Month: April 2021

For decades, the Democratic party and the media obsessed (and I do mean obsessed) with the “Reagan Democrats” , those white voters in places like Michigan who were so upset with the way the hippies and the Blacks and the uppity women had ruined everything that they voted for Reagan in 1980 and never looked back. Year after year, the Democrats chased those voters, absolutely sure that if they just went easy on guns or waffled on abortion and backed the cops or passed lots of job training programs that these folks would come back home. They never did.

So, I have to wonder if this inversion of that moldy trope will dominate GOP politics and the media the way the earlier iteration did?

Anyway, here’s a rare bit of reporting on Republicans becoming Democrats:

Jay Copan doesn’t hide his disregard for the modern Republican Party.

A solid Republican voter for the past four decades, the 69-year-old quickly regretted casting his 2016 ballot for Donald Trump. When Trump was up for reelection last year, Copan appeared on roadside billboards across North Carolina, urging other Republicans to back Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Nearly three months into the new administration, Copan considers himself a “Biden Republican,” relieved by the new president’s calmer leadership style and coronavirus vaccine distribution efforts. Copan is the type of voter Biden is counting on as he pushes an agenda that’s almost universally opposed by Republicans in Washington.

As Biden meets Monday with a bipartisan group of lawmakers to discuss his massive infrastructure plan, he’s betting that the GOP’s elected leaders are making a political miscalculation. The party’s base remains overwhelmingly loyal to Trump, but Biden believes that Republican leaders are overlooking everyday Americans eager for compromise and action.

The question is whether there are enough Republicans like Copan.

“I really want there to be a good two-party system,” said Copan, a former senior officer with the American Gas Association. His vote for Biden for president was his first for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976 but probably won’t be his last. “I think there’s a lot of people like me out there.”

The ranks of Republican crossovers may be smaller than he would expect. Only 8% of Republicans voted Democratic in November’s presidential race, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of the electorate nationwide.

Well sure. And here we see the old narrative reassert itself:

“If there’s any Republicans voting for Biden, they were not voting for Biden, they’re just Never Trumpers,” said Phillip Stephens, a former Democrat who is now Republican vice chairman in Robeson County, about 90 miles south of Raleigh. The county twice voted for Barack Obama but went for Trump in 2016 and again last year.

In Biden’s early months, Stephens sees the president catering more to the left than to conservative Democratic voters.

During last year’s campaign, Biden at times courted Republicans at the risk of alienating the Democratic left. Several prominent Republicans got speaking positions during the Democratic National Convention, such as former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

A number of Republican groups also openly backed Biden. Republican Voters Against Trump spent $2 million on billboards in swing states, featuring Republicans opposed to reelecting their own party’s president. That’s how Copan’s beaming and bespectacled image, 12 feet (3.6 meters) high, ended up on billboards with the words: “I’m conservative. I value decency. I’m voting Biden.”

As president, Biden has expressed openness to working with Republicans. But he also helped ram through Congress the largest expansion of the social safety net in a generation as part of a coronavirus relief and stimulus package that didn’t get a single Republican vote. He’s now calling for spending trillions more on infrastructure, pushing a proposal meant to appeal to people in both parties.

Note the term “ram through” as if the Republicans were even half-heartedly trying to negotiate. Some things never change.

It gets worse:

Biden has so far enjoyed wide, relatively bipartisan support, with 73% of Americans approving of his coronavirus response and 60% approving of his handling of the economy. Still, favorable ratings don’t always translate to votes: Of the more than 200 counties that supported Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016, only about 25 went back to Biden in November.

The limited crossover power is even true in places that were bright spots for Democrats. Biden flipped longtime Republican stronghold Kent County, Michigan, which includes Grand Rapids, Gerald Ford’s hometown. But those gains were built more on the local electorate getting younger than any measurable surge of conservatives backing Biden.

Scott Carey, former general counsel of the Tennessee Republican Party, wrote an op-ed in October saying he was voting for Biden. He’s been mostly satisfied so far — but not about to become a born-again Democrat. He worries about tax increases and government overreach.

“I don’t see myself becoming a big Harris, or certainly a Bernie fan or anything like that,” Carey said of Vice President Kamala Harris and liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders. If Biden decides not to seek a second term in 2024, Carey said, he’d be more excited about Republicans, including “some governors I’ve never even heard of who would step up post-Trump and bring us back to sound governing policies.”

