Republicans step up racism to deflect blame for COVID outbreak

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The GOP strategy to defeat Joe Biden’s presidency was supposed to be simple: raise rates of COVID-19 by convincing Fox News viewers that only dirty liberals get vaccinated, then blame Biden for the wave while a media plagued by both sides is playing the game.

But the plan encountered an unforeseen glitch: Mainstream media, which played a bit of the game with the headlines blaming Biden, suddenly shifted gears in mid-July. The severity of the wave of delta variants prompted the media to start covering both Fox News’ anti-vaccine propaganda apparatus and the fact that COVID-19 hotspots appeared to be concentrated in parts of the country where the people deal with this propaganda. Now the whole evil plan is gone. Polls show Americans are blaming the righties and the unvaccinated instead of Biden and now Republicans are in a panic.

And what are Republicans still doing in panic? Old fashioned baiting.

Rather than blame the obvious culprits of the pandemic, anti-vaxxer Republicans added to Fox News are increasingly accusing immigrants on the southern border of introducing COVID-19 and Biden of supposedly leaving them behind. After Biden rightly called out Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for his part in letting COVID-19 run rampant, DeSantis pitifully attempted to retaliate by claiming Biden “imported more viruses from around the world by having a border wide open south “.

Other Republican politicians echoed this “blame Mexico” talking point, with Texas Senator Ted Cruz accusing the Biden administration of authorizing a “super-spreading event because their border opened” with the Governor of Texas. Iowa Kim Reynolds arguing that “the problem is the southern border is open.”

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Unsurprisingly, Fox News leans heavily on this “blame immigrants, not the unvaccinated” message, often with a secondary dose of contrast between supposedly dangerous dark-skinned immigrants and the world’s supposedly immaculate lighter-skinned people. whole.

Bret Baier of Fox News interviewed Centers for Disease Control director Rochelle Walensky last week and complained that her “in-laws live in Austria, they can’t come here to see their six month old baby because of the ‘travel ban in the EU’, but that ‘migrants come across the southern border of other countries with more COVID.’ Walensky calmly replied: ‘What we really need to do is spend our time to vaccinate our communities, “but of course Breitbart and other right-wing media have described her as somehow too” awake “to deal with the frightening strangers with diseases they clearly believe are identifiable by Skin color.

As usual, there’s a lot of coordination right around the new baiting tactic. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post are both to blame for the immigrants, not the unvaccinated. And Fox News is a constant rate of scary stories about COVID-positive immigrants, all intended to give viewers an excuse to stay unvaccinated, as they can blame ‘dirty’ immigrants instead of unvaccinated Americans in the country who transmit. quickly the disease.

This is of course completely ridiculous. Glenn Kessler wrote a Washington Post fact check that focused on COVID-19 rates among border workers, noting “so far we see no evidence to support” the claim that he is is a major factor in the current outbreak. But frankly, Kessler’s fact-checking seriously downplays the case, from a purely mathematical standpoint. Thousands of unvaccinated immigrants at the border simply don’t have the numbers to pose a greater threat to public health than literally millions of Americans born to be vaccinated.

Any fool who can read a map sees the main problem with the “blame the border” gambit, which is that the parts of the United States that actually border Mexico see less of an increase than the parts that other parts. that border the water and / or border other US states.

Today’s hotspot map from the New York Times. https://t.co/eFIMvvwxC5 pic.twitter.com/fG6c6fKclq

Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) August 6, 2021

Yes, the hot spots cross the Bible Belt more than the southwest. We also have real science that shows the wave of delta variants that are causing our current woes is crossing more Branson, Missouri where vaccine-dodging GOP America is going to party than McAllen, TX.

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None of this makes logical sense, and not just because the Biden administration has policies to push people back to the border for being a COVID-19 threat. Even if one accepts the premise that immigrants add significantly to the COVID-19 problem, why is this an excuse not to get the vaccine? You would think that believing that people are bringing COVID-19 is one more reason to do what offers by far the highest level of protection: vaccination. And yet, “creepy brown-skinned immigrants bring disease!” is used as a justification by white conservatives to avoid taking basic preventive measures.

Of course, none of this is meant to be rational.

Republicans look to racism for the same reason they always do, to deactivate any remaining critical thinking capacity within their base, replacing it with inconsistent fear and rage at the very existence of people who do not look, speak or act exactly like them. As usual, the GOP elite don’t care how many people get sick or die. All they care about is giving their constituents something stupid to rant about, so they can cut their heads off and not think about how stupid it is to keep voting for people who kill them. to score political points.

Does this new narrative work “blame the immigrants, not the unvaccinated”? It will be, in the same way the “blame China” bet worked: to give Fox News viewers a talking point to yell at loved ones voicing concerns about their unvaccinated status and give Republican politicians a way to make noise while avoiding their own responsibility in this crisis.

What that won’t do is end the COVID-19 outbreak anytime soon. For that to happen, ordinary Republicans must aspire and start getting vaccinated in greater numbers. And the longer their leaders continue to provide them with excuses not to, like blaming immigrants, the longer this pandemic will last. And the longer this lasts, the angrier the vaccinated majority will be at the unvaccinated red hats for being such selfish, whiny babies in the face of a global pandemic.

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