Experts are Killing Expertise

Progressives bitch about conservatives "rejecting expertise," and think this means they are ignorant Luddites. In fact, average people have recognized what is obvious: a combination of hubris and ideological capture has led experts to dogmatically advance politically motivated conclusions that much less-well-justified than they make them out to be. COVID is a good example. The left loves control and collective action--and hates risk--and so fell in love with vaccines and mask mandates. The CDC hopped to and--as we've come to expect from such institutions--proclaimed vaccines and masks undeniable sovereign cures. Oh and, for good measure: declared that we knew for a fact that the virus didn't come from a lab. And that any reference to it that suggested any connection to China--including calling it the "Wuhan virus'--was racist. And stigma. And whatever.

   Conservatives and other ordinary people don't deny the expertise of physicists or electricians. They--rightly--question the expertise of experts who are obviously, dogmatically, exceeding the epistemic bounds withing which they should be operating--and those who embrace political correctness, allowing their political preferences to influence their pronouncements.

   And of course then there are non-expert "experts"--political actors who possess only pseudoexpertise--women's studies faculty, gender studies faculty...in fact all the "studies" faculty. DEI administrators and associated race grifters. And now I'd add: "misinformation" "experts" like Nina Jankowicz. Many of CDC's proclamations about COVID weren't medical or scientific, but political, having to do with politically correct--i.e. leftist--naming conventions, "stigma," and whatnot.