Today’s Utterly Moderate podcast episode focuses on the positives and negatives of President Trump’s first 100 days in office in this his second term. We are joined by Jim Swift, a longtime Republican and senior editor at The Bulwark . If you aren’t familiar with the work that they do over at The Bulwark , it is an online publication founded by longtime Republicans from the now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine. They aim to provide good faith, intelligent, center-right and center-left perspective...
Jun 04, 2025•37 min•Season 2025Ep. 3
This episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast deals with liberal bias in higher education and what to do about it, with a specific focus on the field of sociology. According to Gallup , a strong majority (68%) of Americans believe that higher education is headed in the wrong direction. Barely more than a third (36%) of Americans express a high level of confidence in U.S. colleges and universities, down from 57% only a decade ago. Americans give the following reasons for this low confidence: polit...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Season 2025Ep. 2
America is separating into two nations with two different experiences of reality itself: Red America and Blue America. As Robert Talisse , Vanderbilt University political theorist and today’s Utterly Moderate podcast guest, writes : “[O]ur everyday social environments are increasingly segregated along partisan lines. It is no exaggeration to say that in the United States today, opposing partisans live in different social worlds. For example, liberals and conservatives live in different kinds of ...
Jan 31, 2025•46 min•Season 2025Ep. 1
From all of us at the Connors Institute at Shippensburg University , we thank you for listening and hope you have a truly Happy Thanksgiving! Wherever you spend the holiday and whoever you spend it with, we hope you have lots to be thankful for and good people to be thankful with. On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast , social scientist Mark Rank is here to discuss his newest book, The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us . We hope you e...
Nov 25, 2024•31 min•Season 2024Ep. 14
Before we begin, don't forget to check out Lawrence Eppard's new book, The Poisoning of the American Mind , and to read the newest piece in the Connors Journal on single parenthood in the U.S. Now on to the podcast. . . Kimberly Wehle , a constitutional law expert at the University of Baltimore's School of Law, joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss her new book, Pardon Power: How the Pardon Power System Works—and Why . Wehle and host Lawrence Eppard discuss a variety of topics, including...
Oct 04, 2024•28 min•Season 2024Ep. 13
Single parenthood has risen dramatically in the United States over time. Today, 34% of all children live in a single parent household, up from 9% in 1960 . There are regrettable negative consequences of these statistics, as The Bulwark’s Mona Charen notes : “[C]hildren in mother-only homes are five times more likely to live in poverty than children with two parents. And children in father-only homes were twice as likely to be poor as those in married-couple homes. Poverty is not conducive to thr...
Sep 13, 2024•33 min•Season 2024Ep. 12
On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast , the authors of the brand new book, The Poisoning of the American Mind , talk about the book and its implications for America. So what is their argument? A significant amount of research suggests that most people seek out news and information sources that mirror their worldviews, avoid ones that don’t, and interpret information using cognitive filters that force an alignment with what they already believe. As social psychologist David Dunning writ...
Aug 13, 2024•46 min•Season 2024Ep. 11
We want to express our deepest sympathies and condolences to the family of Corey Comperatore. He was killed during the attempted assassination of former President Trump. According to NBC Philadelphia, Comperatore raised two daughters with his high school sweetheart and spent his final moments shielding his family that he loved so much from the gunfire. May he rest in peace. His family is in our prayers. We also want to wish a quick recovery to those who were injured in the assassination attempt,...
Jul 18, 2024•37 min•Season 2024Ep. 10
On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast , host Lawrence Eppard and Connors Institute co-director Jacob Mackey discuss techniques and shortcuts that you can use to spot real expertise in a world where people with expert credentials are sometimes frauds and where people without expert credentials are often very knowledgeable. They also discuss crucial techniques for examining your personal biases and the limits of your own knowledge. This conversation is based on two really good readings, ...
Jun 28, 2024•56 min•Season 2024Ep. 9
Before we talk about this episode, we hope you didn’t miss the latest research from the Connors Institute on the gender pay gap. Check it out now ! We talk quite a bit on this podcast about some of the things that many liberal and conservative Americans believe that just ain’t so. In fact, we just released a free online documentary about this titled The Poisoning of the American Mind . On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Wilfred Reilly , political scientist at Kentuc...