Sure. That’ll happen.

They do mention a few who say they’ve had it:

Tom Rawles is an ex-Republican county supervisor in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and was critical in Biden carrying swing-state Arizona. After voting for Biden, Rawles registered as a Democrat.

“I’d rather fight philosophically within the Democratic Party than I would for character in the Republican Party, because there’s none there,” said Rawles. He’s 71 and said he doesn’t expect the GOP to return to principles he can support in his lifetime.

Rawles and his wife spent months before the election sitting in their driveway along a busy suburban Phoenix road, hoisting Biden signs for four hours a day. Some drivers stopped to chat or offer water. Others made rude gestures or screamed that they were interlopers from fiercely blue California.

“Some people would yell, ‘Go home!,’” Rawles recalls. “And we’d say, ’We’re in our driveway. Where do you want us to go?’”

It seems clear to me that any hope of the Biden Republican becoming a thing is thin. The media certainly doesn’t seem that interested in really looking at it seriously. Their ongoing need to pander to the Real Americans just doesn’t fit this narrative and I see little prospect that they’ll approach it the same way they did back in the 1980s. And the Republicans could not care less about their defectors. They have decided that the way to win in this country is simply to lie and cheat. And why not? It seems to work for them a good part of the time. They just need to hone their tactics a little bit and they can have it all with very little effort.

Nonetheless, it might actually be something that’s really happening. I would just remind everyone that despite all the constant begging and pleading, the Reagan Democrats never came home. In fact, they ended up being among the most conservative Democrats, eventually turning into Tea Partyers and Trump voters. So maybe these Biden Republicans will end up being typical mainstream Democrats even as the Dems move left. You never know.

Example #5,872 of Republican officials acting like little, middle school bitches:

Invites the question: is he really in charge?

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) April 12, 2021

These ongoing, crude insinuations about Biden being senile from the Reagan worshipping right — a man who was clearly diminished in his second term and who they turned into a demi-God anyway — is sick.

The White House press secretary dispatched his comments with a rapier swipe:

Jen Psaki owns John Cornyn pic.twitter.com/5dkdkfMIxo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 12, 2021

Republicans have long been inclined to nasty commentary. Newt Gingrich was a master at it. But it’s only recently that they’ve devolved into such immature, creepy personal attacks in public. Trump didn’t invent this, of course. But there are few who’ve made the profit at it the way he has. And his henchmen are following suit.

Tucker Carlson’s at it again.

As Salon’s Kaity Assaf reported last week, the unctuous Fox News host delivered more grotesque, racist commentary last week, this time explicitly endorsing the hardcore white supremacist “great replacement” theory on his top-rated TV show. Throwing it out there in a discussion of the assault on voting rights around the country Carlson said, “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate” with “new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” It’s a line Carlson has been called out for before.

Back in 2019, in the wake of the mass murder of mostly Latinos at an El Paso Walmart by a violent racist who quoted great replacement theories in his manifesto, Carlson declared that “white supremacy” is “a hoax” that is “used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.” I wrote then about Carlson’s affinity for the belief system that inspired the killing and explained the crude fundamentals of the theory:

[T]he “Great Replacement” theory is a big deal among white nationalists worldwide. Essentially it comes down to two intersecting ideas. They believe that “the west” is threatened by immigrants from non-white countries resulting in white people being “replaced.” And the whole thing is part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule a one-race world. The Fox News “mainstream” American version doesn’t fully embrace the second idea, at least not publicly. But they are all-in on the first one, cleverly couching it in partisan political terms as a Democratic Party strategy to deny Republicans (who are, as we all know, nearly all white) their God-given right to be a majority of this country.

You can see why so many Jewish groups were appalled by Carlson repeating his comments again last week, this time blithely insisting that “left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement.'” Yes, people do get a little bit upset when major TV celebrities use their platform to sell anti-Semitic drivel to their viewers.

