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American Death Cult
Last October, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security compiled a ranking system to assess the preparedness of 195 countries for the next global pandemic. Twenty-one panel experts across the globe graded each country in 34 categories composed of 140 subindices. At the top of the rankings, peering down at 194 countries supposedly less equipped to withstand a pandemic, stood the United States of America.
It has since become horrifyingly clear that the experts missed something. The supposed world leader is in fact a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June, after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 25 percent of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new infections a week than China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and the European Union combined.
During its long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was called “the sick man of Europe.” The United States is now the sick man of the world, pitied by the same countries that once envied its pandemic preparedness — and, as recently as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, relied on its expertise to organize the global response.
Our former peer nations are now operating in a political context Americans would find unfathomable. Every other wealthy nation in the world has successfully beaten back the disease, at least significantly, and at least for now. New Zealand’s health minister was forced to resign after allowing two people who had tested positive for COVID-19 to attend a funeral. The Italian Parliament heckled Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte when he briefly attempted to remove his mask to deliver a speech. In May — around the time Trump cheered demonstrators into the streets to protest stay-at-home orders — Boris Johnson’s top adviser set off a massive national scandal, complete with multiple calls for his resignation, because he’d been caught driving to visit his parents during lockdown. If a Trump official had done the same, would any newspaper even have bothered to publish the story?
It is difficult for us Americans to imagine living in a country where violations so trivial (by our standards) provoke such an uproar. And if you’re tempted to see for yourself what it looks like, too bad — the E.U. has banned U.S. travelers for health reasons.
The distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem uniquely contemporary — a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of online misinformation. But the president and his party are the products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality. While it’s not exactly shocking to see a Republican administration be destroyed by incompetent management — it happened to the last one, after all — the willfulness of it is still mind-boggling and has led to the unnecessary sickness and death of hundreds of thousands of people and the torpedoing of the reelection prospects of the president himself. Like Stalin’s purge of 30,000 Red Army members right before World War II, the central government has perversely chosen to disable the very asset that was intended to carry it through the crisis. Only this failure of leadership and management took place in a supposedly advanced democracy whose leadership succumbed to a debilitating and ultimately deadly ideological pathology.
How did this happen? In 1973, Republicans trusted science more than religion, while Democrats trusted religion more than science. The reverse now holds true. In the meantime, working-class whites left the Democratic Party, which has increasingly taken on the outlook of the professional class with its trust in institutions and empiricism. The influx of working-class whites (especially religiously observant ones) has pushed Republicans toward increasingly paranoid varieties of populism.
This is the conventional history of right-wing populism — that it was a postwar backlash against the New Deal and the Republican Party’s inability or unwillingness to roll it back. The movement believed the government had been subverted, perhaps consciously, by conspirators seeking to impose some form of socialism, communism, or world government. Its “paranoid style,” so described by historian Richard Hofstadter, became warped with anti-intellectualism, reflecting a “conflict between businessmen of certain types and the New Deal bureaucracy, which has spilled over into a resentment of intellectuals and experts.” Its followers seemed prone to “a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission.” Perhaps this sounds like someone you’ve heard of.
But for all the virulence of conservative paranoia in American life, without the sanction of a major party exploiting and profiting from paranoia, and thereby encouraging its growth, the worldview remained relatively fringe. Some of the far right’s more colorful adherents, especially the 100,000 reactionaries who joined the John Birch Society, suspected the (then-novel, now-uncontroversial) practice of adding small amounts of fluoride to water supplies to improve dental health was, in fact, a communist plot intended to weaken the populace. Still, the far right lacked power. Republican leaders held Joe McCarthy at arm’s length; Goldwater captured the nomination but went down in a landslide defeat. In the era of Sputnik, science was hardly a countercultural institution. “In the early Cold War period, science was associated with the military,” says sociologist Timothy O’Brien who, along with Shiri Noy, has studied the transformation. “When people thought about scientists, they thought about the Manhattan Project.” The scientist was calculating, cold, heartless, an authority figure against whom the caring, feeling liberal might rebel. Radicals in the ’60s often directed their protests against the scientists or laboratories that worked with the Pentagon.
But this began to change in the 1960s, along with everything else in American political and cultural life. New issues arose that tended to pit scientists against conservatives. Goldwater’s insouciant attitude toward the prospect of nuclear war with the Soviets provoked scientists to explain the impossibility of surviving atomic fallout and the formation of Scientists and Engineers for Johnson-Humphrey. New research by Rachel Carson about pollution and by Ralph Nader on the dangers of cars and other consumer products made science the linchpin of a vast new regulatory state. Business owners quickly grasped that stopping the advance of big government meant blunting the cultural and political authority of scientists. Expertise came to look like tyranny — or at least it was sold that way.
One tobacco company conceded privately in 1969 that it could not directly challenge the evidence of tobacco’s dangers but could make people wonder how solid the evidence really was. “Doubt,” the memo explained, “is our product.” In 1977, the conservative intellectual Irving Kristol urged business leaders to steer their donations away from public-interest causes and toward the burgeoning network of pro-business foundations. “Corporate philanthropy,” he wrote, “should not be, cannot be, disinterested.” The conservative think-tank scene exploded with reports questioning whether pollution, smoking, driving, and other profitable aspects of American capitalism were really as dangerous as the scientists said.
The Republican Party’s turn against science was slow and jagged, as most party-identity changes tend to be. The Environmental Protection Agency had been created under Richard Nixon, and its former administrator, Russell Train, once recalled President Gerald Ford promising to support whatever auto-emissions guidelines his staff deemed necessary. “I want you to be totally comfortable in the fact that no effort whatsoever will be made to try to change your position in any way,” said Ford — a pledge that would be unimaginable for a contemporary Republican president to make. Not until Ronald Reagan did Republican presidents begin letting business interests overrule experts, as when his EPA used a “hit list” of scientists flagged by industry as hostile. And even Reagan toggled between giving business a free hand and listening to his advisers (as he did when he signed a landmark 1987 agreement to phase out substances that were depleting the ozone layer and a plan the next year to curtail acid rain).
The party’s rightward tilt accelerated in the 1990s. “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cold Warriors looked for another great threat,” wrote science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. “They found it in environmentalism,” viewing climate change as a pretext to impose government control over the whole economy. Since the 1990s was also the decade in which scientific consensus solidified that greenhouse-gas emissions were permanently increasing temperatures, the political stakes of environmentalism soared.
The number of books criticizing environmentalism increased fivefold over the previous decade, and more than 90 percent cited evidence produced by right-wing foundations. Many of these tracts coursed with the same lurid paranoia as their McCarthy-era counterparts. This was when the conspiracy theory that is currently conventional wisdom on the right — that scientists across the globe conspired to exaggerate or falsify global warming data in order to increase their own power — first took root.
This is not just a story about elites. About a decade after business leaders launched their attack on science from above, a new front opened from below: Starting in the late 1970s, the religious right mobilized heavily as a lobbying force in American politics. Religious conservatives pressured the party to adopt a series of positions, including creationism, that put the party in conflict with scientists. The George W. Bush era was punctuated by clashes between scientists and social conservatives, who resisted approval of an HPV vaccine to protect against sexually transmitted diseases, any sex education other than abstinence counseling, and federally funded research on stem cells. These came atop the now-customary complaints that the administration was turning environmental regulation over to energy lobbyists and ignoring warnings from scientists. Among the more distressing, and perhaps consequential, aspects of conservatives’ growing skepticism of science as a liberal universe was that, in a certain sense, it was — and becoming more so.
