Lawlessness and Disorder: Seth Klamman: "New legal filings allege federal immigration agents operating in Colorado have acted illegally and violently at times amid a summer surge in arrests—including one recent incident where an 18-year-old's face was repeatedly slammed into the pavement in a 7-Eleven parking lot." CPR: "Lawyers accuse Colorado ICE agents of brutality, abuse in immigration arrests and detentions."

Undermining Our Future: Jessie Gómez: "As his family self-deports, this teen is leaving behind his friends, his church, and his education dreams." Soon enough we will be begging for immigrants.

A Cultural Sickness: Megan Henry: "A 20-year-old Haitian college student died in an apparent suicide . . . which his father said came after the student was forced to wear an ankle monitor by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. [The student] reportedly walked in front of a semi-truck on Interstate 70 on Monday after being bullied by his classmates for wearing an ankle monitor, according to his family." Obviously there was more going on here than the ankle monitor. Still, that our government forced the young man to wear the device for no good reason, and that some people apparently hassled him about it, reveals a deep sickness in parts of our national soul.

Hired Thugs: AP: "ICE whistleblower warned of 'unprecedented lowering of standards' during hiring spree."

Milo Yiannopoulos Deported: The right-wing agitator was deported for alleged visa violations. He said he was "ashamed" of his previous support for Trump, and he said of his arrest by ICE, "I didn't really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality is in America."

Quick Takes

Somin on 'Democratic' Socialists: Ilya Somin: "Democratic socialism is a terrible ideology. If implemented, its agenda would cause grave harm and imperil democracy itself. And in seeking massive state control of the economy, today's socialists ironically have much in common with the MAGA nationalists they claim to oppose."

Somin on Property: Ilya Somin: "Property rights were central to the origins of the liberal political tradition. . . . In addition to their inherent value as a vital element of liberty and autonomy, bolstering them is essential to uplifting the poor and disadvantaged and boosting prosperity and innovation."

Lindsay Clancy Case: Michael Huemer: The conspiracy mongering about the Clancy case and "the amount of support that Clancy has received" illustrate a "sickness of our culture."

MAGA Socialism: Eric Boehm: "Trump's Venezuela Oil Deal Sells Out Democracy and Free Markets."

McAleavy's Feminism: Much of Emma McAleavy's agenda for feminism is about protecting women's rights.

Our Ignorant Republic: Cato: "While 77% know George Washington was the first president, 58% don’t know what the main purpose of the US Constitution is, and 57% don't know the reason we declared independence from Great Britain and created our government with limited powers."

Politicized Mail: Trump meddling with USPS delivery of mail ballots illustrates nicely why the federal government ought not be involved with the mail. What government runs government can abuse. See Walter Olson.

Trapped by the Algorithm: Jon Ronson tells the story about a man so self-trapped by the YouTube algorithms that he ended up posting bizarre videos of himself and his two daughters dressed up and acting as babies. Ronson's new book, The Castle, is more broadly about crises among men.

Cowen as Social Butterfly: Jeff Holmes (September 3, 2026, email): After Tyler Cowen invited Rick Rubin onto his podcast, the two "became text buddies, and within a few months Tyler was beckoned to Rick's Tuscan villa, a now-regular occurrence. . . . On one of his visits, Tyler apparently ended up playing Woody Harrelson in chess." A peculiar sort of economist!

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published at https://ariarmstrong.com/roundup-75.html.

Could It Be . . . Satan? Hunter Walker: "Colorado GOP Gov. Nominee Tells Wild Exorcism Story About Fighting 'Satan In Person.'"

Campaign Violations: 9News: "State seeks $50k fine against Victor Marx for 'unprecedented' campaign finance violations." In related news, Marx called top 9News reporter Kyle Clark a "psycho trans person," because Marx is an idiot and an asshole.

Enrichment Debacle: In a last-minute floor amendment with no public input, the legislature made big changes to homeschool enrichment programs. Then the Department of Education helped push ERBOCES, one of the multi-district entities, out of existence. I agree that ERBOCES was straining the limits of the law and of good sense. However, the hasty, poorly-planned changes were needlessly disruptive to many homeschooling families. How many families? Here is Ann Schimke: "The dissolution affects 44 state-funded homeschool enrichment programs. . . . If all 44 programs retained an authorizer and received approval, they could have served more than 6,000 Colorado homeschoolers this year at a cost of more than $35 million in state dollars." (State dollars to which, by the way, homeschool families also contribute.) See also the discussion by Ross Izard and Erin Brantley. Erboces Watch posts documents listing expenditures that it regards as dubious. But, I respond, a) yes, indeed, public schools frequently organize trips to museums and such, b) homeschool families pay taxes too, and c) spending could have been reined in without blowing up the entire network. Ann Schimke has a follow-up about the demise of Colorado Homeschool Enrichment.

Big Sandy Education Successes: Erica Breunlin: Schools here are doing relatively well (with the term "relatively" doing a lot of work). Possible factors include teachers striving to connect personally with kids and breaking "students into small groups, sometimes dividing them up by skill level."

Anti-Business: Ryan Warner: "Colorado is getting in its own way, and Democratic Socialists will only exacerbate the problem, according to the head of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. J.J. Ament believes one-party rule in Colorado means business owners are bombarded with regulation."

Child Care: CPR: "Colorado families searching for childcare face exploding waitlists and years-long freezes." It's so weird how spurring supply while artificially restricting demand leads to shortages.

Griswold Trips Again: CPR: "Griswold's GOP opponent among the victims of secretary of state data breach."

Missy Woods DNA Case: Allison Sherry: Woods "was sentenced to 10 years in state prison after altering more than 1,000 samples in labs that prosecutors say could have disproportionately affected sexual assault victims over many years." What was the motive here? Sherry reports that Woods's attorney "told the judge that the vast majority of her data altering was done to move the cases along faster at the behest of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation."

Medicaid: CSI has the stats.

JeffCo Schools on Trans Issues: The New York Times reviews how the district has sued the Trump administration over its threats to revoke funding over transgender-related policies.

Wommack Is a Liar: The religious figure Andrew Wommack claims he has raised people from the dead.

Worker Shortage: Sarah Mulholland: "Fed economists say lack of workers is holding Colorado, nearby states back." If only there were some way to instantly increase the labor pool.

Westminster Tax Relief: Denver7: "Westminster exempts diapers, formula, and feminine products from city sales tax."

Anti-Socialist Resolution: CPR: "Rep. Jeff Crank's resolution condemning socialism passes House."

Medicaid Trans Suit: John Daley: "Colorado's attorney general [among others] sued the Trump administration over health care for transgender youth. . . . The [Trump] decision bars states from using federal Medicaid funds for gender-affirming care for low-income minors and some young adults." It's so weird how politically-run medicine becomes so politicized.

NCAR: Michael Booth: "New evidence shows Boulder climate lab was dismantled in act of political reprisal, lawsuit alleges."

Anschutz Donation to CSI: Salzman and Maulbetsch: "Phil Anschutz & Son Give $735,000 to the Common Sense Institute." Those authors are worried the Gazette, which Anschutz owns, did't disclose that.

Dem Suit: Marianne Goodland: "A former legislative aide has filed a lawsuit alleging she was mistreated, illegally directed to perform campaign work and harmed by a House leadership structure she charged was fragmented, politicized and ineffective at protecting employees."

Trans Panic: Jamie O'Rourke: Unsurprisingly, the Western Conservative Summit featured some dubious claims about trans people in sports.

Get the Flock Out: Marc Sallinger: " At least 10 Colorado cities, counties and police departments have dropped Flock Safety's license plate reader surveillance cameras in recent months." I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, obviously the technology can be and has been abused. On the other hand, it can be used to solve crimes and bring criminals to justice.

A Lot of Shit: Sun: "A failed pipe spewed 4.25 million gallons of sewage into the [Arkansas] river."

Quantum: Olivia Doak: "National Science Foundation grants $37.5 quantum award to CU Boulder."

Dog Stars: Westword: The author of the book on which the new film is based is Peter Heller of Denver.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published at https://ariarmstrong.com/miner-151.html.

But the countryman had spent seven years earning his four-year degree in social justice advocacy, er, the humanities, so he convinced himself that the goose was exploiting him by laying the golden eggs.

“How dare you lay golden eggs when I can lay none!” he screamed at the goose. “No justice, no eggs! Eat the geese! End geese privilege! Destroy goosist oppression!”

The goose, understanding not a word of it, clucked and laid another golden egg, further enraging the man. So the man grabbed a hatchet, lopped off the goose’s head, stuffed the goose’s carcass in the oven, and enjoyed a fine meal of goose flesh.

Then the man rowed out to the middle of a deep lake and dropped the golden eggs to the bottom, freed at last from the taint of exploitation.

Okay, that story is a little dramatic in the context of Amendment 87, the proposal to add progressive tiers to the state income tax. If you prefer imagine instead the man merely delivering punishing kicks to the goose.

But let’s not pretend that Marx-inspired hatred of the rich (that’s Karl, not Victor) is not part of the motivation behind this, nor that punishing producers will not at the margins reduce the total amount of wealth and encourage wealthier people to move elsewhere.

The most important thing to know about Amendment 87 is that it is a net tax hike of some $2 billion annually.

This is the fundamental question, then: Do you think politicians and bureaucrats can spend that money better than the people who earn it? I don’t think so. Indeed, I regard the proposition as laughable. I think government at all levels should be spending less overall, certainly not more.

Here is a stat from the Common Sense Institute: “Government spending has outpaced inflation and population growth in recent years—adjusted for inflation, total state government appropriations per Coloradan increased by 31% from FY06 to FY26, growing from $5,580 to $7,308.” That already seems like a lot!

A brief history of income taxes in Colorado

Federal income taxes, of course, entered the scene in force in 1913 with the Sixteenth Amendment. What about Colorado?

As Rob Natelson notes, Colorado’s original 1876 Constitution “authorized only one kind of statewide tax: the property tax. There were no impositions on sales, income, businesses, or anything else.”

In 1936, voters narrowly approved Measure 2 allowing the legislature to impose income and personal-property taxes. Here is the text of the measure, according to the Wray Rattler: “The General Assembly may levy income taxes, either graduated or proportional, or both graduated and proportional, for the support of the State, or any political subdivisions thereof, or for public schools, and may, in the administration of the income tax law, provide for special classification or limited taxation or the exemption of tangible and intangible personal property.”

Why did most voters support it? As the Rattler notes, “Many voters want what they were led to believe they would be given—relief from real estate and property taxes in the amount that the revenue from an income tax would provide.” Others wanted to raise additional funds for various projects.

As Earl Crockett reported in a 1951 study, the legislature quickly imposed six taxing tiers ranging from 1% to 6%. Then, in 1947, the legislature expanded the number of tiers to a dozen, topping out at 10%. Obviously voters were imprudent to give legislators an open-ended invitation to continually readjust the rates.

Crockett offers an interesting historical account of state income taxes:

The Colorado income tax was established in 1937 after a struggle among various economic groups extending over a period of twenty-five years.

The 1937 law, as finally enacted, contained very liberal exemptions and low tax rates. Consequently, the measure was a partial disappointment to those who had sponsored for so long the income-tax reform.

However, there was general agreement by members of the legislature that after a trial period the tax could and perhaps should be strengthened. Ten years later, in 1947, when the state faced financial difficulties, exemptions and rates were changed so as to make the tax more productive of revenue.

Provisions of this amendment of 1947 were made to expire December 31, 1948. However, in 1947 [apparently actually 1949], the General Assembly re-enacted the amendment, extending the features of the 1947 law until June 30, 1951. Both of these terminating dates (1948 and 1951) were placed in the income-tax amendment by members of the legislature who either believed that requirements for additional revenue were temporary only, or else were opposed in principle to the income tax.

In 1951 the legislature renewed the same rate structure. In 1960 the legislature tweaked the rates, raising the bottom rates and lowering the top ones, and this general structure remained in place through 1986.

On June 13, 1987, the Rocky Mountain News announced on its front-page top headline, “Governor, legislators agree on flat-rate tax.” As John Sanko writes, Democratic Governor Roy Romer threatened to “veto the living hell out of” House Bill 1331 if it reduced business taxes more than he wanted.

“The compromise calls for individuals to pay a flat 5% tax for the 1987 tax year,” Sanko writes, while larger businesses initially would pay as much as 6%, with a “tax phased down to 5% over a five-year period.” Sanko added, “Romer said the plan would raise an additional $40 million in revenues during the next five years.” (See also the 1987 legislative digest, p. 158.)

