Thursday, August 20, 2020

I Hope They Know What They Are Doing

 The Democrats are still trying to play fair in a very unfair game. The problem is that no one is paying attention to how clean and conciliatory the Party is at their convention. The political press would, of course, howl like mad if the left had a more prominent position and are always on the lookout for the slightest disagreement to decry "Dems in disarray". The scumbag traitors in the republican party will call any Democrat "the most liberal... socialist, baby-killer, etc" no matter the truth. The progressives like Capper will call anything that is not completely subservient to whatever his wish list includes at the moment "corporate sell-out republican lite". And the leftists who fawn over Glenn Greenwald will demand that the party be burned to the ground. Driftglass was on to something when he coined the "Democratic War on Four Fronts." These are never calmly considered criticisms made in good faith either. That said, I think the DNC is running a rather solid convention so far.

For all the moaning about having John Kasich and Colin Powell give speeches they were really only on screen for a few minutes. And the republicans speaking at the Democratic convention were brief and persuaded me that they were there because of the extraordinary circumstances, not because they were planning a hostile takeover the way the Lincoln Project is doing. Kasich's remarks were less than a page and a half long, I sometimes need more than that just to get warmed up. We can read all sorts of nefarious intentions into his appearance; or we can ignore it as a silly stunt that is unlikely to change more than a handful of votes and get back to work. AOC and Bernie Sanders made a much stronger impression on me.

Powell's speech was about the same length and hewed pretty closely to his specialization, what a commander-in-chief is supposed to do. I had a little more trouble with this for lack of any indication that he bears responsibility for lying us into Iraq. Sure, I get what the Democrats were going for, "look at our broad coalition", but sweeping the past under the rug for present-day expediency does a lot more for the republican trying to get their reputation rehabilitated than for the party trying to save democracy. And the "regular" republicans jawing about their 11th hour conversion of convenience only got a collective 1 minute and 12 seconds. They looked to be people living among polite society, the types that might be sensitive to whispers about being scumbags for supporting doughfacedonny in the first place, making the social cost of continuing to slum with the Qanon freaks and tribespeople with shit in their hair too high. Which needs to happen a lot more but who wants to live out in the boonies among them?

I keep thinking about what I learned in grade school, that after the republicans shit the bed so badly in causing the Great Depression Franklin Delano Roosevelt rallied the public with his fireside chats. A calm, reassuring voice that was both free from preconceptions about ideology and sympathetic to the real pain felt by most Americans. This convention has much the same feel. We're in the middle of both a pandemic and a depression, even if it is not openly stated, and what a lot of Americans who aren't rock-ribbed progressive ideologues need is just some reassurance that the giant obstacle blocking relief and recovery can be and will be removed by this election. Sure, you can be cynical and complain that the convention looks like an overly-scripted and produced infomercial but that's what all political conventions are now. They stopped having an actual function a long time ago and are now just a way for a party to make it's case to the voters. Running this tight ship of professional speeches given in a lot of living rooms and kitchens with no chaos and technical difficulties between acts, says "we are the grown-ups". 

It remains to be seen whether this convention style makes any difference. And Democrats still seem wrapped up in trying to impress the mainstream media, which never works, and being unifiers instead of the opposition party trying to unseat the incompetent, sadistic, corrupt fascists from power. My goal from the beginning has always been to remove republicans from power, and then push them as far away from the ability to harm Americans as possible. That would open up a lot of space to actually debate ideas, try new things, and allow regular people to organize and be part of the process. A lot of "ifs" to be sure, but we liberals haven't been able to do anything like it in a long time. Politics should not be a spectator sport and abdicating responsibility to get involved ensures you lose 100% of the time. 

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Thursday, August 13, 2020

The Kraken is Let Down Again

 So I've got to say it because I can't stand it any longer. Capper, you are dead to me. I have had enough of your whining purity tests, your constant complaining about the Democratic Party, the omnipresent allegations of a Wall Street conspiracy within the party, and I have absolutely had it with the republican pseudo-male rape fantasies "being shoved down our throats." It's crap, it's constant crap and I can't handle that kind of negativity and defeatism anymore. 

And let's get it out of the way; I know that I am nobody. I am fully aware that I have very few Twitter followers. I am painfully aware that I have no influence on anyone. And I know that losing one follower will not affect you in the least. But I'm tired. Tired of watching a guy whom I started out as a big fan of just fall deeper and deeper into a perpetual curmudgeon idiom while so many of us are trying hard to ease the suffering of our fellows and the damage to our nation. 

