We Hunted The Mammoth
It’s safe to say that The Federalist — the inexplicably well-funded right-wing rag — isn’t happy about Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates. Their first post on the subject declared it a “fascist move”; a followup post groused that the Biden administration is “really just using lies and deception to force their agenda on the American public without regard for the law or Constitution.”
Wednesday, Reddit banned a subreddit — r/NoNewNormal — infamous for spreading COVID misinformation.
The two most influential newspapers in the US put out a set of dueling vaccine op-eds today, with the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake delivering up evidence of what his article’s headline called the “slow and steady decline of the vaccine skeptics.” Over in the New York Times, meanwhile, science writer Tara Haelle argued that “[t]he Anti-Vaccine Movement Is Getting Stronger.”
The CDC has made it official, or at least as close to official as we are likely to get: If you’ve gotten all the vaccination shots for COVID, you don’t need to wear a mask — definitely not outside, and possibly not inside a shop or restaurant.
Recently, I had a very unsettling experience: I found myself agreeing with some of the worst people on planet earth. Donald Trump. Tucker Carlson. Scott Adams. The editors of the Daily Caller and (shudder) the Gateway Pundit.
Now that the CDC has, perhaps prematurely, given the go-ahead for vaccinated people to dispense with face masks outdoors, you might think the anti-maskers would calm down a little. But the fact that some people are continuing to wear masks despite the new CDC guidance has kept many of the anti-Maskers boiling over with anger.
Good news for those who hate the west coast: after decades of steady growth, California saw its population drop some 0.46 percent in 2020, according to a new government study.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld in which the titular character tries to return a jacket to a high-end boutique. When asked why, he answers “for spite” — he doesn’t much care for the salesman to sold it to him in the first place. That doesn’t go over well with the staff at the boutique and they refuse to take the jacket back.
Naomi Wolf was once an icon of feminism. Now she’s devolved into a crackpot, railing “skeptically” against masks and vaccines on Twitter and declaring that COVID lockdowns could well turn out to be the “worst policy decision outside of perhaps the Vietnam War, wars, of the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Today’s dose of recombinant paranoia comes from the Incels.co forums, where one inventive fellow has managed to combine anti-masker paranoia with fears of “incel genocide” into one unholy mess.
