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Text published 07/30/26:

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I’ve also gone back and opened prior articles on the subject:

— “So Friggin’ Likely”: New Covid Documents Reveal Unparalleled Deception.” July 18, 2023. One of several articles co-authored with the staff of Public, on the release of Slack chats between the authors of an influential Nature Medicine article, “The Proximal Origin of SARS CoV-2.” Racket and Public were the first outlets to get hold of those documents.

— “In Their Labs”: Fifteen Illuminating Passages in The Proximal Origin Chats and Emails.” July 18, 2023. See above. More samples from the Proximal Origin chats.

— “Anthony Fauci Was America’s Warmup Dictator.” September 30, 2023. Recounting false statements by Fauci and the censorship of scientists with differing opinions.

If there are other old pieces on this subject I’m forgetting, please let me know. We have to pay the bills, but I’m happy to unlock materials in this area especially.

Mother Jones on Dr. Anthony Fauci:

The diary entries contain plenty of cringeworthy moments—Fauci congratulating himself on how famous he had become, for example, and basking in the attention of female celebrities like Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand. What they don’t contain—much to the dismay of Paul and Fauci’s other critics—is any kind of smoking gun proving that the public health leader deliberately misled the American people.

I wonder what Mother Jones would consider a smoking gun. On February 9th, 2020, appearing on the Newt Gingrich podcast “Newt’s world,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said the idea that Covid-19 came from a lab was a “conspiracy theory… without any scientific basis.”

This was eight days after Fauci took part in a conference call with eleven other prominent scientists, including NIH Director Francis Collins, Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar, UK Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance, Scripps Research Translational Institute Director Kristian Anderson, Germany’s Christian Drosten, University of Sydney Professor Edward Holmes, the University of Edinburgh’s Andrew Rambaut, Tulane Virology Professor Robert Garry, University of Dundee Professor Mike Ferguson, and Ron Fouchier and M.P.G. Koopmans from the Erasmus Medical Center.

Thanks to the diary, we now know that just three of the scientists in that call — Fauci himself, plus the German Drosten and gain-of-function expert Fouchier — advocated for natural origin. Here’s how Fauci characterized the others:

“The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible, and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.”

This is Fauci in writing explaining that 9 of 12 scientists at a key meeting he attended at the beginning of the pandemic felt that “deliberate insertion” of a key mutation was possible, in part because a prominent Chinese scientist known to all had been working on that exact sequencing problem just miles from where the first cases were reported. To repeat the smoking gun line: “Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in [gain-of-function] to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor.”

For Fauci to subsequently say in public that the notion of laboratory release was without “scientific basis” was clearly deceptive. It was deceptive when at a White House briefing on April 18th he said, “the mutations that [Covid] took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” It was deceptive not to tell the public he’d been in constant communication with the authors of a Nature Medicine paper he kept citing as proof of this theory, authors who described him as having “prompted” the paper to begin with.

Fauci’s deception was proven long before the release of the diary, anyway. Three years ago a House Committee released an email by Fauci referencing that same February 1st meeting, noting that scientist described the mutations as “most unusual to have evolved naturally,” resulting in a “suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted.” Why did they think this? In Fauci’s own words:

The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.

This is the public health official who repeatedly told the public he believed the virus evolved naturally and denounced the lab leak theory as ignorant nonsense. Did we ever hear him talk about leading scientists remarking to him about the novelty of the Covid-19 mutation? Did we hear him mention that his close colleague Jeremy Farrar called a 2015 paper written by the University of North Carolina’s Ralph Baric with China’s Zhi Zhengli “a how-to-manual for building the coronavirus in a laboratory”? Its title, after all, was “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.”

MoJo wasn’t the only outlet to shrug at the hearing and the diaries. NPR chose the “chilling effect” thesis, quoting New Jersey Senator Andy Kim in saying the Fauci hearings might dissuade “the next generation of people who might consider stepping up to serve our nation.”

CNN ran multiple iterations of the argument that Senator Rand Paul’s questioning of Fauci was just sour grapes, just the price of fame. “This is an assault on science and scientists, and, unfortunately, Dr. Fauci is in that seat,” said guest Dr. Scott Ratzan on the channel. “Thirty-eight years of service to the country, one of the best-known scientists in infectious disease, unfortunately, has taken a lot of heat for… issues that were not fully his.”

