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Report: Satanic Temple SUES School After It Refused After Hours ‘Satan Club’ For Kids

Senator Ted Cruz took his podcast into what he labelled “the belly of the leftist beast” this week by visiting Yale, where he schooled a particularly woke student who openly accused him of being racist over his questioning of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Footage shows the student, named Maia Cook, attempting to couch her accusations in faux politeness, telling Cruz “thank you so much for coming to Yale this evening,” adding “it would appear to me that you already recognize the importance of new perspectives.”
She then dropped the act and told Cruz “it baffled me that you would ask such flagrantly racist questions to this exceedingly well-qualified candidate,” referring to Brown Jackson, before she was confirmed to the Supreme Court.
The student continued, “Your colleagues in the GOP promised a respectful and dignified hearing for Justice Jackson and, to me, you did not uphold this. So today I wanted to create a space where you might be able to challenge your own thinking, as prudent scholars often do. So, I’m here to ask you: What are two nice comments you can give about recent nominee Justice Jackson’s judicial experience besides from ‘she has an easy smile’?”
Cruz’s response is priceless as he noted how the left only lauds black and hispanic figures they agree with while being downright vitriolic, nasty and racist to those it doesn’t.
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Cruz cited both Justice Clarence Thomas and Janice Rogers Brown, a Justice on the California Supreme Court – both black, and both despised and continually attacked by the left because of their conservative records.
“Do you think the Democrats were all sexist when they voted party line against Amy Coney Barrett?” Cruz also stated, adding “I’m willing to bet you don’t because she’s not a Liberal woman.”
“So, you can’t have it both ways which is that when a Democratic nominee has a certain characteristic, anyone who opposes them is racist or sexist or what have you. But, when a Republican nominee has those characteristics, it’s open season and you can go after them full force and the Left is righteous in doing so,” Cruz asserted.
“You said that my questioning of Judge Jackson was – you used the term ‘racist’,” Cruz responded to the student, adding “Listen, racism is a horrific evil in this country. It is also an insult that the Left tosses around casually.”
Referring to his questioning of Justice Brown Jackson, Cruz said “I could not disagree more deeply when you say it is racist to examine a judge based on their record,” noting that it is the “job of the Senate in the advice and consent process”
Full video:
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As we previously covered, Cruz took Ketanji Brown Jackson to task over both her record of lenient sentences for child porn offenders and for <a href="http://ketanji%20brown%20jackson/">refusing to define what a woman is.</a>
The establishment media <a href="https://summit.news/2022/03/28/abc-anchor-questioning-judge-jackson-about-light-sentences-for-child-porn-offenders-was-a-message-to-qanon/">attempted to spin Republican questioning</a> of Brown Jackson’s record into some sort of racist conspiratorial “message To QAnon”.
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source <a href="https://summit.news/2022/04/25/report-satanic-temple-sues-school-after-it-refused-after-hours-satan-club-for-kids/">https://summit.news/2022/04/25/report-satanic-temple-sues-school-after-it-refused-after-hours-satan-club-for-kids/</a>

revolution summit Report: Satanic Temple SUES School After It Refused After Hours ‘Satan Club’ For Kids

Senator Ted Cruz took his podcast into what he labelled “the belly of the leftist beast” this week by visiting Yale, where he schooled a par...

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Admits Trump Would Have Prevented War

Marie Yovanovitch, the former US Ambassador to Ukraine, let slip during an interview that Trump would have prevented war in Ukraine via diplomacy, but then absurdly asserted that would have been a bad thing.
Yovanovitch, who testified against Trump during his 2019 impeachment trial, made the remarks during an interview with PBS this past weekend.
The former ambassador was asked by host Margaret Hoover about her previous claim that Russia’s invasion “never would have happened in the Trump administration.”
“I’ve heard that you have also suggested that Putin might not have gone to war if Trump was still in office,” said Hoover.
“Trump was very dismissive of NATO – I mean, dismissive, it’s obviously a diplomatic word – very critical of NATO, critical of our allies,” said Yovanovitch. “And his close associates, including John Bolton, have said that if he had won a second term, he would have pulled us out of NATO. I mean, why go to war with Vladimir Putin if the United States is going to present kind of the corpse of NATO on a silver platter? You don’t need to do that.”
Hoover then asked Yovanovitch directly, “I mean, how do you think the invasion would have been different if Trump had remained as president?”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true" readability="11.526912181303">
Marie Yovanovitch — the former US Ambassador to Ukraine under Trump who testified against him in the 2019 impeachment, and was lauded as a hero — suggests that if Trump were in office, he'd have averted the war diplomatically. But she thinks this would've been a terrible thing <a href="https://t.co/1Q4qp5cNOA">pic.twitter.com/1Q4qp5cNOA</a>
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) <a href="https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1517807790605148161?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 23, 2022</a>
</blockquote>
“I think that Trump would have provided Putin with enough of what he wanted that perhaps he wouldn’t have invaded,” she responded.
Yovanovitch was then asked what Ukraine would have looked like if Russia hadn’t invaded (thanks to Trump). She bumbled around before trying to cover her tracks.
“We are now getting into– You know, this is why diplomats are told [LAUGHS] never to answer theoretical questions! So we’re getting into areas of– you know, I mean, it’s a hypothetical question, right? I don’t know what Trump would have done, and I don’t know what Putin would have done. But I can’t see Trump, President Trump standing up for Ukraine the way President Biden is right now.
Apparently, “standing up for Ukraine” means continually feeding them weapons to prolong the war.
As we previously <a href="https://summit.news/2022/04/06/washington-post-admits-nato-wants-to-prolong-war-in-ukraine/">highlighted</a>, prominent voices within NATO want to extend the conflict for as long as possible, something that will undoubtedly please the US deep state and transnational weapons contractors.
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source <a href="https://summit.news/2022/04/25/former-us-ambassador-to-ukraine-admits-trump-would-have-prevented-war/">https://summit.news/2022/04/25/former-us-ambassador-to-ukraine-admits-trump-would-have-prevented-war/</a>

