At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch wrote, America gave up on truly educating all its kids. Then Jan. 6 happened. Coincidence?

Some background — In Pennsylvania there’s a court battle going on about whether disparities in public school funding across the state violate the state constitution.  The lawyer representing “budget-crunching GOP lawmakers” actually argued that children in poor districts don’t need the same education as in well-to-do-districts.

PA school funding lawsuit really illuminating what policy makers think of poor kids’ career potential: “What use would someone on the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1?”https://t.co/r4YpGh2DIw

— Samantha Melamed (@samanthamelamed) December 28, 2021

Note that this isn’t just a black versus white disparity, but also an urban versus rural disparity. I believe the specific area being short-changed of school funding, north-central Pennsylvania, is overwhelmingly white. And a majority of voters in this area supported Trump in 2016 and 2020.

Will Bunch writes,

I’ll even go way out on a limb here to argue you can draw a straight line between the country’s collective decision — hardened somewhere in the late 20th century — to stop seeing education as a public good aimed at creating engaged and informed citizens but instead a pipeline for the worker drones of capitalism, and the 21st century’s civic meltdown that reached its low point nearly one year ago, in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

A word that gets thrown around a lot these days is “meritocracy.” A “meritocracy” is supposed to be a system in which the most skilled and accomplished people are put in charge of things. The problem is that we’ve created a system that gives the children of upper-income white people, especially the boys, easy access to aquiring skill and accomplishment, but puts up barriers to everyone else. This explains how so many of our political and business leaders are mediocrities with Ivy League degrees. (See “Our Decadent Aristocracy” from 2019.)

The issue of school funding is an old one. Across the nation many school systems are primarily funded by local property taxes, so obviously schools in areas with higher tax assessments are funded more generously. Attempts to make the system fairer are usually slapped down by the aristocracy, who are often able to bamboozle the poor badly educated peasants into supporting the aristocrats’ position.

I’m thinking now of New Jersey. Back in 1990 a court decided that the state must ensure that as much money would be spent educating the children of the poor as it did the children of the wealthy. To accomplish this, Gov. Jim Florio proposed a very progressive income tax increase that would have sent lots of money to schools as well as pay down the state’s debts and provide property tax relief. The graduated tax increase kicked in at $55,000 annual income, which in 1990 was equivalent to about $114,000 today. The state also added 1 percent to the sales tax.

And the whole state went crazy. I wrote about this back in 2007:

My state income taxes didn’t change at all, because my income wasn’t all that glorious. But people all around me were going nuts over the tax increase, whether it affected them or not. I saw “Dump Florio” bumper stickers on cars of people who appeared to make even less than I did. In fact, at one point a secretary where I worked was going around with a big “Dump Florio” pin on her chest, and I knew good and well she made less than I did. When I told her that her taxes weren’t going to go up, and explained to her how much one actually had to make before they did, she was dumbfounded. She’d been worried she wouldn’t have enough money left over from the new state taxes to live on.

Then what’s everyone so worked up about? she asked. You tell me, I said. You’re one of the people who is worked up; I’m not.

A “grassroots” citizens’ revolt was organized by John Budzash, a postal worker from Howell Township. Budzash was a very useful tool and got a lot of attention from media, no doubt nudged by the aristocracy. When it was pointed out to him that his own children went to schools that were to benefit from the tax increase, he still wasn’t swayed from his campaign.

A few years later, when Republican Christie Whitman became governor, she lowered the Florio income and sales taxes. But to pay for this she cut the amount of state money going to public schools, fiddled a bit with state pensions, and outsourced the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles to demons from the Fourth Circle of Hell. In many parts of the state property taxes had to be cranked up even more to make up the difference.

Note that Whitman didn’t just fiddle with state pension funds, she raided them to balance the budget as required by state law, setting up problems the state probably is still dealing with. But this is why we can’t have nice things.

The roots of Republican disparaging of public schools really goes back to the desegregation era, 1950s-1960s. As I am sure I’ve mentioned before, I can remember when conservative white people in the Bible Belt were mostly supportive of local public schools. Then came the end of “separate but equal,” and all of a sudden they wanted their kids to go to (white) Christian schools. That was about the time that it became an article of faith among convervatives that “throwing more money” at public schools didn’t make them any better, even though copious data argued otherwise. Since then Republicans have figured out how to divert tax dollars into “charter” schools and “voucher” programs that have failed to live up to promises of better educations. Note that some of these programs have been in effect for decades; if they were going to work, they would have done it by now.

And speaking of educated mediocrities, Betsy DeVos comes to mind. DeVox cut funds to already struggling rural schools, among other atrocities. She was big on “educating the workforce,” as I recall.