Then came the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) in 1992. In addition to requiring voter approval for tax hikes, the language stated, “Any income tax law change after July 1, 1992 shall also require all taxable net income to be taxed at one rate, excluding refund tax credits or voter-approved tax credits, with no added tax or surcharge.”

Notably, then, a progressive or graduated income tax in Colorado requires a constitutional change.

Since then, voters have twice defeated proposals to upend the flat tax. (Note: Although we call this tax flat, because the first $16,000 or so of income is exempted, we actually have a two-tier system.)

In 2013, voters turned down Amendment 66 by a two-to-one margin. This would have created an additional tax bracket of 5.9%.

In 2018, voters turned down Amendment 73 by a seven-point margin. It would have created several tiers, topping out at 8.25%.

In 2020, a proposal aiming to increase the top bracket to 8.9% failed to reach the ballot.

In 2022, voters passed by a two-to-one margin Proposition 121, lowering the income tax rate from 4.55% to 4.4%. Notably, that year both major-party candidates for governor, Jared Polis and Heidi Ganahl, endorsed eventually eliminating income taxes altogether.

That brings us up to the current effort. The upshot is that Coloradans have been debating income taxes for over a century. The debate involves not only how taxes are collected but how much government ultimately spends.

Details of Amendment 87

As the Common Sense Institute summarizes, Amendment 87 (then Initiative 195) would create six tax brackets ranging from 3.7% to 8.4%. CSI predicts that, under the net tax hikes, “Colorado would lose some residents and businesses.” And 8.6% of zero is…let’s see here…zero.

And, as Nash Herman points out, the fact that Amendment 87’s brackets are not indexed to inflation makes it “fatally flawed.”

Punishing people for producing wealth is a great way to undermine prosperity. I agree we need some tax reforms. But Amendment 87 is envy-driven foolishness.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published by Complete Colorado.

No, Initiative 234, which says “ballot questions shall be in plain language at no more than an eighth-grade reading level,” is not a good way to address the underlying problem.

Indeed, by failing to define what constitutes an eighth-grade reading level, the measure invites inane and costly legal battles. And defining reading levels is not as straightforward as you might at first suspect.

Imagine a lawsuit along the following lines: “The state’s ballot title registers on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula at a level of 8.0, but, if you properly add in a hyphen, thereby turning two short words into one longer word, the formula registers an 8.1. Because the constitutional language specifically says ‘no more than an eighth-grade reading level,’ the ballot title is unconstitutional. Na-na-na-boo-boo.”

Notably, the legislature just passed, and Governor Polis signed, House Bill 26-1320, requiring that the title board set titles that “are written using accessible language, which is plain language that is understood by the widest possible audience.” If the problem is that measure has dull teeth, the problem with Initiative 234 is that its teeth will be sharpened unpredictably by lawsuits.

A glance at reading scores

Who defines what is an eighth-grade reading level? That, as William Shakespeare so eloquently writes in his Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 11 Hamlet, is the question.

I take it that “an eighth-grade reading level” does not refer to the reading abilities of Colorado’s actual eighth graders. As I pointed out last time, only 42.2% of eighth graders met or exceeded expectations on the state’s latest English test. If that were the standard, it’s unclear whether any ballot title could be dumbed-down enough to satisfy the requirements.

Presumably, then, we’re looking at some established formula for reading levels. But Initiative 234 doesn’t say that, nor does it say which standard we should use.

Should we use the Flesch-Kincaid formula, the Automated Readability Index, the Coleman-Liau Index, or the Gunning Fog Index? Or maybe we should use the SMOG standard (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) just because that sounds cool?

Remember, if voters pass Initiative 234, this is exactly the sort of arcane minutia over which overeager lawyers itching to sue will salivate.

Let’s take Flesch-Kincaid as a common standard. Per Wikipedia, originally this was developed by Rudolf Flesch and J. Peter Kincaid back in the ’70s for the Navy. I’m sure any eighth grader would enjoy reading the original 49-page report.

The upshot is that the older Flesch formula was updated to the following: Grade Level = 0.39 (words/sentence) + 11.8 (syllables/word) – 15.59. That’s it. That’s the formula.

Why is it minus 15.59 and not minus 17.32 or plus 21? I didn’t read deeply enough into the report to figure that out. For our purposes, just accept that as the formula. And, in the background, imagine lawyers arguing the precise figures in court, which they certainly will do if this measure passes.

The first thing you should notice about this is that shorter sentences and shorter words (fewer syllables) yield lower grade levels. That’s the basic insight: short sentences, short words. “Write tight.”

Here is a very simple example. Consider the sentence, “The constitution is magnificent.” Because that short sentence contains two long words (plus two short ones), the Flesch-Kincaid score is 15.47. Of course the scale is not intended for use with single sentences; this is just to give you the flavor.

If we change the sentence to, “The constitution is great,” that drops the score to 6.62. On the other hand, if we try, “Our resplendent constitution is magnificent,” that gives us 17.04.

The Preamble to the Constitution (“We the People of the United States. . .”) weighs in at 25.8. The first sentence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address scores 15. The preamble to the Colorado constitution scores 29.2.

Initiative 234 fails its own test

Consider the full text of the proposed Constitutional amendment: “Ballot questions shall be in plain language at no more than an eighth-grade reading level. No statute may interfere with this provision by mandating language preceding, following, or in a ballot title of an initiative.”

If we count the hyphenated “eighth-grade” as a single word, that gives us 35 words, 58 syllables, and 2 sentences, for a Flesch-Kincaid score of 10.8.

Here’s something funny. If you instead remove the hyphen or just treat “eighth” and “grade” as two words rather than one, the score drops nearly half a grade level to 10.4. Either way, the language of Initiative 234 does not meet its own standard for dumbed-down language, at least according to Flesch-Kincaid. (Ballot titles are not the same as the underlying language, but still.)

Just for fun I tried to dumb down the language myself, but I only got down to a score of 8.8. ChatGPT, getting good mileage out of breaking the text down into three sentences, outdid me with a score of 4.5: “Ballot questions must use plain words. They must be no harder to read than eighth grade. No law may require words before, after, or in the ballot title of an initiative that would break this rule.”

But notice that “break this rule” doesn’t mean quite the same thing as “interfere with this provision.”

Also notice that I explicitly asked an AI system to optimize the language for a low grade score while keeping the language easy to understand.

I then asked ChatGPT to game the language along another dimension. It came up with a low, low score of only 2.5 but made “the syntax and references needlessly hard.” Here’s what it came up with: “A ballot question must use plain words. It must not be above grade eight. No act may bind a title to words if, but for those words, it would meet this rule. If it would not, this bar does not bar the act for that cause, though this rule still binds the title.”

So if you think that Initiative 234 will prevent people from gaming ballot titles, you’re a profoundly underclocked custodian of scarcely functional cognition. Or, if you wish, you can substitute for that flowery ChatGPT phrase the single-syllable term “dolt.”

Abusing grade scores

Advance Colorado, the organization behind the ballot measure (see the Sun), claims, “Colorado’s . . . ballot titles have consistently received grade-level readability scores between 21-43.”

Such claims seem to be coming from BallotPedia’s Flesch-Kincaid scores of various ballot measures. For example, BallotPedia ranks the ballot title for 2023’s Proposition II (tobacco taxes) a 43.

The first thing you should notice is that assigning something a grade level of 43 doesn’t make any damned sense, because there is no such grade level. Indeed, as experts in the field recognize, “The Flesch-Kincaid score is only valid between US grades 3 and 12 and cannot differentiate information that is easier or more difficult than these levels.”

The main problem with Prop II, in terms of its grade score, is that it’s one huge sentence. And it uses multi-syllabic words such as “cigarettes,” “tobacco,” and nicotine.” I asked ChatGPT to come up with a lower grade score, and it delivered a smooth-reading, six-sentence version at 7.7. (I won’t paste the whole thing.)

Then, at my goading, ChatGPT also came up with a “deliberately perverse version” by “exploiting short sentences, short words, vague pronouns, and unclear antecedents.” That version scored only 4.4. ChatGPT even helpfully summarized, “A Flesch-Kincaid ceiling cannot by itself guarantee clarity.” No kidding.

Other states’ efforts

Advance Colorado points out that other states have adopted comparable reforms. But the language of other measures is less troublesome, and even the best measures have invited legal wrangling. Let’s take a quick look.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading the 77-page opinion from 2025 involving a lawsuit over Arkansas’s grade-level requirement.

The Arkansas measure was a statutory change, not a constitutional one. And, unlike the Colorado proposal, it explicitly included a technical definition of “above eighth grade as determined by the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula as it existed on January 1, 2025.”

That seems specific, right? Ah, but the definition does not say whether “above eighth grade” in this context means only up to and including 8.0 or also up to 8.99. Oops. So that’s part of what the resulting lawsuit was about (although the judge decided the matter on other grounds). The Colorado measure has the same ambiguity.

A New York measure suggested only that a board “shall use best efforts to score at an eighth grade reading level or below.” Because “best efforts” is a subjective standard, the inevitable result was a lawsuit. But the wiggle-room also gives judges more discretion. The language of Initiative 234 is far more inviting to lawsuits.

Rhode Island’s measure says a “question shall be stated in plain language reasonably calculated to be understood by persons with an eighth-grade reading level.” Here again the phrase “reasonably calculated” offers some discretion unavailable under 234. Notably, Rhode Island has only legislature-referred measures, not citizen-initiated ones.

BallotPedia helpfully summarizes similar measures in various states. The language of most of these other states looks similar to what Colorado already has on the books. There’s a reason other states have not adopted language like what Advance Colorado proposes.

Good intentions are not enough. Language matters. Unfortunately, the four-syllable word with which Initiative 234 will be most associated, if it passes, is “litigation.”

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published by Complete Colorado.

“Most students grades 3–8 behind in all subjects according to state testing.”

“State testing shows overall low student scores increase in just over half of categories by grade and subject.”

“Nearly two-thirds of Colorado students struggle in math despite small testing gains.”

“Large majority of Black and Hispanic students continue to struggle in language and math.”

Here is an actual headline from the Denver Post that’s reasonable: “2026 CMAS results show Colorado students making gains in math, falling behind in reading.”

A comparable headline from Chalkbeat, posted May 29 based on preliminary data, reads: “Student math proficiency rises but literacy results are mixed, preliminary Colorado test scores show.”

Headlines that indicate the base level of performance, rather than small year-to-year changes, are more revealing. Compare: If your student told you his report card showed gains in most classes, you would not be satisfied with that level of information. If the student still was earning straight Fs, only some of the Fs reflected slight improvement (a little closer to Ds), you probably would react, “Fs are terrible,” not “Hurray for the marginal gains!”

But the Colorado Department of Education is interested in putting the most positive spin possible on terrible results. Its August 19 media release carries the headline, “Colorado student achievement and growth results show continued progress, with mathematics and elementary literacy leading gains.”

I guess that’s one way to spin widespread failure. However, the state’s bullshit factory will not help Colorado students succeed in college or in the workforce.

A glance at actual results

If you go to the results page you can download the spreadsheet data. Let’s peek at how Colorado students actually are doing on these tests.

Here’s the fraction of students overall who meet or exceed expectations in English: grade 3, 40.8%; grade 4, 47%, grade 5, 49.9%, grade 6, 41.6%, grade 7, 46.6%, grade 8, 42.2%.

Here are the results in math: grade 3, 41.5%, grade 4, 39%, grade 5, 39.3%, grade 6, 32.7%, grade 7, 32.9%, grade 8, 37.8%.

If that’s not enough to horrify you, here are the results specifically for black and Hispanic students in English: grade 3, black 25.6%, Hispanic 24.1%; grade 4, black 29.8%, Hispanic 29.1%; grade 5, black 33.9%, Hispanic 31.7%; grade 6, black 26%, Hispanic 22.5%, grade 7, black 34%, Hispanic 28.5%; grade 8, black 29.4%, Hispanic 23.9%.

And here are the results for black and Hispanic kids in math: grade 3, black 25.8%, Hispanic 24%; grade 4, black 22%, Hispanic 20.8%; grade 5, black 21.6%, Hispanic 21%; grade 6, black 17.6%, Hispanic 15.5%; grade 7, black 19%, Hispanic 15.4%; grade 8, black 23.6%, Hispanic 19.2%.

By the way, results in science and social studies remain absolutely in the toilet. But, hey, at least the legislature scaled back social-studies testing so we won’t have to remind ourselves as strongly of how little Colorado students are learning about that. Who needs to know about American democratic institutions, anyway.

