It seems that, as expertocracy thankfully imploded after Covid, idiocracy’s big moment has finally arrived. Since the past year, through podcast appearances—either as guests or hosts, for example (as reported on these pages) on the Tucker Carlson show—the door has been thrown wide open to a certain range of “non-expert” views now bestowed with the aura of authenticity under the tagline “just asking questions”—views that interestingly very much involve Hitler, the Holocaust, JFK, and, as usual, Jews.
The phenomenon is fascinating, because the conspiracy theories and historical revisionism spouted under that tagline are much more a psychological phenomenon than one of politics proper. While examining this distinction would be worth considering, I want to focus on the more specific issue of “expertise”. One of the more telling debates in this regard was Douglas Murray’s and Dave Smith’s appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast on April 10, in which Joe and Dave teamed up against Douglas to explain that Darryl Cooper—who claimed that Hitler did not openly advocate antisemitism in his public speeches, and also that there were no death camps, but only POW camps in the Deutsches Reich, and that the mass murders by the National Socialists were due to a “lack of preparation and food”—has been terribly misunderstood. “Darryl is not downplaying the Holocaust”, said Dave Smith, comedian. Strange, because saying that there were no death camps specially built to serve as termination facilities for Jews in the German Reich during WWII very much sounds like Holocaust denial to anyone with a brain.
“Darryl is not downplaying the Holocaust”, said Dave Smith, comedian. Strange, because saying that there were no death camps in the German Reich very much sounds like Holocaust denial to anyone with a brain.
Douglas Murray was right to point out a huge inconsistency to Joe Rogan. By inviting self-described “non-experts”, like Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper, who nonetheless get to talk about World War II, Churchill, Hitler, and (mysteriously non-existent) antisemitism in the Third Reich on the biggest political talk show in the world, Rogan is clearly taking responsibility for the publicizing of his guests’ ideas. But when that responsibility was cashed in and accountability demanded, as done by Murray, Rogan brushed it off: “he’s not an expert, he’s just a hobby historian/comedian/gardener”, and whatnot. This of course also goes for the people making these claims themselves. Putting out daring claims and then pulling in one’s tail is rightly considered cowardly. For example, Darryl Cooper refused to debate Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts after Cooper claimed that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain” of World War II. Not a great look.
When accountability was by demanded, Rogan brushed it off: “he’s not an expert, he’s just a hobby historian/comedian/gardener”, and whatnot.
Second, the withdrawal to the safe space of #justaskingquestions serves as leverage to put something outrageous out there—something truly bonkers like “Hitler kept his antisemitism down in public”— can then serve to smuggle in not only bonkers, but evil claims like, “hey, the Third Reich wasn’t really that bad—Churchill on the other hand…”: pre-heated Daily Stormer and David Irving-stuff from 20 years ago. This has been empirically proven by the current debate in real time and has nothing to do with a hallucinated “concept creep” Smith and Rogan accuse Murray of.
It’s clearly the famous loss of trust in institutions during Covid that has ignited this seemingly innocuous “everybody’s opinion is equally valid” stance. But that is a misconception of not only the lesson(s) we should have learned from Covid, but also of the character of free debate: of course not everyone’s opinion is equally valid. One should be able to voice one’s opinion freely and publicly, but if it’s self-contradictory or otherwise irrational, counterfactual, uninformed, or simply stupid, you need to learn the meaning of “losing an argument”. If the “free marketplace of ideas” means anything at all, it means that bad ideas are sorted out quickly. For example, I have a mate who has a certain interest in MMA and has certainly watched 30 matches (perhaps the equivalent of “reading 30 books on World War II”, as Cooper said he did). There is no question that if Rogan had him on his show talking about MMA fighting, my mate would take a cold one.
But the accusation against Murray of being “elitist” and “appealing to authority” is in other ways lopsided, especially if we look at Covid. That ordinary people like myself began ridiculing the “trust the experts”-line during Covid had nothing to do with them thinking of themselves as better epidemiologists or virologists than Anthony Fauci, Neil Ferguson, or Christian Drosten.
That ordinary people began ridiculing the “trust the experts”-line during Covid had nothing to do with them thinking of themselves as better epidemiologists or virologists than Fauci.
When accusing “Covid experts” of ignorance, we did not base their accusation on virological expertise: clearly, I am neither a virologist nor an epidemiologist. But I am a mother, and making my kid wear a mask during PE relay races or keeping me from seeing a dying relative in hospital because of restrictions, was criminal, because it was against my own, and by extension, everyone’s, interests. The measures were famously worse than the “pandemic” itself. The problem was, as I’ve been saying time and again, that Covid was a political and social challenge, not an epidemiological one. And the technocratic “experts” that dictated our way of life were anything but knowledgeable about or even interested in people’s everyday lives, in how or if our social fabric held together at all in the wake of their “recommendations”.
The exclusion of public debates about Covid’s social costs and the fanatical focus on “expertise” in terms of statistics, numbers, R-values, the highly divisive attempt to overthrow a humanist view of the individual for an “epistemological view of the subject” (Benjamin Bratton) and the state’s encroachment onto our private lives—the dissolution of the boundary between the public and private sphere that “experts” demanded—made many of us turn passionately against the state-imposed narrative. In fact, the experts were less than half-educated in relation to the costs of freedom, and even the basic rule of law, which still guarantees a separation of the public and private in most Western democracies: the experts were dumb. In fact, in this regard, they were not experts at all. And yet, we were made to listen to them.
This is not to say that expertise—true expertise—in matters of life is never valuable. But I would still not trust someone else, i.e. the state, to tell me how to live. However, would I reject expertise on the same terms when it came to deciding who is better equipped on the subject of Churchill or the Holocaust—someone who podcasts based on 30 books he has read about 20th century German history, or someone who has written several tomes on Churchill and World War II, teaches at King’s College London, and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society? This does not mean I have to trust the latter on Richard Wagner, MMA fights, or even recent British foreign affairs. But on Churchill, he is probably the better choice.
I realize we have entered a historical phase where one might not be able to read, never mind write, such questions without shaking one’s head: didn’t it used to be common sense to trust authorities in their field over hobby podcasters, just like distrusting state directives used to be common sense? First principles are increasingly undermined by dumbster interventions, which have gained popularity not despite, but because of the naive, average Dan-approach to contested and complex questions. Neither Joe Rogan nor Dave Smith have evil intentions. In truth, their Holocaust-denial apology does not even deserve an expert response. The only correct one was given by Murray: “It’s horseshit”.
