IMPORTANT: Choose Your Own Storyline by selecting the appropriate Section that you would like to receive from Forbidden Science

My work will be divided into four sections; you can choose to receive what notifications you want from each

This Substack will be Sectioned. Meaning, you will be able to select to receive posts from just one or more of the following sections. Click “Manage Subscription” → “Sections” to select what you want to receive. I will repeat this instruction a few times in this post.

I have started posting frequently again. I wanted to pull some threads together. OK, all of them. And explain the through-line, as it were.

Brutal honesty. In the coming days, weeks, months, many of you will hate some of my articles. I ardently believe that if you like everything that I write, I’m doing a terrible job. It would mean that I’m playing to one side or another. But the problems run deeper than most of the sides are willing to acknowledge. So I have no choice but to go across sides and make people mad. It’s the only way to get where I believe we as a society need to go.

So I hope you hate some of my articles. That’s good, actually.

Still, at the same time, I also want to give you the opportunity to enjoy the articles you like, and avoid the articles you hate. It would be good, after all, if I could still provide value to those of you who do enjoy some of my content, but not all of it.

Therefore, this Substack will be Sectioned. Meaning, you will be able to select to receive posts from just one or more of the following sections. Click “Manage Subscription” → “Sections” to select what you want to receive. I will repeat this instruction one or two more times in this post.

Suffice to say, for this to work, you will have to reconcile your distaste for some of my articles with your enjoyment with others. This means that, if you are to be a subscriber, you will have to separate the writer from the writing. Some of the views, from some of the other views. That’s up to you, dear reader. I hope you can.

Now, I will first briefly outline what these sections are. After, I will explain them—and how they fit together in my bigger vision. The contradictions are, in my opinion, cosmetic. But, as I said above, I am convinced that it has become more important than ever to say all of it. At minimum, for me. And maybe, just maybe, I can persuade some of you.

The Sections are:

1. Medicine, Science, Technology, and Our Future: This Section can broadly be described as anti-establishment, though I do not like that label. This is about essays on institutions, medicine, science, religion, progressivism, power, and America’s future. Basically, big picture analysis on what’s gone wrong in mainstream institutions and how to fix them. Radical, often. Subversive, sometimes. True, always, at least to the best of my abilities.

2. Health and Nutrition Breakdowns: This Section can broadly be described as pro-establishment, though I do not like that label any more than I did the anti-establishment one. It will contain scientific breakdowns of trending discussions in health and nutrition. This will hold a lot of my old content from my pre-Substack period, but updated. Sunscreen, vitamin D, taurine, creatine, vegan diets, ketogenic diets, seed oils, statins and cholesterol, vaccines, blood pressure and blood pressure medication. And so on. And, I am going to criticize the critics. People who love the first section may hate this one. For instance, I’m not a fan of RFK Jr. Not a fan of Huberman. Not a fan of Midwestern Doctor. And very confused about what is going on at HHS in general. This section is going to be very detailed and precise about the evidence, but will also make exhaustive reference to Section 1. To be clear, if you are a big MAHA person and you read articles from this Section, you may experience a strong desire for the immediate homicide of yours truly. The only thing I ask is that you do your best to suppress it. No Kevin Bass apartment visits. And also probably not subscribe to this Section.

3. Texas Tech Dismissal Story: This Section can broadly be described as war mode, chaos energy, or perhaps most accurately, brutal truth. Document drips, public records, legal matters, and updates related to my dismissal from medical school. Yes, my friends, the full story is being told. The promise land, at last, shall be reached. Now, it may look like a blasted-out hellscape, but I made no promises that it would be pretty, just that we’d get there. Now, if you’re just interested in science or society, try sections 2 or 1, respectively. But if horror is your thing—and you’d like a first-person perspective and commentary about just how blasted-out things really are—you can find that here. The Document Hub related to my dismissal can also be found in this Section.

