Hey Missouri.
Remember back when New Yorkers tried to earn us about Trump?
Because they knew him for years?
Kirkwood MO would like to provide that same service regarding the MO GOP Senate nominee, @AGEricSchmitt.
Because we've known him for years. 1/ Schmitt first made his bones in the Kirkwood area, succeeding the like-minded Mike Gibbons. Both were the genial, chamber-of-commerce type GOP-low taxes, less govt, blah blah, but the moderate, Rotary Club, 4th of July Parade species, appropriate for an upper-mid class burb. 2/

E mails to MO @AGEricSchmitt turning in school districts & teachers over mask mandates are from a variety of anti-mask extremists, some in the health field. Like a nurse working w/Spec.Ed kids, an official w/the MO Dept of Mental Health, a pharma exec. All from work emails. 1/ The nurse from StL's Spec. School Dist., and the Dept of Mental Health exec, are supposed to be working w/some of Missouri's most troubled kids. The exec from StL's Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals works in an industry that's supposed to be protecting health. 2/

THREAD;
4 members of the Wentzville MO (exurban StL) bd banned a book by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Their district's pulled 3 other books from school libraries, 2 by Black authors, 1 by a lesbian writer. They call them "porn", the usual smokescreen for racism & bigotry. 1/ The Wentzville school Bd voted 4-3 to pull Morrison's "The Bluest Eye", following an 8-1 vote by a school advisory committee to **keep the book**. But after blovating against "obscenity" & "pornography" at the school bd meeting last week, all 4 now refuse to talk about it. 2/

GOP governance in MO is a Gilead preview of what Trumpista extremists want nationwide.
* MO voters amended the state constitution to expand Medicaid. The MO GOP ruling super-majority ignored them, refused.
1/ * A new state law "nullified" all federal gun laws in MO, sets $50,000 fine for any MO cop who assists feds in any gun probes, incl domestic terrorism. The U.S. Attorney General's office notified MO that the law is illegal, unenforceable.
2/

Thread.
An effective online tool used by the upper-middle class insurrectionists preparing for the Jan. 6 "stop the steal" rally & US Capitol assault wasn't Parler, Gab, or Telegram. It was NextDoor, the app suburbanites use to track garage sales & "suspicious" activity 1/7 Take St. Charles County, MO, a rapidly-growing, affluent, pro-Trump suburb/exurb in the St. Louis metro. St. Chas. has a long reputation as home to angry white-flighters who fled N. StL city & county as they turned African-American, & put the MO River btw themselves & Blacks. 2/

Thread.
Many white people are working in white communities to spread a Black Lives Matter message. A young white teacher plans to do that Saturday 7/11, in a remote MO tourist town where she faces push back & veiled threats from a local businessman & "militias". 1/ Teacher Abby Van Winkle plans the Sat. rally (& bake sale!) in Van Buren, MO, a town of 800 that lives on tourists flocking to the crystal-clear Current River, part of the Ozark Natl Scenic Riverways. The rally, she says, is designed to engage friends & neighbors. 2/

Missourians, or anyone who doesn't like racism, should boycott both Branson & the Ozark Natl Scenic Riverways. Both are crawling w/vicious racists, many armed. Neither should get one penny of your leisure spending. Let's unpack this. 1/ Last Friday, 6/26, there was a BLM demo in Branson in front of the Confederate-themed Dixie Outfitters. Today, 7/3 another demo, another pro-Trump counter-demo. The couple below are miming ape motions as they lead the Branson counter-protestors chanting "monkey lovers". 2/

THREAD
During the pandemic, many Americans volunteer and self-sacrifice to help others. Others howl about their "rights" being taken away & claim a virulent virus that's killed 65,000 Americans so far is lib hysteria. This is a story about two of them. 1/ Jamie Allman is a former TV reporter & right-wing radio host in St. Louis. He was fired by Hubbard Radio & Sinclair (!) TV in 2018 after posting on social media that he wanted to "stick a hot poker up the ass" of Parkland school massacre survivor David Hogg. 2/

MO counties in the St Louis metro "re-opening" Monday (going against CDC guidelines requiring 2 consecutive wks of declining cases) have a problem, the same as other red counties nationwide. They don't have the medical/public health infrastructure to deal w/a COVID rebound. 1/ St. Charles County has 52 ICU beds. Jefferson County has 26. Franklin County has 13. That means if the white-flight exurban pro-Trump counties are wrong, and their "re-opening" leads to a COVID-19 rebound between May 18 and Memorial Day, they won't be equipped to deal with it. 2/

Thread.
Why the push to "re-open" is based on ideology, not science, & the return of astroturf Teabaggers.
Let's focus on one state: MO.
The GOP Gov says MO will start to re-open May 3. @GovParsonMO
has said in re-elex ads that D's are "socialist", so you know his politics. 1/ Gov Parson's big-money donors have been pushing him to re-open. He didn't want to close in the first place. 41 other states had implimented stay-at-home orders before he acted. But the damage is real. His own eco-devo people project 15% of all MO biz are gone *permanently*. 2/

Thread. A pandemic story.

