Way worse than the crazies like Alex Jones, are the so called moderate, libertarians, the likes of Joe Rogan and Bill Burr that are just “fucking asking questions." Just listening to the 10 min clip of Joe’s conversation with Dan Crenshaw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHsUgWfUcss) makes you want to puke. So the last year has shown us how weak and fragile we are? Yes, I know more than 500,000 Americans were too fragile and weak and I assume that is why they died. They didn’t die because Republican politicians like Crenshaw ignored any expert suggestions and enforce basic, reasonable policies that have shown can allow countries to live with the virus (see Taiwan, see Australia, see New Zealand), but no, in this imaginary libertarian world of Rogan and Crenshaw the weak ones are the ones that wear masks, that keep physical distance. It is these weak ones that are the ones that lead us down the path of economic decline – ignoring all the facts out there that people even before any restrictions were put in place already reduced their social and economic activity (because trying not to die is not a sign of weakness, it is actually pretty smart).
And let’s be clear Rogan, Crenshaw, and Burr are not “just asking questions,” their questions have implicit answers. “Who are all the bankers?" was “just a question” that was raised quite a bit in 1930s Germany, and there was an implicit answer. So yes, it is ok to ask questions, but one should have the real curiosity to figure out the answers and not ask them as a dog whistle for far right racists. Rogan likes to “just ask questions” about the homeless in CA, but rather than actually look at the problem the “question” becomes a dog whistle against so called liberal policies, ignoring all of the underlying challenges in the US that are leading to the true problem of homelessness (anything from jobs that don’t pay a living wage, to lack of health insurance that drives people into bankruptcy, to help for mental illness.) But those would all be very complex issues to deal with and wouldn’t make for nice sound bites, so instead, let’s just “ask questions.”
