Perhaps Nolte’s dark, paranoid claims simply show that he has lost touch with reality after looking at everything through a culture-war lens for too long. Or maybe, as some on Twitter have speculated, Nolte is engaging in his own attempt at reverse psychology, calculating that his best chance of persuading the still-unvaccinated among Breitbart’s audience of manipulable, leftist-hating, negatively polarized culture warriors is to tell them that the left doesn’t want them to get the jab and that staying alive is the real way to own the libs. (I requested comment from Nolte but have not yet heard back.)

Either way, a Breitbart polemicist deeply familiar with hard-core Trumpists thinks many of them will make life-and-death decisions not to protect their families but to avoid feeling humiliated by Democratic politicians and liberal celebrities. That’s an extraordinary conclusion…

The populist right is not unique in its self-destructive political behavior. Indeed, its members are quick to point fingers at riots that destroy the rioters’ own neighborhoods or social-justice reckonings that sap progressive institutions’ ability to function.

But rarely has so significant a faction in American politics behaved in a way that so directly claims the life of its own supporters. The approach that Trump voters are taking all but guarantees that more of them will die, relative to other Republicans and to Democrats. If mass death among its members doesn’t inspire an inward reckoning, what will?