In Democrats’ pandemic messaging, the cruelty is the point

Frustrated that their control of the White House, the House, the Senate, academia, the media, and most of corporate America hasn’t rid the country of cultural conservatives, the cultural Left increasingly turns to disdain.

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel returned from vacation and earned applause for arguing that hospitals should leave unvaccinated patients to die of treatable maladies. This is the same Jimmy Kimmel who used to insist that healthcare is a right.

Kimmel’s view is more humane than the standard media approach of mocking vaccine-resistant or COVID-skeptical people who die of COVID. I won’t link those stories because they are ghoulish efforts by media outlets to drive hate-clicks about dead private citizens. They are not really efforts to persuade people to get vaccinated. They are naked cruelty, which is of course the point.

Leftist writer Elizabeth Bruenig, a Catholic, dared to suggest in print that those few who are interested in persuading folks to get vaccinated might begin by “examining what the unvaccinated say about their hesitancy to get their shots — by inhabiting their point of view, in other words, honestly and seriously.”

Screen grab from Twitter.

This misses the point, because the point is cruelty. Liberal commentator Oliver Willis weighed in to remind everyone what the aim is (see his tweet in the picture above).

Conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty got a similar reaction over the summer after he wrote a piece pointing out the shortcomings in pro-vaccine messages. “If vaccine advocates really do want vaccination uptake to increase more than they want to feel superior, they have to change course.”

And of course, the government and news media have decided that condescension, even to the point of dishonesty, is the best way to point out that ivermectin is an unproven treatment for COVID-19. The Biden administration tweeted out, “You are not a horse” to argue why people shouldn’t trust their doctor’s prescription of that anti-parasitic drug that is prescribed to hundreds of thousands of human beings every year.

When I suggested that this was both false and motivated by disdain, liberal writer Matt Yglesias, in effect, said, Well, yeah, that’s the point.

On a related question, why are American politicians and public health officials so resistant to the notion of including previously infected people on their “vaccine passport” plans? If vaccine passports are supposed to make certain places safe by insuring all patrons have a high level of immunity, then they should count prior infection. Other countries do so for that very reason. If the point of our vaccine drives is to increase community-level immunity, then we should be fine with infected people skipping the shot.

So it’s hard not to conclude that the purpose of the mandatory vaccine passport programs is to punish the bad people — both the people bad enough to have gotten sick and the people bad enough to have not gotten the shot. At the very least, it’s an effort to created segregated places where only the sophisticated may dine.

This isn’t just about COVID, though. Look at who becomes a folk hero of the cultural Left. Megan Rapinoe , Adam Rippon , the woman who flipped off Trump — their appeal seems to be simply treating the bad people like dirt.

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