How Can People Trust the Experts?

The government likes to put itself in charge of things, but how can we trust the experts when they get it wrong so much?

October 7, 2024

By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP

Propagandists leaned into “trust the experts” rhetoric during the pandemic era. Let’s face it, “fact-checkers” didn’t emerge until regular folks who didn’t collect multiple issues of Catcher in the Rye started to question the narratives.

It’s one thing to have a contained contingent of theorists that can be passed off as crazy. It’s another when average people start asking the same question as the dude with the foil hat on.

No one expects everyone to be right one hundred percent of the time. But they do expect the correction to come with the same energy as the initial declaration… not some fine print on the back page of the obituaries.

Trust the Health Experts?

One trend that took off was Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump and the emergence of MAHA: Make America Healthy Again. Kennedy has been litigating all sorts of cases to do with the over chemicalization of the things we consume. In small doses, “the experts” said, it’s benign. But when combined with small doses of all sorts of other things, what you have is a very toxic soup.

Kennedy challenged “the experts”, and with his endorsement of Trump has made those challenges more mainstream. Even if you don’t agree with everything he’s saying, this alliance is normalizing questioning “the experts”, and exerting your right to refuse their advice.

Most countries don’t even allow pharmaceutical ads to run, but in the US they do provided they come with the proper disclaimers of the drug. That’s why you see all the fine print at the bottom of them, and there’s a lot of fast talking while someone is frolicking in a meadow to happy music.

However, what does it do to the public trust when pharmaceutical companies work around those guidelines and disguise their ads as “public service announcements“? That’s exactly what they did when the vaccine was advertised. no disclosures that the vaccines were not yet FDA approved. They used real people’s testimonials rather than actors.

Where were the government regulators? Where were the experts?

Wherever you stand on the vaccine, the fact that the manufacturers worked with ad agencies to work around the regulations is still worth questioning.

Remember when the USDA rolled out the food pyramid in the early 1990s? People were told to trust the experts there too. Americans were told to load up on carbohydrates rather than proteins, and next thing you know the US has an obesity problem.

Trust the Fire Arms Experts?

Remember when we talked about Chevron Deference? That was passed initially in 1984. The courts deferred to the regulating agencies to define the terms and intentions of their regulations. Essentially, rather than letting the judges interpret the laws (as is their duty and responsibility), regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would read their own intentions into the laws.

Until June of this year, the regulatory agencies were the in-house experts. I guess since Chevron was overturned, these agencies don’t feel the need to know anything anymore.

So, it comes as no surprise that the director of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agency, can’t define what an “assault weapon” is. He definitely wants to ban them though. Doesn’t know what it is, but knows they should be banned.

“I, unlike you, am not a firearms expert to the same extent that you may be, but we have people at ATF who can talk about velocity of firearms, what damage different kinds of firearms cause, so that whatever determination you choose to make would be an informed one.”

This is the same ATF that was responsible for the gross mishandling of Ruby Ridge and Waco. Trust the experts though, amirite?

Trust the Emergency Relief Experts?

That’s difficult since there’s so little visibility into what happens on the ground. People are getting their news updates from friends, family, and social media videos.

Consider the three major disasters that happened just in the past 4 years alone:

“FEMA has wasted taxpayer funds, misappropriated funds, and left other federal, state, and local responders without deployment orders on the ground,” Gaetz wrote to Mayorkas. “As reported and further confirmed by my office, hundreds if not thousands of service members were deployed by the Department of Defense to North Carolina and have sat idle, waiting for FEMA.”

Fun fact: a considerable amount of funding has been directed to support immigrants out of FEMA funds.

According to The Federalist, FEMA has spent more than $1 billion since 2022 addressing the border and illegal immigration crisis.

The New York Post reported that DHS allocated “$640.9 million this year in FEMA-administered funds to aid state and local governments coping with the influx” of illegal aliens and asylum-seekers.

Trust the experts. How? J.D. Vance was chastised for balking at the call to trust the experts in his VP debate, but he cited several instances where the purported experts got it very wrong and the consequences of those pieces of advice.

If you have experts who are held accountable, who amplify their corrections in the same way they give their initial insights, then fine. That’s where the trust is built. When we have to find out through exposes and retrospectives and small print retractions, that’s when TikTok becomes a more reliable source than mainstream media outlets!