In March 1945, while the war raged on, the military released a fact sheet on fascism and how to spot it in America. They said any fascist attempt in America would work under the guise of “super-patriotism” and “super-Americanism” (War Department, 1945). The search for American fascism began. Fascism is outdated, and modern regimes figured out boots and blood provide no long-term investment. Regimes discovered its easier to manipulate people slowly than to burn resources on violent control. Fascism stays in the history; authoritarianism does the work from here. American authoritarianism has to get past a government built to split power among three branches and fifty states. Fringe groups kept trying anyway. The American right has tried it most often and most visibly, and every time the attempt was seen and brushed off. McCarthyism died in the Senate and survived as an idea in the John Birch Society, and its habits of naming traitors and hunting communists run through the current Trump administration. Every right-wing movement that failed left something behind in the Republican Party. Similar to feralization, the party shed its moderate elements one by one and blended in the aggressive ones, until only the worst remained. MAGA is the product of these movements in which observers misjudged how long the radical right of the 1960s would last. MAGA today is an amalgam of far-right fragments, each decade adding its own.

America is a pluralistic society, a dynamic shift of cultures and values that work together, consistently causing negotiations between opposing views, which prevents one group from taking control. Three branches of government, insulated from the others to thwart absolute control. Executive, Judicial, and Legislative. Different levels of judges throughout the country: U.S. district court judges. U.S. court of appeals judges. Supreme Court justices. A complex system meant to mitigate an infestation of tyranny. Many have tried, but the system is too deliberately scattered for any one group to take hold of it all.

America built its identity on freedom and free enterprise, and that shaped the costume any authoritarian movement here has to wear: flags and patriotism in place of European uniforms and state ownership. The deal is simple: become successful or fall flat on your face. America prides itself on the image of the hard-working middle class, while poverty stubbornly lingers. Worker rights have been a constant issue, teetering between rights given and rights stripped. Some leaders want Americans to flourish. While others only care about the rich, leaving the lower classes in filth. Middle ground has been found before, and it worked. Every person wants to stand alone, but out of many we are still one. This would make raw European fascism contradict itself the moment it landed here. Americans would see right through it. Even the staunchest American liberal would draw the line at total control by the government. American fascism would use a flag and hard hat. It would be nationalistic and preservatist, guarding the image of the hardworking man and his traditional American values. It would imitate freedom to lure in even the most independent American into conformity. The conformity would imitate the American instinct. It would be sold on the free market of Americanism.

Some date the radical right to the 1960s, but it had been showing up in pockets long before. The first movement that captured the essence of fascism started in the 1930s by radio priest, Father Charles E. Coughlin. In 1938, he created the Christian Front and told its members that they didn’t have to be, “afraid of the word ‘fascist” (Lipset & Raab, 1970, p. 170). Coughlin’s fascism spoke to the populist, the worker, the unemployed American who felt left behind and believed society and the elites had abandoned them. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said:

They came, in the main, from the ranks of the self-employed, who, as farmers or shopkeepers or artisans, felt threatened by organized economic power, whether from above, as in banks and large corporations, or from below, as in trade unions (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 68).

They hated the elites, and the list of people they blamed for their stalled lives ran from Wall Street lawyers to Park Avenue to the learned men of Harvard and Yale (Lipset & Raab, 1970, p. 169). Coughlin hated communism for being goddless, internationalist, and a false fix for capitalism (p.169). This manifested into a proletariat-type fascism. The enemy was always abstract, every change to who they felt was the enemy: bankers and roosevelt then the Jews by 1938 (pp. 169–171, 180). Coughlin wanted to maintain social hierarchies, turn nativism on its head, an aimed at the old protestant establishment. The punishment fell on whoever got labeled alien. In 1936 he promised to quit the airwaves if his candidate fell short of nine million votes; Lemke got under 900,000. Coughlin went quiet for about three months and came back (p. 170).

