The Emperor's New Gatekeepers

how shifting sense-making is making us stupid

found with a google image search, unable to locate photographer to credit

When people talk about experts, COVID is almost always the first example they reach for. That was the moment when trust in expertise supposedly collapsed.

I think that’s a misreading. What happened during COVID — and what it revealed — is more complex, and more important. It goes straight to the heart of the argument I want to make.

But since COVID is the shared reference point, I’ll start with my own story.

I am consciously, deliberately, and profoundly grateful — every single day — that I did not get a COVID vaccine.

In the most ironic twist imaginable, I got lucky on September 9, 2021, the day President Biden gave his “our patience is wearing thin” speech. I got lucky because something happened that was, for me, memorably distressing.

That speech triggered my PTSD from sexual assault. I sat there, slack-jawed and horrified, listening as the President of the United States — a male authority figure — declared that if I wanted to keep my job, I had to enter a room, remove part of my clothing, and have my body penetrated with a medical instrument of his choosing. My will and my consent were irrelevant.

He was making the rules. My body, his choice.

I told my doctor — who had already tried more than once to pressure me — that the speech had triggered my PTSD, and why. I told her that I would seek an ADA accommodation if necessary, and that I wanted it in my chart that I was never, under any circumstances, to be asked about the vaccine again. She agreed. That note is still there, and still honored.

At the time, I worked remotely for a company with several government contracts. I was often given anonymized datasets to analyze, with no visibility into the client. I suspected, correctly, that at least some were from federal agencies. If so, I’d be expected to comply with the mandate to keep my job.

But I’d never even been in the same time zone as anyone on my team. I worked from home. And because of that, my request for a reasonable accommodation was granted.

I remain unvaccinated. And I remain thankful.

But what struck me most — then and now — is how warped the conversation around expertise had become. So warped, in fact, that most people no longer seem to know what they mean when they talk about “experts” or “institutions,” let alone what anyone else means.

That confusion — that collapse of shared definitions — is where everything else begins.

A recent episode of the Joe Rogan podcast — and an essay by Konstantin Kisin responding to it — have made this confusion especially visible.

Suddenly, the term is everywhere. People across the political spectrum are denouncing credentialism, invoking COVID as the great disillusionment, and blaming both experts and the institutions that housed them.

But in most of these conversations, the terms are used so sloppily — and so interchangeably — that the arguments collapse under their own weight.

Everyone’s trying to talk about trust, truth, and authority without defining their terms, and often without even knowing what those terms mean. They talk past each other, squinting through lenses so riddled with blind spots they might as well be made of Swiss cheese.

They cling to old assumptions, refusing to face new realities — even when those realities are staring them down.

Most of this, I think, is in good faith. It’s what happens when no one drinks from a single well anymore. We’re drowning in algorithm-fed feeds, group chats, headlines, hot takes, and thirty-second TikToks.

Layer on top of that a flood of bot accounts — many run by foreign actors intent on confusion and division — and clarity starts to feel like a luxury no one can afford.

But if we want to make any progress at all, we have to start by speaking clearly. And thinking even more clearly. About what we actually mean.

Experts vs Institutions

When people say COVID killed trust in experts, they’re not saying what they mean.

What they mean is that COVID eroded trust in institutions. The distinction — between experts and institutions — is subtle but essential.

What collapsed was not expertise itself, but a specific type of expertise: the kind filtered through institutional narratives and therefore shaped by politics, optics, and agenda.

Those narratives didn’t elevate truth. They elevated loyalty. Experts who challenged the official line were ignored, mocked, or punished — not because they lacked credentials, but because they posed a threat to the story.

Consider the Great Barrington Declaration. It was written by three respected scientists — Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff — who advocated focused protection for high-risk groups and warned that lockdowns would cause more harm than good. Instead of engaging the argument, institutional leaders dismissed them as "fringe," and internal emails show an active effort to discredit them publicly.

Dr. Robert Malone, who contributed to the foundational science behind mRNA technology, raised early concerns about mandates and side effects. He was banned from Twitter and deplatformed from YouTube — even though many of his predictions, including waning vaccine efficacy, proved accurate.

These weren’t cranks. They were credentialed, experienced, and in many cases correct. But they were inconvenient.

