Okay! I see we’re at the “if they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” portion of our modern Republican/Dickensian nightmare.
So the “pro-life,” anti-evolution party is now openly declaring that the only kind of Darwinism they like is social Darwinism. I remember those halcyon days when religious conservatives rallied around Terri Schiavo like she was the baby Jesus playing splashies and duckies in the lost Ark of the Covenant. You see, women in persistent vegetative states with no quality of life who need to be kept alive with feeding tubes are far more worthy of our protection than completely healthy people who could easily be kept in the pink with two small jabs in the arm.
Because … LIFE! L’Chaim! Unless the lack of fresh corpses somehow helps Joe Biden—in which case, FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!
Somehow, I don’t think these people are being entirely consistent with their messaging. Witness Rob Schmitt, a Newsmax host who has Batman’s chin and The Joker’s diseased brain. He went full Thomas Malthus on his show recently when he said …
Ah, hell. You’ll just have to look yourself:
SCHMITT: “One thing I’ve always thought, and maybe you can guide me on this because obviously I’m not a doctor, but what I’ve always thought about vaccines, and I always think about just nature, and the way everything works, and I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature. I mean, if there’s some disease out there, maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something is supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes, vaccines kind of stand in the way of that. Do you follow what I’m saying? Does that make sense to somebody in medicine?”
His guest, Dr. Peter McCullough of Texas A&M’s College of Medicine, then sorta-kinda agreed. (At the very least, he didn’t vehemently disagree, which is horrifying in itself.) I’m skeptical of McCullough’s takes, of course, because 1) he’s on Newsmax and doesn’t appear to be a hostage and 2) he’s been fact-checked into rubble here, here, and here. He also apparently pals around with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who left the Kennedy Camelot mythos behind to create his own perduring legend as Johnny COVID-seed.
Oh, also, McCullough isn’t an infectious disease expert. He’s a cardiologist.
I’m a writer. That doesn’t mean I can sit down at my desk and write a beautiful, breathtaking sonnet.
A limerick, though, I can handle:
There once was a Newsmax anchor
Who averred with no hint of rancor
No pie in the sky
More people should die
And Darwin replied, “Fuckin’ wanker!”
Later in the conversation, Schmitt wonders why we’re giving the vaccine to younger people when they’re at lower risk for serious COVID-19 complications. I guess he doesn’t understand the exponential nature of communicable disease spread or why we live in a society. (Hey, I’m starting to wonder myself.)
And now, with apologies to Jon Stewart, your moment of Zen:
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