But schools aren’t just educating the Amazon warehouse workers of the future. They are educating citizens and voters. And what’s crystal clear after recent years is that a ton of U.S. citizens and voters have no grasp of science or history and don’t know how their own government works. And they can’t critically think their way out of a wet paper bag. Will Bunch:

True, that carpenter hammering drywall wouldn’t have to call on a knowledge of basic genetics, presumably — but education isn’t only about facts, but also about developing respect for the wider processes of knowledge, and how we find it. When I poked around, I wasn’t shocked to learn that McKean County — where a school superintendent concedes that math and science education is struggling — also has one of the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates in Pennsylvania, just 38.1%, compared with 52.7% statewide. …

… He [Stephen Rodriguez, president of the Pennsylvania League of Urban Schools Caucus of superintendents] told me that, of course, a would-be carpenter would benefit from “a foundational knowledge of biology” — in a world where being a good citizen depends on honing an ability to understand what is true and what is misinformation.

“If we do not give our children a good basis for an understanding of their world, how will we know if our government lies to us about anything?” added Rodriguez, who specifically mentioned the spread of QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory centered on child sex trafficking that animated so many of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

One thing I’ve noticed in online “discussions” over covid mitigation is that righties have absolutely no concept of risk assessment. If masks don’t work 100 percent of the time, there’s no point to them. If a small percentage of vaccinated people get “breakthrough” cases of covid, then vaccines are junk and not worth taking. You can give them data about odds and percentages, and they can’t or won’t understand it.

And, of course, a big, dumb, angry, undereducated population can be manipulated by just about anybody with enough money and clout to get mass media access.

Now schools are under fire for teaching history, for Pete’s sake, and a loud faction of ignorant white bigots is threatening to take over school boards and replace what history is taught with white supremacist myths. And these people are, of course, the same ones who can’t grasp covid risk assessments and think climate change is a hoax. I don’t see education getting any better in the U.S. any time soon.

Following up my post from earlier this week, here’s some much ignored but significant data. In 2017, white Christians became a minority in the U.S. for the first time. And current projections say that Christians of all races will be a minority in the U.S. by 2050.

This is a shift that’s been going on for some time, driven partly by immigration but mostly by millennials. There is a long-standing pattern of young people skipping church attendance when they first leave home, but in the past they’ve returned to religious affiliation when they marry and have children. Millennials, however, are leaving religion and not coming back.

We’ve reached a point at which a reactionary faction among Christians appears to have taken over a large part of state and federal government, including the Supreme Court. They are now actively campaigning to either destroy or take control of the public school systems in conservative states. One wonders if this backlash to secularism and modernity isn’t partly driven by shrinking church memberships. Christians are losing control and feeling threatened.

A few years ago, there was much hand-wringing because the older, non-evangelical Protestant churches were losing members. Catholicism and evangelical denominations were doing fine. But Catholicism has benefited from immigration from South and Central America, which kept its numbers stable in spite of a loss of young adult members. And now evangelicalism is eroding.  “Only 8 percent of young people identify as white evangelical Protestant, while 26 percent of senior citizens do,” it says here.

A big reason for this shift, according to several researchers, is changing views on morality. Younger people are less likely than their parents to be knee-jerk homophobes, for example. Sex before marriage is now openly normal.  Conservative Christianity, with its rigidly absolutist Bronze Age moral code,  is increasingly out of touch with 21st century western culture. And culture is winning.

“Changing views about the relationship between morality and religion also appear to have convinced many young parents that religious institutions are simply irrelevant or unnecessary for their children,” it says here.

Those of us old enough to remember the Eisenhower Administration can probably remember when white Protestant Christianity was simply assumed to be America’s Religion, and white Protestantism dictated America’s accepted moral sensiblities.

How white America saw itself, 1950s

Needless to say, between then and now there’s been a huge erosion of white Christian hegemony. Some People aren’t ready to accept this.

I suspect much of the corrupt state of U.S. Christianity can be traced to the rise of televangelism. Let’s face it; most televangelism is a freak show. It also made some well-known televangelists fabulously wealthy. This no doubt encourages them; religious freak shows make money. A kindly pastor tellng viewers to love their neighbors can’t compete with the likes of flamboyant Jimmy Swaggart, or with Joel Olsteen’s feel-good, guilt- and sacrifice-free prosperity gospel. But while these sideshow acts draw a lot of followers, they repel many more. If all you knew of religion is what you saw on television, you’d probably stay clear of it, too.

Earlier this week I wrote about the weird phenomenon of white evangelicals refusing to get covid shots. Writing in the Washington Post, Michael Gerson agrees that there is no Christian religious doctrine that discourages taking a covid shot. Just the opposite, actually; there’s an overwhelming argument to be made from Jesus’ words that people should just get jabbed.

Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, wrote that “in the upside-down world white evangelicalism has become, the willingness to act in self-sacrificial ways for the sake of vulnerable others — even amid a global pandemic — has become rare, even antithetical, to an aggressive, rights-asserting white Christian culture.” Golden Rule, anybody? Love your neighbor? Love your enemy, even? I guess not.

This objection to vaccines includes the widespread belief that the vaccines either contain aborted fetal cells (not true) or were originally cultivated in fetal cells. This is true of Johnson and Johnson, but the Pope says take it anyway. It’s not true of Pfizer or Moderna. And, anyway, whether Some People agree or not, there is no explicit biblical teaching forbidding abortions.

The objections of evangelicals to vaccine mandates is framed in the language of religious liberty. But, Gerson argues, that doesn’t fit. What the evangelicals are really arguing for is libertarianism, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity. They have replaced Jesus’ moral and ethical teachings (which, you might recall, emphasized taking care of our neighbors, and everybody is a neighbor) with a libertarian position that individual rights supercede everything else, including the well being of others. And that the greatest evil in the world is government coercion, no matter what purpose is being served. “This is heresy compounded by lunacy,” Gerson says.

Writing in Salon earlier this year, an evangelical minister named Nathaniel Manderson said pretty much the same thing.

Over the last 70 years, Christian theology has been steadily replaced, within the evangelical world, by Republican or “conservative” ideology. … This shift is most obvious around the issues of gun rights and immigration. If you want to reject the foreigner, build a wall and own a private artillery, go right ahead. That is your right. But it is not your right if you sincerely want to follow the teachings of Jesus. We are not gun owners; we are pacifists. We are not provided with the gift of freedom and independence by God just to make sure no one else can have it.

As I wrote in the previous post, evangelicalism wasn’t always like this. Originally it was a big and very diverse movement. In the 18th century evangelism was defined by its emphasis on a personal relationship with God — without priest and church as intermediaries — and on a “born again” experience in which one makes a personal commitment to that relationship.

There have long been tensions between conservative and liberal movements within evangelicalism. In 19th century U.S., white southern evangelicals were marked by their support for slavery, while northern evangelicals called for Abolition. Some denominations split apart, some permanently.

But now some are beginning to wonder if evangelicalism is sustainable at all. Evangelicalism is breaking apart writes Peter Wehner at The Atlantic.

“The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.”

Wehner talked to many ministers and church leaders, many of whom have walked away from their former churches. “How many people look at churches in America these days and see the face of Jesus?” one said.

Wehner’s is a really excellent analysis of how contemporary evangelicalism came to be hollowed out of Christian doctrine and replaced by politics and grievance. Churches have been putting more effort into being entertaining — which keeps people in their seats and puts money in the offering plate —  than in teaching.

And large numbers of conservative white Americans who happen to be evangelical are insisting that their churches perfectly reflect their political views, or they will take their offering plate money elsewhere. This is more likely to happen among evangelicals, who have a long tradition of anti-institutionalism, than “mainllne” Protestants. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, sees itself as a kind of confederation of independent churches rather than as a single hierarchichal organization.

Finally we get to Jennifer Rubin, who writes that Trump idolatry has undermined religious faith. Worth a look. Trump really is the Golden Calf.

Getting back to the projection that Christians will be a minority of Americans by 2050 — for a long time I’ve heard that Europe is “post Christian.” This doesn’t mean there still isn’t a lot of Christianity in Europe, but it’s no longer the default. For some time, a growing majority of younger Europeans are “nones” — no religious affiliation. This is especially true in western Europe. The “nones” are not necessarily atheist. They just don’t consider themselves to be Christians or part of any other religious tradition. This is happening in the U.S. also, although the U.S. is a tad behind Europe. This phenomenon is not happening in places dominated by other religions, however in particular Islam and Hinduism. Globally, Christianity is expected to experience a greater net loss in the coming years than other religions.

Between 2015 and 2020, Christians are projected to experience the largest losses due to switching. Globally, about 5 million people are expected to become Christians in this five-year period, while 13 million are expected to leave Christianity, with most of these departures joining the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated.

I could be wrong, but it’s possible that the influence of Christianity on culture and events peaked in the 19th and 20th centuries and is about to go into a decline. If so, it has only itself to blame.

It feels like the end of an era.

Jarvis DeBerry, MSNBC Opinion Columnist, writes that White evangelicals dying of Covid after denouncing vaccines are wasting martyrdom. He begins,

“This year we’ve seen a number of conservative personalities, including the late evangelical leaders Marcus Lamb and Jimmy DeYoung, who succumbed to Covid-19 after minimizing the risks of the disease or making disparaging remarks about the vaccines. What is such opposition if not an arrogant attempt to put God to the test, no less problematic, say, than stepping off a great height and counting on being caught by angels?”

