That's not an outlandish hypothesis. I'm from a family of medical doctors and entrepreneurs. They are all very conservative, while I'm more of a classical liberal.

I gave up working in the tech industry to pursue a PhD with the hopes of becoming a professor. Considering I research NLP, I could be making top dollar in industry, but have opted for the academia route. My family mostly don't understand and view the PhD as a diversion. Despite securing a postdoc at Cornell, they still ask me to reconsider working in industry so I can become rich and powerful, which they equate with fulfillment in life.

What you have here is actually only a hypothesis since to be a theory it has to have passed at least some means testing. A more probable reality is that as with Mr. Berliner, all the conservative or even skeptical liberal voices have been suspended, deplatformed, shunned, systematically lied about, fact cked by the woke mob and found wanting. They’re denied equal opportunity by the DEI committee, ostracized or outright fired for daring to question “the narrative”, exercise their constitutional right to free speech or actually tell the truth. Twenty yeas ago I was a A regular contribution to NPR. I considered it a factual though left leaning arbiter of real news. Now it is little different than MSNBC or CNN as a mouthpiece for democratic party woke-ism that will never admit the truth of their complicity in pushing Hillary’s package deal with the DNC, 50 pseudo-intelligence officials, Adam Schiff’s perjured testimony to the US public and all the other dirty tricks performed by those tasked with taking down a president. The shenanigans have only accelerated and NPR is at the vanguard of providing suppressive fire for perhaps the least competent, most dangerous, unliked and least accountable President in our history. If our federally subsidized organizations fail to recognize their part in this progressive destruction of our social fabric this nation will soon cease to exist.

There is a big difference between academic diploma / position and being educated. The gap was clearly demonstrated recently by Claudine Gay.

maybe it’s really saying something about modern education