A Time of Covidiocy: Media, Politics, and Social Upheaval 9789004499997, 9789004500006, 9789004500013

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A Time of Covidiocy

Critical Media Literacies Series Series Editor William M. Reynolds (Georgia Southern University, USA)

Editorial Board Peter Appelbaum (Arcadia University, USA) Jennifer Beech (University of Tennessee – Chattanooga, USA) Eleanor Blair (Western Carolina University, USA) Ana Cruz (St. Louis Community College, USA) Venus Evans-Winters (Illinois State University, USA) Julie C. Garlen (Georgia Southern University, USA) Nicholas Hartlep (Berea College, Kentucky, USA) Mark Helmsing (George Mason University, USA) Sherick Hughes (University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, USA) Danielle Ligocki (Oakland University, USA) John Lupinacci (Washington State University, USA) Peter McLaren (Chapman University, USA) Yolanda Medina (Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY, USA) Brad Porfilio (Seattle University, USA) Jennifer Sandlin (Arizona State University, USA) Julie Webber (Illinois State University, USA) Handel Kashope Wright (The University of British Columbia, Canada) William Yousman (Sacred Heart University, USA)

volume 8

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cmls

A Time of Covidiocy Media, Politics, and Social Upheaval

By

Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Artwork by Ryan Anderson All chapters in this book have undergone peer review. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2666-4097 isbn 978-90-04-49999-7 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-50000-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-50001-3 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents 1 Introduction: What the COVID-19 Pandemic Has Revealed 1 2 Blame China: Trump and Anti-Asian Sentiment during COVID-19 10 1 Introduction 10 2 Ineptitude, Lies and Conspiracy Theories 12 3 Trump’s History of Racism 15 4 Asian Stereotypes Overview 18 5 The Media Construction of China as Economic Powerhouse 20 6 Treatment of Asians during COVID-19 22 7 Conclusion 24 3 Work or Die: The Dominance of the Capitalist Class in Determining Media Messaging around COVID-19 32 1 Introduction 32 2 Compartmentalization 34 3 Magical Thinking 43 4 “COVID Fatigue” 48 5 Subsidizing Normalcy 56 6 Conclusion 64 4 From “Disposable” to “Essential”: A Critical Analysis of the Worker 73 1 Introduction 73 2 The Value of the Worker 75 3 Perception of the Worker 77 4 Efffects of COVID-19 on the Black and Latinx Worker 80 5 Big Business and Media Hypocrisy 83 6 Conclusion 85 5 Shutdown Meltdown: How the Quarantine Has Revealed the Ideological Collapse of the Nuclear Family Model 94 1 Introduction 94 2 Neoliberalism and the Nuclear Family 95 3 Existing Inequities 99 4 Do It Yourself 109 5 Conclusion: Reconsidering Capitalism 113

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6 Misleading the Populace in the Age of the Coronavirus 119 1 Introduction 119 2 Laying the Groundwork 121 3 Fox and the COVID-19 Misinformation Machine 123 4 Trump, M.D. and the (Non) Experts 126 5 COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories 129 6 Conclusion 136 7 Unmasked: A Dialectical Exploration of the COVID-19 Protests 147 1 Introduction 147 2 Background 150 3 Core Themes 153 4 Conclusion 171 8 Conclusion: The George Floyd Protests as a Rejection of “Returning to Normal” 178 1 The Tipping Point 179 2 There’s No Going Back 181 Index 191

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction What the COVID-19 Pandemic Has Revealed

