About This Series
I am not a Democrat. Haven’t been since 1980. If I had a political affiliation, it would be Despising the GOP, which has become the American Fascist Party. As such, I have, for practical purposes, come to rely on Democratic victories to save the republic from Nazis, demagogues and the Christian Taliban.
Which is why for years I’ve been utterly infuriated by the Democrats’ inability to communicate the stakes (and the truth), while the opposing Party of Lies endlessly dwells in thirst traps of reactionary unreality.
Why the Dems refuse to message systematically until the cusp of Election Day is an ongoing mystery, though they have often claimed the voters care only about pocketbook issues — and now, finally, abortion rights — versus the jagged noise of the 24-hour campaign. There may be truth in that, but the upshot is ceding the Great Political Message Board to the GOP, which beams a steady flow of disinformation into a near-total vacuum of dis-disinformation.
That’s insane. First of all, policy and legislation do not wait for the three months before the polls open every two years. Secondly, while the Democrats sit on their hands, repugnant lies take hold. As we saw in the debt-ceiling clusterfuck, once again the GOP held hostage the full faith and credit of the United States while blaming the administration for the crisis, when objectively the opposite was true.
And so, for what little it matters, I’m stepping in. This will be the seventh of eight columns examining crucial issues long since clouded by laughably dishonest Republican propaganda in the service of authoritarianism, racism, toxic antisemitism, anti-secularism, nationalism and pandering-to-the-stupidism. My mission: to distill GOP depravity to its essence, one spurious lie at a time.
Hanging by a Thread
There exists a terrifying, and surprisingly not all that rare, disorder called Morgellons Disease. Its victims present with unbearable itching, a crawling sensation in their skin and — bizarrely — colored fibers erupting through the epidermis. They tell doctors they are infested with subcutaneous parasites.
For more information, see the Morgellons Research Foundation website, which promotes a likely connection to Lyme Disease. Not to play favorites, but do especially check out the article headlined Chemtrails and Morgellons – It’s Worse Than You Thought!
That may be true. While “chemtrails” are a figment of the conspiracist imagination (those snaking clouds aloft, properly called contrails, are actually water vapor and ice particles from airplane exhaust), Morgellons is all too real. But it’s not a skin disease. According to research published in 2012 by the Centers for Disease Control, Morgellons is a psychiatric disorder, like other manifestations of delusional parasitosis. No infections, parasitic or otherwise, were detected by researchers. The fibers examined by pathologists in this and other studies were glued-on bits of cotton or sewing thread.
But, yeah, there’s a website — not the Lyme deer tick — that is a major vector. Because Morgellons is not just a syndrome; it’s a movement. This synopsis via Wikipedia:
An active online community and publications “largely from a single group of investigators” have supported the notion that Morgellons is an infectious disease, and propose an association with Lyme disease; these findings are contradicted by the much larger studies conducted by the CDC. People usually self-diagnose Morgellons based on information from the internet and find support and confirmation in online communities of people with similar illness beliefs. In 2006, Waddell and Burke reported the influence of the internet on people self-diagnosed with Morgellons: “physicians are becoming more and more challenged by the many persons who attempt self-diagnosis on-line. In many cases, these attempts are well-intentioned, yet wrong, and a person’s belief in some of these oftentimes unscientific sites online may preclude their trust in the evidence-based approaches and treatment recommendations of their physician. Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist who has studied the Morgellons phenomenon, states that the “World Wide Web has become the incubator for mass delusion and it (Morgellons) seems to be a socially transmitted disease over the Internet.”
The University of Google
Mass delusion. Community of true believers. Skepticism of science and medicine. Internet misinformation and disinformation. These, too, are genuine disease symptoms, of the whole society. All you need to foment catastrophe is a roster of scoundrels willing to exploit superstition and actual psychological vulnerabilities for financial or political gain. Because the psychology of Morgellons invites the cultivation of larger mass medical delusions — cynical players misleading the public on a grand scale, sacrificing human lives at the altar of money or populist politics.