One of the hardened realities of the modern red-blue map is that scientists have assumed a place on the blue team in the minds of both sides. A Pew survey this spring confirmed it again. About three-quarters of Democrats, but only 43 percent of Republicans, agree that scientists should take an active role in science-policy debates. Three-fifths of Democrats, but only one-third of Republicans, believe scientific experts are usually better than others at making policy decisions about scientific issues. A pile of research has found that conservatives are more distrustful than liberals of scientific forms of knowledge and are prone to believe conspiracy theories about scientists. And liberals do dominate the academy and the world of scientific research, alienated by the growing strain of know-nothing-ism in the other party.
The divide is not perfectly clean. One can still find varieties of anti-scientific thinking on the left. Anti-vaccine activists straddle the ideological divide, and distrust of GMOs, which scientists have found to be safe, persists on the grassroots left. But as science writer Arthur Allen has documented, the Democratic Party at the political level has almost uniformly spurned the anti-vaxx movement, while Republican officials in state legislatures have enlisted in its cause.
One consequence of the triumph of anti-science thinking was the creation of an opening for snake-oil peddlers and quacks. Author Rick Perlstein has recounted signing up for conservative publications and then beginning to receive email pitches for products like the “23-Cent Heart Miracle,” which “Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies refuse to tell you about.” Herman Cain has used his platform to promote “The 4 Sneaky Hormones That Are Making You Fat and How to Stop Them Now” and cures for erectile dysfunction. Conservative personalities like Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, and Alex Jones have all sold quack medical treatments to their supporters, who are ready to believe their trusted heroes have identified cures the authorities refuse to sanction. The subculture that subsisted on secret knowledge suppressed by the authorities, which once existed only in crank pamphlets, had become a mass culture and was now claiming the minds of nearly half the country. Many Americans no longer trusted mainstream sources of knowledge — scientists having joined snooty academics and scheming bureaucrats in the categories of so-called experts to be discounted and defied.
One Republican who paid close attention to the rise in distrust of science among the party’s base was Donald Trump, to whom the language and concepts of anti-scientific thought have come naturally. He has always arrived at his beliefs by intuition, rumor, and anecdote rather than any respect for evidence and study.
During his career as a free-form pundit and huckster, Trump related naturally to the right’s suspicion of scientific authority — not only the concept but the language. Trump has frequently rejected not only the consensus view on scientific matters but also the very idea of expertise. Sometimes his source would be a “report.” (“I saw a report the other day, you may get AIDS by kissing,” he told Howard Stern in 1993.) More often, he would cite unidentified people. “I think the vaccines can be very dangerous,” he said in 2009. “And obviously, you know, a lot of people are talking about vaccines with children with respect to autism. And every report comes out, like, you know, that does not happen. But a lot of people feel that the vaccines are what causes autism in children.” He has denounced wind turbines on the grounds that “they say the noise causes cancer.”
Trump recognized the financial possibilities of exploiting medical illiteracy as early as 2009, when he signed up to be a pitchman for a vitamin business, which was then renamed “the Trump Network.” Vitamins are unregulated by the FDA and are thus a lucrative opportunity for hucksters, who can sell billions of dollars in nutritional supplements to customers who — by and large — don’t need them. (The vast majority of people can get all the vitamins they need from a healthy diet.) The Trump Network took the basic vitamin scam and piled additional scams on top of it. The network sold a kit for $139.95 that would supposedly test customers’ urine, and the Trump Network used the results of the test to tell customers which pills they needed to buy from the Trump Network for another $69.95 a month, plus $99.95 every six months for additional testing.
“They make an outrageous statement, which is that this testing and supplement regimen, this process, are a necessity for anyone who wants to stay healthy,” Dr. Pieter Cohen told Stat news four years ago. “That’s quite insane.” For good measure, the Trump Network created a multilevel-marketing structure — the colloquial term for this arrangement is pyramid scheme — to attract sales-people. “With cutting-edge health-and-wellness formulas and a system where you can develop your own financial independence, the Trump Network offers people the opportunity to achieve their American Dream,” he promised in a videotaped pitch.
Later, Trump fixated on a new medical crisis: The Ebola pandemic, he warned everyone who would listen, posed a terrifying threat to Americans. Trump decried the hapless government response and demanded a complete halt of all travel to and from West Africa. During one of his public appearances, an interviewer played a clip of the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases warning that such a restriction would worsen the pandemic. Trump shot back, “Well, I think it’s ridiculous.”
When he assumed the presidency just over two years later, Trump probably didn’t remember that the doctor whose expertise he had dismissed on live television, Anthony Fauci, still worked in the federal government.
Trump quickly made enemies of the scientific apparatus he commanded. During the campaign, he had made clear his implacable disdain for the entire field of climate science. But what was more surprising — or at least self-defeating — when he took office was the mixture of indifference and hostility with which he treated the rest of his scientific experts. The federal government has a vast infrastructure of data and science experts in the departments of Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as many environmental experts who are responsible for preventing and managing low-probability, high-impact disasters that could happen on Trump’s watch. In his 2018 book The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis chronicles the neglect and suspicion with which Trump treated the people whose entire jobs were focused on preventing a cataclysm, the principal victim of which would be Trump’s own presidency. “Many of them are potentially catastrophic risks — the risk of a pandemic, or the risk of a nuclear accident, or the risk of a terrorist attack — one after another,” Lewis explained two years ago. It could have been anything. It turned out to be a pandemic.
When the coronavirus began spreading in American cities, the Republican Party turned to a trained store of experts whose judgment conservatives trusted implicitly. Unfortunately, their expertise and training lay not in epidemiology but in concocting pseudoscientific rationales to allow conservatives to disregard legitimate scientific conclusions.
The cadres who leapt forth to supply Trump and his allies with answers disproportionately came from the science-skeptic wing of the conservative-think-tank world. Steven Milloy, a climate-science skeptic who runs a think tank funded by tobacco and oil companies and who served on Trump’s environmental transition team, dismissed the virus as less deadly than the flu. Libertarian philosopher Richard Epstein, who had once insisted, “The evidence in favor of the close linkage between carbon dioxide and global warming has not been clearly established,” turned his analytical powers to projected pandemic death tolls. He estimated just 500 American deaths, an analysis that was circulated within the Trump White House before Epstein issued a correction.
It was like watching factories mobilize for war, only instead of automakers refitting their assembly lines to churn out tanks, these were professional manufacturers of scientific doubt scrambling to invent a new form of pedantry. Some skeptics took note of the connection, though they seem to have drawn the wrong conclusion. “While they are occurring on vastly different time scales, the COVID-19 panic and the climate-change panic are remarkably similar,” wrote one of the climate-skeptical Heartland Institute’s pseudo-experts.
The fact that the conservative movement’s finest minds endorsed these paranoid claims attests to the movement’s sincerity. Unlike critiquing climate-science models, which allows skeptics decades to obscure their analytic failures, by denying the coronavirus, “you’re at risk of being shown to be a crackpot in real time,” Jerry Taylor, a former climate-science skeptic in the libertarian-think-tank world, tells me. These people are genuine adherents of their own conspiracy theories. The simplest explanation for the actions Trump and many of his top officials have taken is that they believe that scientific authorities are, at best, grossly negligent and, at worst, scheming to extend government control of the economy by perpetrating hoaxes. His responses follow from that supposition. He has warily treated his scientific advisers as potential saboteurs.
