Hey, everyone.
We wanted to clarify the situation so that you don't have to speculate about the many questions it raises.
First, we all unequivocally denounce the views that Evan expressed on his feed. None of us share them or anything close to them. We have made it clear to Evan that such views are unacceptable and fail at a basic level of critical thinking and humanity. Also, no one on the SGU knew that Evan was harboring these views. We
have discussed this extensively over the last couple of days, and it's clear he was keeping this compartmentalized and did not feel comfortable discussing it with us. None of us are on X, so we are all as surprised as anyone.
But we have also known Evan for years as a friend and colleague, so we are trying to understand how he got here (not to minimize or excuse, but to understand). As we put this together it seems that Evan allowed himself to be radicalized following the events of Oct. 7th and the ensuing polarization. As a Jewish person this was extremely emotional for him, he felt that his people and identity were under existential threat, and he needed to do something. But he never engaged with the people who perhaps might have helped him the best work through this. Instead he found an online community that shared his views, with unfortunately predictable results. None of this is an excuse - he should have known better, he should have checked in with his colleagues, and he should have recognized the pattern, he should have shown more humility. But he didn't.
To be clear - none of our concerns are about Evan's politics per se. There is a range of political ideology on the SGU, and we value what diversity of background and perspective we have (it's not enough, frankly). We also all feel that the skeptical movement should be a big tent when it comes to political background, ideology, belief, and identity - as long as we all share this common journey of skepticism, rationalism, love of science, and critical thinking. However, Evan's political views crossed a line, violating core skeptical principles and dehumanizing "others".
So where do we go from here? Evan has stumbled hard on his skeptical journey, and he is starting to recognize and wrestle with how badly he has failed. But as we often say on the show, we see our job as helping people on this journey, to educate, nurture, and guide. We do not shame, blame, and cancel. So our instinct is to try to pick Evan up and help him get back on a more skeptical path. He knows he has a lot of hard cognitive and emotional work to do, to unravel his views, grow as a person, and regain the trust of the community and his fellow Rogues.
For now Evan is taking a break from recording the show, to give us all time to work through this more. We are all actively working with him, and will just have to reassess day by day. We will see how it goes.
We are all sorry for the strife this has caused within our community. We all care very deeply about the SGU community and take our responsibilities very seriously. We will fix this one way or the other, and hope we have earned enough trust over the years that you will give us the time to make sure we get this right.
Sincerely,
Steve and the SGU crew.
