Talking Points Memo

There was once a fellow named John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, professionally known as J.B.S. Haldane. He was a scientist who said all kinds of things and, allegedly, knew all kinds of things. A student of his is said to have once remarked that he may have been the last man to know all there was to know in the world. He's credited as having first posited the possibility of in-vitro fertilization and also provided a possible genetic basis for human cloning. "J.B.S. Haldane was perhaps the most brilliant science popularizer of his generation," the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said. On the other end of the ledger, Haldane said some very favorable things about Joseph Stalin. Anyway, I think he's one of the more interesting figures of the 20th century.
 

The reason I bring him up here is because he said something once that I think about a lot: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
 

In the same way a dog cannot understand calculus, no matter how hard we try to teach it, there are things about this world I — we — will simply never understand, or even be aware that we could understand.
 

Every once in awhile, though, I'm humbled, and something completely insane is presented to me. In these moments, I understand this strange rock and the people on it just a little better. Or maybe a little worse. I'm not quite sure.
 

Last week, we're all in the newsroom and I get wind of a story coming down the pike about a "documentary" on Truth Social's streaming platform about lizard people who inhabit planet earth, and another, similar film about how Jesus and The Buddha are aliens. Weird, weird stuff, certainly queerer than anything I could have supposed would be published on Talking Points Memo dot Com, a political news publication. But, these are the times in which we find ourselves.
 

One of the issues with a lot of political news outlets these days is they lack the imagination, the openness — the "beginner's mind," as the Buddha might have called it — to grapple with the challenges we face at the moment. This stuff — lizard people and aliens — it might seem inconsequential and dumb and beside the point. Certainly not as important as voting rights and trans rights and, well, rights in general, which we also cover. But it's all of a piece. It's "flooding the zone" with shit, blurring the lines between documentary and science fiction, what is right and wrong, and who can be trusted.

That's why at TPM we cover all of it. The more traditional, policy oriented stories about how the administration keeps losing cases in which it tries to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport people to how Trump's Devin Nunes-run streaming platform is peddling conspiracy theories in the guise of documentaries about the origin of world religions. It's all important. It all needs to be covered. So we cover it. With verve, I might add.