The Honest Take is HonestReporting's long-form interview series bringing together leading voices to examine how Israel and the Middle East are covered — and what goes into creating and feeding the narratives that target Israel.
Each episode features leading experts, analysts, researchers, and journalists who work on media bias, terrorism, NGO accountability, foreign influence, antisemitism, and international institutions. These are professionals directly involved in investigating how narratives are shaped, amplified, and protected across global newsrooms.
The conversations go beyond breaking news to unpack:
• Media bias and misinformation about Israel
• How terrorist organizations exploit humanitarian and civil society frameworks
• The role of NGOs and international bodies in shaping public perception
• Foreign state influence on Western media and education
• Why context disappears in reporting on Israel and the Palestinians
This series is for listeners seeking in-depth analysis, evidence-based discussion, and accountability in journalism on Israel and the Middle East.
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LIVE — Surviving October 7th: The Nova Festival Massacre and What Comes After It | With Shahar Horovitz
Épisode 29
jeudi 8 octobre 2026 • Durée 58:04
Recorded live on October 7, 2026, three years to the day.
Shahar Horovitz was 22 and had just come home from nine months of backpacking in South America when she went to the Nova music festival with about 30 of the friends she'd made on that trip. At 6:29 a.m. the music stopped. By 7:30 there were gunshots, and when she asked a police officer what to do, the officer told her: you have to run, I can't help you.
She ran for hours through the fields of the Gaza envelope, lost her friends, and joined three strangers she found catching their breath under a tree. They hid in a greenhouse, called the police and were told to hide, and finally reached a farm run by a Bedouin farmer named Yunus. When terrorists came into the farm, they crawled under his office and lay there while armed men walked inches away. Yunus, hiding under a tractor, was found and told them the survivors had left. He saved eight people that day, and was later honored at the President's Residence.
Shahar talks about thinking of her great-grandparents, Auschwitz survivors, while she lay under that building; going to five or six funerals in the first week; the guilt survivors carry; and why she gave herself and her friends new names in her book but kept the real names of the five friends who were killed. She also talks about recovering in New York, the stranger who called her book "biased" without reading it, the therapist who told her "you're not finished," and the text a friend sent her the day after: "You fought yesterday and you won. Keep winning."
The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com.
If this conversation stayed with you, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.
I Can't Believe You Fell for It: Why Antisemitism Is a Lie, Not a Prejudice | With Dara Horn
Épisode 28
mardi 6 octobre 2026 • Durée 01:30:37
A rabbi picks Dara Horn up at the airport and tells her what she's walking into. Someone had been posting online about murdering children on the playground of the town's Jewish day school, and then their parents in the carpool line. The horrible part, her host says, isn't the plot. It's who was behind it: the school's own security guard. After People Love Dead Jews, stories like that came to her by the hundreds, and one of her sisters started calling her the antisemitism Lorax. So October 8 didn't shock her. The speed and the organization of it did.
Her new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, argues that we've been fighting the wrong thing. We treat antisemitism as a prejudice, something you cure by building empathy. Horn says it works more like a con. "The lie is always the same. Jews are destroying what you value the most." Only the value changes. To capitalists the Jews are communists, and to communists they're capitalists. To racists they're race polluters, and to anti-racists they're racists. To human rights advocates, the world's only Jewish state is the world's worst violator of human rights.
That changes the answer. Instead of debunking claims one at a time, which she compares to taking the stand in a show trial, Horn turns the question back on the people spreading the lie and asks who profits from it. When campus hecklers hand her a slogan, she answers it as if they meant the question, and she says the conversation usually ends right there. Her advice to students is that "you don't need a PhD to defeat an argument that's three words long." What they need is courage, and the discovery that far more people are standing behind them than they knew.
Horn also talks about what she saw from inside the antisemitism advisory group Harvard's president convened after October 7, and why the student complaints there were about harassment, not slogans. She covers the 2001 UN conference in Durban, where crowds were already chanting what you hear on campus today. And she remembers the week a fact checker asked her to document pogroms from a century ago while the same paper put Hamas's account of the al-Ahli hospital blast in a banner headline.
She closes on what the book's title means. Every Jew alive today is descended from someone who made a costly, countercultural choice. And for the young people chanting at her talks, she now feels something closer to sympathy than fear.
