Diana Wichtel on dumb luck and the persistence of deniers

Marjorie Taylor Greene, new Republican congresswoman for the state of Georgia, is a QAnon-supporting conspiracy theorist. Photo / Getty Images

People. There's no accounting for them. As if 2021 isn't daft enough – we seem to have stocked up on crazy along with the excess toilet rolls - a man jumped three fences and interposed himself between a field of charging horses and the finish line at Trentham Racecourse.

In another tale of dicing with disaster, there was what Newshub characterised as a "high-risk romantic rendezvous" between a staff member and guest at an Auckland Covid-19 managed isolation hotel. Apparently notes were passed. "I think one was written on the back of a face mask," said Chris Hipkins, struggling to maintain an impassive demeanour in the face of such galloping irony. "A bottle of wine was involved."

No laughing matter, though Newshub's 6pm report gave unintentional comedy a stab. See Samantha Hayes standing sternly at the studio screen gesturing towards a graphic of a face mask with, "Do you like me?" written on it, the box for "yes" marked with an enthusiastic tick. There was a reconstruction, in case we didn't know what the torso of a man entering a hotel room with a bottle of wine looks like.

Dear oh dear. Both incidents ended up, it seems, with no one harmed. Talk about dumb luck. But as metaphors for the potentially lethal effects on yourself and others of demanding your individual right to be an idiot, they were striking.

Where there is a crisis there are cranks. See news reports at testing sites with banner-waving protesters intent on adding Covid to the list of other meticulously documented inconvenient truths – the Holocaust, Aids, the US election, climate change - about which some reserve the right to be "sceptical".

For a while now in our household we have joked that we are entering a new Dark Age of alternative facts and wild conspiracy theories. Here the "Covid Scam" signs are mostly fringe but we couldn't have foreseen how mainstream such toxic magical thinking would become.

Former feminist icon Naomi Wolf began by going on about "chemtrails" and now spends a lot of time on social media promoting such ideas as, "Covid-19 policies are a war on humanity."

In the US, Marjorie Taylor Greene, new Republican congresswoman for the state of Georgia, is a QAnon-supporting conspiracy theorist who speculated in a now-deleted post that the 2018 California wildfires might have been caused by, yes, a Jewish space laser. Cue online hilarity – "The Secret Jewish Space Laser is guarded by Hanukkah Solo and his sidekick Jewbacca" – but really. This sort of thing is dangerous. I remember researching an American woman with HIV, Christine Maggiore, who became a poster person for Aids denialism. HIV didn't cause Aids. People living with it shouldn't take drugs that suppress the virus, not even, as in her case, if they are pregnant. One day I came across a terrible story. Her daughter had died. Maggiore never accepted the findings that the 3-year-old died of Aids.

When she later became desperately ill herself, Maggiore blamed it on a too-stringent detox regime or something. She must have known then that she was wrong. She might have saved her own life - and the lives of others she influenced - by accepting treatment. But that would have meant admitting that she had denied her own daughter that chance. When so much has been sacrificed on the altar of misguided certainty it must feel like there is no way out. Even after her death her supporters hailed her as a hero.

Facts, science, reason, truth: there's not much joy to be had in trying to argue with denialism. Lord knows I've tried. It seems to be about power. For some people, possibly increasing numbers, it's preferable to believe "they" – Big Pharma, Jews, the deep state, progressives, the New World Order, shape-shifting lizards - are out to get you than to acknowledge that there are circumstances and catastrophes beyond your control. What can you do when some people would rather die than accept that we're all in this together?