He Ain’t Tricky, He’s My “Expert”

1,961 words

Expert: “A person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area.”

Begging the question: “The fallacy of begging the question occurs when an argument’s premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it.”

The corruption of language is, perhaps, the most critical metapolitical question of our time. Winners in the battle for the control of language get the power to manipulate and regulate the thinking of those who use the language — to protect us, as the “smart people” now like to say, from “disinformation.” So insidious, so subtle is the process of winning that the losers often have no realization that they have been vanquished and happily assent to the manner of thinking and talking approved of by their “betters.”

Moreover, the widespread, seemingly innocuous conformity that, like a pathogenic slow-growing mold, seeps into the normal, “acceptable” routines of linguistic communication makes any deviation from the usual pater of orthodoxy highly conspicuous and readily punishable. Try saying or writing something accurate about “Jewish power,” black criminality, or poor black SAT test performance that doesn’t end your career or force you into groveling apologies and sensitivity training.

This corruption of language is advanced by the corrupted culture-dominating institutions — schools and universities, government, the mainstream media, the entertainment industry — where words go to be twisted away from stable meanings and “reengineered” as tools of opinion manipulation and political warfare. At the apex of this corruption are the universities, where the latest pernicious fantasies of “progress” are generated and the rationales for enforcing conformity made into ubiquitous propaganda. Out of the universities the professional enforcers and propagandists descend, waving their credentials — “We’re experts!” — and inflict their pieties and moral compulsions on us. The assault on free speech, mandatory struggle sessions for white people, veneration of black criminals, and so on are now standard operating procedure. The “thinking” behind all of these destructive rituals can be traced to one or another “theorist” perched in his comfortable nest at a university, feathered by oodles of grant money from the government and tax-exempt, “charitable” foundations.[1]

Nowhere is this corruption more egregious than in university colleges of education, which are now dominated by mental midgets constantly tweaking the “social justice” agenda. From the teacher-prep ed schools flow the graduates who staff the K-12 schools and conduct the compulsory stupidification of American youth. Children move through this system of pretend pedagogy that’s designed to turn them into permanent adolescents in need of life-long “counseling.” Many of them go on to the universities, now known as “finishing schools for progressives,” emerging thoroughly woke and massively in debt.

Columbia Teachers College (CTC), founded in 1887, is the oldest and largest graduate school of education in the United States. In case you are wondering about what the folks who run the “premier” teacher’s college in the country regard as their mission, you can hear it straight from the Big Enchilada himself, CTC’s President Thomas Bailey, as stated back in 2020: “The Fight against Racism and Inequity Isn’t Part of Our Mission – It Is Our Mission.” Bailey was responding, as the CTC “newsroom” put it, to brutal murders and “centuries of unhealed wounds”:

“I am worried and brokenhearted,” began the message from Teachers College President Thomas Bailey. “And I am angry. I’m angry that my Black students, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and fellow citizens are subjected each day to indignities that I neither have or could ever experience.”

President Bailey apparently isn’t much for statistics and numbers, since the “brutal murders” that should be breaking his heart and making him “worried” and “angry” are overwhelmingly committed by blacks: blacks killing fellow blacks, and whites as well, including children and elderly women, as in Waukesha, Wisconsin recently. He also might have wondered: If “wounds” go “unhealed” for centuries, then it’s a safe bet that they never will. So why bother? But then, this is the usual “vapors”-style virtue-signaling from safely tenured white professors and higher-ed administrators who spend their days pretending to be angry and worried about arcane indignities deciphered as “micro-aggressions.” This is mental ordure that’s supposed to pass for serious reflection.

His statement concludes: “From the humblest pre-kindergarten to the largest university, schools are our best hope for instilling an understanding of human difference and the institutions of a participatory democracy.”

Bailey’s “best hope” is our worst nightmare. To translate: “instilling an understanding of human difference” actually means instilling a vision of race relations — historically and current — that posits white bigotry and privilege as its central motif. Its practical aim is (a) to nurture the resentment of blacks toward whites and to continue the compilation and polishing of their grievances, and (b) to marinate whites in the sauce of collective guilt so as to make them compliant in the effacement of their history, culture, and status.

The “fight against racism” is now openly affirmed as the mission of our educational leaders. “Racism” has become the turbo-charged engine of corruption. Think about how the accusation of “racism” makes it impossible to conduct a minimally frank, honest, dispassionate discussion about black people’s history, status, and behavior in the United States.

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s new novel When Harry Met Sally here.

Now try this thought experiment: The majority of white Americans wake up one morning no longer caring about or traumatized by the accusation of being “racist” and no longer experiencing guilt for the paucity of blacks in departments of physics, actuarial science, petroleum engineering, and the National Hockey League. What would be the result? Black Americans would immediately lose their powers of intimidation, their immunity from norms that bind non-blacks, and their ability to extract resources and special consideration from the white population. Black anger and hostility would be recognized for what it really is: the manifestation of envy and the rationalization for inequality of outcomes. The “diversity” industry would collapse. The entire American political landscape would shift, including the composition and agendas of both political parties. Al Sharpton would no longer be called “Reverend” and might even be where he deserves to be: in prison.

