Two essays make the same point

WHEN IS IT TIME TO DISTRUST EXPERTS? AS KAMPALLAwalla ding dong REMINDS US, “that time is every day”

Viet Nam and the War on Poverty began my own distrust of experts and COVID finished it off, with decades of expert-caused debacles along the way. And then there’s global warming ….

Victor Davis Hanson: Why We Lost Trust in the Expert Class

For years, European policymakers had assured the world that the relatively rapid “transition” to “green” energy was the world’s preordained future — regardless of the costs.

Accordingly, many European Union governments followed the advice of green experts. They eagerly shut down coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants to transition immediately to “renewable energy.”

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As a result, German government officials warn that this winter, in 19th-century fashion, families will have to burn wood — the dirtiest of modern fuels — to endure the cold. And there is further talk of “warm rooms,” where like pre-civilizational tribal people, the elderly will bunch together within a designated heated room to keep alive.

Sri Lanka may be the first modern nation to adopt deliberate policies that have led to mass hunger and bankruptcy. The government, for a variety of reasons, listened to foreign advocates of back-to-nature organic farming, specifically outright abandonment of highly effective synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

The result was endemic crop failure. Cash crops for export failed. Widespread hunger followed. Without foreign exchange, it became impossible to import key staples like food and fuel.

Sri Lanka once had a per capita income twice that of nearby India. Now it cannot feed or fuel itself.

Unfortunately, its incompetent government trusted radical environmental advisors, many of them foreign experts. Sri Lanka believed it could become the woke darling of the “Environmental, Social, Governance” movement, and in that way draw in unlimited Western woke investment.

Instead, it has embraced a policy of national suicide.

Recently, a group of 55 distinguished pro-administration economists assured us that President Joe Biden’s massive borrowing and new entitlements agenda were not inflationary. In September 2021, these economists with 14 Nobel prize winners among them declared that Biden’s inflationary policies would actually “ease” inflation.

Last month, inflation spiked to an annualized rate of 9.1%.

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In late July 2021, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claimed that the Taliban takeover “was not a foregone conclusion.” He bragged that 34 provincial capitals were still in Afghan government hands.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nodded in approval. Less than a month later, the entire Afghan government collapsed. The American military fled in its most ignominious retreat in over 50 years. Milley had been parroting Biden’s earlier prompt that a Taliban victory after the American evacuation was “highly unlikely.”

On the eve of the 2020 election, news accounts revealed some of the lurid contents on Hunter Biden’s lost laptop. Emails and photos began to incriminate the entire Biden family for leveraging millions of dollars from foreign grandees for access to a bought Joe Biden.

Fifty retired intelligence officers, however, without evidence, swore that the laptop’s appearance could be due to “Russian disinformation.” Yet after authentication — Hunter himself never denied the lost laptop was his — few if any of those marquee “experts” apologized for their election-driven dissimulation.

At the height of the massive 2020 enforced quarantine and lockdowns, some 1,200 medical and health “professionals” signed a petition claiming that thousands of left-wing protestors should be exempt from the very quarantine they had insisted on for others.

The experts absurdly claimed that denying tens of thousands the right to break quarantines to protest in the street was a greater health threat than COVID-19.

FBI Director James Comey doggedly pursued the “Russian collusion” hoax. At one point he hired the discredited Christopher Steele to supply the FBI with information from his fantasy dossier.

Once called to account, on some 245 occasions before Congress, Comey swore that he could either not remember or had no knowledge about the questions asked of him.

His successor FBI interim Director Andrew McCabe admittedly lied on four occasions to federal officials. Special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller himself swore under oath that he knew nothing either about the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS — the twin catalysts for his entire investigation.

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All these depressing examples have one common denominator: Elite experts and degreed professionals massaged and warped their knowledge to serve ideological masters, rather than the truth.

In the process, they caused untold damage to their country and fellow citizens. They disgraced their profession. They tarnished the scientific community. And sold their souls to ideologues.

Is it any wonder why the Western public has lost confidence in their degreed and credentialed elites?

Raymond Ibraham: Where Has it Gotten Us? A look back at 17 Years of Killing Terrorist Leaders

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the chief ideologue and, for a decade, leader of al-Qaeda, was finally killed, 21 years after the terror strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. This is certainly welcome news, if only because someone like al-Zawahiri deserved his fate.

