You Be The Reporter: General Evaluation Form - Pbs: Fill & Download for Free

I’m seeing the common theme in many of these answers that, to paraphrase, reads as, “Buckle down on traditional Democratic policies, because if we just educate them… then they will finally get it.” This is to suggest that the working class are, as a whole, unaware of the policies to begin with. It’s condescending because it assumes ignorance, rather than seeking to understand why they have chosen to abandon the Democrats’ methodology.The first thing I would like people to understand is the nature of the bubble of comfort and security they exist within and their complete disconnect with millions of others. Quantifying it helps. The libertarian political scientist Charles Murray put together a short quiz testing the thickness of people’s social bubble: Do you live in a bubble? which was brought to the public by a partnership with the Public Broadcasting System. The quiz isn’t perfect, but I have seen few better wake up calls for millions of Americans. I would encourage everyone to take the test then post your answer to How do you score on PBS' "Do you live in a bubble" quiz? Did you have any answers that you care to elaborate on? and start to realize how disconnected many people are from the red parts of the map.If I had to guess why the disconnect, first I would say this is due to an insular urban society which doesn’t encourage interaction outside of the cities or with the urban poor, one which is actually very lacking in diversity despite it’s advocacy of it, particularly intellectually. It also has a large part to do with “the other half’s” depiction in the media. Cultural representation in entertainment is almost entirely one way. They feature upper-middle class socialites simply existing as if that was the norm.Consider the lifestyle of shows like How I Met Your Mother, where the cast includes people who can afford to live in nice apartments in New York City for years without jobs before becoming a) A successful architect, b) a powerful and influential environmental lawyer, and c) a famous news anchor d) a world traveled painter and e) Barnie. This is an extreme example, but think of the last time you saw a show about rural life that wasn’t one of these people getting lost on the way to another city or of a toothless redneck depicting rural “folk” as uncultured and illiterate, and possibly cannibals. Honestly, when was the last time you saw something that didn’t depict people living an “average” urban socialite lifestyle, which almost no one American has?I hope you didn’t just make the closest jump you could to Orange is the New Black, in which one of the main themes is the quintessential personification of how the left looks down upon working class “white trash.” Ask yourself even this, in a country with 200,000,000 Christians, when was the last time you saw Christianity displayed in a positive light, or acknowledging the many benefits to society that people of faith contribute, such as being the number one contributor to charity, both Christian and secular, as well as the greatest volunteers and providing more to orphans worldwide than any other source combined? I’m not just saying this as a Christian, I’m asking you to take a deep and reflective look at how you’ve seen hundreds of millions of people personified in the last two decades, and how you might feel if whatever group you felt as deeply about as Christians do about Christ being represented as horribly as these shows present Christians.Given that, we have to address the nature of the, “If we could just make them let us help them, they would connect better with us.” We need to evaluate the way in which Democratic “solutions” to problems have looked from the bottom. While not a visible problem to the Upper and Middle classes, many of these policies have fundamentally broken many of the foundations of living and caused worse problems for poor and working class people. Here are a few examples:Policies beginning in the 1960′s with President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” can be traced to significantly harming the family. At a time where poverty was already steeply in decline, programs were set up to aid single mothers. What they actually did, however, was to incentivize fatherless homes by paying mothers who have no father present in the household. If there is a single value which most working class people have, it’s family, and if there is one predictor of a bad life, it is being raised without a father. However, when the government began replacing the role of the breadwinner for families, it caused many single mothers to be wedded not to the father (or fathers) of their children, but to the state, ensuring not only that they would be trapped in American poverty, but also that they had to vote Democrat to ensure their continued lifestyle.This affected black Americans first and worst, and we are seeing the fruits of it today. It needs to be understood that directly after the Civil War and even until about 1910, American blacks had a rate of so called “nuclear family” households, with the father married to mother both living in the home with the children at a rate higher than even white families. In the 1960’s, when the so called “War on Poverty” began, the fatherless rate of black households rose to just 25% and a researcher named Daniel Moynihan called the situation of black fatherlessness a “disaster”. Why this is important is that Moynihan wasn’t some sort of Conservative, but a left leaning researcher working in the Johnson administration, a man who later went on to become a Democratic Senator from New York, and his report The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (better known as the Moynihan Report) outlined the threatening direction that this trend in black families would be taking.Now, the percentage of blacks raised without fathers is at 75%, well beyond the disaster point of 25% fifty years ago, and their communities are even more devastated after five decades of social welfare programs to fight poverty. According to Larry Elders, this is the number one cause of deprivation in the black community, far more than white racism. Why this is important to understand of the rest of the working class is that now the percentage of whites raised without a father in the household (such as was my experience) is now at 25%, precisely where Moynihan called it a disaster for the black