A new study confirms that life expectancy dropped in the United States for the second straight year. COVID is listed as the cause of death, but that’s not really true. Other western countries saw their life expectancy increase in 2021 after vaccines reversed sharp declines in 2020. The killer here was Republican governance and conservative disinformation. 

When COVID first reached our shores in early 2020, African Americans and Hispanics took a disproportionate hit. They saw their life expectancy decrease by more than the country as a whole. A year later, we had an effective vaccine and they actually fared better than the overall population. African Americans saw their life expectancy increase by almost half a year, the same amount that the overall country’s life expectancy dropped. 

The decrease in life expectancy was driven by white people, younger white men in particular—the same people susceptible to the anti-vaccine disinformation pushed by Fox News, conservative talk radio, and GOP politicians. As Dr. Steven Woolf, the researcher who conducted the study, said, “The deaths that occurred in 2021 were a product not only of a lack of vaccination, which was a huge factor, but also being in places that didn’t observe policies like masking and social distancing that prevented transmission of the virus.” 

There’s overwhelming evidence that Republican policies and anti-vaccine/anti-mask rhetoric killed people. The question is “Why?” Was it cynicism or stupidity? Or a better question, how much was cynicism and how much was stupidity? We also need to wonder if Republicans would kill their own base, what lengths would they go to eliminate people who oppose them?

In the midst of a pandemic, Republicans made the people trying to stop the spread of the virus the enemies. They demonized public health officials like Anthony Fauci. They spread conspiracy theories that the virus was a Democratic hoax. They banned private companies from enforcing vaccine mandates. And they did it with a media ecosystem so efficient that their base was getting no contradictory information. Republicans politicians who weren’t spreading disinformation are complicit because they didn’t debunk it. 

The GOP base is like the Russians who believe their army is winning in Ukraine. They’ve been duped by politicians who willingly allow conspiracy theories to flourish in order to score political points with an ignorant population. Despite all the evidence, the GOP base will never know what’s been done to them.

Liberal pundit Matt Iglesias tweeted last week. “I mean if the conservative movement were something other than a con that exploits cultural issues for votes in order to redistribute wealth upwards there is a lot that it could do but … it’s not.” I think that sums up the modern GOP and conservative movement. The only question is which conservatives are part of the con and which are the marks, but there’s no doubt that uneducated, white Americans are victims of the GOP.