Vaccine Passports, and the North Star of Contemporary Republican Policy

A recent news item reads “Brevard County’s Emergency Management Director and the Brevard County Fire Rescue Chief are pleading with the public to only go to the emergency room or call an ambulance if you truly have an emergency.” Brevard County is so overwhelmed with coronavirus cases, they are short on ambulances.

Is this just a random piece of data? Is it just a coincidence that it is happening in the same county where Gregory Edwards died in jail? Or is there something else going on here? Is it maybe a larger pattern of Republican policy? And what exactly is the pattern, if there is one?

I remember back in the 1990’s, Rush Limbaugh used to explain the liberal mind to congenital conservatives like myself. Rush would say things like “I know these liberals like the back of my hand. Let me tell you what is really going on here. This environmental movement is simply the new packaging for socialism. It was started by Gorbachev.” And Rush was right.

Today’s Republicans make no sense to me, the things they obsess over. Their explanations of their policies seem artificial and unconvincing. Just like the liberals trying to sell me environmentalism back in the 1990’s. It sounded then, and it sounds today, like people who are trying to promote to me, something they don’t actually believe themselves.

Governor Ron DeSantis and other Florida Republicans, present opposition to mask mandates, as an example of them being for freedom, for free individual choice. But Republicans are not for freedom, and openly despise libertarians.

Republicans do not believe one person is free to sell heroin and another person is free to take it. And if the second person dies the first person is not responsible. Quite the opposite. The State Attorney for Brevard County is notorious for seeking life sentences for people who facilitated a $50 drug transaction. Many of these sentences were overturned by judges as not even supported by Florida law.

But Florida Republicans insist we are against mask mandates because we are for freedom. And it doesn’t make any sense. They could argue that masks aren’t proven to be effective enough to be worth it. But many Republicans have abandoned that argument. The laissez-faire freedom argument is out of place, in today’s Republican Party. Republicans are passing laws against everything with a perceived social cost, and demanding high sentences, every day.

Republicans also suddenly argue that children are precious little snowflakes, who will suffer lifelong psychological harm from wearing a mask.

These are the same Republicans who a few years ago, were complaining that today’s kids are soft and get participation trophies.

These are the same Republicans who a few decades ago, complained that a rough childhood cannot be a “root cause” for committing crimes later in life.

These are the same Republicans who many years ago, insisted on protecting school sports. They were saying kids need to strap on a football helmet and get knocked down, because it builds character and helps them learn to deal with adversity.

Republicans even flip-flopped on girls’ sports. Not long ago, they were complaining that Title 9 forces schools to waste money on girls’ sports, which there is no real demand for, at the expense of college football. Suddenly today Republicans like Governor Ron DeSantis are saying girls need sports. But somehow the benefit is lost if they compete against guys.

Somehow Ron DeSantis’s daughters are precious little snowflakes who will wilt in masks, but need to play sports in the Florida heat, but cannot suffer losing individual sporting events to biological males. Girls playing snowflake sports against other girls – basically at the expense of and to the detriment of college football – is a key part of the Republican platform. It seems to be a very arbitrary and winding policy path, which on the surface makes no sense.

Let’s go to another area. Republicans say all day they are for the Constitution. They are now “Constitutional Sheriffs”. But they also hate “handcuffing the police”, which is what the majority of the Bill of Rights is precisely and avidly designed to do.

So what are Republicans really for? When they say they are for the Constitution, they mean they are for the Second Amendment. And when they say they are for the Second Amendment, what they really mean is they are for their right to shoot black people.

If a black person is carrying a gun in his car, Republicans have no problem with police violating his Bill of Rights to do an illegal search on his vehicle. Or even shoot a black person just based on the possibility he might have a gun in his vehicle.

Republicans think it is fair to shoot or incarcerate a black person proactively, to prevent the remote possibility of harm to a Karen. But they think if felons lie in court to convict innocent black defendants for harming Karens, “bah, life is unfair, there is no utopia”.

So there is in fact a common thread to all their policies, sold for different reasons. From all arguments and policies, Republicans select a seemingly contradictory subset, but with the common property being that they all justify killing black people.

The proof they are white supremacists, is in the private scale of values which manifests in all the various arguments in their diverse portfolio of policies. There is no other possible explanation, after extensive analysis by a lifelong conservative Republican, me. There is no other common thread, which ties it all together and can explain it.

They say World War I was started by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Today’s Republican Party is basically a subtle war to exterminate black people, which started when Darren Wilson was falsely accused of murdering Big Mike Brown in Ferguson.

Republicans complain that systemic racism is imaginary. They claim the newly popular “critical race theory”, which holds that institutions are structured by white Americans to the detriment of black people, is a hoax. But all evidence that I see, from being a Republican and talking to fellow members of the Republican Party, is that it is real. Even if it may be somewhat new in recent history.

So what is going on with the extreme Republican reaction to mask mandates and vaccine passports, supported by spurious arguments about freedom? Why are ambulances bogged down with coronavirus cases, in the same county where AJ Crooms and Sincere Pierce were killed without shame or regret?

What is going on is these people really are white supremacists. They really believe they are members a superior race, and coronavirus only kills black people and Mexicans. There are even actual Russian trolls promoting this theory to Americans, it is not just a “Russia hoax”.

So white Republicans in Brevard actually see the coronavirus as an opportunity for biological warfare against black people. They believe it won’t harm them or their children. And their children can carry it into their schools, and kill all the black kids, and gentrify them out of the community.

Republicans see the coronavirus as an opportunity to reverse the replacement of whites with browns, and purify the nation back to its European roots. And that is why Republicans dig in harder against mask and vaccine mandates for teachers, even as cases explode, and children, many of them black, suffer possibly long-term consequences.

Back when black people said the crack epidemic was a CIA plot to kill black people, or sweetened soda, or city water, it really was just a culture of paranoia. When today’s Republicans see coronavirus exploding in Florida, and six members of a black church in Jacksonville die in the same week, they see that as their policy working.

Viruses kill dark people, fentanyl is sold by dark people. Vaccines are freedom, fentanyl is murder. Kids who run from cops are dark blame the victim. People who sell fentanyl are dark, protect the victim. People who sell guns are white, protect the seller. You seeing True North?