“There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1987, insisting that we all had to take responsibility for our own fate. But something tells me that even Thatcher would be alarmed if she saw people so determined to isolate themselves from institutions, mutual responsibility and simple sanity that they wound up eating horse dewormer to cure themselves of a deadly disease for which there was a widely available vaccine.
The story of ivermectin — the horse paste in question — is about the omnipresent grifters who prey on the Republican masses. It’s about the merging of politics and media on the right, and how they can combine to nurture people’s worst instincts. And it’s about the atomization and alienation that conservative ideology can produce when confronted with a pandemic and taken to an absurd degree.
Ivermectin, of course, is the latest supposed miracle cure for covid-19 that people on the right have seized on as an excuse to not get vaccinated. I don’t need some vaccine that probably has a microchip in it so Bill Gates can track me! If I get sick, I’ll just take this stuff!
Last year it was hydroxychloroquine, and a month from now people may be drinking antifreeze. But now feed stores are overrun with people stocking up on horse dewormer, some of whom wind up frantically calling poison control after they overdose.
One might argue that people are idiots and always will be, so this kind of thing isn’t unexpected. But this is a conservative...
Read Full Story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/31/how-right-wing-media-social-isolation-lead-people-eat-horse-paste/
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