In an op-ed in the
Washington Post by Glenn Youngkin - which I won't even give dignity to by adding a link - Virginia's answer to Vladimir Putin tries to justify his endangerment of Virginia school children under the guise of "parental rights" and wild claims about overpowering "bureaucrats." Never mind that (i) a majority(probably the vast majority) of parents support studentd wearing masks, (ii) Virginia law requires compliance with CDC guidelines, and (iii) Youngkin has also set up a Stasi-like "hotline" so parents can report any teacher who is alleged to have taught or discussed "divisive" topics, with divisiveness defined by right wing extremist parents. Under this vigilante regime, kiss good by any honest and factual discussion of Virginia and American history, LGBT rights and individuals and the ugly role of religion, including Christianity over the course of history. On the mask issue, Younkin's hypocrisy is underscored by the fact that his own children attend private schoos where masks remain
mandatory. As another column in the
Post accurately notes, Youngkin has shown himself to be "Trump in a red vest" with little concern for those he may harm in the following words:
What’s more, it’s
galling for Youngkin to suggest this is only the handiwork of power-mad
school boards trampling on parents’ rights. Large majorities in Virginia favor
school mask requirements. And given that school boards are by any reasonable
assessment acting lawfully, Youngkin himself may be the one abusing his power
here.
On
top of all this, Youngkin’s own stance on this represented a shift. The Post reports
this important nugget involving Fredericks, the conservative talk radio
host:
Youngkin’s recent position on masks
takes a harder line than he did shortly before and after November’s election,
when he said he would leave it up to localities whether to impose mask
mandates. Some Trump supporters were unhappy with that position — including
Fredericks, who now says he is pleasantly surprised by Youngkin’s firmer
stance.
“He’s Trump in a red vest,”
Fredericks said in an interview with The Post after he had Youngkin on the air,
referring to the governor’s ever-present fleece vest while on the campaign
trail. “It’s exceeded everybody’s expectations.”
He’s
Trump in a red vest. There you have it: Youngkin might
have followed the more judicious path of another GOP governor in a blue area,
Larry Hogan of Maryland, who left this up to local officials. That would have
been in keeping with the pragmatic center-right approach that Youngkin
advertised during the campaign, a sort of conservatism that nominally respects
local control.
Instead,
Youngkin is following
the path of Ron DeSantis. The Republican governor of Florida sought to use
state power to punish school officials for protecting kids as they saw fit,
to play to a national right wing audience.
All of this is about playing to the Trump base in Virginia and elsewhere. As a piece in The Atlantic makes clear, it has deadly consequences and directly ties to the Christofascist base of today's Republican Party. This insanity and/or political cynicism now occupies the Executive Mansion in Richmond. Here are article highlights:
In
the early phases of the
pandemic, as the coronavirus spread in the United States and doctors and
pharmacists and supermarket clerks continued to work and risk infection, some
commentators made reference—metaphorical reference, fast and loose and
over the top—to ritual human sacrifice. The immediate panicky focus on resuming
business as usual in order to keep the stock market from crashing was the
equivalent of “those who offered human sacrifices to Moloch,” according to the
writer Kitanya Harrison. That first summer, as Republicans settled into
their anti-testing, anti-lockdown, anti-mask, nothing-to-worry-about orthodoxy,
Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, said it was “like a policy of mass human
sacrifice.” The anthropology
professor Shan-Estelle Brown and the researcher Zoe Pearson wrote that
people who continued to do their jobs outside their homes were essentially
victims of “involuntary human sacrifice, made to look voluntary.”
Today, however, the
economy is no longer in jeopardy; unemployment rates and salaries have returned
to pre-pandemic levels; GDP per person is
higher than it was at the end of 2019; personal savings are growing, and businesses
are starting up faster than ever; corporate profits and stock
prices are at record highs. And for more than a year, we’ve had astoundingly
effective vaccines that radically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death
from COVID-19. All of which means that for a long time now the right’s ongoing
propaganda campaign against and organized political resistance to vaccination,
among other public-health protocols, has been killing many, many Americans for
no reasonable, ethically justifiable social purpose.
In other words,
what we’ve experienced certainly since the middle of 2021 is literally
ritual human sacrifice on a mass scale—the real thing, comparable to the
innumerable ghastly historical versions.
Anthropologists define ritual sacrifice
as societies’ organized killing of people in order to please supernatural
beings and—the unspoken real-world part—to fortify the political and economic
power of those societies’ elites.
Our
current experience with COVID is filled with what historians of human sacrifice
have identified as its key features. Let me run through the main ones.
