Why dangerous Fox News talking heads are comparing Fauci to notorious Nazi death camp doctor
They're
doubling down on death as a political strategy, a process Trump began the
week of April 7, 2020 (as I documented in
damning detail eight months ago).
If
Meadows' book is right and Trump was
willing to infect then-77-year-old Biden at the debate, we have
one more data point in the evil Trump/GOP Death Cult's plan to leverage the
Covid pandemic as a political weapon.
And
now they're accusing Dr. Fauci of behaving like the notorious Nazi death camp
doctor, Josef Mengele. Seriously: former "real news" reporter Lara
Logan laid out that
unhinged rant on Fox News this week using the old "people are saying"
rhetorical trick propagandists so love.
"This
is what people say to me," Logan told an audience of millions, "that
he doesn't represent science to them. He represents Joseph Mengele, the Nazi
doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the
concentration camps. And I am talking about people all across the world are
saying this…"
Over 800,000 Americans are now dead from Covid, as we track daily at TrumpDeathToll.org.
Multiple
studies suggest as many as a
third of the roughly 50 million
Americans who've contracted Covid are now disabled by having
had the disease, many for life. These mostly unvaccinated people are now
crippled with "long Covid" conditions ranging from chronic exhaustion
to dementia to life-shortening heart and kidney disease, which can't be helping
the labor shortages across key sectors of our economy.
Dr.
Fauci has been working for two years to try to reduce that death toll, and on
Fox they're calling him Dr. Mengele? As the Auschwitz Memorial museum tweeted after
Logan's comments:
"Exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines, pandemic and people who fight for saving human lives is shameful. It is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline."
It's
also a huge distraction from a very real tragedy that could largely have been
avoided if Trump had merely encouraged people to wear masks and social distance
before the vaccine was available, and pushed his followers hard to get
inoculated after the vaccine was available.
But
the GOP math is simple. When economies sag, voters choose the other party to
take over: it's worked that way for 200+ years in American politics. So in 2020
Trump pushed Americans to ignore the virus and keep things "normal,"
leading to tens of millions of infections.
Trump
was apparently even willing to
infect his 77-year-old opponent in the 2020 election: his Chief
of Staff, Mark Meadows, writes in his new
book that Trump tested positive for Covid three days before his
debate with Joe Biden and lied about it after getting a second, negative test.
Thankfully, Biden kept his
distance from Trump throughout the debate, as Trump would be in the
hospital with Covid within two weeks.
When
that didn't work, Biden survived, and Trump lost anyway, starting the week that
Biden was inaugurated Trump and his followers began discouraging people from
getting vaccinated.
And
that's their strategy now: if they can keep America sick and on-edge, that'll
keep the economy soft, which will work to Democrats' disadvantage in the 2022
and 2024 elections.
While
Democrats treat public health emergencies as serious issues, Republicans see
them as a way to gain political advantage.
Remember
when President Obama let an American with Ebola into the country to receive
treatment? The GOP went totally hysterical, some even calling for his
impeachment.
One
conservative commentator wrote,
"Today, his ambition to be a hero to Africa is undermining common sense
approaches to protecting Americans from the Ebola virus." Republican
Senator Joni Ernst called for
Obama's impeachment for behaving like a "dictator" and railed against
him over Ebola.
My
old debating opponent, Phyllis Schlafly, proclaimed:
"That was the purpose of Ellis Island—to have a waiting place where it was decided whether people were healthy enough or responsible enough to come into our country. The idea that anybody can just walk in and carry this disease with them is just an outrage, and it is Obama's fault because he's responsible for doing it."
And
now, as Mark Sumner
reports at Daily Kos,
four Trump-appointed federal judges have put a hold on President Biden's July
efforts to make sure even hospital workers are fully vaccinated through OSHA
workplace mandates:
In
July, President Joe Biden issued a series
of rules requiring that federal workers, and workers at
companies that receive federal contracts, must be vaccinated. That included
health care workers who work for hospitals that receive Medicare or Medicaid
payments.
However,
earlier this month, a three-judge panel in Texas blocked the
implementation of the mandate for many large companies. Now,
as The Washington
Post reports, a federal district judge in Missouri has acted to
block even the mandate for health care workers.
All
are Trump judges, and the most recent decision from Trump-appointed District
Court Judge Matthew Schelp quotes
extensively from lies told almost daily on Fox and other
rightwing media.
His
decision claimed that there's such widespread opposition to vaccination that:
"The loss of [vaccine-refusing hospital] staffing in many instances will
result in no care at all, as some facilities will be forced to close
altogether."
It's
another lie, designed to keep the pandemic going in America. It completely
ignores the success that vaccine mandates have had from United Airlines to the
New York Police Department to the largest hospital chain in Houston. In every
case, a tiny minority of people yelled and squealed and then got vaccinated.
As
a result of these GOP lies and a steady campaign in rightwing media and among
Republican politicians casting doubt on vaccines, however, we have the worst
Covid numbers and the highest Covid death toll in the developed world.
And
we're all forced to interact with 60 million people who refuse to get
vaccinated or even wear masks, because they either are willing to lay down
their lives and health to help the GOP or were simply suckered into false
beliefs by "friends" on social media.
As
David Leonhardt documents
at The New York
Times:
"In October [2021], 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened."
Every
one of those deaths was a loss to a family, a human tragedy. And the majority
of them were preventable— if only Republican politicians had decided that human
lives were more important than political power.
Instead,
they chose the classic tactic of tyrants throughout history: lie to the people
no matter how many die as a result.
This
article was first published on The Hartmann
Report.
Thom Hartmann is
a talk-show host and
the author of "The Hidden
History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream"
(2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America"
(2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