The Anti-Defamation League demanded that Carlson be fired, but there is no word yet as to whether any action will be taken. Just because these toxic beliefs have influenced the recent mass murderers at an El Paso Walmart, a Pittsburgh synagogue and a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, along with the Nazi marchers in Charlottesville Virginia who were literally chanting “Jews will not replace us” apparently doesn’t mean that Fox News has a responsibility to not spread them further.

It’s important to note here that the gunman in El Paso also criticized corporations, which made many observers scratch their heads at the time, but it shouldn’t have. White supremacists who believe in the great replacement theory consider corporations enemies, but not for economic populist reasons, as I wrote at the time of the Walmart shooting:

They see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and Black people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.

Carlson’s recent rant also tied the great replacement into one of the hoariest, right-wing tropes of all: the insistence that the only reason Democrats want to have humane immigration laws is that they believe immigrants will vote for them and make it impossible for so-called real Americans to be represented in “their own country.” He said, “if you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”

That’s right. The people who are moving heaven and earth to suppress voting all over the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s Big Lie, are being disenfranchised by voters who don’t look like them. People like Carlson and Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham have been selling this line forever, but it is finding new life being tied in with the great replacement.

The funny thing is that as ridiculous as it is to believe that immigrants are “replacing” real Americans in a country where the only people in it who aren’t the descendants of immigrants are Native Americans, there actually is a sort of great replacement going on —but it’s coming from within the country.

Those corporations the white supremacists hate for creating the conditions that incentivize migration have responded to the tax incentives offered by conservative states and have relocated there, bringing a bunch of those loathsome progressive social values with them. It’s one of the reasons some of those former red states have been turning purple. And the recent corporate activism on voting rights has been driven at least in part by the last few decades of diversity in hiring which means that many of them have high-level Black and Hispanic executives who bring their own experiences to the job and they are influencing policy. The Texas Monthly reported that the state GOP is becoming quite agitated by the influx of Californians who have recently invaded their state. Tucker Carlson is agitated about it too:

In December, [Governor Greg Abbott] made a comical appearance on Tucker Carlson’s popular Fox News show. Carlson, a San Francisco–born, San Diego–raised pundit, congratulated Abbott, who grew up in Wichita Falls and Longview, on Texas’s population growth. But why, Carlson wondered, had Abbott let in so many coastal elites?

Above a characteristically calm chyron—”The Next California: Onlookers Horrified by Recent Texas Trends”—Carlson argued that Californians would be the death of Texas. “We’ve seen this across the country, where people flee a collapsing, crummy state and then wreck the state they go to,” he said. “Are you worried that all these Californians will bring their values and degrade the state of Texas?”

Apparently, the great replacement isn’t just a threat that immigrants are going to replace God-fearing real Americans. Californians (as well as residents of other blue states, of course) are also threatening to replace God-fearing real Americans by moving to their states and “degrading” the place with their presence. What do you suppose Carlson has in mind to put a stop to that?

The fact is that we are all going to be “replaced” by the generations that come up behind us. And I’m afraid that Tucker Carlson and his white supremacist allies are going to be replaced by a generation that is overwhelmingly repelled by his ideology and everything it stands for. That, of course, will be really, really great.

Salon

Jamil Smith reduces defense argument in the trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd to this: “Floyd’s own body murdered itself.”

“Through the first two weeks of the trial,” Smith explains, “it’s evident Chauvin’s defense is almost entirely reliant upon racist stereotypes and junk science that dates back to the late 18th century.” John Henryism, it’s called (Rolling Stone):

Both Floyd’s death and the John Henry fable fall in line with a long history of American jurisprudence and medicine alike investing in false conceptions about racial differences. Linda Villarosa’s report in the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project details this at length, tracing fallacies (such as, black people are more impervious to pain) to treatises like the one British doctor Benjamin Moseley published in 1787. He offered that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.”

Etc., etc.

Fast forward to today, and it’s clear [Chauvin defense attorney Eric] Nelson has been taking notes. “What was Mr. Floyd’s actual cause of death?” Nelson asked in his opening statement, disregarding the medical examiner’s conclusion. “The evidence will show that Mr. Floyd died of a cardiac arrhythmia that occurred as a result of hypertension, his coronary disease, the ingestion of methamphetamine and fentanyl, and the adrenaline flowing through his body, all of which acted to further compromise an already compromised heart.”

