In a 2018 interview with Michael Lewis, Ultra MAGA’s master propagandist, Steve Bannon, stated plainly the quiet part out loud: “The Democrats don’t matter; the real enemy is the media, and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” What he meant was quite simple, obfuscation of truth is a pretty useful tool when trying to destroy the democratic tradition of a nation of 330 million people.
By the time the 2020 campaign was in full steam, and Joseph Biden had emerged victorious from the Democratic primaries, we had entered peak Bizarro Land, and the zone was flooded.
Donald Trump, the sitting President of the United States. had attempted to extort the newly elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Why? Trump, in anticipation of a Biden candidacy, wanted dirt (real or manufactured) on Biden’s son. Should Zelenskyy fail to provide damaging information, Trump would withhold arms that Ukraine badly needed to prepare for what, at the time, seemed far-fetched to all but a few prescient national security watchers: a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
We know all this because a decorated combat veteran, wounded in action before being assigned to the Trump White House, turned whistleblower on the President’s extortion attempt. The Right smeared him as a partisan hack despite being a uniformed military officer who had no record of any partisan leaning.
Bannon’s foretold “flood of shit” continued after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on a black man’s neck, on video, until he died - and then for a couple of minutes longer. It was just enough of a public lynching to force Fox to jump into the flood and get deep into the Hunter Biden laptop story. The zone was flooded everywhere by faux Antifa-sighting, vilified migrant caravans, and upside-down Bibles.
Most of the flooded zone was at least semi-political. That is if you count NFL players protesting things like asphyxiation murder as political. But the feces extended to public health when the world learned of a little coronavirus first discovered in Wuhan Province. The feces flood rose like a Tsunami, with the Facebook experts - people you remember doing whippets at house parties in high school - weighing in early and hard about how the virus would disappear in two weeks. Then by the summer. And then it was a bioterror attack.
Those Facebook experts touted ingesting bleach, then horse dewormer, as miracle cures. Their spray-tanned-moron-blob leader speculated about shining light “inside the body.” This astoundingly dumb idea must have registered with some conspiratorial knuckledragger because Tucker did a segment about tanning one’s testicles for virility. Masks (the horror of attempting to save lives with a minor inconvenience!) were ridiculed and refused.
But surely the masses would seek refuge from the shit sea if Noah’s Ark appeared in the form of a vaccine.
The vaccine. The vaccine that reduced mortality from the virus by 81%.and prevented, according to academic mathematical models, at least three million deaths in America alone. The vaccine that was shunned by MAGA cops, MAGA candidates, and MAGA faithful but could have prevented hundreds of thousands of excess MAGA deaths. This new vaccine was so effective and good, a miracle of modern health, that the excrement manufacturers couldn’t even attempt to argue its effectiveness. Instead, they ate a massive burrito of lies, bore down real hard the next morning after a cup of black coffee while reading Newsmax, and shat out that it “caused viral myocarditis.”
Those “doing their own research” online turned to the Facebook Experts, also known as their cousins or “someone who knew somebody whose cousin’s uncle’s ex-neighbor had an ex-mother-in-law who had died after getting vaccinated” consumed the shit-posts and became well-versed in fictional manifestations of myocarditis. For those who missed these posts or want an actual medical explanation from a real medical doctor, myocarditis is an inflammatory condition of the muscle cells of the heart that can be caused by viral or auto-immune processes.
This particular shit tributary overflowed its banks so much so that when a 24-year-old super athlete starting free safety on the best team in the NFL keeled over in ventricular fibrillation after a hit, the MAGA anti-vax-do-your-own-research crowd dove back into the shit-flooded zone, and evacuated their bowels with alacrity. It didn’t matter that sudden cardiac death is not a symptom of myocarditis or that the actual symptoms (fever, swelling and edema, fatigue, weakness, and sleepiness) would seem to preclude starting in an NFL secondary (maybe for the Texans), the fire of a thousand tin-foil hat suns was lit. Actual doctors who know what they’re talking about and have completed decades of training collectively vomited into their shoes.
This flooded zone will happen over and over until we as a society wisen up. Spotting misinformation and disinformation must be taught in schools. The Facebook Experts aren’t doing their own research any more than the people consuming their lies. Research is a real thing, with real protocols, that requires years to learn “how to do.” It’s not reading an article or even reading a book. It’s not even reading ten books. Research is an entire discipline, at least as challenging as learning to fly an airplane or argue a court case.
Unfortunately, as a member of the medical community and for the foreseeable future, I am going to have to keep having conversations like this one that I’ll never forget from the height of the pandemic:
I was trying to convince a morbidly obese woman in her mid-60s with heart failure and COPD from a 70-pack-per-year smoking history (already on two liters of oxygen) that she should get vaccinated. She had read on Facebook that the vaccine caused infertility.
She was in her sixties. She told me the “jab can make you sterile.” Let me repeat that: she was in her sixties.
Her risk of dying of COVID with her health history was high. Her risk of pregnancy with or without the vaccine was not. You can lead a horse to water, but they won’t drink if their belly is already full of Steve Bannon’s shit.