4. Other Explorations: This Section can broadly be described as “assorted”. Ideas, reflections, experiments on other topics. Stuff like: forgiveness in Christianity. What’s going on in AI for healthcare right now. Startup stuff. FDA, Sarepta, Laura Loomer, Vinay Prasad. Social media victories. Activism. Humiliations of the enemy. I don’t know. Whatever is my occasional inclination, if I feel I must go off-topic from the normal fare. This Section will relate to the other Sections. But it will be less obvious and not fold into them as clearly. If you are a diehard Yours Truly Fan and want to entertain more off-beat or random-ass commentary, you can subscribe to this section. I’m going to try to keep it to a minimum, though. It’s warpath mode rn fr.

Now, the details. But before I do:

This Substack will be Sectioned. Meaning, you will be able to select to receive posts from just one or more of the following sections. Click “Manage Subscription” → “Sections” to select what you want to receive. I will repeat this instruction a few times in this post.

Section 2. Health and Nutrition Breakdowns

I am explaining the sections out of order. Section 1 is the more important section. But Section 2 is what led to Section 1. So I will explain Section 2 first.

Long-time followers will know that when I first started on writing on social media ten years ago, my focus was on obesity and nutrition. Obesity and chronic disease are the main drivers of poor health in the Western world, especially in America. My hope: after being personally devastated by experiences of the politicization of various fields, perhaps we can all agree about what to do about obesity? And so, great, let’s solve the obesity problem! (Lack of politicization was also a major motivation for entering medicine! Sweet summer child!)

My hopes were dashed. After seeing just how horrible most online nutrition information was, my interest in nutrition morphed into an interest in misinformation—long before this became something everyone talked about. Like, if we cannot agree about basic facts about science, how can we solve our problems?

And so, I created a lot of content in this area: dispelling nonsense. Most of it is not available on this Substack. It will be soon, with some edits. In some cases extensive edits and/or radical overhauls.

Now, of course, I was quite naive. It really is as simple as science vs. pseudoscience, right? I may be pretty darn good at reading the scientific literature. I may insist that we concern ourselves with not communicating it poorly. I may say that misinformation is a serious issue. And very well then. All of that may be true. But not everyone is like me. In fact, most people are not. And sometimes one man’s misinformation is another’s scientific fact. Especially in the age of over-credentialed people who are personally deficient in many respects that are relevant to nonsense-avoidance.

And so it turns out that what misinformation is or is not is rather dependent on the opinions of the people who have the biggest influence on the fields in question. Shocker, right? Well, some of these people are quite ideological. Sometimes they are quite not-smart. Yet, when, at the surface level, the things they say appear to be true, or comport to widely held prejudices, that’s that. Game over. Whoever disagrees is spreading misinformation. Even if it’s the truth. Even if every single receipt is brought. Over and over.

It turns out that something like misinformation exists, sure, but as soon as we acknowledge that, the concept soon starts to get abused by… people who want to spread their own misinformation and call the truth misinformation! It’s like, once we started calling things misinformation, the problem of misinformation became 1000x worse.

And now the caveat. I’m detail-oriented but quite conventional. I’m an orthodox science guy. I know I’m not known for that, but that’s for reasons more to do with rhetoric than reality. I’m milquetoast gone nuclear. You must understand. I learned to communicate on social media in order to talk about the boring stuff of nutrition. And I knew it was important. So I learned to communicate in a compelling way. And I became damn good at it. People go berserk. (Lmao.) But it’s all rather really quite boring and typical if I were to present it to you as if in a scientific paper.

All of that is to say: I’m going to sound like an establishment shill. I am not. I’m the opposite. Still, some will think that way and accuse me of it (ur comments will be deleted), but you’d be wrong. I will explain.

Section 1. Medicine, Science, Technology, and Our Future

I am profoundly skeptical of the medical and public health establishments. American science has generally been one of the most powerful sources for good in the world.