For those of you who missed Sunday School, that last comment is a reference to Matthew 4:5-7, in which the devil told Jesus to throw himself off the highest point of the temple so that angels would catch him. Jesus replied, ” It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Some translations render this as “You shall not tempt the Lord thy God.” There are many centuries of sermons and commentaries on Matthew 4, but most of them I’ve seen boil down to “Don’t try to manipulate God into performing a miracle to save your ass so you can show everybody what a Big Shot Holy Person you are.”

DeBerry points to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that shows white evangelicals are the only “religious” group in the U.S. in which a majority believe people should be able to get a religious exemption from covid vaccine mandates. (I have “religious” in quotation marks because DeBerry apparently thinks that “religion” consists entirely of Christianity and Judaism. PRRI lumps all the world’s other religious traditions under “Other non-Christian religion,” none of which appear to have religious issues with vaccines.) A majority of all the other religious groups surveyed thought there should be no religious exemption for vaccines.

There is no record I could find of evangelical leaders opposing vaccines on religious grounds in the past, before covid. The current objection appears to be some kind of shift in doctrine, even though no one is explaining what that doctrine is.

So the question is, on what basis should a religious exemption from covid vaccine mandates be allowed, from an evangelical perspective?

Although faith healing is not unknown in evangelicalism, I’m not aware of any situation in the Bible in which people were berated for consulting a physician instead of relying on God’s grace for healing. There wasn’t much in the way of medical science in those days, of course, although Greek and Roman physicians had figured out how to treat some things by Jesus’ day. But even the Romans employed prayers and chants as part of medical practice. The point is that there is nothing explicit in the Bible, and no argument from centuries of Christian theology before the 19th century or so, that provides Christians a clear religious exemption from getting covid vaccines or seeking any kind of medical treatment. Yes, this includes abortions.

In the 19th century all kinds of new religions emerged, some ostensibly Christian and some not. These include the Church of Christ, Scientist, which began in the 1870s. Christian Science has a complicated belief system about medical care that I can’t say I entirely understand. They go to medical professionals for some kinds of health care but rely on prayer alone for other kinds. From what I have read these beliefs aren’t based on the Bible or any previous school of theology. However, even the Christian Scientists these days are not rigidly dogmatic about vaccines and encourage practitioners to make up their own minds.

Here’s an article from the Council on Foreign Relations that provides some historical background on religious objections to vaccines in the U.S.. In brief, in the past there really hasn’t been much objection to vaccines based on religious beliefs. One scholar noted that American religious leaders in the 1950s and 1960s praised vaccines as gifts from God.

One of the patriarchs of evangelicalism, John Wesley (1703-1791) not only approved of the medical science of his day, he also opened free clinics and pharmaceutical dispensaries for the poor. He encouraged people to have faith and pray, also, but he encouraged people to take their physical ailments to doctors for treatment.

But evangelicalism itself has changed a lot from its origins. Many 19th century evangelicals were the flaming liberals of their day. Northern evangelicals were leaders of the Abolitionist movement, and later many were active in the Social Gospel movement, which in turn gave birth to the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. There were conservative evangelicals also, of course. But a century and more ago evangelicalism was distinct from fundamentalism, a reactionary religious movement of the late 19th century that formed as a backlash to the Social Gospel and Darwin and modernism generally.

These days evangelicallism and fundamentalism have become synonyms. The reasons for that are complicated, but very briefly over several decades fundamentalism evolved and fused with Christian nationalism, and these movements merged with conservative evangelicalism and took over one congregation after another, driving out the liberals. And this mashup makes up most of today’s “Christian Right.”

It hasn’t been that long since the liberal Jimmy Carter was not shy about calling himself an evangelical. I’m not sure he still does. There are denominations that used to be considered evangelical — the United Methodists, for example — that don’t seem to use the word “evangelical” to describe themselves any more. Likewise the liberal United Church of Christ originally grew out of the evangelical movement but has nothing to do with evangelicalism these days.

The PRRI survey made an interesting distinction between personal religious beliefs and the religious teachings of Christian denominations. “White evangelical Protestants are the only religious group among whom there is a difference between the two statements on religious prohibitions: 21% agree that getting vaccinated against COVID-19 goes against their personal religious beliefs, compared to 13% who say it goes against the teachings of their religion,” it says.

But I wonder if the refusers who say getting a covid vaccine somehow violates their religious beliefs, whether personal or institutional, could articulate how that violation occurs, if you put them on the spot to explain it. I strongly suspect what we’re seeing is a lazy assumption that if one feels getting a covid vaccine is wrong, somehow, then the Bible must agree. Somehow.

