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Jesse Singal is cohost of the podcast Blocked and Reported, author of the newsletter Singal-Minded, and a contributing writer at The Dispatch. His first book is The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, and he is working on his second, which is about the American debate over youth gender medicine.
In this week’s episode, Yascha Mounk and Jesse Singal explore whether wokeness is over, the future of the Democratic Party, and why social science is in crisis.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I feel like you and I are part of a small—and rapidly diminishing—band of people who were very concerned about some of the identitarian excesses on the left but are also very outspoken about our concerns about the way in which the Trump administration is attacking the institutions of American democracy and imposing its own culture war on the United States. How do you feel about the intellectual landscape at the moment? How optimistic or pessimistic are you that there’s still a space for people who can walk and chew gum at the same time? How do you think this debate is going to play out?
Jesse Singal: I mean, I’m fairly optimistic—mainly because so many people are criticizing Trump. I actually think it was the tariffs, of all things, that tipped it for a subset of people who were maybe open to Trump but then realized there’s just no one at the wheel.
I’ve been disappointed, though, by how some of the anti-woke publications and figures haven’t really responded to this. And this gets tricky. As writers—or in your case, as a public intellectual—I don’t think there’s an obligation to respond to every new outrage in the moment. That’s sort of a Twitter thing, right? Like, five minutes after a mass shooting: why haven’t you tweeted about this?
But some of the stuff that happened early in the Trump administration—like sending people to Salvadoran torture prisons without due process—is just absolutely grotesque. According to Cato, many of these people had done nothing wrong and were simply seeking asylum through legal means. There have also been smaller-scale cancellations. You had that classic story about a guy losing his job because someone misinterpreted what he was doing. I’ve written about unfair campus crusades. Katie Herzog and I, on our podcast, have talked about friends getting fired from media jobs. Those stories matter. The epistemic and moral health of liberal institutions is important. And maybe their degradation played some role in getting us to this moment. But it can’t possibly be that you care about an electrician getting fired under unfair circumstances, and not about people being sent to Salvadoran torture prisons under unfair circumstances.
Especially from a free speech perspective, now there seems to be something going on. The administration at this point, when it comes to foreign students, seems to just be targeting everyone. I don’t fully understand it, but for a while it was definitely the case—especially with Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts student.
Mounk: Right. She published, with several co-authors, an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper. I have to admit, I didn’t read it. I’m sure there may be things in the op-ed I disagreed with, but it sounded pretty anodyne.
Singal: I read it. Yeah, it’s anodyne. And yeah, she’s grabbed off the streets of Somerville and shipped off to Louisiana—and she’s free now, thank God. But it’s very clear there’s an effort to target pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel activism. This was even before that interesting story came out in The New York Times about Project 2025. And then there was this Project Esther. You can’t claim to care about free speech and then not talk about a threat of this magnitude.
I do think some people have responded by pointing out that technically, someone here on a student visa or green card doesn’t have the exact same rights as a U.S. citizen. But that’s slicing the salami too thin. This is clearly an attack on their free speech rights. And it’s horrific.
I think you and I both know people at The Free Press and have good relationships with them. I’ve criticized them for not coming out swinging a bit more. They’ve done some good reporting on the ramifications of all this, but I think it’s tricky. If you’re an anti-woke figure or an anti-woke publication, you’re going to pick up a subset of folks who are either Trump supporters or “burn it all down” types—or both. I think you and I are fundamentally institutionalists. We don’t want to burn it all down—because, however flawed institutions are, whatever rises from the ashes will be worse.
Mounk: I think that’s the fundamental dividing line in universities at the moment. I’m well aware of the serious shortcomings and failings of American universities. I think there’s a real reason why they went from having the support of a majority of the U.S. population to only about a third. Professors and university presidents should spend more time looking in the mirror and reflecting seriously on how they can regain that trust. But any administration that genuinely wants to remedy those failings should aim to reform and strengthen these institutions. What the Trump administration has done, clearly, is make a partisan calculation—rational, perhaps, but not moral—that these places will always be somewhat hostile to them. So rather than try to reform them, they’d rather weaken them by any means possible.
As you’re saying, I’m not a “burn it all down” kind of guy. I think that approach is very bad—for the people doing good work in those institutions, and for the long-term interests of the United States. Not to mention the interests of people around the world with cancer or other conditions who rely on continued scientific progress.
Now, to speak to the broader space—we’re in a weird spot, and I feel a bit torn. For two reasons.
First, I think there’s a group of anti-woke figures whose identity, first and foremost, was always to be anti-woke. Many of them have been shamefully silent on Trump—or outright endorsed him, even called for his re-election. I never saw myself as part of that crowd. My first identity—the thing I became known for—was warning about the threat that populists, particularly on the right, pose to liberal democracy. One of the reasons I was so exercised by the excesses on the left was that I believed they reinforced, rather than weakened, those right-wing forces—at least electorally. And I have to say, the people I’ve felt closest to over the last few years—the people I’ve felt intellectual kinship with—have actually been very good. So yes, there’s the Dave Rubins of the world, who’ve completely gone over to Trump. But I don’t know him. Those are not people I ever saw myself in the same category as. A lot of the thoughtful center-left—and some center-right—thinkers who are concerned about identitarian trends on the left, but also about Trump and his first term, have actually been very consistent.
