There were a lot of professionals who reached out to me to basically say "Thank you for writing this." It's right there on his timeline. The American public now has what it wanted. Well, let me tell you about lawyers." I am not confidently predicting victory. My activism for #LoveIsNotTourism is in my freaking bio. "DEVIN STEWART: Okay, same title. Pegoda praised Nichols for not conflating expertise with credentials, and, while avowing that the book has some shortcomings, it has the "potential to start more important conversations". I did get onea story I always tell out here on the roadfrom a molecular biologist in France, saying "thank you," and I thought, Wow! The fight will be a rearguard action, and we will likely lose. You're just supposed to unwind your swing like this." We didn't really understand it." Hes desperate. For those keeping tabs on Tom Nichols, hes creepily fixated on a woman who wants her family to stop being kept apart by arbitrary rules with no scientific basis. Honest to God-a real viewer q. It is, as usual, our fault, as voters and citizens, for tolerating a culture that is endangering our fellow Americans instead of insisting that all of us exercise our constitutional rights like responsible adults. But lets face it: President Trump ran on this. Yes, the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project are now taking in lots of donationsbut that was after burning personal and financial bridges to the Republican Party that sustained them and built their handsome homes over the years. When I chose this profession, I ceased to have any identity outside of it, I guess. In the first season of Netflixs hit reality show Love Is Blind, Lauren Speed visits the Atlanta home of her new fianc, Cameron Hamilton. This is why, when Trump is gone (whether after this election or in 2024), I will continue to oppose everyone who had anything to do with inflicting this scar on American history, long after the members of the Trump family are finally bankrupt, in rehab, in jail, or living in seclusion in Manhattan among the neighbors who already despise them. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2023 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. If you smell something delicious wafting around the entire state of Rhode Island, that'd be my house." You've witnessed this around the world, as well, in Asia and Europe, this phenomenon of scorn toward the elite and toward expertise. What if I didn't have experts? He actually said, "Would it be so bad if I didn't have experts?" "DEVIN STEWART: But isn't it more fun to be less self-aware?TOM NICHOLS: It's certainly less painful to be less self-aware. Just give it up. Meh. Have just been notified that hes on day 3 of talking about me #BloomWhereYoureLaunderedandPlanted pic.twitter.com/MUv15aMssw, Ellen Carmichael (@ellencarmichael) August 2, 2021. As big an ass as I would be if I planted a question on a news show and then ratted out the host who made it seem like a random viewer for making the question seem nastier than the one I planted? Thats an awfully elitist attitude, Tom. DEVIN STEWART: What are the risks here? Obama made something like this case during the 2011 surge, and Donald Trump tried to make a similar argument, but because Trump was too stupid or too lazy to understand anything about international affairs (or much else), he made it purely as a weaponized political charge and, as with his inane attempts to engage North Korea, in a search for a splashy and quick win. Many of us instead held firm and made the case for democracy and the rule of law from the right flank against our own tribe. It was the angry-old-man-yelling-at-clouds piece that I wrote, and that turned into the article that eventuallyOxford [University Press] actually came to me about the book because I wasn't sure that there was that broad an audience for it until the piece went viral. Carmichaels Austrian in-laws have yet to meet her baby daughter, and her family is heartbroken. As is Tom drawing attention to his awfulness its important that as many people as possible realize what kind of person he is. America Is 'Committing Suicide' By Allowing Trannies in the Military (Russian TV News). America still needs accountability at every level. Americas not at war was a common refrain among the troops. My older half-brother, who lived a few streets away, was a police officer. The World as We Knew It shows how Greek mythology can help us make sense of the climate crisis. DEVIN STEWART: Wonderful. When U.S. forces had to endure the misery of the retreat from North Korea back to the 38th parallel, no one made the argument that it had happened because of the voters. He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion. (2/2). But apparently the globalizingI don't want to call it "populism"effect of the Information Age, information overload, the broadening of education, and the segmenting of the media clearly has had a global impact on the relationship between experts and lay people.DEVIN STEWART: Are you hinting at a follow-up book?TOM NICHOLS: As the folks who follow me on Twitter point out, I could probably populate an entire annual volume just by collecting things out of my Twitter feed. While conceding that experts do sometimes fail, he says the best answer to this is the self-correcting presence of other experts to recognize and rectify systemic failures. What are some other spillover effects globally?TOM NICHOLS: That's a good question, because I was surprised. So I think all of these things combined together have created this kind of unfounded and fragile arrogance in people where they claim to know as much as experts, but deep down know they're probably wrong about that.DEVIN STEWART: That first article, was that the Foreign Affairs one, if people want to go back and look for it?TOM NICHOLS: The very first piece was actually in a magazine called The Federalist online. Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 30, 2021. There are places where we just don't know stuff.DEVIN STEWART: I think you talked about how ridiculous the day trader is in the book as an example. Was the question valid or not, Tom? Your implication that I behaved unethically by tweeting a question to ask my government official is preposterous. It's interesting that as I've been writing this and as the Trump administration came in, there was a rumor that the president's assistant, Steve Bannon, has been walking about with a copy of The Best and the Brightest. That's kind of a hedgehog; that's somebody who knows something very deeply and very narrowly, and that does not mean that you're good at everything. I think a good example here is the airlines. Boys were drafted and sent into battle, sometimes in missions never intended to be revealed to the public. I think the Russians will try to manipulate the White House into moving further and further away from NATO, perhaps without the White House even realizing that that's what is happening, because the Russians are way better at this game than anybody in Washington in power right now. He is a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. How Long Would the US Navy Survive in a Shooting War? Christian Husbands, Ditch the 'Honey Do' List! What's different now?TOM NICHOLS: As I said, when I first started out, I was a Russia guy, Soviet Union. But the respect for the idea of expertise, of these exclusive, highly specialized areas of knowledge where people should defer to that body of knowledge and to the people who have that body of knowledge, that's what is really falling under attack in modern society today.DEVIN STEWART: How did you first come to observe this phenomenon?TOM NICHOLS: I think every young professional when you first make that transition, whether you're a doctor, a diplomat, a teacher, or whatever your profession is, you'll always encounter somebody who wants to argue with you about it, who goes: "Oh, you're a lawyer, huh? #LoveIsNotTourism https://t.co/3C7zMNiUfV, Note: my note to Bret was about Europeans not being allowed in while people are coming from countries that had worse vaccination administration rates and more prevalence of COVID-19. They head off expressions of this kind of social disapproval by being aggressive and performative, daring anyone to criticize them for feeling the need to be armed while getting milk and eggs at the supermarket. @redsteeze backs conspiracy theorist and projection artist Tom Nichols into a moral and intellectual corner https://t.co/JCFkLsEGUr, Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) August 2, 2021. For a guy whose beef is not with Ellen Carmichael, Tom Nichols sure has spent a lot of time talking about Ellen Carmichael. This kind of affirmation of cultural norms can be a lot more powerful than any law, and I suspect that the gun-culture extremists know it. How Reality Dating Shows Stoke Racial Tensions. In the author's words, his goal . - Explanation by Fr. ), What I remember about guns is that I remember almost nothing about guns. I think of this passage often, not only because I spent the first part of my career fighting (in my own small and mostly insignificant way) the Cold War, but also because I have spent the most recent part of my career fighting the possible rise of authoritarianism in my own country. Right on brand. DEVIN STEWART: It is a global phenomenon. Disgusting. But mostlyI would say overwhelmingly the letters I've gotten are from professionals, from doctors. https://t.co/VTVSaWa2au, Will knows the person because it was a conservative writer and consultant who fed the question to Fox. Early life and education [ edit] DEVIN STEWART: Wow. https://t.co/e3E8svjYRu. The pandemic caused the biggest disruption in the history of American education. We all paid for our dissent, in various ways. Pegoda also described The Death of Expertise as "extremely interesting, important, and timely" and said that "Nichols, in short, provides a brief History, informed by psychology and political science, of what he argues is a new phenomenon whereby people in the United States are not just regularly wrong or ignorant but 'proud of not knowing things'". I just didnt have the metacognition to be able to step back from what I was doing with my ability to swing the golf club. Liberal democracy is about much more than that. I happen to know the person who asked this question. My mother, for one. What did strike me is that I was taken by surprise at how global the reaction was. Tom, thanks for coming.TOM NICHOLS: Thanks for having me, Devin.DEVIN STEWART: So what is the death of expertise?TOM NICHOLS: It's really the death of the idea of expertise. As a lifelong conservative choosing Crooked Hillary over the Swamp Drainer, I received a short burst of interest, especially from talk radio. My question is, who are the Russia people? Therefore, you're wrong about everything. https://t.co/BKflCNL3L1, (Toms referring to Salena Zito, whom hes accused of fabricating sources and stories. Or try another recommendation from our reading list of books that reveal our anxieties about a warming planet. I identified a Zito-like case of a "News" broadcast laundering a professional GOP consultant as "an ordinary viewer" in order to say "this is a question that many ordinary people have. Now that it looks like Trump is headed for defeat, some Republicans feel safe to criticize him again. Being pissed off about someone making a valid point is right on brand for Tom Nichols. They kind of godfathered the concept, and they've supported the book to the hilt out there as it has been released, so I've been really grateful to them as well.DEVIN STEWART: It's got an endorsement from our friend Ian Bremmer on the back. The