Anyone who would brag over these results has little capacity for common sense and less capacity for shame.

Gazette and Denver schools win spin award

The award for most outrageous spin goes to the Denver Gazette, where this headline sits atop an article by Nicole Brambila: “Colorado math scores hit record high as Denver-area districts show gains.”

Yes, it’s true: 37.3% of Colorado students in these grades meeting or exceeding expectations in math is a “record high.”

I hasten to point out that Brambila does offer relevant context (and anyway reporters rarely write their own headlines): “Despite the gains, only slightly above a third of students are meeting or exceeding math expectations and less than half are doing the same in English.”

Meanwhile, here is the DPS headline for Superintendent Alex Marrero’s August 29 release: “Celebrating Districtwide Academic Gains in 2025–26.” Marrero begins, “It is with great joy that I share Denver Public Schools’ strong year-end academic performance gains across READ Act (early literacy), CMAS and COSAT/PSAT assessments for the 2025-26 school year.”

Let’s dig into the numbers that fill Marrero with such “great joy.”

Marrero states, “Across the district on READ Act assessments, 69% of K-3 students were at Grade Level & Above.” This is a peculiar statement because READ tests are given to check students for reading deficiencies and problems such as dyslexia, not to test overall language competency.

As CDE explains, “The main purpose of K-3 assessments in the Colorado READ Act is to identify students who have a significant reading deficiency and to screen for characteristics of dyslexia in grades K-3.”

The purpose of the CMAS, on the other hand, is to see if students meet competencies outlined by the state. True, as Marrero says, Denver students have improved somewhat in some categories, but that’s relative to low baseline performance. For example, Marrero’s release states, “Math Proficiency Gains: 35% of overall Math scores Met or Exceeded Expectations, a 2 percentage point improvement from last year.” Maybe 65% of students not meeting expectations is not quite so joyous?

If you pull up the spreadsheet for district-level data, you find that, among DPS students for all relevant grades, 26.6% of black students and 25.1% of Hispanic students met or exceeded expectations in English, while 19.9% of black students and 18.6% of Hispanic students did so in math.

And, to reiterate, Marrero is overjoyed with these abysmal results.

The nuances of the CDE release

True, after bragging about “continued progress,” “gains,” “improved achievement,” “meaningful academic progress,” and “encouraging progress,” and right before quoting Governor Jared Polis’s meaningless claim that “Colorado is No. 1 in education,” CDE concedes problems of “persistent achievement gaps, declines in middle school English language arts and limited improvement in science.”

CDE also quotes Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova, who, after praising “gains,” admits “we have much more work to do.” Understatement of the year. She continued, “Too many students are still not meeting grade-level expectations, and longstanding gaps remain far too wide.”

The brightest spot in the testing results, if you squint really hard, is for the PSAT/SAT reading and writing test, which shows around two-thirds meeting or exceeding expectations. Meanwhile, even on this highly delimited test, most students are doing poorly in math.

It’s not as though Colorado students suddenly become literary geniuses in the summer between eighth and ninth grade. Rather, what explains the relative high marks are Colorado’s low standards. Colorado considers an SAT language score of 480 as meeting expectations. Sure, if you set your expectations low enough, more people can meet them. (Note: Colorado also uses a score of 470 in its “Graduation Guidelines.”)

True, the College Board (publisher of the SAT) says, “Students with an SAT Reading and Writing section score that meets or exceeds the benchmark [a 480] have a 75% chance of earning at least a C in first-semester, credit-bearing college courses in history, literature, social sciences, or writing.”

But there is a huge difference between a 480 and (say) a 600. You get a 200 even if you miss every question. A 480 is about the 41st percentile; a 600 is the 79th percentile. So combining students with a 480 and students with substantially higher scores is meaningless. Another way of putting the point is, “Students who reach only the minimum threshold likely will be mediocre college students if they don’t flunk out altogether.” You can cheer that result if you want, I guess.

A useful comparison comes from the 2024 8th-grade reading results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which show 26% of students below basic performance, 39% at basic, 31% at proficient, and 4% at advanced, where “basic” is defined as “partial mastery of the knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at a given grade.”

We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that a fraction of students are doing quite well academically. But that fraction is depressingly small, and it is smaller still for minority kids.

Anyone who actually cares about the education of Colorado students will take the latest test results for what they are: a flashing red siren screaming emergency.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published by Complete Colorado.

Abusing Children: Many people within the borders of the United States already live in a dystopian nightmare. Autumn Billings: "Trump Administration Plans New Facility To House 3,000 Migrant Kids. Many of Them Lack Legal Representation." Reprehensible. Future generations will curse us for allowing this to happen.

Abusing Adults: AP: "More than 2,300 Mexicans sent to Guatemala and Honduras as Trump ramps up third-country deportations."

Abusing Whistleblowers: NPR: "The grievance system in immigration detention is designed to offer a safe channel to report violations of detention standards and seek redress, without fear of retaliation. . . . The system—which in the best of times was a complex patchwork—barely operates and even at times backfires for those using it."

Abusing Military Personnel: NBC: "She enlisted because the Army said it could protect her parents. Then her father was deported on July 4."

Appeasing Tyrants: Matthew Petti: "ICE Handed Over Specific Iranians at the Islamic Republic's Request."

Caging Humans: NPR reviews the case of Homero Calderón, a professional soccer player and "father of two U.S. citizens" with open immigration cases, imprisoned in a concentration camp for no good reason for months. Shameful. Lindsey Toomer: "Health of Colorado priest in ICE custody deteriorating after almost a year in detention." C. J. Ciaramella: "This ICE Office Detains People for Days in Overcrowded Holding Cells."

Betraying Allies: NPR: "They fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan. Now they worry about losing their green cards."

Undermining Our Own Economy: Billy Binion: "Ohio's Republican Governor Says Haitians 'Played a Major Role' in Springfield's 'Economic Comeback.'" Yet the Trump administration is warring against even legal immigration.

Destroying Lives: New Yorker: "More than a million immigrants are seeing protections that granted them safe lives in the U.S. suddenly swept away."

Education Updates

Dystopia Now: AP: "Omaha police agreed this week to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of Nebraska’s largest public school district."

School Choice as Speech Suit: J. D. Tuccille describes a novel approach to school choice by the New Civil Liberties Alliance. The organization argues that education inherently involves speech, so government requiring parents to subject their children to certain types of speech, in the context of compulsory attendance laws, violates the parents' speech rights. I think there can be a weaker and stronger version of the argument. The weaker version would say that governments must let parents opt-out of the official curriculum. The stronger version would say that governments may not compel people to support educational speech of which they disapprove.

Daycare: Some say it's very bad, others say it's very good. Phoebe Arslanagić-Little and Ellen Pasternack say, "It appears that whether a child attends daycare usually makes little difference to their outcomes."

Federal Daycare Waitlist: NPR: "More than 400,000 kids are on waitlists for federal childcare assistance." I continue to think that government would be better (or less-bad) simply to direct all such funds to direct subsidies to poor people with children.

Art Updates

Dolly Parton: RIP. America at its best.

Odyssey: I finally saw Odyssey, and in 70mm Imax. I recommend the film and specifically in that format if you can swing it. Pretty much all the things I've heard as complaints about the film—casting, underplayed gods, modern moral sensibility—are things I liked about it.

Rush: See the Rolling Stone interview and read the related article. A fun detail: In 2022 at a tribute concert for Taylor Hawkins, where Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson played, Paul McCartney urged the two to get back on the road. After Lifeson publicly worried about being the world's best Rush tribute band, Lee recalls, he said, "'They're your songs, motherfucker!' It's not a tribute band! We own those songs as much as we did with Neil. And they're part of us. They're part of your soul. They're part of your heart. And when we started playing them together again, that kind of woke up in him." See also the interview with Radio Futuro in Chile, where the duo talk about their appreciation for the quirky new Canadian band Angine de Poitrine.

Angine de Poitrine: Speaking of, the Guardian has a long article with interviews.

Mr Nobody Against Putin: This documentary, for which the filmmaker was forced to flee Russia, shows the propagandization and militarization of schools under the Putin War Machine. Here's video of the film winning the Oscar.

The Road Warrior: The second Mad Max film is quite good. It's sort of like a Western "reluctant sheriff comes to town to fight the baddies" story, only with fire, tricked out cars, death-defying stunts, and weird dudes in masks and leather. Mel Gibson of course is great; also outstanding are Bruce Spence as the flying sidekick and Emil Minty as the surprisingly expressive "ferrel kid."

Is God Is: This film is about domestic violence and the excesses of revenge. It's very artfully done, and the performances are interesting. It's dark, though, with a touch of grace in the end.

Animal Farm: It is after all a pro-socialist novel, argues Sam Weaver.

Quick Takes

Somin on Israel: Ilya Somin: "Over the last few years, Israeli settlers on the West Bank have repeatedly attacked Palestinians living there, seeking to force them off their land. These actions are deeply unjust, amounting to ethnic cleansing and gross violations of private property rights."

Trump Targets Canada: Ilya Somin: "Trump Imposes Harmful and Illegal Section 338 Tariffs Against Many Canadian Imports."

Minimum Wage: David Neumark and Emma Wohl via Cowen: "Adverse effects for poor and low-income low-wage workers help explain why minimum wages do not reduce poverty."

USS Lincoln: NPR: "Families of USS Lincoln crew say Trump should be 'ashamed' of conditions on board."

Bureaucratic Horseshoe: Austin Kocher offers a good example of someone coming at things from the left reaching libertariani-ish conclusions: "Bureaucratic violence is harm administered without overt force, through decision-making, paperwork, inaction, and exclusion. It reads as separate stories because responsibility is distributed in ways that avoid accountability."

mRNA Breakthrough: Ronald Bailey: "Breakthrough Personalized mRNA Vaccines Are Highly Effective Against Melanoma Skin Cancers."

North Korean Operatives: WSJ: "North Korea has built a secret workforce inside American companies. Using stolen identities, AI tools and U.S. accomplices, its operatives have cheated their way into remote jobs in an effort to earn money for Kim Jong Un’s regime."

$40 Trillion in Debt: Remember when Republicans used to care about this?

Sentience and Welfare: A paper claims, "The aggregate sentience losses of animals in the past half century outstrip the sentience gains to humans from population growth by at least 10,000-fold." Cowen sensibly replies that such "welfare" comparisons are mostly baseless and that "we are not obliged, as welfarists, to commit collective suicide to replenish the biodiversity of the earth." Obviously the paper is making a lot of questionable assumptions. I do think that "we" could develop and increase human populations in ways that optimized natural flourishing. One interesting note: If you want lots of sentient animals, it's possible that promoting space-faring human civilizations ultimately could radically expand the total number of animals. But I continue to think that utilitarianism as a metaethical theory is basically bullshit.

Things Fell Apart Episode List

BBC's Things Fell Apart podcast series by Jon Ronson about the culture wars is one of the best series I've heard (I'm still making my way through). I would say the episodes are crucial for understanding modern America. I asked ChatGPT to list and summarize the episodes; the results are below, with my light edits. For some episodes I insert my own comments, with paragraphs marked with my name.

[ChatGPT:] I checked the current feed, and there are two released seasons, with eight numbered episodes apiece. The feed contains 22 items because it also includes trailers and bonus conversations. One update you probably did not know: Jon Ronson said in July 2026 that he is finishing Season 3 and that it will be out in January.

I'm using the intended episode order rather than the somewhat confusing upload dates.

Season 1 — the origins of the culture wars

1. "1000 Dolls" — abortion and the evangelical right.
Ronson starts with Frank Schaeffer, son of the influential evangelical thinker Francis Schaeffer. Young Frank wants to be a filmmaker; that ambition eventually produces a graphic anti-abortion film series featuring his father and surgeon C. Everett Koop. Those films help transform abortion from an issue many evangelicals regarded with relative indifference into a defining cause of the Christian right. Ronson follows the ripples all the way to the 1998 murder of abortion doctor Barnett Slepian.

Note: This may be the purest example of the show's governing idea: some weird, contingent little event that nobody recognizes as historically important turns out to have enormous consequences. The additional twist is that Frank Schaeffer himself has become deeply hostile to the political movement he helped create.

2. "Dirty Books" — the first modern school-curriculum war.
In 1974, Alice Moore, a fundamentalist minister's wife and school-board member in Kanawha County, West Virginia, reads all 325 books in a proposed language-arts curriculum and concludes that they contain obscenity, anti-Christian ideas, radical politics and objectionable treatments of race. Opposition snowballs into a countywide school boycott, strikes, violence and even bombings. Ronson also shows that some of Moore's most incendiary objections rested on misunderstandings or tendentious readings of the texts.