CBS medical correspondent Céline Gounder stressed she’d read all of Fauci’s diaries, and her big takeaway was a version of, “Who among us hasn’t taken a selfie with a celebrity?” (Nate Burleson — shame on you, dude — chimed in to say, “It’s human nature.”) She dismounted by saying, “The occasional comment about Barbara Streisand is not the headline here.”

Poring through document releases is dull. In Fauci’s case, the significant passages are about the February 1st meeting, plus another saying a failure to address certain media reports would look like Fauci and fellow officials were “covering things up,” and later entries conceding things like “we do not have good vaccinations to prevent infection.” The diary’s most remarkable quality, however, is that it’s full of passages blithely contradicting public statements. Exactly unlike the suggestion of Mother Jones, it shows he was withholding information from the public throughout. That’s on top of years of FOIA and Congressional releases showing the same thing.

Put it all together, and it still doesn’t drag a network like CBS past, “Who doesn’t love a celebrity selfie?” When it comes to knocking these people off a lie, it really does take a village.

“Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee chair, has cast himself as a contemporary Joe McCarthy intent on ferreting out the truth about one man’s supposed crimes against his country…Just before leaving office, President Joe Biden took the remarkable step of providing Dr. Fauci with a blanket pardon… On the advice of his lawyers, the 85-year-old Dr. Fauci made the extraordinary choice during Wednesday’s hearing to plead the Fifth… The effect was a useless drama that offered zero insights to a public desperate for them.”

— The New York Times

In a Senate hearing Wednesday, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), about Covid, and US-funded gain of function experiments. “Can you explain to the committee why you chose to fund this dangerous research in China?”

Fauci answered by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, for the first of 100 times:

This ought to have marked a dramatic and final end to years of hagiographic worship of the man, and commenced a long overdue decision to investigate science’s role in causing the pandemic.

No luck. The reaction to Wednesday’s hearing makes clear that there is no amount of evidence that will move half of the American population off its religious devotion to this invidious huckster-narcissist whose reckless behavior endangered the world. Nothing gets through. Documentary evidence doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that the FBI and the Department of Energy point in that direction. Not even a desire for self-preservation — the investigation of Fauci and other scientists is a necessary precursor to learning how an engineered virus killed millions — will shake this segment of the population.

A sample of the revelations that have been, and apparently will continue to be, ignored:

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We didn’t know much about Covid when it first arrived in America. Now we all know the basics.

To start, Covid-19 a.k.a. SARS CoV-2 is a bat virus that can’t infect bats. The reason it can’t infect bats is because of twelve nucleotides inserted into the viral genome, to create something called a “furin cleavage” site. With this addition, the virus not only lost its ability to bind to receptors in bats, but became extremely transmissible to humans. “If you remove the furin cleavage site,” wrote former CDC Director Bob Redfield in his book Redfield’s Warning, “there is no pandemic.”

Either SARS-CoV-2 went through an organic mutation fundamentally changing its character in one go, or it was engineered. This is why the scientists who ended up writing the Nature Medicine article arguing for natural or “zoonotic” origin of Covid were initially shocked to the point of gallows humor when they learned about the presence of a furin cleavage site. Hence the quote from Dr. Kristian Andersen, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely because they were already doing this work.”

As one virologist told me three years ago: “If someone proposes to insert a furin cleavage site in a bat SARS coronavirus in Wuhan, and then one year later we see a bat SARS coronavirus with a furin cleavage site in Wuhan, that is highly unlikely to be a natural event.”

All the way back on December 30, 2011, Fauci published “A flu risk worth taking” in the Washington Post, arguing for gain of function research. “Important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” he wrote. As for dangers of experiments involving the development of pathogenic viruses in labs, he said weighing the risks is “not simple,” but “the engineered viruses… are maintained in high-security laboratories.” Despite a number of previous biosecurity mishaps, Fauci was confident lab security would protect populations from “generated” viruses.

Three years later, on June 1st, 2014, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded $3.7 million to the EcoHealth Alliance in a grant titled, “Understanding the risk of coronavirus bat emergence.” A portion of those funds went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to study pathogenic bat viruses. This was just ahead of a decision in October of that same year by the administration of Barack Obama to institute a freeze on gain-of-function research. This ought to have ended U.S. involvement in the business of taking dangerous diseases and engineering them to be even more dangerous.

