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In the race to get Americans vaccinated, two groups are commanding a lot of attention: Republicans and white evangelicals. Both are less likely to have been vaccinated already and more likely to refuse vaccination altogether.

But its the overlap between white Republicans and white evangelicals that is especially telling, as white evangelical Republicans are among the most likely groups in the U.S. to refuse vaccination. According to a June survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, where Im the research director, and the Interfaith Youth Core, white evangelical Republicans were considerably less likely to say they were vaccinated or planning to get vaccinated as soon as possible (53 percent) than Republicans who were not white evangelicals (62 percent). Moreover, white evangelical Republicans were the most likely of any large subgroup we surveyed to say they were refusing to get vaccinated (26 percent).

That the combination of being a Republican and a white evangelical would form a particularly toxic anti-vax stew, more significant than party or religion alone, seems obvious to me, but then again, I grew up in rural Texas I see this combination of beliefs in motion every day on Facebook, where Im connected to many high school and college classmates.

According to PRRIs 2020 religion census, the county where I lived longest as a kid (Leon) is 72 percent white Christian, including 44 percent white evangelical, and election data shows 87 percent of the county voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. Just over one-third of the countys eligible population is fully vaccinated, even though COVID-19 case rates are higher than they have ever been. At least three people who went to high school with me have died, while tracking statistics say at least 1 in 9 Leon County residents have been ill almost as many as in New York City (1 in 8), one of the hardest-hit areas in the country, and well over the rate in Washington, D.C. (1 in 13), where I live now.

This is significant because Leon County is extremely rural, with less than 20,000 total residents, including less than 2,000 in Buffalo, the town I lived near. For reference, my high school has only about 260 students at any given time. If you need ICU treatment, you have to travel there are currently no hospitals with ICUs in the county.

But what is also significant about Leon County is the role religion has played in residents low vaccination rates even when faced with death from the coronavirus. When my classmates were hospitalized with COVID-19, there were repeated calls for prayers and proclamations that God would provide healing. When they died, those prayer requests became comments that God called [them] home.

The belief that God controls everything that happens in the world is a core tenet of evangelicalism 84 percent of white evangelicals agreed with this statement in PRRI polling from 2011, while far fewer nonwhite, non-evangelical Christians shared this belief. The same poll also showed that white evangelicals were more likely than any other Christian group to believe that God would punish nations for the sins of some of its citizens and that natural disasters were a sign from God. Whats more, other research from the Journal of Psychology and Theology has found that some evangelical Christians rationalize illnesses like cancer as Gods will.

This is why I remember friends and acquaintances in Leon County when I think about how religious beliefs influence ones attitude toward COVID-19 and vaccination. PRRIs March survey found that 28 percent of white evangelical Republicans agreed that God always rewards those who have faith with good health and will protect them from being infected with COVID-19, compared with 23 percent of Republicans who were not white evangelicals. And that belief correlates more closely with vaccination views among white evangelical Republicans 44 percent of those who said God would protect them from the virus also said they would refuse to get vaccinated. That number drops to 32 percent among Republicans who are not white evangelicals.

Complicating matters further, the pandemic also fits neatly into end times thinking the belief that the end of the world and Gods ultimate judgment is coming soon. In fact, nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Republicans (64 percent) from our March survey agreed that the chaos in the country today meant the end times were near. Faced, then, with the belief that death and the end of the world are a fulfillment of Gods will, it becomes difficult to convince these believers that vaccines are necessary. Sixty-nine percent of white evangelical Republicans who said they refused to get vaccinated agreed that the end times were near.

Moreover, given how many white evangelicals identify as Republican or lean Republican about 4 in 5 per our June survey disentangling evangelicals religious and political beliefs is nearly impossible. Consider how many white evangelical leaders like former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. downplayed the severity of the pandemic in line with Trump. Falwell was hardly the only evangelical leader to do this either. If anything, the pattern of white evangelical resistance to vaccination has reached the point where some white evangelical leaders who might otherwise urge vaccination hesitate to do so because of the political climate.