revolution summit Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Admits Trump Would Have Prevented War

Marie Yovanovitch, the former US Ambassador to Ukraine, let slip during an interview that Trump would have prevented war in Ukraine via dipl...

Report: Google Rolls Out Feature That Corrects You With Woke ‘Inclusive’ Language

Google owned YouTube has removed a recent interview Tucker Carlson produced with a woman who ‘de-transitioned’ from gender conversion and is now speaking out against the promotion of the ideology among young people.
During the interview, Helena Kerschner described how she feels she was  exploited at a time when she was young, confused and “uncomfortable” in her own skin.
Kerschner has said she felt “sucked into gender ideology online,”at age 15 and was even encouraged by officials at her school to undergo masculinizing hormone therapy in a process she describes as “very damaging.”
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<div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper" readability="9.8115501519757">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true" readability="13.899696048632">
when i was 15, lonely, and hated my body, i got sucked into gender ideology online.
my school encouraged me and i was easily prescribed a high dose of testosterone at 18, and it was very damaging.
this is not rare.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DetransAwarenessDay?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#DetransAwarenessDay</a>
me at 19, trans // me now at 23 <a href="https://t.co/oNPF5J3Q7m">pic.twitter.com/oNPF5J3Q7m</a>
— helena (@lacroicsz) <a href="https://twitter.com/lacroicsz/status/1502682333601796102?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 12, 2022</a></blockquote>
</div>
</figure>
During the interview, Kerschner noted “it’s completely normal for not only young girls, but often young boys to feel uncomfortable with themselves uncomfortable with their body. But we have this ideology that is especially prevalent online that says that if you have those feelings, that means you’re trans.”
She further told Carlson “there are literally people who say, if you don’t even like your voice on a recording, that’s a sign of gender dysphoria, and you need to go see a medical professional because you’re trans.”
She continued, “I really feel afraid for these other young girls like myself who they might not be, you know, I consider myself lucky that I was able to get out of it unscarred really medically, but there’s so many young people who can’t say the same.”
“Psychologically as well. I mean, it’s just devastating to, especially from a young age be lied to, by adults at school, and by medical professionals and told that your body is wrong, you need to change it, you need to get hormones you need to get surgeries, that’s devastating for a young person. So I’m just really concerned for younger girls and boys like I once was being led down this path and being hurt by it,” she further urged.
During the interview Kerschner also noted that it is “an oversimplification of the truth” for medical officials to state that the process is reversible.
“When you go on a cross-sex hormone, like that’s going to give you not just physical changes, but psychological experiences, that you can’t just act like they never happened, you can’t just take it back,” she explained.
“And especially with surgeries, you know, a, a breast implant after a mastectomy is not the same thing as never having your breasts taken off in the first place. So there’s a lot of young women who are going through that who had a double mastectomy at 16, 17, 18 years old or even younger that happens, who, you know, there’s nothing you can really do to put that feeling of oneness and safety in your body back,” Kerschner added.
She also noted that while many parents and young people are grateful for her speaking out, there are also “the trans activists and the trans community that exhibits some very unhealthy kind of cult-like dynamics, who are really upset about this.”
The video was taken down for “violating YouTube’s policy on spam, deceptive practices, and scams,” however copies have popped up, as well as versions on Rumble and other platforms.
Watch:
Quite obviously there is nothing deceptive, spammy or scam about the interview. It is one woman’s opinion.
Social media and culture in general is replete with content on how wonderful gender transition is, yet here this one video of a negative experience has been ruthlessly censored and banned.
Big tech wouldn’t want anyone hearing an opinion that deviates from happy rainbow fantasy land.
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source <a href="https://summit.news/2022/04/25/report-google-rolls-out-feature-that-corrects-you-with-woke-inclusive-language/">https://summit.news/2022/04/25/report-google-rolls-out-feature-that-corrects-you-with-woke-inclusive-language/</a>

revolution summit Report: Google Rolls Out Feature That Corrects You With Woke ‘Inclusive’ Language

Google owned YouTube has removed a recent interview Tucker Carlson produced with a woman who ‘de-transitioned’ from gender conversion and is...

