this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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Someone I loved very much died because he thought the Covid vaccine would kill him. Before he fell down the alt-medicine rabbit hole, he was one of my favorite uncles. He was a good guy.
He had four kids, all still in grade school, and a wife who's now a single mom. He didn't deserve to become a casualty of a confidence scam. He deserved to live. It pisses me off when people look at the death toll of a believable lie and gloat about how it's removing the 'right' people.
They fell for a scam. That doesn't merit the death sentence.
Nah, he had access to the same information as the rest of us, but his obsession with Trump was more important to him than his family. He worked hard to earn his death, and his family should resent him for the rest of their lives for abandoning them.
And so should you. If Trump had started rounding up and murdering immigrants and dissidents, he would have cheered for it. Don't deny it, he literally died for Trump. He was a bad and stupid person, who died because of his own poor choices.
It’s wild. Americans being unwilling to enact even SOCIAL consequences on MAGA garbage is exactly why they are where they are. These people need to be cut off without a second thought.
I'm glad no one you cared about died because they got suckered into following a cult. I'm glad you don't have to wonder if they'll get hurt because they've been brainwashed. I'm glad you don't have to wonder who fed them such poisonous lies, and fight to try and cure it.
Cool. Very noble and high minded, aren’t you?.
People like you are the reason the US is where it is.
Yes... too many people with empathy and beliefs rooted in complex first hand experience. That's why the U.S. is where it is...
Definitely nothing to do with people jumping to conclusion driven by black and white thinking
Cool. You live in your grey area where Nazis have some good qualities and maybe you can reach them if you overlook the fact that they’re absolute garbage. That’s definitely stopped fascists before.
I don't want to accuse you of pulling something out of your ass just to box me into a false dichotomy, but I also don't recall typing any of that?
Okay, so you just typed some non sequitur and expected that nobody would assume you were responding to the substance of the discussion taking place? Rad.
No, I was responding to the discussion about losing a loved one who was brainwashed. Based on the full discussion it's unclear if he even supported Trump or was just brainwashed by homeopathic and or antivax propaganda, which is not exclusive to one political party.
You're getting oddly defensive about this though. Tubular. 🤙🏄♀️
Pretty fucked up your making fun of someone who lost a loved one. Completely ignorant to think something like that couldn't happen to you, unless you don't have loved ones, dick.
When maga stop wanting me dead I'll start caring when they die.
Preach.
I’m not making fun of anyone, I’m criticizing someone. For the things they’re saying.
Does experiencing grief (even for science-denying fascist enablers) equal immunity from criticism where you’re from?
Don't you know that the US and Canada are twins? Don't you see that your country is going the exact same way ours is? Those are your friends and family who are reading the same trash, maybe wedging its way into the same cracks in their logic that killed someone I loved.
If it hasn't happened, it will. And I hope when it does, you try to save them too.
Yes, I know that your inaction is likely to make this our problem eventually too.
And when it does, any “friends and family” espousing that garbage gets cut off AT BEST. If they’re fortunate, they’ll get to keep all their teeth. And if they decide that conspiracy theories are more attractive than, you know, staying alive, good riddance.
Looking through your comment history, you seem to make a career out of blaming and mocking victims. I have to wonder who hurt you so badly that you spend all day hurting other people. How does using your trauma like it's a keyboard assault weapon help your cause?
MAGA aren't victims. They're the perpetrators. Fuck's sake, these ignorant bigots have agency.
“Victims.”
You’re confusing laziness and complacency with helplessness.
Who hurt you? lol
Really? You met him?
He kissed your head and grinned when you talked about your favorite superheroes? He picked you up and swung you around on his arms with his own kids, singing songs about monkeys in trees?
He held you when you cried? He held your mother when she cried?
You make a lot of assumptions for some faceless ass on the deep dark depths of the internet.
Hitler loved dogs and children. He also slaughtered millions of them.
I didn't know your uncle personally, but I know he was a MAGA who was so dug in that he literally put his obsession for Trump ahead of his love for his family, and died for it, abandoning his 4 kids. Anyone who puts their politics or religion ahead of their love for their own children is a sociopathic loser.
What else do I need to know about him? Nothing he possibly did is going to redeem him for being an unapologetic MAGA sociopath to the very end.
You're an asshole
Calling someone you've never met a sociopath while demonstrating a complete lack of empathy is certainly ironic.
Health conspiracies predate trump and will continue long after him.
They weren't always right coded either. The granola health nuts were left leaning conspiracy nuts for decades.
Lot of assumptions. First and foremost that he liked Trump.
I could make a lot of assumptions about you.
Agree. The sad fact is there have been plenty of mistakes made throughout history that can often serve as a kernel of truth to make a lie just believable enough. Given historical context within the U.S. (for example Tuskegee experiments), and the fact that even in the last decade we've uncovered more cases of unethical human experimentation by both the government and private companies (MK Ultra, social media manipulation of users emotions), we really should be asking why more isn't being done by leaders to: 1. Publicly acknowledge some very big mistakes, 2. Create ongoing consequences for the people who did this unethical bullshit. As in, ongoing financial penalties/compensations for victims and their families/communities, and demanding more transparency from these agencies and businesses... Instead of allowing them to just continue operating as normal, essentially tax free with zero transparency while pretending we should all just say thank you.
Idk is expecting the bare minimum from the people we trust (and PAY) to create and enforce laws and policy really too far fetched?