In the same survey, about 2 in 5 white evangelical Republicans (43 percent), and Republicans more broadly (41 percent), said one reason they hadnt gotten vaccinated was that the COVID-19 pandemic had been overblown.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that most white evangelical Republicans, and Republicans in general, disagreed with our question about the Golden Rule, that because getting vaccinated against COVID-19 helps protect everyone, it is a way to live out the religious principle of loving my neighbors (57 percent and 58 percent, respectively). This may be because for some white evangelicals and Republicans, politics and religion are inseparable and Gods will, or their interpretation of it, controls everything.

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Why Some White Evangelical Republicans Are So Opposed To The COVID-19 Vaccine - FiveThirtyEight

An elephant. Illustrated | iStock

Nine months after several highly effective coronavirus vaccines started to become available in America, and three to five months after they became available in pharmacies across the country, the pandemic is now as bad as it's ever been in many states. In Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, and South Carolina, daily hospitalizations and deaths are at or near the March 2020 peak, while in Florida the previous records have been far surpassed.

At the same time, conservative elites are doing their level best to spread the virus as much as possible, even as COVID-19 is killing conservatives by the thousands. It's willful, malign negligence on a mind-boggling scale.

I can barely keep up with the number of minor conservative figures who have died of COVID after refusing to take the vaccine. The radio host Phil Valentine is dead after having mocked the vaccine, and so is Newsmax host Dick Farell. The same is true of Texas Republican official Scott Apley. South Carolina party official Pressley Stutts continued to post anti-vaccine conspiracy theories from his COVID ICU bed until he died. And among the voting base, it's total carnage.

Yet Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is still in a ferocious dispute with his state's school districts about mask mandates, as his state's pediatric ICU beds are swamped. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently issued an (almost certainly unconstitutional) order banning any institution receiving public funds from requiring vaccines. South Dakota recently held the Sturgis motorcycle rally again with the furious support of Gov. Kristi Noem despite the fact that the state is trailing in vaccination and last year the rally created a pandemic charnel house. Unsurprisingly, cases there are once again shooting through the roof.

The story that might have fully broken my brain for good is the recent plague of conservatives poisoning themselves with veterinary deworming paste. The idea is to get a drug called ivermectin, which has been promoted as yet another coronavirus miracle cure by various fringe quacks. Perhaps the most prominent is the former biology professor Bret Weinstein, who has been publishing anti-vaccine propaganda on a podcast and YouTube in the classic passive-aggressive "just asking questions" fashion.

Story continues

As Jef Rouner explains at Houston Press, the formula is simple and lucrative: raise fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the vaccines with complicated but false arguments that are hard for a layman to untangle, launder extreme claims by interviewing total lunatics, all while recommending unproven miracle remedies the shadowy Big Pharma conspiracy is supposedly suppressing. Then when you get in trouble for spreading antivaccine lies during a global pandemic, scream that you're being "censored" to get more attention, and watch the subscription numbers jump. Sure enough, Weinstein got on Fox News and other conservative outlets after YouTube demonetized his channel and deleted some videos. He even got a friendly reception from ex-leftist Matt Taibbi, who wrote two articles about ivermectin treating Weinstein as a credible source and a victim of Big Tech censorship.

In terms of science, the story is virtually identical to what happened with hydroxychloroquine promising initial evidence that has crumbled on further scrutiny. One big study was retracted when it turned out much of the abstract was plagiarized and the data was faked. A meta-analysis examining 14 studies published late last month found highly equivocal results: "Overall, the reliable evidence available does not support the use [of] ivermectin for treatment or prevention of COVID-19 outside of well-designed randomized trials."