To recap: Chauvin’s defense is blaming meth, opioids, heart disease, high blood pressure — all which are rampant in poor and working-class black communities and are part of the generational wages of racism, paid with shortened black lives. Pointing to Floyd’s adrenaline — which surely had something to do with the four cops on top of him, and the knowledge that he was asphyxiating — was particularly repugnant.

As he slowly suffocated, Floyd did not get up and into the squad car as the officers holding him handcuffed and prone on the pavement demanded. For reasons we’ll never know, he failed to comply. That and his other personal failings killed him, argues the defense.

Chicago pulmonologist Dr. Martin Tobin testified last week what really killed Floyd: Chauvin’s knee on his neck for nine minutes and 29 second, just as cameras recorded and onlookers warned Chauvin that he was killing the man. Tobin’s assessment was more detailed, professional and clinical. But it amounted to the same. Lindsey Thomas, a consulting forensic pathologist, told the court, “This was not a sudden death.”

Smith concludes:

However the jury decides, this remains an unmitigated tragedy. There can be accountability, but there is no justice, because George Floyd is dead. He has become the latest of our John Henrys, resisting a machine designed for his subjugation only to have it kill him in the end. 

OSHA might prohibit such machines. States and municipalities won’t.

Pretensions Republicans had to being a party fueled by patriotism and serious ideas began dissipating with the trickle-down nonsense and “starve the beast” strategy sold by President Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor and pitchman. Reagan budget director David Stockman later admitted it was all a con.

Richard Nixon’s impeachment over Watergate had been an embarrassment for the party. The greater scandal of the Nixon years — his 1968 back-channel effort to “monkey wrench” the Paris Peace talks for political advantage — would not be exposed for years. President Lyndon Johnson hid what he knew at the time but felt Nixon was guilty of treason and had “blood on his hands”. Reagan lied about tax cuts and sold weapons to a terrorist nation to fund a secret war in defiance of Congress. And got away with it.

It was a few short decades from there to Republicans committing war crimes and lying the country into war in Iraq; to nominating a know-nothing pinup for vice president; to electing a white-nationalist, narcissist man-child as Republican savior. The former pro-wrestling impresario would rub elbows with autocrats. The career con man would preen daily as half a million Americans died in a pandemic he denied while pimping a miracle cure. He would instigate an insurrection by cosplaying “patriots” bent on overturning an election and installing him as dictator.

It’s all kayfabe

Whether Never Trumpers’ come-to-Jesus moment about their party’s state is itself serious, time will tell. For now, conservative pundits such as Charlie Sykes are done. Substance is gone out of the conservative movement. Save for a feral instinct for survival and the will to power, all that is left is putting on a flashy show for the donors. Post-Trump Republican politics is all kayfabe.

Sykes writes at Politico:

There is no legislative agenda here, only a new form of highly theatrical posturing that has replaced what was left of substantive conservatism in the GOP. Under Trump, the Republican Party literally decided that it did not need to have a platform; and even after Trump’s departure, it doesn’t think it needs an actual agenda, or indeed fixed principles of any kind.

The current GOP is less interested in the messy business of governing than it is in performative indignation and the memes that play well in social media and on cable television. Memes, it shouldn’t need to be said, are not ideas and don’t require a consistent set of principles. The result is a kind of free-floating nihilism, as the GOP chases narratives that stir outrage, generate clicks, shake loose grassroots contributions, and play well on Newsmax and Fox.

Principles? Those are the guys in law firms that make the most money.

Increasingly, however, there are voices on the right calling for the abandonment of values like restraint, moderation, or concerns for procedural niceties like the peaceful transfer of power. And this is where the performance veers from absurdist comedy to something much darker. Having abandoned both principles and traditional conservative sensibilities, some of the right seem ready to abandon the very idea of America. In a recent edition of the Claremont Institute’s journal, The American Mind, one right-wing writer argued that anyone who voted against Trump in the last election is not a real American. “I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants,” he wrote. He meant Americans who “may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans.”

Go back and reread the first three paragraphs above. Don’t bother asking nihilists what they mean by Americans.

