John Dean tweet:

[Ocelot II]

11. For many years a lot of Americans have thought being smart was a bad thing.

I think it's much more basic than the idea that an uneducated population is easier to control. It goes way back - I remember reading this book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, in college (during the Pleistocene era). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life

Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.”

Also, he described the term as a view that "intellectuals...are pretentious, conceited... and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive ... The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."

Or, as Isaac Asimov once said, in a similar vein:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”