Today, Michelle Goldberg burned him further, in “Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness: Trump’s son-in-law has no business running the coronavirus response.”
Some excerpts, although you’ll really want to read the whole thing (if I bolded, I’d have to bold everything):
Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror.
According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly said. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top expert on infectious diseases, has said he trusts Cuomo’s estimate.)
Even now, it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”
…
The journalist Andrea Bernstein looked closely at Kushner’s business record for her recent book “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power,” speaking to people on all sides of his real estate deals as well as those who worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in 2006.
Kushner, Bernstein told me, “really sees himself as a disrupter.” Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he “believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about.”
And right there, we have it: Kushner is the glorious poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect:
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: the cognitive bias of illusory superiority.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect explains that many people are not merely ignorant. They are unaware of being ignorant. Their brains do not accept that they are uninformed.
In other words, they are too intellectually inadequate (to be euphemistic) to realize they’re intellectually inadequate. They don’t know that they don’t know and do not have the capacity to understand their inadequacy.
They think they know all there is to know.
Unlike a lot of us, who spend considerable time reading, absorbing information and double checking the information for accuracy, because we’re aware we don’t know everything.
We know what we don’t know.
Dunning-Kruger also makes it clear that we can’t convince people like this that they don’t know and should learn. Their brains are incapable of absorbing it. They are smug in their ignorance.
This is Jared. This is a lot of people but he’s today’s It Boy.