The problem with 'experts'

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

When the left describes the right, they often claim that we’re into conspiracy theories, that we don’t live in a world of facts and reality, and that we’re easily misled by our leaders.

And that’s a level of projection that makes IMAX look like something sold by Fisher-Price back in the day.

Seriously. Today, it’s about Fauci and the facts in his diary, but before then, it was Hunter Biden’s laptop or any of a million other things.

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This time, though, it’s about so-called experts. It’s about trusting them, and many of us do at some time or another. We can’t know everything. We can’t be conversant in every subject, so we trust experts.

The problem is that experts aren’t always worthy of our trust, and lefties aren’t great about recognizing that when it’s one of their experts. Take columnist Scott Galloway, for example, in this clip.

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— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) August","full_text":"SCOTT GALLOWAY: “Of course we trust the experts. ‘Expert’ means you have certification … They don't double-down and say my, now incorrect, information is the right way.” ","username":"TheChiefNerd","name":"Chief Nerd","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/ /zZkL3U76_normal.jpg","date":"2026-08-04T16:57:57.000Z","photos":[{"img_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!a9I0!,w_1028,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_progressive:steep/l_play_button_usfui2,w_88,e_colorize:0/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F__ss-rehost__tw-video-preview-13_ .jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/3uDktJv24z"}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":202,"retweet_count":28,"like_count":257,"impression_count":81714,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":"https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/ /vid/avc1/1280x720/naVEkYp2h-UA8EZQ.mp4","video_preview_media_key":"13_ ","belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

Experts don’t “double-down and say my, now incorrect, information is the right way,” he says?

First, here’s Galloway on Bill Maher talking about lockdowns.

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— NERKISH (@NerkNews) August","full_text":" @TheChiefNerd Him trusting the experts about COVID... ","username":"NerkNews","name":"NERKISH","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/ /GcE3F_PB_normal.jpg","date":"2026-08-04T17:44:54.000Z","photos":[{"img_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hPY0!,w_1028,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_progressive:steep/l_play_button_usfui2,w_88,e_colorize:0/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F__ss-rehost__tw-video-preview-13_ .jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/Nx3nchIx2P"}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":5,"retweet_count":1,"like_count":35,"impression_count":917,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":"https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/ /vid/avc1/1280x720/aE9DBbUw0oqnjT8p.mp4","video_preview_media_key":"13_ ","belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

He admits it was wrong, that the experts were wrong, but do you know who hasn’t admitted they were wrong about things like lockdowns at schools?

Dr. Anthony Fauci.

He still maintains that he was right about lockdowns. He has never reversed his course on the subject, and he’s never going to. Fauci is too in love with Fauci to admit he was wrong.

Ego is a thing that everyone has, and while most of us try to keep it in check, people in every field fail. That includes science, but also everything else, and many of those who fail are so-called experts.

A prime example is Paul Ehrlich. The author of The Population Bomb was absolutely convinced that we were reaching a point where the population of the planet would be too great for the planet to support it. He said wars and famines would ensue if we didn’t take drastic action.

That point was supposed to hit 50 years ago, though, and we’re still not there. He died still claiming that the end was nigh. He never admitted he was wrong, despite literally every prediction turning out to be false.

The same is true of climate scientists who keep saying that if we don’t act by a certain date, the polar ice caps will be gone, only for that date to roll by and the ice caps continue to go strong.

Fauci has maintained, since the start, that he was correct and did everything right. We know that’s not true. We see the damage lockdowns did to both people and the economy.

The problem with “experts,” particularly those who suddenly find themselves in the spotlight such as Fauci, is that they’re no different from anyone else. They don’t like to admit they’re wrong. They don’t like to accept blame. More than that, they think that the adoring respect they’ve gotten from people like celebrities will go away if they admit they made a mistake.

So, they don’t.

Galloway claims that scientists don’t hold onto discredited ideas, but the truth of the matter is that it happens all the time.

Peter Duesberg died while still arguing that HIV didn’t cause AIDS, despite everyone else saying otherwise.

Lord Kelvin was one of the greatest physicists of the 18th century, but he died arguing that X-rays were a hoax and that quantum mechanics and relativity were nonsense.

History is full of experts who hold onto discredited ideas, stubbornly refusing to accept the new information. To believe that experts don’t do that is stupid, and that’s the problem with putting too much faith in experts.

Writing about gun rights at Bearing Arms, it’s normal for me to see stories where the “experts” quoted work for groups like Everytown for Gun Safety or Giffords. They’re treated as experts, and if we gave them the power to stop gun-based violent crime, we’d see draconian gun control measures put into place immediately.

And then we’d still have so-called gun crime, because these people aren’t really experts on anything except sounding like they know what they’re talking about. They don’t understand everything that touches on their supposed fields.

Fauci is no different. He made a pronouncement, his ego got in the way, and he’s refused to back down, even though his pronouncements were enacted just as he said they should be, and part of the problem is that he didn’t really understand everything at risk.

He’s an infectious disease guy. He’s not an economist. He’s not an expert in childhood development. He’s not any of a number of other things that might have shown him lockdowns were a problem.

But since the media was fawning over him, officials listened to him and no one else. His ego was fed, and the result was that he refuses to back down even though we know how incorrect his call was.

Sure, he claims he didn’t have the power to institute anything, but do you think for a moment that those things would have happened without Fauci? I don’t think so.

Woodrow Wilson was a big fan of centralized planning by experts. He figured that a technocracy was probably the way to build an ideal society. That was kind of the goal, and it’s been the goal of every leftist collectivist for generations. This idea is that the experts are, in fact, the experts.

Now, let’s couple that with the fact that, like the “experts” from gun control groups, some so-called experts are only seen that way because others like what they have to say.

Josef Stalin thought Trofim Lysenko was an expert. The biologist was saying the things Stalin wanted to hear. The result was agricultural disaster and famine. Communists like the collectivist hypothesis because it conformed to their views, not because it made sense scientifically, and that’s a risk with experts, too.

Hell, despite all the famine, there have been those in this century who still take his claims seriously.

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The problem with experts, put succinctly, is that experts are humans who are susceptible to all the human foibles. That ranges from being clueless about their own deficiencies to being downright evil.

Assuming anything benevolent about them, simply because they’re experts, is the surest way to make everything worse.

Should we listen to them? To a point. We need to consider what they have to say, but we also need to hear what the other experts have to say. We need to learn as much as we can before we do anything simply because an expert said it was a good thing.

Otherwise, you start trying to reinvent an understanding of genetics based on communist ideology, not actual reality.

No one needs that.