To answer Taibbi's duplicitous leading question, there are two reasons why it is a bad idea to trumpet the possibility of unproven miracle cures during a pandemic. First, even the promising initial studies did not show ivermectin to be anywhere close to as protective as the vaccines, which are among the most-studied treatments in the history of medicine. Second, spreading overheated rumors about miracle drugs before the evidence is in will lead credulous people to take it without knowledge of proper dosage or considering toxic interactions. Sure enough, deworming paste is flying off the shelves, some doctor in Arkansas is giving it to prisoners, and calls to poison control centers are skyrocketing across the South. Facebook groups are full of stories of poisoned people suffering severe diarrhea and expelling "rope worms," which turn out to be almost certainly shreds of intestinal lining.

But in terms of politics, the horse paste saga is a perfect window in the conservative mindset that is currently the biggest force fueling the pandemic. The core behavior here is muleheaded, selfish spitefulness, adhered to even at great personal risk. "Freedom" for movement conservatives is entirely one-directional: They get to spray virus fog whenever and wherever they want, and they also get to force you or your kids to not wear a mask.

Because that behavior is so monstrous, there is a large incentive to make up comforting lies about how the pandemic is exaggerated or fake, or the vaccines don't work much facilitated by the fact that consuming right-wing media for very long tends to turn your brain into horse paste. Some right-wing voices pushing this line actually believe it, as shown by the lamented dead above. But others are just cynical Abbott recently came down with COVID, but it turns out he had not only been vaccinated but also had already gotten a booster shot, and was getting daily tests, so had a very mild case.

Finally, because the financial engine of the conservative media complex is tricking gullible retired people into buying brain pills and reverse mortgages, conservatives are easy pickings for cynical and/or deluded grifters hawking snake oil remedies when they do contract COVID after coughing into each other's face at the Cheesecake Factory to own the libs.

Yet another wave of completely pointless death seems to be motivating a lot of people to finally get vaccinated but thus far the procrastinators, not the ideological, hard core antivaxxers. Even when Donald Trump tried to argue for the vaccine at a rally in Alabama recently, he was booed. It seems the pandemic will keep burning out of control until just about every conservative vaccine refusenik has gotten COVID. Another few months ought to do it.

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The Republican pandemic response is breaking my brain - Yahoo News

This week, resilient Democrats in the House of Representatives passed the John LewisJohn LewisIt's time to give Republicans the fight of their lives on voting rights Texas voting rights at stake in advance of John Lewis Voting Rights Act House approves John Lewis voting rights measure MORE Voting Rights Advancement Act an important bill that takes steps to strengthen our nations voting laws to ensure all Americans can have a say in our democracy despite a great deal of political pressure against the bill.

This critical legislation comes following a coordinated campaign by Republicans in Georgia and in 17 other states that have enacted 30 new laws this year to further restrict voting rights. This strategy should be viewed as nothing more than a veiled attempt to keep nonwhite voters from participating in elections.

When legislators in Georgia passed restrictions on voting earlier this year, former gubernatorial candidate and Fair Fight founder Stacey Abrams said, We are seeing again and again this version of Jim Crow in a suit and tie, because it is designed explicitly for the same reason as Jim Crow [was], to block communities of color from active participation in choosing the leadership that will guide their democracy.

After vote by mail ballot drop boxes, expanded early voting and expanded voting hours were implemented in red and blue states around the country in response to the pandemic, we saw record voter turnout nationally and among communities of color. In fact, turnout among Black, Latino and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women increased 10 percent in the 2020 election. And in Georgia, a state where President BidenJoe BidenSupreme Court blocks Biden's eviction moratorium Overnight Defense & National Security: Terror in Kabul as explosions kill and injure hundreds White House: Biden 'somber' and 'outraged' after hearing of Kabul attack MORE won by a little over 11,000 votes, women of color represented 17 percent of the 2020 presidential primary electorate. It remains clear the immense electoral power of this critical voting bloc.

