I've been mulling your comments for a couple of days, podrock, because they tie in to an ongoing mental thread about natural selection.

Natural selection needs a hammer to work, and for humans, "crop circles, fossils on mars, climate change is a myth, earthquakes are increasing because of radiation in the stratosphere, chemtrails…" have no negative consequences. I include climate change denial because, while it's ultimately fatal, the time frame is so long that most deniers will be comfortably dead, of old age, before their noses are rubbed in the consequences of their beliefs.

But a pandemic like this one is a powerful hammer that lets natural selection operate upon the memes (in the original Richard Dawkins sense) of rejection of science and expertise, and the embrace of conspiracist thinking.

It was reported in the local paper this morning that one third of the reported cases of covid-19 in the county are from the congregations of a handful of local churches. That's about 100 people overall, and one church accounted for 24 of those cases. Safe to say these aren't progressive denominations, but the far-right fundamentalist kinds, whose "theology" celebrates owning the libs by loudly and proudly rejecting science. An interesting twist is that the churches have formally stopped holding services, but their members have been gathering on their own initiative to show their solidarity with their false prophet Trump.

In a related thread, The Coronavirus’s Unique Threat to the South in The Atlantic lays out how the regressive policies of Republican state governments have created large populations of unhealthy young people, lacking health insurance, who are now as vulnerable to dying of covid-19 as people in their 70s. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, are uniquely young peoples' diseases in the South.

Maybe a better name for it is "rapture virus".

I don't think I'm going out on a limb to call this a Darwinian moment. It's not that the coronavirus will wipe out these anti-science populations, but rather that their numbers will be reduced just enough to change the political and electoral landscape. It may give rationalism a chance to see daylight once more, as power leaches away from the forces of darkness.

Better, I think, would be for a critical mass of rightwing extremists to finally see the light. I saw it happen about three weeks ago with 92-year-old Attila the Republican, when he suddenly seemed to take the pandemic seriously. Since then our weekly phone calls have been pretty much all coronavirus all the time, a lot of it comparing notes on survival strategies. I don't dare bring it up directly, but I suspect he's finally realized that he can't trust his Glorious Leader and the state-run propaganda outlets.

All this pollyanna talk on Flame...am I offtopic for this board, podrock? Want me to move it?

For the record, I'm mightily pissed too. It's just that I know too many right-wingers, including close family, to not feel a slight twinge of compassion when contemplating the onrushing hell they've made for themselves, and for the rest of us.