Joseph McCarthy was a politician with a conspiratorial streak, who took the darkest parts of the American mind and used them by feeding into fear and hate. The fear, again, was status insecurity. The anxieties changed shape after the war: new wealth replaced pervasive poverty as the worry, and communism replaced fascism as the enemy abroad (p. 214). Economic conservatives, urban and agrarian, bristled at the New Deal’s reforms and wanted them rolled back (p. 215). They were afraid they would lose their money. The Depression had stripped business of its prestige, and a war against fascism, which people filed on the right, kept liberal sentiment in charge from 1930 to 1945 (p. 214). Peace let the conservative side go back on the offensive (p. 215). Communism infiltrated the liberal party in the thirties and forties, a few of them spies. McCarthy used this to push a full scale hunt for ideological deflectors (pp. 215, 224).

For fifteen years, the Right dropped the ball—now, they’ve finally stepped back into the fight against the liberal establishment. Senator Joseph McCarthy was ready to give anti-communism its mainstream debut. On February 9, 1950, McCarthy began his witch hunt to defame the liberal progress, claimed he possessed the names of Communist Party members who worked for the State Department, and that the Department knew. According to press reports, he said:

While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department (Rovere, 1960, p. 125).

Liberals and Democrats who had helped millions found themselves targets, as if they had always been the enemy. The postwar ultraright ran a doctrine Lipset and Raab call Social Communism, a mirror of the Communist line before 1934 that Socialists and liberals were Social Fascists. Its magazine, The Freeman, argued that every welfare state and planning measure was a step toward a totalitarian Communist state, and it dragged the New Deal, Americans for Democratic Action, and the CIO’s Political Action Committee into the same charge (1970, p. 217). Communism was the left’s kryptonite once more, and the right knew exactly where the rock was kept.

The radical right went on the offensive and a pattern had emerged: take something the left built to better american lives and paint it as proof of failure. The left played dirty too, but this was becoming a habit for the radical right. McCarthy had ultimately failed. The party felt he had become more costly than useful, and after a senate vote, he was cast out. He died three years later (pp. 235–236).

Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society in 1958, a far-right, ultraconservative advocacy group whose anti-communism ran well past the ordinary kind. Welch wanted every government on earth cut to a third of its present size, and the income tax abolished. Alongside the Birch Society was the Americans for Constitutional Action, which wanted political education against “compulsory participation in Social Security, mandatory wage rates, compulsory membership in labor organizations, fixed rent controls, restrictions on choice of tenants and purchasers of one’s property”(Dionne, 2012). The late fifties filled up with right-wing organizations built to push a conservative agenda. By 1968, Welch was handing his members a plot to match: a third world war with Communists steering both sides, dressed up with racial riots, a sabotaged dollar, hippies on campus, pornography in every medium, a Supreme Court that shielded criminals, the spread of the idea that God had died, and a family left to weaken (Welch, as cited in Lipset & Raab, 1970, pp. 250–251). The Birch Society was condemned by the left and the right and dismissed as a fringe radical-right group.

Welch traced the whole business to the Illuminati, a Bavarian society dissolved in 1785, and demoted Communism to one of its instruments; he even floated the idea that Karl Marx wrote the Manifesto as an agent of a branch of it (Lipset & Raab, 1970, pp. 252–253). The Illuminati as a nefarious plot to control the world was never real, but was able to outlast nearly two centuries of debunking as its motivations were vague and ever changing. You can’t disprove something when the claims are extraordinary. Politicians became marionettes to the communist, in this telling. In the Society’s publications, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon were dupes of the Communists, and Eisenhower, the general who won the war, was a conscious agent (Lipset & Raab, 1970, p. 256). Colleges and churches were declared controlled by communists. Anti-elitism drifted back toward the mainstream, and the professors, the intellectuals, and the liberal wing of the Republican Party all stood accused of carrying Moscow’s water (Welch, 1966).