That’s true for institutions, too. Take the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), for example. Every day on Bluesky or Twitter, someone says, why haven’t you spoken out about X? And then you check their feed—or their website—and you see they already have.
Singal: There’s this view among the Bluesky blob that folks like Matt Yglesias, you and I are all secretly reactionary or fascist. And they’ve been saying that forever. But yeah, the people I respect—and in New York, the people I actually know in real life—folks like you, Mike Pesca, Katie Herzog—I think we’ve had the appropriate response.
I think people are still very mad that, during the Trump years—2016 to 2020—there was a real liberal cultural hegemony. It was not even liberal, that was the whole point. I don’t even want to use the word “wokeness” because people jump down my throat for that. We were pushing back against some stuff that genuinely seemed bad at the time. And some people haven’t forgiven us for that. There’s even been this recent spate of five-year retrospectives about the Harper’s letter. To this day, the response to it still kind of baffles me. But I think there’s this weird fixation. A group of folks still, in 2025, seem convinced that the center left is the root of all problems.
Mounk: The Harper’s letter is a great example. That’s over 200 signatories. There was an attempt to imply that most of them haven’t spoken out about Trump. I think it’s very hard to find anybody on that list who is not clearly opposed to Trump. I’m sure among 200 people, there must be two or three exceptions. It would be strange if there wasn’t.
Singal: Well, in one spreadsheet a lefty publication made, they put Martin Amis. The problem there is that he died in 2023, so he has not spoken out against the Trump administration.
Mounk: How dare he. One other problem I have, as somebody who makes editorial decisions in my own writing and on this podcast, is how to think about adding something to the discourse. I could write a denunciation of whatever the Trump administration did yesterday—every day of the four years that Trump is in office. By and large, it would have something to say and would be fair. So far, at least, they have done something pretty outrageous practically every day of the administration. The problem is that a thousand other people are doing that as well. I’m not a primary news source. I don’t think people go to this podcast or to my writing to understand what happened yesterday in Washington, D.C.
I heartily recommend a subscription to The New York Times, or for that matter The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post, in order to do that. Or you can look at BBC News or whatever. That’s just not my role in the discourse. My role is to add something to the conversation, to add a level of analysis, to speak to a subject that may be under-covered, to look out for some of the ideological blind spots within partisan bubbles.
I find it hard to maneuver between those two things. I basically try to write an article that expresses my concern about what’s going on with the Trump administration every third article I write, and then try to do two articles that might be about just an intellectual subject that easily gets lost.
As we’re recording this, I just published an article about how the definition of extraversion is often misleading, and I propose a new way of thinking about extraversion. I think it’s important to take that liberty, to just talk about an interesting intellectual subject that’s got nothing to do with anything. But I find myself sort of torn. Each time I’m like: do I want to write the article—which I did recently—about the attempt by the administration to go after international students at Harvard? Which, having been an international student at Harvard, is also close to my heart. I don’t think that article added that much to the discourse. I hope I did that as well as anybody else. I hope I made some interesting points within that article. But there was a huge outpouring of articles saying more or less the same thing. Steven Pinker had a very good article saying something similar in The New York Times.
So I try to sort of balance over time. But it’s hard. How are you thinking about that, in terms of what you’re covering on your podcast and in your writing?
Singal: It’s tricky. I think you and I both have the benefit of being known for other stuff. You’re known for a lot of stuff, but populism in general. That offers you opportunities to write about this through a more informed and academic lens, rather than just being mad all the time.
In my case, I don’t know. I’m working on a book about the youth gender medicine debate. A fair amount of my newsletter ends up being about that. I think there’s still room to criticize stuff on the left. But yeah, once in a while, when I feel like it, I will chime in about Donald Trump. I think in my case, the vast majority of the people who pay for my newsletter are anti-Trump. But they’re not paying me to hear another anti-Trump opinion.
And I agree with you, the most important stuff going on here is the tireless work of those much-reviled mainstream outlets. At the moment, no one else is going to produce news and break news about the Trump administration other than The New York Times and The Washington Post and The Atlantic, whatever their flaws.
The other thing is that you and I or any other writer have one life to live. If I only focused on Trump, I would go crazy. It’s just this constant source of outrage and moral grotesquerie.
Just one example—on the podcast we talked about his meme coin scam, or the meme coin scams in general. That’s an area where our podcast, which focuses on online culture, collides with Trump stuff. So yeah, I think you need to pick your spots. I think some people have built careers out of being mad at Republicans and mad at conservatives. They’re doing their thing, and some of them are making a good living off it. That’s just not what we do. I think I have firm incentives in place keeping me from doing that.
