Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
The first six months of the Trump administration have not been kind to the experts and the degree-holding classes.
Almost daily during the tariff hysterias of March, we were told by university economists and most of the PhDs employed in investment and finance that the U.S. was headed toward a downward, if not recessionary, spiral.
Most economists lectured that trade deficits did not really matter. Or they insisted that the cures to reduce them were worse than the $1.1 trillion deficit itself.
They reminded us that free, rather than fair, trade alone ensured prosperity.
So, the result of Trump’s foolhardy tariff talk would be an impending recession. America would soon suffer rising joblessness, inflation—or rather a return to stagflation—and likely little, if any, increase in tariff revenue as trade volume declined.
Instead, recent data show increases in tariff revenue. Personal real income and savings were up. Job creation exceeded prognoses. There was no surge in inflation. The supposedly “crashed” stock market reached historic highs.
Common-sense Americans might not have been surprised. The prior stock market frenzy was predicated on what was, in theory, supposed to have happened rather than what was likely to occur. After all, if tariffs were so toxic and surpluses irrelevant, why did our affluent European and Asian trading rivals insist on both surpluses and protective tariffs?
Most Americans recalled that the mere threat of tariffs and Trump’s jawboning had led to several trillion dollars in promised foreign investment and at least some plans to relocate manufacturing and assembly back to the United States. Would that change in direction not lead to business optimism and eventually more jobs? Would countries purposely running up huge surpluses through asymmetrical trade practices not have far more to lose in negotiations than those suffering gargantuan deficits?
Were Trump’s art-of-the-deal threats of prohibitive tariffs not mere starting points in negotiations that would eventually lead to likely agreements more favorable to the U.S. than in the past and moderate rather than punitive tariffs?
Would not the value of the huge American consumer market mean that our trade partners, who were racking up substantial surpluses, would agree they could afford modest tariffs and trim their substantial profit margins rather than suicidally price themselves out of a lucrative market entirely?
Economists and bureaucrats were equally wrong on the border.
We were told for four years that only “comprehensive immigration reform” would stop illegal immigration. In fact, most Americans differed. They knew firsthand that we had more than enough immigration laws, but had elected as President Joe Biden, who deliberately destroyed borders and had no intention of enforcing existing laws.
When Trump promised that he would ensure that, instead of 10,000 foreign nationals entering illegally each day, within a month, no one would, our experts scoffed. But if the border patrol went from ignoring or even aiding illegal immigrants to stopping them right at the border, why would such a prediction be wrong?
Those favoring a reduction in illegal immigration and deportations also argued that crime would fall, and citizen job opportunities would increase, given an estimated 500,000 aliens with criminal records had entered illegally during the Biden administration, while millions of other illegal aliens were working off the books, for cash, and often at reduced wages.
Indeed, once the border was closed tightly, hundreds of thousands were returned to their country, and employers began turning to U.S. citizens. Job opportunities did increase. Crime did go down. Legal-only immigration regained its preferred status over illegal entry.
Trump talked of trying voluntary deportation—again to wide ridicule from immigration “experts.” But why would not a million illegal aliens wish to return home “voluntarily”—if they were given free flights, a $1,000 bonus, and, most importantly, a chance later to reapply for legal entry once they arrived home?
Many of our national security experts warned that taking out Iran’s nuclear sites was a fool’s errand. It would supposedly unleash a Middle East tsunami of instability. It would cause a wave of terrorism. It would send oil prices skyrocketing. It would not work, ensuring Iran would soon reply with nuclear weapons.
In fact, oil prices decreased after the American bombing. A twenty-five-minute entrance into Iranian airspace and bombing led to a ceasefire, not a conflagration.
As for a big power standoff, World War III, and 30,000 dead, common sense asked why China would wish the Strait of Hormuz to close, given that it imports half of all Middle Eastern oil produced?
Why would Russia—bogged down in Ukraine and suffering nearly a million casualties—wish to mix it up in Iran, after ignominiously fleeing Syria and the fall of its Assad clients?
Russia usually thinks of Russia, period. It does not lament when tensions elsewhere are expected to spike oil prices. Why would Russia resupply Iran’s destroyed Russian-made anti-aircraft systems, when it was desperate to ward off Ukrainian air attacks on its homeland, and Iran would likely again lose any imported replacements?
As for waves of terror, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have suffered enormous losses from Israel. Their leadership has been decapitated; their streams of Iranian money have been mostly truncated. Why would they rush to Iran’s side to war with Israel, when Iran did not come to their aid when they were battling and losing to the Israelis?
