One crash, one derailment — and Congress still can’t follow the data



After a midair collision and a train derailment, Congress faces a simple test: Will it follow the evidence?

In aviation, the Senate’s ROTOR Act would mandate improved aircraft surveillance technology after last year’s deadly midair collision involving a military helicopter and a passenger jet. Yet earlier this month, the House failed to advance the bill after Pentagon opposition — sidelining broader use of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, a system that likely would have prevented that tragedy.

Rail risks being locked into prescriptive labor mandates, while aviation safety is undermined by incomplete adoption of proven technology. Neither sector is getting what it needs.

At the same time, a group of senators reintroduced the Railway Safety Act, branding it “data-driven” while again pushing minimum crew mandates — despite no empirical evidence that larger crews reduce accident rates — in response to the 2023 East Palestine derailment.

The impulse is understandable. When tragedy strikes, Washington acts. But acting quickly is not the same as acting on evidence.

If safety is truly the goal, Congress needs to ask a harder question: What actually reduces risk?

The data point in a clear direction. Human error dominates transportation accidents. And the most consistent safety gains in modern transport have come not from adding more people into systems but from improving system design, automation, and structured safety management.

Human error is the core problem

In 2024, roughly 40,000 Americans died in motor vehicle crashes — far outpacing most developed countries on a per-capita basis, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

By contrast, aviation and rail — sectors that have embraced automation and safety management systems — post dramatically lower fatality rates. Commercial aviation in developed countries now experiences fatal accidents at rates below 0.1 per million departures. Federal Railroad Administration data show train accident rates have fallen 33% since 2005, with derailments down significantly and human-factor incidents continuing to decline.

The lesson is straightforward: When systems are designed to reduce human error, safety improves.

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Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Automation works — with caveats

Fully autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle systems have posted lower crash rates in controlled environments. These results require continued scrutiny and larger data sets, but the direction is clear: Reducing reliance on human reaction time reduces collisions.

The same logic applies in aviation and rail.

Automation now governs the vast majority of routine commercial flight operations. Positive train control has sharply reduced train-on-train collisions and overspeed derailments.

Consider last year’s midair collision. Broader, uninterrupted use of ADS-B In and Out would have provided precise real-time traffic awareness to pilots and controllers. The technology exists to prevent exactly this type of conflict, a point highlighted in the BlazeTV documentary “Countdown to the Next Aviation Disaster,” which presaged the January 2025 Reagan National Airport tragedy. Yet expanded deployment has failed to advance despite bipartisan Senate support.

In rail, meanwhile, some lawmakers are moving in the opposite direction — toward mandates for more personnel.

Symbolic safety vs. structural safety

The East Palestine derailment stemmed from a mechanical failure — an overheated bearing — not a shortage of crew members. There were three crew members on board.

Adding personnel would not have prevented a bearing from overheating. Predictive maintenance systems, sensor networks, and better data integration are the tools designed to catch precisely that kind of failure.

Yet the RSA would codify minimum crew requirements across freight rail operations, regardless of route, cargo type, or level of automation.

This isn’t primarily about risk analysis. It reflects political incentives.

Organized interests exert concentrated influence. Diffuse beneficiaries — consumers, shippers, taxpayers — do not.

Labor interests can organize to protect jobs. The Pentagon can block safety rules it opposes. But the public — which wants safer transportation — is too diffuse to mobilize around specific, technical policy choices. The result is a grab bag of special-interest “safety” measures rather than coherent, risk-targeted reform.

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Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Focus on what works

Freight railroads in the United States are privately funded and capital intensive, investing billions annually in track upgrades, advanced detection systems, and predictive maintenance. Rail remains one of the safest ways to move goods over land because sustained technological improvement compounds over time.

By contrast, the Federal Aviation Administration — a government-run system — has struggled to modernize needed surveillance and air-traffic technologies at speed and at scale. In civil aviation, the FAA has deployed ADS-B across controlled airspace, dramatically improving traffic surveillance and situational awareness. But gaps remain where some defense aviation actors are not required to fully transmit or receive ADS-B data.

Rail now risks being locked into prescriptive labor mandates, while aviation safety is undermined by incomplete adoption of proven collision-avoidance technology. Neither sector is getting the policy it needs.

