HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT ALL THE EXPERTS STINK?

That's Kurt Schlichter, calling attention to the failures of Our Intellectual Betters, and this time, it's a more generalized breach of faith than that afflicting higher education, although the status hierarchy in higher education is also the breeding ground for those failures.

We normals are now expected to defer and submit to the commands of unelected functionaries bossing us around for our own good, though this is only good for those said experts and their fellow travelers in the ruling class. Over about 250 years, America has gone from its leaders being selected on the basis of the divine right of kings to its leaders being selected by on the basis of the divine right of nerds with advanced degrees from Yale.

The Colonel is making a point that Our Intellectual Betters can often dismiss if it's only emanating from the populist right. "There is nothing these experts hate more than challenges to the authority they think they deserve."  Thus, they might claim Josh Hammer is simply issuing this week's talking point, which has been a right-populist talking point for at least fifty years, longer if you had read and understood The Road to Serfdom.

American politics is currently in the throes of a populist moment. That populist moment is characterized by widespread distrust of elites and a perceived ever-widening chasm between the ruling class’s prerogatives and the wishes of the American people at large. As we finally begin to emerge from COVID-19, that chasm will only grow wider. The ruling class has finally sullied itself one time too many.

Victory Girl Toni Williams?  "Elites in the United States have proven themselves morally bankrupt and politically corrupt. They hate us and we need to stop listening to them, like, yesterday. Not just the political leaders, but those with top tier educations and letters after their names in every profession."  Just another cheerleader, although you'll note, and we'll refer to, something she found in Manchester's Guardian.  That's an article rated entry 11 in last week's Short Takes, only the emergence of this don't-trust-the-experts all over the internet over the weekend requires elaboration.

Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds might have been writing about a rigged trustee election at Yale (he somehow survived woke indoctrination at Yale Law) and yet he, too, noteth a stench from the Ruling Circles.

As the pandemic especially underscored, the people who run our institutions look with disdain at those they are supposed to serve. They think that they’re so much smarter and better than everyone else, which entitles them to have their way, without interference from the unwashed masses. (Yale, apparently, regards even its own graduates as unwashed.)

Our tech overlords at Google, Facebook, Amazon and the rest likewise regard their customers with contempt. And the people who run our news organizations are deeply impressed with themselves, though their brilliance is rarely in evidence.

One could tolerate elite highhandedness — if the elites in question are, in fact, effective servant elites. But as the just-released Fauci e-mails show, the team of “experts” who coordinated our pandemic response was in fact poorly informed, often dishonest and sometimes deliberately manipulative of the public. The New York Times’ corrections paragraphs are sometimes longer than the underlying news article. And prestigious Yale, as we have seen, is utterly misruled.

If "servant elite" is anything like "servant leader," a term from the churches with some secular applicability, one of the principles to live by is "don't be stupid about being smart."  That, however, defeats the whole purpose of getting to a position of authority, where it's more fun to use an argumentam ad Donahue, plus that gets the clicks, shares, and likes.  In an ordinary week, Robby Soave might get a short take for his "Team Blue's recent obsession with rendering unsayable anything that clashes with its preferred narrative is the height of hubris."  Particularly given the slimness of its governing coalition at the federal level, and the the growing anger with the condescension.  It doesn't help that some among Our Intellectual Betters have gone beyond denying coherent beliefs to treating dissent as heresy.  "That’s one of the lessons I have learned over the past few years as the institutions that have upheld the liberal order — our publishing houses, our universities, our schools, our non-profits, our tech companies — have embraced a Manichean ideology that divides people by identity and punishes anyone that doesn’t adhere to every aspect of that orthodoxy."  I'll give Bari Weiss and Katie Herzog a pass for not noting that "Manichean" is itself a heresy.

When Jonathan Chait starts worrying about epistemic closure in Team Blue, perhaps Our Intellectual Betters have a problem.  "The implications of this episode are much broader than understanding the source of the pandemic. It is a question about whether institutions like the media and government can withstand the pressure of ideological conformity." A few paragraphs later, he obxerves, "When scientists are openly arguing against the study of a scientific hypothesis, for non-scientific reasons, something has gone haywire. In this case, that something seems to be a hothouse atmosphere centered around social media, that has cultivated an ethos of moral fervor and political homogeneity." Alas, he seems more interested in pointing out motes in other eyes than in addressing the beam in his. "This asymmetry between the mainstream news media and the conservative media that was created to oppose it has long been a source of satisfaction for we liberals. Modern journalism, like think tanks and the bureaucracy, grew out of a Progressive Era belief in disinterested expertise. Guided by the principles of scientific inquiry, these institutions would follow the truth wherever it led."

Unfortunately, he's still more interested in the argumentam ad Donohue.

