Covid should have instilled a massive national unity response that was many times that of 9/11 — instead we got the Red Panic.

It’s awfully telling that the dominant story conservatives tell themselves about Covid is “this is a Democrat plot to enslave Republicans,” rather than, “this is a Chinese plot to kill Americans” —; Which, whatever the merits of the “lab leak” hypothesis, is a much more straightforward theory that actually fits the facts. Really shows you how decades of RWNJ propaganda saturating the airwaves of Middle America have fatally corrupted their notions of genuine patriotism and rotted their critical thinking skills from the inside out. (More charitably, these absurd conspiracies directed at Democrats are a reflection of conservatives’ newfound status anxiety: They no longer call the shots in America and they know it.)