The New Hampshire House of Representative has an absurdly large 400 members, and some of them are not too bright. Back on December 2, WMUR reported that the Republican members had a super-spreader event when, after winning control of the chamber in the elections, they gathered in late-November to select a new Speaker.
State health officials are investigating COVID-19 cases stemming from a meeting of the New Hampshire House Republican caucus at McIntyre Ski Area on Nov. 20.
The incoming GOP majority has 213 members. During the event over 200 state representatives and GOP staff members gathered at the ski area to nominate a new speaker.
In a statement to WMUR, officials with the state Department of Health and Human Services did not specify how many cases they are investigating but said contact tracing is underway.
House Republican Leader Dick Hinch said in a statement that the caucus is cooperating with contact tracing efforts and he has no reason to believe that COVID-positive members will attend the outdoor swearing-in ceremony at the University of New Hampshire in Durham on Wednesday morning.
Dick Hinch won’t be doing anymore cooperating with contact tracers because even though he won the contest for the Speakership and was sworn in just last week, he is now dead.
And, yes, he was felled by COVID-19.
As for the Democrats, they had little trust that their infectious colleagues would stay away, so a quarter of the caucus didn’t even show up for the swearing-in ceremony.
This is just an extreme example of what is happening all over the country as conservatives and conservative communities fail to take precautions that are treated as common sense by everyone else, and people get sick and die as a direct result.
But it’s not as simple as natural selection doing its work on morons because that’s not how infectious diseases work. These folks are spreading the virus everywhere and increasing even the careful’s odds of contracting the disease.
There’s more: one of Hinch’s Republican colleagues blamed their caucus for his death.
Meanwhile in Tennessee, Rep. David Byrd—who “had attracted scrutiny for more than a year over allegations by three women of sexual misconduct three decades ago when he was a high school teacher and their basketball coach”—is now begging for “a miracle” as it’s likely he’ll end up on the vent. Byrd, of course, is an obnoxious anti-masker, and has marinated his brain in Trumpism for the past however many years.
It is amazing to me that these people so thoroughly believe their own bullshit. Darwin in action.
The stupid…it kills.
At this point, you have to know that if you get too close to a Republican, you might actually die.
It’s a Death Cult.