Invoking Joseph Welch‘s immortal put-down from the McCarthy hearings is trite by now. Like comic book villains, the Republican Party and its axis of media have long since strangled any vestigial sense of decency in them. They’ve embraced shamelessness as their superpower, as Digby has said for over a year.
That should be news. Programming their supporters to stare COVID-19 in the face and die should be news. Brainwashing Americans to shun basic health precautions during the deadliest pandemic since 1918 should be news. As should encouraging them to conduct medical experiments on themselves with feed-store medications.
Still, a media “nervous about offending conservatives” tiptoes around labeling the madness madness the way it refused to brand Donald Trump’s lies lies, writes Eric Boehlert this morning:
National Public Radio relayed more shocking Covid news on Monday: “In 2020, for the first time in recorded history, more people died in Alabama than were born in the state.” The pandemic has shrunk the red state. Yet local Republican leaders still oppose mask and vaccine mandates, leaving the Trump outpost exposed to more fatalities.
But like so many news outlets, NPR missed the real story. The pile of Alabama deaths continue to mount not simply because of Covid. But because so many people in the Trump-friendly state have been brainwashed by bad-faith partisan actors and they refuse to get inoculated. Anti-science Republicans seem determined to spread the virus among their own voters, which seems inconceivable.
Millions of conservative Americans are being brainwashed about the pandemic, and thousands are killing themselves in the process. Yet the media downplay the huge story, framing it simply as “vaccine hesitancy.”
The dying are described merely as “vaccine hesitant,” “vaccine-reluctant,” or “vaccine skeptics,” Boehlert complains:
Within the media, there’s lots of tsk-tsking commentary about vaccine “misinformation.” But the press continues to look away from the consequences of mass brainwashing —millions of Americans believe the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus. And they’re lashing out in public, staging deranged acts of civil disobedience, often inside restaurants and at local school board meetings, where the white-rage screaming and name-calling commences.
The number of Americans who are dying every 36 hours from Covid now surpasses the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed during 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. It’s an entirely preventable crisis, yet it rages because we have people like the red state restaurant owner who is kicking out patrons if they refuse to take off their masks. It’s pure nihilism.
Walter Sobchak: Nihilists! F*** me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
It’s not as if previous vaccines raised this level of opposition. But there is fringe, anti-vax activism on the one hand and then the suicidal, mass, mindless tribalism of Covid vaccine refuseniks crazy enough to blame their self-immolation on opponents’ tricksy malevolence.
Boehlert concludes:
Brainwashing itsn’t [sic] typically a topic that’s covered when dissecting mainstream American politics. Sadly, it needs to be. And fast.
Each year of the Trump presidency, I wondered if we would survive it. Even with him gone, I wonder.