I guess for this discussion defining intelligent would help.
Is it intelligent to incite citizens to rally behind this stuff? Obviously not. But I’m sure they are intelligent enough to have gotten their high school diplomas. And I bet on standardized tests they would fare as well or better than a lot of non- believers of Q.
I wouldn’t say believing in Qanon alone makes you unintelligent. It’s an unintelligent act made by (mostly) mostly intelligent (by average standards) people.
Engineers are famously prone to conspiracy theories. Dr. Oz is a “board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon” and by all accounts a good one.
I doubt that people believe in this stuff because they are unintelligent. More intelligent people may be better able to countering the objections to these theories that reality keeps throwing up.
The paradox of supposedly-“intelligent” people (for vaguely-defined values of “intelligent”) falling into the conspiracy rabbit holes takes us right back to the OP of this thread.
Perhaps it’s already been suggested in this thread: The “intelligence” we need is “critical thinking”. For surfing instructors or rocket scientists alike, we are seeing lots of stories of “intelligent” people being lost to QAnon and similar horsecrap.
Some of these people can solve twelfth-order differential equations in their sleep, but can’t spot even the most absurd conspiracy theory when it slaps them in the face.
There has been a concerted effort over the past few decades to dumb-down our primary and secondary public educations systems, which I have viewed as an attempt to extinguish (or never develop in the first place) their critical thinking skills, and it shows.
Seems like it has been mostly the right-wing pushing this lately (it fits right in with their authoritarian leanings), but the “left” has been in on it as well somewhat. (Disclosure: Liberal and progressive-minded though I am on most issues, the dumbing down of education has been a concern for me, and I see it coming a lot from all directions. I see myself as very middle-of-the-road or perhaps even a bit conservative in my views of education, in the sense of let’s keep our standards up and not dumb things down.)