CHAPTER SIX   

The Expert Scam

The Elite’s justification for its own position is its expertise, which it uses to run society’s institutions on behalf of the Normals who are busy doing other things, like generating revenue for those institutions. Government, media, Hollywood—you are supposed to have skills to be a part of them. And yet all the Normals see is chaos and failure.

That’s the disconnect. You have a bunch of people who want the respect and reward that comes from applying their expertise successfully without actually having done so. Some, the affiliates and hangers on who grasp at membership in the Elite simply by aping the Elite’s attitude, have no expertise at all.

An expert is supposed to be someone with demonstrated skills in a certain field. In law, because lawyers hire experts to testify all the time, the word has a specific definition. The Federal Rules of Evidence, Rule 702, “Testimony by Expert Witnesses,” defines an “expert” as:

A witness who is qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education may testify in the form of an opinion or otherwise if:

(a) the expert’s scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue;

(b) the testimony is based on sufficient facts or data;

(c) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods; and

(d) the expert has reliably applied the principles and methods to the facts of the case.

This means that in court, and elsewhere, an expert is supposed to be someone with knowledge that most others do not have—“scientific,” “technical,” or “specialized.” He makes decisions based on facts and data, and his analysis is based on proven techniques applied to the situation. Expertise can be broad or narrow. There are many kinds of experts we encounter in our daily lives—doctors, lawyers, but also teachers, priests, movie producers, and even the guy who fixes your Dodge Caravan. Because they are experts, we give them certain tasks to do that we either cannot or do not want to perform ourselves. For example, you could probably ask your spouse to check you for prostate issues, but you are wiser to go with a urologist.

Many of the Elite are experts, though not every expert (like your auto mechanic) is Elite. Some are technical experts; others are experts in performing the tasks of governance. That’s no surprise, and that is the way it should be. After all, the point of the Elite is to have a group of people ready to do the jobs that are essential to the job of day-to-day governing and to other societal tasks.

But some of those experts are not good at being experts, at least not in any real sense of the word. And their results speak for themselves. Iraq. Chicago. The Emoji Movie.

If a purported expert is offered to testify in court by a party, and the expert does not meet those qualifications, he is excluded and barred from offering his opinion. In court, to be an expert, you actually need to be an expert. You have to demonstrate competence.

In American society, including in politics, you don’t. To be an expert, too often all you have to do is repeat what the Elite wants to hear.

Expertise is one of the tools the Elite employs to exercise the power delegated to it by the Normals. It is a sword to enforce their will, and it is also a shield it deploys to protect itself from accountability.

“Shut up and listen to the experts,” the Elite demands. But you never hear the Elite demand any accountability for when the experts they promote are wrong. That’s not an accident. If experts are seen to be fallible, then the Elite is seen to be fallible, and the Elite can’t afford to be seen as fallible.

As in any human activity where there is no accountability, the Elite’s experts screw up on a regular basis. Here’s a test. Look down at your toast. There might be butter on it—or maybe not. If not, it’s because the experts told you that rich, creamy butter was gooey, yellow death. But now, the experts are not so sure. Maybe the Grim Reaper comes in the form of bread, that carby nightmare you spread that delicious, healthy butter upon. Which is it?

The experts are not so sure anymore, though for a while they were positive, and their hypotheses condemned generations to consume the culinary abominations that are low-fat foods. And that’s a problem for an Elite that seeks to use experts to place certain questions out of bounds for input by the Normals they wish to govern.

Progressivism, a disease of the Elite, is notorious for its preference for governing through the wisdom of detached, neutral experts who will be guided solely by the best of science and philosophy. These great minds will not be subject to the passions and prejudices of lesser men and women. Their fact-based, logical rule will usher in a new age of enlightened governance.

And they’ve been trying to impose a regime of rule by experts, with varying levels of intensity, since the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, and everything’s gone great since then.

Wait, what?

