One thing I am furious about is that we’re sliding back into a regime of mask and vaccine mandates, but my anger is like a runaway lawn sprinkler, spraying in every direction. Yes, there’s something malodorously fascistic about the barely contained glee of certain public health officials as they once again get to boss everyone around. (If you want to read how public health was central to Nazi ideology and crimes, I highly recommend Robert Proctor’s brilliant book The Nazi War on Cancer.) But I got a similar whiff when Carlson suggested that people call child services on parents who make their kids wear masks outside (enlisting state power to mess with families strikes me as far worse than confronting someone at a bait shop, by the way).

Similarly, I’m furious at the mainstream media’s obsession with painting vaccine hesitancy solely as a troglodytic right-wing phenomenon, allegedly proving everything they believe about “deplorable” America. (By the way, the news side of Fox has been entirely pro-vaccine as far as I can tell.) And while it’s true that the average hardcore Trump voter is more likely to be vaccine-resistant than the average Democrat, the places where vaccine hesitancy poses the greatest problem aren’t in rural America. They’re in largely blue cities and counties across America, because that’s where the population density is (30 percent of a highly populated area has a lot more people in it than 70 percent of a sparsely populated one). And most of those people aren’t Trump voters. When urban and suburban minorities resist vaccination, it’s an indictment of American structural racism or some such nonsense—and it is mostly nonsense. When rural whites resist vaccination, it’s proof Republicans want to kill people. It’s all such partisan garbage.

But even if you disagree with that, it’s just idiotic to single out white Republicans for your scorn and condescension. As Jim Geraghty notes, 40 percent of New York City’s Department of Education employees aren’t vaccinated. Where was the media’s ridicule of that before this week? Indeed, according to elite liberal logic, the Fox-besotted flyover people don’t know any better. Well, what’s the excuse for metropolitan healthcare workers who have lagged in getting vaccinated? As much as anything it’s the failure of these people to get vaccinated that’s causing the new wave of mandates coming down the pike. Maybe if Democrats and Democrat-aligned media outlets had spent less time basking in the moral superiority of blue America over the last six months this wouldn’t be necessary.