Blue Fragility, Part MMXMLCIII: Pious Fury!

When it comes to state-level Covid restrictions – bans, shutdowns, snitch lines and the rest – the big media and the pundit class (pardon, more and more, the redundancy) act a lot like strict but blinkered Fundamentalists confronting two-for-ones at happy hour; the impenitent deserve any horrors that befall them, in this life or the next.

All through the summer, Big Media was fairly drooling at the notion that, while Covid was ravaging New York and Boston and Minneapolis, “it’s gonna hit the red states MUCH harder”, with a perceptible thrill in their voice.

Which is all I have to explain the way Big Media has covered the surge in Covid in the Dakotas. I’ve called the phenomenon “#BlueFragility” – the notion that no matter what goes wrong in a Blue city or state – crime, corruption, costs, Covid, bureaucratic legerdemain – it’s going to be worse in the Red areas, and it’s probably their fault besides!

The level of joy that came out a few weeks ago when North Dakota’s case load surged (after a cold, wet October – the same weather that’s gonna cause a surge everywhere else, before too long) had a pronounced “Scarlet Letter” vibe to it.

And it’s not just pseudomoral schadenfreud. It’s bastardizing both science and journalism (to the extent that benighted craft can still be bastardized). Remember the Sturgis rally? When snarky bobbleheads with tin “reporter” badges uncritically regurgitated garbage “science” tying every single case in the upper midwest to the Sturgis rally? That made the headlines. The clarification – it was more like 80 cases in Minnesota – got Section C page 16.

Oh yeah – being big media, pretty much everything they’ve written about the situation is wrong. To pick just one bit of misreporting – the story from a few weeks back that Gov. Burgum was asking infected but asymptomatic staff to keep working:.

“Anger in North Dakota After Governor Asks Covid-Positive Health Workers To Keep Working.” That does sound pretty dire – the state is so swamped that the sick are treating the sick.

Except this is a phenomenon in agricultural states generally because they rely on small rural Critical Access Hospitals, often with few beds and limited or nonexistent intensive care capabilities. “COVID-19 patients and other critically ill patients who need to be cared for in an intensive care unit are typically transferred to larger regional hospitals, which can be hundreds of miles from the small critical hospitals,” notes USA Today when it’s not berating the Dakotas. This adds extra pressure to city hospitals and can potentially increase case severity and death. In fact, the CDC spells out guidance for areas in such situations that allows such working situations precisely because unlike what we normally think of as a disease case, that is, an exhibition of a certain cluster of symptoms, many Covid-19 “cases” are asymptomatic and non-spreading. It’s just one of the many idiosyncrasies of how this disease is treated compared to others. 

While I chalk this up to a frenzy of secular-revivalist fervor, the author, Michael Fumento, adds another wrinkle to the diagnosis:

Say you’re a writer in New York or Los Angeles living in something approaching a coronavirus police state and fearing for your job and pining for a pint and you learn North Dakota ranked second in least economic distress from the pandemic while South Dakota also did quite well. Further, a U.S. Census Bureau poll found that the two states least suffering from anxiety and depression right now are, yup, the Dakotas. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s freedom!

I do urge you to read the whole thing.

By the way – unlike pretty much any mainstream media figure, I’ve spent time in the Dakotas since the pandemic started. A *lot* of time. Four times since March. While there was no state mask mandate, people *on their own* were wearing them, no less than in the Twin Cities.

And in a better contrast still? Listening to Governor Burgum addressing the state is a wonderful contrast to Governor Klink; he treats his audience like someone he has to respect as adults, puts the actual science out there, and doesn’t play stupid stunts like hiding his math, a welcome comparison to the gym teacher with his knobs and levers and vanishing models.

Moving as I did from NoDak to the big city 35 years ago, I’ve had an adult lifetime of dealing with “blue” stereotypes of the rural west. I’d say “I’m gonna enjoy watching them choke on them”, but it’s probably too soon.