When the Elite talks about expertise, it really is not talking about using experts as they should be used—as technical advisors to the decision makers. The Elite does not want that. It wants experts—their experts—to be the actual decision makers. The demand for rule by the experts is a demand for rule by the Elite all gussied up and tricked out so it looks bright and shiny and selfless where, in reality, it is precisely the opposite.

The Cult of the Experts is about taking the power to make major decisions away from the Normals. Normals readily cede the minor decisions to the experts in America’s institutions; that’s what experts are for. But for the big choices, the policy choices, the Normals demand a say, and today’s Elite experts hate that.

In a proper representative democracy, experts provide advice and suggestions, and it is the people, the Normals, who should make the policy decisions via their elected representatives. In other words, the scientists at, say, the Department of Science, make the day-to-day decisions, but they don’t make the policy decisions about science. They give advice to the Secretary of Science, who was appointed by the president, whom the people elected, and the Secretary of Science makes more substantial decisions, but within the bounds of the laws passed by the people’s representatives in Congress. And the very biggest decisions? Those are reserved for the president or Congress—people whose names appear on a ballot.

But the Elite wants to skip all those steps where the Normals, via their representatives, might actually get a say in setting policy. They want to go to direct rule by the experts, with the confidence that the experts will always be loyal to the Elite.

And the Elite no longer makes a real effort to hide that fact. Tom Nichols, a noted Never Trumper who teaches at the Naval War College, even wrote a book titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). His ultimate point boils down to the idea that Normals should defer to the experts and stop trying to influence policy based on their own interests and let the experts decide. Normals’ objection is to what Nichols calls “established knowledge,” because experience has taught Normals that “established knowledge” is not always “accurate knowledge.” It is, instead, always the “knowledge” established by the Elite to support the Elite’s preferences and agenda. This “established knowledge” is not necessarily an objective fact, and it denies human nature to argue that it always will be. After all, experts are people, too, which means they can be just as greedy, small-minded, bigoted, and selfish as they think the Normals are.

The campaign Nichols’s title refers to is simply the refusal of Normal Americans to defer to the Elite. And why should they? The hallmarks of an actual expert are neutrality and objectivity, at least in the scientific field (there are also social science experts, who are to science as electronic dance music is to music). Experts often incorporate the scientific method into reaching their conclusions. They carefully gather data and test it against a hypothesis. If the data supports the hypothesis, so be it. If the data does not support the hypothesis, they go get themselves a new hypothesis. The data proves what the data proves—if you really are an expert and not a hack.

Science, after all, is a way of gathering and systematizing knowledge, not some sort of pseudoreligion. When the Elite preens about “believing in science,” they really are not talking about accepting the conclusions that the data compel regardless of whose apple cart they overturn. If they did, Facebook would not be offering you 7,684 choices for your gender identity. You’d have two choices, because there is no combination of chromosomes that creates a “two-spirit nonbinary femme butch otherkin who identifies as a corgi.”

That is not science, and science is not a cafeteria where you get to pick and choose the things science applies to and the things it does not. When a member of the Elite starts flapping his talk hole about “believing in science,” what he, she, or xe means is that he, she, or xe firmly believes in the approved tenets of Elite dogma. But instead of leveling and admitting it is dogma, it gets labeled as “science” in order to allow anyone who dares question the sacred tenets to be dismissed as some sort of slack-jawed kook who eschews fancy book learnin’.

The mind-numbing tweets of Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York, demonstrate the problem. He’s an icon for the kind of guy who wears a T-shirt that reads I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE on his way to the alternative healing bookstore where he works. Tyson’s specialty is dumbing down science for people who wish to seem smart, offering them unimaginative observations phrased as epiphanies designed to blow his cultists’ collective minds. For example, on January 1, 2017, he welcomed his awe-struck Twitter followers to AD 2017 with this shocking insight: “To all on the Gregorian Calendar, Happy New Year! A day that’s not astronomically significant… in any way… at all… whatsoever.”¹

Whoa.

