Good question and the best answer is Conservatives since about the 1960s….and ever since they have worked tirelessly to eradicate it….

As a kid, my favorite part of grocery shopping wasn’t the snacks or the cereal aisle, it was the tabloids at the checkout. I’d devour headlines about Batboy sightings, Bigfoot vacations, royal scandals, and the occasional presidential summit with extraterrestrials. These were absurdities printed with a straight face, and the comedy was half the fun.

I didn’t expect that, decades later, those supermarket fever dreams would feel less like parody and more like prophecy. The fantasies that once lived on cheap newsprint now pulse through mainstream culture. In the social media age, anything can be “true” if it flatters your bias or fuels your outrage. And with AI dissolving the already thin boundary between fact and fiction, we’ve entered an era where reality feels optional, truth feels negotiable, and the most sensational lie travels at the speed of an algorithm.

In this environment, “common sense,” emotion, and personal anecdote have muscled into spaces once reserved for evidence and expertise. But there’s nothing “common sense” about medicine, climate science, gender identity, or any other complex system that shapes human life. Yet this appeal to “what feels right” has become the jet fuel of America’s culture war. It declares: If the issue seems simple to me, it should be simple to you. And if you disagree, you’re elitist or part of a hidden agenda. This flattening of complexity has turned ignorance into authenticity and expertise into betrayal.

This is anti-intellectualism, and though accelerating, it isn’t new. Richard Hofstadter warned in the 1960s of a growing American suspicion of expertise, a belief that intelligence itself was untrustworthy. What was once a cultural tendency has hardened into a political identity and, increasingly, a governing philosophy.

It’s also tied to a literacy crisis hiding in plain sight. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 21% of U.S. adults struggle with “Level 1” literacy, basic decoding with limited comprehension, and 34% of adults perform at “Below Level 2,” meaning they cannot reliably compare or integrate information across texts. The more recent NCES update shows low literacy rates increasing, with “Below Level 2” rising from 29% to 34% as of 2024.

America’s Peril: The Rot of Anti-Intellectualism and Demagoguery is Costing Us Our Future

So why are so many Americans afraid of intellectuals?

They prefer to grasp a hold of some hair-brain idea than see if the idea holds water….is it laziness or just plain stupidity?

Inquiring minds want to know.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”