Has a theater-wide war really ever started when one side entered and left enemy territory in 25 minutes, suffering no casualties and likely killing few of the enemy?
As far as the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, why should we believe our expert pundit class?
Prior to the American and Israeli bombing, many of them warned that Iran was not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and therefore, there was little need for any such preemptive action.
Then, post facto, the same experts flipped. Now they claimed, after the bombing that severely damaged most Iranian nuclear sites, that there was an increased threat, given that some enriched uranium (which they had previously discounted) surely had survived and thus marked a new existential danger of an Iranian nuclear bomb.
Was Trump really going to “blow up”, “destroy” or “cripple” NATO, as our diplomatic experts insisted, when his first-term jawboning led from six to twenty-three nations meeting their two percent of GDP defense spending promises?
Given two ongoing theater-wide wars, given Trump’s past correct predictions about the dangers of the Nord Stream II pipeline, given the vulnerability of an anemic NATO to Russian expansionism, and given that Putin did not invade during Trump’s first term, unlike the three presidencies before and after his own, why wouldn’t NATO agree to rearm to five percent, and appreciate Trump’s efforts both to bolster the capability of the alliance and the need to end the Ukraine war?
Why were our “scientific” pollsters so wrong in the last three presidential elections, and so at odds with the clearly discernible electoral shifts in the general electorate? Where were crackpot ideas like defund the police, transgender males competing in women’s sports, and open borders first born and nurtured?
Answer: the university, and higher education in general.
The list of wrongheaded, groupthink, and degreed expertise could be vastly expanded. We remember the “51 intelligence authorities” who swore the Hunter Biden laptop was “likely” cooked up by the Russians. Our best and brightest economists signed letters insisting that Biden’s multitrillion-dollar wasteful spending would not result in inflation spikes. Our global warming professors’ past predictions should have ensured that Americans were now boiling, with tidal waves destroying beachfront communities, including Barack Obama’s two beachfront multimillion-dollar estates.
Our legal eagles, after learning nothing from the bogus Mueller investigation and adolescent Steele dossier, but with impressive Ivy League degrees, pontificated for years that, by now, Donald Trump would be in jail for life, given 91 “walls are closing in” and “bombshell” indictments.
So why are the degreed classes so wrong and yet so arrogantly never learn anything from their past flawed predictions?
One, our experts usually receive degrees from our supposedly marquee universities. But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation, 50-percent-plus price-gauging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid anti-Semitism, higher education in America has become anti-Enlightenment. Universities now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free expression, and anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink of the diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming orthodoxies.
The degreed expert classes emerge from universities whose faculties are 90–95 percent left-wing and whose administrations are overstaffed and terrified of their radical students. The wonder is not that the experts are incompetent and biased, but that there are a brave few who are not.
Two, Donald Trump drove the degreed class insane to the degree it could no longer, even if it were willing and able (and it was not), offer empirical assessments of his policies. From his crude speech to his orange skin to his Queens accent to his MAGA base to his remarkable counterintuitive successes and to his disdain for the bicoastal elite, our embarrassing experts would rather be dead wrong and anti-Trump than correct in their assessments—if they in any small way helped Trump.
Three, universities are not just biased, but increasingly mediocre and ever more isolated from working Americans and their commonsense approaches to problem solving. PhD programs in general are not as rigorous as they were even two decades ago. Grading, assessments, and evaluations in professional schools must increasingly weigh non-meritocratic criteria, given their admissions and hiring protocols are not based on disinterested evaluation of past work and expertise.
The vast endowments of elite campuses, the huge profit-making foreign enrollments, and the assured, steady stream of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid created a sense of fiscal unreality, moral smugness, unearned superiority, and ultimately, blindness to just how isolated and disliked the professoriate had become.
But the public has caught on that too many Ivy-League presidents were increasingly a mediocre, if not incompetent, bunch. Most university economists could not run a small business. The military academies did not always turn out the best generals and admirals. The most engaging biographers were not professors. And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.
Add it all up, and the reputation of our predictors, prognosticators, and experts has been radically devalued to the point of utter worthlessness.
The only thing I would disagree with is your answer. The answer to why these things are occurring in academia and politicia is that it is intentional. The elite have always used academia and politics to create “unwitting allies” in their efforts to maintain “class distinction” and their grip on power. Whether the academicians themselves are also dupes is a question that is itself academic and of little practical use in solving the interminable problem of the “landed gentry vs. the Hoi polloi.
