’s arguments could come as an explosive revelation to so many.

Youth Gender Medicine

For several years, I assumed that there was a lot of high-quality medical evidence supporting the efficacy and safety of youth gender medicine (i.e., treatments like “puberty blockers” and hormone therapy for young teens), as well as evidence suggesting that those who don’t get specific treatments are at high risk for suicide. I thought this because I’m the sort of person who generally trusts what expert organizations, academics, professional journalists, and those in my social network (mostly, highly-educated progressives) say about things.

Given this, I was surprised when the Cass Review was published in the UK, clearly demonstrating that the scientific evidence for much of the mainstream discourse surrounding youth gender medicine is extremely weak.

As Helen Lewis points out in The Atlantic, there has been a powerful “liberal misinformation bubble” surrounding youth gender medicine. This has been reinforced by many authoritative figures’ incessant repetition of the unsupported claim that children are likely to kill themselves unless they transition. But it has also been upheld by powerful social pressures in place for several years that stigmatized anyone who challenged this apparent consensus. For example, a former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health has likened skepticism of youth gender medicine to Holocaust denial.

Race, Ethnicity, and Crime

For many years, I also assumed that all discourse about the over-representation of Pakistani-heritage men in “grooming gangs” in the UK was part of a sinister disinformation campaign by the far right. I thought this because a prominent Home Office Report in 2020 strongly implied that any concerns about the over-representation of this group in perpetrating such crimes were at odds with reliable evidence, as did multiple mainstream outlets. Although I was aware that some prominent people had claimed differently, many of them (e.g., Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson) strike me as extremely unreliable and racist, so I didn’t trust what they said.

Given this, I was surprised when I read Baroness Casey’s recent in-depth report on this issue. She points out just how bad and misleading the mainstream reporting on this topic has been, with a culture of “denial” and “flawed data… used repeatedly to dismiss claims about ‘Asian grooming gangs’ as sensationalized, biased or untrue.” For example, the official Home Office Report from 2020 alleged that “the ethnicity of group-based CSE [child sexual exploitation] offenders is in line with… the general population, with the majority of offenders being White.” This “finding” from the report was then repeatedly quoted in other official reports and in the mainstream media. As Casey points out, the actual data provides no support for such conclusions. In two-thirds of cases, the ethnicity of perpetrators has simply not been recorded, which, she argues, is itself an “appalling” scandal and “major failing” partly rooted in politically-motivated evasion. “Instead of examining whether there is disproportionality in ethnicity or cultural factors at play in certain types of offending,” she notes, “we found many examples of organizations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions, or causing community cohesion problems.” Moreover, in several areas where data has been collected (Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, and West Yorkshire), it shows “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation.”

Understanding Highbrow Misinformation

Of course, these examples are far from an exhaustive list of cases of highbrow misinformation. (For other relatively clear-cut examples, one can look at reporting on how 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, how maternal mortality rates have dramatically risen in the last twenty years in the United States, claims about global happiness rankings, and much establishment punditry and reporting surrounding the pandemic).

There is a general pattern here in the dissemination of material. Highbrow misinformation primarily misinforms audiences not through explicit falsehoods but through forms of communication that select, omit, frame, and contextualize information in misleading ways, signal-boosting some facts, de-emphasizing others, placing real statistics in deceptive contexts, and soliciting commentary from experts offering preferred opinions. Ruxandra Teslo calls this “Haut Bourgeois Propaganda,” which contrasts with the kind of “brute misinformation” (i.e., outright lies and fake news) often associated with lowbrow sources and alternative media.

A second feature of my examples of highbrow misinformation is that they are all designed to favor politically progressive narratives. There are multiple reasons for this. There also is such a thing as progressive misinformation that isn’t highbrow, but what is of overwhelming significance is educational polarization.

Over the past couple of decades, people with university (and especially advanced) degrees have become increasingly culturally progressive, while those without degrees have shifted to become more supportive of culturally conservative, often populist politics. This means that the highly-educated, credentialed professionals who staff our most prestigious institutions, including our knowledge-producing institutions, typically share culturally progressive attitudes and values. Even non-populist conservative politicians usually have much more progressive cultural views than ordinary voters.

The result is a homogeneity of outlook in institutions. Institutions of knowledge are based around the idea that, although biases can be powerful at the individual level, they tend to cancel out at the collective level—people tend to be pretty good at unmasking and criticizing other people’s biases. The problem is that this process breaks down in contexts where everyone or almost everyone has the same biases. When that happens, individual biases don’t cancel each other out; they compound and reinforce each other. And that is the case in many of our established knowledge-producing institutions today.

In general, highbrow information environments often create a culture that discourages people from communicating truths in tension with progressive ideology or correcting falsehoods supportive of it.

How Bad Is Highbrow Misinformation?

