Trump’s Cult Is Committing Suicide To Own The Libs

The dumbing down of the Republican base is reaping a bitter fruit.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Get 50% off a Banter Membership today. During the Coronavirus pandemic, you need intelligent, reliable, and fact checked reporting. So get The Banter Newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. You’ll get:

1. Access to all premium articles

2. Access to our locked archive

3. Early access to The Banter Podcast

4. No ads, no spam. Ever.

by Justin Rosario

Back at the end of February, I told my wife that we were going to start stocking up on non-perishable groceries and other stuff we would need to be holed up in the apartment for an extended amount of time. She thought I was crazy but she did it because she trusted me.

This was a couple of weeks before I fully understood just how badly Trump and his regime of imbeciles were bungling the response to Covid-19. I was just reacting to reports that a deadly flu-like sickness was spreading and I realized that even under the best of circumstances, something like that would be brutally hard to stop.

Ebola is deadly but not extremely contagious (it’s not airborne) which is why I wasn’t too worried about it despite living in a community with a good number of immigrants that come and go from West Africa. Covid-19 was very different and that was obvious (to me, at least) once I realized how much damage it was doing overseas.

So over the next 3 weeks, as more cases spread throughout the country and Trump played golf, we bought more supplies. Joe Biden, it should be noted, warned us and was ignored by almost everyone, including the press.

Then the weekend of March 13 came. Alexandria City schools closed for three weeks (before closing for the year) and the supermarkets were stripped bare. Suddenly, it became very, very real for Debbie. She finally joined me in Act II. It was not a great weekend for her.

It wasn’t that she didn’t believe me, necessarily, it’s just that it was abstract until it wasn’t anymore. She still prepared for it and didn’t insist it wasn’t happening but Covid-19 wasn’t triggering her Spidey Sense whereas mine had been screaming like a 4-alarm fire for 3 weeks at that point.

Meanwhile in Trumpland, not only did the MAGA Moron Mob not believe anything was wrong, they were going to prove it even if it killed them.

---

Go deeper with Banter Members:

White House Insider: "Trump Is Killing His Own Supporters"

Those close to Trump now admit the president is killing his own supporters, says Ben Cohen

---

Dying To Own The Libs

It’s a little hard to blame the Moron Mob for ignoring the virus at the beginning. Just about their entire information bubble was lying to them about it, and that bubble is sealed tight. From Trump to Fox to AM Hate Radio to right wing hate sites, all the mob heard was, “It’s a hoax!”

So naturally, that’s exactly how they responded. 

But later, when Trump realized that maybe he couldn’t bluster, bully, lie and cheat a virus into submission, and started to kind of sort of treat it like it was real, the mob continued to refuse to accept reality.

This is something a little different. In conservative circles, Trump’s word is law. It does not matter what he said yesterday, all that matters is what he said today. White Republican voters have been conditioned through decades of propaganda to rewrite their own memories so that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia and right now, Trump is very clear that hundreds of thousands of people dying is the best case scenario. And yet, a dangerous number of dangerously stupid people are proudly marching towards their death. 

The Washington Post reports:

In some cases, skeptics have been slow to acknowledge the science behind the spread of the novel coronavirus. In others, such as Florida, politicians took heed of demands from the business community, which lobbied DeSantis as recently as during a Monday webinar to balance medical imperatives with economic needs. Elsewhere, adamance about local autonomy was pronounced. Some, meanwhile, maintained that it was religious authority that mattered.

It’s rare that a single paragraph unintentionally captures the quintessence of right wing insanity but there it is.

When it comes to understanding right wing ignorance, it is important to understand the different mobs within the GOP and how they are responding to the current pandemic.

Ignorance as virtue

Firstly, you have the “science skeptics,” otherwise known as “people what don’t cotton to all that liberal elite coastal educayshun.”

These are the jackasses that are openly proud of being uneducated, as if knowing things were a badge of shame. They’re not necessarily stupid — they can tell you the winner of every Daytona 500 for the last 30 years for example, and could strip and rebuild an AR-15 with their eyes closed. But when it comes to science, they’ve been programmed to reject it in favor of whatever is politically convenient that week. Right now, COVID-19 is a liberal plot to attack Trump so it can’t possibly be as bad as the scientists are saying. The elevation of ignorance as praiseworthy is a pillar of right wing ideology, and it’s killing them.

