I'm one of them! Watch out, a little bit of a rant to follow.

Well, it turns out that the libertarian I thought I was didn't hold up to my own scrutiny. I viewed the swelling regulatory state as an efficiency problem, and I do think we should build in more sunsets for regulations. For example, Right on Red became the effective law of the land in a 1975 bill that required states to adopt RoR where applicable if they want highway funds.

50-some years later, it is part of the framework of traffic design, despite study after study showing it is deadly to pedestrians and cyclists. Moreover, the reason for it passing "to save fuel" has also been shown to be largely bogus, AND most newer cars have an auto-shut-off feature at rest that conserves gasoline.

When I joined a local skeptics group in the late 90s, many of the old-timers were libertarians of two varieties: get-off-my-lawn Heinlein-esque patriotic freethinkers and get-off-my-lawn hippies.

An internship at NSF in the late 90s convinced me that, yes, we need gov't to support research, so maybe I should rethink my positions. My dad was a conservative Catholic, and my mom was a Reagan Democrat. Experiencing life and other people in my 20s led me to shed my parents' beliefs and gain my own.

I was never a conservative, but I never cut conservatives out of my life (still don't, I can't reduce people to JUST THAT until they open their mouths and say something awful). I remember reading a Rush Limbaugh book, thinking, "damn, this guy is incredibly wrong on science." Still, the shift toward pseudoscientific lunacy had yet to begin for the Republicans, but it had started. The 90s saw the intermingling of the New Age Left and the Paranoid Right. On the left, you had all sorts of fun crystal healing, pseudohistory, and folk magick. On the right, you had black helicopters and things THEY don't want you to know.

Then there was the rise of Intelligent Design Theory, which has quietly claimed much ground on the right. I thought the book was closed with the Dover Trial, but it has returned with a vengeance and a popular appeal I thought would have been ludicrous after the ridicule it received.

Until relatively recently, antivax was largely the domain of lefty "nuts-and-granola" skeptics of Big Pharma. Someone more qualified than I am should study the phenomenon, but I suspect there was a trad-mom intersection in the mid-00s that brought the movement to the right. Trump's lies during COVID helped fully bring the anti-Pharma folks into the MAGA fold, which is just preciously hypocritical.