Yes, I know that one pundit's blathering is an awful lot to hang a column on, but hear me out, because I want to riff on an absurdly stupid post by one of the most influential pundits among the midwits, Ann Applebaum.
Who exactly is Anne Applebaum? She is the Queen of the Midwits. Midwits are people with above-average intelligence, but not by nearly as much as they think.
I believe, contrary to what some argue, that of all the people in the world, they are by far the most likely to suffer from the so-called Dunning-Kruger Effect, a well-known intellectual defect in which people wrongly believe they are far more intelligent, competent, and able to see further into a problem than the people around them. They are smart enough to believe they understand something, and too dumb to realize they don't.
Most intellectuals and technocrats fit into this category. Rather than seeing that the systems they are playing with are too complex to control easily, they live under the illusion that they have enough insight to make them work properly. They usually wind up mucking things up horrifically. In many ways, they're the opposite of Javier Milei, who wants to get government out of the way because the market can't be tweaked into perfection; these people believe they can tweak the world and make it obey their fantasies.
Anne Applebaum is a perfect example.
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum[2][3] (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist, historian and foreign-policy commentator. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She became a Polish citizen in 2013, and is married to Radosław Sikorski, Poland's deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs.[4]
Applebaum has worked for The Economist and The Spectator[5] and was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post from 2002 to 2006.[6] In 2004, she won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Gulag: A History.[7] She is a staff writer and commentator for The Atlantic[8] and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.[9]
As you can see, Anne has the perfect resume. Every credential-obsessed midwit would swoon and bow down to somebody who went to Yale and the London School of Economics, and she has written for all the Best™ outlets, including the ever-prestigious Atlantic magazine.
Who wouldn't be impressed? She doesn't just parrot The Narrative™; she has been shaping it for decades.
That's the fundamental problem. We don't have to imagine it. $500 million would fund Medicare and Medicaid for 2.19 hours.
— Austen Allred (@Austen) November 4, 2026
And yet...Anne believes something as truly stupid as this. It's the same sort of crap as all those people who confidently say they could fix world hunger for $6 billion, or that a wealth tax in California would raise enough money to provide healthcare for all in the state.
It is truly mind-bogglingly stupid, but said with such authority and backed by enough credentials that all the midwits nod along. It's the same sort of thinking that leads people to say that we don't need SpaceX; we have NASA! As if one tells you something about the other.
There is no need to actually UNDERSTAND how anything works; they believe that it's all technical details they can hand over to the social engineers after they have come up with brilliant ideas on how to fix the world.
It's Dunning-Kruger. They believe they know how things work and are competent to fix them, and they leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Every time you hear a midwit say Elon Musk is just lucky, or hires the right people, and that NASA could do what he does, assume they are a midwit.
Truly intelligent people tend to underrate their competence and ability to improve things. They second-guess themselves. That's not a philosophical point; it has been measured. Midwits think they are smarter and more competent than they are because they don't actually understand things; truly gifted people tend to underrate their competence because they see the uncertainties and flaws that can trip them up.
A few true geniuses are both confident and can perform what amounts to magic, but they are one in a billion.
It took me years to learn something fundamental about life: I would much rather trust somebody with an IQ of 95-105 than somebody with an IQ of 125 when making most decisions. People of normal intelligence are much less likely to overthink things and overcomplicate things, and focus on practical problem-solving. People a standard deviation or so above that level, and maybe 2 SDs, trust their intellect more than they should.
"I see how it works" is a dangerous thing when you actually don't.
Think of all the smartest economists out there; they have one thing in common: they say planning doesn't work and make things work, and they are right. It's the midwits who come up with the schemes to tweak things and regulate the hell out of the economy.
When somebody as "smart" as Anne Applebaum — and she IS smart, just not as smart as she thinks — can say something so remarkably stupid, it's because she is confident when she shouldn't be. $500 million is a few months of Somali fraud in Minnesota, not world-changing money. She should know that, but is too incurious to care.
I saw this bouncing around but actually listened to what he said. Holy hell.
— Austen Allred (@Austen) November 4, 2026
It's the midwits who are the most dangerous people in the world. They build things like the United Nations and think it will bring world peace. They create the European Union and think you can regulate your way into prosperity. They believe you can tax your way to better weather. They believe NASA can do what Elon Musk cannot, because how hard could it be? They say idiotic things like "Diversity is our strength."
They ignore evidence because they "know better."
Generally speaking, outside of street crime, it's not the stupid people who should frighten you. They can do damage, but it is limited and controllable for the most part. They never get control over major institutions, and nobody assumes they are especially competent.
People of average intelligence are the backbone of our society. They make things work, and we should respect them much more because we value "intelligence" more than competence and results. If an apocalypse comes, I would much rather be in a group of practical-minded people of average intelligence and more common sense than I have in my pinky finger.
Geniuses are great to have around when things are going well, and rarely useful outside limited circumstances. In fact, I suspect that there are more geniuses than we think; it's just that most of them don't have enough practical skills to ever get noticed.
It's the midwits you have to worry about. The people who are smart enough to see a bit further than most, and dumb enough to think that means they understand things and can improve them. These people are the socialists, the technocrats, the meddlers who leave a trail of destruction.
People like Anne Applebaum, who, if she ever reads this, will trot out the credentials to prove how smart she is.
Me? I just see that tweet and think: God, please, quit making more midwits.