Vox.com

---

no merri

abundance bs?

---

How Vox’s new Silicon Valley-funded ‘Abundance’ vertical aligns with Silicon Valley’s political priorities

How Vox’s new Silicon Valley-funded ‘Abundance’ vertical aligns with Silicon Valley’s political priorities

John Arnold and other AI boosters have plenty of reasons to “streamline” energy capacity—some less noble than others.

byAdam JohnsonDecember 17, 2025

ref 5

:{:{earlier this month, Vox announced a new vertical dedicated to “growth” that’s funded entirely by the Arnold Foundation, the influence arm of billionaire former Enron energy trader and founder of energy commodity hedge fund Centaurus Energy John Arnold. Arnold has long-donated to center-liberal causes, some seemingly benign (investigative journalism) and others that are, to say the least, controversial (spy planes in poor majority-Black cities, for example). Arnold’s latest ideological—and economic—agenda is to promote so-called Abundance, a vague political movement currently fashionable among wealthy liberals that’s a constellation of conferences, think tanks, political action group, billionaire donors, and best-selling books by *New York Times* and *Atlantic* authors. }:

Their primary ethos is “growth” through deregulation of industry. Some of the proposals are sensible (obviously not all regulations make sense and regulations can, and often are, manipulated by other capital actors). But this seed of a decent, if entirely banal, idea has predictably morphed into an all-encompassing politics of deregulation and anti-Left populism that dovetails with the political needs of Silicon Valley, and the ultrawealthy in general.}:

Aside from the broader ideological aims it’s worth noting that, in a direct and urgent way, the primary focus on “growth” through rapid and broad deregulation aligns neatly with the most direct and urgent needs of Silicon Valley billionaires—including Arnold, and the company whose board of directors he joined in February 2024, Meta (formerly Facebook). Arnold has discussed publicly how he was brought onto Meta’s board specifically to handle the energy crisis facing AI companies, Bloomberg’s David Rubenstein in August of last year:

“I think [Meta was] looking for somebody who had some energy expertise. The amount of infrastructure that’s required to run the data centers for AI is immense, and the industry is under a real challenge. It is putting tremendous challenges upon the utility industry and the electric industry, in general. But the tech platform companies that are involved in AI are really struggling with this, I think, and my background in public policy is an asset to them.”

Translation: companies that have dumped trillions of dollars betting on LLMs understand that their energy demands are far outstripping capacity, and over the next years and decades getting ahead of these demands will be central to their need for infinite growth. Enter: “Abundance” as an ideological and public policy catch-all for these needs.

Vox’s Case for Growthvertical—while also focusing on related topics like housing and transportation projects—very much prioritizes energy and the building up of energy capacity, name checking it three times in their launch announcement. In Case for Growth’s subsequent articles, the role this supposed “cheap, clean energy” would play in allowing us to scale up AI is simply taken for granted, often spoken about in mystical and providential terms. In his article, “Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country,” Vox Senior Editorial Director Bryan Walsh made somewhat fantastical claims about “clean energy’s” immediate impact on “growing the pie.” While railing against the supposed myopia of “zero sum” leftists, Walsh insisted that

If you’re convinced the pie is fixed, you’ll resist immigration, block new housing, and treat technological progress as a threat rather than a source of abundance — even when those are exactly the changes that would create more opportunity for everyone.

In a genuinely stagnant, low-growth world, this might be rational. But we are on the cusp of technologies — from AI to cheap clean energy— that could dramatically increase the size of the pie.

This is a fairly lofty assertion. What is its source substantiating this assertion? Walsh links to another Case for Growtharticle entitled “The long, fun list of things we could do with unlimited clean energy” which reads like a press release for Silicon Valley. It never, needless to say, establishes the premise that we are “on the cusp” of “cheap clean energy” with any journalistic rigor. Progress is certainly being made in renewables, but even this has other environmental trade-offs and will certainly not, any time soon, usher in a post-scarcity future. This glossy puffery is not serious reporting on a complex and politically fraught topic. It’s Silicon Valley boosterism posing as policy reporting.

In addition to more overt advocacy for Arnold and Meta’s political interests around energy and AI, Case for Growth has thus far produced more abstract ideological defenses of neoliberalism that align with Arnold’s broader worldview, such as:

Why America gave up on economists

The only number that really matters: *If you care about happiness, well-being, or growth, you should care about GDP

We can have growth while fighting climate change

(The aforementioned) Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country

The final example is, indeed, fairly on-the-nose ideological propaganda making the traditional neoliberal argument that what’s most important is “growing the pie.” The substance of the articles vary but in general they lament an alleged rise of “populism,” attack the supposedly overly regulatory and zero-sum “Left” and the political forces against “growth”—a rather vague political goal that we are led to believe is, per se, unobjectionable.

Case for Growth is also running outright puffery for the AI industry more broadly. Their podcast, Explain It to Me, published an episode on “How AI could create ‘a world without work’” where they painted a rosy picture of a post-scarcity society where AI does most of our labor. “AI abundance,” host Jonquilyn Hill tells listeners, “essentially carries the notion that we could all be so much wealthier than we can even imagine today.”

In his article defending the AI industry from its doubters, “We’re running out of good ideas. AI might be how we find new ones,” Walsh insists—after box-checking worries around slop—that we should focus on the “pro-social uses of AI that could actually help address major problems.”

“If I wanted to change people’s minds about AI, to give them the good news that this technology would bring,” Walsh says, volunteering to promote the AI industry, “I would start with what it could do for the foundation of human prosperity: scientific research.”

The day before Vox announced their Case for Growth vertical, with an ostensible focus on promoting AI-oriented growth and “cheaper and cleaner energy,” the $1.6 trillion company Arnold is on the board of directors of, Meta, kicked off their PR campaign to frame their AI investments as environmentally sustainable. “Meta is seeing an increase in emissions related to AI and looking towards an array of clean energy and low-carbon solutions to manage AI’s needs and related emissions,” a Dec. 1 press release read.

