October 15, 2020

By Thom Hartmann

Scientists are projecting 400,000 deaths by the end of the year from coronavirus, although a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that we have already undercounted the total deaths so far by as many as 75,000.

Meanwhile, we’re learning that back in February the Trump administration gave a private briefing to elites at the conservative Hoover Institution, telling them the economy was about to get into big trouble because of the virus. As a result numerous multimillionaires and billionaires made a huge killing, while the American middle class got wiped out.

The New York Times is reporting today that over 8 million American families have slipped into poverty in the last seven months. This almost certainly understates the breadth and depth of the problem caused by the Trump administration‘s failure to stop the virus in the United States.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is even suggesting that, because of Trump’s and the Republicans’ failure to do anything about the virus, we should cancel Thanksgiving.

This is all a result of the Trump administration’s policy of “herd immunity“ which Dr. Fauci calls “nonsense and dangerous.“

The Republicans have a long history of ignoring public health crises.

For decades, they denied that tobacco causes cancer; in 2000 Mike Pence even wrote an Op Ed for a newspaper saying explicitly that tobacco doesn’t cause cancer.

For decades they’ve ignored, ridiculed, and denied that human activity burning fossil fuels is changing our climate in ways that are dangerous to human and other life on this planet.

They are actively ignoring millions of Americans who don’t have enough to eat or are on the verge of eviction right now.

They’re before the Supreme Court in a few weeks asking that protections against pre-existing conditions be knocked down.

For 40 years they’ve been gutting regulatory agencies that protect Americans from corporations polluting our air and water, banks ripping us off, and companies producing and selling defective products.

They are champions for the military industrial complex selling instruments of death and destruction, while actively blocking low-income people’s access to Medicaid in red state after red state.

We need to start calling things what they are. The Republican Party is a death cult.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute

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