A bit rudimentary and out there. But simple enough, right?

Yet behind that simple sales pitch is a considerably radical ideology. Effective Altruism, or EA, at its core, subordinates ordinary moral obligations — often focused on prioritizing family, God, country and truth itself — to “utility.” Its founding philosophers and current evangelists have appointed themselves the masters of quantifying utility and determining which causes matter most.

Share

Subscribe now

EA is a secular cult whose adherents often first encounter EA during their undergraduate studies in STEM fields. EAs are highly concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area but they also have a significant presence in other geographic centers of power and influence. It has grown to incorporate a series of ultra-wealthy and influential patrons, and it has a small foothold in several of America’s elite academic and nonprofit institutions. In the AI space, their followers are identifiable through their apocalyptic prophecies, hubris, and moral claims of superiority. EA often attracts intelligent and largely apolitical young people by simplifying their worldview into a quantifiable speed run philosophy that sells them on humanity’s highest calling.

The intellectual patriarch for the EA movement is generally accepted to be Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. In his seminal 1972 EA essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Singer argues that we should donate substantial portions of our wealth to alleviate suffering in very specific quantifiable ways. However, Singer rejects the idea that every human life possesses inherent and equal dignity. He has controversially declared that newborn infants do not possess the same claim to life as self-aware persons, and therefore, could be candidates for infanticide. Princeton itself has hosted a debate specifically examining his views on “abortion and infanticide.” These views have become attached to EA and this is one of the core reasons why EAs tend to overwhelmingly vote for Democratic Party candidates. The Singer-EA model assesses cognition as a pretext for human value and skates very closely along eugenics lines in the process.

William MacAskill, an Oxford philosopher, helped build EA into a broader international movement and is credited with bringing millennials and Gen Z into the EA fold. His ex-wife is Amanda Askell, the resident philosopher at Anthropic. MacAskill-led and influenced organizations have popularized the EA-related “earning to give” mantra. The idea is that EAs should enter a lucrative profession and make as much money as possible, before donating their fortune to causes selected by the EA priesthood. MacAskill later helped popularize a staple EA term called “longtermism,” under which the hypothetical welfare of trillions of potential future beings can outweigh the needs and rights of people alive today. EAs think of “longtermism” in “millions, billions, and trillions of years.”

The true absurdity of EA reasoning was illustrated by a 2015 article from William MacAskill and Amanda Askell arguing that mass slaughtering wild predators like lions could reduce animal suffering.

Through their botched, poorly thought-out suffering-minimization formula, slaughtering wild predators is “compassionate” because it saves farm animals like chickens. Behold, the dangers of utilitarian arithmetic.

The “lion genocide” idea has led to EAs coming up with a whole host of morally absurd ideas to “prevent suffering.”

One such prominent EA account recently wrote about how “insects matter more than people in the aggregate.” No, he was not joking. Another prominent EA professor took to defending “Shrimp welfare” because they “feel pain” and therefore humans must “reduce the suffering we inflict on them.” Many, if not most EAs are vegans because they highly prioritize the welfare of living creatures and often do not separate them on the moral hierarchy from humans.

EA is at its most dangerous when it comes to the concept of truth, and its value in the moral hierarchy of the ideology.

The Abrahamic faiths teach that humans are morally accountable for their actions, words, and beliefs before a just God. EAs believe actions, words, and beliefs matter far less than measurable impact. If morality is merely a matter of consequence, then lying is fine because an EA could use deception to bring forth greater utility.

Share

Subscribe now

EA advocates say that enlightened utilitarians will prioritize honesty because it creates trust, and trust is important because it creates good consequences. Singer wages this defense after the infamous FTX scandal, arguing that “wise, effective altruists and utilitarians know that honesty is the best policy.” But Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) did not make those calculations when he determined the stakes were too high.

