They’re both currently reaping the personal rewards of cruelty, shamelessness, arrogance, and ignorance. And since the disease they recklessly invited to overtake them is insanely contagious, they are sharing those rewards with the rest of us.
“Most of the [ultraorthodox] community had it already, so we’re not so worried.“
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“Most people had it way back,” [Tzvi] Rosenberg told The Daily Beast, enjoying a cigarette unmasked a few feet from a similarly unprotected friend. “… We’re not wearing right now, because we’re smoking.”
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[M]any in the community believed in the Trump-touted … treatment of hydroxychloroquine…
[One man] approached his wife in synagogue and warned her … that masks cause COVID-19 infection.
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One man walking through Williamsburg provided the simple explanation.
“We all had it already,” he said of COVID, not stopping long enough to give his name.
An 18-year-old walking nearby said the same.
“I had it already and my community had it already,” he said…
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No major Hasidic rabbis in New York City have been seen wearing masks. In fact, photographs of large indoor gatherings — weddings, large prayer services and tisches, gatherings in which the rebbe sits at the head of a table surrounded by followers — have circulated on local news sites and social media.
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[M]ost of the rabbis themselves had the virus earlier this year and believe they have immunity.
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To some, the disregard for masks is evidence of an outlook in which everything in life is up to God.
“I don’t sense a lot of fear,” an administrator at a network of clinics in Williamsburg said. “I think there is a fatalistic attitude, like if it’s meant to be, I’ll get sick.”
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And Trump’s epitaph? UD takes it, with a small alteration, from Larry Kramer’s great play about AIDS, The Normal Heart:
Being defined by [the president’s cock] is literally killing us.
In his swagger lies our doom.