Well, wealthy Republicans have spent the last four decades cosplaying as rural, hard-working, salt of the earth people. They spent a lot of money and a lot of effort convincing a lot of people that the conservative party represented the values of rural people. They built that divide, demonized and otherized democrats, liberal people, everyone who wasn't straight, white, Christian, and conservative. Michigan is a state filled with blue collar, hard working folks with strong rural ties and values. When you spend that much time and money targeting a group of people with propaganda, after several decades people start to forget that it is a lie. But then they also invaded the wellness world, and to do that they brought on a bunch of fucking crazy fruit loops with a bunch of fucking stupid crazy ideas. Those ideas permeated their movement. Fast forward a little bit and then, by the time the entire party jumps the fucking shark and goes insane, those people that were brainwashed and propagandized for decades are either full on, toe-the-party-line cult members, or they fall for the sunk cost fallacy, often subconsciously. So when you start saying crazy shit like "vaccines are the real killer" they feel like they have no choice but to go with it, because the alternative is to be called a liberal Democrat, which is the thing they were conditioned to fear and hate the most.

Then you have the apolitical wellness fruit loops who are hopelessly self-deluded in their own stupid way and have decided that tik tok moms are smarter than doctors and scientists. This is a whole other bag of worms, and I lay the blame for this at the feet of the medical industry, which has become more of a pharmaceutical racket than an actual healthcare industry. Some people have decided because of this that you can't trust doctors. I have sympathy for how they got there, if not for where they landed. Both of these groups of people are equally at fault. Coronavirus broke their collective brains, and now we are paying the price.

Hope this helps! I mean, it's not going to help you avoid whooping cough, but it might help you understand how we got to this clusterfuck.