Popular AI doomsday preacher Liron Shapira supplied a revealing example of EA taqiyya when he announced that he was registering as a Republican “in the interest of making AI x-risk bipartisan.” Shapira, who hosts a popular YouTube channel, added that he was a “one-issue voter” focused on preventing human extinction. For EAs like Shapira, partisan affiliation is just a strategic instrument. The identity is a noble lie but it has become useful because it helps him sell the apocalypse narrative to Republicans, who are less likely to believe in the AI superintelligence apocalypse theory.

EAs prioritize utility over honesty, which is why so many non-EAs in the tech world are wary of them as corrosive vehicles for moral poison. EAs are especially manipulative on AI because many believe that human extinction via AI is a highly plauisble reality, so being truthful and honest has now become a non-factor in support of “saving the planet.”

Given that EA is a speedrun philosophy, there are gaps in its core principles that often reveal themselves as total hypocrisy. This often appears in the self-described “rationalist” world that its members inhabit. While it’s not hard to find an EA obsessing over probabilities, in the next breath, they’ll reach the emotionally overpowering conclusion that AI will kill everyone, despite the notion of a sentient AI being nothing more than a shaky theory. Still, they’ll work backward to lock in a utility that gives their forecase (p(doom)) for that predetermined conclusion. Their forecasts suddenly become mathematical facts through obfuscation and outright lies, because the ends now justify the means.

No figure exposed the dark side of the EA movement more thoroughly than Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the infamous crypto fraudster who remains in federal prison after he was convicted in 2024 of seven criminal counts of fraud and conspiracy. William MacAskill is credited with introducing SBF to the “earning to give” concept, and Bankman-Fried, inspired by EA principles, became the movement’s largest patron. SBF and EA allies spun up the FTX Future Fund with money that had been allegedly acquired in part through siphoned customer funds, and proudly advertised plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars into political causes prioritized by EAs. Its leadership included MacAskill and other major EA figures, like Leopold Aschenbrenner, whose Situational Awareness hedge fund just coughed up billions of dollars in losses.

Before FTX collapsed, the group proudly delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to EA priorities, and it was heavily involved in Democratic politics, according to The New York Times.

Before everything went sideways, Bankman-Fried was an EA in high standing with his fellow travelers, and the corporate press was all too happy to declare him a whiz kid grounded in Effective Altruism. He greatly helped EA expand from a niche Bay Area movement to one that captured institutions and influence. But when the fraud and stolen customer money became an undeniable reality, EA leaders suddenly disavowed him as if they never had anything to do with him. Yes, even the EAs who lived in the “SBF polycule,” the polyamorous group of top executives who lived together in a $40 million luxury penthouse in the Bahamas while running FTX and its sister trading firm, Alameda Research. Team members and affiliated researchers dissolved the FTX foundation, but moved on to separate organizations doing virtually identical work, as if nothing had happened. And yes, the EA “culture” continues to make waves in the media.

Anthropic founder Dario Amodei has long been a staple in EA circles, but he has been politically savvy enough to not publicly identify as an EA. Before launching Anthropic, he and his cofounder sister lived in an EA group house with GiveWell co-founder Holden Karnofsky. Amodei has publicly discussed these forces as part of the “AI safety community” rather than embracing or rejecting the baggage that comes with the EA name.

The FTX implosion revealed the moral shortcomings of “earning to give,” which gives sanction to the notion of “fake it till you make it.” If making money is just a means to an end, then utilitarian moral compromises are fair game, and accumulating money through ill-gotten gains can be rationalized.

While the FTX money disappeared, EA still retained its robust funding engine: Open Philanthropy (which has rebranded to Coefficient Giving), is now EA’s top funding mechanism, and it’s financed principally by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. It has funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars of EA political priorities into aligned organizations. The Moskovitz network has supported think tanks and policy organizations, and it has even spawned fake organizations to grow an increasingly elaborate AI-doomer ecosystem.

Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian billionaire, is probably the second most influential EA funder behind Moskovitz. He has helped to seed several EA-adjacent organizations to influence AI and tech policy, including the Future of Life Institute (FLI). Max Tegmark, the founder of FLI who brought together the “Bernie-Bannon coalition” of AI doomerism, is a longtime EA advocate, though he now tries to distance himself from the movement.

