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 Jamie. 

This is the core of Trump’s base, and I will never understand it. I was raised Catholic, and while the crucifix is gruesome, this is next-level torture porn. Who is cleaning anything with blood aside from mass murderers, maybe? Meanwhile, these fundamentalist evangelicals are cleaning with it, washing in it, etc. 

Truly, I really don’t want to be disrespectful to this particular expression of Christianity, but it substitutes reality for the metaphorical. If you need to disinfect, then yes, sanitizers and bleach work great! That is perfectly compatible with any metaphorical allegiance to Jesus! Why does it have to be one or the other? Because once you start substituting the religious for the scientific, you get, well, this: 

Who needs disinfectants or vaccines if you have the blood of Jesus to cleanse you of disease? And truly, if they really, really believed this, then they wouldn’t go to hospitals once they got sick. They’d go to church. And we’d have hospital beds for those who aren’t callously and willfully disregarding a lifesaving vaccine … then bragging about it!

That thinking has led to this: 

Conservatives are literally killing themselves, mostly in rural counties that are already being decimated by population decline and opioid addiction and death. For a group of people preaching the racist gospel of white replacement theory, they really are doing a great job further decimating their ranks. Such a self-own! But they can’t take that jab to own the libs—the same libs begging them to not die. 

Oh great, a call to violence. Again, they’d just as soon see us dead. Meanwhile, we’re desperately trying to save their lives with a free shot.

Most of those serious ones, like ebola and ISIS, were fanned by the same fearmongering right-wing media that is now denying COVID-19 is a serious threat. No one really thought the world was ending in 2012, or that zika would kill you. Zika causes horrible deformities in fetuses infected in-utero and is spread by mosquitos, not basic human interaction. 

The financial collapse was, actually, a big deal. 

Just two weeks after that last meme! I guess he didn’t turn off his TV quickly enough. 

So unnecessary. That’s what gets me. The first wave was different. We really had no idea what to do. The second wave was obnoxious, spread by people who had simply tired of quarantines and social distancing, but at least there was some kind of logic to it all. But now? We have a vaccine! 

This poor guy is suffering, filled to the gills with fentanyl and morphine to manage his pain, and it’s still not enough. He’s still in pain and choking on his breathing tube. Any effort to revive him if he flatlines would break his ribs, causing even more incalculable pain, and yet she refused. Because Jesus. They expect modern medicine to save their loved ones in the name of Jesus when they refused the vaccine that would’ve saved their loved ones. They could’ve given Jesus credit for that vaccine! It was a bona fide miracle. 

Yet here, even at the very end, she was engaging in “conspiracy theory” because supposedly, a nurse said that her husband wouldn’t get a lung transplant. There’s no one with COVID-19 getting a double lung transplant. The demand alone, with millions of COVID-19 survivors living with damaged lungs, makes this increasingly unlikely. So I’d bet that in her grief and anger she garbled whatever it was the nurse told her. Not everything is a conspiracy. 

The end. And like every other one of these stories, it didn’t have to be this way.