It’s interesting how the boogeyman buzzwords are ever changing, most of them having a peripheral understanding at best as to the actual meanings of what they’re supposed to bitch about.
CRT today, just the latest in a long line of them: Antifa, BLM, Obamacare, ACORN, Solyndra, Benghazi, “the tactics of Saul Alinsky” and on and on.
My wife is into all the new age woo. (Most recently: sound therapy.) Fortunately she still trusts conventional medicine and is fully vaxxed.
Republicans are now simply the party of “We Are Against That”.
They have no ideas, no policies, no willingness to govern or to create, or to actually make anything.
They are just about “NO! WON’T!” That’s all. Nothing more than an empty shell of negativity.
Yep. I know one, and she has lots of like-minded friends. She buys crystals and stones–each allegedly has a unique power (like “releasing negativity”) and adds them to the shungite jewelry she makes. (Shungite protects you from the dreaded 5G by magically absorbing it, doncha know.) And she makes a fortune, so obviously she’s not alone in her beliefs. Oh, and of course she’s anti-vaxx and a big fan of Joe Mercola, thourgh her latest idol is Bruce Lipton, the anti-vaxx biologist who preaches that our beliefs can alter our DNA.
It’s a cult.
Have you seen the “Herman Cain Awards” reddit? They showcase people who were virulently anti-mask, anti-vaxx, “It all a hoax” who eventually die of COVID.
There was one I saw today. Prior to the election, she was posting a meme about how Trump&Jesus were going to create a god-given vaccine to save the US. Post election, the vaccine suddenly became a Democrat/Bill Gates plot to put microchips in everyone.
And you see this kind of thing over and over again.
It’s a cult. Don’t try to make sense of it, because it doesn’t make sense.
Related:
Hah! I remember when that was a thing. Suddenly, I saw references to Saul Alinsky in various places, included right here on the SDMB (I think?). I think it originated with Newt Gingrich or something, right? I was like, who the fuck is Saul Alinsky?
Re: Still crystal healing people out there?
Lot of that in Marin, Sonoma, and Napa Counties too.
I blame Donald Trump.
If the Republicans had chosen a normal Republican in 2016 - like say Ted Cruz - he would have been smart enough to see what to do when he was told about the approaching pandemic. He would have told people he was in charge and reaped all the credit for showing leadership during a major international crisis.
Trump couldn’t see that. He initially downplayed the pandemic because prefers to ignore problems. Then he kept downplaying it because he didn’t want to admit his initial response had been wrong. Then when the problem became too big to downplay, he tried to put the blame on other people. His followers just went in whatever direction he told them to go.
I think that it’s primarily simply about the R’s in the US becoming the party of implacable opposition. Gingrich discovered that his party could simply block everything, no matter how sensible, and voters wouldn’t punish R’s for it, and indeed would reward them for establishing clear lines about what R’s stood for - even if what they stood for was insane.
R’s have pursued that strategy with increasing belligerence ever since.
Agree although I would put a slightly different emphasis. IMHO he doesn’t prefer to ignore problems, he just has sufficient smarts to know when he has no other option. He has no executive ability. He therefore can’t deal with actual problems. He can bluster his way through minor things but that is all.
For all that Trump is (rightly) derided as stupid and incompetent, he does know when he’s in the shit and when it’s time to bail.
There have always been anti-science, ant-vaccine right wing people. Creationists in the US for example. Some of my NZ cousins are evangelical, right wing, young Earth creationist, anti-vax idiots and always have been, since long prior to COVID. It’s just that the politics of the current situation are causing the right wing idiots to swamp the left wing idiots.
The mere fact that the left is for something makes the right default to being vigorously opposed to it.
I honestly don’t think the reverse is true; at least not nearly to the same extent.
mmm
Some of them were, but there’s been an anti-vaccine tendency in corners of the American right for a long time. This newspaper ad from a far-right group in 1953 pushed the idea that the polio vaccine was a plot to impose “socialized medicine”:
I agree in general, but Ted Cruz is a bad example. He’d have just fucked off to Cancun when COVID hit.
Trump did try pushing his supporters to get vaccinated. He got booed.
He rode the tiger - he saw it was headed towards a cliff - tried to nudge it and the tiger snarled. Cowardly Trump stopped trying.
Yeah the Extreme Right has always had a pseudodarwinian “if the vulnerable perish, let them perish” bent. Just that until relatively recently the hardcore version of that was hushed down and relegated to a fringe corner by the grownups in the room.
No, the ordinary Republicans like Cruz or McConnell or Pence (and it says a lot of bad things about the modern Republican party that these guys are ordinary examples of it) have political skills. They would understand that an incumbent President benefits when there’s a major crisis. People instinctively rally around their leader in a crisis. Somebody like Cruz would have known that and known how to exploit it to his advantage.
Too much work.
Truly supporting and encouraging vaccinations means supporting the mandates.
A pandemic was an ideal crisis for Trump. It’s not like a war or an economic collapse where he would have had to make difficult decisions. In a medical crisis, the scientists and doctors are going to do all the work. The Obama administration had already set up an organization to deal with a pandemic outbreak. All Trump needed to do was go on television and take the credit. But he managed to screw it up.
In my opinion, Trump just didn’t understand the problem when his advisors tried to explain it to him. Trump may be able to understand something like a building or a car or a hundred dollar bill - because these are things you can point to and tell him what they are. But it wouldn’t be easy to get him to understand something abstract like the economy or the infrastructure - or a virus outbreak. It would take mental effort for Trump to grasp these things and he’s not interested in making an effort.