You are standing in the way of that work and I will no longer be counted among your followers.

If you look through my archives you will see the multiple instances where I cite you and your work as a trusted source. You were one of the few people who supported my blog and followed me on social media and I am very sad that it has come to this. I don't even know what you stand for anymore. It seems when you support the conspiracy theory that Democrats are somehow forcing you to accept a state of things that you find intolerable that it is really an exercise in projection. You studied psychology, it should be apparent that what you complain about is the inverse of what you demand; that everyone do and believe exactly as you do or they are sheep. 

Most of us are fine with both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Not happy, they were really no one's first choice but no one held a gun to anyone's head and forced them to vote for Biden in the primaries. Everyone who voted in the primaries had a choice. Wall Street can give all the money they want to their favored candidates but in the end it is votes that advance the nominee. I voted for Bernie in the primary, just like I did the last time, and I am perfectly okay with him now calling on all Democrats to support the actual Democratic nominee and his running mate. You cannot get over your pride just enough to kick doughfacedonny out of the office he is perverting and all the damage he has done has not convinced you that maybe compromising could be the key to getting some of what you want instead of bargaining it away. 

Perusing my archives will also find several instances of me questioning your blog partner Jeff, may he rest in peace. The attitude he had toward insisting that his definition of progressivism was the only true way and everyone else was wrong or a sellout was so grating. I take back nothing I said about him but I am sorry that he suffered and passed away too soon. This, however, does not excuse your taking up his purity pity party flag and running with it. When I wake up and see things like this in my feed I kind of want to throw up:

 

 

 

How is this helpful to anyone? It is like when Jeff passed away his spirit passed into you.

 

Don't you just love the "shut up and vote the way we tell you" tactic that the Democrats are using? And they're deploying it early and often this year. Because, y'know, it works so well.

Posted by Chris Capper Liebenthal on Thursday, August 13, 2020

 Sure, I get it. You're old now, retired. You don't have to fight the rat race anymore. Don't have to sweat some boss you've never even met decide on a whim that they aren't making enough money off of you and need to kick you out in the cold. Or bust your ass retraining and sending out hundreds of resumes only to have not one call you back. Politics was a hobby for your generation, not a life and death struggle as it is for younger generations. 

The thing is your shtick isn't even original, I see it in just about every comment thread on the subject. Which gets me to the conclusion; this kind of pessimism is infectious. We are all influenceable and impressionable to one degree or another, heck I used to take what you said seriously. Not only is it infectious but the holier-than-thou attitude snowballs. The republicans figured out a long time ago that if you just assert a thing over and over again many people will come to believe it. The more curmudgeons of any age that express the readily-apparent fact that the Democrats have a lot of problems in this conspiratorial tone, the further we all are from fixing it.

I wrote a post almost a year ago decrying the effects of "wailers" on the left that find that "perfect rhetorical florish" to kneecap Democrats trying to run for office without actually doing anything to fix problems or build anything. I don't know what you do offline politically Capper, but your public facing online presence is all tear down, no build up. And I can't be a part of that anymore. Sure, you can say "I told you so" when Barr's secret police have us in a camp somewhere because the sellout Democrats couldn't get it done. But until then, I've picked a side and I'm not going to let you drag me down anymore.

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Tuesday, August 11, 2020

The Big, Big Deal and the Nature of Political Succession

Nothing profound here, selecting Kamala Harris as a running mate is as completely acceptable to me as it was expected. She has been a solid senator and has the only real prerequisite needed for Vice President, a pulse. Her seat can be filled by a Democratic Governor in a non-swing state and all the conventional political considerations are fulfilled. Senator Harris is young enough as politicians go to make continuity very possible. All is well in the only functioning political party in the United States. I saw on Twitter something about the "irony that a multi-cultural woman is the safe choice" for the ticket. I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but now that Democrats have their "woke" due diligence, it is time to get some plans in place to right the ship of economic justice and democracy enrichment.

