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The word seemed small enough: overeducated. It appeared in political commentary as an explanation for why politicians, journalists, campaign workers, academics, and experts could no longer understand ordinary Americans. Sometimes it was a joke. Sometimes it was an accusation. Sometimes Democrats used it against themselves. But hearing the same formulation repeatedly raises a question that cannot be answered by an anecdote: has education itself become a political liability in American public discourse?

To investigate that question, I began tracing the language backward through television-news data from GDELT, archived CNN and Fox transcripts, and individual examples from 2015 through 2025. The goal was not simply to count the word overeducated. It was to distinguish several related but different ideas. Anti-elitism portrays educated or credentialed people as a socially distant ruling class. Anti-credentialism questions whether degrees, prestigious institutions, or professional status actually indicate wisdom or competence. Anti-intellectualism goes further, treating experts, academics, or intellectuals as a broadly untrustworthy class and sometimes elevating “common sense” as an alternative to expertise itself.

A citizen who believes an economist is wrong is not necessarily anti-intellectual. Neither is someone who thinks Harvard exercises too much influence over government. Experts fail. Institutions develop blind spots. Credentials can become instruments of status. The warning sign comes when the argument changes from “this expert is wrong” to “people like this are wrong because they are experts.”

The strongest quantitative evidence comes not from the relatively rare word overeducated, but from the broader political category surrounding it: elite. GDELT tracked the words elite and elites across cable-news closed captions. Before the 2016 election, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC used the terminology at broadly comparable levels. Then the lines separated. Our reconstruction of GDELT’s published normalized series shows Fox averaging approximately 0.093 percent during 2015-2016 and approximately 0.119 percent during 201-2019. CNN moved in the opposite direction, from roughly 0.077 percent to 0.053 percent, while MSNBC fell from roughly 0.089 percent to 0.049 percent. During 2017-2019, Fox’s normalized use of elite/elites was approximately 2.25 times CNN’s and 2.45 times MSNBC’s.

Those figures do not establish anti-intellectualism by themselves. The word elite has many meanings. Elite troops are not Ivy League professors, and elite athletes are not bureaucrats. But the divergence establishes something important: a linguistic shift occurred, and the transcripts help show what part of that shift sounded like in practice.

By January 2017, Fox viewers could hear commentator Charles Krauthammer refer to protesters as “overeducated college students.” Later that year, Fox commentary complained of “overeducated talking heads.” In 2019, Fox political analysis described journalists as “over-educated reporters.” In 2020, Mike Huckabee described Elizabeth Warren as an “overeducated millionaire” belonging to what he called an out-of-touch “technocratic class.” The construction is remarkably consistent. Education is not merely an accomplishment; it is connected to a social identity: educated becomes elite, and elite becomes disconnected.

By 2022, that rhetoric had undergone a subtle but meaningful grammatical transformation when Greg Gutfeld referred to “the overeducated.” Calling one person overeducated is an insult. Calling people “the overeducated” creates a category. A characteristic becomes a social class. That linguistic move is important because it changes the argument from criticism of an individual to suspicion of a type of person.

The more consequential part of the investigation, however, may not involve the word overeducated at all. It may involve the relationship between expertise and “common sense.” In a June 2020 Fox segment, Laura Ingraham argued that viewers’ own common sense made them smarter than supposed experts who repeatedly got major questions wrong. The discussion went further, questioning whether those people deserved to be considered experts at all. A guest then praised Donald Trump for having common sense and for no longer listening to experts.

This crosses an important rhetorical boundary. Disagreeing with an epidemiologist’s projection is criticism. Saying experts have become politically captured may be institutional criticism. But when the argument becomes that experts lack what ordinary people possess,common sense,the dispute is no longer merely about evidence. It is about which kind of person deserves authority. The expert possesses credentials. The citizen possesses common sense. The two are presented as competitors.

The pattern appeared again during the 2024 vice-presidential debate, when JD Vance dismissed criticism from economists by noting that they had PhDs while arguing that what they lacked was common sense and wisdom. The remark itself came from a candidate, not a television network, and CNN, Fox, and MSNBC all aired the debate. Simply counting those broadcasts as network rhetoric would therefore be misleading. But subsequent commentary repeated the broader proposition that perhaps the experts know too much to understand what ordinary people already know. That comes considerably closer to anti-intellectualism than merely calling someone elite.

CNN complicates any attempt to tell a simple story in which Fox invented the language and everyone else eventually copied it. CNN carried the concept surprisingly early. In 2017, a CNN discussion described Trump supporters as believing that “over educated urban elites” looked down upon them. In 2020, professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway criticized academic tenure as a benefit for “the overeducated.” In 2022, Fareed Zakaria warned that Democratic policy choices could reinforce the impression of a party representing “over-educated elites.” Context changes the meaning of those examples. CNN was sometimes describing anti-elite sentiment rather than endorsing it, and at other times commentators were criticizing credentialed institutions. Neither should automatically be classified as anti-intellectualism.

Something different becomes more visible in 2025. The word begins appearing repeatedly in Democratic self-criticism. Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha argued that the party was being run by “over-educated” people from places such as Harvard and Yale. In another CNN appearance, Rocha said Democrats needed to return to the places where “regular people” live and gather instead of remaining trapped in an “overeducated” political culture. Political analyst Kristen Soltis Anderson Warren later described Democratic campaign personnel as coming from “young, educated, maybe even overeducated backgrounds.” The accusation was no longer simply that wealthy elites controlled the country. It was that education itself contributed to political disconnection. The implied opposition had become regular people versus overeducated people.

