Elon Visits The Pentagon | Power Line

What is “news” and who gets to decide? DOGE head Elon Musk was scheduled to visit the Pentagon today and meet with Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the meeting was to discuss (and tout) the $580 million in budget cuts announced yesterday by Sec. Hegseth, as part of the Musk’s DOGE efficiency push. But the New York Times is pushing a much more sinister narrative. This item was posted on Twitter (X) last evening,

From NYT team, Musk set to get access tomorrow to top-secret US plan for potential war with China

The article itself sits behind the Times‘ paywall. But you can get the point of the piece from this “Elon Pounces” piece in Reuters. The wire service reports,

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the briefing for Musk would be attended by senior U.S. military officials in the Pentagon and would be an overview on a number of different topics, including China.

No one is on the record, just an anonymous source that may or may not be a corporeal being. The “topic” of China, and “top-secret” war plans are two qualitatively different things. For the record, both Pres. Trump and Musk have flatly denied the reports.

So, which is it? Is the head of government efficiency efforts just visiting one of the world’s biggest bureaucratic headquarters, one that hasn’t passed a financial audit in years? Or is Dr. Evil meddling in the war plans we have against our biggest rival?

For all of us who weren’t in the room, all we are left with is probabilities. It seems obvious to me that the Times‘ report is part of a concerted effort by leftists to smear/destroy Trump’s right-hand man, as the President himself is still too popular to go after directly.

And in past eras, the Times would have gotten away with it. And I see that as the point of a recent piece by commentator Richard Fernandez. He wrote the piece {“That Day in Dallas”) behind a paywall at his Belmont Club site. But he makes a similar argument in a Twitter (X) thread that concludes with this post,

For better or worse, hundred percent knowledge is dead in the human domain. What we have now are expectations, probability distributions and a posteriori Monday morning quarterbacking. We are back in the world before the canon. The good news is we’ve been here before.

At one juncture, the New York Times represented the official truth. But no more. All we are left with are the probabilities (such as those seen in Polymarket polls) that guess at the underlying truth. Fernandez notes that we constantly update those probabilities based on new information becoming available (“the Bayesian nature of understanding”).

To illustrate his point, Fernandez cites the example of the ever-changing origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus originated however it originated. It’s the official story that keeps changing. In past eras, we relied on the official unchanging truth received from authority.

John wrote on this very topic back on Monday (“They knew, they all new”). He wrote,

So whoever believed government assurances about the genesis of covid in 2020 and thereafter was a sucker. This goes, too, for those who believed government claims that it was unsafe to gather in public (unless you were a George Floyd protester), that masks would prevent covid from spreading, that it wouldn’t hurt to shut down schools, businesses and churches, that vaccination would prevent you from getting or spreading the disease, and so on.

That there is no longer an official, authoritative repository of unchallenged truth is both terrifying and liberating.

But to build on Ferandez’s conclusion, we’ve been there before, and we did just fine.