People's Pundit Quotes

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.

Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for. Do students ever hear this? What they hear is a constant drumbeat, in the public discourse, that seeks to march them in the opposite direction. When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them.

Pundits, opponents, and disillusioned supporters would blame Obama for squandering the promise of his administration. Certainly he and his administration made their share of mistakes. But it is hard to think of another president who had to face the kind of guerrilla warfare waged against him almost as soon as he took office. A small number of people with massive resources orchestrated, manipulated, and exploited the economic unrest for their own purposes. They used tax-deductible donations to fund a movement to slash taxes on the rich and cut regulations on their own businesses. While they paid focus groups and seasoned operatives to frame these self-serving policies as matters of dire public interest, they hid their roles behind laws meant to protect the anonymity of philanthropists, leaving more folksy figures like Santelli to carry the message.

There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly—'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony.

Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realise just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged. Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.

In the United States, fascism is on the rise. Libraries are under attack. Some pundits ask why universities bother with departments that don’t just teach students to write computer code. Violent bigotry is fashionable again, and for many people, the appeal of politics is the opportunity to impose cruelty on others. The admonition to remember has never seemed so important.

When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, more than 70 percent of the American people backed the invasion of Iraq, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support.

People like my parents, both veterans of World War II, came to be called the “Greatest Generation,” because they rose to the challenge and defended the world against tyranny. Often enough, certain pundits imply that no generation since—today’s generation, especially—can live up to the standard of the greatest generation. I could not disagree more. We face a challenge right now, you and I, that is even greater in aspect and scope than a global war. It is a battle for our house and home, and for our future on this planet. It is a moment for all of us to step up: through our personal effort, through the innovations we create, through the policies we support, through the people we vote for. You and I can be a part of the Next Great Generation. We can save Earth—for us. Let’s get to work.

Our feelings provide meaning not only for our private lives, but also for social and political processes. When we want to know who should rule the country, what foreign policy to adopt and what economic steps to take, we don’t look for the answers in scriptures. Nor do we obey the commands of the Pope or the Council of Nobel Laureates. Rather, in most countries, we hold democratic elections and ask people what they think about the matter at hand. We believe that the voter knows best, and that the free choices of individual humans are the ultimate political authority. Yet how does the voter know what to choose? Theoretically at least, the voter is supposed to consult his or her innermost feelings, and follow their lead. It is not always easy. In order to get in touch with my feelings, I need to filter out the empty propaganda slogans, the endless lies of ruthless politicians, the distracting noise created by cunning spin doctors, and the learned opinions of hired pundits. I need to ignore all this racket, and attend only to my authentic inner voice. And then my authentic inner voice whispers in my ear ‘Vote Cameron’ or ‘Vote Modi’ or ‘Vote Clinton’ or whomever, and I put a cross against that name on the ballot paper – and that’s how we know who should rule the country.

And whether or not the educators who are trying to raise up America's students can actually set and meet higher academic standards, our cultural values make their job next to impossible. It's so much easier for pundits and politicians to point out figures and blame the people who are in the trenches every day than it is to get in there with them, or even to find out what actually goes on in those trenches. It's so much easier for parents to blame teachers when their kids get in trouble than to do the heavy lifting required at home to keep kids on track. And it's so much easier for us as a nation to cross our fingers and hope that we'll "get lucky" with the innovative "solutions" being tested on America's schools today than it is for us to roll up our sleeves and invest our own time, talent, and money in the schools that are even now-- with or without us-- shaping our nation's future.

If word-of-mouth pundits agree on anything, it’s that being interesting is essential if you want people to talk. Most buzz marketing books will tell you that. So will social media gurus. “Nobody talks about boring companies, boring products, or boring ads,” argues one prominent word-of-mouth advocate. Unfortunately, he’s wrong.

As much as the constitutionality of the state emphasizes the spreading of social and economic equality and scientific temper, it does not, however, explicitly talk about the unequal stakes inherited by the traditional power brokers. The reconciliation of the horrid past that manifests into the present remains unacknowledged. As a result, the question of reparation and inherited privilege does not feature in the discussions of dominant-caste people. This lack of historical accountability creates a group of self-declared nationalists, religionists, supremacists and merit holders that parade around as pundits proffering distorted versions of Indian society.

Pundits and politicians like to say that “No one saw it coming,” but what they mean is that they consider the people who saw it coming to be no one.

the illusion of valid prediction remains intact, a fact that is exploited by people whose business is prediction—not only financial experts but pundits in business and politics, too.

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no “normal,” because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can’t compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they’re probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.

A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits—that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information—make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident—the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.

Arthur felt extraordinarily lonely stuck up in the air above it all without so much as a body to his name, but before he had time to reflect on this a voice rang out across the square and called for everyone’s attention. A man standing on a brightly dressed dais before the building which clearly dominated the square was addressing the crowd over a tannoy “O people who wait in the shadow of Deep Thought!” he cried out. “Honored Descendants of Vroomfondel and Majikthise, the Greatest and Most Truly Interesting Pundits the Universe has ever known, the Time of Waiting is over!

a new console generation was on the way, but analysts and pundits were predicting that console gaming was doomed thanks to the rise of iPhones and iPads. Publishers didn’t want to invest tens of millions of dollars into big games without knowing that people would actually buy the next-generation Xbox One and PS4.*

When pundits and strategists claim "attack ads work," they mean it in the most cynical of terms. As Ipsos Reid researcher Andrew Grenville told the Vancouver Sun: "Attacks ads can often work in the short term. They can give you a short boost. But they reduce the number of people who want to vote. They reduce participation in the democratic process. They poison the system.

