Idk your political beliefs but I assume you're a worker. Personally, I think it's useful to remind people, especially people who don't own capital that they are useful, capable and live in deprivation because their deprivation is required so they the upper class can live in idle pleasure. Now, let's think about this materially.

You find manufacturing and logistics work all over, historically, but most recently in the south and midwest. These regions are also fundamentally abandoned by the federal government content to let them languish there as long as they can collect taxes from them. As you said, because neoliberalism saw fit to export these jobs overseas. But without proper access to quality education, infrastructure, and jobs, these people are reduced to backbreaking, low pay, time-consuming work with little left in physical and mental tanks. So they generally don't have the money, feeling, or prior knowledge to cultivate skills that the upper classes find useful or admirable like violin playing or w/e. So this (incorrect) idea that theyre not intelligent exists because of their poverty, which exists because of the upper class's need for a lower class, which exists because of capitalism.

This is a condition they endure not one most of them prefer. And yes chuds take horse paste because based facebook meme told them to, but that is a symptom of an anti-intellectual disease grown and encouraged by governments federal and local. Very few americans know how to properly research, and decades of economic decisions prioritizing the personal profit of robber barons, leading to regional poverty, as well as manufactured culture war has convinced most of them of the futility of even trying. That's not lack of intelligence or ability to learn. That's the evidence of a dysfunctional society hell bent on having an easily manipulated lower class.