One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread national attention was April 19th in New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies filled with white people had metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere.
One that drew particularly high levels of media attention, complete with swastikas, confederate flags and assault rifles was directed against the governor of Michigan, rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer.
NBC News, when they'd gotten hold of April emails from within the White House, ran the headline: "Trump Administration Scrapped Plan to Send Every American a Mask in April, Email Shows."
When Rachel Maddow reported on meat packing plants that were epicenters of mass infection, the conservative Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court pointed out that the virus flare wasn't coming from the "regular folks" of the surrounding white community; they were mostly Hispanic and Black.
The conservative meme was now well established.
Then came news that the biggest outbreaks were happening in prisons along with the meat packing plants, places with few white people (and the few whites in them were largely poor and thus disposable).
Trump's response to this was to issue an executive order using the Defense Production Act (which he had refused to use to order production of testing or PPE equipment) to order the largely Hispanic and Black workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.
African Americans were dying in our cities, Hispanics were dying in meat packing plants, the elderly were dying in nursing homes.
But the death toll among working age white people, particularly affluent white people (who were less likely to be obese, have hypertension or struggle with diabetes), was relatively low.
And those who came through the infection were presumed to be immune to subsequent bouts, so we could issue them "COVID Passports" and give them hiring priority.
As an "expert" member of Jared Kushner's team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration's PPE response to the virus noted to Vanity Fair's Katherine Eban, "The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy."
It was, after all, exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's grandson Max Kennedy Jr, 26, was one of the volunteers, and blew the whistle to Congress on Kushner and Trump. As Jane Mayer wrote forThe New Yorker, "Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as 'a marketing genius,' because, Kennedy said they'd told him, 'he personally came up with the strategy of blaming the states.'"
At year's end, the United States was ranked 5th worst in the world in our response (behind Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Iran); we have about 20% of the world's Covid deaths, but only 4.5% of the world's population.
Why? Apparently because Trump and his Republican enablers and co-conspirators were just fine with Black people dying, particularly when they could blame it on Democratic Blue-state governors.
And once they put that strategy into place in April, it became politically impossible to back away from it, even as more and more Red State white people became infected.
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