[fighterpilot]

Can you share that hypothesis? You are obviously contributing to this thread in a balanced way and in good faith and I really want to hear it.

I know two anti-vaxxers.

One is not political at all but isn't that smart. Very nice and generous person. Bit prone to conspiracy thinking and bought into fake news on Rumble or something.

The other is very conservative and it's a team/tribe issue with him. He has a strong distrust of institutions that he thinks are run by leftists and would distrust anything they say.

[tombert]

Ok, just to be clear I want to preface this by saying "not all conservatives". I know plenty of conservatives who are lovely and intelligent people.

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Basically, I think that rabid anti-vax sentiment is a natural conclusion to roughly ~40 years of near-constant levels of conspiratorial thinking from conservative circles. I think folks like Jerry Fallwell started it, and subsequently Ronald Reagan and most of the conservative politicians after him followed. People like Jerry Fallwell more or less started the "satanic panic", and it started to become somewhat politically acceptable to just say that "the devil" was doing anything that they don't like. This went largely unchallenged in evangelical circles and the evangelicals took a huge turn towards the Republican party.

Fast forward to 2012, and now it's a debate about where Barack Obama was born. A "conspiracy" was just fabricated out of nowhere, and the president is required to show his birth certificate. This was somewhat made fun of, even Bill OReilly disputed it, but it was the first conspiracy that I had heard in my lifetime being taken seriously by at least some politicians.

Fast forward to 2016, and suddenly it seems that idiots like Alex Jones, who had previously been a goofball I would turn on to get a laugh, is being taken seriously by semi-prominent conservatives. PizzaGate was still somewhat of a fringe thing, but it was the first outright debunkable conspiracy that I could think of that people I actually knew who actually believed it.

Fast forward to ~2019, and a sizeable chunk of conservatives (to be clear, NOT a majority) were starting to take the QAnon nonsense seriously, setting the way for 2020, which allowed a basic stream of perpetual lies about COVID to be spread (and accepted) on 8kun. Suddenly, despite overwhelming evidence, we have to have debates on whether we should be taking COVID seriously. Any time Fauchi contradicted Trump, it was because Fauchi was an agent of Satan or something absurd.

I think anti-vaxxing is just the natural progression. There's been an entire generation who has been more-or-less unchallenged in their conspiratorial thinking, and basically anything can be a conspiracy theory. Since they already think that COVID was overblown to make Trump look bad, they subsequently have to think that anything that addresses covid must also be bad.

The left has its share of dumb things that it believes, but it's not nearly at the same level of what is predominant in conservative culture today.

[tremon]

There's another part to this same equation: the "institutions" have very little credibility left. Whether it's about the health risks of tobacco, the environmental risks of fossil fuels, the addiction risks of opiates, the security of mortgage lending, or (recently added) the safety risks of flying, we constantly see the same pattern of officials being undermined by paid-for scientific studies that are aimed at undermining or thwarting policy.

Given that adversarial dynamic between business and policy, I can't bring myself to fault even a single person for refusing the vaccine (I can still fault someone for publicly speaking against vaccinating others on invariably shaky arguments though). There is no public institution that I would trust to act towards any common good, that's how much public trust has been eroded in the name of "good business".

[totony]

I don't think it's quite that. IMO from knowing some anti-vaxx it originates from a rebellion against power more-so than any actual belief in conspiracy. It seems to come from being fed up with being told what to do AND from distrust in authorities (arguably warranted). Conspiracy comes as a post-facto rationalization for some as far as I've seen.

I believe policies like vaccine mandate and the overzealous anti-anti-vax crew are paradoxically aggravating the issue. Making it a partisan issue also seems to force people on the defensive and harden their (potentially unfounded) beliefs, forcing them into the "other camp."

EDIT: My hypothesis on why it comes more from right-wing rather than left-wing people is exactly that right-wing is anti-government power (or more freedom of individuals, usually).

[fighterpilot]

That's really interesting. I would think that growing polarization specifically around education has something to do with the acceleration of conspiracy acceptance on the right that you've described.

[tombert]

Yeah, but even the polarization of education is still somewhat conspiratorial right? My grandmother believes that "public schools are liberal indoctrination camps" and that all education is effectively a plot against conservatives to turn kids into atheists.

While schools definitely do have a lefty-bent, the idea that it's some hyper-organized society designed to destroy the conservative parties in America is absurd to anyone who isn't predisposed to conspiratorial thinking.

[fighterpilot]

There was a miscommunication. I meant that one of the biggest differences between Democrats and Republicans is the level of tertiary education, and this gulf has been widening over the last 20 years. Scott Alexander has written on this demographic shift

[stirfish]

Honestly I don't trust the vaccine, but I got it anyway because I see the virus as a bigger danger to me