Mounk: You were saying earlier that you try to avoid the term “woke.” I mostly try to avoid the term as well, though it is the most economical way of communicating what we mean by identitarian politics on the left.
Now, James Lindsay—who’s gone through an interesting journey over the last years into various parts of the political spectrum—has recently, in a slightly surprising and brave way, pushed back against the most destructive, and sometimes just the most outright racist and anti-Semitic corners of the online right. He is calling this the “woke right.” The implication of this is that there’s a kind of parallel between the left and the right both in the ideology and perhaps in some of the mechanisms of ideological enforcement that were strong on the woke left, that are now consuming much of the right of the American political spectrum.
What do you think about the term? I’m a little torn on it, for reasons I might formulate in a minute, but do you think it’s a fruitful term? Do you think that term helps to reveal something?
Singal: I think it’s useful to point out that ideologues of all stripes engage in the same tactics and have a lot of the same cognitive tendencies. There’s that famous line about how Nazi officers and Soviet officers ended up often getting along. They found out they weren’t that different. That’s an extreme example.
I guess “woke right” is a useful shorthand way to talk about it. It’s tricky to describe the MAGA movement because—I don’t know how historically unusual it is—it’s just resentment. There’s no there there. Tariffs go up: “that’s great.” Tariffs go down: “that’s great.” Art of the Deal, all that. The far left has a set of sacred beliefs. I think Jonathan Haidt’s view of sacred beliefs is very useful. Wander into a MAGA social setting and try to explain that there isn’t some insane immigrant murder crime wave in the United States, that actually that’s overstated—whatever you think about the migration problems under Biden. I’m not sure “woke right” is as useful as just the pre-existing frameworks we have, but I do think there’s something to it in the sense that if you violate one of their sacred cows, they will freak out at you.
But I also think the problem is that when you and I interact with MAGA people, it’s mostly on X. And that’s not what matters. That’s not who tipped the election. As always, it’s lower-propensity, lower-information voters out there in the parts of the country we don’t see much. I don’t know what they’re thinking. I think some of them are going to turn on Trump.
Mounk: I think I have a similar instinct, actually. So let’s separate out a few different things. I think there are two similarities between the woke left and the woke right, and one dissimilarity. I think “woke right” is a good shorthand to call attention to the similarities. But I think the similarities are actually shared with a broader family of political movements, making the term a little less useful than it seems.
Let’s start with the similarities. One is just what you brought up—an imperative of loyalty. If you’re part of the right and in good standing, you’ve got to like Trump. The moment you criticize Trump, you’re expelled. Now, the left is often less good at loyalty, but there’s an element of that as well. I’ve been listening to the Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson book about Biden. Anybody who suggested in 2023 or 2024 that perhaps Biden is not quite up to the job got a loyalty response from a lot of mainstream Democrats—who I don’t think were woke.
Singal: For instance, you have to say “Black Lives Matter.” Of course, black lives matter, but even in mainstream lefty places, it got pretty culty. Folks got elevated as thought leaders who didn’t have much to say or who weren’t particularly rigorous. That’s that same sort of conformity and “say the line, Bart.” I think that definitely happened in mainstream Democratic spaces.
On the right, it’s now all just centered on one guy. The only ideological prerequisite is a belief in Trump. There’s really nothing else there—except, maybe, a dislike of most immigrants. Except, if Trump changed his tune on this tomorrow—which he won’t—I really think they would just follow him and say, now we like migrants. So it’s a strange movement.
Mounk: That’s a similarity, but it’s a similarity that is shared with many highly-mobilized political movements in polarized societies. If you criticized AMLO in Mexico, you would get the same kind of response. If you criticized Modi in India—especially if you were somebody who was formerly a supporter of his—you would definitely get the same response. You can keep giving other examples like that. So there is a similarity here between the woke left and the woke right, but it’s kind of a subgroup of a much broader thing.
I think the same is true about some of those cancellation mechanisms. Something that I’ve argued all along about the deeply illiberal culture of how to deal with minor disagreements on the left is that—not the punishments—but the mechanisms are reminiscent of other moments of moral panic or other moments of ideological enforcement in human history. The extreme examples of that are the witch burnings in Salem, Massachusetts, or the Cultural Revolution. There are milder examples of that, where people also get kicked out of polite society in various ways, but without the gruesome consequences that it had in 17th-century Massachusetts or in mainland China in the 1960s.
And again, I think it’s worth pointing out the hypocrisy: You hated this stuff on the left and now, if someone disagrees with Trump in any kind of way, or if one tries to police the right so that the people who are making the most racist or the most anti-Semitic expressions are isolated, then actually, they’re not pure, nor a member of your movement, and you’re going to expel them and say that they are a horrible person. That’s a horrible mechanism that I think is similar to some of the stuff that happened on the left over the last years. But again, there’s nothing specific to wokeness in that. It’s just a subcategory of a broader set of human instincts we always have to guard against.
