they react emotionally and they emotionally equate the barn with safety.
If that barn is the 'intellectually lazy cover of ignorant group-think' that results from being socialized by self-serving xenophobes... sure.
People are afraid, of a lot of things. Especially those things that threaten their prospects and basic necessities. Attack their reputation and you might torpedo their career, and since they're already in debt up to their upstairs neighbor's eyeballs... it's game over.
Any attack on their character, things they say, or do... becomes an attack on them. Unless they can show it's not them, they're just "acting rightly" according to their fucked up notion of christianity/citizenship. They've gotten so good at it that while claiming to be proudly both they're acting like neither.
So.. whether it's climate denial, covid-19, tolerance for minorities, gun-safety legislation, affordable healthcare.... they're so used to being made to feel bad about being WRONG that they now do it as a display of solidarity and loyalty to those who've rejected -any- kind of inconvenience for their own selfish ends.
And they've got a quorum. Allies that will absolve them of being pigheaded and wrong because they too benefit from it. Herd mentality. "We may all be going towards a cliff, but we're doing it together and it's our right and we'll stampede over you if you try to try to stop us!"
Only short-term obvious self-interest will get them to change course, and there isn't enough leverage in the world to offer it. They're too numerous and as a group they have too much momentum.
And as the rest of us get trampled, there's fewer and fewer of the rest of us to try to balance their destructive force.
Our society has developed a crippling addiction to aggressive ignorance. It won't turn around until it hits rock bottom and takes the rest of us down with it.
