It’s time to take a good hard look at the cadre of mainstream, legacy journalists and psephologists as well as the public health clerisy, that constitutes ‘the expert class’. It might not have escaped your notice that these members of the cognoscenti have gotten so much wrong these past few years it would be embarrassing, or at least it would if the journalistic class bothered to report on it.

Let’s start with the pollsters and journalists. Back in mid-September in these very pages I predicted the Republicans would take the Senate and do so with a net two or three pick up (so, would end up with 52 or 53 of the 100-member Senate). And this despite the fact only 14 of the 35 Senate seats being contested this mid-term year are ones currently held by the Democrats, and those 14 are all in states won by Joe Biden in 2020. If you go back to September you’ll see that virtually all the pollsters and near-on every single member of the legacy media (here as well as in the US) were predicting the Dems would retain the Senate. I didn’t believe it for two reasons. Firstly, I didn’t believe independent voters in the US could or would endorse what they’d seen from this Joe Biden administration, probably the worst in well over a century. Just consider the open southern border that has seen over four million illegal aliens pour in since Joe took over.  Consider the skyrocketing gas and oil prices, largely driven not by Putin and the Ukraine war but by Biden’s massive restrictions on new (and some existing) domestic exploration. Consider the inflation rate. Consider the Democrats thuggish and heavy-handed pro-lockdown, pro-masking, pro-mandates approach to Covid. The list goes on and on. But perhaps more relevantly to my prediction, I have read various people point out that US pollsters have been way off since at least 2016. The pattern we’ve seen is consistently that most US polls overstate the position of Democrat candidates and do so significantly right up until the last week or two before the election. Then the polls move noticeably towards the Republicans. If you’re feeling charitable this might be put down to the difficulty of getting Republicans to answer pollsters, something that might explain why nearly all polls over-sample Democrats. (Look at the small print and you’ll see what I mean.) If you’re feeling conspiratorially minded, though, you might instead put it down to journalists and pollsters hoping to suppress the Republican vote by convincing them their candidate has no chance and then moving at the very end to protect their reputations as pollsters. (‘See, our final polls were pretty accurate.’)

Anyway, back in mid-September the talk and polls were all about a Democrat recovery and an easily retained Senate, not to mention all sorts of talk about how the Trump-endorsed candidates were so weak. But not now. With just under a fortnight to the elections the Republicans are surging everywhere. Winning the House is virtually a sure thing. Meanwhile, every currently held Republican Senate seat has a Republican with a lead or tied (even Dr Oz in Pennsylvania). And the currently held Democrat Senate seats in Georgia, Nevada and Arizona all have Democrats tied or behind. Should those all flip it will be a Republican wave.  But the momentum is such right now that it could even be a tsunami – throwing into play the chances the Republicans pick up Senate seats in New Hampshire and in ultra-liberal, west coast Washington and more. Meanwhile the gubernatorial races are looking cataclysmic for the Democrats. Ron DeSantis in Florida, back in 2018, barely won by 30,000 votes out of 8.5 million or so cast.  Right now he’s massively ahead in the polls (such are the rewards of being brave and resisting despotism during the pandemic).  This while long-time Democrat strongholds are in play. A future star Republican Kari Lake (she tells the press they’re biased and then backs it up chapter and verse) looks like winning in Arizona. The lockdown despot and Dan Andrews-type wannabe Governor Gretchen Whitmer is in big trouble in the safe Dem state of Michigan. Heck, the Republican looks to have a shot at unseating the incumbent Governor in New York of all places. So either something earth-shattering happened in the last four or five weeks. Or, and this will shock you I know, the pollsters and journalists lean so far left they see everything through a ‘what will best help the Democrats’ lens. Either way, the cognoscenti expertocracy is failing us here. Maybe that explains why journalists are coming dead last in surveys of the most-trusted occupations in the US.

Speaking of failures by the expert class, let’s now turn our attention to the public health clerisy in this country. It was to these medicos that our woeful political caste abdicated virtually all decision-making during the pandemic. Last week a self-styled ‘Independent Covid Review’ led by Peter Shergold reported back on how we did in Australia. It found that no schools should have been shut; some of the lockdowns and border closures were avoidable; key groups were excluded from financial support; and generally was not overly complimentary. But let me be abundantly blunt here. This report is as tepid as they come. The data is now clear there should have been no lockdowns, no mandates, no police thuggery, no outspending Trudeau, the list goes on. So say so.

Here’s the problem. All these reports done by the great and the good all start with the premise that in the face of radical uncertainty (no one knew how bad the virus was going to be) the government had to take steps and err on the side of doing something big to keep people safe. It’s from that premise that even this report makes its criticisms. But in my view that core premise is simply wrong-headed. In the face of radical uncertainty there is no plausible ground for thinking the default position should be some regulatory equivalent of the precautionary principle – ie opt for what looks like the zero-risk position – requiring big-state actions. In fact, the best-supported approach in the face of radical uncertainty is to continue on with what the till-then accumulated data indicated was the best road and wait for new data. (Data, not models, to be clear.) That, readers, is basically what three of the world’s top epidemiologists recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration. And it is exactly what we in Australia (and most of the non-Swedish world) did not do. The costs are now proving to be astronomical, even in terms of cumulative excess deaths where we are worse than Sweden. So this report points in broadly the right direction but, really, it is pathetically weak in its criticisms. We lived through thuggery, the worst inroads on our civil liberties in 300 years, massive impositions on the young and poor to benefit the old and rich, and virtually no MPs (Libs included) said a word. Our expert class was wholly useless as were our politicians. (My kingdom for a DeSantis.) Their first principles were catastrophically wrong.  And we here in the pages of the Speccie Australia were saying it from day one, not in an enervated report long after the fact that is far, far too tepid.