Arnold, who was a special guest speaker for the top oil and gas industry lobbying group American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC) last year, promotes other neoliberal PR efforts. In 2024 he donated $175,000 to the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), an ostensibly liberal think tank funded by Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Amazon and Walmart, that I profiled in 2023. PPI operates the @CNLiberalism Twitter account (formerly @Ne0liberal) that attempts to make neoliberalism fun, cool, and novel while promoting bog-standard free market and anti-regulatory dogma for zoomers. Arnold has also lavished money on Bari Weiss’ “anti-woke” university, the free market think tank Niskanen Center, the rightwing American Enterprise Institute, and a similar Abundance publication launched earlier this year called The Argument.

This rah-rah posture for wealthy Americans is not new for Vox; it’s baked into their DNA as a media company co-founded by arch free-marketers Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias over 10 years ago. And they have long run sycophantic write-ups for billionaires—Bill Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Dustin Moskovitz, Sam Bankman-Fried(who funded Vox until he didn’t) and, of course, John Arnold. But this latest project is murky with its conflicts of interest, and ought to be more transparent about where Arnold’s and Meta’s financial interests come into direct contact with Vox’s deregulatory ideological output and seemingly benign-sounding “case for growth.” It’s not enough to disclose the funding source (which they, to their credit, do at the end of every article). They need to disclose what direct interests John Arnold and Meta have in promoting “streamlined” regulation and scaling up the electrical grid. It’s not solely about “smart policy” or “lowering costs” for the average person, but very much about promoting an urgent political priority for the industry and person funding the vertical.

---

no lnx

The “weirdos” shaping Trump’s second term

Politics

The “weirdos” shaping Trump’s second term

A liberal writer explains her journey through intellectual MAGAland.

by Zack Beauchamp

Aug 14, 2025,

Key Speakers At Conservative Political Action Conference

Michael Anton, current director of policy planning at the State Department, speaking during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 2, 2023. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Zack Beauchamp

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.

If you’ve been following American politics in the Trump era, there’s a decent chance you’ve heard of “the New Right.” It’s a loose movement of radical intellectuals who share a basic hostility to American liberal democracy. They all think the system is rotten, that it needs to be fundamentally overhauled, and that Donald Trump can be a vehicle for putting something better in its place.

But why do they think that? How much influence do they really have? And what would a response to their rising prominence look like?

In an upcoming episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast, I spoke about all of this with Laura Field — a political theorist who spent a lot of time in the conservative intellectual world. Her book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a fascinating taxonomy of the wild world of far-right thinking.

We talk about who these people are and how they replaced the “old” conservatism with something more aggressive and authoritarian. We also talk about how they are influencing the Trump administration, and why ordinary Americans should care what a handful of thinkers are putting out on obscure Substacks and YouTube channels.

Part of our conversation is transcribed below, edited and condensed for clarity. The full interview contains much more, and you can listen to it on Monday. We’ll update this link with the embed when the episode is out.

And, if you just can’t get enough of Zack and Laura content, you can come to our Vox-sponsored panel at the Liberalism in the 21st Century conference — held in DC on Friday. There’s already a waitlist, so sign up soon.

You’re someone who is liberal but found yourself as a professional academic and intellectual in conservative spaces — and that’s pretty unusual because there tends to be a lot of self-segregation away from that world. What pulled you into it and what was it like being an insider-outsider in the conservative world of ideas?

I wanted to go into medicine and be a doctor in the developing world. I was very, very liberal and sort of a save-the-world type. I had to take some required courses in political philosophy, and one was a wonderful course on ancient political philosophy and early modern thought. It was mind-blowing.

The right today uses this language of being “red-pilled,” where you see through the lies that we are told by the regime. They use this extreme language, but something sort of parallel happened to me, just reading Plato with these really great teachers.

I fell in love with these books and the tradition of political philosophy and literature that these teachers were so good at explaining. My politics didn’t change dramatically, but some of those circles were quite adjacent to the people who were the leaders of the avant-garde of defending Trumpism: the West Coast Straussians, call them the Claremont Institute people.

When that started happening, I was really quite alarmed.

You use “new right” as an umbrella term for all of these different pro-Trump factions. What makes the new Right a cogent grouping, not just a random smattering of people who all like Trump? What connects them and what differentiates them from the old right?

I’m talking about the MAGA new right, [in contrast] with the Reagan-Buckley right, or the establishment right, which is propped up by fiscal conservatism (free-market economics), social conservatism (conservative social values), and anti-communism.

The new right turns against a lot of that. Michael Anton, one of these Claremont Institute guys, says that Trumpism and the new right is all about economic nationalism — turning against the free market orientation of the establishment — as well as closed, secure borders. So that’s the anti-immigration strain and America-first foreign policy.

I think that there’s also just a hardcore social conservatism at the core of a lot of this — at least spiritually.

The new right has shared principles: preoccupation with gender, strong support for Trump, a general disinterest in the traditional norms of democratic politics, and a commitment to unremitting culture war against the left. But there are huge divisions. If you were to divide the new right into camps, what would you say the fault lines are?

I have three main camps: the Claremonters, the post-liberals, and the national conservatives. Then I talk also about the hard right, but the hard right travels alongside all three of them ideologically. The hard right is the hardcore, manosphere-fascist types. Each of these groupings are different.

The Claremonters are the West Coast Straussians that I was speaking about before. They are really committed, at least in theory, to the American founding. They have this very grandiose vision that’s beyond even your ordinary patriotism. It’s that this is the best regime of all time. They’re also at the very cutting edge of the culture war. So America is the best regime of all time, but we’ve completely lost the plot. The liberals and liberal way of thinking have taken over to such a degree that we need a counter-revolution. They’re the [type] who defended January 6.

Michael Anton, who you mentioned earlier, is now a Trump administration official, a high-ranking one. He’s one of the key leaders in that faction.

Yeah. And then there’s the national conservatives. They’re a little more vanilla, with just nationalism as their core thing. But it turns into ethno-nationalism in some cases and certainly Christian nationalism. They’re a big tent.

The tensions are clearest when we are talking about the post-liberals, who are the most highbrow of the New Right. They tend to be Catholic intellectuals: people like Adrian Vermeule at Harvard, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, and writer Sohrab Ahmari. These are serious Catholics who are more committed to social conservatism and really want to shape the morals of the country in a much more traditional Catholic direction. But they’re also interestingly much more sincere about the left-oriented [redistributive] economics.