Maggie Siddiqi, senior director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress, writes that Covid vaccine and mask mandates expose alt-right Christian hypocrisy: “For many on the religious right, religious freedom only matters if it supports a right-wing political agenda.”

… for many on the religious right, religious freedom only matters if it supports a right-wing political agenda. Indeed for years, extreme-right Christian groups have been misusing religious freedom to do everything from discriminating against LGBTQ people to denying access to reproductive health care. Far from a legitimate effort to protect the right to worship freely, religious freedom has been manipulated into another tool in the Christian nationalist playbook to circumvent any law or regulation they see fit.

At the start of the pandemic, when states were compelled to issue emergency public health orders to shut down in-person gatherings, including at houses of worship, the same groups who cried “religious freedom” at any law they disliked did so once again. It quickly became clear that if they could win exemptions from emergency public health orders on religious freedom grounds — even in the face of a deadly, highly contagious disease — they could win any claim by exploiting religious freedom.

If it were not apparent enough that these supposed claims of religious freedom ring hollow, an entire industry of anti-vaccine activists have now combined forces with Christian nationalists. Some clergy are even offering to provide religious exemptions — if you pay them. Liberty Counsel, the law firm that represented Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, is a major player in providing legal guidance and representation to those seeking to use religious exemptions to circumvent Covid-related requirements.

But religious freedom does not matter, it seems, when Jewish groups state that life begins at birth, not at conception, and that denying the right to prioritize the life of a mother violates Jewish religious beliefs. Religious freedom does not matter when faith-based health care providers say they are morally, religiously obligated to provide care for all, without discrimination.

I am not expert in all of the world’s religions. There may be a sect somewhere that has a genuine doctrinal objection to mandates I don’t know about. But it seems to me there are no legitimate religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate.

This is not really answering the question of why so many white evangelicals are hostile to covid vaccines. I think the answer to that has nothing to do with religion. The problem is that what passes for religious doctrine among many evangelicals is nothing but consuming tribal loyalty to hard-right political views and Donald Trump. John Wesley wouldn’t recognize any of it.

New Yorkers line up for smallpox vaccines, undated illustration

However unsettled the world has become, at least my grandson Dylan has a plan to take charge of Christmas. Have a happy!

The U.S. Justice Department has filed a brief against the state of Missouri’s stupid “Second Amendment Preservation” law. The brief says the law “poses a clear and substantial threat to public safety” and has “seriously impaired the federal government’s ability to combat violent crime in Missouri.”

I wrote awhile back about the state of Missouri’s Second Amendment Preservation Act that went into effect in June. Very basically, the act is an attempt to nullify federal gun control laws. Missouri has close to the weakest gun control laws in the nation. See When Missouri repealed a key gun law, few protested. The result: More deaths than ever, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 8, 2021.

The brief was filed in regard to a suit brought by St. Louis city and county against the law last June, which I wrote about at the time — St. Louis Sues Missouri Over New Gun Law. According to the Kansas City Star, “A Cole County court this year upheld the law, a decision being appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court.”

The Kansas City Star also reports today,

“After an Independence police officer was killed in a shootout in September, Missouri state law enforcement initially refused routine federal assistance in tracing the murder weapon. The same month, a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper released a federal fugitive after a traffic stop.”

I’ll pause for a moment’s reflection. I’m still looking for details about the released federal fugitive.

“The incidents are described in a blistering court brief filed Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Justice outlining the consequences of the Second Amendment Preservation Act, a new state law that prohibits Missouri police officers from helping enforce certain federal gun laws. The document paints a stark portrait of how SAPA, also known as House Bill 85, has disrupted cooperation between federal, state and local law enforcement.”

This is insane. The DOJ has been sending letters to the governor and making lots of other noise about how blatantly unconstitutional the Missouri law is. A brief is a baby step beyond “noise,” I believe. Andrew Jackson would have sent troops by now. But the Missouri Supreme Court is famous for nonsensical rulings, so I have little hope the court will overturn the law.

Earlier this year, St. Louis Mayor Tish Jones was giving a news conference on gun violence prevention when gunshots could be heard in the distance. This is life in St. Louis, folks. It’s a shooting gallery.

In other news — Trump suddenly is taking credit for creating the vaccines and telling people to get vaccinated. Most are assuming this is a signal he’s planning to run again in 2024. The vaccines are the only positive thing his administration managed to do, that I can think of. This might give the MAGA-heads whiplash. Denial of covid and the vaccines is so much part of their tribal culture I’m not sure they can let it go, even on Trump’s say-so.

