This is a thread on Republican messaging. The press doesn’t want to have a direct conversation with you about this. So as a former Republican who is now a consistent Democratic voter, I will. Thread. Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:
1. They can tell people what to do.
2. You cannot tell them what to do.

This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy, there’s an additional layer of complexity to this (later in the thread), but this is the basic formula.

In this thread, I will be discussing the behavior of Donald Trump’s base throughout the viral pandemic—everything from their disdain towards wearing masks to their reluctance to getting vaccinated—but I will be doing it through a very specific lens: caste. The intended audience of this thread: well-intentioned white people who are rightfully angry and still bewildered that the pandemic has persisted because of the malevolent recklessness of Donald Trump’s base. You may not see what caste has to do with this, but you will.