There can be no case for critical media studies as relevant as the COVID-19 pandemic. The defeat of Trump in the 2020 presidential election, along with the approval and distribution of vaccines, has created the necessary space for starting to process just what the COVID-19 pandemic signifies. For Robinson (2020), “we have been given the grounds and opportunity to do some very basic thinking” (p. 43). This includes not only examining how the pandemic has disrupted the normal functioning of capitalism, but what types of opportunities exist to look for alternative models of economic and social relations (Klinenberg, 2020). Most importantly, the virus has created a series of problematics for neoliberalism, which has held itself as the only alternative for organizing society. More specifically, the global dominance of the United States has been severely compromised. Gusterson (2020) asserts, “the bitter truth is that, for all the wealth and technology the human race has accumulated, we are helpless before this tiny, invisible virus that is immune to our weaponry” (para. 23). This helplessness creates important openings for the analysis and critique of contemporary sociopolitical assumptions. We assert that the pandemic has revealed three major neoliberal narratives that are in the process of collapsing: individualism as the solution to social problems, the economic supremacy of capitalism, and the nuclear family form as a privatized model of self-sufficiency. These interconnected narratives have been artificially kept alive by media messaging and right-wing ideology, the legitimacy of which are in free fall in the face of the coronavirus. In particular, individualism has been the dominant ideology of media coverage and government policy, including the absolute refusal to conceptualize the pandemic as a social, not private concern: In no other country were the simple public-health measures necessary to contain the coronavirus so quickly and easily politicized. Trump bears much of the blame, but it didn’t take much for him to convince people that wearing masks is a terrible imposition on their freedom, and that it could be a worthwhile emblem of political identity. So many of us have spent our lives steeping in the ideology of “rugged individualism,” learning that any government edict is inherently repressive and making a per© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004500013_001 Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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sonal sacrifice for the good of your neighbors, even a tiny one, makes you weak. No quantity of dead Americans has managed to dissuade so many of us from believing this. (Waldman, 2020, para. 8) Such individualism has resulted in the U.S. being the world leader in the number of confirmed cases and deaths, though it only represents 4% of the world’s population, a fact underscored by the paucity of testing and contact tracing in keeping an accurate count (Elflein, 2021, para. 1). We also see, within the questioning of the economic supremacy of capitalism, that the application of the business model to social institutions “corrupts any potential for justice and turns all interactions into transactions” (Bollen, 2020, para. 5). This was reflected in the disaster that was the Trump administration’s approach to the pandemic, starting with the profoundly slow, state-based vs. national response, lack of coordinating the production of needed medical supplies, underfunding of medical facilities, a bloated, inefficient, privatized health care system, lack of childcare, insufficient social safety net for employees and small businesses, and the historical legacy of racism in terms of who COVID-19 hit the hardest (Yong, 2020). For Pollan (2020), the pandemic “is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered” (p. 4). A major factor in the struggle to even obtain the most meager forms of relief for the working class include the profoundly undemocratic structure of the two-party U.S. political system, which renders it virtually unresponsive to public needs. Currently the Electoral College (supported further by partisan gerrymandering) sets up a situation where sparsely populated and conservative rural states (the ones who most clearly embody the rugged individualism ideology) can engage in permanent minority rule and obstruction: However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful. (O’Toole, 2020, para. 2) The pandemic has made the barrier of minority rule even more apparent, where Republican-led states do not even feel the slightest pressure to provide much-needed pandemic funds because they will not suffer consequences in the form of losing voter support. They can literally do nothing—and even endorse an insurrection to overturn 81 million votes—and retain support of their base, unlike Democrats, who have to overperform in every election in order to barely

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pull off a victory. As Waldman (2020) explains, this leads to cynicism when Democratic politicians are not able to surmount these barriers, with “negative partisanship becoming almost inevitable when your party can’t deliver for you even when it wins” (para. 5). Hedges (2020) summarizes the national mood as he recounts the words of revolutionary socialist Ernst Toller: “the people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us” (para. 13). One of the most damaging outcomes of minority rule has been the utter lack of accountability, most visible in Trump’s ability to not only receive 46.8% of the vote but turn out an additional 10.1 million people than in 2016, most of whom were new voters (Fessenden et al., 2020, para. 2). Though significantly outnumbered by Biden’s totals, the fact that four years of flat-out incompetence—the latest being the disaster of the pandemic—managed to inspire new voters to select Trump is more of a reward to the Republicans for their policies than a condemnation: In an accountable system, they would have been ruthlessly punished for their ongoing support for Trump, yet they prospered in the 2020 election, picking up seats in the House and limiting their losses elsewhere. For years, people have thought that the GOP had to change to survive as demographic evolution narrows the number of Americans who will respond to their appeals to White resentment. But right now, they clearly believe that there’s no reason at all for them to change, and it’s hard to argue they’re wrong. (Waldman, 2020, paras. 6–7) Alongside a lack of accountability, most of the ideas that have been proposed in the wake of the pandemic have represented “a hardening of the pre-existing order” of the U.S. ruling class, where “the present situation confirms their ideas” instead of things moving to the left as socialists often assume (Pankova & Barrow, 2020, para. 12). Trump himself, with the full and unwavering support of Republican politicians, managed to assert and sustain two contradictory views—that he was the source of absolute authority and that he was not responsible for anything, making him “incapable of coherence” (O’Toole, 2020, para. 17). However, this was not mere incompetence. It carried with it a malicious and vengeful intent, as Truscott (2020) outlines: Nearly every day for months, we watched Donald Trump walk into the White House press room and stand there and tell lies about the COVID pandemic and refuse to address it in a rational, scientific, medically appropriate manner. What we were watching was Donald Trump killing