Former police officer Kim Potter has been convicted of first degree manslaughter for fatally shooting Black motorist Daunte Wright.

“Omicron” would be a good name for a Marvel Comics villain, and “The Omicron Variant” might be the title of a future Frederick Forsyth spy novel. But it’s a virus, and we have to deal with it.

I’ve been reading what researchers and not-researchers are saying about Omicron. The only thing everyone agrees is certain about Omicron is that it really is much more transmissible than earlier versions of the covid virus. Beyond that, we’re still in speculation mode. Preliminary data from around the world suggest that Omicron is less deadly than earlier versions, but the data collection people warn us that there are other factors impacting the data. What is true of one population group might not be true of another one.

This may be why CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky refused to be pressured into calling Omicron “mild” in a Fox News interview. “Mild” suggests it’s no worse than a head cold. But deaths from Omicron are being recorded around the world. There may be a lower rate of deaths than from earlier variants — so far — but the thing can still kill you. This is no time for complacency.

We keep hearing that vaccinated and boosted people are getting infected. But this is not a reason to panic. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic writes,

The easy question is whether a typical vaccinated (or recently infected) adult faces the same individual risk of severe disease from Omicron that she faced from the original coronavirus in March 2020. The answer is, almost certainly, no. The U.S. has banked a lot of immunity through infection and vaccinations, and the Omicron variant doesn’t seem to evade all of that built-up protection. In the past month, we’ve learned that Omicron excels at breaking through the first layer of immunity, which is our neutralizing antibodies. But our next layer of protection, our T-cell response, seems to hold up much better against the variant. If you think of the vaccines as a castle-defense system, Omicron is like an invading army that can scale walls (i.e., bypass neutralizing-antibody protection) but not fight the knights within them (i.e., overcome T-cell protection). Boosted Americans are particularly well equipped against the Omicron variant, because the third shot increases the number and quality of our neutralizing antibodies, which effectively builds up our immunity wall.

I like the castle analogy. Our T-cells are the guys up on the turrets dropping big rocks.

Thompson goes on to say that preliminary data point to a lower rate of severe infection among the unvaccinated as well, maybe. Data collected by the Imperial College of London showed Omicron is as dangerous as Delta, but this was based on a small sample.

Thompson writes that the best way to think about severity is to imagine four concentric circles. In the inner circle are younger, healthy people who have been vaccinated and boosted. They are probably safe from severe illness from Omicron, even if they catch it.

The next group out contains people under age 65 who are vaccinated and boosted, but who have some health issues that make them immunocompromised. They need to be more careful.

Those of us over 65 who have been vaccinated and even boosted are in the third ring out from the center. The older you are, the more vulnerable you are. Don’t take chances.

The unvaccinated are in the outer ring, and in that group some are more at risk than others. There’s a big concern that even if this group has a lower rate of severe illness, they are bound to have a higher rate of infection. It’s likely hospitals will be slammed again this winter.

At this point, we’re all hoping that Omicron is not as deadly as earlier variants, and many headline writers have jumped the gun and declared it to be so. But at the moment it would be wise to procede as if it’s just as bad as the other variants.  Fingers crossed, wear your masks and get your boosters.

What follows is speculation: MSNBC reports that some virologists think the Omicron variant could burn through populations rapidly, causing considerable sickness and death. But then just about everybody will have had covid or the vaccines, meaning everybody’s got some immunity, and finally the pandemic could end.

“As all the public health folks have been saying, it’s going to rip right through the population,” says Dr. David Ho, a world-renowned virologist and Columbia University professor. “Sometimes a rapid-fire could burn through very quickly but then put itself out.”

Nobody expects covid to go away completely, but perhaps it will stop upending lives. Yascha Mounk writes at the Atlantic that whatever happens with Omicron, sooner or later covid will cease to be a social phenomenon. We’ll learn to cope and adapt. Eventually there will be enough immunity in populations that covid will stop being a big deal. However, new variations could still throw that hopeful notion out the window.

And while variants may come and go, we will always have stupid.

A group of unvaccinated people who attended a huge conspiracy conference in Dallas earlier this month all became sick in the days after the event with symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath, and fever. Instead of blaming the global COVID pandemic, however, the conspiracy theorists think they were attacked with anthrax.

This far-right conspiracy claim began after a dozen people spent time together in a confined space at the ReAwaken America tour event in Dallas over the weekend of Dec. 10. And the fact that this was likely a COVID outbreak and superspreader event has been almost entirely ignored.

It’s a wonder our species has made it this far, frankly.

I’ve been reading a lot of snarking about West Virginia voters, and why Joe Manchin has to be a right-wing hardass because that’s what his constituents want. From a social media contact: “HE knows his voter. They believe as he does, everybody but me is undeserving free loaders. They are not insulted by his words. They all know he is talking about everybody else. Not me! Only I am deserving.”

