If you really want to understand why America is now viewed by the rest of the planet as a pariah – its citizens denied the right to travel the world because of the incompetence of its government and toxicity of its culture – please watch this:
IMG_0407 from Andrew Colton on Vimeo.
Somehow, when the ingredients for this cauldron of crazy are fed to this woman by Fox, it is called journalism and sponsored by major companies such as Office Depot, Expedia, Bayer, ADT, Ford, and the like. But when regurgitated on social media and in forums such as the one in the video (Palm Beach County Commission), it is dismissed as fringe lunacy, for which the GOP and its media arm take no responsibility.
Although Trumpism is what precipitated the eruption of this toxic craziness into the core of our national life, it will not disappear with Trump’s presidency.
Although Disney, Papa Johns, and T-Mobil have withdrawn their advertising from Tucker Carlson, many other major companies remain as sponsors of Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham. It’s one thing to acquiesce to the free speech rights of these toxic voices, it’s quite another to fund them by the purchase of products and services from their advertisers.
If your mother were killed by the COVID resurgence in a place where the shut down was ended prematurely and masks were not required, would you patronize a company that sponsored those that spewed the nonsense that killed her? And under what moral code is it ok for the rest of us, who were lucky enough not to have loved ones killed by COVID, to patronize those same companies? Effective immediately, I am boycotting any company that still advertises on Fox.
I still have the concept of “negligent homicide” rattling around my brain from law school days: the killing of another person through gross negligence, i.e., when a person’s death is caused by conduct that grossly deviates from “ordinary care.” That in turn often depends on whether the consequence of the negligent conduct was reasonably foreseeable (for example, the way it is foreseeable that you risk hurting or killing someone if you drive while intoxicated). Every morning I read ample testimony that the relevant state and federal governments knew what was required to protect the people and chose not to do it (in many cases not merely due to negligence or “wishful thinking,” but for political reasons that render the conduct morally repugnant). Looking around at the current crisis in Texas, Peter Hotez, dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, observed: “All of this was predicted and is predictable.”