Reality Bites

Matt Shuham for TPM reviews the tragi-comic story of hydroxychloroquine. If you have been paying attention you already know that the FDA has withdrawn its emergency authorization for use of the drug to treat or prevent Covid-19, because the better the evidence gets, the more clearly it shows that the drug is useless. The only reason the agency gave the emergency authorization in the first place, and the only reason such extensive resources were invested in clinical trials for the drug, is because Resident Dump claimed to have magically gained the knowledge that it is effective. What was essentially a hoax resulted in the federal government spending millions of dollars to purchase the compound, administration of a useless and actively harmful nostrum to veterans around the country and to other patients, particularly in states led by Republican governors, a massive waste of critically needed resources for clinical trials, shortages of the drug for people who actually did need it, many people heedlessly risking exposure to the virus because they thought they were protected by Dump's magic potion, and undoubtedly some number of avoidable deaths and cardiac injuries.

One sad part of this story is that the hoax was relentlessly promoted on Fox News and other right wing media. It is a requirement that cultists sheepishly follow the Holy Word of their leader, and that's what they did. But this is now completely typical of Resident Dump and his death cult. He repeatedly said early in the course of the pandemic that it would miraculously disappear, so his followers believed it was all a big hoax. He claimed that Kim Jong Un would give up his nuclear weapons, just because they had a cordial meeting. We know about the biggest inauguration crowd in history, the massive tax cut for the wealthy that would magically pay for itself, that tariffs on imports are paid by China. Now there is no systemic racism among police in the U.S. and he has done more for black people than any president since Lincoln and maybe including Lincoln.

It's impossible to catalog the tens of thousands of delusional statements from the Resident but by now you get the point. Magical thinking is a characteristic of early childhood, and immature adults. But saying something, even if you really believe it, doesn't make it true. If you live in a fantasy world reality will eventually bite you in the ass because that is the nature of reality. It's real.

A guy once tried to start a Church of Reality. ("If it's real, we believe in it.") That was not actually a terrible idea, unfortunately he turned out to be something of a megalomaniac so it didn't work out. (Trying to become the leader of a personality cult based on reality is a weird move.) But now there's anthropogenic climate change to deal with, resource depletion, mass extinction, deeply embedded racism, rising and unsustainable economic inequality, and growing threats of civil and international conflict. These are real. Denial will not make them go away. We all need to get real, and that means the Republican Party must come to an end.

Update, Dear Fucking Moron: I report on event that happened on June 16, and you send me a link to an event that happened on June 3 thinking it refutes me. You are a total dipshit.