The COVID-19 pandemic

[plam]

I think in a lot of cases this is just a result of being poorly educated and as a result they've become idiots.

Unfortunately being more educated makes people also better at making up rationalizations that aren't actually consistent with all the facts but instead cherry picking useful subsets of facts that lead to a desired conclusion (ie motivated reasoning, as jamincan was talking about upthread.) So education and critical thinking isn't a sure cure here.