On the failure of expert guidance

And its consequences

He won’t listen to us. It’s like we’re not even here!

That’s the cri de coeur of every article about Donald Trump in the New York Times these days. It’s the barely concealed subtext, except when it’s in the open.

He doesn’t care what we think. He doesn’t even PRETEND to care. Can’t he at least pretend?

Trump’s rejection of the establishment has hit no one harder than Times opinion columnist, stenographer-to-the-elite, and professional bad writer¹ Thomas Friedman. Friedman’s piece yesterday was headlined, A Great Unraveling Is Underway. In it he compared Trump’s election to a national suicide pact. (Nope, I’m not kidding.)

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(If you want stenography, look elsewhere.)

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Here’s the problem for Friedman and all the Friedmans.

The ravelers are having a bad run.

In 2003, Dick Cheney, the ultimate insider, pushed the United States to invade Iraq, setting off decades of Middle Eastern instability and terror. (In May of 2003, Thomas Friedman told Charlie Rose the invasion had been “unquestionably worth doing” (!) because of the lesson it had taught Islamic terrorists (!!)).

In 2008, the global financial crisis caused massive economic pain to nearly everyone — except the bankers and hedge fund managers who caused it.

In 2020, public health bureaucrats panicked the world into shutting down over a minor respiratory virus, in part because some of them feared the world would discover that their work had helped create the virus. Then they promised the world they’d found a magical four-letter cure, mRNA.

Those elite-fueled disasters aren’t secrets.

But there’s a fourth, a quarter-century in the making, one that has hit the United States and Canada far harder than anywhere else. It’s not a secret, yet it isn’t usually grouped with the others.

This is the slow griding disaster of our opioid addiction and overdose crisis, which has now killed almost 1.5 million Americans — and counting.

The elites want you to view the opioid crisis as disconnected from their policy decisions: pushing “harm reduction” over prevention; forcing insurers to offer endless and expensive cycles of rehab with scant evidence it works; rapidly expanding Medicaid and thus making prescription opioids far more accessible; and requiring hospitals and doctors to medicate patients aggressively by declaring pain “the fifth vital sign.”

These choices led the United States to increase its medical prescribing of opioids massively. The change started in about 1990, accelerated in the late 1990s, and worsened after 2000.

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(Overdoses ahead!)

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Perhaps each of those decisions seemed reasonable, or at least defensible, when they were made. They have collectively helped cause the worst overdose crisis in American, if not human, history.

But our self-appointed medical, cultural, and academic elites will not accept any responsibility for their lethal decisions, much less consider reversing them.

Even so, the truth is increasingly clear to voters in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida, states which not coincidentally have swung right in the last 20 years. Ordinary voters may not know the details of how Medicare pushed the “fifth vital sign,” but they know that our policies towards drugs and addiction have changed — and not for the better.

Many Unreported Truths readers know too. One of you emailed, out of the blue, in response to yesterday’s Covid piece:

As an aside, do you remember how there was such a push to "treat pain" and how important and overlooked that was, a push that came about right around the advent of the opioid [crisis]?

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An aside. But also not an aside.

The Cold War was in many ways an elite triumph. Following the catastrophes of two world wars, the United States built an elaborate national security structure to contain the Soviet Union while avoiding the very real risk of nuclear conflagration. With the great exception of the Vietnam War, it mostly worked.

But in the last 25 years, the elites have made very, very visible mistakes (and I do not even include their preoccupation with climate change, which is shared by almost no one else and exposes their hypocrisy, given their predilection for private jets).

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(Saving the planet, one supermodel at a time!)

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I can’t pretend I support everything Donald Trump has done since taking office. But the more I consider the last 25 years, the better I understand the anger Americans feel.

These elite failures — and an unwillingness to admit them — have fueled the rise of right-wing populism; and it is no accident that Trump has made attacking fentanyl, the dangerous synthetic opioid, one of his central policies since returning to the White House.

Like all successful populist politicians he has an intuitive understanding of what matters to his base. And he is far more interested in the people who elected him than in Thomas Friedman’s grumblings.

Sorry, Tom.

1. Matt Taibbi has chronicled Friedman’s assaults on the English language for decades. Kid you not, decades. Per Taibbi, the high-water-mark of Friedman’s career might be this bit of advice about George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq: "It's OK to throw out your steering wheel," he wrote, "as long as you remember you're driving without one."

Well, no, it’s not.