Death Came for the Dakotas: A Study in "Conservative" Idiocy

One of the most disturbing things the rise of Donald Trump and the coronavirus pandemic has revealed is how many Americans seemingly celebrate and embrace ignorance and are totally self-centered and place some bizarre concept of "individual freedom" over mask wearing and social distancing restrictions that benefit and protect the entire population.  Refusing to wear a mask sends a clear message that these people don't give a damn about others and don't care if they endanger others. Meanwhile, many of these same people identify as "conservative Christians" which in theory, if one follows Christ's gospel message, should mean they care about others.  Of course, by now we know full well that these "conservative Christians" and  evangelicals are the most self-centered individuals on the planet (after Trump, of course) and hold open hatred towards others. The irony is that this mindset is now literally killing them in North and South Dakota.  A column in the New York Times looks at the deadly toll - among the highest per capita in the county - this embrace of ignorance, contempt for experts, and fetish for ignoring science is racking up.   It is hard to hold sympathy for those who are their own worse enemies.  Here are column highlights:

Under normal circumstances, I would have flown to one or both of the Dakotas to write this column, but the whole point is that these aren’t normal circumstances. And I don’t have a death wish.

Too much? Probably. But how else to convey the proper timbre of outrage, the right pitch of grief, over what happened there? Deep into the coronavirus pandemic, when there was no doubt about the damage that Covid-19 could do, the Dakotas scaled their morbid heights, propelled by denial and defiance. They surged to the top of national rankings of state residents per capita who were hospitalized with Covid-related symptoms or whose recent deaths were linked to it.

As of Friday afternoon, South Dakota led the country in the average daily number of recent Covid-associated deaths per capita . . . . More than 40 percent of South Dakota’s 1,033 Covid-related deaths to that point occurred in November, according to statistics from the Covid Tracking Project, and the same was true of North Dakota’s 983 deaths.

The Dakotas are a horror story that didn’t have to be, a theater of American disgrace. Want to understand the tendencies — pathologies might be the better word — that made America’s dance with the coronavirus so deadly? Visit the Dakotas.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Jamie Smith, the leader of the Democratic minority in South Dakota’s House of Representatives, told me. He was referring primarily to how politicized such basic safety measures as social distancing and masks became, but also to many South Dakotans’ distrust of science and unshakable belief that the virus wouldn’t come for them.

Lawrence Klemin, a Republican legislator in North Dakota who just finished his two-year term as the speaker of its House of Representatives, told me that people in his state “are pretty much independent-minded about how they conduct their affairs.” . . . . And the most stubborn, he said, have been the loudest. Throughout the pandemic, he said, he was deluged with communications from constituents adamantly opposed to any mask-wearing requirement, which North Dakota didn’t even have. He heard almost nothing from the other side.

But after Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, used an executive order on Nov. 13 to institute precisely such a mandate, a poll showed that a significant majority of North Dakotans favored it. . . . . the state definitely should have taken that step last spring or summer — before the number of coronavirus cases skyrocketed, before hospitals were so overrun that sick North Dakotans had to be sent to neighboring states and before his own mother tested positive and died in early October.

Until recently, Governor Burgum was loath to exert much pressure on North Dakotans and steered clear of the social-distancing orders put in place by so many other states. Deaths and hospitalizations have dropped significantly in North Dakota over the past two weeks. On Friday evening, it ranked just ninth among states for the percentage of its residents hospitalized with Covid-19.

South Dakota, in contrast, was No. 1. Still no mask mandate there, and no leadership at all from Noem, who didn’t just welcome but beckoned President Trump to Mount Rushmore for that enormous Independence Day rally, the one at which his perpetually maskless entourage clustered near a similarly maskless crowd.

One month later, Noem played cheerleader for a 10-day motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D., that attracted some 460,000 people. In an article in The Times, my colleagues Mark Walker and Jack Healy described it as “a Woodstock of unmasked, uninhibited coronavirus defiance.”

I get the sense that Noem has presidential aspirations (though she has denied that). If she ever presses the accelerator on those, please remember this savage season, and please remember her damning indifference to it.

When I said “horror story,” I was cribbing. That was a description used in a series of mid-November tweets from a South Dakota emergency room nurse, Jodi Doering, that went viral. . . . . They “scream at you for a magic medicine” and warn that Joe Biden will ruin America even as they’re “gasping for breath,” she wrote. She added: “They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have Covid because it’s not real.”

The truth is that the Dakotas are as emblematic as they are exceptional, the American story — or at least a strain of it — in miniature. In resisting the lockdowns, slowdowns and sacrifices that many other states committed to, they indulged and encouraged a selective (and often warped) reading of scientific evidence, a rebellion against experts and a twisted concept of individual liberty that was obvious all over the country and contributed mightily to our suffering.

“North Dakotans will come to each other’s aids in a heartbeat, but when asked to give up personal freedom for an amorphous common good — that’s difficult,” Paul Carson, an infectious-diseases doctor and a professor of public health at North Dakota State University, told me.

For too long, staying safe from the coronavirus was indeed an amorphous mission to many North and South Dakotans, and their false sense of security was surely intensified by what they heard from President Trump, who spoke of disease-ridden blue states versus freedom-loving red ones and kept promising that this would all blow over. “We maybe believed that our rural nature sheltered us from what cities like yours were experiencing,” Carson said. “Then we found out, very brutally, that was wrong.”