Zuckerberg says that Facebook is committed “to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience” with others.8 Yet what people might really need are the tools to connect to their own experiences. In the name of “sharing experiences,” people are encouraged to understand what happens to them in terms of how others see it. If something exciting happens, the gut instinct of Facebook users is to pull out their smartphones, take a picture, post it online, and wait for the “likes.” In the process they barely notice what they themselves feel. Indeed, what they feel is increasingly determined by the online reactions. People estranged from their bodies, senses, and physical environment are likely to feel alienated and disoriented. Pundits often blame such feelings of alienation on the decline of religious and national bonds, but losing touch with your body is probably more important. Humans lived for millions of years without religions and without nations; they can probably live happily without them in the twenty-first century too. Yet they cannot live happily if they are disconnected from their bodies. If you don’t feel at home in your body, you will never feel at home in the world.

At every step of the way, to give her the contrast she needed, Thatcher marked out an opponent: the socialists, the wets, the Argentineans. These enemies helped to define her image as determined, powerful, self-sacrificing. Thatcher was not seduced by popularity, which is ephemeral and superficial. Pundits might obsess over popularity numbers, but in the mind of the voter—which, for a politician, is the field of battle—a dominating presence has more pull than does likability. Let some of the public hate you; you cannot please everyone. Your enemies, those you stand sharply against, will help you to forge a support base that will not desert you. Do not crowd into the center, where everyone else is; there is no room to fight in a crowd. Polarize people, drive some of them away, and create a space for battle. Everything in life conspires to push you into the center, and not just politically. The center is the realm of compromise. Getting along with other people is an important skill to have, but it comes with a danger: by always seeking the path of least resistance, the path of conciliation, you forget who you are, and you sink into the center with everyone else. Instead see yourself as a fighter, an outsider surrounded by enemies. Constant battle will keep you strong and alert. It will help to define what you believe in, both for yourself and for others. Do not worry about antagonizing people; without antagonism there is no battle, and without battle, there is no chance of victory. Do not be lured by the need to be liked: better to be respected, even feared. Victory over your enemies will bring you a more lasting popularity.

After each mass shooting, students, parents and neighbors call for common sense gun laws while pundits and legislators distract us with talk of mental illness and catchy phrases about people killing people, not guns. Relatively lost in the din of the well-practiced post-shooting punditry is a path forward: if we want to stop mass shootings - whether in schools or yoga studios - we have a stake in working together to stop violence against women.

So is language change progress or degeneration? It is neither, of course. To assert that language change is for the better or worse requires some measure of what "good" or "bad" language is, and the issue of language change needn't come into question here. But no coherent criterion has ever been given: upon examination, the pronouncements of the self-appointed pundits are always a mix of cultural biases, half-understandings of languages, and an obvious compulsion for telling people what to do.

This is not more cultural happenstance. It is a blitzkrieg from the darkness—a frontal attack of calculated and evil dimensions plotted by the adversary of God, man and all that is good, and being advanced by cunning, demonic hordes who can only be blocked in one way: prayer. Call the people to pray. Teach them to counterattack. Unveil My Word to them so that, by calling on Me through the grace I readily give when they invoke the name of My Son, they may unleash My power. As they accept this partnership I call them to, praying that My Kingdom may enter the world of those they love “on earth,” I will answer them by My Spirit’s power—working My will “as it is in heaven.” Well, that is really what happened. I don’t mean, of course, that God stepped into my office in the sense of physical appearance. Rather He made His presence and will known by the means He has revealed in His eternal Word of truth—the Holy Bible. In that book, which is the ultimate authority on all life’s issues, both eternal and temporal, He says that He will speak at times to people by “prophecy.” In this use, prophecy is not a reference to anything arbitrary or arcane—God is never random; nor is He weird. (Toss out the pundits who publish cleverly

when evangelicals define themselves in terms of Christ’s atonement or as disciples of a risen Christ, what sort of Jesus are they imagining? Is their savior a conquering warrior, a man’s man who takes no prisoners and wages holy war? Or is he a sacrificial lamb who offers himself up for the restoration of all things? How one answers these questions will determine what it looks like to follow Jesus. In truth, what it means to be an evangelical has always depended on the world beyond the faith. In recent years, evangelical leaders themselves have come to recognize (and frequently lament) that a “pop culture” definition has usurped “a proper historical and theological” one, such that today many people count themselves “evangelical” because they watch Fox News, consider themselves religious, and vote Republican. Frustrated with this confusion of “real” and “supposed” evangelicals, evangelical elites have taken pollsters and pundits to task for carelessly conflating the two. But the problem goes beyond sloppy categorization. Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.

So if pundits were throwing up their hands even during the Eisenhower era about schools on the decline and students who could barely read and write, the obvious question is this: When exactly was that golden period distinguished by high standards? The answer, of course, is that it never existed. “The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable,” says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing.

But they make an enormous difference to the respect the person commands in his or her social circle. To express the wrong opinion on a politicized issue can make one an oddball at best—someone who “doesn’t get it”—and a traitor at worst. The pressure to conform becomes all the greater as people live and work with others who are like them and as academic, business, or religious cliques brand themselves with left-wing or right-wing causes. For pundits and politicians with a reputation for championing their faction, coming out on the wrong side of an issue would be career suicide. Given these payoffs, endorsing a belief that hasn’t passed muster with science and fact-checking isn’t so irrational after all—at least, not by the criterion of the immediate effects on the believer. The

Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.