Your article is compelling and accurate but ignores root causes.
Facts! The expert class has joined the long list of discredited entities in American society, the mainstream media, FBI, Democratic Party, judiciary, DOJ, USAID, academia, DIE, climate change etc etc.
On the domestic front I will give him some props on this article. But attrition rate in Russian SMO has been minimum 5 to 1 since it started in favor of Russians. Are you saying 5 million Ukrainians have been killed? Evidence of recent body swaps are like 20 to 1 in favor of Russians. There is also major evidence in rate of fire and production of weapons to confirm this thesis. If I fire 5 times the rate with similar ISR and weapons is it not logical I will kill 5 times the people? But look at Russian sortes over 100,000 vs 14000. In short Ukraine and your NATO buddies have been lying to you. Stop listening too stupid neocon generals who have lost every war. Warfare has changed dramatically and not in our favor. We do not have the industrial capacity to maintain these wars nor the proper weapons systems. I know this may come as a shock to you but the USA lost the arms race in the modern era by a lot. The ability to project power both soft and hard has changed dramatically. The only issue is how many more stupid moves will we make against BRICS and the battle for Eurasia which is what all these wars are really about. Recent articles in washington post confirm this idea that we are running low and cant produce fast enough. Isreal got hit hard even according to Trump. No air defense is 100 percent and we have weapons systems out there that were defeated by everything we could throw at it. Our involvement in Iran was pure thearte. I am ok with lying your way out of conflict.
“While all true, this new belief (‘the experts are wrong’) is also being applied to vaccines and pharmaceuticals which are being viewed as ‘optional’ and that being fit and taking vitamins was a legitimate alternative. Influencers now carry more weight than dedicated scientists and doctors who have devoted their lives to a deep understanding of how the real world works.”
No, @Michael, the “experts” as Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Dr. Deborah Birx, and the talking head Dr. Leana Wen as well as the pharmaceutical companies brought “the experts are wrong” thinking upon themselves and the “expert community” because they all LIED to the American people. Instead of providing truthful information and allowing the people and their doctors to make their own personal health decisions, they offered “the vaccine” which in reality is a gene therapy. But, only some of us were able see through the BS. Now, those that lied are still lying. Above all, “experts” should speak truth.
The degree has replaced education as the prize. Education is now defined as something that takes place between the last exam and the ceremony. In an effort to achieve equality, we have pulled the bottom up and pushed the top down. Mediocrity is now normalized.
VDH–SO very well said..YOU ARE A NATIONAL TREASURE
A self declared expert is someone whose ego will not allow them to admit it is impossible to be an expert. How can one possibly know all the things they do not know. That is the dichotomy of education, the more you learn the more you appreciate how little you actually know.
The eleet skoolz have suffered blows from which they may never fully recover, in spite of the mountains of cash they hold in their endowments. They are tarnished. This actually has an upside for me personally. I come from a family of Ivy League graduates, but did not go to an Ivy League skool myself. For most of my adult life, this has made me feel inferior, even though I knew you can learn pretty much anything from a shelf of books, or even youtube videos. With what has happened in recent years, though, this personal problem of mine has gone away entirely. The skoolz have disgraced themselves, and I am grateful to have no connection to them at all.
Professor Hanson, you hit the nail on the head.
Upon completion of my Ph.D., I spent a decade in private industry and then 27 years as an engineering professor at an R1 university.
Engineering schools used to be islands of common sense at most academic institutions, but leftist administrators and the incessant groveling for federal research dollars have erased that outpost of sanity.
Most of my colleagues were knowledgeable in very narrow domains, but they arrogantly assumed their knowledge transcended the constricted boundaries of their subject matter. This assumed expertise combined with zero practical, real-world experience resulted in the so-called experts you describe.
The ongoing war on actual free speech at the universities has been documented for years at sites like TheFire.org, TheCollegeFix.com and CampusReform.org almost entirely shut out of corporate media, with a few appearances on C-Span by Mr. Lukianoff from TheFire. His observation nearly 20 years ago still stands, not a single instance of any “right wing”/”conservative” group stopping someone from speaking on a campus, yet hundreds of instances by the left.
