The 21%er ghost-dance

Over the first week of May, the Pew Research Center asked Americans if they trusted Science!! on the Corona Virus. Specifically: if the conflicting messages they were getting from researchers meant that the research itself had failed.

The results are in. 70% agreed that the core ideas on how to prevent the spread are well understood, even though research studies conflict. Some 28% went with it is difficult to know. This shifted to 78% / 21% when it was allowed research is continually improving.

I am not here to support Science!! on every pronouncement The Scientific Community proclaims as Consensus. I can however do sanity check - this site is even bold enough to use that term. And I am not alone. 70% of my compatriots can figure out the difference between sheer politics, and the physics of aerosolised particles plus the biology of viral transmission.

Further: given that the 21% has cut itself off from the scientific method itself, it has no lever to convince the 70%.

This 21% is clustered nearly entirely on the Right, the QAnon / Nirth Certificate / Expelled Right at that. They are entirely delusional. They are Ghost Dancers, equally doomed and damned.

The tragedy is that they have seized the American Flag brand, and the Christian banner with it. When others see the Ghost Dancers waving the flag without wearing masks, they make the same association. Where the Gadsden Flag became an extremist symbol carried only by the wrong people, the same is now true of what should be a symbol of Union.

UPDATE 7/9: here come the fatalities. It's the same pattern: infections (perhaps first seen in the waste outflow), then tested-positives, then cases, then hospitalisations.

UPDATE 8/4: evaluations. A changing explanation corrects earlier mistakes; it does not impugn the process.