It was a familiar trick, I thought to myself, the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that had become a staple of conservative pundits everywhere, whatever the issue: taking language once used by the disadvantaged to highlight a societal ill and turning it on its ear. The problem is no longer discrimination against people of color, the argument goes; it’s “reverse racism,” with minorities “playing the race card” to get an unfair advantage. The problem isn’t sexual harassment in the workplace; it’s humorless “feminazis” beating men over the head with their political correctness. The problem is not bankers using the market as their personal casino, or corporations suppressing wages by busting unions and offshoring jobs. It’s the lazy and shiftless, along with their liberal Washington allies, intent on mooching off the economy’s real “makers and the doers.

Trump was hardly in office when Democrats and their media allies began tarring him and his top aides as “white nationalists.” There were no facts to support the charge, only innuendo, and tortured interpretations of the word “nationalism” and of presidential rhetoric. One of the worst examples was the Charlottesville, Virginia, historical monument controversy. In that city, leftist protesters demanded the removal of “Confederate” monuments and memorials. The term “Confederate” in their usage extended even to statues of Thomas Jefferson and explorers Lewis and Clark (for being “white colonists”). This sparked a protest by conservatives who objected to the statue removals—not because they were racists, but because they didn’t want to see the removal of these reminders of America’s history. A “Unite the Right” rally was planned for August 11–12, 2017, to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Unfortunately, the rally attracted extremist groups, including neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, and the KKK. During the rally, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of leftist protestors, killing a woman. In response, Trump made a series of statements condemning the Klan, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and racism in general. In one of those speeches, he added, “You also had some very fine people on both sides.”115 Even though he had just condemned racism in his previous breath, many Democrats and pundits condemned Trump for calling racists “fine people.” This was not only absurd but dishonest. The “fine people on both sides” to whom he referred were those who wanted to remove the statues because they were reminders of slavery and those who wanted to preserve the statues because they were reminders of history. Trump never praised racists as “fine people”—he condemned them in no uncertain terms. But to the

The US administration constantly sought to advance its misplaced messianic quest for a magical peace via “courageous” acts on the part of Israel’s leaders, even if these acts meant political suicide. Would American presidents consider taking “courageous actions,” such as, to use a historical example, far-reaching concessions to the Soviet Union if Congress could remove them from office the next day? Of course not. Yet this didn’t prevent American presidents and their envoys from attempting to tutor Israeli prime ministers, especially me, about the need for “courage” and “leadership.” I was being lectured about courage from people who had neither risked their own lives in war nor their political lives. When such “leadership” wasn’t forthcoming from me, this was proof of a clear failure of character by a politician guided solely by cynical and personal interests. The conflict between national necessity and political survival is as old as democracy itself, but it didn’t apply here. What stood in the way of the concessions I was pressed to make was simply my belief that they would greatly endanger Israel. So why make them? This too has eluded many American pundits. They might have noted that when I did believe certain measures were vital for Israel’s future, I didn’t hesitate to take them.

Another painful irony is that, in exile, many refugees strive to stay alive, while watching an absurd show of fraud politicians, experts, pundits, academics, and journalists on the empire’s payroll fighting about them merely to serve their own careers and fortunes. Some promise to imprison refugees, some promise to build walls to stop their influx, some promise to deny them any human rights, others promise to publicly shame and attack them. Many ask refugees to ‘fuck off and go back to their countries,’ forgetting that their empire left nothing to go back to. Yet, conveniently, nobody promises to stop waging wars against refugees. Nobody promises to stop destroying and economically exploiting the places from which refugees escaped. They discuss everything except the actual solution to the refugee crisis, which is simple: stop waging wars of any sort against other people! Everyone loves hearing themselves talking about the refugee crisis, but almost never talking with refugees in meaningful and honest ways. If they talk with them, it is only to depict them as victims or villains in the unjust courts of the empire’s arrogance. They defend them or hate them, depending on the direction in which they wish to advance their fortunes and careers. It all depends on what they need to put on their CVs at any given time or in any given situation. The last piece of this absurd game is that the careers of every self-appointed mouthpiece for refugees are almost always dependent on paychecks paid by those who directly or indirectly run the military-industrial-complex, the biggest producer of refugees. This last piece is precisely what makes breaking the vicious cycle almost impossible. And such continues the game, all while refugees are sitting and watching in bitter silence.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly on the means of production.” Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communications like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual’s brain. Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech — hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical — the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed lèse majesté after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe — except for the dissident minority — cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

The women belonged, as did I, to a particular tribe tribe of America, one holding that we, as black people, were born to a country that hated us and that at all turns plotted our fall. A nation built on immigrants and a professed eclecticism made its views of us manifest through blackface, Little Sambo, and Tarzan of the Apes. Its historians held that Africa was a cannibal continent. Its pundits argued that we should be happy for our enslavement. Its uniformed thugs beat us in Selma and shot us down in northern streets. So potent was this hate that even we, the despised, were enlisted into its cause. So we bleached our skin, jobbed our noses, and relaxed our hair.

