The Anti-Vax Insanity

In Virginia the number of Covid cases is increasing - but nowhere near at the levels of states like Florida - and the first report of a minor dying of Covid in the eastern part of the state is now being reported. The Hampton Rpads area has been identified as a "high risk area" due to many younger individuals who have not gotten vaccinated.  I and many others are masking up again at work and when going into stores and public spaces.  As a column in the New York Times lays out, none of this had to be happening.  If one looks at a map of where Covid is surging, there is a direct correlation to the politics of states with GOP lead states largely leading the surge all because political ideology and "owning the libs" has taken precedence over medical science and sane public health policy.  Short of soaring deaths - if even that - it is hard to see what will change closed minds, especially on the right.  Here are column highlights:

Nothing better exemplifies the gaping political divide in this country than our embarrassing and asinine vaccine response. Donald Trump’s scorched earth political strategy has fooled millions of Americans into flirting with death. And now thousands are once again dying for it.

Almost from the beginning, efforts to combat the virus were met with disdain from a president who felt the crisis made him look bad. The science was denied. We came to live in a world where masking was mocked and ingesting disinfectant was offered up as a possible cure.

All the while, the patients on ventilators gasped for breath, and refrigerated trailers filled with bodies. Death is one of the ultimate truths of life, and yet not even it could dissuade the headstrong from casting doubt on the science.

And then, a miracle. In response to this raging, deadly virus, scientists developed multiple, highly effective vaccines with breathtaking speed. It was like a prayer had been answered. An antidote to the plague had arrived.

We should all have been celebrating in the streets and running to a lifesaving serum with our sleeves rolled up and a smile on our face. But not enough of us were.

The public had been poisoned by partisanship. Masking was a political statement. Social distancing was a political statement. Receiving the vaccine, for far too many, was a political statement.

They hated that businesses were forced to close, and being asked to wear masks inside when they reopened. They hated their children having to stay home from school and being made to wear masks when they returned.

But, the simple truth is that all of this could have been avoided if all Americans eligible for the vaccine — and that’s pretty much every adult at this point — had simply chosen to be vaccinated. But they didn’t. They haven’t.

The vaccine is safe, incredibly safe. There are no microchips or magnets in it. It does not cause Covid and it is not more dangerous than Covid.

Believing all these lies is a luxury of people who have not sat by a hospital bedside, or watched from behind glass, because Covid regulations prevented them from comforting a relative or friend as they drew their last breath, struggling against a virus that choked that breath off.

It is a luxury to be irresponsible in a society where others will be responsible for you, where you simply assume that you are safer because others take the appropriate precautions to be safe: You do not need to get the shot because others have.

But the Delta variant is testing that faith.

As the Delta variant surges there is an uptick in the pace of vaccinations in the country. It’s almost like religion: Many disbelievers will call out to whatever God there may be when the reaper is at the door. Fear of ideological defeat is no match for the fear of imminent death. And yet, it shouldn’t have taken another surge of sickness and death for good sense to set in.

Why were Americans turning away a vaccine that many people in other parts of the world were literally dying for? Many did so because of their fidelity to the lie and their fidelity to the liar. They did it because they were — and still are — slavishly devoted to Trump, and because many politicians and conservative commentators helped Trump propagate his lies.

A recent Monmouth University poll found that “among those who admit they will not get the vaccine if they can avoid it, 70 percent either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party while just 6 percent align with the Democrats.”

It was all lunacy. It is all lunacy. This should never have happened. There are people dead today — a lot of them! — who should still be alive and who would be if people in the heights of government and the heights of the media had not fed them lies about the virus.

So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy. This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

Regent University Sued for Anti-LGBT Discrimination

In what will hopefully turn out to be a major financial blow to Regent University and other discriminatory colleges and university in terms of loss of federal funding, Regent and the U.S. Department of Education are being sued as part of a class action for violating Title IX, a 1972 law prohibiting sex-based discrimination against students at schools that receive federal funds. If the plaintiffs are successful, Regent and similar schools where anti-LGBT bigotry are official policy, could lose millions of dollars in federal funds (Liberty University should likewise lose all federal funds).  If the court follows last years Supreme Court ruling that Title VII ban on se based discrimination in the employment realm applies to LGBT individuals, the case should be a slam dunk for the plaintiffs.  No doubt Regent will shed crocodile tears and claim its religious beliefs are under attack, but there is an easy solution if Regent wants to continue its anti-LGBT bigotry: stop accepting federal taxpayer derived funds.  A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at this long overdue lawsuit.  Here are article highlights (note how Regent apparently pushes totally discredited "conversion therapy'):

Jamie Lord was told she was going to hell. She was told gay people were pedophiles and child molesters.