This is good:

Pete Buttigieg's message to vaccine hesitant evangelicals: "Sometimes I've heard people, people I care about, say, 'if I'm faithful, God's gonna take care of me.' What I would hope they might consider is that maybe a vaccine is a part of God's plan." pic.twitter.com/Z89wIrmhAD

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 11, 2021

If that doesn’t work, you could say that Donald Trump is the one who green lit the vaccine warp speed plan. Since they worship him like a god, it might just persuade them.

Attendees at an event here in Trump National Doral this weekend are attempting to re-write the history of January 6th.

One asks, "what is so terrible about conspiracy theories anyway?"

New reporting today on @CNNnewsroom w/@Acosta. pic.twitter.com/MTPkBYCTWP

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) April 10, 2021

She is intensely frustrating. It would have taken everything in me not to scream in her face that the problem with conspiracy theories is that they are lies and in the case of QAnon defamatory disgusting lies which are turning people into stupid, violent robots — you idiot.

Sadly, she represents the majority of Republicans:

Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.

Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.

Since the Capitol attack, Trump, many of his allies within the Republican Party and right-wing media personalities have publicly painted a picture of the day’s events jarringly at odds with reality.

Hundreds of Trump’s supporters, mobilized by the former president’s false claims of a stolen election, climbed walls of the Capitol building and smashed windows to gain entry while lawmakers were inside voting to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory. The rioters – many of them sporting Trump campaign gear and waving flags – also included known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said the rioters posed “zero threat.” Other prominent Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have publicly doubted whether Trump supporters were behind the riot.

There are a few Republicans pushing back but they are the fringe. That woman who asks why conspiracy theories are a problem is the mainstream.

Republican Rep. Peter Meijer has a warning for his party: He fears baseless conspiracy theories like QAnon will destroy the GOP from within if Republicans don’t decisively and unequivocally condemn the false and dangerous beliefs and take action to stop their spread.”

The fact that a significant plurality, if not potentially a majority, of our voters have been deceived into this creation of an alternate reality could very well be an existential threat to the party,” Meijer, who was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for inciting the deadly attack at the US Capitol, told CNN in an interview.

Frequently described as a virtual cult, QAnonis a sprawling far-right conspiracy theory that promotes the absurd and false claim that Trump has been locked in a battle against a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles made up of prominent Democratic politicians and liberal celebrities. Members of the violent pro-Trump mob that stormedthe Capitol had ties to QAnon, and the conspiracy theory has made its way from online message boards into the political mainstream in recent years.”

When we say QAnon, you have the sort of extreme forms, but you also just have this softer, gradual undermining of any shared, collective sense of truth,” Meijer said. The Michigan freshman believes conspiracy theories fuel “incredibly unrealistic and unachievable expectations” and “a cycle of disillusionment and alienation” that could lead conservative voters to sit out elections or, in a worst-case scenario, turn to political violence, like what happened on January 6.

How deeply far-right conspiracy theories take hold within the Republican Party, and what the party does to either embrace or reject them, will have major consequences for the future of the GOP and American politics.Meijer is far from the only Republican in Congress disturbed by the rise of QAnon, but he is one of a rare few willing to publicly and repeatedly denounce it.

Republicans who speak out risk a backlash, and many would rather dismiss, downplay or ignore the issue. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, famously signaled outright support for the conspiracy theory before she was elected to office, though she has recently attempted to distance herself from it.CNN reached out to the offices of more than a dozen GOP members of Congress to request interviews for this story, and only two agreed to participate.

The lonely voices within the GOP who continue to take a stand must now grapple with what it would take for the party to turn away from conspiracy theories.

Kinzinger hopes that whatever the outcome in the special election, his endorsement will show like-minded Republicans they’re not alone and encourage others to run for office on a similar platform.”I think what’s important is that people see there are people out there that support you, that will back you if you do the right thing,” he said. “It’s a long-term battle for the soul of the party.”

The Illinois congressman describes the danger he believes QAnon poses in stark terms, saying he’s concerned its corrosive impact threatens to pull apart the very fabric of American democracy.”

Do I think there’s going to be a civil war? No. Do I rule it out? No. Do I think it’s a concern, do I think it’s something we have to be worried about? Yeah,” he said.Former GOP Rep. Denver Riggleman of Virginia is outspoken in his opposition to QAnon, and he believes that is part of the reason he was voted out of office.