So where does that leave the rest of us? Doughfacedonny has successfully reopened a lot of Civil War era wounds, crashed the economy even worse than most people expected, let loose a pandemic that will likely have killed more Americans than World War II, and shown just how easily "It Can Happen Here." He skated all sorts of norms of presidential politics, thus far successfully beaten down any attempt to hold him accountable for welcoming foreign interference in the last presidential election or punish Russia. So just like post-Watergate we will probably see a great deal of new rule making to just shore up those loopholes donny squirted through like a well-buttered sow. 

Senator Harris has shown that she can fight republicans on terms that make them feel icky. Which, in our imperfect world where half of the so-called "left" in this country was going to whine no matter who was picked, is definitely a bonus. She will absolutely make puritan Pence squirm and probably cry. If nothing else, that is about the best short-term benefit I can ask for. 

A serious question for all the Bernie bros, holier-than-thou purity angels, and pretend Democrats who've been concern trolling regular folks since the beginning; where did you get these high expectations for American politics? Honestly, have you ever studied any American political history? In terms of "getting what 'we' want" there has been exactly one "good" administration, that of FDR, and Americans had to suffer through THE GODDAMNED DEPRESSION AND A WORLD WAR to get bank regulation, social security, labor protections, and progressive income/corporate taxes. The rest of our history has been an endless series of bad deals, compromises, regression, and ratfckery. Including a damn Civil War. So where exactly do you get these ideas of what progress should look like? It doesn't work here the way it works in other industrial countries. So really, it is time to get over yourselves. Progress is not going to be handed to you on a silver platter or any other way but to fight for it. 

Everyone should just take it down a notch, lower expectations and remember that the president is not our dream date, they are the bus or train that gets us where we need to go along that track. While the above mentioned wailer types have been hand-wringing about how "the fix was in" or the establishment's omnipotent hand ruined the chance for progress again, thousands of regular people organized and ran for offices all over the place. Now, those people get to sit on party committees and decide policies or draft ideas; not you. And in the upcoming election, more people will get organized and just go out and do it.

All I really want from a Democratic administration is a roof. Not like a wall, just a barrier that can keep republicans from getting their greasy mitts on the apparatus of government and sabotaging it. A roof to keep 35 year old fascists from getting a judgeship for life and putting Stephen Miller or Jared in charge of anything where they can harm others. Anything else is gravy. I tried making a wish before doughfacedonny stole the election with Russia's help, I'm not doing it again. Voting against evil is enough. 

For now. 

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Sunday, July 12, 2020

Grothman coughs on other republicans

I'll admit, beating on Glenn Grothman is quite enjoyable. There's so much to despise about the man. He loves to strut about while bitching that single parents are the cause of child abuse and safety-net programs are a bribe to not get married but money is more important for men. Mother Jones called him the man who wants to get rid of the weekend. He also thinks sex education will turn kids gay, Kwanzaa is a fake holiday that should be eliminated, and so on. Grothman is the stuck-up slob everyone rightly picked on in High School because he was such a jerk; and somehow people in Wisconsin keep giving him jobs to take his revenge out on women and working people. He is among the deadliest products out of Wisconsin, right up there with Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Scott Walker (who thankfully got punched back so hard during his small step onto the national stage that he now just whines about Democrats on social media no one pays attention to), cheese, beer, and sausages. 

Not sure how far and wide this video has gone yet. Capper wrote up a more detailed description for Crooks and Liars, calling it the Wisconsin Republican State COVID convention. It is just SOP (standard operating procedure) for republican events to 1.) have reckless disregard of social distancing, masks, etc. and 2.) emphatically state that they take no responsibility for the crowd's health and safety. 

But this is just a little over the top isn't it? I mean, did Grothman just get the coughing fits because he was starting a speech? Did he have them when he went into the convention?  Whatever his motivation, this was a premeditated act to get others sick. Who knows? Has he been tested for COVID-19? How far did his disgusting snot droplets reach during that coughing fit? What wasn't captured on video, was he coughing on people all night? The point is that big gatherings of people are potential super-spreader events. The republicans might be alright with throwing caution to the wind, but what about the other people they come into contact with? 

