"DEVIN STEWART: Okay, same title. Naval War College, and this is a very dangerous trend. Or alternately, that crushing moment of saying, "Wow, I can't believe I'm this bad of a writer." Dixie & Russia: What Do They Have in Common? [Editor's note: See H.R. It's about Fox's craptacular attempt to launder a GOP consultant's "question" as part of an interview with Wallensky. The Russian president is frantic and lashing out in defeat. By Tom Nichols Hulton Archive / Getty; The Atlantic. This was a war that was immensely popular at the outset and mostly conducted in full view of the American public. Thats an awfully elitist attitude, Tom. Just because Tom Nichols doesn't care doesn't mean no one else does. But there was no time at which we all decided that close enough was good enough, and that wed rather come home than stay. D emocracy, in its raw form, is about counting votes. Stop using me to make a point about Fox. Sorry most of all to Tom Nichols, who, no matter how far hes fallen, can always find a deeper bottom to the barrel. Its so sad that someone wouldnt assume that a mother would love her child and her in-laws so much that shed spend day and night trying to find ways to change public policy so their family can be reunited. But I think the American and global airline industry says: "Look, we deliver. So, regular people cant have the same concerns as a political consultant? It's understandable that people overestimatefirst of all, let me just say that all human beings, whether they have a good grip of metacognition or not, overestimate their abilities. Americas not at war was a common refrain among the troops. Some turned out to be as racist and authoritarian as Trump himself, while others merely confirmed that they were little more than vacuous opportunists who were capable of betraying the Constitution at will. https://t.co/SBR3v3ivV2. And that pertains to anything, whether it's writing or acting or singing or any human endeavor.DEVIN STEWART: But the metacognition is also the awareness that you don't have the expertise.TOM NICHOLS: That's right.DEVIN STEWART: So as long as you're self-aware enough to know that there is something lacking in your skill set or your knowledge base, that's the key. As it turned out, even before the Breitbart story dropped, my employer had already determined that I had not violated any laws or regulations. That's a political discussion that people have. we're going to run right back into that same problem we ran into in the 1960s.DEVIN STEWART: That's a very subtle and important nuance there.TOM NICHOLS: Absolutely.DEVIN STEWART: The clich is "a little bit of knowledge is very dangerous. I suppose I'm not really supposed to sit here and say that. Its about performative insecurity. America Is 'Committing Suicide' By Allowing Trannies in the Military (Russian TV News). Heres Ryan Busse, a former gun-company executive who has now taken on his former industry, talking about the day someone showed up to a hunting party with an AR-15: The unwritten rules of decency were enforced by firearm-industry leaders I witnessed how this worked many times, including one occasion when a young writer brought his own AR-15 to a hunting event I was hosting in 2004. Therefore, you must listen to us about everything." What the public does care about, however, is using Afghanistan as raw material for cheap patriotism and partisan attacks (some right and some wrong, but few of them in good faith) on every president since 2001. [1], Kirkus Reviews described The Death of Expertise as "A sharp analysis of an increasingly pressing problem", although Nichols (who "sounds less like an alarmist than like a genial guide through the wilderness of ignorance") fails to propose a satisfying solution. I think it predates the Internet, and I think it has to do with the growth of a strong streak of narcissism in American society. Pegoda also described The Death of Expertise as "extremely interesting, important, and timely" and said that "Nichols, in short, provides a brief History, informed by psychology and political science, of what he argues is a new phenomenon whereby people in the United States are not just regularly wrong or ignorant but 'proud of not knowing things'". Therefore, you're wrong about everything. [3], "These are dangerous times. There's an editor, I think it was at Business Insider, who said, "You know, almost all day traders go broke, and they would be better off working at Burger King because they are that bad at what they do. You need to have a particular kind of intelligence to play the game, an agile mind that can not only recall . Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the author John le Carrs most famous creation, the fictional British spy George Smiley, reflected on a career spent fighting a now-vanquished enemy. All Rights Reserved. What difference would it have made if @BretBaier identified her as a political consultant? I was a founding member of the band of Republican defectors known as the Never Trumpers, and one way or another, the times I have lived inthe movement to protect American democracy from Donald Trump and to stop his reelectionwill come to an end in November. There are two major flaws in the book. At a minimum, I will join with other civil libertarians to limit the speed and depth with which the president will take us into authoritarianism. Here we are again, trying to make our way around nuclear terms and concepts as war rages in the middle of Europe. Tom Nichols Sep 23 2015 5785 Atheists and Leftists Infiltrated Russia's Schools in the 19th c., Mortally Wounding the Country - a Lesson for America by Michael Spreng Practical Ways to Avoid Lust - Answers from a Priest in Russia by Fr. It's a great book, and it has a funny cover too.TOM NICHOLS: I should tell you that the cover has all of these fake Twitter quotes on it. I think of this passage often, not only because I spent the first part of my career fighting (in my own small and mostly insignificant way) the Cold War, but also because I have spent the most recent part of my career fighting the possible rise of authoritarianism in my own country. Many of us instead held firm and made the case for democracy and the rule of law from the right flank against our own tribe. Tom Nichols was born on 7th December 1960. Naval War