April 27, 2020

During the week of the April twelfth we saw an outbreak of right-wing extremists protesting numerous state governors executive mandates closing down businesses and stay at home orders to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus to protect their citizens from contagion and their hospitals from being overwhelmed with very ill patients. These right-wing reopen protests began in Michigan but soon spread to Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Minnesota, Idaho, Kentucky, and California and then boiled over into Colorado, Texas, Indiana, New Hampshire, Nevada, Maryland, Utah, and Wisconsin.

The protesters were chafing under the many weeks of shut down in their respective states whining that their freedoms were being infringed upon. The irony is that many of these folks are survivor types carrying weapons and boast of being able to survive for decades in well stocked shelters but now cannot go for a few weeks without their haircuts, bowling, or bars.Were these spontaneous, grass roots, people driven protests? Undoubtedly not. Wealthy donors like Michigans Betsy DeVos gave $500,000 to the Michigan Freedom Fund, co-host of the Michigan protest. The other host was the Michigan Conservative Coalition, founded by Matt Maddoch, a Republican member of the state house of representatives. These two host groups behind the Michigan operation gridlock on April 15 are both tied to the Republican Party and Donald Trump. These protests are as much rallies for Trumps reelection as they are about ending the states closure of business and stay-at-home orders. Two minutes after the FOX News coverage of the protests in Michigan, Virginia and Minnesota Trump tweeted his treasonous liberate to his supporters and protesters.

A decade ago they called themselves the Tea Party and before that the John Birch Society. But they are all the same right-wing extremist people supported by right-wing billionaires like Charles Koch.

Why are these right-wing extremist billionaires funding and promoting these less than grassroots movements to try and force prematurely the lifting of business closures and stay-at-home directives that would inevitable cause a resurgence of COVID-19 cases leading to the deaths of millions more? Such deaths would most heavily fall upon communities of color, poor whites, blacks, and Hispanics, and senior citizens. These people are the most expensive in our society from the point of view of billionaires and most likely to be on Medicare, Medicaid, SS Disability, and Social Security. Billionaires hate paying taxes especially to help people they see as moochers to use Ayn Rand libertarian language. So maybe they think if they can kill off enough of them they wont have to worry about their taxes going up to help keep Social Security and Medicare solvent, or to pay for programs that help the poor. Then they can keep more of their wealth.

Or is it a case that these billionaires who get much of their wealth from economic activity and when that is frozen, as in this national shut-down, their revenue stream stops. Take Charles Koch who is heavy into oil and in many brand name products. Oil is way down in price; in fact on April 20 the price of oil went negative causing Koch to experience a drop in revenues. So maybe the billionaires are seeking to force states to reopen prematurely, even though deaths from a resurged COVID-19 would increase, simply because they want to make money again and dont care how many would people die as a result.

I daresay both are reasons.

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An Alternate View: Why Right-Wing Billionaires are Financing the Reopen Protests - Clare County Review