Tuesday’s remarkable three-and-a-half hour hearing that featured Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health experts before the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee set in stark relief three currents in American politics today involved in determining the future of the nation now in its most dangerous crisis since the Civil War, the Covid-19 pandemic.

On one of the three sides were Fauci and his public health allies along with key Democratic senators on the committee. Fauci spoke forcefully warning against the deadly threat of reopening the U.S. economy too soon, as is currently beginning to happen in states all across the land even as the cases of the highly-contagious and deadly virus continue to grow and the number of deaths in the U.S. rises past 80,000.

On the second side present at the hearing were an array of other senators, including many Republicans, who were honestly trying to grasp what was being said and how to evaluate an appropriate response. They included Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, among others.

On the third side was the GOP Death Cult, which was represented by only one senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, but whose point of view reflected that of President Trump and other key GOP lawmakers.

Actually, there are only two other hard core Death Cult U.S. senators, and they were not on the committee and therefore not in the hearing. They are Sen. Mitch McConnell, like Paul also from Kentucky, and Sen. Lindsey Graham from South Carolina. There are numerous more Death Cult members in the House of Representatives and in high level public offices at the state level.

In the hearing Paul argued for the Swedish approach, which has taken no measures to contain the virus in the name of generating a so-called “herd immunity” that, in theory, leads to the dying out of the pandemic when enough people are exposed to the virus and recover, developing at least a temporary immunity through the formation of antibodies that naturally arise in the body to fight off the infection.

The Swedish approach is, it could be argued, a social experiment designed to see how well a society could tolerate the explosive loss of life that surely resulted, although the lives lost tended to be restricted to those most vulnerable, including the elderly and those with preexisting conditions that weakened their systems such that the virus could overwhelm and kill them.
This radical “survival of the fittest” policy is little better than fascist euthansia, but since it is couched in bogus health science terms, it is accepted by too many unthinking people.

No wonder Paul touted this approach at the Senate hearing, and said it should be applied to children, as well, so that schools should reopen without delay this fall even though, Fauci warned, strange new manifestations of serious illness resulting from the virus have begun to show up in children.

It is not sensationalist hyperbole that lies behind coining the term “Death Cult,” but a frightening reality that has come to grip America thanks to Trump and Fox News controllers.

It is also not extreme to call it a foreign intelligence operation run by the Russians that succeeded in getting their Manchurian Candidate puppet placed in the White House accompanied by his Red Sparrow spouse.
Russian psychological warfare is an outgrowth of an extreme form of nihilist, anti-science prejudice that gained a toe-hold in Western culture in the last sixty years. Our current predicament was foretold on Trump’s first day in office when his sorry press secretary insisted that black was white, that millions had attended the inaugural, before a stunned White House press corps.

That was the cult in full force on Day One, and it has only gotten worse from there.

The Russians cultivated this particular form of “gaslighting” (a softer term than “brainwashing”) in their creation of scores of mind-altering cults from the 1950s through the 1970s, including the Jim Jones Death Cult in Jonestown where over 900 committed mass suicide.

The GOP Death Cult still runs roughshod over science, promoting Lysol as a cure and unleashing the virus as thousands of Americans bow.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.