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Americans just as surely as if he had his knee on their necks, closing off their airways, snuffing out their lives. It’s one thing to put up with his racism and misogyny and ignorance and contempt for the rule of law, but it’s quite another to watch him commit murder day after day, week after week, standing there contemptuously treating the pandemic as if were a conspiracy against him personally instead of a deadly disease that would infect millions and kill, as of this week, nearly a quarter million of us. (para. 7) On top of the disdain of Trump and the Republican Party, we have significant segments of the U.S. population who value their ability to move through life without inconvenience over human health and safety. Wedderburn (2020) describes his reaction to receiving a text from a friend to go for a drink “once this is all over”: “what “this” is exactly, and what it being “over” could possibly mean in the context of a [six]-figure national death figure and a global recession is anyone’s guess” (p. 35). This casual approach to the pandemic as reflected in the media is a manifestation of a larger receptivity to authoritarian populism, signified by increasing marginalization and elevated economic inequality, along with the use of disruption for its own sake (Hedetoft, 2020). The chronically ill and old, for example, were expected to neatly segregate themselves out of the way (if not die from natural herd immunity) in order to restore “business as usual.” Expectations that people wear masks in public spaces continue to be met with dramatic displays of inverse victimhood through viral videos and rallies, to the point of making illogical comparisons to events that led to the Holocaust. Another disturbing aspect of the pandemic was the corruption of information disseminated through the media, something vital in the midst of a public health crisis. Freedland (2020) explains how this information is itself infected, just as the virus infects the population: For the better part of four years, those sounding the alarm about the dangers of fake news and the perils of a post-truth world struggled to make the case that this was a matter of life and death. Try as they might to argue that a secure foundation of facts was the very basis of a liberal, democratic society—that such a society could not function without a common, agreed-upon basis of evidence—the concern seemed somehow abstract, intellectual, even elitist. Their angst was easily dismissed by their populist foes as the self-interested whine of a snobbish establishment. And then came the coronavirus. (para. 1)

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Far from being an e-libertarian paradise of “throwing it all out there and letting the people decide,” the spread of misinformation had actual consequences in the form of rising case and death tolls. This book focuses on the time period of media awareness and coverage of COVID-19 through the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden (December 2019–January 2021). Paxton’s (2005) presentation of key mobilizing passions of fascism provides a useful framework for processing what had happened and what continues to happen during the current situation of the pandemic. This includes understanding the reactionary elements it has revealed, most notably the January 6, 2021 right-wing insurrection against the outcome of the 2020 election. The first mobilizing passion is the presence of a large crisis that is impervious to traditional solutions. This is definitely the case with the COVID19 pandemic, where collapsing narratives of capitalism are not up to the task of problem solving in this context. A second mobilizing passion is the primacy of the group, which can be seen in the enduring adherence of the Republican Party to Trump, along with Trump’s followers, forming an insular group impervious to outside information while generating endless conspiracy theories about the virus via social media. At the same time, the third mobilizing passion is to see one’s group as a perpetual victim. This perceived victimhood is important because it forms the basis of justification for any action, free from moral or legal constraints. Refusing to wear masks, deliberately spreading a lethal virus, or defying public health measures—all while framing yourself as a victim—remains extremely powerful and motivating. The fourth mobilizing passion of fascism is concern about the decline of the group’s status, in reaction to liberal concepts like expanding education to underrepresented groups or the visibility of immigrants. The stereotyping of China during the pandemic serves to consolidate group identity and anxieties around a country that is seen as a major economic threat. A fifth mobilizing passion includes the need for a purer community, which can be seen in the compartmentalizing of people into “the vulnerable” who were supposed to move out of the way in order for “the productive people” to live their lives free from inconvenience or any sort of public health regulation. A possibility of the vulnerable being needlessly killed off was of no concern. Added to this is the expectation that the family unit is the one who is supposed to handle economic crisis, not the corrupting element of a socialized government. In terms of leadership, the sixth mobilizing passion involves the concept of the natural leader who is always male, and through which the group’s identity is filtered. This is related to the seventh mobilizing passion, the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and scientific reason. Trump embodied

