Better in their words…

A new Big Theory; Musk celebrates disintermediation; rules for detecting experts; Times triggers readers with pro-Trump op-ed; who killed the hippies?; watching the woke color revolution unfold; Trump in McDonalds biggest Google search ever.

Source: FLOWER POWER ☙ Sunday, October 27, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥🔥 At a recent town hall, space billionaire Elon Musk discussed the astonishing information migration from legacy media, with its gatekeeping layers of editors and owners, now —only two years from buying Twitter— to completely disintermediated “Citizen Journalism.” He also complained about experts:

CLIP: Elon Musk discusses the rise of direct citizen journalism (2:20).

His comments were all interesting, but when Elon dragged so-called experts, you know at that point, I was all in. Elon said:

“Legacy Media is from a time when, in order to read the news, it had to go through a centralized institution. But you don’t need that anymore; you have the Internet. It’s citizen journalism— by the people, for the people. Legacy media is controlled by a handful of editors-in-chief, they decide what gets published. But on X, you get to hear from actual experts in the field and in any given industry. And you get to hear the rebuttals. So if somebody says something that’s wrong, or needs more context, people can add that.”

Could it be that our long war against corporate media’s empire of fake experts is finally winning? Elon, the world’s richest man, who commands nearly as much attention as Trump, perfectly described corporate media’s cherry-picking, one-handed expert trick. It’s now exposed.

Corporate media’s favorite way to smuggle bias in is by quoting only carefully-vetted experts only on one side of an issue. This accomplishes two things. First, the deceitful reporter can pretend to be neutral, letting their cherry-picked experts do the heavy opinion lifting. Second, by rounding up two or three so-called experts, the lying media can manufacture an illusion of consensus.

They used to hide it better. But media repeated this expert sleight-of-hand throughout the pandemic, and we could see just how it works. By the end, we could even predict ahead of time which compliant covid “experts” would appear in the latest scripted, one-sided nonsense.

Anyway, Elon pointed out that, on a free Twitter, it’s possible to hear from actual experts rather than media-anointed fake experts. Of course, this only works if the government minds its own business, which is not at all something to count on yet.

🔥 To help figure out who to trust during the pandemic, I devised a simple definition of ‘expert,’ and it has held up well ever since. A real expert is someone on whom other professionals rely, when their money, reputations, or lives are at stake. (And sometimes, in very rare cases, someone accomplished something truly remarkable, like single-handedly building a private space industry, and became an expert that way.)

These people are real experts: a professor who wrote a textbook that other professors teach from. An OSHA-certified environmental engineer that corporations hire to help de-contaminate spill sites. A hang-glider who teaches other hang-gliding instructors in safety techniques. A bodybuilder who other bodybuilders fly across the country to work out with. A cancer specialist whose published studies are often cited by other researchers.

Those are all experts.

Who aren’t real experts? The following folks are NOT experts: Elected or appointed officials, especially people elected or appointed to health-related offices. People with fancy titles. People who published books, articles, or even peer-reviewed studies (unless other professionals cite the work a lot). People interviewed by MSNBC. Teachers and professors. People who run non-profits.

🔥 Let’s try applying the definition, using an article from ABC published Friday, headlined “Is Elon Musk’s $1 million voter sweepstakes legal? Experts weigh in.” ABC’s headline promised experts, so we readers expected to hear from experts in election law. We expected ABC’s experts would fully explain and inform us of the different possible interpretations of applicable law.

Haha, nobody is holding their breath.

ABC’s first expert candidate was Richard Briffault, a “professor of legislation at Columbia University Law School.” (Legislation?)

It’s well known that most (99%?) university professors are liberals. So there’s that red flag. But Richard is a law professor (though not in election law). But is he an expert?

ABC offered no evidence the baffled law school professor was an expert in anything, not even in “legislation.” Richard does have a title, he’s a professor, but there was no evidence anyone in the legal world has ever relied on Richard’s opinion when it matters.

So, no. Richard is just another schmoe like the rest of us, trying to make a buck. We don’t fault Richard for pretending to be an expert. It’s flattering when media wants a quote, and the exposure might help with his future career development. No, we fault the lying media for finding a friendly liberal and dressing him up in a liberal clown suit, calling him an expert, and pretending he’s nonpartisan.