As Congress considers the RSA, lawmakers should prioritize provisions that directly reduce accident probability. Decades of transportation data point to a consistent lesson: Safety improves when systems are engineered to anticipate and correct human limitations — not when policymakers assume more humans automatically mean more safety. One-size-fits-all crew mandates don’t meet that test.

Nor should Washington abandon expansion of ADS-B and other proven collision-avoidance technologies. The system exists to prevent the very type of tragedy we witnessed. It shouldn’t take another collision for Congress to act.

The evidence isn’t ambiguous. Technology-driven risk reduction works. Symbolic mandates do not. If lawmakers are serious about safety, they need to focus on what demonstrably prevents accidents — and have the discipline to follow the data.

The strategy to win elections hasn’t changed in 2,000 years



As we head into a contentious election year, campaign messages will soon flood every screen and mailbox. New technologies keep arriving, but political strategy hasn’t changed much over the past 2,000 years.

Need proof? Go back to 64 B.C., when Marcus Tullius Cicero — the Roman Republic’s great orator — ran for consul, the highest office in Rome and the closest analogue to a modern presidency. Cicero’s brother, Quintus, wrote him a blunt, practical memo on how to win. Princeton University Press published that letter in 2012 in Philip Freeman’s translation, “How to Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians.” The title isn’t clever. It’s accurate.

Quintus didn’t teach Cicero to preach doctrine. He taught him to assemble a majority.

Quintus urged Cicero to treat every appearance “as if your entire future depended on that single event.” Modern technology only amplifies that warning. A bad phrase or a sour expression, caught on camera and looped endlessly, can sink a campaign.

Quintus also mapped the coalition a successful candidate must build. He told Cicero to focus on the supporters who matter most and to shore up those already on his side: “those holding public contracts,” along with “the business community.” He reminded him not to neglect “the special interest groups that back you.” He added a familiar note of retail politics: use “the young people who admire you and want to learn from you,” and rely on “the faithful friends who are daily at your side.”

Government contractors. Business leaders. Interest groups. Youth outreach. A loyal inner circle. Quintus could charge today’s consulting rates and still find clients.

He also gave Cicero the oldest instruction in politics: collect what you’re owed.

“Now is the time to call in all favors,” Quintus wrote. “Don’t miss an opportunity to remind everyone in your debt that they should repay you with their support. For those who owe you nothing, let them know that their timely help will put you in their debt.”

Anyone who has worked in politics has heard the modern version of that message, usually delivered with a smile and a firm handshake.

Quintus emphasized the need to win over the “nobility” and “men of privilege,” including former consuls. Swap “nobility” for major donors and influential business leaders — Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg come to mind — and swap “consuls” for ex-governors, former senators, and party grandees. Candidates still chase endorsements from yesterday’s power brokers.

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Blaze News Illustration

Quintus also told Cicero to exploit his opponents’ scandals. He described the corruption and sexual misconduct surrounding Cicero’s rivals, Antonius and Catiline, and urged Cicero to use it. Modern history offers obvious parallels. Gary “Monkey Business” Hart. John Edwards and his “love child” saga. Sex scandals keep happening, and campaigns keep weaponizing them.

Quintus warned Cicero about enemies and mistakes. “Since you have so many potential enemies,” he wrote, “you can’t afford to make any mistakes. You must conduct a flawless campaign with the greatest thoughtfulness, industry, and care.” Political hatreds didn’t start with cable news. Cicero faced what today might be called “Cicero derangement syndrome.”

Quintus broke campaigning into two tasks: hold your friends and persuade the public. He offered instructions for both. When it came to organizations Cicero had helped, Quintus told him to press them: “This is the occasion to pay their political debts to you if they want you to look favorably on them in the future.” He boiled down vote-getting to three levers that still move elections: “favors, hope, and personal attachment.”

Then he reached what he called the most important part of campaigning: create goodwill and kindle hope.

“Bring hope to people and a feeling of goodwill toward you,” Quintus urged. But he warned Cicero not to lock himself into specific promises. He told him to reassure each constituency in language it wanted to hear: Tell the Senate you will protect its “power and privileges.” Tell the business community and wealthy citizens you stand for “stability and peace.” Tell ordinary Romans you have always defended their interests.

Quintus didn’t teach Cicero to preach doctrine. He taught him to assemble a majority.

