American Lie

The expert classes and their armies of virtue-signaling sycophants pushed us to the brink of anarchy through avarice and mendacity. We're not hugging that out.

So, bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
And them good ol' boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "This'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die"

From The Washington Post last week: “Scientists now say this worst-case climate scenario is ‘implausible.’ The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is finally acknowledging the plain truth by backing off its most extreme doomsday emission scenario, known in big-climate lingo as RCP 8.5, after admitting that those projections “have become implausible.”

You don’t say.

The fact of the matter is that the IPCC has been working diligently to get the world wound up over climate change projections that were wildly pessimistic from the get-go. This does not reflect well on their acumen or trustworthiness.

Unfortunately, it’s about par for the course.

Any climate expert who viewed the data without the lens of progressive ideology in the way should have known that the most apocalyptic outcomes of climate change were unlikely. Within the realm of the possible? Yes. Likely enough to upend entire industries and economies? Absolutely not. The only reason this projection persisted as long as it did was because it granted career government bureaucrats and NGOs vast regulatory powers to shape economies and social policies. It was crack for public sector policy nerds.

From Covid to climate change to DEI to devaluing meritocracy to attacks on scientific reality itself, the 21st century has been an era of arm-twisting from authorities seeking to impose onerous social and financial policies forestalling some imminent catastrophe. And time after time, the public has been misled. Now the bill for the embellishment and browbeating is coming due in the form of an unprecedented decline in the public’s trust in experts.

Why have such large segments of our expert class turned out to be either incompetent or disingenuous? It’s a fail either way, but the exact why is important.

Though knowledge, as it turns out, is overrated, power is certainly not. I’ve never heard of the knowledge that be. But the powers that be—now that’s recognized all the way from Wall Street to Juba.

It turns out that the powers that be have historically sought the means to impose the proper way of thinking on the otherwise unpersuadable, unwashed masses. We know what’s best for you even if you don’t. That paradigm is alive and well.

How is such arrogance forged? It’s a little sad, actually. The entire expert power-broker class—regulatory bureaucrats, science dictators, gender medicine charlatans, woke grifters, climate change hucksters and the staffs of many NGOs—more than occasionally evolved into adults from forlorn kids who never got a base hit, never received a valentine card, looked like dorks in the yearbook, and were never able, under any circumstances, to come off as cool. If they went to the prom, it was with their first cousin.

As young adults, they skied in Patagonia Synchilla togs, acquired an entire collection of NPR tote bags and knew at least one sommelier. They acquired substantial student loan debt in grad school but lacked the knowledge to change a flat tire to save their lives. They hated both the First and Second Amendments but loved the 25th as long as Donald Trump was president instead of Joe Biden. They loathed and despised the deplorables they grew up with.

Now, as vengeful professionals, they prefer authority over persuasion and wield credentials as a substitute for trust. Armed with the imprimatur of authority, they are able to impose their will on others, aided by armies of sycophants who believe in redemptive suffering—especially among others.

Right, wrong or reason have nothing to do with anything. Remember this?

I triple-dog dare you to explain to me how this plain medical malpractice arose from the careful, scientifically informed deliberations of an entire posse of rational, well-adjusted adult professionals tasked with shepherding children safely through adolescence. No amount of insouciance explains this; it’s straight-up Revenge of the Nerds, but way less funny and with much bigger dickheads.

The people who did this to Avery Jackson are so grossly maladjusted that the world would have been better off if they had been hauled out of their igloo at birth and immediately tossed into the ocean. Since that didn’t happen, they should now be sued into oblivion.

All involved with this have forfeited their expectation that anyone should ever take them seriously again. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen either. Failing upward is the norm in the expert class.

Lest you imagine that dumbassery among medical experts is confined to the USA, think again. Despite the Faucis, Sacklers and Pharma Bros abundant in our land, Canada is impressively ahead of us on the road to medical dystopia courtesy of their expert class.

A doctor in Ontario recently approved a 45-year-old man suffering from inflammatory bowel disease and depression for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) after a quick assessment in the parking lot outside of a Tim Hortons restaurant. He even drove his new, but not for long, patient to the assisted-death facility and administered the drugs himself. He’s currently being counseled by Canadian medical boards with no other apparent consequence. I had to check several times to make sure that this story did not originate in the Babylon Bee.

Back here, Americans have grown very weary of experts they don’t much like or trust talking down to them. That’s a major reason why Donald Trump has been elected president twice. Want to knock the smug right out of some highly credentialed, completely full-of-shit expert? Say hello to my little friend. But this isn’t a permanent solution, even if it is amusing as hell.

The worst part of the betrayal of America by the expert class is very personal. I am, you see, an erstwhile member of the expert class. I watched all of this unfold from the inside. Expertise screwed itself through arrogance, ego, declining standards and something even worse—avarice.

I devoted my career in physics to teaching good science and debunking bad science. I argued against Bigfoot, homeopathy, chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, flat-earthers, moon landing deniers and the alien origins of UFOs. I argued for nuclear energy (and sound energy policies) and for science to have a seat at the table when big decisions were being made. I argued that the current epoch of climate change was real, anthropogenic in nature and that we weren’t going to do a single non-suicidal thing in the short term except learn to live with it.

I showed students over the course of a quarter century in classrooms and labs that there are useful answers for anyone willing to work diligently enough to decipher the great book of nature. Some things are objectively true within the construct of our universe. But to find the best answers, you must follow the evidence wherever it leads. It takes years of discipline and effort, but the rewards are there for the patient and tenacious.

So imagine my bitter disappointment watching classical science, centuries in the making, destroy its credibility in the eyes of the public in less than a decade. I can explain it plainly: It’s like watching someone burn a book that you spent your entire life writing.

That’s not going to just buff out, because science is, at some level, based on trust. This is necessarily so because not everyone has the wherewithal or interest to investigate science to the degree required to distinguish it from religion.

That includes other scientists in disparate fields. I don’t know squat, for instance, about molecular biology. But I trust that the people who do are good scientists operating in good faith with tight peer review. As long as they maintain that trust, I will accept what their peer review approves as the best available knowledge.

The problem is that a lot of that trust in experts of all types has been lost in the past few years as entire fields have been co-opted and corrupted by ideology. Activists have captured entire professional organizations, viewing objective data (which may not say what they want) the way ants view a can of Raid.

Toss a dollop of avarice on top of that, and you have the well-earned distrust of the expert class circa ACE 2026.

Occasionally I wonder if there is an unseen hand behind the decline of science and expertise into a 21st-century house of Babel. That would almost make me feel better than us having screwed it up all by ourselves. The first step in control through propaganda isn’t getting people to believe something; it’s getting them not to believe anything. That’s pretty much where we are right now. But who benefits?

I can come up with a few scenarios. You think that the banking industry, for instance, really wants most future borrowers to get enough education to discover linear equations and amortization tables? Fuck no. As soon as consumers figure out compound interest, they become investors instead of borrowers.

That’s the power of knowledge. I don’t think that big money likes any of that. Maybe the powers that be are laughing their asses off right now at people like me who foolishly sought knowledge over wealth because they imagined that knowledge was power and that power belonged to the people. What a bunch of naïfs.

Seeing how things have worked out, they’re not wrong.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, climber, skier, motorcyclist, musician, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising four kids. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.