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@IwantRooseveltagain
And? You want a political reporter to be ignorant of politics?
Thanksgiving 2016 I was asked what I thought about Trump's election victory. I told my mother and sister that out of the plethora of reasons to be concerned my biggest was the fact that he is a conspiracy theorist. For obvious reasons we wouldn't want the man making the most consequential decisions in our society to be someone incapable of telling the difference between fiction and real life, but there was another reason this concerned me; because people follow the lead of the person running the country.
Trump's embrace of breathtakingly stupid ideas has a real world impact, which is that it creates a permission structure for people who are too lazy to learn critical thinking to accept those ideas because they are convenient. The idea that expertise itself has no real value or that being an expert somehow makes you less trustworthy to speak on the topic you are an expert in is among the stupidest that he has managed to spread to half the country.
To be fair, there has been anti expertise element within the political right for some time now, but at least then people making such stupid arguments felt pressured to justify them, which they could never do. What Trump brought into the mainstream is the thought terminating cliche, where all they have to do is utter a word or phrase and in their minds they won the argument. Don't like what's being reported? Fake news. Trump's own government agencies are warning us that his ideas are dangerous? Deep state. It's all just a convenient excuse structure to never have to confront the absurdity of what they're supporting. Unfalsifiablility is bliss.
