You may remember a fellow I wrote about last week — a GOP candidate in Pennsylvania who threatened to take “twenty strong men” into a school board meeting and physically remove the board for mandating masks for kids.
He then launched into a sort of free association game based on the word “men.”
“Men where are you?” he asked the crowd at the “freedom rally” he was speaking to.
Men wake up smell the coffee. Let’s go make men great again, right, make men men again. Let’s go men, I need you.
Well, it turns out he’s not the only anti-vaxxer who wants to solve all the world’s problems — at least insofar as they involve schoolchildren and COVID masks — by assembling a group of big tough burly guys to maybe beat some school board members up.
Earlier this week, in Manatee County in Florida, a pro-Trump group put out its own request for a “manly presence” at a school board meeting.
Never mind that masks were already optional; these people are mad that they have to fill out a form. Because, like most anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, they are huge babies with a grossly overgrown sense of entitlement.
Anyway, in this case the group’s cyber-bark was worse than its IRL bite. According to the Bradenton Herald, the Tuesday meeting (which was actually about the school budget, not masks) was relatively free of disruption.
“[T]hough the message caused a brief stir,” the paper reported,
Tuesday’s meeting carried on with few disruptions. …
Just over two dozen maskless men and women attended the meeting in downtown Bradenton, quietly waiting for public comment and watching as the board reviewed this year’s finances.
Still, the manly (and womanly) brigade treated the board to a bunch of off-topic “public comments.”
One after the other, about a dozen people took to the podium and opposed the mask mandate before quietly returning to their seats.
Still, with so much talk of violence in the air, it’s really only a matter of time until some “manly” men actually physically assault local school board members or some other low-level politicos who dare to stand up to the anti-mask, anti-vax mob. And that is pretty alarming.
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they threatened to zip-tie that principal in arizona 🙁
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/three-men-zip-ties-confront-arizona-principal-after-student-told-n1278504
But caring about other people is socialism! Socialism bad! So masks bad! /s obvs
According to some numbers I just saw in an article, the claim that 99% of people recover from Covid is close to correct, with the actual number being more like 98%.
Of course, some of those recovering suffer permanent health issues, many run up massive time and bills in the hospital, etc, etc, and 1ish% of the US population is around 33 million people, so yeah, all this mask and vaccine stuff is just a bunch of BS. Should just let it go like Frozen…
@ .45
Yeah. There seems to be this idea that you either die from covid or make a full recovery. But in reality, for every fatality, 19 people will suffer serious permanent lung damage, and a larger number of people will still feel some level of illness for a few months.
All I’m saying is I’m not surprised that this is the kind of bullsh*t that privileged white men protest for! Remember when people used to protest to be treated like human beings, for voting rights, and civil liberties like school desegregation!
I think all this new zeal for protesting has probably come about as an influence of the George Floyd protests last year, because up til then nobody could get these complacent, overprivileged, mentally inert people to protest about anything. They were simply too comfortable to get off their ashes and protest for anything, not even the lives of their own children through gun control! And I could understand if they protested for that…. but this kind of stuff…trashing coffee makers and shoes they’ve already bought, reopening the hair salons, reinstating trump as President, taking off everyone’s masks, Covid is a hoax!
I seriously didn’t think it was possible for these people to become even more mindlessly fearful and more easily manipulated. I thought it had reached its pinnacle. It’s extremely obvious to anyone looking how they’re being stampeded back and forth like sheep, upset about whatever is the new thing Fox says be upset about that week. They’ve forgotten about cancel culture and CRT, in the meantime, while they protest this. Next week it will be something else that’s irrelevant and just as meaningless.
Is it just me, or is anyone else just horribly, horribly, tired of these people being mad about and protesting some brand new meaningless bullsh*t every month to keep them diverted from the fact that we’re all sinking on the f*cking Titanic?The rest of us have enough real actual fears (climate change, gun massacres, racism, voting rights) without also adopting whatever codswallop these people have swallowed this week!
One child dead is 100% of somebody’s child.
@ .45 and @ Alan Robertshaw
From the numbers I’ve seen the survival rate is less than 98 percent. On top of that and the lung damage, there’s more still. The virus causes damage throughout the body which can lead to renal problems and heart disease in the future. That’s just to name a few of the serious long-term life threatening conditions infection can cause. Then there’s then the ruinous medical bills too. Still, that’s not the worst of it. Covid cases come in clusters and overwhelm hospitals. How many secondary deaths has that caused already and how many more will it cause going forward? Since a hospital that’s a!ready past its capacity can’t take in an emergency case of a heart attack, or any number of other immediately life threatening emergencies. The death toll of this virus stretches far beyond the deaths we can confirmed it caused directly.
So since they keep begging for manly men volunteers… does this mean they themselves aren’t Manly Men?
@.45: Yeah, 30+ million people dead and other millions heavily in debt and unable to work due to long Covid is SO much less important than wearing a piece of cloth over your face.
