I’ve had an interesting conversation with another user on Substack. I think there are several important lessons here that I want to discuss as it applies to the liberty and skeptic movements as a whole, because until we really internalize these lessons we’re going to be stuck spinning our wheels and, frankly, people will continue to not take us seriously.
I found this user because he was posting some anti-government memes and I thought, oh - this guy gets it! But then everything fell apart. The same person posting anti-government memes also thinks gravity is fake, the earth stands still (no rotation, no orbit around the sun), and basically all of modern physics is a lie. Satellites are fake (they’re just balloons apparently) and every picture from space is a NASA CGI fake.
Why am I sharing my run in with this person? Because this position is fundamentally a self-defeating one and I see it all the time.
The Wrong Rabbithole
There are some serious rabbit holes out there on the internet, that lead down some very uncomfortable truths. For instance, the CIA really did run a secretive program called MKULTRA. The U.S. government really did torture people in Abu Ghraib. Operation Paperclip really did bring thousands of Nazi scientists (many implicated in crimes) to the U.S. instead of putting them in prison. These are documented facts that are well proven, and yet the government tried (and crucially, failed) to keep them secret.
Then there’s the fake rabbit holes. The idea that the earth is flat, gravity isn’t real, or that the government possesses incredible secret spacecraft with anti-gravity tech that nobody knows about.
Why are these a problem?
They waste your time.
They confuse you and disable your ability to reason. Spend enough time reading this nonsense and you risk actually going crazy.
They make everything seem like a lie, which erodes your ability to trust in the basic reality of what’s around you, which in turn stops you from enacting meaningful change in your life.
They discredit you when you talk to people who can think and reason, and therefore, unfortunately, often discredit all of the other positions you hold too, even if they happen to be correct. Basically, you get labeled a raving lunatic and the metaphorical baby is thrown out with the bathwater.
They make the government seem far more powerful than it really is.
Discrediting Yourself
Let’s talk about point 4 in a bit more detail first.
Imagine you approach a normie friend and tell them “We don’t need a coercive monopoly on violence to have roads. The government is both evil and inefficient and should be abolished. We can figure out how to build roads without violence.”
That’s a tough pill to swallow. What are you really saying? You’re not just making a claim about roads. That would be fairly trivial.
No - you’re actually challenging the fundamental worldview underpinning everything this person believes about society. If the government isn’t necessary, something they’ve been told since they were a small child, then they’ve been lied to. By their parents, by their teachers, by their “elected” “leaders”. The news broadcasts, the books, everything they know about reality.
Man, are they going to fight you hard on this. They will do whatever mental gymnastics are required to disprove you, even if your position is unassailable. You therefore already have a difficult proposition ahead of you; but now imagine that in addition to that you say, “Oh, and the earth is flat.”
Boom. Instant dismissal. Now your normie friend can safely categorize you as a crazy person - as someone who is not to be taken seriously. “Phew - I knew they were wrong about that taxation is slavery thing.”
Your ability to reach people is inversely proportional to how crazy you sound, and libertarians and anarchists already sound pretty crazy just advocating for liberty (as sad as that is).
Government is not omnipotent
But perhaps the bigger problem is not what thinking this way does to others opinion of you - it’s what it does to your own worldview.
If everything is a lie. If everything is a psyop or a false flag, then government becomes this near-omnipotent boogie monster. A leviathan not just in size and evil, but in competence. And that’s a tough pill to swallow.
How can we fight back against an omnipotent power that has super advanced secret anti-gravity ships? That can keep secrets like “gravity is fake” for centuries? We can’t.
And if you believe this, you’re disabling your own abilities before we even get started.
It’s the same kind of position that sees everything as a false flag. “Oh, look, that explosion happened! It couldn’t have been terrorists, it must have been the government!”
Do governments blow stuff up and pretend it was someone else with false flags? Yes, sometimes.
Do actual terrorists exist who also blow stuff up? Yes, sometimes.
