The political life is sometimes implicitly thought of the same way. It’s easy to imagine that the challenge of politics is limited to questions about just where things will end up if we apply our enormous, and enormously reliable, tools in various ways. Take a recent tweet by Keith Olbermann, in which the former MSNBC star raged: “You know what would’ve stopped Trump’s blackmailing of these universities? What could STILL stop it? If [the University of Pennsylvania] retracted his degree. If Penn merely announced it was being ‘reviewed’ because of problems in the admissions office.”

The notion is remarkable both for the sentiment and for the choice of weapon.

A place like Penn plays a double role in the pool game of liberal politics. First, the duly credentialed experts at such an institution are the ones who can do the billiard math. They can tell you authoritatively what is going on around you: why Hillary Clinton will beat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, how one of your thoughts or actions constitutes a microaggression or an implicit bias, that you must wear a mask outdoors to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and so on.

More from this author

Why we stopped trusting 'experts'

By Oliver Traldi

Second, the expertise of academics at Penn and similar institutions is itself one of the main tools of American progressives. Trump can be attacked because the experts gave him a low score on the democracy index. You can win an argument because you have experts to cite, and your opponent doesn’t.

At the heart of this role is the credential, which makes an expert somehow official. Of course, a credential is precisely what Olbermann suggested Penn should retract. The idea that some people and institutions have this quality of being official and others don’t is surely part of selective liberal meltdowns about fake news, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and conservative skepticism about the academy. The sensible and admirable concern that falsehoods and bullshit are easily spread is often unwieldy, since it gets us quickly into very difficult questions about how to figure out what’s true and what’s false, and how to convince others once we’ve convinced ourselves. These dangerous waters are canalized into the worry that official sources are being drowned out by unofficial ones.

What went wrong with our experts and our official stories? There’s no master answer, but various sorts of errors were made, I think, over and over again. One characteristic mistake is confusing the political and non-political realms. For instance, in applying for grants, academic scientists and mathematicians for years have been asked to frame the benefits of those grants in terms of political goals like diversity, equity, and inclusion, even if the topic of the research was something non-political like theoretical physics. On the other hand, clearly political projects like the 2020 protests over the death of George Floyd might be recommended under the supposedly non-political banner of public-health expertise.

Another characteristic mistake is confusing the entry requirements for expertise with the outcome of expert inquiry. Someone with a credential in the study of, say, race or gender might rest on their authority to give some pronouncement about race- or gender-based oppression. But anyone who would contradict that pronouncement would have been weeded out of race and gender studies long ago. So the credential doesn’t give the pronouncement any extra weight; to a sensible observer, it should already be factored in. Noam Chomsky famously asserted that American foreign policy was controlled by a “secular priesthood” which required certain views at the outset.

The patina of expertise can be produced in much sillier ways. Soon after Trump was elected in 2016, a “Media Bias Chart” started circulating. On this graph’s left was an arrow indicating reliability pointing upward, in some versions toward “Original Fact Reporting” and in others toward “Fact-Reporting Sources,” and on its bottom axis were the words “Liberal” or “Left” on the left and “Conservative” or “Right” on the right. The chart looked a bit like a bell curve, so that the most centrist sources (apparently Reuters, The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, NBC, and so on) were also among the most reliable, and the most Left-wing (apparently Mother Jones, New Republic, “Occupy Democrats,” and so on) and Right-wing (apparently Fox News, The Daily Wire, Breitbart, and so on) sources were among the least reliable.

This chart is now in its 13th version, but even in its nascent form, it was virally popular. But very few concrete metrics went into the determinations made for the chart; even now, nearly a decade later, its methodology mostly involves splitting the task of rating individual articles between a few people of different political persuasions. It was the fact that the chart looked like the sort of thing that features hard data, rather than the presence of any actual hard data, that gave it persuasive power. It looked, in a word, official.

Suggested article

America's new caste system

By Mark Lilla

In a polity of critical thinkers, things ought to first be official because we trust them, and only later, derivatively and provisionally, should it be that we trust things because they seem official. Official stories have faced myriad challenges recently, from the replication crisis in social science (which I wrote about for UnHerd five years ago) to journalists’ abandonment of objectivity to government malpractice of all sorts. At heart, an expert must be someone with extraordinary knowledge or extraordinary skills, but our respect for excellence has dwindled, as has our ability to recognize it.

Early on in The Godfather, a great film about the realities of pursuing political power, the drug dealer Virgil Sollozzo tells Don Corleone that he needs “all of those politicians that you carry around in your pocket,” to which Corleone responds — after some time — that his “friends in politics . . . wouldn’t be so friendly if they knew [his] business was drugs.” Just as friends can stop being friends, and no longer serve our political goals, so can experts stop being experts, officials lose the imprimatur of their offices, and credentials cease to mean anything at all, if they don’t act with prudence and in the way that their role requires.