Their stories don’t point to a death of expertise. They point to a betrayal: institutions suppressing dissent, not because it was unqualified, but because it was unapproved.

And when people cite these cases, they’re not rejecting expertise. They’re rejecting institutions—that used to be trusted to deliver it.

Even the loudest anti-“expert” voices still rely on experts all the time. They check the weather, use Grammarly, hire contractors, have their taxes done by accountants. Expertise wrapped in an app—coded by experts to display the knowledge of experts—or presented without an institution behind it still passes the test.

Because people do trust knowledge.

What they don’t trust anymore is the process by which it’s sanctioned and sold.

What they’ve rejected isn’t expertise.

It’s the machinery that decides which expertise gets a microphone.

What Is An Institution?

An institution is a structured and enduring organization, system, or norm that plays a foundational role in governing, shaping, or sustaining society.

Institutions don’t need trust — which is why Congress, the IRS, the police, and the Presidency still qualify.

Institutions require reliance, not trust. People depend on them — sometimes unwillingly, often resentfully — because they’re central to some unavoidable aspect of how the world works.

That reliance might be grudging. It might even be hostile, as it so often is with Congress and the cops. But it’s still there.

Institutions are unavoidable. They shape the terrain. They’re the water we swim in.

The Problem with Podcasts

Since much of this essay is about podcasts, let me say this up front.

Relying on podcasts to figure out what’s true — even the really good ones — is a mistake.

Conversation and debate are vital — but they don’t arbitrate truth.

They never have.

Because conversation and debate, in and of themselves, are skills — not truth-discovery mechanisms.

I’m an anxiety-ridden freak in general, and more so about pronouncing words correctly. I’m deaf, so there are tons of words I’ve only read, never heard — and my friends are too kind to correct me.

Between the anxiety and the lack of verbal fluency, I could genuinely lose a debate over whether 2 + 2 = 4.

Put me up against one of the “2 + 2 = 5” crowd on Woke Twitter, and I’d lose.

I wouldn’t just lose. I would lose badly.

I know this about myself. Which is why I would never, under any circumstances, accept such an invitation.

But let’s say I did. Let’s say I felt pressured, publicly cornered — told that declining meant admitting I was wrong.

So I accepted. And — predictably — I lost. Lost so badly that every listener agreed I lost.

2 + 2 would still not equal 5.

True things stay true — no matter how poorly they’re defended.

Podcast hosts who choose — deliberately or not — highly skilled speakers for some topics and not others are influencing audience perception.

And they are doing so unavoidably.

What Is an Expert?

Everyone defines an expert through some mix of education and experience — and the balance shifts depending on context. Most people don’t realize they do this, but we all do.

Here are a few quick examples.

You have a legal question. Do you ask a kid who just passed the bar — or a 62-year-old paralegal who’s worked that exact kind of case for decades?

You need weight loss advice. Do you choose a licensed nutritionist with a perfect BMI — or a man who lost 100 pounds in a year without surgery, and kept it off?

You’re preparing for a tax audit. Do you go with a top-of-the-class CPA — or a retired IRS auditor who hasn’t read the new regs but knows every trick in the book?

None of these choices are obvious. All of them depend on what kind of expertise you value most in that moment.

One of the most frequent (and justified) criticisms of the Woke worldview is its overreliance on “lived experience.” The flaw isn’t in valuing lived experience — we all do that — it’s in tying it to immutable traits, as if identity alone confers insight.

In reality, people still respect expertise. They just stop calling it that when it’s inconvenient.

The woman who mocks academia still checks PubMed when her kid gets sick.

The startup guy who rails against credentialism still hires the backend dev who built two scalable systems — not the philosophy major who read The Lean Startup twice.

Expertise hasn’t disappeared. It’s just been rerouted. No lab coat. No official seal. Just proof of work — and a bullshit filter that never turns off.

What’s eroded isn’t expertise.

It’s trust in the institutions that once claimed to deliver it.

How Institutions Finished Themselves Off

Cherry-picking compliant experts wasn’t the only way institutions lost trust. Two deeper failures made it worse:

They stopped allowing dissent.

Contrarian views weren’t debated — they were silenced. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter enforced rigid policies that erased even highly credentialed voices if they challenged the “consensus.”