Heavy.

All over America… nay, all over the planet… people were swallowing the red pill and awakening to the shocking secret that dates on the Western calendar are not based on any particular astronomical occurrence.

Ta da!

You know, if you want to be regarded as elite, and not merely a member of the Elite, you ought to raise your game. And it’s all a game. It’s not the pursuit of knowledge. It’s wearing pedestrian knowledge like a funny hat and walking around a cocktail party just waiting for people to ask you about it.

The idea of “science” has become just another means by which the Elite attempts to disempower the Normals it should be working for while flattering itself. You will often see a Christian fish symbol stuck on the back of an SUV—well, you often do in the parts of America beyond the flight range of seagulls. There’s a similar symbol of a fish with little legs you will often see on Priuses covered with seagull droppings—and in case you don’t get the joke, the word Darwin is there inside the fish. Take that, people who do not believe the unutterably complex interplay of physical laws within the universe and the mind-bogglingly complex collection of organic structures and processes that constitutes life just sprung into being from nothing for some reason.

Where the original fish identified persecuted Christians for their brothers in Christ, the Darwin fish is a cult identifier for the least persecuted people in human history, the American Elite. They want you to know who they are, and they want your deference. So do the experts among them. The Elite’s experts want to be treated with the respect and reverence due those who dedicate themselves to nonpartisan, disinterested service.

Except, like our media, they don’t actually want to be disinterested public servants. They want to be partisan players pursuing an agenda—while still getting the same kind of deference that might be appropriate for those who are not.

The notion that Normals somehow have an unreasoning hatred for experts is ridiculous. Many of the Normals themselves are experts in their own fields—let’s see a patent lawyer from Manhattan track a deer. The problem is the exploitation and perversion of Elite expertise to conduct a power grab that disenfranchises Normal Americans.

Expertise is good, and it is necessary. The notion of the Elite itself is based on the idea of expertise—by training, experience, and inclination, the people in the Elite are prepared to operate the levers of power in our society on behalf of the Normals who are off doing something else. The “on behalf of the Normals” is the key part of that sentence—expertise is properly understood as a resource designed to fulfill the Normal citizen’s ability to exercise self-governance. It is not designed to replace that ability to self-govern.

But what happens when the servant—and the Elite and experts are properly understood as servants—decides he’s smarter than the master and wants to actually be the master?

The disenfranchisement of the Normals by the Elite and their pet experts is not a side effect; it is the goal. They are the Keepers of the Secret Flame of Science. Cede them your autonomy and despair!

To hide the truth, the Elite reacts to criticism of experts who swerve outside of their proper lane by trying to frame any objection to their overreach as one to expertise itself. This is worse than dumb—it’s a lie, and not a very convincing one. No one would prefer to do his own C-section on his wife. You want doctors with years of training wielding the scalpels. And you want them to be experienced. In fact, you want the doctors to walk into the operating room bored nearly to tears and chatting about their 401(k)s as they scrub up and stride over to the patient. You want them talking about anything but the surgery as they slice through the abdominal wall, pull out the kid, and flop the uterus, which looks like a raw flank steak, onto the patient’s stomach.

The husband can peer over the curtain and gape at this tableau with confidence. For the docs you want, this is nothing special because they have done a couple thousand of these. They’ve seen it all. This is no big deal. You don’t want the shaky new resident to start cutting and suddenly exclaim, “Holy crap, that uterus totally looks like a flank steak!”

Hell, you want those doctors to go out for a flank steak afterward.

You want them to be technically proficient. But it’s your (or your wife’s) body, and that’s where you get a say. Because before they start slicing and dicing, these specialists, these experts, must come to you. They must come to you and explain what they think you should do, and why, and what the risks are. And then…

And then, you make the decision. Not them. You.

They may think you are making the wrong decision. Maybe wifey wants to keep pushing. Maybe she had a friend involved in one of those rare circumstances where a simple caesarean section procedure went to shit, and she doesn’t want to roll the dice. Maybe she just doesn’t trust doctors.