Unfortunately, on January 7th, 2017, the outgoing Obama White House issued a “Recommended Policy Guidance for Departmental Development of Review Mechanisms for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight,” also known as P3CO. This revised definition was a semantic leprechaun trick, redefining a “potential pandemic pathogen” as one “capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations,” essentially creating a loophole to work with wild viruses.

As former CDC Director Bob Redfield explained the other day: “If you start with a pathogen that’s already pathogenic for humans and you make it more pathogenic or more transmissible, that’s gain of function research,” he said. “But if you were to start with a pathogen that's not pathogenic for humans, i.e. COVID, and make it pathogenic for humans, by definition, that’s not gain of function research.”

This loophole is what health officials used to deflect attention from gain of function research. Paul for instance just released correspondence between the FBI and NIH in 2020. In response to FBI questions then about US-funded research in China, Ashley Sanders of the NIH told the FBI on May 22, 2020 that:

The replacement policy, Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight (P3CO), requires additional review and oversight of experiments that are anticipated to increase a potential pandemic pathogen’s transmissibility or pathogenicity in humans. The viruses created under this award are chimeric bat viruses… While chimeric viruses were created via this award, they would not be considered GoF... For example, expressing the spike protein of SARS-CoV in the WIV-1 backbone did not increase the pathogenicity of WIV-1 beyond that of SARS-CoV.

Fauci in his diaries complained on October 7th, 2021 about the “nonsense” in Congress “as to the gain of function issue.” In Fauci’s mind, it was a non-issue because he was legally covered by the loophole:

Eco Health should have let the NIH know that in some of the mouse experiments there was an increase in pathogenicity associated with the chimeric virus. However… even with that increase in pathogenicity, the experiment and the result still does not fall under the category that would trigger P3CO. In other words, according to the operable definition of gain of function of concern at the time, this was not gained a function of concern. Namely, it was not an experiment that would increase the transmissibility and pathogenicity a virus that would likely cause widespread transmission and morbidity/mortality IN HUMANS.

Fauci’s whole defense is the adverb “likely.” He concedes that the EcoHealth experiments brought about an “increase in pathogenicity,” but rather than being concerned with the real question — did that research lead to an accidental leak of a manipulated virus that killed millions? — he reassured himself that he was insulated from legal danger because the funding in question did not constitute gain-of-function research in his mind, because it was not “likely” to cause widespread transmission in humans.

Added to other devastating passages from Fauci’s diaries, like the line, “given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go,” there’s little doubt left that the virus was indeed “constructed,” and came from the Wuhan Institute.

None of it will matter. Even after Fauci pleaded the fifth, news outlets across the country are covering the story as a “Republican pile-on.” This continues a pattern that began in the first days of the pandemic.

When Covid-19 arrived in early 2020, there was no reason for the question of its origins to be politicized. That changed when Donald Trump made a string of statements deemed “false, confusing, and inconsistent,” like saying the disease was “a little bit like the flu,” that “the risk to the American people remains very low,” and that “we have it totally under control.”

On some of these questions, Trump was indeed incorrect, but that didn’t make the opposite of any Trump statement true. The latter viewpoint was every bit as unscientific as anything Trump said.

This is how the story was handled, though. Fauci emerged as an anti-Trump, which to the press made him a beacon of truth. If Trump said the disease had “little impact on young people,” Fauci told governors they should be “careful, particularly when it comes to children”; if Trump said the disease will just “go away,” Fauci said “things will get worse”; if Trump said “we’d much rather be ahead of the curve than behind it,” Fauci countered with, “You’re always behind where you think you are.”

From that point, instead of investigating the disease, legacy press concerned itself with turning Fauci into not just a rock star, but a sex symbol. Fauci t-shirts rushed off the line, along with votive candles, bobbleheads, mugs, “In Fauci We Trust merch,” and other totems of political Beatlemania. The New Yorker ran a feature on how he became “America’s doctor,” the Atlantic told us “America is Thirsty for Anthony Fauci,” calling him a “heartthrob,” while NBC cold-opened Saturday Night Live in April, 2020 with Brad Pitt playing the murine immunologist.

