So it took a few days, but the media seem to be realizing that the anti-quarantine protests aren't a real grassroots uprising; they're Potemkin populism staged by right-wing billionaires 1/ washingtonpost.com/politics/insid…
Genuine public opinion strongly supports maintaining the quarantine 2/
To careless observers, these protests looked like the 2010 Tea Party, which is no accident — they were staged events *designed* to look that way. And to be fair, there was a lot of astroturf involved in the original Tea Party stuff too 3/
But there was also a genuine if nasty form of populism involved in the Tea Party, which consisted largely of older white men who believed that Obama was going to take their money and give it to Those People 4/ scholar.harvard.edu/files/williams…
Much less clear that there's anything comparable now. Seniors, the mainstay of the Tea Party, have little stake in reopening businesses and are justifiably afraid of the virus. They are far less supportive of Republicans than in the past 5/ washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…
The real target here, I'd say, is the news media, which right-wing networks hope will be fooled into believing that they're seeing a mass movement — and, to some extent, governors they hope can be similarly fooled. Don't fall for it! 6/
