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Popular Jew-hating conspiracy theorist Candace Owens recently speculated that high-profile tech moguls such as Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel were not humans but rather members of a race of sentinel-human hybrids. If you think that’s stupid, don’t worry, she was just “asking questions.”
At some point in the recent past, millions of people convinced themselves that publicly pondering unhinged, deranged, or idiotic ideas was fine so long as they were framed in the form of a question. Who could possibly be opposed to open inquiry, right?
Perhaps they remember teachers telling them there’s “no such thing as a stupid question” or that “the only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.” But we use those platitudes on children because — let’s face it — they aren’t very bright. Any educated adult with a room-temperature IQ understands the distinction between a genuine, good-faith question and an idiotic one. Or they did.
Of course, most of the people “just asking questions” operate in bad faith, injecting bigotry, ideology, and lies into conversations to prey on gullible listeners. Very rarely do any of their questions come from a place of genuine intellectual curiosity.
Yet many of their fans confuse the asking of dumb questions with skepticism and contrarianism. Both of those worthy pursuits entail challenging conventional wisdom with fresh perspectives and new evidence, not endlessly throwing out insane theories that can never be resolved.
Begging questions with unfalsifiable claims isn’t critical thinking. You will always find more tenuous “evidence” to propel a conspiracy than dispositive evidence to debunk it, which is the point. It is, for instance, impossible for anyone to prove that Charlie Kirk isn’t a time traveler, as Owens claimed the other day. Every rational person understands that just because a contention can’t be debunked doesn’t make it true.
A parallel platitude to “no bad questions” is “you fix bad speech with more speech.” Really, you have zero responsibility to interact with crackpots. Once reputable people start treating delusional ideas seriously, they begin to give them undeserved credibility. People have the tendency to accept ideas they are regularly exposed to, no matter how outlandish. We are suffering from a mass illusory truth effect. Increasingly, people treat the cranks they hear on Joe Rogan or Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson as genuine experts simply because lots of other people also listen.
Being passionate or charismatic alone doesn’t make you smart. Genuine experts spend years gaining knowledge and then form their worldviews. Today’s podcasting experts adopt worldviews and then skim Wikipedia pages. The internet, and now artificial intelligence, has given charlatans instantaneous access to just enough snippets of superficial and convenient knowledge to sound informed. There’s a cottage industry of dilettantes making millions by faking expertise on Middle East history or medicine. Sometimes they are even appointed to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
The expert class has brought much of this on themselves, no doubt. In the past years, partisans posing as “experts” or simply dishonest ones have misled the public on many high-profile occasions. Other experts have gotten important questions wrong in good faith. Academics aren’t prophets, and we shouldn’t treat their proclamations as scripture.
But despite popular sentiment, real experts aren’t “always wrong.” They are, in fact, typically and generally right about most things. The notion that true expertise is illusory has given people license to untether themselves from reality. Being red-pilled is often just an excuse to shed all intellectual discipline and join a fantastical world where people can endlessly theorize and feed their preconceived notions and resentments.
Treating all theories with the same validity doesn’t make you open-minded — it makes you a mark. Questioning every largely settled issue just because an expert or the “right people” believe it is no better, and often worse, than blindly following every declaration from officials. Instead of demanding more accountability from experts, we’ve filled the credibility void with charlatans who play on our confirmation biases and amuse us.
A lot of this trend probably has to do with entertainment. For most people, listening to a conspiracy theory is a lot more fun than sitting down, reading a book, and actually learning something. Still, discerning adults have the capacity to sniff out nonsense and treat it as an unserious diversion. Years ago, popular radio host Art Bell came on every night and amused millions with innocuous stories about aliens. Vice presidents didn’t treat him as a serious commentator, and think tanks didn’t invite his true believers into their political movements.
These days, the act of trusting expertise is often conflated with elitism. You don’t need a doctorate or an Ivy League degree to say something interesting or true. There are plenty of autodidacts and run-of-the-mill people who have great expertise in their fields or areas of interest. Not to mention, some of the biggest nuts on the planet are professors. The do-their-own-research crowd, though, has convinced themselves that those who hew to existing evidence and “narratives” are the naïve ones.
SOCIALISM’S RISE IS REALLY A GIFT TO AMERICA
Now, obviously, there is occasionally more to a story. Authorities lie all the time. The default position these days is that there is an all-encompassing web of lies behind every event. The internet is captured by an epidemic of apophenia, the need to find patterns and connections in wholly unrelated or random events. Virtually every story sends millions into paranoid spasms online. I’m sorry, not everything is a psyop. The official story of the authorities is often the right one. Sometimes a solitary nut shoots someone. Sometimes a rich guy pays underage girls for sex and then kills himself in jail when he’s caught. The real world isn’t a movie.
We can admit that, for many years, our leaders tried to chill speech with appeals to authority. We should also admit that there’s a significant difference between a person wondering how contrails are formed and the person wondering whether the Rothschilds are seeding clouds to control the weather for Israel. I’m not dismissing the notion that many idiots genuinely contemplate the latter. I’m saying that nonidiots have a societal responsibility to stop pretending every question is valuable or incisive or worthy of an answer. We have a responsibility to society to marginalize and mock these people.