Note: The remarkable thing is how little has changed. Substitute "DEI/CRT" or today's fights over school-library books for some of the 1974 vocabulary, and the political dynamics are immediately recognizable.

Ari: One of the most interesting things about this episode is its discussion of how both Moore and modern leftists opposed Dick Gregory's autobiography, N-word (not spelled out here). Ronson interviews Gregory's son about this irony. See also Dick Gregory's essay about the 2016-era controversy. He defends a dean pushed out of a college for offering a copy of the book to a student: "I am pleased that she has the foresight to want to give these young men and women the knowledge, insight and experience of a civil rights activist that might just help them understand life a little better. I am disappointed that they seemed to have stopped at the title instead of opening the book and reading its contents."

3. "A Miracle" — Tammy Faye Bakker and AIDS.
During the AIDS crisis, televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the hostility of her evangelical milieu toward gay people. In 1985 she interviews Steve Pieters, an openly gay Christian minister suffering from AIDS, and treats him with extraordinary warmth and sympathy before a huge evangelical television audience. Ronson interviews Pieters decades later and traces the surprisingly beneficial repercussions of that one encounter.

Note: This is the lovely anomaly in Things Fell Apart: a pebble goes into the pond and the ripples actually make the world better. Ronson later called Pieters one of the most extraordinary people he had interviewed in his career. Pieters died in July 2023, after the episode appeared, at age 70.

Ari: This episode caused me to see Tammy Faye Bakker (Messner) in an entirely new light.

4. "Believe the Children" — the Satanic Panic.
The focus is Margaret Kelly Michaels, a young worker at New Jersey's Wee Care nursery school who becomes engulfed in the 1980s belief that Satanists are secretly subjecting children to bizarre ritual abuse. Suggestive and coercive questioning of very young children produces increasingly fantastical allegations; Michaels is eventually convicted on 115 counts and sentenced to 47 years. The case becomes an extraordinary example of how authorities, therapists, parents and children can mutually reinforce a false narrative.

Note: Michaels spent five years imprisoned before her conviction was overturned; prosecutors finally dropped all charges in 1994. This episode is especially useful background for understanding later child-trafficking panics, Pizzagate and QAnon—not because the movements are identical, but because the social psychology is so eerily familiar.

Ari: This episode also is an important warning about how the criminal justice system can fail catastrophically.

5. "A Scottish Jewish Joke" — the birth of online moderation and online shaming.
In 1988, software developer Brad Templeton posts an offensive Jewish joke to a primitive Internet discussion system. People object; administrators debate whether it should be removed; computer-science pioneer John McCarthy mounts a free-speech counterattack. Ronson presents it as perhaps the first recognizable case of somebody being publicly shamed for something posted online—and, more importantly, an early argument over whether online communities should police speech at all.

Note: I think this is one of the intellectually richest episodes. You can watch the basic dispute underlying thirty years of Internet governance being worked out while the Internet is still small enough that practically everybody involved can talk to everybody else.

6. "Many Different Lives" — feminism, identity and the origins of the trans-rights schism.
The episode begins with a girl growing up between unusual racial, cultural and family worlds and follows her influence on the emergence of 1990s third-wave feminism. Ronson then tracks divisions within feminism over whether trans women belong within women's movements and spaces, eventually arriving at the contemporary British fight over trans rights and the terminology surrounding it.

Note: This is probably the most compressed episode in the whole series. Ronson is trying to get from 1970s identity politics through third-wave feminism to one of today's nastiest disputes in 35 minutes. I regard it more as an illuminating genealogy than as anything approaching a complete history.

7. "A Secret Room Behind a Fake Wall" — Pizzagate to QAnon to Stop the Steal.
A bizarre 2017 Hollywood prank convinces actor Isaac Kappy that he has stumbled onto evidence of a secret pedophile world. Kappy begins making wild accusations about Hollywood figures and becomes absorbed into the Pizzagate/conspiracy ecosystem. Ronson follows the flow of claims outward through online conspiracy networks and eventually into Trump-world, election-fraud lawyer Lin Wood and the milieu surrounding January 6.

Note: This is the natural sequel to "Believe the Children." The Satanic Panic required therapists, churches, police and television to propagate a fantasy; by 2017, the Internet lets essentially the same sort of self-reinforcing narrative manufacture itself.

8. "A Mock Slave Auction" — everything converges at a school board.
In mostly white Traverse City, Michigan, teenagers create a private Snapchat group in which Black classmates are mock-auctioned, accompanied by racist jokes and slurs. The district's response prompts demands for anti-racism measures; those in turn provoke opposition framed around CRT, indoctrination and parental control. Ronson deliberately makes this the finale because nearly everything from the previous seven episodes—race, schools, moral panics, shaming, social media and political polarization—turns up in miniature.

Note: Season 1 mostly looks backward for origin stories. This episode abruptly says, in effect, "And here is what all those accumulated historical currents look like right now." It works unusually well as a finale.

Season 2 — the great lockdown acceleration

Season 2 has a stronger single thesis. Ronson noticed that an astonishing number of today's culture-war explosions clustered around May 2020, several weeks into COVID lockdowns. Isolation, fear, government restrictions, enormous amounts of time online, George Floyd's killing and the protests that followed created an extraordinary accelerant. All eight stories eventually lead back to that period.

1. "The Most Mysterious Deaths" — 'excited delirium' and George Floyd.
Ronson begins with the unexplained deaths of 32 Black women, many of them sex workers, in 1980s Miami. Out of that investigation grows the proposed syndrome "excited delirium," which later becomes embedded in policing and discussions of deaths involving restraint and Tasers. He then takes the listener, without initially announcing the destination, to the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020.

Note: Subsequent events actually strengthen the episode. In 2023 the American College of Emergency Physicians formally withdrew its old endorsement of "excited delirium," called its 2009 paper outdated, and said the term should no longer be used; the AMA likewise says the evidence does not support it as a medical diagnosis.

Ari: This also has direct relevance to the police-involved killing of Elijah McClain in Colorado.

2. "We're Coming After You, Honey" — Judy Mikovits and Plandemic.
A chance relationship between scientist Judy Mikovits and a wealthy family seeking answers for a daughter's chronic illness leads eventually to the Whittemore Peterson Institute and Mikovits's sensational claim linking the retrovirus XMRV to chronic fatigue syndrome. The scientific finding collapses, the paper is retracted, and Mikovits comes to believe she has been persecuted by the medical establishment. Years later that personal story becomes the emotional backbone of the viral 2020 conspiracy film Plandemic.

Note: One of the series' best episodes on how conspiracy theories acquire sincere
protagonists. Mikovits doesn't suddenly decide in 2020 to invent a conspiracy; Ronson shows a decade-long accumulation of grievance, humiliation and suspicion that makes the conspiracy story psychologically compelling to her.

3. "Tonight's the Night, Comrades" — the imaginary Antifa invasion.
During the unrest following George Floyd's death, American media and social media are awash in warnings that Antifa militants are about to descend on small towns. A family driving a bus on a Twilight-inspired camping trip through Forks, Washington, is mistaken for the invading Antifa force. Armed locals follow them into the woods; someone cuts trees across the road, effectively barricading the terrified family inside.

Note: The episode title itself comes from a supposedly Antifa tweet that helped inflame the panic. The account was actually controlled by the white-nationalist group Identity Evropa. It is an almost laboratory-perfect example of imaginary violence generating real threatening behavior.

Ari: Shockingly, no one involved in the extreme harassment of the family faced criminal prosecution. Terrifying events. This is a great example of "social contagion" at is most dangerous. The locals involved literally became the sort of domestic terrorizers they imagined themselves to be fighting.

4. "Spicy Brando" — the Whitmer kidnapping plot and the FBI.
Brandon Caserta is a drifting, antigovernment young Michigan man who becomes enraged by COVID restrictions and begins training with militia types. He is swept up in the federal case alleging a plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Ronson digs into the enormous role of informants and undercover FBI operatives, the media's portrayal of the men as white-supremacist terrorists, and the uncomfortable question of where investigation ends and encouragement begins.

Note: Caserta was acquitted in 2022, as was Daniel Harris; other participants pleaded guilty or were convicted. That's precisely why this episode is good: "there really was a criminal kidnapping conspiracy" and "the government's tactics and characterization of particular defendants deserve scrutiny" are not mutually exclusive propositions.

5. "Things Weren't Going Back to Normal" — gender identity, parents and Florida politics.
During lockdown, January Littlejohn's 13-year-old child begins questioning gender identity. Littlejohn becomes furious after discovering that the child's Florida middle school had developed a gender-support plan without what she regarded as meaningful parental knowledge or consent. The private family rupture becomes a public cause, then feeds into the much larger political campaign over schools, parental rights and gender that culminates in legislation championed by Ron DeSantis.

Note: This is one of the episodes where Ronson's method matters most: he refuses to turn either the distressed teenager or the distressed parent into the villain the opposing culture-war camp wants. It has also been one of the more contested episodes—critics on the left subsequently argued that Ronson was too credulous toward Littlejohn's account.

Ari: I, on the other hand, tend to take Littlejohn's basic account (if not all the surrounding details) at face value. Her story is remarkably similar to that of Erin Lee of Colorado. And the hysterical claims about "furries" largely defined the last campaign for governor on the Republican side. However, Heidi Ganahl, despite her obsession with furries, did not claim that schools offered litter boxes to students, something others claimed.

6. "A Hierarchy of Trauma" — when clinical language escapes the clinic.
Ronson uses Bessel van der Kolk's enormously successful The Body Keeps the Score—a lockdown bestseller—to examine the expansion of "trauma" language. Ideas developed to understand severe psychological injury spread into campus disputes over offensive speech, triggering material and emotional safety, and then outward into workplaces during the racial and political upheavals of 2020.

Note: I particularly like this one because Ronson avoids the crude choice between "trauma is real" and "people are oversensitive." His actual subject is concept creep: a useful idea can become less useful when its definition expands to encompass qualitatively different experiences.

7. "You'll Own Nothing and You'll Be Happy" — how separate facts become one conspiracy.
Ronson starts with three essentially unrelated things: an attempt to solve affordable housing problems, an Oxford traffic-management scheme, and Danish politician Ida Auken's speculative 2016 World Economic Forum essay imagining a sharing-economy future. Online, they gradually fuse with the WEF's "Great Reset" into a single theory that elites intend to abolish private property and use "15-minute cities" to imprison people in their neighborhoods.

Note: This may be the show's best demonstration of what I'd call conspiracy collage. Most of the constituent facts are real—the WEF really did publish the piece, Oxford really did propose traffic filters—but the causal glue joining them into one master plan is imaginary. Auken herself explicitly said her scenario was not her proposed utopia.

8. "Mikki's Hero's Journey" — the man behind Plandemic, and the payoff.
The finale profiles filmmaker Mikki Willis. His brother's death from AIDS helps produce a lasting suspicion of the medical establishment; Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" gives him a way of interpreting his own life as a struggle in which a hero receives a call, confronts evil and slays a dragon. Eventually Willis makes Plandemic, with Judy Mikovits as its star, becomes an important COVID-conspiracy propagator, and appears around January 6. Ronson then reveals how Willis intersects, directly or ideologically, with story after story from the season.

Note: Definitely listen to this after the other seven even if revisiting episodes selectively. It's not merely another profile; it's the structural conclusion of Season 2. And I think Ronson's most interesting insight is that conspiracism is partly a storytelling problem: if you insist on seeing your life as a hero's journey, complicated people start turning into heroes and dragons. That is exactly the habit Ronson himself tries very hard to resist.

A couple of bonus items worth knowing about

The feed also contains a Louis Theroux conversation after Season 1, in which Theroux questions Ronson about his reporting and interview methods, and an analogous Adam Buxton conversation after Season 2. Those are worth listening to if what you especially like is how Ronson does this: approaching people he thinks are badly mistaken without humiliating them, while still trying to establish what actually happened. There's also a Hay Festival conversation and a later audience Q&A.

And having gone through the whole set again, I think your enthusiasm is justified. What distinguishes Things Fell Apart from most "culture war" material is that Ronson is much more interested in causal history than adjudicating which tribe is good. Again and again the important discovery is that today's grand ideological battle arose from a ridiculous accident, a personal grievance, a misunderstood text, a bad scientific paper, or some person nobody had ever heard of. That's very close to the Randi virtue you liked in the other project: curiosity about how people came to believe the thing, rather than merely announcing that the belief is wrong.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published at https://ariarmstrong.com/roundup-74.html.