The Birch Society fought civil rights legislation on the grounds that it swelled federal power and ignored the one remedy the Society endorsed, individual initiative by Black Americans themselves (Lipset & Raab, 1970, p. 267). Subversive groups and communism were blamed for fueling the civil rights movement. In August 1963, days after the March on Washington, William Sullivan, head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division, marked Martin Luther King Jr. as the most dangerous Black man in America’s future from the standpoint of communism and national security (Silverman, 2018). The Society still claimed a thousand Black members, listed Black speakers on its roster, and funded scholarships for Black students, and within hours of the Watts riots in 1965 it sent Los Angeles chapters orders for an anti-civil rights propaganda drive built to capitalize on white backlash (Epstein & Forster, 1966, as cited in Lipset & Raab, 1970, p. 268).

George Wallace was a building block for the radical right because his campaign, though it lost, showed the Republican Party where the votes were, and the Southern Strategy followed (Diamond, 1995, p. 13). Wallace, the 45th governor of Alabama, was a segregationist Democrat in the mold of Huey Long, a demagogue with a populist pitch and a taste for the strong hand (Lipset & Raab, 1970, p. 351). Neither the left nor the right wanted him. James Ashbrook, in October, 1968, the head of the right-wing American Conservative Union, stated, “True conservatism cannot be served by George Wallace. At heart he is a Populist with strong tendencies in the direction of a collectivist welfare state” (Lipset & Raab, 1970, p. 348). Wallace spoke to the people who felt left behind by the establishment, workers and union members especially (Lipset & Raab, 1970, p. 348), and aimed them at professors, bureaucrats, and Washington. Ten million votes and five southern states went his way, and Birchers and the Citizens’ Councils helped run the machinery (Diamond, 1995, p. 143). He lost. Conservatives said Wallace wasn’t conservative, but the Republican Party was quick to fold his issues into the Nixon Southern Strategy (Diamond, 1995, p. 13).

If Wallace was a tributary, Reagan was the confluence. The New Right was already a coalition of corporate backed think-tanks, republican political strategist, and a newly organized conservative evangelicals—formed in the 1970s. The were considered a fusionist mix of, “economic libertarianism, traditional “law and order” morality, and militarist anticommunism” (Diamond, 1995, p. 133). The libertarian wing wanted welfare and regulation rolled back; the anticommunists drew in the neoconservatives and the hawks. The Heritage Foundation released The Mandate for Leadership which was a conservative playbook to, “Continuing the Conservative Revolution". The aim was to “ensure the continuation and permanence of the Reagan Revolution” (Butler et al., 1984). Reagan took 66% of the white vote, taking the majority of the southern white vote (Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, n.d.). Liberals and progressives were cast as the villains by a Legion of Doom that mistook itself for the Justice League.

The decades that followed brought new ideologies into the Republican Party, and conservatism kept the keys. Moderates tried to steer the party. McCain lost in 2008 and left it without a clear leader, his own advisors feuding with his running mate (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012, p. 6). Romney drew suspicion from Tea Partiers, who disliked his health plan and did not trust him (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012, p. 195). The economy collapsed in 2008, and the bailouts and the stimulus package that followed hardened Republican hostility toward the new president (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012, pp. 6–7). On February 19, 2009, a CNBC reporter named Rick Santelli ranted on air against foreclosure relief and called for a tea party, and the name stuck (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012, p. 7).

By 2015, Republicans were so done with Obama that they somehow convinced themselves that health care for all is bad and that Obama created racism. Opponents of the New Deal had walked the same road, resisting a program that lifted millions out of ruin. They were beaten down and had completely lost trust in the establishment. Trump enters the room and promises to drain the swamp, remove the ACA, and build a wall to keep the Mexicans out (Trump, 2015). He was anti-establishment and unapologetic about it. He was using overt prejudice and exclaimed he would not be bogged down by political correctness.

