America has long curated and groomed gullible people to be anti-Enlightenment. To distrust science and facts and critical thinking.

These people are the base. They are the W/Sarah Palin/Nixon floor - the people that approve of the Republican no matter how awful and inept and unqualified the candidate is. When Hillary was talking about “deplorables”, she was talking about this core group.

My guess is that since education here is so hollowed out and so many snake-handlers do things like home-schooling, teaching nothing but the bible, and we still allow white-flight schools so that the insular world they seek is nearly complete - and that as a result we have more of these kinds of people than other countries.