A young-ish (mid-forties) lobsterman I knew was seemingly a pretty solid Berner (like back in 2018) who was, unfortunately, obsessed with vaccines and believed all of them to be evil, despite the fact that he had like five kids from three different wives and had vaccinated all of them without any problems. He was a good guy, at least on the surface, who was driven insane by his third wife, the cliche Californian white woman with blue hair who sells alternative “medicine” and calls herself a shaman. She was also actually really nice but just had terrible and bizarre political views. (One of her kids from a previous marriage had very vaguely defined vaccine injuries, thus her anti-vaxxness.) My kids were friends with their kids. I honestly really liked their family. They lived in a nice house that reeked of marijuana. You could smell it from hundreds of feet away.

Back then I was on Facebook, and the guy would just fight with anyone there over vaccines, endlessly, including me. I once drove past his house and saw him sitting on his porch using his phone, clearly arguing with someone on facebook. Like many of the people mentioned ITT, his political views were totally incoherent. One moment he was ranting about the Rothschilds, the next he was approaching me in person to discuss the Holocaust because I’m Jewish. (Feel like I should mention that Israel is an abomination which should not exist.)

Still, every politician or political issue hinged entirely on vaccines. Nothing else mattered. If Hitler was an anti-vaxxer, go Hitler! Eventually the lobsterman was banned from every local Facebook group (like me, but I was banned for being a communist). One of the last times I talked with him was maybe in late 2020 / early 2021 when I ran into him at the post office, and he said: “Ready for the Trump vaccine?” This is an interesting artifact from that era, when more liberals might have become anti-vaxxers if Trump had won re-election (since Trump did actually push for the development of vaccines). At the time I couldn’t answer the lobsterman’s question. I had not actually thought of it that way. All I had thought was: just please get us these fucking vaccines.

I’m not sure what happened to him but he ended up moving away but still lived in the area. I saw him at the beach either that summer or the following summer. My kids and I were the only ones there masked, of course. One of his kids said hi to my kids and wanted to high-five them, and I told them not to. (Judge me all you like.) Several hours later, after we had gone home, I saw that the lobsterman had PM’d me on Facebook strongly implying that things would get violent if we ever met in person again. I didn’t respond and haven’t interacted with him since (and have also been off facebook for years).

Before the pandemic there was this thing with small groups of petite bourgeois white people where they made being an anti-vaxxer their entire identity. They were extremely vocal about this online and in person, but never represented more than a small minority of the general population. Another woman I knew at the time was a friend who stopped being a friend once it became impossible for me to ignore her anti-vaxx views. (My FIL has been disabled his entire life because he got polio as a child and was too poor to afford the vaccine.) I saw her at the grocery store a few months ago and she was unmasked, with her unmasked daughter, and grabbed her daughter and moved away from me the moment she saw me. She also had this weird thing where she was really into fucking Graham Hancock.

Anyway, I’m not sure what the lobsterman is up to now or how his family is doing (I feel bad for his kids, who were really nice), but I do know that another lobstering couple is constantly sick now, with the mom being yet another white multi-level marketing organic health food yoga anti-vaxxer.