A Brief Example of How Republican Posing for Wingnut Cred Is Getting Them Killed

If you want an example of how the Far Right are publicly exposing themselves to COVID-19 in order to show off their wingnut bona fides, look no further than the Florida Republican Party leadership, like this guy in Hillsborough literally dying for no sane reason THE GRAND FAR RIGHT NARRATIVE (via Brooke Lee Howard at the Daily Beast (paywall)): 

Just a day after testing positive for COVID-19, a Florida Republican official who battled against mask mandates, attacked the vaccine, and railed at CDC officials has died in Tampa.

Gregg Prentice, who was 61, led the Hillsborough County Election Integrity Committee—and his sudden death has sent the local GOP scrambling as it no longer has access to essential campaign finance software without his help.

In a Sept. 14 letter to the Federal Election Commission, the Hillsborough County Republican Executive Committee reported it might not be able to file its monthly financial reports as required—because only Prentice knew how to do it.

“Gregg’s software converted data from our Quickbooks software to supply the information needed by the FEC,” it states. “Unfortunately, Gregg passed away suddenly from Covid-19 on Saturday, Sept. 11, 2021. Gregg did not share the software and instructions with our officers. We will have to enter the August data manually, and according to the information we have received from our FEC analyst, Scott Bennett, we may likely have to re-enter the data from our first 7 months of 2021...

Just to point out, aside from Prentice foolishly dying from a pandemic he could have avoided with a cheap (FREE) available vaccine, the local party organization did not plan for emergencies like this to have Prentice train somebody else to be a backup, even for situations where Prentice could have been away on vacation for Christ's sake, nobody planned for that, can I just keep yelling at the idiots in charge of this clown factory or something I MEAN JESUS... 

(calms down)

And that is just one example of a Far Right True Believer (tm) buying into the wingnut Narrative against vaccination and masking so much that he/she/they DIE FROM COVID because of ignoring the science on this.

There's an entire Reddit thread - the Herman Cain Award, an off-shoot of the Darwin Awards it looks like - that documents each and every vocal opponent of safe vaccination and protective masking policies who die from their own angry ignorance.

It's not particularly funny, other than the bleakest way. It shouldn't count as Schadenfreude, because there's no malicious joy to have from people - even these fools - dying in a way that will be a burden and a grief to those who did love them.

If anything, there's a bit of horror attached to all this, because if you read down through Howard's Daily Beast article, it gets into Prentice's friends jumping onto the QAnon Anti-Vaxxing Conspiracy bandwagon accusing the Tampa hospital of "forcibly intubating" Prentice right away and how THAT killed him instead of the COVID. We're getting more and more of the wingnuts out there buying into the accusation that the virus is an engineered bio-weapon and that hospitals are intentionally killing patients "to justify illegal mandates against our freedoms." 

Christ. This is the kind of "virtue pandering" that's going to get doctors and nurses killed...