Don’t get me wrong: I think expertise is badly needed in society and that we’d drive ourselves crazy if we didn’t defer to the expert consensus most of the time. But increasingly “trust the experts” or “trust the science” is used as a political cudgel, such as during many controversies about the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, as David Shor found out, citing the experts isn’t always welcome if it doesn’t match the Village’s political objectives. Something has changed when skepticism—something I’d always thought of as the province of liberals—is instead being championed by conservatives like
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