Dwain Northey (Gen X)

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, we were taught that knowledge was power. Teachers said it. Parents said it. Television specials said it. Every after-school program, public service announcement, and educational cartoon hammered home the same message: learn things. Read books. Ask questions. Get an education. The more you know, the better your life will be.

It wasn’t a controversial idea.

Nobody looked at the smart kid in class and accused him of being part of some elitist conspiracy. Nobody claimed scientists were enemies of the people. Nobody suggested that universities were dangerous because they exposed students to facts.

Knowledge was considered a virtue.

Fast forward to today, and somehow we’ve stumbled into a political movement whose unofficial motto seems to be, “Please stop learning things.”

The man who famously declared, “I love the poorly educated,” wasn’t joking. It has become a governing philosophy. Expertise is suspect. Education is suspect. Science is suspect. Journalism is suspect. History is suspect. If you spend your life studying a subject, apparently that makes you less qualified to discuss it than somebody who watched a three-minute video on social media while sitting on the toilet.

Climate scientists? Can’t trust them.

Medical researchers? Probably hiding something.

Economists? Part of the deep state.

Historians? Woke propagandists.

Teachers? Brainwashing children.

At some point, ignorance stopped being something to overcome and became something to celebrate.

The strangest part is that every advancement we enjoy came from people who knew things. The phone in your pocket wasn’t invented by someone screaming at experts. The internet wasn’t built by people who thought education was a scam. Modern medicine wasn’t developed by folks who believed feelings were a substitute for evidence.

Every bridge, airplane, vaccine, computer chip, GPS satellite, and MRI machine exists because somebody spent years learning complicated things.

Knowledge built the modern world.

Yet we’re living through a period where facts themselves are treated as political opinions. If reality disagrees with someone’s worldview, reality is the thing that gets rejected.

Imagine telling our parents and grandparents that one day politicians would campaign against universities, research institutions, libraries, and scientific expertise. The Greatest Generation fought a world war with engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and codebreakers. They understood that knowledge wasn’t weakness; it was a strategic advantage.

Now we have leaders who seem terrified of educated people asking inconvenient questions.

Why are prices rising?

Where did the money go?

What does the data actually say?

Who benefits from this policy?

Questions are dangerous when your argument depends on people not asking any.

As a Gen Xer, maybe that’s what bothers me most. We were raised on curiosity. We were told to look things up. Go to the library. Read the encyclopedia. Learn how things work. Figure it out yourself.

Now we’re told that expertise is elitism and ignorance is authenticity.

God forbid we advance anything.

God forbid we solve problems.

God forbid we invest in research, education, or innovation.

Because if knowledge is power, then an informed population is difficult to manipulate. And maybe that’s the real problem.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that knowledge is still power.

The difference is that when I was a kid, everyone admitted it.