Death Cult

I keep writing about this, because "conservatives" won't let me stop: anti-governmental ideologues are going to get people killed.  The modern, reactionary, anti-government movement known as the Republican Party's base has its roots in the John Birch Society and the Confederacy, but it remains stubbornly a part of American politics. It very likely will kill a bunch of Americans.

If you haven't seen it, reactionary astroturf groups of planned protests have targeted state capitols with Democratic governors. No protests (that I've seen) have targeted Republican governors who have done the exact same thing. They are the logical outgrowth of reactionary commentators on TV saying that "the cure can't be worse than the disease," in terms of shuttering the economy to defeat the coronavirus. Republicans know that the worse the economy is in November, the worse their electoral outcomes. They are laying the groundwork now to blame the economy on Democrats. I doubt it will work, but that's the plan. These are the same groups that funded the Tea Party in 2010, and they are clearly trying to recapture that political moment.

Opening the economy is, of course, a terrible idea advanced by profoundly stupid and/or cynical people.  If Larry Kudlow is advocating something, you can be reasonably sure it's wrong.  As people have said, opening the economy prematurely will only cause it to crater later when we get mass hotspots again. The most efficient countries at fighting this have had to practice a form of modulated closures, responding to real-time evidence of outbreaks.

What's more, the American people are pretty damned supportive of social distancing measure. By a two-to-one margin, Pew Research found that people were more concerned about ending social distancing too soon, rather than having it linger too long.

The problem, however, is twofold.  First, the epistemological closure of the Right is fairly airtight by this point. Republicans and Republican leaners get most of their information from outlets like Fox News.  Fox News is pushing the message to re-open the economy, so the 66% of Americans who want to be safe will likely erode as they are exposed to more and more QAnon theories about "fascist power grabs" by governors just trying to keep their citizens safe. What is now a fringe band of lunatics will likely grow out of motivated partisan reasoning.  If you're a reactionary Republican, you are going to believe what your cohort tells you to believe.

The second problem is more profound.  Frankly, I can't help but wish that these fucknuts out there get sick. All these yahoos whining about not being able to get their hair cut and colored or to fertilize their lawns (I'm not making that up), should get sick. I hate that their stupidity is making me wish pain and suffering and even death among my fellow human beings, but if the karmavirus gets them, so be it.  If someone gets stinking drunk and drives into a tree, that's sad, but choices have a way of manifesting themselves.  The problem is that these yahoos will keep the virus alive and in circulation, so that we can't reduce it's spread.

We've seen what good results look like. Until we get a vaccine, we know what we have to do: test and track. We need to keep the R0 of the disease below 1 - which is to say, we need to try and keep everyone who has the virus from passing it on to more than one person. That is only done through incredibly rigorous testing and tracking of contacts.  A competent government would hire the millions of currently unemployed Americans to manage the grunt work of this process. Instead, the reactionary fucknuts are going to make sure that we can't get the R0 below 1. Every tailgate party, every astroturfed protest movement, every evangelical megachurch service will be another hotspot that will keep the virus circulating.

If there was a way for only the tragically stupid to die from this, I say, "Have at it. Yes, most of you will survive, but a horrifically large number of you won't.  But whatever, please proceed."  It doesn't work that way.

The dumbshits will infect us all, against our will with their stupidity virus.