There is a kind of uncertainty principle in politics, that the tools we use to accomplish our goals change in our very hands as we make our attempts. Liberals like Olbermann should step back and think about just what is left in their arsenals before lining up their pool shots.

Now, we live in a radically different world. A world in which a generation of young women is being taught to disregard the fear they might feel in a threatening situation. They are told not to trust their intuition. And they are called bigots and sent death threats if they suggest that they feel uncomfortable in their bathrooms and changing rooms — or even in shelters for survivors of sexual abuse.

As a sexual assault survivor myself, I fought back tears while watching Paula Scanlan testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee about her experience of being on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team — with the transgender athlete Lia Thomas. “I know of women with sexual trauma who are adversely impacted by having biological males in their locker room without their consent. I know this because I am one of these women.”

I felt rage, too. How outrageous that Scanlan should have to defend her desire to be free of biological males in a female changing room. How dare her university send her to psychotherapy in an “attempt to reeducate [me] to become comfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a male”? I find it hard to believe that, five years ago, feminists’ rallying cry was #BelieveAllWomen.

Clearly, Scanlan does too. “Let us not forget the viral #MeToo movement that empowered female victims to speak up,” she said. “It trained a spotlight on the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and abuse, including in scholarly and educational institutions … many policies pushed today completely ignore my experiences and many women like me.” In the space of five years, we’ve gone from #BelieveAllWomen to: “Believe all women, especially if they are men.”

How have we regressed so rapidly? Everyone from Oprah downwards preached to my generation of women to listen to your gut; listen to your instinct; listen to that voice whispering “Get out!” Back in 1997, she interviewed Gavin de Becker, whose book The Gift of Fear — a guide to understanding how your instincts about other people can keep you safe — became a bestseller. During her show, he summed it up like this: “Someone who doesn’t hear ‘no’ is trying to control you.”

Oprah looked out at the audience. “Did y’all hear that? Gavin, you need to say it again.”

Such was the impact of the book that, in 2008, Oprah did an hour-long show to commemorate its tenth anniversary. During it, de Becker repeated a line from his book, distilled from a Margaret Atwood lecture: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”

I understood this. I was taught to get out of any threatening situation as soon as possible. If you’re alone in a room and a man enters and you don’t feel safe? Leave. If you’re walking at night and feel the instinct to escape? Just run. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong, because what if you’re right? I was told to ignore that little voice at my peril. My mother raised me and my sisters to scream and run like hell if a stranger asked us to get in their car. “Because if you end up in a trunk, you’re dead.”

As de Becker says: “Can you imagine an animal in the wilderness overtaken with fear and saying ‘Oh it’s probably nothing.’ But we do that every day.” In his 1997 Oprah appearance, he argues that the real information we should be giving women and children is: “Honour your own fear and teach them that it’s important, that their own internal voice is important.”

Suggested reading

Do we need a Trans Olympics?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Where is Oprah now?

The message today’s young women are getting is that if their inner voice says it feels wrong when someone with a penis undresses in front of them, or is present when they undress, in a space designated for women, there is something wrong with them. Scanlan said in her testimony: “We, the women, were the problem, not the victims. We were expected to conform, to move over and shut up. Our feelings didn’t matter. The university was gaslighting and fearmongering women to validate the feelings and identity of a male.”

It appears that institutions, politicians and progressives are happy to sacrifice women at the altar of inclusivity. They demand we keep quiet when we feel uncomfortable or unsafe. Ironically, instead of teaching us to keep ourselves safe and fear violation, the women’s movement teaches us to fear being labelled as bigots. Paula Scanlan and collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines have been called transphobes for objecting to someone striding around with his penis on show in a locker room designated for women.

We are setting a dangerous precedent. Think about the young women watching the way that Scanlan and Gaines are being treated. They will surely conclude that they must suffer to accommodate the small handful of males that want to make everything about them. They are now being given access to female prisons, domestic abuse shelters, rape centres, locker rooms, spas and public toilets, as well as changing rooms.

Suggested reading

Why I stopped being a good girl

By Hadley Freeman

It would be absurd to assume that all trans-identified male-bodied people are looking for ways to abuse girls or women; it is equally absurd — and naïve — to think that male predators won’t exploit this system. But what I find particularly alarming is that it teaches women in general not to trust themselves. It tells us to ignore the discomfort triggered at a subconscious level. It encourages us to ignore our instincts. When a woman senses danger the last thing she needs is for her judgment to be clouded by another fear: the fear of social death if she acts to protect herself.

And all of us who witness the abuse that women who speak up are being subjected to are expected to remain silent. All of us whose little voices are telling us that there’s something wrong with prioritising men’s feelings over women’s safety are told we are wrong.

But my gift of fear is telling me to resist being intimidated into submission. To teach young women and my own daughter to honour that voice, that intuition. To stand behind women like Paula Scanlan who are also resisting. And to say, “No.”