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these characteristics, where his followers saw his lack of a response to the pandemic as evidence of his authentic leadership, with scientists and experts like Anthony Fauci portrayed as weak and hesitant to act. The establishment of a natural leader moves easily into the eighth mobilizing passion of the aesthetics of violence and use of sheer will, which puts into expression the ninth and final mobilizing passion of the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint. This right is established by a framing of the group’s strength in a form of Darwinian struggle. The insistence of using herd immunity and valorizing risk by deliberately spreading the virus are manifestations of these passions, as is the attempted overthrow of a presidential election. Each of the chapters in this book address an aspect of these mobilizing passions, along with the three collapsing narratives of individualism, supremacy of capitalism, and the nuclear family. In “Blame China: Trump and Anti-Asian Sentiment during COVID-19,” the eroding supremacy of capitalism was channeled into xenophobic scapegoating. Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic response fed into efforts to deflect his and Republican failures onto China, utilizing long-standing Asian stereotypes. The xenophobia that was part of this deflection manifested itself into numerous conspiracy theories, which threatened initial public health measures to contain the virus. We address these issues, along with the continuing violence aimed at the Asian American community in the U.S. The discussion of the failures of capitalism continues in “Work or Die: The Dominance of the Capitalist Class in Determining COVID-19 Media Messaging,” along with exposing the severe limits of relying on individualism as a governing philosophy. In this chapter, we analyze the cultivation of specific 2020 media messaging around the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, asserting that the capitalist class had a vested interest in creating a sense of normalcy, as if the pandemic were a temporary situation that could be easily sidestepped. In particular, the media used hyper-libertarian framing of the pandemic response as an either-or choice between getting the economy going again or mass death and health problems. The potential alternative solution of a strong social safety net like other countries have deployed was silenced in favor of what boils down to “work or die.” This dynamic plays out specifically in “From “Disposable” to “Essential”: A Critical Analysis of the Worker,” where a Marxian frame is used to explain how essential workers were exploited and treated as disposable during the pandemic. At the same time, the use of media advertising to glorify the essential worker as a hero, all the while refusing to properly protect them from COVID-19, is addressed. We also outline how the essential and unskilled worker came to such prominence during this global pandemic and how the weight is crushing

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both the Black and Latinx communities in the U.S. The fact that those hit the hardest by the virus have been these communities is not coincidental in the resistance of Trump supporters to mounting an effective public health response. In examining the inadequacies of the nuclear family as an economic unit, “Shutdown Meltdown: How the Quarantine Has Revealed the Ideological Collapse of the Nuclear Family Model,” specifically outlines how the quarantine was felt differently depending on one’s work and family situation. Far from being a self-contained and self-sufficient privatized unit, the nuclear family model failed its first big test, as this chapter outlines. We connect the emergence of the nuclear family and its serving as a replacement for social programs and shrinking responsibilities of the federal government with the rise of neoliberalism. Specifically, we look at issues of work-life balance and childcare as families found themselves solely responsible for feeding, educating, and entertaining their children. The media’s role in spreading disinformation about the virus is outlined in “Misleading the Populace in the Age of the Coronavirus.” In this chapter, we discuss the role that Trump himself played in the spreading of misinformation and lies about the coronavirus. Throughout the pandemic, Trump maintained his assault on expertise, even in the face of escalating COVID-19 cases. We also explore how particular news sources (i.e., Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax) provided Trump with much of his (mis)information and how they fueled the spreading of falsehoods and outright lies to the populace. This chapter also discusses several conspiracy theories related to the novel coronavirus and how they continue to pose significant health risks to those who believe them. An examination of the role of social media in disseminating misinformation is included. Linked to the capitalist class media messaging of “work or die” outlined in Chapter 3 and the use of fake news and conspiracy theories in Chapter 6, “Unmasked: A Dialectical Exploration of the COVID-19 Protests” utilizes dialectical materialism to explore the alliance between the middle class and capitalists in the form of public protests to “reopen the economy” by opposing mandates to wear masks or state shutdown orders. We identify six primary discourses used in the anti-mask and anti-shutdown protests of 2020, which operated against a backdrop of the retreat of the federal government from a unified response to the COVID-19 crisis: eugenics rhetoric, liberty as an absolute value, hyper-individualism, anti-government sentiment, denial of economic disruption, and veneration of recklessness and risk taking. Additionally, we look at the funding networks behind the protests and how their coverage over-inflated the messaging of the protests while public opinion has remained overwhelmingly in support of public health measures.

