In a society flooded with knowledge, we cannot know everything, so we construct our arguments from fragmented information. In that regard, an example that supplements my argument is the case of the Trump administration and Columbia University in 2025. Harvard resisted, but I don't think every university did.

However, in the essence of your argument, I sometimes sense a hint of elitism. Your logic is very solid and rational. If I entered your area of expertise, I probably wouldn't even be able to engage with you on any logical level. And I'm not trying to win an argument in the first place, but I don't think you should frame things as 'the public was ignorant' using the witch trials as a pretext.

We all become 'the public' in some context.

Were the witch trials really a problem of the public? The church and judicial authorities monopolized the knowledge of the Bible and used it as a tool to maintain ruling order. Couldn't there be a perspective that sees it the other way around, that the elites used the public as a tool instead? When you study medieval European history, education was handled by the church. The authority to identify 'witches' ultimately rested with the church, and that actually makes me think that the public was the educated one.

Regarding the Scopes Trial, frankly, I don't know much about it. So I can't offer a lengthy rebuttal. I can't casually criticize something I don't know about.

But I think your comment shows how the problem of stratification that we're thinking about actually applies