Example: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford pushed for focused protection over blanket lockdowns — and was promptly blacklisted and smeared. Not because he lacked credentials, but because he challenged the script.

They stopped admitting when they were wrong.

When institutions got it wrong, they rarely owned it — or corrected themselves long after the damage was done.

Example: The CDC’s mask guidance. First: “Don’t wear masks.” Then: “Wear one or you’re a murderer.” The science may (or may not) have evolved, but the shift wasn’t explained; it was imposed. People noticed.

And nothing drove the double standard home more than the messaging around public gatherings in 2020.

Church? Dangerous. Funerals? Irresponsible. Family visits? Selfish.

But mass protests for racial justice? “Necessary.” “Courageous.”

“A vital expression of public health, since racism is the real pandemic.”

When institutions told people that chanting in the streets was safer — and somehow more virtuous — than mourning their dead, trust didn’t just erode.

It collapsed.

The Joe Rogan Experience Is An Institution

Yes.

Joe Rogan’s podcast is now an American institution.

And before I defend that claim, let me issue an important caveat: I am not saying he should adopt institutional ethics, strive for “balance,” or change anything about how he operates.

He’s free to wield his power — to shape conversation and even world events¹ — however he wants. And his fans are right to defend that freedom.

He has no moral obligation to say or not say anything in particular.

He should expect criticism, because that’s the cost of power. But how he responds — or doesn’t — is his business.

What I am saying is that the pretense needs to stop.

“Alternative media” is no longer the scrappy underdog punching up at legacy institutions. That might have been true ten years ago. It’s not true anymore.

And no one illustrates that shift more clearly than Joe Rogan.

The Joe Rogan Experience is no longer an outsider platform. It is an institution by every metric that matters: audience size, cultural impact, political relevance, and agenda-setting power.

A single episode reaches 11 to 14 million people — more than triple the peak audience of Tucker Carlson Tonight, and ten times that of a typical CNN primetime hour. Rogan commands more real-time attention than The New York Times, which, for all its reach, doesn’t have a single article that reshapes the national conversation overnight. He does.

His reach isn’t theoretical. It is now structural.

JRE is where political narratives are test-driven. Where intellectual reputations are made or broken. Where the Overton window expands. When Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard appeared on the show, they weren’t just interviewed — they were reintroduced to America on terms the mainstream media never gave them.

When Elon Musk smoked weed on air, Tesla’s stock dipped. When Rogan hosted Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, it triggered a federal response — from Spotify disclaimers to White House statements. Entire segments of legacy media now exist just to react to Joe Rogan episodes.

That’s institutional weight.

Whether people love him or loathe him, they’re orbiting him. And that gravitational pull — that ability to bend the trajectory of culture and conversation — is the defining mark of an institution.

Even people who say they don’t listen to Rogan often find themselves reacting to conversations that started with him. His influence travels — through headlines, clips, reaction videos, group chats, algorithmic drift, and dinner-table debates.

Politicians court him. Journalists quote him. Scientists fact-check him. His guests go viral days or weeks later, with their appearance treated as a cultural event whether you heard the episode or not.

Rogan doesn’t sit at the edge of the discourse.

He sits in its bloodstream.

And that’s what makes him an institution: not just the size of his platform, but the way everything else now curves around it.

What Does Not Follow

So why am I not saying that Rogan has a responsibility to develop institutional standards appropriate to his level of power?

Because I don’t care about moral prescriptions. I’m not here to judge how Rogan should wield his massive power and influence.

I’m here to point out that he has it — and that pretending otherwise is unserious at best, flatly dishonest at worst.

You can’t meaningfully critique power if you refuse to name it. But naming power isn’t the same as demanding it follow your script. I’m not interested in policing Rogan’s ethics.

I’m interested in dropping the illusion that he’s just some guy asking questions.

I also don’t think trying to impose an ethical framework on him would help. It would invite endless bad-faith nitpicking — not about what he said, but whether he violated a rule, whether that rule was applied fairly, whether someone else got away with worse. It would turn every episode into a proxy battle in the culture war. Truth would get lost in the process, to a greater extent than it already does.

But the real reason — maybe the most important — is this: it’s better this way.

