I have my own hypothesis about the COVID vaccine denialism in particular, but I am afraid that it might come off as a bit too political for HN and Dang would lock the thread :).
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.
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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.
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.
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".
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).
As a reaction to this problem you see the basic approach that the social justice wing has basically declared that intent doesn't matter. No more excuses.
And I'm getting to agree with them. If somebody is doing something destructive and the stakes are high, wasting time being nice about their feelings seems thoroughly counterproductive. COVID has made this problem deafeningly loud - whether the bad actors are crazy or grifters or misguided, polite deference to them on grave matters gets people killed.
I actually think we might agree on a bit more than you might think. I actually am in that social-justice camp that says "intent mostly doesn't matter". I don't have the ability to read minds yet, so I can't possibly really know anyone's intent, so I have to look at the reasonable consequences of their actions and judge from there.
That said, whether or not people are secretly klansmen or good deep down, they still exist, and they're still humans who deserve to have their voices heard at some level. While I don't think we should automatically assume good faith on every person speaking, I also don't think we should immediately discount it either. A lot of voters are just victims of bad publications, and I don't think any of us are fully immune to that. I'm sure there's a million dumb things that I believe; I try and catch them when I spot them, but I would hope that most people would give me the benefit of the doubt in assuming that my beliefs were honest, if dumb.
edit: Added a "don't" because my point was wrong without it.
They don't believe this of us, and this is why they win, and we lose.
Playing devil's advocate here let's imagine that someone from a political party that is probably not yours (just guessing!) might use your same logic and apply it.
Abortions. They're killing people. High stakes? Check.
Abortions. They're killing defenseless humans. Destructive? Check?
You don't have to agree with these definitions for people on the political right to define things this way. And were they to take their definitions and use your logical template and then react in the way you're suggesting might be OK with your definitions, what you're left with is something that looks an awful lot like the Texas abortion ban right now.
The point I'm trying to make isn't that you're wrong and bad and should feel bad. The point I'm trying to make is that a person needs to think very long and very hard about situations in which polite deference isn't warranted.
Because with the team sports politics we've got going on right now it's super easy for one side to look at the template the other side is using and reappropriate it for their pet issues and then things which are "settled" suddenly get very exciting indeed.