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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe GOP's Dark Death Plot to Win Elections
Authoritarian Trump followers within the GOP are actively promoting death and disease among Americans to win elections. The brutality and cynicism is breathtaking.
As we saw yesterday, Rand Paul and several of his Republican colleagues in the Senate, grilling Dr. Fauci, did their best to advance one of the GOPs two major 2022/2024 election strategies.
The first of those strategies, of course, is to replace actual election officials with Republican hacks so they can throw out the votes they dont like and simply decide elections on their own. That strategy also includes suppressing the vote and stopping people from voting, as GOP Governor Ducey did yesterday, throwing 140,000 voters (including 30,000 Latinos) off the early voting rolls.
As I wrote yesterday, theyve passed those laws in several states now and are proposing them in nearly every state in the union, and the only defense American democracy has against them is the For The People Act, which hinges on changing or ending the filibuster.
But the second, and most evil part of their strategy at least in the context of their total disregard for human life has to do with the coronavirus.
Their logic goes something like this:
1. Convince enough Americans not to get vaccinated that the country never reaches herd immunity and President Joe Biden therefore cannot get the virus crisis under control.
2. The failure of Biden to control the virus will mean, like what happened to Trump, that the economy will not get back to full functioning, either.
3. As any first-year Political Science student can tell you, the biggest single variable in most elections, particularly federal elections, is the economy. If Republicans can keep the economy off-balance by keeping the virus circulating, theyll have a much better chance of winning elections in 2022 and particularly in the presidential race in 2024. And if they can use uncertainty about when the coronavirus crisis may end here to crash the stock market, that gets them double bonus points!
This strategy, aggressively supported by right-wing media, requires creating doubt about the virus generally and the vaccines in particular. Its why about half the Republicans in Congress refuse to say whether theyve been vaccinated or not, and why Trump and his wife took their shots in secret before they left the White House.
Tucker Carlson has been asking questions about people who died after getting vaccinated, as if the vaccines had anything to do with their deaths (it didnt), echoing similar lies told by Americas dumbest senator, Wisconsins Ron Johnson.
Right-wingers and conspiracy nuts on radio and across the Internet, and bots and trolls from multiple foreign countries filling thousands of Facebook groups, are coming right out and warning people against getting vaccinated.
Their freak-outs include everything from the theory that Bill Gates is putting tracking chips in the vaccines so he can know where you are (presumably these people dont know about cell phones?) to suggestions that mRNA vaccines alter your DNA (they dont) and could turn us into zombies, mutants, or even make us all liberals.
In yesterdays hearing, more than one Republican senator tried to produce a clip worthy of getting themselves on Fox News by suggesting that people who have had the coronavirus dont need to get vaccinated because they are already immune.
Fauci has already shot that one down; people who had the wild variety of coronavirus earlier in the year can still get just as sick or even die from the South African variant, which is spreading across the United States right now, and because the Indian variant contains some of the same mutations presumably it can also infect and kill people who have already had the wild first-generation coronavirus.
The vaccines, however, actually produce an immunity to all of these variants thats stronger than the natural immunity of having had coronavirus in its original form. None of that actual science, however, mattered to the Republicans speaking yesterday.
Rand Paul, for his part, tried his best to promote the idea that somehow Fauci was in on an evil plot years ago to send money to China to develop a weaponized coronavirus that they would then unleash on the world like, you know, a year ago.
Its a classic example of how a grain of truth can be turned into a sand castle of lies.
Its true that governments, including China and the United States, have been engaged in biological warfare experiments for decades, which includes weaponizing viruses. When anthrax (a bacterium) was mailed to leading Democrats and news media after 9/11 just in time to promote passage of the PATRIOT Act, it was traced back to a US weapons lab, for example.
Whats not true, however, and what Rand Paul was trying to get people to believe is that labs doing basic virology research, including the lab in Wuhan, are not only involved in this kind of research but are intentionally responsible for the pandemic.
Theres a remote possibility that some part of his hypothesis is correct the part about the Covid virus escaping from the lab in Wuhan but nobody knows for sure at this point in time and its considered extremely unlikely by most credible sources. Even if true, though, it has nothing to do with Pauls questioning.
Because that wasnt the point he was trying to make: what Rand Paul was trying to do is discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci and the entire public health team surrounding President Biden, so Americans will not believe what they say and therefore wont get vaccinated.
