The very perspicacious Amanda Marcotte, a senior political writer for the online magazine Salon, most certainly knows how things go!

A mask comeback is not enough to sway Trump voters: It’s time to start imposing vaccine mandates

Coddling and cajoling the Trumpers isn’t working: Mandates give them a chance to save face while avoiding COVID

By Amanda Marcotte | July 27, 2021 | 12:59PM EDT

Vaccinated America is fed up with the unvaccinated, and the mainstream media is finally starting to pay attention.

“As Virus Cases Rise, Another Contagion Spreads Among the Vaccinated: Anger,” declares a Tuesday morning New York Times headline. “‘Patience has worn thin’: Frustration mounts over vaccine holdouts,” read a similar headline from Friday’s Washington Post.

This anger is completely understandable. While some vaccine holdouts are people who are sincerely scared or misled by misinformation, people are noticing both the geography showing hotspots are in Republican-heavy areas and polls showing the stark partisan divide on inoculation. Vaccinated Americans lived through the past year, including Donald Trump’s failed coup and the pandemic surging due to Republican disinformation. They know full well that it’s Republicans who are refusing vaccines and that they’re doing it out of pure spite. Of course, vaccinated Americans are angry. They should be angry.

Of course, Miss Marcotte doesn’t really look at the data.

You’ve probably been told that “white Republican males” are the chief drivers of low vaccination rates, and they certainly show up in the mix. But the overall demographic data shows that whites, in general, are volunteering to be vaccinated at a far brisker pace than either Black or Hispanic citizens, though whites are lagging well behind Asians who are leading the pack. Overall in the United States, Asians lead with 62% being fully vaccinated. Whites are at 47%, Hispanics have reached 39 percent, and Blacks are still stuck at a 34 percent vaccination rate.

Then there’s this:

Vaccination rates in NYC remain stuck, with more than 40% of the population still unvaccinated.

Ahhh, but those pesky numbers again! 2020 Presidential election in New York City:

• Bronx: Biden 83.44%; Trump 14.60%
• Brooklyn: Biden 76.97%; Trump 20.50%
• Manhattan: 86.76%; Trump 11.37%
• Queens: Biden 72.19%; Trump 25.07%
• Staten Island: Biden 42.07%; Trump 52.99%

Looks like maybe, just maybe, it ain’t all Trump supporters who aren’t taking the vaccines!

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, on July 24^th, that black citizens in the city — Miss Marcotte’s new hometown — have the lowest vaccination rates, at 49%, compared to 62% for both whites and Hispanics, and 88% for Asians. Philadelphians gave just 17.90% of their votes to President Trump, and 81.44% to the dunderhead from Delaware.

Yet black voters are estimated to have given 90% of their votes to Joe Biden.

Forget the mask mandates. Time instead for vaccine mandates.

It is, I suppose, no surprise that someone who couldn’t sell ice water in Hell believes that people ought to be forced to do what they do not wish to do. I’ve said it before: the left are pro-choice on exactly one thing.

The politics are different in the U.S., where refusing vaccination has become an identity marker for conservatives. Still, there’s a good reason to believe that there’d be a similarly high ratio of people who quietly get vaccinated to people who protest. After all, what vaccine mandates would do is give Republicans a way to save face. No doubt many of them are harboring secret worries about getting COVID-19, but they keep refusing to get the shot, out of the perception that doing so would be disloyal to the conservative cause. But if they were “forced” to, they could have it both ways. They could both get the protection while still claiming to oppose the vaccine in the abstract. It’s a win-win for most conservatives, even if they would publicly whine about it. (And, in fact, having something to whine about is a bonus for them!) It’s the same dynamic we see with taxes — conservatives pay them and then get the pleasure of complaining about it.

How, I have to ask, would it give Republicans a way to save face? To mandate the vaccines would require some means of enforcement, and if you are having to carry some form of “vaccine passport,” you would be identified as having taken the vaccine. If you had to show your “vaccine passport” to do practically anything, it would soon become public.

The notion that conservatives “are harboring secret worries about getting COVID-19, but they keep refusing to get the shot, out of the perception that doing so would be disloyal to the conservative cause” is silly. If they were, they could get the vaccine, for which there is no current public confirmation requirement, and either say nothing about it or deny they had done so.

But the very educated Miss Marcotte doesn’t really care about the actual facts, not when they contradict her worldview. And now that the Democrats are back in power, she doesn’t seem to care much about the fascism, the notion that the desires of the state trump the rights of the individual, about which she was so worried when Donald Trump was President.

I am not exactly surprised.