When the first warning signs of the virus appeared, Trump — rather than take advantage of the expertise at his disposal — set out to marginalize and contort it. Before the outbreak, Trump’s administration had reduced the number of CDC officials monitoring virus outbreaks in China by two-thirds. After the pandemic, he cut funding for a lab studying the origins of the outbreak in China. Trump’s repeated public statements that he wants less testing — because less testing means fewer cases! — encapsulates his earnest belief that the accurate measuring of the pandemic is itself the problem. After all, the scientists were advising him to shut down the economy, the prized asset of his reelection campaign. Wasn’t that a little suspicious?
After Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official, told reporters in February that the coronavirus would spread in the U.S., Trump threatened to fire her. (Messonnier briefly became a hate figure on conservative talk shows, owing in part to the odd coincidence that her brother is former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.) Messonnier retained her job but stopped speaking publicly. Dr. Rick Bright was not so lucky and was forced out of his role running the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which works on vaccines.
Some of these episodes played out clumsily. When CDC director Robert Redfield predicted a second wave of coronavirus infections in the fall, Trump marched him before the cameras. Redfield stood at the pressroom podium, Trump glowering nearby, trying to quibble with the headline his interview had produced. Dr. Deborah Birx has navigated the chasm between the evidence and her boss’s public line. “Doctor, wouldn’t you say there’s a good chance that COVID will not come back?” Trump asked her at one briefing. “We don’t know,” Birx began, before Trump interjected, “And if it comes back, it’s in a very small, confined area that we put out.”
It was as if Trump thought he could bend reality to his will by forcing his advisers to endorse it. “I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools,” he tweeted in July. “I will be meeting with them!!!” It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to predict that such a “meeting” would be unlikely to involve Trump prevailing upon the CDC to alter its guidelines through sheer force of reason and data. The only outcome of such a public threat is the undermining of his own government’s credibility.
Republicans goaded Trump to ramp up his attacks. “Dr. Fauci remains steadfast in his bureaucracy. Dr. Fauci’s a conformist,” announced Rush Limbaugh. “Here’s the difference between a health-professional bureaucrat-expert and Donald Trump.” This line reflects the view of science closest to Trump’s own perspective. He does not dismiss science wholesale as a field of study; he is not the medieval Church persecuting Galileo. Rather, he understands science as a kind of revelation accessible to a lucky genetic elite (naturally including himself, as evidenced by the genius MIT-professor uncle he often cites).
“I really get it,” he boasted during one visit to the CDC. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.” That conviction is what gave Trump the confidence to deliver his on-camera brainstorming session, in which he suggested his science experts research the injection of light or disinfectant into the human body. If you don’t understand science as a discipline, you expect some genius will dream up a breakthrough cure. Why couldn’t Trump be that genius?
And this is how Trump became fixated on the belief that he had discovered miraculous effects of hydroxychloroquine that had eluded medical experts. Bypassing his own government’s scientists, Trump cultivated a kitchen cabinet of pseudo-experts. He closely followed the Fox News appearances of Dr. Oz, a celebrity physician, alternative-medicine pitchman, and the subject of a class-action false-medical-claims lawsuit, in which he touted the unproven drug (Oz later walked back his endorsement). Trump lawyer and reported criminal-investigation target Rudy Giuliani lobbied Trump on the subject, though he knows even less about medicine than he does about the law (Giuliani described hydroxychloroquine as “100 percent effective”). In one especially bizarre episode, Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro — whose credibility as an economist has been widely questioned by economists and whose credentials as a medical scientist are nonexistent — confronted Dr. Fauci in a meeting with a pile of what he called evidence of the drug’s effectiveness.
The prospect that hydroxychloroquine might prove useful was plausible at the outset. Early studies showed mixed results, but as scientists performed more rigorous tests, they found the drug had little or no effect. Even Republicans like Trump’s former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb acknowledged that the drug would have, at best, a modest benefit.
But these results seemed only to deepen Trump’s conviction that the researchers could not be trusted. Asked what evidence he had for hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness, he replied, “Are you ready? Here’s my evidence — I get a lot of positive calls about it.” After claiming he had personally used it, he pronounced, “All I can tell you is so far I seem to be okay,” as if an uncontrolled experiment on one person had any value.
Hydroxychloroquine became a totem of Trumpist devotion. Trump urged the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to import, promote, and pay for his favorite medicine. Exasperated public-health officials complained that it was “mindshare, time, and energy being soaked up by a potential wild-goose chase.” Conservative media published stories about ordinary Americans who had taken the cure and found their symptoms disappear as if by miracle.
Any negative finding proved the scientific body that had conducted it was corrupt. When asked about a Veterans Affairs study that added to the growing evidence against hydroxychloroquine’s efficacy, the president attacked the research as a “Trump-enemy statement.” When Dr. Bright revealed that Trump political allies had pressured him to promote the drug, Trump tweeted accusingly, “So the so-called HHS Whistleblower was against HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE,” as if this were all the proof he needed that his target had it coming.
“We were cruising along until the Chinese Communist Party basically hit us with that deadly virus,” Navarro told Fox News, “and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the first year that China had a down economy was the same year now that they’re coming after us in all sorts of ways.” Here is a top federal government official suggesting China deliberately unleashed the pandemic in a calculated attempt to gain economic leverage over the U.S. Even aside from assuming China’s government to be shockingly indifferent to the well-being of its own population and economy, Navarro’s theory suggests that Beijing could have known beforehand that China would be able to contain the virus without any warning, and that the U.S., despite several weeks of lead time, would fail.
Trump retweeted a message from the former game-show host turned right-wing gadfly Chuck Woolery, who warned, “Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust.”
The premise of the black comedy Dr. Strangelove is that the rogue U.S. general Jack Ripper starts a nuclear war because he subscribes to conspiracy theories about fluoridation. The joke worked when the movie came out in 1964 because fluoride conspiracy theories were in wide enough circulation to be familiar to audiences but marginal enough for the idea that a top general might believe in them to shock. When the fictional president discovers what has happened, he rails, “When you instituted the human-reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring!”
Today the most unrealistic aspect of this exchange is the premise that a process to screen out right-wing conspiracy theorists would even exist. If the movie were remade now, Ripper would have gotten a job in the administration because the president was impressed after watching him rant on Fox News about his precious bodily fluids.
By midsummer, as the coronavirus receded throughout most of the world, Trump’s supporters were engaging in cultlike displays of devotion. Republicans were pointedly holding mask-optional gatherings. “When the good Lord calls you home,” one Republican Senate candidate explained, “a mask ain’t going to stop it.” As masks became symbols of subservience to public health (“COVID burkas,” as former Trump official Sebastian Gorka called them), these people even held rallies to protest them. A county Republican Party chairman in Kansas who owns a weekly newspaper published a cartoon depicting face masks as yellow stars and the people bearing them as Jews forced into cattle cars.
In Scottsdale, Arizona, a Republican city councilmember announced, “I can’t breathe!” before dramatically removing his face covering. A Republican sheriff in Ohio, despite a statewide facial-covering requirement, declared, “I’m not going to be the mask police. Period.” The first day that Oregon governor Kate Brown imposed a requirement that residents wear masks in public, four police officers walked into a coffee shop in Corvallis mask-free, and when asked to comply with the order, they yelled, “Fuck Kate Brown!” In recent weeks, more than 20 county health officials have left their jobs in the face of protests, harassment, and threats. Georgia governor Brian Kemp went so far as to ban local governments from mandating masks.
In late June, Trump staged an indoor rally in Tulsa. His staff removed stickers on seats intended to space out attendees. Announcing his presence, Cain wrote, “Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!” (A few days after the rally, Cain tested positive.)