The third point: the reason why I’m slightly skeptical of the concept of the woke right is that I think the woke left (not my favorite term for it—I prefer “the identity synthesis”) was an ideological movement. I think it did have a set of actual ideas that stood at the core of it. You can’t understand the movement unless you understand the intellectual history of it and the actual ideas. I don’t think that there’s any real similarity between the ideology of the woke left and the ideology of the woke right.
Singal: I guess I’m not entirely sure what the ideology of this so-called woke left was. It was broadly anti-racist, anti-bad things, pro-good things. Sometimes some members of it would say abolish or defund the police, but then sometimes other members would say, no, no, no, we don’t mean anything like that. So I’m not really sure exactly what the ideological project was other than this weird grab bag of sort of bougie progressive causes. Do you think there was more to it than that? I do think it was more ideologically coherent than Trumpism.
Mounk: No political movement has a set of unanimously accepted political positions, and every political movement has some ideological range. Even Marxist movements—which were very heavily coordinated, in part through things like the Socialist International and in part through very heavy repression, both within Marxist movements where they weren’t in government and of course particularly in countries where they were in government—had real range. There’s a famous debate between Karl Kautsky and Georg Lukács about whether or not reformist social democracy was acceptable, or whether you had to have a revolutionary strategy, and so on.
I think that two of the people we both like to criticize—and perhaps a little bit mock—Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi probably have some significant differences in their views from each other. And certainly, both of them are a lot less sophisticated than the founders of the movement, like Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw and others.
Now, I do believe that there are some fundamental commitments that broadly apply to most people—at least to those who are in that tradition. The first is that the primary prism—the primary way to understand the world—is to look at it through identity categories like race, gender, and sexual orientation.
The second is a deep rejection of universal political principles. These ideologies are really founded in the rejection of movements like the civil rights movement that said: we’ve been excluded from participation in the facially neutral principles of the American Constitution. The Founders said all men are created equal, but that’s certainly not what the black experience in America has been like. And the solution is to live up to these principles.
I think at the core of woke ideologies is the opposite: the solution is not to live up to those principles—it’s actually to create a society where how we treat each other, both in our private lives, and even how the state or various institutions treat us, should explicitly depend on the kind of identity group into which we’re born.
Singal: Well, I think this was part of the problem. People said, don’t use “wokeness.” What is wokeness? But if you were in progressive communities from 2015 on, it was clear that this set of rules and norms involving identity had emerged. A lot of it really was: whoever is more oppressed wins. It sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but that really was how it worked. And it was always such a dead end, because it’s so complicated.
First of all, the more oppressed person might just be wrong on the merits. Second of all, it’s hard to figure out who’s more oppressed—you need some sort of complicated intersectional matrix.
There was plenty I was wrong about back then—but I think some of us identified that and wrote about it. Actually, Matt Bruenig and Freddie deBoer were two lefty thinkers who wrote about that very early on. They were just sort of ignored. And we were ignored. I think there’s less of it today, and I think everyone’s quietly embarrassed by it but won’t admit how bad it got and how off-putting it was. I don’t think you can necessarily draw a straight line from that to someone like Trump.
I do think anyone—and this is still true in sort of hard-left online spaces—who encounters this, who’s just a normal and average American, will find it really off-putting—this sort of oppression Olympics and the callousness with which people act.
The MAGA right is quite callous in different and much more consequential ways now. But we were just not able to have a left that was welcoming and open-minded and could tolerate dissent. Do you think that now that there is the unifying force of Trump 2.0, there’s going to be an actual reckoning—at least within the Democratic Party? One example is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson—their book Abundance is not about wokeness per se, but it is about having a positive vision and not just being basically against anything potentially productive.
Mounk: The book has quickly been condemned by huge numbers of progressives. It sort of polarized what, before that, was a somewhat technocratic debate into these very clear camps within the Democratic Party. I broadly agree with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on these issues. But there are a lot of people in the broader Democratic coalition who have positioned themselves very strongly against it. So, two observations.
The first: I share your sense that there hasn’t been an intellectual reckoning, and I don’t think there’s been a political reckoning with those years. I wrote The Identity Trap in part because I thought this would be a serious intellectual debate for 20, 25 years. I’ve been struck that on many of the issues that were at the forefront of the debate five years ago, there’s now a weird silence.
It’s like: Oh, nobody really ever thought that. Why would you think that? It’s just been shunted off without actually reckoning with those positions. Now, I think the problem is that that’s true on a couple of particularly toxic political positions—like the idea of defunding the police—but the basic ideological infrastructure, the basic assumptions about how the world works, actually remain roughly the same as they were before.