The new right as a whole speaks as if they want to help the working class, and create new populist programs. But I think that the people who are closest to Trump haven’t really followed through. They’ve got the tariffs, but otherwise economically, they’re still doing the big tax cuts. They’re still beholden to donors. So that’s been a big fissure, because the post-liberals are almost open to socialism.

A lot of other fissures come in terms of how accepting they are of the hard right. Ahmari has been quite outspoken against the Proud Boys and the manosphere, Bronze Age Pervert and those guys.

I think another interesting divide, which came about just after the election, was DOGE vs. MAGA. DOGE came in and did the destructive part of getting rid of the so-called administrative state. But a big part of the new right wants to harness the state and weaponize it for their own purposes.

Why does any of this matter for our politics?

The knee-jerk reaction to think “who cares” is a natural one, because a lot of these people are bizarre — weirdos. That’s why it’s alarming to see them wield so much power, to see JD Vance have that clout.

I think they have dramatically reoriented the GOP. It’s not just JD Vance who’s some weirdo who’s gotten to the top. It also seems to matter a lot to young people. These kinds of movements can build energy, and young men are influenced by these circles.

A lot of these people I’m writing about are in the intellectual spheres. They’re pretty smart. A lot of them have PhDs, which is no marker of genius, but they have a lot of education and resources available to them. They’re experts in ways that would surprise many people. They know a whole lot. I wouldn’t want to debate some of them on the founding or other questions.

These well-learned people shape the minds of people like Joe Rogan. Ideologically, there is a trickle-down effect. The culture war has a big impact. You see the impact of someone like Christopher Rufo.

You argue that the right operates with an “ideas first” approach, believing that ideas have a tangible, causal impact on politics. Democrats, in contrast, are putting ideas last. You contrast the “coarse brazenness of [the right’s] ideologues and the tepid intellectual and cluelessness and cowardice of so many centrist and liberal leaders both within academia and beyond.”

That is a stinging indictment of the liberal intellectual class. Where are you coming from here? When you say that they’ve failed in contrast to the coarse brazenness of the new right, what do you mean?

Trump has been much more effective in his second term. The Democrats are in a difficult position. They had a very rocky electoral cycle with Biden staying in so long and Harris in this awful position of having to parachute in and not being very well prepared.

I don’t feel like there’s much of a response from the left intellectually to what’s going on. It doesn’t seem to me like the party has much to offer on the ideological front.

It is frustrating as an observer to see that Bernie and AOC were the people who went and toured the country. But I didn’t see more centrist Democrats doing very much. And I still think that’s the case. They seem very shocked and unprepared. And I think that that comes down to a failure of imagination — taking way too much for granted for a very long time. And that’s part of what got us Trump in the first place.

See More:

Politics

Most Popular

The White House has a preferred alternative to PBS. It may already be in countless classrooms.

Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword

The 25 pieces of culture that explain the last 25 years

The Air Quality Index and how to use it, explained

The Joe Rogan Experience is a mirror for America

Today, ExplainedUnderstand the world with a daily explainer, plus the most compelling stories of the day.

===

AN 8 25

Back in the early 1980s, left-wing R&B singer Gil Scott-Heron (remembered for his incendiary "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised") was fond of saying that "the New Right is the same old wrong." The term "New Right," in those days, referred to President Ronald Reagan's fragile coalition — a mixture of neocon defense hawks, evangelical Christian fundamentalists, libertarian budget hawks and moderate Reagan Democrats. But in 2025, "New Right" has a radically different connotation and is synonymous with President Donald Trump's far-right MAGA movement.

Journalist Laura Field, author of the book "Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right," examines the elements of the 2025 "New Right" in an interview with Vox's Zack Beauchamp published in Q&A form on August 14.

Field describes today's New Right as a coalition, but one that is considerably different from the Reagan coalition of the 1980s.

"I'm talking about the MAGA New Right, (in contrast) with the Reagan-Buckley right, or the establishment right, which is propped up by fiscal conservatism (free-market economics), social conservatism (conservative social values), and anti-communism," Field told Vox. "The New Right turns against a lot of that. Michael Anton, one of these Claremont Institute guys, says that Trumpism and the New Right is all about economic nationalism — turning against the free market orientation of the establishment — as well as closed, secure borders."

IFrame Content

Field added, "So that's the anti-immigration strain and America First foreign policy. I think that there's also just a hardcore social conservatism at the core of a lot of this — at least spiritually."

The Clairemont Institute, a right-wing think tank, was founded in 1979 by the late Harry V. Jaffa, once a speechwriter for Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona). Claremont has changed dramatically since then, and its ultra-MAGA leanings are a major departure from the Goldwater and Reagan conservatism it once championed.

Describing the elements of the MAGA New Right, Field told Vox, "I have three main camps: the Claremonters, the post-liberals, and the national conservatives. Then, I talk also about the hard right, but the hard right travels alongside all three of them ideologically. The hard right is the hardcore, Manosphere-fascist types. Each of these groupings are different. The Claremonters are the West Coast Straussians that I was speaking about before. They are really committed, at least in theory, to the American founding. They have this very grandiose vision that's beyond even your ordinary patriotism. It's that this is the best regime of all time. They're also at the very cutting edge of the culture war…. And then, there's the national conservatives."

Field continued, "They're a little more vanilla, with just nationalism as their core thing. But it turns into ethno-nationalism in some cases and certainly Christian nationalism. They're a big tent."

The journalist/author stressed that even though the New Right is full of "weirdos," that doesn't mean they haven't achieved power in the Republican Party.

"The knee-jerk reaction to think 'who cares' is a natural one, because a lot of these people are bizarre — weirdos," Field told Vox. "That's why it's alarming to see them wield so much power, to see (Vice President) JD Vance have that clout. I think they have dramatically reoriented the GOP."

:{---

drilled

Beyond Ads: How Politico, Vox and Axios Enable the Fossil Fuel Industry

Some publications are banning fossil fuel ads, but outlets like Vox, Politico and Axios enable Big Oil in ways that go beyond advertising.

no lnx many

https://www.vox.com/scotus/23841718/edgelord-federal-judiciary-james-ho-fifth-circuit-abortion-guns

The edgelord of the federal judiciary

Imagine a Breitbart comments forum come to life and given immense power over innocent people. That’s Judge James Ho.

