@Cacacoisfarraige
I just wonder about the US culture.
Are independent and critical thinking so absent from a large portion of their population ?
Why is educational thinking so dismissed / viewed with suspicion by them.
I just can’t get my head around it
No, it's really not absent nor is it dismissed.
But in these days of 'insta-fame' and 'if it bleeds it leads', the idiots that make the most noise or say the most shocking things seem to get the most exposure. And because Scrotus is such a car crash he and his cult get a lot of international coverage. Just the same way that Farrage and his ilk got a bit of coverage here during the Brexit vote period. Because of you lovely vipers I knew that not all Britons were 'like that'. But some people might have heard the 'Britain First' supporters on US news and wondered where all the kind and good people in the UK had gone. Like my dad used to say "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see".
I also think some of the coverage is to 'take the US down a peg' because we've always been so chauvinistic (and vocal) about the US being 'the best country'. It's what we were taught in schools back in my day and maybe it was 'sort of' true 50-60 years ago. But in reality, now we're no better than any other democratic country and indeed, fall far short of some of them in many areas.
Most of us are just living our lives, trying to stay educated and informed, and trying to talk sense to the people in our lives. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You can't argue with stupid.