What Really Happened After October 7: Inside Israel's War Room, and the Press That Got It Wrong | With Elliot Kaufman
Épisode 27
mardi 29 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:08:07
"If you are Hamas, you have to be laughing at how easily you can play the international and American news media." For Elliot Kaufman, the coverage turned ten days in, when the blast at al-Ahli hospital was reported around the world as an Israeli strike that had killed hundreds. He points out that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in the hospital's parking lot. From there, he argues, the war was told as if Hamas weren't in it: not in the footage, not in the casualty counts, not in the story of the aid. He's just as blunt about Israel's own failures. On aid, he says, "I don't think Israel messed up on the PR there. I think Israel messed up. Period."
Kaufman is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, and he writes about Israel and Iran. With Yonah Jeremy Bob of The Jerusalem Post, he wrote In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel's Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis. The two reported it while the war was still going on. They interviewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, who made up the original war cabinet, along with Jake Sullivan, Steve Witkoff and more than a hundred Israeli military officials.
The Netanyahu in the book is not the one most coverage describes. Kaufman argues that in the opening weeks he was the brake. He held back Gallant's plan to hit Hezbollah first. On October 11, 2023, Israeli warplanes were already in the air to strike Hezbollah when radar picked up what looked like paragliders crossing from Lebanon; they turned out to be geese, and the planes were called back. Kaufman says the whole war could have turned on that one misreading. Netanyahu then spent the 20 days between October 7 and the October 27 ground invasion holding back the push into Gaza. Kaufman says the IDF had no plan on the shelf for a full invasion of Gaza at all. His verdict on the war that followed is that Israel didn't go too far in Gaza. "I think it fought for too long," he says, because under a raid-and-leave strategy troops had to fight for the same neighborhoods again and again.
Then the conversation comes home to Brooklyn. In 2021 Kaufman went back to the 1991 Crown Heights riot for the Journal. For three nights, Jews in the neighborhood hid in their homes while rioters threw bricks through their windows, and Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed and killed. His argument is that the police stood back and the press filed the violence as a racial clash, when the actual story was antisemitism.
A Is for Apple, M Is for Martyr: How Schoolbooks Teach The Next Generation to Hate Israel | With Marcus Sheff
Épisode 26
mardi 22 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:01:43
A fourth-grade math textbook asks Palestinian children to add the number of martyrs killed in the First Intifada to the number killed in the Second. A physics lesson teaches Newton's second law using a boy with a slingshot aimed at an Israeli soldier. A first-grade Arabic book introduces the letter ha with two words: attack, and martyr.
Marcus Sheff runs the institute that found all of it. He was a political reporter, then an editor at The Jerusalem Post, then a foreign correspondent, and then he ran a communications firm — and now he is CEO of IMPACT-se, the Jerusalem-based research institute that reads school textbooks across the Middle East and Europe line by line and grades them against UNESCO's own standards on peace, tolerance and non-violence. His analysts go through every line of every book of every subject of every grade; one country can mean 350 textbooks in a year. The Syrian report is 300 pages.
His central claim is not that the books are offensive. It is that they are predictive. "Textbooks are remarkable political predictors," Sheff says. "What children are taught today in classrooms all over the world is a pretty good indication of what the country is going to be like in ten years' time." A fourteen-year-old reading a physics problem about throwing rocks is twenty-four in a decade, and a fully formed member of a society. What a regime prints is what it intends.
Sheff walks through what IMPACT-se found in the Palestinian Authority curriculum and why he reads it as strategy rather than accident: the peace agreements that used to be in the books — Israel and Egypt, Israel and Jordan, the Wye Accords — were taken out when the curriculum was rewritten between 2016 and 2018, leaving only a dismissive account of Oslo, along with the letter Yasser Arafat wrote to Yitzhak Rabin renouncing violence, which was doctored. None of that, he argues, happens by accident. It was done at the top, in the open, with the international community in the room.
Then there is UNRWA — the UN agency that runs most of the schools in Gaza, teaches the Palestinian Authority curriculum in them, and has produced some of its own supplementary material besides, one piece of which describes an attack on a bus full of Israeli civilians as a barbecue party. Sheff testified to the committee the UN set up to investigate the agency after October 7; IMPACT-se was the only nonprofit asked. He describes what the committee recommended and what happened next, which was very little.
Who Are We, and What Do We Owe? A Chagim Special on Jewish Pride and Memory | With Ben M. Freeman, Yossi Klein Halevi & More
Épisode 25
jeudi 17 septembre 2026 • Durée 34:45
"The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is not Israel. The greatest achievement of the Jewish people is the Jewish people."
