The Most Dangerous Pathogen

Headline: “Republicans are embracing Trump-enabled conspiracy theories more vigorously than ever.”

It’s as if a pandemic of a virus that infects the brain has swept the land, Republicans are singularly vulnerable to it, nearly all of them have fallen ill with it, there’s no cure for it, nor hope that a vaccine will be developed to prevent it, and even if there were, those vulnerable to it would refuse to be inoculated. The pathogen destroys judgment and any sense of what is right and wrong. Victims become obsessed with bizarre and patently irrational theories and become willing to destroy democracy in order to invest power in hyper ego-centric demagogues. For example, in what, if it were a movie, would be a farce too absurd to be considered for public release, the Arizona Republican-controlled senate recently hired a firm with the name of Cyber Ninjas, owned by an extremist Trump supporter, to conduct a faux audit of the results in the state’s most populous county of last fall’s election. Meanwhile, although Trump is out of office, he is as active as ever as a super-spreader of this ghastly disease.