Like true revolutionaries, the EAs are beginning to eat their own, rebrand, and fracture into splinter groups.

The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is one of the EA movement’s most robust institutions and one of the most well-funded AI-doomer outfits in America. CAIS has received millions from Open Philanthropy and has created several astroturf organizations in Washington, D.C. with the mission to nuke innovation.

However, its founders, though ideologically identical to EAs, are now distancing themselves from the EA label.

In their efforts to infiltrate the Washington, D.C. lobbying and influence scene, they’ve undergone a revealing rebrand. CAIS is trying to detach the AI doomerism from EA’s damaged reputation while preserving its apocalyptic premises and much of its funding lineage.

Both the White House and the Pentagon have joined the campaign against EA. Former Uber executive Emil Michael, who serves as the CTO of the War Department, is all too familiar with EA, and he has spearheaded some of the Trump Administration’s efforts to raise awareness about the nefarious ideology. The DOW technology account recently declared, “The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country.”

Michael has described EA as a “dystopian” anti-human ideology, while additional administration officials have attacked it more broadly as the “Doomer Industrial Complex” they believe would fumble America’s advantage in AI and deliver it to China.

Effective Altruism might be rebranding, but its ideals remain embedded staples of the AI-doomer movement. It delivers corrupted moral authority, botched arithmetic and an excuse to override ordinary human virtue. It’s a philosophy that promises utility over honesty, and that core concept is why so many Americans are right to be wary of its influence across the nation.

Share

Subscribe now

Byron Donalds

Rep. Donalds smartly leaned into his Trump endorsement, but he also carved out space for himself, distinguishing his campaign from his opponents by taking the optimist lane. He talked about building Florida to new heights, allowing for businesses and families to flourish, while keeping the government out of people’s lives. His rivals were focused on painstakingly workshopping the next thing they should ban.

Of course, fomenting outrage is a legitimate political strategy, and it’s often successful, unfortunately. Donalds was smart to avoid it. He spoke warmly about both the President and the Governor for eighteen straight months — both men are genuinely beloved by Floridians and retain 90+% GOP approval ratings in the state — and refused to be baited into feuds between their respective supporters. Congressman Donalds is undoubtedly a high-level political operator, and he will need those skills up in Tallahassee.

Donalds had raised a ton of money, with over $51 million still sitting in his war chest. No candidate in either party was remotely close.

He heads into November with a largely unified party. Job well done.

Jay Collins

Nobody hustled harder than Jay Collins, and it showed in how he overperformed the pollsters. Though he still finished over 22 points back.

But sometimes, pure retail energy is not enough for seasoned voters. Ask ten Collins voters what a Collins governorship would look like and you’d get ten different answers. That vagueness is likely part of the reason why Governor DeSantis never endorsed his campaign. Things started off with lots of promise, given that DeSantis handpicked Collins as his Lieutenant Governor and called him the “Chuck Norris of Florida politics.” But eventually, he declined to back him despite being asked point-blank, repeatedly. Collins eventually settled on the explanation that the Governor was avoiding a “proxy war” with Trump. The more accurate read is that DeSantis simply didn’t see a compelling message or a path to victory.

James Fishback

Fishback did successfully inspire a niche of young voters to rage against the machine, and 177,000 votes is not nothing.

More seasoned voters saw what was within the skin suit: a con man, a clown, and a chameleon all in one. A federal judge recently ordered him to pay his former employer more than $1.3 million in fees and costs because he stole proprietary information from them, on top of a separate $229,000 judgment that sent the U.S. Marshals after his possessions. He owes his own lawyers over $150,000 in unpaid bills. Fishback is a narcissistic loser untethered from any value system, and he is now almost two million in the hole. Expect a big podcast launch within the month to start repaying his creditors.

