Ask A Genius 1119: Petty Evil
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/09/28
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Did you see the post from September 24th about Elon Musk? After seeing an AP post tweet that read, “Judge orders auction of Alex Jones’s Infowars to pay for legal damages to Sandy Hook families,” a parody account tweeted, “I have the opportunity to do the funniest thing possible. Should I?”
Rick Rosner: That’s a good one. So you’re saying it wasn’t Musk himself but a parody account?
Jacobsen: Yeah, it was a parody account with about 1.5 million followers.
Rosner: Musk tweets out jokes, but they’re usually not as clever as that one. This joke shows self-awareness, though it’s not Musk himself being self-aware; it’s whoever is running the parody account.
Jacobsen: Do you think Musk is generally self-aware?
Rosner: I think he’s fairly aware of his public image, but maybe not to the degree people expect. His jokes don’t always land, and not everyone has a high batting average regarding humour.
He’s funny sometimes, but like everyone else, myself included, some of his humour doesn’t land. That was a funny joke, however. But I’d also like to say that I’m genuinely delighted that Alex Jones’s empire, built on lies and exploiting people, is crumbling. He made the Sandy Hook families miserable by lying about the tragedy for a decade, leading to not just harassment but real threats. People went after these families, showing up at their doorsteps and vandalizing their homes—all because of Alex Jones, who made millions selling supplements and pushing conspiracy theories to angry, gullible followers.
I’m delighted to see him lose his empire, built on something toxic and harmful. It feels extreme to talk about evil in the context of politics, but in this case, it seems appropriate. Alex Jones is an evil guy.
Trump is an evil guy, too. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that. Trump’s actions led to the unnecessary deaths of more Americans than any other president in history. You could argue that Lincoln was complicit in the deaths of around 750,000 people during the Civil War. Still, that war was inevitable by the time he became president. His greatness was in preserving the Union.
But it raises the question of whether Lincoln is responsible for those deaths. The Civil War claimed about 3% of the U.S. population, which is massive. But Trump, by comparison, has around 1.4 million COVID deaths tied to his presidency, though more died under Biden simply because the pandemic outlasted Trump’s term. Trump only had one year of COVID, while Biden has dealt with it for three and a half years.
Still, Trump set up the country for these unnecessary deaths, even though he wasn’t in office for most of the pandemic. He politicized COVID. Had he not done that, fewer people would have died. It’s between Trump and Lincoln in terms of complicity in the deaths of most Americans. However, Trump’s case is even more striking when you consider that in 2018, he disbanded the U.S. pandemic response team. That team wasn’t just sitting in some office; they were working globally with other governments to prepare for pandemics, which often originate outside the U.S.
Could they have stopped COVID? Could we have been better prepared? That’s hard to say, but there’s a chance the pandemic might have played out differently. Even if COVID was inevitable, epidemiologists and immunologists I’ve spoken to estimate that about 400,000 of America’s COVID deaths were entirely preventable. These were people who refused vaccines after being misled by propaganda. Florida alone likely accounts for 60,000 of those deaths.
So yes, I’d argue that Trump is complicit in hundreds of thousands of deaths. His refusal to promote mask-wearing for over a month at the height of the pandemic is part of that. I’ve heard he avoided masks because he didn’t want to mess up his facial bronzer. Shockingly, someone would let vanity get in the way of saving lives. At the start of the pandemic, Trump and Jared Kushner reportedly withheld aid because they thought it would harm liberal states more than conservative ones. That level of negligence, vanity, and political cruelty is pretty evil.
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
License & Copyright
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.
In-Sight Publishing 