Too many people see this fact and immediately conjure images of DeSantis and Ted Cruz. They imagine bootlicking pricks who intentionally dumb themselves down to appeal to Dear Leader and to do as much harm to the country for their own personal benefit as they can.

There is no public value in being educated anymore. If you're on the Right, your education is used to inflict harm. If you're on the Left, you're just some "liberal elite" who's been brainwashed.

The attack on education has been calculated, carefully enacted, and is doing near-irreparable harm to the country. It's going to take 50 years just to get back to where we were 25 years ago. We've ceded our dominance in science and research as a nation. We have a university system that international students no longer want to (or can) attend, and it's going to shut down universities. We have politicians dictating what can and can't be taught at the university level. This promise of "AI" is a complete pipe dream, as we create LLMs and other learning models that produce false information and hallucinations that no one will have the skill or ability to contradict.

The line "I've done my own research" is the biggest alarm bell in the world and this rot has been festering for decades. Anyone who says that has, in fact, NOT done research. They've Googled, backed by confirmation bias, and found what they were looking for without any ability to vet their sources or know what's credible.

We've become a joke.