OLIVER TRALDI: With All Due Respect to the Experts. “Experts are also susceptible to processes that arbitrarily reinforce an unexamined consensus, both ex ante and ex post. The linguist and left-wing political commentator Noam Chomsky has noted that the technocrats who express their expertise through public policy form a kind of ‘secular priesthood.’ If admission to the priesthood requires demonstrated commitment to certain beliefs, then the deck is already stacked. The consensus view is a prerequisite for qualifying as an expert, not a considered consequence of one’s genuine expertise. Chomsky has always made this case about American foreign policy. But academia and journalism now conduct such sifting quite explicitly, with mandatory diversity statements that function as political pledges and high-profile firings of those who manage to slip through the cracks.”