The WORST case ever just happened and it was also ignored. Porter v. NCSU established the right of colleges to fire tenured academics for speech somebody simply didn’t like. This on top of the Morgan Hill CA flag t-shirt case, HS students suspended for wearing US flag tees after THEY were threatened with violence. BOTH these outrages were allowed to stand by the “right wing extremist” SCOTUS just as it did with the teen suspended for wearing “There Are 2 Genders” tee.
Free speech is dead. In France now you go to prison for questioning the mRNA shots. SCOTUS races to invoke the Smallpox Precedent from 1905 to force vaccinations and denies all appeals. The Covid “science” is in ruins but any mention of evidence contrary to the media-worshipped “experts” is kept off all the TV networks and the NY Times. And if you are still foolish enough to believe the NYT look up “The Gray Lady Winked” a demolition of the “newspaper of record” that has been ignored by all the J-schools and has not been allowed on C-Span BookTV.
Facts: Stanley Meyers built a VW dune buggy that ran on water with resonances also used in welding….. Paul Pantone built his “geet” generators that produced plasma, changing the exhaust gases into Oxygen and Hydrogen, he used to propel his Chevy pickup to Washington DC, however, no one would receive him….. Google both and see they both were eliminated. Randall Carlson and a group of scientists built generators burning gasoline using Paul Pantone’s basic design producing plasma, proving the science converting gas or diesel into oxygen and hydrogen via a plasma reaction works. Randall Carlson showed this on the Joe Ragan podcast, I saw it and later I was told that the episode was removed. Do your own research… These proven technologies are not new by any means.
After a 5 decade career in civil litigation in California, it’s not at all surprising that the opinion of an “Expert” is a commodity. We used to joke that so and so (the expert) was like a candy machine. You put your money in and out comes the opinion to suit. That’s why each side gets to decide whether to have their own “Expert.” When it happens in politics or government… there’s usually just one side – and one side ”Expert.” I was just thinking about how during the pandemic, we couldn’t go anywhere or convene in groups. But, if you went to the Supermarket, you’d see dozens of kids. Medical sense would dictate to limit the number of people in the same area. But Nooooo. Kids were not allowed to go to school but they could play in the aisles of a Supermarket endlessly.
I noticed the “reconstruction” face of the oldest DNA found in Egypt to date, looked just like VDH. We are old souls.
I was never a regular watcher but I did come across Trump’s old TeeVee show, the “you’re fired” one a few times. It was a well done show with solid content. I remember being VERY impressed when, after the teams had completed their assignment, he would “take apart” the plan of the losers first, detailing where they went off, where their plan built for failure or low return, and so forth. It surprised me that he was genuinely trying to help the losing team learn where they went off and why. It was “free education time”. He seemed to hold himself to a very high standard of excellence and was encouraging others to do the same. Laely I have wondered if perhaps some of his current team are not “graduates” of his past work.
As I read about the details of the 25 minute flight into Iran and back out, I marvelled at the incredible accuracy and skill demonstrated by the crews. I was astounded to read how the first bomb landed in the tenring on that new concrete pad covering the vent hole, imploding the fresh mud and opening the shaft. Then the second one, fractions of a second behind, waltzed on through, straight down the tube, and exploded on the work floor far below. Trump, the man of excellence and who surrounded himself with like kind, and encouraged them all to a high standard, and together they all established an amazing new high standard of performance.
Classicist Peter V. Jones once wrote that until the 20th century all doctoral theses had been written in Latin. For example, Sir Isaac Newton’s 1687 seminal treatise Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Could one imagine if “Doctor” Jill Biden’s vacuous dissertation about community college student retention had been formally accepted in Latin? It wouldn’t have passed the laugh test.
Jones further elucidates that Latin had been the language of education, church, and state for 1500 years. Today, sadly, Latin is becoming an academic dead letter. It is no longer taught in most high schools and, even worse, it is under attack for being an integral part of a supposedly racist, toxic past.
If we want to return to a civilization that discovered the laws of motion, gave us Shakespeare, and put a man on the moon, then we will need to restore higher education and teach what has proven to be beneficial for centuries.
Professor Hanson,
Thank you for being an anchor to good ol’ common sense and the truth. Please never let up.
In trade, I’m purchasing your latest book (I’d offer free labor on your farm, but I’m in Dalton,MA. Pray for me…lol. )
Divine discernment come from the Holy Spirit… This is why so many REAL Christians see the world and events in a similar light… Discernment is ultimately more important than Intelligence, Education, Culture, Experience and Wisdom…
Importance of Discernment:
Discernment helps believers avoid deception, make wise decisions, and live in accordance with God’s will. It fosters a deeper relationship with God by aligning one’s thoughts and actions with His Spirit. Discernment also enables believers to recognize God’s work in the world and resist spiritual attacks.
