JULY 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

The recent spike in Covid delta variant cases, and associated deaths, and continued refusal of many Republican faithful to get vaccinated, dominated the July news cycle. At the risk of kicking a dead horse in the mouth, I will confine the July nominations to GOP absurdities on the subject.

NOTE: Also, as you will notice the presence of some frequent IGGY candidates, perhaps it is time, as one Phronesis reader suggested, to retire some of these repeating absurdists to the Ignominious Absurdity Hall-of-Shame, thus joining original inductee Donald Trump. Expect a new induction ceremony in the near future. If you have any IGGY HOS recommendations, please let me know.

1. Tennessee Republican Lawmakers. Ever wondered how far the GQP will push the limits of anti-science?  Look no further than the state of Tennessee.  Straight from the files of “you can’t make this up,” some Republican lawmakers were so aghast at commercials encouraging children to get Covid vaccines (which is a great idea, by the way, of addressing the low vaccine rates we are still struggling with), that they are saying we should just cancel the Health Department.

Some Tennessee Republican lawmakers accused the Tennessee Department of Health of "guilt-tripping" kids to take the Covid-19 vaccine. Rep. Scott Cepicky, (R) Culleoka, motioned to "dissolve" the department altogether over the accusations.

Cepicky said the department's vaccine campaigns featuring children "peer pressure" them into taking the vaccine.

"When you have advertisements like this with a young girl with a patch on her arm all smiling, we know how impressionable our young people are and wanting to fit in in life," Cepicky said.

How terrible!  It’s bad enough teens have to fend off aggressive advertising from tobacco, alcohol, vapes, and big pharma, now we are taunting them with lifesaving, pandemic-busting vaccines!

At the source of this conflict (allegedly) is the state’s “Mature Minor Doctrine” allowing health care providers to treat children age 14+ without parental consent.  These advertisements may brainwash teens into getting health care against the wishes of their science-denying parents!  The horror!

The worst part?  This wasn’t just some off-the-cuff comment that will be ignored and forgotten.  The issue is scheduled to be brought back up in July.  Republicans have a strangle-hold on the state, and so far, only democrats and health officials have spoken up in opposition to the plan.

It may be time for us to move.

2. GOP Representative Lauren Boebert. Despite the number of lives the novel coronavirus has claimed and the amount of time the world has been battling this ongoing pandemic, some Republicans just don’t get it. A new variant of Covid-19 is spreading rapidly worldwide, this one highly contagious with scientists believing it may be twice as transmissible as the original coronavirus.  

But instead of acknowledging the dangers of the Delta variant, GOP representatives nationwide are continuing to downplay the severity of Covid-19, some even taking it to another level by offering unsolicited advice. In a since-deleted social media post mocking the threat of the Delta variant, Rep. Boebert said “the easiest way to make the Delta variant go away is to turn off CNN.” But the tweet doesn’t end there, she continued: “and vote Republican.”

Clearly Boebert is living in another universe, because Republicans are the ones who have both downplayed the virus and called it a hoax since the start of the pandemic. So given this trend, instead of ending the virus or making it go away, voting Republican would surely have the opposite effect.

Of course, Boebert—or someone from her team—realized how stupid the tweet really was and deleted it, but not before a screenshot could be taken and shared. Given the number of cases Colorado has of the Delta variant, especially in Mesa County, which is part of the congressional district represented by Boebert, it's no surprise she received a good amount of backlash. Her comments only fuel the misinformation around the novel coronavirus and contribute to the irresponsible downplaying of it.

Lauren Boebert’s continuous displays of utter stupidity have elevated her to the status of ignominious, and that says a great deal.

3. Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Cruz is now trying to pin new Covid-19 cases on undocumented immigrants, falsely claiming that “[i]n South Texas, we’re seeing #COVID positivity rates rising and it’s a direct result of illegal aliens being released into communities.” Not only is this a despicable lie, it’s a racist one with a long, disturbing history.

The trope that migrants bring diseases that threaten immigrant-receiving countries is among the most pervasive myths touted in anti-immigrant discourse. “Decades of research have debunked the idea that modern immigrants writ large pose an extreme health risk to receiving countries.” Not that Ted and his GOP pals care. After all, most are intent on running on a racist playbook in 2022, even if it did cost the 2020 presidency.

San Antonio Express-News reports that Texas ranks 37th in vaccinations, with just over 43% of residents in the state having been inoculated. “COVID-19 cases are rising again in the U.S. after months of decline, with the number of new cases per day nearly doubling over the past three weeks, driven by the fast-spreading delta variant, lagging vaccination rates and Fourth of July gathers.”

You know, if Cancun Ted is currently in the U.S. and really looking for one of the main culprits, he should try the governor’s mansion. Back in March, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott rushed to lift pandemic restrictions, including blocking “county and city governments from requiring masks, or from limiting business operation, or doing essentially anything to protect their citizens. Just one day later, Abbot tried to blame the superspreading on, you guessed it, asylum-seekers.