Paul Renner

Paul Renner is a serious conservative with real legislative wins in the state of Florida. Unfortunately, his campaign was a total mess. He ran as something of a DeSantis tribute act and never distinguished himself from the original, pushing all of his chips in with the hopes to receive an endorsement that never arrived. He should have saved the money.

What’s Next?

Byron Donalds enters November with a largely unified GOP and a robust state party apparatus that feels good about its chances of defeating Democrat David Jolly. Governor DeSantis has made it clear that he is on board, too. I like his chances.

Share

In some corners of the conservative movement, Anthony Fauci is likened to a criminal genius: the architect of a bioweapon, the string-pulling conductor of a worldwide operation. Some have declared him a plotting mind so formidable that only an elaborate international conspiracy could explain what he pulled off. Yet this is not a man of competence. The Fauci story is one of a public health bureaucrat with terrible instincts and reasoning abilities, granted virtually unlimited power in the time of a manufactured hysteria.

This article is proudly sponsored by Kalshi — home of the American Power Index (KPOW), the real-time “S&P 500 of politics” that tracks the shifting balance of power between Democrats and Republicans by blending current control with live prediction-market odds.

Dossier readers can sign up for Kalshi for free today and earn up to $500 to make predictions on sports, politics and more.

For decades, Fauci was a career government health bureaucrat of unexceptional ability whose primary skill involved accumulated more power than any unelected American of his generation. He then used those skills to smother risk calculations and create consensus that any intelligent and wise adult would have rejected wholeheartedly.

On Monday, Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the first text chain from what we hope are a series of communications recovered from Fauci’s government-issued iPhone, which HHS finally handed over on August 5 in response to Johnson’s request. His phone is said to hold more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails. Quite suspiciously, it only contains three saved contacts, which probably means that it was tampered with. I do hope that government officials can secure the data that was possibly deleted.

The senators released something of a bombshell that discusses January 2021 communications between Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and future Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. This was just days after former President Biden’s inauguration. The subject is pregnant women and the mRNA injections. In it, Fauci writes that the supposedly “safe and effective” shot “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

One week later, Fauci went in front of cameras and said the vaccines had “no red flags” regarding pregnant women. He later said that there was “no indication whatsoever” of increased adverse events in pregnant women. By September, Walensky and her comrades in the Biden Government Health bureaucracy were strongly recommending vaccination before or during pregnancy.

If Fauci and his goons were level-headed and honest with the public, they would have said something along the lines of “we do not yet know if it’s totally safe, but we think covid is bad, so decide for yourself.”

Instead, they demanded compliance.

In another text in the chain, we get insight into Fauci’s mindset. It becomes clear that he is justifying the risk of miscarriage by declaring “COVID-19 can be a serious disease especially in pregnancy.”

Again, this is in January 2021, one full year into the hysteria. We already knew that the Wuhan sniffles were not harming healthy people. Nonetheless, Fauci decided that catastrophic utilitarianism was the path forward.

At the end of the day, Fauci in his government service was a mediocrity who understood that raising a complication would slow the campaign to create consensus.

This is the same man who told Congress that the absurdity that was the six-foot distance rule “sort of just appeared,” and that he was unaware of any study supporting it. That one nonsensical rule shut down places of worship, bankrupted millions of businesses, and forced the closure of America’s schools. As we documented last month, it somehow became the primary mechanism for the whole shutdown apparatus.

Informed consent just means that the person taking the risk gets all of the information that the person or company recommending it actually knows. A pregnant woman in the early covid hysteria days was entitled to hear what Fauci and his colleagues knew. They swept it under the rug for the “greater good” of maintaining public health order.

Treating Fauci as a supervillain makes a lot of sense when you’re trying to sell copies of something. But the truth of the matter is a lot more sobering. He was an average man with a giant ego, and the absolute worst person to hand unlimited authority over the lives of everyone else. It resulted in predictable disaster.