College, where he taught for 25 years, and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School. Today, many claim that they did not know what the military or the government were really up to, and they point to The Washington Posts attempt to create a Pentagon Papers vibe around a set of revelations that were not nearly as shocking as the secrets of Vietnamor should not have been, anyway, to anyone who read a newspaper during the past two decades. Someone of his age and self-declared credentials spends all day and night being a jerk online. Homosexuals Persecuting Christians in America - Do You Feel The Walls Closing In? That's normal. I have no professional stake here whatsoever. But as comforting as it would be to blame Obama and Trump, we must look inward and admit that we told our elected leadersof both partiesthat they were facing a no-win political test. 170 East 64th Street The senior figures there responded immediately. I have made my case against the president loudly and clearly. I get hate mail; I get people saying, "Oh, you experts think you control the world, and Brexit finally showed you, and Trump finally showed you." Well, let me tell you about lawyers." Tom Nichols 's email & phone Current Position: Contributing Writer at The Atlantic Location: Middletown, Rhode Island Experience: 34 years How to contact Tom Nichols Get email address: txxxn@theatlantic.com Phone number: +1-205-xxx-xx47 Last updated: 2022-04-16 Social media: Sign Up to Get Free Contacts Use a Browser Extension Opt-Out How hard can this be?" Watch. Was the question valid or not, Tom? To mock us or use it as a way to dunk on Republicans or Fox News or whatever is incredibly screwed up. Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 21, 2023 Tom wrote a whole thread about how people in East Jesus, USA, are obsessed with people like him, because Tom doesn't care what people in East. Americans will now exercise their usual partisan outrage for a few weeks, and then Afghanistan, like everything else in a nation with an attention span not much longer than a fast-food commercial, will be forgotten. Tom Nichols ( @RadioFreeTom) is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, a professor at the U.S. It is an expansion of a 2014 article published in The Federalist. In The Death of Expertise, Nichols condemns what he describes as the many forces trying to undermine the authority of experts in the United States. Would you attribute this scorn to the rise of populism worldwide? There's much more of a hierarchical respect for expertise and education." But yes, you're the victim here, not the viewers who had no idea they were getting played by @FoxNews. Bret, Id like to know the scientific rationale for the continued ban on EU visitors, while immigrants and visitors alike from countries with far greater COVID spread and far worse vaccine administration are able to come here. He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy champion. For those keeping tabs on Tom Nichols, hes creepily fixated on a woman who wants her family to stop being kept apart by arbitrary rules with no scientific basis. So there is suspicion on both sides of the aisle. The other is that at the end I didnt reallywe were talking earlier about The New York Times and how all their reviews always have a little of a backhand in them. But before we move on, before we head back to the mall, before we resume posting memes, and before we return to bickering with each other about whether we should have to mask up at Starbucks, let us remember that this day came about for one reason, and one reason only. https://t.co/dEoyBoLbaP, I tweeted him as the mother of a 6-month-old whose European relatives cannot come to America to see her. Which is why Toms making such a big deal out of it. "DEVIN STEWART: And that's a fact.TOM NICHOLS: That's empirically demonstrable; 99 percent of day traders go broke.DEVIN STEWART: Going back to the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, play us through a scenario here. I am too scarred by the horrific outcome of the 2016 election to count any chickens, no matter how alive and clucking they might seem. Rather than people even challenging me or arguing with me about important issues, people were simply saying, "No, no, let me explain your area of specialization back to you," and that, I think, is a new wrinkle.DEVIN STEWART: Is it because they have access to more information on the Internet? I could barely lift it.). But the initial piece was a kind of a rant on my blog of "Why do people think they can explain Russia to me when they didn't know where Russia was three months ago?" Listen. Have you seen Breitbart? a colleague asked. You could catch Lightyear, the perfectly functional sci-fi tale and Toy Story origin story, in theaters. Its been invisible. But Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden all ran on getting out of the war, and now were out. Hes desperate. In post-2001 America, it became fashionable to speak of war weariness, but citizens who were not in the military or part of a military family or community did not have to endure even minor inconveniences, much less shoulder major burdens such as a draft, a war tax, or resource shortages. His new book, " Our . Second, these four years have confirmed to us that Trumps moral corruption of the Republican Party is total, from top to bottom. For the first time in my life, I felt like a dissident. I think that's where experts also get into trouble; we can be overly directive. For example, in Vietnam, the "best and the brightest" were the people who were generically smart but not experts. Will knows the person (me) because he is a personal friend. A serious peoplethe kind of people we once werewould have made serious choices, long before this current debacle was upon them. (This is where I am duty-bound to remind you that I do not speak in any way for the U.S. government or any of its agencies.) I was wrong. I had turned it down flat.). He blames trends in higher education (such as . The US Outspends Russia 10X On Military, But They Are Equals. https://t.co/VTVSaWa2au, Will knows the person because it was a conservative writer and consultant who fed the question to Fox. 