And she was told if she brought her girlfriend on campus at Regent University, where Lord is a law student, she could be kicked out of school.

Lord is one of 40 current and former students at Christian colleges and universities named as plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education.

At issue is the religious exemption to Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex-based discrimination against students at schools that receive federal funds. The Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP), the nonprofit that filed the suit, claims that the religious exemption has allowed schools to continue with discriminatory practices.

The suit aims to “put an end to the U.S. Department of Education’s complicity in the abuses and unsafe conditions thousands of LGBTQ+ students endure at hundreds of taxpayer-funded, religious colleges and universities.”

A spokesperson for Regent declined to comment on Lord’s claims, citing federal privacy laws.

“Regent University upholds Biblical values and teaches traditional Christian principles,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “... as followers of Christ, Regent staff and faculty are committed to treating every student with love, dignity, and respect.”

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Oregon in March with 33 initial plaintiffs. In June, seven more — including Lord — joined.

In court documents, students and alums described being forced into conversion therapy, facing expulsion, sexual and physical abuse, “as well as the less visible, but no less damaging, consequences of institutionalized shame, fear, anxiety and loneliness.”

Lord, 23, grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, with dreams of becoming a detective. She graduated from University of South Carolina with a bachelor’s degree in criminology and decided law school would be a good fit. Her family wasn’t particularly religious but she said she was excited to attend Regent University, lured by its high bar exam pass rate and the sizable scholarship offered.

At an event for accepted students in the spring of 2019, Lord said she pulled a professor aside, informed him she was a lesbian and asked if that would hinder her ability to fit in at Regent.

“He said that they loved diversity, that they have great conversations in the classroom and that the love all sorts of different people,” Lord said in a recent interview near her home in Virginia Beach. “Of course, I took his word on it.”

Instead, Lord said she has endured years of discrimination at the hands of Regent staff because of her sexuality. She said she was routinely berated in and outside of class, and her mental health suffered.

She said she informed a dean that a professor was harassing her because of her sexual orientation, but nothing changed. And the dean told Lord that, per the school’s policy, she could be kicked out of the school for having “premarital sex,” even though they could not give her an answer as to what they defined premarital sex as in a lesbian relationship, according to the complaint.

“If he had just told me the truth right then and there I wouldn’t have come,” Lord says now, remembering the reassurance she received at the event for accepted students.

According to REAP, there are about 600 four-year, degree-granting nonprofit Christian colleges in the United States, about one-third of which have policies against LGBTQ+ students in their student code of conduct policies.

The Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, of which Regent is a member, contends the lawsuit is “frivolous” and a threat to religious freedom. The organization asserts that if the suit succeeds, low-income students who wish to attend Christian colleges will lose access to federal aid.

According to a U.S. Treasury Department website that calculates federal aid, Regent received $116 million in 2018, the last year for which data is available.

Lord will soon enter her third and final year of law school, taking all her classes online — a mutual agreement with the school, she said. She and her girlfriend are now engaged.

Her experiences at the school, however, have cast doubts on her desire to practice law. And she said she’s never felt further from God.

If bigoted institutions like Regent (and Liberty University) cannot survive without federal funds, they need to either end the bigotryor go out of business. 

