Trump supporters have repeatedly demonstrated that they would prefer to believe whatever crap makes them feel good about Trump, or themselves, or how much better they are than The Eeeeevil Democrats, versus doing even the least amount of fact checking.
Nearly verbatim from a Facebook exchange, when a high school classmate announced truculently that hospitals were deliberately overdiagnosing COVID because it got them more money, especially when they had to go on a ventilator. I googled the source of the rumor, provided a link to a reasonable sounding rebuttal, and followed it up with my own summary which was roughly “The person who started the rumor even admits publicly that he does not have any evidence of it happening”.
Her response: “I don’t care. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”.
Now, this is someone who was in the “smart” crowd in high school. Maybe not the all-honors classes, but definitely in the college-bound crowd. You would expect her to have some willingness to at least do some research to support beliefs - if for no other reason than that you can be hella lot more convincing when you can cite your reasons.
But her attitude is like that of so many Trumpists: Evidence is not only not required, but ACTIVELY DISCOURAGED, especially when it doesn’t fit your tidy little view of the world.
My own sister in law - whom I like, mostly - responded to a vent on Facebook a year back where I was amazed that Trump didn’t even know that there was such a thing as a cat-5 hurricane. A couple of people jumped in with Trump-bashing which was not helpful - but SIL said “Well, there have only been two cat-5s that have ever hit the US”.
- The article she cited was outdated, at that point there had been another one
- It didn’t matter what strength they were when they hit, as many massively-damaging storms were below 5 when they hit,
- I wasn’t complaining about that, but about the fact that Trump thought they didn’t exist (and had said the exact same thing a year before)
And she finally huffed off saying “You all won’t listen, when the facts don’t support what you believe!”.
Now, she was offput by the trump-bashing - but SHE HERSELF REFUSED TO READ THE FACTS.
Like I said: the past 4 years have been one example after another of right-wingers actively discounting facts and science in favor of whatever rhetoric they’ve been told to believe.
To top it all off: on SEVERAL occasions when I’ve tried having a factual discussion with someone from the other side, and they can’t rebut something, their parting salvo has been “All you Democrats just want to kill babies”.
Seriously. Not making that up.