From experience, even highly-educated professionals who acknowledge the existence of highbrow misinformation mostly downplay its harms. One reason for this is contrastive: when you compare the flaws of the highbrow information environment with its main rivals (alternative and “populist” media, conspiracy theory culture, TikTok feeds, etc.), it comes out looking pretty good. I will return to this point below.

However, another influential argument is simply that the effects of highbrow misinformation, even when real, are benign or even positive. This goes hand in hand with the idea that most highbrow misinformation is “well-intentioned.” If one thinks that climate change, transphobia, gender inequality, racism, and so on are crises, then maybe misleading communication is fine if it leads people to take them seriously.

This attitude is another critical factor driving highbrow misinformation. In many cases, academics, reporters, pundits, and politicians believe that conveying selective or simplified messages—“noble lies” or at least noble half-truths—will cause audiences to support noble causes.

This attitude is pernicious.

First, the popular idea that progressive misinformation is “well-intentioned” whereas non-progressive misinformation is “ill-intentioned” is shockingly self-serving. Most people who communicate misleading ideas will convince themselves that they are doing so for some higher purpose or noble ideal. That’s why it’s important to enforce norms across the board rather than letting people or factions police their own behaviour. This includes basic norms of honesty, accuracy, and respect for one’s audience.

Second, people need to be able to trust experts and establishment knowledge-producing institutions. If such institutions uphold a culture that tolerates or even encourages misleading communication when it aligns with progressive values, that trust will evaporate. In this sense, any short-term political benefits that highbrow misinformation might have will be outweighed by growing institutional mistrust and resentment among a diverse public with different values and ideological allegiances. I suspect that this is a significant factor explaining why so many people have lost trust in institutions like universities and legacy media in recent decades.

Finally, for all the examples of highbrow misinformation I have listed, they are scandals! It’s terrible if large numbers of people mistakenly believe that humans are doomed due to climate change, or that they inhabit a society where men and women are being paid radically different amounts for doing the same job, or that they can’t trust establishment institutions to investigate topics whenever they connect to progressive values or taboos among educated elites. These are not trivial issues. And it is an extreme indictment of our institutions that the people who identify and object to such institutional failures are often stigmatized more than those who participate in them.

How Should We Respond?

For these reasons, I think it’s partly understandable that, when some people discover that the establishment presentation of many issues is highly misleading, they become angry, outraged, resentful, and sometimes “radicalized.” They come to think that they are being systematically lied to, assuming that the rot might go extremely deep. If people would lie about some things, they think, maybe they would lie about everything.

Nevertheless, although this dynamic can partly explain why people lose trust in establishment knowledge-producing institutions, it cannot explain why so many people embrace far worse information sources. This includes most of “alternative” media and the increasingly influential cranks, conspiracy theorists, and bigots who thrive within this space.

It’s noteworthy also that for almost all examples of highbrow misinformation documented above, their detection and critique comes from people working within establishment institutions. In other words, the primary way that anyone can discover the truth about topics like climate change, grooming gangs, youth gender medicine, or anything else, relative to which misinformation (including highbrow misinformation) can be identified, is by relying on credentialed experts and professional journalists operating within these institutions.

This doesn’t mean that nobody operating within the world of contrarian punditry or alternative media ever says anything true. But usually when figures in alternative media make legitimate critiques of establishment narratives, they’re drawing on knowledge produced by establishment institutions. For example, when Elon Musk decided to turn his attention to the issue of grooming gangs in the UK, almost all of the actual “evidence” he and others on the far right cited came from official government reports and professional journalists operating within establishment institutions. When Musk and his allies did introduce genuinely new information into the conversation not reported by establishment sources, it overwhelmingly involved absurd falsehoods and fake news.

Ultimately, this shouldn’t be surprising.

Discovering the truth about complex issues is extremely challenging. The default state of political debate and public opinion involves wholesale capitulation to prescientific intuitions, tribal mythology, and ideological delusion. To overcome such ignorance and misperceptions, you need hard-won, fragile institutions that can support activities like careful data collection, scientific research, investigative journalism, and fact-based reporting. The thriving world of “alternative media” has not created such institutions, or even shown any evidence that it recognizes their necessity. Instead, it has mostly abandoned the project of uncovering and reporting knowledge altogether.

Sometimes, such observations are used to dismiss the significance of highbrow misinformation, or to argue that establishment institutions are sufficiently diverse and self-correcting that there is nothing to worry about. I hope it’s clear from what I’ve written already that I disagree with this. Our institutions need urgent reform. They need more ideological diversity and stronger norms against pernicious forms of motivated reasoning and progressive groupthink. But “reform” is different from destruction.

In other words, highbrow misinformation is a huge institutional problem. But it’s a solvable problem, not an excuse to replace our only hope for acquiring knowledge in complex, modern societies with an informational state of nature dominated by charlatans, demagogues, and bullshitters.

A version of this essay originally appeared in Conspicuous Cognition.

Dan Williams is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He works on issues at the intersection of science, politics, and technology. He blogs at www.conspicuouscognition.com.

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