The conservative movement built a counter-Establishment to oppose this network, but the alt-institutions of the right mimicked the hallowed liberal Establishment only in form. The Heritage Institution, the Washington Times, and Fox News were not mirror images of Brookings, the New York Times, and CBS News — they were parodies of them. Liberals had a phrase to describe this imbalance: the hack gap. The Republican Party had an army of partisans at its disposal, unburdened by any fealty to any scientific or professional norms save the advancement of the conservative movement. The liberal media might make mistakes, and bureaucracies may produce wrong conclusions, but at least they aspire to norms of fairness and impartiality that the right-wing counterparts merely sneer at.

I'm not persuaded, and when I hear someone defending the Establishment Institutions such as the Ford, MacArthur, or Rockefeller foundations whilst scorning Bradley or Koch or Mellon money, I cringe. It's called countervailing power, and it's amusing when the same people who might take up the cause of oppressed or marginalized people when it is convenient are so quick to marginalize with terms like "parodies" or "hack gap."  His conclusion, though, is a backhanded recognition that the experts stink.

Openness to evidence is the historical strength of American liberalism. This is why, for all the errors liberals have committed since the Progressive Era, a capacity for self-correction has given continued vitality to their — our — creed. The lab-leak fiasco ought to be a warning sign of what happens if the urge to not be defeated or manipulated by the right turns into an emulation of its methods. The only thing worse than having a hack gap would be not having one.

At Common Dreams, Jonathan Cook is not confident that the self correction will be forthcoming.

No one in power truly wants to get to the bottom of this story. In fact, quite the reverse. Were we to truly understand its implications, this story might have the potential not only to hugely discredit western political, media and scientific elites but even to challenge the whole ideological basis on which their power rests.

Which is why what we are seeing is not an effort to grapple with the truth of the past year, but a desperate bid by those same elites to continue controlling our understanding of it. Western publics are being subjected to a continuous psy-op by their own officials.

So much for those Disinterested Experts acting in the Public Interest. Oh, and Common Dreams claim the mantle of "progressive" for their own fans. Let the fun begin, or the ruling classes tremble! "Given this context, the events of the past 15 months look much more like a pre-emptive cover-up: a desire to stop the truth from ever emerging because, if a lab leak did occur, it would threaten the credibility of the very structures of authority on which the power of western elites rests."

Perhaps, the elite class have their own interests, which are not the same as those of the public more generally.

In the calculations of western elites, the truth is largely irrelevant. What is of utmost importance is maintaining the illusion of truth. It is vital to keep us believing that our leaders rule in our best interests; that the western system—despite all its flaws—is the best possible one for arranging our political and economic lives; and that we are on a steady, if sometimes rocky, path towards progress.

The job of sustaining the illusion of truth falls to the corporate media. It will be their role now to expose us to a potentially lengthy, certainly lively—but carefully ring-fenced and ultimately inconclusive—debate about whether Covid emerged naturally or leaked from the Wuhan lab.

Adam Smith diagnosed the impulse; Karl Marx elaborated on it in one way, and the Public Choice school of political economy another.  Here's Mr Cook.

Those questions, let alone the answers, will be avoided by anyone who needs to believe that our rulers are competent and moral and that they pursue the public good rather than their own individual, narrow, selfish interests—or those of their class or professional group.

Scientists defer slavishly to the scientific establishment because that same establishment oversees a system in which scientists are rewarded with research funding, employment opportunities and promotions. And because scientists have little incentive to question or expose their own professional community's failings, or increase public scepticism towards science and scientists.

(That is, unless it's accusing a colleague of taking tainted Bradley or Koch money?)

Thomas "Listen, Liberal" Frank weighs in along similar lines.

In the years since (and for complicated reasons), liberal leaders have labored to remake themselves into defenders of professional rectitude and established legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to the fool Trump, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch “norms,” the “intelligence community,” the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media, and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general.

Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.

Don't tell me you weren't warned, dear reader.  We began with some piss-'n-vinegar from the Colonel.  Take us home, James "Long Emergency" Kunstler.

The downfall of Dr. Fauci is a watershed moment. There were so many more authorities caught lying over the past five years, but who got off scot-free — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, James Comey (actually, the whole FBI and DOJ E-suites), John Brennan, James Clapper, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, Adam Schiff, and the editors and producers of the news media, plus the execs of social media — who not only disabled the truth at every opportunity, but just about destroyed the public’s grip on reality.

The result has been an utter collapse of authority in this land, so that now nobody who runs anything is credible, from the current pitiful president of the USA, to most elected and appointed officials, judges, corporate CEOs, college deans and presidents, and “The Science” itself. Just remember: there is still a sizable faction in America of people who are deeply interested in ascertaining the truth about a lot of things. They are aiming to get at it, too, for example, the truth about the 2020 election. Maybe now you can begin to see why this is important.

Note, no scare quotes or personal possessives on that truth.