Raw Story

How is it that in Australia it's 3 out of every 100,000 people, and in New Zealand it's 1 out of every 200,000 people, but here in America we're dropping like flies? Chalk it up to Republican racism and a libertarian indifference to the notion of society.

It’s time to defund the GOP, and there’s precedent and strategy for the effort. The need to cut the party’s access to both private and government money is seen in the reaction by some extremist Republicans to news like a New York State lawmaker’s proposal to make vaccination against COVID-19 mandatory. Predictably, the far right is freaking out. “Freedom!” they scream as they run around maskless, assaulting their fellow citizens with potentially virus-laden breath.

Donald Trump‘s treason extends far beyond his efforts to damage Americans belief in our form of government, our elected democratic republic, that Trump’s oligarch buddies in Saudi Arabia, Russia and China also regularly disparage. Trump’s also actively damaging the ability of the incoming Biden administration to aid Americans during the Trump Depression, and to get the virus in check. In this, he has help from Steve Mnuchin and Mitch McConnell.

Tens of millions of Americans are going hungry right now. Today. But Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans don’t give a damn, because they only exist to serve their billionaire donors. Almost 20 million Americans will lose all their unemployment benefits the week after Christmas, but Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans don’t give a damn, because they only exist to serve their billionaire donors.

America’s rightwing billionaires comfortably hang out on their massive estates, giving instant Covid tests to their live-in servants, while using the word “freedom“ to describe their lifestyle in the rightwing media they own or support. The headline yesterday over at NewsMax reads, “No Masking Biden’s Disdain For Freedom” and one at RedState references “Covid Tyranny.”

People are acting shocked—shocked, I tell you!—that the Trump/GOP strategy on coronavirus is essentially one of promoting herd immunity with the possible downside of as many as 2.5 million dead Americans. We shouldn’t be surprised. It’s simply the logical extension of conservative policies on pretty much everything for the past 90 years—policies that have killed a hell of a lot more than just 2.5 million people.

In the power grab to fill the Supreme Court seat announced the same evening as the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mitch McConnell didn’t do anything new. The GOP has a long history of playing hardball power politics. In the late 19th century, Republicans added four states (Nevada, Colorado, North Dakota, and South Dakota) purely to gain eight new Republican senators, a trick Democrats could duplicate today by bringing statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico (and maybe even Guam).

Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies are letting America die. The billionaires who make their money from fossil fuels have bought off Trump and Republicans so that they’re denying climate change while a dozen states in the West burn and the Gulf Coast is repeatedly ravaged by hurricanes. Firefighters are using dogs to identify the remains of homes where people died by the smell of burnt human flesh.

What could happen to America if Trump were to further, severely crash the U.S. economy the day after Joe Biden is announced as the winner of the 2020 presidential race? As Trump tweeted on June 15, 2019, “if anyone but me takes over… there will be a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before!”

Donald Trump wants to go after social media because Twitter pointed out one of his lies. And, in fact, social media has done a lot of damage to America and the American body politic, with the most visible example being its help in putting Donald Trump in the White House in 2016. But even more concerning should be Fox News and right wing hate radio. A new study out of Columbia university finds that when people in any particular ZIP Code experience a 1% increase in Fox News viewership, it "reduces the propensity to stay at home by 8.9 percentage points compared to the pre-pandemic average." In other words, one of the reasons that so many people have died in America right now is because conservative media has been repeatedly and consistently promoting the idea that this virus is a Democratic hoax or a "bad flu."