We are now more than a year into social distancing and isolating, of staring at the walls of our homes, of mourning loved ones and worrying about our own health, of fretting about finances, of raging at the ignorance of others, of wondering this wondering when this will all end.
At least 563,000 Americans dead of the virus and likely far more than that. Over 31 million confirmed cases. Poverty rising to rates unseen since the Great Depression. When time provides some buffer and perspective, it will be impossible to recognize the pandemic in the United States as anything but a genocide — at least to those unblinkered by American exceptionalism). With that many deaths driven by cruelty and politics, there’s no other word for it.
As I obsessively chronicled for much of 2020 through my newsletter and a separate site, Republicans consciously ignored all scientists, medical professionals, and policy experts, choosing to instead encourage and even force their own constituents to march towards their own doom. The facts are coming out now; in her apology tour, Trump enabler Deborah Birx just estimated that more than 400,000 American lives were lost due to Trump’s blatant and purposeful mishandling of the virus.
But Trump wasn’t the only Republican leader that was grossly negligent and willingly homicidal.
Republicans across the country, from senators to governors and state legislators, downplayed the virus and spread lies about it from the moment it arrived and began killing Americans by the dozen. They did it with an election in mind, knowing that people of color were dying at higher rates and that stoking inane and vulgar culture wars allows GOP powerbrokers to continue their plunder of the American people and the dying planet. The virus wasn’t preventable, but much of the devastation could and should have been avoided.
Yesterday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke a story revealing just how much Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp ignored scientists, doctors, and anyone else with any humanity in his mission to please big business and own the libs:
This examination found Kemp’s administration was slow to act on early warnings about the pandemic’s severity. The governor’s aides, not public health officials, often determined strategy to contain the virus and dictated public messaging. And the state withheld critical information showing the pandemic was worsening as Kemp lifted restrictions.
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Kemp was one of the nation’s last governors to issue lockdown orders last spring — and then the first to begin lifting them, 22 days later. He never required Georgians to wear face coverings in public, even as 36 other states and the District of Columbia imposed mask mandates and as a White House task force strongly lobbied him to follow suit. And as hundreds of thousands of Georgians contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and the death toll rose from hundreds to a few thousand to, now, approaching 20,000, Kemp declined to adjust his strategy and put into place new restrictions to slow the virus’ spread.
I documented Kemp’s vicious disregard for human life and posted a timeline that ran from last March through the summer at my site COVIDSuperSpreaders.com.
Check out this partial timeline:
- April 24th: As businesses begin to reopen, the state’s coronavirus numbers continue to climb by the day.
- July 24th: Cases continue to spike exponentially, topping 160,000 in the state.
- August 11th: After Kemp encourages schools to reopen, COVID cases begin to spike amongst students and teachers.
- August 15th: Kemp officially files a lawsuit against Atlanta and other cities, seeking to strike down their mask mandates.
At that point, it was clear that hardly anything would change. He fought localities on mask mandates, consistently overruling Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms when she tried to install even the most modest safety measures. So many Georgians died because of Kemp’s decisions — and his neighbor to his south, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has been even worse.
DeSantis’s ignorance and stubbornness rivaled only that of Donald Trump and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s. He opened the state back up when Florida was reporting over 11,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day. He refused mask mandates. He’s allowed everyone to do anything they want for months and months. Just look at this timeline I put together for my newsletter/site:
- August 7th: DeSantis and his education commissioner threatened to withhold funding from schools that did not open up to in-person classes five days a week.
- September 25th: DeSantis reopens the entire state. He goes so far as to ban any cities from creating more than a 50% capacity restriction on restaurants, bars, and other locations where the disease is known to spread.
Even more egregiously, DeSantis ran an obvious cover-up of COVID deaths down the stretch in October and November, helping Donald Trump win the state and then seizing the computers of the whistleblower who was trying to keep an honest count.
The state has officially suffered well over 30,00 deaths. And so many of them were preventable, had DeSantis listened to science instead of burnishing his strong-man image and national ambitions:
As Florida became a global epicenter of the coronavirus, Gov. Ron DeSantis held one meeting this month with his top public health official, Scott Rivkees, according to the governor's schedule. His health department has sidelined scientists, halting briefings last month with disease specialists and telling the experts there was not sufficient personnel from the state to continue participating.
"I never received information about what happened with my ideas or results," said Thomas Hladish, a University of Florida research scientist whose regular calls with the health department ended June 29. "But I did hear the governor say the models were wrong about everything."
As the virus spread out of control in Florida, decision-making became increasingly shaped by politics and divorced from scientific evidence, according to interviews with 64 current and former state and administration officials, health administrators, epidemiologists, political operatives and hospital executives. The crisis in Florida, these observers say, has revealed the shortcomings of a response built on shifting metrics, influenced by a small group of advisers and tethered at every stage to the Trump administration
It should come as no surprise that Florida now has the highest case rate in the country once again, as new variants outpace a vaccination policy that has overtly given preference to rich, white, conservative supporters.
Then there are Republicans like Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, who continue to peddle quack medicine after fighting every preventative measure tooth and nail. The list goes on and on. They’re all complicit at the very least.
It’s just beyond shameful. It’s criminal. No one will likely ever be prosecuted, because the media doesn’t ever want to admit that atrocities happen here in the same way that they happen in foreign countries, because politicians are afraid of their own culpability, and because half the country is so red-pilled they think the GOP is protecting their freedom from Dr. Seuss cancelation. But history will remember what happened here as a mass slaughter.
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