Blood on Their Hands
People are needlessly dying from COVID, because politicians and right-wing media figures are telling them lies.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If someone sent you this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to become a paid subscriber: you can sign up here.
There is chutzpah … and then there is this.
Noem also blasted other Republican governors for not being as lax as she was in protecting their citizens against COVID.
"We've got Republican governors across this country pretending they didn't shut down their states; that they didn't close their regions; that they didn't mandate masks," said Noem. "Now I'm not picking fights with Republican governors. All I'm saying is that we need leaders with grit. That their first instinct is the right instinct."
Let’s be very clear on this point: “grit,” as Noem appears to be defining it, was deadly in South Dakota.
As of this weekend, Noem’s state had 230 deaths per 100,000 people - that’s the tenth-highest total in the country. South Dakota also has had 14,090 COVID cases per 100,000 people, which is the third-highest in the nation. How do I know this? It’s literally in the article that Noem is retweeting as she brags about her “response” to the COVID-19 pandemic. These preventable illnesses and deaths don’t appear to even register with Noem. After all, you need to break a few eggs to make a freedom omelet (yes, that is sarcasm).
It’s hard to think of a more perverse example of the mind-boggling indifference to human life that defines the current leadership class of the Republican Party. Noem’s decision to give South Dakotans the “best information” and relying on them to exercise their “personal responsibility” was a horrific and predictable failure — and one compounded by Noem’s lack of responsibility as she regularly appeared in public not wearing a mask. Her decisions unquestionably cost hundreds, if not thousands, of people their lives — both in her state and beyond. In addition, the state’s hosting of the massive Sturgis motorcycle rally last summer is now widely seen as a super-spreader event that contributed to a spike in cases across much of the Midwest.
The very notion that personal responsibility can be relied upon during a deadly pandemic could not be more misdirected. Allowing South Dakotans to make their own decisions on wearing a mask and socially distancing not only endangered their lives — it endangered the lives of every person with whom they came in contact. Would Noem, or any other politician, suggest that whether one drinks and drives is a matter of personal responsibility? How about smoking indoors in public? The reason why political leaders — like the Republican leaders who Noem is now criticizing — imposed mandates was to protect all their citizens from illness, the elderly, the immunocompromised, and the health vulnerable.
Noem gave her speech at the CPAC conference, a gathering of conservatives in which the execrable Alex Berenson, who has spread one COVID lie after another for the past 18 months, touted the fact that President Biden would miss his goal of vaccinating 70 percent of Americans. Loud applause greeted his words.
What is so disturbing about Noem’s particular line of attack is not just that she is mocking fellow Republicans for putting the sanctity and preservation of life below a childish notion of “freedom” from government diktats. If there are future COVID spikes — like the one happening in Missouri right now — Republican governors (especially those with presidential ambitions) will almost certainly refuse to reimpose public health mandates to stop the spread.
The truly odious part is that Noem sees her monstrous indifference as a political asset. Over the past year, she’s become a rising star in the GOP, traveling the country on behalf of fellow Republicans, and rising to the top tier of 2024 presidential candidates. She knows that her criticism of other GOP governors will resonate with rank-and-file Republican voters. For many of them, the fact Noem’s policies cost lives and led to so much needless suffering is not a bug — it’s a feature.
Killing Their Own
According to a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the gap in vaccination rates between counties that voted for Joe Biden and those that voted for Donald Trump has grown “by five times” since April. None of this is surprising, considering that vaccinations have become one more policy issue defined by a red/blue divide. While the growing backlash to the vaccines by Republican politicians has been a major contributing factor, let’s not let Fox News off the hook.
As Tiffany Hsu wrote in the New York Times this week, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have used their powerful platforms on Fox News to tell their viewers “that the vaccines could be dangerous; that people are justified in refusing them; and that public authorities have overstepped in their attempts to deliver them.” Carlson has criticized the Biden administration’s plan to go door-to-door to encourage people to get vaccinated as an effort to “force people to take medicine they don’t want or need” and “the greatest scandal in my lifetime, by far.” Wait until Carlson hears about the 607,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19.
Carlson has also said about universities that are requiring students to be vaccinated, “They shouldn’t get the shot. It’s not good for them. There’s a risk involved, much higher than of Covid, but colleges are forcing them anyway.”
For the record, Carlson has not publicly said if he’s vaccinated, but I would bet a substantial amount of money that he’s gotten his jab. He’s telling his viewers not to get vaccinated because it plays to their political grievances. It’s little different from the Trump administration officials who would privately mock him but keep up appearances in public by consistently praising him. The difference, in this case, is that Carlson’s words will cost lives. That’s not just my opinion: it’s a view also recently expressed by a former Fox News executive in the Daily Beast. And if Fox’s behavior is not terrifying enough, it’s worse on other right-wing media sites. According to the Times, “among Republicans who watch Fox News, 45 percent said they were hesitant or unwilling to get a Covid-19 shot, compared with 68 percent of viewers who watch the niche right-wing news channels Newsmax or One America News Network.”
As awful as all this is, it’s also bizarrely self-directed. Last year, before the vaccines, Americans who didn’t wear masks and refused to socially distance were spreading a wide swath of potential misery. Overwhelmingly, the people being hurt now by vaccine hostility are the people who watch Fox News. Today, virtually every person hospitalized and dying from COVID-19 has not been vaccinated. In effect, Republicans are “owning the libs” by killing themselves.
I’ll grant you; it’s hard to feel sympathy for people who knowingly take steps that harm themselves and those around them. “Serves them right” is a line of argument that you occasionally hear from the political left. But to my mind, this is nothing short of an American tragedy and one where the responsibility lies with political and media elites. For essentially political reasons, Kristi Noem put her citizens in harm’s way, and thousands got sick and died. For ratings, Carlson and Ingraham are telling their viewers not to get vaccinated against a deadly disease.
The people they influence certainly have free will, but they are being lied to and misled by people they trust. Their blood is on the hands of those who have fed them those lies. And like the fictional Lady Macbeth above, that damned spot will never wash off. Of course, the major difference between Lady M and Noem, Carlson, et al, is that she felt guilty for what she had done.
What’s Going On?
David Wallace-Wells points out that the only silver lining from this horrid pandemic is that COVID-19 doesn’t affect kids … but asks why is it so hard to get that message across.
A really interesting essay by David Deudney and John Ikenberry that argues the roots of Joe Biden’s foreign policy vision is Rooseveltian.
Sports Are The Best
I’ve watched this video probably 100 times, and the smile on the little boy’s face at the end gets me every time.
Shohei Ohtani is pretty, pretty, pretty good
Musical Interlude
Enjoy!