The War on Wisdom, how the GOP made smart uncool.

From outlawing the polio vaccine to ignoring the scientific consensus on gender dysphoria,

to refusing to wear masks in hospitals, to try to strip evolution and science from our schools,

stupid has become fashionable in today's GOP.

When Republican politicians want to score points,

they criticize their opponents as having had elite educations. The GOP's war against Ivy League colleges was particularly evident during the student protests of Israel's slaughter in Gaza.

Congressional Republican inquisitors' voices dripped with scorn and contempt as they

grilled university presidents. It wasn't always this way. I remember when the USSR launched

Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth. It was the fall of 1957. I was six years old,

and my dad and I watched it arc over our house

from our backyard one clear October night. My best friend's father, a ham, radio operator, let us listen

on a shortwave radio to the beep, beep, beep, it was emitting when it was over North America. I'd never

seen my dad so rattled. That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower

administration and Congress. In his January 27th, 1958 state of the union address, Republican

President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation

of America's educational system. With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, he said,

I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead,

invest it in the right places, and do all this not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women.

In less than a year, Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured

piles of money into our public schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids. I was lucky

enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959. By the time I left elementary school,

I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I'd had two years

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