Republicans treated Covid like a bioweapon. Then it turned against them.

[CousinIT]

Trump’s team reportedly believed that coronavirus would hurt Democratic states – and Democratic governors – worse. But the virus does not discriminate

. . .

Democratic governors, Native nations and people with moderate-to-leftwing views have done a better job of protecting against this scourge. The worst-hit areas in the country are now Republican-led states and regions. At one point recently, Florida under raging science denier Governor Ron DeSantis, with about 7.5% of the US population, accounted for 20% of all new Covid cases. The governors of Florida and Texas have banned mask mandates, making attempts to protect public health, including that of children, acts of defiance by cities and school districts. DeSantis’s supporters are peddling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” T-shirts and drink coolers with the text “How the hell am I going to drink a beer with a mask on?” On 27 July, as Delta infections proliferated, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, “Make no mistake – The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.”

. . .

There is of course another angle to the conservative response to the pandemic. In far-right ideology, freedom – for white men especially – is an absolute goal. Even recognizing the systems in which we are all enmeshed might burden the free person with obligations to others and to the whole. Science itself is a series of descriptions of our enmeshedness: of how pesticides travel beyond the crops they’re sprayed on, of the way that fossil fuel emissions contribute to health problems and climate change, of how the spread of disease can be prevented by collective action. Rightwing ideology, after all, has emphasised the right to own and carry a gun over the right to be free of being menaced or murdered by guns, as thousands are in the US every year.

But just as the right to brandish guns is defended in the face of those gun deaths, so the right to contract and spread a sometimes lethal and often debilitating disease is defended as the antithesis of the responsibility not to do so. It’s safe to assume that the Republican leadership knows better, and that some of their followers do and some don’t. Some have chosen to engage in biological warfare; some are merely tools being used in that warfare. That is, some of them are unwitting corpses being catapulted over the walls, unconscious smallpox blankets; some of them are Amherst in spirit. Those using fake vaccine cards – as college students, and two recent travelers from the US to Canada have – are definitely Amhersts.

Covid-19 is far from the first time people have decided to profit from promoting the death of others: the fossil fuel industry plunging ahead while fully aware that climate catastrophe was the consequence of its product is the most extreme example. Manufacturers of guns and prescription opiates have done so as well. But it might be the first time that a new threat has been so dramatically increased not by direct profiteers but by those selling ideology and sowing division.

Measuring the impact of the pandemic by its death toll leaves out other impacts that matter: millions of schoolchildren isolated and undereducated, millions of parents exhausted by double duty, millions of small businesses shuttered, millions unemployed and impoverished, their dreams crushed, millions isolated and anxious, millions grieving the dead. Medical workers who were selflessly heroic the first time around are demoralized now that the hospitalised are so often people who could have been vaccinated, could have been careful, but chose not to. The poison runs through everything. Some of it was spread on purpose.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/07/republicans-treated-covid-like-bioweapon-turned-against-them

[Hortensis]

1. "In far-right ideology, freedom - for white men especially - is an absolute goal."

ECONOMIC freedom. Not so much personal social freedom. Most conservatives we know have very strong belief in rights related to their money and possessions, which contrasts very strong with beliefs in the need for government to limit the personal behaviors of both populations and individuals. Those they disapprove of, anyway.

They've also always seen the great gulf developed between us as between their virtuous RW ideology and my liberalism which leads to social depravity and communism.

Meanwhile, their leadership has been encouraging and augmenting those hostilities to divide and conquer the electorate.

Their great divide is between the ruling classes they've been creating and everyone else. Of course they're willing to employ strategies that exploit and even kill the working class conservatives who so foolishly imagine they're on the same side. Many of those are also redundancies whom the RW plutocrats, who've benefited enormously from this pandemic, don't expect to particularly need once they prevail and wouldn't be willing to meet the needs of. Not just retirees already collecting benefits.

[MLAA]

2. +1000

[Botany]

3. The brutal political calculus

The cruel fact is that Fox News and the like along with a large section of the right and Christian Evangelicals have made the brutal political calculus that keeping the disease going is good for the Republicans. “They” know masks, vaccines, and social distancing works but “they” don’t want Joe Biden to get a win and they want the people and the economy to hurt so they will take it out on Biden and the Democrats.

[paleotn]

4. As bio weapons always do.

That's what happens when people don't know how things actually work and don't listen to those who do. They get themselves in even worse shape than when they started. But then again, that's from a rational, non-psychopathic point of view. The real story may be that Republican powers that be want to churn up as much covid animus towards Dems as they can, in hopes of riding that back to power in 2022 / 2024. If a bunch of their proles have to die to move that narrative forward, than so be it. They're already laying the ground work for "this is all Biden's fault." I expect the conspiracy mills to start running along the lines of....this was a Democratic plot all along to kill off conservatives and red states are receiving fake vaccines, while Dems horde the real stuff for liberals.

[cbabe]

5. Sadists. As Chris Hayes says.

They like the fear and anger and death. They can dress up in the bible or the constitution or the flag.
But it's vampire blood rites. And we're the prey.

[johnp3907]

6. In other words:

Some terrorists have learned that disinformation campaigns are an easier and more efficacious way of killing numerous people than crashing planes into buildings or gunning down crowds.