If there’s one thing worse than listening to one Fox News host spout ridiculous conspiracy theories, it’s listening to five of them at once. Which is why The Five may be the scariest show on television. Of course, that just happened to be airing when Joe Biden made the announcement about his new vaccine mandates and, well, the panel’s reactions were a lot to take in.
Among some of the choicest comments, as Mediaite noted, came from Greg Gutfeld, who somehow got from the president’s press briefing that Biden was saying “the unvaxxed are the new terrorists” and that he “showed more anger toward that 80 million” unvaccinated Americans than he has toward the Taliban. (Always with the Taliban with these people.)
(As a reminder, this was Gutfield the day before, when Donald Trump was doing grunty impressions of what Taliban leaders sounded like.)
The always-uplifting Jeanine Pirro called the mandate a “Marxism thing” then reminded her co-hosts that she has both have COVID and been fully vaccinated, so “How am I at risk from someone who doesn’t get the vaccine?” It was Geraldo Rivera who was the voice of reason in this conversation when he reminded Pirro that her grandchildren were at risk (oops!) and also that: “This was a president who is doing something that he feels necessary to curb an emergency that has already, ladies and gentlemen, taken more lives than the American Civil War. I mean, let’s put it into context.”
Most notably, however, was Jesse Watters—who was the first one to take control of the conversation with a conspiracy theory that he’s clearly been working on for a while, just waiting for the opportunity to whip it out. And here it goes:
“He’s an angry man, he’s a bitter man. He’s humiliated by the Afghanistan situation. He’s upset with the economic recovery, where it should be but it’s not, so he’s taking the anger out on the unvaxxed. He’s targeting 80 million Americans who don’t trust him, don’t trust the media, for good reason.
Instead of uniting the country against the virus—and against China, because that’s where it came from—he’s trying to divide the country against itself for political exploitation. He has obviously poll-tested ‘mandates’—never said ‘mandates,’ it’s ‘requirements’ now… If he gets away with this power grab, he’s gonna be bloodthirsty. Imagine what he thinks he’ll get away with next.”
Like Geraldo, let’s put this into context to make sure we understand Watters’ theory: The president—who was not president when COVID first arrived—is dealing with record-high COVID infections and hospitalizations which, in some areas, are making it impossible for health care professionals to give adequate care to all the people (COVID or not, vaccinated or not) who need it. And there’s a vaccine that could easily put an end to this insanity. But there are 80,000 million adult humans who refuse to be vaccinated, some of whom are opting to instead ingest horse medicine to protect themselves. Because they’ve somehow decided that is safer. Yet big, bad, angry man Biden’s reason for requiring people to get vaccinated is… because of a war we lost in Afghanistan 15 years ago?
Yes, makes total sense.
(Via Mediate)