Public health is always a hard issue to deal with for such an individually-minded nation like ours. Grothman has access to probably the best health care in the country, if he gets sick because he refused to wear a mask or follow common sense it is his own fault. But he will be taking up a hospital bed that could have gone to someone who did behave responsibly. And that is how we have to face this war that doughfacedonny have declared in weaponizing the pandemic. I keep waffling between schadenfreude that republicans seem to finally be getting their comeuppance by willfully spreading COVID-19 among themselves and basic human decency of not wanting to see others suffer. I feel sad seeing stories like this one:

 Seeing the progression of tough guy to his last message, which I looked up on Facebook before seeing this tweet and the obituary, was a meme of something like "when you see me in heaven, don't be surprised you judgmental hacks" I felt awfully sad. It was a guy not too much different than me, though trying to be a tough guy against microscopic pathogens is not really my style. From feeling lousy on the 1st of July, to dying on the 4th that's really something. Damnit, I guess I have a conscience and empathy after all. 

Despite Rick Rose's intransigence on wearing a mask, he did have the courtesy not to take up a hospital bed and linger for months. In public health emergencies like this one triage is going to be important. If Grothman ends up on a ventilator (sure, it is not publicly known yet whether he even has COVID-19 for sure), I can think of a few million people who are more worthy of saving than him.

This disease is not something republicans can use their usual strategies of lie and deny on, there's no shouting down a virus. And finding someone (like fox news) to tell you comforting lies to make you feel better about flaunting science will not save you from COVID-19. Nope this is the really, real world man and plenty of republicans need to pay for their sins against our country. 
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Republican Virtue Signaling

Found this letter to the editor in my hometown's newspaper. These declarations of... what exactly? Is this fellow trying to be brave in the face of adversity? In denial? Setting up a straw man and knocking it down is fairly easy even for people with no idea what a logical fallacy is. Or is it simple rebellious spirit to resist authority as the writer sees it? 

As in previous posts, these rural authoritarian followers believe themselves isolated and removed from what "those people" in the cities are doing. Though it doesn't keep them from voting for republicans to punish "those city folks" for whatever they don't like in the moment. This letter was written by someone who has never feared anything before, nor had anyone to smack him down for arrogance. I cannot say whether rural authoritarian followers in Wisconsin are any worse than in other parts of the country but if you go there, this is exactly the kind of attitude you will encounter. His luck may hold out for a while, and maybe that isolation will protect him for COVID-19 altogether. But the virus really doesn't care about your posturing, defiance, arrogance, or virtue signaling. It is hard to have sympathy for someone like this, and I have none left. Every republican who gets sick because they "continue to live as normal" and is chastised by the ordeal will be a benefit to mankind. 

Continuing to live life as normal

To the editor: When the dreaded coronavirus hit, my first thought was that it was all a bunch of hooey. But now ... now, I've had a change of heart. I've now decided I'm going to follow the science.

Follow the science.

Highly educated people — TV star doctors, wearing masks (and scarves) and having many alphabet letters after their names from prestigious universities

informed us that 2.2 million people were “probably going to die” from covid — 2.2 million deaths. Not 2.2 million tested, not 2.2 million sick, not 2.2 million recovered, but 2.2 million were probably going to die! These medical geniuses are using the latest and greatest computer models to arrive at this magic 2.2 million number. We will never know how many have died due to the manipulation of the data but even padding those statistics didn’t get us anywhere near 2.2 million. Perhaps the Trump administration will get the blame for not hitting the 2.2 million?

So here is my personal, strategic covid plan: When those 2.2 million people die, I'm going to go directly into my bathroom and wash my hands! Until then, I’m going to live my life and avoid doing business with any company that forces me to wear a mask!

And what if I’m one of the 2.2 million? I’ll be with my resurrected lord and savior who decides when, how and where I die. My faith is in Him, not computer regurgitations fed by flawed human beings.

I sincerely hope to see you there!



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Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Nobody wants to say "I told you so" about the never trumpers

What comes after is always the big question when ever a coalition of opposing groups unite against a common enemy. I want to believe that this tweet isn't as supportive of the #nevertrump republican front group called the Lincoln Project as it appears:


Right before doughfacedonny won the hearts and minds of soulless meatbags in the republican primaries with open racism and even more open aspirations of dictatorship to "get" the 'libs and brown people, the illustrious members of the Lincoln Project were honing their craft of shitting on Democrats and liberal ideas while whipping up the mob of religious fanatics and racist imbeciles to vote for a corporate-approved republican. They were all set to take over the party leadership after doughfacedonny and his thugs went down in flames to Hillary Clinton with a big, fat "I told you so" finger wagging. Then Lincoln Project members would revel in crushing the mob so they could get back to the real business of appearing respectable while doing... basically everything donny is doing, slashing taxes, giving corporations huge handouts, crushing labor, and waging more ridiculous wars of choice. 