By Ian Millhiser Aug 26, 2023,

James Ho sits on a panel speaking as video of him is projected on a screen behind him at the Federalist Society’s 2022 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, DC.

Trump Judge James Ho speaks at a 2022 event hosted by the Federalist Society. Shuran Huang/Washington Post via Getty Images]

Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.

If you could breathe life into 4chan, the dark corner of the Internet where shitposters, edgelords, Groypers, and trolls of all kinds thrive, and then appoint this new lifeform to the federal bench, you would have created Judge James Ho.

Ho, appointed by former president Donald Trump in 2018 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, recently argued that anti-abortion doctors may seek a court order banning a commonly prescribed abortion medication, because “doctors delight in working with their unborn patients — and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”

He’s written that a federal law prohibiting gun possession by people that a court has determined to be a “credible threat to the physical safety of [their] intimate partner” is unconstitutional. Among other things, Ho claimed that this law “should give us pause” because women getting a divorce sometimes seek such court orders as “a tactical leverage device” in their divorce proceedings.

Ho’s very first opinion as a judge, a dissenting opinion in a case he did not even hear, claimed that all laws limiting the amount that wealthy donors may give to political campaigns are unconstitutional.Under Ho’s understanding of the Constitution, nothing prevents Harlan Crow, the billionaire Republican donor famous for lavishing gifts on Justice Clarence Thomas, from funding an entire presidential campaign.

Also, speaking of Harlan Crow, Ho held his official ceremony swearing him in as a federal judge in Crow’s personal library.

Ho’s work, in other words, is often indistinguishable from that of a professional troll. He revels in taking deliberately provocative positions. He often joins a fairly extreme opinion written by a colleague, and then writes separately to take an even more extreme position. His judicial opinions mingle Fox News talking points, men’s rights activism, Federalist Society fantasies, and discredited legal doctrines that are now taught to law students to warn them of the Supreme Court’s worst mistakes.

Ho seems to never miss an opportunity to weigh in on a political controversy. When he’s not writing concurring opinions arguing that the Supreme Court should bring back the Lochner era, an age when conservative justices imposed their own laissez-faire ideology on the rest of the nation, he can often be found lecturing law schools on the evils of “cancel culture.”

(That said, Ho did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this piece.)

When I speak to other judges, I often hear them use a derisive word to describe this kind of behavior: “auditioning.” It’s an increasingly common practice among Republican judges itching for a promotion.

In his final years as a lower court judge, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote several opinions laying out his plans to shift power from federal agencies to the judiciary — a high-priority issue for the Federalist Society, which played a key role in picking Trump’s judges and justices. These opinions reportedly “proved decisive” in the Trump White House’s decision to give Gorsuch a big promotion.

Similarly, in his final year as a lower court judge, Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who previously had a thin record on abortion — went out of his way to convey both in a published opinion and in a speech to a conservative think tank that he opposed Roe v. Wade. Trump picked Kavanaugh for the next seat to open up on the Supreme Court.

The most alarming thing about Judge Ho, in other words, isn’t his penchant for trolling. It is the very real possibility that he will be rewarded for it. No judge in America has auditioned harder for a Supreme Court appointment in a Republican administration. And, if the next president is Donald Trump, Trump has already shown that he prefers judges who go out of their way to show their loyalty to Republican causes.

What does Jim Ho’s version of the Constitution look like?

Lochner v. New York (1905) is one of a handful of decisions that legal scholars refer to as the “anti-canon” — a list of cases taught to law students as examples of how judges must never, ever behave. The list also includes the pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and the segregationist decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Ho wants to bring back Lochner.

Lochner stuck down a New York state law that limited, to 60 hours a week, the amount of time worked by bakery workers. At the time, these workers were typically paid by the day or by the week, so the law had prevented these workers from being forced to work extraordinarily long shifts for no extra pay.

Other cases applying Lochner’s reasoning struck down minimum wage laws and stripped workers of their right to unionize.

Lochner was grounded in what it described as the “right of the individual to ... enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate or necessary for the support of himself and his family.” The idea was that, if a worker entered into a contract to work long hours for little pay, then the law could not alter this contract — even if the contract was itself the product of exploitation or desperation.

Lochner, in other words, not only stripped the government of much of its power to protect workers, it did so on the dubious ground that, by insisting that workers adhere to whatever exploitative employment contracts their bosses imposed upon them, the Court was actually defending the rights of those workers. The Court ultimately abandoned Lochner in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937).

Ho picked an inauspicious case, Golden Glow Tanning Salon v. City of Columbus, to offer his love letter to Lochner. In it, a Mississippi tanning salon claimed that Covid era lockdowns violated the salon owner’s “right to work,” a common argument made by modern day libertarians who seek to revive Lochner. (A “right to work” is synonymous with Lochner’s so-called right to “enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate.”)

Though all three judges who heard Golden Glow agreed that the Supreme Court’s decisions repudiating Lochnerism prevented them from ruling in the tanning salon’s favor, Ho wrote a brief concurring opinion that relied heavily on scholarship by right-wing lawyers arguing that Lochner should be revived. He suggested that the anti-worker right recognized in Lochner has a “better historical grounding than more recent claims of right that have found judicial favor.” And he urged the Supreme Court to take up a pending case seeking to revive Lochner (the justices declined to do so).

Ho’s passion for the sorts of economic “rights” favored by Gilded Age robber barons is matched by his disdain for abortion. He wrote about the “moral tragedy of abortion” in one of his judicial opinions. And he’s urged his Fifth Circuit — which is already the most right-wing federal appeals court in the country, and is typically hostile towards reproductive freedom — to be even more aggressive in quashing abortion rights.

Just last week, for example, a three-judge panel that includes Ho attempted to ban the drug mifepristone, which is used in more than half of all US abortions. That decision will have no effect, because the Supreme Court preemptively blocked it last April — a pretty clear sign that even this very conservative Supreme Court thinks that the legal arguments against mifepristone are weak.

