It’s hard keeping up with the amount of misinformation that one individual — who isn’t a deluded lame-duck president — can publish in a day, so I’ll merely identify the root of the problem so you can gasp and be on your way — after this Public Safety Announcement.

(Cough) When Rep. Luke Simons, R-Dickinson, told the Dickinson Press, “I’ve been called a lot of things but never a liar,” he lied.

And that’s nothing. Under the banner “Representative Luke Simons,” the barber/rancher churns out a daily batch of demonstrably false statements, memes, videos and math, most of it detrimental to the health of gullible people inclined to believe a “hep cat” like Simons.

Simons quote: “How many deaths were there in each of these years 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, compare that to 2020. Then ask yourself are we truly in a epidemic?’’

How many times did your roof blow off in the last 14 years? Compare those numbers to today’s tally. Then ask yourself, “Are we truly within Sharpie range of a hurricane?”

We’ve been in a pandemic for a long time. The doctors and scientists are very picky about when to whip out the label maker, baby. But perhaps they all lied. Many thousands of them. Who knows? Conceivably even Donald Trump lied about the virus?

If people died just because the socialists and Bill Gates want to “control us,” I’m going to be so mad.

Simons shovels faster: “One thing that we know for certain is COVID-19 has cured the common flu that traditionally kills thousands every year.’’

Give it a chance, man. Last year, flu cases started to rise around Nov. 18 and grew steeply in mid-December. I asked myself why people aren’t dying from the flu at a rate that satisfies Luke, and it turns out the “common flu” has a season. We’ll get those “common flu” deaths up in time for sweeps.

And all health care providers are in cahoots and cooking the books in their spare time according to the clown who was trying to palm off a product called VIRA-Pel as a coronavirus treatment nine months ago. It’s made of olive leaf, hyssop, raspberry leaf, schisandra berry and echinacea root. Yum. Who could resist contracting the virus if they could get a whiff of VIRA-Pel? Now in cherry.

Blah, blah, blah: ‘’Masks don’t protect you from viruses. In fact they’re a superspreader. People continuously touch their masks spreading the virus even more then without masks making them a superspreader, also they give people the false impression that they’re safe from a virus.’’ That’s an exact quote if you think Simons could be made up.

Yikes. That Dickinson High School really drills down into the depths of the mask behavioral sciences.

And mandatory! He despises the word and has no idea how many things in this life are mandatory. Simons won’t be tread on without making idle threats about him possibly causing a hubbub, though, because of the mandatory mask policy enacted by N.D. legislators.

Simons repeatedly claimed he would not comply. No mask would touch his face, dagnabbit. The founders never mentioned anything in the Constitution about wearing any stupid facemasks.

But he did comply. Luke bent the knee to his Republican overlords, and in a snit, he answered the injustice with a barrage of silly memes, many flagged by Facebook as way too false and stamped, “Oh, for Pete’s sake.”

One meme conflates “the government” with a control freak wife beater. Pictured is a man’s large closed fist and a petite woman cowering on the floor without her facemask and “the government” is about to assault her because she didn’t cover her face. Evidently, Simons is a scared victim, which is an odd thing to admit.

As he writes, ‘’Sometimes A meme can say what a book is trying to say.’’

In another picturesque Simons meme, there is a picture of a suspension bridge over a large body of water with text reading, ‘’Hmm … This bridge is only 99.997 percent safe. I think I’ll swim.’’ Luke thinks COVID-19 takes the lives of only 0.003 percent of those who become infected. Or “less than 1/10th percent” some of the time. His math is fluid.

Apparently, Simons is explaining how wearing a face mask is like swimming across a broad expanse of choppy water, which, of course, would be the stupid thing to do, like duh. He’s coy that way. Lick a doorknob, why doncha?

So if you’re clever like him, you’ll drive over the probably frigid water on a bridge designed and constructed by experts in many fields with a degree of knowledge so high it took eons of human collective learning before such a structure could be erected.

Luke is advising us to trust the educated professionals. I didn’t see that twist coming.

Of course, if a guy writes, “I WEAR UNDER Duress” on his facemask with a Sharpie, he’s breathing marker fumes, so maybe that flip flop was predictable. “Dave’s not home man.”

Then Simons drops this bombshell: ”It’s not about masks, it’s about a forced vaccine.”

What isn’t about masks? What is about forced vaccinations? He didn’t say. Very coy.

Except, “I’m telling you it’s coming! Let your legislators know you do not want them to go along to get along with mandatory vaccines.’’

Sure, sure, sure. Let’s string this pandemic out for a stretch.

How much longer will the battle to defeat this new disease take if people refuse to take the vaccine? Who knows? Who wants ANY longer?

Oh, and people who wear a mask and trust vaccines are sheep* — always with the sheep — as if Luke hasn’t always vaccinated his livestock and pets? How many of his cows have EVER gone into a Microsoft financed trance and goose-stepped into positions of global power after a shot in the rear?

Anti-mask rhetoric is taking lives every day, and the death will continue until we reach herd immunity, which the vaccine will help achieve without 200 million Americans being infected and millions more dying.

It’s likely that 200,000 more Americans will die of COVID-19 before this nightmare is over. Mitigation efforts need to continue during the next six months of vaccinations for obvious reasons.

Will Rep. Simons keep hindering the pandemic response or will he become a responsible member of the Legislature?

My money is on more conspiratorial gibberish and whining.

*In 1527, the bubonic plague was raging and Martin Luther published a pamphlet titled, “Whether one may flee from a Deadly Plague.” Luther writes:

“Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. … See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.”

Curt S. provided this quote. It proves that Martin Luther had more sense in 1527 than the reality-challenged nitwits of 2020.