Thread by @RachelBitecofer

1. I think school closures also dragged Ds down in congressional races. To be clear, they wouldn't in a functional democracy not following a herd immunity strategy & normalizing the indifference genocide of up to a half million of its citizens. That "conditional" is a necessary

https://twitter.com/dadakim/status/1326548451530739725

2. component of the "pandemic backlash effect that we have in the U.S. other countries don't have sizable anti-mask movements, ones so large it impedes states like North Dakota who governor @DougForDakota has "led" them to a point where every single county in his large;y rural

3. state has been governed to "high" infection rates. He must feel so successful that liberty & freedom is so abundantly clear all around him! So yes, in a country that has normalized murdering via indifference its old, medical compromised & in the case of grandforksherald.com/newsmd/coronav…

4. COVID- which is a random killer, which sometimes kills young healthy mothers whose own mothers couldn't let their daughter forgo a baby shower bc its such a special part of the birth experience or bc how do you skip the "1 year" baby party when the baby smashes her cake all

5. over her own head? I get it. Those are once in a lifetime events that can't be replaced. So people have been doing them bc their governors & their president esp has told them to do so, that its no big deal, that actually they'd be FOOLS not to hold that gender reveal party,

6. and the result is that all across this country there are tiny humans who will be growing up without ANY memory moments/milestone moments with their mommies bc when the time came for leadership to matter, people like @GregAbbott_TX and @realDonaldTrump told them to get on out

7. out there and play Russian roulette with a random killer. So average voters, the ones that don't know who Chuck Todd or Mitch McConnell (IE: the vast majority of them) are- they are assessing the pandemic from the American frame, from an imagistic lens-shaped largely by the

8. president's tone. President is telling them its no big deal then why in the hell can't I send my kid to school? Journalists/analysts might point to polls to say that there is a large disconnect between the public & Trump on the pandemic- on its severity and the response which

9. by every objective standard will go down in history has wretchedly bad, as @OliviaTroye is trying to bring attention to as a brave whistleblower from the WH's COVID task force. What the GOP understands & Ds just don't is that bc the vast, vast majority of Americans are passive

10. receptors of info (via ads targeted at them on TV & esp online now, appearances strategically constructed for them via cable news channels) reality is what you make of it. If you want to make Donald J. Trump the best darn diddley 'arn president in the history of the world

11. it is fairly easier to do. If you want to convince your "crop" of 60 million Americans that more than a third of the ballots cast in the 2020 cycle are "illegal" with enough repetition and shrewd dishonor, yep, you can do that too. And that is pretty much what the Right has

12. done with COVIOD19. In order to deal w Trump's piss poor handling of the crisis- his Administration total executive ineptness, they simply de-crisified it (that is not a word, but I am using it anyway.) If @NaomiAKlein likes the Shock Doctrine- how about turning the party's

13. entire propaganda machine to the purpose of erasing a global pandemic, WHILE IT IS IN PROGRESS, and thus leading to the deaths of thousands of Americans? I mean, wow right?! Those people at the Trump rallies- that was some next level shit there.

Trust me, it did not escape

14. GOP strategists' attention that rather than any of this stuff harming them at the polls- in terms of Senate races, voter manipulation via digital was a stunning success.

I'll state this again, the argument that @SpanbergerVA07 is having w The Squad is like arguing about the

15. best set up for a library's Dewey Decimal card catalog 10 years after the invention of the internet.

15. Same as the convo that much of the moderate influencers are having- its the same tied convo bc it focuses on ISSUES. That is NOT the overhaul Ds need. I think @TimRyan gets this. Tim, ☎️ me