Another perspective, from a tweet that Bette Midler caught flack for tweeting: “What #JoeManchin, who represents a population smaller than Brooklyn, has done to the rest of America, who wants to move forward, not backward, like his state, is horrible. He sold us out. He wants us all to be just like his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.” If she’d stopped after “He sold us out” she would have been all right, but instead she’s being roasted as an “elitist.”

I do not live in West Virginia, but demograpically it’s pretty similar to the Ozarks, I suspect. The reasons rural white people vote as they do are complicated. As I have said many times, one big reason is that they are saturated with right-wing media and rarely if ever hear progressive perspectives. At this point, they’ve been so well taught that “government is the problem” that many have given up looking to the government — local, state, and federal — for solutions to their very real problems. It’s also the case that neither party really listens to them. It’s also the case that the people who represent very poor rural areas often are not the rural poor.

There is an excellent article in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos, “West Virginians Ask Joe Manchin: Which Side Are You On?” If you want to read it and run into a subscription firewall, just open it in a private/incognito window. Osnos writes that to some West Virginians, “Manchin has become an icon of Washington oligarchy and estrangement, a politician with a personal fortune, whose blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty represents a sneering disregard for the gap between their actual struggles and his televised bromides.”

This part sounded familiar to me:

To anyone who knows the details, Manchin’s self-narrative—of a coal-country football star from the tiny town of Farmington—has always passed over his wealth and status. The Manchins are machers; Joe’s grandfather ran Farmington’s grocery store and served, over the years, as its fire chief, constable, justice of the peace, and mayor. His father had a similar stature in local politics, while also expanding the family business from groceries into furniture and carpets. Joe’s uncle, A. James Manchin, ascended to the positions of West Virginia’s secretary of state and treasurer. Joe’s daughter, Heather Bresch, went to work at a pharmaceutical plant in the state run by Mylan, eventually becoming its C.E.O. and collecting an estimated $37.6-million exit package when she retired, in 2020. Joe, for his part, has prospered as a coal broker, building a net worth of between four and thirteen million dollars, according to his Senate disclosures. In West Virginia terms, Manchin has been a member of the gentry—corporate, political, and personal—for decades.

As the child of a small mining community in the Ozarks, I relate to this. It’s common for rural communities to have their own version of the “1 percent,” a small number of families that seem to have plenty of money and manage to run everything. They don’t experience poverty even when living next door to it. I say Manchin probably suffers from what might be called J.D. Vance syndrome. He is utterly obvlivious to the historic and systemic reasons why rural people, white and black, remain locked into poverty. He was born into an affluent family with many advantages and doesn’t understand why those who weren’t can’t be just as successful as he is. And people like Manchin are the ones who end up deciding what problems government will address.

And so the rural poor are voiceless and unheard, which is a big reason a lot of rural whites are angry and have attached themselves to Trump. He hasn’t done bleep for them, but it feels to them that he is some kind of champion. Because of the saturation of right-wing media many don’t actually understand how the government works or what policies do, so they can be easily misled by somebody who communicates in their emotional frequency. This is especially true if the frequency includes some racist dog whistling. Note that 93.5 percent of the population of West Virginia is white.

So, they are not always faultless people. But that doesn’t make them all lazy drug addicts. Rural farming and mining areas have been left behind economically over the past several decades. There is much less opportunity than there was 50 years ago. But moving and starting over somewhere else may be too much of a hurdle, for a lot of reasons both financial and sociological. Helping these people really will take something like a New Deal. It’s not going to happen otherwise.

Eric Levitz writes at New York:

Joe Manchin is a conservative Democrat. As such, he fears deficits, distrusts the poor, champions fossil fuels, and reveres the Pentagon. Manchin believes that the national debt is a threat to our grandchildren; that giving cash aid to the idle poor only encourages lassitude; that an excessively rapid green transition is a bigger threat than climate change; that the United States cannot afford to cut its military spending; and that there is a limit to how much the nation can increase taxes while keeping its business environment “competitive.” …

… Much of Manchin’s worldview is deluded, classist, and wholly incompatible with meeting the challenges that the United States faces in the present moment. Manchin’s deficit-phobia is premised on basic misunderstandings about the nature of sovereign debt. His fear that providing cash aid to indigent families would only trap them in dependence is rooted in hateful folk wisdom, not actual social science (studies have demonstrated that giving unconditional cash benefits to low-income parents does not significantly depress their labor-force participation, but does improve their kids’ later-life outcomes, in part by increasing their labor-force participation). His stalwart support for ever-higher military budgets is born of a delusional faith in both the wisdom and plausibility of America’s absolute global dominance. His skepticism of green-energy subsidies proceeds from some admixture of his family’s financial interests and his region’s understandable yet destructive nostalgia for a long-dead coal economy.

