Daily Archives: May 13, 2020

Get Back to Work! The Clarion Call of White Christian Nationalists – LA Progressive

Posted: May 13, 2020 at 7:41 pm

As the racial, class and demographic implications of the coronavirus are in full view, eugenics dictates that the elderly, prisoners, people of color, immigrants and poor and working folks who are vulnerable and unable to work at home via Zoom are expendable.

Pandemics know no politics, and yet President Trump, Republican Party leaders and members of the GOP base have weaponized coronavirus for the culture wars, placing American capitalism over human lives and responding to this disease by presumably asserting a right to die without an oppressive lockdown, all for the sake of capital. It seems misplaced for these individuals, predominantly white conservatives, to demand that everyone return to work and reopen the economy, even as we have yet to reach the height of a deadly outbreak. White Christian nationalism is taking on the plague with potentially disastrous results.

Once again, white Christian nationalists prioritize profits over lives. This time, they worship an unholy triumvirate of the Golden Calf, White Jesus and Donald Trump.

As Democratic governors of the northeast, Midwest and West take COVID-19 seriously, take precautions and form consortia to protect their states in the absence of presidential leadership, the GOP has made coronavirus a political issue. Some Republican governors have taken a lax approach to the pandemic, and in some cases such as South Dakota have not only refused to issue a statewide lockdown despite the disease running rampant in meat processing plants and nursing home facilitiesbut have framed the resistance to stay at home orders as an issue of individual liberty. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested that elders would gladly die to save the American economy, Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina are allowing businesses to reopen in the middle of a pandemic, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reopened the beaches, and even considered reopening schools based on the false belief the virus does not affect children.

Trump ally Jerry Falwell Jr. opened Liberty University after Spring Break, and unsurprisingly, students exhibited symptoms of coronavirus infection. Trump wanted to fill the church pews with worshippers on Easter Sunday, and conservative judges in Wisconsin forced voters to walk through a plague to vote, rather than postpone the state primary election. More recently, protestersincluding some sporting guns, waving Confederate flags, blocking ambulances and holding antisemitic signshave participated in anti-quarantine protests. These Astroturf actions to open the country are affiliated with the Koch Brothers, the Heritage Foundation and billionaire Secretary of Education Betsy DeVoswho is also associated with the placement of kidnaped migrant children into Christian foster care. Trump adviser Stephen Moore compared the protestors engaged in acts of civil disobedienceapparently the right to infect others to Rosa Parks. This, as Vice President Pence defends Trumps tweets fanning the flames of dissent and encouraging acts of armed insurrection and terrorismby calling for the liberation of Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia from stay-at-home orders.

While it is possible to chalk up some of this reactionary, irrational and toxic behavior to the peculiarities of the death cult that comprises the Trumpian basewith their unhinged pronouncements of fake news and Democratic hoax conspiracy theoriesfar more is at play here.

Red stateswhich include the former states of the Confederacy, the ideological successors to the Dixiecratshave a long legacy of disregarding human rights and the well-being of people, a legacy of slavery, segregation and lynching. These states, for all their pro-life rhetoric, have high rates of poverty and other negative health and socioeconomic outcomes. Racism and fundamentalism breed phony science and science denial, whether climate change denial and the belief Jesus rode on dinosaurs, or pseudoscience to justify slavery by claiming Blacks were inferior to whites, or that slaves suffered from a mental illness that made them run away.

Remember that white supremacyof which the Trump administration is an adherentalways ends in death. White Christian nationalists do not follow the theology of a Palestinian Jewish refugee of color who healed the sick and cared for the least among us. Rather, theirs is the religion of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus of fiction, the religion of the slave masterreminiscent of the redacted Slave Bible that omitted 90 percent of the Old Testament and half of the New Testamentincluding passages related to the liberation of the Israelites, rebellion and equalityand taught enslaved Africans to obey their masters.

For centuries, get back to work! has been the clarion call of white Christian capitalists who cared little about the health and welfare of human beings, and were concerned foremost with amassing wealth for a small group of white men.

