• @Makeitstop
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    1926 days ago

    If what they really cared about was stopping crime, they’d make it an additional charge that could be tacked on when committing crimes. But they don’t want that, they want to prosecute and harass protestors in violation of their first amendment rights, and they want to oppose public health measures including mask wearing specifically as a method of preventing the spread of diseases.

    Trump wanted to downplay Covid in 2020 because he thought it made him look bad (not understanding that he’d have looked a lot better if he showed some leadership and called for unity against a common threat). Because of that one decision, the right aligned on an anti-health, pro-disease platform that will probably be with us for a generation. The only ways it might go away sooner are if the feds crackdown on it hard (assuming politics and the courts don’t stop them), or if a new pandemic spreads with a high enough mortality to rate to weed out those who don’t learn the lesson.

    • @grue
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      425 days ago

      Trump wanted to downplay Covid in 2020 because he thought it made him look bad (not understanding that he’d have looked a lot better if he showed some leadership and called for unity against a common threat).

      Trump wanted to downplay Covid in 2020 because for a hot minute there at the start it was killing more urban Democrats than rural Republicans.