When Skepticism Becomes Schizophrenia

The right-wing echo chamber on X has a serious science problem. This isn’t a nuanced skepticism of institutions or the government; it’s an outright rejection of empirical reality.

I’ve noticed more flat earth and moon landing deniers lately. These demonstrably false beliefs are actively promoted, celebrated, and monetized across major right-wing platforms. And any attempt to correct people who believe or promote these lies is met with hostility.

But here’s the thing: skepticism itself isn’t the problem. Healthy skepticism of powerful institutions is not only legitimate; it’s essential in a free society. I know this firsthand. I was sent to Iraq twice based on “faulty intelligence.” I’ve watched governments lie about wars, about corruption, about things that cost people their lives. Questioning those entities is a civic responsibility.

The problem isn’t doubt. The problem is what happens when doubt becomes a closed system—when no video, no photograph, no physical evidence, no testimony, and no methodology count as evidence. When nothing could ever, in principle, change your mind. That isn’t skepticism anymore.

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The Threshold Where It Breaks

Real skepticism has a structure: you encounter a claim; you question it; you investigate; and, most importantly, you update based on what you find.

I’ll give you an example of how I actually approach these things. Because I wanted to learn from all sides, I looked into Flat Earth and Moon Landing arguments. I watched Eric Dubay’s 200 Proofs We’re Not on a Spinning Ball, and I researched Bart Sibrel’s “evidence’ as well, along with other YouTube videos proporting NASA faked the landings.

One moon-denier argument genuinely gave me pause: when the lunar module ascent stage lifts off the surface of the moon, there’s no visible flame. It looked strange, like a bad special effect. And who was filming the ascending craft?

So I looked into it. It turns out the propellants used—Aerozine 50 and nitrogen tetroxide—produce a nearly transparent exhaust. In the vacuum of space, with no atmosphere to scatter light, it’s essentially invisible. Even so, you do see the “sparks” flying out of the bottom as it lifts off. There are no crane wires, the entire lunar suface is illuminated with one light source—impossible in any studio—and they didn’t need a massive boost to escape the gravity or atmopshere such as Earth’s. Once I understood the chemistry and physics, the anomaly disappeared completely. There was no longer anything to explain.

As for the camera tracking the craft, it was obviously automated and timed. But this slips your mind when you’re thinking in conspiracy mode. The blind spot created by the conspiracy lens is as silly as thinking that Richard Nixon directly called the moon from his phone, when the reality was he called Houston, who connected him to the astronauts after their transmissions arrived at mission control. Deniers say there were no delays in the call, implying that it was staged. But that’s because they show an edited version as evidence. Here’s the unedited version of the call.

That is what real skepticism looks like. You investigate and try to debunk your own initial reaction. If the investigation resolves the anomaly, you update. You don’t cling to it because it fits your preferred narrative.

The flat earth and moon hoax communities do the opposite. They collect anomalies and never resolve them. Every explanation is met with a new objection. The whole apparatus is designed not to discover truth but to maintain the belief indefinitely. Despite Artemis II sending back footage showing the curvature of the Earth, people didn’t pause; they dismissed it instantly and moved on.

When no possible piece of evidence could change your mind, you have left the territory of skepticism and entered the territory of delusion. That is the threshold. And a disturbing number of people on the right have crossed it.

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The Grifters vs. the Genuinely Lost

The fuel driving this is almost always religious—specifically, literalist readings of holy books that treat the firmament as a physical dome, the Earth as stationary, and NASA as a Satanic conspiracy to hide God’s creation from the faithful.

Now, some of these people are true believers. They have genuinely fused their identity with these claims to the point that no evidence can reach them, because accepting the evidence would mean ceasing to exist as they currently understand themselves. That’s a form of epistemic psychosis—not a clinical diagnosis, but a real breakdown in the machinery that connects belief to reality.

But others, and I suspect this is the majority of the loudest voices, are not true believers at all but entrepreneurs. Flat-earth content creators, moon-landing-hoax channels, and religious influencers have built significant audiences and revenue streams on a simple formula: tell people what the government doesn’t want them to know, sell them the merch, and collect the donations. All they have to do is pretend to be religious, finding Jesus or reverting to Islam, and the grift gets even more profitable.

I saw this with my own eyes after fourteen years as a right-wing-adjacent activist. People I thought were trustworthy were running operations. And when I called it out, I was isolated, called a liar, called divisive, called a traitor. And even worse: The so-called truth-seekers turned a blind eye to bad actors in their own circles.