That's Ben M. Freeman, and that's where this episode starts.
Most weeks on The Honest Take, we spend an hour with one guest. This week is different. We're in the Ten Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the stretch when you're supposed to sit down and take an honest accounting of yourself. So we went back through the conversations on this show and pulled the moments that had nothing to do with the news cycle.
Nobody in this episode is going to tell you what's being done to us. You already know that. Instead, nine people take on a harder question: Who are we? What do we actually know about ourselves? And what do we owe the people who handed this to us?
Ben M. Freeman, founder of the Jewish Pride movement, explains why Jews are a people, a nation and a civilization, not only a religion, and why "religions don't have homelands."
Rawan Osman grew up in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and spent seven years reading her way out of what she was taught about Jews. She describes what she found when she finally walked into a synagogue, and tells young Jews that being born a Jew "is like winning the lottery."
Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute names the failure: "We have the most compelling national story out there… And we're not telling it."
Dr. Henry Green, founder of Sephardi Voices, turns the same charge inward. Nearly every Jewish community marks Yom HaShoah, and almost none mark Yom HaPlitim, the day that honors the Jews who left the Arab world.
Author Meg Keene says the community is going to have to build its own institutions, and pay for them.
Brigadier General Amir Avivi argues that security starts with spirit and purpose, and that a nation that has been around for thousands of years should be able to think a thousand years ahead.
Alana Newhouse, founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet, says Zionism is "not something that we picked up at Walmart 20 years ago," and lays out four survival tests that, she argues, only Israel in the West currently passes.
A Verdict Waiting for a Trial: Where 'Israel Is Committing Genocide' Came From, Decades Before Gaza | With Hillel Neuer
Épisode 24
mardi 15 septembre 2026 • Durée 39:49
"Israel is committing genocide." It's a sentence heard every day since October 7, and it is far older than the war. Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch in Geneva, returns to The Honest Take to trace where the charge came from, and how it was in circulation decades before the war it is now used to describe.
Neuer traces the vocabulary back to Soviet propaganda that he says probably began in the 1950s, and to the UN's 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution, which was repealed in 1991. A decade later it was revived at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which the United States and Israel walked out of 25 years ago this month. As Neuer puts it, "a conference that was supposed to be against racism became a conference that promoted racism." Marchers equated Zionism with Nazism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were handed out as literature. A parallel NGO Forum adopted a declaration accusing Israel of "acts of genocide," "Israel's brand of apartheid" and "racist crimes against humanity." At the time, Human Rights Watch's Reed Brody, while accusing Israel of "serious crimes against Palestinian people," told CNN that "it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide." Congressman Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, called the conference "the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I had seen since the Nazi period."
Neuer argues that the charge never went away. The same accusation now comes from UN mechanisms, including the Human Rights Council's commission of inquiry and Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
The UN is still marking the anniversary. On Monday, September 28, the General Assembly holds a high-level meeting to commemorate 25 years since the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. The resolution setting it up passed in July, 142 to 3 with 13 abstentions; Argentina, Israel and the United States voted no. Ten countries pulled out of the 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva, and 38 boycotted the General Assembly's 20th-anniversary meeting in 2021. UN Watch is asking democracies to stay away again.
Also in this episode: Secretary-General António Guterres telling the Financial Times that many UN special rapporteurs are "totally out of control, from the point of view of the Secretariat," and his spokesman's clarification days later; Deborah Lipstadt's account that Guterres privately called Albanese "a horrible person"; and Neuer's answer to Albanese's defamation charge: "Please go ahead and sue me. Make my day."
"Israel Probably Did 9/11": How a Settled Conspiracy Came Back | With James B. Meigs & Michael Shermer
Épisode 23
mardi 8 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:31:05
"'Yeah, Israel probably did 9/11. I wouldn't put it past them.' That is one more thing people can put in their knapsack of arguments for why Israel is a uniquely evil country. And I'm just not sure how we're going to argue these people out of it."
That's James B. Meigs, and he has been arguing with these people for twenty years.
In 2005, Popular Mechanics did what almost no newsroom was willing to do: it took the 9/11 truther claims seriously enough to test them one at a time, and it published what it found. Meigs was the editor-in-chief. He spent the next two decades being told he was part of the cover-up.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, the same claims are circulating again — with one substitution. "The government did it" has become "Israel did it." Same anomalies. Same absence of evidence. New target.
