How our political system, our government, higher education, the media and the professional class have betrayed America

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind

Calling it your job don’t make it right, Boss.

An AP VoteCast poll conducted during this week’s Iowa caucuses revealed that 62% of those who intended to participate in the caucuses did not believe that Joe Biden was legitimately elected in 2020. Though I find this result distressing, I absolutely do not find it surprising. It reflects a large-scale distrust in institutions that has been dearly earned.

Virtually every institution in this country that is supposed to represent trusted authority has, at the very least, recently failed the American people and, at most, betrayed them for 30 pieces of silver. Once people figure out that they’ve been played for chumps, all utterances, even the ones that are probably true, are suspect. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Let’s start with the political system. We are just a few months away from a redux of Trump v. Biden. This potential nightmare, which roughly 75% of the country does not want, was preceded by Trump v. Biden I and, before that, Trump v. Clinton. That’s almost a decade of stunning political mediocrity at the top. I simply cannot think of a more obvious failure on such a grand scale or a more scathing indictment of the system responsible for selecting the leader of the free world. If this sounds like a bad joke, it's because that’s exactly what it is.

It almost doesn’t matter whether it’s the Democrats or Republicans who run the show anymore, since they are merely the heels at the opposite ends of the same rotten loaf of bread.

When the Democrats get a chance to run the show, we get identity politics, open borders, soft on crime and tough on law enforcement policies, socialism, irresponsible governance, and lots of attempts to censor what the left doesn’t like. The Democrats have shown little reluctance of late to use the levers of power to undemocratically force their points of view on everyone else.

When the Republicans get a chance to run the show, we get a pronounced lack of budget discipline, attacks on reproductive rights, religion jammed down our throats, irresponsible governance, and lots of attempts to censor what the right doesn’t like. The Republicans have also shown little reluctance of late to use the levers of power to make everyone dance to the tune they call.

Then there is the vast agency that is our government itself. I think that most of us, at least at one time, operated under the assumption that, no matter how much we questioned a government policy, we’d grant that there were probably competent, reasonably fair-minded public servants in the loop. We might not see eye to eye on everything, but we wouldn’t question anyone’s basic competence over just a policy difference.

COVID laid the truth bare. Virtually every policy, piece of advice, or mandate from the government to address the COVID pandemic was wrong and often manufactured on the spot, nearly from whole cloth, based on ideological considerations. There was simply not sufficient data to justify most governmentally decreed social distancing directives, school closures, or vaccination mandates. We wrecked our economy, damaged our children, and wrought social problems that will beget consequences for decades based on stupors and vapors.

Even worse, media, social media, and business interests—including pharmaceutical companies that made billions of dollars peddling COVID drugs—suppressed and censored, with the government’s approval and encouragement, the views of people who were aware of the extent of shaky or downright false information that was being peddled by “authorities.”

In this process, the careers of people who were often speaking truth to power were derailed, to the detriment of not only them but the entire country. Opposed to lockdowns, masking, or social distancing due to a lack of sound evidence? Censored. Want to even discuss the lab leak theory? Censored and labelled as a conspiracy theorist. Questions about the efficacy or potential side effects of rapidly developed and tested vaccinations? You must be an anti-vaxxer.

Though COVID is perhaps the most egregious recent example of government untrustworthiness, there are many others: border security, the climate crisis, green energy mandates, and the list goes on. These days, to mistrust the government, you have to get in line.

Don’t even get me going on the courts. The contemporary legal landscape is littered with liberal courts, conservative courts, and neither liberal nor conservative but just plain bad courts. But smart, fair, and fearless are exceedingly rare (ask Derick Chauvin about this). It boggles the mind how courts manage to put cops in jail over questionable murder charges for decades but allow criminals who are clearly guilty of mayhem and murder to walk free. I understand what motivated Dick the Butcher when he said, “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”

Higher education has, after decades, finally been exposed for the fraudulent endeavor that it has become. Higher education, as it currently exists, isn’t about the acquisition of knowledge or wisdom or improving the lot of humanity through teaching, research, and service; it’s about acquiring vast amounts of wealth and ideological inculcation.

The pedagogical scam that is at the heart of higher education relies on a transfer of wealth from one area of the government to another in a scheme that encourages students to take out sizable, government-backed loans worth trillions of dollars to support an explosion of programs that the majority of students don't need and an exponential growth in administrators. In many contexts outside of government, this would be considered usury.

Some universities in this country have endowments valued in billions of dollars on which they pay no taxes. Rarely does any of this money directly benefit students. It does, however, provide long-term employment for armies of administrators whose sole raison d'être is perpetuating their sorry existence.

