We're all going to die. Or more specifically, Republicanism is going to murder the lot of us now that it's nothing more than a weird cult declaring the personal whims of weird people to now be not just equal to, but above, all realms of scientific fact. We are well and truly on the verge of a million or more Americans dying because behatted lunatics don't want to be safe if hosts taping their shows from isolated home studios tell them being safe is liberal.
The newest Axios/Ipsos poll reveals that 78% of Democrats now say they wear a mask at all times when in public. For Republicans? 45%. Less than half. And it's entirely because keeping your family safe is now less important to the Republican base than showing proper devotion to whatever new premise Dear Leader has farted out lately.
That's not entirely fair, of course. It’s not that the Republican base is specifically listening to Dear Leader himself; it’s the Republican infrastructure that is spreading the message that mask-wearing is "weak," or a "plot" to inflate the dangers of the raging nationwide pandemic. It’s Fox News that relentlessly suggested to viewers that the virus was a "hoax" being used to hurt Dear Leader's reputation, or that the current deaths are China's fault, not because of our own actions, or take-your-pick. Axios notes that there "were no partisan differences on masks in February," and Republicans and Democrats were "about equally worried" about the pandemic at that time.
Everything that's happened since to create the partisan disparity can—and very much should—be blamed on specific Republican elected officials, talk show hosts, radio hosts, and other conservative luminaries who created that disparity on purpose, gambling that the virus would somehow "go away" or be otherwise dispensed with sans any public action.
The more Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, and the entire collected Republican establishment botched and bumbled vital pandemic response efforts, the more Fox News hosts insisted to their audiences that none of those efforts were really important. When masks became scarce, Trump's boot-polishers insisted that masks were unneeded. When federal testing efforts collapsed—simply collapsed, apparently after Jared Kushner discovered it was too complex to be easily solved—conservative pundits sniffed that it was ridiculous to even contemplate conducting tests on the scale and frequency of what experts were advising. When Trump staked himself the quick-fix of a specific anti-malaria drug, they all obediently sold it and sold it hard; when the White House gave up on fighting the pandemic at all, instead declaring that everyone should just go back to work while pretending nothing was happening, all of Republicanism swiftly adopted that same new line.
It has varied only when individual Republican state leaders determine that the number of people dying in their own states are so high as to possibly ruin their own careers that anything but the bare minimum is done. Acknowledging that the virus is dangerous is now partisan, because the entire conservative infrastructure is now invested in saying it isn't. The Axios/Ipsos poll also reports that 80% of Democrats are “extremely or very” concerned about the pandemic, but for Republicans it is half that percentage. From a public health perspective, that level of partisanship is catastrophic.
The problem, of course, is that the virus is not gone. Masks have proven surprisingly effective at reducing transmissions, luckily for us, but if ideological partisans are going to insist on themselves spreading the virus with risky behavior (like Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt), it undermines everyone else's efforts.
How much? This much.
Shutting down the hot new restaurant in town and putting everyone inside in danger to own the libs. Truly, the essence of modern Republicanism.