It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1935 In The Death of Expertise, national security expert Tom Nichols warns that knowledge is under attack by an ill-informed public determined to replace […]
Cone Of Shame by Nancy OhanianIf someone was to start an essay with "I was a Republican for most of my adult life," there's a good chance I would stop reading. How much of a moron or bigot would someone have to be to have been a Republican for most of their adult life? I wasn't even an adult when I figured out that even a horribly flawed Democratic Party in practice wasn't as bad as the Republican Party in aspiration (and practice).
Tom Nichols is author of The Death Of Expertise and that video above was recorded before Trumpism really took hold in America as Trumpism. The Know Thing impulses were always around, but not focused and ascendant as they became once they were in the Oval Office. Yesterday, writing for USA Today, Nichols addressed the problem as it stands now: As America tops 4 million COVID cases, the cult of Donald Trump has become a death cult.
We've all had a good time analyzing the narcissistic sociopath in the White House for the last few years, right? How about a serious look at the crackpots who not just voted for him in 2016-- after all, it was a lesser of two evils election-- but who still support him today? You're not a psychiatrist, so you can't.
Trump was nominated for the presidency by the Republican Party over two years ago and he has been in the White House for nearly two years. Tom Nichols is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, his seventh book.
