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.
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
facilities—but 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, protesters—including some sporting
guns, waving Confederate flags, blocking ambulances and holding
antisemitic
signs–have 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
DeVos--who 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 disobedience”—apparently
the right to infect others-- to Rosa
Parks. This, as Vice President Pence defends Trump’s tweets
fanning the flames of dissent-- and encouraging acts of armed
insurrection and terrorism—by 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 base--with their unhinged pronouncements of “fake
news” and Democratic hoax conspiracy theories--far more is at
play here.
Red states--which
include the former states of the Confederacy, the
ideological successors to the Dixiecrats--have 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 supremacy—of which the Trump administration is an
adherent—always ends in death. White Christian fundamentalists
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 master—reminiscent of the redacted Slave
Bible that omitted 90
percent of the Old Testament and half of the New
Testament--including passages related to the liberation of the
Israelites, rebellion and equality--and 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
trade—with 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 system--who were imprisoned under the Black Codes for bogus
offenses such as vagrancy and rented out to plantations,
corporations, mines and railroads--and the forced laborers who toiled
in Ford and General Motors plants in Nazi Germany.
Even
today, 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.
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.
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