There is no question that restrictions on voting like the ones we saw in Georgia will depress voter turnout particularly among nonwhite voters. In a recent public pollingsponsored by reproductive justice collaborative Intersections of Our Lives, we learned that nearly 80 percent of women of color reported voting either by mail or early in-person. At the same time, two in five experienced issues while voting including the 23 percent of Black women who were asked to show identification to vote and the 16 percent who experienced long voting lines at the polls.

It isnt a coincidence that the very same voting options that drove voter turnout among people of color are the same policies Republican legislators around the country are seeking to eliminate.

The House has taken one step to bring an end to the wave of restrictions, but more must be done to advance policies that protect and expand the vote. The For the People Act, which was stalled in the Senate in June after passing the House, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would revive our democracys promise that all citizens have the opportunity to have their voices heard. Together, these bills would restore the Voting Rights Act and help to secure accessible voting across all 50 states. They would ensure disenfranchised communities could participate in our democracy without the threat of local officials undermining their rights.

Senate Majority Leader Charles SchumerChuck SchumerPolluters would help foot the bill for conservation under Democratic spending proposal Oil producers push Democrats to preserve key drilling deduction Schumer says infrastructure bills would cut emissions by 45 percent MORE (D-N.Y.) has pledged to bring up voting rights legislation in September and we are going to hold the senator to this commitment. Democrats campaigned on making voting more accessible, and six in 10 women of color voters are watching elected officials more closely now than during previous elections to make sure they deliver on these promises.

Black women and women of color are mobilized, and when we have access to the polls, we can deliver victories up and down the ballot. In 2020, we saw it in Georgia and across the U.S. I urge the Senate to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the House and Senate to continue to prioritize voting rights legislation. Because we all deserve to have a say in our elections and the future of our country.

Marcela Howell is the president and CEO of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda.

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It's time to give Republicans the fight of their lives on voting rights | TheHill - The Hill

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) is calling on President Biden to reverse course in Afghanistan in the wake of an attack Thursday morning near the Kabul airport.

Sasse called the explosions, which U.S. officials suspect were carried out by ISIS-K members, "the nightmare we feared" as the military has sought to evacuate U.S. personnel and Afghan allies in recent days. He argued that Biden's two options are to either "rip up the August 31 deadline" for evacuations or "leave people behind in your retreat." By casting aside the previous deadline, Sasse says the U.S. could expand its military presence around the airport or "retake" Bagram, where the U.S. previously held an air base.

Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan (N.H.) agreed with Sasse, saying "We must complete this mission, regardless of any arbitrary deadlines."

"Weakness will accelerate the bloodshed," wrote Sasse. "Lord, have mercy on Americans in harm's way."

Excerpt from:
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse calls on Biden to 'reverse course' and extend military evacuations in Kabul - The Week Magazine

Nine months after several highly effective coronavirus vaccines started to become available in America, and three to fivemonths after they became available in pharmacies across the country, the pandemic is now as bad as it's ever been in many states. In Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, and South Carolina, daily hospitalizations and deaths are at or near the March 2020 peak, while in Florida the previous records have been far surpassed.

At the same time, conservative elites are doing their level best to spread the virus as much as possible, even as COVID-19 is killing conservatives by the thousands. It's willful, malign negligence on a mind-boggling scale.

I can barely keep up with the number of minor conservative figures who have died of COVID after refusing to take the vaccine. The radio host Phil Valentine is dead after having mocked the vaccine, and so is Newsmax host Dick Farell. The same is true of Texas Republican official Scott Apley. South Carolina party official Pressley Stutts continued to post anti-vaccine conspiracy theories from his COVID ICU bed until he died. And among the voting base, it's total carnage.

Yet Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is still in a ferocious dispute with his state's school districts about mask mandates, as his state's pediatric ICU beds are swamped. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently issued an (almost certainly unconstitutional) order banning any institution receiving public funds from requiring vaccines. South Dakota recently held the Sturgis motorcycle rally again with the furious support of Gov.Kristi Noem despite the fact that the state is trailing in vaccination and last year the rally created a pandemic charnel house.Unsurprisingly, cases there are once again shooting through the roof.