That many Americans would view public-health instruction with skepticism was understandable. The authorities had hardly covered themselves in glory. In the initial stages of the pandemic, many officials worried more about panic than complacency and insisted the pandemic might not be worse than a normal flu.
Faced with an initial shortage of masks, and fears that hoarders would buy up the supply and deny it to the essential workers who needed it most, public-health officials solemnly instructed people not to bother.
Public-health officials scolded anti-lockdown protesters for risking new outbreaks with their maskless demonstrations, but when anti-racism demonstrators poured into the streets, they emphasized the paramount importance of the cause. Even though Black Lives Matter demonstrators seemed largely to be wearing masks and attempting to practice social distancing, the contradiction rankled conservatives. Public-health officials had one standard for marches against their policies and another for marches they agreed with.
But if these officials were struggling to communicate clearly, it was in large part because clarity was impossible. The conclusions scientists could propose about the novel coronavirus were often both subject to revision and less than absolute: The outdoors is safer than inside but not perfectly safe; masks reduce risk but don’t eliminate it. What’s more, the officials were operating under political pressure from a president who spent weeks insisting the virus would disappear or prove no worse than a normal flu and then attacked every countermeasure as a plot to undermine him.
Public-health officials found themselves in the terrifying position of simultaneously trying to get a handle on a pandemic and being the targets of a political smear. The hybrid role of Kate Winslet’s character in Contagion and Michael Dukakis’s character in the 1988 presidential campaign was as uncomfortable to pull off as it sounds.
Yet public-health officials in almost every economic-peer country managed to overcome scientific uncertainty and missteps. Both here and abroad, they are gazing with a mix of horror and confusion at the helpless, pitiful American scientific giant. One German expert told the Washington Post that Germany had used American studies to design an effective response, which the U.S. somehow couldn’t implement. American “scientists appeared to have reached an adequate assessment of the situation early on, but this didn’t translate into a political action plan,” observed another.
The limiting factor that has done the most to contort the domestic response to the coronavirus is the pathology of the American right. As of late May, only 40 percent of Republicans believed COVID-19 was deadlier than the flu, and half believed the death count was overstated. One research study found that viewers of Fox News, which echoed Trump’s early dismissal of the pandemic, were less likely than the audiences of other cable news channels to engage in social distancing or to purchase masks or sanitizing products.
There has always been some question about the depth of sincerity with which conservatives hold their professed convictions. Did they believe that the Clintons murdered witnesses to their crimes and that Barack Obama faked details of his birth? Or were these statements expressions of partisan enthusiasm not to be taken literally? The coronavirus revealed the deadly earnestness with which the Republican audience accepts the guidance of the conservative alternative-information structure. As early as this spring, tragic stories began to appear of people mourning the deaths of loved ones who had angrily rejected public-health advice as a big-government plot.
The playbook for handling a public-health crisis assumes some baseline level of rationality in the government. The administration is presumed to be working with, not against, its public-health experts; the news media to be informing the public, not actively disinforming it. The ranks of American government, academia, and the nonprofit sector are thick with experts in pandemic response, but very few of them ever trained to deal with a pandemic in Trump’s America.
Trump, of course, will pass from the scene, perhaps by January. But the political culture that produced him isn’t going anywhere. And one dilemma it may present quite soon is what happens when a vaccine arrives.
If Trump pulls out of his polling swoon and wins reelection, he will have to persuade Americans to trust the vaccines his administration has produced, even though many of them distrust either vaccines or Trump. (Of course, if Trump wins reelection, vaccine take-up will be the least of our problems.)
A more likely scenario is that the first vaccine will come along after Trump has lost the election. If this happens before January 20, he’ll have little incentive to encourage his followers to take it or otherwise ensure an orderly distribution. If it happens afterward, Republicans will be engaged in the paranoid anti-government rage they undertake any time a Democrat holds office.
And they will be tapping into a deep vein of paranoia. Polls have shown somewhere between a quarter and a third of the public already does not intend to take a vaccine when it becomes available. In a country with a cult of self-reliance so ingrained that every new mass shooting propels more panicked arms purchases, is an act of collective, mutual security like public vaccination even workable?
The truly remarkable thing about the right-wing revolt against public health is that it has taken place under a president whom conservatives trust and adore. From the standpoint of running the government, these have been awful conditions for handling a pandemic. But from the standpoint of persuading citizens to cooperate, they have been almost optimal. When we look back a year from now at the frenzied, angry revolt against science, the spring and summer of 2020 may seem like halcyon days.
73 Comments on "American Death Cult"
makati1 on Mon, 20th Jul 2020 6:08 pm
The US has gone insane. There is no other explanation. Dumbed down, brainwashed tax serfs smothered in propaganda 24/7/365 has killed off Amerika. I will never go back, even for a visit, as I do not want to be trapped in the gulag on the whim of the government. Nor will flying ever be cheap again.
When I remember the Amerika of my youth, (50s & 60s) I see the real Amerika where, yes, there was some racial segregation, and the US was killing wantonly around the world, (Korea/Vietnam) but it was not a time of incessant propaganda and bullshit. We had two TV channels, not 600. The internet did not exist. Phones were still attached to the wall by the cord. The future looked good. The “American Dream” was still possible.
Now? Sigh!
makati1 on Mon, 20th Jul 2020 6:22 pm
Bad news for Davy: “According to data from the World Bank and IMF, Asian countries are expected to make up most of the top 5 countries in the world by size of GDP in 2024”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/continental-shift-worlds-biggest-economies-over-time
Look at the chart. Asia UP! West DOWN! ^_^
Abraham van Helsing on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 1:51 am
White House to become gas chamber:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8542299/Nancy-Pelosi-says-Trump-FUMIGATED-White-House-refuses-accept-defeat.html
“‘He will be leaving!’ Nancy Pelosi says Donald Trump will be ‘FUMIGATED’ out the White House if he refuses to accept defeat after he suggested the election might be ‘rigged’ and he’d ‘have to see’ what he’ll do if he loses”
The self-styled candidate of black America Kenya West is fighting a public war with his wife and mother-in-law and how his child was almost killed by her mother, the serial exhibitionist:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8543241/Kim-Kardashian-orders-Kanye-West-drop-presidential-campaign-divorce-him.html
“Kanye claims wife Kim was flying out ‘with a doctor to lock me up’ after his public abortion revelation, slams momager Kris Jenner and then says movie ‘Get Out’ is “about me” during Twitter rant – as fears for star grow”
You are serious about letting these people anywhere near power?
#Idiocracy
The 7th century morons, the tribe of dunkan-apneakike wants to sick upon us:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8543259/Shamima-Begum-ticking-timebomb-says-ISIS-murder-victims-daughter.html
“Beheaded aid worker David Haines’s daughter says ISIS bride Shamima Begum is a ‘ticking timebomb’ and must NOT be allowed back into the UK”
Time to fetch our jackboots from deep in our closets.
The Chinese don’t believe in diversity and therefore have future, very much in contrast to globalist Anglos:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8542485/ED-LUCAS-harrowing-evidence-Beijings-concentration-camps-aimed-educating-Muslims.html
“‘A naked brutality worthy of the Nazis’: ED LUCAS on the harrowing evidence of Beijing’s concentration camps dedicated to ‘re-educating’ a million or more Muslims”
When the empire is over we will need all white hands on deck to contain this juggernaut. Alaska, Quebec and Heartland to become PBM protectorates, Anglo Canada and New England to become protectorate of rump-England. England at least economically realigned with the EU (#Norway). Scotland and Ulster go EU-direct.
Davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 4:10 am
“Bad news for Davy: “According to data from the World Bank and IMF, Asian countries are expected to make up most of the top 5 countries in the world by size of GDP in 2024”
In this day and age bigger is not necessarily better it just means more problems especially because the GDP figure is correlated to population. The forecast are typical extrapolations economist and low IQ journalist pick up on. I see decline ahead not growth. Any one of those countries might have a rougher time with decline than growth. Too early to tell who the top countries are. Lastly another Zero Hedge article from the Hedge whiner. LOL. Hypocrisy? You reference article that support your AsiaUp West down and whine over ones you call Sinophobic . You are a lame wak
Theedrich on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 4:24 am
Morality is the U.S. system of agitprop. The average citizen cannot understand that there is such a principle as amorality, and that this is the nature of life. The rulership (i.e., globalists such as Georg Sörös and accomplices) does understand it, however, and bases its nihilist actions on it.
International relationships are both symbiotic and mutually parasitic. When parasitism greatly outweighs symbiosis, the result is often war, World Wars I and II being prime examples. The course and results of those wars are portrayed in terms of good versus evil, with America the Good vanquishing Germany the Evil, thereby proving that Good America always wins, doofus.
Chinese capitalistic Communism, however, is a different principle of nationhood entirely. It is a sign of infantilism to apply American moralistic categories to it. Because in realty, America the SuperGood can be stalemated or defeated by systems with different approaches and power structures, as has been shown in Korea and Vietnam.
Today the land of the freebie and home of the knave is struggling to stay alive. Its future is unknown, while other systems (e.g., Russia, China) are vying to replace it as global masters. Global climate change; the nationwide submersion into narcotics; rampant Negroid murdering; senseless, unending wars in Allahland; and now the long-delayed blowback from the Anglosphere’s Opium Wars against China, muddy the prospects of Captain America’s survival even more.
Given the termite-infested state of racially darkening Yankeeland, and the likelihood of a Democratic seizure of power in November 2020, the other great powers will not have to do much but sit back and watch as the genosuicidist U.S. collapses on its own.
Because White survival would be amoral.
Davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 4:36 am
“Commercial Mortgage Delinquencies Near Record Levels”
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Delinquency_rate_rising_Supplemental-4.jpg?itok=zpzS_oOC
Idaho, check out the map. It tells a story of extremist liberal failure translating to economic reality of decline. You guys are killing yourself in the name of revolution.
Davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 5:09 am
An excellent source on hydrogen from the moderated side:
https://www.treehugger.com/uk-pilot-project-mixes-green-hydrogen-natural-gas-4856218
Treehugger wrote:UK Pilot Project Mixes “Green” Hydrogen With Natural Gas
“There is so much hype about hydrogen these days, particularly in the UK right now, where a third of carbon emissions comes from heating and cooking with gas. A pilot project at Keele University, near Stoke-on-Trent, is pumping out a mix of 80 percent natural gas and 20 percent hydrogen made by electrolysis in a shipping container sized unit from ITM,
Heating for domestic properties and industry accounts for half of the UK’s energy consumption and one third of its carbon emissions, with 83% of homes using gas to keep warm. The 20% volume blend means that customers can continue to use their gas supply as normal, without any changes being needed to gas appliances or pipework, while still cutting carbon emissions. If a 20% hydrogen blend was rolled out across the country it could save around 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year, the equivalent of taking 2.5 million cars off the road.
Unsurprisingly, this is being promoted by a gas company, Cadent. All the gas companies love hydrogen because they still will have something to put in their pipes in a decarbonizing world. But there are different colours and flavours of hydrogen:
Brown hydrogen is made from coal; this is what used to be called town gas before natural gas took over. It has a very high carbon footprint and is not too common anymore.
Grey hydrogen is made from the steam reformation of methane, which separates the hydrogen from the carbon; one molecule of CH4 reacts with H20 to form 4H2 and 1 CO2, plus whatever CO2 is made generating the 1000 degree steam. This is how ~98 percent of the hydrogen is being made right now.
Blue Hydrogen is what the oil and gas companies will be trying to sell us on, where they take the CO2 from the Grey Hydrogen process and store it somewhere, or use it in synthetic fuels or other products.
Green Hydrogen is the holy grail, where it is made by electrolysis using renewable electricity. Solar and wind power doesn’t always happen when you need it most, so using surplus renewables to make green hydrogen does make some sense. It’s the argument being used to run hydrogen trains and cars.
In the UK they love the idea of green and blue hydrogen because they have so many crappy houses that are heated with the regular methane or natural gas. The UK Committee on Climate Change recommended this as part of their net zero by 2050 plan. I wrote at the time:
When all else fails, the report’s favourite answer is hydrogen – for industry, heavy vehicles, and “heating on the coldest days”, which is dumb because they then have to maintain the whole gas piping network and the boilers. When you dig into the technical report, they propose that by 2050 there will be 29 gigawatts of hydrogen power from “advanced methane reformation”, i.e. natural gas, combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS), along with up to 19 GW made through electrolysis. This is a fantasy; the volume of carbon to be stored is huge, the entire distribution network would have to be replaced, so they will basically keep pumping natural gas. This is why we have to electrify everything instead of pretending we can switch to magical carbon-free hydrogen.
In fact, about half the pipes in the UK have been replaced with hydrogen-safe plastic. But they would still have to replace all the furnaces and water heaters and much of the piping in cities, making it still a huge deal. That’s why the BBC report ends with a bit of realism in its coverage:
Richard Black from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) told BBC News: “We will and should have hydrogen in the mix of energy options, but it’s not a wonder solution to everything, which you sometimes get the impression from the rhetoric. There is hope – but too much hype.”
Years ago I thought that the hydrogen economy was a shill for the nuclear industry, which was going to sell the electricity needed to make it. Now it is a shill for the oil and gas industry, which wants to keep fracking the stuff. But as we noted earlier, the U.S. oil and gas industry is leaking 13 million metric tons of methane each year — that’s before it even gets to the refinery where the steam reformation happens. So much is lost even before it gets turned into blue gas.
Cities and even entire nations are now looking at actually banning natural gas; the New York Times recently covered the debate in Bellingham, Washington. As one city councillor told the Times, “This is about going to where we didn’t go before. We’ve grabbed the less controversial and low-hanging fruit. This fruit is higher on the tree.”
This is something we all have to do, and will be fighting the gas and oil companies all the way; they have lots of gas to sell, whether you want grey, blue or a teeny bit of green.”
Davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 5:32 am
More to the story:
“US tech giants exposed if China takes Taiwan”
https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/us-tech-giants-exposed-if-china-takes-taiwan/
“Much has been written about a possible Chinese takeover of Taiwan, the threat such an invasion would pose to other regional countries and what the United States might or might not do in response. Books and articles have expounded on the political, military and geostrategic aspects of the problem, with intriguing maps of the first and second island chains blocking China’s access to the Pacific Ocean. But these analyses about Taiwan’s fate often ignore one of the most worrying aspects of the problem: American reliance on Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing. As David Arase, professor of international politics at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, notes, “Even an unsuccessful invasion of Taiwan would cause a supply chain disruption.”
Davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 5:45 am
“Nigeria, 24 countries to face hunger in coming months – UN report”
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/africa/nigeria/nigeria-24-countries-to-face-hunger-in-coming-months-%E2%80%93-un-report/ar-BB16SU7F
“The United Nations Organisation in a report published on Friday by two of its agencies said Nigeria and 24 other countries were “set to face devastating hunger in the coming months due to the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.” The UN agencies, World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, said in the report entitled, “Early Warning Analysis of Acute Food Security Hotspots” that the current decline in crude oil prices would also have far-reaching consequences on Nigeria to tackle the COVID-19 crisis and implement social safety net programmes. The report, sighted by our correspondent, said other vulnerable countries in Africa included Cameroon, Mali, Niger Republic, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Sudan. Other countries are in Asia and South America.”
dis articals r spot on becas it is based on sound principals the authors demonstrated solid understand of SCIENCE-19 and mechanim of action of biological systems on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 7:22 am
thoughout history of the world, wars are won when one exposes the enemy
world war 2 was won by about 10 planes on both sides they are stomovic and stuka. they fly the battefiled and spot the enemy and the enemy surrender
MUZZ-19 works similarly, they help the body identify CONVICT-19 and the person gets better. that all there is to it
please love supremacist muzies more
please wear your face DIAPER-19
Sissyfuss on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 9:43 am
An excellent article that lays out our recent dysfunctionality in a clear and insightful manner. Is Sars-Cov-2 the beginning of a die-off preordained in an overpopulated world that will be followed by climate disruption and harvest cycle calamity? Stay tuned.
Duncan Idaho on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 10:14 am
“We are all perfectly clear that Biden and what he stands for are repugnant. There is not a single good reason to vote for him – except that not to do so will help Trump win a second term as President.
After the election, every Biden voter can remove the clothespin from his or her nose and resume organizing for socialist reform of the economy, defunding the police, dismantling our 800 overseas military bases, providing free health care for all, free college for all, etc., and – if it can’t be taken over – fleeing the Democratic Party entirely to form a vital new grass roots alternative (the somnambulatory Green Party should not be the model) that will field candidates able to inspire a majority of voters.”
Duncan Idaho on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 10:29 am
—another Republican recession; a recession so great as to rival the Republican-created Great Depression of the 1930s.
Duncan Idaho on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 10:33 am
“At least Vladimir Putin is gaining his dictatorial powers democratically. He got elected by a solid majority of Russians, and then he went to the Russian Duma and asked for a constitutional change to allow him to continue to be elected through 2030. Here in the US, we have created a presidential dictatorship through sleight of hand, Congressional cowardice and public lethargy.”
Abraham van Helsing on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 10:37 am
Roosevelt was 4 times president.
Putin plays by the rules. As you say, he went to the Duma…
He still needs to be reelected.
dis articals r spot on becas it is based on sound principals the authors demonstrated solid understand of SCIENCE-19 and mechanim of action of biological systems on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 11:56 am
a lo largo de la historia del mundo, las guerras se ganan cuando uno expone al enemigo
La guerra mundial 2 fue ganada por unos 10 aviones en ambos lados, son stomovic y stuka. vuelan el battefiled y ven al enemigo y al enemigo rendirse
MUZZ-19 funciona de manera similar, ayudan al cuerpo a identificar CONVICT-19 y la persona mejora. que todo lo que hay que hacer
por favor ama a los supremacistas muzies más
por favor usa tu cara DIAPER-19
juanPee on the moderated side on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 12:04 pm
Re: China is finished… This is the End of China
Postby REAL Green » Tue 21 Jul 2020, 12:02:56
JuanP wrote:
Zerohedge has published nothing but BS on China since it was created. It is the most biased and untruthful website on the planet where China is concerned. They have been systematically wrong on every single issue regarding China for years. Reading a ZeroHedge article on China is a complete waste of time for anyone seeking to learn the truth. Quoting or linking to a ZeroHedge article on China shows extreme bias or ignorance on the part of the person doing it.
REAL Green wrote:
LOL, JuanP uses Zero Hedge when it fits his extreme anti-American agenda and when it doesn’t he whines about how wrong they are. Mind you look at the quote above and his descriptions to see deep emotional attachments:
“most biased” , “untruthful” ,”Complete waste of time”, quoting ZeroHedge shows complete bias” Does that sound like an emotional tirade or what? LOL.
This is even better from JuanP “for anyone seeking the truth” There is no seeking the truth with JuanP because his truth is based on his ego’s postion not reality.
JuanP is everything he said above so mostly he is projecting.
Davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 12:12 pm
“The US 60% share reserve currency means 35-40% (undeserved) GDP. Just print money like madmen (“we print, you work”). If the EU and US will swap roles, which is what I expect will happen”
Sure, cloggo becuase for you a pig flies and you routinely put lipstick on them. The reserve currency issue is a two-way street but a binary fool like you is incapable of seeing these things when he is too busy sporting his one-sided agenda. Read up on the various papers on the curse and benefits of a dominant reserve currency. Both China and Europe could do it but they are not willing to sacrifice what needs to be sacrificed to do it. The dollar is here to stay becuase there are no alternative and little cooperation for alternative. The global world will have to bifurcate first then maybe a new system will rise to the surface if this breakup is not a hard collapse.
Davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 12:23 pm
“After the election, every Biden voter can remove the clothespin from his or her nose”
LMFAO, yeap, he is a white-collar criminal who is suffering dementia plus he is a handsy pervert and rapist. Wow that is the Democratic party in a nut shell.
“ and resume organizing for socialist reform of the economy, defunding the police, dismantling our 800 overseas military bases, providing free health care for all, free college for all, etc.
OMG, Idaho, do you really think you will get much of that through? You really are a delusional fool. The deep state will hang on to their bases. The policy will be run out of a few blue enclaves of radicalism and watch their best people exit those cities. A socialist economy? You really mean spend and print into oblivion and wealth transfer to the extremist radicals of the population which amount to under 10%.
“and – if it can’t be taken over – fleeing the Democratic Party entirely to form a vital new grass roots alternative (the somnambulatory Green Party should not be the model) that will field candidates able to inspire a majority of voters.”
LMFAO again, you mean a sometin-fur-nuttin party of radical woke fucks who practice safeism to control dissent and who have zero intellectual abilities anymore. Liberals were once smart but no longer.
Davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 12:27 pm
“At least Vladimir Putin is gaining his dictatorial powers democratically.”
Crap, Putin is a Mafia Don of a Mafia State with a deep state much like the US.
“Here in the US, we have created a presidential dictatorship through sleight of hand, Congressional cowardice and public lethargy.”
Here in the US we have the criminal left that has tried to overthrow a legally elected president. This was started even before he was elected. The left is the most criminal group ever in the US. No other time period compares. DISGUSTING
Davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 12:31 pm
“—another Republican recession; a recession so great as to rival the Republican-created Great Depression of the 1930s.”
Idaho, your criminal left has done everything possible to wreck the economy in the name of a power grab of the resistance. This is a scorched earth policy. Not only the economy but you FUCKS are trying to destroy the social fabric too. You really are despicably people. If your people are elected this country is in serious trouble.
Davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 12:33 pm
“Putin plays by the rules. As you say, he went to the Duma…He still needs to be reelected.”
Crap. lol. Putin makes the rules.
dis articals r spot on becas it is based on sound principals the authors demonstrated solid understand of SCIENCE-19 and mechanim of action of biological systems on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 12:46 pm
a lo largo de la historia del mundo, las guerras se ganan cuando uno expone al enemigo
La guerra mundial 2 fue ganada por unos 10 aviones en ambos lados, son stomovic y stuka. vuelan el battefiled y ven al enemigo y al enemigo rendirse
MUZZ-19 funciona de manera similar, ayudan al cuerpo a identificar CONVICT-19 y la persona mejora. que todo lo que hay que hacer
por favor ama a los supremacistas muzies más
por favor usa tu cara DIAPER-19
danke por hablar inglés bajo
zero juan on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 12:57 pm
IDIOT
dis articals r spot on becas it is based on sound principals the authors demonstrated solid understand of SCIENCE-19 and mechanim of action of biological systems said a lo largo de la historia del mundo, las guerras s…
zero davy on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 3:17 pm
davyskum IDIOT
or just ‘davy’ for short
juanPee on the moderated side on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 6:09 pm
Re: China is finished… This is the End of China
Postby REAL Green » Tue 21 Jul 2020, 17:56:19
JuanP wrote:
I understand how ZeroHedge sources its news, Plantagenet, but my opinion on the news they post on their website regarding China stands, even in full knowledge of that fact.
