"Experts Say"

Note from Erick: After publishing this, the White House announced President Biden will address the nation at 3:45pm ET.

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One more and I’ll leave y’all alone. I’m just fired up today over this disgrace in Afghanistan.

The experts said if Trump withdrew from the Iran deal, there’d be war and Iran would have nukes. The experts were wrong.

The experts said if Trump moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, there’d be war. The experts were wrong.

The experts said if Trump killed Qasem Soleimani, there’d be war. The experts were wrong.

The experts said if Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban would not sweep back into power. The experts were wrong.

Is it any wonder we are all less likely to listen to the experts? This has spillover effects because Americans don’t distinguish “foreign policy experts” from “public health experts” so they are no more likely to trust the expert saying to get vaccinated than the expert saying Biden could pack up and leave Afghanistan.

Our expert class and the American elite have lost the public’s trust. It is their fault. But they refuse to acknowledge it, refuse to change, and refuse to show any level of humility.

In 2010, Steve Jobs, then the CEO of Apple, was on a family vacation in Hawaii as scandal brewed. His expert engineers had designed an iPhone — the iPhone 4 — that had a problem. The way the engineers designed the antenna for the phone caused the cellular signal to disappear if people wrapped their hands around the phone in two particular places.

It just so happened that the places where the antenna could shut off if touched by hands were the most likely places for people to grab their phones. A media firestorm erupted over the flaw in the iPhone 4. Steve Jobs scrambled, canceled his vacation, and flew back to Cupertino for a press conference that was a master class in damage control.

In February 2021, during prolonged blackouts in Texas due to a winter storm, Ted and Heidi Cruz packed up their family, coordinated with others, and flew off to Mexico to the warmth. The national media excoriated Cruz for abandoning Texas during the power outages. Cruz wound up leaving his family and returning to Texas.

In August 2021, after Joe Biden and Jen Psaki assured the public the White House’s experts said the Taliban would not sweep back into power, the Taliban did so. There is now a humanitarian crisis.

Biden is still in hiding and Psaki is still on vacation. As of this writing at 11:04 am on August 16, 20201, the White House insists no one in the White House is changing their plans and the President will not address the nation. This morning, Jen Psaki’s White House email still generated an autoreply message that she was on vacation, out of the office.

The Chancellor of Germany and the President of France are both addressing their nations today about Afghanistan. Joe Biden is not addressing his. His press secretary is on vacation. The world is in chaos thanks to Joe Biden’s actions.

The experts were wrong, the President lacks basic humility to admit his mistakes. and distrust grows across the board. This situation is about more than Afghanistan. It is about the basic competence of and trust in our institutions.