Is Nate Silver OK?

By Chris Revelle | News | December 29, 2023 |

By Chris Revelle | News | December 29, 2023 |

Many aspects of the political reality we inhabit have changed rapidly over the last five years, and one of the most drastic shifts has been in how we receive and treat polls. We know now that polls are largely bullshit (further insights to which can be found on the Pajiba Substack), but remember when we used to go by polls religiously? Remember the advent of FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver and how his polls and statistics felt, for a time, like a calming rock to cling to in the uncertain world? What halcyon days! Silver and FiveThirtyEight held significant sway in political circles for a while. Silver accurately predicted the outcome of the 2012 election, and that went a long way to vouching for his prognostication abilities. FiveThirtyEight went on to form partnerships with other media entities such as the New York Times and ESPN. Silver was a celebrated presence in American culture for a spell.

Because luck is a spinning wheel and fortunes will always reverse, Silver fell out of favor in time. His predictions headed into the 2016 election were extremely reassuring to voters for Hillary Clinton. According to Silver, there was nothing to fear; there was a 71.4% chance that Trump would be defeated and Clinton would become the first female President. When this didn’t come to pass, and we entered a particularly egregious recent chapter of American life, Silver became less popular. He left FiveThirtyEight during the layoffs at ABC in April of this year and started publishing a newsletter from his website, but otherwise, he sorta fell off my radar. Can you guess where he’s been since?

If you guessed, “banging on about the Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theory,” then give yourself a pat on the back!

There were rather explicit and active efforts to control the narrative around lab leak discourse, including by scientists with some pretty bad conflicts of interest.https://t.co/gDsKdGb9Xt

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 28, 2023

In fairness, he’s been doing this since February of this year, but it’s intensified as of late. His X activity has been devoted to discussing this topic over the past few days. It’s not clear why this conspiracy theory is resurgent. The lab leak theory is a debunked theory about how the Covid pandemic began and spread. In essence, it posits that studies of coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology led to an accidental or even intentional outbreak of covid-19. It’s been floated by people like Jon Stewart as well, an unfortunate fact we all have to deal with.

For Silver’s part, he’s specifically signal-boosting Paul Thacker. Thacker is an infamous conservative flack masquerading as a journalist. He writes for the Brownstone Institute, a COVID conspiracy group headed by a child labor and child tobacco usage advocate! Thacker was also one of the chosen journalists to report on the “Twitter Files” so you know he can be trusted!

This is quite bad. A group of virologists wanted to do gain-of-function research on COVID viruses in Wuhan in ways that closely matched the SARS-CoV-2 virus that's killed 8+ million, but tried to hide the Wuhan linkages and got a lot of help in doing so from science journalists. https://t.co/0KNFoIfNLb

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 23, 2023

As a fun side note, Thacker also claimed that journalist Taylor Lorenz used family connections who owned the Internet Archive to have information removed. What a stable source of information to be turning to!

So is Nate Silver OK? That might be a matter of perspective, but considering he’s seemingly sinking in deeper with nutbar conservatives, I would say no, and perhaps a wellness check is in order.