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An awful lot of people believe that low intelligence logically implies moral inferiority. That if you are unintelligent, you are a bad person. It is a moral failing to not be smarter.
Progressives seem to believe this more strongly than conservatives, and use it as one of their primary attacks against the right. If you take "stupid = bad" as an axiom, then HBD forces you to conclude that less intelligent races are bad, and progressives who don't even question the "stupid = bad" axiom automatically equate HBD with "some races are inferior". But because the "stupid = bad" axiom is unstated, and probably not consciously endorsed, they can't quite articulate this chain of reasoning. The embarrassment that would come if it were incontrovertibly proven that some races were inferior on a genetic level is that it would be revealed that they are bigots. They have always been bigots against unintelligent people, but by restricting their bigotry to unintelligent white people, manage to convince themselves that that doesn't count. But if colored people are even less intelligent, and it wasn't society's fault it was inherent to the individuals themselves and their genes, then the progressives would either have to admit to being racist, or change their worldview to account for good but unintelligent people. Who, in my opinion, exist in multitudes. I've met quite a few. But a lot of people aren't ready to admit that.
"progressives believe stupid = bad more than conservatives but conveniently don't think about it" always looked like a sneer to me rather than an accurate assessment. Progressives do think uneducated = bad.
It's not enough to just be educated, though. Trump has a B.S. from Wharton, and yet many of the progressive attacks on him focus on his perceived lack of intelligence.
George W. Bush went to Yale and he was famously seen as an idiot by the left in the 2000's merely because he had a few malapropisms and committed the largest foreign policy blunder in my lifetime. If your family is loaded and you're not an eloquent speaker people will assume that your degree wasn't really earned. The right is similarly dismissive of Jill Biden's PhD because she got it after Joe became a senator.
Jill Biden has a Ed.D which is a doctorate in education, and enables you to make more money if you are a teacher. It is not a Ph.D. A Ed.D is a practical degree, for people who plan to teach. Most schools pay you more the more education you have, so it makes sense to get the qualification. At Delaware, where she got her degree, you need a portfolio rather than a dissertation, and and Ed.D is part-time for 3-4 years as opposed to a Ph.D. which is full-time for 5 to 6 years.
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