To my all time favorite Renaissance Man, VDH! After pondering over many of your on point insights I have come to the following conclusion. An alien race from a distant galaxy is conducting a social experiment with all the left wing lemmings. They picked out the Biden’s, Obamas, Schumer’s, Schiff’s, Pelosi’s, AOC’s, members of the MSM (too many to list here!) Harri’s and Walz’s of the world and abducted them. Once abducted they were subjected to hours of left wing ideology brainwashing and returned to earth to carry on with all the insanity that we have witnessed over the past four years. If anyone out there in VDH land has a better explanation, I am ALL EARS!! God bless America, POTUS, his administration, our military and Veterans. Happy July 4th to everyone who values common sense, integrity and God.
Our university system appears to be an elaborate form of welfare for tenured professors and administrators.
Many years ago, when I was attending the university, we used to say about some professors, “Long on intelligence, short on wisdom”. Nothing has changed!!!!
I know this is also true of higher education in South Africa, which seems to serve as a petri dish for social decline for ‘Western’ societies in general. Yet this negative assessment of academic standards applies more to the humanities and social sciences and less to the hard sciences, does it not?
So true , I’d love to see the diplomas hanging on the walls of the idiots that graduated during the “Covid” years , and see just how proud they are of getting a degree without passing one single test.
Stop the federal funding of ALL Universities and colleges , make them run them as they would their own small business and see how long that last , especially Harvard , Vanderbilt , and Yale .
Professor Hanson: You are somewhat late to the party. When my mother was in high school in the 1930’s the teachers were experts in their fields and the requirements for graduation were high. A high school degree was not universal and those who had earned one were regarded as well educated. Then the standards for the diploma gradually were lowered so more people would have the benefit of a high school diploma and eventually, it became meaningless. We then decided that those with a college degree were exceptional and it became necessary to have a bachelor’s degree, at least, in order to demonstrate higher academic abilities and parents encouraged their children to get a college degree. As demand increased, standards for admission and graduation slowly, but surely were lowered to the point that most college degrees became equivalent to what 30 years earlier was the equivalent of a high school diploma. Now, as you point out, most of the advanced degrees only indicate more time spent in playing the game rather than true scholarship. And the effect is that those degrees are becoming worthless as well as indicators of advanced thinking and even rational thought. If we had another 30 years to see how this mess will be rectified and substance replaces phony degrees we will see that we have come full circle and the education elite will be returned to obscurity.
Another miss by the Experts – the $37 trillion Debt Crisis. Since 2012, when the debt was declared an “unsustainable” $16 trillion and debt service was $230 billion, the financial community experts have wasted hundreds of millions on studies, committees, conventions, charts and graphs in a failed attempt to convince politicians to curb spending. I reached out to several organizations with a plan to pay down the existing debt. I was advised their “focus” was to control future spending. Never did they consider paying down the Principal. Now, finally, Elon Musk has recognized this and suggests dedicating DOGE savings to reducing Principal. But much more is needed. I have an outside the box plan that will help. Maybe it’s time to refocus?
Isn’t it human to try and reinforce one’s lofty status like Mandarins, building little fiefdoms to one’s perceived greatness. It takes a society conceived in individual liberty in an individual like Trump to expose it all, renew it and ‘bring it all down, man!”.
Going back a while, I recall with gratitude that my first interest in VDH was his being quoted and recommended by the late Rush Limbaugh. Thank you Rush for introducing most of us to Victor Davis Hanson. We all would be less without both of you.
Another excellent analysis by Professor Hanson. I have, for years now, watched the decline of so many Universities as they have become institutions of indoctrination rather than education. I refer to the type of “Professors and experts” as Credentialled Idiots. Sadly, we see evidence on a daily basis that my assessment of these “Experts” is pretty darned accurate.
How frustrating it must be for you Professor VDH to patiently lay out an analysis of facts and results again and again only to continue to see such thoughtfulness is mostly ignored. Thank you for your continued persistence to educate and inform even in the face of such ignorance and stupidity of people living in an echo chamber. As the saying goes: “It is better to light just one little candle than curse the darkness”. Rebuilding our base of meritocracy, respect for ideas, debate and seeking truth is so slow in contrast to how quickly elitist can tear that environment down.
