Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

(Thread)

It's too soon to tell for sure, but now that some #reopen states are starting to take prevention measures seriously, we might be approaching a second peak.

It's better than the near-straight line we were at before, but I'm a lot less optimistic about what happens next.

Remember the big surge in #reopen rallies?

The one in Harrisburg was right during the height of those, April 20th.

A week later, we saw a secondary peak that was nearly as high as the first.

https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1252354466449289217?s=19

Those protests were a site of infection, not just in terms of COVID but in terms of the politicization of basic common sense public health practice.

It created a blue/red divide along public health practice at the worst possible moment.

You have to remember, at this point COVID-19 was mostly killing people in liberal areas, specifically major cities mostly located in blue states.

The bluest of the blue.

For folks in Trump strongholds, it seemed distant in a way that reinforced racists' prejudices.

If you think that Jewish people deserve to die and that Black and other POC people are inherently diseased and dirty, seeing cities you associate with those two populations fall ill both makes sense and feels like just a "well, they had it coming" moment.

That's not me extrapolating.

That's what I was watching racists write in the chats I monitor.

There was early on a push to say COVID-19 was a gay disease.

As it found foothold in urban areas and especially Black spaces, they read it through the lens of their own prejudice.

There's always been a strain of "the evil (((elite))) use blacks as gullible foot soldiers in their war against Whites" language in white supremacist conspiracy theory, & the death demographics fed into that too when it came to Soros/Gates vaccine microchipping conspiracy stuff.

To the white supremacists, it made perfect sense that a vaccine and/or microchipping conspiracy would target urban Black folks first.

They'd already emphasized sexual transmissability, and they already think Jewish elite program white women to have sex with Black men.

And of course, those same white supremacists see urban centers and particularly northeast urban centers as dens of "degeneracy" (read: homosexuality and interracial relationships), so it makes sense to them that 1) they'd start there but also that 2) "good" whites were immune.

In many ways it replicated the way white supremacists and homophobes responded to the AIDS crisis: ignoring it because it hit marginalized communities first, and assuming it was impossible for it to make the jump to "good" straight whites, especially rural whites.

Not every racist "good" white believes every detail of every conspiracy, but the general theme was everywhere.

As with AIDS, wasn't so much that these racists didn't believe the disease existed or was transmissible so much as they believed they were insulated by their race.

Especially when COVID-19 was at its peaks in NYC and Italy, you could see not only the Nazis on Telegram but also relatively mainstream racist wackos like Bill Mitchell struggling to redefine whiteness in real time to support that supposition.

For a hot minute, Bill Mitchell was circulating race theory about how Italians (including Italian-Americans in NYC) were probably predisposed to disease.

Christian Identity Nazis broadened it to Catholics in general, citing various supposed uncleanlinesses of ritual and culture.

The United States has always had fascist subcurrents, but Trump's regime and COVID were the perfect storm.

Fascism's central theme has ALWAYS been built around a notion that some peoples are "naturally" stronger-- genetically superior-- to others, & "naturally" should dominate.

Trump's widely-reported fear of disease and disgust for the sick is fascistic, not hypochondria.

If it were that, he'd happily self-isolate, temp-test, mask up.

As he has said himself, it's about equating wellness with an image of fascistic strength, with "natural" dominance.

If you look at what drove the overall decline in the US over May, after that secondary bump, it's clear that the overall decline was driven by NJ/NY recovery, and highly uneven across states.

Some of the states first to #reopen actually experienced increased case rates.

It's important to remember that those red states were less likely to push testing or to accurately report death numbers, artificially deflating those figures.

They resisted worker assistance, which made people less likely to stay home in areas where mask-wearing was stigmatized.

If you only look at US numbers overall, you'd be tempted to think that maybe they'd learned their lesson.

The problem is, the stronghold for those red states-- the US South-- is still going strong.

California, meanwhile-- which had been the high-population blue state exception initially fueling this second case surge--seems to be on the decline in terms of diagnoses.

Texas and Florida now surpass it in total daily diagnoses and continue to trend upwards.

It's also worth noting that since we're measuring not only from a weekend but from a holiday weekend that is of disproportionate importance to red states in the throes of fascist nationalism, the dips and slows we see are likely due in part to weekend reporting breaks.

Re-opening is a genie that is very hard to put back in the bottle, period, especially when the federal government is absolutely unwilling to acknowledge the threat.

No one wants to go back to the dull stress of quarantine, even if we know we should.

Quarantine also relies on folks feeling like they can survive in quarantine, and COVID unemployment benefits are about to expire on 7/26.

Employers are emboldened, #reopening, and calling people back to work.

Even in blue states, an economic breaking point is coming.

Even for those who can live off normal benefits, work from home, or live on savings, there's an increasing social pressure to leave the house & be a part of the world.