While serving in Congress, Riggleman co-sponsored a bipartisan resolution condemning QAnon that passed in the House overwhelmingly, though seventeen Republicans voted in opposition and 34 didn’t vote at all. But he thinks most Republican lawmakers “want to have it both ways” when it comes to the issue of conspiracy theories.

The former congressman said Republicans frequently try to make it look like they’re standing up for principle, while at the same time “winking and nodding” at conspiracy theories in an effort to get more votes.It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how widespread belief in QAnon is in the Republican Party. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly a quarter of Republicans who know about QAnon view its supporters favorably, though nearly half of Republicans say they know nothing at all about the conspiracy theory.

Riggleman believes a major problem right now is that there’s a strong “contingent of GOP voters who have completely lost themselves in the rabbit hole of conspiracies, disinformation and grievance politics,” and most Republican lawmakers “want to get re-elected so they would rather have people like me shut the hell up, even though they know I’m right.”

“It’s almost like we’re facts-based pariahs that are trying to sort of rein in this insanity that’s gone on,” he said.

.[…]

As the GOP charts a path forward after Trump lost the White House, Kinzinger said he does not want to see Republicans push voting laws based on false claims of widespread election fraud.”The narrative is almost we have to tighten our election system so that the next election isn’t stolen again, and that is garbage,” he said. […]

Meijer is concerned that embracing conspiracy theories like QAnon could make it harder for the GOP to recalibrate and rebuild after losing the White House and being in the minority in both chambers.”I think it’s all part of this broader trend of blame casting,” the congressman said. “In the case of QAnon, it’s well, why am I in the position I’m in? Well, it’s because others are holding me down. Why did we lose this election? Well, it wasn’t because our candidate wasn’t the best or had made mistakes, it was because it was stolen. It’s these ways of distancing oneself from responsibility and accountability.”

There is a rot at the center of the GOP and the party has decayed rapidly.

It’s still a crime that John Roberts and his nihilist majority ruled that this was ok, and an even worse crime that these radicals took him up on it:

Expansion under Obamacare extends Medicaid coverage to those with incomes below 138% of the federal poverty level. Twelve states — 10 of which Trump carried in both his presidential campaigns — have resisted doing so since the ACA was enacted in 2010.

If all 12 accepted Biden’s new incentives to expand, roughly 4 million people could gain insurance under Medicaid. None has accepted so far. In Missouri, the Republican-controlled legislature is blocking implementation of Medicaid expansion even after state voters passed a ballot measure expanding Medicaid last year.

And they keep winning because of stupid bullshit like Dr. Seuss and phantom threats from Mexican nannies and taco trucks on every corner. They’d literally rather have their voters die than allow them to have a government program they need. It’s a real sickness and there is no cure.

The US is an immigrant nation and we are richer in every way because of it. We are all the beneficiaries of the contributions of other cultures. I always thought we had an advantage against other countries because of our long immigrant tradition, despite the ongoing racism and xenophobia that has plagued us from the beginning but now I’m not so sure.

Anyway, I thought this tweet storm by Ali Velshi concisely spelled out why we should be welcoming of immigrants on an economic basis, which is even more important than it used to be for different reasons:

One thing many of us have learned in the last year is how productive we can be when we aren’t spending an hour or two commuting to and from work. The pandemic has made us efficient, if nothing else.

All this working from home didn’t break the internet so, with a laptop & a phone or 2, we sure get a lot done. In fact, even before Covid, the American worker was about as productive as we have ever been.

As business picks up & unemployment falls, all that productivity is going to be a problem. It’s an economic concept but it’s Sunday so I won’t give you equations and stuff.

In lay terms, once you have an economy running at capacity, with almost everyone employed – like we were before the pandemic, the only way you can actually grow an economy is with people.

America doesn’t actually do that. Virtually no developed nation does, because we have families where every parent works, and we have very few children compared to the olden days.

In a modern society, the birthrate isn’t high enough to replace workers who retire from the workforce. Hence, America has what we call a “negative replacement rate.” Simply put, we don’t give birth to enough new humans to replace those retiring.

There’s really only one way to fix that: more immigrants to make up the difference, both to do the jobs we need done and to sustain the economy with the money they earn, and to pay taxes to help pay for our future retirement.

