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Praying For Time

“You break it, you bought it” has rarely fit so aptly as it does for Republican officials finding themselves suddenly with little choice but to emphatically call for their supporters across the South and West to finally get vaccinated. 

Vaccine misinformation and antivax messaging sits squarely with conservative news and media outlets; nightly skepticism from Fox, Newsmax and OAN joined up with months of Covid minimization and attacks on leading public health figures (the especially gross attempts to go after Anthony Fauci deserve their own special section of hell). The messy witches brew of Trump sycophancy, anti-intellectual takes on science and political gamesmanship around Covid were always bound to end in a mess of infections and finger pointing… still, its been a remarkably fast six weeks since Biden’s initial 300 million vaccines ran headlong  into the vaccine resistors, and the reality of the Delta variant started shortly thereafter. 

What had been whispered in polite circles has now become the undercurrent of urgency: if Republican officials aren’t successful soon, predictions of Republican voter dominance won’t be about manufactured conspiracies and ham handed legislating… instead it will be about the devastation done to one side of the electorate by misinformation and recalcitrance and how that dominance was lost. 

All of this underscores something even more obvious: the breakdown of the right wing noise machine, the carefully constructed false narratives that animate right wing “news” outlets, that have served as an endless buffet of distractions for right wing voters, the pundit class, and ultimately all of us. Who needs masks! Mandates are fascism! What about the lab in Wuhan? Critical Race Theory will destroy us all! And on and on. 

And so we get surreal moments like an op-ed from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, one day after publicly questioning vaccines yet again, telling Arkansans that she was indeed vaccinated and they should too, but not because “The Left” is telling you to in some condescending way… do it because your preacher says so. Or something.

The narrative is falling apart because, mainly, it is a lie. When studies were able to show that the vast majority of vaccine misinformation can be traced back to just 12 Facebook users, when the Administration can calmly and with virtually no blowback point out that Fox News traffics in disinformation… conservatives panicked. It doesn’t help that at this point some 7 states in the south are facing outbreaks of Delta that amount to the worst period yet of infections and hospitalizations… and that was in the space of one week.The rest of us can (fairly) be concerned about potential implications… but all bets are going to be off if, as predicted, a swath of southern states will have India-like issues of nowhere to store ever increasing numbers of the dead.

So… well, good luck with that: good luck trying to say “we’re really telling you the truth now” as if you can perpetuate all the other lies - the January sixth insurrection stories, fearmongering Wuhan, smearing Hunter Biden, I could go on… - and not face consequences. This cannot be fixed with a tweet. This doesn’t just end. Conservatives are on the hook for all of it - all of the lies, all of the fake stories, all of the haze that kept their audience angry and fearful and spun up. In part, this is the lesson of playing with fire: I suspect many conservatives had little idea about the deep tentacles the antivax crowd had lying in wait for just this moment, ready to seize upon, repackage and expand on the little white lies they started telling about COVID vaccines. Much the way that some more cosseted Republican operatives didn’t understand a white supremacy movement just waiting for the green light to take dog whistles and make them into flat racist rhetoric. Not at first, anyway.

Critical Race Theory, though… that one you knew. You knew that was a put up job, a new meaningless jeremiad you could throw around as an all purpose slop of racist anger, education myths, and grievance politics that can set a nation back 40 years. Or more. Who cares! Anything for a win! Let’s all pretend to make Kevin McCarthy a serious man - whose only hope now is screaming at the sky while Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger help Democrats tell the true story of January sixth.

These are the days of the guilty man… and it was fine, taking all these chances while God didn’t seem to be keeping score. But the narrative is blowing up, what was over there is over here… and suddenly belief in witchcraft and fear of science could get a lot of people killed. And maybe we should all be praying for time… but hey, conservatives, why don’t you go first. Pray that you have enough time to stop the antivax madness. Pray that no one notices your house of cards tumbling down. Pray that one inkling truth doesn’t lead to a flood of raised consciousness. All that religious fervor has got to count for something. Or… just maybe… God was keeping score. And maybe you’re just not the children he’s coming back for.

This Tired Old Man They Elected King

Since the arrival of the initial indictments in New York, I think the conversation around Trump has shifted. Not that he doesn't still have that well of support amongst the sycophants... but the understanding of what that fan base is (and isn't)... maybe, just maybe, is coming into focus.

