Started writing a response to the OP late yesterday evening, and it was about how this thing boils down to Dunning-Kruger. We see it every single time flat earth, evolution or anti-vax is discussed on these forums. Inevitably, a few posters will come forward expressing doubt about virtually all peer-reviewed evidence to date, and after tens of pages of back and forth, it becomes blatantly clear that their knowledge is based on a 3-hour long youtube session. But somehow after that, they're so well versed in a field like astrophysics that they can successfully challenge and dispel basically all currently accepted scientific knowledge on the topic.
It's a combination of several personality traits that seems like they're featured heavily in the mix. First up is what's described in the DK effect, where people of low ability assume they're experts, because they're too ignorant to realize that they're incompetent. Add in a dose of arrogance with that ignorance, and now they believe the experts are all shills who aren't actually smarter and more competent than they are, they're just liars. Now add in a low agreeable personality and a distaste for traditional authority, and all the dots connect: You end up with incompetent individuals who are greatly overestimating their ability, prone to believing the craziest shit simply because it goes against conventional knowledge which they see as being forced on them by people who are liars, because they couldn't possibly be smarter than them, because only very few, if any, people are.
That's to a large extent true. (Red flag - I'm about to take the discussion to other areas of social study and politics.)
However, there is a missing element. That the smarter are not always the wiser, and especially in a society like America where we are supposed to raise people to be responsible and inquisitive. (Traditionally.) Where the romanticized Yeoman Farmer comes from. Enlightenment thinkers creating a system where diligent Puritans could government themselves without a need for much in the way of reeducation, guillotines, or later collectivist (I mean that in the real sense, not as a byword) notions of nationalism, communism, or deriving any meaning from the horde, I mean mob, I mean crushing hand of the authority, whew, no sorry I mean The People.
Smarter people are no more immune to wanting - power over other people's lives, greed, and all new forms of dishonesty.
That goes double or triple in politics. "What's the matter with Kansas?" is largely that a rural and traditional community does not want to be rich and prosperous in the way of Maryland.
At all, and while some of those people are no doubt ignorant or belligerent, most are probably more capable to determine their own lives than a "smarter" man with a different culture, background, life experience, expertise, and value system.
Climate Change is where we see a lot of direct conflict here. Do most serious people agree that it exists? Yes. Do most serious people have different ideas on what to do to correct the problem? Yes, or they should, otherwise the orthodoxy of the "knowledgeable" runs for a Dunning-Kruger effect in the opposite direction.
Imagine there was a brilliant economist, and from that brilliance, he wrote on politics, society, and the human condition... and yet, outside of the true believers his insights were rather awful. (This fictional character has a striking resemblance to Paul Krugman!)
When that is strip-mined out of Americans, humility and live and let live attitudes are also replaced with that clumsy paternalism from the top and this kind of empty rabble rousing from the bottom.
This is all a serious problem that is a bit above my weight class to handle, at least at this time, but in summary - all levels of society are suffering from delusions of grandeur - the bottom rungs call it "common sense," while suppose intellectuals call it "common science," when no such thing applies to complications of people's lives, in order to understand that? Well, wisdom has set her table, she is always waiting for those who want to come and listen.
