Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
One of the most preposterous recent trends has been the political use of supposed expert letters and declarations of support from so-called “authorities.”
These pretentious testimonies of purported professionalism are different from the usual inane candidate endorsements from celebrities and politicos.
Instead, they are used by politicians to impress and persuade the public to follow the “expertise,” “science,” or “authorities” to support all sorts of injurious initiatives and policies—of dubious value and otherwise without much political support.
Think of all the health experts who collectively swore to us that the COVID mRNA vaccinations would give us ironclad and lasting protection from being either infectious or infected and were without any side effects.
Other “authorities” assured us the first nationwide lockdown in U.S. history would stop COVID without hurting the social or economic life of the country.
Ditto testimonies about the pangolin-bat origins of COVID or the authenticity of the bogus Steele dossier.
Do we still remember the 1,200 healthcare “professionals” who in June 2020 told us that hitting the streets in mass numbers to protest during the post-George Floyd riots was a legitimate exemption from their own prior insistence on a complete nationwide quarantine? Or as these ideologues lectured us as “experts”:
“We wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health.”
To convince the public to get behind the agendas of politicians—increasingly on the left—ideologues round up groups of politically kindred professors, researchers, retired officials, and former bureaucrats to show off their supposed expertise and convince the public by means of their “authority”.
Perhaps one of the most notorious examples was the “70 arms control and nuclear experts,” who in 2015 were gathered together by Obama subordinates to persuade Americans to support the administration’s bankrupt Iran Deal—the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
It was clearly a treaty designed to appease and empower Iran on empty promises that the theocracy would slow down its nuclear bomb program. And it was railroaded, illegally, through Congress without the constitutionally required two-thirds treaty vote of the Senate.
But what followed from the deal was an empowered Iran. Freed from the burden of embargoes, it subsequently raked in billions of dollars in oil revenues—to lavish upon its terrorist appendages Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.
Trump withdrew from the farce in 2018. His actions quickly bankrupted the terrorist state with embargoes and sanctions—only to see Biden-Harris beg Iran, in vain, to reenter the deal in 2021.
What followed was a second round of U.S. appeasement and the greatest Iranian-fueled terrorist wave in the Middle East since the 1980 theocratic Iranian revolution.
None of those Iran-Deal experts have weighed in since.
Do we remember Joe Biden’s disastrous “Build Back Better” and related huge spending packages? Coupled with additional borrowing, they contributed to well over a combined $4 trillion deficit from 2021 to 2022.
The public at least knew well enough that the economy was beginning to boom after the gradual decline of COVID. Pent-up consumer demand was starting to skyrocket. Still low interest rates encouraged reckless borrowing. Supply chains were still backed up and had not recovered from the national quarantines.
Stuff that the now cash-laden public wanted was often in short supply.
In other words, people wished to splurge on things that were scarce—just as Biden printed $4 trillion of new “stimulus” to boil an already overheating economy.
The result would soon be hyperinflation topping out at a 9% percent annual inflation rate. During the Biden-Harris administration’s four years, the price surge would leave key staple costs some 20-30 percent higher than in 2021.
Yet to ensure such madness, in 2021, we were assured there would be no such inflation. To convince us of the unconvincing, Team Biden rounded up “Seventeen recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences” to sign an implausible letter to reassure the public that the massive spending (called “investments”) was “long overdue.”
Worse still, the illustrious left-wing economists blindly doubled down on public fears of what soon would be crippling price hikes due to the massive borrowing: “Some, however, have invoked fears of inflation as a reason to not undertake these investments. This view is shortsighted.”
None of the seventeen Noble Prize winners ever apologized for their wrongheaded predictions and assessments that greenlighted destructive inflation.
In 2024, the academic economists were back at it again, this time manifested in media speak as “sixteen of the world’s most notable economists—all Nobel Prize winners.”
They were now signing another letter for the very opposite agenda: warning that a putative President Trump’s third term would spur inflation by way of his supposedly reckless spending proposals!
In other words, when Biden wished to print trillions of dollars, partisan Nobel Prize winners in advance discounted the crippling hyperinflation that followed. But now, given their dislike of Trump, they reversed course, warning the country that Trump’s likely deficit spending was “irresponsible.”
Would that such suddenly tight-fisted, inflation-hawk Nobel laureates had earlier warned us of their concerns in 2021, before the inevitable Biden inflation emasculated the middle class.
Yet the worst groupthink letter of supposed authorities was the now infamous and abject lie spread by the supposedly illustrious “51 former intelligence officials.” In weaselly language, they pontificated that Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”—an emphatic assertion designed, however, by the word “earmarks” to shield them from the charge of lying, which, in fact, they knew that they were.