House Bill 24-1147 requires that AI-generated portrayals of candidates and incumbent office holders contain the disclaimer, "This (image/audio/video/multimedia) has been edited and depicts speech or conduct that falsely appears to be authentic or truthful."

I do think people should not be allowed to inaccurately present other people as speaking. I don't think legislators should receive special protection in this realm that other people do not enjoy. We're not supposed to have a privileged class in this country. So the statute undercuts equal protection.

The required disclaimer is obvious bullshit. For starters, it is inherently contradictory, because if the disclaimer is posted, then the speech does not "falsely" appear to be authentic. Government ought not require people to lie, which is what this mandated disclaimer does.

The Independence Institute (which pays me to write a column) recently released a video portraying State Sen. Kathy Kipp as working in a grocery store, where she simply pockets the change she's supposed to give to customers. This is presented as a criticism of Prop. NN, which eliminates TABOR refunds. It's a hilarious video, on point, and obviously satire. No reasonable person would seriously think that Kathy Kipp acted that way as a grocery store clerk. And the II did include a textual disclaimer to the effect that the contents were fake. So this is 100% protected speech under the First Amendment.

But Kipp is an enemy of the First Amendment as well as a pathetic whiner, so, instead of just chuckling and releasing a statement—or, better yet, releasing a reply AI-generated video of Jon Caldara (head of the II), Kipp filed a legal complaint accusing the II of violating 1147.

The silver lining is that Kipp's complaint generated a ton of earned media coverage of the video, so many times the number of people have seen it than otherwise would have. See the CBS story and related video, and share them with all your friends.

Quick Takes

Trump Targets Colorado: Sentinel: "Don't let Trump get away with illegally punishing Colorado for Tina Peters." See also Mario Nicolais, Mike Littwin, and Patricia Calhoun.

Breunlin on CMAS: Erica Breunlin offers good context on the CMAS tests. She points out that a few districts have high opt-out rates, which skews results; that schools often become consumed with testing in April; and that CMAS tests do not reflect everything important about what students know and are learning. All fair points. None of that undercuts my point that results indicate that a large fraction of Colorado students are doing poorly academically. I do think the tests should be shorter. Ideally, students would get short, frequent tests, but maybe that's unmanageable. Let's take a hypothetical free market in education. Some parents would choose schools without any standardized testing. Others would look for schools that sensibly employed quality tests to track student progress. People groan about tests, but the alternative is to have no measure of student performance.

Water Water Everywhere: I asked ChatGPT to weigh in on Matt Yglesias's article on water markets. Chat returned a very-useful reply, complete with citations. In sum, "A remarkable number of Western water rules discourage transactions." These include rules restricting water to a particular location and "use it or lose it rules." However, Chat warns, the solution is not simply to allow people to sell existing use in terms of total gallons or whatever, because one sort of use may not return as much water to the downstream flow as another. Here is a key formulation: "Making water markets work may require more state capacity in some dimensions—better meters, better hydrological modeling, clearer adjudication and standardized transferable rights—while requiring less state restriction on what owners can subsequently do with those rights."

ERBOCES: Paula Noonan explains how a multi-district coop directed state education dollars to private religious schools. But in the process of cutting off ERBOCES, the state cut off many other secular programs for homeschoolers or threw them into disarray.

Clark vs. Lee: On August 7 Erin Lee claimed, "Kyle Clark has put out stories that I am a cult leader who covers children in blood." Clark never said she was a "cult leader," and he quoted her accurately about saying she wants to "cover them [children] in the blood of Jesus." Lee objects to Clark calling her "anti-trans" and calling one of her associates a "Christian nationalist," but those terms fit. Hemant Mehta discusses.

Get 'Er Done: A CU Boulder professor used "aggressive and hostile language" by emailing, "Just get it done," according to a bias report.

Conservation Tax: The ballot measure on taxes for conservation is doubly bad: It sucks up more TABOR refunds and it unduly binds the legislature. Generally I'm for limits on what the legislature can spend but flexibility within those limits.

School Drones: Yeah, there's nothing dystopian at all about using drones in schools that can shoot pepper spray and ram people. Whatever the problem is, this is not the solution.

Punishing Businesses: Mike Krause: Colorado Chamber of Commerce head Loren "Furman says 98 large businesses have left Colorado since 2019, taking nearly 14,000 jobs with them." These are "companies relocating operations to other states, with Texas, Florida, Utah and Tennessee among the biggest beneficiaries of the Colorado exodus."

Jeffco Schools Tax: Mike Krause: "Jeffco schools asking $133 million more from taxpayers." No thanks!

Religion in Schools: The Montezuma-Cortez district adopted, and then quickly dumped, curricula with religious content. See Ann Schimke and Hemant Mehta.

Hunter Walker on Marx: TPM: "His detailed descriptions include claims that one man 'transformed' in front of him, developing 'pointy' ears and 'superhuman strength.' In another episode, Marx said a 'demonized' teenage girl 'turned reptilian' before his eyes." But Marx's delusions are not merely ridiculous; they are dangerous, especially when it comes to Marx demonizing LGBTQ people. What an embarrassment for Coloradans. Related: Hugo Chavez-Rey, Vice-Chair of the Denver Republican Party, resigned rather than support Marx.

Denver Homicides: Crime is down overall across the U.S., but homicides are up in Denver.

Governing Interest: Colorado regulates interest rates more harshly than the federal government, and the Tenth Circuit is fine with that, even when the banks are out-of-state. God forbid we have voluntary consent in such matters.

Kafer vs. Griswold Krista Kafer makes a convincing case that voters ought to vote against Griswold in the AG race. Dick Wadhams also is not a fan of Griswold.

The XX-XY Shirt: According to Wayne Laugesen, a Colorado Springs teacher wore a shirt to a meeting prior to the start of school saying "XX does not equal YY." As a matter of fact, the shirt's message is incontrovertible. But district officials hassled her over it. True, the shirt's manufacturer, XX-YY Athletics, promotes an overtly political message: "It is unfair and dangerous to allow males (XY) to compete in girls and women's (XX) sports." I happen to believe that that statement is sometimes true, depending on context. Laugesen himself promotes an anti-trans message, referring to "the false belief that humanity consists of multiple genders." His mistake is to reduce gender to chromosomes.

Gun Lawsuit: Derek Draplin: "The latest lawsuit, brought by the National Rifle Association and two out-of-state gun owners, argues that the state and city's carry laws 'together leave otherwise qualified nonresidents who travel to Denver with no lawful means to carry a handgun there for self-defense.'"

Abortion Notification Suit: Sean Beedle: "Lawsuit Challenging Parental Notification for Abortion Will Proceed." This is a difficult issue. On one hand, if I were the parent of a pregnant girl, I'd absolutely want to be notified. On the other hand, parents should not be able to commit a girl to a lifetime responsibility of parenting. Offhand I'd say parental notice is appropriate, but a minor should be able to go to a judge to override parental decisions in this matter.

Community High School: A remarkable stat from Jason Gonzales: "About 40% of Colorado’s community college enrollment is made up of high school students earning college credits."

Government-Aided Advocacy: This is remarkable. State Rep. Lorena Garcia runs the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition, a group involved in political advocacy. Sherrie Peif reports: "CSPC has raised nearly $2 million in Colorado tax-funded grants and other programs since Garcia became director." See also Jon Caldara.

Jail Visitations: Jillian Turanovic and Melinda Tasca: "The Adams County Jail, just north of Denver, does not allow in-person visits." This seems pretty obviously to violate the rights of prisoners, and it's a terrible way to reintegrate convicts back into society.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published at https://ariarmstrong.com/miner-150.html.

This Summer, my son also read the “Hunger Games” trilogy; the “Isle of the Dark” series by Rina Brown (a local author); the “Sound of Nothing” series by Nicole Aisling (also local); the Magnus Chase series by Rick Riordan; “Project Hail Mary,” “The Martian,” and “Artemis” by Andy Weir; “Middle School” by James Patterson; and other books.

Together as a family we also read the outstanding “Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom” by Boulder author (and former philosophy professor) Claudia Mills. I love that book!

We also read four books together from the Elizabeth School District list of suppressed books. We especially enjoyed “You Should See Me in a Crown” by Leah Johnson and “Redwood and Ponytail” by K. A. Holt.

We’re now also reading “The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs” by paleontologist Dean Lomax, who is visiting Denver next month. Did you know that some animals can both lay eggs and give live births?

The point is, my son, who has never in his life attended regular school, is well ahead of most of his public-school peers academically.

Yes, our schedule will change somewhat for the Fall. Our district-authorized one-day-a-week “enrichment” program is starting back up, so that approaches “real school.” We’re joining three new homeschool co-ops, one nature-based, the other two for science projects and the like. So it does feel like a change of seasons for us, even though our core academic program looks largely the same.

Answering smears against homeschoolers

Given what we’re doing academically, it is not much of a surprise that our son scores in the top one percent on the California Achievement Test. It saddens me that so many public-school children learn well below their potential.

What do surprise me are the bigoted smears that homeschooling families such as mine continue to endure.

After podcaster Jennifer Welch said, “I think homeschooling is weird,” a caller said, “What I have absolutely f***ing had it with is watching some of the stupidest people I went to school with decide that they’re qualified to homeschool their children.”

Cohost Angie Sullivan replied, “I just think homeschooling is a bad idea, from soup to nuts. I don’t care if you’re a nuclear physicist. I think it’s just f***ing weird as f*** that you want your kids around you all day, every day, and all night. And just the socialization. For me personally, it was that I would have gotten up on my hands and knees and strapped them to my back and crawled to get them to school every day just to get them where I wasn’t. So, I don’t trust somebody that wants to be with their kids 24/7. I think a lot of dumb people do it because it’s just easier and that’s a concern. . . . It’s like two or three hours a day at the computer and then the kids are going just off to the races. So, I just can’t think of very many good things about homeschooling.”

As tempted as I am just to dismiss such overt bigotry out of hand, I will answer the objections directly.

In responding to the podcast episode, Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) writes, “A new systematic review of only peer-reviewed, representative-sample studies . . . [reports] sixty-two percent of those studies find homeschooled students significantly outperforming others academically. Sixty-four percent find better social-emotional outcomes, such as lower depression, higher social competencies. Fifty-four percent find stronger adult outcomes—greater political tolerance, higher conscientiousness and agreeableness, lower neuroticism and divorce rates. In the large majority of the remaining studies the homeschooled perform at parity, not worse.”

True, these studies are working with limited data, but the results hardly count against homeschooling.

The claim that homeschooling is easier for parents is laughable. Still, it is just a myth that homeschooled children spend every moment with their parents. In addition to our enrichment program, our son spends an afternoon every week with his grandparents and plays with his friends for hours on end at meet-ups. My son gets much more, and much higher-quality, “socialization” time with his friends than do many public-school kids.

True, homeschooling parents generally do spend more time with their children. Why is that weird? As one of my homeschool friends answers such concerns, “I happen to like my kids.” Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and the norm for almost all of that time has been for children to learn with their parents. What’s weird is the modern practice of dumping your kids off in a bureaucratized, regimented school.

The grain of truth to Sullivan’s remarks is that homeschooled kids often can efficiently fit their core academics into a shorter time. This is not surprising, given that most public school students waste most of their time in school. Even in the best classes, teachers must slow down the material and bore the more-advanced students so that others don’t fall behind. Even then some fraction of students fails to grasp the material.

Public schools falling short

If the public schools were performing well that would be one thing. But critics of homeschooling often try to generalize from the worse stories of homeschooling while treating public schools as idealized utopias.

The point bears repeating: In not a single grade, in not a single subject, do a majority of Colorado students perform at grade level, according to the Colorado Measures of Academic Success.

For some public-school students, “socialization” means being terrorized on a daily basis. Earlier this year, Erica Breunlin described the experiences from a decade ago of one Colorado public-school student: She was publicly called a “nobody,” and “kids…threw gum at her, picked apart what she wore, iced her out during lunch and started false rumors that she had cancer, or that she was pregnant. The torrent of hateful comments stopped only with her death by suicide.”

Here is a report from June 16: “ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) has filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging a Jewish student was subjected to persistent, escalating and severe antisemitic harassment and assault while enrolled in the Boulder Valley School District.”

High school survey data from 2015 through 2023 indicate that over ten percent of Colorado students reported being “bullied on school property during the past 12 months.” True, in 2025 93% of youth said they felt safe at school, but that implies that 7% did not feel safe.