Trumps second term played like a reunion tour for the coalition Reagan assembled: the New Right, the neoconservatives, the evangelicals. Trump, the man who had promised to drain the swamp, had become a resident, a second-term Reagan with his energy back. The New Right had walked through Emerald City, fought off the wicked liberal witch, and asked the Great and Powerful Oz to address their wishes. The warhawks got an Iran war (Gringlas, 2026). The evangelicals had proof of persecution (Trump, 2025). The racists watched brown people get deported(U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2025). Behind the curtain stood Coughlin, Long, Welch, McCarthy, and Wallace, applauding the show they created.

We were warned eighty years ago by the military that American fascism would arrive under the guise of “Americanism.” Each time it came, moderates pushed it back or it defeated itself, and each time a piece stuck behind to feed the next movement. Like Dr. Manhattan reassembling himself atom by atom, the body re-formed while people watched and never took it seriously enough. It is here now, and the accusations are the same ones. The left is accused of communism and socialism, and every progressive movement is blamed on some subversive group. MAGA has engulfed the Republican Party and grown more radical, more conspiratorial, and more prejudiced (Neumann & Kaufman, 2025; Newman et al., 2021; Ruisch & Ferguson, 2022). The deep state never materialized. Then a video leaked of a DSA Zoom call discussing a contingency plan in case Trump tries to stop the midterms (Sellers, 2026). MAGA had a contingency plan if Biden won the 2020 election: storm the Capitol. Contingency plans are not proof that something will happen. MAGA now claims the deep state was inside the room all along, and that it was the DSA (Sellers, 2026). The radical right has molded the party into the worst parts of the right and dragged authoritarianism along with it. Authoritarianism was handed down to the Republican Party, decade after decade, until it was fully realized.

References

Lipset, S. M., & Raab, E. (1970). The politics of unreason: Right-wing extremism in America, 1790–1970. Harper & Row.

United States War Department, Information and Education Division. (1945, March 24). Fascism! (Army Talk Orientation Fact Sheet No. 64). Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism

Rovere, R. (1960). Senator Joe McCarthy. Meridian Books.

Welch, R. (1966). The new Americanism: And other speeches and essays. Western Islands.

Silverman, J. (2018). “The most dangerous Negro”: Martin Luther King Jr. and the FBI. University Writing Program, Brandeis University.

Epstein, B. R., & Forster, A. (1966). Report on the John Birch Society 1966. Vintage.

Butler, S. M., Sanera, M., & Weinrod, W. B. (Eds.). (1984). Mandate for leadership II: Continuing the conservative revolution. The Heritage Foundation.

Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. (n.d.). How groups voted in 1984. Cornell University. https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1984

Trump, D. J. (2015, June 16). Remarks announcing candidacy for president in New York City (G. Peters & J. T. Woolley, Eds.). The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-announcing-candidacy-for-president-new-york-city

Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. The New Press.

Skocpol, T., & Williamson, V. (2012). The Tea Party and the remaking of Republican conservatism. Oxford University Press.

Gringlas, S. (2026, February 28). Iran strikes were launched without approval from Congress, deeply dividing lawmakers. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/28/nx-s1-5730203/iran-israel-trump-congress-strikes-reaction

Trump, D. J. (2025, February 6). Executive Order 14202: Eradicating anti-Christian bias. The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/eradicating-anti-christian-bias/

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2025, April 29). 100 days of making America safe again. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/04/29/100-days-making-america-safe-again

Newman, B., Merolla, J. L., Shah, S., Lemi, D. C., Collingwood, L., & Ramakrishnan, S. K. (2021). The Trump effect: An experimental investigation of the emboldening effect of racially inflammatory elite communication. British Journal of Political Science, 51(3), 1138–1159. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123419000590

Ruisch, B. C., & Ferguson, M. J. (2022). Changes in Americans' prejudices during the presidency of Donald Trump. Nature Human Behaviour, 6(5), 656–665. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01287-2

Neumann, C. S., & Kaufman, S. B. (2025). Malevolent vs. benevolent dispositions and conservative political ideology in the Trump era. Journal of Research in Personality, 118, Article 104638. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2025.104638

Sellers, B. (2026, October 22). If seditionists don't face accountability, everyday Americans will pay the price. RedState. https://redstate.com/ben-sellers/2026/10/22/if-seditionists-dont-face-accountability-everyday-americans-will-pay-the-price-n2208447

Dionne, E. J., Jr. (2012). Our divided political heart: The battle for the American idea in an age of discontent. Bloomsbury USA.