The signees were supposedly our best and brightest—headed by former CIA directors John Brennan (who previously had confessed to lying twice to Congress) and Leon Panetta, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (who previously also confessed he had lied once to Congress).
The point of the letter, like the aim of all such disingenuous politicking masked by supposed academic credentials and past government expertise, was political: to help Joe Biden’s evasions in his last 2020 debate on the eve of the election.
Armed with the fraudulent letter, Biden on the stage trashed Trump’s charge of Biden family corruption by citing the letter’s professional authentication that his son’s incriminating laptop was cooked up in Moscow.
The charge of “Russian disinformation” was, of course, a blatant lie—given the FBI already had taken possession of the laptop and knew it was genuine.
Everything about the letter stunk.
It was cooked up by then-Biden campaign aide Antony Blinken (later rewarded by becoming our current Secretary of State). He wrote Michael Morrell, a past interim CIA director, asking him to round up supposedly retired intelligence grandees to thwart Trump’s plausible accusations that the authentic laptop’s contents proved the corruption and tax evasion of the Biden family.
In a close election, the purpose was to prevent a Biden debate disaster and thus the perception that the Biden family was crooked. Such convincing charges might have lost him the election.
Many of the supposed disinterested “retired” authorities were actually still employed as contractors by the CIA.
In the end, none of the experts apologized for their misinformation, even when one post-election poll revealed that their deliberate efforts to mislead the voting public had affected the outcome of the 2020 election. Our experts’ charge of “Russian disinformation” turned out to be classic “American election interference.”
More recently, we saw another such letter with the same-old, same-old boilerplate. Lots of names (100!) of supposedly “retired” Republican “national security figures” emphatically endorsed Kamala Harris.
Given the predictably corrupt genre, almost anyone could have anticipated the letter’s contents. The list of “former” national security signees broadcast their bloated titles (but did not disclose whether any are now still contracting for the government) to assure us of their exalted expertise.
Like all such letters, the public has no idea who these obscure supposed expert national security figures are or even who they were when they worked for past Republican administrations. The point is simply to scare the public into voting for Democrat Harris because supposed experts, who have titles and were once insider Republicans, now despise Donald Trump and want to use their former positions and supposedly conservative credentials to convince us he’s dangerous. But it does not take a Ph.D. or J.D. to fathom that Afghanistan, Gaza, Israel, the wider Middle East in general, Ukraine, North Korea, and Iran were all quiet during the Trump administration. And all have blown up during the derelict Harris-Biden tenure. In the case of Russia, Vladimir Putin invaded other countries on his border in three of the last four administrations—except Donald Trump’s.
We no longer have a southern border, given the directorship of Border Czar Kamala Harris. We have no idea where or who some 10 million illegal aliens are who entered the country under Harris—after she and Joe Biden blew up an inherited 2020 secure border from Trump.
No matter. Our Republican experts nevertheless assure us that Trump “is unfit to serve again as President, or indeed in any office of public trust,” while Harris, they insist, has “consistently championed the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”
In such Orwellian language, destroying the border and federal immigration law with it, helping to unleash an unprecedented lawfare at election time to ruin a presidential rival, or urging court packing, an end to the electoral college and the senate filibuster are all championing “the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”
In sum, as a general rule, anytime we read an election-cycle solicited letter from retired functionaries, replete with their grandiose former titles, we should completely discount it.
They inevitably were rounded up by politicos. The signees in many cases are likely angling for a return to government; in others, they are loudly virtue-signaling—and in nearly all instances, are usually wrong but will never issue a second letter of apology when their concocted expertise and pretentiousness are thoroughly discredited by subsequent events.
Of note is Sam Clemens’ immortal definition of an “expert”. Said he: “it seems to me that an “expert” is most often just someone from out of town”.
Boy, is that true. I worked at a large, renowned academic institution where it became clear that internal applicants for upper level managerial jobs were always passed over in favor of ones that came from some other institution , even institutions that were second or third tier. It was as if they thought, “Well, you can’t really be very good if you have been working for us.” It was a kind of “grass is greener on the other side of the fence” mentality in regard to personnel decisions.
Excellent point, William.
I remember from my earliest days my Dad’s “take” on “experts”.
An ex is a has been, and a spurt is a drip under pressure.
He grew up on a farm in rural southeastern Nevada during the Great Depression and knew how to work hard and figure things out then DO them. He had a finely tuned sense of cynicismand would, humourously and in good fun, poke at just about anything.
A childhood memory is of the definition being:
X – an unknown quantity
PERT – the sound a drop of water makes.
