Luke Ford

Grok says: Thilo Sarrazin, the German economist, former SPD politician, Berlin finance senator, and ex-Bundesbank board member, remains a prominent and controversial figure known for his sharp critiques of immigration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries, as well as related topics like demographics, welfare state sustainability, education, and crime in Germany.
His core views haven’t shifted much in recent years; he continues to argue that unchecked mass immigration (especially from certain cultural backgrounds) imposes heavy economic, social, and cultural costs on Germany, threatens the welfare state without secure borders, lowers average intelligence/competence levels through demographic shifts, increases crime and integration failures, and accelerates a “demographic decline” faster than he initially predicted.Key points from his recent activity (roughly 2022–2026):Books and ongoing themes: His most recent major book appears to be Der Staat an seinen Grenzen: Über Wirkung von Einwanderung in Geschichte und Gegenwart (The State at Its Borders: On the Effects of Immigration in History and the Present), discussed in interviews around 2020 but still referenced. He has continued promoting ideas from earlier works like Feindliche Übernahme (Hostile Takeover, 2018) on Islam’s impact on progress and society, while reiterating warnings from his 2010 bestseller Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Abolishes Itself). In 2025 interviews, he described the demographic shift in Germany as “accelerating faster than predicted,” claiming his bleak outlook on declining native birth rates combined with low-skill immigration was underestimated.
Interviews and public statements (2025–2026): He has appeared in various formats, often on conservative or alternative media platforms, delivering harsh assessments of Germany’s situation. For example:In early 2026 (around February), he analyzed Germany’s challenges in a webinar/interview, pointing to rising crime rates, an education crisis due to language deficiencies among migrants, massive financial burdens on municipalities and the economy from migration policies, lack of effective border controls, structural system overload, and eroding public trust in established politics. He warned of widespread business failures (citing figures like 569,000 companies at risk) and described 2026 as potentially a “year of bankruptcy” for Germany.
In other 2025 appearances (e.g., studio visits and discussions marking 10 years since Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das”), he criticized “imported violence,” reality denial in politics, Berlin as the “capital of citizen’s income” (Bürgergeld, implying welfare dependency), and the state’s total burden from migration. He stressed that a welfare state without protected borders is not viable long-term.
He has linked these issues to broader failures in integration, with statements like violence being “imported” and the state bearing the full costs.

On platforms like X (formerly Twitter), people still reference him positively as prescient—e.g., claims that events prove him “right” about demographic changes (like high Muslim proportions in certain settings potentially leading to Islamic majorities in decades), or suggesting him as a figure for roles like president in conservative circles. Critics continue to view his positions as inflammatory or outdated, but his exclusion from the SPD (finalized in 2020) hasn’t silenced him; he remains active as an independent commentator.

Overall, in the past few years, Sarrazin has doubled down on his longstanding warnings: Germany faces existential risks from demographic “Umvolkung” (population replacement), fiscal unsustainability, cultural erosion, and political denial. His tone is often described as uncompromising or “knallhart” (hard-hitting), focusing on data-driven critiques of policy failures rather than new ideological shifts. He appears in economic/financial contexts (e.g., webinars on gold/investments tying into national decline) and remains a reference point in debates on migration and identity.