But Ho didn’t just join this attempt to ban the drug, in a case called Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA,he wrote a separate opinion arguing that his colleagues were insufficiently hostile to abortion rights.

Technically, the Fifth Circuit’s majority opinion in Alliance did not purport to ban mifepristone outright, it merely ordered the FDA to reinstate restrictions on the drug that the agency abandoned in 2016. As a practical matter, this order would prevent the drug from being marketed in the United States for at least a few months, because it would take a long time for government regulators and the drug maker to comply with the pre-2016 rules. But Ho would have gone even further, ordering the FDA to rescind its decision to approve the medication way back in 2000.

There are so many errors in Ho’s legal reasoning that it would be tedious to list them all here. One of them is that the statute of limitations to challenge an FDA approval of a drug is six years. While there are legitimate reasons that time period can sometimes be extended, Ho can’t rescue a lawsuit that was filed more than two decades after mifepristone’s approval.

On guns, Ho joined the Fifth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Rahimi (2023), a decision the Supreme Court is likely to reverse in its upcoming term, holding that people who violently abuse their romantic partners or their partner’s child have a Second Amendment right to own a gun — even after a court proceeding determines that the abuser is “a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child.”

Rahimi is another case where Ho joined an alarming decision written by one of his colleagues, and then wrote separately to argue for an even more extreme position.

Ho argues that one reason his court should be skeptical of a law seeking to disarm people subject to domestic violence restraining orders is that women who are not victims of abuse allegedly obtain these orders to “secure [favorable] rulings on critical issues such as [marital and child] support, exclusion from marital residence and property disposition.”

As evidence that this is a real problem that actually exists, Ho cites a handful of court decisions — including a 1993 decision by a court in New Jersey that invalidated a restraining order because of a lack of evidence that the man subjected to it was violent, and a 2005 incident where comedian David Letterman was briefly subject to a restraining order before a court tossed that order out.

The fact that Ho had to rely on decades-old cases in faraway jurisdictions to show that judges sometimes issue domestic violence restraining orders for invalid reasons is a sign that, maybe, this isn’t as big of a problem as Ho makes it out to be. Nevertheless, Ho would potentially arm hundreds of men who have murderous intentions in order to save someone like Letterman from having to go without a firearm for a couple of weeks.

Ho could be the future of the federal judiciary

Ho’s penchant for tacking to the right of his already quite reactionary colleagues marks him as an outlier, even within a conservative federal judiciary. But he’s hardly an extreme outlier, especially on the far-right Fifth Circuit.

In Collins v. Mnuchin (2019), for example, Ho signed onto an opinion by Judge Don Willett that threatened to invalidate every single action taken by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which was created in 2008 to stabilize the US housing market during a historic recession. Had Willett’s approach prevailed in the Supreme Court, it could have potentially collapsed the US housing market and triggered a global economic depression (the Supreme Court voted 8-1 against Willett’s approach).

Notably, however, Ho was one of a total of seven judges who signed onto Willett’s attempt to burn down more than a dozen years of work by a federal agency. There is no shortage of judicial arsonists on the Fifth Circuit.

Similarly, the Supreme Court will hear several cases in its upcoming term in which it is likely to reverse similarly aggressive decisions by the Fifth Circuit. Those most likely include the Alliance case about mifepristone, as well as the Rahimi guns case, and two decisions declaring the entire the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional and gutting the federal government’s power to enforce securities law.

The leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination are already signaling that they want to pick justices who are well to the right of the three already very conservative justices Trump placed on the Supreme Court. In his infamous speech before the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Trump said that he is “not happy with the Supreme Court” because they supposedly “love to rule against me.” (When Trump was president, the Court often manipulated its own procedures to rule in Trump’s favor, but the Court rejected his bid to overturn the 2020 election.)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked Trump’s justices in June, claiming that “none of those three are at the same level of Justices Thomas and Justice Alito,” two justices who fairly consistently vote like Fifth Circuit judges.

Ho, meanwhile, is auditioning harder than anyone in the judiciary to catch Trump or DeSantis’s eye. And, even if the next Republican president decides to pick someone less flamboyant for the high court, they will have no shortage of candidates who are eager to light decades' worth of settled law — along with entire federal agencies — on fire.

mike adams:

NaturalNews) A gatekeeper of the industry, ==

aturalNews) A gatekeeper of the industry, Vox's Julia Belluz has consistently attacked Dr. Mehmet Oz and other proponents of natural health since early 2010, invoking suspicions that she may be employed covertly as an operative for Monsanto's "Discredit Bureau."

Though her earlier reports are unmentionable, now that consumer interest has turned towards natural health alternatives, desperate to stay relevant, the food, drug and chemical industry needs her as their mouthpiece now more than ever.

Belluz's repeated slandering of Dr. Oz reached new levels when she recklessly reported on a letter signed by 10 doctors addressing Columbia University, demanding that Oz be fired from his senior staff position.

Vox.com completely failed to perform real journalism by ignoring important facts that would quickly discredit claims made by the biased doctors, possibly due to Belluz's likely position as an operative for biotech-affiliated front groups.

Vox journalist paid to defend industry henchman?

Belluz failed to note that a key signer of the letter, Dr. Gilbert Ross, is a convicted criminal and Medicaid fraud artist who was sentenced to 47 months in federal prison for racketeering, mail fraud and conspiracy.

Dr. Henry Miller, who also endorsed the letter, has a clear bias, as he was the FDA's medical officer in charge of Humulin, the first GMO to be approved for human use.

Learning that his biased ties were going to be exposed on Thursday's airing of The Dr. Oz Show when Oz intends to address his critics, Miller emailed Belluz insisting that, although he's "written extensively" about GMO regulatory policy, he has "no conflicts of interest."

Even after learning about the corruption and ulterior motives behind the doctors' letter, Belluz accepted Miller's statement, posting it in her report and adding:

But even if Miller and his co-signers do have conflicts of interest -- as other observers have also suggested -- it's largely beside the point. Attacking their motivations completely sidesteps the substance of their claims, which did not come in isolation.

Her response is a failed attempt at journalism, and her rebuttal follows the pattern of an operative paid to discredit opposing views.