The French election is over, but the country’s politics are still broken

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZUgzd41dKIb9iXHSXTRpoJ_xbFE=/0x388:5416x3224/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23413343/1393406294.jpg" /></div>
France’s second-round presidential election on Sunday, a contest between incumbent center-right Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Marine Le Pen, <a href="https://www.resultats-elections.interieur.gouv.fr/presidentielle-2022/FE.html">ended with a clear Macron victory</a> — but not the overwhelming victory he had in their 2017 match-up.
In the first round of the elections on April 10, Macron and Le Pen emerged as the frontrunners after a tumultuous campaign, which saw polling numbers careening wildly in the weeks before the election. Macron bested Le Pen by <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-2022-french-presidential-election-%E2%80%93-first-round-results">less than five percentage points</a> in the first round this time; in their first matchup in 2017 that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2017/apr/23/french-presidential-election-results-2017-latest">gap was even smaller</a>, but Le Pen also received a smaller percentage of the total. Macron ultimately won the final vote in 2017, with about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/07/world/europe/emmanuel-macron-france-election-marine-le-pen.html">66.1 percent to Le Pen’s 33.9 percent</a>. Voters who had selected Socialist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the 2017 elections mostly gathered around Macron, though they may not have followed suit this go-round despite Mélenchon’s pleas after the first round that his supporters “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/21/macron-le-pen-france-election-runoff/">not give a single vote to Madame Le Pen.</a>”
While the French public has typically abided by the unspoken rule of the cordon sanitaire — essentially, the idea that voters will prevent a far-right politician from presiding over the Fifth Republic — a combination of low turnout, voter apathy, and a lack of viable alternatives to Macron on the left threatened to put Le Pen in power, or at least very close.
Le Pen did indeed come even closer than she did last time, perhaps showing that despite her noxious ideas, her economic messages are resonating with voters who are struggling with rising prices due to global inflation and the war in Ukraine. The French Left failed this round to put up a candidate who could speak to citizens’ economic concerns without Le Pen’s hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant, and isolationist worldview — and likely suffered for it. Le Pen may have won a greater proportion of voters who previously chose candidates on the left, or who previously voted for Macron himself, because of an overall apathy toward the incumbent.
<h3>A Le Pen victory would have changed France and Europe</h3>
Le Pen softened her far-right rhetoric during this election cycle to focus on economic issues and presented herself as the candidate for people struggling to pay their bills as inflation and fuel costs creep up. Her shifting focus does not negate the fact that she has long espoused views that, if not fascist, come alarmingly close, however.
In a televised debate on April 20, Macron tore into Le Pen about her proposal to <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-france-elections-campaigns-presidential-24d8ca9828ab7855b4d27d3bb3cf8bfe">ban the hijab</a>, a head covering some Muslim women in France wear in public, saying that the proposed ban would lead to “civil war.” France’s Muslim population is the largest in Western Europe, and it has already faced serious discrimination from the government: Former President Nicholas Sarkozy proposed <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20100519-france-government-examines-islamic-veil-ban-bill-sarkozy">a bill in 2010</a> that would ban all face coverings — particularly burqa and similar coverings — in public.
France cherishes its particular vision of itself as a secular state; <a href="https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/coming-to-france/france-facts/secularism-and-religious-freedom-in-france-63815/article/secularism-and-religious-freedom-in-france#:~:text=Law%20of%201905-,Introduction,states%20the%20Constitution%20of%201958.">its 1958 Constitution</a> states that “France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic, guaranteeing that all citizens regardless of their origin, race or religion are treated as equals before the law and respecting all religious beliefs.” However, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/22/islamic-veils-sarkozy-speech-france">building on the 2004 ban on religious clothing in schools</a>, Sarkozy twisted the concept of secularism to suit his own right-wing worldview and advocate for the ban. But secularism doesn’t mean restricting people from practicing or adhering to their religion in a public way — rather, secularism as it’s defined in the French Constitution indicates that the state doesn’t favor or identify with any religion and people are free to follow their traditions and beliefs as they wish.
With Le Pen, the proposed hijab ban would be in line with <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/far-right-le-pen-cloaks-nationalist-policies-with-social-veneer-2022-04-23/">other discriminatory and anti-immigrant policy ideas</a>, like only providing welfare benefits to French nationals and giving them preferential treatment in social housing and jobs programs; deporting undocumented immigrants; stopping reunification programs for immigrant families; and withdrawing residency permits for immigrants if they aren’t employed for longer than a year.