Thilo Sarrazin has maintained a generally sympathetic but not fully endorsing stance toward the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in recent years (2024–2026), viewing it as a logical political response to the failures of mainstream parties on immigration, integration, demographics, and welfare issues that he has long criticized.He has not joined the AfD (despite invitations around his 2020 SPD expulsion and earlier speculation), and he remains an independent commentator. However, he has appeared at events or given interviews where he aligns with or defends aspects of their positions, and he has been described in media as an “intellectual enabler” (intellektueller Möglichmacher) for the party due to how his data-driven critiques from books like Deutschland schafft sich ab (2010) and later works have paved the way for AfD’s rise on migration and cultural topics.Key recent statements and positions:In a March 2026 interview with Deutschland-Kurier (a conservative/right-leaning outlet), Sarrazin explicitly called the AfD the new “workers’ party” (Arbeiterpartei). He argued that the traditional SPD (his former party) has lost its working-class base due to its support for open migration policies, high welfare burdens, and failure to address economic pressures on lower-income Germans. He sees the AfD as filling that vacuum by appealing to workers concerned about competition from low-skilled immigration, rising crime linked to migration, and the erosion of social security. Clips and discussions of this interview circulated widely on platforms like YouTube and X in mid-March 2026, with titles like “Thilo Sarrazin: DESHALB ist die AfD die neue Arbeiterpartei!” (That’s why the AfD is the new workers’ party!).
In a September 2025 interview with Swiss outlet Blick, he advocated for a different approach to the AfD, criticizing the “firewall” (Brandmauer) strategy of other parties (especially CDU/CSU) that refuse cooperation. He compared it unfavorably to Switzerland, where the right-wing SVP (Swiss People’s Party) is treated as a normal democratic player without isolation. Sarrazin suggested breaking the German firewall, arguing that demonizing AfD voters alienates large swaths of the population who have lost trust in the state (citing polls showing ~75% distrust). He sees the AfD’s electoral gains as a symptom of mainstream failures rather than something to be purely condemned.
In broader commentary (e.g., a February 2025 t-online profile on his 80th birthday and a 2024 DIE ZEIT review of his book Deutschland auf der schiefen Bahn), Sarrazin has expressed ambivalence: He appreciates the AfD’s focus on border control, reduced welfare migration, and demographic preservation—issues central to his own warnings. However, he has distanced himself from more radical figures like Björn Höcke, calling parts of Höcke’s rhetoric “schrecklich” (terrible) during a 2024 book presentation. He criticizes the blanket vilification of AfD voters by other parties as counterproductive and undemocratic.

Sarrazin portrays the AfD’s success (especially among former SPD/CDU voters in eastern Germany and working-class areas) as evidence that his long-standing predictions about migration’s societal costs were correct—and that ignoring them has fueled populism. He urges treating the AfD more like a legitimate opposition force rather than an outcast, while stopping short of full endorsement or membership. His views continue to resonate in conservative and right-leaning circles, where he’s often cited as prescient on why the AfD thrives.

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s far-right populist party, has historically attracted support from certain academic circles, particularly economists and social scientists, due to its origins as a euroskeptic “professors’ party” (Professorenpartei) founded in 2013. While the party has radicalized over time—shifting from economic liberalism to anti-immigration, nationalist, and identitarian positions—some academics continue to endorse it, provide intellectual backing, or show public sympathy through statements, donations, or involvement. However, many early academic supporters have distanced themselves, citing the party’s rightward drift.Support among academics is not widespread; Germany’s academic community is largely critical of the AfD, with surveys showing low endorsement rates (e.g., a 2023 study found only about 3-5% of professors sympathize with it). High-profile cases often involve economists or social scientists who align with the party’s critiques of EU policies, migration, or “woke” ideology. Below is a list of the most notable figures, based on their public profiles, media presence, and documented ties.

1. Winfried Stöcker (Physician and Medical Researcher, MD)Background: Founder of Euroimmun (sold for €1.2 billion in 2017), a diagnostics company. He studied medicine at the University of Lübeck and has conducted research in immunology; often described as a “medical entrepreneur” with academic credentials, though not a full professor.
AfD Ties: Major donor, giving €20,000 in 2019 and €1.5 million in January 2025—the largest single donation to the party at the time. Stöcker has stated the AfD “has many good views” and spreads “some bad ones,” but he supports it for its positions on migration and COVID policies (he controversially self-developed an unapproved vaccine). His financial backing signals strong endorsement.
Profile Level: High—known for business success and pandemic controversies; his donations drew widespread media coverage.

2. Joachim Starbatty (Professor of Economics)

Emeritus professor at the University of Tübingen, specializing in European economic policy. Co-author of euroskeptic works and a key figure in early anti-euro movements.
AfD Ties: Founding member and part of the party’s scientific advisory board since 2013. He ran as an AfD candidate in the 2014 European elections and has defended the party’s economic critiques, though he’s less vocal on its cultural-nationalist shift.
Profile Level: Moderate to high—prominent in euroskeptic debates; his involvement helped legitimize the AfD early on.

3. Roland Vaubel (Professor of Economics)
Emeritus professor at the University of Mannheim, focusing on international economics and monetary policy. Known for libertarian-leaning views.
AfD Ties: Elected to the AfD’s scientific advisory board in 2013; early supporter who advised on euro-criticism. He has not publicly distanced himself and continues to align with the party’s economic nationalism.
Profile Level: Moderate—respected in academic economics circles, though less publicly controversial.

4. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider (Professor of Islamic Studies)

Professor at the University of Bayreuth, specializing in Arabic philology and Islamic history.
AfD Ties: Active AfD politician since 2016; member of the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament and the party’s federal executive board. He endorses the AfD’s anti-Islam stance, often criticizing multiculturalism, and has faced accusations of right-wing extremism (e.g., links to identitarian groups). His academic work informs the party’s cultural policies.
Profile Level: Moderate—known in regional politics and for controversial statements on Islam.

5. Marc Jongen (Lecturer in Philosophy, PhD)

Philosopher and lecturer at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design; influenced by thinkers like Heidegger and Sloterdijk.
AfD Ties: AfD Bundestag member since 2017; serves on committees for education and culture. He provides intellectual framing for the party’s “new right” ideology, defending it against “left-green” dominance in academia.
Profile Level: Moderate—seen as the AfD’s “house philosopher” in media profiles.

Jürgen Habermas spent his career arguing that legitimate political outcomes emerge from open, rational communication among equals. He built an elaborate theory around this idea, called communicative rationality, and used it to describe a public sphere where private citizens reason together toward shared judgments. The theory made him the most influential political philosopher in postwar Germany and one of the most cited in the world. It also gave his class a philosophical foundation for something considerably less noble than open deliberation.
His proceduralism was not simply self-serving in its origins. It grew from a real historical catastrophe. The collapse of Weimar and the memory of how democratic mechanisms had been used to destroy democracy itself shaped everything Habermas wrote. He believed democracy required institutional mediation precisely because unmediated mass politics had already produced catastrophe once. That fear was not paranoid. It was empirically grounded. But a diagnosis can be accurate and a cure can still become a new pathology, and that is what happened.
The postwar German liberal intelligentsia, the class Habermas belonged to and spoke for, held enormous institutional power. They ran the universities, shaped the press, dominated public broadcasting, and set the terms of what counted as acceptable political argument. His theory gave that arrangement a philosophical foundation. Rational discourse, properly conducted, would naturally produce the conclusions they favored. Anyone who reached different conclusions had either reasoned badly or introduced illegitimate premises. Democracy was fine as long as it ratified what they had already decided.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory illuminates what was happening. Pinsof argues that political ideology is not primarily about beliefs or values in any sincere sense. It signals coalition membership and manages alliances within a stratified social environment. People adopt ideological positions not because they reason their way to them but because those positions mark them as reliable members of a particular coalition and distinguish them from rivals. Habermas fits this framework almost perfectly. The elaborate procedural language, the theory of communicative rationality, the public sphere, all of it marked him as a member in good standing of a transnational credentialed class. The complexity of the theory was not incidental. It was part of the signal. Only someone with the right education, the right institutional affiliations, and the right cultural formation could fully engage with it. That barrier to entry was a feature, not a flaw.
Moving the criterion of democratic legitimacy from voting to discourse theory was also a labor shift. It favored people with leisure, vocabulary, and institutional access. A factory worker in the Ruhr with a restrictionist view on immigration could not participate in Habermasian public discourse on equal terms with a Frankfurt professor, not because his argument was worse but because he lacked the cultural equipment the framework required. Calling that democracy required considerable nerve.
The analogy that clarifies this most sharply is medieval Latin. Latin did not just communicate theology. It constituted a class with exclusive interpretive authority. Communicative rationality functions the same way. It does not just describe how rational discourse works. It installs a clerisy whose professional identity depends on being its guardians. The universities, the constitutional courts, the quality press, these institutions do not merely apply Habermasian norms. Their occupational legitimacy rests on those norms remaining authoritative. That is why the reaction to social media among that class has been so visceral. It is not just a political threat. It is an existential professional threat.
The Sarrazin affair exposed the machinery with unusual clarity. When Thilo Sarrazin published Germany Abolishes Itself in 2010, Habermas did not engage his empirical claims with the careful deliberative reasoning his theory prescribed. He moved immediately to expulsion, to marking Sarrazin as outside the coalition and therefore outside legitimate discourse. Sarrazin was not a fringe agitator. He was a credentialed insider, a trained economist and senior public official, who used the tools of empirical argument to reach conclusions the class found intolerable. Habermas could not beat him on procedural grounds because Sarrazin was doing roughly what deliberative theory asks people to do. So Habermas ruled him out of bounds on substantive grounds and called it a defense of reason. The book sold over a million copies. His own theory of the public sphere treated widespread public engagement as a signal worth taking seriously. He had no clean theoretical answer for why a book that provoked genuine mass deliberation should be pushed out of the conversation. The theory of communicative rationality was the flag. The Sarrazin response showed what the flag protected.