Business before lives

Second, you have greedy corporate stooges. These people knew exactly how bad the virus was, but also knew how bad it was going to be for the economy. That’s where the “The cure can’t be worse than the disease” talking point came from, and why Republican governors are not closing down their states and allowing the virus to spread unchecked.

Corporations demand profits no matter how many have to die and the leaders of the GOP are all too happy to go along with that. An utter lack of humanity is another pillar of right wing ideology, and again, it is killing them.

Free and dead

Third, you have the “freedumb” coalition. As far as they’re concerned, if the evil gub’mint says it, it ain’t true, even if that government is run by their white nationalist lord and savior Donald Trump.

In Freedumbland, the Second Amendment is the only one that matters, vaccines are a government plot to do...something, and black helicopters are watching everyone. You can’t tell them not to meet in large groups because it’s their God-given right to spread a deadly disease if they want to. Just like the Founding Fathers intended.

What appears to be blinding selfishness is in fact “patriotism” and “rugged individuality”. Of course, the second a tornado or flood annihilates their home, they’re the first to scream for FEMA. Faux-individualism and hatred of the government is yet another pillar of the right wing and it is killing them.

Jesus vs Coronavirus

Finally, there are the bible thumpers. These come in a few flavors. There are the true believers who insist JAY-zus will protect them from the virus. Then there are the grifters who are concerned hey’ll lose their marks if they can’t keep conning them at service every week.

But then there are those who are putting their followers at risk just to stick it to the libs. It’s not about god. It’s not about money. It’s about making a political statement. Several right wing religious leaders have either threatened to hold mass congregations or have actually gone through with it.

Jerry Falwell, a far right lunatic, reopened Liberty University as a thumb in the eye of the left. Now students are spreading Covid-19 among themselves and into the surrounding community. Will Falwell care if any of his students or faculty die? Of course not. A few dead bodies is a small price to pay when there are political points to be scored.

The abuse of religion as a political weapon is a defining pillar of right wing ideology and it is killing them.

Suicide-by-conservatism is perhaps best exemplified by Karen Kolb Sehlke, a Texas god-fearing, gun and freedom-loving patriot who hates liberals and loves Trump.

On March 14, her Facebook post on Covid-19 being a hoax by the liberal media went viral. In it, she hit on all the Fox News talking points: It was less dangerous than the flu, something about impeachment and socialism, CNN is lying to you, etc.

She died on April 2nd from Covid-19. 

Political Darwinism

If Trump continues to botch the federal government’s response (which is almost guaranteed) and the governors are not able to compensate hundreds of thousands to millions of Americans — mostly elderly — will die.

Since so many Republican voters, who are overwhelmingly elderly, are so eager to own the libs, it stands to reason that a significantly disproportionate number of the deaths will be theirs.

It occurs to me that sometime shortly after November 2022, data crunchers are going to analyze the election and they’re going to find that the Republican Party lost a significant percent of its voting power due to Covid-19 deaths.

If things go truly catastrophic and we lose 1-2 million by the end of this summer (the worst case scenario), that would still probably be the case for the 2020 election, but it would be difficult to determine since so many people would be avoiding going to the polls. 

The same will be true for the off-year election in 2021. Even if a vaccine is available by then, it won’t have been mass-produced enough to make it to the full population, so an accurate assessment will be challenging.

But by the midterms, this should all be over, one way or the other. Either there will be a widely-distributed vaccine or Covid-19 will have burned its way through the population (let’s hope for the former). Regardless, the 2022 election will give us a clear picture of the electorate and I’d be willing to bet that there will be a very distinct and noticeable dip in Republican voters.

When all is said and done, the Darwinism will have its way and those who deliberately expose themselves to a deadly disease suffer the most, especially since that group is the most vulnerable in the first place.

It’s almost like watching the dinosaurs rushing towards the ash cloud enveloping their world screaming, “You can’t tell me not to breathe ash and starve to death! How dare you?!” 

But this is the inevitable outcome of the dumbing down of America’s right wing. The Republican Party abandoned good governance and instead relied on propaganda and molding its base into a cesspit of paranoia and stupidity to keep itself alive. Now that decision is literally killing Republican voters and there’s nothing the GOP can do to stop it. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Read more for Banter Members:

White House Insider: "Trump Is Killing His Own Supporters"

Those close to Trump now admit the president is killing his own supporters, says Ben Cohen

The Media Is Helping Re-Elect Donald Trump

Trump hasn’t once earned the benefit of the doubt, from any of us, and the usual suspects in the press need to stop giving it to him, says Bob Cesca.