Yeah, you pretty much get it. Although it’s not about feeling better about their ignorance exactly. It’s that scientists keep telling them to stop doing things that they want to do, and they don’t like being told what to do. Stop beating your kids, stop burning so much gas, stop depleting the biome in your farm soil, stop torturing animals because they have feelings, stop treating women like they are intellectually stunted, etc.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

Isaac Asimov said this almost fifty years ago. It still doesn't answer the "why" but it shows how long (at least) this has been going on.