An Essay on Ignorism-by-Design: Shedding Light on Manufactured Darkness and Compliance Theater

here, because the last post's thread was so robust with interrogations I committed towards the ED-CNME-NACIQI institutionalized context, I tasked the current Claude Sonnet 4.6 to create an essay centered around a great word that may capture [a pun!] a great deal of it -- ignorism:

001. tasking language: 

Create an essay that talks about how what this thread's context involves is an example of a broad and peculiar "ignorism" by naturopathy's advocates and its institutional enablers.

002. an ignorism-augmented logo upgrade for 2027, perhaps?

[2000, as I have talked about even in 2013's Episode 1, is the year I really awoke while in naturopathy school to the obvious chasm separating the essentially naturopathic and the typical basic medical sciences I was studying while in naturopathy school in CT at UB: "Fourth semester coursework is when I started to really feel that there were two types of course content going on at the college, legitimate medical science stuff, and hokey naturopathic junk [...e.g.] homeopathy [...] Chinese medicine [...] hydrotherapy."]

002. in full [I've lightly changed / edited some aspects, and added comments in right-aligned blue, but I think the output is pretty good --- a mundane, short scenic view kind of way-point / pause on this long journey]:

"Ignorism by Design: How Organized Naturopathy and Its Institutional Enablers Manufacture and Protect Ignorance

[Note: A very good title.]

I. A New Word for an Old Mechanism

There is a word that has not yet entered common usage but that the phenomenon documented in this thread demands: ignorism.

ED SDO's 2026-06 Naturopathy-CNME Determination

here, what a mess --

• precisely "a nauseating, deliberately exploitative, structurally convergent, ethically regressive, academically fraudulent system — one that presents as a mess [to distract from its overall intentionality] while functioning as a machine, and whose deepest harm is not the individual clinical encounters it enables but the institutional infrastructure of positive freedom it has converted, layer by layer, into an architecture of epistemic obstruction";
• with the ED SDO's “remedial framework [...] structurally incommensurate with the harms he identified [...serving as] an institutional gatekeeper managing access to an organism that consumes what enters it [...] SDO and ED, in their concierge function, are not merely smoothing a guest experience — they are managing the intake process for an institution whose documented outputs include insurmountable student debt, compromised patient care, and the systematic corruption of the epistemic infrastructure of positive freedom";

[hear, hear! -- minimally; because, I'll herein identify many more issues and suggest multiple remedies]

001. documents used for my Perplexity taskings:

• 001.a. “Naturopathic Accreditor Gets Reprieve” by Josh Moody at insidehighered.com 2026-06-24”, where we’re told about the determination;
• 001.b. the 26-page USDE letter dated 2026-06-23, included in the web page above, authored by Under Secretary Nicholas Kent [the above link is archived];
• 001.c. my pre-decision Naturocrit post of 2026-06-23;
• 001.d. my 2026 CT ND Final Report archived here;
• 001.e. the AANP press release;
• 001.f. the CNME press release;

002. via Perplexity, taskings [letters 'a' through 'p']:

002.a.1. [tasking] "In light of the attached post PDF and the 2026 CT ND Final Report PDF, what does the attached ED Letter PDF address, avoid, support, undermine, value, defile, uphold, undermine?" [So, respectively: 001.c., 001.d., and 001.b.; oops, two undermines!!!]

Holistic / Wholistic Thoughts on CNME-NACIQI-ED [pre] Determination, the 2026 CT ND Final Report, and Knowledge Integrity, Ethics, Commerce, and Positive Freedom

here, musings by way of some AI-LLM muscle within my own Naturocrit'in on these Naturocritters.  I’ve been thinking about CNME, NACIQI, and ED in light of ‘all that I know.’ And in gaming-out the either thumbs up or thumbs down that ED will do, I realized that such is just a surface distraction / the bushwa [a nice Americanism?] from the larger issues at hand. Therein, some thoughts before I even know about what ED will decide...

[my notations are below in blue and right-aligned]

001. two taskings were assigned to Perplexity:

001.a. “In terms of the findings of the attached 2026 CT ND Final Report PDF and the soon-to-be-determined fate of CNME by way of NACIQI and ED, expound upon the attached DOCX commentary.”

[Note: The commentary was this quick ‘back of a napkin’ scribble:

 “Whether ED determines a thumbs up or at [oops, 'a'] thumbs down for CNME, I feel that what I’m watching is superficial. What’s dire is not being addressed, in terms of both knowledge integrity, ethics, commerce, and the integrity of freedom — in so many ways. So, it’s like watching the leaves change on a tree — the thumbs up or thumbs down — on a tree that eats people. All that’s being talked about are the leaves, not the trunk and root issues which are more dire. E.g., the homicidal tree metaphor. All eyes are averted in terms of the dire; it is so decreed, structured, and in terms of processes...baked in. Special treatment...tree-tment. [I’m in my old man punning mood...].”]

001.b. “In terms of the entire system -- federal administrative, state legislative, academic accreditation, broad investigative and evidentiary malaise -- create an explanation of the national, state, and intellectual / lack-of-intellectual  virtues and values / vices and transgressions as relates to knowledge integrity, ethics, commerce and positive freedom in the Snyderian sense.”

002. answers [all puns aside]:

It's the 2000th Post!!!

It's the 2000th post.

It's about science, reason, critical thinking, ethical behavior in terms of the professions, and consumer rights in terms of commerce.

It's about laying bare nonsense disguised as reason- and science-backed, and unfair trade.

It's about the public's right not be be used as cannon-fodder by educational institutions which sell pseudoscience as science and fill their coffers with students' Federal loan money based on those false labels.

