COVID Gets Even Redder, While Trump Worries More About Windmills (Not) Killing Birds

An exhaustive analysis of COVID-19 data by David Leonhardt of the New York Times has found that the efforts of right-wing media like Fox News to deceive their audience about the coronavirus have been remarkably effective. The result confirms previous studies that show that those who rely on Fox News for information are significantly more at risk for contracting COVID than those who do not.

Donald Trump, Coronavirus

The article in the Times is validation that trusting Fox News is dangerous to your health, as well as that of your family, your community, and your nation. Leonhardt goes into detail in the article, but he summarized some of his findings in a handy Twitter thread beginning here (with some key points following):

“The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe COVID, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults, per @KHNews polls.”

“As a result, COVID deaths have been concentrated in counties outside of major metropolitan areas. Many of these are in red states, while others are in red parts of blue or purple states.”

“This situation is a tragedy, in which irrational fears about vaccine side effects have overwhelmed rational fears about a deadly virus.”

“It stems from disinformation — promoted by right-wing media, like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group and online sources.”

“[C]onservative Americans will probably continue to suffer an outsized amount of unnecessary illness and death.”

This is indeed a tragic situation. And the problem is not limited to conservatives and Fox News viewers. Their stubborn refusal to accept the science has the potential of allowing the virus to mutant into new variants that are vaccine resistant. So they are putting everyone else at risk to satisfy their partisan blindness and selfishness. What’s more, they are preventing businesses and schools from fully opening up so that we can return to some semblance of normalcy.

In the meantime, Donald Trump has not even mentioned this matter, even though it is affecting his supporters more than anyone else. But he did have the time to tweet (via his Twitter ban defying spokes-shill) that energy generating windmill turbines are “Destroying our oceans, landscapes, and birds!” He forgot to mention his ludicrous belief that they also cause cancer.

Trump’s tweet linked to a three week old article in the New York Times about the Biden administration’s plans “to build 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind in the United States by 2030.” The article said nothing about birds. That was another of Trump’s tropes that has no basis in reality, but which he frequently repeats to keep his cult disciples in a perpetual state of fear. For the record, according to the Sierra Club

“Estimates of up to a million or more birds a year are killed by turbines in the US, but that is far exceeded by collisions with communications towers (6.5 million); power lines, (25 million); windows (up to 1 billion); and cats (1.3 to 4.0 billion); and those lost due to habitat loss, pollution and climate change (American Bird Conservancy, Nature). Even if there were twenty times more wind turbines, enough to supply the US with electricity, the number of birds killed, assuming no improvement in wind turbine design, would be about 10 million–still far less than most other causes of bird deaths.”

So apparently Trump is more worried about his false notion that windmills are killing an excessive amount of birds, than he is about COVID actually killing people – particularly Republicans, the people who he purports to represent and who worship him. It’s a grotesque mangling of priorities that rests on a foundation of lies.

And if that weren’t bad enough, Trump and his GOP confederates are so utterly incapable of responding to the recent good news for Democrats and America (infrastructure bill, jobs report, climate conference, COVID decline), that they are resorting to attacking (the fictional) Big Bird of Sesame Street for having the audacity to educate children about vaccines. There goes his pretense about caring for birds.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump Whines that Threats He’d Start a 3rd Party are ‘Fake News’ Because, Of Course He Does

It’s another Monday morning and another day of cranky kvetching by America’s biggest crybaby, Donald Trump. Once again he is wallowing in victimhood at the hands of the meanies in the media, or as he refers to call them so tediously, “fake news.”

Donald Trump, Republican, GOP

On this occasion Trump was triggered by an ABC News story previewing one of the revelations in an upcoming book by veteran journalist Jonathan Karl. In the book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” Trump spoke with the Republican National Committee chair, Ronna McDaniel, and delivered a bold threat. According to Karl…

“In an angry conversation on his final day as president, Donald Trump told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee he was leaving the GOP and creating his own political party — and that he didn’t care if the move would destroy the Republican Party. […] Trump only backed down when Republican leaders threatened to take actions that would have cost Trump millions of dollars.”

In response, Trump released a statement (via his Twitter ban defying spokes-shill) making a predictable and familiar charge that…

“It’s a totally made up and fabricated story, it’s Fake News. Jonathan Karl is a third-rate reporter working for ABC Non-News. ABC Non-News and 3rd rate reporter Jonathan Karl have been writing Fake News about me from the beginning of my political career.”

Karl’s book says that he has “two sources with direct knowledge of these events.” They report that McDaniel “called to wish [Trump] farewell [and that] It was a very un-pleasant conversation.” Elaborating on this, Karl wrote that…

“Donald Trump was in no mood for small talk or nostalgic goodbyes. He got right to the point. He told her he was leaving the Republican Party and would be creating his own political party. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was also on the phone. The younger Trump had been relentlessly denigrating the RNC for being insufficiently loyal to Trump. In fact, at the January 6 rally before the Capitol Riot, the younger Trump all but declared that the old Republican Party didn’t exist anymore.”

Karl also related the following exchange between Trump and McDaniel:

“I’m done,” Trump told McDaniel. “I’m starting my own party.”
“You cannot do that,” McDaniel told Trump. “If you do, we will lose forever.”
“Exactly. You lose forever without me,” Trump responded. “I don’t care.” […]
“This is what Republicans deserve for not sticking up for me.”

According to Karl, Trump eventually backed down after McDaniel issued threats of her own. She told Trump that if he left the Party it would cease to pay his quite substantial legal bills. And even more troubling for Trump, the Party would withhold the campaign’s email list containing some forty million Trump supporters who were worth millions of dollars to Trump politically and personally. That was the kicker.

Naturally Trump is dismissing all of this in his customary fashion by throwing a tantrum. But he had no objections Karl’s reporting back in June when a passage from the book was released that revealed what his Attorney General, Bill Barr, had to say about his baseless claims of election fraud. Barr confessed that…

“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time. If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bull—-.”

Trump’s fantasies about starting a third party would have zero chance of success. Unless his definition of success is damaging the Republican Party, which he is doing anyway. But whether or not Trump leaves the Party, there are plenty of long-time members who are leaving because they can no longer stomach Trump’s lies and disloyalty to the nation. Which is precisely how the majority of the American people feel. In the end, we don’t care if he goes with the GOP or his own party. We just want him to go.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.