The Rise of Right-Wing Nihilism; The New York Times, August 21, 2025

David Brooks , The New York Times; The Rise of Right-Wing Nihilism

"A few months ago, I had lunch with a young lady who said, “The difference is that in your generation you had something to believe in, but in ours we have nothing.” She didn’t say it bitterly, just as a straightforward acknowledgment of her worldview.

Faith in God has been on the decline for decades; so has social trust, faith in one another; so has faith in a dependable career path. A recent Gallup poll showed that faith in major American institutions is now near its lowest point in the 46 years Gallup has been measuring these things. But the core of nihilism is even more acidic; it is the loss of faith in the values your culture tells you to believe in.

As Skyler and I exchanged emails, I was reminded of an essay the great University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter wrote last year for The Hedgehog Review. He, too, identified nihilism as the central feature of contemporary culture: “A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.”

He pointed to our culture’s pervasive demonization and fearmongering, with leaders feeling no need to negotiate with the other side, just decimate it. Nihilists, he continued, often suffer from wounded attachments — to people, community, the truth. They can’t give up their own sense of marginalization and woundedness because it would mean giving up their very identity. The only way to feel halfway decent is to smash things or at least talk about smashing them. They long for chaos.

Apparently, the F.B.I. now has a new category of terrorist — the “nihilistic violent extremist.” This is the person who doesn’t commit violence to advance any cause, just to destroy. Last year, Derek Thompson wrote an article for The Atlantic about online conspiracists who didn’t spread conspiracy theories only to hurt their political opponents. They spread them in all directions just to foment chaos. Thompson spoke with an expert who cited a famous line from “The Dark Knight”: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”"

Troubling examples of ‘pseudoscience’ at the Cleveland Clinic; Washington Post, 1/11/17

Daniel Summers, Washington Post; Troubling examples of ‘pseudoscience’ at the Cleveland Clinic

"People will understandably look for their own answers. Unfortunately, when no less than the president-elect is among those promulgating dangerous misinformation about vaccines, medical providers have to deal with a lot of false, misleading stuff their patients may find.

One way I deal with this is to give patients a list of resources that generally provide good, evidence-based advice. Though I can’t vet every single article they may publish, knowing a few sites that typically give clear, sound information is a valuable resource when patients ask.

Sadly, no matter how glowing its reputation or how superlative the care it routinely provides, I can’t include the Cleveland Clinic on that list. Knowing it promotes treatments that have no grounding in science, or that a patient could stumble upon a fearmongering article that makes baseless claims about the unspecified dangers of environmental toxins on its website, I can’t direct patients there in good faith. Considering its prominence as a renowned medical establishment, that’s a terrible shame.