Esteemed VDH, i follow your writings & podcasts from the UK. I’m mightily pleased you’ve been proven correct on all the topics you mention in this article. I ignore the MSM in the UK, which is more often than not anti-trump. Keep up the good work, Sir.
“But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation, 50-percent-plus price-gauging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid anti-Semitism, higher education in America has become anti-Enlightenment. Universities now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free expression, and anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink of the diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming orthodoxies.”
Reading this I envision Victor’s new book: “The War on the Free Mind: How universities wage war on free expression.”
VDH, my Ivy League PhD and I say…BOOM! You completely nailed it, as usual!
Wow, i am stunned at the timing of this.
First, VDH is a national treasure. His summaries so succinct in encompassing the whole of a subject, and delivered (his podcasts) as if he were a friendly, wise farmer neighbor; which, is what he is. 🙂
A small group of geezers, of which i am a most insignificant quarter, a retired western jesuit educated large asian nation md, an ivy league teacher on the east coast wherein Albert once toiled, a retired officer of the court in a southern CA burb of leisure, recently concluded that rational thinking not based in experience is critically incomplete, unless and until it is based first on experiential knowledge.
This is possibly the reason public education here has failed so miserably. There is a low probability our Ph.D. experts will be made to improve, that Ph.D. programs will be made to experience the real world before being introduced to theorizing, thus, they lead our decline. Otoh, guys like VDH were first based on the reality of life on the farm as he became formally educated, etc., so, he had both concurrently. Real life is harsh and unforgiving. Many learned that lesson in 1929.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Excellent as usual, sir. Please keep up the good work!
Being a contrarian can sometimes be difficult in life but also extremely rewarding; I’m sure VDH knows this well. Great stuff as always.
Mr. Brown,
You seem not to understand the greatness of truth and common sense.
Thank you Professor Hanson for your wisdom.
Respectfully,
Karen Burton
The professoriate? Ha ha, I like that! Never have so few felt so entitled to use circular logic to demand so much from so many…my Mom, God Rest Her Soul, born and bread in Farmersville, CA, known for using the phrase Jiminy Crickets and words like idjit, always thought Ph.D. stood for Phuc#ing Dumb. We would be sitting around the TV with one of those “talking heads” blabbering on about something and she would say “Jiminy Crickets, I’ll bet that idjit is one of those Ph.D’s”…
Wow. VDH hits an absolute homerun with this piece. He didn’t even touch at how wrong the “experts” were during Covid, a disaster which we will be a generation repairing. For the last few election cycles I kept hearing how single women and holders of advanced degrees voted overwhelmingly against Trump. As a college educated individual, I thought many times, “what am I missing”? Now I have a better idea. Elitists in nonprofits, at universities, in Big law and government feared Trump. Not because he was a threat to “democracy” but because he was a threat to them and their hold on public opinion, money and power. Others don’t like the way he talks and his blunt and bullying style. I understand that. But I can also see it as a refreshingly genuineness. What you see is what you get with Trump and once you figure out that you should always look behind the rhetoric for his ultimate objective and never take Trump too literally, it makes more sense.
It appears that the American Greatness site is no longer available. All I am getting is a generic page that states the domain is for sale.
While all true, this new belief (‘the experts are wrong’) is also being applied to vaccines and pharmaceuticals which are being viewed as ‘optional’ and that being fit and taking vitamins was a legitimate alternative. Influencers now carry more weight than dedicated scientists and doctors who have devoted their lives to a deep understanding of how the real world works.
Measles is sweeping the country and morbidity and mortality rising as a result.
Binary thinking is usually wrong and dangerous.
Spot on! And who better to know than you who has been in Academia and has seen it first hand for years! Thank You VDH!!
I need help signing in to blade of persius
I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s definition of an expert. “There is no such thing, only varying degrees of ignorance”.
Closer to home my office shared a wall with our the Chief Economist. He constantly refereed to his “ two primary laws of economic forecasting” . 1, if you give a number, don’t give a date & 2, if you give a date, don’t give a number.
As for everything else in your fine article, it’s merely level 5 TDS.
I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s definition of an expert. “There is no such thing, only varying degrees of ignorance”.
Closer to home my office shared a wall with our the Chief Economist. He constantly refereed to his “ two primary laws of economic forecasting” . 1, if you give a number, don’t give a date & 2, if you give a date, don’t give a number.
As for everything else in your fine article, it’s merely level 5 TDS.
True.