Facebook is a menace. COVID 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 Crystal.

“Let us die and y’all can defund police and shit.” That’s called “foreshadowing.” 

Of course, the problem isn’t QAnon assholes dying: It’s the strain it’s putting on our health care system, it’s the chances to infect vaccinated people (since no vaccine has ever promised 100% protection), it’s the millions of extra opportunities for the virus to mutate, and it’s a basic humanity that says, “No, we don’t want people to die unnecessarily for easily preventable reasons.” 

Had Trump tweeted “get the vaccine or wear a mask,” we’d all be ecstatic! We’d be like, “Holy shit he’s finally taking his job seriously!” Some dumbass pundit, somewhere, would say that “Today is the day that Donald Trump finally became president.” And we wouldn’t even attack that dumbass pundit for saying that! We’d be like, “Okay okay, that’s going too far, but seriously, good thing he’s finally urging vaccination and mask usage.” 

Meanwhile, if you really want to know what the Bible says about this situation, read this.

No vaccine is 100% effective, and even less so against new variants given life because … people won’t vaccinate. No one is contesting that. But this is never about the effectiveness rates of vaccines. If they really believe it is “the mark of the beast,” then what does the effectiveness rate have to do with anything? 

Of course, this all assumes that there’s an underlying consistent logic to all of this. Clearly, there is not. 

The coronavirus isn’t really transmitted via surfaces. It’s transmitted via air droplets. Whether that plexiglass screen actually protects from those droplets might be debatable, but that has nothing to do with touching groceries. Science figured that out last year.

Now, let’s fast-forward all the way to ONE WEEK after hyperventilating about New York City’s vaccine passport …

She left behind THREE kids. Three!  And for what?! For a lie propagated by assholes, recklessly disseminated on Facebook? “Let us die” so we could defund the police, she said, and still we begged her and people like her to take the vaccine, to avoid this exact outcome! 

Her last Facebook message hits hard. Many of these stories end with family members claiming their loved ones passed “peacefully.” Yet that’s not the reality of this disease. She was screaming and crying out to her god, desperate for life, yet unsure she would make it. I can’t fathom what that pain, suffering, and fear must’ve felt like, especially knowing that three kids would be left behind motherless. There is nothing peaceful about this process: It’s a freakin’ nightmare. 

That’s why we need people to vaccinate and behave responsibly. That’s what we’re begging these people to do, not for us and our “defund the police” efforts, but because we aren’t a death cult like this wretched excuse for a political movement.