So I think, in the next political debate, we’re quickly going to end up back in really unpopular positions. Because both the basic structure of how the Democratic Party is organized—with huge influence from activist groups claiming to speak for underrepresented demographics but actually run and funded by very affluent people with very advanced degrees—leads the party in the wrong direction. They haven’t actually reckoned more deeply with some of the ideological roots of how they ended up in those very unpopular political places.
The second thing I’ll say is this: I worry that Trump being in office, and Trump doing some pretty extreme things, makes it much harder to have this reckoning. I think there was a moment in the immediate aftermath of the electoral defeat of Kamala Harris where it felt like we were going to have that reckoning, and it felt like there was going to be a course correction. But as soon as Trump took office and started doing pretty extreme things, there’s the sense that the only thing the Democratic electorate should be doing is not picking internal fights, not trying to move where the party is, not trying to revise its message to reach new voters in 2028. It’s just: Trump is bad in this way, and that way, and what we’re doing here is wrong. They also often defend pretty bad positions or associate themselves with quite unpopular people.
I think, in a lot of this, we need some subtlety. We need to defend Harvard against the attacks on the institution—as I’ve done in my writing—and also recognize that there are some genuine problems at Harvard that need fixing. We need to defend students who are being deported without any due process, in some cases for reasons that seem clearly spurious. We also need to be able to say that some of the pro-Palestinian protests—whatever the justice of the underlying cause—have broken university rules, likely broken laws, and used coercion to intimidate members of the university community who don’t agree with their point of view in ways that are quite worrying. I think that level of subtlety is just very hard to sustain in the face of the attack from Trump.
So I worry that—certainly in terms of what MSNBC sounds like today, but probably in terms of what a lot of CNN sounds like today, and it’s a little early to predict, but probably in terms of what the Democratic nominee is going to sound like in 2028—we’re not really going to have distanced ourselves from a lot of the most unpopular positions. We can talk about that stuff in a bit. Perhaps on something like the participation of people who’ve undergone male puberty in female sports. Perhaps. I’m not even sure about that. But not sort of one level further down.
Singal: There’s all the dynamics of how the primary system works, and you could end up with a not-great candidate. I think I’m more optimistic, just because there are so many people. Well, there’s two things. So there’s “the groups,” right? The activist groups who have done a little bit of soft extortion over the years. I forget where this came from—I think it was an Ezra Klein column—but it’s like: It would be a shame if you disagreed with our group and we had to come out and call you racist. I think mainstream Democratic types in D.C. are just not going to abide by that anymore. I think those accusations have lost their bite.
I also think there are a lot of people who really want money and power. I’m making a market-based argument here, but there’s a lot riding on Democrats’ ability to have power. A lot of people really want that to happen, and I think they recognize that what has been going on is not working.
I guess what worries me the most is people saying, how could you say the Harris campaign was too far to the left? She was so moderate and centrist. I find it deranged, because videos exists. We know what she said in 2019 and 2020.
So I just hope they can find someone who’s had a long, steady career of being moderate. And being moderate doesn’t mean you can’t talk about economic unfairness or important issues like housing—it just means not sticking to positions that are 80/20 issues where you’re on the 20 side. I hope Democrats start to see that as: If you’ve done that, you’re not a good candidate for national office. I’m worried there’s the top-down thing versus the grassroots and who they like. Maybe the grassroots will continue to think AOC is a really promising presidential candidate, and that’s where we’ll be at. I just hope not.
Mounk: It’s interesting, I actually think it’s less important where you were in the past. Ideally, you’re not deeply defined and marked by very unpopular positions you’ve taken in the past. But I think it’s more about being willing to take on the parts of a party that are wedded to very unpopular positions. I don’t think the problem with Kamala Harris was that she said really unpopular things in 2019 and 2020. I think a lot of the problem was that she wasn’t willing to proactively distance herself from them in 2024.
Singal: The malpractice of not being able to say what you would do differently and not throwing Joe Biden under the bus, which was her only path forward, will be, I think, written about just as a massive world-historical event. It was horrible.
Mounk: That’s absolutely true in relation to an incumbent, very unpopular president at the time. But I even mean on cultural issues, it’s just not enough to say, well, in 2019 and 2020 I was speaking in ways that were read as very unpatriotic, and now I’m saying I’m patriotic. I think you have to actually be willing to say, hey, I was wrong about these things, and the people in the party who are taking these positions are wrong.
There’s so much concern about coalition management in the Democratic Party—which is understandable. It’s partially rooted in the American political system, where you have to wield these very broad coalitions. But I think what people are thinking is: look, she seems afraid to go on Joe Rogan because her junior staffers are going to criticize her. She seems afraid to criticize those positions. She’s not taking them proactively, but she’s also not telling us explicitly that she’s not going to take them. She seems to be beholden to those parts of the party. How can I trust her, when she’s in office, to look out for the interests and reflect the views of ordinary Americans—rather than still being hostage to those things?