In the name of Jesus, white Christians committed genocide against indigenous people, and kidnaped millions of Africans in the Transatlantic slave tradewith 40 Africans dying in the Middle Passage of infectious disease, malnourishment and brutality for every 100 who made it to the New World. White Christian slave masters who murdered their slaves and worked them to death were concerned with profit, not the lives of black people, as death was baked into the cake and part of the business model. This, as hundreds of thousands of poor white Christian men died for the Confederacy to preserve an economic system that rendered their labor superfluous, and filled the coffers of the Southern aristocracy.

Similarly, there was no concern for the health of black prison laborers of the Jim Crow convict lease systemwho were imprisoned under the Black Codes for bogus offenses such as vagrancy and rented out to plantations, corporations, mines and railroadsand the forced laborers who toiled in Ford and General Motors plants in Nazi Germany.

David A. LoveBlackCommentator

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The Pandemic Brings Out the Authoritarian and Libertarian in Us All – The Intercept

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Illustration: Kelsey Wroten for The Intercept

One reason Trump has been invincible so far is that he not only embodies but also exploits a powerful American ambivalence: on one hand, the punitive authoritarian instinctthat supports long prison sentences and a strong military; on the other, the leave-me-alone libertarianism embodied in the Bill of Rights, a defense of individuals from the power of the state.

This ambivalence is not a red-blue split. It is internal to both. On the right, laissez-faire economics chafe against Christian cultural intolerance, isolationism against imperialism. On the left, the Stalinists are still at war with the anarchists, the nanny-statists with the hippies, and a taste for utopian direct democracy, as in the Occupy movement, strains against a hunger for big government.

The coronavirus crisis has brought this ambivalence to the fore. Mistrust of the government emanates from both right and left. In Lansing, Michigan, a heavily astroturfed movement of wing-nuts with automatic weapons storms the state Capitol in defense of the liberty to get haircuts, get infected, and infect others. In Los Angeles, the grassroots Stop LAPD Spying Coalition a network of organizers in low-income communities of color seeking to dismantle government-sanctioned spying and intelligence gathering, in all its multiple forms airs a webinar series to strategize resistance to expansion of the police state in the pandemic.

Such resistance can border on the self-destructive. Theres lively discussion among evangelicals about the pandemic as a left-wing Zionist hoax or, perhaps, a welcome early sign of the end times. But did God mean to decimate denominations of their pastors and sickentheirchurch choirs? Those clamoring to be freed from house arrest seem unconcerned with the motives of their would-be liberators. The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people, mused Paychex founder and chair Tom Golisano, whose estimated net worth is $3.9 billion. You have to weigh the pros and cons a luxury Paychexs $11-an-hour data entry clerks will not have when the day comes to clock in.

On a Stop LAPD webinar, a presenter discusses the National Coronavirus Response: A Road Map to Reopening, published by the libertarian pro-business think tank American Enterprise Institute. The report stresses new technologies of testing and contact tracing, real-time data analysis, and the buildup of comprehensive COVID-19 surveillance systems. Representing communities subject to constant policing based on predictive algorithms of crime, facial recognition software, and police files of serology, fingerprints, and other personal biodata, Stop LAPD is wary of the whole approach. We dont need to police or surveil our way out of the pandemic, coordinator Hamid Khan tells me. The group isnt telling people not to get tested, but our perspective is data abolitionist cool it with the stats, just send the resources even if the data substantiates the racial and economic inequities that leave black and brown bodies vulnerable or the disproportionate rates of Covid-19 infection and death in these communities. Our folks in Skid Row dont need someone from the outside to tell them whats wrong with the conditions on the ground, Kahn says. Asked if its valuable for other people to know in order to act, he, like the coalition, is agnostic.

Different resisters are more or less justified in their fears. The webinars title, Power Not Paranoia, evinces the tension for marginalized communities between survival in the moment and self-preservation in the long run. But paranoid might not be the wrong word for the anti-lockdown crowd. There was one arrest at the Michigan state Capitol action. Were the armed intruders black or brown, its doubtful the police would have been so accommodating of their rights to free speech and assembly.

Trump has nearly achieved realization of Ronald Reagans adage that the nine most terrifying words are Im from the government, and Im here to help. Bereft of any benign function of an administrative state and suspect of a sinister police state, many citizens see no option but to take care of their own and take their chances. Rather than fight for government action, DIYers are sewing, 3-D printing, or raising money on GoFundMe for masks for hospital workers. Others are turning to violent self-defense against perceived government overreach. In Michigan, asecurity guard was fatally shot after allegedly ejecting a woman related to the shooter from a Family Dollar store for not wearing a mask.

