Go Doubt Yourself: Critical Thinking in Politics

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Go Doubt Yourself is a short video series about critical thinking in politics, from Rachel Hurley, the writer behind The Daily Grift. Each episode takes one habit of mind, shows it at work on something real from your feed, and leaves you with a check you can run yourself in under a minute. Same detective, different case: the reasoning, including her own. rachelandthecity.substack.com

Episodes

  1. Oct 2

    Why Americans Always Think Crime Is Rising

    Welcome back to Go Doubt Yourself - the series about critical thinking in politics.Case 003 opens in Memphis, where the federal crime operation Trump launched in September 2025 has just turned a year old, and where its arrest totals have become a talking point a month before the 3 November election. Before anyone takes that scoreboard at face value, the episode asks an older question: why have most Americans, in most years since the early 1990s, told pollsters crime is getting worse, through decades when the counts kept falling? Partisanship and the crime data both get a hearing, and neither one closes the case. The missing piece comes from a study of Oregon college students in the 1970s, who were asked to rank causes of death and got some of them wrong by enormous margins, and from the name Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky gave the shortcut behind those guesses. Then it’s back to Memphis with that shortcut in hand: who the operation actually arrested, what it has cost so far (no one in charge has put a number on it), where the state’s money went instead of prevention, and what the people on this fall’s ballot want to do next. Watch for the gap between how Americans rate crime across the country and how they rate it on their own street.In other news:I have nearly 13,000 pages of public records on xAI. Help me read the ones nobody has gotten to yet. Everything I’ve written about AI in one place, from Memphis data centers to the Pentagon. Catch up on The GriftMatrix: every episode of The Daily Grift, newest first. The latest from The xAI Files, plus every records request I’ve filed and who still hasn’t answered. Sources * Gallup: Crime Seen as Less Serious for Second Straight Year (2025), Smaller Majorities Say Crime Is Serious, Increasing (2024), Americans Say Crime Is Up From Last Year, Exploring Local Positivity Bias in Crime Perceptions (2025) * FBI, 2025 Reported Crimes in the Nation Statistics; Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey * WREG, Memphis’s 2024 crime report * Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability,” Cognitive Psychology 5(2), 1973 * Sarah Lichtenstein, Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, Mark Layman and Barbara Combs, “Judged frequency of lethal events,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 4(6), 1978 * The White House, Restoring Law and Order in Memphis (presidential memorandum, 15 September 2025) * Action News 5, the task force’s one-year figures, 29 September 2026 * Center for American Progress, “The Trump Administration’s $1.7 Billion National Guard Deployments Fail To Reduce Urban Crime,” 13 July 2026 * MLK50 and ProPublica (Wendi C. Thomas), via Tennessee Lookout: “Just 2% of immigration arrests by Memphis Safe Task Force were for violent crime, records show,” 15 April 2026 * Public Opinion Strategies for the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, 2026 Public Safety Poll * The Commercial Appeal (Lucas Finton), the one-year series, 16 to 21 September 2026: the overview, the federal court outcomes, and “Trump’s Task Force demands transparency from others, shirks it internally” * Congressional Budget Office, letter on troop deployments, 28 January 2026 * Fox 17, Gov. Lee’s $175 million in crime grants, $100 million for Memphis * Action News 5, the $30 million prevention cut, 24 April 2026 * Action News 5, County Mayor Harris declares a state of emergency, 17 October 2025 * Action News 5 and Local Memphis, the sheriff’s overtime request, May 2026; Tennessee Lookout, the state troopers (12 November 2025) and the new state investigators’ unit (16 September 2026); City Journal (Rafael Mangual), July 2026 * Nashville Banner, the governor’s race, 8 September 2026; theGrio, Justin J. Pearson, 23 March 2026 * News film, a few seconds each, no sound: The White House (15 September 2025); Associated Press (10 October 2025); USA TODAY, the Myrtle Beach rally (21 August 2026); ABC24 Memphis (15 September 2025 and 15 July 2026); WREG News Channel 3 (10 and 17 October 2025); WKRN News 2 (14 May 2026). Every link is in b-roll/film/SOURCES.md. Get full access to Rachelandthecity at rachelandthecity.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Sep 30

