Every village used to have an idiot. Now every idiot has the Internet.

“Before the Internet, every village had an idiot,” mused Tom Nickell, a Facebook friend. “After the Internet, the idiots have their own village.”

“Covidiot” is a variant of “village idiot.” A Covidiot has been defined as somebody “who acts like an irresponsible idiot during the COVID-19 pandemic, ignoring common sense, decency, science, and professional advice leading to the further spread of the virus and needless deaths of thousands.”

“It’s amazing that just a couple of thousand people in a nation of 330 million can have such an influence because of the Internet,” said Tom’s brother, David, a sociology professor at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah, where I taught history for two dozen years. “We’ve been talking about this in class.”

Pre-Internet, “people who had strange ideas were pretty much social isolates,” said Greg Leichty, communications professor emeritus at the University of Louisville. “You had to work really hard to find people like you.”

Science could hardly be plainer about COVID-19, which has triggered the deadliest pandemic in a century. Wearing a mask, social distancing, hand-sanitizing and, most importantly, getting vaccinated are the surest ways to ward off the virus that could land you in the hospital or the cemetery.

Even so, Covidiots are feverishly spreading bogus and even potentially lethal COVID-19 quackery via websites and social media. “First, there was hydroxychloroquine,” Judy Stone wrote in Forbes. “The latest fad was Ivermectin, the horse dewormer. In today’s ‘What will they think of next?’ antivaxxers have taken to gargling with and ingesting Betadine to prevent Covid.”

Medical experts are working overtime to counter such dangerous and baseless claims. But on the Internet “disinformation is more novel,” Leichty said. “It tends to attract more attention and get shared more often.”

Remember when we hailed the newfangled Internet as a communications revolution to rival the invention of moveable type, the radio and TV? The wisdom of the ages would be just a few home computer keyboard clicks away, we thought.

Leichty said the Internet has indeed provided us with vast amounts of easily accessible knowledge, while simultaneously brewing “the most toxic elements for democracy that you can imagine.” In other words, the Internet also has made malarkey accessible to millions.

He cautioned that lack of meaningful Internet filtering allows reckless disinformation and flat lies to be presented as facts. “Editors played an important societal function as gatekeepers. When you don’t have gatekeepers, a lot of trash gets circulated.”

Leichty agrees that the Internet has provided idiots with their own village. “People with extremist ideas, instead of feeling like social isolates, can go on YouTube or Twitter, do some searching, and find content that reinforces what they believe. They can find discussion communities that give them social validation.”

The loony right-wing hasn’t cornered the market on conspiratorial flights of fantasy. Village idiots also dwell on the loopy far-left.

Even so, Covidiots are way over on the right-wing fringe. They see vaccination and masking mandates as “anti-freedom” and more “big government tyranny” pushed by Democrats, the “socialist Deep State” party. (While they preach “freedom,” Covidiots practice “freedumb,” which the online Urban Dictionary defines as “a totally nonsensical and asinine belief (of many Americans) that freedom means you can do literally anything you want, including violating other peoples’ rights.”

“Something is much easier to believe if you can attribute it to an evil agent you really hate,” said Leichty.

Naturally, Trump and a slew of Republicans lawmakers pander to the Covidiots because they are a big chunk of the GOP base. While almost all of the GOP bigwigs croon in the anti-mask and anti-vaxx mandate chorus (some are anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, period) most of them quietly got vaccinated.

I suspect that the Republican brass—including Dear Leader — privately make fun of the faithful for believing that COVID-19 shots secretly slip a “Deep State” tracking device into your arm. This just in: Some Covidiots are now vowing that vaccinations will turn you into a liberal and a Democrat.

Said Leitchty: “When it comes to politics, it is very easy for our cognitive filters to go straight down the tubes when we really dislike somebody or something.”

Anyway, in his book, “Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science, and Fake History,” Damien Thompson wrote that “one of the greatest legacies of the European Enlightenment is a scientific methodology that allows us to make increasingly accurate observations about the world around us.”

Hence, Thompson sees a ton of irony in the Internet, also a product of science, as a threat to the Enlightenment’s legacy. “Paradoxically…science has given us almost unlimited access to fake information,” the author wrote, adding that as societies, we are more vulnerable to phony history and fake science “than at any time for decades.”

The book was published in 2008, 11 years pre-COVID. Should Thompson care to write a follow up book about Covidiots and Covidiocy, “Profiles in Paranoia: the Internet Age of Unreason” would make a dandy title.

A Mayfield native, Berry Craig is a journalist, historian and author who lives in Arlington, almost as far west as Kentucky goes.