News reports about alleged abuses by adults in public schools also appear with alarming frequency. Here is one recent report from 9News: “A former paraprofessional at a Jefferson County elementary school is charged with felony assault related to an incident involving a developmentally disabled student in April of this year.”

I’m not saying that such bullying and abuse is widespread in public schools. Nor am I saying that homeschooled kids never are abused or bullied. What I am saying is that homeschooled kids on the whole get plenty of quality social time, and homeschooling families often are able to avoid problems of abuse and bullying that are too common in public schools.

I’m also not saying that my family’s homeschool experiences are universal. I agree with Welch and Sullivan that some people homeschool for bad reasons. Some homeschooled children, like most of their public-school peers, are not doing well academically. That is hardly a reason to paint all homeschoolers with a broad brush and make us out to be stupid and demented.

Homeschooling in Colorado news

Homeschooling continues to pop up in the news occasionally. A recent CBS story begins, “A new law governing homeschool enrichment programs in Colorado is leaving some families and teachers in limbo.” (I’ve discussed details in previous columns.)

A recent KRDO article finds that “the number of students reported as homeschooled full-time increased by 541 students, from 9,826 in fall 2024 to 10,367 in fall 2025,” with most of the increase coming in “six southern Colorado school districts.”

There are two problems with this. First, as the article notes, homeschoolers can file a notice of intent in any district. Second, most people who “homeschool” technically are enrolled in private “umbrella” schools, which do not report their attendance totals, so nobody really knows how many homeschoolers there are. NHERI suggests the actual number is several times the official count.

Homeschooling works great for some

I do not want to suggest here that homeschooling always and everywhere is some sort of blissful paradise, nor that it is the right choice for every family. All of us have our struggles. And a small fraction of cases are genuinely concerning.

But it simply will not do to presume the worst about homeschoolers while treating the public-schools as trouble-free paradises. The typical homeschool experience is great. I routinely ask my child if he’d rather attend regular school. He consistently tells me he’d rather homeschool, and my family has been able to make that work. For us, it’s a great lifestyle and a great academic adventure.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published by Complete Colorado.

Have you heard about the new progressive Colorado ballot measure enshrining in the state constitution a "right" to buy solar power? It states, "Consumers have the right to purchase solar power for cooking or heating in homes or businesses throughout the state." It adds that utilities have the right to sell it.

This is a terrible idea because an alleged right to buy something imposes a duty on others to sell it. Compare: One person's out-of-context "right" to buy a house imposes a duty on someone else to sell the person a house. Who has that duty, under what conditions, and at what cost? The ballot language promises legal chaos, great news for opportunistic lawyers.

It is also stupid to enshrine one particular sort of energy in the state constitution. What if nuclear power becomes so cheap, reliable, and widespread that solar no longer is economically viable? Under the ballot language, will people still be able to sue to force others to sell them solar?

Oh, wait. I had that wrong.

You haven't heard about the measure on solar power because it doesn't exist. Instead, conservatives have proposed a measure, Initiative 177, to enshrine an alleged "right" in the constitution to buy natural gas. And it is a bad idea for exactly the same reasons a measure on solar power would be a bad idea.

Negative rights restrain government

I am not the only person to raise these concerns. Colorado's Legislative Council issued a November 12, 2025, memorandum on a version of the language stating:

"A right creates a duty that is placed on other people. For example, the right to property means that other people have a duty to not take, use, destroy, etc. the property of the owner. Given that this proposed initiative grants rights: a. Who has these duties? b. What is the nature of these duties? Do they mean that the person with the duty must actively provide the energy, products and services, or natural gas? Do they mean that the person with the duty must not prevent the producer or utility from selling the energy, products and services, or natural gas?"

Notice the negative nature of the right to property. Properly understood, the right to property does not mean that a person has a right to someone else's property; it means that others, including government agents, may not deprive him of his justly acquired property.

As "Goddess of the Market" Ayn Rand points out, "The right to property is a right to action. . . . It is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it."

Generally, people do have a right to buy things that are legal to own, with the crucial proviso, from willing sellers. That is precisely the proviso the ballot measure lacks.

Imagine if, late in the 1800s, Coloradans had enshrined in the constitution a "right" to purchase covered wagons, even if in the future no one wanted to sell them. Would we today have a state-funded wagon store collecting dust to ensure compliance?

Or consider Colorado's Article II, Section 13 of the Bill of Rights. It begins, "The right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall be called in question. . . ."

This absolutely does not say that a person has a right to purchase a gun independent of the willingness of gun sellers. If you can't afford a gun, or can't afford the gun you want, you can't walk into a store and demand that the clerks sell you the gun at a discount, on grounds that you have a "right" to purchase it. With a generalized right to purchase, someone could argue that the state must provide subsidized guns to the poor to fulfill their "right."

Similarly, the First Amendment explicitly guards against government "abridging the freedom of speech"; it does not try to say that people have a "right" to purchase items of speech independent of the willingness of sellers.

Here is a concrete example of the potential problems with a "right" to purchase natural gas. Let's say a developer wants to provide only electric lines and not gas pipes. Or let's say a developer wants to build a subdivision using entirely geothermal or nuclear energy, options that someday may exist. Under the ballot language, could someone sue to force the private developer also to provide natural gas lines? Obviously the language invites just this sort of legal wrangling. Who would win such a suit depends on how the courts interpreted the language.

Notably, the same crew behind Initiative 177, Michael Fields and Steven Ward of Advance Colorado, also proposed Initiative 19, which stated, in part, "State and local government shall not ban or restrict products or services powered by an energy supply in common use based on the energy source that powers or fuels that product or service."

This measure was denied title setting "on the grounds that [the] measure does not constitute a single subject." Elsewhere we can complain about the arbitrariness and resulting abuses of the single-subject rule. Here the point is that the alternate language clearly would have restrained government without confusing rights with positive duties.

Wishing away the problem

The Independence Institute's Sarah Montalbano claims, "Initiative 177 . . . simply bars the government from banning Coloradans from purchasing natural gas or prohibiting utilities from selling it."

Sorry, but that's not what the language says at all. The language doesn't say anything about restraining government. It talks only about creating an alleged "right" to purchase. Now, could someone plausibly interpret the language to apply only to government bans? Sure. But someone also plausibly could interpret the language to allow for the sorts of suits against private developers described above.

During a November 14 hearing for the proposal (time stamp 10:11:34), legislative staff again brought up the point about positive duties. A lawyer for Advance Colorado claimed, "The duty is basically upon the government not to interfere with that right" to purchase natural gas." But again, that simply is not what the language of the measure actually says.

In his January 23 interview with the Institute, Fields says that drawing up the matter as an "affirmative right" was partly a PR matter:

"There's other times when it's like, hey, do you want to pass something that bans local governments or state governments from doing X, Y, or Z? That language is a lot harder to pass. When you have an affirmative right that you're saying, do you want to keep this right that you already have right now that's being taken away from you? You have better numbers on that."

Amending the state constitution is serious business. It should not be about waging culture wars, getting out the vote, or any such thing. The only relevant question is whether the language constitutes good law. Initiative 177 fails that test.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published by Aurora Sentinel.

Assaulting Citizens: C. J. Ciaramella: "A North Carolina man has filed a claim seeking damages from the federal government, alleging he was arrested last year by immigration officers despite having valid REAL IDs, then dumped on the side of the road once the officers confirmed he was a U.S. citizen."

Getting What He Voted For Good and Hard: CBS: "Trump voter pleads for fiancée's release after ICE arrest: "They're destroying families.'"

Worker Shortages: Go figure.

Education Updates

AI and Motivation: Sal Khan has a pretty good explanation of why AI alone cannot motivate kids to learn: "Imagine I walk into a classroom and I say, 'Hey kids, my name is Sal. I think I'm a pretty good tutor. I’m just going to sit in the back of the room here, and if any of you have any questions, I'm happy to help you.' Well, you can imagine what would happen. Some of the kids maybe would leverage it, but a lot of kids might be too embarrassed. They wouldn't know how to do it."

Choice Contracts: Lobbyist Ross Izzard pointed something out that I haven't much contemplated before: states typically contract out the implementation of "choice" programs to a single company. These contracts are worth huge amounts of money and so, predictably, involve intense and expensive lobbying. This to me illustrates the central problem with government-involved "choice."

Kids and Screens: Peter Gray via Cowen: "(1) Extensive research refutes the theory that effects of smartphones and social media account for a meaningful portion of the decline in teen mental health in the years following 2010. (2) Smartphones and social media can have both beneficial and harmful effects on teens’ mental health, which tend to cancel out when averaging. (3) Future research should focus on understanding better the ways teens use these tools and how to help them maximize the benefits and minimize the harm." I think screens are very harmful to some children and very beneficial for others. Details matter!

James Randi in Skeptic

Recently Skeptic announced that it had published online 64 columns by the magician and debunker James Randi. (By the way, if you haven't seen the documentary about Randi, An Honest Liar, I consider it a must-watch.) I asked ChatGPT to come up with a "best-of" list; following is what it came up with (with Chat's summaries). My wife and I had the chance to meet Randi in Boulder a few years before his death in 2020, and that was a great experience.

1. The Matter of Dowsing
Probably the best single introduction to Randi’s method. It combines the ideomotor effect, the difference between demonstration and experiment, claimant psychology, and practical test design.

2. John Edward and the Art of Cold Reading
His clearest explanation of how mediums exploit fishing, volunteered information, prior contact, selective memory, audience cooperation, and television editing. It is both a case study and a reusable guide to watching psychic performances.

3. Another Farce of New Age Technology Bites the Dust
The LifeGuard "people detector" case may be the fullest miniature of Randi's investigative process: inspect the claim, contact witnesses, identify ideomotor movement, propose double-blind testing, pressure institutions to act, and obtain a definitive failure at Sandia National Laboratories.

4. Million Dollar Madness
The essential statement on the Million Dollar Challenge: what the money represented, why preliminary tests were required, why famous psychics avoided it, and how believers constructed reasons that failure would not count. It also captures Randi's combative public persona particularly well.

5. Applied Kinesiology and Bell Laboratories: The Embrace of Nonsense by the Otherwise Well-Informed
Essential because its target is not an obvious carnival charlatan but highly educated corporate professionals. It demonstrates his point that intelligence and technical training do not immunize anyone against a badly controlled performance.

Classic Investigations and Explanations

6. Uri Geller & the Moving Compass Trick
A compact illustration of Randi's distinctive tactic: reproduce the supposedly paranormal effect through ordinary conjuring, decline to reveal everything immediately, and force observers to consider mundane possibilities before announcing new physics.

7. The Oregon No-Vortex
One of his most accessible visual explanations. Randi reconstructs the "growing and shrinking person" effect with tilted platforms, false horizontals, perspective, and a carefully chosen camera position. An excellent essay on how perception can be perfectly honest and completely wrong.

9. May the Schwartz Be With You
Randi's critique of Gary Schwartz's laboratory research into mediums and survival after death. It is worth reading because the dispute concerns apparently scientific experiments rather than merely a stage performance: controls, judging procedures, sensory leakage, and the difference between statistical anomalies and evidence of spirits.

The Broader Case for Organized Skepticism

10. A Deadly Intellectual Atmosphere
Perhaps his best short manifesto. Its subject is the surrounding culture of bogus products, advertising, credulous institutions, useless detection devices, and educational failure—not any single paranormal claimant. It explains why Randi regarded skepticism as civic work rather than a hobby.

11. An Address to Congressional Representatives
Randi translates his campaign into public-policy terms: government purchases of worthless devices, patent-office failures, scientific literacy, taxpayer protection, and teaching children how rather than what to think. It also contains a concise statement of his intellectual heroes and values.

12. Homeopathy, the French, Psychic Dreams, Testing Astrology, and Numerology
The title sounds miscellaneous—and it is—but the opening six-point comparison between homeopathy and paranormal claims is one of Randi's sharpest taxonomies of pseudoscience. The numerology section also displays his gift for reductio through playful imitation.

13. Medical Quackery Down Under, Think of a Card, A Step in the Right Direction, Raining on Art Bell’s Parade, The Big MEG Takes a Fall
The best representative of the typical "'Twas Brillig' miscellany." It moves from a dangerous homeopathic 'vaccine,' to an Internet card trick, magnetic shoes, media credulity, and a free-energy device. Read this one to experience the column as regular subscribers originally did.

14. Are Science and Religion Compatible?
A useful statement of Randi's refusal to manufacture an easy reconciliation by defining science and religion so loosely that disagreement disappears. It shows the harder-edged secularist Randi, beyond the investigator of spoon-benders.

