I’d hate to be a far-right conservative anti-Covid-vaxxer these days, because I think Erick Erickson just tied them into knots using, of all things, poison ivy. Keeping in mind that Erickson’s blog is called Confessions of a Political Junkie, meaning he sees damn near everything through the political prism, he’s decided that the Democrats are really, really sneaky:
The Quinnipiac Poll shows Joe Biden underwater. 42% approval in the Quinnipiac Poll, which tends to lean pretty notably towards the Democrats. President Biden’s polling average has him down four points, 45 to 49. He is in the territory of Gerald Ford in terms of the polling average now regarding popularity. Gerald Ford was the least popular president other than Donald Trump in modern polling time.
I need to submit a proposition to you. What if Joe Biden’s demands for mandatory vaccines at companies of a hundred people or more is not intended to increase compliance with the vaccination rate, but is rather intended to have the effect everyone said it would, for people to dig in their heels and not get vaccinated. What if it’s part of a larger plan by Biden’s strategists who know that people will dig in their heels and refuse to get the vaccine. Biden’s team can then use this message headed into the midterms to make people hate the Republicans.
In other words, what if this is all part of a larger plan to try to divide people from the GOP and make them hate Republicans so they turn out in the midterms to help Democrats. I don’t like to go there in my thinking, but this Washington Post report and the polling seems to suggest that’s exactly what the Democrats are doing. Their internal summer polling shows that more and more people are disdainful of the unvaccinated. It is obvious, even to Democrats, that if the President of the United States goes out and tells people to get vaccinated or else, they will dig in their heels and not do it. What if Joe Biden’s announcement that he was mandating vaccines was in fact, an effort by design to get people to dig in their heels so that the Democrats could then turn around and blame the unvaccinated and tie them to Trump supporters?
In other words, the student body right[1] cries of Erickon’s comrades – to his credit, Erickson & his family are fully vaccinated, and he does not echo those cries of no vaccination! – from both secular (see: Tucker Carlson) and theocratic circles (see any number of far-right pastors and prophets, such as Robin Bullock) are actually being voiced by those wicked Democrats.
And the only way to own the libs is to get vaccinated.
Obviously, intellectually it’s fallacious. Speaking as an independent, this is clever, but not reflective of reality. That said, the far-right has demonstrated its lack of connection to reality, so perhaps this will work. We can certainly hope. Because I don’t want to see our endangered hospitals disappear further under the mound of Covid-19 sufferers. I want to get back to a normal society.
And I really doubt the Democrats would even think of such a scheme.
1 Student body right refers to power sweeps in American football, in which a number of players would attempt to escort the ball carrier around the right side of the line. I suspect the term refers back to the early days of American football, in which all of the men on the field for the offensive team would form the escort; sometimes, men were killed.
