THE SHEEPLE WHO CALL US SHEEPLE

We're living through one of the worst episodes of The Apprentice ever. We have this woman trying to nab a promotion:

The Justice Department has demanded that Wayne County, Michigan, turn over all ballots from the November 2024 election, another escalation in the Trump administration’s voting inquiries.

In a letter to the chief election official of Wayne County dated April 14, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon ... gave the county 14 days to produce the requested documents, which included ballots, ballot receipts and ballot envelopes.

Michigan's governor, secretary of state, and attorney general are resisting this effort. Much of MAGA wants Trump to choose Dillon as his new attorney general, and I'm sure Dillon knows that continually trying to prove that elections are rigged by Democrats, particularly in big cities, will make Trump more inclined to pick her.

Another competitor on this episode is doing something similar because he's trying to avoid being fired.

FBI Director Kash Patel has insisted he has the “evidence” to finally prove President Donald Trump’s long-standing claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him and hinted he could make it available this week.

Patel – who was hit by allegations of alcoholism this weekend, sparking rumors he could soon be fired – told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures: “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim....

“Stay tuned this week,” he urged Fox viewers. “You might see a thing or two.”

As I'm reading this, I'm also reading about the latest "wellness" trend: nicotine.

A new wave of health influencers ... many of whom are aligned with the Make America Healthy Again movement, are championing nicotine as a health product. They promote nicotine patches, gums and lozenges as well as pouches, which are often filled with nicotine salt powder and give people a convenient way to consume the compound.

To these boosters, nicotine is another “natural” product that the medical establishment has unfairly demonized, like beef tallow, peptides or raw milk....

Tucker Carlson, the conservative TV host and vocal MAHA ally who sells his own brand of nicotine pouches, has called the nicotine pouch brand ZYN a “lifesaving” product that can increase productivity and “male vitality.” Mr. Carlson went so far as to say that the pouches are “like the hand of God reaching down and massaging your central nervous system.”

... Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ... has been photographed carrying a tin of ZYN....

Last month, The Atlantic's Adam Serwer wrote about Americans who seem to combine cynicism and gullibility:

Many Americans believe that vaccines are unsafe, but will jab themselves full of performance enhancers. They think seed oils cause chronic disease, but beef tallow is healthy. They’ll say you can’t trust federally insured banks, but you can trust the millionaires who want you to invest in their volatile vaporware crypto tokens. They think food additives are toxic but support an administration removing all restrictions on pumping pollutants into the air and water. They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.

... Americans are ... facing a bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism—gullicism, if you need a portmanteau—that is drawing people into a world of conspiracism and falsehoods, one where facts are drowned out by a cacophony of extremely loud and wrong voices.

Serwer quotes Hannah Arendt:

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.” She argued that “the whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naïve fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism.”

But what we have in America today isn't merely a curious "mixture of gullibility and cynicism." The cynicism is the gullibility. The people who think we're "sheeple" for believing what experts tell us -- that vaccines are safe, that nicotine and raw milk are dangerous, that American elections aren't rigged -- have the same naive faith in anti-experts that they claim we have in experts.

If they were the skeptics they claim to be, they'd be as wary of anti-experts' claims as they are of experts' claims. But they aren't. They'll believe anything an anti-liberal, anti-expertise influencer tells them.

And while mainstream experts might look at new data and tell us that a drug they thought was safe has dangerous side effects or is ineffective, that rarely happens on the anti-expertise side, because none of the claims are backed by evidence. In fact, evidence that debunks their claims is often cited as a reason to believe them even more -- Look how far the so-called experts will go to cover up their lies! they say. (See, for instance, every failure to find election irregularities after the 2020 election.)

I see genuine cynicism among mainstream people -- we criticize politicians we vote for and news outlets we rely on. We think doctors are basically knowlegeable but sometimes downplay our symptoms or don't listen. We trust vaccines and other medical treatments from Big Pharma, but are wary of Big Pharma's greed.

I don't see a similar cynicism among the believers in anti-expertise. They implicitly trust Donald Trump, Fox News, right-wing podcasts, and wellness snake-oil peddlers. They trust these anti-experts even when the quack treatments don't work, the tariffs don't turbocharge the economy, the war doesn't achieve any of its goals.

The most gullible sheeple in America are the ones who apply the term "sheeple" to the rest of us.