May 31, 2024•46 min•Season 2024Ep. 8
Before we talk about this week’s podcast episode, don’t forget to check out the Connors Institute’s new documentary, The Poisoning of the American Mind , an illuminating film about how conservatives and liberals in America regularly fall for misinformation and disinformation. On this week’s episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast , we are joined by everyone’s favorite astrophysicist, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Dr. Varoujan Gorjian , to discuss a number of science-related topics, including: ...
May 10, 2024•38 min•Season 2024Ep. 7
We’ve talked a lot on the Utterly Moderate Podcast about how both liberals and conservatives in America are bombarded with misleading information on a regular basis. On the left, unfortunately, a lot of this bad info comes from an academic research community which is overwhelmingly liberal. A recent study found the least imbalanced discipline to be engineering, which was still 62% liberal professors. Political science was 89%, psychology 94%, and sociology 98%, while some disciplines had no poli...
Apr 19, 2024•41 min•Season 2024Ep. 6
It is extremely hard for the average citizen to understand what the “state of the science” is on many issues. We can all type our queries about a particular topic into Google but, when we get the flood of results, most of us are not trained to be able to (a) understand the complicated statistical methodologies employed in many research studies, (b) compare studies and evaluate their strength relative to each other, or (c) assess what the preponderance of the evidence is across tens or even hundr...
Mar 21, 2024•54 min•Season 2024Ep. 5
On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Jacob Mackey to discuss two big gender-related stories in the news. The first story is positive, and we have covered it in the Connors Newsletter —a big new research study shows that we have made great progress combatting sex discrimination in the labor market. This is great news! Then there is a difficult and troubling story. According to leaked internal files from WPATH, a leading global organization which advocates for transgend...
Mar 07, 2024•33 min•Season 2024Ep. 4
On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined again by Lisa Selin Davis , a writer who covers issues related to gender and gender affirming care. Davis joins the program to discuss a recent UnHerd article “Why did three journals reject my puberty-blocker study? Trans children deserve to know the facts,” written by Sallie Baxendale, a clinical neuropsychologist at University College London. Baxendale details an academic article she wrote about the state of the research on whether ...
Feb 21, 2024•29 min•Season 2024Ep. 3
On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we discuss recent controversies at and concerns about colleges and universities in the United States—from highly publicized instances of campus unrest to a lack of intellectual diversity among faculty to hypocrisy on free speech . This episode’s guest is Jacob Mackey, associate professor at Occidental College and coeditor with host Lawrence Eppard of The Poisoning of the American Mind , which is due out later this spring. Check out the podcast epis...
Feb 01, 2024•43 min•Season 2024Ep. 2
Before we get to today’s episode, check out this article about the Connors Institute in The Sentinel newspaper! On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Robert VerBruggen from the Manhattan Institute to discuss a new documentary which claims to disprove that George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, as well as a new research study which claims to disprove that income inequality in the U.S. has been rising since the 1960s. The documentary in question, The Fall of Minneapol...
Jan 11, 2024•44 min•Season 2024Ep. 1
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the Connors Institute at Shippensburg University! Since this Utterly Moderate episode is both our Christmas program and our 100th PODCAST EPISODE , we thought we would try to be as uplifting as possible. In that spirit, we are being joined by Johan Norberg , author of a number of books including Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future . In that book, Norberg presents extensive data documenting how the world has gotten much better over the centu...
Dec 21, 2023•35 min•Season 2023Ep. 20
Jim Swift from The Bulwark joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss the fraught nature of the immigration debate in the U.S. Both sides in the immigration debate have important points to bring to the table, and good faith discussions and compromises are badly needed. Unfortunately, such efforts often get sidetracked by misinformation and disinformation about this thorny issue. Swift discusses a story of his that had a number of important issues—legal immigration, unauthorized immigration, a...
Dec 11, 2023•34 min•Season 2023Ep. 19
Leading American poverty researcher Mark Robert Rank joins the Utterly Moderate Podcast to discuss his Poverty Risk Calculator , the record-low poverty rates that the U.S. saw in 2021, Dr. Rank’s research on the risk Americans face of experiencing poverty throughout their lives, a new book he has coming out on luck, and more! Rank has spent his career studying poverty, economic inequality, and social policy in America and teaching about these topics at Washington University in St. Louis , where ...