1. Cultural and social complexity
[A]s a regular practice on a grander scale, human sacrifice
seems to belong to … larger empires”—“more developed cultures” that “have a
strong government” and thus “could happily dispose” of people “without the
community suffering a disastrous loss of members.” A groundbreaking 2016 study
of scores of socially complex cultures across the Pacific and East Asia found
that “sacrificial victims were typically of low status.” In various
places around the world, the victims of human sacrifice tended to
be elderly, ill, or both.
Today in the
U.S.—the world’s most powerful empire and third-most-populous nation, possessor
of a strong government and social and political complexity, a culture both
advanced and decadent—two-thirds
of COVID victims have had incomes below the median. Three-quarters
have been 65 or older, with a
median age of over 75.
2.
Intense social stress
In Inca
societies in 15th- and 16th-century South America, according to a 2015 paper,
“sacrifices were often conducted in response to natural calamities, such as …
epidemics,” “based on their belief that illness and natural disasters were
forms of supernatural punishment for sins committed.”
Accompanying the
exceptional health crisis of COVID-19 were the immediate economic and social
crises: public life shut down, a spike in violent crime, a one-third
drop in stock prices, an economic recession, unemployment near
15 percent. . . . . n a different 2020 survey,
three in five white evangelicals agreed that the pandemic and its ramifications
were “evidence that we are living in what the Bible calls the ‘end times.’” . .
. Notably, most believers apparently didn’t judge themselves to be
sinners deserving of this punishment: According to the University of Chicago
survey at the start of the pandemic, 55 percent thought God would protect them
from infection.
3.
Politics plus faith
According to
the literature, human sacrifice occurred in societies where highly supernatural
religion and state governance were deeply intertwined.
For some time in
the U.S., evangelicals have made up about a
third of Republicans, and 78
percent of all U.S. evangelical voters chose the GOP nominee in 2020. Donald
Trump is a conspicuously un-Christian leader for an ultra-Christian party, but
he is a showman, like the most successful evangelists throughout American
history. . . . Republicanism has been transformed by the merger of religion and
partisanship that started before the turn of this century. “If more and more of
a political party’s members hold more and more extravagantly supernatural
beliefs,” I wrote about the 21st-century GOP’s anti-modern denial of various
empirical realities in my 2017 book, Fantasyland,
“doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to
make-believe in its politics and policy?”
4.
Enormous scale
The human
sacrifices carried out in the 15th and 16th centuries by the Aztecs, “a relatively
young empire,” killed thousands of people and perhaps tens of
thousands annually. For that civilization, according to Science’s
Mexico-based archaeology and Latin American correspondent, “political power as
well as religious belief is likely key to understanding the scale of the
practice.”
Relatively young
North American empire? Check. An annual count of victims in the thousands?
Check. Driven by religious belief and politically powerful figures
seeking to sustain their power? Check.
5.
Victims volunteer and “volunteer”
The historian
Bremmer writes that in the ritual sacrifices carried out by India’s Kond people
into the 1800s, “the victims were always treated with great kindness before
being sacrificed” to “the founding goddess of the village” and that, “in turn,
the Konds expected them to offer themselves voluntarily.” Not surprisingly,
when it comes to human sacrifice, the lines between voluntary and involuntary,
suicide and murder, can be blurry.
Millions of
Americans in 2021 were tricked by propagandists of the political right into
forgoing vaccination and thus volunteering for death by COVID. Fox News hosts
have consistently disparaged vaccination. . . . The median age of Fox News
viewers is
65. Unvaccinated people from 65 to 79 are now 21 times as likely
to die of COVID as vaccinated people the same age, and unvaccinated Americans
50 and older are 44
times likelier to be hospitalized than the vaccinated and boosted.
Last fall, Joy
Pullmann, the executive editor of the well-funded right-wing magazine The
Federalist, published a remarkable essay
there headlined “For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is a Good
Thing.” She portrays vaccination, along with other pandemic mitigation, as part
of an “illusion of human control over death,” because, she insists, “there is
nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer.” And, according
to her, “the Christian faith makes it very clear that death, while sad to those
left behind and a tragic consequence of human sin, is now good for all
who believe in Christ.”
The
fundamentalist Protestant revival that got under way in the U.S. a century ago
was specifically anti-science, because adherents’ literal reading of Genesis
didn’t jibe with modern geology or astronomy or biology. Starting in the 1960s
and ’70s, their next U.S. revival resumed that crusade and extended it to other
scientific realms, lately including virology. Not only are white Protestant
evangelicals less
likely than any other large American religious demographic to be vaccinated,
but, according to the Public
Religion Research Institute, those “who attend religious services regularly
are twice as likely as less frequent attenders to be vaccine refusers.”
There is more, but you get the drift. This ignorance embracing and suicide embracing base is who Youngkin is playing to. Virginians need to be very afraid.
