At the risk of stating the obvious, different policies would have resulted in different patterns of spread and local prevalence. Collins might be right: people in less afflicted areas initially might have taken it more seriously, but that's because they likely would've been hit much harder earlier.

And if we hadn't taken strict measures nationally, the carnage in the U.S. outside of the I-95 corridor & parts of the West Coast would've been horrific in the first three months

Collins' remarks are awful. Everyone I know in public health was absolutely talking about the whole picture. I even did a podcast with an economist who talked about the best way to jump the economy was to control the virus. So much revisionism.

My point is this, GOP normies may think they have no interest in fascism, but the fascists have a ton of interest in them and their party. They've had that interest for about 70 years now. Any self-described Republican or conservative who isn't cognizant of that history is whistling in the dark.

That process of takeover was slow, often reversed, & still ongoing. The guy I'm writing about, a fascist who led a grassroots insurgency that took over the OR GOP in 1978, encountered a ton of resistance. He was ultimately pushed out of institutional GOP politics, but not for a lack of trying.

The point is not that the GOP has always been a fascist party. That's silly. The point is that an internally diverse, minoritarian political persuasion we can call "a home-grown, fascist tradition" has always been a feature of modern US politics. Beginning in the 50s it targeted the GOP for takeover

The people today who dismiss the use of "the f-word" to describe US politics are the descendants of those 1980s and 90s era pundits who assured us that the GOP was a totally normal party, fully accommodated to the idea that the US was a multi-racial democracy committed to religious pluralism.

Observers of the far right in the 1980s and 1990s like Chip Berlet worried that these fascistic elements were beginning to establish a foothold inside the Republican Party, and saw that party as its path to real political power. Very few "mainstream" commentators took such warnings seriously.

Since the 1930s, American political culture has had "fascistic" elements and organizations that stood in opposition to "the consensus" that the US was a religiously-pluralistic and multi-racial democracy. But such elements rarely had the ability to wield much power on a national scale.

I try really really hard to not focus on how every source of income I have dropped by at least 30% thanks to the loss of Twitter.