Education Quote by Mickey Kaus

Kaus takes an old moral fear - that knowledge amplifies power - and drags it into the blogging era, where a keyboard can feel like a crowbar. The line works because it flips the usual hierarchy: we’re trained to treat “learned” as a compliment, “ignorant” as a hazard. Kaus concedes the hazard, then argues the truly dangerous figure isn’t the dim thug; it’s the articulate one with a platform. “Unarmed robber” is almost comic, a petty criminal reduced to bluster. “Fully armed,” by contrast, lands with a click: the weapon is credibility, plus the reach and speed of publication.

The subtext is a dig at the early-2000s faith that democratized media would automatically purify public discourse. Blogging, in that optimistic story, was sunlight. Kaus suggests it can also be a force multiplier for bad character: sharpened arguments, selective evidence, rhetorical tricks, an audience primed to reward certainty. The “robber” metaphor is doing a lot of work: it implies not just error but extraction - attention, trust, outrage, donations, status. You’re being taken, and the taking is easier when the thief can cite sources.

Contextually, Kaus was part of the first wave of political bloggers who understood the internet as both liberation and temptation: a place where smart people could bypass gatekeepers, and also where gatekeeping’s old friction (editors, fact-checkers, reputational cost) evaporated. The barb isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-credential-as-alibi. In a medium that rewards velocity and hot takes, learning becomes less a safeguard than ammunition.