I’ve been doing a slow burn that is turning into an unmodulated rage when it comes to three categories of people:

• Climate deniers
• Anti-vaxxers
• People still believing the Big Lie

Taking them in order.

Climate deniers

For the second year in a row, the western United States is basically one gigantic forest fire. The fires have been so intense this year, that smoke from the fires have made it all the way out to the East Coast, to New York and Boston, and we are having air quality warnings urging us not to exercise outdoors.

At the same time, on the East Coast we are being inundated with rain like never before, causing massive amounts of floods. In my home city of Worcester, we broke the record for rainfall in the month of July on July 20th, or less than two-thirds of the way through the month.

In Germany and Belgium, and in China, and in India, and in Sri Lanka, and in Eastern Australia, there have been unprecedented floods as the result of unnatural amounts of rainfall.

Climate change isn’t “coming,” it’s already among us. And yet, we have huge numbers of idiots still denying that climate change is either dangerous or man-made.

If these idiots want to deny science, they should get off the Internet and give back their computers, tablets and cell phones, because none of these things work without science.

Anti-vaxxers

Earlier in 2020 a miracle happened: scientists developed not just one, but more than a dozen vaccines worldwide, including vaccines based on messenger RNA (which had never successfully been developed before). If you talked to anybody last year who had expertise in the development of vaccines — as I managed to do — those people were probably tamping down your expectations about how quickly these vaccines could be developed and how effective they would be.

Well, scientists around the world, many working in coordination, exceeded just about everyone’s expectations.

And that should have been the beginning of the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, at least here in the United States, if people had actually committed to taking the vaccine.  

Joe Biden wanted to deliver us our “independence from Covid” by July 4th, and we could have gotten there with a little bit of cooperation.

Instead, we now have the delta variant, the reimposition of mask mandates, and people begging for the vaccine as they are being intubated when it finally dawns on them that the pandemic is not a hoax.

Fuck these people. 

Fuck people like Phil Valentine — a Tennessee radio host who is now singing a different song after having been infected with Covid — for all the damage he already did mocking people who were getting themselves vaccinated before the virus finally came for him. 

Okay, maybe don’t fuck him, he can actually help. But he certainly deserves the time he’s spent in the hospital and the discomfort he’s endured.

The Big Lie

And finally, the big lie. Newsflash: Trump did not win the 2020 election, and he’s not getting reinstated in August.

This is about one thing and one thing only: the supercalifragilistic ego of one unreconstructed malignant narcissist, Donald Trump, who just cannot accept that he lost to a “sleepy” guy who once was a stutterer.

There is no “policy” involved here, no greater truth that his supporters are seeking to reveal. It’s one guy, so out of touch with reality, that he just cannot deal with the fact that he lost.

Loser!

Now, the Republicans are taking advantage of the moment to enact laws designed to produce voter suppression, but that’s just a strategy of convenience. Needless to say, the same Republicans who claim there was voter fraud in the Presidential election make no claims of voter fraud based on the very same ballots on which they were elected.

Hypocrites!

And somehow, we’re supposed to “make nice” with these people because their feelings have been hurt by critical race theory, a theory taught in law school, and which almost no regular Republicans understand.

Fuck these people.

They’ve been hating on us for decades because we’ve asked them to pay women the same as men, to accept gay marriages, or not to use racial epithets. They are so invested in the culture wars. They think that we will fold in the face of their intransigence, but they may find that they’ve finally pushed us too far.