communities.Continuing on, New Deal programs such as the the Federal Housing Administration, created in the National Housing Act of 1934 eventually worked to create a system of renters among the poor where rents became much more common than mortgages that actually lead to wealth creation. They also cloistered poor blacks in extremely cramped and extremely crime ridden housing blocks (see the Projects).Another New Deal Program, the Social Security Act created a system where everyone would receive a fair retirement plan, though they did not pay fairly into it. Furthermore, the heavy taxation imposed by the Social Security taxes caused millions to have little disposable cash to invest and save. Even at modest returns, almost all investment strategies outperform government payouts over the course of a person’s working life. So you have many who have earned enough to still be taxed, but ended up paying almost all their disposable income on a program that won’t exist when they are older and need it.Minimum wage has been a deceptively damning Democratic policy. This week McDonald’s unveiled self-service kiosks nationwide. This came in response to the “Fight for $15” Minimum Wage advocacy program propped up by numerous champions of the Democratic party and backed by union organization.[1]This of course, means a conversation about manufacturing. The state of American manufacturing is a hard reality. In part, jobs by expensive workers were shipped overseas in one form or another and in part, a large part, because of automation. Automation has made the output of the United States continue to increase, channeling wealth from the working class to the entrepreneur class as fewer and fewer jobs are needed. This is most evident in the Rust Belt, where the name itself decries the state of economic collapse. There, excessive payments for factory workers spelled a great life for the few workers who could qualify, but destroyed the entire local automotive industry and the caused disruption and destitution for millions of workers. Left leaning news organizations do a great disservice to this problem with a selective telling of the history, such as this graph by FiveThirtyEight.It’s misleading because it tells the story of America’s outpaced increase in manufacturing output, but give hope that jobs are also on the rise. It’s interesting that they choose 2010 to start the graph, since a much more honest look at the state of American manufacturing can be found by following the American Enterprise Institute[2].By looking at the second graph, we can see that, while we have produced something of a half million manufacturing jobs since 2010, job growth in manufacturing has stagnated since the 1970’s and collapsed in the 2000s. This collapse began, not coincidentally, around 2001, the same year that China joined the World Trade Organization. This sudden and dramatic decline in the costs of labor markets, is what sent many of the jobs Americans had come to take for granted at exorbitant hourly wages overseas or incentivized for innovations toward automation to remain competitive against foreign corporations in similar industries.Looking to other parts of the country, high minimum wages have decimated entire industries outright. Consider agriculture. A look at my part of the country historically will show thousands upon thousands of acres dedicated to cotton fields and cotton production (and no, I’m talking about the 1960’s, not the 1840s.) My grandfather actually managed the town’s last cotton gin, as those cotton fields are now gone because no one can afford to hire workers and there is no technology to replace their labor. So no, industry hasn’t been automated… it’s just gone, leading to millions fleeing the rural areas for crowded cities and competing for the fewer and fewer jobs being created there.***This brings up the actual ramifications of the Affordable Care Act for the working class. Around the time the ACA began rolling out, I was a retail store manager, and wrote the schedules. Corporate had enacted a policy shift in response to it. Basically, most of our full time staff were getting a ceiling of hours where they were encouraged to get below 29 hours a week. For all the part timers, we had to give cushion in case we stayed open late, so I was never allowed to give someone more than about 22 to 25 hours. The reason for this is that a full time worker who never worked over 30 hours a week would drop down to part time status, which was good. You see, if we have only a massive staff of part time employees, then corporate has no obligation to provide now even more costly benefits, including health care coverage.The net effect was that I had to keep the full time people full time, but didn’t resist at all if they started to dip below a floor of 30 hours and, worst of all, make sure that our part timers had no chance of advancement. There was no force on heaven or Earth that would get them to reach full time status. They couldn’t even trade shifts because that could put them over the 30 hours if they really needed the money. They were stuck making next to nothing and couldn’t even work extra hours to make ends meet. The logical consequence of this was that many of my employees worked two to three dead end jobs just like the one I provided them… none of which were obligated to provide them insurance, which meant that they would be among the hardest working Americans out there, but still have to pay a government-mandated fine for not carrying insurance.The Affordable Care Act, in essence, incentivized thousands of companies to reduce the labor of millions of people because that was what was best for the company. I want to hate the company I worked for for this, but seeing the economic projections, as well as looking at the implications of John Roberson’s If your health insurance changed after Obamacare, in what ways did it get better or worse, and how did the cost of it change?, I realize that they were just doing what they had to for their survival.Prior to the ACA my family paid $350/mo for excellent health insurance. We were limited to the hospital near our house apart from emergencies, but copays were $20–35 and nearly everything was covered after a small deductible. It even had maternity coverage.Fast forward a couple of years once the ACA was fully rolled out. Insurance with the same group costs more than $1000/mo. No more copays and easy deductibles; every medical bill