Trump's supporters are killing themselves by the thousands to prove their fealty to him.
Donald Trump Is Now Responsible For Every Republican Covid Deathhttps://thebanter.substack.com/p/donald-trump-is-now-responsible-for
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I felt genuine fear. I live in Washington DC and the mood on the street was palpable. Neighbours were in tears, and many friends of ours began planning to leave the country. A hard nosed reporter I know even confessed to having panic attack before she went on air to declare his victory. My wife and I strongly considered leaving the US for the UK, and only decided to stay because we knew that the only way to defeat Trumpism was to confront it. We marched on the street with hundreds of thousands of women in the days after Trump’s inauguration, donated to anti-Trump groups, and I geared the Banter team up for a relentless war on the new administration. I would like to say that I had no idea how bad the Trump administration was going to be, that Trump might curb his insane behaviour in the White House, and that he might (for once) rise to the occasion. The truth is that I knew it would be bad. Very, very bad.
The wrong man at the wrong time
Anyone with even a vague understanding of history should have seen that Trump never had any interest in “Making America Great Again”. Like every autocrat before him, Trump wanted power for himself and satiate his uncontrollable thirst for destruction. We now know that the very worst predictions about Trump’s presidency were true. Not only did he almost succeed in destroying democracy in America and turning it into an international laughing stock, he helped kill off hundreds of thousands of citizens by botching the Covid pandemic response. He fanned the flames of America’s vicious culture wars by turning the pandemic into a political issue, ensuring his supporters would suffer needlessly from the Coronavirus in order to “own the libs”. The culture war Trump poured gasoline on is now having very real world consequences after his presidency. The Delta variant is ripping through the country, and Trump’s supporters are dying by the thousands because they will not get vaccinated.
The suicide cult
Link to tweet
Trump greatest crime against his country is that he turned an ignorant mass of uneducated racists into a full on suicide cult. His supporters aren’t just willing to commit acts of violence against liberals and minorities, they are willing to die to prove their fealty to him. In a stunning CNN report this week, Elle Reeve travelled to Missouri to interview Trump supporters who won’t take the Covid vaccine despite rapidly escalating deaths in the region. It makes for incredibly sobering viewing as Reeve asks residents why they won’t get vaccinated. “They shafted my president," Wayland Bland told Reeve during the filming. “They would have had the vaccine, already had it, but they wouldn't give it to him because they know he would be re-elected so they had to swindle around and... keep it from him." “You shafted me and my president and I ain’t taking your medicine”. While some of the other participants in the report weren’t quite as gung-ho about offing themselves as Reeve, the sentiment was similar: Republicans don’t trust the vaccine because they associate it with Democrats and the Biden administration. As a consequence, Missouri is experiencing huge surges in Covid cases and hospitalizations. Reported The Kansas City Star earlier this week:
This isn’t just happening in Missouri — red states across the country are seeing dramatic surges in infection rates and their hospitals are filling up with unvaccinated patients. This is now, as CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky stated in July, “A pandemic of the unvaccinated." This is entirely Donald Trump’s fault. He did what every public health official, doctor, Democrat, and scientist told him not to do, which was to politicize the virus. And as this chart indicates incredibly clearly, Republican states have shockingly bad vaccination rates:
How not to respond to a pandemic.........
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Last edited Sat Sep 11, 2021, 07:21 AM - Edit history (1)
Than to make themselves abysmally, pukingly sick, and then to die a wretched, lonely death to "honor" a New York City casino hustling, contractor-stiffing, lie-spouting, tax-cheating comrade.
literally a century - since Woodrow Wilson - a whole demographic finally found someone - the designated "leader of the free world", who was not only willing to coddle them and cater to their idiosyncrasies, but helped to promote their racism and xenophobia, giving them a new way to express it. And that was a powerful motivator that allowed them to "finally" be "legitimized", both in their minds and as reinforced and magnified by the media (the latter doing it so they could increase their ratings by endlessly covering or manufacturing a "both sides" view (not caring whether what they were doing was actually pouring more gasoline on the fires that had been started).
I.e., the things they always "stood for" generationally, that American society had finally started rejecting and fighting back against over the past 60 years, were now "in vogue", and as "proof", were even being supported by "the top". That gave them reassurance that they were "right all along", and gave them something to finally "rally around". 
Before this, they existed in "isolated pockets" or scattered among the general population around the country, continually suppressed not only by Democratic Presidents, but by Republican ones as well, the latter like Tricky Dick, Raygun, Poppy, and Shrub, who initially sought out their support at election time, subsequently threw them on the back burner once they got into office. But this time, things were different.
And so here we are. 
The one thing that does correspond to the "before" (under Wilson) and the "now", under Biden, is that many of the "symbols of hate" that DID crop up under Wilson - e.g., all those statues and worship of the the Confederacy and its flag, have been finally systematically removed.
Andrew Johnson from that list, the same one who made everything about himself and who got impeached in the process.
are sort of unusual too, and can sometimes go OTT enough to be distracting.
But the fact that you used a Faux Snooze-linked quote for what he said seems to suggest who benefits from his viewpoint, not much different from Hattie McDaniel's vehement defense of her ugly stereotypical work in another racist "classic" also hailed as "one of the greatest films of all time" - "Gone with the Wind", a film, like the same director's "The Wizard of Oz", was unique at the time due to use of color film -
You also have Disney's racist trope "Song of the South", highlighting another heralded Academy Award-winning film that came out not long after, perfecting the long-form use of a "live action/animation" mix in a film -
.
One could also add a film that came out a little over a decade after "Birth of a Nation" - "The Jazz Singer", bringing about what was probably the most significant breakthrough in film-making as the "first talkie" -
But with all I have shown, do you see a consistent and troubling pattern there?
Lee has been been roundly criticized throughout his career regarding the problems he has with his sexist views of black women (including in "She's Gotta Have it" and "School Daze" ), and his uneven attempts to rectify that.
These types of films have always been "rewarded" by the white supremacist power structure to reinforce what is posted about over and over and over here on DU - "institutional racism".
It took the graphic real-life snuff video of a man who had the life choked out of him by a gleeful cop smashing his knee in the man's neck until he was dead, to FINALLY begin to break over a century's worth of damage to a whole community - in film, in the "memorials" that litter the nation with the celebration of traitors, and in "every day products" that many people brought into their homes to covet and enjoy while subconsciously embracing the fucking supremacist stereotyping that these products were drenched in.
I posted what Spike Lee also said and thought about that film with clips and interviews, which you seemed to have missed, and also posted how he directly addressed it during his career with a film "short" that referenced it while he was still in school and via another of his feature-length films that seemed to have gotten little press. Those are the facts that are being outright ignored but that's not surprising.
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