Ben Chertoff, who managed the reporters on that Popular Mechanics investigation and ran its fact-checking, is joined by Meigs and by Michael Shermer — founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a Scientific American columnist for eighteen years, and the author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, Denying History, and Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Matters.
They take the machinery apart. Proportionality bias — the intuition that an enormous event must have an enormous cause, and that nineteen men with box cutters cannot be the whole story. Anomaly hunting, and why a handful of loose threads feels more persuasive than a mountain of settled evidence. The Gish Gallop, and why a claim you can make in one sentence takes three thousand words to refute.
And the part that should trouble everyone: how material that originated with Holocaust deniers and professional antisemites — a full-page New York Times ad in 2004, a seismic-spike claim traced to the American Free Press — ended up circulating among people who considered themselves liberal, progressive and open-minded, because they liked where it pointed.
Also in this episode: what happened to Tucker Carlson between 2012 and 2025. Why thermite and Building 7 refuse to die. How the goalposts moved from "made it happen on purpose" to "let it happen on purpose." Why every new story now routes through the Mossad. What it would actually cost to pay off everyone who would have to stay quiet. And what you say to a family member who believes this, without sounding condescending.
BONUS: They Counted Terrorists as Journalists — Then Quietly Removed Them | Erin Molan, Salo Aizenberg, Leslie Kajomovitz, Gabriel Epstein
Épisode 22
vendredi 4 septembre 2026 • Durée 46:32
"CPJ has dozens of names where they claim the journalist died on a dangerous assignment, while the description says they died in their home. So use a little bit of logic and tell me — how can a journalist be on a dangerous assignment while they're in their own home?"
That is Leslie Kajomovitz, near the end of this panel.
On June 25, the Committee to Protect Journalists announced it was reviewing its own database of journalists killed since October 7. The reason was not an outside investigation. It was that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had begun publishing obituaries for their own fighters — and some of those fighters were already on CPJ's list.
CPJ has since removed eight people for taking part in hostilities, and another seven for not meeting its own definition of a journalist. The review cost the organization a board member: Nika Soon-Shiong, publisher of Drop Site News, was ousted as the audit went forward. The International Federation of Journalists quietly dropped eight terrorism-linked names from its own list and has still offered no explanation for why.
HonestReporting's research puts it further than CPJ has been willing to go: over half of the people on CPJ's October 7 War database are operatives or carry a documented affiliation with a terrorist organization.
And the number that gets least attention is CPJ's own. In its 2025 annual report, CPJ counted 52 journalist deaths in Gaza — and determined that only 18 of them were targeted by Israel. The other 34, by CPJ's own finding, were killed in the course of the conflict and not specifically targeted. Of the 86 deaths CPJ attributed to Israel worldwide that year, 31 worked for the Houthi public relations department's newspapers in Yemen.
Erin Molan puts it to the panel: why did so many organizations reach for the "Israel is hunting journalists" narrative, how did so many combatants get counted as press, what does it cost real journalists when the label is handed out this cheaply — and why has almost no newsroom that ran the original story gone back to correct it.
Salo Aizenberg, author and researcher and a HonestReporting board member; Leslie Kajomovitz, twenty-plus years in international news; and Gabriel Epstein, Senior Policy Associate at the Israel Policy Forum. Moderated by journalist and broadcaster Erin Molan.
Someone Should Give Soros a Shower: How Antisemitism Learned to Hide From the Keyword Filters | With Dr. Matthias Becker
Épisode 21
mardi 1 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:15:45
When most of us picture antisemitism online, we picture a swastika, a slur, a guy in a dark room. Matthias Becker will tell you that's the part that barely matters.
He's not a political scientist. He's a linguist. For more than a decade he has been reading the comments — not on fringe platforms, but under the BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde. His project, Decoding Antisemitism, has now been through 300,000-plus comments across Britain, France and Germany, and what it found is that roughly 80% of the antisemitism in those mainstream spaces never uses a slur at all.
It hides in a joke. In a rhetorical question. In a name dropped like a password. Below an article about George Soros, someone writes: someone should give George Soros a shower. No slur, no threat, nothing a keyword filter will ever catch — and everyone who needs to understand it, does.
Which means, as Becker puts it, that nearly every statistic you have read about online hate is built on sand.