I cut bot traffic to my site by over 80% with a simple trap.

Last month, my hobby website OpenBenches.org transferred more than 2.5TB of data to visitors. As much as I'd like to think the site is enormously popular, it looks like it is just AI bots endlessly crawling the data and slurping up the images.

So I've built B⁶ to be an indiscriminate tool to eradicate these unwanted parasites.

It is very loosely inspired by Jeff Starr's Blackhole, but works even on sites with heavy caching.

Here's the high level description of how it works.

• Create a directory like /honeypot/ on your site
• Put some code in index.php within the directory
• Add the honeypot as an explicit "Disallow" in robots.txt
• Include a hidden link to to the honeypot on every page of your site
• If something accesses that page, write its IP address to your .htaccess
• The .htaccess bans the IP address from ever accessing your site again.

This blog post shows you how you can build this yourself and discusses some of the problems it might cause.

Bad Robots!

The file robots.txt lives at the root of your website. It contains a list of instructions to automated web crawlers. Respectful bots will read it and refuse to look at specific parts of your site.

Add these two lines to it:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /honeypot/

That says bots shouldn't visit any page in the honeypot directory.

Bots generally check for updates every 24 hours, so either wait a day or manually submit it to major crawlers.

.htaccess

The .htaccess file contains a list of instructions for how your server should process requests.

Find the bit of your .htaccess file which looks like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteBase /

Edit it to look like this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteBase /

### BLOCKED IPs
    #   TEST-NET-1
    RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} "=192.0.2.1"
    RewriteRule ^ - [R=402,L]
### /BLOCKED IPs

It is important that these rules come before any other rewrite rules.

Change the end of this IfModule to look like:

</IfModule>

ErrorDocument 402 "Payment Required - Access Denied."

If an IP address is in the blocked IP list, the server will send an error code and a readable message. You can add whatever plain text you like here.

Wipe Them All Out

Inside the honeypot directory, create a file called index.php (or whatever you like). When this page is visited, it grabs the visitor's IP address and the name of its User Agent. It then places them in the BLOCKED IPs section.

//  What's their IP?
$IP = get_client_ip();

//  User Agent
$UA = isset( $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] ) ? $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] : "";

//  Get the existing .htaccess file.
$htaccess_file = "../.htaccess";
$htaccess = file_get_contents( $htaccess_file );

//  Split by newline.
$htaccess_lines = explode( separator: "\n", string: $htaccess );

//  Where's our start block?
$start = "###   BLOCKED IPs";
$end   = "###   /BLOCKED IPs";

//  Exit if the .htaccess doesn't have the block.
if ( !in_array( needle: $start, haystack: $htaccess_lines ) ) { die(); }

//  This is where to start from.
$start_block = array_search( needle: $start, haystack: $htaccess_lines );

//  Add the line after the start block.
//  Include a date.
$htaccess_lines[ $start_block ] = $start . "\n" . 
    "\t#\t" . date( "c" ) . "\t{$UA}\n" . 
    "\tRewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} \"={$IP}\" [OR]";

//  Turn the array back to a string.
$newHtaccess = implode( separator: "\n", array: $htaccess_lines );

//  Save the new .htaccess file.
file_put_contents( filename: $htaccess_file, data: $newHtaccess );

function get_client_ip():string
{
    //  Adapted from https://github.com/ibericode/koko-analytics/blob/main/src/Resources/functions/collect.php

    //  X-Forwarded-For sometimes contains a comma-separated list of IP addresses
    //  @see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-Forwarded-For
    $ips = empty( $_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"] ) ?
        [] :
        \array_map( "trim", \explode( ",", $_SERVER["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"] ) );