is simply split with the insurance company 50/50, excepting a couple of things that the ACA has specific requirements for. This is competitive with other insurers.In thinking about this just for John’s family, but then imagining providing that kind of insurance for thousands, or even millions of their employees, I can’t help but say I understand. I’ll be honest, the company I worked for wasn’t doing great. They were international, but paying their people an extra $650 a month by way of insurance premiums… that’s something that might have reasonably destroyed the company.I’m still bitter about it, though. Back in 2012, it made me sick to my stomach to know how much we were abusing our employees. I’m betting there were a lot more people in Corporate who shed even more tears about it than I did, but they weren’t as free to move as I was and couldn’t seek a lifestyle that didn’t make them hate themselves. That and other experiences were enough to make me abandon my business degree and focus on education and writing about politics and Conservatism. I don’t make nearly what I made in business, but with the money I make working for the schools and the support of my patrons on Patreon, I am able to provide comfortably for our family and sleep well at night. I was just so disgusted with a system that was portrayed as helping poor people, but instead created a class of people that went from poor — to hopeless.Millions of people who could have had insurance were no longer able to get it, and millions of others lost what they had. Millions more who had it are now paying much more for it, and suffering economically as a result. The Affordable Care Act created an environment where the largest hirers in America could not afford to provide care to their employees.Following the collapse of the markets in 2008, it made it such that employers had no incentives to bring back full time workers. Instead, they were incentivized to work around the new proposed legislation, they had to use shady and inhumane tactics that hurt their own employees just to stay afloat. And they did.This meant that the economic struggles of 2008 and the unemployment that followed never corrected. It just remained stagnant for years, with millions of full time workers out of jobs, instead juggling three crap jobs, making no money to save, never seeing their families, and still without health insurance. The worst part was how foreseeable all this was, or maybe it was how this was communicated as some sort of a win.On the subject of unemployment, this hasn’t even been honestly reported by the broader media. Today, I received a notification that one of the news agencies I am subscribed to said that American unemployment is actually at it’s lowest point in many years. This, however, is misleading. What we have actually seen isn’t a real reduction in unemployment. What we have are many people who are chronically underemployed, stuck working many hours at multiple low-paying part times jobs where they are never able to be promoted to full time employment status. This is a direct result of the Affordable Care Act.As I said before, part of ACA was federally mandating that only full-time employees had to have health care provided, so many corporations just cut hours and hired more people to work part time. If you didn’t work in the limited and specialized fields of tech in the few growth cities, you were screwed. Also, many people who couldn’t find good work just left the workforce altogether. What’s important to know is that people who aren’t looking for work aren’t counted as “unemployed”. Also, for reasons that I find dubious, the message of “more new jobs” stopped counting underemployment and completely ignores those who left the workforce out of the unemployment metrics. A better indicator is looking at the Workforce Participation Rate, which is pretty clear.This was actually a national problem, and not just local to small towns, but felt much worse in the recessed parts of the country.Finally, technology, one of the only truly prosperous fields in the United States are incredibly left leaning and growing more so, and are, rather carelessly, working to disrupt other industries in a process which creates great wealth for a very select few, while destroying the jobs and livelihoods of millions of people[3].How this looks from the bottom is that a growing class of young and idealistic technocrats are driving them out of work and ruining their lives in pursuit of their own wealth and political agenda. I’m not saying personally that that is an actual effort being made by the technology industry, but seeing the gulf of disconnect I have personally experienced while working in Silicon Valley, I can agree that there is at least a valid argument for many working class in Middle America to be angry with the technically savy left.Furthermore, considering the failing education system, simply saying that these individuals should “work hard” or “gain new skills” no longer works as a method to actually produce people capable of surviving in a dynamic job market. First is a public school system which fails regularly to perform its basic job. This, I blame (as a public school teacher) on the lack of incentives for quality teachers and the lack of removal of ineffective ones. This is due mostly to the saturation of teachers unions in the education system, pushing for greater protections for veteran teachers even when evidence mounts that they fail at their primary duty, educating.We also spend far, far too much on very few children engaged in tasks that do not lead to greater education. Additionally, the entire industry has shifted towards leftist ideals of education which place no practical value on fundamentals or accountability for the individual, leading to a generation which are incompetent, but feel great about it.Compound this with a secondary education system where students are force fed lefitst values that don’t in any way create students capable of being successful in the workforce. I don’t know how people of the left are raised. Perhaps you were taught that college is about “gaining new ideas, or challenging assumptions”, something I find odd given the nature of suburban life, but the mantra of the poor was always “do well in school, go to a good college, and get a good job.” This was literally told to us thousands of times in our childhoods, so when quite the opposite was true, it disrupted the projected