Donald Trump is the single individual in US society most responsible for spreading dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 in the midst of a global pandemic. Anyone who echoes him, or his administration’s entreaties to not take going out in public too seriously, is engaging in public endangerment. Anyone who actively encourages people to gather in mass, and in close proximity, is doing so at a mass scale.

So why, in contravention of Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines and health experts’ urgings, did the DNC and Joe Biden’s campaign do just that at immense scale earlier this month, as major cities were already closing public spaces? And why have media that have deservedly taken Trump and his administration to task for their fatal failures not done the same with Democratic leadership?

If a senior adviser to President Donald Trump falsely claimed on national television that the CDC had declared that it was safe to vote in person, despite its actual recommendation to the contrary, the adviser and the president would be rightly condemned by much of corporate media as, at best, incompetent and ignorant, and, at worst, dishonest and reckless in encouraging people to put their lives at risk.