April 23, 2020: The Windmill Party and the "Four Corners of Deceit."

 

4/23/20: Time to face a simple truth. Trump is now the leader of the newly formed Windmill Party. The GOP is extinct. He can tell the rank and file anything and they will swallow his sentences whole. If he says windmill noise causes cancer, they won’t blink. If he says climate change is a “hoax,” they will nod. If scientists at NASA and NOAA are sounding alarms, they tune them out. If they believe wholeheartedly in Donald J. Trump, there’s no need to think for themselves.

Rush Limbaugh taught the ill-informed to trust science.

(He will later receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

 

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“Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.” 

Dr. Rick Bright, head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority

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Not to deny that the Windmill Party includes many fine folks. Some of this blogger’s friends, neighbors, and even favorite relatives have been known to vote the Windmill Party line. 

That doesn’t mean this party isn’t chock full of nuts. Unfortunately, those nuts usually drive party policy. You have Alex Jones, peddler of both absurd conspiracy theories and expensive coronavirus-curing toothpaste, for one. In this alternative denier universe, Barack Obama was never born in America. The slaughter at Sandy Hook was a “false flag.” The massacre of first graders and teachers wasn’t the work of a screwed up 15-year-old armed with his mother’s AR-15. It was pulled off by the government, so Obama could have an excuse to seize all of our guns. 

Now we find ourselves swamped by trouble, in large part due to President Trump’s ability to ignore science. The Windmill faithful believed him when he claimed COVID-19 was like the flu. Their hero promised when it got warmer in April the virus would go away. They believed Trump and the other loudest deniers. They listened when Rush Limbaugh said the coronavirus was “the common cold, folks.” They believed because Rush had warned them about the “four corners of deceit” for years. Those four: government, academia, science, and media.

 

On an almost daily basis, Limbaugh and others worked to fire up the Windmill base. And the base believed. They listened when Laura Ingraham and Ainsley Earhardt and that whole goofy Fox News crew said there was no need to be alarmed. They took comfort knowing the virus was no threat. The president was nonchalant about taking action to address the spread. Party members assumed the nation was in good hands because they didn’t believe the media if they said we were not. The nation wasn’t in good hands. The president was a bumbling buffoon. 

The four corners of “truth” for Trump and the Windmill Party turned out to be superstition, simplification, bullsh*t, and lies.

 

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Fired for refusing to bend science to fit the president’s whims. 

NOTHING this president or any other did could have kept our country from suffering serious pain. But there was a chance to blunt the spread and limit that pain in the first weeks of the crisis. 

That chance was thrown away. 

The science was ignored. Now we pay an astronomical price. Today, we learned that 4.4 million more Americans had filed for unemployment. That brings the total for five weeks to 26.5 million. 

That is what happens when you compare a virus with some of the characteristics of SARS and MERS (my daughter, who works in infectious diseases at the CDC, just explained the similarities in a phone conversation) to “the common cold, folks.” You don’t act with the urgency you should. 

And you pay and pay and pay.

Frontline nurses aren't messing around with this "flu."

 

WE HAD fresh evidence again yesterday of the damage that can result when deniers lead us in reverse. 

Dr. Rick Bright, the director of the federal agency working on a vaccine to fight the virus, released a letter, announcing he had been fired. He said he refused to bend science to fit the president’s whims. 

If you haven’t been paying attention, because you’ve been busy trying to figure out how to pay last month’s bills, let alone the bills for this month, you may not realize the president has been touting an almost magical cure for COVID-19. The drug has never been tested for the purpose, but Trump says hydroxychloroquine could be “a gift from god.” He had “a hunch,” he has said, it could work to fight off the virus and he has been pushing hard for its use.

 

The problem was that the Windmill Party folks were sold. Ingraham made it clear on her nightly show that the drug would be a “game changer” and we could all thank Donald J. Trump. Hannity touted the drug. Tucker Carlson invited a guest on his show who swore that hydroxychloroquine had a “100 percent” cure rate in a clinical trial conducted by Stanford University. (See: 4/19/20.) 

Behind the scenes, Dr. Bright was making it clear he believed the drug would not work and might well do harm. 

What, then, was the sin for which he was fired? Dr. Bright says he was shunted aside because of his “insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit [emphasis added].” 

Bah! The Windmill crowd doesn’t trust science! Science is one of the “four corners” of deceit. 

In his statement, delivered by his lawyers, Bright said he was “speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science – not politics or cronyism – has to lead the way. Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths,” he added. “Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.”

 

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FOR NOW, we live in a free country, where Dr. Bright can publish his statement and employ the word “trump” in unsubtle fashion. We still enjoy free speech. The New York Times can pick up the story. We still have freedom of the press. Trump might not like it, nor his most avid fans. We don’t live in China. (Yet.) In China they silenced whistleblowers who warned COVID-19 was a threat. 

In this country, a reporter – a person President Trump would tell his followers was an “Enemy of the People” – inquired  during the daily press conference: Was Dr. Bright fired for taking a stand? 

In this country, the leader of the Windmill Party could only respond, “Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t; I don’t know who he is.”