This conversation covers what actually changed on October 7 — the shift from demonizing Israel to openly celebrating the murder of Israelis, and the overlap with misogyny he had never seen before. It covers his event studies of Charlie Kirk, the Capital Jewish Museum, the White House Correspondents' Dinner attack, and Dan Bilzerian's congressional run — where the single video that pushed back on him drew the most antisemitism of any in the set, over 50%. It covers why he thinks surveys can't measure this and comment sections can. And it covers what he now tells the AI companies, whose guardrails he is trying to help build.
He is, after ten years in the worst of it, not a cynic. His argument is that the same technology that lets one person manufacture a wave of propaganda is the first tool we've had that is powerful enough to read the flood back.
Related episode: Ashley Rindsberg, "Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth" — Becker names Wikipedia and Reddit on tape as the stumbling block feeding these models. Rindsberg's episode is how that pipeline got poisoned; Becker's is what it costs downstream —
The Soviet Factory That Built Modern Anti-Zionism | With Izabella Tabarovsky
Épisode 20
mardi 25 août 2026 • Durée 01:37:16
In 2018, Izabella Tabarovsky walked past a protest on an American campus and recognized the signs. Not the sentiment — the sentences. She called her father in Russian and read them out. His answer: we've heard all of this before.
She grew up in Soviet Siberia, in a Jewish city with no synagogues, where the word "Jew" was a line on an internal passport and Jewish applicants to math departments were handed problems known as "coffin problems," because they would bury you. So she went looking for the paper trail — and found one. The Soviet Union didn't merely dislike Israel. It assigned the problem to research institutes and told them to build a scientific-sounding case against Zionism. The volumes they produced look like scholarship. They have footnotes, endnotes, citations to Hannah Arendt and to Herzl.
Tabarovsky sat in the National Library of Israel and checked those citations one at a time. They're fake. Real quotes turned to mean the opposite of what they meant.
From there the trail runs out of Moscow and into a UN resolution, into Mahmoud Abbas's Soviet dissertation, and into an American Communist Party book that a successor organization quietly serialized "for our young readers" one month after October 7th.
A conversation about where the vocabulary came from, why it outlived the state that built it, and what a nineteen-year-old is supposed to do about it now.
Her book is Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student's Survival Guide, with a foreword by Natan Sharansky.
Also in this episode: "kill the Jews, save the turtles"; the Z word and the J word; why antisemitism inside an institution is the tail end of its collapse, not the canary; the Talmud's Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish, and why a study partner who agrees with you is useless; the Passover story as a story about burning down the palace; pre-bunking and the eight-lesson curriculum at The Tell Institute; the Muslim allies risking their lives, and the Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Mir; and New York City's new antisemitism plan ("Wait, how is it something?").
The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show — 60 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com.
If this one gave you something to argue about at your own table, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.
He closes on hope, and on a warning. He argues that the practical, interest-based case for Israel as an ally has never been stronger. He's worried about the right as well as the left: "The subtext of, say, the Tucker Carlson Show isn't that all Jews are evil. It's that all evil is Jewish."
Also in this episode: the joke Kaufman heard from the Prime Minister's Office about a "two-state solution" (Michigan and Nevada); the Students for Justice in Palestine toolkit sent to campus chapters on October 8, 2023; the advice Gallant got from General David Petraeus; what Netanyahu's own 2022 memoir predicted about invading Gaza; a documentary's claim about civilian-casualty approvals, set against the strike on Mohammed Deif; and how the war looks from Tehran.
The Honest Take is HonestReporting's weekly long-form interview show — 60 to 90 minutes, recorded remotely, hosted by Ben Chertoff. Every episode at podcast.honestreporting.com.
If this episode changed how you think about the first draft of this war, please leave The Honest Take a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing that helps new listeners find the show.
The obvious objection gets its turn: does any of this actually change anyone, and isn't the whole thing impossible to fix anyway? Sheff's answer is the most useful thing on the tape. Changing a curriculum is not hard. These are thin, magazine-format books, reprinted constantly, and the world has two billion children in school — it is not short of experience in producing textbooks. The refusal is not technical. "This is not a pedagogical question," he says. "This is a political question."
He also turns the same standards on Israel — IMPACT-se examines the Israeli curriculum, he says, more comprehensively than any other — and describes what the Ministry of Education's civics textbook actually teaches Israeli children about 1948, including the Palestinian account of it.
