You revere the man who claimed the virus would disappear "like a miracle," and not only refused to wear masks or socially distance (defying all health experts' advice), but until days ago was holding rallies where he had no expectations of safety for the crowd. The Barrett nomination is now being characterized as a superspreader event.
True realists know people will die, but you know what they also do? They take threats seriously and know that it's possible to minimize casualties with early, coordinated action. You, sir, are not even close to being a realist.
Conservatives and generally apathetic people have taken this, "well people will die, it just works that way" notion as if it is still 1917, or 1038, or whatever century of human misery, prior to germ theory, contemporary or even modern medicine, all the vast amounts of knowledge and wisdom we have gained through epidemiology, and have decided that none of that matters. "We are the greatest nation in the world! ...but of course none of the amazing things that actually made us great matter, are relevant, and should be summarily dismissed because I have a narrative that must be defended.
Retro Rob is the perfect example of this transparent dismissal of everything that makes us an advanced, modern human society while praising its "greatness" and celebrating its collapse as a strange defense of "what is necessary" in a temporary narrative that he will absolutely change within a week.
This is the problem with conservatives: they want to pretend that "greatness" is some divine gift that they
deserve, without work, without history, without any effort or any acknowledgement of the reality of that greatness....because those things have been recently defined as evil, or simply uncomfortable to the conservative philosophy, because the inevitable reality of human progress is that conservatism is a plain, undeniable threat to actually being great. They've
earned nothing about "greatness" while time and time again, it is without question the intellectuals, usually liberal, open-minded, oftentimes deists or atheists (Read: not Christians, or simply do not care) that have actually done all the work that makes this country great. Conservatives want to claim all of the results of greatness for themselves, dismiss everything that made it great, and pretend that the greatness was there all along, giving them a singular divine right to announce it and own it. Hell, just look at every Texas Tugger post: he's the poster child of this lazy, ignorant, plainly unappreciative right-owner to what he believes is "great" (about a country that he has probably only ever witnessed ~2% of throughout his life)
This is why the "narrative" argument must be established. Everything and anything can be false or true, at any time, because it is the only way to mentally shelter oneself from the plain truth that their philosophy is indefensible, broken, and really the core reason why they are so miserable in life. The invented enemies that they were given (have always been given by such regressive, fascist regimes: "the stranger, the outsider, the not us") aren't enough anymore. The entire reality must be changed, and constantly fluid. It takes one day of simple thought to dismiss any established conservative narrative, so they must by fluid.
