America's Other Pandemic: Right Wing Hate

Hannity on February 27, 2020.

Each day Americans who choose to tune into Donald Trump's coronavirus press conferences get to watch a series of lies, untruths and a times dangerous misinformation by the narcissist -in-chief.  Yet Trump is hardly the only one spreading lies and, even worse, hatred and the embrace of egnorance and bigotry.  Fox News, after weeks of lies and misinformation, has its anchors denying what was said on video and captured for the world to see. Beyond Fox News, in the ugly underbelly of the right wing media, conspiracy theories are promoted, health experts are attacked - Dr. Anthony Fauci has needed increased security - and efforts to excuse the right's "glorious leader" malfeasance are non-stop. It is all part of the larger unleashing of hate that has plagued America since Trump's election which has given a green light to white supremacists and coddled some of the most extreme and bigoted acolytes of the Christian Right.  America needs to win the war against Covid-19, but it also needs to win the war against hate, bigotry and the celebration that Trump has unleashed.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality:

We see the best of America in the health-care workers and first-responders risking (and sometimes losing) their lives to help others. But we also see the pathologies that have surfaced (or recurred in new mutations) during Trump’s presidency: the scapegoating of religious minorities, attacks on science and scientists, and promotion of globalist conspiracy theories (in this case, that the World Health Organization conspired with communist China to conceal the virus).

This country’s woeful response to the virus has an obvious cause: a president who refused to heed warnings and to prepare, instead offering false assurances while the nation snoozed. Even now, inexcusable delays limit tests, ventilators and respirators, and even now President Trump resists a nationwide stay-at-home order.

But it’s painful for some to put the responsibility where it belongs. Christian broadcaster Rick Wiles, therefore, took a different tack. He blamed the Jews. “God is spreading it in your synagogues! You’re under judgment because you oppose his son, the Lord Jesus Christ,” he proclaimed on his TruNews platform. This is the same Rick Wiles who in November called Trump’s impeachment a “Jew coup.” And this is the same Rick Wiles whose TruNews outlet was granted press credentials by the Trump administration to cover the World Economic Forum in January; Wiles stayed in a room booked by the administration.

Others follow Trump’s lead in blaming scientists for our woes. As The Post first reported, the government had to step up security for Anthony Fauci, the top infectious-disease expert at the National Institutes of Health and the most visible scientist responding to the crisis. Threats had been made against the 79-year-old doctor, who frequently contradicts Trump’s uninformed happy talk. Fauci has been attacked by pro-Trump outlets such as Gateway Pundit and American Thinker, which labeled Fauci a “Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving Stooge.” The dark-web conspiracy theorists from QAnon and the like do worse to Fauci, a loyal public servant under every president since Ronald Reagan.

Still others try to distract from the Trump administration’s failures by blaming a globalist conspiracy. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) demanded an investigation into the WHO for “helping Communist China cover up a global pandemic.” Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, former Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Tom Cotton (Ark.), Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and pro-Trump outlets such as the Federalist and Breitbart have proclaimed similar sentiments. The scientists issued a report warning that the virus is “spreading with astonishing speed” and called for governments to “immediately activate the highest level of national response,” including immediate and extensive testing and planning for closing schools and workplaces.

And yet, Trump slept. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he said on Feb. 28. He blew it. Not the scientists, not the WHO, and not the Jews.