This is exactly what I fear they will go right back to once the common enemy is defeated. 

Is the ad amazing? Sure. Are other ads and posts that members of the Lincoln Project good as well? Probably. When you have a collective century or two of experience building and running attack ads, over a century's worth of marketing and psychological warfare knowledge to draw on, and are well-funded (even from some liberals and liberal sources) then yeah, they ought to be good. Replies to Josh Marshall's tweet are largely fawning praise for how awesome these allies are and how much damage they are doing to doughfacedonny. But one stood out in its cautionary skepticism:

Gluon was replying to this comment "Yes, but today they are helping to push Trump out, and that's huge.

It's not as if by speaking out against them today we'd prevent them from making ads about Dems in the future."

Now, in February of 2019 when we were still afraid Howard Schultz (and his never trumper campaign manager Steve Schmidt) would go the distance and siphon votes from the Democratic candidate for president, I wrote up a debate between Bob Cesca as host and Driftglass and Bluegal as guests where the former was enthusiastically selling his liberal credentials to cozy up to never trumpers and the latter were politely and civilly raising questions about whether that was a good idea. I have since stopped subscribing to Bob Cesca's show and started contributing to DG & BG's Patreon because it was time to stop being polite to the monster factory many years ago. 

The reframing of never trumpers and the Lincoln Project in particular as the Red Army bearing down on the capitol of the Third Reich in terms of messaging and attack ad power seems apt. But I do stand by my assertion that the number of voters that they can bring amounts to a rounding error. Many credulous liberals providing cover for never trumpers as "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and "'we' will dump them after the election" should really take a small refresher course on the end of WWII. Our ally of convenience, Stalin, kept his army parked where it had stood at the end of hostilities and didn't leave for 45 years. Driftglass keeps making the point that these never trumpers that made the Lincoln Project act like they are entitled to tell the Democratic Party how to run it's campaign, and are taking up seats on TV that should be going to Democrats and liberals who have been fighting the fascist takeover of the United States for longer than the last four years.

If never trumpers were willing to shed (rhetorically) the amount of blood that the Red Army spent in defeating the nazis, there might be some merit in supporting them. (As an aside, the Soviets never stopped screaming for more aid, more help, more materiel, and a second front in their great patriotic war that they even now claimed they won on their own, but that's another story) But thugs like Rick Wilson want to stand on Democratic heads and shit on them if they disobey orders from... thugs like Rick Wilson, as though they get to just jump in and run the place without penitence or making amends.

I posted on Facebook in response to what seemed like a liberal chorus praising Steve Schmidt for essentially calling doughfacedonny a giant poopy head for not doing anything to punish Russia when the bounties for dead American soldiers came to light. 
Sure, all true words. We’ve never had a “faithless” president before, I mean bringing up Nixon, Reagan, Dubya Bush is completely off limits. Which leads into, why is criticism of republicans only valid if a republican is doing it? Why is the guy who worked for team evil until #doughfacedonny started saying the quiet part out loud and jumped at the chance to run a third party spoiler (Howard Schultz)’s campaign sitting in a chair on television when hundreds of liberals who have been right all this time are not? Don’t cheer the never trumpers, they are stealing our spot and will fall right back to calling Democrats traitors and cutting taxes for rich people the millisecond they get back in charge of the gop.
These never trumpers look like Reagan claiming that he won the Cold War without acknowledging the previous 7 presidents and 2 generations of containment policy that it took to stretch the Soviet Union to the breaking point. Only after doughfacedonny is finally peeled out of power there will not even be the pretense of trying democracy out in the new never trump GOP, it's straight to the Putin authoritarianism in that party only the next would be dictator won't be an illiterate cretin. And how dare you peasants question the saviors of the republic, not Joe Biden or the millions of Americans who vote him into office, no the whole lot of those allies of convenience in the Lincoln Project. 
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Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Coronavirus hits Authoritarian America


When the pandemic first hit I was thrown into a defeatist, fatalistic fugue state after reading Mark Sumner's essay about why America is about to get a godawful lesson in why health care should not be for profit that went point by point why anyone who gets sick is screwed. At that moment it seemed like we were all taking the threat of COVID-19 seriously and wanted to do everything we could to limit the spread and protect ourselves. I never got a chance to fully explore the rural, white authoritarian followers and their astroturf "reopen the economy" silliness. It was pretty clear that the gun-toting "protesters" doing corporate America's bidding were just Tea Party 2.0 but displayed equally clearly how dedicated those white authoritarian followers were to becoming plague rats for doughfacedonny. To this day they are resisting wearing masks out of some insane partisan virtue signaling because donny thinks wearing a mask makes you a wimp or something. Or as Josh Marshall and TPM has been putting it, "we" got bored with the epidemic so "we" are just pretending it doesn't matter.