life plans of millions of young people and left them horribly disaffected with the education system altogether.Perhaps this explains, in part, why the tech industry and much of the media, characterized by young workers, is so heavily influenced by the left and also why research showcasing how left-leaning agendas are failing so many people is regularly repressed by research institutions and the media. That’s just a theory, but the left has to acknowledge that the evolution of American education into a place of far-left ideas in no way serves the needs of the American people who need jobs much more than degrees in Inter-sectional Feminism.So, to answer for how people of the left can begin to connect with the other half of the country I would say that first, they need to check their privilege and realize just how damaged the working class has been, their family structure, their housing availability, their job prospects, and most important, their ability to be upwardly mobile in the American socioeconomic spectrum.The saddest of any of this, I can see how, in almost every case, most of the left who fought for all of these initiatives believed they would be helping us, but when we said, “Hey, this crap ain’t workin’” we were told that our experiences were false, and our observations were biased towards hurting the poor. What they failed to understand was that our observations were biased, because we’re the poor and we were the ones being negatively affected by their help. Had they actually been affected by most of their policies, they may have seen things differently. That said, most of the problems we faced were/or/face are due to severe overdoses of “help”. If the American left wanted to connect with the working class, they need to accept at least the possibility that these programs don’t work. Then they need to start looking to acknowledge their own biases in thought and practice, and finally to realize that the lifestyles of the working class is not being something to ridicule, but something to understand.If I were to offer any suggestion, it would be to read the works of two authors first. The first being , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance and the second is Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed by Jason L. Riley. Both peel back the facade of, “If only we could get them the help they need,” and help the left get away from the mentality of superior benevolence over working class in general.***So many people are misunderstanding my point on technology, that I need to clarify with an added item. No, I am not saying I want to stop the flow and growth of technology just to keep my life the way it is. I worked in a technology centric role in the Marines, later when on work in Silicon Valley’s technology industry made an effort to hang a pennant for MIT in my daughters room. It’s important that you know that she is three months old. She already has a library of computer programming, robotics, and video game design books for kids in her little library for when she is ready. That will surely grow. We have invested in this direction for her life, because I know no other avenues seem to be possible for her generation, so I want to start her early.That being the case, I am tired of the very selfish mentality for people disrupt any industry they can, rather than thinking about what problems they can solve. Taxis really weren’t a problem before Uber, but education is a problem. Yet they disrupt the taxi industry while education still sucks. Why? Because opportunism. The government spends trillions on education and half of it is waste doing inefficient things (I can’t remember if I mentioned I’m a public school teacher here people.) There is opportunity there to help support educators.Take this, for example, Grannies in the Cloud. Someone devised an app to make volunteer retired people able to link up with and tutor children across the world. This provides the one-on-one support all kids needs, but which teachers are completely too overworked to provide. My wife is a school teacher too, 3rd grade. She is responsible for around 50 kids and works over 70 hours a week for a job that pays ~32,000 a year. She doesn’t have the bandwidth to give each of her kids any more of herself. It just isn’t possible. Something like Grannies in the Cloud could provide the support that she needs to help her kids progress at their own rate, since the state system holds all kids back at the speed of the slowest learner.Working to improve these huge level problems, such as education through better and cheaper technology would also help greatly to solve the work problem by driving more people into the actual growth industries, something we’ve needed for decades. For that matter, why isn’t “job loss due to catastrophic technological change” an insurance industry policy that employers can provide to pay for reeducation? I don’t know why the great minds of the world are busy screwing around with reenventing the wheel, or at least the taxi, when so much bigger problems could be solved through the same use of their talents.So yes, I love technology. Technology is great and it solves the world’s problems. I seriously want my daughter to be one of the first people on Mars, or maybe just her robots. I don’t care, but I am more than a little resentful that the best minds in the world seem to be focused most on solving the problem of how best a wealthy and highly educated person can become a billionaire creating digital services for millions of people rich enough to own a new iPhone, while carelessly destroying the lives of millions of the nation’s poor.Be rich. Be as rich as you can. Design and build things, but do so after you ask how many people will you getting rich hurt, and if that number is far more than will be made rich, you really need to be held accountable for that. Can you get rich in some other way? Basically, what America, and the rest of the world for that matter, needs is a generation of socially minded tech entrepreneurs who have left their bubbles I mentioned earlier and look to the urban and rural poor to see how they can solve their problems, give them the avenues to elevation, and flatten the graph of American prosperity in a way that improves everyone’s lives and not just a few venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.Thank you for reading. If you liked this answer, please upvote and follow The War Elephant. If you want to help me make more content like this, please visit my Patreon Support Page to learn how. All donations greatly appreciated!Footnotes[1] Thanks To 'Fight For $15' Minimum Wage, McDonald's Unveils Job-Replacing Self-Service Kiosks Nationwide[2] https://www.aei.org/publication/october-2-is-manufacturing-day-so-lets-recognize-americas-world-class-manufacturing-sector-and-factory-workers/[3] This one stat exposes a fundamental 2016 divide between the parties