Meanwhile, some of us are privately, anxiously contending with conflicting impulses rising from deep psyche: to chastise the neighbors for standing too close? To touch the hand of the checkout worker, not exactly accidentally, for a moment of contact? As I witness violations of our new social codes, and break them occasionally myself, my political-personal faith in a mutually supportive, mutually protective community begins to wobble. This isnt working! Wheres the police state when we need it? As if to teach me a lesson, a Lower East Side officer tackles, punches, and kneels on the head of a man for an alleged social distancing infraction. In Philadelphia, cops are videotaped dragging a passenger from a bus for not wearing a mask.

It is easy to write off social distancing opponents or anti-vaxxers as selfish Luddites, and those sticking with the program as rational promoters of public health. But either would be hasty. Because, as University of Michigan historian Alexandra Minna Stern points out, the definitions of publicand health are debatable.For example, the 1905 Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination during a smallpox epidemic was reprised as precedent in 1927 to rule that the state of Virginia did not violate the due process rights of an institutionalized feeble-minded woman by performing an involuntary tubal ligation on her, to promote, as the law read, the health of the patient and the welfare of society. In other words, eugenics was constitutional. Vaccination rational, eugenics criminal? In both cases, the justices found that individual liberty implying bodily autonomy could be subordinated to the collective good.

To get through the pandemic, we need something between too much and not enough government. Somewhere in the middle lies solidarity: the recognition that an injury to one is an injury to all, and the less injured have a responsibility to the more injured. Fortunately, disasters inspire this spirit. But solidarity is not just banging pots and putting rainbows in our windows to thank the essential workers. Solidarity implies government policies of wealth redistribution and adequate public services and support to those who need it. With Republicans taking advantage of the pandemic to expand authoritarian power and liberate the economy for corporate plunder, America may never have needed its instinctive skepticism of government more. But we also must not let up demanding that the state promote the public good, even as we continue to debate the meaning of that term.

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What You Need To Know: Is Herd Immunity Too Risky? – Georgia Public Broadcasting

Posted: at 7:41 pm

Georgia Public Broadcastings new series What You Need To Know: Coronavirus provides succinct, fact-based information to help you get through the coronavirus pandemic with your health and sanity intact.

In the fight against COVID-19, many countries have shut down businesses and schools, but thats not the case in Sweden. The countrys relaxed approach is supposed to minimize the damage to the economy. The other goal is to slow the pandemics spread through herd immunity when enough people become immune to a disease after recovering from it or getting vaccinated. GPBs Virginia Prescott talks with Emory University professor Felipe Lobelo about the risks of herd immunity.

So herd immunity or herd protection? This is ultimately aimed at slowing the spread of infectious diseases. Can you give us a brief sketch of what that actually means and how it works?

Herd immunity is also referred to as the golden ring of protection. So if you have enough people in a community that have been immunized or that have gotten the disease and now are immune, then the transmission of an infectious disease or an agent or a virus in this case is going to slow or even stop completely because, you know, the virus essentially runs out of hosts to infect. So that's what we're trying to achieve with this coronavirus and with any infectious disease.

You mentioned with immunization, it does rely on the assumption that once you have had a disease, whether by getting it or getting a vaccine, you develop an immunity. Is there any evidence that that is the case with coronavirus?

We don't know for certain yet, but we know from previous coronaviruses that you do develop some kind of immunity. We just don't know how long and how strong, you know, whether it's going to be three months, six months, 12 months. We sort of have pretty good indication that a vaccine or getting the disease will protect you. But we still need to have more data in order to definitively say if it's going to be six months, 12 months or longer.

So how about, if we're looking at the difference in the Swedish model, how about risk factors for coronavirus: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, smoking? How do the Swedish and American populations compare on those factors?

Right. So, you know, when you look at the mortality or the impact of a virus, you also need to look at the host that that virus is infesting. And in this case, in the United States, we have much higher risks of poor being, with much higher prevalence of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, physical inactivity, bad diet compared to Sweden and other Scandinavian countries. And that may explain why in the U.S. we have to take stronger lockdown measures because we have a more vulnerable population.

