No, it’s just a matter of who they accept as legitimate “authority”.
If the Dumbass-in-Chief, their ministers, and their news had all told them to wear masks, they absolutely would have, but every single one of their primary authority sources were pulling in different directions and they don’t accept any “liberal” sources as legitimate authority. You can see it at a much smaller scale by looking at Church congregation sizes where some ministries focused on trying to protect their elderly and infirm members and those who didn’t.
Conservatives who had pastors who told them to wear masks were a LOT more likely to do so than ones who were getting mixed messaging.
Yup, although the downside is that your posting style definitely shows off that you’re a Mastodon user.
Your use of the @ tag, the hashtag are all markers of a more Twitter-like user experience, and it makes you post stand out somewhat oddly for those using one of the lemmy instances. Either way, it’s really neat to be able to cross between those, since I vastly prefer the Lemmy UX as opposed to Mastodon’s, but I can still get a Mastodon’s content!