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

Yet it’s not the lab-leak question and the real, widespread confusion surrounding those early days of hysteria that is the scandal here. What we lived through was a seasonal respiratory outbreak converted by an unaccountable bureaucracy and a compliant press into the largest episode of mass hysteria in modern American history. The pathogen was not a significant part of the covid story. The panic and hysteria that resulted in civilizational disruption is.

Agree with my premise or not, but on top of that, Fauci’s “mitigation” record is still indefensible, and Fauci has already admitted it under oath.

In January 2024, in a closed-door transcribed interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci was asked where the six-foot rule came from. His answer, released in full that May: “I don’t recall. It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall, like, a discussion of whether it should be 5 or 6 or whatever.” Asked whether he had seen any studies supporting six feet, he said he was not aware of any, and that such a study would be very difficult to do. He called it an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data, or even on data that could be gathered. Asked whether he recalled reviewing any studies on masking young children, he could not.

Now remember what six feet actually did.

That number, pulled out of thin air by government bureacurats, was the load-bearing number of the entire American shutdown apparatus. Six feet set restaurant capacity. Six feet determined whether a gym, a salon, a bar, or a church could open at all, and at what fraction of full capacity. These catastrophic government edicts dictated classroom layouts. A number that “sort of just appeared” was used to reorganize the economic, educational, and social life of 330 million people.

Then the masks. In January 2023, Cochrane published an updated review of physical interventions against respiratory viruses, pooling 78 randomized trials. On community masking it found little or no difference in influenza-like or COVID-like illness across nine trials and some 277,000 participants. Masks never work, but Fauci didn’t care. He found them a useful mechanism to control his sycophantic followers, like a cult leader insisting upon uniforms to showcase compliance.

Quite infamously, in November 2021, Fauci told CBS that his critics were really criticizing science itself, “because I represent science.” Four days after three courageous epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford published the Great Barrington Declaration, Fauci and high level government health bureaucrats waged a smear campaign against the truth tellers. NIH Director Francis Collins emailed Fauci demanding “a quick and devastating published takedown” of what he called “three fringe epidemiologists.” No, not a rebuttal. A “takedown.” The federal government’s two most powerful “public health” officials used their authority to discredit the people asking questions about the legitimacy of their policies.

Between February and April 2020, the number of working business owners in America fell from 15.0 million to 11.7 million. That’s a loss of 3.3 million, 22 percent, the largest drop ever recorded. Many of those businesses never recovrered. The Great Recession, by comparison, took 730,000 over its entire span. Yelp alone logged 163,735 closures by that August, and roughly 60 percent of them became permanent. Peer-reviewed work using California’s full sales-tax filing universe found permanent-closure rates spiking, with small firms hit far harder than large ones.

There were also devastating results for America’s youth. After decades of sustained progress in math and reading, The Nation’s Report Card recorded the largest math decline in its history. Twelfth graders tested in 2024, which is the first cohort to spend all four high school years after the closures, were still way below normal levels. Despite tens of billions in federal dollars infused into the system, the money did not close the gap. Studies showed that the schools that stayed remote longest lost the most.

The hysteria was infinitely worse than the claimed disease itself. From April 2020 through the end of 2021, Americans died of non-covid causes at an annual rate 97,000 above trend. Heart disease, diabetes, drug overdoses, alcohol, homicide, car crashes, etc all went way up. All-cause mortality rose 26 percent among working-age adults versus 18 percent among the elderly. Among children, who were never threatened by a mild respiratory virus, there were essentially no aggregate excess deaths at all. We shut the schools for a supposed viral threat that was not impacting the students whatsoever.

In a just world, Anthony Fauci would spend the rest of his life behind bars. Not because of some massive, hard to track, intelligence agency sourced foreign conspiracy involving Wuhan, China. But because he used his credentials to insist again and again that his devastating authoritarian dictates were absolutely necesssary, and backed by real science. Fauci is a negligent and despotic criminal of the highest order, and it would be a shame if he got away with it. I do hope that he will face some type of real criminal prosecution in the coming days and months while Republicans are still in power.

Share

Subscribe now