BBC Verify examines how the campaign to blame Kyiv unfolded.

Russian leader also suggests Ukraine is somehow involved in the attack without providing any evidence.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In 2017, my Daily colleague Tom Nichols wrote a book titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Three years later, America underwent a crisis that stress-tested citizens’ and political leaders’ faith in experts—with alarming results.

The Atlantic published an excerpt today from the second edition of Tom’s book, which includes a new chapter evaluating the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the relationship between experts and the public. I chatted with Tom recently about American narcissism, the mistakes experts have made during the pandemic, and why listening to expert advice is a responsibility of citizens in a democracy.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Everyone should feel bad about Kate Middleton’s cancer news. Trump would break the budget. The Shohei Ohtani betting scandal won’t be the last.

Narcissism and Distrust

Isabel Fattal: Why did you feel it was important after the COVID-19 crisis to rerelease this book?

Tom Nichols: The book is currently being used in colleges and even some high schools around the country, and it’s been translated into 14 languages, so at some point, I think my editor and I knew we wanted to keep the book fresh and update it. We would email each other now and then about some gobsmacking example of people rejecting expertise and say that it needed to go into a second edition.

But we didn’t see COVID coming, or the way that the pandemic deepened the crisis of trust in knowledge. In the book, and in presentations I would give over the years, I predicted that a crisis would probably alleviate some of this problem as people turned to science for answers and help, and I was wrong. So I thought it was important to look at the past few years more carefully and ask why things got worse.

Isabel: You write in the excerpt that “when the coronavirus arrived, a significant number of Americans were already primed by the media, their political leaders, and their own stubborn narcissism to reject expert advice during a crisis.” When do you think America’s faith in experts began to plummet?

Tom: It’s almost a cliché to haul off easy answers and say “Vietnam and Watergate,” but even clichés contain some truth. It really is the case that the crisis of expertise began in the early 1970s, for several reasons. The misconduct of a president and several executive-branch agencies produced a feeling that U.S. institutions were no longer led by wise people. And a war that we couldn’t seem to win had a profound effect on trust and social cohesion.

But the ’70s were also the Me Decade. People looked inward after all the turmoil of the previous decade, and they decided to seek answers to a lot of things on their own. It’s not a coincidence that the ’70s were the heyday of cults and fads and quack remedies and “ancient astronauts.” This is when anti-vaccine movements started to pop up. We think we have it bad now, but go look up Laetrile and pyramid power to see what things were like 40 or 50 years ago.

The problem, of course, is that the Me Decade never really ended, so here we are.

Isabel: You argue that one mistake scientists made was to take on the role of elected officials. Can you talk me through that shift?

Tom: If you look back at those White House press briefings, where you had people such as Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci standing there uncomfortably while Donald Trump ranted about bleach and lights, you can see where they and other experts felt the need to clarify useful policies in a way that ordinary people could follow, especially because elected leaders—and not just Trump—were making a mess of things. Early in the pandemic, for example, I was impressed by then–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who seemed like a steady and capable hand on the tiller. But Cuomo—as we now know and as I discuss in the book—was desperately trying to cover up his own lethal mistakes.

The scientists, people we’d mostly never heard of at the state and federal levels, stepped forward to issue guidance. But that’s not their job, and, frankly, talking to the public isn’t their main skill set. People, understandably, don’t want to take orders from appointed officials. When it came time to close public places—and, even more important, to reopen them, including schools—scientists got dragged into a huge fight that was more about politics than science. They got tagged as political figures rather than dispassionate experts.

You can blame a lot of that on Trump and the GOP making pandemic measures into political issues. But the way medical professionals supported the George Floyd protests was a big mistake and a completely self-inflicted wound on the cause of expertise.

Isabel: How so?

Tom: As I say in the Atlantic excerpt, a vocal part of the medical community said: These protests are so important that they should be allowed to happen despite all of our advice warning against such gatherings.

To say this while people couldn’t go to church, get married, or bury their dead inflamed a lot of people, including me. (My brother died in a VA long-term-care facility at the start of the pandemic that was later at the center of a scandal about the mishandling of COVID measures, and we couldn’t lay him to rest for weeks.) Many doctors, who had argued that their advice was apolitical, made a nakedly political decision. Fauci, wisely, tried to stay neutral, but by late summer, the damage was done.

I don’t think we can say definitively whether the protests increased COVID cases, but the bigger problem is that the argument is a no-win trap for experts: If the doctors were concerned that the protests could spread the disease, then they shouldn’t have signed on to the protests. But if the protests were acceptable with the appropriate precautions, then the doctors and the public-health officials should have allowed gatherings for everyone willing to use the same measures.