America has had a long list of celebrity doctors that have made a great deal of money dispensing questionable advice while selling books, seminars, and supplements.Drs. Oz, Weil, Chopra and the like.These doctors typically present themselves as knowing far more than anyone else. In essence, they are proselytizing their own brand of religion, recommendations based on belief rather than science.From The Cut:In recent months, the media has become increasingly impatient with high-profile health advocates who dispense unsubstantiated medical advice. Among the highlights have been John Oliver’s continued humiliation of Dr. Oz, who repeatedly touted the power of energy healing and “miracle” weight-loss solutions, and a viral Gawker takedown of Vani Hari, aka “the Food Babe,” a blogger and food activist who once advised her followers that “there is just no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever.” Even the American Medical Association has had enough, and just announced that it would draft guidelines for disciplining physicians who dispense pseudo-scientific advice.Yet despite this heightened concern about the accuracy of health information, best-selling celebrity neurologist Dr. David Perlmutter seems to have escaped much scrutiny, even though he has a decades-long history of offering — and profiting from — suspect medical advice.In fact, he remains one of the most influential physicians in the U.S. His 2013 book Grain Brain reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, and after nearly two years, sales remain so strong that it has still not come out in paperback. This extraordinary success led to a long profile in The Atlantic and won him a 90-minute TV special: Perlmutter’s “BRAINCHANGE” aired on over 110 PBS affiliates, and has continued to air on a regular basis since it was first released in late 2013. In April, he released his newest book, Brain Maker, and within a month it, too, became a New York Times bestseller.Despite Perlmutter’s popularity, most mainstream medical authorities do not endorse the advice he dispenses. In Grain Brain, Perlmutter revealed “the surprising truth”: Gluten is a “silent germ,” and declining brain health can be blamed in large part on gluten-containing grains. Brain Maker, for its part, promises to help readers harness “the power of gut microbes to heal and protect your brain — for life” — it even purports to offer groundbreaking preventative measures and treatments for allergies, autism, Alzheimer’s, ALS, dementia, Parkinson’s, and cancer.Perlmutter has always been unorthodox in his approach to medicine. For well over a decade, and long before he was a household name, he has claimed to offer his readers “miraculous” — his word — treatments capable of preventing or reversing all sorts of devastating medical problems. He has also claimed that supplements and “detoxification” regimens — available for purchase on his various websites — are crucial to optimizing brain health. Earlier this year, he stated that the conversation about childhood vaccines and autism is “ill-defined,” and that parents should ask their pediatricians about spacing out their children’s vaccinations — an approach the CDCdisagrees with, and which 90 percent of doctors surveyed by the journal Pediatrics in 2013 said would put children and communities at greater risk of contracting preventable diseases.As Perlmutter’s megaphone has grown, so, too, has his brand empire — he has sold everything from “Empowering Coconut Oil” to supplement blends tailored for specific demographics, like the $90 “Scholar’s Advantage Pack” for “young adults seeking to optimize cognitive function,” and the $160 “Senior Empowerment Pack,” a “combination of formulas designed to help keep you cognitively sharp as you age.” One book pointed readers to an $8,500 brain detoxification retreat run by Perlmutter, which included shamanic healing ceremonies. (He even has his own organic foaming hand soap.)In light of all this, it’s worth asking: Should Dr. Perlmutter’s millions of fans really trust him?***Since Perlmutter presents himself as a distinguished medical expert, a natural place to start is with his credentials. “[Dr. Perlmutter] contributed extensively to the world medical literature,” reads his website, “with publications appearing in The Journal of Neurosurgery, The Southern Medical Journal, Journal of Applied Nutrition, and Archives of Neurology.” Earlier bios also list the Journal of the American Medical Association.Yet a closer look at his publications reveals that Perlmutter hasn’t actually conducted much research. In the scientific community, full-length peer-reviewed articles, especially widely cited ones, are the gold-standard of significant research. But his contribution to JAMA — an extremely prestigious medical journal — is actually just a letter to the editor. The Southern Medical Journal? A case report and a clinical brief, both co-authored with his father when the younger Perlmutter was still a medical student. Archives of Neurology? Another case report. (Case reports and clinical briefs are short discussions around 1-4 pages long.)As for the prestigious-sounding Journal of Applied Nutrition, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a legitimate nutrition scientist who’s even heard of it — and Quackwatch cites it as a “fundamentally flawed” publication that has carried ads for “questionable potions, services, books, and/or publications.” (As far as I can tell, Perlmutter’s article in it is unavailable on any reputable scholarly database.)Perlmutter does have two legitimate peer-reviewed articles in The Journal of Neurosurgery, co-authored nearly four decades ago with his mentor, the decorated neurosurgeon Dr. Albert Rhoton. Neither has anything to do withPerlmutter’s current theories about nutrition or the gut microbiome.I spoke with Dr. Rhoton at the University of Florida, who fondly recalled the young lab partner who wrote a total of four articles on microsurgical anatomy under