This Thanksgiving you might step into the role of the “crazy uncle.” You know the one—big opinions, the loudest voice, met with apathy. But maybe their ideas aren’t dismissed because they’re wrong. They just don’t always bring enough receipts. This year, I’m here to help. Here are a few examples to back your claim that the world, if not ending, is certainly getting dumber.
Begin with Brittany Patterson, a mother from Fannin County, Georgia, whose arrest for “reckless conduct” is both absurd and alarming. Her supposed crime? Failing to know her 10-year-old son had walked a short mile to visit his friend’s grandmother. A passerby spotted the boy, called the sheriff, and soon Patterson found herself in handcuffs. Readers of an older generation might struggle to fathom such overreach. Children once roamed neighborhoods for hours without GPS trackers or cellphones, yet today, a simple stroll is enough to trigger accusations of neglect.
Having grown up in the era of helicopter parenting, however, I’m less surprised. Patterson’s ordeal is emblematic of a broader societal shift—we’ve outsourced parenting to institutions like the police, schools, and social services, granting them authority to enforce a zero-tolerance approach to risk.
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Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt described Patterson’s arrest as a national wake-up call: “One lesson should be: parents, go as a group to your local police department and ask them to work with you, to support you as parents and not arrest you.” Haidt is right, though perhaps overly optimistic that one could reason with a police department that chose to prioritize arresting a mother over pursuing more serious offenses—tracking down drug traffickers, murderers, or even locating some of the 10 million illegal migrants who recently entered the country, one of whom tragically murdered a college student in Georgia.
The real absurdity, however, lies in a society that jails a mother for allowing her child a moment of independence while simultaneously insisting that children should have total independence when it comes to making irreversible decisions about their gender.
Take, for example, an Indiana family who recently lost custody of their teenage son over a disagreement about his transition to living as a woman. The parents, steadfast in their religious convictions, opposed the transition, believing it to be harmful. Yet a judge, swayed by dubious psychological theories—learned in college, no doubt—ruled against them, citing their opposition as detrimental to the child’s well-being. The decision fractured the family and set a troubling precedent. Even the so-called conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.
The paradox of the zero-tolerance approach to risk is that it can be stretched so far as to encompass protecting the child’s feelings—affirming he is a she or she is a he—while permitting actual physical harm through irreversible hormone therapies or sex-change surgeries. Feelings no longer need to reconcile with facts. It is no surprise then that your sister now lives in a society where she could be criminalized for allowing your nephew a taste of independence but sidelined entirely if your nephew seeks to become your niece.
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You might also bring up science—a word many of your relatives likely invoked during the pandemic to urge your compliance with masks and vaccines.
Tell your cousins about the collapse of Eliezer Masliah’s career. Once a respected figure in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research, Masliah’s fall from grace was precipitated by a forensic review that uncovered manipulated data and doctored images in his work. The fallout from this scandal is staggering. Drugs developed based on years of painstaking work and millions of dollars may be rendered utterly useless. But Masliah is not the only one.
Ranga Dias, the physicist from the University of Rochester whose career, once filled with promise, is now tarnished by allegations of research misconduct as well.
Born in Sri Lanka, Dias earned his Ph.D. from Washington State University and conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard—a university you could spend the entire holiday season picking apart. In 2022, Dias’s claim of discovering room-temperature superconductivity made headlines, but soon after, his so-called groundbreaking article in Nature was retracted, followed by four more articles and damning revelations of data manipulation, plagiarism, and fabrication. It was even uncovered that a substantial portion of his Ph.D. thesis was plagiarized. As of now, after a year of restrictions on his research activities, Dias has been recommended for dismissal from the University of Rochester.
An Aunt at the table might argue that the exposure of these men demonstrates the system’s integrity—that science can self-correct by identifying and holding bad actors accountable. But such optimism would obscure the deeper rot within modern scientific practice. The fall of Masliah and Dias shows how easily the integrity of the scientific process can be compromised. Reformers argue that the entire enterprise has devolved into a pressure cooker, prioritizing flashy publications, grants, and headlines over genuine discovery.
Critics like Scott Turner trace this problem to a cultural shift within science itself, from an “ethic of discovery” rooted in curiosity and communalism to an “ethic of production” driven by bureaucratic demands. The result is a system that rewards quantity over quality, churning out unreadable, often meaningless research. Even well-meaning reforms, like preregistration and open data initiatives, address symptoms rather than the root problem: a culture of perverse incentives that values output over truth.
In other words, your nieces and nephews have no basis for saying, “Trust the science, Uncle Bob.”
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If the football channel hasn’t yet been switched on, you might still have time to offer your family one more example. I urge you to have them consider the state of literacy.
Columbia University, once a beacon of academic rigor with its vaunted Core Curriculum, now faces the uncomfortable reality that many of its students are ill-equipped to tackle full-length books. As Liza Libes observes, these students increasingly rely on summaries, study guides, and excerpts, avoiding the intellectual challenge of engaging with original texts. And this is not a problem confined to Columbia alone. High schools are increasingly skipping novels in favor of snippets, and colleges are graduating students who can barely process more than a headline.
To make matters worse, grade inflation has masked this decline, turning report cards into little more than hollow praise—empty symbols of achievement that no longer reflect actual learning or intellectual growth. Richard Vedder offers a sobering analysis of this trend, noting that today’s students work far less than their predecessors yet earn significantly higher grades. The pandemic, which sent thousands of students into the abyss of online schooling, only deepened this slide into intellectual apathy. With these standards crumbling, it begs the question: how can we expect young people to meaningfully engage with complex texts—or, by extension, with the world around them?
It’s hard to say, but to spare you from more reading and allow you to enjoy your dinner while it’s hot, I’ve reached the end.
My fellow crazy uncles, these hard truths will undoubtedly be met with nervous laughter and a swift pivot—”Pass the gravy, please.” But beneath the deflections lies a bitter reality: arrested mothers, scientific fraud, and plummeting academic standards. And that’s just the beginning. I didn’t even touch on rising anti-Semitism, malign foreign influence, sports scandals, accreditation scams, or the fact that your turkey is probably genetically engineered. Families, it’s time to admit that your crazy uncles aren’t so crazy after all. The world is growing stranger with each passing day, and pretending that the gravy boat isn’t full won’t make the meal any less caloric. Sometimes, it’s the one willing to connect the dots—even between servings of turkey and stuffing—who reminds us of what’s truly on the table.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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Image created by Jared Gould using Chat GPT.
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