I know whenever I read some crazy MAHA bullshit coming from DHHS in 2026 implying I should be depending on raw milk for my own health instead of vaccinations, I think about the fact that A. Obviously this is a once trusted source of information I can no longer trust, B. The damage currently being done to public trust isn't going to disappear overnight if/when fascism leaves office, C. The current damage is compounded on top of a lot of previous damage our government never took the time to actually acknowledge and try to repair. D. I doubt anybody in this administration will face consequences for the damage they're doing, but there will be ongoing consequences to public health and safety for decades if not generations. And that's kind of their overarching goal.
Tldr: It's valid to be angry at people for making poor choices, but they're still people. I'm more angry at the system that failed them and is continuing to fail all of us by not demanding accountability from the agencies/corporations/individuals who knew what they were doing was wrong, but did it anyway because they believed/trusted that even if they got caught, any consequences/penalities would be insignificant.
You know, if this scam wasn't both easily avoidable and actively calling for the imprisonment and/or death of various groups of people within the country, I might be a bit more sympathetic. I know it can be tough watching someone you know fall for it and not being able to stop it, but getting mad at internet strangers who say that MAGA followers got what they should have seen coming to them has the same vibes as going "But my uncle was a good guy before he fell for all this Nazi stuff Hitler is saying, he didn't deserve this," while overlooking that they volunteered to be a guard at one of the camps.
Nobody is forcing people at gun point to go MAGA at present,, and adopting and promoting that ideology has real impacts on other peoples' lives, which currently include arbitrary imprisonment, an inhumane death camp in El Salvador and Trump's brown shirts beating and killing people in the streets. So it might suck on a personal level, but who are you to tell someone who lost their access to abortion, medical care and/or the ability to just live a normal life if they happen to be trans or gay in the wrong state, or even someone they know being rounded up by ICE that they're bad people when they say, "Well, good thing another MAGA person died, that's one less of them fucking up my life," in a situation like this?
Again, it sucks for you that you lost your uncle, but he didn't live in a vacuum and the ideology he adopted has real, severe consequences for everyone else who has to deal with it.
With that said, I do think we need to give some serious thought to deprogramming these folks and reintegrating them with civilization in the near future. "Screw them all, let's just kill them," is hardly going ti be a viable strategy when we have to face our own period of de-Nazification in the future and could be helpful in actually getting some off the indoctrination pipeline and reducing their numbers in the present. There are millions of people who have openly embraced fascism in the US, and millions more supporting right-wing extremists in Latin America and Europe. Indefinite imprisonment or mass executions are both equally unfeasible as solutions for when we collectively pullour heads out of our asses as humans and go "Oh shit, we really fucked up with this fascism stuff, again. What do we do now?"
Where did I say that he was pro-Trump? I said that he believed medical misinformation. He had conservative leanings, but he didn't vote for him. He fell down a different rabbit hole.
You know, that was a bad assumption on my part commenting on an article about conservatives and their conspiratorial views, but it still just changes the specifics of things, rather than the grand picture, as your uncle still didn't live in a vacuum. The vaccine skepticism and other nonsense still made things worse for everyone, and caused needless deaths, aside from your uncle's. I get that it can be harsh for those who personally knew an individual, but you can't ignore the impact that line of thinking has on everyone else around them and pull out the surprised PIkachu gif when people are less than sympathetic towards them.
Personally, I had to deal with those sorts of yokels yelling at me and being jackasses because I was wearing a face mask in the fall of 2020, actively following up on the health issues that arose after I had the OG Covid and was left unable to walk more than two blocks from my apartment without being completely exhausted, and had to deal with my body deciding that it was an excellent time to develop an autoimmune disease and nerve damage. I'd be yelled at to take off "that face diaper" because Covid isn't real, and vaccines are fake, blah blah blah, from the same sort of people who were all in for Trump, so I've got a bit of a bias there. Still don't have much sympathy for them, though.
As someone else pointed out, they had access to the same information as the rest of us, and chose to go with the dumbest possible conclusions they could draw, yelling "Fake new!" and "Do your own research!" to the rest of us desperately screaming at them to knock that shit off, get with the program and stop actively making an ongoing pandemic worse for themselves and those around them. They decided that they and their misinformation monger(s) of choice knew better than the rest of the world, and now we all have to live with the consequences of it.
But it wasn't believable.
No one should have believed it.
People falling for the "scam" aren't fooled, they are buying in to an ideology that they want to support.
This is why i call the conservative/alternative medicine mindset a "brain worm". If unprepared, you can get infected.
He wasn’t a good guy, and the world is a better place without him.
Imagine having no empathy, as if that will make the world a better place.
Nazis don’t get empathy. They deserve to be put underground.
World woulda been fucking better if there was help for the dude's uncle. Please don't be so callous.
There was help. Still is. These people have agency and the same access to information you and I do. If anyone believes something in spite of the available information it's because they want to. They're just dumb, but this kinda dumb kills other people too, not just themselves.
But there was help for people like this uncle. There were massive campaigns to address vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID, to which they collectively said "No thanks, I did my own research." What were we supposed to do, set up reeducation camps and forcibly round them up and ship them off? I can't really see that being a viable solution.
Ironically RFK has said he wants what amount to reeducation camps.
I guess it depends if he was just consuming the misinformation or if he was actively spreading the misinformation
Go fuck yourself. Feel free to talk shit about your own family. Don't talk shit about mine.