Colin McEnroe: A newly reformed Colin chases conspiracy theorists down rabbit holes

This column is dedicated to Michele from Danbury.

I will probably never meet Michele. I got an email from her right before Election Day.

Introducing herself as “a first-time poll clerk (Yes, I am a little old lady who will be peering over her progressive eyeglasses next Tuesday),” Michele remonstrated with me for my hotheaded language regarding people who would be showing up, un-facemasked, to vote. I believe I called them “dangerous idiots.”

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Michele observed that I was only making the problem worse, and she was absolutely correct. I am attempting to turn over a new leaf.

So let me introduce you to my new friend Todd. I met Todd on the Connecticut Preppers Facebook page, where he was venting his spleen over an incident in which uniformed cops ushered him out of a Walmart because he wouldn’t wear a mask.

As an experiment, my newly reformed personality posted a comment respectfully asking Todd to tell me more about his views. Specifically, I wondered what kind of proof he would accept that masks work. I posted an article from the esteemed journal Nature.

It was long, more than 3,000 words. I picked it because it was not entirely unsympathetic to people like Todd. It acknowledged the early scientific uncertainty about masks but also the steady development of more knowledge about their efficacy. It copped to the fact that masks — while effective at reducing both transmission and reception of particles — are well short of ironclad protection.

But the final takeaway was, in the words of one of the scientists quoted, that masks are “a profoundly important pillar of pandemic control.” But not infallible, so keep your distance.

And … not much happened. Except that Todd started writing about Koch’s postulates. And I wrote back asking what he was talking about. Which is how I met my other new prepper friend Debbie.

Koch’s postulates are a landmark in medical history and, specifically, germ theory. They were formulated by Robert Koch in 1884 as a way of establishing that a microbe was a causative agent of a disease.

One problem is that Koch didn’t know about viruses, which had not been discovered, so his postulates had to be modified in the 1930s by Thomas Milton Rivers, the father of modern virology. Not only that, but we live in a universe Koch could not have imagined. Scientists sequenced this virus’s genome almost immediately and have since been able to track its subtle mutations, even in Danish mink (long story).

And, I explained, modern science can look at a virus in ways that would have blown Koch’s mind (after we explained to him what a virus was, am incomplete life form that doesn’t even have its own cell, which also would have messed with his head). We would have had to explain to Koch things such as single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer imaging to observe conformational dynamics of spike proteins on virus particles.

I mean, making Koch’s postulates a deal-breaker in accepting COVID-19 science is sort of like saying you won’t buy an electric car until you know how much hay it eats.

I even found a reference to the postulates in a bowling forum. Bowlers don’t want to catch COVID-19 from each other, and damned if they didn’t start arguing about 19th century germ theory.

But Todd and Debbie were really into Koch. I did some digging into how that particular idea started circulating, and meanwhile Debbie sent me a slickly produced video about how scientists and various entities have been seeking patents of coronaviruses for many years. I had to do more digging so I could figure out the origins of that hoax.

And gradually I realized (a) that I was getting really tired and that (b) Todd and Debbie had stopped answering my questions and (c) the stuff I was (politely) sending them wasn’t really registering. I think Todd read maybe the first 400 words of that big Nature article.

Was I accomplishing anything?

“You never know whose mind you might be changing,” said Jonathan Jarry, a biologist on the staff of the Office for Science and Society at McGill University in Montreal.

Debbie and Todd might be pretty dug in. “Trust me,” wrote Todd. “I’ve gone deep down rabbit holes for decades now.” (Rabbit holes and rabbit trails do not have the same pejorative connotation in the universe Todd and his fellow deniers inhabit. They are often mentioned enthusiastically.)

But, said Jarry, seven lurkers (people who read but do not announce themselves) could have seen the stuff I put up on that thread and been influenced by it.

Jarry talked to me about “motivated reasoning,” which is the human tendency to assign more value to “evidence” that reinforces what we want to believe, even if that evidence isn’t reliably sourced. If you want to believe the moon landing was faked, and the Earth is flat, and the Sandy Hook victims were child actors and that SARS-CoV-2 was cooked up in a lab to sell vaccines, you can Google those ideas and be supplied with stuff to buttress that claim.

He also told me that the tendency, if you believe one of those scenarios, to start embracing some of the other ones is the “most consistently reproduced finding in research on conspiracy ideation.” Once you decide to question settled history and scientific truths, you’re on a water slide that will dump you into the whole pool of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.

So Michele, did I do OK? I was very polite. I never insulted anybody, and they mostly returned my courtesy. But I had a feeling that, given the choice between my company and the denizens of rabbit holes, these people are going to pick the bunnies every time.

Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.

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