Is Everything a Scam?

President Trump’s first unofficial act as president of the United States was to release a memecoin designed to be the perfect vehicle for institutional bribery. TrumpCoin funnels untraceable cash directly into his bank account. As he took the stage at his inauguration the coin’s value skytocketed to an astounding $31 Billion. There is no way to know how much of that money now lines Trump’s coffers.

It might not be fair to call the current leadership in America an “administration” as much as it is an unstable pyramid of scammers, bullies and oligarchs. Just take a look at the screenshot I took of Elon Musk’s newly-established Department of Government Efficiency, or D.O.GE. on the first day of Trump’s rule:

Never mind that DOGE’s role in the government isn’t yet clear yet. Instead just remember that its name and photo were inspired by the memecoin DOGECoin, which was founded as an admitted scam and parody of the crypto market. Elon Musk has championed the coin for years, presumably to pumping up its value, and dumping it over and over again to add to his untold personal fortune. By making an entire department a meme, Musk isn’t even trying to hide the fact that he’s scamming America.

Try as I might, I can’t even wrap my mind around all of the various and blatant scams that are getting up and running under Trump’s rule—whether it’s speculation on fossil fuels, manipulating the money supply, tax schemes that benefit the ultra-wealthy, impunity for convicted criminals or the rise of the MAHA movement. The overriding theme of the next four years will be legalizing various mechanisms of theft against the American people and the world at large.

All of this is a long way for me to introduce my guest on the podcast today. Timothy Caulfield is one of the top experts on misinformation in the world. And since the world will be nothing but misinformation for the foreseeable future, I figured that it was important to bring him on to discuss the few guideposts for truth that remain to us. His new book, The Certainty Illusion focuses primarily on the way that the general public has lost faith in science, both because of deliberate misinformation by the influencer ecosystem, and the declining quality of scientific literature writ-large.

To quote the introduction of his book:

The present reality: our information environment— that space where we seek, contribute to, and interact with the world’s knowledge—is completely and truly f*cked. It is a tangle of lies, distortions, and rage- filled rants. This has created a massive paradox: we have more access to more knowledge than ever before and, at the same time, less and less certainty about the issues that matter to us.

I follow Caulfield on Threads, but he is on all the other platforms, too.

I hope you enjoy the video.

Below the paywall, I have a few private things to discuss with my premium subscribers who make my reporting possible.