Helpfully ABC handed us the next three contenders all in a row: James Gardner, an election law professor at U. Buffalo; Doug Spencer, professor of election law at U. Colorado, and Rick Hasen; a “director” of some UCLA non-profit with the word “Democracy” in the name:

Shockingly, all ABC’s handpicked experts agreed with each other. But, were they really experts? The first two, Jimmy and Doug, sounded more promising, since they were called professors of election law, which means that at least law students rely on them. So, does that count?

Nope. Someone’s an expert only if other professionals rely on their advice. Jimmy might be fairly called a “legal professional,” but the bare fact that law students rely on him does not make Jimmy an expert. For all we know, Jimmy was a failing liberal lawyer last Friday, and a brand-new liberal law professor this Monday morning.

But, you ask, why doesn’t the student reliance count? Why am I so persnickety in insisting that any reliance on advice must be by other professionals? Because students have no choice but to rely on Professor Jimmy. Coercion can’t make someone into an expert. Students are forced to call Jimmy “professor” even when he’s only been a professor for an hour. (Plus, one poorly kept secret about law schools is most law professors have never successfully practiced law. They might know a lot, but they aren’t experts.)

It’s meaningless to call someone a ‘law professor.’ The title isn’t disqualifying; Jimmy might still be an expert for some other reason, but just having a law professor job does not make anyone an expert. Anyway, the same analysis applies to Doug. That’s three down.

Finally, what about Ricky Hasen, the director of UCLA law school’s Saving Democracy Project. Does directing a political nonprofit make Ricky an expert on election law? Nope, not as far as we can tell. This is the clearest example of all, and probably why he came last. Nothing about Ricky’s job running an obviously partisan “nonprofit” suggests he could be an expert. In fact, Ricky was the most clearly biased of all four of the ‘experts’ quoted for ABC’s story.

🔥🔥 Just when I finished tearing media a new one over its fake expert tricks, the New York Times shocked me (and its readers) by running a remarkably fair op-ed featuring two conservative foreign policy experts, headlined “‘They Would Never Be Doing This Under Trump’: Two G.O.P. Foreign Policy Experts on What a Second Term Would Mean for the World.” (It ran in today’s print edition, but appeared on the website on Thursday.)

The op-ed’s author, Ross Douthat, is the Times’ pet conservative, a Catholic who frequently criticizes free-market capitalism and decries nationalism. But he can sometimes surprise, as he did yesterday, when he published a long, interview-style op-ed with two former Trump officials: Robert O’Brien, who was Trump’s national security adviser 2019-2020, and Elbridge Colby, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense in 2017-2018, and helped draft Trump’s 2018 national defense strategy.

The most astonishing things was that the Times’ editors green-lighted this op-ed right before the election at all. The piece —and I recommend you read it and maybe share it with others— was a full-throated intellectual argument for voting for Donald Trump. While it focused on foreign policy, it also quietly and forcefully made the election case in existential terms like what we saw from Robert Kennedy’s latest campaign ads.

It wasn’t just me. Publishing this pro-Trump op-ed on the eve of the election, the Times badly triggered its readers, who clearly felt deeply betrayed. Maybe not betrayed to the extent of LA Times and Washington Post readers, but still. Here’s one example of a regular reader’s reaction to the tsunami of outrage welling up in the article’s comments section, just to give you a sense:

Behold Mr. Colby’s closing argument, which again, appears in today’s print edition, nine days before the election. Colby criticized the Biden administration’s bellicose nuclear escalation and basically said it was either “Vote for Trump or duck and cover”:

Colby’s not wrong. Where did the peace-loving left go? What about flower power? They just vanished in a puff of politically convenient smoke. Democrats are now so deranged that, if Trump is for peace, then they want full-on nuclear war.

Mr. O’Brien’s closing argument, on the other hand, made the positive case. He explained that Trump doesn’t just love America. He loves the American people:

And the American people have noticed. Many of them love the President back. Which brings us to the next segment.

🔥🔥 The most shocking and thought-provoking theory appeared yesterday, when former Democrat and now independent journalist Michael Shellenberger published a Public News Substack titled, “Toxic Femininity And Wokeism Are Driving Men, Jews, Billionaires, and Muslims Away From Harris To Trump.”