So I think the most important thing for a Democratic candidate in 2028 is going to be: Hey, I have values that are in tune with those of the majority of the population. Perhaps on some things I have a slightly different view, and I’m going to be honest and outspoken about that. But I’m actually going to say what I think. Part of that is saying some stuff that’s going to piss off the left of my party. And I’m not afraid of that. Both that level of authenticity and that level of courage is important.
One way to think about this is a costly signal. How can I trust a politician to actually stand up for common sense? Because they’re willing to take some incoming in order to do that. And I think the problem is that Harris’s campaign never wanted to send any costly signals, and so people didn’t trust her on anything.
Singal: Yeah, she was caught in this place where she had said certain things in the past, and they were just lingering there. And if she couldn’t address them head-on, she was stuck.
I’m having trouble imagining AOC giving the speech or speeches where she says, look, I got too far out over my skis on these issues, because there are already people on the left who think AOC is not far enough to the left. She’s regularly criticized in socialist spaces. I think someone like her would be in a very difficult position to tackle back.
Mounk: I agree. I’m really not a fan of AOC, and I think it’s a sign of the poverty of the Democratic Party’s bench that on some betting markets she’s currently the favorite for the nomination. There’s even a lot of moderates saying, perhaps she wouldn’t be so bad.
I don’t think she’s likely to do what you said. I don’t think that’s where her ideology is at, and that’s her character. But I think if she were willing to do that and to say, hey, you know what, I was wrong about a bunch of this stuff, and I’ve always been authentic, so I’m going to speak to you honestly about how I was wrong about this, just as I was advocating those positions when I was unpopular in much of the population, I think that actually could be an interesting political positioning. I don’t think she’s likely to do that.
I want to touch on two things that you’ve written about a lot, and you are writing about a lot. Let’s start with social science. You wrote a book a number of years ago about the replication crisis in social science. For people who haven’t heard that conversation: what is the nature of that crisis, and how serious is it? And for people who did listen to that conversation and are curious: what’s the update on that? Do you feel like ten-ish years after we first really started to grapple with this, academia is doing better at avoiding those pitfalls? Or do you think that a lot of social science is still quite compromised by this challenge?
Singal: The argument was simply that a lot of published scientific findings—because of the corner-cutting researchers do, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, and because of certain basic facts about statistics that were underappreciated, that make it easy to confuse noise for signal—and some very popular ideas that found their way to TED Talks, turned out to be maybe not true. When other researchers—or the same researchers—would try to replicate the original findings, they failed to do so. That’s the replication crisis.
Do I think things have improved? Overall, no. There’s still a lot of good discourse about it. There are centers dedicated to replication. So, maybe a mild improvement. My next larger project has been this book on youth gender medicine, where it’s a mix of medical research and psychology research that underpins the practice of giving kids puberty blockers, hormones, and sometimes so-called top surgery. And the stuff I’ve found there—which is all recent papers, mostly published since 2020—is just awful. There’s a lack of quality control at top journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association journals, which is just astonishing.
I try to be the hedgy, reasonable, Yascha-esque guy. So when I say “astonishing,” what I mean is that when you read these papers—and I’m not an expert, I’m not a methods guy, I just had a little bit of training in this in grad school and I know the right questions to ask—these are the sorts of errors and exaggerations you’d be taught about in your first three months of a grad school methods course, or maybe even an undergrad methods course. It’s just a really serious exaggeration of the available evidence, I think.
Mounk: Give us some examples of that. What is a particularly striking and influential paper that had some of those methodological flaws?
Singal: Sure. There was a New England Journal of Medicine paper. I wrote a couple of pieces about this. They pre-registered it. I might not have the numbers exactly right off the top of my head, but they pre-registered and said they were going to look at these eight variables. They predicted that when kids go on hormones, these eight variables were going to improve.
Now, first of all—these were kids at gender clinics, many of whom were also getting psychotherapy or pharmaceuticals, you know, if they had anxiety, depression, or other symptoms often associated with gender dysphoria. So right off the bat, if you don’t control for those other factors—if you just take someone at time T equals zero, time one, time two, time three, and you trace their trajectory, and they improve—or they get worse, for that matter—you don’t know what’s causing it. You can’t use causal language. And yet, they did use causal language. They said the hormones helped.
Meanwhile, they pre-registered eight variables—anxiety, depression, trauma, body image, and suicidality. But six of the eight variables, if I remember correctly, just disappeared between the pre-registration and the paper.
Mounk: What that means is that they said, we’re going to look at these eight variables. Then, the idea of pre-registration is precisely to make it possible for people to check that you’re not setting up the model and the research design in order to make it seem more significant than it is: e.g. adding random variables that somehow get you to a significant result, or dropping things that look like they don’t really fit in with the rest of your analysis.
So the point of a pre-registered study is to say, look, we’re not going to play around to make it look like a significant finding after the fact. We’re telling you—before we have the numbers, before we have the data—which eight factors we’re going to look at.