    How Last Names Can Influence Votes

    Welcome back to Go Doubt Yourself - the series about Critical Thinking in Politics. Case 002 opens on a close Democratic primary in New York City in 1998. Four candidates wanted the House seat Chuck Schumer was giving up, and the city rotates the order of candidates from district to district. Nobody set it up as an experiment, but that’s what it became: the same front-runners, on otherwise identical ballots, with only their position changing. The result is uncomfortable for anyone who believes votes go to the better candidate. Being printed first was worth real votes, in a race whose final margin came in under 500. It wasn’t a one-off, either. The same tilt turned up all over the city that year, in Ohio, and in New Hampshire in 2016, for Trump and for Clinton alike. Part Two brings Daniel Kahneman back to explain why voters never notice it happening, with a short arithmetic puzzle that trips up students at some of the country’s top universities. Watch for what the people who solved it wrote down before they got it right.In other news:The latest from The xAI Files, plus every records request I’ve filed and who still hasn’t answered. I have nearly 13,000 pages of public records on xAI. Help me read the ones nobody has gotten to yet. Everything I’ve written about AI in one place, from Memphis data centers to the Pentagon. Catch up on The GriftMatrix: every episode of The Daily Grift, newest first. Sources Jonathan G. S. Koppell and Jennifer A. Steen, "The Effects of Ballot Position on Election Outcomes," Journal of Politics, 2004 Joanne M. Miller and Jon A. Krosnick, "The Impact of Candidate Name Order on Election Outcomes," Public Opinion Quarterly, 1998 Bo MacInnis, Joanne M. Miller, Jon A. Krosnick and others, "Candidate name order effects in New Hampshire," PLOS ONE, 2021: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0248049 Shane Frederick, "Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2005 Andrew Meyer and Shane Frederick, "The formation and revision of intuitions," Cognition, 2023 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 98 (the certified primary result) Archival film, public domain, from the Internet Archive: A Day at the Fair (1947, Encyclopedia Britannica Films, Prelinger Archives), Wreckless (1935, Prelinger Archives), Behind the Freedom Curtain (1957, Prelinger Archives), The Boat (1921, Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline) Get full access to Rachelandthecity at rachelandthecity.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Sep 28

    Politics Can Trick Your Brain. Yes, Even Yours.

    Welcome to my new podcast series: Go Doubt Yourself.Go Doubt Yourself is a short video series about critical thinking in politics. Same detective, different case. The Daily Grift follows the money; this one follows the reasoning, including mine. Each episode takes one habit of mind, shows it on something real that turned up in a feed, and hands you a check you can run yourself in under a minute. The episodes are a few minutes long and made to be watched on a phone - or you can subscribe to the audio-only versions. The links are in the sidebar. This first case is from 2003. A Yale psychologist handed committed liberals and conservatives a news article about a made-up welfare plan. Half read a generous plan and half read a harsh one, and the article also said which party backed it. You can probably guess where this goes. The harder question is how the students explained their own choices afterward. In Part Two, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-winning psychologist, explains the mental shortcut behind it. Stay for the last few minutes, where the students rate their own bias lower than everybody else’s.Chapters0:00 The experiment0:35 The cover story0:58 Two welfare plans1:36 The flip2:14 What the students said3:03 The show3:17 The expert witness4:03 The question swap4:42 Why nobody noticed5:22 Both sides do it5:46 Spotting it in others6:19 Case closed6:52 Next case7:07 Sign-offIn other news:The latest from The xAI Files, plus every records request I’ve filed and who still hasn’t answered. I have nearly 13,000 pages of public records on xAI. Help me read the ones nobody has gotten to yet. Everything I’ve written about AI in one place, from Memphis data centers to the Pentagon. Catch up on The GriftMatrix: every episode of The Daily Grift, newest first. Sources * Geoffrey L. Cohen, “Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003: https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/ed/files/party_over_policy_0.pdf * Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) * Archival film, public domain, from the Internet Archive: Tulsa, Oklahoma (ca. 1945, National Archives), From Trees to Tribunes (ca. 1931, Prelinger Archives), Going Places (1948, Prelinger Archives), A Day of Thanksgiving (1951, Centron Corporation, Prelinger Archives) Get full access to Rachelandthecity at rachelandthecity.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Season 1 Trailer

    Introducing Go Doubt Yourself: Critical Thinking in Politics

    A new series from the maker of The Daily Grift, about critical thinking in politics. Each episode takes one habit of mind and tests it on something real from your feed. Episode 00 sets the table with two examples: a claim that ran in Reuters, the BBC and The Guardian after the June 2025 strikes on Iran, all three resting on a single speech, and a White House steel chart from January 2026 whose vertical axis began at 80 rather than 0, so a small rise read as a giant one. Chapters0:00 Episode 000:05 Headlines0:21 The comment section0:45 Stubborn on both sides0:55 Telling people off1:18 The show1:22 Why we dig in1:38 The checks1:49 One speech, three outlets2:04 The steel chart2:21 What the series covers2:26 Asking before knowing2:45 Spotting it in yourself3:07 Holding a view loosely3:13 The question to keep3:21 Episode 1 preview3:27 Sign-off3:34 Where to find me Subscribe on Substack: https://rachelandthecity.substack.comThe critical thinking hub: https://rachelandthecity.com/critical-thinking-hub/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/itsashameaboutrachelThe Daily Grift and the GriftMatrix: https://thegriftmatrix.com #GoDoubtYourself #CriticalThinking #MediaLiteracy #PoliticsPodcast #Misinformation #FactCheck #DonaldTrump #WhiteHouse Get full access to Rachelandthecity at rachelandthecity.substack.com/subscribe

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Go Doubt Yourself is a short video series about critical thinking in politics, from Rachel Hurley, the writer behind The Daily Grift. Each episode takes one habit of mind, shows it at work on something real from your feed, and leaves you with a check you can run yourself in under a minute. Same detective, different case: the reasoning, including her own. rachelandthecity.substack.com

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