Essentially, for Republicans, it seems like avoiding raw milk is the new masking — and they’re just not going to do it in order to prove a point.
For instance, in April, Infowars host Owen Shroyer called the Food and Drug Administration a “gangster mafia” who wanted to “make raw milk illegal.”
“So, now that more people are going to local farms and farmers markets and consuming raw milk, this angers the FDA,” Shroyer said. “This angers Big Milk. Say, ‘No, you need to pasteurize milk, it’s a lot less healthy for you.’ See, eventually, they’ll just make it illegal. They’ll just make raw milk illegal. That’s what this is all about.”
These people are in their own reality. It’s a cognitive dissonance wrapped in layers of shoddy reasoning and tribal beliefs to keep it from unwinding. You can’t rationally reason with them and any attempt to do so will be seen as a personal attack. It’s the classic “you can’t reason somebody out of a position where they didn’t reason themselves into.”
Best you can do is going along, acknowledge their pain or fear that’s somewhere at the basis of this cognitive dissonance and ask some questions that might get them to thing like asking them to explain who taught them this or the “so why would God cause a new pandemic?” type of questions from time to time.
Yeah, I find asking questions often tends to put them into a space they are not used to being in, depending on the question.
For instance, recently, I was visiting another relative during some larger gathering. I was flipping around channels and left it on CNN for a minute. Another relative (known for being a magabrain) drifts over to the TV and says, “CNN, eh?” and expects me to react in some prescribed way. I just shrug and ask “is there something wrong with CNN?” They honestly had no real answer. You could see them kind of thinking it through, esp. given the current content was something very innocuous.
I think I asked that anti-evolution type what they thought the difference between mutation and evolution was when they were objecting to the term “evolution” in regards to new strains of viruses. That was ages ago, it was probably around SARS or avian flu.
More recently, I asked one of those people going on about “gain of function” in relation to Fauci and Wuhan labs, etc., that I knew also to be an anti-evolution. I just asked them what they think gain of function means?
It’s not about trying to find trick questions - that tends to just have the blowback question. I find just trying to ask more innocent questions, ask them to define their terms, or what they are parroting means to them seems to have them go quiet for a while. I’m assuming they are mulling it over. It might not change their mind, at least not any time soon. But if I can at least get them thinking about what they are mindlessly repeating, I figure that’s a win.