The Fear of Knowledge
Connecting TikTok, student protests, and the worry that informed citizens may connect the dots
Welcome to another edition of Willoughby Hills!
This newsletter explores topics like history, culture, work, urbanism, transportation, travel, agriculture, self-sufficiency, and more.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how little I know. Or really about how little I have learned, which is somewhat related I suppose.
When I was in school, the goal was not to acquire knowledge; the goal was to pass the test. Sometimes the test was one given by a teacher that affected our report cards. Other times, the test was the Ohio mandated Proficiency tests, which affected school funding, teacher performance, and other factors.
I have distinct memories, not of the knowledge I gained in school, but of the strategies I learned around test taking. On a multiple choice test, there will usually be one answer that can immediately be discounted and two that seem likely. If both likely answers are equally plausible, simply guess between the two. If none of them seem any more likely than the other, choose C, because statistically, C is the most common right answer.
I passed all of my required tests and did well enough on my SATs to earn a high school diploma and gain admission to a good college. But I still didn’t really know anything.
My adult years have been spent trying to learn as much as I can to make up for all of those wasted years of knowledge. I’ve tried to seek out not only information, but truth, which is much harder to discover.
I used to believe that my lack of knowledge was a failure of individual teachers, or maybe at worst, our local school district and its policies. But I have become increasingly convinced that knowledge and truth are actively being withheld from most American citizens by the powerful elites in politics and business.
While most of us look around and see the greatest threat to our society to be gun violence or climate change, these ruling elites fear an educated population more than anything else.
What proof do I have for these claims? Simply look at their actions.
Last week in this space, I wrote about the protests on Columbia’s campus against Israel. At the time, more than 100 students had been arrested after their encampment was raided by the NYPD.
Since last week, dozens of Gaza Solidarity Encampments have sprung up on college campuses across the country: UC Berkeley, USC, Tufts, Harvard, University of Texas, Ohio State, and University of Minnesota, to name just a few.
From the reporting I’ve seen, these were peaceful student protests, designed to call attention to the murder of Palestinians and America’s funding of the genocide through Israel. Rather than allow these protests to continue, administrators have been calling in police in riot gear to break up the demonstrations and arrest participants.
Yes, this is happening in places with Republican governors and generally right leaning electorates, such as Texas. There’s a widely circulating video from 2019 of Governor Greg Abbott signing a law protecting free speech on college campuses, often being cut against footage of police carrying assault rifles arresting young students on the UT Campus.
But voting Blue didn’t stop this violence from reaching liberal enclaves either. At my alma mater of Emerson College, a private liberal arts school in the heart of Boston, more than 100 students were arrested and brutalized by Boston Police last week. Any illusion that Blue states or Blue politicians were “safer” seems to be fading fast.
Again, these student protestors are not inciting violence. They are not destroying property. They are not committing any crime other than peacefully assembling and voicing their freedom of speech.
But they are shining a light on how U.S. taxpayer money is being used to brutalize and murder Palestinians, and how private investments (including those of university endowments) also perpetuate that violence. This is knowledge that I certainly didn’t have seven months ago, and it’s knowledge that the ruling class does not want us to have.
When politicians weren’t calling for the arrest of protestors last week, they found time to limit knowledge in another way by passing the so-called “Tik Tok ban” through both houses of Congress. Joe Biden signed it into law, then said his presidential campaign will continue to post to TikTok.
The law requires ByteDance, the China-based owner of TikTok, to either sell their U.S. operations to an American company or be banned in this country. Supposedly, it’s to safeguard American’s personal information from being used by the Chinese Communist Party, although there are not similar measures to limit access to our data by Meta, Amazon, or Apple.
Some people suspect that the real reason for this push to ban TikTok now is because it has been a vital source of pro-Palestinian content in the wake of October 7, especially as the mainstream media has seemed to tell the story of the violence through the lens of Israel.
Again, knowledge is dangerous to the ruling class.
Seeing the violence in Palestine has certainly been eye-opening to me. Perhaps even more eye-opening has been to realize that this genocide isn’t an anomaly, but a continuation of U.S. policies abroad for decades.
I’ve written before about recently learning that American troops destroyed Manila and killed more than 100,000 Filipinos during World War II. This was at a time when the U.S. occupied the Philippines, so they were essentially killing Americans. There are other stories like this from Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.
From the perspective of America’s elites, the most dangerous thing that any citizen can do in this moment is to understand that Palestine is part of a continuum, not simply a blip. And so, knowledge is shut down. TikTok is banned, college campuses become scenes of violence. To prevent us from connecting the dots.
This may seem like an odd connection, but thinking of the U.S. media ecosystem in this moment reminds me of something Sarah McCammon said in my recent podcast interview with her.
McCammon is the author of the book The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. In the book, she described being raised as a white Evangelical and her entire world being carefully constructed by her parents and religious leaders.
She attended Christian schooling from her elementary years through college, where textbooks were written by Christian authors to push Christian agendas. She watched Christian TV shows, listened to Christian music, and had limited interaction with mainstream American pop culture.
It was almost a Truman Show existence, where every element of her life was designed to reinforce a certain perspective and worldview. As McCammon grew up though, she began to notice cracks in that narrative and to ask questions. It ultimately led her, and the many other folks she profiles in her book, to deconstruct their faith, usually realizing that they had been gaslit for a long time and needed to learn a new way of relating to the world.
We are indeed all living in a similar bubble at the moment. Consider the feedback loop between politicians, police, and the media. The state’s perspective is often reported as objective fact, with little room for criticism or critical analysis. Newsrooms have been stripped to the bone, with overworked journalists serving more as stenographers than investigators.
But the knowledge is out there to be discovered. For McCammon, it meant trips to science museums that seemed to disprove everything she had been taught about creationism. For those of us that don't feel as informed as we’d like, it means listening to first hand accounts from these protests or reading books about our violent, racist history in this country.
The knowledge is there. At least for now.
It’s our job to seek it out, to keep learning, and to question why there are some among us who will stop at nothing to see that knowledge is silenced.
Thanks for reading Willoughby Hills! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Related Reading
Bats Have More Rights than Palestinians
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.