The Piece of Me That Died in the Plague

Caleb Wallace (left) and Phil Valentine

Caleb Wallace, the Texas COVID-era anti-mask activist and sometime border vigilante, died of COVID on Saturday morning. He leaves behind a pregnant widow and three daughters under age six.I can’t imagine the excruciating months and years Wallace’s family now faces, in a world where pandemic restrictions make direct assistance to others more difficult than ever. I want, as a Christian and decent human being, to feel bad for them.

Yet reading myself, I feel, not sympathetic grief, but a towering, weighty vacuum. A nothingness that weighs my limbs like slabs of granite, urging me to surrender to paralysis. The effort necessary to care about others’ suffering feels wasted in situations like this, where that suffering is created by a cause not only widely known, but easily preventable. I feel drawn by the temptation to surrender to bitterness and blame-laying.

Wallace’s death comes one week after Nashville talk-radio icon Phil Valentine, who used his regional pulpit to mock and belittle mask mandates and vaccine drives. August alone has seen three right-wing radio personalities die, all of whom espoused anti-mask and anti-vaccine positions. At least two of them tried to retract their anti-vaccine positions from their deathbeds, adopting a technique beloved of the status quo: repenting after it’s too late.

Of everything this pandemic stole, I miss my ability to care the most. Sure, the illness itself was bad; I had COVID in November. I spent entire days terrified to move, knowing that the slightest disturbance would result in gastroenteritis symptoms. Even now, months later, I wake every morning feeling queasy, needing to wait out the symptoms. But I can adjust. I haven’t adjusted to my newfound inability to care.

Valentine, Wallace, and those like them weren’t merely deceived. They didn’t believe a false narrative; they took leadership roles in peddling disinformation and lies. I can accept that some people distrust the vaccine, as it’s new, the rollout is unusually fast, and change is often scary. But these men actively distributed claims they knew were unsourced and false, to a public hungry for some authoritative-looking figure to verify their fears.

But like drug dealers, the local, street-level guys have little power. They’re playing in a market primed by international cartels and an economic machine. While Phil Valentine tried to retract his antivax statements, and Caleb Wallace’s soon-to-be widow urged people to embrace the vaccine her husband opposed, a national consortium of opinion brokers continued coaching their market to distrust science and embrace weird technocratic wizardry.

Fox News's prime-time stars, l-r: Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity

Fox News has essentially been Ground Zero for the Ivermectin conspiracy, telling gullible patsies that government scientists are liars, and we should take off-label livestock medications. If local talk-radio conservatives tried to pivot away from these conspiracies, they’d lose their audiences, which have accepted the top-level myths of how mysterious forces want to curtail your liberties. Phil Valentine might’ve regretted his statements, but he’d never compete with Tucker Carlson.

Like the drug dealer analogy, though, the peak peddlers don’t believe their message. While Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and others actively tell audiences to distrust science and embrace their cargo cult, we now know that Fox News requires vaccine credentials to enter the building. In other words, Fox News knows they’re lying, that they’re paying telegenic talking heads to repeat those lies; they either don’t care, or… something.

I say “something” because I’m bereft of other explanations. Fox, and regional Fox mini-me types like Valentine, spout the party line because, whatever motivation they might have to clarify and speak truthfully, they find those motivations less compelling than the impulse to spread a profitable, camera-friendly lie. They know the truth; they simply don’t care. And they encourage audiences to not care likewise.

The claims emerging from conservative spokespeople are flat wrong and counterfactual, and belied by their own policies. We know many prominent conservatives, including the former President and every Republican governor, are vaccinated. Many have been for months. Yet they continue encouraging their adherents to reject the minor inconvenience necessary to arrest the pandemic, causing many to put themselves in positions where they will risk sickness and death.

I’ve spent eighteen months trying to care. Trying to convince myself that, even when people reject the one thing that will save their lives, they’re still humans, made in God’s image, deserving of respect. But I just don’t feel that anymore. These people encourage others to risk their lives, and every life they come across, then weep crocodile tears. I can’t care anymore, and for that, I can't forgive them.