The question that has puzzled Kremlin rulers since 1953 is how to perpetuate the house Stalin built without acquiring Stalin’s evil reputation. Unwilling to forfeit their control over Russian society, and unable to fully appreciate the devilish efficacy of arresting and executing millions arbitrarily, the Soviet ruling class charted a middle path that would pacify the West without losing the essential components of empire. This middle path, which brings us to Vladimir Putin, combines low profile red-brown totalitarianism with lip service to democracy and free markets. It is a case of power retained. Instead of genuine democracy, Russia is guided by secret totalitarian structures that govern through fictitious political fronts. In essence, there has been no capitalism in Russia since 1991. There has been no democracy. It was all an elaborate KGB hoax. The mask that hides the totalitarian face of Russia isn’t perfect. It has fooled the experts and pundits only because they wanted to be fooled. The inhumanity of Stalin’s regime was so great, its injustice so mind numbing, that good people don’t want to believe that Stalin’s system was and is a work in progress. We don’t want to admit that Stalin’s murder machine is undergoing renovation, that we ourselves may be included among its next victims. Such an admission would turn our world upside down, and such a turning is not at all desirable – especially when we consider that Stalin saw Hitler as “the icebreaker” of the Revolution. This leads us to the unpleasant possibility that Putin may see Osama bin Laden as an “icebreaker” as well.

many technology companies and pundits (usually with an ulterior motive) suggest that “people” are no longer how the game of sales is won or lost, that technology is what matters most, Jeb Blount comes forward with Sales EQ. This extraordinary message about sales-specific emotional intelligence and human relationships will radically improve your sales results and change the way you look at sales. In Sales EQ, you will gain a deeper understanding

Was i Doomed from the Start? Some pundits have also said my campaign was doomed from the start, either because of my weaknesses as a candidate or because America was caught up in a historic wave of angry, tribal populism sweeping the world. Maybe. But don't forget I wan the popular vote by nearly three million, roughly the same margin by which George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004. It's hard to see how that happens if I'm hopeless out of step with the American people. Still as I've discussed throughout this book, I do think it's fair to say there was a fundamental mismatch between how i approach politics and what a lot of the country wanted to hear in 2016. I've learned that even the best plans and proposals can land on deaf ears when people are disillusioned by a broken political system and disgusted with politicians. When people are angry and looking for someone to blame, they don't want to hear your ten-point plan to create jobs and raise wages. They want you to be angry, too.

fellow commentators on NBC. A front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune the next day read simply, “The Phenom.” Barack’s cell phone began to ring nonstop. Cable pundits were dubbing him a “rock star” and an “overnight success,” as if he hadn’t spent years working up to that moment onstage, as if the speech had created him instead of the other way around. Still, the speech was the beginning of something new, not just for him, but for us, our whole family. We were swept into another level of exposure and into the swift current of other people’s expectations. It was surreal, the whole thing. All I could do, really, was joke about it. “Must’ve been a good speech,” I’d say with a shrug as people

The social media revolution wrenched the keys ot the cultural kingdom away from pundits and gatekeepers, giving ordinary people a voice.

In recent years, evangelical leaders themselves have come to recognize (and frequently lament) that a “pop culture” definition has usurped “a proper historical and theological” one, such that today many people count themselves “evangelical” because they watch Fox News, consider themselves religious, and vote Republican. Frustrated with this confusion of “real” and “supposed” evangelicals, evangelical elites have taken pollsters and pundits to task for carelessly conflating the two. But the problem goes beyond sloppy categorization. Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.

When politicians and pundits fume about long-term welfare addiction among the poor, or the social safety net functioning like “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency,” to quote former Republican congressman Paul Ryan, they are either deeply misinformed, or they are lying.[20] The American poor are terrible at being welfare dependent. I wish they were better at it, just as I wish that we as a nation devoted the same amount of thoughtfulness, creativity, and tenacity to connecting poor families with programs that would alleviate their hunger and ease their hardships as multinational corporations devote to convincing us to buy their potato chips and car tires.

I thought the Vedas were a load of humbug and it didn’t matter which way you recited them. Some jobless Brahmin like my father, created them thousands of years ago. Instead of making themselves useful, the Brahmins prayed to the Gods they themselves invented for the rain, the sun, horses, cows and money and many other things. It must have been very cold, from whichever cursed places they came. Otherwise, why would they croak like frogs and appeal to the Gods after putting hundreds of assorted twigs into the fire? Perhaps I was prejudiced. I shouldn’t think that the work they were doing, as Yajnas, was useless. In fact, it served as a perfect tool to mint money and gain material favours. They were no fools-these Brahmins. They knew how to project even the mundane tasks of burning twigs as earth-shaking, scientific discoveries and claimed to tame the forces that controlled the world. And it was funny that the majority of people like the carpenters, masons and farmers who were doing something meaningful, had become supplicant to these jokers croaking under the warm sun, sweat pouring from their faces in front of a raging fire and chanting God knows what. They had a Yajna or a Puja for everything under the sun. If you had leprosy or a common cold, there was a God to whom you had to offer a special puja to appease him. You wanted your pestering wife to elope with your bothersome neighbour, there was a puja for that too. You wanted your cow to have a calf or your wife to have son, the Brahmin would help you. He would just conduct a Puja and a divine calf or son would be born. You curried favour with the Brahmins and your son would become the biggest pundit in the world by the age of sixteen. If not, he would perhaps become rowdy like me, who did not respect Brahmins or rituals. He would become a Rakshasa. I think there are many more Rakshasas among us now. Perhaps, it was because the ‘why?’ virus spread. Couldn’t the Brahmins conduct a puja so that our heads were cleared of sinful thoughts? This is something I have to ponder over when I have time.

