The mask debacle that the public health community perpetrated has also taught me one very important lesson: noble lies do not work.

Even if we ignore your (correct!) points about how truth and honesty are important for the formation of civic virtue both in the public and in the professions, untruth fails even in narrow utilitarian terms. If our public health professionals are caught lying about one thing, that dramatically erodes the trust that the public will have in them for the next thing.

Step One: The experts softpeddled the importance of masks early in the pandemic (in the USA) because they feared that people would horde masks, they would not wear the masks correctly and they would also use the masks as an excuse to circumvent the more effective forms of social distancing.

Step Two: These experts did this because of a long standing habit of fudging the truth or telling white lies to encourage policy outcomes they think would be optimal because the American public acts like they are as dumb as a bag of hammers. See for example Robert McNamera and the Vietnam War.

Step Three: you are arguing then that because the experts and their expertise have lied, or used covert persuasion rather than argument in the past to deal with the American public then the public does not trust them and some portion of the American public will reflexively reject any advice from experts.

I hope this is a fair reprisal of your argument. I am going to proceed as if it is. But, if not please tell me where I get it wrong.

My disagreement is this: the experts are not the only ones holding the floor in any policy debate either in the public eye or behind closed doors. The public sphere, if you will, is not a one way street. The experts are more than equally matched by the stone cold ideologues from the Right Wing Think Tanks whose job is to make up policies that will sound good to the American public, but are actually squid ink to distract from the looting carried out by our plutocratic elites. These are flagrant liars who consistently get more than a fair hearing in the media and have yet to see their credibility dented in any meaningful fashion. Then there are the conspiracy theorists, John Bircher types, QAnon, the UFO chasers, the anti-vaxxers. These are either out and out liars or sincerely deluded loons. They too have been proven false only to rise up from the dead and haunt us like Marx’s Nightmares of history.

Why is it that only the liberal policy experts are discredited by their white lies, but the kooks, the chiselers, the mountebanks, and the grifters have nine lives? How is it that Alex Jones and David Brooks are more trustworthy than Fiona Hill or Alexander Vindman?

Mutatis mutandes, this is also what’s happened to higher education.

It’s also true that while the truth shall make you free, the truth may also result in a public execution (read: crucifixion).