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 Wanda. 

Lots of things work and are safe, but conservatives reject them out of ideological idiocy. Like democracy. And voting. 

Not to mention, if huge ad campaigns weren’t necessary to convince people to do stuff, advertising wouldn’t exist. 

At this point, it seems like those Facebook warnings don’t communicate “check out the truth of the matter” to these people. Rather, it feeds into that “block, censor, and threaten” motif from the previous meme. They know the truth, and evil Facebook and DemoncRATS and Joe Biden are all trying to bully them into science. Because reasons. 

What does the booster do? It prevents people from dying in hospitals and reduces transmission by some measure. You might still catch COVID-19, but if you’re home sick with flu-like symptoms and nothing more, that sure as hell beats being intubated in a hospital as your organs shut down. Should be pretty freakin’ obvious. 

To these people, “freedom” means the unfettered ability to infect other people, because they’ve convinced themselves that 99.9% survive infection (their made-up number), and they’ll never be in that small percentage who die or are seriously incapacitated by the disease. And a big part of that arrogant indifference is their religion—their god will protect them from disease. It’s those heathens in the Big City who will suffer. 

Hydroxychloroquine? Ivermectin? 

It’s shocking how afraid they are of a vaccine literally “tested” on 2 billion people and counting, but they’re happy to play guinea pig with unapproved substances they read about on Facebook. Even when said substances are horse dewormer.

Not to mention, as we all knew, they only cared about FDA approval when it suited their talking points. “It’s not approved, it’s ‘experimental!’” Final approval for the Pfizer vaccine didn’t change any of their minds.

One week after that Snow White meme, Wanda’s husband Tommy dies. That one was quick, holy shit. Wanda is pissed because some people discussed it on Facebook—and not because Facebook miseducated her and her family into refusing the vaccine or other life-protecting precautions, like masking. 

The problem here is that these decisions aren’t strictly personal ones: They actually do impact others. She can’t say “you have nothing to do with [this decision]” when those decisions clog hospital beds and impact those who did take proper precautions, and those who might need medical care for non-COVID emergencies. Not to mention, those decisions could impact other people, which should be obvious for people who profess to follow a religion that commands everyone to love their neighbors. 

Which brings us to …

Enter Cobie, Wanda’s daughter, who seems to be the only person in the family who isn’t infected with COVID-19. Her dad (Wanda’s husband), is dead of COVID-19. Wanda is now in the hospital. Wanda’s son and Cobie’s brother, Hunter/Hunk, is also in the hospital, with pneumonia. Grandma is home with COVID-19 too. The blood of Jesus isn’t enough, which is why they’re in a hospital, and it wasn’t enough to protect them from the virus, because it really doesn’t care about anyone’s religion.

“I refuse to believe anything different” should be the official slogan of the conservative movement.