Then in the published results, they say, hey, these two factors improved, but they don’t talk about the six that were in the pre-registration—which, presumably, one can only guess, didn’t improve. Otherwise, they would have also been included in those published results. Am I understanding this right?
Singal: Yes, yes. They also changed their hypothesis, which is HARKing—Hypothesizing After the Results are Known. So that way, you can search through the data, and any result you find that moves in the right direction, you can say, that was our hypothesis all along—which is not an honest way of doing science.
Some of the improvements were so small we don’t know if they were clinically significant. Not a big deal, but this is not some podunk journal. This is The New England Journal of Medicine. And these are errors that jumped out to someone like me—who, again, is not an expert.
So in terms of my overall view of the state of science and the replication crisis, I’m biased by the fact that I’ve been poking around in an area that has profound problems—I think fairly high-stakes problems. It’s not 20 million kids who are going on these treatments, but they’re serious treatments, and anyone considering them deserves good data.
I’ve been quite disturbed by that. I think at this point, the researchers know who I am and know that I’m writing a book that might be somewhat skeptical of these treatments—but there’s something very broken in public intellectual life when you can publish stuff that’s this shoddy-seeming and then just not answer any follow-up questions about it.
But at root, the problem is with the gatekeepers. For example, they wrote in the paper, we followed our pre-registered study plan, which is just not true. And The New England Journal of Medicine let them write that. They let them make these causal claims that are completely not warranted. And if the editors of The New England Journal of Medicine don’t take their job seriously—where does that leave us?
Mounk: I may be misremembering some of the details here, but another instance I was struck by was that there was a study which had significant taxpayer funding to look at the very important question of suicide risks among gender dysphoric people. I believe that it tried to look at whether that suicide risk would decrease once they were getting cross-hormone treatments, or perhaps even gender reassignment surgeries.
As I recall, the principal author of that study found that it didn’t lead to the improvements that she had hoped for, and then sat on the study and didn’t publish it for many years. I think she even publicly acknowledged that she didn’t publish the study in part because she was worried that it would influence legislation on this issue in a way that runs counter to her views of what would be preferable.
Singal: A few of those details are slightly off, but it’s actually the same team as the one I just described—this federally funded team that published the New England Journal of Medicine study. The woman in question is Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy. The puberty blocker study was sort of the puberty blocker equivalent of the hormone study I just described. And yes, she told Azeen Ghorayshi of The New York Times, we just didn’t publish it because we were worried the results would be weaponized.
As far as the broader replication crisis goes, maybe there have been wonderful advances in some other areas of psychology—although I’m skeptical—but from what I’m seeing, these are still major problems.
There was also a book called Doctored put out by Charles Piller that’s more about medical issues, but there was a huge scandal in the world of Alzheimer’s research. This involved outright fraud rather than the sorts of corner-cutting I’m talking about.
So maybe to tie things together a little bit: I think this whole crisis in expert authority is a disaster in its own right. We should be able to trust the studies that are published. But one of the knock-on effects is that it fuels folks like Trump, who take the burn-it-down approach. We’re now in a situation where RFK Jr.—who is himself a conspiracy theorist—is talking (I haven’t looked in depth at these comments) about the replication crisis, and he’s not entirely wrong. But we should not be in this situation. Part of the reason we are in this situation is because experts have screwed up so badly, so often.
Mounk: I guess there are two different questions here about the broader social science issue. I want to go back to some of the specific things regarding youth gender medicine.
The first is just that in any area of research that is highly ideologically polarized, I now have significant concerns about the trustworthiness of academic findings. I think we see that in all kinds of tests. For example, on certain questions—such as whether various groups (women, ethnic minorities, religious minorities) are discriminated against or not—studies with a positive finding (which is to say, that there is discrimination) tend to have a much lower number of observations, and by some other metrics tend to be much less rigorous, than studies that find there’s no discrimination. That just systematically biases our estimate of how much discrimination there really is in the world in one direction. I think there is some genuine discrimination, but the state of the literature—through the selection effect of what makes it through the publication funnel—just seems to be pushed in one direction or another.
The second problem is that some research gets published not because of ideological bias, but because it’s flashy or headline-grabbing in a way that draws attention. There’s a famous case of Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, who—ironically—was working on various forms of dishonesty, and now appears to have been fired by Harvard Business School over outright data fraud in her publications. Those studies end up making it into the public sphere because they’re headline-grabbing in some way that’s not really ideological.
The third is just the concern of careerism. There’s an Alzheimer’s study, I think, that was neither particularly headline-grabbing at the time, nor particularly ideological, from what I understand. But it made somebody’s career and gave them a lot of social status and standing in their field. It led Alzheimer’s research down the wrong rabbit hole for twenty-something years, because it posited a biological mechanism as the root of Alzheimer’s, which now turns out to likely be mistaken. So those twenty years of research—based on trying to tackle and attack that biological mechanism—has basically been in vain.
