"It used to be that people at least gave lip service to admiring brainy people, but today stupidity is actually celebrated."

How did average people give lip service to admiring brainy people? The ability to communicate to people other than the ones in the same room with you was limited to the telephone, or ham radio. People stayed in their lane by race, ethnicity, or class, so they never talked to others outside of it. To have a letter to the editor appear, an editor picked your letter out of hundreds. Giant media corporations located in NYC and LA controlled everything that people saw and heard on the 3 TV and national radio networks, and their affiliates. There were national newsmagazines, and local papers were controlled by local monied interests or by chains like Hearst. Do you know what 'zines are? Xeroxed hand stapled magazines. If you wanted to find wack jobs and contrarians, that's where they were before the internet because that was the only place they could be.

Americans have been considered anti-intellectual since the earliest days of the republic. We're not impressed by some fucking title. Knowing stuff is not enough. You have to do stuff.