If you asked me if I believe conservatives are "dumb", I'd first try to establish an agreed upon definition of "dumb". One can still have a high IQ and fall for common logical fallacies if not trained to recognize them, or if one lets preferential bias cloud logic due to emotion. Thus, one can be smart and dumb at the same time.
In general conservatives are less educated, and thus more likely to be unaware of standard logic fallacies as found in logic, debate, and critical thinking textbooks.
But, based on growing up among conservatives, I've learned that even with sufficient education, evangelicals are encouraged to trust their feelings above all else. Their common remedy to any situation is to "pray on it". That encourages intellectual laziness because meditation takes less brain calories than digging into details.
It's a belief that God or Jesus is guiding one's gut, so they listen to their gut without doing external "homework". If Jesus is real, I doubt he'd agree that's the way to go about life, but he's not here to zap sense into them. Prayer isn't intended to replace mortal brain-work. It's sometimes said, "An idle mind is the workshop of the devil", but so is a lazy mind.
I've tried to counter by asking, "Why do you assume your gut is more powerful than my gut?" Their reply is often something like, "because I pray daily for guidance, and you don't." Well, it's not working correctly, conservatives; you are suckers for BS, such as that found on Fox "News", OAN, Breitbart "News", etc.
They don't feel challenged to cross-check such news that tells them what they want to hear; because they trust their gut above logic, cross-checking, and research. I even challenge them to look deeper into specific news stories, and they mostly ignore me. They have summarily deemed their gut "good enough".
It's a kind of arrogance: "I have a special susbcription to the Jesus Fact Channel and you don't, so I don't have to do mortal brain-work! I'm special and thus get to be mentally lazy; now bug off!" They are letting their ego do their bidding.
They've made themselves non-curious on purpose. In short, if you pray hard enough, you don't need critical thinking skills, in their minds. Medieval thinking lives on, sadly.
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