This essay makes one argument. The split between rhetoric and inquiry was never as clean as the canonical twentieth-century formulations imply. It was a specific historical settlement, accepted as natural for a hundred years, and now visibly cracked. Trump distances himself epistemically from the “deep state” expert apparatus, and his second administration has implemented a substantial share of Project 2025 within sixteen months. Chinese youth diagnose their seniors as 老登 (lǎo dēng, “old privileged farts”) who lecture about grievances they refuse to name. AI capabilities outrun governance by the quarter. The deeper symptom is that comedians and Substack writers are producing better social inquiry than tenured professors, because they have not accepted the settlement that requires them to do only one of the two things. 胡适 (Hu Shih, 1891–1962), the 1980s 文化热 (Culture Fever) generation, and the contemporary work of 项飙 (Xiang Biao) give us the materials to see the settlement as a settlement.