It only takes one person getting drunk at a "socially distanced" BBQ & forgetting the rules to infect everyone.

Finally, we live through times of trouble by focusing on a light at the end of the tunnel, and July was supposed to be (and frankly, should have been) that light.

I'm deeply concerned with this stuff and even I feel the temptation of "I tried, I was good, fuck it."

So again, blue states are keeping relatively flat or suppressed on case load right now.

Reopenings, employer mandates, that 7/26 COVID unemployment benefit cutoff, social pressure, restlessness, and hopelessness seriously threaten that status quo, though.

Meanwhile, it's clear that the politicization of public health response makes it unlikely that meaningful steps will be taken in skyrocketing red states until the crisis is impossible to ignore.

Impossible to ignore is hospital overload, mass death, and pervasive infection.

As those of us in the greater Northeast and Mid-Atlantic know well, that "impossible to ignore" is a moment of mass flight for those we can afford to flee.

Who in this region doesn't know a family who took in a refugee from NYC as it approached its grim caseload apex?

That means a flock of potentially infected refugees to safer states--blue states-- just as those blue state populations reach a point of overwhelming political, social, psychological, and economic pressure to go back to an even less socially distanced normal.

Those refugees will be well-enough resourced to go take up life in a disease-vacation second residence, which means disproportionately white, which means disproportionately likely to subscribe to a politics that sees masks and social distancing precautions as unpatriotic.

In other words, those refugees from a disease-ravaged South are the least likely to observe travel quarantine rules or practice the basic measures that might keep them from infecting others.

And they will be traveling from places of peak disease to states starting to normalize.

At the same time, the people in most present in public space in those blue state refuges will be far and and away disadvantaged people-- those who were called back to retail and dining gigs first, those who never qualified for unemployment, those who depended on COVID benefits.

Moreover, this will happen at a time when these economically vulnerable people make both too much money to qualify for Medicaid & too little to pay for decent healthcare, and as COBRA increasingly becomes an unworkable burden for most.

A time when medical care is too expensive.

That plus economic insecurity means the people most prone to infection will be resistant to leaving work even when they are symptomatic, that they will resist treatment even after hospitalization is advisable, & will pack emergency rooms only once they are very sick & contagious.

"Impossible to ignore" usually starts with hospital overload and establishes itself with death rate.

That happened quickly in NYC, but in more rural red states it will probably take longer-- weeks, may be even a month or two.

So we're talking a peak in red states in late summer and early fall, with mass flight from those states to blue states just as economic pressure forces mass return to public spaces by those with the least financial security and the least access to affordable healthcare.

We're talking about that already-perfect storm of precaution-avoidant, infectious red state influx to reopening, vulnerable blue states just as flu season gets underway and temperatures force more and more people inside and closer together.

We're talking about that perfect storm of red state infectious influx to highly vulnerable reopening blue states not only under the peak time of year for flu and flu-like virus transmission, but just before Thanksgiving and the holidays.

And not only are we talking about that perfect storm of infectious influx to vulnerable reopening blue state during peak flu season just before the holidays, we're talking about that happening at a moment when many of us haven't seen parents/older relatives for nearly a year.

Many of us have never gone that long without seeing those loved ones in person.

Many of us moss them terribly, think of our holidays with them as precious, and will be heartbroken at the thought of having to give that up.

Some will be too heartbroken to stop themselves.

A socially distanced pool party or barbeque is hard enough, but a socially distanced Thanksgiving or Chtistmas sounds not only miserable but also logistically impossible for anyone without a mansion banquet hall.

Throw in an election where many states refuse to allow mail-in voting and where Trump will threaten to litigate for the invalidation of ballots from those that do, all just before the holidays, and jfc have we not just lined up a passive eugenicist's dream calendar.

And of course, that's before we add in disaster-based interstate migration as infected people from the highest case density states flee wildfire (Arizona, California) and hurricanes (Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida) before or as they hit their peak.

That's before we consider that some of the people most vulnerable to infection and death-- low income elderly people who can't afford AC-- will be especially likely to seek out cooler temperatures in public spaces over the summer, a time notorious for heat-related elder death.

It's a nightmare scenario.

As with the nightmare scenario we've seen play out so far, part of the nightmare is that it is so completely preventable, and that prevention would be so much less expensive than after-the-fact attempts at mitigation inevitably will be.

An actual social safety net-- livable welfare, Medicare for all-- would make prevention easily matter-of-course, but even temporary, moderate reform measures could make a huge impact here.

Individual stimulus checks at a living wage rate would put people in a position to quarantine.

Even a relatively small individual stimulus check bonus for people living in stay-at-home states could generate public support for proactive public health measures.

