FIRE president Greg Lukianoff and writer Angel Eduardo offer a thoughtful essay on the current establishment fret about “misinformation.”

Refreshingly, they come right to the point: Many of us mistrust what we hear from authorities because “our expert classes — those of us who should be trusted authorities on these matters — have torpedoed so much of their credibility with the public.”

One example Lukianoff and Eduardo cite is the establishment’s sneery dismissal of the now-widely-accepted lab leak theory of Covid’s origin as a racist conspiracy theory. In fact, it was always a reasonable inference from the available information:

In this context, platitudes like “trust the science,” or signs saying, “In this house we believe…,” which were repeated like mantras and plastered everywhere, show themselves to be mere tribal signifiers — symbols of a group’s certainty and moral superiority. More than that, they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what science actually is: the systematic application of doubt.

It’s difficult to overstate just how much damage our academic, scientific, and intellectual elites have done to our universe of shared facts, our institutions, and the public’s ability and willingness to believe them. There is a growing sense among people that trust and confidence in our experts and institutions is unwarranted — and particularly in the last ten years, there has been no shortage of behavior to justify this suspicion.

“The misinformation crisis isn’t about truth, it’s about trust,” The Eternally Radical Idea, (March 20, 2025)

They note that the paperback edition of Lukianoff’s 2023 book, The Canceling of the American Mind — co-authored with Ricki Schlott — will be published April 29, with lots of updated material on that topic.

But what about the fact that Cancel Culture works?

Lukianoff and Eduardo go on to say more about the dynamics of Cancel Culture in general:

In the last decade or more, we have seen people getting in trouble for being on the “wrong” side of virtually every hot button issue in the United States. Cancel Culture has ruined lives. It has cost people their livelihoods. And combined with the constant denial that Cancel Culture even exists, it has understandably fomented a general distrust in academia, journalism, and expertise — the very mechanisms of knowledge creation in our society.

This shouldn’t be surprising. When the penalty for having a disfavored opinion can be life-destroying, trust in the objectivity of experts is inevitably going to take a hit. As Greg mentioned in an early ERI post, “When even a single thinker is punished for their academic opinion or for engaging in thought experimentation, it leads the public to be justifiably skeptical that any expert on that topic is being fully honest.” “It’s about trust”

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But are we missing the point about Cancel Culture? The main thing to see is that it works! That is, it works for what it sets out to do: Make thoughts of which the establishment disapproves unthinkably costly.

And it works because Nice people agree to Cancel those who have spoken such inconvenient truths. They are not forced. They agree because being Nice is far more important to them than telling the truth is or ever could be.

Here’s an example: Canadian publisher Conrad Black, writing about the evidence-free claim that thousands of children lie buried in unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools in Canada, had this to say: The public hysteria couldn’t have happened without “a large section of the public, which knows this to be a falsehood but chooses to side with the silent forces” that forbid open discussion.

How far can Cancel Culture go? Although the Canadian government has stopped funding the so-far fruitless effort to find bodies, there are active calls to criminalize “residential school denialism” In the context, that surely means criminalizing reporting on the fact that no bodies were found. Solzhenitsyn’s “Live Not by Lies” was never more relevant.

But many Nice people get along fine with Cancel Culture as long as the lies are not injuring them. We should not suppose that the slow creep of totalitarianism requires active collaboration. For that very reason, Black warns Americans against assuming that a hysteria of that magnitude “couldn’t happen here.”

Making trusting the experts into a bogus moral issue

Lukianoff and Eduardo go on to offer a number of other useful insights, including

For far too long, our intellectual and ideological gatekeepers have taken their expertise, experience, and the trust of the public for granted. And they have abused that trust on the basis of several errors.

The first is the assumption that trusting experts is a moral issue, rather than a political and pragmatic one. They believe that trust in and fealty to them is owed rather than earned. Given their immense cultural and institutional power, this assumption creates several self-fulfilling dynamics that help bolster and perpetuate it. For example, failing to trust experts often reflects negatively on the person who doesn’t trust them rather than on the experts themselves. And by dismissing dissenters as kooks, cranks, or bigots, the experts are not obligated to do anything to reassess their positions, craft stronger arguments, produce better evidence, or take other actions to build and preserve trust. “It’s about trust”

Decades from now, insightful books will be written about why universities, for example, became centers of intolerance and why bureaucrats were consumed by fears of misinformation. Provided, that is, Cancel Culture doesn’t win out — in which case those will be forbidden topics.