This pretty much speaks for me:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/oh-my-fucking-god-get-the-fucking-vaccine-already-you-fucking-fucks
@Natsume:
https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality
Already nearing 10% of the casualties from World War I or the 1918 flu, and 5% of those for World War II, if we extrapolate to the present (probably near 5 million; on the one hand there’s vaccinations, but on the other delta is deadlier than the original strain and the majority of the world’s population has not been vaccinated).
Wow. The poster from FL spelled “rogue” correctly. Maybe he has Sarah Palin’s book with that word in the title and knows how to copy. How manly, or whatever.
@Katherine the Adequate
Some people say that Sarah Palin went rouge. I’m one of these people.
Palin Parody ‘Going Rouge’: Fair Or Foul?
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2009/10/palin_parody_going_rouge_fair.html
Anti-vax terrorists in Colorado were throwing fireworks, garbage and mystery substances at vaccination/testing sites and also ran down signs and ran a car onto a curb at a nurse. No charges were filed, of course. These people keep getting away with their violent tantrums. They yell about their freedom from vaccines but now they’re trying to stop others from having freedom.
@Natsume
And it’s killing perfectly healthy doctors from overwork. My mom works a county hospital urgent care, which means the government one in our state. It’s a contractor job because you wouldn’t want to, you know, give benefits to doctors or anything in a time of crisis when they might catch a communicable disease but I digress. It’s a critical hospital, the only one for a thirty mile radius. If she doesn’t go to work on her shift, the urgent care is closed, no patients are seen.
She’s 70 years old and working 80 hours a week because two doctors already died of covid, the two 80 year old doctors retired (didn’t want to risk covid at their age, not gonna blame them), and one died of a heart attack. One quit because they wouldn’t give her PPE to treat covid patients with, about a year ago (my mom chose to make custom PPE from garbage bags. Garbage bags!). So my mom is working obscene hours for anyone, but especially a 70 year old. It’s slowly killing her.
I tried running ads at my place long ago, didn’t last long: ’till the backwoods barbi’s “book” Going Rouge showed up in my sidebar. That was the end of that. I get’s better …
Around the same time someone from Alaska with a … ahhhhh, writing style very much like the quitta’ from wassilla showed up in comments trying to convince me teabagging was/is grassroots, up by the boots not scrotum-sucking. That was the end of comments.
If we had put her jail when she put a target on a congresswoman, we wouldn’t be here.
I’ve had Barjavel’s La Nuit Des Temps on the mind lately.
This is one of the reasons why.
@Big Titty Demon
I’m so sorry. That is a horror story. All best wishes to you and your dedicated mother.
One in seven children who gets COVID develops chronic symptoms.
These men are fighting for the right to maim their own children. For life. I don’t think there’s literally anything that shows better how heartless and empty conservatism is – for all their talk about Protecting Our Children and Doing What Needs To Be Done, they’re treating their own descendants as disposable. And not in the long-term sense as with global warming, but in the immediate sense of “I don’t care if my own kids get COVID tomorrow”.
It’s like mass suicide on the scale of a whole country.
Huh, almost like the Venn diagram between anti-vax science deniers and the neofash insurrectionists is a circle or something. How strange! How bizarre!
@Big Titty Demon, your mom is heroic. She also needs to take care of herself and scale those hours back before it does kill her. I hope that you’re able to convince her of that. <3
@ .45
The population of the U.S. about 330 million, and 1% of that is 3.3 million, not 33 million.
@Big Titty Demon
You and your mom have my deepest sympathy for that horrible situation. Thanks for adding even more depth to my fury and loathing for anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. On the other hand, mad respect and love to your mom. She’s a real life suoerhero.
I really need to motivate my disabled rear and take the mile long walk to get vaccinated. Since it’s the only place I can for sure access to get vaccinated easily. At least I always mask up and take all of the other precautions. So that if I do get it, I won’t be spreading it.
@ Surplus to Requirements
If we’re doing war comparisons:
The number of US dead from Covid is already higher than the number of US combat deaths. All of them. From every war. Combined.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Well, sure, but as whichever asshat it was said, “Your dead child doesn’t trump my Second Amendment rights.” (This was before Cheeto Mussolini ran for office, the verb was fine then.) Clearly it doesn’t trump their right to getting themselves or others sick.
I wonder how long it will be until some group appropriates “I can’t breathe” as an anti-mask slogan.
@rabidrabbit:
I wonder how long it will be until some group appropriates “I can’t breathe” as an anti-mask slogan.
It’s long since happened:
https://www.amazon.com/Breathe-Mask-Protest-Facemasks-T-Shirt/dp/B08F1Z8X7M
http://www.youtube.com/Kz2lRQig-us
@Rabid Rabbit – I was going to say until it’s their own child, but the GOP doesn’t care about their own children, either. They fight tooth and nail against the future.
We’ve now reached the part of civic discourse where one side has run out of ideas and is resorting to violence. In 2024, the Republican platform will be just sounds of punching and explosives.