A temporary increase in the threshold to qualify for Medicaid and permitting its use as a secondary insurance wouldn't solve systemic healthcare problems, but it would at least make emergency and preventative healthcare accessible to people when they need it.

None of this is particularly radical; it's all neoliberal stopgap.

It would *still* create conditions that would enable and encourage state and local govenments to enormously slow the spread of COVID-19, to prevent devastation if not damage.

Trump's approach to this pandemic gets cast as delusion, and that may be part of it.

Whatever truth there is in that, it's undeniably true that his approach is fundamentally fascist in its emphasis on projected physical strength & health, its transparently eugenic consequences.

I'm never not disgusted with congressional Democrats' milquetoast approach to dealing with Trumpian fascism, but it is simply jaw-dropping to me that they almost certainly see this cliff coming and are poised to stay quiet and allow us to fall over it collectively.

I can't help but feel almost an accelerationist energy and morbid excitement coming off the Dem establishment as they watch Trump's poll numbers drop.

It's as if *they've* decided that things will have to get worse before they can get better, which for them means Biden victory.

My critique of leftist accelerationism is and has always been that most accelerationists are people with enough privilege to survive acceleration, while most marginalized people are far less likely to make it.

I stand by that critique, but also... at least left (and far right, for that matter) understand that the whole thing about acclerationism is that once you've accelerated up and over the hill, the subsequent descent is inevitable and outside anyone's control.

Dems, not so much.

We're already well into beginning that descent, and the Dems seem to think that if they let up on the brakes and let Trump peddle harder, the electorate will say "enough!" and slam on the brakes by electing Biden in November.

But that's not how acceleration works on a downslope.

The whole point of accelerationism is that there comes a point when you're flying downhill so fast that the brakes are insufficient and can't keep you from hitting the bottom and using the momentum to power your way up the next slope unhindered.

A chief failure of the Dems in the past four years has been a lack of imagination.

A lack of imagination around how bad things can get.

A lack of imagination around how a fascist might get away with using the Constitution as toilet paper.

If the Dems think a low-polling Trump is the trough they're accelerating into, or that Biden is the next hill, their profound lack of imagination has struck again.

The bottom of the hill isn't low poll numbers for Trump.

The bottom of that hill is civil war and mass death.

If we reach the bottom of that hill, the next hill won't start with the United States government crowning Biden in January 2021, because there won't be a United States government anymore.

Not a US governed by elections, anyway.

Leftists can argue about whether the next hill might be anarchist or socialist utopia, but frankly-- thinking about who has the guns right now-- I think more likely than not it would be the fascists who got to steer that momentum and use it to climb their unimaginably scary hill.

Whatever the next hill is, it certainly isn't a Biden presidency.

If the Dems keep leaning into this strategy of "fuck it, let him dig his own grave," what they'll really be doing is leaning into a strategy of "fuck it, let him dig and fill a mass grave for marginalized people."

Time isn't out on the COVID-19 doomsday clock, but we're at five minutes to go and that second hand is flying.

If the Dems won't pause that clock, much less roll it back, they're they're dooming exponentially more marginalized people to death while thwarting their own ambitions.

They think they're just digging a grave to bury Trump and the casualties they allow along the way.

What they're really doing is digging a mass grave for us and (eventually) for them.

It's literally a grave for us, and figuratively a grave for our last semblance of democracy.

Even if the COVID-19 numbers today were accurate, even if they somehow weren't depressed by the long weekend and holiday, the story they tell isn't of a final peak.

It's of a peak that marks a moment of transition, transition to red state full-blown mass infection.

That's not just a red state problem.

It's a red state problem that will inevitably become a blue state problem at the very moment we fool ourselves into behaving as if we're out of the woods.

It paints an ink-dark portrait of the future.

Trump, the dominant political leader in those red states, will let his people die horribly at the altar of fascist image.

The Dem leaders of blue states have so far mostly chosen to step back and let that scenario play out, thinking they can reverse the trend come January.

There's no stopping this come January.

There's no stopping it later, period.

There is only stopping this now.

The brakes we have can only slow us down so much, and we are already accelerating.

Not stopping this now is allowing mass death.

Those are the facts.

Those are the facts, and as I watch the unemployment COVID benefit deadline draw near with barely a peep from the Dems, I can't help but feel mass death isn't just Trump's strategy.

It's their strategy, too.

If we don't hold them accountable now, we give Trump the ongoing and escalating disaster he needs to scare and distract us into acceptance of unthinkabilities.

Unthinkabilities like elections delayed, discounted as illegitimate, or simply ignored.

If Dems still lack the imagination to understand how the unthinkable might become not just thinkable, but inevitable, we need to paint the picture for them.

Otherwise, they will sacrifice us en mass on an altar to a god who will always favor Trump, anyway.

The end.