his tutelage. “David did a nice job in our lab,” Rhoton told me. “He did good research and wrote up those studies. I wanted him to be a neurosurgeon, but he became a neurologist instead.”Rhoton was unfamiliar with Perlmutter’s recent work. “Something about grains?” he asked. “Grain … Brain? I’m so focused in on neurosurgery I don’t know anything about it.” (Perlmutter declined to comment for this article.)The basic premise of Grain Brain doesn’t fit with the current neurological literature: The latest reviews of evidence-based dietary approaches to preventing Alzheimer’s support a Mediterranean-style diet, complete with whole grains. Nevertheless, Perlmutter describes the science of Grain Brainas “undeniably conclusive.” He is similarly confident about the treatment regimens proposed in Brain Maker, telling his readers about astonishing transformations accomplished through simple dietary changes such as going gluten-free, eating fermented foods, and taking probiotics. “I can’t wait to share with you the countless stories of individuals with myriad, enfeebling health challenges … who experienced a complete vanishing of symptoms following treatment,” he writes. “These stories are not outlier cases for me, but by standard measure of what might typically be expected, they seem almost miraculous.”He’s right. The stories do seem miraculous: dramatic improvements in autistic symptoms after probiotics and DIY fecal transplants; Tourette’s symptoms gone after a regimen of probiotic enemas; multiple sclerosis successfully treated with nutritional supplements, probiotic enemas, and fecal transplants. (At this time, fecal transplants are only indicated for a bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile.)But for medical researchers, claims of dramatic improvements as a result of unproven treatments generally raise red flags. A 2014 commentary on Grain Brain, published in the American Journal of Cardiology, puts it bluntly: “The declaration that a single, simple ‘cure’ can successfully treat numerous diverse diseases and symptoms is reminiscent of the oratory of the ‘snake oil’ merchants of generations ago.” Yale physician and nutrition researcher David Katz, no friend of the food industry, is equally dismissive, describing Grain Brain’s arguments as “the raw power of pop culture repetition, not the staying power of truth,” he said. “Whole wheat does not make us fat; whole grains do not make us stupid.”I asked Jonathan Eisen, a microbiome expert at the University of California, Davis, about Brain Maker. “To think we can magically heal diseases by changing to a gluten-free diet and taking some probiotics is idiotic, quite frankly,” he told me. After Eisen read the case study of an autistic boy that Perlmutter highlights in Brain Maker and on his website — “from a scientific perspective, [fecal transplantation for autism] makes absolute sense” — his words were even harsher. “It resembles more the presentation of a snake-oil salesman than that of a person interested in actually figuring out how to help people,” said Eisen.Perlmutter has a stock answer for skeptics like Katz and Eisen. “Each progressive spirit,” he tweeted in October of 2014, “is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past.” The problem, in other words, isn’t with Perlmutter — it’s with all the so-called experts hamstrung by traditional thinking. In one book Perlmutter even parallels his situation to Galileo’s, a genius initially persecuted for his scientific theories only to be triumphantly vindicated by history.Setting aside the response to his two most recent books, does Perlmutter’s broader body of work lend credibility to his self-understanding as a path-breaking genius?To answer this question we’ll start with his second book, the self-published BrainRecovery.com is for sale (2000). Named after Perlmutter’s personal website at the time, it promises powerful techniques for preventing or reversing Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, stroke, Parkinson’s, post-polio syndrome, ALS, and much more. (His first book, LifeGuide: Your Guide to a Longer and Healthier Life, was self-published in 1993.)Like Perlmutter’s latest best sellers, BrainRecovery.com is for sale includes dietary recommendations. But it is strikingly devoid of any discussion of gluten, grains, or probiotics. Gut bacteria are only mentioned once, in passing. Instead of emphasizing the importance of cholesterol and saturated fat for promoting brain health — as he does in Grain Brain, Brain Maker, and on his blog — Perlmutter cautions against them. “Meat and eggs are rich inflammation producing fatty acids [sic],” he declares. “It is this inflammation that leads to the enhanced production of brain damaging free radicals. The best diet is vegetarian with added fish.” There’s no doubt, Perlmutter writes, about “the direct relationship between multiple sclerosis mortality and dietary fat, especially saturated fats and animal fats.”Given Perlmutter’s current alarmism about grains, it’s hard to make sense of the numerous recovery stories in BrainRecovery.com is for sale. If one is to believe the “undeniably conclusive” science of Grain Brain, then the early Perlmutter was somehow healing his patient’s intractable neurological conditions despite putting them on a diet that was full of poisonous whole grains and dangerously low in saturated fat and cholesterol.It’s not just that Perlmutter is remarkably sure of himself, even when presenting an opinion that’s precisely the opposite of what he’s been advising for years. It’s that his confidence in unproven treatments often appears to profit him directly. During the BrainRecovery.com is for sale stage of Perlmutter’s career, for example, dietary changes were secondary. At that time, his main weapons in the battle for brain health were hyperbaric oxygen chambers, special nutritional supplements (BrainRecovery.com encouraged customers to purchase Perlmutter’s proprietary BrainSustainTM for $49.50 per 600 grams), and intravenous glutathione — an antioxidant naturally produced by the liver that is covered in a section of the book entitled “The Glutathione Miracle.” Glutathione’s effectiveness in Parkinson’s patients, writes Perlmutter, “is nothing short of miraculous.”What does science say about these cutting-edge treatments, which Perlmutter prescribed regularly through the end of 2014? Let’s start with hyperbaric oxygen chamber treatment. Perlmutter sings