Here's yet more evidence of what happens to people who marinate in Fox News, Donald Trump, talk radio, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They go cuckoo:
Republican voters are increasingly anxious about COVID amid a swirl of unfounded claims on the right that the federal government is preparing a mass reimposition of restrictions. At a New Hampshire focus group of Republicans commissioned by the political podcast Breaking Points and reviewed by Semafor, five of the eight participants said they believed there was some connection between the recent rise of COVID cases and associated restrictions and the upcoming election being “rigged” for Democrats.
“With the ‘plandemic,’ we see it coming again, and there’s a lot of writing on the wall,” one voter said.
Five out of eight! But how does this make sense, even to an unhinged mind? The theory here is—what? There's an election coming up, so Democrats are seeding the air with COVID and secretly planning to impose a big batch of wildly unpopular restrictions? This does not strike me as a campaign strategy bound for success.
God help me, I also googled "plandemic" and discovered it's a viral video released a few weeks after COVID hit American shores in 2020. It says that the virus was deliberately created in order to enrich the—oh, forget it. It's just a hodgepodge of miscellaneous conspiracy theories. You can google it yourself if you just have to know the grim details.
And of course, the aspect that makes the most sense in us dastardly conniving liberals to rig the election is to impose all of these restrictions over a year before the election. JFC. This country is just doomed. I've been waiting for this insanity to stop for at least since 2016 and it only gets worse and dumber.
I guess the wisdom in unleashing COVID this year is that in making their case for re-election, Biden and the Democrats could point to a successful recovery.
The details don't matter -- indeed, unless the cultists had just heard them, they probably couldn't recite them clearly. What matters is, they trigger the desired emotional reactions. Democrats evil and conniving, trying to destroy OUR America. COVID big conspiracy, trying to take away OUR freedoms and subject us to mind control (microchips in the vaccines, remember?). Elections rigged by Those People so they can take OUR Hard-Earned Tax Dollars™ for their inner-city / immigrant welfare babies. Lather, rinse, repeat, with infinite variations on the same themes, and a different new, exciting, sinister conspiracy every week or so, just to keep the audience hooked and frothing with anger.
Seriously, stop paying attention to the substantive content rather than the emotional subtext. The apparent substantive content is just window-dressing, and you'll drive yourself crazy if you try to find anything meaningful, or even consistent, in it.
"Plandemic" is hilarious--a great piece of sublime satire....oh wait, they meant it....nevermind.
Restrictions aren't coming back unless the mortality rate shoots up. Of course, reimposition of restrictions seems unlikely in deep red areas, in which case, I'd like to remind everyone:
You can't lead a horse to water, so just give it its Ivermectin rectal paste.
Reimposition of restrictions is unlikely in blue states as well. I promise you. For good or ill, no one is going to put up with that again.
I'm confident mask mandates would come back in many blue states. Hawaii would be at the top of the list.
Which restrictions? Masks in hospitals? Weekly testing in schools? Tests before entering nursing homes?
And furthermore, I'd hope that smart people would enact restrictions based on the data and the effect on public health and not on what people "put up with."
Well, most of those things you listed are not "mask restrictions."
In a democracy, what people will put up with is always a factor.
School and business closures and mask requirements are not gonna happen again in my lifetime.
You probably could have said that in Oct. 2019. Never say never.
Unregulated biological and viral experiments on the rise. You seriously don't think the future risk is higher that someone's going to trigger a deadly pandemic?
I have two brothers who are all in on this nonsense. We don't talk often and when we do we avoid politics.
It truly is amazing the level of genius they imagine George Soros and Biden and Faucci and whoever else inhabits their fantasies are capable of to be pulling all this stuff off.
But what you have to understand about the right-wing mindset is that it starts with the premise that liberals have some kind of secret agenda to something something something evil. Because otherwise how do you explain the constant attempts to actually try to help people? Why it's all a front to bring on something something Soros socialism something.
yup.
I was going to try to say something useful or witty about this. I got nothing.
in a country that elected trump and almost did it again in 2020, i have no idea what is and is not a good campaign strategy anymore.
We can't underestimate the entertainment value of conservative thought leadership among the banal and bored, --it provides drama and validation for those who worry they don't have enough desperation and disorder in their lives, or not enough of the right kind anyway.
Like Flat Earthers and those people who spend all Christmas day watching indoor pickup truck racing (--my cousins, that was how I spent Christmas day) (it's a curse circumstances have prevented me from avoiding).
>God help me, I also googled "plandemic" and discovered it's a viral video released a few weeks after COVID hit American shores in 2020.
Oh, you sweet summer child!
Yeah, how had Kevin missed this at the start of the pandemic? It was one of the early hints that COVID wasn't going to be like other viral outbreaks.
Option One: Ignore it and hope it goes away. Good luck.
Option Two: Ignore Bob Dylan's advice and criticize what you can't understand. The Republicans being criticized here took this option.
Option Three: Try to understand. You might not get there, but you'll never know if you never try. Then criticize.
It's important to remember they were like this before Trump came along,
https://twitter.com/GroovyBruce/status/1701274189590831408
Time to overload on dewormer paste and bleach, Trump folks! Don't worry! The more you chug, the more a lib cries! Trust me! Hillary Clinton *hates* it when patriotic Americans thwart Big Pharma by injecting bleach directly into their scrotums! Really!
What mostly they will say is,
it really comes down to strength,
https://i.redd.it/jyhdzv6gxenb1.jpg
They are strong and certain and anything that suggests they might not be, or if they know of something that is not, that thing needs to be eliminated.