This is arguably worse than delusion. The truly deluded person at least believes what they say. The grifter is sane enough to know the difference between truth and lies, and chooses lies because they pay better.

The communities built around these figures are now so emotionally invested that any challenge is experienced as an attack. Echo chambers enforce themselves not through argument but through social punishment. This is what locks the schizophrenia in place: you cannot update even if you want to, because updating means exile.

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I Understand the Doubt

I understand why these people don’t trust the government. Being deceived by powerful institutions leaves a mark.

The biggest blow to public trust was no doubt the COVID pandemic, which directly affected everyone’s lives. I didn’t get vaccinated, because for my age group, COVID mortality was low, and the product was rushed into development with no long-term safety data. I may well have gotten it had it gone through the standard years-long testing process like any other vaccine. Being asked to take an experimental product pushed simultaneously by three of the least trustworthy institutions in modern American life—the federal government, the pharmaceutical industry, and the mainstream media—only compounded my hesitation.

The COVID episode did enormous damage to public trust in science because the institutions claiming to represent science behaved dishonestly. They moved goalposts, suppressed debate, and even censored people. They conflated scientific consensus with political compliance. The blowback was predictable, and ordinary people who lost faith in those institutions shouldn’t be judged too harshly for it.

But—and this is the critical point—justified skepticism of corrupt institutions is not the same thing as concluding that everything any institution says is a lie. That leap is where skepticism becomes schizophrenia.

And notice what the conspiracy side never does: it never holds itself accountable. There were plenty of people in 2020 claiming that by 2025, billions would die from the jabs. It’s 2026. Billions have not died. Claims of turbo cancer, 5G towers, and nanobots were forgotten, moved on from, and never revisited. Conspiracy theorists hold the government to an impossibly strict standard of proof while exempting themselves from any standard at all. That asymmetry is not skepticism; it’s grifting.

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The Price of Saying So

I kept quiet about the science stuff for a long time. The political agenda I was focused on felt more urgent, and engaging the flat-earthers and moon landing hoaxers would have created division, since some of my allies believed in these ridiculous things. But this was a mistake. Silence in the face of nonsense is interpreted as tacit endorsement, and the nonsense spreads.

I’ve detached myself from all movements and started calling out nonsense directly. It’s ironic that people claim I’ve gotten the $7,000 when I have actually lost about 7,000 followers on my X account. The people who once amplified my work are calling me compromised. I’ve been completely and totally isolated.

But that’s fine. I’d rather be right and attacked than wrong and applauded. That trade has always been the only one worth making.

The deeper problem is what the attacks reveal: these communities have become so identity-fused with their beliefs that criticizing the belief is experienced as an attack on the person. When your belief is your identity, no amount of evidence can reach you, because accepting the evidence would mean ceasing to exist as you currently understand yourself. That’s egotism in its strongest form, and it’s genuinely sad to witness.

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We Can Do Better

The Earth is a sphere. The moon landings happened. Not every vaccine is a bioweapon designed to kill you. These are not matters of opinion, and saying so clearly, loudly, and without apology is what intellectual honesty requires.

Healthy skepticism updates on evidence. It investigates anomalies and resolves them. It holds itself to the same standard it holds its opponents. It can say, “I was wrong.”

I have yet to see one influencer admit they were wrong about Bibi Netanyahu being dead after claiming every video of him was AI for a week straight. I’m not a fan of Bibi or Israel, which only proves that I will call out any schizophrenic takes. Even Israelis were shocked that to see that one of the world’s most “dangerous antisemites” was calling out these influencers. Well, yes. This is what truth-telling looks like—no side get special treatment.

But those who pushed these lies are still going. They were never held accountable. No one was upset with them. Yet I was being scolded for showing it wasn’t AI, while these others were getting applauded for being wrong the entire time.

When skepticism loses the ability to say the three words, “I was wrong,” it becomes the very thing it claims to oppose—a closed system of belief insulated from reality, enforced by social punishment, and exploited by people who know exactly what they are doing.

I will continue to be the voice of reason no matter what it costs me. And I will never again make the mistake of lowering my standards for any political agenda, for any group, and especially for the so-called “greater good.” For what good is it to tolerate great lies because people would be offended by the truths they are obscuring?

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