Opinion

That some southerners are refusing to get vaccinated against the covid and are instead eating horse paste, or injecting sheep drench, has sparked yet another round of tedious debate over "messaging." If federal officials could say the right thing at the right time for the benefit of the right people, then surely misinformed southerners would get vaccinated and this goddamn pandemic would be over. The time for persuasion is gone, though. It was gone before it began.

The debate certainly appears to be reasonable, so reasonable, as a matter of fact, that it demands a near-daily airing on cable news. After all, if southerners are willing to ingest ivermectin, a drug used to kill parasites in large domestic animals, then surely the problem is lack of public trust in public institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in political leaders or in the health care system itself.

Americans like to say we don't leave Americans behind.

We don't abandon people to be oppressed and victimized by a bunch of gun-toting yahoo zealots who hate freedom and hate science and think they have a direct line to God.

If there's one thing growing up evangelical taught me, it's to be suspicious of kindness from Christians. God may, theoretically, love us unconditionally. (Some restrictions apply). But Christian kindness, particularly from the most conversion-focused Christians, tends to come with goals, expectations and conditions that objectify those receiving the kindness. That is, conversion-focused Christians such as evangelicals treat other human beings as means to an end, rather than as morally autonomous equals. It's not always nearly so obvious as requiring that people listen to "the gospel" before receiving aid from a Christian foodbank or homeless shelter, but in some ways, the less obvious manipulation tactics may be all the more insidious.

In the interdenominational evangelical Christian school I graduated from, I learned about "friendship evangelism" — making friends with non-Christians with the goal of building up the kind of rapport that might allow you to convert them. That practice felt sleazy to me even then. But whether through friendship or other means, parents, pastors, chapel speakers at school and teachers all reinforced the belief that we Christians were all "called" to engage in "witnessing," that is, evangelizing, in order to "lead people to Christ." The pressure to witness caused me a good deal of stress as an empathic introvert, but I nonetheless did it on occasion, even handing out tracts in downtown Indianapolis with my senior Bible teacher and other students as a way of fulfilling one of the class's requirements. It took decades of processing before I could articulate that one of the things that most bothered me about proselytizing — besides the clearly abusive belief that God will torture those who don't "accept Jesus into their hearts" forever in Hell — is that this imperative to proselytize inevitably entails objectifying the people targeted for conversion.

The former president's attempted coup is not stopping. He still refuses to concede and continues to rile up supporters with his bogus claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Tens of millions of Americans believe him.

Last Sunday, at a Republican event in Franklin, North Carolina, Congressman Madison Cawthorn, repeating Trump's big lie, called the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 "political hostages."

Like other forms of fascism, Donald Trump's cult demands human sacrifice.

This can come in the form of those targeted for violence and pain as "the enemy." The sacrifice can also come in the form of followers so committed to the movement that they are willing to kill and die for it. These rituals of violence bind the followers to the leader and one another, offering them meaning, a sense of community and a mythos built around their simultaneous "victimhood", triumph and "heroism." Ultimately, Trumpism and other forms of fascism are human destruction — both for their followers and society as a whole.

There's been considerable chatter over the past few years about the crisis of democracy — sometimes more clinically described as a "democratic recession" or "democratic deficit." And for good reason: When Donald Trump stripped the flesh off the American body politic, he revealed a disease that has become endemic throughout the so-called Western world.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

The former president's attempted coup is not stopping. He still refuses to concede and continues to rile up supporters with his bogus claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Tens of millions of Americans believe him.

Last Sunday, at a Republican event in Franklin, North Carolina, Congressman Madison Cawthorn, repeating Trump's big lie, called the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 "political hostages."

One of the great myths of the United States is that rebellion and insurrection are among the necessary components of patriotism. Myth-making provides the U.S. a way to recycle its gory mess of violent anti-government white supremacy and white privilege into something sacred. Perhaps no nation has accumulated more myths about itself in its short 245 years of existence than America, which has used those myths to justify everything from Indigenous genocide and slavery to dropping nuclear weapons on Japanese cities at the end of World War II.

The defenders of and the deflectors from the Jan. 6 insurrection have been spinning a new tale for the world for months now. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., said in May, "There was no insurrection, and to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bold-faced lie." Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., an ardent Trump supporter, defended the insurrectionists under investigation and arrest for their roles in the Jan. 6 riot. "The DOJ is harassing peaceful patriots across the country," Gosar said on May 12. As author Mychal Denzel Smith put it in a recent article for New York magazine, "If we let the mob participants and sympathizers claim their own version of the narrative, it will be told through a righteous lens." They have already laid the groundwork for making the House hearings on Jan. 6 a dog and pony show.

By Thomas M. File, Jr., MD and Joel A. Kammeyer, MD, MPH

A Butler County judge ignored scientific evidence and proven patient care when he ordered West Chester Hospital to treat a seriously ill COVID-19 patient with the livestock deworming drug ivermectin. This drug, which has been proven safe and effective for treating head lice and other parasitic infections in humans, has come under intense scrutiny as it is being promoted among some as the latest COVID-19 miracle treatment. It isn't. Ivermectin is scientifically unproven as a treatment or as a preventative measure for COVID-19.

Those now lining up against the Biden administration's $3.5 trillion Reconciliation Bill represent the same small segment of society that has always demanded working families surrender to the wants and desires of the so-called "job creators."

The "job creator" fantasy is a malignant, but persistent myth that the corporate class and their power-suited courtiers use to squeeze the working class and extract their wealth.

When President Joe Biden addressed the families of the 13 military members killed in Afghanistan last week he referenced losing his son Beau. It's a reference he frequently makes when addressing people who have lost loved ones and experienced profound grief. In response to the incident, New York Times reporter Peter Baker penned a report about those complaining that Biden grieves too much, and in this incident, it didn't make sense because Biden's son didn't die in combat.

As American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein detailed in a thread that the grief of losing a child is "unfathomable." Biden lost two, one from cancer and one suddenly when he also lost his first wife in a car accident. Ornstein noted that frequently when he met with people who knew he'd lost his son, they'd explain they lost their cat or their 93-year-old mother. He was at first insulted that those could even be compared to the loss of a child.

While a majority of Americans say they continue to react poorly to an apparent lack of planning in the hastened, chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, maybe we should be looking more closely at the distinctly Republican attempt to politicize the efforts of the Biden administration to quickly organize an unprecedented airlift rescue of 120,000 under fire as a disastrous failure.

Those same polls say we should be out of Afghanistan.