Doomiest images of 2020
31 December 2020 (Desdemona Despair) – In 2020, the long campaign by conservatives to squelch scientific decision-making in government reached its goal: the complete sidelining of evidence-based expertise in favor of arbitrary political whim. Last year’s Doomiest Graph presaged this development, but even Desdemona couldn’t have imagined the mass death that would result as government scientists were ignored, censored, and silenced.
The official-but-officially-denied policy of herd immunity brought a new kind of terror to daily life in the U.S. and a few other rogue nations. Adherents to “pro-life” values, who have spent decades fighting to ban abortion and euthanasia, suddenly embraced a cold-blooded cost-benefit analysis: COVID-19 kills “only” the elderly and people suffering from other medical conditions, so they must be sacrificed for the greater good. “We can’t let the cure be worse than the problem,” was the stated goal. Desdemona started calling this the “Unnütze Esser” (useless-eater) policy, without the slightest irony.
“We want them infected”
In March, Trump threatened to forcibly re-open the U.S. economy (somehow) by Easter, ignoring all scientific advice to the contrary, just because it would be “a beautiful timeline”. Desdemona started losing a lot of sleep, as the realization dawned that the official policy was becoming “throw Americans on the pyre for Wall Street”.
Some elected officials reacted with appropriate horror at this resurgence of fascist thinking – that America literally fought a world war to stop. New York Governor Mario Cuomo declared, “My mother is not expendable, and neither is yours.”
Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle-aged with no conditions, etc. have zero to little risk … so we use them to develop herd … we want them infected.
White House science adviser Paul Alexander email to Michael Caputo, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs, 4 July 2020
But the U.S pursued herd immunity relentlessly, demonizing anyone who tried to enact common-sense public health policies, like universal mask-wearing. Trump followers demanded the “right” to infect their neighbors with a deadly virus, because mandatory mask-wearing is “tyranny”. Religious zealots demanded the “right” to meet at indoor superspreader events and knowingly return home to infect their communities, turning a wide swath of nominal Christians into suicidal bio-terrorists wearing “viral bomb vests”. The Supreme Court nodded and gave its approval to these willful attacks on less indoctrinated Americans.
By the Fall of 2020, as the pandemic raged through the Midwest, the President of the United States traveled from state to state, holding political rallies where mask-wearing and social-distancing were officially encouraged but strongly derided by the crowds as “socialist” and “communist”. Herman Cain, a 2012 Republican presidential candidate, was infected at the Oklahoma rally in June and died a month later. That didn’t prevent somebody from tweeting in August that the coronavirus which killed Cain in July is “not as deadly as the mainstream media made it out to be”.
Numerous other Republican politicians and religious leaders – who had attacked public health measures like mask-wearing and had exerted all of their influence to minimize the danger of the virus – later died from the disease. But that didn’t deter the indoctrinated; they blamed the victims for being weak, for insufficient piety, or for failing to take “personal responsibility” for pre-existing medical conditions, whatever that might mean.
After contracting COVID-19 himself and receiving every known treatment – except, strangely, the hydroxychloroquine and bleach that he had advocated a few months earlier – Trump declared, “Don’t be afraid of Covid”.
The virus had successfully infected the brain leading the most powerful nation on Earth.
Can’t wait ’til Trump’s “Don’t be afraid of COVID” message is approvingly RTed by Herman’s Cain’s ghost.
Comedian Bill Corbett tweet, 5 October 2020 (since deleted)
The virus takes charge
Pres. Superspreader incited insurrection against the duly elected governors of the states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia. Public health officials were harassed out of government service by threats from thugs. A Florida public health official resigned in protest and had her home raided by armed officers, reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic in China. The swearing-in ceremony of religious zealot Amy Coney Barrett became a superspreader event, and the virus spread throughout the Trump party’s leadership. America was living “The Masque of the Red Death”, 2020-style.
Desdemona began to view the Trump party as a literal death cult, as lethal as any that humans have suffered with in the past. President Superspreader became the leader of the Pestilence Party. The official state religion became Moloch worship, with Trump its high priest and its followers throwing fellow Americans onto the sacrificial pyre with abandon. The fact that coronavirus kills people of color at much higher rates than white people made it easier for white nationalists and white supremacists to shrug and call it “God’s will”.
Between the pandemic and the democidal maniac in the White House, Desdemona lost the wherewithal to post for a few months. It seemed that The Doom had arrived, so there was no point in blogging about it. After the election, Desdemona’s anxiety receded a bit, to the point that blogging seemed sensible again.
Return to Reason in 2021?
With new leadership in place, will the U.S. return to some sort of rational, science-based public health policy in 2021? There are hopeful signs: the avowed policy of the Biden/Harris administration is to reverse course and repair the damage done by the Pestilence Party. And in the final week of the year, U.S. District Judge Jesus Bernal ruled against the death cult in California: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
The First Amendment has not taken a sabbatical. Californians may still worship, attend services, pray, and otherwise exercise their religious freedoms. They just may not do so in ways that significantly increase the likelihood of transmission of a virus which has claimed more than three hundred thousand American lives in less than one year. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. The First Amendment may not be used to make it one.
U.S. District Judge Jesus Bernal ruling in Harvest Rock Church, Inc. et al. v. Gavin Newsom, 21 December 2020
But we still have more than 74 million people who voted for another four years of this antiscience madness, and they won’t go away after Trump slinks out of the White House. As recently as mid-December, Republican Representative-elect Bob Good of Virginia called the coronavirus pandemic “phony” at a Trump rally in Washington, D.C.:
“This looks like a group of people that get that this is a phony pandemic,” he said. “It’s a serious virus, but it’s a virus. It’s not a pandemic. … You get it. You stand up against tyranny.”
His fellow Congressman-elect, Luke Letlow of Louisiana, also a Republican, died of COVID-19 complications two weeks later, at the age of 41.
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