After 4 years of an administration that conflated our Southern border issues with actual immigration policy – which is a lie – some Americans believe immigration should be severely curtailed or shouldn’t exist at all.

The idea that America has been a prime example of innovation and creativity is, in large part, because America has always attracted the best and hardest working immigrants from every corner of the world.

But bad immigration policy is narrowing the innovation gap between the U.S. and other countries. The good news is, despite being unwelcoming to immigrants for the last few years, surveys indicate that most would still choose the U.S. over other countries.

I could easily make the case that America’s immigration is what makes America great. There’s a 135 yr. old statue 7 miles southwest of me near where the Hudson River meets the Atlantic Ocean dedicated to the idea but over time, bad politics has eroded that idea.

Bad politics. And bad policy. Despite that, it’s important to remember America is, historically, really good at immigration and immigration has been really good to America.

Originally tweeted by Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) on April 11, 2021.

The “negative replacement” issue shows just how stupid Tucker Carlson and his Great Replacement Nazies really are. They’re signing America’s economic death warrant.

Michigan has a big problem. The virus is surging and the people are just “done” with trying to prevent it.

Michigan’s Thumb region is the hottest of U.S. hot spots for coronavirus right now.

But at Mark’s Barbershop in the small downtown of Sandusky, masks are optional.

“Just so you know, you don’t have to wear that if you don’t want to,” owner Mark Heberling says as a masked visitor walks through door.

Across the street at the Downtown Deli, an sign at the entry says: “If we see you without a mask, we will assume you have a medical condition and we will welcome inside.”

The same philosophy holds true down the road at the Sandusky Family Diner, a former Big Boy that had its franchise terminated after violating state’s the indoor dining ban in November.

“I didn’t sign up to be the mask police,” says restaurant owner Troy Tank, as a handful of maskless employees clean up after the lunch rush. Tank casually mentions one worker is home quarantining after a positive COVID test.

Past the diner is the Sandusky Walmart, where mask use has been “50/50,” Tank says. After a coronavirus outbreak among workers, the Walmart was closed for part of the day Monday and all day Tuesday for deep cleaning.

Sandusky, population 2,500, is the county seat of Sanilac County, 40 miles north of Port Huron and in the heart of the Thumb, a region known for its expansive Lake Huron shorelines, its rolling farmlands and its friendly small towns.

In recent weeks, it’s also become known for its coronavirus rates.

On Friday, five of the nation’s top 15 counties in per-capita coronavirus cases were in Michigan’s Thumb — St. Clair, Huron, Sanilac, Tuscola and Lapeer.

Collectively, the five counties have reported 3,167 new cases of COVID-19 reported in the past seven days, a per capita daily rate of 1,216 cases per million residents — six times the national average and eight times the benchmark for the state’s highest risk level of 150 cases per million residents.

The region also has an eye-popping 32% positivity rate as a seven-day on coronavirus diagnostic tests, more than six times the level considered safe.

“These communities are literally on fire,” said Dr. Mark Hamed, public medical director for Lapeer, Huron, Sanilac and Tuscola counties.

Ask the region’s health experts for the reasons behind the spike, they point to multiple factors.

Compared to the rest of Michigan, the Thumb was less impacted by previous surges, which meant fewer people had natural immunity coming into the spring. The area appears to be hard-hit by the new B.1.1.7. variant which is much more contagious and also more lethal. Restrictions implemented in November have been eased, increasing social interactions.

And fanning the flames is widespread resistance among local residents to coronavirus mitigation strategies such as masking and avoiding indoor gatherings, said Bryant Wilke, Sanilac County public health director.

“There’s been a defiance towards masks,” Wilke said, “and I think it was because it got so political at the beginning of the pandemic. People said, ‘We don’t trust this. We never had to do it before,’ even through its been proven that it is a protective factor. People haven’t gotten over the hump to say, ‘We need to do this,’ and now we’re seeing the causation of not doing it and that’s the skyrocketing numbers in cases.

“I compare us to a potential wildfire,” Wilke said. “You’ve got fuel out there and the virus hadn’t hit us that bad yet. Now it’s hitting us and we’re dealing with the U.K. variant, and it’s just moving through the population rapidly.”

