Originally Posted by
BCR
Listen, I don’t think anyone started from a bad place of wanting to kill grandma. Ones ability to adapt to changing information quickly is what determines intellect and leadership. Not making the same mistakes twice
As long as you’re all on the same page of we have a major problem and need to address it to the best of our ability, then you do the best you can and make the smartest choices known at the time.
The problem is you had a leader continuing to downplay it and dismiss it to a group of followers who begin from a place of government skepticism and pure mental illness conspiracy theory thinking. If their idiocy only touched them, so be it, but it’s a virus.
You always handwave away the majority of your party as some backwoods rubes who are a small part. You have been mostly at home, live in LA, and think that’s real America. It is, but it isn’t real red America.
I live on the border of the seventh and eighth most populous states. Not the Dakotas. You don’t grasp the degree to which these people take their marching orders directly from Trump. Professionals, people who appear otherwise normal, not just white power guys.
You don’t see the President tweet or say something stupid and hear three people a day repeat that shit to you verbatim. You and Ben Shapiro aren’t the Republican Party. You’re the part of the party Trump ran right the fuck over beating all your candidates in 2016 and went directly to his people and won easily.
You say he made mistakes in messaging like he was selling shoes or an app. Bad messaging is political speak or business speak. His “bad messaging“ were outright lies that led directly to people killing other people. That’s not bad messaging. That’s not an honest mistake. A honest mistake in February was a sociopathic lie by April, let alone November. The continued and constant lies and mockery of anyone who took it serious. He’d mock reporters and his own staff if they had a mask on. He sent a clear message from the start until the end and it killed more people than necessary.
I have contact with a lot of people on the right whom I consider unreasonable and/or conspiracy prone. These are the people who believe Trump really won this election, and that a lot of COVID was a hoax. I've talked to them. I can't get through to them.
However, it's not because of what Trump said or did. It's the opposite. Trump didn't come out strongly for masking because his most dedicated supporters decided they hated both masks and lockdowns, and that it was an affront to their freedom. Had Trump come out strongly for masking, these people would have ignored him and not done it anyway. Trump wanted his base to still be supportive during the election year, so he didn't strongly oppose them on the masking thing. Sad but true. I wish that wasn't his approach, but I disagree that he brainwashed followers into not masking.
Also, the effectiveness of masking still isn't known. Norway had 4% of the population masking through late August. They never had a bad COVID problem. The reasons for this are unknown. The only regular Norwegian poster, adamantium, defended it by saying that the country was instructed to use common sense and social distance. That actually would make an interesting study. I've found that people wearing masks almost feel like COVID-immune supermen, because of the left/media's obsession with masking. In an effort to get masking cooperation, the media tried to avoid saying that there's a decent chance you'll get COVID even if you wear a mask, if you're in a risky environment. Our own Master Scalir (and his friend Ryan) got COVID for exactly this reason -- they overestimated the protection masks gave them. This is a common problem.
I don't want to go down a whole mask/no-mask rathole, because I do believe that masks help, and I wear them. However, I also believe that the left turned masking political just as the right did, and this led to the opposite problem of people believing masks are more useful for the wearer than they really are, and thus letting their guard down.
In short, I don't believe Trump caused mass death. I also still stand by my second point -- that the Democrats bungled it badly. Between the COVID-patients-to-the-nursing-home thing (which even baffled my 9-year-old son Benjamin when it was going on), the woke obsession with xenophobia in February (instead of focusing on COVID), and the unwavering support for dangerous massive protests in June, the Dems have shown themselves to be wholly poor leaders during this COVID crisis.
I'm not going to defend everything Trump did, and I would have done a lot differently if I were President. However, to say that the Democrats would have "followed the science" and "listened to the experts" is just insane, given what we saw of how they actually handled things.