    //  Always add REMOTE_ADDR and HTTP_CLIENT_IP to list of ip addresses, if set
    foreach ( ["REMOTE_ADDR", "HTTP_CLIENT_IP"] as $key ) {
        if ( !empty( $_SERVER[$key] ) ) {
            $ips[] = $_SERVER[$key];
        }
    }

    //  Return first valid IP address from list
    foreach ( $ips as $ip ) {
        if ( \filter_var( $ip, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP, FILTER_FLAG_NO_PRIV_RANGE | FILTER_FLAG_NO_RES_RANGE ) ) {
            return $ip;
        }
    }

    return "";
}

Setting The Trap

Web crawlers look at a page, find every link on it, then visit those links. So we need to put a link to the honeypot on every page - but in such a way that normal users will not find it or click it.

This adds a link, removes it from the accessibility tree, and gives it impossible to click text (a zero width joiner).

<a id="honey" aria-hidden="true" href="/honeypot/index.php">&zwj;</a>

This CSS hides it from normal viewers and removes the mouse cursor from view.

#honey {
    display: none !important;
    cursor:  none !important;
}

Problems This Might Cause

It's unlikely that a human will find the link, click on it, and be banned. But if they do, consider put a message in the blocking text telling them how they can get unblocked.

Some useful bots ignore robots.txt. If they identify themselves via a User-Agent string (and they should) you can manually remove them from .htaccess. You could also code in an allow list exemption for them. But, of course, many bad bots lie about who they really are.

Conversely, not all bots crawl every link. This won't catch bots which respect robots.txt but are nevertheless problematic.

If you have thousands of different bots blocked, the performance of your server might slow down while .htaccess is parsed. There's weak anecdotal evidence that it adds a slight overhead. But, personally, I don't think that's worth worrying about.

Bots often use hijacked IP addresses. After the bot has moved, an innocent party might be blocked from your site. Each block has a timestamp associated with it. You could periodically unblock older entries.

Bots rotate through hundreds of different IP addresses. So the same bot might get blocked multiple times.

Bots might see the CSS marks the link as hidden and refuse to follow it. Instead of CSS, you could use invisible spaces or other characters which would be hard for a human to see but appear visible to a bot.

Similarly, a smart bot might refuse to visit a path called /honeypot/ so choose a better name for it. A smarter bot would see that touching the honeypot leads to a ban - so perhaps a selection of traps are needed?

As is implied in the name, this is a blunt banhammer. It doesn't give a warning, nor does it look at User-Agent, Country, or any other signal. You touch the honeypot and you receive an instaban. No warning and no automated way to appeal.

Alternatives

There are alternative ways to do this. Some bots don't send language headers, some use older versions of HTTP, they often have severely outdated User Agent strings. Those are all reasonable ways to block something which is probably a bot. There are likely to be a few false positives though.

But B⁶ has no false positives. A normal user can't follow the link to the trap and a well-behaved bot won't follow the link.

Things like Anubis require a lot of work to set up and annoy normal users. B⁶ doesn't require a specific hosting environment and is never shown to normal users.

It Works!

Since running B⁶ a week ago, I've blocked over 400 IP addresses and seen a significant fall in traffic. I've not had any complaints yet. Sadly, none of the bots have paid to remove the paywall!

At peak, my site was seeing 216GB of data transfer per day. That's now dropped to around 25GB.

I don't claim this is the most sophisticated bot blocker in existence - but I enjoyed building it myself. I'll probably add something to records the geolocation of the IP and maybe remove any block older than a certain age.

If you'd like to use it or improve this code, I'd be grateful if you treated it as AGPL v3 licensed.

fuckyeahchinesefashion:

OP: How an artist perceive color (cr叶无趣).