I deeply admire the president’s determination to defy the small, poll-driven politics of our day to tackle big things. However, the gap between the singular focus of the campaign and his varied and ambitious agenda afterward undoubtedly sapped some of his political strength, leaving Americans wondering if he was truly focused on their concerns. You can’t take politics entirely out of the process. I don’t speak with the president as much anymore. With the campaigns over, our once-frequent conversations have slowed to a trickle. I miss them. And when I hear the thundering hooves of the Washington pundits and pols on a stampede to run him down, I feel for him. Hell, I bleed for him. The brutal midterm election of 2014 was another painful rebuke. Yet I know this: There are people who are alive today because of the health coverage he made possible. There are soldiers home with their families instead of halfway across the world. There are hundreds of thousands of autoworkers on the assembly line who would have been idled but for him, and the overall economy is in better shape than it has been in years. There are folks who are getting improved deals from their banks and mortgage lenders thanks to new rules in place and a new cop on the beat. There are gay and lesbian Americans who are, for the first time, free to defend their country without having to lie about who they are. There are women who have greater legal recourse when they’re paid less than the man doing the exact same job alongside them. There are families who can afford to send their kids to college because there is more aid available. Oh, and yes . . . just as he predicted in my conference room back in those wonderful, heady days when we first considered an audacious run for the presidency, millions of kids in our country today can dream bigger dreams because Barack Obama has blazed the trail for them.

consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It’s the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they’re going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it’s a lie. They’re shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves. He returns with fuel. Outside the town office he douses himself, lights a match, and burns. Only the conclusion of this story is unusual. There are countless poor street vendors in Tunisia and across the Arab world. Police corruption is rife, and humiliations like those inflicted on this man are a daily occurrence. They matter to no one aside from the police and their victims. But this particular humiliation, on December 17, 2010, caused Mohamed Bouazizi, aged twenty-six, to set himself on fire, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked protests. The police responded with typical brutality. The protests spread. Hoping to assuage the public, the dictator of Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital. Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. The unrest grew. On January 14, Ben Ali fled to a cushy exile in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three-year kleptocracy. The Arab world watched, stunned. Then protests erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. After three decades in power, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Elsewhere, protests swelled into rebellions, rebellions into civil wars. This was the Arab Spring—and it started with one poor man, no different from countless others, being harassed by police, as so many have been, before and since, with no apparent ripple effects. It is one thing to look backward and sketch a narrative arc, as I did here, connecting Mohamed Bouazizi to all the events that flowed out of his lonely protest. Tom Friedman, like many elite pundits, is skilled at that sort of reconstruction, particularly in the Middle East, which he knows so well, having made his name in journalism as a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon. But could even Tom Friedman, if he had been present that fatal morning, have peered into the future and foreseen the self-immolation, the unrest, the toppling of the Tunisian dictator, and all that followed? Of course not. No one could. Maybe, given how much Friedman knew about the region, he would have mused that poverty and unemployment were high, the number of desperate young people was growing, corruption was rampant, repression was relentless, and therefore Tunisia and other Arab countries were powder kegs waiting to blow. But an observer could have drawn exactly the same conclusion the year before. And the year before that. Indeed, you could have said that about Tunisia, Egypt, and several other countries for decades. They may have been powder kegs but they never blew—until December 17, 2010, when the police pushed that one poor man too far.

Larry Kudlow hosted a business talk show on CNBC and is a widely published pundit, but he got his start as an economist in the Reagan administration and later worked with Art Laffer, the economist whose theories were the cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Kudlow’s one Big Idea is supply-side economics. When President George W. Bush followed the supply-side prescription by enacting substantial tax cuts, Kudlow was certain an economic boom of equal magnitude would follow. He dubbed it “the Bush boom.” Reality fell short: growth and job creation were positive but somewhat disappointing relative to the long-term average and particularly in comparison to that of the Clinton era, which began with a substantial tax hike. But Kudlow stuck to his guns and insisted, year after year, that the “Bush boom” was happening as forecast, even if commentators hadn’t noticed. He called it “the biggest story never told.” In December 2007, months after the first rumblings of the financial crisis had been felt, the economy looked shaky, and many observers worried a recession was coming, or had even arrived, Kudlow was optimistic. “There is no recession,” he wrote. “In fact, we are about to enter the seventh consecutive year of the Bush boom.”19 The National Bureau of Economic Research later designated December 2007 as the official start of the Great Recession of 2007–9. As the months passed, the economy weakened and worries grew, but Kudlow did not budge. There is no recession and there will be no recession, he insisted. When the White House said the same in April 2008, Kudlow wrote, “President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country.”20 Through the spring and into summer, the economy worsened but Kudlow denied it. “We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession,”21 he wrote, a theme he kept repeating until September 15, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Wall Street was thrown into chaos, the global financial system froze, and people the world over felt like passengers in a plunging jet, eyes wide, fingers digging into armrests. How could Kudlow be so consistently wrong? Like all of us, hedgehog forecasters first see things from the tip-of-your-nose perspective. That’s natural enough. But the hedgehog also “knows one big thing,” the Big Idea he uses over and over when trying to figure out what will happen next. Think of that Big Idea like a pair of glasses that the hedgehog never takes off. The hedgehog sees everything through those glasses. And they aren’t ordinary glasses. They’re green-tinted glasses—like the glasses that visitors to the Emerald City were required to wear in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Now, wearing green-tinted glasses may sometimes be helpful, in that they accentuate something real that might otherwise be overlooked. Maybe there is just a trace of green in a tablecloth that a naked eye might miss, or a subtle shade of green in running water. But far more often, green-tinted glasses distort reality. Everywhere you look, you see green, whether it’s there or not. And very often, it’s not. The Emerald City wasn’t even emerald in the fable. People only thought it was because they were forced to wear green-tinted glasses! So the hedgehog’s one Big Idea doesn’t improve his foresight. It distorts it. And more information doesn’t help because it’s all seen through the same tinted glasses. It may increase the hedgehog’s confidence, but not his accuracy. That’s a bad combination.

