The Department

Department of Evil is an independent satire and criticism project by Chris Mish. The institution is fictional. Its sources, corrections, and responsibility for what it publishes are not.

We use the language of manufactured certainty to make its shortcuts visible. Sometimes the joke is an organization demanding your trust. Sometimes it is the audience enjoying the demand. Sometimes it is us.

We are not campaigning for a party. We are not campaigning against the existence of functioning institutions. We expect more from institutions because we need them.

The founding position

A position, not a measured universal fact. By Chris Mish.

I believe our education is nowhere near sufficient for the information environment a healthy democracy now has to survive. Technology can distribute an assertion faster than a person can evaluate it. Knowing how to repeat a conclusion is not knowing how it was reached. Having the right enemies is not an education.

I am not interested in destroying the institutions we depend on. I am interested in what happens when those institutions demand trust while treating explanation as optional. Science is a method of inquiry, not a costume for a fundraising department. Democracy requires people who can question a claim, including a claim they desperately want to be true.

The Department's political alignment is No. No to borrowed authority. No to compulsory applause. No to pretending a slogan is an argument. No to the assumption that disagreement establishes stupidity or evil. That is not a demand to abolish government, expertise, or collective action. It is a demand that they do their jobs and show their reasoning.

Chris Mish
Department of Evil

The method

A dispatch borrows the voice of institutional certainty, then turns the question back on the reader. Its working identifies the fiction, the source statement, the unsupported inference, and a question to carry into a conversation.

A share can start an encounter. It is not proof that someone learned anything, agreed with us, or even believed the joke.

Accountability

The Department is not a government office, a scientific body, or a claim of institutional endorsement. The fictional title does not make the author unaccountable.