Such is the power of corrupted language, the power of a single word charged with rancorous emotion but devoid of any stable meaning or application.

This experiment suggests that “our mission should be the fight against “racism,” a metapolitical battle against this noxious word that makes politicians go weak-kneed and makes too many white Americans willing to submit to the blackmail and feel guilty for a “privilege” they don’t possess. Once this word is defanged, we might be able to talk about “human difference” and the best ways to deal with it.

This battle against “racism” must be a broader battle against the entire supporting cast of corrupted words that support the orthodoxy of “white privilege” and “systemic racism.” “Hate speech,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “equality,” and “African-American” are just a sample of words that litter their daily propaganda barrage.

A word that needs more attention and also needs to be defanged is “expert.” As we see from the definition above, an expert is someone with “authoritative knowledge.” This is the source of the ruse that begins with “experts say” — the go-to move for a know-nothing mainstream media “journalist,” paid to peddle the party line. It says: “Don’t believe me? Well, I hang out with the ‘authoritative knowledge’ people who have the final say on these important matters — quod erat demonstrandum.” This lazy journalist doesn’t have to prove what he assumes to be true; his more knowledgeable friend steps in and asserts it for him.

The “experts say” trope is a version of the “begging the question” fallacy particularly favored by writers from the New York Times. Here is an example. “Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What.” From the headline, you can already draw the conclusion the writer of the article will make: “Anti-racist Covid lockdown protesters are virtuous; those protesting the loss of their businesses, jobs, and freedoms are white, ignorant rubes who threaten public health.” The conclusion is derived from the assumption that is the foundation of the NYT’s editorial position: White bigotry remains America’s original sin.

Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism.

Yes, there was some “discomfort” caused by the logical dilemma of inconsistency, but come on! We’re talking about “racism,” mate. No reason to worry, however: The experts came through with the “truth” that the folks at the NYT have been in possession of for a long time.

Some public health scientists publicly waved off the conflicted feelings of their colleagues, saying the country now confronts a stark moral choice. The letter signed by more than 1,300 epidemiologists and health workers urged Americans to adopt a “consciously anti-racist” stance and framed the difference between the anti-lockdown demonstrators [the bad people] and the protesters [the good people] in moral, ideological and racial terms.

Somehow, “follow the science” didn’t seem to fit in with the “experts’” talking points in this case.

The entire article is worth reading as a NYT masterpiece of equivocation, special pleading, and question begging — one more piece of propaganda masquerading as objective journalism.

By coincidence, the “experts” of “stark moral choice” favored by the NYT reporters are on the same page as those selected by the folks at our government-subsidized propaganda mill, NPR. In a Special Series: American Reckons with Racial Injustice, we have Bill Chappell, “writer and editor on the News Desk in the heart of NPR’s newsroom [sic] in Washington, D.C.” with “Protesting Racism Versus Risking COVID-19: ‘I Wouldn’t Weigh These Crises Separately.’”

The article leads off with the conclusion, affirmed by “some experts”:

Mass protests that have erupted over police brutality toward black people in America are raising concerns about the risk of spreading the coronavirus. But some health experts, even as they urge caution, said they support the demonstrations — because racism also poses a dire health threat.

“Racism” is front and center for NPR, the NYT, and the rest of the mainstream media. “Racism” as “a dire health threat”? If you doubt that, ask “the experts” — some of them, anyway.

To return to the definition of “expert,” someone with “authoritative knowledge,” it should be clear why it has joined the lexicon of corrupted words so heavily relied upon by the Left. “Authoritative” as used in the warfare of postmodern politics is purely rhetorical, a vocable that affirms the power of those who use it and signals that those subjected to it must submit. The irony in this is that the Left has been so successful in its assault against authority that the only rational response is a comprehensive distrust of the authority of those now in power who claim “to know” how best to order our lives. They have brought us full circle back to Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic: “Justice is serving the interest of the stronger.”

Our fight against “racism” is a larger, metapolitical struggle against the corrupted language foisted on us by the Left. We must repudiate it and aggressively assert a language that conforms to the rules of logic and the implication of facts. A language that does not bend to the domination of feelings and the dictates of sensitivity will put us in a better position to disrupt the current plans for our subjugation and dispossession.

Note

[1] An instance that shows how far insanely left the “charitable” foundations have moved is: “Ibram Kendi, BU Center for Antiracist Research Founding Director, Wins 2021 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant. The $625,000 no-strings-attached fellowship honors his exceptional creativity, scholarly achievements, gift for communicating his antiracist work and ideas with diverse audiences, and promise for further benefiting society.” This is also confirmation of the second of Robert Conquest’s “Three Laws of Politics”: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”

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