It doesn’t matter.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what the expert surgeons think. It’s not for them to make that decision. They are the technical specialists. They give their best advice, and they sit back and let the proper decision maker make the decision.

That can be frustrating for an expert. After all, an expert gives the advice he thinks is right. He’s trying to identify the best option available. And sometimes, that stubborn patient makes the wrong decision.

Why not skip the middleman? Why not let the doctor choose and the hell with what the patient wants?

Two reasons, one utilitarian and one philosophical.

The utilitarian reason involves information and priorities. The doctor actually has only a narrow range of information at hand—the objective technical information regarding the procedure. He knows that cold, if you have an experienced surgeon. But he doesn’t have all the information that is relevant. What else is relevant? Well, the patient’s objective and subjective priorities and the patient’s concerns.

The patient may have objective objections to the procedure. There may be an issue with insurance and money, or a concern about the scarring. The hospitalization and recovery time might matter in terms of employment or caring for other kids. These are all objective issues the doctor must brief the patient on before getting consent, and therefore it’s not unreasonable for issues to perhaps form the basis of granting or withholding consent.

And there is another objective issue, rarer but significant. The surgeon could be wrong. This patient might not be a proper candidate for a caesarean section, and the patient (who might have a second opinion or even be a doctor herself) might know it. Tens of thousands of patients die every year from medical malpractice. Experts’ advice is not always sound. Sometimes the data is incorrect or incomplete. Sometimes the expert draws the wrong conclusion. Sometimes the expert is just flat-out incompetent. And there is also the natural tendency of an expert toward an opinion that he is personally comfortable with. If you ask a surgeon if surgery is necessary, you might find that a surgeon is more likely to go for the scalpel than an obstetrician who does not do any cutting. That’s not a flaw—that’s natural, which is the point. Experts are human beings, and they operate within the bounds of human nature.

But sometimes experts are wrong. The mere status of an expert is not, in and of itself, a guarantee that the opinion you are being offered is sound. Look at the Federal Rules of Evidence rule—it is premised on the notion that both sides will appoint an expert. This implies that those experts will disagree, meaning that at least one of them is wrong.

At least one is always wrong.

And there’s more—since they are both being paid, there is the chance that their monetary compensation will influence their opinions. It should come as no surprise that every single time a trial lawyer cross-examines an expert witness on the stand, he begins with a question along the lines of, “How much is my opponent paying you to testify here today?”

Every single time.

After all, human beings are human beings, and experts are not necessarily without self-interest and, occasionally, greed. While this is not likely a consideration in a surgeon recommending not to go with a vaginal childbirth, it’s not entirely irrelevant that a surgeon does not get paid unless he operates.

But there are also subjective issues at play, issues that revolve around the patient’s priorities. The patient is the one who puts a value on having a vaginal birth—some women don’t care and just want that baby out of them right freaking now, while others find it very important to have a natural childbirth for whatever reason. Maybe she just really wants to have a baby that way because her sister did, and a caesarian would make her feel less “womanly.” Maybe the doctor thinks that’s silly. Maybe you do, too. But she doesn’t, and what everyone else thinks does not matter.

The patient’s preferences are important even if you can’t quantify them in terms of percentages, or at least they should be important in a culture that recognizes the inherent liberty due all human beings. That’s the philosophical part—you don’t have to have an objective reason for granting or denying your consent. You can just not want to give it.

That’s where the experts get antsy, because they not only don’t necessarily have access to all the objective information (Does the doctor understand that your mom can’t come out and help with the kid while you recover from surgery?), they certainly do not have the subjective information (Does the sawbones understand just how much you want to have a natural birth?). Here’s the thing—experts can talk and talk and talk, and the decision maker might still choose “wrong.”