But while we can all celebrate, his death will, unfortunately, and despite Joe Biden’s August 1 speech, have zero impact on the global jihad. This dismal prognostication is fortified by the fact that, for nearly 17 years now, every time an Islamic terror leader has been killed, politicians and media exulted, portraying the death as a “major blow” to the jihad; and, for nearly 17 years now, I have responded by recycling an article that I first wrote in 2006, titled “The West’s Multi-Headed Monster.”

Although I changed the names of the jihadi leaders killed to suit the occasion—first Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, then Abu Hamza al-Masri, then Abu Laith al-Libi, then Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Misri, then Osama bin Laden, then Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and now Ayman al-Zawahiri — my conclusion always remained the same:

The West’s plight vis-à-vis radical Islam is therefore akin to Hercules’ epic encounter with the multi-headed Hydra-monster.  Every time the mythical strongman lopped off one of the monster’s heads, two new ones grew in its place.  To slay the beast once and for all, Hercules learned to cauterize the stumps with fire, thereby preventing any more heads from sprouting out.  Similarly, while the West continues to lop off monster heads like figurehead Zarqawi [or Zawahiri, bin Laden, al-Baghdadi, et al] it is imperative to treat the malady—radical Islam—in order to ultimately prevail.  Victory can only come when the violent ideologies of Islam are cauterized with fire.  But alas, the Hydra-monster is myth, while radical Islam is stark reality.

Consider, for instance, all the exultation that took place in 2006 after al-Zarqawi — the forefather of the Islamic State, or “Al-Qaeda Second Generation” — was killed. Then, almost every major politician, including President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, gave some sort of victory speech. The New York Times called his death a “major watershed in the war.”

Similarly, in 2008, after Abu Laith al-Libi was killed, Congressman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) issued a statement saying that his death “clearly will have an impact on the radical jihadist movement.”

More myopic triumphalism was in the air after Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Masri were killed in 2010 during a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation. Then, none other than Joe Biden, serving as vice president, said the “deaths are potentially devastating blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq [the embryonic form of the Islamic State],” adding, “This operation is evidence in my view, that the future of Iraq will not be shaped by those who would seek to destroy that country” — a prediction that proved to be woefully wrong.

Similarly, U.S. commander Gen. Raymond Odierno asserted that “The death of these terrorists is potentially the most significant blow to al-Qaeda in Iraq since the beginning of the insurgency,” adding that it would be “very difficult” for the al Qaeda network to replace the two men.

And who could forget all the media triumphalism, if not hysteria, surrounding the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden?  Then, CNN security analyst Peter Bergen declared that “Killing bin Laden is the end of the war on terror. We can just sort of announce that right now.” Insisting that the “iconic nature of bin Laden’s persona” cannot be replaced, Bergen further suggested that “It’s time to move on.”

Another CNN analyst, Fareed Zakaria, assured us that “this is a huge, devastating blow to al-Qaeda, which had already been crippled by the Arab Spring. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is the end of al-Qaeda in any meaningful sense of the word.”

In retrospect, surely all these assertions and assurances have proven to be immensely puerile — even for “mainstream media analysts.” The only significant development following the killing of bin Laden was the birth, spread, and subsequent hegemony of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (“ISIS”) — an organization that made al-Qaeda pale in comparison when it came to savagery and atrocities.

To recap: for years, Americans were repeatedly told that al-Qaeda was suffering “devastating blows”; that the killing of individual jihadis were “major watersheds in the war”; that “the end of the war on terror” occurred in 2011, when bin Laden died (“it’s time to move on,” counseled Peter Bergen); and “that the future of Iraq will not be shaped by those who would seek to destroy that country,” according to Biden.

Yet, lo and behold: an Islamic State, a caliphate engaged in the worst atrocities of the twenty-first century, was born — despite the deaths of individual jihadi leaders, including the notorious bin Laden.

In light of this, should one expect the jihad to disappear now that al-Zawahiri is dead? Joe Biden seems to still harbor such hopes. During his recent victory speech, and after opening with a typical contradiction — “You know, al-Zawahiri was bin Laden’s leader. He was with him all the — the whole time.  He was his number-two man — the U.S. president said: “He [Zawahiri] will never again — never again allow Afghanistan to become a terrorist safe haven because he is gone.”  Newsflash: with or without al-Zawahiri, Afghanistan has been and continues to be a “terrorist safe haven.”