Attacks intensify after Dr. Oz talks GMOs==

Vox journalist paid to defend industry henchman?

Dr. Henry Miller, who also endorsed the letter, has a clear bias, as he was the FDA's medical officer in charge of Humulin, the first GMO to be approved for human use.

Even after learning about the corruption and ulterior motives behind the doctors' letter, Belluz accepted Miller's statement, posting it in her report and adding:

Her response is a failed attempt at journalism, and her rebuttal follows the pattern of an operative paid to discredit opposing views.

Attacks intensify after Dr. Oz talks GMOs has consistently attacked Dr. Mehmet Oz and other proponents of natural health since early 2010, invoking suspicions that she may be employed covertly as an operative for Monsanto's "Discredit Bureau."

Vox journalist paid to defend industry henchman?

Dr. Henry Miller, who also endorsed the letter, has a clear bias, as he was the FDA's medical officer in charge of Humulin, the first GMO to be approved for human use.

Even after learning about the corruption and ulterior motives behind the doctors' letter, Belluz accepted Miller's statement, posting it in her report and adding:

Her response is a failed attempt at journalism, and her rebuttal follows the pattern of an operative paid to discredit opposing views.

Attacks intensify after Dr. Oz talks GMOs...

BA jrnl,

London School of Economics and Political Science

Master of Science, Social Anthropology, Graduated with distinction (highest academic standing)

Julia Belluz is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist covering medicine and public health for Vox.com. She was a 2013-14 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Julia’s writing has appeared in Maclean’s, the British Medical Journal, the Medical Post, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Slate, the Times (of London), the Economist, and other publications. She founded the blog/column 'Science-ish' to examine the evidence behind popular health claims—and won a Gold National Magazine Award and a Canadian Medical Association Award.

Outside of reporting, Julia speaks regularly at health care and journalism conferences the world over. She is a fellow and guest lecturer at McMaster University and is co-writing a book about the misuses and abuses of science in policy, clinical practice and journalism. She holds an MSc. from the London School of Economics and a B.A. from Ryerson University’s School of Journalism. Find her on Twitter @JuliaOfToronto and Linkedin.

Experience

Vox.com

Health reporter

Vox.com

July 2014 – Present (1 year 6 months)

McMaster University

Fellow

McMaster University

2012 – Present (3 years)

• Guest lecturer for health policy and global health classes and mentor students in health journalism.

• Consult on research about the research-to-reporting gap and how to improve quality health journalism.

Speaker

Various

January 2010 – Present (6 years)

• Regularly address public audiences through radio interviews (BBC’s World Have Your Say, CBC’s The Current, Minnesota Public Radio’s Daily Circuit, AM radio’s World with Rob Breakenridge, America Weekend with Paul Harris, etc.)

• Keynote speaker, Hancock Lecture 2012 at Hart House (University of Toronto)

• Regularly guest lecture in universities (MIT, McMaster University, University of Toronto, Ryerson University)

• Speaker on health science and journalism at conferences (MIT Center for Civic Media Conference 2014, McMaster Health Forum ‘Do celebrities do more good than harm with their medical advice?’ 2014, World Science Journalism Project SjCOOP Tokyo 2013, World Science Journalism Conference Helsinki 2013, MagNet 2013, Health Care, Technology and Place Interdisciplinary Symposium 2013, Canadian Association for Health Services and Policy Research Conference 2012, Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health Conference 2013, HackingHealth 2012, Stem Cell Network 2012, Canadian Association of Science Writers 2012, World Health Organization Evidence-Informed Health Policymaking in Low and Middle-Income Countries International Forum 2012, etc.)

Marine Biological Laboratory

Logan Science Journalism Fellow

Marine Biological Laboratory

June 2014 – June 2014 (1 month)

• Studied biomedical research and bench science through hands-on labs.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Knight Science Journalism Fellow

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

August 2013 – June 2014 (11 months)

• Deepen knowledge about health, science, and digital journalism through classes at MIT and Harvard.

• Conduct independent research on the interplay between science, policy, and industry as it relates to health.

Maclean's

Contributing writer/blogger

Maclean's

June 2010 – April 2014 (3 years 11 months)Toronto, Canada Area

• Write health-related news stories, blogs, and features for print and the web.

• Write the weekly ‘Science-ish’ column/blog.

Senior editor

The Medical Post

May 2011 – July 2013 (2 years 3 months)Toronto, Canada Area

• Write most of the Medical Post’s cover stories, including data-driven investigations on such topics as discrimination against foreign-trained doctors in Canada, the ballooning budgets at Canada’s medical colleges, and physician unemployment.

• Plan, develop, and edit other health news stories, columns, features, and special issues for print, web, and brand newsletters.

• Write the weekly ‘Science-ish’ column/blog, and produce accompanying multimedia features including infographics and podcasts.

• Comment on health care issues in broadcast media and at public events.

• Regularly travel to and report on medical and health-science conferences in Canada and internationally.

• Develop social media strategies to grow Medical Post’s online readership and Twitter presence.

• Manage and edit Medical Post’s interns.

World Health Organization

Facilitator

World Health Organization

August 2012 – August 2012 (1 month)

• Organized, facilitated, and presented at a workshop for journalists, researchers and policymakers from across the developing world (mainly Africa) on bridging the research to reporting gap and improving the quality of health journalism during a week-long conference about evidence-informed policymaking and journalism.

The Economist

Intelligent Life's Editorial Assistant

The Economist

February 2009 – May 2009 (4 months)London, United Kingdom

• Researched, proofread, fact checked, wrote, and generated ideas for the general interest magazine.

• Blogged and reported for the More Intelligent Life website.

The Times

Bernard Levin Intern

The Times

September 2008 – January 2009 (5 months)London, United Kingdom

• Wrote, researched, and copy-edited for the national, science, features, obituary, and online desks.

Editor

Ryerson Review of Journalism

September 2006 – May 2007 (9 months)Toronto, Canada Area

• Managed a masthead of 14 peers through all aspects of producing the national publication.

• Wrote the cover feature for the magazine, which won gold and silver National Magazine Awards.

• Issue was nominated for seven National Magazine Awards, the most in the publication’s 30-year history.

