Geopolitics and Empire is joined by Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies, senior Brownstone

scholar and author of the just published The Treason of the Experts, COVID and the Credential

Class Thomas Harrington. Welcome to Geopolitics and Empire, Prof. I'm delighted to be here,

we spoke last year on my TNT radio and and now we're meeting virtually face to face for the first time.

And now you've got a new book out.

Again, the title is The Treason of the Experts.

And if you want to tell us, you know, just to start a bit about the book.

Yeah.

Well, I'll start with the title.

It may bring some bells in some people's mind. There's a famous book written in 1927 by the French intellectual Julian Banda called

La Traition de Clerc, the treason of the clerks or of the educated class.

And he wrote it in the wake of World War I.

And it's a reflection on how the elites in both France and Germany had betrayed their

role as guarantors of the search for culture, for truth in culture at that time.

And it's a searing indictment of the way they all rolled over.

And that's the way I felt these last few years.

And the second part, of course, is the credential class,

which I think adds another aspect to it. because I wanted to separate the ideas of having

a credential and actually being wise or intelligent. And I think the gap, and we can talk about

some of the reasons why that gap between the credential and the wisdom it's supposed to represent is getting wider all the time

and has a lot to do with the way the university industry has deployed itself in these last 30 and 40 years.

But it has another factor that I think has to do with the way our society has become divided socioeconomically. And so we've lived in,

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