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

The GOP, Felling Heat on Covid-19 Goes Racist

In today's GOP when the consequences of GOP policies and Fox News propaganda goes south so to speak, the default position is to go racist  so as to distract the party base from the reality that their suffering is due to the policies and actions of GOP elected officials.  The current explosion of Covid-19 among the unvaccinated is a case in point.   Rather than blame the surge on Republicans like Ron Desantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas, and Republican officials in other Covid hot spots for their refusal to follow the recommendations of the CDC and medical experts and their anti-vaccine and anti-mask  policies, the default position is to blame the surge on brown skinned refugees at America's southern border.  Never mind that Florida - a particularly bad Covid hot spot is a good thousand miles from the nearest part of the Texas/Mexico border.  Likewise for Missouri and other hotspots nowhere near the southern border.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP effort to shift blame from themselves to Central American refugees.  Here are highlights:

The GOP strategy to tank Joe Biden's presidency was supposed to be a simple one: jack up COVID-19 rates by convincing Fox News viewers that only filthy liberals get vaccinated, then blame Biden for the surge while a media plagued by bothsidesism plays along.

But the plan hit one little, unforeseen snag: The mainstream media, which did play along for a bit with headlines blaming Biden, suddenly switched gears in mid-July. The severity of the delta variant surge pushed the media to actually start covering both the anti-vaccine propaganda apparatus at Fox News and the fact that COVID-19 hot spots appeared concentrated in parts of the country where people mainline such propaganda. Now, the whole evil scheme has gone sideways. Polling shows Americans are blaming right-wingers and the unvaccinated instead of Biden — and now Republicans are in a panic. 

And what do Republicans always do in a panic? Old-fashioned race-baiting.

Rather than blame the obvious culprits for the pandemic — Fox News-addled anti-vaxxers — Republicans are increasingly accusing immigrants at the Southern border of bringing in COVID-19, and Biden of supposedly letting them. After Biden rightfully called out Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, for his part in letting COVID-19 run rampant, DeSantis pitifully tried to hit back by claiming Biden "imported more virus from around the world by having a wide-open southern border." 

Other Republican politicians have been echoing this "blame Mexico" talking point, from Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas accusing the Biden administration of allowing a "super spreader event because their open border" to Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds arguing that "the problem is the southern border is open."

Unsurprisingly, Fox News is leaning hard into this "blame immigrants, not the unvaccinated" messaging, often with a side dose of contrasting the supposedly dangerous dark-skinned immigrants with the supposedly pristine lighter-skinned people around the world.

Bret Baier of Fox News was interviewing Centers for Disease Control head Rochelle Walensky last week and complained that his "in-laws live in Austria, they cannot come here to see their six-month-old baby because of the EU travel ban, . . . . Walensky calmly replied, "what we really need to do is spend our time getting our communities vaccinated," but of course, Breitbart and other right-wing outlets portrayed her as somehow too "woke" to deal with the scary disease-ridden foreigners who they clearly believe are identifiable via skin color. 

As usual, there's a heavy amount of coordination on the right around the new, race-baiting tactic. The Wall Street Journal and New York Post are both on the blame-immigrants-not-the-unvaccinated train. And Fox News is a steady drumbeat of scare stories about COVID-positive immigrants, all meant to give viewers an excuse for remaining unvaccinated because they can blame "dirty" immigrants instead of the homegrown unvaccinated Americans who are passing the disease rapidly. 

It's all, of course, completely ridiculous. . . . . Thousands of unvaccinated immigrants at the border simply do not have the numbers to be a greater threat to public health than literally millions of native-born Americans who refuse to get vaccinated.

Any fool who can read a map sees the main problem with the "blame the border" gambit, which is the parts of the U.S. that actually border Mexico are seeing less of a surge than parts that other parts that border water and/or border other U.S. states. 

Yep, the hot spots are running through the Bible Belt more than the Southwest. We also have actual scientific data that shows the delta variant surge that's causing our current woes is flowing more through Branson, Missouri — where vaccine-eschewing GOP America goes to party — than McAllen, TX. 

One would think that a belief that people are bringing in COVID-19 is all the more reason to do what offers, by far, the highest level of protection: vaccination.  And yet "scary brown-skinned immigrants are bringing disease!" is being used as a justification by white conservatives to avoid taking basic prevention measures. 

Of course, none of it is meant to be rational.

Republicans are turning to racism for the same reason they always do, to turn off any remaining capacity for critical thinking among their base, replacing it with inchoate fear and rage over the very existence of people that don't look or talk or act exactly like them. As usual, the GOP elite doesn't care how many people get sick or die. All they care about is giving their voters some stupid thing to rant and rave about, so they can shut off their brains and not think about how foolish it is to keep voting for people who are killing them to score political points. 