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The book concludes with an examination of the activism that has emerged during the pandemic in “The George Floyd Protests as a Rejection of ‘Returning to Normal.’” This chapter outlines how Trump’s plan to ignore and deny the rising COVID-19 death toll while blaming others was disrupted by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police. We assert that the scale and reach of the protests that transformed a local issue into a global expression of Black Lives Matter would not have been possible without the context of the pandemic and the Trump administration’s criminal neglect of public health in his mishandling of the response to COVID-19. Throughout this book, we address how Trump and his followers’ cultivation of mistrust toward experts and the media resulted in actual consequences of over 33.8 million COVID-19 cases and 602,616 deaths in the U.S. as of May 2021 (Elflein, 2021, para. 2). At the same time, people had limited access to public entertainment distractions, and had a chance to reflect and focus on issues of race, politics, and the economy. The quarantine experience has forced people to see the world differently and refuse to return to normal, against the wishes of the capitalist class. As Yong (2020) concludes, “COVID-19 is an assault on America’s body, and a referendum on the ideas that animate its culture” (para. 76). In this book, we analyze the unpleasant truths about the United States that COVID-19 has laid bare as well as where we continue to move in the future.

References Bollen, C. (2020, July 14). Ask a sane person: Jack Halberstam isn’t here to comfort you. Interview. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/ask-a-sane-personjack-halberstam-is-not-here-to-comfort-you?fbclid=IwAR0U_ j5DwyQ8ZJJULm65I9fQPkqjfyHZ9ztEA-N7R0saRKThljK8fimOb7w Elflein, J. (2021, May 21). Coronavirus in the US: Statistics and facts. https://www.statista.com/topics/6084/coronavirus-covid-19-in-the-us/ Freedland, J. (2020, August 20). Disinformed to death. The New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/fake-news-disinformed-to-death/ ?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Walcott&utm_content= NYR%20Walcott+CID_32b89005cce7c6faffd72d52d773a868&utm_source= Newsletter&utm_term=Disinformed%20to%20Death Gusterson, H. (2020, May 12). COVID-19 and the turn to magical thinking. Sapiens. https://www.sapiens.org/column/conflicted/covid-19-magic/?fbclid= IwAR3jsjovvvyfIUituQH2FT30MdGVIacdU5qZjSx92mOb8LrvjrS2Hfcvy6s Hedetoft, U. (2020). Paradoxes of populism: Troubles of the west and nationalism’s second coming. Anthem Press.

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Hedges, C. (2020, August 10). Chris Hedges: America’s death march. Consortium News. https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/10/chris-hedges-americas-death-march/ Klinenberg, E. (2020, April 23). The great green hope. The New York Review of Books, 67(7), 55–58. O’Toole, F. (2020, April 25). Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintano-toole-donald-trump-has-destroyed-the-country-he-promised-to-make-greatagain-1.4235928?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2 Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Ffintan-o-toole-donald-trump-hasdestroyed-the-country-he-promised-to-make-great-again-1.4235928 Pankova, R., & Barrow, K. (2020, June 24). “A worldwide mutual pact”: An interview with Wendy Brown. The Drift. https://www.thedriftmag.com/a-worldwide-mutualpact/ Paxton, R. O. (2005). The anatomy of fascism. Vintage Books. Pollan, M. (2020, June 11). The sickness in our food supply. The New York Review of Books, 67(10), 4–6. Robinson, M. (2020, June 11). What kind of country do we want? The New York Review of Books, 67(10), 43–46. Truscott, L. (2020, November 7). Joe Biden may have won but American is lost. Raw Story. https://www.rawstory.com/2020/11/joe-biden-may-have-won-but-america-islost/?fbclid=IwAR3WQpSMuDWaARGDkOB5oHrrlqI1ISQ-DimP3FJZxjijxE482ZhWM9QGFY Waldman, P. (2020, December 21). What a miserable 2020 revealed about America. The American Prospect. https://prospect.org/politics/what-a-miserable-2020-revealedabout-america/?fbclid=IwAR3-9Q-DT06qM5WEryLyPMuCPIAaBbBPeUSOX5 IqXKWRXRE9SYV0nhVS7DU Wedderburn, A. (2020, Summer). Pandemic time. Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 75, 31–35. Yong, E. (2020, September). How the pandemic defeated America. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-americanfailure/614191/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign= share

