Donald Trump and Republicans like to talk about the “silent majority” of Americans who Democrats are unfairly oppressing. But what the increasingly contentious battle over masking in schools proves is that, in truth, it’s the GOP’s “violent minority” afflicting the rest of Americans over COVID-19.

The Associated Press lays out a series of aggressive and even violent incidents in recent weeks over pandemic mitigation efforts: a Northern California man marching into his daughter’s elementary school and punching a teacher in the face; a Texas parent ripping the mask off a teacher’s face at a “Meet the Teacher” event; a furious Tennessee man yelling at a mask proponent, “We know who you are. And we will find you!” 

“The heat definitely got turned up this week,” Shannon Portillo, a county commissioner in Kansas, told the AP after the board mandated masking indoors for unvaccinated children aged 2 to 12.  During a four-hour debate at the Douglas County meeting, anti-maskers compared pro-maskers to Nazis, the Taliban, and Marxists. “It got much more hostile than anything I had seen,” Portillo said.

Portillo, the descendant of a Holocaust survivor, added, “It is really insulting to families all over who lost loved ones in genocides.”

But as anti-maskers bask in their righteous rage, the truth is that they are on the fringier side of public opinion on mandatory masking and vaccinations. 

New AP-NORC polling released Monday morning confirmed what multiple surveys over the past several weeks have shown: Not only do solid majorities of Americans support mitigation mandates, a relatively small sliver of the population opposes them.

The AP-NORC poll found that nearly six in 10 Americans favor requiring K-12 teachers and students to wear masks, while roughly one-fifth to one-quarter of Americans oppose it.

Requiring K-12 teachers to mask up in school:

Favor: 59%
Oppose: 22%
Neither for/against: 18%

Requiring students K-12 to mask up in school:

Favor: 58%
Oppose: 25%
Neither for/against: 17%

Naturally, the partisan divide is vast. “About 3 in 10 Republicans said they favor mask requirements for students and teachers, compared with about 8 in 10 Democrats. There was a similar split over vaccine mandates in schools,” writes the AP.

The poll also found 59% support for requiring teachers to get vaccinated and 55% support for requiring the same of students 12 and older who are eligible for the vaccine. But among parents, support for requiring students to get vaccinated fell to 42%.