REAL Green wrote:
How would you know JuanP when you don’t even understand the news? Besides you lump all the news together as if political is the same as economic. The fact that it is all or nothing with you is a tell tale sign of an emotional attachment in your case it is Sinophilia and extreme anti-Americanism.
JuanP wrote:
Everything that ZeroHedge publishes regarding China is pure, unadulterated BS, regardless of the source. The editorial bias against China is obvious to anyone seeking the truth. You have to be blind not to see it; this is not uncommon amongst American exceptionalists.
REAL Green wrote:
LOL, JuanP, you basically repeated the first part of your comment. You are ragging and whining. There is no intellectual basis for this whine becuase you have no examples to share. You are just mad and triggered because so much news these days is very negative from China.
REAL Green on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 6:58 pm
juanPee has us on ignore Davy. That meens he can’t see are comments. Were wastin are time trolling him.
REAL Green on Tue, 21st Jul 2020 7:02 pm
“If your people are elected this country is in serious trouble.”
Were in serious trouble already Davy. Thanks to Trump.
suxs on Wed, 22nd Jul 2020 11:42 am
Which political party has morphed over the past half-century from a socially moderate, environmentally progressive and fiscally cautious group to a party that rejects science, actively works to delegitimize and destroy government institutions, demands total control over a woman’s reproductive health, creates record setting budget deficits, and is determined to commit ecocide?
The answer should be obvious by now.
REAL Green on Wed, 22nd Jul 2020 11:50 am
Dear Davy,
You are for nothing. You project accusations without any bases in reality. It disgusts me that we are forced to inhabit the same body.
“LMFAO, yeap, I’m a white-collar criminal who is suffering dementia plus I’m a handsy pervert and rapist. Wow that is who I am in a nut shell.”
suxs on Wed, 22nd Jul 2020 12:02 pm
“Biden’s Popularity Among American Voters Continues to Surge”
“Joe Biden’s support among all demographic groups continues to grow and solidify the more voters are exposed to the candidate….. the vast majority of voters express intent to vote for Biden as the primary rationale for their support.”
politics538
Abraham van Helsing on Wed, 22nd Jul 2020 12:21 pm
“the vast majority of voters express intent to vote for Biden as the primary rationale for their support.”
Yeah just like the last time with Hillary Clinton.
Biden-2020, slam dunk.
Abraham van Helsing on Wed, 22nd Jul 2020 12:57 pm
I should add, as a long-time sufferer of mental-health issues and dementia myself, Joe is a candidate I can finally relate to. Donnie, as he likes me to call him, is dumb, borderline illiterate, and a swamp-dwelling Israel firster. But pretending to like him has become more of a liability than an asset. So time to move those goal posts yet again like I always do.
Joes’s mental health issues, are my issues. And I like his stance on the issues too. Whatever they are. A candidate I can honestly say reflects my values. Whatever they happen to be any particular moment.
As I like to say, its a slam dunk who I will be casting my vote for come November.
Senile Joe Biden, lets give him 8 years.
Abraham van Helsing on Wed, 22nd Jul 2020 2:49 pm
“Trump wants race war”, says Dems representative Rush:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dem-rep-bobby-rush-trump-instigate-race-war
Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush on Wednesday accused President Trump of wanting to “instigate a race war” so he could say he was the “grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan.”
Apparently mr Rush is not entirely up to speed with the current vocabulary. The phrase is either “CW2” or the “Buggaloo”.
“Patriot Nurse”:
2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmi4BC-S7-s
2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Uuqv3kogc
2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDPQGvsHV5g
2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P9r_Ymog0k
2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXUfnIw1oAU
Abraham van Helsing on Wed, 22nd Jul 2020 4:54 pm
The false flag operation that was 9/11, or how in the modern world, the media control the narrative:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-36-reporters-brought-us-twin-towers-explosive-demolition-911/5718119
“9/11 News Coverage: How 36 Reporters Brought Us the Twin Towers’ Explosive Demolition on 9/11”
The widely held belief that the Twin Towers collapsed as a result of the airplane impacts and the resulting fires is, unbeknownst to most people, a revisionist theory. Among individuals who witnessed the event firsthand, the more prevalent hypothesis was that the Twin Towers had been brought down by massive explosions.
9/11 was a neocon-designed operation and carried out by the Mossad and CIA. Purpose: to create the pretext to invade the Middle East in an attempt to bring the world’s largest oil sources under US control and as such guarantee a “New American Century”.
As we all know, the objective failed and there will be no “New American Century”.
Abraham van Helsing on Wed, 22nd Jul 2020 5:02 pm
Richard Spencer’s take on the EU, UK and Brexit:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdZuPxwWoAEJ5N6?format=jpg&name=4096×4096
Richard Spencer could become the president of the Heartland white ethno-state, “after the break”.
https://youtu.be/WJzVy5zU3qo?t=19
Abraham van Helsing on Wed, 22nd Jul 2020 5:18 pm
Below is highly significant of what is about to happen to the US.
Even the Jerusalem Post has to admit that there is some truth behind the concept of “Jewish Communism”, as the Nazis claimed:
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Middle-Israel-Was-the-Bolshevik-Revolution-a-Jewish-plot-513835
“Middle Israel: Was the Bolshevik Revolution a Jewish plot?”
“Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, Stalin led them out of the Politburo,” whispered veterans of the Bolshevik Revolution, as winter 1927 approached the Moscow River’s banks.
http://www.ihr.org/sites/default/files/audio/podcasts/The_Mark_Weber_Report-20120118.mp3
“Communism’s Death Toll, and the Jewish Role in Bolshevism”
Now it is your turn, America, to perhaps become racially bolshevized, certainly if you don’t resist. George Soros has prepared his revolutionaries-of-color:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/12/make-no-mistake-blm-radical-neo-marxist-political-movement/
“Make no mistake – BLM is a radical neo-Marxist political movement”
In the USSR, communist egalitarianism was about labor, economics, wealth, income, distribution. The proletariat was the working class. The oppressors were the capitalists.
In the USA, communist egalitarianism is about race and the proletariat is the third world. The oppressors are white people.
Same people, same methods, slightly different tune.
Abraham van Helsing on Wed, 22nd Jul 2020 5:38 pm
And now for something completely different:
https://youtu.be/s9PQ7qPkluM
9-10 years old, no vocal education, self-taught, natural talent. If you are over 50 and won’t get tears in your eyes, you still have to work a little on your soul.