The U.S. also has high rates of poverty and income inequality. How does this factor into the debate over herd immunity?

It's very important because we know the social determinants of health are drivers really of the outcomes not only of chronic diseases, but in this case infectious diseases. Because you start to see that vulnerable populations, populations of color, African Americans, Latinos are shouldering a much bigger burden of disease with coronavirus compared to white populations. And that is really partially explained by, you know, disparities in income, in education, in access to healthcare, you know, in the ability to self isolate, or stigma, work from home versus to being an essential worker. So all those factors, in addition to the biology of the virus, are driving the outcomes that we see.

So the results have been different in different countries. How is Sweden faring even compared to the Scandinavian countries which surround it? How is this model working?

Well, it's a mixed bag. We know that they have a higher total number of deaths and a higher mortality per capita compared to other Scandinavian countries.

Now, we also know that the percentage of the population that has been infected so far, it shouldn't appear to be higher. Maybe around 50% compared to 5% or less in most other countries.

So, you know, if this is a long process, they will slowly achieve herd immunity faster because the virus obviously is going faster through the population, but they're also paying a high toll in terms of mortality, particularly around elderly population. More than 80% of their deaths come from nursing homes.

But that is part of the argument for herd immunity. And critics of this strategy have also compared it to eugenics. Basically, you're depending on the younger, stronger population continuing to survive and in the crudest terms, you know, picking off the elderly and the less strong. What do you think of that criticism?

It's a very valid criticism. I mean, the reason we have public health and mitigation strategies is precisely to protect everyone. And, you know, we do know that the elderly are more vulnerable, but we also know that these virus can affect and does affect younger people and people that maybe don't have preexisting conditions.

Even we're starting to see cases in kids that develop of vasculitis or inflammation of their blood vessels or their heart. So, you know, we really don't know exactly how these virus kills necessarily.

So this idea that we can write off a whole segment of the population to keep the economy going is just a false alternative. We do have the public health and tools in order to mitigate a disaster like this.

But you mentioned that the Sweden is seeing a higher per capita death rate than its neighboring countries. This is a population of just above 10 million for the entire country. So were that to scale up, were the U.S. to adopt this kind of model, what kind of numbers do you think we'd be seeing?

Well, we know if had do we know nothing in the United States, early models predicted up to 2 million deaths due to coronavirus over the next 12 months. And we have now data showing that a big lockdown, a big hammer in order to suppress the virus, hopefully will bring that down to around 150,000 deaths, so like the latest estimate for the next few months.

So had we taken a middle approach, which is where Sweden is doing, which is just doing mitigation strategies but not for suppression, we'd probably be somewhere in between 150 and 2 million deaths. It's very hard to know because you know, these disparities, because our country is very diverse, because people by seeing what's happening in other countries are taking their own measures even before the governor's lockdown. So it's really impossible to tell like somewhere in between.

You could argue that Georgia has taken a somewhere in between strategy so far with Gov. Brian Kemp trying to open up the economy, opening up a lot of businesses. Do you think our health care system, especially here in Georgia and across the U.S., can handle that kind of the kind of numbers? Obviously not as the world not the country wide numbers that you mentioned of 2 million. But of what is to come?

Every aspect of health care and public health is local, so it's hard to make a prediction about how the state will fare. If we look at the state, we've been relatively doing okay in terms of the percentage of ICU beds, for example, that are being used statewide. But when you drill down into particular communities like Albany or like some areas of northeast Georgia, we do see an overrun in the health capacity of health care systems because outbreaks are localized and they don't all happen at the same time. So it's hard to know how this is going to affect the way the health care system in Georgia is fully going to cope.

I think it's going to cope in some areas, but unfortunately, in areas where there's more vulnerable populations, their likelihood to seethey will have likelihood to see outbreaks and more excess mortality unfortunately, because we're not taking all the public health measures that we need to take. It's not just the suppression, it is also improving our public health capacity to early detect, isolate and find the contacts of people that develop the disease. In an essence, we're not beaten, we're not able to do that anymore.