its praises as “powerful therapy” for stroke, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, Bell’s palsy, and Lyme disease, and until very recently he directed the Perlmutter Hyperbaric Center. (Though Perlmutter’s website doesn’t list prices, off-label HBOT therapy usually starts at around $200 per one-hour session, and it’s generally only covered by insurance in a very limited number of instances.) But a 2015 Cochrane review — the most comprehensive research review currently available — is skeptical of HBOT’s ability to improve stroke outcomes: “The evidence is insufficient to confirm that HBOT significantly affects outcomes after acute ischemic stroke. Use of HBOT as routine therapy for people with stroke cannot be justified by this review.”The science on HBOT for other neurological ailments is even worse. In fact, it’s so bad that in 2013 the FDA had to issue a consumer warning about unapproved HBOT therapy for precisely the conditions that Perlmutter claimed to treat.What about the “incredible effectiveness” of the “glutathione miracle”? Perlmutter has been an enthusiastic proponent of this substance for over a decade. In one 2010 online video posted by “Protandim Anti Aging” — more on that product soon — Perlmutter treats an elderly Parkinson’s sufferer with glutathione, effecting a remarkable recovery. BrainRecovery.com is for saledescribes similar successes, multiple patients reversing Parkinson’s and getting off of medication after following Perlmutter’s “Parkinson’s protocol,” a combination of intravenous glutathione and supplements (available for purchase on his website).These case studies raise an obvious question: If glutathione injection is such a miracle procedure, why hasn’t the protocol been more widely adopted? Perlmutter’s answer points to the profit-driven influence of Big Pharma: “Glutathione … cannot be owned exclusively by any particular pharmaceutical company and therefore won’t find its way to the highly influential advertising sections of the medical journals.”Sure, maybe. Or it could be that doctors don’t prescribe intravenous glutathione for Parkinson’s because it doesn’t work. And they know it doesn’t work thanks, in part, to work done by a man named … David Perlmutter. In 2009, he collaborated on a randomized, double-blind studyof intravenous glutathione for Parkinson’s. The results are clearly stated in the study’s conclusion: “We did not observe a significant improvement in parkinsonian signs and symptoms in the glutathione group when compared with the placebo group.” Based on these results, the National Parkinson Foundation put out a strongly worded statement about intravenous glutathione: “First, there is a lack of evidence it actually works; second, the therapy requires an intravenous line which has both short and long term risks; and finally, insurance does not cover the costs of this therapy. .. Patients should beware of any medical practices offering a fee for glutathione treatment of Parkinson’s disease.”Once the glutathione study was finished, Perlmutter had various opportunities to disclose its results. Yet in 2009, shortly before the study was published, he told fellow celebrity doctor Andrew Weil that the treatment was “quite effective.”It’s possible that Perlmutter just didn’t understand the results of the study, or perhaps he disagreed with the statistical analysis of his co-authors. The responsible thing to do, then, would be to acknowledge the study’s conclusion, state his dissent, and admit that it did not replicate the miraculous 80-90 percent effectiveness he claimed to have achieved in his clinic.But he does no such thing. Instead, in his 2011 book Power Up Your Brain, Perlmutter doubles down on glutathione — “we shout the praises of glutathione,” he writes — not just as a treatment for Parkinson’s, but also for fibromyalgia, cancer, and the common cold. As evidence, Perlmutter cites a series of outdated studies but never once mentions the double-blinded study in which he himself participated (and no, there’s no solid evidence of glutathione’s efficacy in treating those other conditions, either).Perlmutter co-wrote Power Up Your Brain with a “medical anthropologist and shaman” named Alberto Villoldo. The book opens with the tale of a woman suffering from chronic progressive multiple sclerosis, who, one afternoon, suddenly recovers and begins walking unassisted. “We are putting you on our miracle list,” Perlmutter tells her, a list that is apparently quite long:Over the coming months, I began to notice that we were putting more and more people on the miracle list. And it was becoming clear to me that, overwhelmingly, the patients who achieved the most profound recoveries were those engaged in some form of meditative or spiritual practice … Virtually all of these patients were somehow connecting with what the shaman had referred to as the Great Spirit.According to Perlmutter, open-minded healers like himself and the shaman are capable of achieving miraculous results that traditional doctors cannot. And the reason these miracles go unacknowledged is due, at least in part, to the effects of industry corruption (the Food Babe uses the same strategy to tarnish her critics.) Perlmutter regularly stresses how food and pharmaceutical companies cover up the effects of poisonous foods and deny the efficacy of life-changing “alternative” approaches to chronic illness. Companies profit, doctors and scientists line their pockets with kickbacks, and it’s all at the expense of public health.Perlmutter is right, in a broad sense, to bring up the pernicious influence of money on medicine. Indeed, “mainstream” doctors — like Marcia Angell, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre, the author of Bad Pharma — have dedicated substantial parts of their careers to exposing corruption and financial conflict of interest in medical science. (Their efforts have met with near-universal acclaim from the scientific Establishment.)But Perlmutter might not be the ideal whistle-blower when it comes to the issue of profiting from questionable medical treatments. Starting with BrainRecovery.com is for sale through Brain Maker, his books have pointed readers to ever-slicker websites where he has sold his “scientifically proven” supplements, often developed by him and manufactured by companies in which he had a direct financial interest as an employee. There was brainrecovery.com for BrainRecovery.com is for