Source: Gideon’s Substack
by Noah Millman
“There’s nothing weird or exceptional about an organization making a catastrophic mistake and hiring a liar and a fraud, nor is there anything surprising about such failures being in part due to poor or nonexistent vetting. These kinds of people’s particular skill is inspiring extreme credulousness, and then manipulating people to maintain that credulousness in the face of mountains of disconfirming evidence. They might make use of ideological or identity-based affinity to manipulate you—Bernie Madoff famously defrauded numerous Jewish organizations by playing on precisely those kinds of sentiments—but if that’s not an option they’ll use something else. It’s not a unique feature of politics or academia, nor of left-wing spaces. I mean, look who’s president. The unavoidable moment of reckoning for most organizations, though, comes when it becomes clear that their own mission is being damaged.” (08/06/26)
https://gideons.substack.com/p/confidence-men-are-everywhere