The "skeptics couldn't debunk him" (ignoring Randi and plenty of others), and by that we mean, "The real point is Mr. Geller is an entertainer" who "challenges our relationship to the truth".
Weird that he "is less dogmatic about claims to otherworldly gifts now" given that the "skeptics couldn't debunk him" and the "anti-Geller brigade laid down its arms."
But really, aren't deep fakes much worse? I mean, not that Geller was bad.
I’ve seen a lot of great illusionists who never claimed to be doing real magic, and they were no less entertaining or mystifying. We don’t need to give up on respecting truth to enjoy a bit of fantasy.
Or, going back a lot further, Paul Daniels, who did the same kind of thing Penn and Teller did on his TV show decades earlier, where he'd show you a trick, then show you it slowly, then show you how to do it, then show you the same trick with a twist you'd never figure out - real magic :-D
He actually wrote a computer game in the 1980s where you had to learn to do some close-up magic tricks in real life in order to solve the in-game puzzles.
The real magic is showing people exactly how the trick is done, and *still* fooling them with it.
You could lump-sum them into the dollar store variety, that are not as thick and sturdy as expensive ones, but look reasonably the same.
This isn’t a glib comparison, as it gets to the heart of what is so wrong with letting public figures slide by with the excuse that they shouldn’t be taken literally. I can attest that many close relatives of mine literally believe the 2020 election was stolen b/c Trump says so. And as for Geller, he’s nothing special as a magician — his blurring of the actually true line is the very essence of his undering appeal.