It’s been a long time since I paid any attention to Bill Dembski or Vox Day/Theodore Beale, but they seem to have found each other in an unholy marriage of stupidity. Vox has “published” a new article called MITTENS 3.0 — MITTENS is an acronym for Mathematical Impossibility of The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection — and it attempts to use mathematics to disprove evolution, using the data from the Long-Term Evolution Experiment by Richard Lenski.

It’s not really “published” in the sense of scientific publishing. There was no peer review, but just a dump of his assertions to an archive with no critical assessment. He compares the data from the LTEE to known divergence rates between Homo sapiens and chimpanzees, asking whether documented mutation rates in E. coli are sufficient to account for the 35 million single-nucleotide variation between two primate species. He says not.

The numbers are clear. At the non-mutator rate, 191 fixations can be accomplished in 252,000 generations. The requirement is 205 million. The shortfall is 1,075,000-fold.

Unfortunately for him, he exposes his methodology. He looks at the rate for a single mutation to go to fixation, divides the number of generations (252,000) by that rate, and concludes that there has only been time to accumulate 191 mutations. That’s true, if each trait has to wait for the previous mutation to go to fixation before it can be selected/drift to fixation itself. This is not how evolution works. Evolution is a property of populations and involves massively parallel action on multiple traits and individuals at once. Vox is using the typical simple-minded sequential estimations that simple-minded creationists have been using for decades to disprove their cartoon version of evolution. It’s ridiculous.

But Bill Dembski sees a naive “disproof” of evolution and decides that he and the author must be bestest buddies, and grants him a long interview in which Vox gets to thump his chest and gloat. Nowhere in this interview does Bill bring up Vox Day’s long history of coarse racism and ugly misogyny, nor does he bother to dig into the mathematics of Vox’s “disproof,” which is surprising since Dembski is purportedly a mathematician. Instead, it’s a long exercise in sucking up to Vox’s ego.

For instance, Vox has an undergraduate degree in economics and East Asian studies from Bucknell University, a small private liberal arts college. He does not have a science degree, and by his own admission he did not exactly apply himself to his studies.

Bill: You graduated from Bucknell University with majors in economics and East Asian studies. Please describe your training in economics in detail. What mathematics, probability, statistics, econometrics, or modeling did the program teach you, and which parts of that training have proved most relevant to your work on evolution?

Vox: My econ program covered all of those things except probability, although I didn’t take a course in modeling because my focus was on the historical process of development in late-developing countries like Japan and the Soviet Union. I did independent studies under Michael Moohr and Robert Chernomas, so my studies were a little bit more Marxian than was customary at the time. I would say developing an intuitive grasp of statistics, their limits, and how important it is to understand them contextually is what proved to be most relevant to all of my subsequent work, in games, evolution, and philosophy.

That’s not a very detailed answer. Any student who tells me that their achievement was developing an intuitive grasp of a subject is bullshitting me. Then he confirms it: Vox Day was a slacker who learned nothing in college.

Bill: Did you pursue any graduate study, professional research, or sustained independent work in mathematical economics or mathematics more generally after Bucknell?

Vox: None whatsoever. My biggest educational regret is not dropping out after my first semester sophomore year. I consider academic credentials to be a pointless waste of time. At Bucknell I seldom went to class and sometimes didn’t even bother buying the textbook. Once my professors realized that I was doing fine academically without doing the reading or attending the classes, they switched me to independent studies. I barely went to to a class my senior year.

He wishes he dropped out after his first semester, he seldom went to class, and didn’t bother reading the textbook — and he probably thinks that means he must have been a genius, rather than a lazy goof. It doesn’t speak well of Bucknell or his professors that they decided to get rid of him by putting him in a program of independent studies, rather than flunking him. I sorta sympathize with them. You get attached to your students and want to help them succeed, so you coach them through and design a limited curriculum that matches their abilities to allow them to finish the program. I guess we’re doing the students no favor if that just means their ego is stoked.