But when later asked to back up his lie, Greg had nada. The truth is Abbott “rejected offers from the Biden administration for help with testing and quarantining migrants, saying that job belongs entirely to the federal government,” ABC News reported in March. “The infection rates for all arriving immigrants are lower than for Texas as a whole, local officials and nonprofit groups serving those families say.”

An alleged ”immigrant menace” has been the focus of xenophobes in the past—whether it be Irish Catholics in the 19th century, then later Chinese and other Asians, of course, Italians and Jews and other Southern and Eastern Europeans and Mexicans, the claim has always been that these groups were not only racially inferior, but that they brought particularly dangerous and contagious diseases that would end up harming the US native population.”

It’s a push by Republicans in Congress in recent years as well, following larger numbers of unaccompanied children seeking safety in the U.S. In 2014, another Texas Republican, the ludicrous Louie Gohmert, even suggested bringing in the National Guard to stop the disease-ridden invasion.

(I might note that Guatemala, for example, has universal health insurance and vaccines are 100 percent funded by the government. In Texas, one in six kids in Texas is uninsured, and even insured families often must pay for vaccination.)

For Ted, Greg, Louie, and the rest of their Republican buddies, this is all gross, political gamesmanship. They are desperate for power and have no care for the real-life consequences that can follow this anti-immigrant rhetoric. “On August 2, it will be two years since a gunman—motivated by racism—drove nine hours to El Paso to shoot and kill immigrants,” Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts tweeted, “Ted Cruz knows full well that his dangerous rhetoric puts a target on the back of every brown person in Texas.”

4. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Green is back again, as predictably as Donald Trump praising Hitler, to compare Covid vaccinations to the Holocaust and Nazi medical experiments. It’s been just over two weeks since Green reluctantly issued a sort of apology and paid a perfunctory visit to the Holocaust Museum to show her regret over comparing being vaccinated against a deadly disease with being rounded up along with your whole family; tortured, humiliated, and starved; then executed in any one of several horrendous ways.

So, naturally, Greene has done it again. As The Washington Post reports, Greene used a speech this month to call federal health officials “medical brown shirts.” She then went on to complain that the Covid-19 vaccines were just “a political tool used to control people.”

When Greene first made such remarks, spineless House minority leader Kevin McCarthy pretended to be outraged and said that Greene’s statements comparing “the horrors of the Holocaust” with attempting to prevent Covid-19 were “appalling." That came weeks after McCarthy was forced to admit to Greene’s use of antisemitic conspiracy theories, including claims about “Jewish space lasers” being used to start forest fires in California.

Don’t expect any such reaction from McCarthy this time. The GOP has moved on from being embarrassed by racism, antisemitism, or having their leadership praise Nazis. Two months ago, the racist rantings of Marjorie Taylor Greene placed her at the edge of the party. Now she’s the core.

Racism and xenophobia have never been far from the GOP’s heart, and they’ve been the party’s defining principle ever since Donald Trump descended his golden escalator to talk about Mexican “rapists” who were bringing drugs and crime to America. Over the course of his White House occupation, Trump became increasingly comfortable with using the language of white nationalism, and with overtly supporting groups like the Proud Boys and white supremacist militias. His GOP colleagues have obediently followed in line. (Therein lies the real Nazi analogy.)

At the same time, the Q-Anon conspiracy grew from a side branch of the already evidence- and sense-free “Pizzagate” to consume much of Trump’s base. That conspiracy not only includes a belief that Democrats are running an underground delivery system for satanic pedophile cannibals, it is steeped in the terms of Nazism and antisemitic pogroms throughout history. The whole basis of both QAnon and Pizzagate is nothing but a variation on the ancient “blood libel” claims that have been used to justify the murder of Jews for centuries.

Now the stars of the GOP aren’t the figures who are those most strident in following the party’s supposed principles, but those who are pushing back the borders of hate. Both Green and Josh Hawley have been rewarded for deluging Republicans with support for conspiratorial claims and constant pushing of the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

So, Greene is now explicitly comparing Democrats to Nazis and comparing President Joe Biden’s efforts to see more Americans vaccinated with medical experiments conducted on Nazi prisoners. She also later piped in to say that Covid-19 was not dangerous for people unless they were obese or over 65. It’s clearly Taylor Green who’s dangerous.

Don’t expect McCarthy to do anything about it. After all, Greene has been touring the country with Matt Gaetz, whose connections to a genuine underage sex-trafficking ring haven’t merited so much as a slap on the wrist from McCarthy.

Greene, Gaetz, and Hawley aren’t retreating. They’re leading the party … right down the Nazi-loving trail Trump has laid for them.

4. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy. Senator Cassidy is a doctor, so presumably he knows that vaccine hesitancy is killing thousands—especially in Southern states like the one he represents, and particularly in Republican redoubts. We have highly effective and safe vaccines, but many people aren’t taking them. Why? Because, well, according to Dr. Cassidy, Joe Biden is apparently too partisan.

Here’s his exchange with Chris Wallace:

CHRIS WALLACE: “Your state of Louisiana is the fifth lowest in vaccination rate. Only 36% of people in your state have been fully vaccinated. You’re a medical doctor. Your thoughts about that, about the resistance to the vaccine in Louisiana, and is there anything you can and plan to do about it?”