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The strange case of Michael Gove’s bookshelf – The Conservative Woman

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MICHAEL Gove has come under fire after his journalist wife Sarah Vine tweeted two pictures of their bookcases, showing a bookby David Irving, the Holocaust denier, andThe Bell Curve,which controversially claims that ethnicity can play a part in determining IQ.

Delving deeper into Mr Goves reading material, critics were appalled to discover that he also has biographies of Mussolini, Stalin and other leaders sharing shelf space with the memoirs of Baroness Thatcher.

Alastair Campbell duly tweeted: Having Hitler, Rommel and Napoleon next to Maggie is not a good look. Unfazed, Ms Vine replied: Dont be so absurd. They are books. You should try them sometime you can learn a lot from them. You will note there is also a Peter Mandelson.

Owen Jones, the Labour activist, demanded: Why does [sic] Michael Gove and his wife own a copy of a book by David Irving, one of the most notorious Holocaust deniers on earth? He was backed by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, who said the former Labour leader would have been vilified for owning the same reading material.

The editor of theJewish Chronicle,Stephen Pollard, called the Twitter spat The Great Twitter Bookshelf Derangement and remarked of the criticism: The implication was clear that there is something very dodgy about reading a book by a man like Irving. In other words, if you read it, you clearly have some sort of sympathy with the views. Blimey. If thats how it works, I am beyond redemption. As well as two books by Irving, Ive got a book by the actual Adolf Hitler on my shelves, not to mention Mao and heres where it gets really bad I also have speeches by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.

He insisted that Michael Gove, a member of the Holocaust Commission, set up in 2014 to explore ways in which Britain can have a permanent memorial to the Holocaust and educational resources for future generations, had probably done more for Holocaust education and the Jewish community in Britain than any senior politician other than Gordon Brown. Its obvious to anyone why he would have read the work of a Holocaust denier.

Gove did not comment but his wife said: To defeat prejudice you have to understand it.

This seems eminently sensible, although it might cause some concern that the former Secretary of State for Education under David Camerons Conservative-Liberal coalition owns a copy of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murrays 1994 bookThe Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which caused controversy because, as theTelegraphnoted, it argued that IQ is largely inherited and that certain ethnic groups have poorer socio-economic prospects because they are less intelligent. And yet although Mr Gove has his critics on both Left and Right, including in the field of education, he seems not to have displayed any signs of eugenicist tendencies. Indeed, as someone who was adopted as a baby from a mother of humble background, surely he is a living refutation of the eugenics argument that backs nature against nurture.

Attending state primary and independent secondary schools, he ended up at Oxford, and in his post as Education Secretary he took a deep interest in social mobility (or lack thereof under the previous Labour administration) and the role of education; he was keen to reintroduce classic authors into school lessons and rigour to examinations. For this he was accused of elitism by the Left, for whom he became a hate figure, despite the fact that their insistence on equality of outcomes and a one-size-fits-all approach led to a great many children who did not have academic leanings being perceived as having failed, thus playing into the hands of the eugenics lobby that they condemned.

Stephen Pollard notes Mr Goves support for Holocaust education, and an interest in Jewish affairs must include an interest in the Holocaust and its architect, Adolf Hitler. As a student of Jewish-Christian relations I also have a number of books about Hitler, includingMein Kampf, and the Holocaust; and as a researcher into the role of the Sexual Revolution in facilitating eugenics and population control, who has moreover suffered from a hereditary condition and chronic ill health for a number of years, my bookshelves would no doubt lead the academic detectives to deduce that I am a hypochondriac anti-Semitic Darwinian sex maniac. Having consulted the books for research purposes, there is the dilemma of how to dispose of them: one would not want them to fall into the wrong hands. Burning them is clearly out of the question.

I will not be tweeting pictures of my library any time soon, but Mr Goves life and political career are public knowledge, and with so many enemies on both sides of the House, as well as outside of it, any Nazi or eugenics involvements he may have had could scarcely remain secret. In short, regardless of his bookcases, Mr Gove is an open book, while actual eugenics and anti-Semitism in the shape of abortion advocacy and anti-Israel sentiment have flourished quite openly on the Left, most notoriously under anti-racist Jeremy Corbyn. No need to seek for hidden sympathies in his case, and yet Left-wing vilification is hard to find, while his defenders are many. Which just goes to show that youcanjudge a book by its cover.

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