On Fauci’s 80th birthday, celebrities serenaded him, including Orlando Bloom, Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Amy Poehler, Lily Tomlin, Sophia Bush, Matthew McConaughey, Steve Buscemi, Magic Johnson, and Joan Baez. In the newly released diaries we learned the latter crushed hard on Fauci. Baez wrote to him, “I wonder if you have any idea (probably not) how important you are to us,” and painted a portrait of him that could have been a pre-teen girl’s rendering of a unicorn or pony. Fauci ate it all up, sticking it in his just-released diary, along with other happy memories:

The hero worship will never end. After watching Fauci “plead the FIF,” my own dickhead Senator Andy Kim used the hearing to rivet his lips to Fauci’s posterior, blessing him with Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech:

Would Kim answer five minutes of questions from me, one of his constituents, about this performance? He won’t have to, because he’ll never face the kind of full-court media press that motivates politicians to act. Again, none of this has a thing to do with Republicans or Democrats. It’s strictly about getting to the bottom of a historical disaster, and because one blue state heartthrob is in the middle of the action, half the country is averting its eyes, trying to filibuster an investigation of global importance. God help us when this happens again.

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 07/27/26:

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“The Farrar phone call was different. The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furin cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary jump that they found nowhere in bat isolates. They bring up the possibility that this could have been deliberately inserted and either accidentally released or deliberately released by a crazy person in the lab, the former being the most likely.”

— From the diaries of Dr. Anthony Fauci, January 31, 2020

Dr. Anthony Fauci never told the president, the media, Congress, anyone about any evidence suggesting the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a lab accident or leak from the Wuhan Institute in China. The public was deceived about this, not just by Dr. Fauci but by much of the scientific community. The consequences of that decision have still not been wrestled with, considering the millions of deaths worldwide.

“That’s the story here,” says former CDC Director, Dr. Bob Redfield. “It was created by science. That scientific decision had more consequences of loss of human life than all nuclear bombs.

On the heels of Senator Rand Paul’s release of hundreds of pages of Fauci’s personal diaries, the former head of NIAID will testify before the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee tomorrow beginning at 8:30 AM ET. It’s hard to remember a more consequential Congressional standoff. Will Fauci offer any new information? Will he be more candid about the origins of the pandemic? Will he hide behind piles of “I don’t recall” answers? One imagines the latter is most likely, but there is a chance for real drama tomorrow.

, who was working was on the proverbial front lines in an Emergency Room in southern Massachusetts when the pandemic arrived, will be joining me to provide live commentary on the hearings. You can find us on X, @mtaibbi or at:

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The release of Fauci’s diaries, coupled with the hearings, will mean I’ll have to put my reporter hat back on in coming weeks. Racket ran many stories on the origins of Covid-19. In July of 2023 I worked with Michael Shellenberger and Alexandra Gutentag of Public on one in particular that seemed sure to have a major impact.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic retrieved the private slack discussions of five scientists — Dr. Kristian Andersen, Dr. Robert Garry, Dr. Andrew Rambaut, Dr. Edward Holmes, and Dr. Ian Lipkin — who authored a crucial paper for Nature Medicine called “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which became the chief reference for news media in establishing a natural or zoonotic origin for the Covid-19 virus. Whenever any news outlet speculated that the disease might have originated as, say, a lab accident, the “Proximal Origin” paper was cited as the authority to shoot it down.

The first time I looked at those slack messages, I thought they were a head shot, fatal to the credibility not only of those five scientists, but of the senior health officials with whom they interacted at the outset of the pandemic, like Jeremy Farrar and Drs. Francis Collins and Fauci.

The chats, after all, showed the scientists all but endorsing the idea of a lab leak. Referencing the “furin cleavage site” in the Fauci diary quote above, Andersen wrote, “The presence of furin moves me a posteriori slightly more towards accidental release.” In another note he wrote, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely because they were already doing this work.” Dr. Garry added, “The major hangup I have is the polybasic cleavahe [sic] site… it’s not really a natural process.” The most damning line, to me, came from a Holmes comment about the famed “wet market” theory: “No way,” he wrote, “the selection could occur in the market.”