Is everything a government false flag or psyop? No.
And in thinking it is, we give the government far more credit than they deserve. In reality, some things are done moderately competently by the government. For instance, they’re pretty good at incarcerating (kidnapping) people. They’ve had a lot of practice, after all.
It’s a bizarre position to be in - to both disclaim the government as a bunch of corrupt, evil and incompetent psychopaths, while also saying they’re exceptionally good at keeping secrets and have all of these super secret technologies.
The “They Admit it!” fallacy
Notice what’s happening in this conversation below.
This person is both using NASA as a source to substantiate his opinion and then immediately after that discrediting NASA as a biased source and saying it proves nothing. He even calls me stupid, for good measure.
You might think I’m just screenshotting this to make fun of this person contradicting themselves; but there is another, bigger reason. I call it the “They Admit It!” fallacy. I see it in the conspiracy theorist community all the time.
They say the government is constantly lying about everything, but as soon as someone in the government happens to say something that they agree with, suddenly it’s trustworthy. “They admitted it!” Oh, the people who are liars admitted something? And now we trust them? But if they contradict us they’re categorically worthless?
A position like this exists in a state of constant cognitive dissonance.
Skepticism is a Method, not a Knee-Jerk Reaction
Real skepticism is not automatically believing the opposite of whatever NASA, the government, or the news says. If an institution makes a claim and you reflexively invert it, that institution is still doing your thinking for you.
The standard you use to determine if something is true should remain the same no matter who is speaking. Just because someone in the skeptic community says something, doesn’t automatically make it true.
The questions we should be asking ourselves are:
What exactly is the claim? What evidence supports it? Can any of that evidence be checked independently? What would prove the claim wrong?
The user who prompted this post would not accept any evidence or logic that contradicted his belief. Every objection became further evidence that the deception was even larger than it appeared. At that point, the belief was no longer a conclusion drawn from evidence. It had become an article of faith.
Extreme certainty in the face of limited evidence is a warning sign, especially when honest questions produce anger instead of answers. Anger does not prove that a claim is false, but it may show that the belief has become part of someone’s identity and is no longer being tested honestly.
Can we trust the government?
The anarchist in me wants to scream, “No!”
But, in fact, that would be too simplistic.
A government source is not true merely because it is official. It’s also not false merely because it is official. The same applies to an anonymous account, a viral video, an alternative-media personality, or a meme. Evidence does not become stronger because it confirms what we already suspect.
The liberty movement cannot afford to replace blind trust in institutions with blind distrust of reality. Our actual argument is already radical: no person acquires the moral right to coerce another by winning an election, wearing a badge, or acting through an agency. We do not need fake physics, omnipotent secret cabals, or a theory that explains every explosion, election, war, and technological development. The documented record of what governments do is damning enough.
Government is dangerous because it holds coercive power, not because it is all-knowing or all-capable. Governments contain rival factions, make mistakes, lose wars, expose their own crimes, leak secrets, and frequently fail at what they attempt. They can also lie, coordinate, conceal wrongdoing, and exploit events they did not create.
That distinction matters because omnipotence produces fatalism. If every event is scripted, every witness is controlled, every photograph is fabricated, and every contrary fact proves the cover-up, then nothing can be known and nothing can be done.
That is not skepticism. It is surrender.
You surrender your judgment, your peace of mind, and your ability to act. The state does not have to defeat you; your belief in its omnipotence has already convinced you that resistance is futile.
Good skepticism should make us harder to fool and more capable of acting. It should help us identify real abuses, protect ourselves, reduce our dependence on coercive institutions, and build voluntary alternatives. If a worldview instead leaves us terrified of an unbeatable enemy and unable to trust anything around us, it has not liberated us. It has merely found another way to disable us.
That is the standard we need: hard to fool, but still willing to learn.
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On point. I sm guilty as charged. I try though. 😁
Appreciate this reality check.
Very well elucidated! You wrote down the things which I've been mulling over for years. Thank you.