Bootleggers, Baptists, and COVID-19
How bootleggers are inciting violence against healthcare workers
The novel coronavirus is a global pandemic, and healthcare workers worldwide are being stigmatized and attacked because people believe they are spreading the deadly germ.
In the small town of Cortlandt, N.Y., a 29-year-old man slashed the tires of 22 vehicles in the parking lot of New York-Presbyterian Hudson Valley Hospital. The nurses who found their cars vandalized had just completed overnight shifts caring for COVID-19 patients, and the hospital will cover the cost to replace the tires.
In the Philippines, attackers doused a nurse with bleach, and he can no longer see. In India, a mob threw stones at medical workers. In Pakistan, a landlord evicted a nurse and her children from their apartment. In Mexico, bus drivers denied nurses public transportation, preventing them from risking their lives to save others.
Bootleggers and Baptists is a concept conceived by regulatory economist Bruce Yandle. One interest group advocates for change based on moral grounds. Another advocates for change based on financial gain. Yandle’s theory carries the belief that regulatory movements tend to emerge and succeed with the support of “coalitions of economic and moral interests that desire a common goal.”
During a large part of the 20th century, Baptists and other evangelical Christians lobbied for states to restrict the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Bootleggers earned more money if legal sales were restricted. Such a coalition, Yandle wrote, “makes it easier for politicians to favor both groups. The Baptists lower the costs of favor-seeking for the bootleggers, because politicians can pose as being motivated purely by the public interest even while they promote the interests of well-funded businesses. … [Baptists] take the moral high ground, while the bootleggers persuade the politicians quietly, behind closed doors.”
Today, as we all search for more answers than ever before, many of us question and deny the validity of facts from leading epidemiologists, doctors, statisticians, and the World Health Organization. A growing portion of the US population find the truth in far-right forums—on the websites of Breitbart’s offspring, on FaceBook, on subreddits, on video chats with friends, and in their homes, and they pass the information they find to their children. But the truth they seek is often misinformation in disguise, and they hold onto it with conviction, anger, and rage.
If we return to the Bootleggers and Baptists, we see common ground between COVID-19 and booze.
Now, the far-right media entities are the bootleggers. They publish conspiracy theories to earn advertising and subscription revenue, and the self-proclaimed muckrakers believe the theories themselves. The truth-seekers are the Baptists, and their moral high ground is rooted in distrust of science and, like most extremists on both ends of the spectrum, black-and-white thinking.
Several people I went to high school with are conspiracy theorists. In the last few weeks, I’ve come across roughly three dozen videos and articles that compile independent facts and conjoin them to form firm conclusions that have never been so flimsy.
‘Bill Gates spoke about depopulation and once warned that a deadly virus is more likely to kill millions than another global war, so he planned COVID-19 to inject trackers into everyone’s bodies.’
‘The National Institutes of Health, backed by Dr. Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, committed $3.7 million over six years to scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses so Dr. Anthony Fauci’s research helped create COVID-19.’
The list goes on, and on, and on… and, for a moment, I almost care less about when I’ll be able to give my family hugs and more about when the far-right will be stopped. The truth is, it likely never will, and that is something I’ll never be able to accept.
Far-right entities feed off the economically and intellectually vulnerable. Hitler’s rise to power was the result of many factors: the frailty of Weimar democracy, the strengths of the Nazi party, and the impact of the Great Depression.
Today, far-right publications are Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine; employees at Russian-owned content and troll farms are SS foot soldiers; and a growing portion of the public are the desperate and gullible German people, but the scope isn’t targeting Jews. It has its mark on democracy, and the weapon is a machine gun that’s fired rounds since before the 2016 election. Now, healthcare workers are standing in front of the bullseye, and members of the public are pulling the trigger.
Often times far-left media outlets distort events to mobilize vulnerable liberals, too. I am a moderate Democrat and I don’t ignore the faults on the far-left. But this article is about the overwhelming volumes of misinformation that come from the far-right these days, and the theories are deadlier than ever. Do those who believe them realize the danger that’s in the air? If we rush back to work, we increase our chances of perishing from Mother Earth, a natural wonder that continues to forewarn us about the consequences of negligence and abuse.
Sources: Miami-Herald; The New York Times; Newsweek; Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; Big League Politics; Fox News; Google Finance