Such conduct, of course, is practically the definition of evil. Another name for it might also be “the Republican Party,” whose Covid soft pedaling, misdirection, obstruction, politicization and outright denial is responsible for 10s or 100s of thousands of American deaths in the worst global pandemic in a century.
Presently we’ll examine their crimes in detail. But first let’s briefly review the precursor hysteria, the shocking yet unsurprising history of the anti-vax movement, which two decades earlier first combined the above list of pre-existing societal conditions to trap millions in a toxic miasma of lunacy, and still does.
It began in 1998 with Andrew Wakefield, a now defrocked physician and corrupt “researcher” who managed to con Britain’s prestigious Lancet medical journal into publishing his fraudulent paper linking the Measles Mumps Rubella vaccine to autism. The article (long since withdrawn by the journal) caught the attention of the popular press and went (analog) viral, especially among the desperate parents of autistic kids seeking answers — or culprits — for their kids’ conditions.
Somehow, though, Wakefield failed to disclose 1) that he was on the payroll of a law firm mounting litigation against the vaccine’s manufacturers; 2) that he fabricated results and deleted inconvenient evidence; and 3) that he had applied for a patent for a rival “safer” vaccine. In short: he was a grifter.
By the time the scandalous truth came to light, a panic had set in among parents worldwide — gigantically amplified by the nascent internet. Suddenly, parents were opting their kids out of the MMR vaccine, resulting in outbreaks of childhood diseases that had been all but eradicated. Skeptical of Big Pharma and the medical establishment — and of all the science that quickly emerged to refute Wakefield’s fraud — they relied instead on the likes of centerfold celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, who claimed that her (it turns out non-autistic) son was harmed by the MMR vaccine. In 2007, she took her crusade to Oprah:
MCCARTHY: First thing I did — Google. I put in autism. And I started my research.
WINFREY: Thank God for Google.
MCCARTHY: I’m telling you.
WINFREY: Thank God for Google.
MCCARTHY: The University of Google is where I got my degree from. ... And I put in autism and something came up that changed my life, that led me on this road to recovery, which said autism — it was in the corner of the screen — is reversible and treatable. And I said, What?! That has to be an ad for a hocus-pocus thing, because if autism is reversible and treatable, well, then it would be on Oprah.
And suddenly there it was on our televisions: ignorant hokum endorsed by the Deity herself. The problem, though, is that the University of Google is a really shitty school. Its famous algorithm privileges not validity but popularity, like letting fraternities and sororities choose the curriculum. Google doesn’t distinguish between fact and fiction, rigor and speculation, data and invention, science and pseudoscience, rationality and superstition, expertise and celebrity, disinterest and self-service, logic and sophistry, public-mindedness and demagoguery, coherence and nut-jobbery. It cares only about relevant keywords and inbound links. To be platformed there, all you need is a web page.
See “Morgellons.org.”
See “QAnon.”
See “Flat Earth Society.”
The upshots were two: 1) measles cases jumped 30% worldwide over the subsequent three years, and in the past three years re-emerged in nine countries where it had been eradicated; and 2) anti-vax idiocy became a movement. What began as a community of protective California moms in Lululemons soon devolved into a wedge issue of the political right, which seized on the hysteria to depict vaccinations as government tyranny. Government and medical elites corrupted by pharma, they claimed, were putting your children’s well-being at risk.
The metamorphosis from panic to politicization was noticed by Politico’s Arthur Allen in May 2019, six months before the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic:
As more politicians take an anti-mandate stand, some end up adopting bogus theories about the supposed harms of vaccination — threatening to roll back one of public health’s great achievements.
In Kentucky, Gov. Matt Bevin said vaccine mandates were un-American. In Oregon, the state party used vaccine mandates to bash Democrats as violating parental rights. And in the California Senate, all 10 Republicans last Wednesday opposed a measure aimed at stopping bogus medical exemptions from vaccination … .