A Le Pen victory would have <a href="https://carnegieeurope.eu/2022/04/19/far-reaching-consequences-of-le-pen-victory-in-france-pub-86936">dramatically shifted the balance of European and NATO power</a>, which would be especially precarious as NATO support and European solidarity have proven critical for Ukraine as the country’s military tries to keep Russia from essentially taking over. Le Pen promised to withdraw French troops from NATO integrated military command if she won the presidency, which at the very least would symbolically weaken the NATO alliance — particularly after five years of Macron’s efforts to secure France’s position in European and international alliances. While she didn’t call for a full withdrawal as far-left candidate Mélenchon did, her positions on NATO and the EU would certainly destabilize both those alliances.
In terms of the EU, Le Pen called for increased French independence from the bloc, including recognizing the primacy of French law over EU law — a move which, when attempted by Poland last year, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/22/brussels-launches-legal-action-over-polish-rulings-against-eu-law">resulted in legal action by the European Commission</a>.
Furthermore, Le Pen’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/14/le-pen-nato-russia-france-rapprochement/">call for a NATO rapprochement with Russia</a> after an end to the Ukraine war at a news conference on Wednesday was at the very best poorly timed, and at the worst could be perceived as continuing her support for Russian President Vladimir Putin. While she has condemned the invasion, she supported the initial Russian incursion into Crimea in 2014, and her party, the National Rally, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/world/europe/le-pen-putin-france-election.html">borrowed millions from the First Czech-Russian Bank</a>. The bank ultimately collapsed in 2016 and was acquired by Aviazapchast, a private Russian company with historical ties to the Russian government. Her party has not yet repaid the loan, making them indebted to Russia — and putting Le Pen in uncomfortably close proximity to the Kremlin.
<h3>What comes next?</h3>
Macron’s victory, while clear, isn’t quite the thumping that his supporters produced in 2017. With <a href="https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/24/world/french-election-runoff-results.amp.html">just about 66 percent of the public turning out to vote</a> — a low figure in French elections — the political apathy and distaste for Macron is still clear. And again, Le Pen came much closer than last time to the French presidency, indicating that although France’s political promise to keep a far-right nationalist out of the highest office has held, Macron’s victory is far from a sweeping rebuke to the far-right in Europe.
It’s also a clear indicator of the inability of the traditional political parties, the Parti Socialiste and Les Républicains, to carve out a clear role for themselves in the current political landscape, placing their future in question.
The low turnout, in particular, reflects a sense among French voters that, “their national political system doesn’t work,” as Susi Dennison, the director of the European power program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox in an interview before the first round of elections.
“You can kind of see that there’s this idea that there’s literally no point voting, it doesn’t change anything,” Dennison told Vox. “The deal that you pay your taxes, you go out and vote, you sort of play the game, is no longer applicable in France.” Macron’s victory, though a relief to many watching from outside France, was likely carried by people who felt like they had no other option and that there’s no one speaking to their needs, but also that they ultimately couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Le Pen.
“There’s a lot of worry about perceived increases in inequality under Macron, under Macron’s mandate, a kind of a sense that some of the big, staple public services around health and education, are increasingly pushed more in a privatized direction,” Dennison said. “So, I think it’s these very domestic political issues that are preoccupying the debate — almost more than the security context and so on.”
“Normally, with the National Assembly elections coming shortly after the presidential elections, you tend to find that it goes the same way,” Dennison continued. “But I wonder if, this time around, this sense of frustration may be different, that if Macron, as expected, wins the election but people feel they haven’t had a chance to express their actual views in the current context, that they’ve been forced to vote for Macron for want of an alternative, then, I wonder if they may use the [National Assembly] elections as a chance to vote more with their convictions,” she said.
“Which might make for a more interesting situation with regards to the National Assembly but, with the way the Fifth Republic works, may make it more difficult for him to drive through a clear agenda in his second mandate as president, not having the sort of support that he’s had in the first mandate.” The shape of Macron’s second mandate could become clearer during the National Assembly elections, which are scheduled to take place on <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/2022-presidential-election/article/2022/04/22/the-election-doesn-t-end-on-sunday-round-3-is-on-everyone-s-mind_5981281_16.html">June 12 and June 19</a>.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/4/24/23039772/french-election-macron-le-pen-where-france-is-headed">https://www.vox.com/2022/4/24/23039772/french-election-macron-le-pen-where-france-is-headed</a>