Cicero won, and he won big — more votes than any other candidate. Romans later called him “Father of His Country,” a title Americans associate with George Washington. Quintus became praetor two years later. Both men met violent ends in 43 B.C., as civil war consumed the republic and paved the way for empire.

Their deaths don’t diminish the point. Quintus’ advice endured because it describes permanent truths about politics: ambition, coalition-building, vanity, fear, flattery, and the eternal hunt for advantage.

Tactics and terrain may change, but the playbook didn’t. One wonders — who in our day will leave such a legacy?

I walked away from California Democrats to keep my sanity



It used to feel good to be a Democrat in California.

Emphasis on used to — and President Trump’s recent State of the Union address illuminated exactly why I left the party.

California is not failing because it cares too much. It is failing because it confuses caring with governing.

In Silicon Valley, voting blue often feels like the default setting.

In many professional circles, especially in technology and venture communities, political alignment is assumed. Fundraisers double as social gatherings.

It feels compassionate, enlightened, on the right side of history.

But that night, the president challenged any member of Congress to stand who believes that the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. Shockingly, Democrats remained seated, providing a stunning visual of the current values of the Democratic Party.

What changed my mind was not the rhetoric. It was the outcomes. California is the glaring example of the failure of liberal policies.

Three areas illustrate the pattern.

Elections: Confidence is a safeguard

California does not require photo identification to vote in person. A voter provides a name and address and signs the roster. More than 30 states require some form of voter ID, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Countries such as Canada, France, and Germany require identification to vote. A 2023 Gallup poll found roughly three-quarters of Americans support requiring photo identification at the polls, including majorities across party lines.

Even if large-scale fraud is difficult to quantify, administrative failures and inconsistent verification practices fuel public doubt. Visible safeguards deter misconduct and preserve confidence in the system.

When California Democrats treat voter ID as ideological heresy, they weaken the legitimacy of the system they claim to defend.

Family: When the state becomes the decision-maker

Under California law, minors ages 12 and older may consent to certain mental health services without parental notification if deemed mature enough by a provider. State law also allows minors to access reproductive health services confidentially. Recent legislation has expanded confidentiality protections in sensitive areas.

The justification is protection, but the effect is state supremacy in decisions that belong to parents.

The Supreme Court has long recognized parental rights as fundamental. Family authority is the first layer of civil society.

When the state positions itself as the confidential decision-maker in significant medical and psychological matters involving minors, it undermines that sovereignty.

It is not compassionate to expand state authority at the expense of parental sovereignty. It is government overreach into the most intimate sphere of civil society. As the co-founders of Moms for Liberty have put it, “We do not co-parent with the government.”

Compassion cannot justify dissolving the family as the primary unit of accountability.

Fiscal reality: Math still applies

California’s budget rests on a narrow and volatile base. The Legislative Analyst’s Office has documented that the top 1% of earners account for close to half of the state’s personal income tax revenue. That revenue is heavily tied to capital gains and is therefore inherently unstable.

Instead of broadening and stabilizing that base, state leadership has repeatedly targeted it. Wealth-based tax proposals focus on the very taxpayers who fund a disproportionate share of state commitments. Capital is mobile. IRS data shows sustained net out-migration of high-income households from California to states such as Texas and Florida over the past decade.

Then comes execution.

California’s high-speed rail project, approved in 2008 at an estimated $33 billion, is now projected to exceed $100 billion and remains incomplete. Florida, by contrast, expanded Brightline passenger rail through a public-private partnership model that attracted private capital and delivered major segments on time.

Between 2019 and 2023, California spent roughly $24 billion on homelessness programs. During that same period, homelessness rose statewide. In 2024, the California state auditor found the state failed to consistently track whether billions in spending produced measurable results.

The pattern is simple.

Spend expansively. Measure loosely. Promise morally. Deliver inconsistently.

The issue is not the stated goals, but the absence of discipline.

In each case, the rhetoric was noble, and the result was dysfunction.

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Photo by Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images

This is the governing model Kamala Harris rose within and that Gavin Newsom refined over time. Not because they lack intelligence, but because the system they represent rewards virtue-signaling over measurable performance. It resists basic electoral safeguards despite broad public support. It expands state authority into the family. It builds budgets on volatile revenue while accelerating out-migration. It spends billions without demanding outcome verification.

If that framework scales nationally, the consequences will be dire.