It’s better that Rogan doesn’t pretend to be neutral. It means we get to see what he actually thinks. Who he elevates. How he handles disagreement.

When Dave Smith and Douglas Murray came on the show, Rogan repeatedly stepped in to back Smith’s take on Israel — often at Murray’s expense. That told us something. But what told us more was what came after. When Rogan mocked Murray on a later episode — not to his face, but once he was gone — it was a break from his usual graciousness and hosting ethos. It was pointed. It was deliberate. And it wasn’t just casual banter. It was alignment.

That’s the real data. Not the guest list; the choices. The unsanitized reactions.

We don’t need Rogan to be “fair.” We need to be honest about what he’s doing.

He may not have asked for institutional power. He may not even want it. But he has it.

And that means his choices are fair game.

What the Reactions Revealed

Rogan’s mocking of Murray wasn’t just a moment of poor taste. In my view, it was a tell.

It signaled alignment — not just with Dave Smith’s position, but with a deeper cultural instinct. One that I’ve seen before. One I recognize.

The debate between Smith and Murray was twelve days ago as I write this — though it feels like twelve weeks. First the debate, then the debate about the debate, then the ripple of reactions, interviews, essays, including Kisin’s. Watching it unfold, I started seeing patterns. Some I already suspected. Others crystallized only after watching everything play out.

Yes, it could be confirmation bias. I tried to falsify them — I asked smart friends, consulted Grok, asked ChatGPT. I kept coming up empty. Which doesn’t prove I’m right — in fact, that kind of “I was right!!!” moment often precedes a fall.

But the patterns persist. And if they’re real, even partly, they’re worth naming.

The Left Left Me

Here’s one: people who once strongly identified with the political left but now find themselves more aligned with the right — the group often called, half-mockingly, “The Left Left Me.”

Political realignment is rarely clean. For those who grew up seeing the left as the home of compassion, empathy, and intellectual openness, breaking from it isn’t just a political shift — it’s an identity crisis. Even when Woke dogma becomes unbearable, many still long to reconnect with something on the left that feels emotionally true.

So when a left-coded cause appears — something that’s trendy, transgressive, celebrity-endorsed, and anti-Trump-adjacent — the pull is powerful. Right now, the Palestinian cause is that cause. It checks every box: anti-establishment, anti-imperialist, anti-Western-power. It feels rebellious, cool, redemptive.

In my opinion, that’s what we’re seeing with Rogan. I don’t think his stance is about the facts on the ground. I think it’s about vibes — about the chance to plant a flag on the left again. The chance to say: See? I’m still one of you.

And I get it. I see it in myself. My support for abortion rights isn’t a partisan reflex — it’s rooted in trauma. But I also recognize—and am willing to admit— the deep, almost defiant joy I feel when I get to side with the left on something I still believe in.

When I see someone on the right attack same-sex marriage, I take a special joy in pushing back. Not just because I believe in it, though I do — but because it gives me a chance to stand with the left on something.

Being on the side with the moral halo is still a rush. There’s a thrill in that alignment, however brief.

It’s the emotional reward of still being able to say: That’s my side, too. Even if only for a moment.

Suffering, Empathy, and Naïveté About Islam

Another pattern I can’t stop seeing — and I say this bluntly — is how few Americans take the threat of radical Islam seriously.

Smith and many of his fans seem to believe that October 7 couldn’t have been driven by anti-Semitism — that it must have been born of suffering. As if deep, generational hatred were unimaginable. As if cultural indoctrination, martyrdom education from toddlerhood, or genocidal scripture couldn't possibly be relevant.

But hatred is a cultural inheritance. It doesn’t need a trigger. It doesn’t need to make sense to you. It just needs to be passed down — and taken seriously by the people who receive it.

Now that waving a Palestinian flag is coded as edgy, righteous, anti-Trump, and anti-Western, the people waving them are more diverse than ever — and many have no idea what they’re aligning themselves with.

No, I am not saying all Muslims are extremists. I’m saying some people, including Muslims, take their holy books seriously — and that matters. I spent much of my childhood on the receiving end of Proverbs 20:30 and 23:13, so I know what it looks like when people truly believe — and don’t just say they believe — that their holy book was dicated by the Creator.

