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AMERICA’S DEADLIEST VIRUS
It’s not COVID-19

In Danny Boyle’s prescient 2002 film 28 Days Later, a Cambridge research lab has been conducting experiments on chimpanzees caged in darkness. The only light comes from 360 degrees of screens showing nothing but beatings, riots, explosions, torture — a round-the-clock barrage of the most savagely violent images imaginable.
Enter three animal liberation activists. A panicked scientist rushes in and warns them not to release the chimps, who are infected with a highly contagious virus. This warning is, of course, ignored, and the first ape freed attacks the girl who opens its cage and … let’s just say carnage ensues. Cut to four weeks later, and London is a ghost town populated by zombies infected with the “rage virus,” and their only goal is to infect everyone else.
We are currently living through a version of this hellscape. Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the rest of their depraved ilk are the ones who’ve spent the last quarter-century exalting ignorance, demeaning truth and preaching hatred, seeding and feeding the rage virus that — even more dangerous than COVID-19 — is currently ravaging the nation. Donald Trump is the ape who sunk his teeth into America, infecting its population with the fecal filth that spews from his appropriately anus-shaped mouth, making the public discourse safe for incivility, indecency, and insanity. Safe for inhumanity.
Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well.