vox The French election is over, but the country’s politics are still broken

France’s second-round presidential election on Sunday, a contest between incumbent center-right Emmanuel Macron and far-right challenger Ma...

One Good Thing: Conversations with strangers, which I missed so much

Three years ago, if you had asked me, I would have said I didn’t really like strangers. Living in New York City for my whole adult life, I’ve always taken the masses of people I don’t know as a given, the wallpaper or background noise for whatever path I was carving through the sidewalk on my day. But if you sit next to me on a plane, I stick my earbuds in; I have never been much for small talk. I love to people-watch, but in public, I tend to keep to myself.
That all changed when the world shut down, and for nearly a year, I rarely saw or interacted with someone I didn’t already know. But in February 2021, I finished my second round of vaccination, thanks to my teaching job. It was strange, moving through the world feeling like I had a minor superpower — not invincibility, but at least some extra protective wall.
My newfound minor superpowers acquired, I felt a little more confident about entering public spaces for nonessential purposes: cafes, beer gardens, that bagel shop I’d been missing. I found myself striking up very minor conversations with bartenders and baristas and feeling almost tearful when I walked away. It had been so long since I had a conversation that wasn’t planned (on Zoom, in my classroom) and with someone I knew. Since I’d had a spontaneous conversation with the vaguest of acquaintances, or even a stranger.
Of course, I am not the only person who has discovered in the past two years that we really lean on interactions with acquaintances and strangers for part of our daily dose of humanity. For decades, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200701-why-your-weak-tie-friendships-may-mean-more-than-you-think">researchers have found</a> that having many “weak ties” — the people we chat with at the water cooler or the person who takes your donut order every morning or the greeter at your place of worship or the doorman in your building — is a reliable predictor of your well-being. In other words, it’s not just your close friends and family, the people you might reach out to in a time of crisis, who aid your emotional state; it’s also the semi-random people who chance simply puts in your path. And that’s exactly who I’d been missing.
I thought of this research while watching <a href="https://filmmakermagazine.com/113796-pawel-lozinski-balcony-movie/#.Yl27ptPML5Y">Pawel Lozinski’s documentary The Balcony Movie</a> (currently making the rounds at festivals and coming soon to HBO Max). Incredibly, Lozinski made the movie pre-Covid; it feels like a perfect setup for a pandemic movie. But no. Lozinski sat on his balcony in Warsaw and asked questions of the people who passed on the sidewalk below. For over a year, he filmed and asked questions about their day, about the meaning of life, about love, about all kinds of things.
Many people Lozinski talks to are good sports, joking with him and passing the time. They talk about the errand they’re on the way to accomplish. An old woman tells him snippets of hilarious stories about her late husband; another man tells him about hiding his relationship with his great love for all his life because they were afraid of being judged for being gay. We see a pregnant woman’s belly grow and then, later, she pushes a carriage. A man who has just been released from prison shows up several times, first thanking Lozinski for a shirt he handed down from the balcony for him, later updating him on his life.
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<figcaption>Sharing with neighbors.</figcaption>
<cite>HBO Max</cite></figure>
Those interactions build the kind of movie critics like to call “deeply human,” whatever that means. In the end, it’s a tale of weak ties, and of the joy of simply watching people pass by and engaging them in conversation. You never really know what someone will say, but it’s rarely what you’re expecting.
Having watched The Balcony Movie, I was reminded of that feeling this winter when, omicron having all but fully subsided in New York, I stopped into a bustling French bistro on 10th Avenue to grab a quick brunch before I went to a Sunday matinee of a much-talked-about off-Broadway show for which I had a ticket. I had 40 minutes. I perched at the counter and ordered a bowl of poached eggs and vegetables, a cup of black coffee, and a bottomless passionfruit mimosa.
An older gentleman sat to my left, and smiled and told me the mimosa was very good. A minute later, his friend returned from the bathroom and they kept eating and chatting. I finished my eggs and was still hungry and started to ask the waitress for toast, but the man stopped me and said, “You want the fries. They’re the best fries.”
Well, he was right: I did want them, and they were the perfect bar fries — shoestring style, not too many of them, crispy but not overcrispy, salty and delicious. I ate them so fast that he missed that I’d even gotten them when I turned to thank him. He asked me why I was on this side of town on a snowy Sunday, and I explained; it transpired he and his friend were church musicians who’d just finished their shift at a nearby parish and were grabbing lunch before they went to their evening gigs. They wanted to know where I write, and we laughed, in what to me is a very familiar conversational beat, about how similar “Vox” sounds to another well-known but very different media outlet if you say it out loud in a busy restaurant. They wished me a good time at the show and hoped we’d bump into each other again.
It’s the simplest thing in the world, the kind of interaction that you can have twice a day in New York if you want, just eating some $5 fries at a bar. It’s also the best kind of conversation. Nobody has an angle or is trying to get anything. You’re just delighted that another interesting human you’ve never seen or talked to before has crossed your path. They might never do so again.
But the camaraderie that comes from just being alive at this moment — having survived to this point, to be able to sit in a snowy bistro on 10th Avenue and bask in the kindness of strangers. To celebrate that we are here, both human, and to be alive together in this moment is a little bit of a miracle.
<a href="https://filmmakermagazine.com/113796-pawel-lozinski-balcony-movie/#.Yl27ptPML5Y">Pawel Lozinski’s documentary The Balcony Movie</a> will be on HBO Max in the future. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the <a href="https://www.vox.com/one-good-thing">One Good Thing</a> archives.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/23033949/balcony-movie-weak-ties-pandemic-strangers">https://www.vox.com/23033949/balcony-movie-weak-ties-pandemic-strangers</a>

vox One Good Thing: Conversations with strangers, which I missed so much

Three years ago, if you had asked me, I would have said I didn’t really like strangers. Living in New York City for my whole adult life, I’v...

