no picture bc I’m at home rn, but I recently started working at the Library in my small town. we’ve been trying to remove the outdated or poorly circulated books and replace them with more recent ones and ones that will circulate better. in the process of doing this my boss found an anti-vax book from 2008 that we got as a donation in the early 2010s (we know bc it says in the computer) and the last time it had been checked out was like 2 months ago and it has some the best circulation of any of our books. even worse, we dont just get a book and put it straight on the shelf. donations are sorted through by volunteers, offered to the library if the volunteers think they’d be good, and then have to be accepted by the director. the previous director added the book to the system personally. a librarian did this. thankfully my boss, the new director, decided it was 1) too old to keep around, 2) too damaged to keep around (fucked up spine), and 3) bullshit, so she put it in the pile of books we are deleting from the system.
Anti-vaxxers often do a lot of reading, ime. The stuff they read is often bullshit written by scammers or other people who drank the Kool-aid, but I think the “research” they do is a big part of the anti-vaxx culture. My view is that many who are drawn into conspiracy theories end up there due to a diminished sense of agency, and that the “research” is key to them feeling more in control — it gives them a false sense of understanding in which they can take all their bad feelings about how the world is, and construct a worldview in which they feel more oriented.
It reminds me a lot of the line “antisemitism is the socialism of fools”, though I feel like this is more like “anti-vax is the antiauthoritarianism of fools”. It’s frustrating because in some ways, they’re so close to understanding the ways in which the world is super fucked up, but they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and hide in a fortress of ignorance instead.
this sums up my experience with them pretty well too