sale; kidsbrainsustain.com for Raise a Smarter Child By Kindergarten; powerupyourbrain.com for Power Up Your Brain; and finally, slickest of all, drperlmutter.com for Grain Brain and Brain Maker. (The store section of his website came down in March of 2015.)Perlmutter has also had a long-standing involvement with shadysupplement companies. One of those companies, LifeVantage, fraudulently said one of its best-selling substances, Protandim, was developed by a biochemist, when it was really cooked up by a business executive. In various videos and interviews, Perlmutter has testified to the undeniable efficacy of Protandim for treating and preventing many brain disorders.It’s not just supplements. Up until late last year, Perlmutter offered a “6-day Power Up Your Brain Personal Intensive Program” on Powerupyourbrain.com. The most expensive package cost $8,500 (that is, a touch under $1,500 per day), and it was designed to “cleanse your body” and “detox your brain” using “neuro-nutrients, hyperbaric oxygen treatments under medical supervision, and ancient energy medicine practices.” In addition to being granted access to “shamanic sessions” — the administration of which was taken over from Albert Villoldo by Perlmutter’s wife, Leize — participants received the following:. 90-minute intake evaluation with Dr. David Perlmutter. One 30-minute follow-up 3 weeks after program completion with Dr. David Perlmutter. 90-minute evaluation with nutritionist. Five 60-minute Hyperbaric Chamber Oxygen TreatmentsAnd naturally, no course of treatment with Dr. Perlmutter would be complete without his go-to miracle substance: “Five intravenous Glutathione treatments.”***Taken as a whole, Perlmutter’s career — his support for unproven treatments, his profiting from those treatments, his endless “miracle”-talk — suggests he probably isn’t a misunderstood genius who will be vindicated by time. Rather, his work places him squarely in the medical arm of the self-help industry, which stars figures like Dr. Oz (who has hosted Perlmutter and blurbs his books) and the notorious anti-vaccine quack Dr. Joseph Mercola (Perlmutter wrote the foreward to Mercola’s latest best seller, Effortless Healing).The industry has clear rules: Endorse fellow gurus, even if they make extravagant, untested claims. Cherry-pick studies performed by Establishment scientists, but deflect Establishment criticism by accusing it of industry corruption. Take promising medical research that’s in its infancy, on subjects ranging from gluten sensitivity to the microbiome, and repackage it as settled science. If you do all this, then your unproven message will reach a giant audience of eager believers that’s far larger than the one reached by doctors like Marcia Angell and Ben Goldacre, whose criticisms of industry malfeasance do not serve as prelude to the promise of miracles.Perlmutter’s pitch is nothing new. Here’s food historian Harvey Levenstein comparing early-20th-century diet gurus to faith healers, in a passage that still rings true today: “[They] would tell of their own devastating health problems, miraculously cured by the proposed diet — mysterious or common physical or psychological ailments that had defied the greatest of modern medical minds had disappeared once certain foods were added or deleted from the diet.”There’s no problem with exploring the gut microbiome and the potential of dietary changes for treating neurological conditions. These are areas of ongoing study among genuine microbiome experts and nutrition scientists. After all, it’s their promising research that gets appropriated in Grain Brain and Brain Maker. But there’s a crucial difference between them and Perlmutter: legitimate researchers are humble about what they know and wait on proof before claiming to have discovered a cure, while Perlmutter forges ahead with marketing BrainSustainTM, intravenous glutathione, and other completely unproven products.Grain Brain ends with a warning that, in the context of Perlmutter’s full dossier, is a bit surreal. The epilogue tells the story of Dr. Mesmer, an 18th-century physician and charlatan who duped the public into believing he could “cure nervous system problems using magnetism,” which happens to be the origin of the word “mesmerized.”According to Perlmutter, “the medical and scientific community feared Mesmer,” and eventually they exposed him as a fraud. Perlmutter writes of this exposure approvingly, warning readers to stay alert for other like-minded crooks.It’s now generally accepted that Mesmer was actually treating psychosomatic illness, and he profited mightily from people’s gullibility. In retrospect, his theories and practices sound ridiculous, but in truth, the story of Mesmer parallels many stories of today. It’s not so ridiculous to imagine people falling prey to products, procedures, and health claims that are brilliantly marketed. Every day we hear of some news item related to health. We are bombarded by messages about our health — good, bad, and confusingly contradictory. And we are literally mesmerized by these messages. Even the smart, educated, cautious, and skeptical consumer is mesmerized. It’s hard to separate truth from fiction, and to know the difference between what’s healthful and harmful when the information and endorsements come from “experts.”It may be tempting to ignore all of Dr. Perlmutter’s advice, but this paragraph, at least, deserves everyone’s attention.Alan Levinovitz is an assistant professor of religion at James Madison University. He is the author of The Gluten Lie. Follow him on Twitter: @top_philosopher.The Problem With David Perlmutter, the Grain Brain Doctor

While Fox News is certainly on the right of the bias spectrum, one could ask your question about CNN, NBC News, MSNBC .. the list goes on and on (those that fall to the left of the spectrum). It is important to understand that news is no longer about the pursuit of non-biased objectionable reporting. Today's media outlets have a target audience comprised of a pre-existing audience base. Being neutral or fair in reporting will only enrage the core audience/subscription base and lose them $$$. If you think PBS is an exception, think again. PBS is paint by number pseudo intellectualism at it's best - they have a center left audience base who demand monotone reporters who claim to have integrity - but when looking at the makeup of the staff you will find a 6/1 liberal to conservative ratio (a l(more)