If I had to identify Ground Zero for everything wrong in America, I would point to academia. Our colleges and universities, which we have funded with taxpayer dollars, have given birth to, cultivated, and spread every bad idea, whether about borders, economics, race, national security, immigration policy, biological reality, COVID, climate change, the virtues of faith and Constitution, and just about anything else. Academia claims its entitlement to this kind of national destruction comes about because its members are smart and, by implication, you are dumb. That’s why a video of a smug PhD being absolutely reamed by reality is so very satisfying.

The premise in the video below is that six strangers are being asked to rank themselves and others based on what they think are their own and the other people’s IQs. In the short clip below, we are introduced to only two of the six: Tyler, a 21-year-old high school graduate who is in the Marines, and Maria, a 30-year-old PhD in cancer biology, who works for a biotech company making COVID-19 test kits.  

Before the IQ test, we see Maria ranking herself as the second most intelligent person in the group and Tyler as the least intelligent. And then this happens:

Smug woman with a PhD gets put in her place by IQ test results pic.twitter.com/tVpQfje3qn

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 6, 2023

If you watch the entire video, which is a couple of years old but fascinating, you’ll find that everyone but Tyler is credentialed, including the guy with a double major in dance and cultural anthropology (although the latter also had true humility about his intellect).  All the others assumed the white male Marine was the most stupid in the room:

All I could think of when listening to those who denigrated Tyler was John Kerry, back in the day, explaining that, if you don’t get his poncy Yale degree, you’re good for nothing but the military:

I’ve never made the mistake of confusing either my IQ or my credentials with intelligence or, more importantly, with wisdom. I know many who make that mistake, believing that because someone is credentialed, he or she brings more value to society. Some degrees are useful because they’re concentrated, standardized apprenticeships in practical skills (medicine, architecture, engineering, etc.).

But other degrees, most notably in the liberal arts and social sciences, are a waste of time in today’s world. Once, those people who were not scientists still got post-high school degrees to become knowledgeable about the world in general (hence “university,” from the Latin “universum,” meaning “all things”). At college, you learned about history, great literature that plumbed the heights and depths of human nature, morals, world cultures, etc.

Now, all that is gone. Sex, deviant sex, race hatred, antisemitism, anti-Americanism, hostility to traditional faith…these are the currency of modern academia and have nothing to do with intelligence. Indeed, because they’re easy, they are a pathway for people whose mental processors are slower and less agile than was once indicated by a college degree.  

Anyway, now I’ve depressed myself all over again talking about how awful American academia is. However, I can still enjoy watching the arrogant, credentialed Maria finding herself at the end of the line, while the reviled Tyler not only has the third highest IQ but is a minimal number of points away from the person with the highest IQ.

Image: YouTube screen grab.