Opinion

Proponents of ivermectin as a treatment for covid are now in damage-control mode after a series of stories about people overdosing on horse paste and sheep drench from feed stores.

Such luminaries as Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Brett Weinstein and United States Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) stoked demand for the dewormer, only to have the craze blow up in their faces when the ginned-up demand outstripped the pharmaceutical supply and people started self-medicating with horse paste.

Fox News is stirring concerns that the California recall election may be in need of an audit – a conservative tactic now being widely used to discredit Democratic wins throughout the country.

During a Tuesday broadcast of Fox News' "Outnumbered," Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren argued that "the only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud."

Former President Donald J. Trump must be getting desperate.

Over the past few weeks he has deluged me with emails begging for money and trying to sell me various sorts of stuff that I would mostly describe as “junk.''

United States Representative Jim Jordan wrote the following to accompany a video of University of Wisconsin students going wild before the opening game of the college football season: "Real America is done with #COVID19. God bless!" the Ohio Republican tweeted. I'm confident he didn't mean to, but Jordan has provided us with perhaps the best illustration of what it means to be an American fascist today. Unfortunately, most people most of the time won't see it. Jordan's tweet appears all-American! It's not, though. It's anti-American.

This article was originally published at The Editorial Board

Back in 2012, Republicans were on one of their tears against women's rights, thinking that it was the ticket to win the election and oust President Barack Obama from office. They decided to attack contraception, confirming once again that their alleged love for the fetus was really all about restricting reproductive freedom.

The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held committee hearings and insulted the women who testified about the medical need for contraception. Rush Limbaugh grossly derided one of them on his national radio show, calling a woman named Sandra Fluke a "slut" who is "having so much sex she [couldn't] afford her own birth control pills ... having so much sex, it's amazing she can still walk." Ever the classy fellow, Limbaugh added, "If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I'll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." (And that was just for starters.) One of their top donors, Foster Freiss, went on television and claimed that in his day, a woman just used aspirin for birth control — by putting it between her knees. Haha! And perhaps the most famous quote of that entire campaign season came from a GOP Senate candidate from Missouri named Todd Akin who was asked about his stance that rape and incest survivors should be forced to bear the child of their rapist and said this:

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."