Editorial Assistant and Intern (summers)

Azure and Design Lines

2006 – 2007 (1 year)Toronto, Canada Area

• Wrote, fact-checked, sourced photos, and copyedited for the art, architecture, and design magazine in the summers during university and sometimes part-time while in school.

• Coordinated the commissioning of stories among writers, editors, and photographers.

Online Producer

The Canadian Press

August 2005 – April 2006 (9 months)Toronto, Canada Area

• Managed the online desk independently on weekends and worked as part of a team on weekdays.

• Edited French and English stories and accompanying photographs and captions for the CP website.

NB, none of these for GLP?

he repackaged one:

Dr. Oz is finally responding to his critics. But rather than address their complaints head on, he mostly wants to talk about … civil liberties. This is no doubt an excellent PR move. Oz is depicting himself as a victim against critics.

But Oz has nothing to say about the substantive criticisms against him. We picked through his defense to show why each of his counterarguments are wrong.

1) Dr. Oz might have a right to free speech — but he also took an oath to “do no harm”

2) It doesn’t matter that some of Oz’s critics are conflicted

3) Oz has no defense against the substantive complaints against him

As a doctor, Oz also took the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm.” The reason so many people listen to what Oz says is that he isn’t just your run-of-the-mill faith healer.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.Read full, original post:All of the arguments Dr. Oz made against his critics were wrong endit

note miller et al gone

Articles written for the GLP are listed after the date as “Genetic Literacy Project”. All other articles were written for the sources noted with excerpts provided by the GLP.

Why have mammograms failed to reduce breast cancer?

Julia Belluz | October 29, 2015 | Vox

23andme

23andMe relaunching health tests with nod from FDA

Julia Belluz | October 22, 2015 | Vox

DrOzGMO

Can Dr. Oz rehabilitate image as haven for pseudoscience?

Julia Belluz | October 15, 2015 | Vox

oprah-and-dr-oz-450px

Latest blow for Oz: Oprah dumps his radio show, replaces him with Sanjay Gupta

Julia Belluz | May 1, 2015 | Vox

Oz bungled attempt to shift focus to his critics

Julia Belluz & Steven Hoffman | April 24, 2015 | Vox

More trouble in Oz: Wikileaks reveal beleaguered doc promotes products based on ‘business synergy’

Julia Belluz | April 21, 2015 | Vox

Screen_Shot_2014_06_17_at_7_29_11_PM

Fall of Dr. Oz: Magical mystery tour of the world of a celebrity medical quack

Julia Belluz | April 17, 2015 | Vox

Overhyping research on ‘cures’ harms patients and medical community

Julia Belluz | March 25, 2015 | Vox

Why we should be concerned about antibiotic-resistant superbugs

Julia Belluz | March 11, 2015 | Vox

(Credit: US Army/Flickr)

Personal genetics consumers risk uncovering uncertain paternity

Julia Belluz | September 10, 2014 | Vox

Ce2uq

Should TV ‘quack docs’ like Dr. Oz be regulated?

Julia Belluz | July 16, 2014 | Vox

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/:{2013}:/01/can_you_trust_dr_oz_his_medical_advice_often_conflicts_with_the_best_science.html

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8485711/dr-oz-criticism

Dr. Oz has come under heavy criticism in recent months for promoting junk science on his widely watched television show. He's been lambasted by experts, by fellow doctors, even by the federal government.

Now Oz is finally responding to those critics. But rather than address their complaints head on, he mostly wants to talk about ... civil liberties. "I know I have irritated some potential allies," he wrote in Time magazine on Thursday. "No matter our disagreements, freedom of speech is the most fundamental right we have as Americans. We will not be silenced."

This is no doubt an excellent PR move. Oz is depicting himself as a victim against critics that, he says, are working hand in hand with industry to silence him. (Some of the doctors who wrote a high-profile letter asking Columbia University to strip Oz do seem to have potential conflicts of interest.)

But Oz has nothing to say about the substantive criticisms against him. We picked through his defense to show why each of his counterarguments are wrong.

1) Dr. Oz might have a right to free speech — but he also took an oath to "do no harm"

Oz's first line of defense is to remind his audience about his fundamental right to free speech. But that doesn't mean he can just say anything he wants about health and science — even if it harms people.

Legally speaking, it's true that Oz has the constitutional right to speak freely on TV. Claudia Haupt, an associate-in-law at Columbia Law School, points out that doctors have to be careful what they say in a clinic, since bad advice could be considered malpractice that's not protected by the First Amendment. On TV, however, Oz is technically speaking as a private individual in public discourse. "That speech is generally protected by First Amendment," Haupt said.

But that's not the whole story. As a doctor, Oz also took the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm." The reason so many people listen to what Oz says is that he isn’t just your run-of-the-mill faith healer. He’s a heart surgeon, one who had a well-respected career as a researcher before starting a TV show. Oz reminds his viewers of that authority in almost every show.

Oz recently tried to protest — preposterously — that his show isn't reallya medical show and shouldn't be held to high standards. "We very purposely, on the logo, have 'Oz' as the middle, and the 'Doctor' is actually up in the little bar for a reason," he told NBC. "I want folks to realize that I'm a doctor, and I'm coming into their lives to be supportive of them. But it's not a medical show." But this is absurd. Of course many viewers are going to assume he's speaking from his position as a medical authority. (As John Oliver quipped, the show isn't called: "Check this shit out with a guy named Mehmet.")

So even if Oz has the constitutional right to say whatever he wants, he also has an obligation not to harm people with bad or scientifically invalid advice — particularly when he's going out in public with his white coat. And his critics certainly have the right to hold him accountable for misleading people about medicine — even if he is outside the operating room.

2) It doesn't matter that some of Oz's critics are conflicted

... a phone interview with Vox on Sunday evening, Dr. Oz said many of his detractors had ulterior motives — such as financial ties to the food industry. "Did you know who those people were who were sending the petition [to Columbia University]?" Oz said. "Did you know they work for companies and groups linked to the pro-GMO groups?"