The argument that Bette Midler is an “elitist” but Joe Manchin is not doesn’t sit well with me. Midler probably knows nothing about life in Appalachia, but that’s not her job. It is Joe Manchin’s job, and he’s failing. He looks down his nose at his impoverished constituents and declares they’d just blow the child tax credit on drugs. He thinks givng people money discourages them from taking jobs but doesn’t want to fund day care so that women with children can take jobs.

And while the coal industry isn’t dead yet, it is dying. It is not helping anybody to pretend otherwise. I know what it’s like when mines close. Once there were a steady supply of jobs in a community. Often these are union jobs. Years ago, the boys could graduate from high school and get hired by the mining company the following week, and if they consistently showed up sober and on time to do the work, they were probably set for life. They could buy houses and pickup trucks and vacations in the summer. They had health benefits and a retirement plan. Those salaries also supported construction companies and car dealerships and a lot of retail businesses. When the mines closed, it wasn’t just the miners who lost income, but the entire community. Mining towns are often one-industry towns. And if the community is rural and isolated, good luck finding other industries to take the place of the mines.

And this is not unlike the problem of the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., which remains unsolved even though everybody knows about it. It remains unsolved because some people are making too much money the way things are.

Greg Sargent writes,

First, the United Mine Workers of America just called on Manchin to reconsider his opposition to BBB. Second, the New York Times just published an expose of the coal industry’s apparent success in shaping Manchin’s stances.

Yep; the United Mine Workers begged Manchin to support Build Back Better. The Union members aren’t stupid; they know the old coal mining industry is fading away. They are keenly interested in how the transition to new energy sources will be managed. The BBB bill provided incentives for alternative energy industries to build manufacturing plants in coal-producing areas. This would be great for West Virginia.

Manchin’s objections to the BBB energy investments are nonsensical. He thinks a fast transition will create chaos. He thinks somehow this transition will lead to more fiascos like last winter’s power outages in Texas (which had nothing to do with windmills, remember). And coal industry executives and lobbyists have persuaded Manchin that investing in solar power somehow will benefit China.

Of course, there’s also the half million dollars Manchin gets every year from coal industry dividends. That’s a strong argument for the status quo, right there.

At the New Yorker, Evan Osnos points out that Manchin has a long habit of not meeting with constituents. Especially people who want to talk to him about West Virginia poverty or West Virginia jobs scarcity talk to his office staff, not the Senator. This inspired some of his constituents to surround his yacht — which he calls his “houseboat” — in a little flotilla of kayaks. It’s the only way they could talk to him.

Not exactly a man of the people, are you, Senator?

Jennifer Rubin thinks the reaction to Joe Manchin’s announcement yesterday caught the West Virginia senator by surprise.

I was going to not write about Joe Manchin again today, but then Joe Manchin got on Fox News Sunday today and announced he could not vote for the Build Back Better bill. Just couldn’t do it. He tried and tried to get himself to a place where he could vote for it, but he never arrived. So that’s that.

Politico is reporting that less than 30 minutes before his television appearance, Manchin sent an aide to inform the White House of what he was about to announce. WH staff tried to get him on the phone before the interview, but he wouldn’t take the call.

Jen Psaki then delivered a statement on Manchin that called Manchin a liar and a traitor without using those exact words. She did call Manchin’s announcement “a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate.” She laid out all the ways that Manchin’s excuses for not supporting the bill were total bullshit. Do read it.

In June we learned that Manchin more or less takes orders from No Labels, a “third way” sort of organization whose members include many billionaires — capital management, equity firms, hedge funds, etc. Even though he got “caught on tape,” so to speak, no one in mainstream media has been willing to call him out on this, I have noticed.

Steve M:

I thought there might still be hope for Build Back Better, in some greatly reduced form, but Joe Manchin just stabbed the president and every swing-district Democrat in the back, as well as every person who would have benefited from the bill, because the people who own him want to keep ordinary people’s grubby hands off what they consider their money and want Democrats to lose every election, and Manchin wants whatever they want.

It’s well known that Manchin makes money from fossil fuel investments, which puts him off any provisions in the bill meant to develop new energy sources. But if that were all that bothered him he wouldn’t be against all the rest of it. Which he is. I’m guessing his donors ordered him to pull the plug this weekend. Maybe right before Christmas fewer people would notice.

Up until now I have suspected there has been an agreement among congressional Democrats to not speak ill of Joe Manchin in public no matter how much he was pissing people off. I suspect that agreement just got nullified.