They're Trying to Kill Us

There is no other intrepretation.

If you’ve ever thought about being a paid subscriber to The Rooster, now is the time. It’s the end of the month and I have bills to pay next week, so I’m offering 50% off annual plans to those that subscribe by the end of the day.

Strike now while the iron is hot:

I understand why most Americans don’t care about state politics. It’s hard enough to live your life under the hammer of capitalism and then come home and pay attention to whatever atrocious shit our federal government is doing. Who has additional time to pay attention to the used car salesmen and fundamentalist preachers are running amok in their state government?

The problem is, like federal politics, even if you’re not into state politics, state politics is into you. And state politics affect your everyday life more than whatever senile corporatist resides in the White House.

Take the above video, which is worth watching in full if you have 12 and a half minutes to blow today. Anti-vaxxers exist in every state, but in Ohio, they have leveraged outsized power in Columbus among politicians looking to turn their militant base into votes at the ballot box. As Jake Zuckerman of the Ohio Capital Journal detailed last year, their influence extends across both sides of the aisle.

This news was alarming in normal circumstances. Everyday people who take their medical advice from Facebook posts should be drummed out of serious society. That these freaks have sway within the Statehouse is disturbing albeit not surprising.

Of course COVID-19 compounds the problem. In the State Senate, the new chairman of the Health Committee is Senator Steve Huffman (R-Tipp City), the man who posited that “the colored population” suffer from higher coronavirus mortality rates not due to institutional racism but because they “don’t wash their hands as much.” (It’s worth noting Tipp City openly shuns black people and has a white population of 96.4%.)

At least Huffman is a doctor, though he got fired from his emergency room job because he’s racist.

On the House side, indicted former House Speaker Larry Householder appointed Scott Lipps (R-Franklin) to preside over the House Health Committee. Lipps’ qualifications are that he owns “Sleep Tite Mattress Factory & Showroom.”

As the above video shows, Lipps is in deep with the anti-vaxx movement, going as far as to ask these Facebook posters to help him “stop this vaccine shit” when it comes to the COVID vaccine rollout.

It’s depressing to realize that Huffman and Lipps will have outsized roles in the COVID vaccine rollout, which has already been a debacle for Ohio, a state that ranks near the bottom in vaccine rollout.

Personally, I don’t take medical advice from racist doctors or mattress salesmen. And yet, I live in Ohio so my chances of getting vaccinated and leaving this hellacious country are dependent by these gremlins whom, as best as I can tell, wouldn’t flinch to learn that I was dead in the gutter.

I understand that Republicans will always be too ignorant to understand that abortion is a medical procedure that is more safe than childbirth, no matter the newfound evidence. I understand why they fetishize the unborn; it’s easy as the unborn have no agenda and you don’t have to support them with social services.

It’d be harder to understand why the ostensible pro-life party would be going down this route if I was incapable of remembering that they don’t care about human life. They only care about raw power and anybody that will help them obtain and maintain that grip on power.

In the end, it will be public health that suffers. And unlike them, we don’t have their insurance that insulates them from the consequences of their disastrous public policy.

I remember being young and looking down my nose at places like Mississippi, Alabama or West Virginia. I was too dumb to realize that I lived in Ohio, and that gives me no room to clown on other states. There is no more embarrassing state in the Union.

THOSE WMDs. Ohio nearly purged 10,000 people that casted 2020 ballots… Columbus forced to rehire cop accused of raping sex workers… Kobe Bryant’s tragic flight… The battle inside Signal… The easiest, simplest way to make classic prime rib.