Oz was previewing a defense he has articulated all this week — attacking the integrity of a select few critics. "The lead author [of the Columbia letter], Henry I. Miller, appears to have a history as a pro-biotech scientist, and was mentioned in early tobacco-industry litigation as a potential ally to industry," Oz wrote in Time.

Yet even if those letter writers do have conflicts of interest, which they may, it's largely beside the point. They are far from the only critics. Plenty of concerns about Oz's show have been raised by members of medical and scientific communities, as well as by the US Senate and Federal Trade Commission. Experts have complained that Dr. Oz's medical advice too often deviates from science and influences public health for the worse.

The FTC found that at least one of Dr. Oz's guests used the program as a platform to deceive audiences and sell products, capitalizing on the "Oz effect" — the fact that whenever he so much as mentions a product, stores can't restock it quickly enough.

Oz was also called before a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection last summer. He was asked by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) to explain his use of "flowery" language to champion weight-loss fixes that don't actually work. McCaskill also admonished him for endorsing a rainbow of supplements as potential "belly blasters"and "mega metabolism boosters." "The scientific community is almost monolithic against you in terms of the efficacy of the three products you called 'miracles,'" McCaskill said.

That's the real issue. The backgrounds of a few letter-writers are a diversion.

3) Oz has no defense against the substantive complaints against him

One of the highest-profile criticisms of Oz came in a recent paper for the British Medical Journal. The researchers examined health claims showcased on 40 randomly selected episodes of the two most popular internationally syndicated health talk shows, The Dr. Oz Show and The Doctors. They found that about half of the recommendations on these shows either had no evidence behind them or actually contradicted what the best available science tells us.

Oz tried to rebut this study in his Time piece, claiming that he's being held to an unfair standard. After all, he said, only about half the advice that doctors give in their offices is backed by randomized clinical trial data (i.e., the gold standard of research evidence). "This reflects that natural gap between what is proven in clinical trials and the needs of our patients," he said.

But Oz was making a false comparison here. It is true that doctors can't always make recommendations based on the highest-quality evidence. Sometimes randomized clinical trial data isn't available, so they have to make use of other evidence, like cohort studies or case reports.

But the BMJpaper didn't say this is what Oz was doing. It said that half of the recommendations on The Dr. Oz Show were based on no science whatsoever. They were either completely baseless or wrong. This is completely different from what most doctors do.

Indeed, this explains why eight of Oz's own colleagues at Columbia University recently cited this BMJstudy to criticize Oz's show. "This [BMJ] report raises concerns that Dr. Oz's presentations of anecdotal therapies as 'miracle cures' occur in the absence of what we see as obligatory discussions of conflicts of interest, possible side-effects and evidence-based medicine (or lack thereof)," they wrote in a USA Today op-ed.

Oz's Columbia colleagues also added this: "Many of us are spending a significant amount of our clinical time debunking Ozisms regarding metabolism game changers. Irrespective of the underlying motives, this unsubstantiated medicine sullies the reputation of Columbia University and undermines the trust that is essential to physician-patient relationships."

To be clear, those Columbia colleagues don't think Oz should lose his faculty position because of his sometimes-dubious TV advice. But they do argue that we need a better way to deal with media doctors and their virtual patients. They're right. Doctors shouldn't be deterred from speaking in public; we need more science-minded people who will work against the erosion of reason and legitimization of pseudoscience that has become pervasive in our society. Unfortunately, Oz clearly isn't always doing that.

Richard Feynman, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, said, "Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves." Right now, Oz is fooling himself — and his audience.

:{New WikiLeaks documents reveal the inner workings of:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:100ms;transition-delay:initial;transition-property:all;display:inline-block;padding-top:15px;padding-bottom:5px;padding-left:15px;vertical-align:middle;width:522.391px;font-weight:700;background-image:none !important;background-attachment:initial !important;background-size:initial !important;background-origin:initial !important;background-clip:initial !important;background-position:initial !important;background-repeat:initial !important"):}:*The Dr. Oz Show*

wiki

Vox is an American news website run by Vox Media. It was founded by Ezra Klein and launched in April 2014. Key contributors include Matthew Yglesias, Dylan Matthews, Max Fisher and Melissa Bell. Its signature feature is the reusable, wiki-like "card stack", which provides context and key definitions related to an article topic.

[hide]

History

Ezra Klein left The Washington Post in January 2014 for a position with Vox Media, the publishers of the sports website SB Nation, technology website The Verge, and video gaming website Polygon.^[2] The New York Times described Vox Media as "a technology company that produces media" rather than its inverse, associated with "Old Media".^[2] Klein expected to "improve the technology of news" and build an online platform better equipped for making news understandable.^[2] The new site's 20-person staff was chosen for their expertise in topic areas and included Slate 's Matthew Yglesias and Klein's colleagues from The Washington Post.^[2]

Vox launched in early April 2014 with Klein as its editor-in-chief. His opening editorial essay, "How politics makes us stupid", explained his distress about political polarization in the context of Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan's theories on how people protect themselves from information that conflicts with their core beliefs.^[3]

Content

In order to reuse prior journalist work, Vox creates "card stacks" in bright "canary yellow" that provide context and define terms within an article. The cards are perpetually maintained as a form of "wiki page written by one person with a little attitude".^[4] As an example, a card about the term "insurance exchange" may be reused on stories about the Affordable Care Act.^[4]

The site uses Vox Media's Chorus content management system, which enables journalists to easily create articles otherwise complex visual effects and transitions, such as photos that change as the reader scrolls.^[4] Vox Media's properties target educated households with six-figure incomes and a head of house less than 35 years old.^[4]

Reception

The Economist considered the site concept virtuous and compared Klein's intentions with John Keats's negative capability: that Vox can recognize uncertainty without being mired in its details.^[3] They connected Klein's hypothesis—that clear and well-presented information improves deliberative democracy—to Vox 's site design, particularly its "explanatory 'cardstacks'".^[3] The Economist also added that the essay defeats the purpose of the site, since Vox would have no audience if people were unwilling to hear information that conflicts with their core beliefs.^[3]

The New York Times 's David Carr associated Klein's exit for Vox with other "big-name journalists" leaving newspapers for digital start-ups, such as Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher (Re/code), David Pogue, and Nate Silver.^[2]