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Notes -
I’m pretty sure that’s post hoc reasoning. It’s popular, probably because it dovetails nicely with the Trump’s general platform, but the timeline is wrong. Where was this argument during the fights over Obamacare? During the early-2000s measles resurgence? Even within Trump I, when people were suddenly deeply concerned with institutional capture, medical research was almost a non-issue.
It’s a referendum on COVID policy, plain and simple. Which really means it’s a referendum on Biden. The outcome was predetermined.
I think at that point a big enough portion of the normie-right still believed that the hostages could be saved, that these hostile institutions had to be preserved even if sometimes you had to account for their biases. COVID certainly had an effect as to demonstrate how captured institutions could be weaponised against them. I think another aspect that pushed the normie-right towards preferring burning it all down rather than living with the captured institutions is the insistance from institutions, in and around the same years, on allowing kids to transition without their parents' approval; to a conservative parent, nothing could feel more like an existential threat.
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