And there is a genuinely hopeful half to this. The Palestinian Authority curriculum is not the regional norm; it is the outlier. The United Arab Emirates rebuilt its textbooks first. Saudi Arabia has been reforming its curriculum since 2020. Morocco's books, built on the country's 2011 constitutional reform, treat the Jewish community and the Amazigh as part of the Moroccan tapestry, right down to a photograph of a Muslim family at a Jewish Friday night table. Central Asia is doing better on antisemitism than much of Western Europe, where Sheff calls the picture a mixed bag and puts Ireland at the bottom of it.
Also in this episode: what the analysts physically do with a stack of several hundred textbooks; why UNESCO doesn't conduct this kind of country-level review itself; the fact that Hamas, on taking Gaza, did not change a word of the curriculum Fatah wrote in Ramallah; why the US withdrew its UNRWA funding after IMPACT-se testified in Congress; what Sheff would say if he had one sentence in front of the UN General Assembly; and where his hope comes from after a career spent reading the worst material anyone produces.
Shai Davidai, who was teaching at Columbia Business School on October 7, explains what he decided to do after getting punched in the face.
And Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was murdered in the 2001 Sbarro bombing in Jerusalem, answers the question of what still gives him hope: "I'm a Jew. I'm a proud Jew."
From all of us at HonestReporting, g'mar chatima tova.
If this episode was worth your time, send it to someone who needs it, and leave a rating and a review. It genuinely helps other people find the show.
Full conversations
Every guest in this episode sat down with Ben for a full-length episode of The Honest Take.
If this episode changed what you hear when someone says "apartheid" or "genocide," please leave The Honest Take a rating and review o...
Guests: James B. Meigs, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, columnist for the Wall Street Journal's "Free Expression" newsletter, and former editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, where he ran the 2005 "Debunking 9/11 Myths" investigation. He also writes for City Journal and Commentary. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.
If this episode was useful, a rating and a review genuinely helps other people find it.
Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts — Popular Mechanics, edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan, foreword by James B. Meigs (revised and updated 10th-anniversary edition, 2011) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1588165477
Michael Shermer, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1421449072
Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (University of California Press, updated and expanded edition) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/0520260988
Michael Shermer, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/142145372X
The lexicon Ben names in the outro — this is the free, open-access one
Decoding Antisemitism: A Guide to Identifying Antisemitism Online — eds. Becker, Troschke, Bolton, Chapelan (Palgrave Macmillan / Springer Nature, 2024, Open Access CC BY 4.0). 46 antisemitic categories, each with historical background and explicit/implicit examples — read or download free
His work referenced in the episode
"Decoding antisemitism online: linguistic and multimodal challenges in the age of AI" — Frontiers in Communication, Jan 23 2026 — read it
"Antisemitism Exploding on the Far-Right: The Conspiracy Theory Doesn't Need an Event Anymore" — The Algemeiner, May 7 2026. This is the Bilzerian study: ~3,000 YouTube comments across six appearances, 41% antisemitic on average, 23.6%–52% range, with the pushback video topping the set — read it
"The Conspiracy Architecture Doesn't Need Jews: It Just Prefers Them" — The Algemeiner, Apr 28 2026. The White House Correspondents' Dinner study: conspiracy framing 6% → 25%, conventional blame 30% → 5% — read it
"Celebrating Terror" — the case study his team published two weeks after October 7, on the online reactions to the attack. Available through the project's publications page
The new work
AddressHate — the New York think tank he describes at 59:01, connecting discourse research, malicious-actor research and algorithmic-amplification research — addresshate.org
Decoding Hate — the NYU successor project, expanding from antisemitism to anti-Asian and anti-Black racism and misogyny. Site was "about two months" from launch as of taping; not yet live at publication.
Related Honest Take episodes
Ashley Rindsberg, "Garbage In, Gospel Out: Wikipedia, Reddit, and the Battle Over Truth" (Jun 30 2026, 43:04) — listen · watch. The direct on-tape connection: at 57:30 Ben raises Wikipedia and Reddit as the stumbling block, because they are what feed the models. Rindsberg's episode is how that corpus got captured; Becker's is the cost downstream, in the guardrails.
Izabella Tabarovsky, "The Soviet Factory That Built Modern Anti-Zionism" (Aug 25 2026, 97:16) — listen · watch. Complementary: she traces where the vocabulary was manufactured; he measures what people do with it now, sentence by sentence.
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