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If the lack of smart, educated conservatives was driven entirely by institutional gatekeeping, then there would be a lot of smart uneducated conservatives, and the adverts on conservative websites would be for educational trips to Rome and the St John's College extramural programme. In fact, the adverts on conservative websites (except explicitly Christian ones) are for crypto scams and acai berry colon cleanses, suggesting that there is a real difference in IQ.
Richard Hanania isn't trolling when he complains about how dumb American conservatism is in the Current Year - he is expressing frustration. This is new, but not that new. George W Bush had to pretend to be dumber than he was in order to be a serious right-wing candidate for President, George HW Bush did not. The only powerful right-wing tendency that would appeal to an intellectually curious 130+ IQ is tradcath.
[Yes - I know Elon Musk is on the right, and a genius. But his right-wing fanbase don't like him because he builds electric cars, they lie him because of his low-effort shitposting]
Quite a few logical leaps here, e.g. even if there were a lot of smart uneducated conservatives, it doesn't follow that they'd be a large proportion of conservative consumers, nor that they'd be especially interested in education, and moreover (this is more questionable) they might be more gullible because of a lack of education.
However, isn't the original claim that there is a lack of conservatives in education (especially higher education) not that there are a lot of smart uneducated conservatives?
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While 130+ IQ is probably overrepresented among IRL tradcaths, a randomly-chosen IRL tradcath is more likely to be a geocentrist who believes cigarrettes are good for you than to be rat-adjacent. Median-level tradcath politics are Alex Jones-tier conspiracy theories with added reactionary social conservatism- although not twitter race warriors either.
The difference between the internet tradcath posters(most of whom do not actually go to church) and the IRL tradcaths(who do not describe themselves that way) is vast. It seems that many of these posters could care less about practicing or believing any form of Catholicism; they just want to attach themselves to a living, reactionary western tradition.
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There isn't a lack of smart, educated, conservatives. There's a lack of conservatives in the field of education, which is an entirely different thing.
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The majority of highbrow independent publishing appears to be conservative. Measuring things by ad targeting is frankly nuts because the entire ecosystem of intelligent people on the internet are adblocked ghosts to advertisers.
That's as may be, but when I go on talkingpointsmemo.com in incognito mode I get ads for premium brand menswear and SUV's, when I go on dailykos.com I get ads for e-scooters and high-end video editing software, and when I go on redstate.com or other sites in that network most of the ads are for cheap clothes imported from China. Admittedly I did see one ad for small-business accounting software on a right-wing site, which points to the one useful demographic that is still mostly conservative.
This does nothing to change the tracking performed by major ad services.
You'll have to create a totally fresh device/connection/account, and you'll have to do it in a location that's geographically separated from your current browsing history. The advertising systems know what it means when a brand new "person" hops onto the internet using the same internet connection, device, browsing patterns, display-size etc as someone who already exists.
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Have you considered that some of this is just cultural differences?
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