Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Atlantic Monthly: The Gaslighting Vaccine

I know November seems far away, but the time to start preparing for the coming onslaught of Republican misinformation and gaslighting is now.  Towards that end, I would like to recommend an excellent series of articles in The Atlantic starting with this one entitled "We were warned."
We were warned in 2012, when the Rand Corporation surveyed the international threats arrayed against the United States and concluded that only pandemics posed an existential danger, in that they were “capable of destroying America’s way of life.”
We were warned in 2015, when Ezra Klein of Vox, after speaking with Bill Gates about his algorithmic model for how a new strain of flu could spread rapidly in today’s globalized world, wrote that “a pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.” If there was anything humanity could be certain that it needed to prepare for to prevent the deaths of a lot of people in little time, it was this.
We were warned in 2017, a week before inauguration day, when Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s outgoing homeland-security adviser, gathered with Donald Trump’s incoming national-security officials and conducted an exercise modeled on the administration’s experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. The simulation explored how the U.S. government should respond to a flu pandemic that halts international travel, upends global supply chains, tanks the stock market, and burdens health-care systems—all with a vaccine many months from materializing. “The nightmare scenario for us, and frankly to any public-health expert that you would talk to, has always been a new strain of flu or a respiratory illness because of how much easier it is to spread” relative to other pandemic diseases that aren’t airborne, Monaco told me.
Never forget that in the face of all these warnings, Donald Trump closed the White House pandemic office.  He fired Tim Ziemer, the head of global health security on the White House’s National Security Council, and did not replace him. He tried to cut funding for the CDC (happily that bit of insanity was thwarted by Congress). He called the corona virus a Democratic hoax.  And, despite failing piled upon failing, he steadfastly insists that he's doing a terrific job and takes no responsibility for anything.

James Fallows has been writing a long series in The Atlantic documenting all of Trumps disastrous decisions in real time since 2016.  There are so many it can make tedious reading, but we're all going to have more free time on our hands in the coming months.  One of the ways you can use that time is to inform yourself about how we got into this mess so that we can start to make better decisions going forward.  You can start with the first four installments of Fallows' series dedicated specifically to the corona virus, because even the most die-hard Trumpeteer is going to have a hard time avoiding the reality of the situation.  It is true that Donald Trump is not singlehandedly responsible for the disaster that is currently unfolding.  But there can be no doubt in any sane person's mind that he has made the situation much, much worse by failing to provide leadership at a crucial time, in other words, by utterly failing to do his job.

Pay attention.  This matters.  A lot.  Our last chance to rid ourselves of this pariah comes this November.  Success depends on convincing people who have been very effectively vaccinated against facts, so this is not going to be easy.  But in this case here are, quite literally, lives at stake.  We can't afford to blow this again.

3 comments:

Publius said...

Democrat Priorities

>I know November seems far away, but the time to start preparing for the coming onslaught of Republican misinformation and gaslighting is now. Towards that end, I would like to recommend an excellent series of articles in The Atlantic starting with this one entitled "We were warned."

I read it. Some quotes:
'The systemic failure stems in part from the fact that in recent decades successive administrations have not treated pandemic preparedness with the degree of seriousness they reserved for addressing other top security threats—from, say, terrorists or adversarial nations.'

'The irony is that this is all occurring in a country, the United States, that for decades "has been a leader in pandemic preparedness," Toner said. "We were better prepared than others," he acknowledged, “but no one, no country, is prepared for what we’re seeing now."'

@Ron:
>We were warned in 2012, when the Rand Corporation
>We were warned in 2015, when Ezra Klein of Vox, after speaking with Bill Gates about his algorithmic model for how a new strain of flu could spread
>We were warned in 2017, a week before inauguration day, when Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s outgoing homeland-security adviser,

What has Congress doing to respond to these warnings?
* Waste two years creating and perpepuating a "Russia Collusion" hoax
* Waste time with a hoax impeachment

Has "pandemic readiness" been a priority of democrats and the Democratic party? No, democratic priorities have been offshoring manufacturing jobs to China, open borders, the Green Leap Forward, public funding for abortions, and forcing public schools to let boys shower in the girls locker room.

These "warnings" are also very non-specific -- they identify what, but not when.

Ron, sometime in the future you are going to die, and your spirit is likely going to Hell. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.

>Never forget that in the face of all these warnings, Donald Trump closed the White House pandemic office. He fired Tim Ziemer, the head of global health security on the White House’s National Security Council, and did not replace him. He tried to cut funding for the CDC (happily that bit of insanity was thwarted by Congress).. . .

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.

Ron said...

> What has Congress doing to respond to these warnings?

Yes, thank you for reminding me.

Congress consists of two chambers, one of which has been controlled by Republicans this entire time, the other of which was controlled by Republicans for two thirds of the time. So yes, Congress -- which is to say Mitch McConnell and the other Republicans who have been shielding and enabling Trump (which is to say, all of them) -- certainly deserve a good deal of the blame.

> Waste two years creating and perpepuating a "Russia Collusion" hoax

Excuse me? What does that have anything to do with Congress? The Russia collusion investigation was carried out by the Justice Department, not Congress.

> Has "pandemic readiness" been a priority of democrats and the Democratic party?

Yes. Barack Obama maintained not one but two separate teams dedicated to different aspects of pandemic response. Trump dissolved both of them.

https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-social-behavior-trump-white-house.html

> No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.

See, this is exactly what gaslighting looks like. He may have been there, but the White House definitely did dissolve the pandemic office, and Trump definitely knew about it despite the fact that he said "I don't know anything about it." How do we know? Because Trump actually *bragged* about it at the time. There's video:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/coronavirus-video-trump-pandemic-team-cut-2018-a9405191.html

Publius said...

A priority of no one

@Ron:
Excuse me? What does that have anything to do with Congress? The Russia collusion investigation was carried out by the Justice Department, not Congress.

You must have missed the antics by Rep. Adam Schiff and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

>Yes. Barack Obama maintained not one but two separate teams dedicated to different aspects of pandemic response. Trump dissolved both of them.

You mean - Trump moved the responsibilities from the NSC to other government agencies.

What have you been up do during the "Warning Period"?

Post about killer asteroids: It's not a question of when, not if

Your vow to fight to the death for Steven Cavanaugh's right to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. How's that going, by the way?