We had extraordinarily good people create many of the concepts and institutions we have today. But insane incentives (and people) have converged to create a crisis. And our scientific and institutional inheritance is being progressively degraded and destroyed.

We are standing on a big rug covering termite-infested wood. That rug, we might say, is the fake debates that we have about science. We have these fake debates because people are, quite frankly, dumb. More charitably, we have them because providing fake narratives about science that cohere with dominant cultural and political currents is beneficial to acquire and accumulate power. OK, that’s not charitable. At all. It’s actually horrible. Damn, I’m really doing my best here.

And what about the termite-infested wood that the rug is covering up? And that we’re, um, standing on? You know, the wood that is about to give way beneath our feet?

That’s Turchin’s overproduction. The wealth pump. The depredations of neo-liberalism and progressivism. That’s the exploitative atheocracy of Yarvin. But it’s more than that. That’s the economic precariousness and the glut in the professional-managerial class after we outsourced the American economy to China and shoved everyone into the universities (how else are you going to get job?), even the people who don’t belong, and most of them don’t. Plus, add a little bit of gasoline poured on by social media, i.e., the 21st century’s Gutenberg press. Wars happened because of that damned press. Western civilization was fractured. And we’re here. Again. Post-fracture. Fracturing again. And it came at the worst time. We’re not ready. At all.

Which is to say, in the scientific and media fields, with such a huge glut of people jammed into the same space, competition is at an all-time high. And those who want to win exploit cognitive biases and political current to do so. To end up at the top of this massive status heap? Certainly not by getting a real job: so few of those exist!

In fact, they’ve won. On both sides. They’re fighting each other and winning all the time. And they’re justifying themselves by saying they’re fighting for science. Their existence is necessary, you see. Give them power and money.

But they are absolutely not fighting for science. Not a goddamned single one of them. They are fighting for power. Maybe they always were. But if society is functioning properly, those urges are channeled in productive ways. Western society is not functioning properly. It is falling apart and has created dark forces of self-destruction. And so now the battle intensifies. And, as they say, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

So what I’m saying is: look at this goddamned termite-infested wood. I mean, it’s infested by termites. We’re about to fall through. Do you care? And who the hell put this goddamned rug here? Who is hiding the termite-infested wood? Are they doing it on purpose?

It wasn’t only Fauci or Harvard. Not just Walensky or the NIH or CDC. Sure, they played a huge role. They should have done better. But it’s also RFK Jr. and MAHA. It’s HHS and the antivaxers. This is where I get the unsubscribes. I know. Whatever.

The rug wasn’t put over the wood by the milquetoast scientists, either, though there are plenty of these too who will ask for funding for trash science and publish trash papers. Damn, actually, it’s the milquetoast scientists too. They’re also responsible for the rug.

I’m saying: look at this goddamned wood! We’re about to fall through! Let me do my best to try to put up some pillars beneath. And scream hysterically for the exterminator. Unfortunately, we are going to have to burn down half the house. But I can tell you the blueprint for how to rebuild. That I’m posting on Substack. Fuck, I’m doing my best here. Where the hell else are you going to publish your blueprint for how to rebuild? I guess Substack will have to do.

Section 3. Texas Tech Dismissal Story

In this Section, nuclear blasts will be delivered. And may be received. Maybe laser-guided missile attacks. Not sure exactly. All I know is that my heart had to be hardened before I could write any of this. But once you put your head down, anything is possible guys. I will be experimenting richly with my writing technique to make sure anyone who reads it can survive their way through. It’s going to be fun. The writing part anyway. Can’t say the same about the rest.

Section 4 is a grab bag, so we’ll just skip that.

Conclusion

In conclusion, buckle up and choose a Section that suits you and please do not complain to me about being a pharma shill or antivaxer. I’m something of a right-wing scientist who got ripped out of the Matrix. America is in a lot of trouble.

I will end with a provocative, satirical proposal. The goal is to illustrate just how much our frame influences how we see the world, and science. It’s a joke guys. Though not entirely…