Fox’s trajectory between 2020 and 2025 is different. The evidence does not show a sudden outbreak of anti-expert rhetoric after 2020 because strong experts-versus-common-sense rhetoric was already present by then. What appears to change by 2025 is institutionalization. “Common sense” becomes not merely a phrase in commentary but part of a recurring media identity, including Fox News at Night’s “Common Sense Department.” The phrase itself is not anti-intellectual. There is nothing inherently hostile to knowledge about common sense. But its political environment matters. Donald Trump entered his second presidency declaring what he called a “revolution of common sense,” and the phrase became part of the administration’s governing vocabulary. That does not prove coordination between the administration and Fox. It does suggest that “common sense” had evolved from a rhetorical argument into a broader political brand.

Treating everything in this investigation as anti-intellectualism would obscure what is actually happening. There appear to be several overlapping currents. One is anti-elitism: people with prestigious credentials wield too much power and do not understand ordinary Americans. That argument can be entirely legitimate. A democracy should worry about concentrated power regardless of whether that power belongs to billionaires, politicians, or Ivy League technocrats. Another is anti-credentialism: degrees do not necessarily indicate competence, wisdom, or good judgment. That can also be legitimate. Experts fail, institutions reward conformity, and prestigious universities reproduce social hierarchies. A democratic citizen should never confuse credentials with infallibility.

The line becomes more troubling when the argument shifts to something else: their education itself makes them less trustworthy. Now the PhD becomes a liability. The professor becomes suspicious because he is a professor. The economist’s expertise becomes evidence that she cannot understand ordinary life. “Common sense” and expertise become competing systems of knowledge. That is the line this investigation is trying to locate.

The evidence supports several conclusions. There was a measurable change in elite/elites rhetoric after 2016, with Fox separating sharply from CNN and MSNBC. Fox commentary repeatedly connected higher education and professional credentials with elitism, disconnection, and distrust. There are explicit examples in which “common sense” is presented as superior to expert judgment. And by 2025, CNN repeatedly aired Democratic self-criticism using overeducated as an explanation for the party’s distance from ordinary voters.

There are also conclusions the evidence does not support. We cannot yet say that the exact word overeducated increased by a specific percentage across all three networks because the complete annual NGram export needed for that calculation has not yet been recovered. We cannot establish that CNN copied Fox. We cannot conclude that every criticism of expertise constitutes anti-intellectualism. And nothing here establishes an American equivalent of China’s Cultural Revolution.

That comparison helped inspire the investigation, but the historical differences are enormous. Mao’s Cultural Revolution involved organized persecution of intellectuals, destruction of institutions, forced ideological reeducation, imprisonment, torture, and killing. American television rhetoric is not that. The historical comparison is useful only as a warning about a much narrower phenomenon: what happens when knowledge itself becomes associated with political disloyalty or social suspicion.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is that American politics may not actually be becoming anti-expert in a straightforward way. Something more selective may be happening. Political movements still employ economists. They still cite doctors. They still invite professors, lawyers, scientists, and analysts onto television. They still surround themselves with credentials. The distinction increasingly appears to be: our experts are experts; their experts are elites.

That is not the disappearance of expertise. It is the politicization of expertise. Knowledge becomes another marker of identity. A degree no longer tells us merely what someone studied. It can tell audiences which cultural tribe that person supposedly belongs to. Once that happens, evidence itself becomes vulnerable to partisan sorting. Citizens no longer ask only, “Is this claim true?” They begin asking, “What kind of person is telling me this?”

That may be the more consequential democratic danger. A republic cannot function by unquestioningly obeying experts, but neither can it function by assuming expertise is evidence of corruption. Self-government requires something harder from citizens: the ability to question authority without rejecting knowledge, to distrust institutions without abandoning evidence, and to recognize that neither credentials nor intuition make anyone infallible.

The question left by this investigation is therefore not whether Americans should trust experts. It is whether we can continue distinguishing skepticism of authority from suspicion of knowledge itself.

When does distrust of elites become distrust of knowledge?

Bibliography

GDELT Project. “Mentions of ‘Elites’ Increase on Fox News After Trump’s Election.” GDELT Project, 2020.

GDELT Project. “Announcing the Television News NGram 2.0 Dataset.” GDELT Project.

Motta, Matthew. Anti-Scientific Americans: The Prevalence, Origins, and Political Consequences of Anti-Intellectualism in the US. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Merkley, Eric. “Anti-Intellectualism, Populism, and Motivated Resistance to Expert Consensus.” Public Opinion Quarterly, 2020.

CNN. CNN Transcripts, selected broadcasts, 2017-2025.

Fox News. Fox News Transcripts and Commentary, selected broadcasts, 201-2025.

CBS News. “Full Vice Presidential Debate Transcript: Walz-Vance.” October 1, 2024.

With apologies and credit due to Charles Shultz, creator of Peanuts

This May, a medevac plane took off from New Mexico to pick up a patient. Once in the air, the plane ran into trouble because US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the pilots of the medevac plane forced to revert to older technology. Because of that, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.

JONES: “It’s already happening in Europe. You will have to face scan to leave your house. You won’t be able to leave your house more than 3 days a week. We’re in trouble.”