The critique of deliberative democracy as a gatekeeping system did not originate with populists. Left feminist theorists, most notably Nancy Fraser, made it decades ago on entirely different grounds, arguing that the public sphere Habermas described had always excluded most people and that his procedural idealism masked structural power. That intellectual history matters. It shows the problem runs deeper than a left-right culture war and that the niche Habermas constructed was never as egalitarian as advertised even within its own terms.
Niche construction, a concept developed in evolutionary biology by John Odling-Smee, Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman, captures what Habermas did at a structural level. The core idea is that organisms do not merely adapt to their environments. They modify those environments in ways that alter the selection pressures acting on themselves and their descendants. Beavers build dams. Earthworms change soil chemistry. Habermas built an intellectual and institutional environment. His theory of communicative rationality, his rehabilitation of the Enlightenment project, his arguments for European integration, these were interventions that shaped the discursive environment in which the European liberal intelligentsia operated. The niche rewarded certain kinds of argument and penalized others. Academic philosophy that engaged with his framework got published, cited, and institutionally supported. Argument that failed his criteria got pathologized. Over time the niche selected for people who shared his class’s basic commitments, even when they disagreed on specifics.
The generational transmission dimension matters here. Habermas trained students who trained students who staffed universities and think tanks and editorial boards across Europe. The environment he helped build shaped what the next generation considered normal, reasonable, and thinkable. But niche constructors do not always control what their modifications produce. The constructed environment selected against exactly the kind of robust disagreement his theory claimed to champion. It produced rigidity and boundary enforcement instead, and that gap between intention and outcome is very much a niche construction story.
Constitutional patriotism, his proposed substitute for organic national identity, was always a thin foundation for the kind of solidarity that sustains political communities through difficulty. Shared history, shared sacrifice, shared demographic reality, these are not irrational attachments to be transcended by better procedures. They are the substrate on which any democracy operates. Habermas treated them as problems to be managed rather than facts to be incorporated, and that evasion stored up pressure that now releases through support for the AfD and movements like it across the Western world.
The elite opposition to majoritarianism was never really about protecting minorities or defending constitutional norms, though that was the language used. It was about preserving the conditions under which a relatively small credentialed class could continue to manage political outcomes. A divided polity needs brokers. Elites are the brokers. Populism of any variety threatens that arrangement because it collapses the divisions that make brokerage necessary. This is why elites across the nominal left-right spectrum converge when genuine mass movements appear. They may disagree about tax rates. They agree that the wrong kind of politics should not be allowed to win. Habermas gave that agreement a philosophical veneer. That was his social function.
When populations discover that institutions meant to represent them have instead managed and constrained them, the reaction tends to overshoot. The German establishment’s response to the AfD’s rise has been to reach for the same tools that accelerated the problem, more boundary enforcement, more legal pressure, attempts to ban the party outright, louder insistence that its voters are ignorant or morally compromised. This is niche construction defending itself against an environment that has shifted beyond its parameters. It cannot adapt because adaptation would require acknowledging that the niche was never as legitimate as advertised.
People who feel manipulated do not simply switch coalitions and adopt moderate positions. They experience something closer to betrayal, and betrayal produces a desire to punish, not just to correct. The credentialed class treated ordinary Germans as people whose political instincts needed supervision. When enough Germans fully internalize what was done to them, the response will not be a polite request for better deliberative procedures.
A niche constructed for a specific media environment, a specific demographic stability, and a specific postwar moral consensus is brittle precisely because it optimized so narrowly. When the environment shifted, the organisms it had selected for could not process the new data. They could only defend the niche. That is not a political preference. It is a structural incapacity, and it makes the eventual collapse of the arrangement something closer to biological necessity than political choice. Habermas, near the end of his life, likely understood some of this. The conditions he spent his career constructing made the reaction more likely, not less.
