The oil lobby has paid copious amounts of money to propagandize the population, and to bribe republican politicians to continue their policy of laissez-faire.

They're just against anything liberals are for at this point. If liberals like it, it must be bad! Just wait until the Republicans take away their Medicare and social security. But wait, the Republicans will blame the Dems for it and the hate continues. This country is pretty much fubar for decades.

They're brainwashed zealots and Republicans in office are preaching that it doesn't exist because they're paid by corporations that would be hurt by green energy.

These people start with one crazy idea, pop into an internet/Fox news rabbit hole, and come out with all the crazy ideas.

If you fall for one, you can fall for any.

Not to get overly philosophical or anything, but who you are as a person and what your ideas are come down to your experiences. For me, I spend time fixing/causing programming problems at work, talking with people, doomscrolling lemmy/mastodon, playing video games and watching shows.

For a portion of the population, they are sitting and watching fox news for hours upon hours a day. Even if you are resistant to a view point, your brain is not capable of 100% rejecting a message that is being sledgehammered in to you over and over again. If Fox news or other shit media is your experience, it would be hard to think of the world in a way that doesn't conform to what they tell you. It will be incremental at first, you'll reject 95% of a message that doesn't conform to your previous ideas, but maybe concerned face newscaster has a point about the border. "We can't let everyone in" you might reason. All to make your more malleable to the next crock of shit they serve up.

The more I think about it the grosser it is. Just a mass of blond ladies telling you minorities and people who care about the environment are out to change your way of life. You way of life - which is sitting on a couch watching blond ladies spouting lies to you. I'm sure there's some sick mental illness issues floating around here.

I used to work at a bank that had fox news on all day and it was horrible, but I'm positive some of my viewpoints from then were shaped by that experience, despite me knowing it was a shit entertainment channel.

If the Democrats express support for a concept, Republicans MUST be against it. Their entire identity is based around taking the most extreme version of the polar opposite thing the Democrats express.

True religious nuts (in other words, 10-15% of the population) believe that nothing at all matters because Special Jesus is coming back any day now. So, the more fucked up things get, not only does it not matter since it’s “THE END TIMES!!”, but also things being worse just proves Jesus is coming back soon.

Your average angry conservative is pissed off about it for a couple reasons. One, “think tanks”, Fox, Limbaugh and other propaganda organizations have been paid by the fossil fuel industry to spread disinformation about it and explicitly tell them it’s a “hoax” for decades. Then, being “conservative” literally means resisting change, so replacing a gas-guzzling truck that smells like complete shit and emits tons of pollution is upsetting to them just because it’s different. Also, many conservatives are super sensitive and get very upset if someone says they should do something different because they feel like they’re being chastised or “someone thinks they’re better than me”. Same reason they hate stuff like being vegan or eating gluten free.

I'd guess that leaded gas played a role.

Also, the truth has progressed much further than what many are willing to swallow at once. Not only is our way of life currently potentially leading to an extinction level destabilization of the climate and life cycles that we depend on (which also implies we're not as important as some religions would lead us to believe), but the Euro-American way of life has been fucking things up for centuries or even millennia in the past. The only way to avoid accepting that our past is full of normalized evil is to bury your head in the sand and say everything is fine.

And add in some racism where they want to blame entire groups for actions of individuals and that line of reasoning says that you must also be to blame for the actions of your ancestors.

And then there's the human tendency to double down when challenged, which makes it even harder to later change your position, because that doubling down can involve saying or doing things that does directly implicate you in some of that evilness. Or making ridiculous claims to "express certainty" like "if x is true, I'll do y" where y is something no one would want to do or would even expect someone to do as part of a debate. When you behave like an idiot, changing your mind requires you to accept how much of an idiot you behaved like.

And there's also group momentum. When the group sees dissenters as deserving hate and violence, it makes it harder to change the group's direction. Especially if there's members that don't really care about the philosophy but are just looking for a "good excuse" to be violent or hateful. It's not rare to see people treat former allies even worse when they turn compared to those who were never on their side. "Traitor" is one of those labels that can entice a negative reaction like "murderer" or "rapist", even though it boils down to "person who changed their mind about something they once supported with others".

So we might, collectively, have too much baggage to stop this train headed for the cliff before we can tell if the track curves to follow the cliff or just goes straight off. And if we do go off that cliff, don't doubt that, on the way down, those fucking idiots will be loudly complaining that there was no way they could have known and that we should have told them.

If they cant tell you why then i doubt we can lol