What if the doctor said, “Well, statistically, it’s clear that the best outcome will come from a caesarean. So, prep her, and gag her if she won’t shut up.” Based on the purely objective facts he knows and based on his priorities, he is likely correct. But he only knows some of the objective facts and not necessarily any of the subjective facts, and it is not his place to put a value on any of them.

A citizen sets his or her own priorities. A subject is subject to the priorities of others, even if those priorities are set with some level of a desire to help.

Now let’s apply this same principle to society. We hear a lot about how Normals hate science because they refuse to yield to the demands of the Elite and its menagerie of pet experts, who insist that we are on the verge of dying from climate change if we don’t comply right this minute. But Normals have yet to follow their advice. Carbon remains untaxed. Barbecues roast rib eyes and spare ribs across the land. Outside of blue enclaves, people don’t post on Facebook how they are forgoing the bearing of children in order to rescue Gaia from doom.

This drives the Elite crazy. Its response is to claim Normals are Neanderthal half-wits.

There is no doubt that the Elite is generally on board with the climate change scam. That’s one of the markers of admission. If you are Elite, you will almost certainly buy into it at some level, even if you are a putative conservative. All the smart people do, you know. And the refusal of the Normals to do what the Elite contends it will take to fight the threat of slightly warmer temperatures in a century simply reaffirms the sense that Normals are unfit to participate in their own governance.

You see, the Normals have chosen wrong.

Or have they?

The climate change controversy is a terrific example of the problem of expertise abuse. It has everything—self-interest by the Elite and self-dealing by the experts. It has objectively false conclusions and a rejection of the scientific method. And it has an underlying theme of disregard for the preferences and priorities of the very people who are supposed to be the ones whose interests are being protected.

At the outset, the whole premise of the campaign is focused on bum-rushing into effect a plan of action consisting of a bunch of Elite-favored policies right now with minimal input from the Normals. That’s one reason we get the breathless alarmism—no time to think! We have to ban cars tomorrow or else the penguins will die, then the polar bears will die, and then the children will die!

Everyone will die, damn it, there’s no time to talk! The experts know what’s best and if we keep yakking, pretty soon the water will be up above our ankles in Denver.

Now, over the last two decades of nonstop red alerting the Elite has not been able to push its agenda forward, except in silly places like California, and we have had some time to evaluate the accuracy of these warnings of impending doom. If you credit the claims of not too many years ago, by now we should be pushing up the daisies into the searing oven that is Earth’s atmosphere. We were told the ice caps were melting. They’re still there. We were told that blizzards were a thing of the past. That would be news to most of the United States.

But this alarmism is nothing new. If you credit what the experts warned about back in the seventies, right now we should all be entombed in a mile-deep glacier. Back then, it was global cooling and another ice age was on the way, and the climate change crew is infuriated whenever someone brings this up. Of course, it did not quite work out as promised. Nor did the ozone hole fry us all. Nor did acid rain melt us all into puddles of pinkish goo.

It’s hard to inspire folks to believe in the cult of expertise when the experts are so wrong so often—especially when they get angry and deny what they actually predicted. They weren’t wrong—you are wrong for remembering what they said! Call it “greenhouse gaslighting.”

It’s not being wrong occasionally that is a problem. Normal people understand that one can be competent and get things wrong. Perhaps you’re good at doing oil changes and you’ve done a lot of them, but one time you fail to put the new oil filter on right and the oil leaks. Annoying, sure, but not a referendum on your general ability to do an oil change. You just forgot to tighten the new oil filter. You swear a little, get the Camaro back on the lift, redo it, and then you are ready to zoom. A pain in the ass, but one incident does not call into question your competency to perform this basic task.

Everyone makes mistakes.

But here’s the thing. When you make a mistake, you admit it and fix it. The problem arises when you ignore the criticism or, worse, deny you made a mistake at all.

No, damn it, that oil’s supposed to be leaking! You’re an oil leak necessity denier!

