For the first time in my career, I’ve been fielding many questions from mainstream reporters. This is because I’ve been tagged as a “person of interest,” as law enforcement would say, in the staffing of federal public health agencies and committees. Sometimes I pick up the phone and sometimes not. The high dudgeon over my supposed role strikes me as wildly overwrought.
The issue is the upheaval going on in public health bureaucracies. The Food and Drug Administration is changing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff and mandate have been winnowed back dramatically. The food pyramid is being overhauled. Priorities are changing as regards National Institutes of Health science funding. And the vaccine schedule for children is being pared back and changed.
In other words, these reporters assume that there is some kind of conspiracy. Seriously. They are asking detailed questions about my phone contacts, conversations I might be having with this or that person, my personal relationships with administration employees, funding sources, payment systems, the people with whom I am socializing, and so on.
At some point, I flat-out said it’s no one’s business. No, I won’t hand over my cellphone and bank records.
It’s all quite absurd. As I’m talking with these reporters and trying to help them understand the broader context and the organic nature of these reforms—they had to happen in light of the past five years—it’s like talking to a brick wall. They begin their reporting with the presumption that there is some plot afoot. Their job is to find the malefactor. I’m just a convenient target.
It’s as if these people haven’t considered that what is happening is a reflection not of a scheme but a population-wide blowback against terrible policies that were shockingly imposed upon the whole population and that turned out to be enormously destructive. It would be more surprising if the status quo remained in place.
If anything, the reforms are going too slowly to satisfy public demands. The loss of trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is an example. About one-third of the staff has been fired. Is that really so shocking? This agency is the one that imposed six feet of distance, one-way grocery aisles, sanitizer baths, the rental moratorium reversed by the Supreme Court, small-business closures, school closures, and even mail-in ballots.
Did they really think that once this was over, it would be business as usual? That seems to be what many ideologues on the left want. But it is not to be. What happened instead is exactly what one would expect in a democracy: The systems of government are responding to the grassroots. The bureaucracies are being rolled back. The mandates are being restricted. Protocols are being changed.
What’s at issue here comes down to a kind of worldview. I was explaining this strange problem to a friend who said plainly that these reporters on the left are simply assuming that we are operating as they have always operated. They plot, scheme, and trade quid pro quos, so they naturally assume that we do, too. Their operations are driven by the cash nexus, so they assume that ours are, too.
That could be the whole explanation. And yet I sense that there is more going on.
Think about the term “progressive.” Its root is “progress.” Real progress can take many forms, but in the minds of the original Progressives, there was only one way forward. That way involved the march of the state in league with corporate elites and academics. The most intelligent and credentialed people in society would take possession of society’s resources and organize them more intelligently than they otherwise would be.
That was and is the essence of the Progressive agenda.
And what were the Progressives against? They were opposed to a society that turned over the forces of social evolution to the people themselves in their communities and in their lives as individuals. To them, this was the essence of the old world they wanted to leave. It meant free markets; organically emerging community structures; decentralized government; families of any size, including very large ones; and businesses that came and went based on the wiles of the market.
Every Progressive was against this sort of system on the grounds that it all seemed too chaotic, unpredictable, and random. It seemed unintelligent. Thus was born the binary of progressive versus reactionary. To them, history would, should, and could only move one direction: toward social and economic planning. Everything and anything else was considered reactionary or revanchist.
And from where did this strange view of history arrive? It traces back to the usual suspect: G.W.F. Hegel writing in the early decades of the 19th century. He was a German nationalist who was trying to bring a form of philosophical therapy to the German people following the loss of territory at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Hegel’s solution was a new model of history that removed personal forces and replaced them with a meta-narrative. Impersonal forces were in charge that were ultimately driving the narrative of history toward a single end, that of the triumph of the German state against all its enemies.
Hegel’s views became hugely influential in German academia, particularly among those people who favored empire and a unity of nation, corporation, church, and state. In the second half of the century, communists such as Karl Marx picked up the Hegelian view of history and wedded it to socialist utopianism. Marx called his views scientific precisely because they were rooted in this strange Hegelian view of history. The triumph of communism was inevitable, he said, and therefore everyone who resisted it was a reactionary holding back the “tides of history.”
These Marxian views became so influential that the Fabians in the UK and the left-wing socialists in the United States picked them up. That’s how movements for higher taxation, public school, the banning of youth labor, and so many other causes, not all of them bad, came to be called progressive. Progress toward state control by administrative elites was inevitable.
This entire paradigm of progress and regress has dominated the public mind for a century.
Even low-end reporters for mainstream media outlets have picked it up. This is why President Donald Trump’s efforts to drain the swamp and gut the deep state have been greeted with such hostility. It is why Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s efforts on health are considered reactionary even though his views have not changed from decades ago, when they were aligned with crunchy liberalism.
As a result of this worldview—people learn their Hegel not from books but from the streets—people who accept it simply cannot imagine that any rollback of their plans is due to anything other than a scheme or plot or conspiracy designed to thwart the forward march of “progress” toward ever more control by the administrative state. This mindset rules out the existence of organic shifts in public life that do not go their way.
I can assure these reporters all day that I’m a mild-mannered guy with a newspaper column and a research institute, but it doesn’t matter. They still believe that I’m some kind of string-puller with hidden billions of dollars and a mysterious control over the levers of power. They would rather believe this than come to terms with how horrible the COVID-19 pandemic response was and how fed up people are with the bureaucrats in Washington.
They say the same about Trump. He surely did not win fairly either in 2016 or 2024. He must have cheated or had Russian help. He is not legitimate precisely because he wants to take the country in a different direction than the one of which they approve. He is seen as “reactionary,” whereas they are “progressive”; therefore, he is wrong and they are correct.
In other words, the real conspiracy theorists are on the mainstream left these days simply because they refuse to believe what is in front of their eyes. They cannot see their own failure for what it is and therefore cannot see the efforts to unravel the messes they made as just and necessary corrections.