It's about recording it all for future engagements, providing an arsenal for whomever ends up needing such.

--- 

[Musings this 2026-06-04:

a) For some reason, the 500th Post post from 2011 is the most viewed Naturocrit Podcast post of all time.  There is also a 1000th Post post from 2015.  And a 1500th Post post from 2018.

b) And sorry, if it's a bother, but I still enjoy right-aligned text for short scribbly things! 'Easier to change the world than to change me.'  I've been using 'sauce for the goose' lately, and since I regard naturopathy as quite 'hasty, messy, or careless' in the sense of logic, therein scribbly, yes,'sauce for the goose' all around.

c) So, also, I put the above text into the Perplexity thread that generated the past few posts.  The 'what can be said' response:

"This passage is from the same Cullen/Naturocrit framework, and reading it against the CT ND context as it stands in June 2026 produces a remarkably precise alignment across every clause.

"Science, reason, critical thinking, ethical behavior in terms of the professions"

This maps directly onto the dual analytical failure the CT record documents. The CT Final Report's Cullen-Snyder Framework applies exactly this standard — epistemic rigor (science, reason, critical thinking) and professional ethics simultaneously — and finds CT naturopathy failing on both axes. The NACIQI finding adds a federal institutional voice to the same conclusion: CNME failed as a quality authority not only because its standards were weak but because it rationalized that weakness, which is an ethical failure of the credentialing profession, not merely a procedural one.

"Laying bare nonsense disguised as reason- and science-backed"

This is the precise analytical operation the CT Final Report performs with the Cullen framework — identifying "science camouflage," the mechanism by which vitalism, homeopathy, and energy medicine [and kind!!!] are presented under the exterior of a four-year doctoral credential, state licensure, and clinical title. The CT Board's NABNE substitution is itself an instance of this same disguise operating at the regulatory level: substituting one acronym for another to obscure a substantive federal finding behind administrative-looking paperwork.

"Unfair trade"

This is the most underappreciated dimension of the CT ND situation and the one with the most direct consumer protection purchase. Connecticut's Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA), CGS §42-110b, prohibits unfair or deceptive acts or practices in commerce. An ND presenting homeopathy, constitutional hydrotherapy, or non-standard Lyme testing as scientifically supported medicine, charging clinical fees for these services under state licensure, constitutes a colorable CUTPA claim. The state's licensure of these practices does not immunize the individual practitioner from deceptive trade practice liability — licensure authorizes practice, it does not certify the truth of the scientific claims made in the commercial context of that practice. [That's right baby!] This is a largely unexplored enforcement avenue in CT.

"The public's right not to be used as cannon-fodder by educational institutions which sell pseudoscience as science and fill their coffers with students' Federal loan money based on those false labels"

This clause has acquired specific and urgent meaning in 2026 that it did not fully have in 2017 when it was written. The University of Bridgeport's College of Naturopathic Medicine — the CT-specific ND institution Cullen has documented extensively, which shut down in 2022 — was a CNME-accredited program. Its students took out Title IV federal loan debt to attend a program whose accreditor has just received a 12-0 NACIQI denial recommendation on the grounds that it "fundamentally compromised its integrity as a reliable authority on educational quality." Those graduates of UBCNM are, in the precise language of this passage, cannon-fodder — they are bearing federal loan obligations for credentials whose accreditor has been found by the federal advisory system to have allowed substandard outcomes while citing student demographics as justification. The "borrower defense to repayment" complaint Cullen mentions filing with ED in 2017 is now structurally far more viable than it was then: borrower defense requires showing that the institution made a misrepresentation on which the student relied. A CNME-accredited program that marketed its graduates as scientifically trained naturopathic physicians while CNME maintained the standards NACIQI found deficient has a serious borrower defense exposure.

"Recording it all for future engagements, providing an arsenal for whomever ends up needing such"

This clause describes exactly what the documentary record now is. The 2017 podcast scripts, the letters to CTDPH that went unanswered, the archived naturopathic organization websites, the legislative history of PA 14-231, the 2026 CT Final Report, the NACIQI March 2026 transcript, and the May 2026 CT Board meeting video together constitute precisely the arsenal this passage anticipates. Each layer of the record — the epistemic critique, the unanswered regulatory complaints, the federal findings, the board's evasive response — is a separate evidentiary strand that, in combination, supports multiple legal and policy theories simultaneously:

•     Legislative action to amend CGS §20-34;
•     CUTPA enforcement against individual practitioners;
•     Borrower defense claims by ND students;
•     APA-style challenge to the CT Board's ultra vires NABNE vote 

[the Uniform Administrative Procedure Act (UAPA), CGS Chapter 54; in essence, a successful APA-style challenge strips away the administrative buffer the board created and forces CT's regulatory apparatus to confront directly what the NABNE substitution was designed to obscure: that the statutory foundation of CT naturopathic licensure is anchored to an accreditor the federal system has found to have fundamentally compromised integrity];

•     Informed consent litigation by harmed patients;
•     Federal oversight attention to CT's regulatory non-response to the NACIQI finding.

The passage turns out to be a description of the strategic function of long-form documentation in regulatory and consumer protection contexts — and the CT naturopathy record is now one of the more complete such documentations in any state. Whether it is used depends on who picks up the arsenal." 

d) What's there to say about resembling oneself, across the years, just in varied forms and voices?

Like Bob Seger sang in 1976: "Well, all of Chuck's children are out there playing his licks." {with the children being the present creations / forms / voices, and Chuck's licks the past iterations.]