Raw Story, Facebook, Ladbible
I’ve long spectated the slowly unfolding culture of conservative contrarianism since around 2008 when Obama’s election brought it out of the woodwork in a big way. Certainly it’s largely political in nature. If there’s a Republican president, Democrats won’t listen. If there’s a Democrat president, Republicans won’t listen. Lest we forget, Kalama Harris and Joe Biden were opposed to any vaccine released while Trump was president:
Politico, Reuters
For both parties, the narrative requires that the enemy tribe is always wrong about everything. If Harris and Biden suddenly went back to being anti-vaxx tomorrow and Trump broadcast his undying support for vaccinations, millions would abruptly switch sides on the issue, either pretending they never held any other position or sincerely not remembering that they did.
Such is the power of politics, unfortunately, to sway the public on crucial matters of public health. But I don’t think it’s a purely political phenomenon. Culturally, this country is changing in a way that its former ruling ethnoreligious hegemony finds unsettling.
The dynamics of group belief are such that, for individual practitioners, being surrounded by a demographic majority who shares their beliefs is a big part of what makes those beliefs “feel real”. Something beyond all suspicion which they can safely take for granted.
But as religious demographics change, social reinforcement and cozy feelings of reassurance diminish, until the very foundation of their framework for interpreting reality is under threat. Understandably, this could cause quite a bit of anxiety.
Trump’s election was to some extent an expression of those fears, besides simply being racially and politically motivated retaliation for the indignity of having a black president for 8 years. I suspect Qanon and other closely clustering movements like anti-vaxx and anti-maskers are, likewise, acts of protest over Trump’s electoral loss. 
Twitter
The specific form of protest I’m concerned with in this article is a sort of politically motivated, contrarian brand of skepticism-as-protest. The United States has grown demographically less Christian at an astonishing pace over the past few decades. Below you’ll see the percentage of the US population self identifying as Christian, by year:
1948: 91%
1960: 92%
1970: 90%
1980: 89%
1990: 85%
2001: 81.6%
2007: 78.4%
2014: 70.6%
2015: 75%
2016: 73.7%
2019: 65%
Source 1, Source 2 (gaps filled in with census.gov data searched by year)
This change is due to many factors, none more than the incredible success of the gay PR machine at getting basically everybody under 30 on their side since the early 2000s. Nobody wants anything to do with homophobic religions anymore. But to some extent this mass apostasy is also attributable to the internet.
Facebook, WaPo, 7 News Miami
Before the internet, the average person’s exposure to alternative modes of thinking was very limited. Their exposure to scientific accounts for biological and cosmological origins were limited to what they heard in high school, and perhaps college. If their parents, pastor and everybody else they trusted told them the same things about human origins, for example, they believed it. Living in an echo chamber will have that effect on you.
As soon as holes began to open in that echo chamber, the tides began to turn, and the times began to change at an accelerating pace. I won’t sit here and pretend the internet has only been a force for truth. There’s as much fringe lunacy, fake news and conspiracy nonsense online as there is factual information.
It is, or was, a free marketplace of ideas however. That’s less true by the day, as Facebook, Twitter and others look to orchestrate what information users are exposed to on their platforms. We’re supposed to trust that these new algorithmic filters were designed by the only politically, religiously unbiased humans on the planet I guess.
BBC, Citizengo, LA Times, Yahoo News, Twitter
But for a while there between the 1990s and some time around 2010, the internet was a mostly lawless frontier. If you wanted to hear forbidden perspectives, you could find them if you knew which terms to search for. This ruthless unmoderated competition of ideas, for the most part, saw the most defensible and credible ideas rise to the top, as measured by their mainstream acceptance.
Everybody looking to reinforce their politics sought out, and found, echo chambers suited to their personal tastes. Everybody who wanted instead to hear credible challenges to their beliefs, having either been denied access to that information in childhood or fed carefully editorialized “controlled opposition” versions (in the A.C.E. curriculum for example) could at last read what they weren’t supposed to.
In this way, many well demonstrated truths became clouded in manufactroversy, such as the shape of the Earth, whether it’s hollow, whether Hellen Keller existed, and so on. At the same time, the most fragile lies imploded first, having survived relatively unchallenged for so long only due to careful information control which the internet totally circumvented. This is how the likes of Scientology, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others so abruptly became objects of widespread, mainstream ridicule during the mid-2000s.
Facebook
For those religions and social movements which depended heavily on information control, for whom that strategy had worked perfectly for decades or even centuries, this development was a devastating and unexpected stab at their soft underbelly.
Many incriminating materials like the OT3 courses (Xenu, volcano nukes, etc.) the CES Letter and other materials concerning foundational claims of Mormonism, sex abuse scandals and more were laid bare for public scrutiny in a way that was never possible before the internet. A day of judgement arrived, but not the one they were expecting.
For people inextricably invested in these belief systems, whose happiness and livelihood may depend upon fragile lies, this is why skepticism has threatening connotations. It’s something alien, subversive, and underhanded which intrudes into their cozy dream bubble, eating holes through it like an unwelcome acid.
Facebook, CTV News Montreal, The Sun
Someone in this boat, thusly wounded, might then seek to retaliate in kind. Leveraging skepticism, at least how they understand it to work, against the hated political enemies who first deployed it against them. The problem being, people like this generally didn’t have critical thinking classes. They were never trained in how to correctly apply skepticism, assured that they already possessed infallible discernment granted by a supernatural higher power.
