Thread by @TomLevenson

This is a reminder that Donald Trump spent over a year demonizing a "China" virus, along with other even more vicious terms.

The GOP leadership in Congress and the states let that stand--and in many cases amplified the hate....1/

2/ Last March I wrote in The Atlantic that such rhetoric has a long, fatal history. I was thinking of public health measures: historically labeling a disease as Chinese (or Jewish, or whatever) leads often to taking the wrong actions, or none at all, to respond to an outbreak...

3/ I didn't stop to consider the immediate threat of anti-Asian hate, though my historical example, early 1900s outbreaks in Honolulu and then San Francisco of the global bubonic plague pandemic, certainly provide plenty of examples of exactly that...

4/ Now we're 2 days out from the brutal events in Atlanta, a massacre of some of the most vulnerable in the Asian community there. We are being reminded of a story that's been out there, but not top-of-mainstream-media-mind: the increase in anti-Asian violence over the last year.

5/ The last sentence of that 3/2020 piece said that putting a lid on bigoted anti-China rhetoric on the pandemic was a matter of life and death; it was–at least some failures in the Trump/GOP response to the virus derive from the urge to other it in their vision of American life.

6/ But none of us can now evade the fact that it is life and death in the most immediate sense: the climate of hate created by Trump and Republican rhetoric is doing what persuasive rhetoric always does: drive some of its hearers to take actions: crimes of hate and violence...

7/ Unless and until those in leadership in the GOP who do not deploy racist tropes, (from their hearts or simply expediently, given the current tendency in the party, it doesn't matter) make such ready hate anathema, neither they nor the country can be redeemed.

/fin