I put that "we" in quotes because, yes there are a lot of people who should know better but aren't taking social distancing, masks, and hand washing seriously anymore but many are just boomers who think they are immortal. "I can't see it, so it doesn't exist." And many of those boomers are republican meatbags who do what they are told by their authoritarian masters, so "screw you city minorities, my privilege saves me from getting sick." And they got away with it, for a few months anyway.

Now, we really need to  disregard any national statistics on where the epidemic is and is heading. This has finally moved on to hit authoritarian America, Red America, where ignorance, racism, and science-bashing is already an epidemic. A great article from May by Adam Serwer in the Atlantic about America's "Racial Contract" helps explain why doughfacedonny and republicans all decided that COVID-19 was not only not a threat to them but not really a problem for authoritarian, Red America.

The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying

Can you guess? Do I even need to elaborate? There is so much information, analysis, and ideas in this article it deserves it's own full treatment but for now I just wanted to pull out one small aspect of it. The racial contract of white personhood (and perceived innocence) versus nonwhite subpersonhood is and should remain hyper relevant to BLM protests for certain, but extending this awful but undeniable contract, our unwritten constitution if you will, to COVID-19 will help explain the rural, white intransigence about the epidemic.   
The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience. Temporary measures meant to prevent the spread of the disease by restricting movement, mandating the wearing of masks, or barring large social gatherings have become the foulest tyranny. The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that [republican] legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions. In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians. [emphasis mine]
The point of this next quote supports my original idea of trump as a Doughface from right before the loathsome usurper was inaugurated before anemic crowds. TLDR for this term is that before the Civil War, southern Democrats would conspire against the northern wing of their party by nominating northern men with southern sensibilities, making a party in the North that welcomed immigrants, was religiously tolerant, and supported expanding democracy complicit with the slave power. We can read a lot from this previous shameful practice into today's republican party. 
Trump’s administration, in carrying out an explicitly discriminatory agenda that valorizes cruelty, war crimes, and the entrenchment of white political power, represents a revitalized commitment to the racial contract.

But the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.
Again, the cruelty is the point. White cops don't kill black Americans because they want to exterminate the African-American community, they are reaffirming the racial contract of white supremacy and domination over nonwhites. As long as it was black and brown workers on the line, there was no limit for tolerable losses. Now, however:
 
 "All three states and Oklahoma are seeing rising case numbers. The virus has spiked in Texas, with record new numbers reported in each of the past three days, prompting Governor Greg Abbott to halt the state’s reopening. On Friday, he ordered all bars to close by noon after the state’s positive-test rate topped 11%. Oklahoma also reported a record number of new infections.

Trump supporters expressed varying levels of concern about the virus. Some donned masks when they went inside and acknowledged some anxiety, while others scoffed."

"Too soon to know if this was a 'super-spreader' event" states the accompanying article. But, yeah even a moderate spread from doughfacedonny's 2 minute's hate rally is criminal.

This is not the continuation of the first wave, this is not a second wave of COVID-19, this is the virus jumping from democratic America to authoritarian America. The former was caught off-guard by the arrival of this highly-contagious disease and the majority there has tried to take it seriously. The jump to authoritarian America was expected and more or less inevitable. It will spread like wildfire there because of republican plague rats first, then keep going because of arrogance, ignorance, and blind obedience to doughfacedonny. 

And none of it is your fault. You cannot change the minds of authoritarian followers because they didn't have these ideas in the first place, they cannot defend the ideas implanted in their skulls, but they will stubbornly resist until it is too late because the racial contract says that only "those" people get COVID-19, any outgroup they consider "other". Because these republicans are not our countrymen any longer, they don't count in our unwritten constitution of democratic America. They are simply a burden. I have no sympathy left.  
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