Michael Lewis on why Americans don’t trust experts

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/fwTIIa_HyFkIxcnEij0wXOgCyAQ=/0x540:6500x3943/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23409520/GettyImages_509176265.jpg" /></div>
Why don’t Americans trust the experts?
One answer is that experts get a lot of things wrong and often they pay a big price for those mistakes. From the forever wars to the 2008 financial crisis to the botched pandemic response, it seems Americans are constantly careening from one avoidable catastrophe to another.
Another answer is something like Martin Gurri’s thesis in his 2014 book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143/?ots=1&slotNum=1&imprToken=d0c0266a-1608-db48-1a0&ascsubtag=%5B%5Dvx%5Bp%5D20768838%5Bt%5Dw%5Br%5Dgoogle.com%5Bd%5DD" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Public-Crisis-Authority-Millennium/dp/1732265143/?ascsubtag=[]vx[p]22794246[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]google.com[d]D\u0026ots=1\u0026slotNum=1\u0026imprToken=d0c0266a-1608-db48-1a0","subtag_max_length":99,"subtag_delim_length":2,"subtag_key":"ascsubtag","subtag_data":{"ascsubtag":"[]vx[p]22794246[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]google.com[d]D","ots":"1","slotNum":"1","imprToken":"d0c0266a-1608-db48-1a0"},"encode_subtag":false}'>The Revolt of the Public</a>: The digital revolution has transformed the information space in ways that have empowered individuals and undermined the dominant institutions in society — government, media, the academy — and the elites who run them.
Whatever the causes, America has an expert problem and it’s making it harder and harder to solve its societal troubles. Michael Lewis, bestselling author of books like <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Norton-Paperback-Michael/dp/039333869X" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Norton-Paperback-Michael/dp/039333869X?ascsubtag=[]vx[p]22794246[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":99,"subtag_delim_length":2,"subtag_key":"ascsubtag","subtag_data":{"ascsubtag":"[]vx[p]22794246[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>Liar’s Poker</a> and <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393324815">Moneyball</a>, is taking all of this on in the new season of his podcast Against the Rules.
Lewis is as good a storyteller as we have, and he takes a close look at what’s happened to our trust in experts and expertise. The problem, he says, isn’t that we lack experts; in fact, we have lots of experts and some of them have likely saved your life before. The issue is that we don’t value expertise and are therefore really bad at recognizing it when we see it.
I reached out to Lewis for a recent episode of <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vox-conversations/id1081584611">Vox Conversations</a> to talk about how we got here, why it’s an existential problem, and at what point skepticism of authority becomes pathological.
Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vox-conversations/id1215557536">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/search/vox%20conversations">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations">Stitcher</a>, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
<hr class="p-entry-hr" />
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
We live in a society that is very good at creating knowledge and very bad at applying it. Why is that, Michael?
<h4>Michael Lewis</h4>
It’s a really great question. I think part of it is that we have the luxury of being that way. There are various safety nets for our idiocy.
But why are we so bad at this? If you listen to all the [podcast] episodes this season, although I never quite say it, you might say [the answer could be], “Well, in a lot of spheres of life, there has risen new expertise. It’s very complicated and it’s not easy to understand the expertise, especially for people who are not particularly numerate or statistical or scientific.”
I’ll give you an example: meteorologists. So you’re in Gulfport, Mississippi, right now. There’s a famous old weatherman in Alabama named James Spann. He says he’s the second most famous man in Alabama, behind Nick Saban, the football coach. He’s a wonderful weatherman who’s devoted his life to stopping people from getting killed by the weather in Alabama, which happens often.
And he said 50 years ago when he started, he knew basically nothing. When he got up to predict the weather he’d stick his head out the window and say, “It’s pretty sunny today.” He would give you a very crude understanding of what might happen in the next couple of days. Ten days out, he was useless. It was no better than guessing. He certainly had no idea when and where tornadoes were going to touch down. Not very good at predicting movements of hurricanes. But, he said, he stood up on air and his job was to seem as confident as possible about what he was saying.
Now, flash forward 50 years; he knows a great deal. His 10-day forecast is pretty good. His three-day forecast is three times more accurate than it was 50 years ago. He can tell you with some precision where you’re at real risk of being killed by a tornado and when and how to save yourself from it. Still, his life is a constant stream of grievances from the people who feel he’s misinformed them. If he says there’s a 20 percent chance of rain and it rains, everybody thinks he’s an idiot. They don’t understand the probabilistic nature of forecasting.
You find this in a whole bunch of areas where the expertise is complicated and the understanding is probabilistic. Think about medicine. Doctors knew this before Covid, but now it’s so obvious. Doctors will tell you they know so much more than they did 30 years ago as a profession. They are much more useful to patients. But every day more and more people are walking into the office after reading something on WedMD and they think they know what they’re talking about.
It’s not a full answer, but there’s something about our information environment and our ability to understand people who are making probabilistic judgments that make it difficult to evaluate expertise.
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
