Like there's a reason every goddamn populist movement shits on "coastal elites" or "liberal white woman" or "wall street and the MBA banker class" some other boogeyman group that is invariably cut from a subset of these people. It's because the stuff they peddle is, typically bad if not fundamentally then the flavor they are peddling.
I'm sure this take will be wildly unpopular around here but I don't care.
I’d also point out that our current “revenge of the nerds” economy is an aberration. The returns to individual intelligence weren’t nearly as significant before the knowledge economy, and before the knowledge economy started geographically segregating people by IQ. Your small town in Iowa used to just have high IQ people who had nothing better to do than help run the town or operate some local business or government agency. Average people benefited from that. I suspect a lot of the malaise afflicting the Rust Belt today is that most of the smart people left, leaving the social infrastructure strained by their absence.
They left because they read the regulations and realized that the mills were never coming back. Sending the smart people back won't fix that state of affairs except perhaps by making formerly industrial america more uppity which may in 50-100yr time get those boondoggles fixed.