Very dramatic, but funding scientific studies is no antidote to groupthink, authoritarianism, and cruelty towards the non-conforming, in case you missed the last 5 years.

There's a pretty clear causal chain between the abuse of public trust and social influence from educational and scientific institutions in the last decade or so and the anti-intellectualism we're witnessing today, abuse which was and is driven by the same hubris you demonstrate by conflating intellectualism with All That Is Good. And needless to say since I am posting on HN, but I say that as an intellectualist.