Millions of red state rural Trumpistas think COVID-19 is a hoax, lib hysteria, & something that won't affect them out in the country.
Let me introduce you to Midco, Missouri. Finding Midco is like stumbling upon a Mayan temple complex in the Yucatan. 1/ Just north of Carter County Road 148, a smokestack rises incongruously in the woods. As you get closer, you discover you're walking on an old street. Rusted rail tracks to and from nowhere snake through the tall grass. Crumbled foundations mark where the buildings stood. 2/

This is going to get a lot worse, so let's do the math.
* Dr. Anthony Fauci testified today that the death rate from COVID-19 is 10x that if the normal flu.
* Dr. Brian Monahan, attending physician to Congress & SCOTUS, held a closed-door meeting for Senate staff yesterday. 1/ * Dr. Monahan told them he expects between 70 million & 150 million Americans will catch the coronavirus.
* Let's take low-end estimates--70 million cases w/a 1% death rate (10x the normal flu). 2/

Thread:
Why did the US reject coronavirus test kits readily available from the World Health Org & insist on making its own (initially botched & now mostly unavailable) tests? Possibly b/c the US-made test kits could make a personal profit for Trump. 1/

shero.substack.com/p/trump-could-… Here are the receipts.
First, from the CDC.
It says the US-made test kits, made by Integrated DNA Technologies, Inc. must be analyzed using a device called the 7500 Fast DX Real Time PCR Instrument, made by a company called Applied Biosystems. This is from the CDC website. ⬇️ 2/

Right-wing yapping heads and propaganda have convinced American goobers that climate change and global warming are hoaxes. And the malicious refusal of US "conservatives" to act may have pushed us over the brink. 1/

m.accuweather.com/en/weather-new… All of these items are just from the past two weeks. While an unprepared Europe grapples with record heat, bits of the North American power grid have failed because of record heat followed by the "new normal" of severe electrical storms. 2/

foxnews.com/us/heat-wave-p…

An update on the articles of impeachment against Trump introduced by Rep. Lacy Clay:
HR 13, impeachment, has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee. That means it's now up to the committee Chair, @RepJerryNadler, whether it goes anywhere. 1/

metrostl.com/jaco-in-push-t… Nadler is known to favor impeachment personally, but is reportedly holding off A-in deference to Pelosi, who opposes impeachment, and B-get a better idea how much support there is among D's for going forward. 2/

So the pro-Trump GOP now says ONLY way the shutdown ends is if TSA agents strike and US air traffic goes down the toilet. The ONLY way. This is what Trump's extremist white nationalism means: wrecking the govt & endangering safety are ok, b/c The Wall. 1/

https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1085302803482980353

The Wall isn't about a wall. The Wall, like Pepe, is a symbol, a metaphor in concrete, an idea made of steel & barbed wire. The idea is the United States as a white ethnostate. The idea is blood & soil. The idea is the US turns its back on the world, & cleans house. 2/

The Trump disaster slowly wrecking America has been building for decades.
American racism has been baked into US life for so long we lived with it, not dreaming it would erupt into full-blown Euro-style ethnofascism because we elected a black president. American Know-Nothingness has been growing for years as generations of people without (and contemptuous of) critical thinking skills reproduced. Education and logic became avatars of elitism to people for whom analysis was boring and irrelevant.

Trump is a physical coward, which is why he won't visit grunts in harm's way. He's afraid. He's a weak, flabby creature of physical comfort, which is why he wouldn't go in the rain to honor WWI dead. He's fond of soft clothes & makeup. He's a parody of an 18th C French aristocrat His gelatenous physicality is a window to his inner rot. He snarls and bullies b/c he's weak and afraid. He's a staggering moral & physical corpse, animated only by his desire for money, which buys him the comfort to shield him from the outside world.

@RepAnnWagner refused to attend League if Women Voter's candidate forum, ripped KWV as "partisan".
That's a lie.
She skips debates, forums, Town Halls b/c she's convinced racist white flight voters & anti-choice extremists in MO-02 will keep her in power

stltoday.com/news/local/gov… That's her whole strategy. While Dem Cort VanOstran @cortvo refuses to take PAC $ & holds forums across MO-02, she goes all "Everything's normal, nothing to see here" on Trump, & rakes in big $ from Enterprise Rental Cars, Edward Jones brokers, Northwestern Mutual Ins, & Ameren.

NYT probe of Trump $ exposes why he's a bullying coward. He's rich b/c of Daddy's $. His own ventures lost $. And Fred never let him forget it. He has neither friends nor loving family. His brain's a hellscape of Fred's mocking him. Which is why he tries to look like his mother. I mean, did you ever consider how his macho strutting contrasts with his feminized appearance? Bouffant hair dyed the color of a 1980 Miami condo rug? Sprayed-on tan and make-up? Tiny hands and soft body? He's trying to reject Fred by looking like Mary.