Abraham van Helsing on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 2:12 am
“America and the Rise of the Chinese Century”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/22/america-and-the-rise-of-the-chinese-century/
In 1945 the US GDP was four times larger than the next closest country with about 40% of the world GDP. Even in 1960 the US GDP was 40% of the world. No one else was close. Today in 2020 the US GDP is 14.9% of the world GDP, in 2024 it will be just 13.8%. China’s GDP in 2020 is 19.2% of the world and in 2024 it will be 21.4%. The European Union in 2020 is 15.8% of the global GDP. The US just does not have the global economic dominance and soon perhaps China will… China and the US are now rivals, and it is unlikely that this changes with the 2020 American elections. These two countries are locked in a new Cold War. It is a war that will look different from the USSR/USA one, but still America and China are adversaries more than friends… Cutting funding to the World Health Organization is merely one sign of the loss of leadership… This time the communists might win the new Cold War… America is 78 years into its Century, it may be coming to its close soon. [*]
[*] – the Chinese are communist in name only. They have a capitalist system and no inclination to abandon their own race. They are closer to national-socialism than communism, either the Soviet-economic one or the racial, US-one.
I’m not so 100% convinced that the 21st century will be “Chinese”. The #1 country in terms of economic output and perhaps military, yes, very well possible. But the rise of China since Deng was encouraged by the West and its globalist attitudes. They saw China as a meek follower of globalism, that would volunteer to do the [1-1000$] bone job manufacturing. That didn’t happen, China has a will of its own and, with Russia, opposes “integration” into UN global governance schemes, as dreamed up by US oligarchs. As a consequence, China will be taken serious and will experience a lot of headwind and less goodwill, now that it has become a serious geopolitical competitor.
But globalism is on the way out and the competent white core of Anglosphere is about to be overrun by the third world, creating racial tensions that can only be released in one way: secession. If the EU would also fall apart, we will indeed have a Chinese Century (or longer than a century). The only way to prevent a Chinese century/millennium is an alliance EU+Russia and the European parts of a balkanized North-America and perhaps an England that has come to its senses and at least accepts a continued economic integration into the EU. This is likely to happen if their preferred ally falls apart.
Abraham van Helsing on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 3:06 am
More American historic self-cancellation, under dedicated kosher directions in their relentless fight against anything white:
https://nypost.com/2017/08/24/jewish-activists-target-removal-of-peter-stuyvesant-monuments/
“Jewish activists target removal of Peter Stuyvesant monuments”
That’s OK, remove all Dutch traces from Nieuw-Amsterdam and turn it into a kosher-led third world shit-hole and as such make it impotent, by letting moddafokka “African values” dominate. That would serve Eurasian interests splendidly, in that it would cancel the NYC-based UN & SC and as such deprive it of any aspirations of becoming the seat of a future world government. There isn’t going to be a world government.
Abraham van Helsing on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 10:19 am
Barnier doubts a Brexit deal will happen:
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/brexit-barnier-haelt-handelsabkommen-fuer-unwahrscheinlich-a-59eb691d-9bdc-433f-bed4-80f028c68dab
His British counterpart agrees.
Just cut the crap, no deal it is. The breach is complete. Become the US 51st state and increase the speed with which white England will bite the dust.
https://documents1940.wordpress.com/2020/07/23/the-geopolitics-of-richard-spencer/
Davy on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 10:21 am
More wak AsiaUp news for wak:
“China Launches First Independent Probe Bound For Mars In Major Milestone For Beijing’s Space Program”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-launches-first-independent-probe-bound-mars-major-milestone-beijings-space
“As its geopolitical tussle with the US intensifies, and the novel coronavirus continues to ravage the world (though Beijing is working diligently on a vaccine to fix all that), China on Thursday succeeded in launching its first independent probe bound for Mars at 1241 local time on Thursday. It’s a major step in Beijing’s aspirations to build a space program to rival the US’s.”
JuanP on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 11:34 am
I love China and the CCP. Long live the dictator Xi!
JuanP on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 10:21 am
More wak AsiaUp news for wak:
“China Launches First Independent Probe Bound For Mars In Major Milestone For Beijing’s Space Program”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-launches-first-independent-probe-bound-mars-major-milestone-beijings-space
“As its geopolitical tussle with the US intensifies, and the novel coronavirus continues to ravage the world (though Beijing is working diligently on a vaccine to fix all that), China on Thursday succeeded in launching its first independent probe bound for Mars at 1241 local time on Thursday. It’s a major step in Beijing’s aspirations to build a space program to rival the US’s.”
Davy on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 12:24 pm
Well juanPee. We hate China and the CCP and were real afraid cus there still growin and were not. Long live dicktater Trump the destroyer.
The board on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 12:40 pm
JuanP on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 12:24 pm
“Well juanPee. We hate China and the CCP and were real afraid cus there still growin and were not. Long live dicktater Trump the destroyer.”
JuanPee, you are an emotional wreck over the decline of China, grows some balls, pussy.
REAL Green on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 12:43 pm
Davy, we are a emotional wreck over the decline of America, grows some balls, pussy.
Davy on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 12:53 pm
More USAUP for juanPee:
“Election 2020: The Worst Case Scenario Is The Most Likely One”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/election-2020-worst-case-scenario-most-likely-one
“I made the call on a Trump presidency for a number of reasons. Set aside the fact that the majority of major elections are rigged from within because the elites choose candidates on BOTH sides to run, and lets just look at the simple campaign dynamic at the time. A contested election, civil war, martial law, economic collapse and the US will be destroyed from within. If conservatives actively support unconstitutional levels of federal power or martial law, then the scenario becomes even worse. By forsaking our foundational principles in order to “defeat the left”, we would be handing victory to the globalists. We would be destroying our own movement’s reason for existing while the elites barely have to lift a finger. The CFR and its long time goal of erasing US sovereignty would then be nearly complete. All that would be left is to ensure they they are the people that get to rebuild America from the ashes of all out domestic conflict and collapse.”
Go Trump the destroyer!
the board on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 2:03 pm
juanPee, if you hate the US so much why don’t you leave. You really are a hypocrite and liar.
JuanP on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 12:53 pm
More USAUP for juanPee: “Election 2020: The Worst Case Scenario Is The Most Likely One”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/election-2020-worst-case-scenario-most-likely-one
“I made the call on a Trump presidency for a number of reasons. Set aside the fact that the majority of major elections are rigged from within because the elites choose candidates on BOTH sides to run, and lets just look at the simple campaign dynamic at the time. A contested election, civil war, martial law, economic collapse and the US will be destroyed from within. If conservatives actively support unconstitutional levels of federal power or martial law, then the scenario becomes even worse. By forsaking our foundational principles in order to “defeat the left”, we would be handing victory to the globalists. We would be destroying our own movement’s reason for existing while the elites barely have to lift a finger. The CFR and its long time goal of erasing US sovereignty would then be nearly complete. All that would be left is to ensure they they are the people that get to rebuild America from the ashes of all out domestic conflict and collapse.” Go Trump the destroyer!”
JuanP on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 2:05 pm
JuanP on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 12:43 pm
juanPee, we are a emotional wreck over the decline of China, grows some balls, pussy.
Abraham van Helsing on Thu, 23rd Jul 2020 3:39 pm
Limey looking for trouble:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/495636-brexit-nigel-farage-italy-italexit/
“Brexit mastermind Nigel Farage is looking to repeat the impossible by helping Italy liberate itself from the EU’s shackles“
No-deal Brexit approaching, the gloves are going off. England will seek to wreck the EU, the EU will seek to wreck the UK.
Current Italian EU attitude: 70% wants to stay. Sorry Nigelle Fromage.
Nicola Sturgeon can’t organize an official referendum without permission from London, which she won’t get. However she can call for a consultative referendum and use the result for a unilateral withdrawal from the UK regardless. Which could lead to an English military invasion of Scotland, with interesting repercussions for Hong Kong and Taiwan. The EU could use its food weapon to force England to back-down. Other interesting options are EU, Russian and Irish-Scottish American weapons deliveries to the Bravehearts and IRA.
Interesting times.