Blocked and Reported

Episode 295: Gone Broke? Go Woke!

February 16, 2026

Key Takeaways Copied to clipboard!

  • The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with its $8 billion endowment, now exerts a dominant and potentially distorting influence over the humanities by tying grant funding to social justice outcomes, effectively replacing traditional academic incentives with ideological ones. 
  • The intense online reaction to the host's nuanced discussion of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, including accusations of excusing him, highlights the current fever pitch of conspiracy thinking and the public's low tolerance for distinctions regarding his specific offenses. 
  • The decline in traditional funding sources for journalism and academia creates an incentive structure where elite-educated individuals dominate, leading to an echo chamber where certain orthodoxies are parroted, regardless of broader public opinion or factual nuance. 

Segments

Carpenter Ant Infestation Woes
Copied to clipboard!
(00:00:11)
  • Key Takeaway: Carpenter ants are actively chewing through the host’s ceiling, requiring professional extermination that involves waiting for the ants to ingest and track poison back to their colony.
  • Summary: The host is dealing with a significant carpenter ant infestation in their ceiling, which is causing structural damage. Extermination requires spraying poison and waiting for the ants to carry it back to the nest. The host consulted an entomologist friend who confirmed ants can feel pain, though this did not deter the necessary genocide.
Patriots Super Bowl Loss Reaction
Copied to clipboard!
(00:03:19)
  • Key Takeaway: The host received extremely hostile and personal backlash from Seattle Seahawks fans after publishing a satirical column predicting a massive Patriots victory in the Super Bowl.
  • Summary: The host wrote a satirical column for the Boston Globe and Seattle Times regarding the Super Bowl, predicting a 55-0 Patriots win. Following the actual loss, the host received aggressive emails containing personal insults, including antisemitic remarks and crude sexual commentary directed at the quarterback. The intensity of the sports fan reaction surprised the hosts.
Epstein File Nuance Debate
Copied to clipboard!
(00:09:12)
  • Key Takeaway: Distinguishing between Jeffrey Epstein’s confirmed crimes (sex offenses with post-pubescent girls) and unproven, sensationalized claims (like involvement with literal infants or Pizzagate) is crucial but often results in the host being accused of letting him off the hook.
  • Summary: The discussion revisits the host’s previous argument that Epstein’s known crimes, while horrific, should be separated from unverified, satanic panic-level conspiracy theories circulating from the leaked files. Figures like Tucker Carlson and Michael Schellenberger are criticized for giving credence to coded language (like pizza and grape soda) suggesting involvement in Pizzagate. The host argues that making factual distinctions about the nature of his crimes is necessary to avoid turning the situation into an unhelpful moral panic.
Conspiracy Thinking and Media Trust
Copied to clipboard!
(00:21:30)
  • Key Takeaway: Legitimate institutional failures, such as errors in coverage regarding youth gender medicine, are creating a generalized loss of consensus reality, making people susceptible to unrelated, extreme conspiracy theories like the moon landing being faked.
  • Summary: The erosion of trust in institutions due to real failures, such as those concerning youth gender medicine coverage, creates a slippery slope toward believing extreme falsehoods like the moon landing being faked. The hosts note that even friends of the show are embracing such theories, illustrating a breakdown in shared reality. The danger lies in conflating specific institutional errors with wholesale fabrication of historical events.
Mellon Foundation’s Humanities Control
Copied to clipboard!
(00:31:59)
  • Key Takeaway: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with an $8 billion endowment and $540 million in annual grants, now dictates the cultural output of the humanities by prioritizing research that explicitly contributes to a ‘fair, more just, more beautiful society’ over pure scholarship.
  • Summary: The Mellon Foundation, led by Elizabeth Alexander, has shifted funding priorities away from traditional scholarship toward projects with obvious social justice relevance, replacing GDP contribution goals with ‘Gross Woke Product’ goals. This incentive structure pressures academics to twist their research, even in fields like history or climate science, to fit required social justice narratives to secure funding. This dynamic mirrors how Soviet science was promoted based on party worldview, albeit in a less severe form.
Journalism’s Class Problem
Copied to clipboard!
(00:49:08)
  • Key Takeaway: The financial collapse of traditional journalism has made it an increasingly elite-only profession, filtering out applicants from non-traditional backgrounds and leading to a less diverse pool of reporters who parrot established orthodoxies.
  • Summary: Unlike the humanities, foundation funding is not seen as the primary driver of ideological capture in journalism, but rather the increasing economic barriers to entry. Journalism has become a ‘rich kid’s game,’ excluding those who might enter through trade-like paths, such as starting in the mailroom. This lack of socioeconomic diversity among journalists makes them less likely to question prevailing orthodoxies, mirroring the issue seen in academia.