So an unknown drip – i was young at the time but still find it appealing.
Every single one of the 51 and now 100 new quislings should, upon Trump’s election, be immediately stripped of any security clearances they have at any level for any government information permanently. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that there is no such thing as “permanently” but at least for the next 4 years they won’t be able to trade their access to classified information for prime spots on MSNBC or CNN or any of the Big Three national networks. It should be made clear to the economists among them that they will no longer have any exceptional access to government information, and any project they are involved in that asks for government assistance should be summarily rejected. All these folks need to be ostracized and shunned.
Former government officials/ employees simply should not retain their security clearances without an affirmative showing of a continued legitimate need and, even then, for only as long as that need is affirmatively shown to exist. The idea that government officials retain security clearances after they leave their security-requiring jobs is ridiculous.
Good idea.
Yes the old Argumentum ad Verecundiam taken to its limit!
It does seem to be a pattern that when an election is in the offing, these “elite experts” seemingly just pop up out of the woodwork to offer sage counsel to the nation.
It’s only after the fact that we find out that a 2020 Biden campaign member, in the form of one Anthony Blinken, enlisted the “51 former intelligence officials”, through the agency of ex-CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, to hoax the American voting public that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore “all the signs of Russian disinformation” – Mr. Morell later admitted to Congress that he went along with Blinken, and coordinated a letter, because he wanted to help Joe Biden’s electoral chances. Pretty brazen election interference IMO.
Mr. Blinken was rewarded for his activities by Joe Biden making him Secretary of State in his “administration”. Secretary Blinken is now one of the foremost advocates of the “appease Iran” constituency in the Biden “administration”. I guess the Hunter Biden laptop hoax worked out well for him.
God help us and grant us a miracle.
The outrageous behavior which the American people are exposed to by such superficial inanities is unacceptable. There have to be consequences from this kind of behavior which supes the public and leads them down the Road To Serfdom.
Letters of history(Satire), aka things that didn’t age well::
– Claudius had a letter signed by 113 Roman Generals and Senators that Britannia was a threat to democracy.
– Jefferson Davis had a letter signed by 52 southern economists stating slavery was absolutely necessary for a stable financial system.
– Kaiser Wilhelm II had a letter signed by 37 German Arms Manufacturers that they could easily out produce the combined efforts of the rest of the industrialized nations.
– President Lyndon Johnson had a letter signed by 82 foreign policy experts that sending a mere division or two into Vietnam would lead to the collapse of the Viet Cong and eventually the Viet Minh.
As far as I know, none of the signatories ever suffered the consequences of their endorsements.
I believe this is the correct link to the letter, signed with the ‘new’ Club-100 …
https://rbmralumni4harris.substack.com/p/over-100-republican-national-security
Will some sort of October surprise along these lines still work?
Pray against ANY October surprise and ask God to reveal it, cause it to fizzle like a firecracker dud and that nothing comes of it. Also pray that if a reputation hatchet man or woman tries the “art of the smear” against Trump or Vance will be ruined themselves. “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is not intended to be a suggestion. God takes it seriously!!! I know that God is neither Republican or Democrat, BUT HE DOES HAVE A PERFECT PLAN for America, Israel, and the world. I say LET IT BE DONE!!! God says to us in the book of James:. “You have not because you ask not.”. ASK! ASK! ASK! “Ask and it shall be given to you, knock and the door will be opened to you, seek and you shall find”.
Grook on “Expert Authority”
The experts speak, their letters strong,
Proclaiming right, condemning wrong.
Their titles shine, their wisdom gleams,
Yet truth is lost in noble schemes.
For power’s sake, they twist and bend,
To suit the aims that never end.
But when the dust has cleared, you’ll find,
The “authorities” were often blind.
The sad and frightening part of this is when we think about how influential these people really ARE and how much they will directly impact the upcoming election. Add on top of the “experts” the technological tomfoolery in AI and it’s all more than Orwellian. It doesn’t bode well. I hope I’m wrong.
Noble Prize winners, well, that explains a lot.
“None of the experts apologized for their misinformation…” No, no they didn’t. And there will never be apologies nor consequences for their “expert” lies, Democrat border subversion, 2020 rioting, bogus collusion charges, endless investigations, impeachments, violence, mayhem, Epstein, Hunter laptops, lockdowns, Wrays, Comeys, McCabes, Brennans, et al., and now possibly two inside assassination attempts. The entire society — media, elections, business, education, finance, healthcare, science — is now rigged and fraudulent. The Fix is determined in advance. Conspiracy theories hold more truth.
Isn’t that the truth!
