The scene is getting pretty wild in local politics. If you follow these stories at all, you have seen everything from screaming, profane meltdowns to actual fist fights at school board, city council and county commissioner meetings throughout the land. That said, this next clip ratchets up the hysteria unto a new plane, making the anti-vaxx movement, in essence, a holy war. Listen to this women tell the school board members that they are “demonic entities.”
Woman said she is an RN with 2 kids, told the Lee County FL Sch Bd last night: “You are all demonic entities. All of us christians are sticking together to take you all out. These doctors that were sneering at us like we’re scumbags, they need to go back to f*cking med school.” pic.twitter.com/sXl7yQ6HO8
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 31, 2021
I can tell you from first hand experience that these people, whom I call “the evangelical wingnuts” are scary. There was one staying at the house I used to live in in California, and she told people that she saw “demons” following me up the staircase. This gal saw a lot of things, visions and apparitions of all nature. She didn’t drink nor use drugs, she didn’t need to. She spoke in tongues and chanted biblical passages. She told my roommate, “she [meaning me] won’t hear the word of God. That’s why she’s sick.” That conversation took place when she started blasting the Christian Broadcasting Network from the dining room TV and I limped down the stairs and told her that if she didn’t turn the effing thing down I would rip the cable box off the pole outside and hit her with it.
What is insidious about these people is that they are self-righteous and utterly convinced that they are right. They get so far out of tune with the normal world that I’m not sure that there is any coming back. The wingnut that I knew didn’t work and hadn’t worked in years, perhaps never. She claimed to have worked at everything from being a stripper to managing a real estate office. She sponged off of people, trading out her services as a “prayer warrior” for a place to stay.
She was an aging party girl from Pacific Palisades, a former beach bunny, and in her early fifties she still had enough of her looks left that she could convince enough people, enough men I should say, that they should let her have a spare room. So she lived a parasitical existence and told the rest of us in the house, who were productive folk in one way or another, how we were the ones who didn’t have it right. Frankly, it would not surprise me to see her show up in one of these right-wing clips, although she shied away from anything political. Her mission in life was to have her living expenses paid in compensation for talking the crazy talk, which she called “helping people.”
The thing that distinguishes the wingnut in this clip and the one I knew in L.A. from the rest of us was that they haven’t a clue how crazy they sound. In their bubble, this is how you talk and what you talk about.
Where these religious fanatics are lost is in two ways: 1. They take a firehose to a situation where a cup of water would suffice. They have zero sense of proportion. 2. They are convinced that they are right and you are wrong, because they thump the Bible and you don’t. They honestly believe they have information that you don’t, and you cannot convince them that it’s really the other way around.
Finally, look for the snake oil salesmen, who are part of the right-wing religionist cult, to stay in the pandemic remedy arena. They’ve got too much riding on it to get out now. Paul Krugman has a terrific essay on this in New York Times:
The interesting question, however, is to what extent the connection between right-wing politics and snake oil marketing has shaped the political landscape.
Put it this way: There are big financial rewards to extremism, because extreme politics sells patent medicine, and patent medicine is highly profitable. (In 2014 Alex Jones’s operations were bringing in more than $20 million a year in revenue, mainly from supplement sales.) Do these financial rewards induce pundits to be more extreme? It would be surprising if they didn’t — as conservative economists say, incentives matter.
The extremism of media figures radicalizes their audience, giving politicians an incentive to become more extreme.
So you can see how vaccination became such a flash point. Getting shots in arms is a priority for a Democratic president, which automatically generates intense hostility among people who want to see Joe Biden fail. And such people were already primed to reject medical expertise and believe in quack cures.
Surely everyone on the right noticed that even Donald Trump got booed recently when he told attendees at a rally that they should get vaccinated. He probably won’t say that again, and would-be future Trumps definitely won’t.
None of this would be happening if there weren’t a climate of anger and distrust for unscrupulous pundits and politicians to exploit. But the fact that extremism sells patent medicine creates a financial incentive to get more extreme.
Extremism sells patent medicine and this is why the right-wing pastors are so busy up at the pulpit encouraging everybody to throw away the masks and forget about the vaccines, because that will drive them into the arms of the snake oil salesmen. It all makes sense now, in an insane sort of way. The big fact that is lost sight of, and that is why high profile anti-vaxxers die every day and you read the news stories about them, is that COVID-19 is real. It’s not a matter of opinion or choice. It will get you if you’re out there to get. But the bubble world these people have built comes with a sense of invincibility. That’s why you hear the death bed confessions, “I was wrong. I should have gotten the vaccine.” But still it continues. I wonder which right-wing radio host will die today?
“I wonder which right-wing radio host will die today?”
If karma had her way, they’d ALL die today. But, how much you wanna bet every last one of them has been FULLY vaccinated and so, as such, aren’t in any danger? They don’t even stop to consider that their rhetoric will lead to (much) lower ratings if their listeners actually take their advice and not get vaccinated and then wind up in an ICU for days (if not weeks and/or months) before possibly/probably dying.
Even 20% of the Mormons are in the crazy bin, and that’s with their church leaders telling them to get vaxxed and wear masks.
Georgia has had a couple of vaccine events cancelled because the loonies showed up and threatened the workers.
You think ONE was bad, Ursula? Try growing up in an area where they are thick on the ground like I did. It’s nothing to me, their resistance. They set themselves up to die or be crippled while the rest of us have a decent chance to survive them and thrive.
And before anybody brings up the whole “but innocent people, children included, will suffer too!”, that was ALWAYS baked into the cake the second Trump started spewing his nonsense. On balance, the overall equation is the same: they get to fade away, we get to go on. Fair trade.
American Nazi’s. 1.5 children died during Nazism. Didn’t stop them. Children will die now. Propaganda works really well for those that are weak minded or fear becoming “less than.” The fast run towards fascism is shocking.
They got nowhere left to go but down. Still, kindly stop kidding yourself that this is all of a sudden. This is who they have ALWAYS been. It’s just now the numbers and time are no longer on their side. So they’ll kill as many of us as they can on the way out. But out is where they’re headed…we should give them a shove that way.
I wonder what would happen if you sprayed them with holy water?
Clouds of steam?
More problems have been cause and more people have died because of religion than any other cause. Religion was invented by man to control his fellow man.
I disagree. Religion was born in mystery to try & explain the mysteries. The law was invented to control other people with force & the threat of force. When religion is made into a legal bureaucracy & they appear to merge, as in the history of the Catholic church, then religion becomes propaganda for the state. Every system of law is backed by violence & the threat of violence.
If this woman is indeed an RN, she needs her nursing license revoked-in a f*cking hurry. Someone this stupid, someone so out of touch with anything factual but very in touch with nonsense, should not be anywhere near people needing treatment. The woman is dangerously ignorant.
Mentally ill people are often drawn to evangelical, right-wing religions. They like the security of someone telling them what to think and believe, that the voices in their head come from god. They are easy prey for the charlatans, the snake oil salesmen, which we seem to have too many of those these days. Didn’t they used to tar and feather those guys and ride them out of town on a rail? Something I’d like to see return.
She thinks doctors are demons who need to go back to medical school.
So I guess that begs the question – if one of them did go through med school again, then came out and still said she needed to be vaccinated, would she listen then?