15. Science Is Not a Notion: Randi on Evolution, Miracles, and Freedom of Choice
A wide-ranging piece touching evolution education, miracle reports, Carl Sagan, drug policy, and freedom of choice. It is less tightly constructed than his best case studies, but unusually revealing of his general political and philosophical outlook.

Essential for the Randi Fan, Rather than Merely the Student of Skepticism

16. Pigasus Flies Again
The Pigasus Awards are Randi in comic-prosecutor mode: homeopathic information transmitted digitally, UFO benefactors, credulous television hosts, and celebrity mediums. The satire sometimes dates more quickly than the methodological essays, but it was an important part of his public identity.

17. A Gardner Centennial
The most personally indispensable article. Randi remembers Martin Gardner as mentor, correspondent, puzzle-maker, punctilious journalist, friend, and foundational figure in modern skepticism. It is warm, funny, grief-stricken, and much less armored than his usual writing.

Quick Takes

Jason Arday: Michael Huemer is not amused. Or, rather, he's sardonically amused? He warns, "The problem with universities is probably worse than you realized."

DGU: NYT: "Some local residents . . . have turned their attention to what they consider the tragedy's silver lining: that Mr. Salinas and another man had drawn their own guns and fired at Mr. Williams, slowing his rampage and forcing him to retreat before he killed himself."

Astor on School Shootings: Bill Barshay: Trying to reduce bullying doesn't seem to help; reducing social contagion by more-responsible news reporting does.

Cowen's Greatest Fear: Cowen pointing to Tymofiy Mylovanov: "US air and naval power still cannot force open the Strait of Hormuz. Cheap Iranian drones and missiles blunt its fleet, and Russia builds the same weapons at scale. The offset that kept the US ahead since the 1940s has stopped working." More. We need to get our shit together. Having an incompetent president at the helm at this time may prove disastrous long-term.

FBI Aids China and Russia: Reuters: "FBI Director Kash Patel says he has forged new law enforcement partnerships with China and Russia, two longtime U.S. rivals, over the past year in hopes of gaining allies in combating transnational crime including fentanyl, cyber fraud and child sexual exploitation." What could go wrong?

Weakened Military: NYT: "The U.S. Is Burning Through Weapons in Iran. Russia and China Are Taking Note." WSJ: "U.S. Intel Finds Putin Could Test NATO's Resolve With Limited Incursion."

Will on DSA: George Will: "DSA socialism is Peter Pan politics for sandbox revolutionaries."

Random Dad Jokes:
* What is the favorite social media site for ghosts? Faceboo.
* What is Jesus's least favorite part of word puzzles? Across. His least favorite gym? Crossfit.
* What do they call reproduction among clusters of Dorothy's Rope organisms? A clusterf**.

There's No Vax for Stupidity: U. of Minnesota: "More people requesting 'unvaccinated' blood for themselves or their children."

Dating Amber: This 2020 Irish film is considerably heavier than I anticipated, but excellent, especially the lead performances. Two high schoolers, a boy and a girl, both of whom are gay, date each other to disguise their gayness. The teens, Eddie and Amber, both struggle to come to grips with their sexual orientation in a substantially homophobic culture. The film is funny, as I expected, but it also conveys the trauma of living with profound unearned shame.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published at https://ariarmstrong.com/roundup-73.html.

Kafer on Marx: Krista Kafer: "By conflating journalism with religious persecution, Marx is not just deflecting responsibility; he is indulging in identity politics, the kind of us-versus-them rhetoric that inflames the body politic and leaves scars of resentment and distrust long after the race is over."

Marx Merch: 9News bought some just to see if they got any campaign contribution information. They didn't.

Marx Fundraising: Denver7: "CO Democrats send letter to SOS regarding allegations of Victor Marx accepting excess campaign contributions." Mario Nicolais: "Marx could find himself in serious trouble. From massive campaign finance fines to potential criminal charges, Marx has put himself into more jeopardy than any candidate in state history." That's probably an exaggeration, but still.

Flomberg on Devil Horns: David Flomberg: "Portraying a Jewish person with horns is not a new idea—it's a dehumanizing trope that dates back to the Middle Ages, when a mistranslation of a biblical verse describing Moses was depicted in medieval Christian art and calcified into the idea that Jews were literally demonic, horns and all." I take Sean Pond at his word that he didn't know Weiser is Jewish or that portraying Weiser with devil horns might be perceived as antisemitic, which, to me, proves only that Pond is too ignorant to responsibly involve himself in political matters. The ADL says bluntly, "Adding horns or satanic imagery to a Jewish person's image is antisemitic." Pond says he's suing Clark and 9News; good luck with that.

Marx on Fox31: Marx with his running mate George Markert finally found a interviewer he's not scared of, Matt Mauro. If Marx is smart he'll let Markert do as much of the talking as possible; that guy actually is a credible candidate. Mauro asked some real questions but mostly let Marx dodge the tough ones. Mauro also interviewed Weiser.

Moving On: Seth Klamann quoting CSU's Kyle Saunders on Marx: "He's never held office. There's no voting record, no budget, no administration to point to. When he says 'let's move on to the issues,' he’s asking to be evaluated on things he's never done, using the credibility of a story he no longer wants examined."

Incredible Stories: Seth Klamann: "In his books, he [Marx] writes about befriending the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, a miraculous near-miss with a helicopter crash, and repeatedly using prayer to expel demons. He describes himself as a state champion trumpeter so adept with a butterfly knife that he wowed a group of 'gang bangers' he confronted in a parking lot in Colorado Springs."

Marx Bawk Bawk: Seth Klamann: "Campaign manager Buddy Jericho declined The Post’s request to interview Marx for this story." Ernest Luning: "Weiser's campaign confirmed that he will participate in a televised debate on Aug. 27 in Colorado Springs, sponsored by Colorado Politics, The Gazette, KOAA-TV and the El Pomar Foundation. . . . In an email to the debate's debate organizers sent Tuesday morning, Buddy Jericho, the Marx campaign's general consultant, declined the invitation and elaborated on the campaign's decision to take part in just one debate." Kyle Clark: "We have invited Marx and his running mate to sit down on 9NEWS for a joint interview. The Marx campaign preemptively declined." Marx's absurd announcement that he will participate only in an unmoderated debate just means he will not debate. What an idiot. And a chicken-shit. He can face down demons but he can't face news journalists or other candidates?

Flomberg on CTR and Antisemitism

Well this is awkward! I write a column for Colorado Times Recorder mostly covering religious issues.

Corey Hutchins writes: David "Flomberg spent years covering antisemitism at the progressive digital Colorado Times Recorder site, but said he was recently let go after a disagreement with his editor about whether to call the Israel-Gaza war a genocide."

On his own website, Flomberg wrote (July 28):

For the past several years, antisemitism has been my beat at the Colorado Times Recorder. . . .

Last week, that ended. My final piece for CTR—"The Shomer: Antisemitism, For All, By All"—ran, and a few days later, the publication ended my employment with them.

I want to be careful here, because I think precision matters more than heat, especially on this subject. In my termination conversation with my now former editor, he told me: 'We think [Israel is committing] genocide and you don't, it just comes down to that.' . . .

The term 'genocide' has a very specific definition. . . . There is no shortage of argument to be had about the Israel/Gaza war, about how PM Netanyahu has chosen to prosecute it, whether or not war crimes have occurred, whether or not ethnic cleansing applies. . . . [T]he meaning of genocide—especially to the layperson—has been successfully obfuscated by Israel's detractors. . . . [W]ar and genocide are two very different things, and while both result in devastating consequences, purposefully conflating them is an act of bad faith. . . .

This newsletter is going to do the thing I am no longer allowed to do at CTR: cover antisemitism as what it is, wherever it shows up, without asking anyone’s permission about which direction I’m allowed to look.

For the record: Given my current understanding, I agree with Flomberg that, while the Israeli military has done many things worthy of moral condemnation, the term "genocide" does not apply.

Jason Salzman, publisher of CTR thinks the term does apply. He told me:

Our overall policy is, we publish fact-based opinion articles. Our position in this case is that the Israeli government has committed genocide in the Gaza, as a factual matter.  Most credible international bodies and human rights groups, minus the International Court of Justice, which has a lengthy court case going on, have said it’s genocide. We agree.

So we do not think it's a legitimate opinion to argue in an opinion piece that it's not genocide—just as we would not accept an opinion denying human-caused global warming or the Holocaust. We want fact-based opinion. We don't want genocide denialism.

I also don't want to get overinvolved in a technical semantic debate when what most matters are the on-the-ground policies and actions.

I disagree with a fair amount of material published by the progressive CTR. I also write a column for the conservative-libertarian Complete Colorado, and I disagree with some of the material published there too. If I only wrote for publications with which I perfectly agreed, I could write only for my own site. (And, hell, I don't always even agree with my past self.) There are definitely some publications I'd never write for. And it can be hard to know where to draw the lines. But I think I'm well inside the bounds writing for these two publications, whatever disagreements I may have with their editors and writers.

More Notes on the Elizabeth Books

Someone asked me why parents would let their kids read books about gay people. I answered seriously. (See also my column.)

1) Gay people, including close personal friends of mine, are human beings and should be understood and treated as such rather than demonized or treated poorly.

2) About three percent of the population is gay, meaning you and your children almost certainly know gay adults and children (remembering that "child" here refers to anyone under 18). For example, the governor of Colorado is gay.

3) The problems that gay people face are comparable to the problems that everyone faces. For example, the story You Should See Me in a Crown, while about the romance between two girls, covers topics and problems relevant to all relationships. Generally, it would be stupid to read fiction only about people exactly like you. A major purpose of fiction is to enable readers to inhabit others' worlds and think others' thoughts, if only for a little while. I will never be a woman, or a slave, or a Native American, or someone born in Afghanistan, or someone who suffered under the Nazi terror, or a steel magnate, or someone who lived in 300 bc or 1700 ad, or a gay person, but, through fiction and biographical works, I can partly inhabit such lives, and thereby gain more understanding of people who are in various respects not like me.

Also, only some of the books suppressed by the Elizabeth School District are about gay people. For example, the book Speak is about a heterosexual girl recovering from the trauma of being raped prior to her freshman year. Kite Runner is about a heterosexual man who rescues a child from the Taliban. The Hate U Give is about a heterosexual teen who witnesses a horrific homicide.

Quick Takes

Atheist Colorado? Seth Klamann claims that "in Colorado . . . more than half of residents don't believe in God." That's not quite right. What Pew actually asks (based on data from 2023 and 2024) is whether people "believe in God or a universal spirit with absolute certainty." Only 46 percent of people said they do. But some people hold that "absolute certainty" is impossible regarding any matter. Many more would say that God exists but without claiming absolute certainty that God exists. An additional 32 percent of Coloradans say they "believe in God or a universal spirit" but are "not absolutely certain" about that. So combined that's 78 percent who believe in God or a universal spirit.

Federal Choice Money: As Ross Izard and Erin Brantley point out, there's certainly no guarantee that Governor Weiser will opt back in to the federal tax-credit program for school choice, which Polis has opted into for 2027. Everything I've seen from Weiser suggest's he's unfriendly to school choice in any form, but it's hard to predict how he'll come down on particular issues.

James Wiley: Erik Maulbetsch: "GOP Candidate for State's Top Election Job Is an Election Denier Who Wants to Delete the Voter Rolls." Good backgrounder.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published at https://ariarmstrong.com/miner-149.html.

Ha ha, just kidding! Polis proclaimed that “Colorado Ranked #1 in Education,” ignoring the low rankings in other categories and downplaying the fact that most Colorado students cannot read or do math at grade level according to state testing.

You can see the U.S. News rankings for yourself. Colorado ranks as 17th “best state overall,” which I guess is kind of good? I mean, it’s the top half, right? Okay, sure, we got beat by Wyoming, Wisconsin, and Delaware, while our neighbor Utah took the #1 spot. Not embarrassing at all!

Cherry picking

If you dig into the specifics, you will find that, while Colorado ranks 47th in crime and corrections, we actually rank 49th in public safety. At least we’re not dead last! That dishonor goes to New Mexico.

If you look at the education subcategories, you’ll find that we rank #3 in higher education and #9 in pre-k–12. Notably, being ninth on this list does not mean that Colorado has the ninth best schools. Rather, the ranking depends on “preschool enrollment, standardized test scores among eighth-graders, high school graduation rate and college readiness.”