By promoting the interest of the injured or helpless you're not respecting their, --the conservatives, strength.
If all the parts of a body perceive themselves to be parts of a system, then they take care of the parts that are injured and suffering. If a part perceives itself as an independent system, then it perceives the rest of the body is merely an opportunity to be exploited, a threat to be neutralized, or irrelevant.
A system is not necessarily just a physical body. A social system is a body.
Nice comment. Hmmm, "If a part [of the body] perceives itself as an independent system..." Isn't that called a cancer?
Shirley Kevin you were reading your then Mother Jones colleagues’ work back then?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/05/trump-joe-scarborough/
After a Conspiracy Site Boosted the Debunked “Plandemic” Video, Trump Pushed Its Take on Joe Scarborough
I can't believe he missed it as well. Probably ejected as useless sometime last year.
Who ejected? Kevin, or the author of that May 2020 MoJo article?
KD. He read it, filed it away, and then ejected it after it became useless. This is my opinion, no one else's.
Thanks - I thought you were implying that Kevin was ejected from Mother Jones. Honestly, it wouldn't take much to convince me of that.
Someone was having cancer, dude.
And still posting very regularly on COVID and any number of other topics, dude.
And here is just how regularly: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kD6ZXW2ANJUvHavyjPEioOlsktyB0sv-r1EjGD_V5MQ/edit?usp=sharing
I will say the crazy is getting faster though. It took maybe six to eight hours after the immolation of Lahaina for space laser clips to come out.
I don't think it's restrictions they are concerned about. Republicans are worried about a replay of the "theft of 2020":
(A) COVID emerges (1st time real, 2nd time bogus)
(B) Election officials + judges change/loosen restrictions on voting
(C) Which leads to illegals, dead, out-of-area voters participating
(D) Vote results are therefore unreliable/fake
Finally.
FFS Kevin Drum, stop playing dumb about this. @Dana Decker just laid out for you what you already knew but for some reason chose not to access.
I'm not sure why you think he is playing dumb. I think you are right that the argument runs through mail in ballots. But that argument is even stupider than the one that Drum attributes to them. After all, there are non-Maga people who got upset about the mandates. The conspiracy theories about the election appeal to nobody but the true believers. And since states like Pennsylvania never rolled back the mail-in ballots, no fake crisis is needed to add them.
It is true that one should apply a principle of charity to people one disagrees with and try to understand them in a way that makes them look like they are not ridiculous. But Drum seems to be being charitable here in not guessing the full stupidity of the actual argument.
So what you are saying is that it is a way of pre-whining about being cheated in another election, pretty much what cost them Arizona in 2022. What do you think makes it less crazy to put it your way than his way?
I admit I can't tell if you mean to be supporting the strategy or making fun of it. The strategy does seem to be self-parody.
Of course, none of that is true. The trends of mail in voting were already established, they never were able to find these illegal registrations, and they just don't believe the covid numbers no matter what.
"This does not strike me as a campaign strategy bound for success."
Don't you see? When the Dems reinstitute COVID restrictions, that will give them cover to sneak in millions of phony ballots in the middle of the night--JUST LIKE LAST TIME!!1!11! And this time they'll have EVEN MORE MULES, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS O THEM harvesting ballots from nursing homes and Antifa!!
Wake up and connect the dots, sheep!
That's it.
I knew it! Those who don't know what "plandemic" means are the same people who don't know whether modern pop music is, in fact, sadder than usual, [because they] don't listen to modern pop music.
Let's not ignore how our beloved mainstream media reacts to this. On Monday I unfortunately came across this headline on CBS News:
"Gov. DeSantis, Florida Surgeon General warn against new COVID-19 restrictions, vaccine."
I repeat: NOT from Fox News, OANN, or InfoWars; from CBS -- you know, the Columbia Broadcasting System. Just warnin' . . . I mean, just sayin' . . . from the RNC talking point gallery direct to voters' eyeballs.
Focus groups are about as valid and reliable a source of information about American public opinion as comments threads at the website of your choice. The fact that journalists even mention them, let alone report their "findings" as if they have some significance, is one more illustration of the sorry state of the American media.
Someone at another site commenting on this story complained that it didn't mention "the margin of error". The American public opinion industry is a farce.
This week in organized crime,
Sweeping study finds 1,000 cases of sexual abuse in Swiss Catholic Church since 1950,
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/priests-committed-over-1-000-sex-crimes-in-switzerland-since-1950/48804720
Texas to replace public school guidance counselors with child molesters,
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/24/texas-legislature-chaplains-schools/
What could possibly go wrong?
I first saw this idea in a political cartoon at The Week. A doctor tells a patient that it is just a coincidence that every election we have a new variant that requires a vaccine and mail in ballots. It is hard to find conservative cartoons funny because they so often seem to depend on having a bizarre lack of understanding of the world.
Where exactly have mail in ballots been taken back from voters since the last election? The odds that we will have emergency covid voting measures in 2024 is basically zero. (And if we were going to then it would not be due to variants in 2023. Of course the odds that Republicans will whine that they were cheated if they lose is about 100%. "Waaah" has become the motto of the Republican party.
No, they just don't believe the pandemic is real.
What's impressive is that there is apparently a bottomless demand for insane bullshit nonsense with zero evidence. At some point you'd think there would be a breaking point, but none in sight.
How could you not know about the Plandemic bullshit? Wow you are sheltered.