The free market for ideas had a specific historical context that is easy to forget. John Stuart Mill’s argument in On Liberty assumed a relatively small, literate public engaging in print debate, and it assumed that bad ideas would lose to good ones over time through rational contestation. The marketplace metaphor made sense in that environment. The people who would participate in the market were, by and large, the educated classes. The gatekeeping was already built into literacy rates, publishing costs, and social access. Mill did not need to defend the gate because the gate was invisible.
The First World War changed elite thinking profoundly. The propaganda machines of all the major powers demonstrated that mass publics could be manipulated into enthusiasms that bore no relationship to their interests. Walter Lippmann drew the sharpest conclusions in Public Opinion in 1922, arguing that ordinary citizens could not process the complexity of modern industrial society and that democratic governance required a class of expert administrators to manage public perception. Lippmann did not think he was opposing democracy. He thought he was saving it from its own limitations. That pattern of thought, saving democracy from the demos, became a recurring feature of twentieth century liberal intellectualism.
The interwar period and then fascism seemed to confirm the diagnosis. Mass politics had produced catastrophe. The Frankfurt School, which is the direct intellectual ancestor of Habermas, drew the conclusion that Enlightenment rationality contained a pathology within itself, that the same instrumental reason that built modern science and liberal institutions also built the death camps. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment argued that the Enlightenment project carried the seeds of its own barbarism. The response was not to abandon reason but to distinguish between good reason, critical, reflexive, oriented toward emancipation, and bad reason, instrumental, manipulable, vulnerable to fascist mobilization. That distinction required someone to draw the line, and the Frankfurt School appointed itself to the task.
Habermas inherited this framework and tried to rescue it by grounding legitimate reason in communicative procedures rather than substantive content. But the underlying assumption never changed. Mass publics remained potentially dangerous, and intellectual supervision remained necessary. The free market for ideas was fine when the market participants were people like Mill’s readers. It became suspect when the market opened to everyone.
The buffered self argument, which comes from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, cuts in an interesting direction here. Taylor describes the modern Western self as buffered against the world, protected by a sense of inner depth and rational autonomy from the kind of possession, enchantment, and mass enthusiasm that characterized premodern experience. The buffered self is the Enlightenment self. It trusts its own reason. It maintains critical distance from collective emotion.
The irony is that the people most committed to the buffered self ideal, the credentialed liberal class, turned out to be among the least buffered when their own coalition commitments were at stake. Habermas reacted to Sarrazin not with critical distance but with immediate coalition enforcement. The European intellectual class reacted to Brexit and Trump not with analytical curiosity but with something close to collective panic. The buffering worked against populist enthusiasm but dissolved entirely when the threat came from outside the niche. That is a very Pinsofian observation. The buffered self was always partly a signal of coalition membership rather than a genuine psychological achievement.
The Overton Window question gets at something structural. The window shrank not because elites stopped believing in free inquiry but because the cost-benefit calculation shifted. When the relevant public was small and educated and shared basic premises, open debate was low risk. Losing an argument meant revising a position. When mass publics with genuinely different premises entered the conversation through television and then the internet, open debate became higher risk. Losing an argument could mean losing power. The commitment to free inquiry turned out to be contingent on the assumption that inquiry would stay within acceptable bounds.
The Digital Services Act, the push to label vaccine skepticism as misinformation, the pressure on social media platforms to suppress certain political content, all of this follows the same logic Lippmann followed in 1922. The public cannot be trusted to process contested information responsibly, and experts must manage the information environment for democracy’s own good. The Enlightenment rhetoric remains. The commitment to open inquiry quietly departed. What replaced it was a therapeutic paternalism dressed in the language of harm reduction, which is a more comfortable way of saying that the wrong people were reaching the wrong conclusions and something had to be done.
The free market for ideas was never a sincere universal commitment. It was a winning strategy for a class that controlled the means of ideological production. When that control eroded, the strategy changed. The Enlightenment values remained as rhetoric because they retained social capital. The practices those values were supposed to generate got abandoned because the practices had become inconvenient. Habermas is simply the most philosophically sophisticated example of that substitution.
Hugo Mercier’s argument in Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe cuts directly against the foundational assumption that runs from Lippmann through the Frankfurt School to Habermas. That assumption holds that ordinary people are cognitively vulnerable, easily manipulated, and require expert supervision to protect them from propaganda and demagoguery. Mercier argues from evolutionary psychology that this picture is almost entirely wrong.