Just as Nikita Khrushchev had threatened back in the 60s
VDH –
I got my Trump/Vance bumper sticker in the mail last week after donating to the “Righteous cause.” The letter (signed by Donald Trump) accompanying the bumper sticker asks that I proudly affix the sticker to my car or home window. I hate to admit to being a bit apprehensive about doing this because I live in a small town in southern California that is politically comparable to Marin County. The house down the block proudly displays “Black Lives Matter” signs and the most vulgar and indecent sign – with words I cannot include in this comment – from the “ShareAbortionPill.info” organization. I truly feel that I’m the only Independent conservative within a 50-mile radius. What to do? Should I just suck it up and display the bumper sticker while standing guard with my SIG Sauer for 24 hours per day until November 5th?
Do Trump/Vance have campaign buttons that you can wear on your lapel? Wearing a campaign button may give you the opportunity to talk with people around town to encourage, inform and persuade.
Do it.
Paraphrasing Bill Buckley, Jr’s comment about political experts: “I’d rather be governed by the first 100 names in the New York City phone book than by the current crop of political hacks representing us now.”
That was said about 60 or so years ago and it was as right then as it is now.
We are electing know-nothing political grifters. Look no further than Joe Briben, old Willie Brown’s whore, Nancy Pelosi & Hillary Clinton.
The way I learned William’s cited saying was “an expert is someone who comes from at least 50 miles away.”
I’m sure that plenty of those former “security mavens” who signed the letter are browning up their noses for a high level job (puke, barf, gag) in a HUH Harris administration. I’m sick that because of Biden’s stab in the back, this “campaign” will last less than half the length of a normal campaign. The more exposure people get to Harris, the less they like her.
God help us all.
Apparently these “experts” believe that they are respected for their condescension. They must be proud that their scat don’t stink!
VDH–a national treasure. Reading his columns and listening to him as a guest is sure to lead to a more advanced level of informed thinking and reasoning than most “students” experience after years of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting under the vapid instruction of those who exemplify, “those who can’t do, teach” and then pooling their ignorance with other gullible students who are always in search of something or a cause to make their hollow lives “signifcant’ never realizing they have the most significance possible. They have been made in the image of God, Who loves them, and offers the option to move from foolishness to wisdom if they are willing to humble themselves, avail themselves of the gift, and then live a life of eternal purpose.
Good insight on man’s search for significance. He is misguided and his worship is misdirected. Man tends to love his sin and deny his Creator. Jesus calls us to repent from sin and turn to him as sovereign Lord and sacrificial Savior. Romans 1:16-32; Mark 1:14,15
Another excellent piece VDH, thank you!
However, I’d like to add the climate change cult experts (CCCE) as the most dangerous and frightful serial group – speak “authorities” to date. The vast majority, of the CCCE “the science is settled” neophytes, will ignore a conversation and consideration even after reading a search result, such as, “the composition of air.” Almost like an anthropogenic ice age instantly enters the room.
Yet, religiosity is strong amongst this group. With no one in the compliant (bought) mainstream media willing to question the orthodoxy, the world governance rages towards a carbon free net zero world unable to explain how a greenhouse gas THEORY is tied to carbon at .04% air makeup.
Just ask Governor mayonnaise head to please explain the linkage.
It’s just money – right?
Thanks for the information on 0.04% CO2.
Water vapor is the main heat retaining gas in the atmosphere.
Much should be said on this fear manipulating topic.
The disturbing feature of this cohort is its infantile regressive tone and content. They are repeating political slogans. What were they doing during the Trump administration ? Leaking ?Protecting the United States or…? How many more undeclared experts, officers, analysts are there in the USG with this degree of political prejudice and primitivism? Have they been manipulated by the Russians – are they vulnerable to recruitment by hostile intelligence services? They have introduced a new problem to the USA-domestic electoral interference by intelligence and defence officials. That makes them a counter intelligence problem as foreign intelligence agencies will assess them as recruitable. They may be assessed in the future as a new form of CI threat to US national security,.
People have had enough of the experts. They want a street fighter now.
In my book if “expertise” is not followed closely by suitable results, it is mere noise.
Fly your TRUMP flag and smile smile smile
“His words were oaks in acorns; and his thoughts
Were roots that firmly gripped the granite truth.” Edwin Markham
Worshiping experts is part of the foundations of progressivism. That we worship them so much is a sign of how far progressivism has infected our way of thinking. But given that it has been underway since the 1890s, it’s no surprise expert worship has become so common.
Thanks Victor! We appreciate all that you do for our country.
Uh, aren’t we reading this piece because you are an expert?
How many group-speak letters have you see VDH sign?