Of all the downsides of the "Trump Experience", this one concerns and depresses me the most. The amplification of what was once a lunatic fringe that rejects even the most obvious and basic realities in favor of conspiracy theories.
When it's 1% believing in "flat earth" conspiracies, you can laugh it off. When it's double-digit percentages believing a global pandemic doesn't exist...how the hell are we ever going to deal with more abstract, less directly visible things like climate change?
How do you reach people who will accept no facts because all of reality is suspect?
I have just this week been told that we have no tests that can identify SARS-CoV-2, and all the counts of positive cases are based entirely on symptoms.
I've had another tell me that the CDC has been unable to isolate the supposed SARS-CoV-2 virus, and their genome work has only checked about 30 points in the virus and those could be common with the flu.
It may be a stretch to say they believe there is no virus, but not much of stretch to say that many believe it may literally but just a cold variant, and others that scientists really don't know anything about it at all.
I see pride in willful ignorance, people who still don't realize that a lot of transmission happens from people with no symptoms, or people who think cloth masks guarantee safety. Not to mention the straight up conspiracy crap. It may be more of an incentive problem than an IQ problem, but it's widespread.