My gripe with IQ is that it is not the complete picture of intelligence, and more so that it is even hard to agree on what is intelligence exactly. e.g: Are you truly intelligent if you have good pattern recognition, but poor EQ, and willingly opt to listen to your emotional brain all of the time.

I am not saying that trump supporters occupy perfectly the left side of the distribution, be it for IQ or whatever good measure of intelligence we might have. Obviously intelligence is also not just it. Lazy, proud, hateful and people with a tendency for authoritarianism will vote for trump, they’re not all ‘truly’ stupid, but I think most truly simple-minded folks at a big risk of falling prey to cults and populism.

To add onto this, there is a correlation between being uneducated and supporting trump. There is also a correlation between education and IQ (if that matters). It is not perfect, so it is not all supporters. The way I see it, you can still support trump if you’re very intelligent, but also cruel. Or if you know better but you lack the EQ to go over your family values and your entourage of cultists.

I guess, my point is that IQ fails to address what we observe in society, because IQ lacks one or many of the components needed to truly draw conclusions from it. When I call people ‘truly dumb’ for being susceptible to cults and populism movements, I am sort of stretching the definition of intelligence, which is the point I tried to make in the previous post. I don’t need to know where someone is located on a normal distribution to make a judgment of intellect, because, to me, by definition, if you’re blind to objective reality, fails at the simplest syllogism exercise when it comes to your beliefs, and let hate flow through you and everything else, then you’re ‘dumb’ to me. You’re that 1 out of 3 person who I can’t rely on for anything, whether you posses the ability for critical thinking and simply decide not to use it for your whole life, if whether you’re simply incapable, in both cases I can’t, and might never be able to reason with you.

I believe the reason why a cult which requires such blatant cognitive errors to adopt is that there is way more 'dumb" and unreliable people that we’d like to believe, and it could happen anytime anywhere, you just need to right “brand” of stupid shit at the right time, and you can count on 30% of the population being potential buyers.