Nov 09, 2023•43 min•Season 2023Ep. 18
Friend of the Connors Forum and frequent Utterly Moderate guest, Lee McIntyre , has a new book out titled On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy , a “powerful, pocket-sized citizen’s guide on how to fight back against the disinformation campaigns that are imperiling American democracy, from the bestselling author of Post-Truth and How to Talk to a Science Denier .” McIntyre argues that there is an effort in this country to destroy facts and make America ungovernable. In ...
Oct 12, 2023•42 min•Season 2023Ep. 17
On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we discuss both the pros and cons of nuclear power, especially as it pertains to combatting global climate change. The international community is attempting to keep the world from warming no more than 1.5-2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century. While there have been incredible efforts to achieve this—efforts that have likely taken the worst-case warming scenarios off the table —we are still on track for closer to...
Sep 26, 2023•26 min•Season 2023Ep. 16
On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are going to be talking about something called the “replication crisis.” Most people will not be familiar with this since it has been happening in academia but we promise it is not only quite intriguing and full of juicy details but it also has some pretty big implications for the larger society. So what is the replication crisis? In the past 15 years or so it has been discovered that many research findings in major academic journals actually do...
Sep 11, 2023•44 min•Season 2023Ep. 15
On this Utterly Moderate Podcast episode we tackle a sensitive issue that is hard to find a clear, definitive answer to: does race play a significant role in fatal shootings of civilians by law enforcement in America? Our guest, Robert VerBruggen , a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has done important work on this topic, including his March 2022 report: “Fatal Police Shootings and Race: A Review of the Evidence and Suggestions for Future Research.” Based on the best available evidence, he find...
Aug 25, 2023•43 min•Season 2023Ep. 14
On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are going to tackle a very sensitive topic, the debate and controversies surrounding gender affirming care for minors who display signs of distress at an incongruence between their gender identity and their biological sex. In several countries, including places like Finland, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand, governments and clinics are either banning or placing new limits on the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender-affirming...
Aug 02, 2023•1 hr 38 min•Season 2023Ep. 13
Did you know that President Joe Biden was bussing unauthorized immigrants to a hotel near Orlando, Florida and giving them pre-loaded credit cards, hotel rooms, and clothing—all on your dime ?!? You say you didn’t know? Good, because the story was a complete fabrication. On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by good friend of the show Jim Swift from The Bulwark to discuss the mechanics of how a modern conspiracy theory like this goes viral. Swift covered this story over a...
Jul 17, 2023•38 min•Season 2023Ep. 12
Before we get to today’s episode, GREAT NEWS for American democracy! The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper . If they had not ruled this way, it could have opened the door in presidential elections for state legislatures to ignore the votes of their residents and simply decide to give their state’s electoral votes to the legislature’s preferred candidate. This would have been a nightmare, so the SCOTUS decision is a win for American democr...
Jun 30, 2023•36 min•Season 2023Ep. 11
Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER ! On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are going to discuss a topic that was back in the news recently with the debt ceiling negotiations : Social Security. A number of politicians and elected representatives have recently suggested that we make major changes to the Social Security program, changes which could have a substantial (and I think likely negative) impact on American seniors. We will all eventually age, so this means it wil...
Jun 05, 2023•42 min•Season 2023Ep. 10
On this episode of the Utterly Moderate Podcast we are joined by Lee Jussim , Rutgers University distinguished professor of psychology. He is here to discuss the questionable science behind microaggressions. If you are unfamiliar with the term, microaggressions are claimed to be “acts, often facially innocuous, that convey subtle animus or bias against someone in a traditionally marginalized group.” Our guest, Dr. Jussim, has written multiple excellent articles detailing the problems with microa...
May 21, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 2023Ep. 9
Another massacre in America. It feels like we are living in a nightmare—and we should refuse to become numb to it. Instead, we should use our anger and sorrow and demand that our leaders do the things that most Americans support to stop the carnage. I include links to some *extremely* graphic images of Emmett Till’s corpse as well as the corpses of the recent mass shooting victims in Allen, Texas below. If you believe that you will not be able to handle seeing these images, I strongly urge you n...
May 07, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Season 2023Ep. 8