(I)n states where legislators have advanced serious efforts to tighten restrictions, such as Maine, Washington, Colorado and Oregon, nearly all of the opponents are Republicans who’ve taken a medical freedom stance.
“The more they dig into it being about freedom, the more susceptible they become to the theories,” said Dave Gorski, a Michigan physician who has tracked the anti-vaccine movement for two decades. “Appeals to freedom are like the gateway drug to pseudoscience.”
At the extremes are legislators like Jonathan Stickland, a pro-National Rifle Association, Christian conservative in the Texas Legislature, who has described vaccines as “sorcery” while personally attacking Baylor College of Medicine scientist Peter Hotez, who has a daughter with autism and works on vaccines for neglected tropical diseases. “Parental rights mean more to us than your self-enriching ‘science,’” Stickland tweeted at Hotez earlier this month.
That same day, the Oregon Republican Party’s official Twitter account posted that Oregon Democrats were “ramming forced injections down every Oregon parent’s throat.”
It was as if the perfect storm were forming in the south Atlantic. And when Covid arrived a mere seven months later, the winds were already gusting. Very quickly the rhetoric of small government, revulsion over supposed out-of-touch and arrogant elites, fears of a stalled economy and its blame, religious deference to “God’s plan,” a perverse defense of liberty and just plain batshit-crazy paranoia would swallow the GOP whole. First came the backlash against social distancing. Then masking. Then remote school and work. Then the vaccine. Covid denial, in all its various forms, was upon us, and the sophistry of skepticism would prove lethal.
“This is a flu. This is like a flu,” said Donald Trump on Feb. 26, 2000. “The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year. And, so far, if you look at what we have with the 15 people and their recovery, one is — one is pretty sick but hopefully will recover — but the others are in great shape … . And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
A year later, on February 26, 2021, 500,349 Americans had died from Covid. It was later revealed that Trump’s “This is like a flu” assurances came a few days after he was briefed about the scale of the crisis by his health advisors, who predicted perhaps 500,000 deaths and trillions of dollars in cost to the economy. As The New York Times reported, “by the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president.”
Needless to say, the information vacuum did not remain a vacuum for long. The natively paranoiac and stupid element, of course, coalesced by itself. A study by 14 academics, from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, amassed a list of 637 rumors and conspiracy theories that bubbled up around the world, among them:
Dr. Anthony Fauci approved vaccines without clinical trials.
Vaccines cause infertility.
Bill Gates says experimental technology built into the vaccine will alter your DNA.
World Health Organization says vaccines won’t work.
Fauci says they are toxic.
Vaccine killed Putin’s daughter.
Vaccine killed 30% of subjects in Ukraine trial.
Vaccine contains microchips injected into the subject, connecting them to 5G networks that transmit signals to control humanity.
Vaccine is made from the cells of aborted fetuses.
And also monkey and pig genes.
Suicidal-Thought Leaders
According to the Center for Countering Hate, which in 2021 scoured the internet for misinformation and sourced it, the vast majority of Covid-19 bullshit originated with 12(!) people. That “Disinformation Dozen” accounted for 65% of the 812,000 tweets, posts and shares on Facebook and Twitter in the study period, reaching 59 million people. Atop the Disinformation Dozen were (this is me saying) the Should be Grabbed by the Fucking Throat Three: 1) Joseph Michael Mercola, a sleazy peddler of alternative-medicine snake oil and dietary supplements, which have supplemented his fortune to the tune of $100 million; 2) Ty Bollinger, another quack, who got rich promoting bogus treatments to desperate cancer victims. With his wife Charlene, they have amassed 3.5 million social-media followers. They are big Stop the Steal organizers, too; and 3) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
All are senior research fellows at the University of Google.