DC media, with it's instinctive "who's up, who's down" mindset, doesn't quite get this... but right now, the problem is less about Trump, per se, and more about why his fans were drawn to him to begin with, and what they will do if he's (forcibly) removed from the stage.

One of the biggest misunderstandings of Trump's popularity, I'm convinced, is thinking his fans elected him President as defined by our Constitution or taught in Civics. Because the people who voted in that popularity contest (whether 2016 or 2020) weren't picking the head of our Executive Branch... they were electing something more like "Prom King" or "Favorite TV Host" or America's next MMA star... one of those.

And, as you might guess, those roles don't have a lot of definition around them.

It's not that "Trump thinks he'll be reinstated in August" was bonkers, or that Trump believes it; the problem is, still, no one seems to quite know what to do about it.

Just look at Mike Pence, who trotted out something to the effect of "reasonable can disagree" or... what was it? "we may never see eye to eye"? Pence would apparently like to suggest that he represents the sensible middle between normal government and bonkers crazypants world.... but that's not a middle, never mind anyplace real. The fact that Pence, hilariously, thinks that he can bridge the distance between non Trump Republicans and the "Hang Mike Pence" crowd - we may never see eye to eye, what with you hanging from the tree like that - is perhaps just the perfect cherry on top of the ludicrous sundae of Republican failures to do anything about Trump since he lost reelection.

They can't, of course: that would involve a return to a kind of sanity that's long gone in the discussion of Trump, conservatism, or our current Right Wing. You can't "do something" about Trump any more than you can advocate a sensible vaccine policy, question the Critical Race Theater, or stop Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tug on the threads of crazy that make up this useless tapestry... and the whole thing just unravels.

We get lost, I think, too much in asking whether the blind eye Republicans seem to have about taking on Trump is calculated opportunism or blind fear of his fans... because the reason really doesn't matter. Whether Trump can or will marshal his fan base to turn out in GOP primaries and punish naysayers (say, Liz Cheney) is still no excuse; and sure, the folks who raise money and cheerfully pass along his lies knowing they're untrue is gross (never mind the remaining contingent of true believer sycophants). But really, no one needs proof the Republican party, the wider conservative movement or the nutty world of QAnon is bankrupt morally, out of ideas and running on sheer desperation. The question is... when we get to August, and the lies are revealed (if not, you know, next week)... what difference will even that make? And if not August, what month? Does that matter either?

It makes no difference because, in no small part, we are watching the doings in a land where they don't have a President... they have a King. And sure, the crown is just some spray painted foil, and the Kingdom is whatever the view he's surveying from the absurd Mansion McCastle he's calling home - he's king of all he surveys, and what he sees on TV. And sure, that kingdom is a lot smaller since he was deposed... but the struggle now is the lingering collection of misunderstandings and lies. It's the way angry conservatives expect governance to happen by fiat. It's that anger itself, really - that education policy can be run by the angry mob, that "law and order" can simplified to police vs an angry mob of minorities... but ignore any angry white mob, say, invading our nation's capital.

Even now, as the GOP tries to sideline Trump - generally with no idea as to how - the real problem is clearer: maybe, perhaps, you can remove The King... but that just leaves a restless crowd all too eager to  hand over that crown to the next opportunist. The hesitancy within the right around autocrats and authoritarians is both how we got here and why they're stuck. Without a wholesale rethinking and reorientation to the truly American ideals - of consensus, collaboration, the values of a democratic republic - the core of the right floats further away from both reality and any real shot at redemption. Sure, there are risks to our way of life and our government that we must stand up to... still, what we may be witnessing, more to their point, is the death march to a dead end.

The teetering tower of ever piling up bs apparently hasn't reached a jenga-like moment of toppling over... but we sure look close. Trump is months, if not days or weeks, from a legal reckoning that could make a lot of his plans moot. So too, are the fates of a number of Trump hangers-on facing legal results over, say, those frivolous election lawsuits. Arizona's recount soldiers on, unlikely to give anything like the results long promised. The natives are getting restless - and pandering to ugly racist tropes while deliberately encouraging deadly myths about vaccines and public health is playing with a kind of fire  that many will regret sooner rather than later. Offer up your best excuses... but conservatives are at the end of their innocence in many ways. Your land without a King, your King without a crown... wait til they find out this land... isn't their land, after all.