experience of fighting taught the Never Trumpers how much the president had poisoned the Republican Party and long ago exposed the character of many of our former comrades. Well, that phenomenon actually has a scientific basis called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that the people who are the least competent at something have the greatest tendency to overestimate their competence at it.DEVIN STEWART: That's because they lack the intelligence to be self-aware?TOM NICHOLS: They lack a particular skill called metacognition, which is the ability to step back and see that you're doing something poorly. The Supreme Court has now affirmed that all these guys can be the handsome ranger with the Big Iron on their hip. Other conservatives who spoke privately and sometimes publicly of Trump with utter contempt in 2016 buckled that November. "If a show on MSNBC had a "a viewer" question lobbed at a Trump official, and it turned out I wrote it, you'd totally say it was disgusting to call it out, right? relatives in Greece once posed me in a Greek Evzone-soldier costume with my uncle's hunting shotgun. The emergence of a strong center in France; all of this fear of an ignorant right-wing, anti-elitist, anti-expert takeover in France turned out to be in the exact opposite direction. Watch. It didnt use to be this way. I think that's where experts also get into trouble; we can be overly directive. Posted at 11:36 am on August 2, 2021 by Sarah D. Last week, Jen Psaki said that the Biden administration will maintain all existing travel restrictions at this point (while doing absolutely nothing to curb the influx of migrants at our southern border). (I had been asked some years earlier to be a contributor when the publication launched. And it's humbling. Using the power of ethics to build a better world, [emailprotected] As it turned out, even before the Breitbart story dropped, my employer had already determined that I had not violated any laws or regulations. Across the world today, there is active hostility towards experts, says Tom Nichols of the U.S. I could . Americas at the mall.. No, Id say my 6-month-old baby girl, her wonderful Austrian grandparents and all those suffering under a cruel, unscientific, illogical travel ban on Europeans are the real victims. But first, here are three great new stories from The Atlantic. That was the big change. Stop using me to make a point about Fox. TOM NICHOLS: Same title. Thanks for watching https://t.co/T20oaSSrHq. Homosexuals Persecuting Christians in America - Do You Feel The Walls Closing In? "TOM NICHOLS: "I nailed it." Its my pinned tweet. Breitbart claimed I was breaking that law. Why? Other people had to fight for their rights, not me. The purpose of my life was to end the time I lived in., With a bit more pensiveness, Smiley adds: Or perhaps our troubles are just beginning.. I think most people don't want to do that second part. That's a keeper." I didn't say you behaved unethically, @ellencarmichael. But because I teach at a military institution, I am a Defense Department employee and I am therefore bound by the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using their positions for political purposes. The US Outspends Russia 10X On Military, But They Are Equals. Shutterstock / The Atlantic. Our next-door neighbor was a police officer. The house is airy and bright, and Lauren and Cameron, fingers laced, wander the rooms imagining the life they might have there together. Today, many claim that they did not know what the military or the government were really up to, and they point to The Washington Posts attempt to create a Pentagon Papers vibe around a set of revelations that were not nearly as shocking as the secrets of Vietnamor should not have been, anyway, to anyone who read a newspaper during the past two decades. A serious peoplethe kind of people we once werewould have made serious choices, long before this current debacle was upon them. There is nothing nefarious about this. Biden was right, in the end, to bite the bullet and refuse to pass this conflict on to yet another president. Tom wouldnt know about using his platform to help anyone. Coverage in print media remained solid, but cable-news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off quickly, especially once a new adventure was launched in Iraq. @BretBaier described you as "a viewer. Well, and also, that Baiee added an inflammatory linking of two issues that the original questioner says did not have in the question which that we would not have known because the question was laundered through the host. You need to spend at least an hour with me"whoever the Russia expert is"before you walk into that room." If they chose to stay, they were warmongers intent on pursuing forever war. And so here we are, in the place we were destined to be: resting on 20 years of safety from another 9/11, but with Afghanistan again in the hands of the Taliban. Kabul has fallen. Russian Flashmob Sings Famous WW2 Song (Smuglyanka), Russian Missile Tech has Made America's Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete, Amazing Russian WW2 Monuments in This Viral Song Tribute to Veterans (Video), In a War With Russia NATO Doesn't Stand a Chance, Gloves Are for Sissies: Photographs Show White Helmets Are Immune to Sarin, NATO Would Probably Lose a War Against Russia, Putin Bored by Netanyahus Bible Stories, Invites Israeli PM to Join Real World, US Media Falls in Love With Unhinged British Witch Who Wants to Bomb Russia, EPIC FAIL: Why Most US Weapons Systems Are Worse than Russia's, US Secret Services' Tried to Nab 29 Russian Troops in Syria and Got Their Butts Kicked - Russian Military, The Tsar's Photographer and His Amazing Preservation of Russian History. Listen. Tom Nichols. A win in the Supreme Court for the American right to threaten one another in public.