People are flipping away from the cackling noises. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai apparently told President Trump that his McDonald’s shift was the biggest thing ever to happen on Google, which says a lot, both of the massive search and the fact Google’s CEO called Trump.  A few days before that, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook also called Trump, to complain about EU over-regulation. Yesterday, a large group of Michigan muslim leaders endorsed Trump for president, reversing decades of support for Democrats.

And yesterday, Dearborn, Michigan’s Democrat mayor announced he’s not endorsing anybody. So.

Even worse for Harris, Shellenberger noted that the elite class —another Democrat stronghold— dumped Kamala like she was a cheating girlfriend. Various Silicon Valley venture capitalists, tech leaders, and billionaires like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman —all former Democrats— have now jumped the Democrats’ sinking ship of state and climbed aboard the Trump train. Plus, after spending $400 million to help Biden in 2020, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg now prudishly says he won’t endorse anybody for president.

Then, on top of all those defections, this week the country’s two biggest lib papers refused to endorse Harris and probably won’t even come to her next birthday party.

Shellenberger pointed out these remarkable developments were not obvious. For one example, Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos endorsed Black Lives Matter on the Amazon website in 2020, and sniped at the time that he was “happy to lose” any customers who disagreed.

For most of these folks and liberal institutions, it’s a total turnaround.

Six months ago, Shellenberger explained, “Democrats and their allies in the criminal justice system appeared close to getting Trump incarcerated or prevented from running for office.” Trump was never the clear front-runner. During the primaries, both DeSantis and Haley at times appeared viable, if not strong. Things got so bad that in August, after Trump had “the worst three weeks of his campaign,” I was forced to write an encouraging post titled “The Second Act,” promising that we’d soon see a better Third Act.

(I was right, but I’m not gloating.)

Now, barely three months following the Times noticing that Trump’s campaign had scraped bottom, the Times this week ran an op-ed by Democrat political consultant John Della Volpe titled, “Trump’s Bro Whispering Could Cost Democrats Too Many Young Men.” This is how far we’ve come: Della Volpe warned readers that President Trump “could peel enough young men away from the Democratic Party to transform the country’s electoral math for years to come.”

Years.

I don’t completely agree with Shellenberger’s theory, which is that the Democrat party’s Marxist strategy of knitting together various victim groups into a political quilt is finally fraying. Jews used to be victims of antisemitism, but are now shocked to find themselves yeeted as colonialists and oppressors. White women used to enjoy #MeToo survivor status, but now are just “Karens” whose “white tears” are themselves racist and transphobes if they don’t want to share locker rooms with male cross-dressers.

Muslims, formerly victims of islamophobia, are fed up with the LGBT nonsense and are moving rightwards. Black folks are discovering they aren’t as valuable as illegals, who are claiming all the benefits and displacing everyone else from low-income housing.

Last night, former Clinton insider Van Jones basically told Bill Maher that woke progressives are tearing themselves to pieces:

It’s all falling apart. It’s almost like someone ran a color revolution against the Democrat party. Someone, perhaps, who learned firsthand how the deep state runs color revolutions against other countries, by exacerbating existing divisions. A former President perhaps.

And listen closely. Color revolutions only work when the deep state can communicate directly with citizens of the target country. That’s why color revolutions work on countries like Ukraine and Venezuela, but not China, North Korea, or Russia. So if I’m right, somebody engineering this woke color revolution had to find a way two years ago to talk to Americans without deep state interference. And it cost them $45 billion dollars.

Or Shellenberger could be right. He thinks that the left’s problems come from wokeness. Specifically, woke toxic feminism, which has formed a political party in Hillary Clinton’s shrill image. “Democrats,” Shellenberger suggested, “have cemented their position as the party of affluent women” —mean girls— “while Republicans are becoming the party of men and the working class.”

I don’t disagree. But that’s been true for at least 20 years. Someone or something has tipped the teetering edifice, causing it to crash. At this last, desperate hour, could we be finally watching the ultimate collapse of the left’s cobbled-together, Frankensteinian, woke Tower of Babel?

How amazing would that be? Let me know what you think in the comments: is the left imploding from over-wokeness or a counter-color revolution?

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you for loyally supporting C&C and helping us save the country. Don’t get complacent, vote early, and stay frosty. Then roll back here tomorrow morning, to kick off October’s final week in the right, C&C way.

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