Singal: It’s important—and I mention this in my book—that there are those sorts of non-political factors, to the extent anything can be non-political, where a favored theory in an area of science doesn’t have a huge number of experts on one side. If a favored theory catches on early, it has a first-mover advantage, especially if it grabs headlines. And then it becomes very hard to speak out against that theory.
We’re talking about the amyloid plaque hypothesis of Alzheimer’s. I’m not privy to the full history of how it caught on, but yeah—for 20 years, research into Alzheimer’s has been dominated by the idea that these plaques you see in the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers cause the disease, when it could just be that there’s some third factor causing both the symptoms and the plaques. The plaques themselves might not be causing the symptoms. According to the biggest critics of that theory, there was almost this cartel of researchers who kept out folks who disagreed with it.
I saw something a little bit similar—though it’s not as high-stakes—in the implicit association tests. This is the idea that you could give someone a quick computer test that reveals their level of implicit bias or unconscious bias against different groups. There was just this flood of early studies, and then it was off to the races. Pretty soon you get the ABC News special, and you have millions of people taking the test at home. Maybe that’s a similar situation—20 years of effectively wasted research—because in 2025, if you look for practical, rigorous applications of the IAT, they’re just not there. So I think it would be a mistake to view this as strictly political, although I do think a version of the IAT that found most people weren’t racist would not have caught on—because that’s not what the liberals who dominate science and media want to hear.
I think if all this work has taught me anything, it’s just that science is really like any other human enterprise. There’s nothing unique about science or scientists. There’s nothing incorruptible about it. Science done well can bring us knowledge and insights and advances nothing else can—but it’s hard to do it well.
Mounk: There’s a way in which I think these two debates connect, slightly surprisingly: our conversation earlier about whether or not the Democratic Party is going to be able to move away from some of the more identitarian political assumptions—and this debate about how it is that, even in a not particularly politicized field like the biological roots of Alzheimer’s, you can end up getting this allegiance to one theory long beyond when it’s justified.
I think that’s explained by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. What he says is that when you look at Isaac Newton’s explanation of mechanics and gravity—which explains most things on Earth but turns out not to explain some things, like the way in which Venus makes its way around the sun—how is it that scientists slowly come to accept Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which improves upon it? His description is that you start getting these anomalies. You have a scientific model that helps explain a bunch of things, but there are some areas where it doesn’t predict what happens in the world accurately. You try to measure how quickly an apple falls to the ground, and Newton is going to give you the answer. You try to measure what happens in some of those things in outer space, and suddenly those mechanics don’t work anymore. He says that even as scientists become aware of these anomalies, they have real trouble letting go of the original framework—because they have no alternative. They need some way of thinking about the world, some way of trying to figure out how natural forces work. If the best theory we have is Newton’s theory, we’re going to hold on to it until there is a real alternative. Even once there is an alternative, there will be people whose careers and lives depend on the old theory. All of their contributions have been in refining it. And if they suddenly acknowledge that it doesn’t work anymore, they’re likely too old, no longer at the intellectual frontier, too invested in their reputation. They’re just going to be left out in the cold.
That’s why, in order for us to give up on a paradigm that turns out to be erroneous in some important ways, we need an alternative paradigm—and even once we have one, that shift happens, as Kuhn famously said, one funeral at a time.
I’m connecting these two things in this perhaps slightly surprising way because I think what the Democratic Party needs, in order to actually speak a different language, is an alternative paradigm. While I think the Democratic Party has started to recognize some of the shortcomings of the current paradigm, I’m not sure it’s quite embraced a new one.
Then again, when it comes to science, I think the problem is that even once people start to recognize, “Well, we’re not really making progress by using this supposed biological mechanism for Alzheimer’s,” until we have an alternative hypothesis that’s actually useful, we’re going to end up sticking to it. And the person who made their career writing that paper that posited that natural cause is going to try to defend it as much as they can—because they recognize, especially if they’ve committed some scientific fraud, that they’ve got to hold on to it for the sake of their careers.
Singal: I think there’s something to the idea that there’s this new class of Alzheimer’s drugs that were touted as the first meaningful advances in a couple of decades. They do very little, frankly, as far as anyone can tell.
I think that idea of clinging to a theory long after you should, especially in the absence of an alternative theory—with something like Alzheimer’s, it’s particularly tricky, because this isn’t just like, okay, Newton’s theory is basically okay, Einstein’s does a little better at the margins. This is the feeling that you have to almost start from scratch. Or maybe Alzheimer’s isn’t one disease, but a bunch of interrelated conditions. Or maybe—it’s sad to think about—there’s just never going to be a cure. Those are all possibilities.
You can think of all the sociological and psychological reasons people would rather cling to a flailing theory than admit it’s wrong. It’s just—again—science is very human. And we shouldn’t forget that.
In the rest of the conversation, Yascha and Jesse discuss youth gender medicine, and what the recent Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti means for young people with gender dysphoria. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…