I’ve said a bunch over the years that I think we’re a society that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, and maybe that’s part of the reason why we don’t recognize expertise when we see it.
<h4>Michael Lewis</h4>
I think that’s right. Let me tell you a story that dramatizes what you just said. I wrote a book about the federal government called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/1324002646" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/1324002646?ascsubtag=[]vx[p]22794246[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":99,"subtag_delim_length":2,"subtag_key":"ascsubtag","subtag_data":{"ascsubtag":"[]vx[p]22794246[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>The Fifth Risk</a>, where I just wandered into the federal government and looked at it as a risk-management enterprise and kept meeting these unbelievably impressive, passionate, mission-driven experts who were just trying to save us from ourselves.
After I finished that book, we had our government shutdown in December 2018 and it lasted for over 30 days. [Hundreds of thousands of federal workers were furloughed] as inessential workers and sent home without pay. And I thought of those people I’d met. I asked for a list of people who’d been sent home from an organization in Washington that was monitoring the situation, called the Partnership for Public Service. It was not a random sample of federal employees. It was federal employees who’d been nominated for one of the awards they gave out every year by someone who thought they’d done something good.
So I took this list and picked someone at random. It was a guy whose name was on the top of the list: Arthur A. Allen. He won the alphabet contest. So I call him up and asked him if I could come visit him and just see what he’s doing. He had nothing else to do. He was sitting at home with nothing to do.
This is a guy who spent his whole career as the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard search-and-rescue division, where he’d started in the late ’70s. There was a particular problem he was working on by himself, and the problem was costing a lot of American lives. It was people being lost at sea. The Coast Guard didn’t know how they drifted in the ocean. And Americans have this unbelievable talent for getting lost at sea, which is a whole other thing. On average, every day, the Coast Guard is saving 10 people who are lost in the sea and losing three. So you’re talking about thousands of people who are getting in this situation every year.
The problem is that if you fall off a boat into the ocean, you’re going to drift differently than if you are in a life raft, or if you’re on top of an overturned sailboat, or if you have a life vest on — you get the point. So if the Coast Guard knows where and when you started, as they often do, they should be able to predict where you are in the ocean four hours later, knowing the currents and the wind and your drift. But they didn’t know the drift, until Arthur A. Allen figured it all out. He spent years of his own free time tossing objects into the Long Island Sound, where he lives, measuring the specific drift of like 80 different categories of objects.
That all sounds boring and tedious, I know. But he reduced the drift to mathematical equations and embedded them in the search-and-rescue software program, and instantly they were able to find people they never would’ve found before. Thousands of Americans are alive because of Arthur A. Allen. And thousands of people are alive around the world because of the work he did here. No one knows who he is. No one pays any attention to him. They furloughed him as if he’s useless.
The punchline to all of this, to your point about the way we treat these experts who save our tails over and over again, is that when I went to go see Arthur to talk to him about what he had done with his life, I spent three days with him, interviewing his family, going to see his old office, going to the Long Island Sound to see where he dropped his objects, asking him every which way the story of his career.
After the three days, I’m going back to the airport to head home and he calls me and says, with real wonder in his voice, “Hey, you’re a published author.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m a published author.” He says, “You’re like a real deal. You’re a real writer.” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Are you going to be writing about me?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s why I spent three days learning how objects drift. Yes. I’m going to be writing about you.” He goes, “Wow. I didn’t expect to get any attention for this.” And I said, “Well, what did you think I was doing for those three days?” He said, “I just thought you were really interested in how objects drift.”
This is the mental world of the government expert. They’re so used to nobody caring about what they do, even when what they do is mission-critical, that they can’t imagine us even taking an interest in them. We so don’t value them that they don’t value themselves.
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
You make an offhand comment in one of the early shows about the arbitrariness of social status and how that has a way of obscuring someone’s real value, and I can’t help but think of it now.
<h4>Michael Lewis</h4>
I really think that we exaggerate status differences and create inequality at our peril. These people we end up shoving into lower-status roles actually know things.
We have these big complicated organizations and agencies and corporations, and when some crisis pops up it usually has a very specific solution, and it’s really unlikely that that specific solution is going to be in the heads of the people who are at the top of the organization. It’s going to be something nitty-gritty and the person is going to be six levels down in the organization. And if you’ve created these barriers between the levels, so that someone who’s six levels down will never be heard by someone at the top, you’re essentially saying, we’re never going to surface the expertise that we need to deal with the problem.
Something like this happened in the pandemic. We had this apparatus for dealing with communicable disease. It was called local public health. That’s who did it, local public health officers. Their status was so low. They were so socially powerless. They still haven’t stepped front and center stage and taken over the thing.