Preschool enrollment per se says nothing about educational success. As Ann Schimke writes, “A report from the National Institute for Early Education Research showing that Colorado’s universal preschool program meets only two of 10 benchmarks meant to promote preschool quality.” Frankly, this program seems more like free babysitting (and “free” in this context means funded by taxpayers) than something aimed to improve education.

Relatively high standardized test scores mainly mean that Colorado residents tend to be wealthier and better-educated, not that the schools are doing a great job. But various elected officials rely on the stupidity fostered by the public schools to lie about cause and effect.

In a related release, Polis quotes various elected officials who groundlessly claim the education establishment is responsible for Colorado’s relative success. For example, Senator Jeff Bridges claims the ranking “shows that in Colorado, we know how to put our education dollars to good use.”

Of course, the high ranking also proves that taxpayers need to spend even more money on public schools, according to various officials whom Polis sites. Rep. Emily Sirota says the ranking shows “there is still more work to do to fully fund our schools.”

You see how this game works, right? Whether the purported evidence suggests that the public schools are failing or succeeding, the conclusion is always the same: raise tax funding.

Poor outcomes

As a reminder, back in May, the Colorado Department of Education released preliminary results for the latest round of testing from the Colorado Measures of Academic Success. The results are dismal. In not a single subject, in not a single grade, do a majority of students meet or exceed expectations. True, the PSAT and SAT, national tests, show around two-thirds of students who take those tests doing okay in reading and writing, but even those tests show most students performing poorly in math. Anyone who crows about those outcomes is shameless.

Let us state the facts bluntly: Colorado being #1 in education (or #9 in pre-k–12 education) means only that our k–12 schools completely suck overall (with some notable exceptions), only maybe they suck slightly less badly than schools in most other states.

But wait: Did you catch me in a contradiction there? On one hand, I seem to be saying that, insofar as Colorado students are succeeding, that’s mostly because they have parents who support their learning, while, on the other hand, the relative lack of success reflects poorly on schools. So which is it: Do schools matter or not?

Basically I think that students with parents deeply invested in their education will do pretty well regardless of the quality of the schools and indeed regardless of whether they even go to school. (My homeschooled sixth-grader scores in the top one percent on the California Achievement Test, and he’s never gone to regular school.) On the other hand, students without those advantages still often can do well if they attend an excellent school. It is precisely those students the public schools routinely fail.

For the most part I don’t think academic success is a matter of funding. More money will not equal better outcomes, especially when funds are not tightly tied to results. Colorado’s public schools waste vast sums on bloated bureaucracies and curricula fads.

What matters is a deep institutional and person commitment to helping students develop literacy, numeracy, and basic knowledge. But tax-funded institutions have weak incentives to achieve strong academic outcomes.

For what it’s worth, I don’t much trust the U.S. News rankings anyway, although they probably give some indication. (They definitely generate advertising dollars for the company.) But critically observing how public officials selectively use the rankings is a social-studies lesson in itself. I suggest that Polis leave the cherry-picking to Western Slope farmers.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published by Complete Colorado.

Marx’s claims about demons

Marx wears his religion openly, and central to his religion is his self-purported war against demons. On September 14, 2025, at the memorial service for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Marx teased a possible run for governor. He spoke openly about the “devil” being the “enemy of our soul,” then immediately pivoted to talking about a possible run for governor: “I’m going to let all y’all know if in fact God is calling me to run and win for governor.” (Although some might characterize the soft-launch of a political campaign at a memorial service as uncouth, the crowd, judging from the applause and standing ovation, loved it.)

For his closing statement during a June 2 Republican primary debate hosted by 9News, Marx chose to offer a Christian prayer.

Although in his Facebook post Marx accused Clark of “repeated misuse of the word ‘exorcism,'” it is Marx who called himself a “reluctant exorcist,” as I wrote last Fall. As Marx has subsequently clarified (see my July 8 article), he doesn’t regard what he does technically as “exorcism,” despite his use of the term.

It is worth reviewing Marx’s own words during his May 27 interview with Clark. Although Marx said he called himself a “reluctant exorcist” as a “joke,” he made it clear that he very much believes he is engaged in spiritual warfare with literal demons:

As a follower of Christ, and someone who’s very familiar with evil, that’s been both forced upon me as a kid, and then seeing the effects of it in humans’ lives, I believe the word of God, that I can pray for people and see people set free from, whether it’s demonic oppression … I never call it possession. I believe there’s levels of demonization where people are suffering because of evil. … I don’t command demons to come out of someone. I think of them as assignments or attachments to people. And we identify the demon, like Jesus did, we ask what their name is, and then we give them commands, and they very frequently and typically will answer through the person’s mind. They’ll tell us what they hear. And then we destroy them, banish them to perfect judgment from Christ.

Clark followed up by asking if Marx has performed exorcisms by phone and if they are just as effective. Marx claimed (despite the terminology) that he has and that they are. Marx also told Clark that, if elected governor, he would “never stop praying” for people suffering from demonic attachments. Clark also pointed out that at one point Marx sold a “spiritual warfare” guide through his website about fighting demons for a suggested payment of $99.

Clark’s report on Marx’s demon hunting

Fast-forward to Clark’s July 28 report on Marx. Clark began by perfectly summarizing Marx’s own statements: “Victor Marx says he’s not an exorcist. He just prays away the demons that attach to people.” Clark said that, in scores of hours of video featuring Marx, “‘exorcisms’ are front and center.” True, Clark slipped into the language about “exorcisms” when he probably should have substituted “demon-casting” or the like. Clark brings the receipts, showing clip after clip of Marx purporting to pray against demons.

Marx, Clark reported (and played a clip of Marx saying it), even chalks up homosexuality to demonic influence. This is consistent with what Marx has said elsewhere, that “of course homosexuality is a perversion of what God has intended.” (However, Marx added that he thinks some Christians are biased against homosexuals because “sex outside of marriage” is as perverted as homosexuality.)

Clark also reported various criticisms by political opponents and skeptical religious leaders. Marx probably is reacting in part to those reported criticisms.

Clark also reported this astonishing fact:

The origin of Victor Marx’s demon deliverance ministry appears to have been about 20 years ago when he says he was doing a Bible study at a youth correctional facility in Texas when he directed the prison guards to place him alone in a cell with a 15 year old girl who he said was in the grips of the devil. I should mention it’s not the last time that Marx says he performed this ritual on a child. Marx’s campaign did not respond to our specific questions about that encounter with the 15 year old girl.

So why did Marx complain about Clark’s reporting, most of which consisted simply of playing clips of Marx talking about demons? The answer seems obvious: Marx wants to deflect attention away from his own past comments about demons and cast himself, however groundlessly, as the victim of media bias.

One odd thing about Marx claiming that Clark mocks his faith is that Clark too is a Christian. Clark confirmed this in a July 30 email to me. But of course Marx’s version of Christianity hardly is universal.

American belief in demons is fairly common; talk about a war against demons in the context of a political campaign is not. In 2023, Pew reported that 65% of Americans “believe in spirits or unseen spiritual forces” (which may be good or bad). Back in 2007, Pew reported that 11% of Americans said “they have experienced or witnessed an exorcism.” Of course, many people who believe in demons might nevertheless express skepticism about Marx’s particular claims about them. Official Catholic doctrine holds that exorcism can be needed to protect a person “against the power of the devil or to be withdrawn from his spiritual dominion.” As odd as it is to hear Marx’s views on demons in a political context, his views are shared, if typically in less-exaggerated form, by many Americans.

How should journalists cover religious views?

Clark’s coverage of Marx raises larger questions about how news journalists should cover candidates’ religious views, especially unconventional views.

I agree with Clark that Marx’s statements, actions, and products related to demons are important and deserving of media attention. Clark justifiably denied anything amiss in his reporting. He wrote to me:

Our reporting on Marx’s ministry is detailed, straightforward, and focused on his own words and actions. Marx has described his demon hunting as his greatest accomplishment, so I assume every journalist covering the race will examine his claims. Because Marx’s work as a ministry leader makes up the bulk of his experience and qualifications, it will naturally be a subject of reporting.

I asked Clark about whether journalists should publicly discuss their own religious views (as Clark shared with me his Christianity). He answered:

Journalists should feel free to discuss their personal lives to the extent that they and their employer are comfortable with that. Some journalists are uncomfortable sharing much about their personal lives for security reasons or because it can introduce accusations of bias, but journalists are people like anyone else. I’m a journalist but I’m also an American citizen, a husband, a father, a person who grew up in a rural area who now lives in a city, and so much more. All of it influences the way I see the world. Journalists are not immune to bias, we just work to identify it and counteract it in our work.

Finally, I asked Clark to clarify the tidbit about Marx or his team offering to pray about Clark’s potential demonic attachments. Based on Cory Hutchins’s June 5 report, I had the impression that Marx himself had asked to pray about this. No. During his news report, Clark mentioned, “When I visited Marx’s training compound earlier this year, his team offered to perform the demon hunting prayer on me.” Clark told me:

Marx did not offer to perform an exorcism [or prayer against demons] on me, it was his team [names omitted]. They politely offered to perform their “retooling prayer” on me when I visited their training compound. I didn’t get the sense they thought I was particularly demon-infested. It struck me as a courtesy they likely offer a lot of people. While Marx has since falsely claimed that I “declined prayer,” I told Marx’s team that I am grateful if they or anyone else keeps me and my family in their prayers. But, as for their offer of their specialized prayer to cast off demons, I told them I would need to give that more thought.

I hasten to point out that, although Marx’s perspective on demons certainly is media worthy, now that Marx is facing a general election, he has deemphasized talk about demons. For example, in a recent Facebook ad, Marx does not so much as mention demons or even God. Instead he talks about affordability. His website features common themes including government transparency, cost of living, economic growth, and public safety. Marx knows he cannot win the general election by appealing only to evangelical voters, and he has shifted his rhetoric accordingly. Journalists rightly cover what Marx says is important about his campaign as well as what he no longer wishes to emphasize but that obviously is relevant to his qualifications and fitness for office.

9News’s Next also has covered Marx’s selection of a running mate and his apparently law-defying request for contributions via his merchandise store. So it’s hardly as though 9News is only covering the demon angle, as newsworthy as that is.

Reality matters

It is a news journalist’s job to report the news of the day, not (usually) to wade into philosophic debates. But I’m an opinion writer, so I can wade and indeed swim into such matters.

In my view, the majority of Americans who believe in demons and the like simply are wrong. Victor Marx is not a “reluctant exorcist” or a demon hunter or anything like that for the simple reason that demons do not exist. Demons are figments of the imagination. We therefore should give Marx’s comments about demons exactly as much credence as if he claimed to influence the lightning bolts of Zeus, a magical genie from a lamp, or Santa’s flying sleigh.

I do, however, agree with Marx that evil exists in the world; I just think it is a matter of human choices, psychology, and ideology, not supernatural forces. For example, it is evil to say that homosexuality is caused by demons.

My basic argument against the existence of demons, and indeed of any supernatural consciousness, is that natural phenomena, specifically our brains, give rise to consciousness. Consciousness cannot exist without a natural substrate. The notion that there can be a consciousness without anything natural giving rise to it is a variant of the error of thinking that something can come from nothing. But this is an op-ed, not a philosophic tract, so I will stop there.

Something Marx says, as quoted by 9News, illustrates that really what he’s talking about are psychological phenomena, not demons:

This is how I explain it to women. I go, ladies, you get out of the shower, you’re getting ready. You’re looking in the mirror, you know, it’s just you. Do you ever hear these thoughts? You’re ugly, you’re disgusting, you will never … That’s how you start to go, my gosh, maybe that is demonic, and it is. But there’s a way to battle, have victory, and I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it from addictions to homosexual lifestyle to cheating to murder, the whole nine yards, people get set free from it all.

We hardly need demonology to explain such things as people having negative thoughts about themselves. That we can have negative thoughts, and that our minds can seem to have conflicting allegiances, are basic psychological insights. As for Marx claiming that homosexuality arises from demonic influence, he is literally demonizing people for the way they were born. For him to categorize homosexuality with cheating and murder is dangerous and wrong.

We don’t need to worry about demons, because they don’t exist. We do need to worry about people such as Marx who believe they are hunting or praying away the demons, especially when they attribute benign behavior to demonic influence.

Marx is delusional when he claims to be warring against demons. I don’t expect news journalists to point that fact out, but I do expect them, as Clark did, to factually cover a candidate’s relevant religious views and their political implications.

As for those of us who aspire to be grounded in reality and guided by reason, we should feel free to call Marx’s delusions what they plainly are.

Terms of Use | Copyright © 2026 by Ari Armstrong. Originally published by Colorado Times Recorder.