Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric. But I hadn’t really fully understood just how horrifying that combination of right-wing extremism, Facebook, and a killer virus was until I became a regular at the Herman Cain Awards subreddit. This series will document some of those stories, so we are aware of what the other side is doing to our country.

Today’s cautionary tale is James.

We live in a society which necessarily places constraints on someone’s “freedom” in order to live together. Someone may want the “freedom” to take a dump on their neighbor’s porch, but yeah, we don’t allow that. Murderers have their freedoms infringed. So do drunk drivers. 

Point is, when someone’s freedom infringes on that of someone else’s, then yeah, we as a society view that as selfish and seek to curb that behavior. 

Infecting and possibly killing someone because you don’t want to take a free jab and wear a strip of cloth over your mouth? Yes, that is the epitome of “selfish.” 

Common sense actually says that it’s patently absurd that safely Democratic states like California and New York would lock down because of any election. The results in those states were never in question. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis killing 2,500 of his people, mostly supporters, every week? Now that is about an election. But only because Republicans fetishize people who allow mass death to happen in the name of “freedom.”

Ah good. Why not inject some antisemitism into the room. The racism was getting lonely.

Thinking this through isn’t hard, if you are really willing to think it through. 

We take actions to mitigate risk. No one thing is 100% fool-proof, so you engage in multiple actions—masks, social distancing, vaccination, hand sanitizing, etc. And when possible, you do things via mail that avoid the congregating of large crowds. This shit isn’t hard. 

I love seeing “life site news dot com” pop up time and time again with pro-death demands. 

So … it’s better not to vaccinate and have even more people suffer from the flu and potentially die? 

I take the flu vaccine not because I’m afraid of dying from it, but because getting the flu freakin’ sucks, and I’d rather stay healthy! 

If there was a vaccine for food poisoning, I’d take that! If there was a vaccine for the common cold, sign me up! This doesn’t mean you don’t trust your immune system. Vaccines train your immune system to work better. They are a marvel of science. But that, unfortunately, is also their Achilles heel. “Science” and fundamentalist right-wing ideology are fundamentally mutually exclusive. 

Well reposting that on Facebook should protect James and his family! 

Or will it … 

Tampa Bay, Florida. 

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won the state by just 32,463 votes in 2018. He is running for president, but still needs to get reelected next year. He just lost two more dependable votes, to go with the roughly 2,500 Floridians currently dying every week. You’d think that, if nothing else, he’d have some self-interest in urging his supporters to get jabbed. 

But remember, even Donald Trump got booed for recommending the vaccine. For Republican elected officials, there is more political upside in refusing vaccine and mask mandates in the name of “freedom” than there is in keeping people alive. 

That’s your modern Republican Party: merchants of death. 

And no, we liberals have nothing to do with it.