Will this new "blame immigrants, not the unvaccinated" narrative work? It will, in the same way the "blame China" gambit worked. . . . What it won't do is cause the COVID-19 surge to end any time soon. For that to happen, ordinary Republicans need to suck it up and start getting vaccinated in larger numbers. And the longer that their leaders keep feeding them excuses not to do so — such as blaming immigrants — the longer this pandemic will drag out. And the longer that goes on, the angrier the vaccinated majority will get with unvaccinated red hats for being such selfish, whiny babies in the face of a global pandemic. 

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Glenn Youngkin Refuses to Condemn Trump's "Big Lie’

Glenn Youngkin's gubernatorial candidacy offers Virginian's two things: (i) a warmed over version of the GOP's 2009 campaign platform of tax cuts to benefit the wealthy and promises of school choice policies that would have taxpayer dollars got to private and religious schools thus thrilling The Family Foundation crowd that hates public education, and (ii) an embrace of Trumpism and the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.  Like the majority of Republicans, Youngkin can't find it within himself to be truthful and cease self-prostitution to Trump and his base.  Obviously, if Youngkin cannot be truthful about the 2020 election, it is safe to assume he will lie about everything else, especially his embrace of the far right Christian agenda to inflict their beliefs on all Virginians.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Youngkin's deceptive campaign.  Here are excerpts:

After weeks of running an empty-vessel campaign into which voters could pour whatever ideas, hopes, fears and theories they wished, Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin has finally put some ideas on the table.

They aren’t fresh or new ideas. The tax rebates, small-business support and modest school-choice policies, plus a spending spree on constituencies such as law enforcement, would be standard fare for a Republican running for office in, say, the late 1990s or early 2000s.

There are flaws with each proposal — the biggest being that many of them are based on Virginia’s share of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). Youngkin has flip-flopped on the spending plan, calling it unnecessary in the spring but more recently saying he wants to spend it.

That change of heart — or bow to reality — means the starry-eyed outsider has taken a big step toward becoming the transactional insider he’s running against.

But even as Youngkin was floating his ideas, he’s still playing footsie with the Trump dead-enders who’ve brought the GOP so low.

The most recent instance: his inability to denounce the conspiracy theory that former president Donald Trump (and other defeated Republicans) will soon be restored to office.

At a recent campaign event, an audience member insisted that “Trump won,” the election results were “all fraud,” that a number of Virginia races were “stolen” and Trump will return in “August or September.” The audience member asked Youngkin whether Trump’s fantastical return would help get “our people back in office.”

Rather than politely but firmly say there is no means, method or reason that will restore Trump to the presidency, Youngkin offered a bizarre word salad instead:

“I don’t know the particulars about how that can happen, because what’s happening in the court system is moving slowly and it’s unclear. And we all know the courts move slowly …”

That’s an unforced error. Youngkin tried to change the subject, saying, again, that Joe Biden was legitimately elected to the presidency. No dice. He had the chance to put a stake through the QAnon cancer coursing through the GOP and didn’t.

But not all is lost. The 5th Congressional District “conspiracy-palooza” happens this weekend. Officially billed as an election integrity event, GOP lieutenant governor nominee Winsome Sears and GOP attorney general nominee Jason Miyares, who were dubbed “featured guests” on the announcement, now have plans to campaign elsewhere. Youngkin, who said he’d stop by, hasn’t made similar plans.

He should make other plans now and get to work advocating for his newfound policies rather than feeding the big lie.

Vote a straight Democrat ticket in November.  The rest of the GOP ticket is just as scary - Winsome Sears is even more scary, in fact - as Youngkin.

