Trump Celebrates MLK Day By Declaring Race War

They only have the one song, and they sing it loud and proud.

In celebration of Martin Luther King Day, the former president is honoring the real victims of racism: white people.

"The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies," Donald Trump said at his pitchfork rally in Arizona on Saturday.

"It's unbelievable to think this," he continued. Truthfully for once, because literally no one should believe this nonsense.

As Insider notes, this appears to be an extended riff on a Wall Street Journal   opinion piece decrying New York State guidelines for dispensing antivirals, which are in very short supply during the omicron surge. Among many other health factors, "Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19."

And this, unlike the former president's freeform arglebargle, is actually true. Black and Hispanic people are roughly twice as likely to die from coronavirus as white people. So if care has to be rationed, it is entirely logical to give it to a patient with double the risk of dying from a disease Trump and his followers insist is just like the flu anyway.

But the piece's authors, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, neither of whom appears to have any background in epidemiology or immunology, confidently wave away this statistical reality by invoking "the laid-off auto worker" — presumably white — who "might also deserve some consideration from the New York health officials."

They also suggest, bizarrely, that the authors of studies demonstrating higher death rates for non-whites are biased because they don't control for "class factors."

"Clearly then, the observed disparities in vaccination rates between Blacks and whites have a lot to do with the higher noncollege proportion among the Black population," they write, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the antivirals in question are only available to unvaccinated people who test positive for the disease.

Back at the Trump rally, though, these details were irrelevant. The once and future political candidate had a race war to flog, and he wasn't going to let a little thing like objective reality get in his way.

"If you're white, you don't get the vaccine," he said, adding a layer of pure horseshit over an already distorted version of reality. Literally no one is rationing vaccines based on race. The country is awash in vaccines, and thanks to Trump's minions, tens of millions of eligible adults won't take them. Or they won't take the boosters because they believe two shots are fine, but the third shot is where Bill Gates hides the microchip that makes you infertile.

"Black people don't want it. White people don't want it. Nobody wants it!" he shouted, against a backdrop of strategically situated "Blacks for Trump."

Trump says white people are being discriminated against on covid treatment: “If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics .. In NY state, if you’re white, you go to the back of the line if you want help.”pic.twitter.com/QLgkC3VESk

— Ron Filipkowski (@Ron Filipkowski) 1642302470 

"It's not even believable," he repeated, like a tic. "You saw this come out a week ago it came out. Nobody can even believe it."

TRUE!

"And they don't want to talk about it, because they know it doesn't work very well for them," he said, which is a weird way to describe published New York Department of Health guidance. "But the Wall Street Journal described the practice. Race-based, preferential COVID treatment, so that's what it is. You get it based on race."

"In New York state, if you're white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical help. Think of it! If you're white, you go right to the back of the line," he said without apparent irony on a weekend where we celebrate the civil rights victories by people who literally had to go to the back of the bus and drink from a separate water fountain.

And while we're on the subject of clanging irony, let's not forget that Trump himself got that monoclonal antibody cocktail when it was an experimental treatment , not widely available to the general public. And he made sure that Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, and Ben Carson got it, too. At a time when some hospitals were using a lottery to allocate the lifesaving antibodies, some people were able to jump right to the front of the line based on no risk factors at all. Their proximity to the president was enough.

So maybe spare us the bullshit about poor whites being forced to sit on the back of the COVID bus.

Of course, this is all Trump has: race war now, race war tomorrow, race war forever.

[ Insider / WSJ ]

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