The progressive abandonment of concern for reason or evidence has required the administration to develop a highly effective propaganda machine with which it attempts to embed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of one central doctrine upon which all the special interests agree: Government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible—except the parts of it that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle. This coalition gains access to the public through a cabal of pundits, commentators, and “reporters”—call it the Limbaugh-Hannity-Drudge axis. This fifth column in the fourth estate is made up of propagandists pretending to be journalists. Through multiple overlapping outlets covering radio, television, and the Internet, they relentlessly force-feed the American people right-wing talking points and ultraconservative dogma disguised as news and infotainment—24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

For example, when Democrats routinely blocked George W. Bush’s nominees, you did not hear members of the mainstream media complaining about Harry Reid contributing to “gridlock” or failing to “get things done.” But when a conservative tries to stop disastrous legislation put forward by the left—such as Democratic gun-grab legislation—pundits seem to rush to television cameras to complain that people like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are blocking progress. We aren’t getting things done!

Arguably, Semco’s most controversial initiative is to let its employees set their own salaries. Pundits are quick to bring up their dim view of human nature, on the assumption that people will obviously set their salaries much higher than feasible. It’s the same argument we hear about people setting their own work schedules in a seven-day weekend mode. The first thing that leaps to mind is that people will come as late or little as possible—and this has never been our experience.

Great kingdoms grew into being in the old times, at least we suppose so, we having now nothing of them but their dark old tombs. Big men did big things, and might as well never have done them for all we know about them, seeing that they rot now in such unrescued, irrecoverable oblivion. Even the most learned of our pundits in the historical and antiquarian line have but the most shadowy impression of what brave deeds were done, of what wise thoughts were thought, of how men lived and loved, and believed and hoped that dim far dawning. As for the bulk of us ignoramuses or ignorami (as I suppose would be the correct plural), it is a great chance if we know the names of the four great empires that people talk so much about nowadays. But

The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the soothing adjective “middle.” Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt concern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of society. By including almost everyone, “middle class” serves as a conveniently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actuality of class power.

The kind of rhetorical slight of hand that had become a staple of the conservative pundits everywhere, whatever the issue. Taking language once used by the disadvantaged to highlight a societal ill and turning it on its ear. The problem's no longer the discrimination against people of color the argument goes it's "reverse racism" with minorities "playing the race card to get an unfair advantage". The problem isn't sexual harassment in the workplace, it's humorless "feminazis" beating men over the head with their political correctness. The problem's not bankers using the market as their personal casino or corporations suppressing wages by busting unions and offshoring jobs, it's the lazy and shiftless along with their liberal Washington allies intent on mooching off the economy's real "makers and doers". Such arguments had nothing to do with facts, they were impervious to analysis, they went deeper into the realm of myth redefining what was fair, reassigning victimhood, conferring on people like those traders in Chicago, that most precious of gifts, the conviction of innocence as well as the righteous indignation that comes with it.

One did not argue with people who denied reality. Which was why the pundit Stewart Alsop wrote that conservatism was “not really a coherent, rational alternative at all—it is hardly more than an angry cry of protest against things as they are”;

Here is G. Gordon Liddy, the celebrated Watergate felon, telling us how it all works in his best-selling 2002 backlash book, When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country. There exists in this country an elite that believes itself entitled to tell the rest of us what we may and may not do—for our own good, of course. These left-of-center, Ivy-educated molders of public opinion are concentrated in the mass news media, the entertainment business, academia, the pundit corps, and the legislative, judicial, and administrative government bureaucracies. Call it the divine right of policy wonks. These people feed on the great American middle class, who do the actual work of this country and make it all happen. They bleed us with an income tax rate not seen since we were fighting for our lives in the middle of World War II; they charge us top dollar at the box office for movies that assail and undermine the values we are attempting to inculcate in our children.4

While the Wichita Cons worked hard to build their movement, they would not have succeeded so extravagantly had it not been for the simultaneous suicide of the rival movement, the one that traditionally spoke for working-class people. I am referring, of course, to the Clinton administration’s famous policy of “triangulation,” its grand effort to minimize the differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic issues. Among the nation’s pundit corps “triangulation” has always been considered a stroke of genius, signaling the end of liberalism’s old-fashioned “class warfare” and also of the Democrats’ faith in “big government.” Clinton’s New Democrats, it was thought, had brought the dawn of an era in which all parties agreed on the sanctity of the free market. As political strategy, though, Clinton’s move to accommodate the right was the purest folly. It simply pulled the rug out from under any possible organizing effort on the left. While the Cons were busily polarizing the electorate, the Dems were meekly seeking the center.

Dozens of articles took aim at pundit Malcolm Gladwell after he dismissively wrote in the New Yorker: “Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented.

Outside the prison walls, the world continued its drunken surge, teetering, as ever, on the brink of ruination. Arabs revolted, and Americans. Drones like alien saucers flew overhead, manned with cameras. Americans still raged against Muslims, until they grew tired of raging against Muslims and switched to Mexicans or anyone resembling a Mexican, including Muslims. Hurricanes disappeared entire islands, palm trees bent in the raging winds. Villages vanished under mudslides. On land, grown women were dying their hair purple, and hipsters walked the streets of San Francisco, wearing sleeves of embedded ink up their arms. Iran enriched uranium and pundits worried, and China had more money than God, and the iPhone was making everything better and everything worse, and birds were angry and pigs thieving. Superheroes were back, all over the place, in every theater, because they were needed. The free people outside the prison walls needed supermen and wonder women to wrench them from the ditch they'd dug, arms flailing, bodies sinking into the squelching soil.