At the same time, Thumb residents — like many in Michigan — are thoroughly sick of more than a year of various coronavirus restrictions. They are ready to move on, whether the pandemic is over or not.

“We’re just f—– done with it,” Heberling said.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Tank said, people were “scared enough about the virus” to pay attention to emergency orders issued by the state.

But people have moved beyond that now, he said. “They’ve had it.”

Joseph Schlichting, 29-year-old who grew up in Sanilac County and moved back just before the pandemic, He said he’s not surprised that the Thumb has become an epicenter for coronavirus.

“Some people who took the restrictions seriously saw the numbers go down, so they stopped working with the restrictions,” he said. “But I think there’s a large group of people who just never followed the rules from Day 1.

“It’s been kind of eye-opening to see people that you’ve known all your life, people you would think would take this kind of risks seriously or take precautions seriously, but they don’t or seem to just flat out think it’s a lie.”

The politics of COVID

Fueling the attitude around the pandemic are the region’s political leanings. In the November election, 72% of voters in Sanilac County cast their ballots for Donald Trump, one of the highest percentages in the state. In the five-county Thumb region, it was 67%.

Trump’s popularity in the region certainly didn’t help with public health messaging around COVID-19, considering the former president’s skepticism of the masks and the seriousness of the pandemic in general, Hamed said.

“It created mixed messages that muddied the waters for a lot of rural Michigan” where Trump is revered, Hamed said.

No question, echoes of Trump’s talking points about the pandemic are apparent in talking to his supporters about the pandemic. That said, the rhetoric of conservatives has shifted over time. A year ago, some were suggesting the pandemic was a hoax, something no more harmful than seasonal flu. Today, skeptics are less likely to offer that argument.

“I definitely don’t think it’s a hoax,” Tank said. “I do think the virus is real. I know people who have had it. I know people who have gotten very sick from it. My father got it, and he was very sick. My brother, who’s a couple years younger than me, relatively healthy guy in his 30s, had it quite bad.”

But Tank is among those who question whether the mitigation strategies have made any difference.

“We all just need to live our lives,” he said. “My opinion is that you’ve either had coronavirus or you’re going to get it.”

He points to states such as Florida that have far less restrictions than Michigan and currently lower caseloads. In his reading on the topic, he said, it appears that coronavirus particles are too small to be contained by cloth masks. He’s highly skeptical that indoor dining contributes to coronavirus transmission rates. The vaccine “makes him a little nervous” and he questions whether it really works.

Part of the problem is that the state is run by a power-hungry harpy, of course.

And then there is the monumental ignorance about the world works:

Tank said he greatly resents what he feels is government overreach. He sees Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as “extremely power hungry” who is just using the pandemic as an excuse to be an authoritative leader. He especially doesn’t trust government officials after a November election that Tank is convinced was stolen from Trump.

Another thing that’s fueled his skepticism, he said, is the changing advisories from the federal Centers for Disease Control.

“One day, a mask is great, and the next day, it’s not great. One day, you should be six feet apart. The next day, it’s three feet,” he said. “They’re just all over the map. So when the people who are supposed to be the professionals are so unclear, that kind of leaves enough doubt in my mind to where I’m just going do what I feel is best for me and my family.

“We’re strong. We’re healthy. We take care of ourselves and do the proper things that I think prevents us from getting sick,” he said.

On a mirror in Heberling’s barbershop is a sticker that reads “MI COVID POW.”

He’s scornful of lockdowns and mask use, saying keeping people indoors and masked has hurt their immune systems. “You need fresh air in your lungs every day,” he said. And people “are constantly touching their masks, so they’re transporting bacteria to the next thing they touch.”

Heberling also thinks the United States has ignored medications such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as coronavirus treatments. “I think there are medications out there if used early on could have greatly decreased the number of cases,” he said.

The article goes on and on, getting more depressing with each word. I came away wondering how we can live in this world with people who don’t understand how science works, are politically brainwashed or, in most cases, both. I know we’re supposed to have empathy and try to understand the factors that made these people like this but I’ve run out of it. Over half a million people died in one year because of this and they still refuse to see the seriousness of it. What would it take?

Update: Jonathan Cohn has a comprehensive look at what’s happening in Michigan and why. It’s not reassuring.