Trump's poison continues to harm our virus response. He suggested for a year that taking covid seriously constituted disloyalty that would lend aid and comfort to his enemies.
Vaccine-reluctant GOP voters recently interviewed by @ddiamond echoed Trump:
@ddiamond On the anti-lockdown movement, it's striking how easily Trumpist "populism" backslid into standard issue small-government conservatism, producing a college-dorm level liberty ethos in the face of calls for collective action amid a public health emergency:
@RonWyden Some GOP senators want Democrats to do a separate bill focused just on "real" infrastructure. But Republicans won't raise corporate tax rates to pay for it.
Some Democrats see this as a trap. I gamed out how this might work here:
@JVLast Corporate defenses of voting rights are a problem for Republicans. They shed a harsh light on the GOP's slide into radicalization, which could alienate suburbanites and provoke a Dem countermobilization.
@DavidAFrench 2) As @DavidAFrench notes, each of these are being attacked for different things. MLB and companies like Delta are faulted for criticizing the Georgia voting law, Big Tech for supposed suppression of conservative viewpoints.
@DavidAFrench 3) But in all these cases, @DavidAFrench argues, these are forms of speech. That’s what MLB is doing by pulling the game, and what private platforms moderating content are doing.
And conservative voices *aren’t actually* being suppressed:
Phony populist Josh Hawley is now claiming "woke" corporations are victimizing people like him for merely defending "election integrity" in Georgia. Yes, the leader of the effort to subvert Biden's electors really said that. I unloaded a rant in response: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Here's Josh Hawley's full quote. It's just steaming wretched nonsense.
No sympathizer with the new "conservative populism" should accept this. It's truly deranged:
What's galling is Hawley is using the rhetoric of empowerment (protecting conservative voters' agency from woke elites) to defend actual efforts to disempower people via voter suppression.
Amazing: Gov Brian Kemp has done 14 Fox News interviews on Georgia's voter suppression law, in a frantic bid to atone for his heretical refusal to help Trump steal the election. And it's still not enough! I tried to unpack the deeper pathologies here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Republicans keep telling their voters to fear "woke" corporations and "cancel culture."
But what Republicans really fear is *more Democrats voting.*
And what they really object to is corporations defending a future shaped by Dem voters' participation:
Republicans can whine all they want about "woke corporate virtue signaling." But here's the truth: This situation is their fault. It's in no small part the result of the continuing GOP refusal to fully renounce Trump's lie about the election. New piece: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Another Republican threatening companies who criticize voter suppression: Texas' Dan Patrick.
He says they might “have a bill they want us to pass for them. Good luck!”
And he says voting limits are needed to boost voter confidence, which he undermined.