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CHAPTER 2

Blame China Trump and Anti-Asian Sentiment during COVID-19

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COVID-19, more commonly known as the novel coronavirus, has led to over 3,400,000 deaths around the globe. While it is thought that the virus originated in Wuhan, China in fall 2019, it may take years to ascertain how COVID19 was first actually contracted (Brennan & Schick, 2020). In the United States, President Trump appeared to be more concerned with finding those to blame for COVID-19, along with spreading conspiracy theories as to its origins, than taking any real responsibility for his ineffective and lackadaisical approach to stopping the spread of the virus. According to Cable (2020), “Trump’s floundering and erratic response to the virus has left him in need of a plausible scapegoat” (p. 2), and with 400,000 deaths due to COVID-19 in the U.S. by the end of Trump’s term in office, Trump had solely and firmly placed blame for the global pandemic on China’s doorstep. This misplaced blame came to its head when Trump began to refer to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” during its early stages in the U.S. and using the phrase “Chinese virus” at least 20 times between March 16 and March 30, 2020 in tweets, interviews, and press conferences (Costello, 2020). In addition, Trump also referred to the coronavirus as the “Kung Flu” at his political rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June 2020 (Moreno, 2020). To blame a global pandemic on a particular country and nationality, especially one with a long history of racial discrimination and bigotry in the U.S., is incredibly irresponsible and dangerous. The scapegoating and negative stereotyping of Asians has been a staple in the U.S. since the first Chinese laborers came to work in the gold mines of California in the 1840s (Abreu et al., 2003). Historically, this fear of Chinese Americans, with their “yellow faces,” is referred to as the “Yellow Peril.” This irrational fear of the Chinese, as well as other Asian groups, is based on the notion that Asians pose both an economic and cultural threat to U.S. society (Nguyen et al., 2019). While in office, Trump used the coronavirus, and his complete inability to handle the threat, to revive the association of the “yellow peril” with modern China and the Asian peoples. It should come as no surprise that, due to Trump’s use of the term “Chinese virus,” it has been reported that there

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has been a major increase in racist and xenophobic incidents aimed at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. (Reports of Anti-Asian Assaults, 2020). For those of us who lived under the Trump regime, his reckless and racist behavior was not at all surprising. Unfortunately, the media also played an important part in perpetuating the yellow peril stereotype in its COVID-19 coverage. The role of the media in perpetuating specific narratives about China’s role in the pandemic was also a contributing factor to increased racism and discrimination against Asian people in the U.S. Lin and Pham (2020) detail how major U.S. newspapers have responded to the pandemic, emphasizing the role of China: On January 6, 2020, The New York Times published its first report on COVID-19 with the headline “China Grapples with Mystery Pneumonia-Like Illness.” This mysterious virus was later described by its reporter Denise Grady as “a deadly Chinese coronavirus” on January 17, 2020. As the novel coronavirus spread around China in January and February, China was called “the real sick man of Asia” by The Wall Street Journal, and Chinese were depicted by the NYT as hard-core believers in the magical powers of exotic foods such as bat and palm civet. Since the epidemic has become a pandemic in March that has heavily hit many parts of the world, ranging from Europe, Iran, to the United States, leading media outlets in North America such as the NYT, the WSJ, and CNN have published thousands of articles, many of which either question China’s recovery or criticize China’s initial mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak. (para. 1) In this chapter, President Trump’s complete and utter mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his lies to cover his mistakes, will be addressed. Trump’s history of racist and xenophobic rhetoric, both as a private citizen and as President of the United States, will also be detailed and explained. Chinese coronavirus conspiracy theories espoused by both Trump and his administration will be discussed. This messaging took place against the backdrop of constant media coverage of China as a looming economic threat, which began in earnest decades prior to the pandemic. Finally, it will be shown how the inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his supporters directly and negatively affected the Asian American community in the U.S. during the time of COVID19. In many ways, Trump not only resurrected the old “yellow peril” stereotype but had adapted it for 21st century neoliberalism and the associated anxieties it generates around globalization.

