Benjamin Ryan is a prominent independent journalist who has written for major national publications like the New York Times, NBC News, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Free Press, and who writes regularly on his Substack page, Hazard Ratio. After graduating from Columbia University in 2001, Ben established himself in New York City writing initially about the AIDS epidemic and about scientific research on HIV.
But in recent years, Ben’s growing frustration and skepticism with what he sees as cosmopolitan progressive institutions’ resistance to confronting ideologically inconvenient truths led him to reorient the direction of his reporting work. Covering the outbreak of the monkeypox virus in 2022, Ben questioned the Biden CDC’s unwillingness to forthrightly state that the disease outbreak was overwhelmingly concentrated among gay men engaging in anal sex (it's worth noting here that Ben is himself gay). He then turned his attention to pediatric gender medicine, where he began to uncover the low quality evidence supporting medical interventions like prescribing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to gender dysphoric children and teens. More recently, Ben’s reporting broke important new ground in the Jason Arday fiasco at Cambridge University.
So we asked Ben (who grew up in Seattle) to join us on BCB to talk about progressive elites’ relationship with the truth. It’s a given in blue America that the MAGA right in the era of Trump lives in an alternate – and often false – reality. But there is much less willingness among culturally cosmopolitan thought leaders, Ben tells us, to follow the evidence when it raises inconvenient facts or uncomfortable truths that contradict their ideological priors. Ben refers to this pattern as “elite misinformation”: powerful institutions and influential people accepting, protecting, or circulating claims because those claims support their progressive political and cultural commitments.
So we dig deep into the elite misinformation problem with Ben, which he sees as rooted in progressives’ laudable commitment to protecting marginalized people and communities. But that commitment, Ben contends, goes off the rails when it takes precedence over honest reporting or objectively assigning accountability. When blue city elites subvert the truth in name of protecting the marginalized, they ultimately harm the very people they are trying to protect.
This is what has happened in the arena of pediatric gender medicine, he argues. Practitioners and trans rights advocates - along with the cosmopolitan institutions that largely follow their lead - promote elective enthusiasm for favorable studies, provide shifting explanations when findings disappointed, and level personal attacks on reporters who question the evidence.
And it happened in the Arday case, where the left’s defenses of Arday often substituted accusations of racism for engagement with the evidence. And as our discussion winds down he points the finger at politicians like AOC who, in discussing the Cornell 7 case, have asserted conclusions before the contested evidence has been adequately resolved. Drawing on his own earlier campus reporting, he explains to us how he learned to balance sympathy for accusers with due process for the accused.
“If you lie to yourself, if you make that a habit as an intellectual being, and then you're going to transmit it to other people, they don't know that you're lying to yourself because they trust you because you're an intellectual beacon,” Ben tells us. “And that is very tragic.”
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
Benjamin Ryan, Hazard Ratio, Substack.
Benjamin Ryan, "You are being misled about monkeypox," Washington Post, July 18, 2022.
Benjamin Ryan, "Psychiatrists learned the wrong lesson from the gay rights movement," Washington Post, May 3, 2024.
Benjamin Ryan, "Star Cambridge Professor Jason Arday Lied for Years About Raising Millions for Charity: Simon & Schuster Scrubbed Financial Details From His New Memoir and Falsehoods From His Bio," Washington Free Beacon, Aug. 4, 2026.
Benjamin Ryan, "‘Frankly, He Has Been Killed’: Angry Scholars From UK’s Top Academics’ Union Blame Jason Arday’s Death on Racist Mob, as ‘Race Realist’ Who Ignited the Firestorm Is Suspended," Washington Free Beacon, Aug. 21, 2026.
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