Isabel: I was really struck by the quote you include from a member of the COVID Crisis Group: “Trump was a comorbidity.” Is there a world in which COVID didn’t get quite so politicized?

Tom: I think, given decades of narcissism, political polarization, and general distrust in government, a pandemic was always going to be politicized. But in my view, Trump’s personal influence and his mobilization of an entire political party around the demonization of expertise cost lives. It’s still a remarkable thing, and it astounds me that anyone would think of putting him back in any position of responsibility anywhere.

Isabel: Why is listening to experts the task of a responsible American citizen?

Tom: It’s not our task to obey experts without question, but, yes, listening is a requirement of being a citizen in a democracy. In the end, political leaders should, and do, have the last word and make the call on most things, including war and peace. But we are not a rabble. We don’t just all shout in the public square and then demand that the loudest voices carry the day. Experts give all of us, including our elected leaders, information we need to make decisions.

We can choose to ignore that advice. Experts can tell us about risks, and we can choose to take those risks. But if we simply block our ears and insist that we know better than everyone else because our gut, or some TV personality, or some politician, told us that we’re smarter than the experts, that’s on us.

Related:

When experts fail Following your gut isn’t the right way to go. (From 2021)

Today’s News

Forty people were killed and more than 100 wounded after gunmen opened fire at a popular concert venue near the outskirts of Moscow, according to Russia’s top security agency. Kate Middleton announced that she is undergoing chemotherapy for an unspecified cancer discovered in tests after her abdominal surgery in January. The Senate is deliberating a $1.2 trillion spending bill, the passage of which would avoid a partial government shutdown at midnight.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Some computer-science students are being shielded from the liberal arts. That may be a problem for those studying AI in the future, Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: Reading can be a sensory experience that awakens your perception and, in turn, your emotions, Maya Chung writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

No Parent Can Make Home-Cooked Meals All the Time

By Yasmin Tayag

On Sunday evening, I fed a bowl of salmon, broccoli, and rice to my eight-month-old son. Or rather, I attempted to. The fish went flying; greens and grains splattered across the walls. Half an hour later, bedtime drew near, and he hadn’t eaten a thing. Exasperated, I handed him a baby-food pouch—and he inhaled every last drop of apple-raspberry-squash-carrot mush.

For harried parents like myself, baby pouches are a lifeline. These disposable plastic packets are sort of like Capri-Suns filled with blends of pureed fruits and vegetables …

But after my son slurped up all the goo and quickly went to sleep, I felt more guilty than relieved.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

It’s time to give up on ending social media’s misinformation problem. Whatever happened to the urban doom loop?

Culture Break

Neon

Watch. Sydney Sweeney’s performance in Immaculate (in theaters now) demonstrates just why the actor is becoming so unavoidable, David Sims writes.

Read. In a newly discovered letter to a college student, the playwright Arthur Miller explains one of his most famous works: Death of a Salesman.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

When Tom and I aren’t working on editions of The Daily, you can usually find us in intense debates about which movies from the 1970s and ’80s I’ve woefully neglected to watch. This past week, Tom lobbied for the 1978 Superman, with Christopher Reeve. I’ve long been more of a Batman fan, but Tom is persuasive in making his case (and tells me that it’s the first movie to include genuinely great flying scenes), so it may go on this weekend’s watch list.

— Isabel

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Updated at 2:05 p.m. ET on March 23, 2024

A decade ago, when foreign fighters were flowing into Syria, the Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, became a sort of Epcot of global jihad: New arrivals from different nations clustered together in their national groups. If you were a recent arrival from France or just wanted to know where to get a croissant, you could visit a café full of French people and ask. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters came from places as distant as Chile and Japan. Russia alone contributed as many as 4,000, according to President Vladimir Putin, and by all accounts, their cluster focused not on pastry but on warfare. The only countries that put up numbers to rival Russia’s were Tunisia and Turkey.

Yesterday, terrorists murdered at least 133 concertgoers in suburban Moscow. The Islamic State’s news agency, Amaq, posted the group’s claim of responsibility, as usual in language balanced between wire-service precision and rabid derangement. The claim described an attack “against a large gathering of Christians”—an odd way to describe a nonreligious prog-rock concert. Videos from the scene show gunmen firing into piles of huddled civilians and stalking others. The style resembles the Bataclan massacre, which ISIS perpetrated in Paris in 2015, and the October 7 attack, the handiwork of ISIS’s enemy Hamas. The Amaq report says the killers “withdrew to their bases,” which suggested that they remained at large and capable of attacking again, and that they had more than one base. By Saturday, Russia claimed to have arrested all four perpetrators and several accomplices. Putin suggested the killers had been on a run for the Ukrainian border.