Express Empathy When Bill Clinton delivered his now-famous line “I feel your pain” in 1992, he did more than just clinch a victory over George H. W. Bush; he positioned himself as the guide in the American voters’ story. A guide expresses an understanding of the pain and frustration of their hero. In fact, many pundits believe Clinton locked up the election during a town hall debate in which Bush gave a rambling answer to a young woman when she asked what the national debt meant to the average American. Clinton countered Bush’s linear, cerebral answer by asking the woman if she knew anybody who’d lost their job. He asked whether it pained her that she had friends out of work, and when the woman said yes, he went on to explain how the national debt is tied to the well-being of every American, even her and her friends.5 That’s empathy. When we empathize with our customers’ dilemma, we create a bond of trust. People trust those who understand them, and they trust brands that understand them too. Oprah Winfrey, an undeniably successful guide to millions, once explained the three things every human being wants most are to be seen, heard, and understood. This is the essence of empathy. Empathetic statements start with words like, “We understand how it feels to . . .” or “Nobody should have to experience . . .” or “Like you, we are frustrated by . . .” or, in the case of one Toyota commercial inviting Toyota owners to engage their local Toyota service center, simply, “We care about your Toyota.” Expressing empathy isn’t difficult. Once we’ve identified our customers’ internal problems, we simply need to let them know we understand and would like to help them find a resolution. Scan your marketing material and make sure you’ve told your customers that you care. Customers won’t know you care until you tell them.

It turns out pundits don’t want to talk about what’s happened; they want to use what’s happened to talk about the same things they talk about every day. Eventually, I realized that almost all of these people were talking on the news for free. And they weren’t doing it because they wanted to change the world, or because they wanted to do something interesting. They were doing it because it got their face and their name into the world.

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter asserted it clearly, in capital letters, in the headline of one of her nationally syndicated columns: They Gave Your Mortgage to a Less Qualified Minority. Another conservative columnist, Jeff Jacoby, wrote, “What does it mean when Boston banks start making many more loans to minorities? Most likely, that they are knowingly approving risky loans in order to get the feds and the activists off their backs.” By 2008, Jacoby was declaring the financial crisis “a no-win situation entirely of the government’s making.” When asked during the market panic on September 17 about the root causes of the crisis, billionaire and then New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg told a Georgetown University audience that the end of redlining was to blame. “It probably all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone….Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor; they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages. Tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas,’ ” Bloomberg said.

Some critics acidly observed that people throughout the ages have always believed they were living in particularly crucial times. There is some truth to this criticism, because human history is indeed continuously decisive, for in humanity’s march through time every step determines the future of our species. But only the cynic would sneer at the idea that some steps, some historical periods, are more decisive than others—not only in the shaping of a particular race or nation, but for humanity as a whole. Possibly one such decisive historical threshold was what the German philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers styled the “axial age”—the period between 800–500 B.C.E. when “thought turned back upon thought”: the epoch of Confucius, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Zoroaster, Heraclitus, Plato, and Socrates.1 In the West, this development gradually led to what can only be described as the enthronement and autarchy of cold reason and the consequent suppression of nonrational modes of consciousness. As many contemporary thinkers have shown, this inflation of ratio lies at the root of today’s moral and spiritual bankruptcy, and its disastrous effects can be witnessed all around us (and in us, if we care to look). What is perhaps most disheartening is that this lopsided orientation to life is now being thrust upon the “underdeveloped” world, which merely magnifies the existing threat to our planet’s ecology and to the survival of countless life forms, not least our own human species. When we take stock of the folly of humankind we begin to realize the extent of the global problems induced, in the last analysis, by hypertrophied (egocentric) reason. We may also be impressed with the traditional Hindu explanation of the particular spirit of our era. For, according to the computations of the Hindu pundits, we are well into the “dawn phase” of the kali-yuga, or “dark age.” Like so many premodern mythologies, Hinduism views the evolution of humanity as a cyclical process of progressive moral degeneration from an original state of purity and spiritual wholeness. The

Despite what they had seen with their own eyes, for the GOP to condemn the people who had stormed the Capitol on January 6 as insurrectionists would be to condemn Trump, and the identity of their own base. They couldn’t risk distancing themselves from the red-pilled right, which had been schooled to line up behind Trump. Right-wing influencers and pundits had their work cut out for them in shaping a counternarrative, not only about the direction of the GOP but about objective political truth as well. Tucker Carlson rose to the challenge at the year anniversary mark with a three-part documentary series arguing that the insurrection had been a deep state trap to persecute conservatives. “The U.S. government has in fact launched a new war on terror,” he said. “But it’s not against Al Qaeda, it’s against American citizens.

As I sat there on the tarmac waiting for takeoff, I thought hard about the man standing between us and Uber’s future. Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York City in 2013 by portraying himself as a champion of the left, as the antagonist of income inequality, as the hero of people of color. He structured every fight, every policy, every issue as “de Blasio, champion of the oppressed versus big, bad corporation.” The politics worked well for him, since it forced virtually every union, newspaper, pundit, political influencer, and everyone else in the system to take his side or risk being thrown out of the progressive mafia. His play was clearly going to be “de Blasio defending poor taxi drivers against the big, bad, multibillion-dollar Uber.” And that play had a very good chance of success. We had to come up with a different story.

Particularly in the wake of the 2016 election, I have found myself subjecting other people to vulgar taxonomies, watching them shed any nuance of history and become corpses whenever glimpsed through the begrimed looking glass of political identity [...] No longer manifestations of sublime mystery, gifted with the fluke of consciousness, born of a thousand minute experiences, they had become, through the defects of my perception, dead mouthpieces for dead opinions, always victims of false consciousness, already agents of bad faith. All around me were dead Republicans and dead Democrats, dead snowflakes and dead working-class voters, dead virtue signalers and dead trolls, dead boomers and dead millennials, dead beta-males and dead deplorables. Very quickly the world became a zone of corpses, feeding off the carrion of pundits and demagogues, and I began to see everyone univocally, as though they were only what they betrayed. It was in such moments that I had forgotten my obligations as a writer, which is to eschew generalization for particularity—I had forgotten that in the jurisdiction of my perceptions I always have a choice." Swanson, Barrett. Lost In Summerland (pp. 280-281)

Always be careful, as they say, “Text without context is usually pretext.” In other words, people like to try to use the Bible to get you to agree with them instead of helping you understand what a given section of Scripture meant to its original audience at the time. I gotta think St. John would back me up on that.