And when that book includes explicit instructions about infidels, women, and war? That’s not theoretical. That’s a worldview.

Here’s the pattern I see: among the loudest American voices urging us to “contextualize” October 7, the men are not veterans. They may have sparred in gyms or fought in cages, but that’s rule-bound violence — not chaos and carnage.

None of them have experienced violence at its most real — life-altering trauma. None have had to make the transition to living as a human who now knows, and will always know, what the inside of a human skull looks like. They haven’t seen it. They don’t know what it does.

And the women? Every one I could identify had a father, a husband, or adult sons. Men who, if the caliphate came, would put their bodies between those women and what the Quran permits for women in conquered lands — rape, slavery, forced conversion.

They live in safety. They evaluate the world from within it.

They speak from a life built in a Western country, protected by Western men who hold Western values.

And they have no idea how protected they really are — or how much of that protection depends on someone else’s spine holding the line.

No, We Haven’t Learned

For all the noise, confusion, and factional warfare around experts, institutions, podcasts, and public trust, one thing is obvious: we’re not living in a world without expertise.

We’re living in a world where people have finally learned — often the hard way — to separate expertise from institutional authority.

That distinction is the beating heart of this entire essay.

People still crave grounded, earned understanding.

They still want deep knowledge.

They still seek skilled, experienced voices.

What they no longer accept — at least not reflexively — is the idea that such voices must come stamped and approved by institutions that have proven, over and over, to be slow, self-serving, politically captured, and unwilling to admit error.

Joe Rogan’s rise to institutional status despite his anti-institutional framing is just one of many cultural paradoxes — a signal of how disoriented we’ve become about who holds power, how it’s used, and who gets to be heard.

But underneath the confusion, there’s a core truth: people still care what’s true.
They just don’t believe the people who used to tell them.

If anything, our filter has gotten sharper. We no longer mistake credentials for credibility. We look for performance. For humility. For signs that someone can handle disagreement, admit error, and tell the truth even when it costs them.

That’s why voices like Bhattacharya and Malone — once mocked and silenced — have become symbols of what expertise looks like after institutional legitimacy has collapsed.

It’s also why Rogan sits, unavoidably, at the center of the conversation. Not because he is the conversation — but because he’s where it flows through: raw, unresolved, unedited. People trust the chaos more than the script.

And maybe that’s not a flaw. Maybe it’s the beginning of something better.

But I doubt it.

Because we haven’t really learned.

We’ve just shifted the spotlight. Built new institutions with new aesthetics, but the same blind spots.

We’ve traded polished conformity for charismatic confidence…but not much else.

And if we treat these new institutions as immune — if we think their power can’t rot the same way the last batch did — we’ll wind up in the same place again.

Arrogant. Censorious. Certain.

That’s how idiocy spreads. That’s how trust dies.

That’s how you end up with people earnestly insisting — as I’ve seen an uncountable number of times on Twitter — that the gas chambers were fake because “they had wooden doors.”

This is what happens when institutions collapse: people mistake a stupid gotcha for an insight.

This gotcha is particularly stupid because they don’t need to take anyone’s word for it. They can buy a few gallons of ammonia and bleach, pour them into the bathtub, shut the wooden door, and find out for themselves just how much protection a wooden door actually offers.²

That’s the cost of failing to teach people how to think.

That’s what happens when institutions use trust like a currency, then spend it all and ask for more.

We told ourselves that killing off gatekeepers would make us freer. Smarter. Harder to fool. And in some ways, it did.

But most people can’t run every test. Can’t vet every study. Can’t read every primary source. So, by necessity, they outsource their sense-making. They look for cues. They look for whom to trust.

And when credibility dries up, they often follow vibes.

When rigor disappears, they frequently follow confidence.

When earned authority vanishes, they mistake repetition for truth — and charisma for wisdom.

We didn’t stop trusting.

We didn’t end institutions.

And that denial is exactly how the corruption starts all over again.

Not with bad intentions.

With unexamined power, disguised as something new.

1. That there is serious debate over whether the election was decided by Trump appearing, and Harris declining to appear, on his podcast means that the notion that Joe Rogan can shape world events is, at the very least, not crazy.

2. Don’t do this. It’s a grim bit of rhetoric, not a serious suggestion.

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