[Neil Hauer: Russia has a plan for Ukraine. It looks like Chechnya.]

In Russia, as in many authoritarian states, rumors proliferate fast after shocking events like this. Many repeated the crazy theory that ISIS was deliberately invented by America. The exiled chess master and dissident Garry Kasparov suggested that Russia had attacked itself to drum up ethnonationalist sentiment. Putin’s intimation of Ukrainian involvement makes little sense to me. It beggars belief that the most hunted men in Russia would immediately drive in a white Renault toward the most heavily militarized and monitored zone in the entire region when they could drive in any other direction and be alone in a birch forest somewhere. But Putin’s version is consistent with the theory that he will use the attack to demonize Ukraine.

Everything we know about Russia and its history with ISIS supports the theory that ISIS perpetrated the attack. ISIS has been reviving its capacity, particularly in its Khorasan affiliate, the one identified by U.S. intelligence as responsible for the attack. Islamic State Khorasan Province “has taken on a more central role in planning attacks abroad,” Tore Hamming, a jihadism researcher at the risk-management consultancy Refslund Analytics, told me by text. He said a number of recent events, such as the arrests of suspected members in Turkey, suggest that the group is planning attacks outside its usual area of operations.

ISIS had a huge Russian and Central Asian contingent in its heyday. And the fault lines in Russian politics and society have foretold this kind of atrocity for literally centuries. It would be a surprise if four guys piled into a car and sped toward Ukraine after committing mass murder. Nothing could be less surprising than an ISIS attack in a region susceptible to just such an attack.

About one out of every five Russian citizens is Muslim, but that population is not evenly distributed either geographically or socioeconomically. In cities, a lot of taxi drivers and hard-luck laborers have names like Magomedov and Ismailov, indicative of Muslim ancestry. Many have roots in majority-Muslim Central Asian countries and have come to Russia in search of jobs. A very large proportion of the ISIS fighters from those countries came through Russia and developed violent tendencies there, away from the moderating influence of friends and family. The four alleged perpetrators arrested by Russia are reportedly from Tajikistan, a Central Asian republic bordering Afghanistan.

The center of geographic gravity of Islam in Russia is the Northern Caucasus, the site of domestic strife and bloodshed in a series of episodes going back centuries. In lieu of perfecting croissants, some groups around Dagestan and Chechnya have become proficient guerrilla warriors, and Putin perfected his own harsh methods on them during the Chechen Wars of the 1990s and 2000s. Those wars ended with a decisive Russian victory and the installation of micro-Putins, such as Ramzan Kadyrov, so that Moscow could rule Chechnya indirectly. These figures’ loyalty is such that two years ago, in the early days after the invasion of Ukraine, Kadyrov’s Chechen fighters were among the first deployed to fight on Putin’s side.

[Casey Michel: Decolonize Russia]

The problem is that decisive victories are never as decisive as they seem. Most residents of formerly restive regions in the Caucasus enjoy peace as much as anyone. But discontent is easy to detect. On my last visit to Dagestan, a taxi driver sheepishly turned down his music player when a jihadist song came on. Some people remain eager to fight.

The rise of ISIS was useful for Russia, which could imagine no better destination for its domestic jihadists than a faraway conflict with a conveniently high mortality rate. Anyone so inclined could go to Iraq or Syria with Moscow’s tacit blessing. That is one reason the number of ISIS members coming from Russia was so high: They were more or less permitted to go, so that they would self-detonate or run into machine-gun fire there, rather than make trouble within Russia’s borders. Many of those who went are now dead, as hoped. Some are not, and many of those have not lost their fervor. They just need a new object for it.

The connection between Russia and ISIS is, in other words, overdetermined. The cruelty of the killing and even the choice of venue—a concert hall—are all awfully familiar to anyone acquainted with jihadism in Russia. What comes next will be familiar too. The horrific videos and claims of responsibility have already arrived. Next will be a brutal reply from the Russian state. Whether that reply will be addressed to the attack’s actual authors is an open question.

Even if some Russians blame their president for failing to foil the attack, they have no other security guarantor.

Pavel and his wife were attending a concert in Moscow when gunmen opened fire, killing dozens of people.

15-year-old cloakroom attendant Islam Khalilov helped dozens of people to safety during the theatre attack near Moscow.

Everyday Russians say they feel anxious after Friday's brutal attack at the Crocus City Hall that killed 137 people.

Four men accused of participating in the ISIL-claimed attack on a Moscow theatre have appeared in court.

Sunday was a day of mourning in Russia for the victims of a horrific terrorist attack on a packed concert hall.