Utterly Moderate Podcast

Before we talk about this episode, we hope you didn’t miss the latest research from the Connors Institute on the gender pay gap. Check it out now!

We talk quite a bit on this podcast about some of the things that many liberal and conservative Americans believe that just ain’t so.

In fact, we just released a free online documentary about this titled The Poisoning of the American Mind. 

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Wilfred Reilly, political scientist at Kentucky State University, to talk about misleading claims that have made their way into educational curricula in the U.S. Friend of the show Jacob Mackey joins the conversation as a special guest cohost.

Our guest, Dr. Reilly, is the author of several books, two of which are particularly informative in this discussion:

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Episode Audio:

Before we talk about this week’s podcast episode, don’t forget to check out the Connors Institute’s new documentary, The Poisoning of the American Mind, an illuminating film about how conservatives and liberals in America regularly fall for misinformation and disinformation.

On this week’s episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, we are joined by everyone’s favorite astrophysicist, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Dr. Varoujan Gorjian, to discuss a number of science-related topics, including:

Enjoy, and thanks for listening!

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Episode Audio:

We’ve talked a lot on the Utterly Moderate Podcast about how both liberals and conservatives in America are bombarded with misleading information on a regular basis.

On the left, unfortunately, a lot of this bad info comes from an academic research community which is overwhelmingly liberal. A recent study found the least imbalanced discipline to be engineering, which was still 62% liberal professors. Political science was 89%, psychology 94%, and sociology 98%, while some disciplines had no political conservatives at all. 

This significant one-sidedness means that the people doing the research as well as the people checking to make sure that research is high quality before it is published all have similar ideological blind spots, and this is allowing too much misleading information to make it into the public discourse, where it is often perceived by average citizens as being backed by solid evidence when that just isn’t so.  

On this episode host Lawrence Eppard is joined by anthropologist Michael Jindra from Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs to talk about this problem and hopefully offer some ways to save the social sciences from themselves.

Check out just some of the great insights Jindra has to offer in his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, “When Ideology Drives Social Science.”

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Episode Audio:

It is extremely hard for the average citizen to understand what the “state of the science” is on many issues. We can all type our queries about a particular topic into Google but, when we get the flood of results, most of us are not trained to be able to (a) understand the complicated statistical methodologies employed in many research studies, (b) compare studies and evaluate their strength relative to each other, or (c) assess what the preponderance of the evidence is across tens or even hundreds of studies.

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast, we are joined by Dr. Sallie Baxendale to help us think about how we might make such judgements. She also goes into detail about ways in which the scientific process can go wrong, as it has been in some areas of gender-affirming care in recent years, as Joshua Cohen discusses in Forbes:

“In the U.S., a politically partisan divide is shaping up between states that allow for and guarantee access to youth gender-affirming care and states that ban such treatment altogether. Twenty-two states have passed bans on the use of cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and surgery in minors.

In Europe political divisions on this topic aren’t nearly as conspicuous as they are in the U.S. Rather, the debate is much more fact-based. An increasing number of countries have conducted systematic reviews of evidence to determine the benefits and risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. And the findings from these reviews—that the certainty of benefits is ‘very low’—have informed changes in policy regarding treatment of gender incongruence in minors. . .

All things considered, according to European health authorities and medical experts, there isn’t yet a medical consensus for the use of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in gender dysphoric minors.

And so authorities are ‘tapping the brakes,’ shifting from care which prioritizes access to pharmaceutical and surgical interventions, to a less medicalized and more conservative approach that addresses possible psychiatric comorbidities. . .

In the U.S., on the other hand, talk of introducing guardrails like the ones being incorporated in Europe is sometimes met with being branded ‘transphobic’ or a ‘science denier.’”

You can read about Dr. Baxendale’s own troubling experiences with this field of research in her recent UnHerd article.

Dr. Sallie Baxendale is a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College of London’s Institute of Neurology. She has over three decades of clinical experience working with people with epilepsy in London and Oxford, is the current chair of the International League Against Epilepsy Diagnostic Methods Commission, and serves on the Board of Governors for the International Neuropsychological Society.

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Episode Audio:

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Jacob Mackey to discuss two big gender-related stories in the news.

The first story is positive, and we have covered it in the Connors Newsletter—a big new research study shows that we have made great progress combatting sex discrimination in the labor market. This is great news!