I did not leave the Democratic Party because I stopped caring about vulnerable people. I left because I care about institutional durability. Compassion matters. But governing requires discipline. California is not failing because it cares too much. It is failing because it confuses caring with governing. Compassion without competence becomes institutional rot.

If you are a Democrat in California who feels uneasy but cannot quite articulate why, I understand. I defended the language long after I stopped believing in the results. At some point, loyalty to outcomes must matter more than loyalty to a label. It did for me.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

9 must-have devices for detecting leftist threats in your area



A recent story in Wired celebrated the culture of “maker resistance,” casting hobbyists and hackers as neighborhood sentinels guarding against federal immigration enforcement.

All over the country, makers are 3D-printing thousands of whistles to help people on the ground alert others to nearby ICE activity. But the whistles are far from the only tools being used to respond to the surge of federal agents. Protesters are DIY-ing a wide array of gadgets like camera mounts, mobile networking gear, and handheld eye washers to clear away pepper spray, tear gas, and irritants used to quell protests.

For a conservative audience that supports the rule of law and ICE’s work, the story reads less like grassroots resilience and more like a blueprint for obstruction dressed up in DIY chic.

A pocket unit that emits a courteous chime when declarations of moral purity rise in direct proportion to personal insulation from consequences.

The federal government is charged with enforcing immigration law enacted by Congress. ICE agents are not an invading army; they are civil servants tasked with carrying out policies shaped through democratic processes. That fact rarely survives the romantic renderings of resistance culture.

Muddled makers

The maker movement itself has long embodied ingenuity and independence. In another era, that spirit wired towns, built radios, and launched small businesses. Today, the same tools that once fueled invention are repurposed to shadow enforcement and surveil federal agents.

The technical skill is undeniable. The intent is harder to defend. When creativity shifts from creation to confrontation, the balance between citizen and state tilts toward disorder.

Supporters frame these efforts as mutual aid. Critics see something more troubling: a normalization of defiance against lawful authority. The line between observation and obstruction blurs quickly in tense moments. A mesh network that alerts neighbors to approaching agents may also alert traffickers. A whistle meant to warn a family may also warn a fugitive. Technology is neutral; its consequences are not.

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Wally Skalij/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Early-warning ingenuity

There is also an irony worth noting. Many of the same voices that champion strict regulation in speech, commerce, firearms, and energy now celebrate decentralized networks designed specifically to evade oversight. Authority is applauded when convenient and denounced when it isn’t.

Still, the celebration of gadget-driven resistance invites a certain tongue-in-cheek response. If protest culture can engineer mesh nodes, mobile camera rigs, and tactical “mutual aid” kits, perhaps the rest of the country should respond in kind.

After all, this is a nation that can detect a tremor thirty miles beneath the Pacific shelf, triangulate a hurricane from orbit, and deliver neighborhood-by-neighborhood pollen counts to your phone. Surely we can apply that same early-warning genius to the domestic climate.

Consider the following prototypes. Currently seeking investors.

1. Calm before the outrage monitor

A wristband calibrated to tremble whenever emotional intensity outruns factual content.

It hums peacefully at food banks and flood cleanups, then begins to vibrate like a malfunctioning espresso machine the moment a megaphone appears and nuance slips quietly out the side door.

Engineers report one prototype briefly achieved low orbit during a campus forum after the phrase “this is violence” was applied to a seating chart.

2. Virtue-signal radar

A pocket unit that emits a courteous chime when declarations of moral purity rise in direct proportion to personal insulation from consequences. The indicator slides from blue to amber, then bright red once self-righteous certainty reaches escape velocity.

In beta tests, it rang like cathedral bells when someone began, “As I stand here on stolen land.”

3. Aesthetic alarm

If you’re attempting to gauge ideological intensity, hair, wardrobe, and visual branding provide surprisingly reliable data. Developers are currently refining the aesthetic alarm, which activates when political identity is communicated primarily through costume, accessories, and hair shades normally reserved for highlighters.

It measures symbolism per square inch. A recent firmware update allows it to distinguish between genuine individuality and curated outrage aesthetics, though field reports suggest the two often arrive looking remarkably similar.

4. Radical credentials authenticator

Verifies whether an anti-capitalist has a trust fund or whether a housing activist owns property.