Which takes us back to the second of the two Republican election strategies: keep the virus circulating in America; thus keeping the US economy in chaos; then run ads complaining about the bad Democrat economy and use that to win elections in 2022 and 2024.
The raw brutality of this election strategy is extraordinary.
The number of new coronavirus infections in the United States has now dropped below 30,000 a day, and the number of deaths is consistently well below the 400-a-day mark. This is a huge contrast to the time when Donald Trump was pushing people back into the workplace to get re-elected and we were seeing hundreds of thousands of people infected and thousands dying every day.
No matter how hard Rand Paul and his Republican colleagues try, enough of us are vaccinated now that they wont get America back to those kinds of terrible numbers. But they apparently think they can get the numbers to stay high enough that the economy will remain in crisis and Republicans can use it as a wedge issue.
And, looking at their behavior, it appears they dont care how many Americans die to get them there.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
Hugh_Lebowski
(33,643 posts)The new law, enacted by the State legislature, only removes people from the permanent early voting list (i.e. automatically receive mail-in ballots) if they don't vote for 2 election cycles, it doesn't remove them from the rolls (i.e. you're still registered).
It's also being said it's not retroactive so it'll be 4 years before this begins happening but I've not confirmed this.
All I'm saying is it not the best example as there's a lot worse crap going on nationwide than that law.
The Unmitigated Gall
(3,811 posts)Because that was the part making my innards squirm with rage.
Hugh_Lebowski
(33,643 posts)The Unmitigated Gall
(3,811 posts)I sure walked into that one!
Hugh_Lebowski
(33,643 posts)for allowing unrepentant and unmitigated jokers like me into their midst
spanone
(135,831 posts)abqtommy
(14,118 posts)CaliforniaPeggy
(149,615 posts)You have brought clarity to a complicated and messy situation, and I appreciate it.
CaliforniaPeggy
(149,615 posts)ancianita
(36,055 posts)Biden will smash the tuckertalk with the exact right covid numbers, and so will Psaki at WH pressers; and Biden will smash the economic lies with numbers, along with Psaki.
And everyone with common sense will feel the difference by this fall.
This strategy will be a big FAIL this year by the time kids go back to school from K-12 to college.
By next year trumpcult will have to have a new strategy.
jmbar2
(4,886 posts)The market has been in a bubble, and it is now starting to correct. The trend will accelerate as inflation sets in, interest rates rise, and the Fed stops buying treasuries.
If the analysts are correct, the market is going to drop about 30% later in the year. This is absolutely normal after a huge run up - stock traders take advantage of these normal cycles to book profits.
On StockTwits - a stock traders website- whenever the market dips, you can now see conspiracy theories, racist and sexist memes, and anti-Biden bots come out in force. They've gotten pretty ugly since Trump. https://stocktwits.com/symbol/SPY
We've seen a whole new generation of young folks start daytrading during covid - the Robinhood, crypto and meme-stock kids.
They have never experienced a market correction or bear market before. They are going to take some serious losses. I fear that they might be prone to radicalization by the stock trading board bots. Worth keeping an eye on.
Pepsidog
(6,254 posts)NullTuples
(6,017 posts)in the Republicans' version of,
1. Collect underpants
2. ???
3. Profit!
Specifically,
"1. Convince enough Americans not to get vaccinated that the country never reaches herd immunity and President Joe Biden therefore cannot get the virus crisis under control."
What happens if the only* people left unvaccinated...are the 30-40% of the country that wouldn't vote for Biden anyway?
Everyone else will be winding the economy back up to speed, as will the roughly half of the 30-40% (so, 15-20%) who would be asymptomatic anyway.
That's 80-85% of America NOT working toward the evil GOP plan to stifle the economy, but instead doing that other thing where they work and spend.
*excluding those who cannot get vaccinated
LastLiberal in PalmSprings
(12,586 posts)If they convince enough people that the entire presidential 2020 election was fraudulent because of The Big Lie -- which they will repeat over and over until it becomes the "truth," there's no point in holding elections at all. They are already setting up the rules in Georgia and Arizona so if their candidate gets fewer vote despite all the voter suppression measures the Republicans have put in place, the GOP legislature can swoop in and change the result to the "right candidate."
So if it doesn't matter who you vote for, why have elections at all? That will become the next big lie.