Then there is a difficult and troubling story. According to leaked internal files from WPATH, a leading global organization which advocates for transgender health care, WPATH has not been completely forthcoming about their internal concerns about the evidence behind gender affirming care for minors as well as the ethical issues surrounding informed consent for such care.

The first part of this conversation is really positive, while the second half is a difficult subject that we hope we treat fairly and with an appropriate level of concern. Thanks for taking a listen.

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Episode Audio:

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined again by Lisa Selin Davis, a writer who covers issues related to gender and gender affirming care.

Davis joins the program to discuss a recent UnHerd article “Why did three journals reject my puberty-blocker study? Trans children deserve to know the facts,” written by Sallie Baxendale, a clinical neuropsychologist at University College London.

Baxendale details an academic article she wrote about the state of the research on whether puberty blockers are harmful to people’s cognitive function. Baxendale argues that the responses that she got from peer reviewers suggest that ideology is clouding the judgement of the experts responsible for making sure that the best science is available to transgender children and their families when they are making life-altering decisions.

Lisa Selin Davis discusses this article and its broader meaning within the larger conversation about whether some sciences are allowing ideology to get in the way of doing the best research possible.

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Episode Audio:

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we discuss recent controversies at and concerns about colleges and universities in the United States—from highly publicized instances of campus unrest to a lack of intellectual diversity among faculty to hypocrisy on free speech.

This episode’s guest is Jacob Mackey, associate professor at Occidental College and coeditor with host Lawrence Eppard of The Poisoning of the American Mind, which is due out later this spring.

Check out the podcast episode and also check out two reports that were recently released from the Connors Institute, the “Connors Institute Media Report Card” and “Place Matters.”

In the media report card Connors researchers take a rigorous look at numerous news and information sources in the U.S. and evaluate their bias and accuracy. Check it out yourself to see which outlets made the grade and which ones missed the mark.

In “Place Matters” Connors researchers examine the impact of neighborhoods and communities on American children’s chances of success. The efforts and choices of the individual children themselves of course matter for their success, as do the efforts and resources of their families. But this research shows that the neighborhoods and communities where children are raised matter a great deal for their success as well—take a look at the report yourself and also take some time to examine your own neighborhood!

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Episode Audio:

Before we get to today’s episode, check out this article about the Connors Institute in The Sentinel newspaper!

On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Robert VerBruggen from the Manhattan Institute to discuss a new documentary which claims to disprove that George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, as well as a new research study which claims to disprove that income inequality in the U.S. has been rising since the 1960s.

The documentary in question, The Fall of Minneapolis, was produced by Alpha News, an organization that has a history of low-quality journalism that is often inaccurate, biased, and misleading. Podcast host Lawrence Eppard and guest Robert VerBruggen will discuss the claims in the documentary and why they fall short.

They also discuss a new and important research study which calls into question whether income inequality has really been rising since the 1960s like we have all been led to believe. While this new paper does not completely disprove the argument that inequality has in fact been increasing, it raises serious concerns about how certain we can be about the dominant narrative that inequality has been rising out of control.

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Episode Audio:

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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the Connors Institute at Shippensburg University!

Since this Utterly Moderate episode is both our Christmas program and our 100th PODCAST EPISODE, we thought we would try to be as uplifting as possible.

In that spirit, we are being joined by Johan Norberg, author of a number of books including Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future.

In that book, Norberg presents extensive data documenting how the world has gotten much better over the centuries across several measures, including freedom, life expectancy, poverty, violence, hunger, sanitation, the environment, literacy, and more.

The book helps us not only to avoid being so doom and gloom about the state of the world, but to identify the reasons why we have made so much progress in the first place, avoid derailing those efforts, and help us build on them for a better tomorrow.

Enjoy this conversation, and very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

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Episode Audio:

"Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)

"Please Listen Carefully" by Jahzzar (Free Music Archive)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jim Swift from The Bulwark joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss the fraught nature of the immigration debate in the U.S.

Both sides in the immigration debate have important points to bring to the table, and good faith discussions and compromises are badly needed. Unfortunately, such efforts often get sidetracked by misinformation and disinformation about this thorny issue.

Swift discusses a story of his that had a number of important issues—legal immigration, unauthorized immigration, and disinformation—all wrapped into one.

Enjoy the conversation! And don’t forget to subscribe to our FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER in just one click at ConnorsInstitute.org!

Episode Audio:

"Air Background Corporate" by REDCVT (Free Music Archive)

“Happy Trails (To You)” by the Riders in the Sky (used with artist’s permission)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.