Tom Nichols was one of those special “conservatives” that was allowed to write for Leftist magazines like The Atlantic. Meaning that he was not a Conservative, but a Liberal who didn’t have a Che shirt in college.
He’s an author and academic who specializes in national security and Russian affairs.
Since the election of Donald Trump, he took to writing shit like this:
Why this Never Trump ex-Republican will vote for almost any 2020 Democratic nominee
I’m good with anyone who is mentally stable and in no way sympathetic or beholden to a hostile foreign power. That’s it. Policy just doesn’t matter.
Because that is a totally rational and principled position to take. Especially in the wake of multiple investigations that showed there was no Trump collusion with foreign powers.
That a man who teaches at the Naval War College on the topic of Russian affairs bought into the “Russian collusion” narrative should be a total disqualifier from that job and everything else in his life.
That he was hired to teach at the Naval War College is everything wrong about what Obama and his appointed military leadership did to the US military.
He wrote a book called The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.
This is how Harvard Magazine describes the book, written by one of the school’s professors (because of course, he teaches there).
People were no longer merely uninformed, Nichols says, but “aggressively wrong” and unwilling to learn. They actively resisted facts that might alter their preexisting beliefs. They insisted that all opinions, however uninformed, be treated as equally serious. And they rejected professional know-how, he says, with such anger. That shook him.
Skepticism toward intellectual authority is bone-deep in the American character, as much a part of the nation’s origin story as the founders’ Enlightenment principles. Overall, that skepticism is a healthy impulse, Nichols believes. But what he was observing was something else, something malignant and deliberate, a collapse of functional citizenship. “Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,” he would write in the preface to The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Expertise and Why It Matters, which was published by Oxford last year and quickly became a bestseller. “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything.” Further down the page, he would add: “I’m worried.”
Here is the problem with Nichols’ assertion.
He’s a fucking narcissistic idiot.
Nichols graduated from Boston University, the same school that gave us the idiotic socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He teaches at Harvard, the same school that hired Bradley “Chelsea” Manning as a digital security Fellow (later rescinded due to public outcry), and gave a full ride to David Hogg.
It was kids at Harvard that forced the school to turn away Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a visiting professor because the students felt unsafe because of the dubious allegations against him.
It was also the Ivy League MBA’s that crashed the housing market with their unethical fuckery and legal thievery hiding it behind B-School jargon.
(If you’ve never seen The Big Short, you should. Just don’t drink while you’re doing it or you’ll end up in your garage trying to build a guillotine.)
The problem that Nichols laments is a result of the democratization of information, or as Reason TV puts it The 2010s: When the Media Lost Their Gatekeepers.
The “experts” were wrong about almost everything. Everything they touched turned to shit.
They crashed the housing market and the economy and told us that Hillary Clinton would be President.
The “experts” do not have expertise based on an analysis of the empirical evidence. They have their prejudices reinforced from inside their elite echo chambers.
The public has come to realize that and doesn’t want to listen to these idiots and assholes anymore.
Case in point, his opinion on CCW:
Even when I was a Republican, I never understood people who measure freedom by how many of us walk around with guns. This is a cultural change, the spreading of the gun culture from a corner of the GOP to the entire conservative moment. /1
The spread of gun worship is conservative virtue-signaling. Never liked it when I was among my old tribe, and it’s gotten worse as “conservatives” try to figure out new markers for what makes them “patriots” now that they’ve had to sell out so much actual patriotism to Trump. /2
When I was a kid, everyone had a gun. Most of my neighbors. Teachers. (Lots more veterans in those days.) But it was not a culture of “I went for a coffee and wore my gun because damn it, I’m an American.” My GOP voting family and friends never talked about guns. Why would we? /3
Among the working class guys who all owned guns, talking a lot about guns was weird. You had them, it was your right, you left it at that. We didn’t measure our sense of worth by whether we were going to go face down the gangbangers around our church in the 70s. /4
I’m uncomfortable with people who worship guns and feel the need to have them nearby 24/7 not because of guns, but because I’m uncomfortable with people who worship guns. That this is now a litmus test for “conservatives” tells you something sad about conservatism. /5x
He was an Acela Corridor Republican, from a suburb of Springfield, Massachusets. He has no knowledge of gun culture from the South or Midwest, but he will criticize us and lecture us and tell us why we are weird.
“Those dirty southerners, making being a Republican something unbecoming for a Harvard man.”
You can feel the anti-Southern and anti-Midwestern bigotry drip from him.
It’s not that he hates guns. Guns that are possessed by and under the lock and key of the US Government. He just hates gun owners who have a desire for the right to self-defense.
And he wonders why nobody outside his bubble gives a shit about his opinion?
Because his opinion is the products of a lack of brain oxygenation from him sniffing his own farts too much.
The surge in gun culture among the GOP was the result of the Brady Bill and AWB. They kicked that hornet’s nest when they tried to turn the rest of the US into “The Republic of New Yorkafornia.”
And again, it was something pushed by “experts” that didn’t do one iota of what it was claimed to do.
His entire argument is:
“Why won’t you let me beat you down, degrade you, and take away your rights, anymore? I teach at an Ivy League, I know better than you, so you need to shut up and learn your place.”
There is a reason there is a “death of expertise,” “experts” like Nichols’ proved why it needed to die.
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