His core claim is that humans evolved open vigilance, a set of cognitive mechanisms that evaluate communicated information before accepting it. We did not evolve to believe everything we hear. We evolved to assess the source, the content, and the plausibility of incoming claims against our existing knowledge and interests. Credulity in matters touching survival and social standing would have been lethally costly across evolutionary time. The mechanisms that protect against it are therefore deep, robust, and largely automatic. We are not blank slates waiting to be written on by clever propagandists.
This lands hard on the Habermasian project. The entire justification for procedural gatekeeping rests on the premise that mass publics are susceptible to manipulation by demagogues and bad arguments. Habermas needed ordinary people to be cognitively fragile in order to justify intellectual supervision. Mercier’s evidence suggests the fragility is vastly overstated. People are quite good at rejecting messages that conflict with their perceived interests, their existing social knowledge, and their direct experience. What looks like mass manipulation often turns out, on closer inspection, to be mass people agreeing with messages that genuinely reflect something they already believe or experience.
This reframes the Sarrazin episode entirely. Over a million Germans bought Germany Abolishes Itself not because Sarrazin manipulated them into false beliefs but because the book articulated something they already observed in their own lives and neighborhoods and found confirmed by their own experience. Habermas’s class called that manipulation. Mercier’s framework calls it open vigilance working exactly as it should. People assessed the source, a credentialed economist and public official, assessed the content against their own experience, and found it plausible. That is not a failure of reason. That is reason functioning.
Mercier also has a sharp account of why the manipulation narrative is so persistent among elites despite the evidence against it. He argues that people systematically overestimate the persuasive power of messages directed at others while remaining confident in their own critical resistance. This is sometimes called the third person effect. Elites believe that ordinary people are vulnerable to propaganda precisely because elites feel immune to it themselves. The asymmetry licenses supervision. If you believe you can evaluate information critically but others cannot, you have a justification for managing what others see and hear. Mercier’s data suggests this asymmetry is largely illusory, but it is a very convenient illusion for a class whose social function depends on it.
The alliance theory dimension compounds this. Pinsof argues that ideological positions signal coalition membership. Mercier adds that the beliefs people hold tend to track their social interests and experiences rather than being arbitrarily installed by propaganda. Together the two frameworks suggest that when working class Germans supported Sarrazin or later the AfD, they were not victims of manipulation. They were people with genuine interests and genuine experiences reaching conclusions that their cognitive machinery evaluated as sound. The elite response, which was to pathologize those conclusions as products of irrationality or foreign interference or media manipulation, was itself a coalition maintenance move, not an honest assessment of what was happening.
Where Mercier’s thesis creates a genuine puzzle is around cases where large numbers of people do seem to hold beliefs that conflict with their interests or the evidence. He handles this by distinguishing between domains where open vigilance is strong, matters touching direct experience, survival, and immediate social stakes, and domains where it is weaker, abstract claims about distant events or technical questions where people lack the background to evaluate content directly. Propaganda and elite manipulation tend to work best in that second domain, which is exactly where foreign policy, financial regulation, and complex demographic questions tend to live.
That qualification strengthens the case against Habermasian gatekeeping rather than weakening it. If elite management of discourse is most powerful precisely in the abstract domains where ordinary people lack direct experience, then the class that controls expert discourse in those domains has enormous power to shape outcomes in its own interest while claiming to serve the public good. The ordinary person’s open vigilance cannot protect against manipulation it cannot see operating in a domain it cannot directly assess. Immigration is a partial exception because many Germans experienced its effects directly, which is exactly why Sarrazin’s book broke through despite elite opposition.
Mercier ultimately provides the cognitive science foundation for what the conversation has been building toward. The manipulation narrative that runs from Lippmann to Habermas to the current push for social media censorship is not primarily a theory about human cognition. It is a political technology. It pathologizes the conclusions of people who lack elite credentials while insulating elite consensus from challenge. Not Born Yesterday demonstrates that the cognitive premises of that technology are empirically false. People are not nearly as gullible as the gatekeeping class requires them to be, and the persistence of the gullibility narrative tells us more about the interests of those who promote it than about the minds of those it purports to describe.