People like this believe themselves to be shrewd but in fact are trivially easy to fool. Easier to fool, by far, than to convince that they were fooled. They’ve been coached to trust anybody from their own tribe and mistrust anybody outside of it, as if the world is that simple and humanity falls so neatly into predictable good and evil groups.
So when an administration they associate with mean spirited skeptical naysayers tells them to wear a mask and get vaccinated, what do you think goes on in their mind? Reflexive, resentful, contrarian faux-skepticism. “Let’s see how they like a taste of their own medicine” they might think, ridiculing as “sheep” anybody who complies with the public health mandates in the same way they feel their emotionally important beliefs were ridiculed. "You reject my important cause, I'll reject your important cause".
Twitter
So it is that the crowd most fond of pointing out how reality doesn’t care about our feelings discovers the hard way that covid is a reality, and it doesn’t care how they feel about communism, jews, biden, harris, democrats, LGBT, or any of the other things they associate covid with. Viruses don’t have politics.
Many of these people died in shock, unable to accept they were wrong. Their reasoning felt airtight. After all, many of the defenses frequently given for refusing vaccination or not wearing masks have at least some basis in reality, like real incidents in the not too distant history of this nation when the US government either deliberately infected PoC with STDs under false pretenses to study the symptoms, or left some untreated who were told they received treatment.
The problem was putting the cart before the horse, starting out with a conclusion and then looking for justifications. Certainly the US government has done shady shit in the past. If you live and breathe conspiracy theories though you might get a distorted perspective of just how often such incidents occur.
Certainly, there is a danger of governments using disasters as a pretext to erode individual liberty and extend their own powers under the pretense that it will be temporary, unwilling to rescind those powers after the danger has passed. The Patriot Act, anyone? Homeland Security act? Climate change too arguably, though it’s every bit as real as covid.
Certainly the government should never be able to force you to compromise your own bodily autonomy. “My body, my choice” logically applies to vaccination just as it applies to abortion. All of these defenses are true, logical and would seem to support the anti-vaxxer’s position…right up until he dies of covid.
At the end of the day, nothing is totally certain, scary as that is. Sometimes there’s no better choice but to take a calculated risk. Is it more likely that the government is trying to stem the tide of a plague killing off valuable taxpaying human cattle, or that Bill Gates is injecting microchips into our bloodstream to be activated later by 5G, altering our DNA in fulfillment of the Biblical prophecy concerning the Mark of the Beast?
If the Shadow Government, Elites, Reptilians or w/e wanted to exterminate us, would they contaminate vaccines? Something anybody could steal, analyze and prove was intentionally contaminated with dangerous compounds, microchips, etc.?
Or would they use reverse psychology, exploiting the antigovernment paranoia of their enemies to ensure only loyalists receive a life saving vaccine during a real pandemic? Such that legally their hands are clean, since (nearly) everybody who died to covid did so voluntarily, having been offered free vaccines which they refused.
Stephen Cornfield, via Unsplash
If that’s their game, it’s working out splendidly. Covid has preferentially targeted a traditionally solid red voting bloc, the elderly, as well as disproportionately devastating red states (Though this wasn’t true early on, with cities hit hardest). All of this is likely to have a lasting effect on elections to come, many of the most determined, intractable R voters now decomposing underground or vibing in a pretty urn on their surviving family’s fireplace.
If you have ever considered AIDs to be Yahweh’s judgement on gays, is it far fetched within that premise to speculate that coronavirus might be Yahweh’s judgement on American Christianity? For being too harsh, too mistrustful, and when it comes to public health, asking “Am I my brother’s keeper”? The main reason Yahweh destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah isn’t what you probably think.
Why do I tell you this? Am I just another facet of the conspiracy? All of these supposed corpses actually paid actors who are relaxing on a remote beach in Ibiza now? If you’re determined to think so I can’t change your mind. Part of me doesn’t want to, because it’s a little bit funny watching what happens next:
…But part of me does want to change your mind. Because we may disagree, and I may think you’re stubborn, but I don’t actually want you dead. It also becomes exponentially less funny over time as more and more of your kids catch it too. I don’t expect you to stop being stubborn overnight. If stubborn people could change quickly, they wouldn’t be stubborn.
We all have those stubborn relatives, set in their ways. Maybe a stubborn dad, or co-worker. It was lovable and charming until Covid hit. Discernment didn’t used to be life or death. There didn’t used to be such severe, rapid consequences simply for guessing wrong. But things are different now.
Covid won’t be the last pandemic. Besides the delta variant, or viruses yet to make the leap to humans, we have super-resistant bacteria and parasites to worry about. These “super bugs” are a consequence of over-prescription of antibiotics over the past several decades. Those chickens are coming home to roost eventually.
Get smarter soon, or die. Maybe not just you, maybe you take family members with you, or fellow parishioners from your church. I’ve seen the edgy bumper stickers all over your Hummer, Ford F-150 or Raptor. Trust me, message received. I definitely get that you scorn and mistrust nearly everybody. I don’t expect you to suddenly start loving your neighbor enough to wear a mask for his protection, just because Jesus probably would.
I am however suggesting you take some basic medical precautions for your own safety and the safety of your family and friends even if it chaps your ass to do anything democrats recommended. If it makes you feel better, they recommended the opposite before Trump left office. If not, suit yourself. I’ll add your obit to the next article.
