Warning: meandering wall of text (hopefully it's interesting, it's certainly got something for most people. It's got WWI era intelligence testing for semi-illiterate soldiers, 60's youth movements and denazification)
tl;dr: Measurements of intelligence are often caught up in socioeconomic bias, and these people are conflating that with intelligence itself. They are either making assumptions about who they're speaking to or just can't represent the difference between something being fraught with bias and something being intrinsically biased. It's wrong but it's not necessarily a ton more off base than most other things but people are super touchy when accusations of bias or prejudice are thrown around.
Honestly it's pretty believable. However, that doesn't mean that the entire left is those people or anything totally dramatic like that.
All it is is the age-old phenomenon of people eagerly snapping up new ideas that they haven't fully metabolized yet and making a fool of themselves, but now in an era of pervasive communications that lets their mistakes be broadcast worldwide.
In this case the nugget of truth is that the measurement of intelligence has had huge problems with cultural and class biases creeping in, and the difficulty of creating a test that measures native
aptitude without education changing the results (or representing intelligence as a natural aptitude when it's actually a combination of that aptitude and education). For an example, one of the first standardized intelligence tests applied to a large population was given to US soldiers in WWI. There was a written and non-written test. The written one is utterly execrable, but the non-written one (intended for soldiers with shakier English literacy) has a canonical example of cultural bias. One of the questions is a picture of a bunch of houses with instructions to say what's missing on the houses. Soldiers from an Italian background frequently answered a cross because those were ubiquitous on Italian houses back then. The "correct" answer was a chimney. Who in Italy is going to think a nice hot fire indoors is a good idea?
Similarly some things that don't represent intelligence one iota are frequently used as proxies for it. Most forms of vernacular English, be it the most usually referenced African American vernacular or just lower class dialects with strong accents (there's some fascinating legacies of dead Italian pronunciation in some New York and Pennsylvania accents as an example) aren't "proper" English. I speak "proper" English because it's what I was raised speaking. If anything someone managing to code switch fluently between two different vernaculars is more impressive, not less.
The thing is, that doesn't mean that intelligence itself is any of those things. It's just that someone needs to be honest with themselves about what's actually intelligence and which are just proxies that are based on bias.
There are COUNTLESS recordings of exactly this insanity from college students. Seriously. It's not just common, it's
pervasive.
Impossible to miss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDlQ4H0Kdg8
People go to college to learn. Give a final exam from a class to people who are just starting that class or who had a roommate who took that class and talked about it and see how badly it goes. That's the level a lot of people are on when they're talking about issues. They know something's wrong, and they latch on to the academic equivalent of a game of telephone. Do you think that the students in the Civil Rights Movement in the US or the 68er bewegung over in Germany could all clearly represent their ideological goals and worldview on camera at all times?
Hell no. Does that mean that what they did didn't have value?
Hell no. My dad is just about a right-anarchist with a staggeringly ill-reasoned worldview but the protests he went to got the cafeteria workers livable pay rather than the specially negotiated below minimum wage they got before. The 68er bewegung included actual unironic communists, but they were an essential component of the final success of denazification in West Germany by providing a final push to remove fascists when there were enough people to build a working state without them (I can go into a lot more detail about denazification if anyone wants, it's fascinating). Better yet, we can tell it was successful without doubt because East Germany didn't have a similar youth movement, and modern neo-nazism in Germany mirrors the east-west border.
Also as an aside, we expect better from colleges to the point of knee-jerk inanity legislating how to behave, but what's the overall standard of discourse in society at large? Are we even living up to the example provided by colleges? Or are we babbling out half-understood concepts just like the worst of them?
Guess I'm an ableist and classist bigot then! Intelligence is hot.
Yep, intelligence is hot but not in the sense of how neo-nazis love to wave around poorly considered concepts of it like "140 IQ Aryan man" (Direct quote from a propaganda comic incidentally). Being able to understand and apply intellectual frameworks is pretty awesome, especially if you can meaningfully attempt to understand other people's perspective. It's honestly a whole lot less important to me at least to be able to manage certain hallmarks of class or race (other than being able to converse somewhat fluently in English, but that's a me problem, not an other people problem. I'm a bad linguist and I lean heavily on certain peculiarities of English, such as using mostly synonymous words for subtext from their alternate meanings).
Good grief that's a long post. Now Blue Max gets to know how it feels to anyone who actually tries to watch one of his videos.
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