CASSIDY: “A couple things. First, people are surprised when citizens don’t trust government. When you have partisan comments coming out of the White House regarding next Jim Crow laws, or people like Sen. Schumer and the White House not cooperating on a bipartisan bill. Oh, here we’re going to be partisan, but over here, you better trust us. That just doesn’t work.” …. People need to communicate, through your physician, your nurse, your PA, etc., not through some uber-partisan person who asks us to trust him, except when they’re making incredibly partisan statements.”

First of all, the idea that Joe Biden is hyperpartisan is a canard, for the simple reason that most Americans agree with him on the most pressing issues facing our country. On infrastructure, voting rights (specifically the For the People Act), and climate action, Americans back Biden’s agenda with strong majorities. These are not partisan priorities—at least they shouldn’t be—they’re American ones.

What are Republican priorities? Defending racist Dr. Seuss drawings? Banning the teaching of Black and Native American history in schools? Suppressing voting? More tax cuts for the rich?

Unfortunately, Republicans’ lack of interest in anything resembling a real crisis has prompted them to deflect and obfuscate like never before. The problem? In their telling, it’s that the party and president who are respecting the public’s clear wishes are being “partisan.” If this is partisanship, bring it on.

And, what about Mitch McConnell?

5. Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The ignominious pelican is at it again. Now he claims to be “perplexed” by the inability of the United States to “finish the job” of getting the vast majority of Americans vaccinated against the deadly coronavirus that has already claimed more than 600,000 lives nationwide.

Asked if he had advice for right-wing pundits and GOP politicians who have vilified the vaccines, McConnell called himself “a huge fan” of vaccinations. “I’m perplexed by the difficulty we have in finishing the job,” McConnell offered. “We need to keep preaching that getting the vaccine is important,” he added.

Astonishingly, considering comments like those above, McConnell seems oblivious to the fact that members of his party across the country are routinely stoking vaccine hesitancy among their followers as a way to score political points. In fact, contracting Covid-19 has now largely become a red state-blue state problem due to vaccination rates among GOP voters.

At last weekend’s CPAC conference in Texas, attendees actually cheered when extremist Alex Berenson celebrated the Biden administration’s inability to, as he put it, “sucker” 70% of U.S. adults into getting the lifesaving vaccine. Or, as a pointedly macabre Esquire pit it. “They clapped for death.”

One reporter at McConnell’s press conference did something unusual: She fact-checked him in real time.

“It isn’t all that perplexing. There are Republicans who are casting doubt on the vaccines,” she said, name checking GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, in particular. “That’s where this hesitancy is coming from—from members of your own party casting doubts on vaccines,” she added, asking McConnell what kind of conversations he’s had with members of his own party.

McConnell declined to say whether he’s had any conversations with Johnson or other Republicans about the host of baseless conspiracy theories they are pushing.

“I can only speak for myself,” McConnell said.

That’s exactly how we landed here in the first place—Republican politicians who have been completely unwilling to acknowledge or take any responsibility whatsoever for the (sometimes deadly) consequences of the actions of those in their own party. In fact, that’s exactly what Senate Republicans are trying to do right now as they turn an eye toward 2022 when they hope to recapture the House and Senate.

The Pelican is itching with anticipation for as majority leader in 2022 he can block any President Biden supreme Court nominees. Justice Stephen Breyer, please retire now!

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And the July IGGY winner is:

How can you pick among the despicable characters represented above, or from the litany of other Republicans who have said absurd things about vaccinations, like Rep. Steve Scalise and Senator Tommy Tuberville who blamed vaccine hesitance on Joe Biden for not giving enough credit to Donald Trump for his vaccine efforts, or Kansas Senator Roger Marshall who pointed the finger at Jen Psaki and Dr. Fauci for their preachiness, or Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri who likened the knocking on the doors of the unvaccinated Americans as a “KGB-style” campaign?

Anti-vaccination right wing rhetoric is killing people. The naysayers should all be indicted for crimes against humanity. Think about this: if the ignominious sampling listed above, and their fellow right-wing colleagues and enablers, were in control of most governorships and federal and state public health agencies in previous eras, we likely would not have been able to eradicate smallpox, polio, diphtheria, pertussis, mumps, and tetanus, at least not until millions of people had died or been maimed for life. Look at what they're dong in red states now.

There have always been anti-vaxxers when vaccinations are made compulsory, but never have they ever been so closely associated with one of the major political parties.

The Supreme Court upheld the principle of mandatory vaccinations in the 1905 case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. Since then, the authority of public health officials to determine the best methods of fighting an epidemic have been reaffirmed. Can we expect the current Supreme Court to uphold this principle, should it come up for review? And, what about the future of public health if Republicans recapture the presidency and congress?  Ghastly to think about.

Since all the above candidates are equally worthy recipients of the July IGGY, I won’t single any one out. Instead, I award this month’s ignominious award to all anti-vaxxers and misinformation peddlers, wherever they may be.