More Friday Male Beauty

 

We Can’t Let the Jan. 6th Traitors Rewrite History

On January 6, 2021, millions of Americans (save perhaps for Fox News viewers) watched live time television coverage of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of insurrectionists composed of Trump cultists, white supremacists and right wing Christians.  Their goal?  To overthrow the U.S. Constitution and a legitimate election to install Donald Trump as autocrat.  Given the additional information that has come to light, it is clear to anyone with open eyes and thinking skills (the latter excludes evangelicals) that Trump's goal was to stage a coup.  Fortunately, the insurrectionists and their Fuhrer were not successful.  Now, aided by the right wing media and far too many Republican office holders, the insurrectionists and their apologists - much like the Old South after the Civil War - are attempting to rewrite history to create their own modern day version of the "Lost Cause" myth.  This cannot be allowed to happen and the insurrectionists need to be forever labeled as traitors and seditionists.   A column in the Washington Post looks at this insidious effort which must be defeated.  Here are excerpts: 

History, the adage goes, is written by the victors. Would that it were true.

In the Civil War, the U.S. Army, at a staggering human cost, eventually crushed the traitors who took up arms against their own country. But Lost Cause mythology rewrote the rebellion as a conflict over states’ rights, portrayed Confederates as gallant heroes fighting impossible odds, romanticized plantation life and sanitized slavery. The fictions, taught to generations of southerners, fueled Jim Crow and white supremacy.

In the retelling of Jan. 6, we see an echo of Lost Cause mythology. On that terrible day, terrorists took up arms against the United States, sacking the seat of the U.S. government in a deadly rampage. White supremacists marauded through the Capitol. It was a coup attempt, aimed at overturning the will of the people with brute force, encouraged by a defeated president and his allies. The Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police, badly outnumbered, ultimately prevailed in putting down the insurrection.

But now the losers are trying to rewrite the history of that day. The terrorists were “patriots.” Theirs was a “normal tourist visit.” They weren’t armed. They were “hugging and kissing” the police. A woman, shot as she breached the last barrier keeping elected representatives from the mob, was a martyr shot in cold blood. The Capitol Police were ill-trained. It was Nancy Pelosi’s fault.

The losers, again, are trying to write the history. They must not be allowed to succeed — for if they do, they will certainly try again to attack democracy.

President Biden joined the battle against the revisionists on Thursday as he presented the Congressional Gold Medal to the police who saved democracy on Jan. 6. “We cannot allow history to be rewritten,” he said. . . . . “A mob of extremists and terrorists launched a violent and deadly assault on the People’s House and the sacred ritual to certify a free and fair election,” he said. “It was insurrection … It was unconstitutional. And maybe most important, it was fundamentally un-American.”

To that list of labels, Ty Seidule adds one more: “It was a lynch mob.”

He told me of the disgust he felt when he saw a photo of an insurrectionist in the Capitol on Jan. 6 carrying the Confederate battle flag — “the Flag of Treason,” he calls it — past a portrait of Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator nearly caned to death by Preston Brooks, a proslavery congressman from South Carolina. Seidule wanted to suit up in his old uniform and fight the Capitol terrorists. “The people who did that need to be in orange jumpsuits and shackles,” he said.

In his book [of “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause,”], Seidule [A retired U.S. Army general] writes of the importance of words in defeating the Lost Cause lies. It wasn’t “Union” against “Confederate,” he argues. It was the “U.S. Army fighting … against a rebel force that would not accept the results of a democratic election and chose armed rebellion.” Confederate generals didn’t fight with “honor”; they abrogated “an oath sworn to God to defend the United States” and “killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy, ever.” It wasn’t “the War Between the States,” as Lost Cause mythology would have it; the Civil War was, properly, “The War of the Rebellion.” They weren’t “plantations” as glorified by Margaret Mitchell, but “enslaved labor farms.” Writes Seidule: “Accurate language can help us destroy the lies of the Lost Cause.”

So, too, can accurate language destroy the lies now being floated to justify Jan. 6.

These were not tourists. These were not patriots. They were terrorists, as D.C. police officer Daniel Hodges, savagely beaten on Jan. 6, labeled them in congressional testimony. They were armed — with rebar, poles, knives, bear spray, tasers and an untold number of firearms — and they were unspeakably violent in their attack on the duly elected government of the United States.

The revisionist history serves a purpose: Sanitizing sedition so the foes of democracy will be able to attack it again, but successfully. This is why those who still revere our democracy must answer the lies with the true stories of Jan. 6 — again and again. “We’re not going to let them win the narrative,” Seidule said. “History is too important.”

Friday Morning Male Beauty