The story that might have fully broken my brain for good is the recent plague of conservatives poisoning themselves with veterinary deworming paste. The idea is to get a drug called ivermectin, which has been promoted as yet another coronavirus miracle cure by various fringe quacks. Perhaps the most prominent is the former biology professor Bret Weinstein, who has been publishing anti-vaccine propaganda on a podcast and YouTube in the classic passive-aggressive "just asking questions" fashion.

As Jef Rouner explains at Houston Press, the formula is simple and lucrative: raise fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the vaccines with complicated but false arguments that are hard for a layman to untangle, launder extreme claims by interviewing total lunatics, all while recommending unproven miracle remedies the shadowy Big Pharma conspiracy is supposedly suppressing. Then when you get in trouble for spreading antivaccine lies during a global pandemic, scream that you're being "censored" to get more attention, and watch the subscription numbers jump. Sure enough, Weinstein got on Fox News and other conservative outlets after YouTube demonetized his channel and deleted some videos. He even got a friendly reception from ex-leftist Matt Taibbi, who wrote two articles about ivermectin treating Weinstein as a credible source and a victim of Big Tech censorship.

In terms of science, the story is virtually identical to what happened with hydroxychloroquine promising initial evidence that has crumbled on further scrutiny. One big study was retracted when it turned out much of the abstract was plagiarized and the data was faked. A meta-analysis examining 14 studies published late last month found highly equivocal results: "Overall, the reliable evidence available does not support the use [of] ivermectin for treatment or prevention of COVID-19 outside of well-designed randomized trials."

To answer Taibbi's duplicitous leading question, there are two reasons why it is a bad idea to trumpet the possibility of unproven miracle cures during a pandemic. First, even the promising initial studies did not show ivermectin to be anywhere close to as protective as the vaccines, which are among the most-studied treatments in the history of medicine. Second, spreading overheated rumors about miracle drugs before the evidence is in will lead credulous people to take it without knowledge of proper dosage or considering toxic interactions. Sure enough, deworming paste is flying off the shelves, some doctor in Arkansas is giving it to prisoners, and calls to poison control centers are skyrocketing across the South. Facebook groups are full of stories of poisoned people suffering severe diarrhea and expelling "rope worms," which turn out to be almost certainlyshreds of intestinal lining.

But in terms of politics, the horse paste saga is a perfect window in the conservative mindset that is currently the biggest force fueling the pandemic. The core behavior here is muleheaded, selfish spitefulness, adhered to even at great personal risk. "Freedom" for movement conservatives is entirely one-directional: They get to spray virus fog whenever and wherever they want, and they also get to force you or your kids to not wear a mask.

Because that behavior is so monstrous, there is a large incentive to make up comforting lies about how the pandemic is exaggerated or fake, or the vaccines don't work much facilitated by the fact that consuming right-wing media for very long tends to turn your brain into horse paste. Some right-wing voices pushing this line actually believe it, as shown by the lamented dead above. But others are just cynical Abbott recently came down with COVID, but it turns out he had not only been vaccinated but also had already gotten a booster shot, and was getting daily tests, so had a very mild case.

Finally, because the financial engine of the conservative media complex is tricking gullible retired people into buying brain pills and reverse mortgages, conservatives are easy pickings for cynical and/or deluded grifters hawking snake oil remedies when they do contract COVID after coughing into each other's face at the Cheesecake Factory to own the libs.

Yet another wave of completely pointless death seems to be motivating a lot of people to finally get vaccinated but thus far the procrastinators, not the ideological, hard core antivaxxers. Even when Donald Trump tried to argue for the vaccine at a rally in Alabama recently, he was booed. It seems the pandemic will keep burning out of control until just about every conservative vaccine refusenik has gotten COVID. Another few months ought to do it.

View post:
Death and horse paste - The Week Magazine