5. Consensus individualist counter

Counts how many people in a given room have independently arrived at identical opinions about every major issue. Particularly useful in university settings and progressive book clubs.

6. Platform purity gauge

Detects lectures on digital colonialism delivered from an iPhone while using two-day shipping to order the works of Noam Chomsky.

7. Oppression Olympian scoreboard

Ranks competitors in real time as new marginalized identities are introduced mid-conversation. Features an automatic podium update when a previously undisclosed condition alters the standings.

8. Therapist’s fingerprints analyzer

Identifies the precise moment unresolved personal grievances become public policy positions.

9. Transference detector

Detects when a policy disagreement begins to carry the emotional voltage of a Thanksgiving argument about authority that predates the current administration by at least 15 years.

In a country built by barn-raisers, radio tinkerers, and backyard engineers with coffee cans full of bolts, answering gadgets with better gadgets feels almost patriotic.

How the laptop revolution destroyed public education



A recent Fortune magazine article made waves with a grim admission: After more than $30 billion spent flooding classrooms with laptops and tablets, standardized scores keep sliding. Worse, neuroscientists now link more classroom screen time to lower performance. The device meant to modernize learning may be helping to unmake it.

Schools rushed into a technological revolution without asking the most basic question: What does this do to a child’s mind? Many teachers saw the answer firsthand and in real time. Administrators and “experts” ignored them because the fad sounded like “progress.”

A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now. Put the devices where they belong: limited tools, not the center of learning.

I taught history and civics in Florida public schools as the laptop trend took hold. Computers had sat in classrooms since my own childhood, but they played a supporting role. A few desktops in the back helped with research. A computer lab handled bigger projects. Most learning still happened on paper with books, notes, and conversation.

Then the Chromebook arrived: cheap, durable, limited, and perfect for one thing — living inside a web browser. Suddenly a district could put a machine not just in every room but in the hands of every student.

Buzzwords beat judgment

Public-school administrators love buzzwords. “Technological literacy” sounds noble, as if every ninth grader is training for Silicon Valley while working on their grammar assignment. Google did not just sell discounted laptops. It supplied a full ecosystem: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Classroom. The whole apparatus of schooling migrated into Alphabet’s software suite. Few people in the system asked why a private company wanted to become the operating system of childhood.

The laptop push also fit the religion of metrics. District offices love anything that produces dashboards, timestamps, and “engagement” graphs. A worksheet completed on paper frustrates the spreadsheet priesthood. A worksheet completed on a Chromebook generates data. The device did not just enter the classroom; it entered the managerial imagination, where metrics matter more than minds.

Once laptops became ubiquitous, the problems announced themselves. The deeper the integration, the harder it became to control.

Cheating became routine. Students searched answers in seconds. The larger problem went beyond quizzes. Googling replaced thinking. Kids refused to read because they assumed a quick search and a copy-paste counted as “learning.” Wikipedia became the default authority. Students stopped vetting anything because they treated the first search result as truth. Even writing shifted. Instead of building an argument, students stitched together paragraphs from the internet and hoped the teacher felt too tired to fight.

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Cemile Bingol via iStock/Getty Images

The distraction machine

Schools tried parental controls. Teenagers treated those controls as a challenge. When thousands of bored adolescents share a building, they collaborate. A new filter went up; within days, kids found a workaround. Soon the screens again showed games, movies, even pornography — during class, in plain view, behind a pretense of “work.”

Students used shared Google docs as a covert messaging system. They gossiped, bullied, and planned actual crimes while keeping a document open to look studious. My school eventually held assemblies to remind students that everything typed into a document leaves a record and that bragging about criminal activity or sexual escapades can end up as evidence.

All of that raised another issue: privacy and capture. Google did not subsidize devices and software out of corporate charity. By making Google search and Google apps the center of a child’s information life, the system trained dependency. Google finds the truth. Google organizes the truth. Google presents the truth. A student’s education happens inside a Google ghetto. Pretend the company is not collecting that data if you want, but the incentives cut the other way.

Screens also fed the attention crisis. Administrators told teachers to stop showing videos longer than three minutes without pausing to explain because students could not stay focused. The device that was supposed to expand horizons kept shrinking attention spans. Teachers began competing with the entire internet for a child’s attention, and no lesson plan can win that contest for long.

