I really do. I empathize and sympathize or whatever. I don't really respect it or appreciate it, but I get it.
Anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers - I get it.
It is no secret to reasonable people that the average COVID-denier is full of absolute shit. The wild success of materials science (waterproof jackets, boats, etc.) and the medical field (eyeglasses, heart surgery, etc., for example) have proven beyond a doubt that both masks and vaccines work. Many of these folks probably have a fair amount of positive experiences with the fruits of labor in these fields.
Then why the highly politicized and absolutely wrong stance taken on by your average COVID-denier, logical fallacies be damned?
Critical thinking skills are not on trial here, instead consider at a higher level - many folks promoting masks and vaccines - what else is a very vocal subset of that population talking about?
Things like this:
1. Men can have babies; men can have periods. And if you don't automatically accept this as gospel, you are transphobic and all kinds of other bad made up stuff. And probably white supremacist too. Maybe in a decade or two we will see some sort of confirmation of a dude having a baby or something, I doubt it, but eh.
2. The US government nearly fell victim to a dangerous insurrection by a bunch of Dungeon & Dragon playing cosplayers. Yes, we barely lived through a revolution where the end of a Donald Trump presidency was almost overthrown by a bunch of Donald Trump supporting LARPers. Never forget. But I did forget to mention that many of these almost-overthrowers were wearing costumes lol. Honestly I have seen more plausible and likely scenarios in wildly complex conspiracy-theory movies. Imagine serving in an actual war, seeing horrors beyond belief, not dying, getting old, and then seeing words like "nazi", "fascist", or "insurrection" get totally redefined with the new meaning of the word completely unrelated to the original. That's gotta be a lot to process.
3. A white supremacist organization that is led by somebody that is not white has infiltrated the government at every level. I hate white supremacy and white supremacists as much as the next person, but I am still trying to wrap my head around this one. Fear the Proud Boys lol.
4. The election where their candidate lost was clearly stolen by Russia, but questioning the election where their candidate won, well that's just crazy. I thought we all expected a certain high degree of foul play by everybody involved in elections. Somewhere, Keith Olberpersonn just got an idea for a talk show segment.
5. In a greedy, capitalist, profit-driven culture, where women get paid seventy five cents to every dollar that men get paid for the "same" job, greedy profit-driven capitalists strongly prefer to pay more for men to do the "same" work. What version of crapitalism are we running here!?
6. Inanimate objects will get up and start killing people, but it's only worth talking about sometimes. Sometimes not though.
I totally understand folks wanting to just chalk masks and vaccines up to being just another round of made up stuff. Over a year into a pandemic, we are seeing how that is working out for deniers though lol.
