One of the things plenty of conservatives have emphasized during the COVID-19 pandemic is that they choose not to "live in fear" in a time when many people are panicking or frustrated due to how the virus has affected many aspects of everyday life. This is often expressed in a refusal to wear masks in the presence of others (not that wearing or not wearing masks was ever the biggest issue of 2020 or that it possibly could be the most important thing for anyone to focus on), which leads to claims of victimization when conservatives are told not to enter certain businesses because of this. There are some people who are unnecessarily concerned about COVID-19 and current events because of irrational beliefs, but conservatives are in no way immune to this.
The grand irony of this is that conservatives have been very vocal for the past year about how they are incredibly frightened by mask mandates enforced by the same businesses they elsewhere claim should be free to make their own policies, as well as by all kinds of supposed "deep state" activities that, if they are even occurring in the first place, would be invisible to citizens and thus without any public evidence of their existence. The claim that they will not choose "living in fear" over noncompliance with mask policies when those policies are not legally enforced by the federal government is contradicted by their suspicion of every government activity in the name of opposing a force they cannot even know is real.
The seemingly miniscule number of rationalists of America have likely had to deal with more fallacious nonsense from relatives or friends than usual because of this. Hell, my own parents, who are by no means even attempting to be rationalists in any area of their life, talk as if they are consumed by sheer panic about unprovable and even unlikely conspiracies against the American public at every waking moment! The typical conservative on social media imagines that business-required mask policies--not government-required ones--conceal some diabolical plot to condition Americans to accept utter compliance to the government no matter the instructions.
Even though conservative voters' belief in a deep state would still be inherently irrational [1], there is a way to make the (still irrational) conspiracy-based fear of a deep state consistent with the claim that conservatives do not want to fear a disease. However, this kind of nuance is very absent in much of their language, which strongly suggests it is absent from their beliefs as well. In either case, the belief that unverifiable conspiracy theories are true is still a sign of either inconsistent alignment with reason or a rejection of rationalistic philosophy altogether. It can only be one or the other even for conservatives who do not hold to the same ideas about government conspiracies during the pandemic.
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