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Other people had to fight for their rights, not me. But I think what people can do in the United States, or at least the people listening to us right nowthis is going sound very Pollyanna-ishbut just be nicer to each other, just get past this divide. Or maybe such a project was impossible. Whether it is Nikki Haley or Tom Cotton running for president or Foxs prime-time lineup bolstering Trumps underlings, for as long as I have a public platform, I will contend that these are people who betrayed the principles of our system of government for their own gain and that my fellow citizens should refuse to give them votes or ratings. And if the Trump administration is saying, "Well, we're all a bunch of smart guys who made a million dollars in Goldman Sachs or real estate; how hard can running Syria policy be?" DEVIN STEWART: Is there a danger that Russia might take advantage of perceived ignorance in the White House, like Khrushchev did with Kennedy?TOM NICHOLS: I have that fear very strongly. As my colleague David Frum has put it: For good or ill, the Biden policy on Afghanistan is the same as the Trump policy, only with less lying.. February 23, 2023. While conceding that experts do sometimes fail, he says the best answer to this is the self-correcting presence of other experts to recognize and rectify systemic failures. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Instead, were bickering about masks. There are things I suppose I would fix. First, insofar as that populist fever seems to have overtaken people running down blind alleys. The Supreme Court has now affirmed that all these guys can be the handsome ranger with the Big Iron on their hip. (At 30 Rock in New York, at least it was Starbucks.) But mostlyI would say overwhelmingly the letters I've gotten are from professionals, from doctors. When my friendsincluding the few I have left among the conservativesask what the Never Trumpers will do now, I say with all honesty that I am not sure. What are they saying?TOM NICHOLS: They mostly are from professionals. Americas at the mall.. Well, because theyre trying to get you fired, my friend said. My question is, who are the Russia people? My hometown was a military town, and almost all of the men I knew were veterans who owned weapons and knew how to handle them. Can you explain that phenomenon? How Reality Dating Shows Stoke Racial Tensions. I know you have a tight schedule here. We are the safest mode of transportation in human history. Before we get to the global, let's talk about the local. It was me. The experts on things like Southeast Asia and insurgency, they were saying, "Look, this is a lot harder than it looks." What does my profession have ANYTHING to do with this? What's different now?TOM NICHOLS: As I said, when I first started out, I was a Russia guy, Soviet Union. [1][2], In The Death of Expertise, Nichols condemns what he describes as the many forces trying to undermine the authority of experts in the United States. Across the world today, there is active hostility towards experts, says Tom Nichols of the U.S. I've gotten them from lawyers and a fair number from people in the teaching profession, so it's been very encouraging. Several years ago, Tom Nichols started writing a book about ignorance and unreason in American public discourseand then he watched it come to life all around him, in ways starker than he had imagined. Use your critical thinking skills. Were at war. Now I was accused of legal wrongdoing for expressing my political views as a private citizen. DEVIN STEWART: As some final advice for us, what can we do about it? It turns out it's a true science thing; it actually happens.TOM NICHOLS: Exactly. And all kinds of things could go wrong, all kinds of things. "DEVIN STEWART: So the ancient wisdom of "know thyself," [Ancient Greek aphorism] maybe the ancients were onto something back then?TOM NICHOLS: There is a reason we should all still be reading Shakespeare, exactly. The past is the future: The song Big Iron was a hit in early 1960, but it became an internet meme thanks to Fallout New Vegas, the 2010 entry in one of the greatest science-fiction-video-game franchises of all time, the Fallout series. The GOP strategy of acclimatizing us to scandal is still working. The purpose of my life was to end the time I lived in., With a bit more pensiveness, Smiley adds: Or perhaps our troubles are just beginning.. You need to spend at least an hour with me"whoever the Russia expert is"before you walk into that room." "DEVIN STEWART: "Nailed it. I also know Ellen, and you're making an ass of yourself. I happen to know the person who asked this question. As a lifelong conservative choosing Crooked Hillary over the Swamp Drainer, I received a short burst of interest, especially from talk radio. 803 were here. Copyright Twitchy.com/Salem Media. (There were some female veterans too. If wed been in it for our own enrichment, wed have made the smart play and signed on with Trump, because thats where the money was right from the start. After living with this subject and writing about it for three or four years now, I almost don't want to work on it anymore because it's too depressing. But maybe you should rewatch Minority Report insteadSteven Spielbergs prescient 2002 thriller is as chilling as ever (and widely available on streaming services). This is why, when Trump is gone (whether after this election or in 2024), I will continue to oppose everyone who had anything to do with inflicting this scar on American history, long after the members of the Trump family are finally bankrupt, in rehab, in jail, or living in seclusion in Manhattan among the neighbors who already despise them. This comment reveals the depths of the Republican Partys moral collapse. And finally I turned to him, and I said, "Dude, if I could do that, if I could see why I'm doing this wrong, I wouldn't be paying you." As we approach Election Day, my career and my constitutional rights remain intact. Yes, but the point is to command the viewer's unthinking assent by implying that "many ordinary people are thinking this. What I think we're getting with a lot of the folks in this administrationand I hope I'm wrongare people who have kind of a generally smart record in some very narrow areas like finance or manipulation of money in New York City and saying, "Well, that makes me smart."