But if I were a television producer booking guests who can explain to America what’s going on with Covid, that’s who I’d book. But you don’t see them because they’re invisible because they’re low-status. You see some fancy-pants person who worked in the White House who doesn’t actually know anything. And this is a broader problem that has been exacerbated by the structure of our society, by these widening chasms, between level one and level two, and level two and level three, and level three and level four, and so on.
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
A certain amount of skepticism of expertise and authority is healthy, but at what point do you think that skepticism becomes pathological?
<h4>Michael Lewis</h4>
That’s an unanswerable question, but I’ll give it a whirl.
It becomes pathological when your unwillingness to take in what the putative authority or expert is saying kills you. It’s pathological when you turn up in the emergency room as a 45-year-old healthy police officer with Covid, as someone in one of our stories does, and he’s circling the drain and refuses to be intubated because, in his view, hospitals are trying to kill people in the ICU — that’s pathological.
It’s pathological when you are running a big Wall Street firm and you’re unable to distinguish between the trader, who’s making a lot of money in your firm, making really dumb bets on the subprime mortgage market, and the person who has actually got a bead on how the subprime mortgage market is working and can explain it to you, but you don’t want to hear it — and so your firm blows up.
You can get away with ignoring a lot of expertise in your life as you move through the world. And I agree that you never want to lose your ability to question the things you’re being told, but it’s also not true that everybody has a right to an opinion about everything. I don’t have a right to an opinion about climate change. Neither does Donald Trump. There are people who study this stuff, their whole lives are devoted to trying to understand it. They are state of the art. It is a scientific consensus. My opinion shouldn’t exist, but people think they have a right to an opinion about it.
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
Do you think, on some level, that the world has become so big and so complex that it’s too much for people to make sense of, and the temptation to retreat into conspiracy theory or tribalism is just too irresistible?
<h4>Michael Lewis</h4>
To default into a narrative that’s fueled by anecdote that happens to come from the small circle of people in your world — I’ve seen this. I’ve been amazed with people I admire and who I think are intelligent who will sit down with me and tell me they’re not getting vaccinated because the vaccine is making people sick.
And they’re not wrong in one way. They know somebody who got sick, but that’s the thing that they pay attention to as opposed to the 1 billion studies that show that you were just so much better off being vaccinated. It’s like you walked into the casino for the first time in your life, looked at all the games, and you saw someone pull a slot machine and they hit the jackpot, and you decide, “Oh, well, the slot machines are the smart game to play here.”
It’s people organizing a complicated world with stories that are basically not true stories. They’re not representative stories. They just happen to be the stories they hear. And if you made me God and said, “Michael, how do you fix this problem?” — if I could do anything, I’d probably start with making everyone take a basic course in statistics. Everybody would have to learn a little bit about data and probabilities, just so they understand the notion of a small sample size, especially a sample size of one.
<h4>Sean Illing</h4>
Do you have any sense at all of what it would take to rebuild trust in our society?
<h4>Michael Lewis</h4>
I tend to think of this stuff on such a personal, micro level and not as a broader social thing. Again, if you’re handing me God-like powers, one of the things I’d do is, maybe not create some kind of mandatory national service, but at least strongly incentivize people, when they’re 18 or 19, to spend a year or a year and a half working in some government service where they’re all mixed up with other kinds of people.
Part of the problem is we’re not mixed up enough. It’s much easier to think of “us” and “them” if you’re in Berkeley, California, and you’ve never met anybody from Alabama, or if you’re in Alabama and you’ve never met anybody from Berkeley, California. Or if you are poor and you’ve never met a rich person, or if you’re rich and you’ve never had to do anything with a poor person.
It’s amazing how helpful it is when people have personal experience doing something together, trying to achieve something together with people entirely different from themselves. Then we have a living sense that we’re not all that different. There’s no us and them. We don’t belong in these tribes. It’s not the natural order of things. So mixing up the society more in various ways is one answer I would give.
My own personal answer is what I do with my time. I’ve been trying to write about this in ways that invite people who might be deeply skeptical that anything in the government is good for them to see this in a different light. Like, this thing exists to keep you safe. Think about it that way. This is the thing that storytellers can do to help.
To hear the rest of the conversation, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/episode/3jfqgRGAo63MYLYK1fHmdl?si=qzmPrHsRSouXKy2ciTJz9Q">click here</a>, and be sure to subscribe to Vox Conversations on <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vox-conversations/id1215557536">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/search/vox%20conversations">Google Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6NOJ6IkTb2GWMj1RpmtnxP">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/vox-conversations">Stitcher</a>, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/23030205/vox-conversations-michael-lewis-against-the-rules-experts">https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/23030205/vox-conversations-michael-lewis-against-the-rules-experts</a>

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