So if he has no background in or comprehension of biology, how did he write MITTENS? He explains it all:

Vox: AI did all the calculations and wrote the first draft of everything. It also provided about 750 of the 20 effective criticisms that improved the paper. I don’t think most people understand the first thing about the proper way to use AI to augment your outputs. If you don’t really know what you’re doing, AI will do nothing but defend its training and convince you that you’re wrong. I address this in great detail in Hardcoded, a book I wrote about the process of writing PZ and TFG.

[PZ is his book, Probability Zero, and has nothing to do with me; TFG is The Frozen Gene, another book he hacked together with AI. Isn’t AI wonderful? So many words, so much nonsense.]

Apparently the proper way to use AI is to hammer its outputs through multiple iterations until it tells you the answer you want to hear.

Well, but surely he had the work reviewed and evaluated by his colleagues? Nope, he has no colleagues. He has more AI.

Vox: My first, foremost, and primary form of feedback is from my Red Team. For all my papers, non-fiction books, and translations, I run them through a Red Team Stress Test comprised of ChatGPT, Deepseek, Gemini, and Grok instructed to take a hard oppositional stance. They produce detailed and extensive criticisms, most of which are obviously erroneous in some way, but even when incorrect, often produce new lines of attack. I seldom bother with human feedback. But both PZ and TFG were sent out pre-release to about ten volunteer readers, who ranged from a world-class physicist to a number of mathematicians with PhDs. I got some very good suggestions for improvement from a few of them, and even an Introduction and an Appendix from Dr. Tipler. But none of them had anything to add that fundamentally altered the work; I discovered and resolved the Kimura and LTEE [Long-Term Evolution Experiment] anomalies on my own after the fact.

Oh, well, he’s got the approval of notorious crank Frank J. Tipler, who has written multiple books on the physics of the supernatural and also writes for the Discovery Institute. So much credibility, wow. I’ll have to quote Wikipedia on Tipler to give you a little background.

Frank Jennings Tipler (born February 1, 1947) is an American mathematical physicist and cosmologist, holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Mathematics and Physics at Tulane University.[2] Tipler has written books and papers on the Omega Point based on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s religious ideas, which he claims is a mechanism for the resurrection of the dead. He is also known for his theories on the Tipler cylinder time machine. His work has attracted criticism from many, for example cosmologist George Ellis, who has argued that his theories are largely pseudoscience.

The bulk of the wikipedia article is about all the people who reject his nonsense. But sure, Vox Day has one supporter with legitimate academic credentials, that he was too lazy/incompetent to earn for himself. Otherwise, he’s just smarter than Kimura and Lenski.

He really does think he has disproven all of evolution all by himself, with a paper that contains all of 11 citations (a number I’d find unacceptable in an undergrad student paper that was much more narrow in its scope). Even worse, 7 of those citations are to the LTEE, and contradict his conclusions, and 2 are to ape genome sequencing papers whose authors would be surprised to learn how their work is being distorted. At least he has 2 that reinforce his argument, sorta, but they’re both also written by Vox Day.

So this is an argument made by an unqualified buffoon who churned it out of a battery of AIs, written with negligible knowledge of the scientific literature, and rubber-stamped by a couple of biased dorks from the Discovery Institute. But have no fear, his anti-evolution sentiment is not based on religious dogma at all.

Bill: To what degree, if at all, do religious considerations motivate you, not so much in the arguments you make but in the fact that you are making arguments against neo-Darwinism at all? In 2008, you published a book titled The Irrational Atheists, taking on what were then “the New Atheists” — Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris. They all lean heavily on Darwin to support their atheism. Did your religious leanings or your anti-atheistic leanings at all motivate your work criticizing evolution? Briefly, can you state your religious faith, whatever it may be?

Vox: Not at all. My faith is not based upon the historical origins of homo sapiens sapiens or any other species. I believe in material evil and I believe that Jesus Christ is the only thing standing between Man and his enslavement by that evil. I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God… In sum, I’m a Nicene Creed Christian.

And he has a flaming sword. Can’t argue with that.