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Trump's Cult Is Committing Suicide To Own The Libs
The dumbing down of the Republican base is reaping a bitter fruit.https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trumps-cult-is-committing-suicide
Back at the end of February, I told my wife that we were going to start stocking up on non-perishable groceries and other stuff we would need to be holed up in the apartment for an extended amount of time. She thought I was crazy but she did it because she trusted me. This was a couple of weeks before I fully understood just how badly Trump and his regime of imbeciles were bungling the response to Covid-19. I was just reacting to reports that a deadly flu-like sickness was spreading and I realized that even under the best of circumstances, something like that would be brutally hard to stop. Ebola is deadly but not extremely contagious (it’s not airborne) which is why I wasn’t too worried about it despite living in a community with a good number of immigrants that come and go from West Africa. Covid-19 was very different and that was obvious (to me, at least) once I realized how much damage it was doing overseas.
So over the next 3 weeks, as more cases spread throughout the country and Trump played golf, we bought more supplies. Joe Biden, it should be noted, warned us and was ignored by almost everyone, including the press. Then the weekend of March 13 came. Alexandria City schools closed for three weeks (before closing for the year) and the supermarkets were stripped bare. Suddenly, it became very, very real for Debbie. She finally joined me in Act II. It was not a great weekend for her. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe me, necessarily, it’s just that it was abstract until it wasn’t anymore. She still prepared for it and didn’t insist it wasn’t happening but Covid-19 wasn’t triggering her Spidey Sense whereas mine had been screaming like a 4-alarm fire for 3 weeks at that point. Meanwhile in Trumpland, not only did the MAGA Moron Mob not believe anything was wrong, they were going to prove it even if it killed them.
Dying To Own The Libs
It’s a little hard to blame the Moron Mob for ignoring the virus at the beginning. Just about their entire information bubble was lying to them about it, and that bubble is sealed tight. From Trump to Fox to AM Hate Radio to right wing hate sites, all the mob heard was, “It’s a hoax!” So naturally, that’s exactly how they responded. But later, when Trump realized that maybe he couldn’t bluster, bully, lie and cheat a virus into submission, and started to kind of sort of treat it like it was real, the mob continued to refuse to accept reality. This is something a little different. In conservative circles, Trump’s word is law. It does not matter what he said yesterday, all that matters is what he said today. White Republican voters have been conditioned through decades of propaganda to rewrite their own memories so that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia and right now, Trump is very clear that hundreds of thousands of people dying is the best case scenario. And yet, a dangerous number of dangerously stupid people are proudly marching towards their death.
The Washington Post reports:
In some cases, skeptics have been slow to acknowledge the science behind the spread of the novel coronavirus. In others, such as Florida, politicians took heed of demands from the business community, which lobbied DeSantis as recently as during a Monday webinar to balance medical imperatives with economic needs. Elsewhere, adamance about local autonomy was pronounced. Some, meanwhile, maintained that it was religious authority that mattered.
It’s rare that a single paragraph unintentionally captures the quintessence of right wing insanity but there it is. When it comes to understanding right wing ignorance, it is important to understand the different mobs within the GOP and how they are responding to the current pandemic.
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