I love to see the Trumpist tr0lls start eating each other - and Trump. At the same time this is going on, though, there’s apparently a Q-ish conspiracy theory that Trump was cloned (and the clone was the one pushing vaccines). The whole thing is an Ouroboros of insanity.
Someone framed the whole issue as being about “caste” and it made an enormous amount of sense to me - making it about more than just his followers taking Trump’s lead and running with it. It explains why Trump can’t convince them otherwise, now. The argument goes, roughly, that after Trump and others on the right downplayed covid (which had to do with who was being hit by covid in the early days, i.e. “blue states,” urban dwellers, people of color), it became an issue of “caste.” I.e. about in-groups and out-groups defined by political tribalism, religion, rural vs. “urban elites” and race (so it’s also about white supremacy), etc. The right saw themselves as the superior caste, being dictated to by an inferior caste(s). That. is. not. acceptable. Doubly so about issues of health and where people get to go and who/how they meet, especially when it’s viewed as for the benefit of the inferior caste.
So the “dictates” of the lower caste get rejected reflexively - vaccines, masks, social distancing, taking the pandemic seriously, etc. Doesn’t matter if it hurts them, too, so long as the caste system is maintained. This isn’t just about having adopted a position and being stubborn - they see it as an issue of the out-group dictating how they live their lives. In other words, it is fundamentally about maintaining the established order and they being the ones that dictate for themselves (and others, of the lower castes) how they live their lives. Which is why they immediately went to rhetoric about “freedom” even while Trump was in office, even though, on the face of things, it just seems like insane gibberish. Their idea of freedom is the right to tell how others live, not the other way around (even if it’s something as fundamental as, “we need to do this if we want to live”). It also explains why Breitbart made the hilarious argument that “the left” was using reverse psychology on the right to get them to kill themselves - it’s the only argument that works when they’re reflexively rejecting all directives of the “lower caste.”
So what this also means is that the vaccine/mask/distancing denials are part of the same dynamic as the whole mythology about “CRT.” The “lower castes” are trying to up-end the established order (of which white supremacy is a key part) and they have to “fight back.” The two issues, weirdly, feed into each other - vaccine mandates increase the unease they feel about maintaining their hold on education, about maintaining white supremacy.