In a normal media environment these texts would have prompted an all-out investigation into what happened in the U.S. health bureaucracies. Why were so many high-ranking officials steered away from any investigation of the Wuhan laboratory? Why were four (at least) different U.S. government agencies funding work at a Chinese military lab? How was it that so-called gain-of-function research appeared to be continuing with American backing, long after a moratorium had been announced? Last but not least, why was the press so unwilling to investigate Fauci, who as far back as 2011 printed an article in the Washington Post arguing that “important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” insights whose benefits outweighed the risks even of a pandemic:

Once Fauci’s communications with the “Proximal Origin” authors became public, a functioning press would have been off and running with a major investigation. It did not take that step only because Fauci had been propped up in the press as a rational, dependable anti-Trump, the figure a frightened country could turn to in a panic.

If the press didn’t keep investigating, Senator Paul and his staff did, hammering away until it procured new documents and secured the hearing. Tomorrow may prove uneventful, but there’s at least a chance we’ll get an important answer or two. I’m also looking forward to watching alongside old friend Dr. Bivens, who has a wealth of knowledge on the subject, and questions of his own, arising from his clinical experience. More to come, but please come by tomorrow.

With this outburst at a provincial fête, Stepan Verkhovensky — one of the main characters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons — seals his fate as the enemy of political progress, in the eyes of a movement he’s loved all his life. It’s one of a list of comic twists in a critical portion of the novel, which Brad Pearce and I will be back discussing today.

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 07/24/26:

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With this outburst at a provincial fête, Stepan Verkhovensky — one of the main characters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons — seals his fate as the enemy of political progress, in the eyes of a movement he’s loved all his life. It’s one of a list of comic twists in a critical portion of the novel, which Brad Pearce and I will be back discussing today. Join us at 4:30 PM ET at:

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You can also find us on X, @mtaibbi or @waywardrabbler. See you soon!

On Saturday evening, a German-born man attacked a Pride Parade, first chasing people with a machete, then driving a van into a crowd, and finally running “toward officers with a sharp instrument” before being shot dead in the town of Spandau. One woman was killed, and 29 other were injured at the Christopher Street Day event, which was guarded by 2,200 police officers, up from 1,300 last year. “How did he even get into the Tiergarten?” one attendee was quoted as saying. “There were anti-car and anti-truck barriers everywhere.”

Berlin-born Abdel Ballout got past more than anti-car and anti-truck barriers to make his attack. In a journey that Jonathan Swift couldn’t have scripted, he was practically escorted to the site by German authorities:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 06/22/26:

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The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would be dropping subpoenas issued to New York Times reporters over a story about Air Force One, acknowledging these could have swept up private information of reporters’ relatives. “Upon further consideration,” said Sean Buckley, Chief Counsel for the Southern District of New York, “the government is prepared unilaterally to withdraw the subpoenas.”

An embarrassing court exchange came first. District Judge Arun Subramanian announced to Trump lawyers, “Either we can quash the subpoenas, or you could withdraw the subpoenas.” Subramanian got Buckley to admit the government issued them before exhausting investigative avenues, an “error” that was a “consequence of trying to move too quickly.” The Judge also asked the prosecutor who’d sought a nondisclosure order from another judge, Kevin Sullivan, to get up from the audience and come forward for a dressing down. “Are you going to do this again?” he asked.

“No, Your Honor, absolutely not,” Sullivan said.

The subpoenas fiasco was a concentrated dose of everything that’s gone wrong with the second Trump term. Unlike the Biden administration, whose unethical pursuit of mass speech violations was organized, purposeful, and efficient, Trump keeps dancing on First Amendment principles in haphazard, impulsive, nonsensical episodes. In this latest case involving the New York Times, the big question is — why?

Subpoenas were issued as a response to a story claiming that when Trump earlier this month flew from Ankara to Mildenhall Air Force Base in England, he went in an old Air Force One plane instead of his new, Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8 as “a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a tweet earlier this week denouncing the story as a leak of “sensitive defense information,” but the Times had already reported on alleged security problems with the new Qatari plane.

Even the Air Force admitted in a late June press release that the new “Bridge” plane was missing security specs, saying “the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver.” It can’t be fun for the White House to have the Times add that the plane “did not have the same counter-defensive capabilities of the previous model,” but it’s not like the Times published a how-to guide on shooting down presidential aircraft.