As Coates notes in “The Case for Reparations”: The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer. And this destruction did not end with slavery.6

Why did it happen? Was he a Defender? Was it ultimately about the Carls? No. Those are all the wrong questions. It's so tempting, even now, to try to blame all of the politicians and pundits who were rising in power by feeding on people's fear and confusion. We can blame those people, but the only thing a mass murder "means" is that we've made it too easy to kill. None of us are going to talk about it anymore in this book, because if we did, that man will get to keep having his power on us, and I'm sick of it. Moving on.

Coates notes in “The Case for Reparations”: The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer. And this destruction did not end with slavery.6

One of the arguments often made in response to weak public understanding of technology is a call to increase technological education - in its simplest formulation, to learn to code. Such a call is made frequently by politicians, technologists, pundits and business leaders, and it is often advanced in nakedly functional and pro-market terms: the information economy needs more programmers, and young people need jobs in the future. This is a good start, but learning to code is not enough, just as learning to plumb a sink is not enough to understand the complex interactions between water tables, political geography, aging infrastructure, and social policy that define, shape and produce actual life support systems in society. A simply functional understanding of systems is insufficient; one needs to be able to think about histories and consequences too. Where did these systems come from, who designed them and what for, and which of these intentions still lurk within them today?

But only a soulless pundit funded by the automotive industry--and there are several--would claim that people are not more likely to be healthy in environments that invite walking.

Consider three goals that a political pundit might have. One goal might be to open the minds of people on the other side. Another goal might be to open the minds of people on the pundit’s own side. A third goal might be to close the minds of people on the pundit’s own side. Nearly all the punditry that appears in the various media today serves only the third goal.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly on the means of production.” Since man extends his nervous system through channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual’s brain. Thus, in pre-literate societies taboos on the spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organization. With the invention of written speech—hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical —the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what they write. (Some of the first societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidently kept a knowledge of their hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writers feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as desacralized as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed lèse majesté after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had overstepped, and the whole tribe—except for the dissident minority—cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

I'm anxious to hear what he will say to the people back in Cambridge—the engineers who write the code, the bros in the boiler room who sell it, the grunts in the content factory who generate the leads, the customer service reps who deal with angry people all day. Most of these people will get next to nothing from this IPO, but their hard work had just made Dharmesh an immensely wealthy man. How will he thank them? He embodies our culture: He's the creator of HEART, the inventor of "delightion," the pundit who proclaims, "Success is making those who believed in you look brilliant." This man who has just reaped a $70 million windfall, whose stock will soon be worth more than $100 million when HubSpot shares keep climbing, looks into the camera and says something amazing: "Get back to work.

people need the craziness in the world to make some sort of sense to them. That idiot ‘pundit’ would rather believe you and Manny were thugs than believe a twenty-year veteran cop made a snap judgment based on skin color. He identifies with the cop. If the cop is capable of murder, it means he’s capable of the same. He can’t accept that.

By then there was a long and growing list of pundits who claimed they predicted the catastrophe, but a far shorter list of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet on their vision. It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without being insane.

What makes the partisanship so debilitating is that it's not confined to one party and, despite what so many pundits say, it's much more than a political tool to win elections. It has shaped our culture and our national dialogue. We've lost our ability to disagree without being disagreeable, and to argue substance without questioning the basic decency of the people on the other side of the line. The partisanship rips at the bonds of affection that tie the country state to state, political party to political party, citizen to citizen.

As Coates notes in “The Case for Reparations”: The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer. And this destruction did not end with slavery.

Pundits often suggest that people must come together and converge on a perspective to meet pressing challenges. But it is quite the opposite: our power lies in the difference of human frames and in our ability to see the world from a myriad of angles. Only if we tap the breadth of human frames can we devise the original solutions we will need to survive as a species.

Professionalism embodies the power to prescribe. Today it is the key to determining need, defining clients, delivering solutions, and deepening dependency—whether in healing identity, rebuilding inner cities, dispensing public opinion, or planting churches among baby boomers. The result, however, is not necessarily greater freedom and responsibility for ordinary people, because the dominance of the expert means the dependency of the client. All that has changed is the type of authority. Traditional authorities, such as the clergy, have been replaced by modern authorities—in this case, denominational leaders by church-growth experts. The outcome is what Christopher Lasch calls “paternalism without a father” and Ivan Illich “the age of disabling professions.”[1] The suggestion is that “The expert knows best,” so “we can do better.” But the “ministry of all believers” recedes once again. Even the dream of the “self-help” movement becomes a radical chic illusion that disguises the gold rush of experts in its wake. In most cases, all that has changed is the type of clergy. The old priesthood is dead! Long live the new power-pastors and pundit-priests!

Individuality doesn’t mean anything if we’re obliged to spend our lives heroically lunging at every injustice. People do horrible things to one another all day, all the time, the world over. Why isn’t it enough for me to do science? I’m trying to fix fucking climate change. Why do I have to be captive to every crisis? Why should I have to be in a constant state of broadcast, a pundit on every topic of public concern?