ROSS DOUTHAT'S COLUMN ABOUT DEBATING ROBERT KENNEDY JR. REFUTES ITSELF

Lunkhead podcaster Joe Rogan has offered $100,000 to try to shame Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College and a vaccine expert, into debating Robert Kennedy Jr., master of the Gish Gallop/firehouse school of misinformation. Elon Musk and other rich men have piled on, offering more and more money, and now Ross Douthat uses his New York Times column to try to give this bullying effort credibility.

Kennedy has a brain full of fake facts, and he'll throw out half a dozen or more in a typical two-minute statement, which means that the only way a debate on vaccines between him and an actual scientist could possibly be fair is if every assertion of (fake) fact he makes is catalogued, after which the scientist is given adequate time to refute all of them before Kennedy is allowed to speak again.

But even that wouldn't work, because the facts that rebut Kennedy's lies are usually contained in scientific papers that are turgidly written and hard for lay people to follow. Rogan wants this debate to take place on his podcast -- a medium that rewards exciting assertions that arouse suspicion, falsely other otherwise, rather than yawn-inducing truths. Also, challenging accepted wisdom is inherently exciting, which leads many naive people, especially young white men, to believe that challengers of accepted wisdom are always right and accepted wisdom is always wrong.

Douthat thinks Hotez should debate Kennedy because vaccine skepticism is widespread:

In the year 2023 ... the ideas that Kennedy champions are not obscure; they clearly have influence, for instance, over the millions of Americans who declined the Covid-19 vaccine. The man himself is a famous figure who already has access to many prominent platforms, Rogan’s included. And he’s a candidate for the presidency of the United States, probably ultimately a marginal one but with meaningful support in current polls.

Which means that if you don’t think he should be publicly debated, you need some other theory of how the curious can be persuaded away from his ideas.

But Hotez has another theory. He appears to be willing to go on Rogan's podcast alone. He's done the show before. But to Douthat, refusing to be in the same room with Kennedy is wrong:

Right now the main alternative theory seems to be to enforce an intellectual quarantine, policed by media fact-checking and authoritative expert statements. And I’m sorry, but that’s just a total flop. It depends on the very thing whose evaporation has made vaccine skepticism more popular — a basic trust in institutions, a deference to credentials, a willingness to accept judgments from on high.

But this is where Douthat's argument refutes itself. If Hotez appears on Rogan's show -- with or without Kennedy -- what will Rogan's audience hear from him? Authoritative expert statements. Fact-checking of Kennedy. If you're arguing that skeptics don't want to hear the word of experts, then what's the point of Hotez's appearance?

Douthat continues:

That evaporation hasn’t happened because of bad actors on the internet. It’s happened because institutions and experts have so often proved themselves to be untrustworthy and incompetent of late. So every time those now-untrusted institutions make heavy-handed appeals to authority (“Mr. Kennedy, WHOM EXPERTS CONSIDER A CONSPIRACY THEORIST, says ...”), they are entrenching suspicion and alienation, not defeating it.

So because the vaccines greatly reduced death and severe illness from COVID but didn't prevent breakthrough infections, the experts were "untrustworthy and incompetent"? And therefore we're supposed to believe guy who thinks, among other things, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS? (But of course Kennedy believes that.)

Whereas argument, while it risks much, gives you a chance to make the suspicious feel like their suspicions are being taken seriously, to regain the trustless person’s trust.

But people who are merely skepticism-curious will listen to expert opinion presented in a format other than a steel cage match, whereas the "red-pilled" won't allow the experts to regain their trust, because they have a blind faith in anti-experts that's an exact mirror image of what they see as our blind faith in experts. That's why they make heroes of demagogues who say the experts are always wrong -- RFK Jr., Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones. Their "skepticism" isn't a set of skeptical beliefs intermingled with mainstream beliefs -- it's skepticism as religion. To them, experts are always wrong and anti-experts are always right.

So Peter Hotez might win a few fence-sitters over with a solo appearance on the Rogan podcast. But the anti-expertise cultists want a fight with a winner and a loser -- and since neatly packaged, iconoclastic lies are the most useful in a fight like that (because they seem more exciting and dangerous), Kennedy would inevitably be declared the debate's winner. So of course Hotez shouldn't debate Kennedy.