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Shadow1980 said:

While not all conservatives believe outlandish nonsense, I cannot help but notice how American conservatism in general has become more and more open to rejecting objective reality. Bircher-style paranoia is becoming ever more mainstream. We are, after all, talking about a political movement where the majority of its members think that not only is the scientific consensus on global warming is wrong, but that the science is part of some vast left-wing hoax designed to destroy America's economy or something else equally nefarious. We have dozens of Congressmen and now also a president-elect who parrot this nonsense. AGW denialism has become increasingly ingrained into the very notion of what it means to be a conservative. More and more it's becoming part of their identity. Fewer than one in four Republicans accept the scientific consensus that global warming is real and predominantly due to human activities.

If you can be convinced to reject physical reality itself, you can be convinced of a host of other outlandish claims supported by zero evidence. Even in 2016, less than 30% of Republicans agree with the statement "Barack Obama was born in the United States." And most relevant to this discussion, at least 60% of Republicans believe voter fraud is common. Again, we have conservative people in positions of political power who either refuse to fight against these obviously false ideas, or they believe in them themselves. This is not healthy.

They say that all stereotypes have an element of truth to them. While support for science denialism or Birtherism or voter fraud conspiracies are not unanimous, they are present in an overwhelmingly majority of the conservative populace.

To be fair, there are plenty of liberals who believe ridiculous things, but in every case I can find, support for such notions is far, far from mainstream, and in many cases it has no significant ideological component (liberals and conservatives are both just as likely to be anti-vax or anti-GMO, for example, and such views are a relatively small minority). The "paranoid style" is largely a conservative phenomenon in today's America.

Science denialism is more prevalent and damaging to society among liberals. While the views you have mentioned are ridiculed by the media and education system, the Left is almost entirely unchallenged in the public sphere on their creationist ideology that denies biology, genetics, and evolution. AGW denialism has not been the driving ideology behind the past 50+ years of governance, but impossible "equality" has been, to predictable results.

BMaker11 said:
Gotta be careful, though. Can't call these people uneducated. When you "insult" them like that, they backlash against your "elitism" and vote for someone like Trump, who doesn't "look down on them".

Which is strange, because the whole Trump campaign was a rallying cry of being anti-PC. So when you're, then, not PC with them, they get mad. They like Trump because he "tells it like it is", but when you tell them "like it is" and call them idiots, you're one of the causes behind them voting for Trump.

It's like a catch 22 or something.

Unfortunately for you, even the Pew Research Center concedes that Republicans are more informed than Democrats.

http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/07/what-the-public-knows-in-words-and-pictures/#partisan-differences-in-knowledge

Of course, trying to smear conservatives as "uneducated" is especially hypocritical when the least educated demographic, high-school dropouts, vote Democratic by wide margins. Way to insult your own base.

KrspaceT said:
Americans, particularly the American Right, have a nasty anti-intelligence streak.

There are so many habits that they do that I found utterly baffling. Confederate flag wavers who say they are real patriots, anti-vaccine phobias, denial of climate change science.....

They live in a fantasy world, and they are harming decent people in doing so

The only people living in an anti-intellectual fantasy world are the ones who think that all individual humans and all human groups are identical and interchangeable, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.