The Claudine Gay fiasco exposed a lot of this fraud. After seeing the emperor with no clothes, it’s very difficult for the average American to put a lot of faith in anything that comes out of many colleges and universities. Enrollments are declining across the board as Americans begin to respond to the breadth and depth of the rot and betrayal of American ideals in much of higher education.

I’ve never really held the media in this country to a very high bar just because I’ve worked in it for so long. Even in the days before reporting was so blatantly partisan and newsrooms were filled with 20-something social justice warriors, a lot of reporting just wasn’t very good.

On the other side of this, in my career as a scientist, I was interviewed hundreds of times on various issues in weather, astronomy, and other topics. I can’t think of a single interview where the reporter got what I carefully explained to them in simple terms substantially right. It was just a matter of how chagrined I was going to be when the article or video came out.

The decline of modern journalism began almost at the moment that it reached it’s zenith in the 1960’s and 1970’s. When Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and the Washington Post managed to sink the Nixon administration over Watergate, the gold rush for Pulitzer Prizes and other journalistic catnip was on. Though there was nothing intrinsically wrong with that, there was a problem with it. Woodward and Bernstein were, first and foremost, outstanding journalists who did the hard, dogged work required to break a complex, major story.

Many of their successors, not so much.

The vanity, ego, and unearned arrogance of many journalists seeking prize-winning fame and glory permeated, infused, and eventually became their stories. Cable news, the bogyman for what remained of sound journalism when it came to the fore in the 1990’s, merely accelerated the trend. When journalists became media stars, the wheels began to fall off.

Now, after decades of legacy journalism’s race to the bottom over vanity, arrogance, and greed, the one thing that seems to unite legacy journalists across the ideological spectrum is a disdain for independent voices in journalism like those found on social media and in places like here on Substack. The legacy media’s support of censorship on social media and their attacks on Substack for things like an alleged Nazi problem, show how worried they are about the distrust they’ve wrought by being spectacularly bad at journalism.

Substack scares the hell out of the legacy media because it loosens their control over information and it's concomitant benefit, money. It's completely unsurprising that critics attached to legacy media would go full-court press against a platform that assumes it's users are smart enough to discern what's wheat and what's chaff for themselves.

When the legacy media spent years peddling falsehoods about Donald Trump (Russian collusion), COVID (nearly everything), policing (the narratives surrounding George Floyd and Michael Brown), Hunter Biden (nothing to see here, folks), DEI (merit is racist), Donald Trump (again) winning the 2020 election, and green energy, etc., etc., they probably ought to have expected that folks were going to take a dim view of their veracity when they eventually figured it all out. The fact that the legacy media doesn’t appear to really get any of this is the clearest indication of exactly how badly they suck at their jobs.

It's beyond irony that the very organizations in legacy media whose business models were peddling nonsense, specifically to stoke partisanship and develop their own consumer silos, would hammer independent journalism over a lack of control or content moderation. But it’s probably too little, too late, for them now that the genie is out of the bottle. I view the attacks on independent journalists and their platforms as the wild thrashing that precedes slipping beneath the waves.

Unless and until legacy media can clean up their act, good riddance. Even if Substack had a "Nazi problem," which it does not, so what? According to a recent Gallup Poll showing a record-low level of confidence in the media, legacy media has a credibility issue that is demonstrably much worse than the worst bad dreams that Substack is capable of conjuring.

Finally, the professional class. Their betrayal is perhaps the worst, as many of them were classically educated in public institutions, at least partially at taxpayer expense. Every professional in this country owes a debt of gratitude to those who worked to build a society where higher education and professional training are readily accessible. You repay that debt by fearlessly striving to make the world a better place with your training.

Here’s the most damning part about the betrayal of the professional class: they had, far and away, the least to lose by holding the line against woke stupidity. Yet as the embrace of wokeness and fear of rebuke from the scions of pop culture began to permeate corporate boardrooms and professional organizations, things like making a profit for investors took a back seat to ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance); “do no harm” took a back seat to expensive regimes of drugs and physical mutilation of children suffering mental health crises; producing woke movies, television, and movies took a back seat to making successful ones; pandering to the green agenda took the place of producing reliable vehicles and home appliances.

Ask nearly anyone who’s bought a dishwasher in the past few years what they think of it, but be prepared to make your getaway quickly. Mine makes me want to drive a railroad spike through my kneecap every time I unload the dishes.

So, yes, I get why 62% of the participants in the Iowa caucuses don’t think that Joe Biden legitimately won the last election, even though he did. It’s because that banner is carried by a media that enjoys the trust of less than a third of the country, a government that whipsaws back and forth ideologically with one immutable talent: screwing up nearly everything that it touches, courts that might be the first things to get torched if push ever comes to shove, politicians that occupy whatever level is beyond excruciatingly bad, and businesses that think about their customers last.

I have a difficult time trusting them as well. And I think that about sums it up.

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Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com