Locked into the system

The system made escape difficult. Florida went all-in on Chromebooks and tied them to everything. Standardized tests moved entirely onto laptops. “Test prep” software got woven into daily coursework. Students with accommodations or limited English got pushed toward the device as a universal crutch. Denying a Chromebook got treated as denying an education. Teachers who resisted risked discipline.

I reached a point where my students mattered more than compliance. I rebuilt my classroom around paper, books, and discussion. Students used Chromebooks only for mandated testing and accommodations we could not meet otherwise.

The shift showed results fast. Students engaged more. Distraction dropped. Discipline improved. More assignments got finished. Grades rose.

Then COVID-19 struck.

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Wavebreakmedia via iStock/Getty Images

Remote learning turned the screen into the classroom itself. Even Florida, which resisted lockdown hysteria, shifted much of schooling online. Learning fell off a cliff. The lockdowns devastated achievement, but the damage did not end when students returned in person. After COVID, it became nearly impossible to pry students, parents, and administrators away from screen-based schooling. Digital integration became mandatory. No exceptions.

Now the corporate press arrives to play cleanup. Reporters discover the failure well after the money has been spent, the infrastructure has hardened, and a generation has been trained to treat a browser as a brain.

A way back

Public education is stuffed with managerial drones who chase consensus and trends while ignoring what helps students. The bureaucracy will keep this program alive through sheer inertia even as evidence piles up. Parents and lawmakers need to force a reset: paper-based instruction as the default, screens as a tightly limited accommodation, and tests that reward reading and writing instead of clicking. Districts should stop outsourcing childhood to Big Tech, stop laundering ideology through “digital citizenship,” and start treating attention as a scarce resource worth defending.

A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now. Start with elementary grades. Bring back books. Bring back handwriting. Bring back sustained attention. Put the devices where they belong: limited tools, not the center of learning.

Kids learn slower, but they learn for real.

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Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘philosophy’ wasn’t deep — it was dirty



Anyone can search the currently available Epstein files and see what turns up. As a professor at Arizona State University, I searched for my own school. I did not expect to find so much ASU-related material.

One reason: ASU employed Lawrence Krauss, paying him a substantial salary to write books arguing that the universe created itself from nothing.

Epstein’s philosophy collapses under its own weight because it begins with a lie about God.

That claim is its own story. You will object, rightly: “But we can’t get something from nothing.” Krauss replies, “By ‘nothing’ I mean quantum foam.” And you respond, “Then the title misleads. You don’t mean nothing. You mean quantum foam.”

Krauss also became close with Jeffrey Epstein. In one exchange, Krauss wrote: “I really do love you deeply as a friend Jeffrey. I don’t think I know anyone else who so honestly cares about me, and I don’t think I can ever truly express how wonderful that feels. Thank you. The cruise was a great reset.” In other messages, they discuss science and religion.

That is what caught my attention. As I read Epstein’s comments about religion — and listened to his interview with Steve Bannon on similar themes — a picture began to form of how Epstein made sense of the world and, more chillingly, of himself.

How a monster sleeps

A question hangs over every moral horror: How does a moral monster live with himself? Even if we limit ourselves to the explicit immorality in the files — without speculating about coded language or hidden networks — how did he sleep at night? What silenced his conscience?

Several pieces fit together.

In the ASU-related material and in interviews, Epstein does what I have often seen among intellectuals: He retreats into abstraction. He speaks about the history of ideas, mathematics, and cutting-edge research in a way that floats above concrete people and particular moral obligations.

That retreat protects a self-image. He can pose as the enlightened patron of science, funding humanity’s progress. That image sits in grotesque contrast with the cruelty he inflicted on actual human beings.

Abstraction as a moral anesthetic

This pattern tracks with Paul Johnson’s thesis in “Intellectuals”: Intellectuals who talk about serving “humanity” often treat individuals in their orbit badly. Grand claims become a shield. The rhetoric of progress becomes moral insulation.

Think of the professor who preaches liberation while using DEI programs to impose racial essentialism and ideological coercion. He can tell himself he is helping “the marginalized” even as he harms colleagues and students in the real world.

Or consider the pop star who repeats slogans like “no one is illegal on stolen land.” The moral performance happens at the level of abstraction. The carelessness happens at the level of reality.

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Marco Bello/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Epstein’s ‘unknowable’ God

Epstein goes further by trying to dissolve moral accountability at the metaphysical level.

