White Republicans Are Killing Themselves Because Of Trump And Fox News [View all]

[Celerity]

It is hard to view this as anything other than an orchestrated campaign for murder.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/white-republicans-are-killing-themselves



Newsmax host and radio personality Dick Farrel urged his audience not to get the coronavirus vaccine calling it ““bogus bull shid”[sic]. He called Dr. Anthony Fauci a “power tripping lying freak”, labeled liberals who argued that a vaccine was still necessary after getting Covid “morons”, and believed the Delta variant was a conspiracy theory to keep people scared. Farrel, who lived in Florida, caught Covid just weeks later and deteriorated rapidly. On July 11th, he posted this to his Facebook page:



10 days after his initial diagnosis he was admitted to the ICU with severe breathing difficulties. From his hospital bed, Farrel reportedly changed his mind about the dangers of Covid and urged his friends privately to get vaccinated. "I wish I had gotten it" he told his friend Amy Leigh Hair. Dick Farrel died of Covid-19 complications on August 4th. Stories like this are an almost daily occurrence now. Prominent Texas Republican Party member H. Scott Apley promoted mask burning activities online, labeled incentives to get vaccinated “disgusting”, and likened mask mandates to Nazi Germany. Apley caught Covid, was placed in a coma and hooked up to a ventilator. He also died of Covid complications last week. Last month, Phil Valentine, a conservative talk show host in Tennessee who mocked vaccines and downplayed Covid was admitted to the ICU after a coronavirus infection gave him pneumonia. Valentine is still in critical condition and fighting for his life. According to his brother, he apparently regrets spreading vaccine disinformation. Republicans are dropping like flies as the Delta variant rips through the United States. The data on this is unequivocal; the pandemic in America is now almost entirely an unvaccinated problem — or more specifically a red state problem. Just look at what is happening in Florida. Reports NPR:



The Right’s deadly game

While Florida Governor Ron DeSantis threatens to withhold salaries from school officials who enforce mask mandates, he is quietly begging the federal government for new ventilators. By politicizing Covid-19, the Trump administration set the scene for the biggest domestic bloodbath since the Civil War. Almost 634,000 Americans have now died from Covid-19, an unimaginable number that could have been cut almost in half had the former administration taken the virus seriously. From the beginning, Trump viewed Covid as an inconvenience and refused to take it seriously. Instead of listening to public health officials and making the difficult decisions necessary to lead a country through a genuine disaster, Trump pretended everything was fine. He encouraged acts of domestic terrorism against public officials trying to contain the virus, refused to wear a mask in public, promoted quack cures off of the internet, held huge rallies with no social distancing, and even held a super spreader event at the White House that almost killed him. Trump became the number one cause of Covid misinformation in America — an astonishing fact given he was tasked with leading the country through its worst crisis in a century. Taking their cues from Trump, the right wing media fell in line and helped spread the insane disinformation coming out of the White House. Whatever Trump said, Fox News dutifully supported leading to spikes in infection rates in red states.

New vaccines, new smears

Now that we have several highly effective vaccines, the politicization and misinformation hasn’t stopped despite Trump being out of office. The right wing media ecosystem still sees enormous value in spreading false information having trained their audience to see Covid as a Red vs Blue issue rather than a highly contagious, deadly pathogen. Media Matter published a study on Fox News last month that concluded the network “relentlessly undermined the effort to get Americans vaccinated against the COVID-19 disease”. According to the report, “From June 28 through July 11, 57% of segments about coronavirus vaccines on the network included claims that undermined vaccination efforts.” This included “claims suggesting that the vaccination drive is coercive or that it represents government overreach,” and “suggesting that vaccines are unnecessary or dangerous.” It isn’t surprising then, that Republicans as a group are amongst the least likely to get vaccinated. It is hard to view this as anything other than an orchestrated campaign for murder. Fox News and other right wing outlets are quite literally encouraging their audiences to kill themselves for no other reason than to “own the libs”. The numbers are unequivocal: vaccinated Americans now account for less than one percent of Covid deaths. That means over 99% of Covid related deaths are occurring amongst the unvaccinated. It isn’t difficult then to draw a straight line from Fox News disinformation to unvaccinated Covid deaths.




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