It's very easy to appear to be intellectual these days ...
... spell-check corrects you're spelling and grammatical errors, quotes from Oscar Wilde and Churchill are available on a Google click and any global event has a thousand conspiracy theories you can tap into. Any opposition can be easily countered by using the phrase,
"Don't believe those lies in the media, do some proper research and you'll find the real truth."
Sadly that 'truth' is usually from just another Joey Barton or 'Tommy Robinson' who gets their 'facts' from other lunatics on the internet.
That truth is repeated until it becomes an absolute fact such as
'Only Nigel Farage has the answer to the immigration problem' ...
... despite him never ever saying what the answer actually is