Dropping subpoenas on reporter Julian Barnes and his family while they watched Sheep Detectives was guaranteed to create a storm of new media problems, without solving the old ones. Why do it? Why also go the subpoena route against the Wall Street Journal, one of the few papers that doesn’t seem to have a policy of avoiding stories that help Trump? Why resort to gambits like revoking Pentagon credentials and only re-issuing them to reporters who sign a loyalty-oathish document? Forget about whether or not that’s legal, who thought it would improve coverage? The reporters who objected to the Pentagon credentials business, like Barnes, Eric Schmitt, and Eric Lipton of the Times, were bylined on the Air Force One stories that annoyed Trump so much later.

The best-case scenario for Trump’s re-election was always that he’d be a highway pileup on speech, stopping heavy traffic in the direction of the full-blown censorship bureaucracies that were being constructed at least in part with the aim of shutting him up. America under a second Trump administration was never going to expand the State Department’s Global Engagement Center or join the EU’s Digital Services Act, nor was he likely to increase funding to the “anti-disinformation” programs growing like weeds in the budgets of organizations like USAID (to say nothing of DHS and the Pentagon). If Trump just didn’t add new speech problems, it would have been a huge accomplishment. He’s been too thin-skinned to manage:

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The 2026 AP stylebook I just received in the mail checks in at nearly 500 pages, ten times as long as the 1951 edition, 200 pages longer than the 1977 guide. The meaning of “style” has expanded massively over the years. Once, the most important part of the book was a “libel guide,” but that’s long gone, replaced by new sections on “inclusive storytelling,” along with enhanced guidance on “race-related coverage,” immigration, AI, and other politically charged topics.

Much of AP style is still good old usage — discreet means prudent, circumspect, while discrete means detached, separate, etc. — but in the 2026 guide, you’ll find a ton of basic descriptive terms shoved into the “avoid” column for questionable reasons, from populist to typical to community to euthanasia (but dying with dignity or medical assistance in dying might be okay). Writers are advised not to use a lot of excellent words like “insane” and “demented” and “crazy” outside of quotes, on the grounds of being “derogatory,” while declaring taboo harmless idioms like “turn a blind eye” and “fall on deaf ears.” Meanwhile, a new “inclusive storytelling” section tells editors not to write about diversity and inclusivity — they say that can imply a false “norm” — but to make silent decisions in favor of stories that shine “a brighter light” on the underrepresented.

That’s not necessarily a bad idea, but not long ago no one would have thought of folding that concept into a “style” guide, instead leaving those calls up to editors. Now, the fight to standardize even complex political ideas has become an ingrained feature of American politics, compounded by the explosive rise in AI-generated content. Substack CEO Chris Best, with whom I’m speaking at 5:00 PM ET today — just look for us on Chris’ Substack Notes account — describes hearing complaints from readers about a content landscape not only filled with “soulless slop,” but one where readers are lured to AI-generated prose by unscrupulous humans who don’t disclose that they’re reading something “written by no one.”

I’m looking forward to discussing this issue with Chris, so please come by. It’s a tricky topic with more than a few ethical problems. In the meantime, a few thoughts about the additional layer of deception buried in a lot of this content, as a result of a movement toward jargon-loading in journalistic and official “style” guides:

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Substack CEO Chris Best published an article yesterday called, “Against Claudefishing,” in which he announced a new site tool to help editors and users spot potential AI-generated text:

We’re partnering with Pangram, the leading AI-detection tool. You’ll be able to scan notes, replies, comments, and posts to see an estimate of how much of the text was written by hand or with AI assistance. This will work on text longer than 100 words, published from today on, and will show an analysis only to those who request it.

He added a screenshot, so users will be able to see how it works:

There’s an obvious reason Substack would be the first platform to introduce an option of this type. The company’s business model was always a bet on the appeal of human voice over corporate concoction, which makes the gathering tidal wave of AI-generated content (as Best notes, it constitutes as much as 40% of some platforms already, with roughly one in four social media posts AI-generated) a threat to their bottom line. Substack sites like Racket are “based on trust between people,” but that trust collapses if writers start using machine helpers to feed the content monkey.

I’m going to be on a panel discussion about the issue with other Substack users at 5:00 PM ET tonight. Look at this space, on Notes, or at my Twitter account later for details. A related article is coming out here later.

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 06/16/26:

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