Unfortunately, from the actual scholars at the University of New South Wales, we learn that “people who were exposed to vaccine-related information on social media were more likely to be misinformed and become vaccine-hesitant.” And thus suspicions galore, one more idiotic than the last. There was, however, one side effect of Covid protection that was not imaginary: inconvenience. Distancing and masks and jabs disrupted life as usual. The majority of the population shrugged, took a deep breath, maybe clenched their teeth and made do, because Covid’s toll on public health obviously justified sacrifices, disruptive or not.
Except, no. From the political right, which had foreshadowed its reactionary stance in the pre-Covid surge of the anti-vax movement, backlash was swift. Covid mandates were not necessary public-health measures amid a pandemic that was killing millions. Nooooo. They were attacks on our freedoms, an out-of-control government interfering in our own lives, our own liberty, our own destiny.
Eight Republican-led states forbade mask mandates. According to Ballotpedia, 20 Red states imposed various bans on vaccine requirements.
In Florida, Republican Governor Ron (Don’t Say Gay) DeSantis threatened to withhold the salaries of school officials who defied his no-mask decree.. And in Washington, Republicans in both Houses of Congress floated legislation to prohibit any national Covid mandates.
In due course, the unmasked Patriots became indistinguishable from the nutjob fringe, promulgating their own unfounded accusations and conspiracy theories, many vilifying Dr. Fauci, whose unfortunate lot was to head the government’s research on and the public’s protection from the ever-mutating virus. In search of a smoking gun, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) demanded Fauci release a full financial disclosure — even though such a disclosure was on file and publicly available — to uncover damning facts suppressed by “the big tech giants.”
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who had previously called the CDC “a political arm of the administration [that] wants to control every element of our life,” tweeted that, under his forthcoming speakership, “Dr. Fauci will be held to account.” Noting that a biolab in Wuhan China had received joint-research funds from the NIH, Republican Senator Rand Paul repeatedly accused Fauci of conspiring with the facility on “gain of function” research to make the virus more contagious. Former Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro went farther: “For whatever reasons, Fauci wanted to weaponize that virus, and he is the father of it. He has killed millions of Americans if that thing came from the lab. Now it’s 99.999 percent sure it did.”
Then, naturally, there was the GOP’s Clown Princess, Lauren Boebert of Ohio, one of 24 Republicans to refuse a mask mandate in the House, where 435 members of Congress work at close quarters. “Totalitarian,” she said. Yeah, like traffic lights.
Meantime Trump, who continued to say the end of the pandemic was just around the corner, prescribed just a little more patience. “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” he said. This from the guy who promoted the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (ineffective on Covid), livestock dewormer Ivermectin (ineffective on Covid, and dangerous) and household disinfectant. And people took it, because they believe in him like a prophet, and because they despise the woke elites, Marxists and pedophiles trying to impose their will on the God-fearing public.
As David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic, “Many conservatives are tired of being told how to live by the majority, and they want to live exactly as they please, even if that means they may die—and even if that means making other people sick along the way.”
They certainly got their wish. For the country at large, polling from KFF in February 2022 showed 56% of Republicans were vaccinated, compared to 70% of Independents, and 92% of Democrats. Predictably, then, the Covid death rate was 38% higher in red states, Which resulted in these grim statistics, courtesy of ABC News in March 2022:
Over the span of the last 10 months, in the 10 states with the lowest vaccination rates … there was an average of 153 COVID-19-related deaths per 100,000 residents.
In contrast, during the same time period, in the 10 states and jurisdictions with the highest vaccination rates, which all voted for Biden, there was an average of about 82.2 related deaths per 100,000 residents. In all 10 states, about 75% of residents had been fully vaccinated.
So far there have been 100 million U.S. Covid infections and 1.1 million deaths — millions of them a direct result of lethal propaganda and policy decisions by elected Republicans, and the mindless fealty of rightwing Covid deniers.
As such, the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2023, on top of its intrinsic horror, was nothing less than a mass murder-suicide.