21 thoughts on “Blue Fragility, Part MMXMLCIII: Pious Fury!

  1. They don’t treat you like a citizen because as far as they are concerned you are not a citizen. You are a subject, aka subject to rule. You are a thing that is done to, not a thing that does, a “who,” not a “whom.”

  2. I do urge you to read the whole thing [by Michael Fumento]

    Mr Fumento is always worth reading when it comes to medical alarmism. For example this with the subtitle, “The public health service rewards people who are grotesquely wrong”.

  3. German deaths per million (7 day rolling average) are now approaching US numbers.
    So I guess we won’t be hearing much about the wisdom of the German response any more.

  4. Well, if we can believe the results of the election in Minnesota, then we can easily see why Kim Jong Walz treats people like they are too stupid to figure things out for themselves and like being told what to do.

    I’m also waiting for someone that’s tired of all of the fear mongering by the Democrat Ministry of Propaganda aka the media, to take their frustrations out on the bobble heads that represent it and it won’t be a Republican. It will be an entitled, self righteous Democrat or Bernie Bros.

  5. What is missing in all of the covid restrictions is a robust public debate.
    There is no “perfect path” to managing the impact of covid-19. Everything is trade offs. Democracy is not a mechanism for perfect government, it is means of holding the governors to account by the governed, That’s it. Democracy has no other purpose.

  6. Max, I disagree. Democracy by definition is mob rule. And he who has the support of the mob, rules. What we have is a representative republic. At least we used to, until Democracy took over. And as long as demoncRats keep catering to the mob, they can, and indeed will do whatever they want. Until the mob either turns on them, or there is a rival mob that usurps the current one.

  7. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 11.30.20 : The Other McCain

  8. Mitch writes about Big Coastal Left’s blinkered tone-deafness about the Great Plains.

    Emery provides evidence reinforcing the point.

  9. Democracy by definition is mob rule.

    Well, sorta. Spell it with a large “D”, and it’s 50%+1 rule – the mob JPA references.

    Spell it with a small “d”? It’s a term in common use for elected government, be it a Democracy, representative republic, federation or what have you.

  10. MBerg: Have you spoken to anyone working an ICU in North or South Dakota? Judging by your writing — it appears not.

    I don’t have high hopes for the pandemic subsiding anytime soon because of the persistent willful ignorance of people who are too afraid to acknowledge the truth about what’s going on and to act responsibly.

    In any serious situation, there will always be some who fail to rise to the occasion. Trump provides no leadership to minimize this, in fact he encourages counterproductive behavior. Biden will have a hard time turning the tide. Until an effective vaccine is widely available, we’ll all be living with the fallout from Trump and his followers denialism.

  11. “Biden will have a hard time turning the tide. ”
    Biden has difficulty putting on his depends without help.

  12. People who are ignoring Biden’s obvious descent into dementia should be really careful about using the term “denialism.”

  13. 👆Better to believe in fake conspiracy theories and blame others to rally the troops than in actual facts and science where you have to do something to address the problem, in a timely manner.

  14. “By the way – unlike pretty much any mainstream media figure, I’ve spent time in the Dakotas since the pandemic started. A *lot* of time. Four times since March. While there was no state mask mandate, people *on their own* were wearing them, no less than in the Twin Cities..”

    This is what I have pretty much noticed in Iowa, too.

    I, too, wish we were having more robust discussion on actual risks and precautions.

  15. Walz & his supporters no longer believe that the government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.
    So I suppose it is okay to call them un-American, now?

  16. North Dakota hits another milestone: 1 out of every 800 residents dead.

    Just two weeks ago, North Dakota crossed the 1 in 1,000 threshold. ~ Bloomberg News

  17. If North Dakota was a country, it would be the 3rd deadliest on Earth for COVID. But it’s only the 8th deadliest U.S. state (though rising fast!) ~ Bloomberg News

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