Admitting errors—that is, confessing that your hypothesis was incorrect—should not be an issue. The scientific method is all about making errors, all the way up until you get the answer that at least appears to be right in light of all of the available data. After all, even things science was nearly certain of are sometimes proven false—you have butter on that muffin? Science is all about proving theories false, falsifying them. That’s why unthinking faith in science is ridiculous—if you have faith in your result, you aren’t doing science.

And ’fessing up to errors is necessary to maintain people’s confidence. Admitting mistakes show the Normals that an expert thinks accuracy is important. It gives the observer the impression that the expert cares about getting the answer right rather than his pride or his agenda. In other words, it makes the expert seem like what people expect an expert to be.

So when you have a nearly four-decade-long series of climate errors—not little errors or niggling technicalities, but big, honking errors—and absolutely no accountability, that’s a problem. This is the same accountability problem the Elite always presents with. It screws up, does not make it right, and then tries to continue on as if it had not shattered its credibility while calling Normals idiots for pointing out the truth.

People notice when you tell them that the Arctic is going to broil and the fried polar bears we were promised never materialize. The vivid imagery of igniting ursoids is really useful in getting attention, but if you don’t come up with the burning bears, people will have questions. And telling those people, “Well, you just hate science, you science denier who denies science” is not a particularly effective rejoinder.

Where’s our ice age?

Where’s our ozone hole o’ death?

Where’s our acid rain monsoon?

Where’s our global convection oven?

Like the apocalypse cultists of the past, the prophets of doom can only roll back the big day so many times before the congregation stops marking its calendar for the next Armageddon and refuses to once again gather naked beneath the trees to bathe in the moonlight as they await the arrival of the four horsemen who never seem to come.

A track record of failure with no explanation other than “You’re stupid!” is not going to inspire the awe and deference from the Normals the Elite was hoping for.

The ever-changing standard for evaluating the evidence is another problem. People notice glaring inconsistencies, and they do not build confidence. Every time there’s a heat wave, that’s global warming. Of course, sometimes it just gets hot—you can’t have the temperatures setting new records if you didn’t have records in the first place. But, for the weather cultists, every time it’s a bit toastier than usual it is proof positive that Earth is on the way to becoming a kiln.

So, obviously if every time the mercury rises it’s evidence that global warming is a thing, then every time the mercury drops it’s evidence against global warming. Nah. You and your linear thinking! Cold is also proof of global warming. Only someone who hates science would apply the scientific method and allow data to falsify the preconceived conclusion!

It’s also racist somehow.

But, after this charade goes on and on and on over the years, the way every single thing is always proof of global warming is a bit hard to ignore. You have a terrible fire season, and the weather cultists come out in force to announce that it’s totally got to be global warming. But you have a recollection of prior bad fire years, and if there were bad fire years in the past with similar magnitudes of conflagration, then it’s not really a trend, is it? And if it’s not a trend, then it’s not evidence things are getting worse. Nor is it easy to accept that a bad fire year confirms the theory, but a good fire year means nothing. Seems a little… convenient.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the staggering death toll and widespread destruction was pinned on global warming. But what about how we went for nearly a decade after without a major hurricane? Was that evidence that maybe the global warming trend line was headed south? Cease that crazy talk, denier!

But as soon as Houston got flooded, there was global warming in effect again. Better late than never.

The “heads we have global warming, tails we also have global warming” game is really quite remarkable for its audacity. After all, these are people who FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE and all, and suddenly the possibility of falsifying certain hypotheses is now off the table. It’s almost like they aren’t doing actual science but are working backward from a result they want.

That’s not science. Call it “science” instead. “Science” is science’s creepy adopted little brother who Mom and Dad discover trying to set the dog on fire in the basement.

Which is why they shuck and jive and try to weasel out of accountability in the rare instances when the voices of the people saying, “Er, uh, I don’t think that’s how science works,” are heard over the chorus of outraged liberals screeching “Denier!” and wanting to set the heretics aflame. Apparently burning witches is worth the carbon cost.

