re: #175 Backwoods_Sleuth

This, to me, is very easy to understand when you accept that the current state of the GOP is literally a cult. “Cult” is not hyperbole.

When COVID first hit, the thoroughly incompetent Dear Leader was caught off-guard, completely unprepared, and had no idea how to react to a genuine crisis during his “presidency”, so he chose to deflect and minimize it. “We have 15 cases, soon going down to zero”, etc etc. Nothing bad could happen on his watch, because that might reflect on him personally. There was nothing more important than his image.

If Trump at any point had ever publicly said, “we have to beat this COVID thing and the way we do that is by wearing masks, avoiding public gatherings, and taking a vaccine as soon as it’s available” all of his followers would have done so and COVID would have by now been a memory of 2020.

Because the country is completely broken (especially the media) and the GOP exists only to serve what it imagines would make Trump and his base of reprogrammable meat puppets happy, NOTHING THAT EXPRESSES OR IMPLIES THAT COVID IS AN ACTUALLY SERIOUS PROBLEM CAN BE ABIDED. If COVID is a real and serious problem, that means Dear Leader was wrong when he failed to treat it as a real and serious problem. Dear Leader cannot be wrong, therefore COVID was and is not a real and serious problem. This is why people die of COVID while using their last choking breath to declare that it’s a hoax.

Comparing it to seatbelt laws, second-hand smoke avoidance, or safe-sex practices misses the point entirely. GOP antivax/antimaskers are not taking a calculated risk that they arrived at rationally after “doing their own research”, regardless of what they might say. They’re just defending the ego of Dear Leader.