I watched the back half of the debate. I agreed with a lot of what was said. All of them but maybe Christie promised to do things Presidents can't actually unilaterally do. And I was disturbed at the end how all of them went after vaccines. Both of these ideas are cancerous to our country. The more Presidential candidates promise to do things unilaterally that they don't have the power to do, the more primed we will be to accept a real dictator when he comes. And the more we indulge in vaccine skepticism and other forms of reality denial, the more damage that dictator will be able to do to our way of life once he has power. It's bad enough if we flatten the government out to "what he says goes" but what if we let the guy say completely illogical stuff while he's up there? Big Brother says the chocolate ration was increased to 20 grams. I have in my hand last week's chocolate wrapper and it's marked 30 grams. But I have been trained to deny evidence of my eyes and ears when Big Brother, whom I love, tells me otherwise. We have so many studies showing the vaccines work and cause much less harm than they prevent, but that doesn't matter. The GOP needs us to doubt that. It's not enough for the Party to just say "the mandates were wrong" (most of them were, only health care workers should have been mandated, not police and not military) but they feel a need to go after the whole thing and say vaccine manufacturers should be sued. They know better. But they reject their own logic and and their own ability to see facts and say things that the Party needs them to say.

Maybe I shouldn't be concerned about that. But I am.

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