What is “reality”? A woman lectured me yesterday about my having worn a mask into the place where I was meeting a friend for a beer. She told me masks are useless (viruses go right through them), no one has died from COVID, and January 6? 1/6

She said those people who stormed The Capitol were placed by Democrats to make trump look bad. The “media” has brainwashed everyone to believe what was shown on TV screens that day. I pointed out “media” is plural and the images were caught by MAGAts. 2/6

In competitive debate in high school and college, a popular tactic of affirmative teams was to run a “squirrel” case - a case based on reasoning so attenuated and terms so obscure other teams lacked evidence to counter it. We carried big files of 4 x 6 cards w/quotes on each. 3/6

Here are “counters” to what was said: COVID-19 particles are around 0.1 microns in size, but always bonded to something larger & never naked floating in the air. Prof. Linsey Marr, Virginia Tech, specializes in airborne transmission of viruses. USA Today 6/11/20. 4/6

January 6: trump spoke to/encouraged those people to go to The Capitol. They waved flags & have admitted their actions in social media (& thereby made prosecutors’ jobs a bit easier). Bannon talked it up the day before. And COVID deaths are real. 5/6

Johns Hopkins’s COVID website states numbers. Scientific American, The Economist, Forbes have ... Wait. How does one counter idiocy? I’m not going to cart around files of color-coded 4 x 6 cards. I left the place, came home & talked with my cats. 6/6