conservatives fundamentally don't believe in reality. they think things become true by being spoken into existence. "if you don't test, there's no cases." the purpose of words is not to describe the world, but to prescribe it. therefore whoever can speak loudest, and get the most people to speak with them, has the power to literally remake the world. they think "proving" something is just coming up with the right sequence of words that sound convincing enough, regardless of whether they correspond to anything in the physical world

that's why they think, for example, that addressing the existence of gay people turns more people gay