So they try to hide how they switched out science in favor of “science” in a variety of ways. Global warming stopped being “global warming” after the conservative media gleefully ran footage of Al Gore walking into the umpteenth snowed-out global warming conference decked out like an Eskimo on a whale hunt. It became “climate change,” which is an utterly brilliant formulation since any kind of change confirms the concept.

Hotter? Climate change!

Cooler? Climate change!

No change? Why don’t you freaking love “science,” denier!

Being the Elite, they also had to serve up a healthy dollop of condescension. “You’re confusing weather with climate,” they would say as soon as it snowed. But then, as soon as it got hot, it was, “See, I told you so!”

So, the weird weather cult had a track record of failure, and it treated the basic principles of science as optional, but we Normals were still supposed to capitulate. And to what? Well, that’s the next issue.

We were supposed to capitulate to giving the Elite more power and money.

We are always supposed to capitulate to giving the Elite more power and money. That’s the solution for every problem, not just ones involving weather.

I mean “climate.”

Remember the “Here Comes the Ice Age!” fad of the seventies? What was the answer then? Come up with more money for the Elite, and more power for them to exercise over the Normals.

The answer for acid rain? Come up with more money for the Elite, and more power for them to exercise over the Normals.

And the ozone hole? Come up with more money for the Elite, and more power for them to exercise over the Normals.

Power comes in many forms, including regulatory power. “There’s a crisis coming! No time to wait! We need to give the Department of the Armageddon Du Jour the power to regulate us in order to head off our impending doom!”

With regard to the climate scam, look at what Obama did. He promised to, and nearly did, wipe out the coal industry. But don’t worry. While tens of thousands of Normals lost their livelihoods as ritual sacrifices offered up by the smug enviro faithful of San Francisco and Manhattan, Obama’s buddies got government handouts to let them get rich off cheesy “green energy” schemes. Coal never had a problem turning a profit; not so for scandal-plagued enterprises like Solyndra, which weren’t really designed to solve the energy problem. They were designed to take government money from the public purse and hand it over to designated members of the Elite.

Oh, there’s always a tax increase involved with every new crisis. With the climate change scam, it’s a carbon tax. This is supposed to lower the demand for carbon and promote green energy, which is simply another way of saying, “Enrich the buddies of the political Elite.” Have you noticed how, in all the talk about a carbon tax, no one ever mentioned what tax the carbon tax is supposed to replace? Income tax, death tax, property tax—what tax is the carbon tax going to replace?

Just kidding.

It’s supposed to supplement the current taxes. Nothing gets repealed. They would just pile the carbon tax on top of all the other taxes. And it’s the most regressive of taxes because Normals use more carbon fueling up their F-150s than the dork in the Prius with the “Coexist” bumper sticker.

It seems concern for the less fortunate only arises when it involves a demand for Normal people to give up more of their money to the Elite to redistribute to the less fortunate—after taking their vigorish, of course. And it’s fine to take from the less fortunate, too, if it’s in the name of “science.”

Pop quiz, hotshot. Name one proposal for ameliorating the climate catastrophe that hits the Elite harder than the Normals.

Just one.

Tick, tock.

What about the impact on the Normals? Well, you don’t need that big truck, the Elite has decided. The Elite doesn’t drive trucks—a lot of them don’t even have cars. Why don’t you take the subway like everyone else, though there isn’t a subway within five hundred miles? Or ride a bike—that should be bracing, pedaling across the Oklahoma landscape in January. You say you need your truck for your job? Why, what kind of job requires a truck? Maybe four-wheel drive is a necessity—do you go to the mountains to ski?

Autos are a big problem for the Elite and were long before the fake weather scare got ginned up. This is especially true among the urban planners—more experts—who find cars inefficient. It’s so, so decentralized. Public transportation is the way the masses should move. Orderly, regularized, public transportation is the way to get Normals from Point A, which the experts designate, to Point B, which the experts also designate.

