Rule By Favored Experts
My reply to the command "Stay in your lane!"
By John Leake
My first true crime book—about the Austrian author, journalist, and international serial killer, Jack Unterweger—recounted a strange dilemma suffered by Austria’s intelligentsia after evidence emerged that Jack had murdered several women. The trouble for them was, they had, just a few years earlier, vehemently advocated (through letters and a petition to the Justice Ministry) Jack’s early release from his life sentence in prison for a brutal murder he’d committed in his youth. Their passionate desire to liberate him arose after he published an “autobiographical novel” titled Purgatory. They (a Who’s Who of Austrian writers, artists, journalists, and scientists) found his book so moving, and so apparently expressive of his mature self-awareness, that they asserted it was evidence of his rehabilitation.
About 18 months after he was released from prison with great fanfare, an Austrian daily newspaper reported that a warrant had been issued for his arrest for murdering 7 women in three Austrian cities. Shortly thereafter he also fell under suspicion for murdering three women in Los Angeles and one in Prague, for a total of eleven women.
The lead police investigator, Ernst Geiger, discovered that many Austrian journalists and public commentators were extremely reluctant to acknowledge the extensive circumstantial evidence that Jack was the killer. Especially embarrassing for the Austrian National Broadcasting Corporation was the strange fact that Jack had gotten an assignment to produce a major radio story on the mysterious killer who was stalking Vienna’s red light district, much like “Jack the Ripper” had done in London a century earlier.
Those who’d advocated the extremely risky social experiment did not want to face up to the fact that their gamble had gone the wrong way, resulting in the terrible deaths of eleven young women. Many even seemed to prefer that the arrest warrant be rescinded and the investigation suspended.
One of the strangest discoveries I made in my research was that ALL of Austria’s intellectual elite—including the prominent psychologist Ernst Federn—advocated Jack’s early release from prison. Not only were ALL of these so-called experts wrong, their reasons for advocating Jack’s early release were obviously fallacious.
It is no exaggeration to state that not ONE of these so-called experts knew ANYTHING about Jack’s criminal past. When I tracked down the attorney who’d defended Jack at his murder trial in 1974, he told me that I was the first journalist who’d ever contacted him. In other words, allowing a parcel of so-called experts to conduct a dangerous social experiment directly resulted in the sadistic murder of eleven women.
My experience in researching my first book was, for me, an illustration of what James Madison meant when he said:
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.
Whenever a reader of one of my Substack posts exhorts me, “Stay in your lane!” my reply is as follows:
If the citizenry is compelled to leave all examination and deliberation of major public policy issues—and the physical reality on which these policies are based—to favored experts, the citizenry will soon be mere subjects of the favored experts.
Please note my use of the modifier “favored.” If we learned anything from the disastrous pandemic response, it’s that powerful commercial and political interests are very adept at promoting their darlings among the expert class, and ruthlessly censoring experts in any given field who question their orthodoxy.
By the time Dr. McCullough testified before the U.S. Senate on November 19, 2020, he was one of the greatest experts in the world on the early treatment on COVID-19. Nevertheless, his testimony was heavily censored, and the minority witness, Ashish Jha, branded him and his fellow expert witnesses (Drs. Harvey Risch and George Fareed) The Snake Oil Salesmen of the Senate in a New York Times Op-Ed a few days later.
Dr. Jha had the presumption to write his mendacious essay in spite of the fact that, by his own admission in his Senate testimony, he had never treated a single COVID-19 patient. In spite of being an absolute nullity in the matter of treating COVID-19, he was, just a few months later, appointed the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator.
To be ruled by so-called experts such as Dr. Jha is to be ruled by arrogant and incompetent tyrants. No thanks.
To be sure, I don’t expect readers to agree with my point of view, and I welcome civil counter-arguments and (especially) additional data and information that I have failed to consider. However, those who command me to stay in my lane are commanding me to cease my inquiry and conversation about public policy issues that affect me, my community, and my country.
As an educated citizen of a nation that still resembles a Constitutional Republic, I refuse to obey such commands. Those who are inclined to issue them should save their keyboard time for other endeavors.
“Stay in your lane?” As one who knows you well, admires your intellect & curiosity & your knowledge of many arenas— especially history— I say: Stay on the path you’re on! We need you.
The only time anyone should stay in a lane is when you're behind a wheel 🤓