You know how conservatives claim to be “the party of personal responsibility”? Obviously, it’s a crock. But at the very least, it’s fun to see the extremes they go to in refusing responsibility for their own actions.
As you are likely aware, conservatives are killing themselves off in frightening numbers by refusing to vaccinate and take the COVID vaccine seriously. I have a whole series on the topic. And it’s not just anecdotal. The evidence is clear.
In short, the redder the county, the higher the death toll. At this point, it’s intuitive and common sense—the people who refuse to accept the pandemic reality are the same people doing the dying. Now imagine places like Florida, suffering around 2,500 dead per week, and how that might impact the state’s historically tight elections? The official margin in the 2000 presidential election was 537 votes, statewide. In the 2018 governor’s race, Gov. Ron DeSantis, merchant of death, won by just 32,463 votes. In that same year’s Senate race, Sen. Rick Scott won by just 10,033.
Republicans are literally murdering their margin of victory.
So if you’re a conservative and maybe don’t want your people to extinguish themselves—not because it’s the human thing to do, but because it might affect you electorally—what do you do? Well, you can’t look in the mirror or to Donald Trump, Fox News, OANN, Newsmax, the entire AM talk radio sphere, and a vast online network of misinformation and disinformation sites peddling the anti-vaxx gospel. Nah, that would be too much like “taking personal responsibility.”
It’s much easier to blame the liberals.
Breitbart’s John Nolte has just given us what might be peak conservative blame shifting.
In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?
If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what [Howard] Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!
And why is that a perfectly human response? Because no one ever wants to feel like they are being bullied or ridiculed or mocked or pushed into doing anything.
In another piece, he writes this:
The organized left is deliberately putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.
In other words, I sincerely believe the organized left is doing everything in its power to convince Trump supporters NOT to get the life-saving Trump vaccine. I’m sorry, but people willing to drone strike seven children and who are eager to unleash terrorists like Antifa and Black Lives Matter into our cities are sociopaths. The left’s morality is guided only by that which furthers their fascist agenda, and so using reverse psychology to trick Trump supporters NOT to get a life-saving vaccine is, to them, a moral good. The more of us who die, the better.
I’ll give Nolte credit for one thing: He is a rare conservative voice that gets the dangers posed by COVID and is trying to get his tribe to take it seriously, and stop dying.
But he’s a conservative, an “editor-at-large” at Breitbart, which has conditioned its readers to distrust pretty much anything that doesn’t come out of Donald Trump’s mouth. These are people that have decided that everything that doesn’t conform to some predetermined world view is “liberal” or untrustworthy. So Nolte can’t share the latest CDC data with them, or talk about peer-reviewed studies. He knows Breitbart readers will reject that information outright and maybe even brand him the enemy, part of their “deep state” conspiracy.
There is no reason or logic that will appeal to that crowd. They respond to one thing: raw, ugly, emotion. And thus, suicide by COVID isn’t the fault of a vast conservative movement and a former president that created the conditions for vaccine skepticism to rise. Instead, it’s the fault of those dastardly liberals.
Why, liberals know that conservatives will always do the opposite of what they say! If a liberal said, “please conservative friend, get chemotherapy to try and beat this cancer,” the conservative would immediately sniff out the trickery! “Aha! Nice try, liberal fiend! I will not get chemotherapy!”
So while liberals desperately clamored to get the life-saving jab (because being in the hospital on life support for an avoidable disease is stupid, and dying even more so), conservatives saw all of that—and smelled a rat.
Why, those liberals want to drone strike children! As if we weren’t the ones arguing against invading Afghanistan (and every other place) in the first place. Liberals are unleashing antifa and Black people into cities! As if the only terrorists we really need to deal with are those who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6. But perhaps we can laugh that off as Nolte’s pathetic efforts to shore up his crazy conservative bona fides. “Guys, I want you to take a vaccine, but I’m still one of you, I promise!” But his core argument betrays so much of what modern conservatism is all about:
The organized left is deliberately putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.
Read that carefully. Because his argument is explicitly that conservatives don’t want to feel something. He admits this isn’t about logic or even a human’s basic instinct for survival. The core of the conservative movement is based on how it feels.
It doesn’t want to feel like a “cuck.”
It doesn’t want to feel like it’s “caving” to liberals.
Why, they’d rather be owning the libs! Rolling coal around Priuses and cyclists. Wearing MAGA hats. Serving Papa John’s pizza at weddings. Everything Marjorie Taylor-Green does. The antics of James O’Keefe. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reading Green Eggs and Ham. That’s the stuff that gets them excited, not a treatise on economics from the Heritage Foundation. In a piece aptly titled “Hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism,” Paul Waldman wrote, “the one thing that unites the right and drives the GOP is hatred of liberals. That hatred has consumed every policy goal, every ideological principle and even every ounce of commitment to country.”
Hate is a feeling. It’s literally all they have left.
So let’s examine this Nolte passage again:
If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what [Howard] Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!
And why is that a perfectly human response? Because no one ever wants to feel like they are being bullied or ridiculed or mocked or pushed into doing anything.
Vaccines came out early this year. No one was bullying or taunting or ridiculing anyone. We were all too busy refreshing vaccination site websites, desperate to score our jab appointments. The science was in, the results were available, and millions were getting vaccinated on a daily basis if anyone wanted to take a “wait and see” attitude before taking their own plunge.
Yet when the dust settled, vaccination rates trailed off, and we got to look at who was left, it turns out it was conservatives. And so everyone asked them nicely. Heck, even Donald F’n Trump asked them. And they booed him. And now we have our third wave, and it’s conservatives doing the dying, and we’re like, “Can you please freakin’ vaccinate?” And we’re asking them to vaccinate because we’re not monsters, but also because the longer this virus circulates, the more chances it has to mutate and negate our own vaccines. There is real liberal self-interest in getting everyone (conservatives included!) to vaccinate, if you want to truly believe that liberals are monsters who want conservatives dead.
But no, it’s the liberals fault because Howard Stern said something. That’s the only reason.
Conservatives have no agency. They have no ability to think for themselves. They are driven by “feelings” of being mocked or ridiculed. They are so weak that they would rather die than listen to sage medical advice.
Nolte may not mean to make such a ridiculous argument,and make such a stark admission about his own people, but that’s the end result.
Conservatives are so weak that they would rather die than to feel like a liberal “cucked” them.
I didn’t realize we had that massive power, to exterminate an entire political movement by simply asking them to not die.
In any case, among his own crowd, Nolte’s arguments are falling on deaf ears. The comments to those stories are riddled by the same idiocy we’ve seen in the Anti-vaxx Chronicles. Because, it turns out, it’s not liberals who have willfully conned conservatives into killing themselves, but the very kind of “conservative” bullshit that tries to argue that liberals are “willing to drone strike seven children.”
Once you sever your readers’ link to reality, it gets a lot harder to bring them back.
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