Notice what’s missing in that Elite calculation?

What the Normals want.

Maybe they don’t want to go from Point A to Point B. Maybe they want to go from Point C to Point D, or Point E, and maybe they want to stop on the way home and buy a gallon of milk at the supermarket located at Point F.

Maybe they want the flexibility of traveling when they want to travel, not when some expert allows them to by creating a schedule.

Maybe they want to crank some Ted Nugent in their car and head bang all the way home, or listen to a book without sticking things in their ears. Maybe they want to talk on the phone in the peaceful confines of their ride without speaking in a low hush so as not to annoy all the other poor suckers exiled to the bus.

Maybe they just prefer to drive.

But none of that matters. Not one bit. Because the problem with the Elite and their experts is the same problem as always. The Normals ceded the Elite the authority to do certain work organizing and running society’s institutions with the understanding that the Elite could collect certain benefits (money and prestige) in return for competently executing these tasks for the benefit of the Normals.

But they haven’t competently executed these tasks for the benefit of the Normals. Piling self-dealing on top of incompetence and deceit is a bad, bad look.

The corruption of our Elite has spread to our society’s technicians, the experts. Like the Elite, they misunderstand their role. It is to advise and enable, not to command and control. It is to help make policy, not make it themselves using their own criteria and their own priorities.

Of course, experts get mad at the Normals, and experts chafe under the Normals’ bridle when the Normals pull on the reins. But that’s too bad. If the Normals are not setting society’s priorities then we have ceased to be a representative democracy and have become a technocracy.

The Normals did not vote for that.

In the wake of Trump’s election, the Elite noticed the Normals’ absolutely understandable dismay with the Elite attempting to assert expertise as a way to bar input from those they see as lesser men. There is nothing our Elite detests more than uppity Normals.

The December 27, 2016, New Yorker ran a cartoon that was the perfect encapsulation of the Elite’s attitude and, unintentionally, its essential ineptitude. The little black-and-white drawing depicted a Normal with a moustache that no one in the Elite would ever imagine sporting turning to his fellow coach passengers and asking for a show of hands. The caption read, “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?”²

Good one, nodded thousands of people who thought they were smarter than those upstart yahoos who did not know their place. Implicitly, they identified with the airline pilot, though none could fly a 777.

Here’s the thing. The joke did not work. Its underlying premise was false. After all, what commercial airline pilot decides where he is going?

None. The Normals who buy tickets decide where they are going.

Now, the pilots are skilled technicians—let’s leave aside the fact that computers largely fly commercial airliners these days and give them some credit for technical proficiency. And a guy like Chesley Sullenberger demonstrates that there still are experts who deserve respect and reverence out there. But that’s what pilots are—technicians. They have a narrow, specific skill set, and based upon it Normals cede them the minimum level of authority needed to complete the task.

They fly the plane. They don’t decide where it goes. That’s for the Normals to decide by buying their tickets. If the pilot were smug enough to decide he wanted to fly somewhere else, there would be consequences. And the Normals back in steerage would be absolutely justified at being pissed.

Are the New Yorker readers who chuckled at this masterful takedown of pretentious bumpkins who presume to dare object to the decisions of their superiors really nodding in agreement at the real premise of the cartoon?

Do they believe that the idea of governing with the consent of the governed is an outdated concept? Are they really saying that Normals should sit quietly in their seats, mere passengers in their own country, and be taken wherever the Elite feels like going?

Do they believe that the notion of Normals having a say in their country’s big picture policy decisions is obsolete?

Do they believe that the Normals should sit down, shut up, and be thankful for the dictatorship of the Elite?

Of course they do.

Why do you think they got so furious at Trump, so uncontrollably angry that they let the mask slip in the form of this dumb cartoon and a thousand other digs at regular people?

It was because Donald Trump knew his proper role. But it was not the role the Elite considered proper. It was not as a fighter for the interests of the Elite.