I've Got the World on a String...

CAMEROTA Violent crime is down. The economy is ticking up.

GINGRICH It is not down in the biggest cities.

CAMEROTA Violent crime, murder rate is down. It is down.

GINGRICH Then how come it’s up in Chicago and up in Baltimore and up in Washington?

CAMEROTA There are pockets where certainly we are not tackling murder.

GINGRICH Your national capital, your third biggest city

CAMEROTA But violent crime across the country is down.

GINGRICH The average American, I will bet you this morning, does not think crime is down, does not think we are safer.

CAMEROTA But it is. We are safer and it is down.

GINGRICH No, that’s just your view.

CAMEROTA It’s a fact. These are the national FBI facts.

GINGRICH: But what I said is also a fact... The current view is that liberals have a whole set of statistics that theoretically may be right, but it’s not where human beings are.

CAMEROTA: But what you’re saying is, but hold on Mr. Speaker because you’re saying liberals use these numbers, they use this sort of magic math. These are the FBI statistics. They’re not a liberal organization. They’re a crime-fighting organization.

GINGRICH: No, but what I said is equally true. People feel more threatened.

CAMEROTA: Feel it, yes. They feel it, but the facts don’t support it.

GINGRICH: As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel and let you go with the theoreticians.¹

Personally, we contend that expertise may take numerous reliable forms, and is not necessarily limited to "ivory towers," nor in the dichotomy of "alt-science," in what the late Professor Christopher Lasch - reflecting on José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses - wrote:

The mass man, on the other hand, had no use for obligations and no understanding of what they implied, “no feeling for [the] great historical duties.” Instead he asserted the “rights of the commonplace.” At once resentful and self-satisfied, he rejected “everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select.” He was “incapable of submitting to direction of any kind.” Lacking any comprehension of the fragility of civilization or the tragic character of history, he lived unthinkingly in the “assurance that tomorrow [the world] will be still richer, ampler, more perfect, as if it enjoyed a spontaneous, inexhaustible power of increase.” He was concerned only with his own well-being and looked forward to a future of “limitless possibilities” and “complete freedom.” ^{2, 3}

Despite being written in 1995, Lasch's observations seem to hold true in that the mass man, surprisingly (with all due respect) bearing a certain resemblance to a "MAGA" nation,

It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution; their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators. It is the working and lower middle classes, after all, that favor limits on abortion, cling to the two-parent family as a source of stability in a turbulent world, resist experiments with “alternative lifestyles,” and harbor deep reservations about affirmative action and other ventures in large-scale social engineering. More to Ortega’s point, they have a more highly developed sense of limits than their betters. ⁴

Juxtaposed, Lasch likewise offers his version of the "elites" as seeing their counterparts as participating in a "patriotism that supports imperialist wars and a national ethic of aggressive masculinity":

Upper-middle-class liberals, with their inability to grasp the importance of class differences in shaping attitudes toward life, fail to reckon with the class dimension of their obsession with health and moral uplift. They find it hard to understand why their hygienic conception of life fails to command universal enthusiasm. They have mounted a crusade to sanitize American society: to create a “smoke-free environment,” to censor everything from pornography to “hate speech,” and at the same time, incongruously, to extend the range of personal choice in matters where most people feel the need of solid moral guidelines. ⁵

This, then, would seem to be the perfect breeding ground for what Charles P. Pierce observes in his description of "Idiot America" in the "Three Great Premises":

• 1. Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
• 2. Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.
• 3. Respect for the effort required to develop and promulgate nonsense somehow bleeds into a respect that validates the nonsense itself.⁶

Further yet, is the great exposition - and the surprising NY Times Best Seller - of the late Princeton University Philosophy Professor, Harry G. Frankfurt, regarding the concept of On Bullshit, which we must confess to having developed a profound academic fondness for. While he did follow this extended essay with similar volumes of On Truth and The Reasons of Love, this volume captured attention because of his attempt to define the nature of the act - best simply characterized in On Truth:

My claim was that bullshitters, although they represent themselves as being engaged simply in conveying information, are not engaged in that enterprise at all. Instead, and most essentially, they are fakers and phonies who are attempting by what they say to manipulate the opinions and the attitudes of those to whom they speak. What they care about primarily, therefore, is whether what they say is effective in accomplishing this manipulation. Correspondingly, they are more or less indifferent to whether what they say is true or whether it is false. ⁷

More to the point, however, is Dr. Frankfurt's contention that bullshiters, who inordinantly have a penchant for placing themselves in public view, frequently, shall we say, are prone to "mispeak":

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled—whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others— to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything... ⁸

And all the worse when assumed to be "levelling" with their attentive audience:

One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself... Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit. ⁹

We could somehow, then, rely on Charles P. Pierce to infom us that, "Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in federal court," ¹⁰ and Christopher Lasch to inform us that,

As for the claim that the information revolution would raise the level of public intelligence, it is no secret that the public knows less about public affairs than it used to know. Millions of Americans cannot begin to tell you what is in the Bill of Rights, what Congress does, what the Constitution says about the powers of the presidency, how the party system emerged or how it operates.¹¹

Having pointed out all of this, would you be suprised to find that, in a major study, published in a major scientific journal (Nature), published on January 20, 2025, after surveying more than 72,000 individuals, in 68-countries around the world, as to their opinion of science, scientific data, medicine, medical data, and the experts who practice these disciplines, discovered that an overwhelming number of respondents "trust science," and believe "scientists are among the most trusted actors in society." Yet, amazingly, this massive cadre of researchers also found that,"There is a popular dominant narrative claiming that there is a crisis of trust in science and scientists...

The epistemic authority of science and scientists has been challenged by misinformation and disinformation, a “reproducibility crisis,” conspiracy theories, and science-related populist attitudes. Science-related populism has been conceptualized as a perceived antagonism between ‘the ordinary people’ and common sense on one side and academic elites and scientific expertise on the other. Unlike political populism, which criticizes political elites and their political power claims, science-related populism criticizes academic elites, challenges their decision-making authority in scientific research and suggests that their epistemic truth claims are inferior to the common sense of ‘the people.’ Anti-science attitudes, even if held by only minority of people, raise concerns about a potential crisis of trust in science, which could challenge the epistemic authority of science and the role of scientists in supporting evidence-based policymaking. These concerns, which have been prominently discussed in leading news media, have been exacerbated as trust in scientists and their desired role in policymaking have become divided along partisan lines. Several studies show that in the USA and some other countries, conservatives and right-leaning individuals have low levels of trust in scientists, hold stronger anti-science attitudes and express low confidence that scientists act in the best interest of the public, provide benefits to society, and apply reliable methods. Empirical evidence is needed to determine how widespread such critical attitudes towards science are across countries and population groups.¹²