"Underwater basket weaving degrees" is a great piece of rhetoric because it lets the listener project their personal most hated field in its place. If you think gender studies degrees are useless, I don't see the value in marketing, and we run into this little meme: boom, suddenly we're attacking higher education hand in hand. Epstein conspiracies are another example. Lots of people think he didn't kill himself. Ask them what did happen and they're at loggerheads, but if you can steer thoughts away from that you have broad public support. It's a clever if disastrous way to build American anti-intellectualism.