He argues that physicists once believed reality could be fully captured by mathematics. Now, he claims, we understand reality is irrational. Mathematics can only approximate what he calls “the limit,” but the limit itself remains unknowable. Some call that limit “God.”

But if God is unknowable, then God becomes irrelevant to our calculations about life and moral choice.

At one point, Epstein frames this as a male-female divide. The male mind, he says, runs on logic and mathematics. Reality, however, does not fit that paradigm. Reality is fundamentally irrational and accessed through feminine intuition. Ultimate reality, in his telling, is best understood as the divine female.

Humans, in Epstein’s view, are beasts with frontal lobes sophisticated enough to rationalize their impulses.

He may have believed he was elevating the feminine. The framework reads more like a metaphysical excuse: reason fails, therefore the standard fails.

The tension between reason and intuition is ancient. Epstein narrows “reason” to a single project: reducing the world to material causes through mathematics. When that project does not deliver what he wants, he does not abandon reductionism. He abandons reason.

Francis Schaeffer described this move in godless intellectual life: When autonomous reason cannot sustain itself, the thinker does not repent. He escapes into irrationality. Intuition becomes the alibi. Mystery becomes permission.

Religion as therapy, not truth

In conversation with Krauss, Epstein defends a kind of religion, but not biblical religion.

Krauss, echoing the New Atheists, treats religion as an evolutionary leftover — maybe useful in an earlier age, unnecessary for modern man. After all, modern man allegedly knows universes can create themselves out of nonexistence.

Epstein pushes back, but only to reduce religion to psychological management. Religion concerns the “inner world,” he suggests, while science and mathematics concern the outer world. We cannot ignore the inner world. Its purpose is peace. Anxiety and depression signal inner disorder; religion restores equilibrium. That, for Epstein, becomes religion’s function.

Not worship. Not truth. Not repentance. Peace.

That is New Age self-help with a faux religious vocabulary.

A Nietzschean pattern

Put the pieces together and a Nietzschean outline emerges.

Nietzsche described the dialectic between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian seeks order, reason, structure. Yet it can become sterile and suffocating. The Dionysian seeks raw experience — ecstasy, pleasure, intoxication, release. Dionysian revelry becomes not only indulgence but purgation: a controlled environment where darker impulses can be acted out so a man can return to ordinary life and call himself functional again.

God’s moral law is written on the heart. We are not left with "unknowable limits" as our excuse. We are without excuse.

Humans, on this view, are beasts with frontal lobes sophisticated enough to rationalize their impulses.

That is the worldview of the modern pagan: order and chaos, calculation and intoxication, “science” by day and ritualized transgression by night. Add Epstein’s skepticism about knowable truth and his reduction of religion to inner peace, and the method of self-justification comes into focus.

His reported fascination with longevity technologies and strange diets fits too. Death becomes the great enemy. It must be cheated — through science, mythic elixirs, or Silicon Valley innovation.

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cglade via iStock/Getty Images

Temptation is not his alone

The unsettling part: These temptations are not unique to Epstein.

Many people oscillate between cold rationalism and irrational indulgence. Many treat morality as a social construct and religion as therapy. Many use abstractions to excuse what they would never defend in plain language.

That should drive self-examination, not mere disgust. Are we living inside the Apollonian-Dionysian loop, shifting between self-justifying “reason” and self-excusing “release”?

The lie at the center

Epstein’s philosophy collapses under its own weight because it begins with a lie about God.

God has not hidden Himself. Scripture teaches that His eternal power and divine nature are clearly revealed through creation. His moral law is written on the heart. We are not left with “unknowable limits” as our excuse. We are without excuse.

The claim that reality is fundamentally irrational is not a profound insight. It is an evasion. It is a way to suppress what is plain.

That is why Lawrence Krauss’ self-creating universe and Epstein’s divine female belong in the same category: idols. They exchange the truth for something else — something that grants permission.

Romans 1 describes the pattern of Epstein’s life: the darkened mind, the suppression of truth, the exchange of glory for self-justification, and the descent into sexual corruption. The cure is not oscillation between sterile rationalism and ecstatic purgation. The cure is redemption. The cure is communion with God restored.

We need Christ, who alone frees us from the pagan dialectic — ancient and modern — and grants eternal life, “that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).

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