The Great Culling

I'm not saying every Republican or rich asshole thinks this way, but since I am allowed to say what polite people cannot, I am 100% sure that many of them do think that Covid is a welcome way to rid the planet of some of the botched and the bungled.

In college, I studied the decline of the Soviet Union and its last failed efforts to engineer society around a “New Soviet Man,” a fit, young, action-oriented prototype optimized for kitschy ideological warfare. Everything Republicans have done in Florida since I was an adolescent here—from deregulating septic tanks to disenfranchising millions of voters—has established that the state exists primarily for a certain kind of Florida Man, and the rest of us are welcome to ride behind him, as long as we pay our own way. Now I can’t help but wonder if DeSantis’s and his partisans’ coronavirus calculus is an essentially eugenicist one: They seem overtly content to let lots of people die, as long as they’re the right people.