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chapter 2

Ineptitude, Lies and Conspiracy Theories

This chapter must be prefaced with the fact that President Donald Trump was (and still is) a liar of epic proportions. It has been documented that at the conclusion of his presidency, Trump had made a total of 30,573 lies (referred to as “false or misleading claims”) through tweets, daily briefings, interviews, press conferences, and public speeches (Spocchia, 2020, para. 1). For the sake of comparison, it was found that just in Trump’s first 10 months in office as president, he told almost six times as many lies (or falsehoods) as President Obama did during his entire eight years as president (Leonhardt et al., 2017). Based on the total number of Trump’s lies (18,000) as of April 2020: That works out to an average of 15.38 lies per day while he’s been in office. Not only does he exceed the [average person] outlier cutoff of 3 to 5 lies per day, but he [sic] places him in the upper echelon of Big Liars. So, from a statistical standpoint, President Trump clearly is [a statistical] “outliar.” He lies with such frequency that he is in a category separate from most of us. (Hart, 2020, p. 2) Based on the data, it can be stated that Trump was a liar of such grand magnitude, of such pomposity, that even the worst of lying politicians pale in comparison to him. Therefore, it was no shock that Trump had lied about China and the spread of the coronavirus. Trump completely mishandled the coronavirus outbreak (Baron, 2020; Edsall, 2020; Remnick, 2020) and consistently and continually lied to distract from his failings (Paz, 2020). It has been documented that there were several major missteps (i.e., poor decisions, miscalculations) made by Trump and his administration that could have greatly changed the impact of the coronavirus on U.S. citizens. First of all, Trump weakened the country’s biodefense by ignoring former President Obama’s officials’ pandemic simulation. In 2019, Trump also cut funding for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Department of Health and Human Services, and the $30 million emergency response fund. In addition, Trump’s Security Council disbanded the pandemic response team in 2018 and never reformed it. The pièce de résistance was that, due to Trump’s inaction at the initial outbreak of the coronavirus, there was a major shortage of test kits, ventilators, and personal protective equipment (known as “PPEs”) for healthcare workers. There were countless stories about U. S. healthcare workers struggling with safety measures, such as having to make do with one face mask for an entire week as well as using garbage bags in lieu of surgical gowns and snorkels in place of respiratory masks (Ankel, 2020; Sullivan, 2020).

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Due to weak and ineffectual leadership from the federal government, state governors were forced to procure their own supplies, often getting into bidding wars with other states (Baron, 2020). It has been shown that, despite Trump’s assertions to the contrary, “There were not enough COVID-19 testing kits, hotlines were overwhelmed, and hospitals and public health departments were hobbled by a lack of reliable statistics on the spread of the disease” (Bergengruen & Hennigan, 2020, p. 2). It has been discovered that it took Trump 70 days from first being warned about the seriousness of the coronavirus as being more than just the average flu to finally treating it as an actual threat that could kill tens of thousands of lives in the U.S. (Sullivan, 2020). Scientists have also found that if Trump had acted decisively earlier when the pandemic began, tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented. Researchers at Columbia University have estimated that if restrictions such as social distancing had been instituted just one week earlier in March, then about 36,000 lives could have been saved in the U.S. (Pei et al., 2020, p. 1). These numbers go even higher if restrictions had been introduced even a week or two earlier than that. Until the end of the Trump presidency, the number of coronavirus cases continued to increase daily as the virus spread throughout the country. What media reports showed repeatedly is that when confronted with the coronavirus threat, Trump wasted a great deal of time that should have been spent on preparing the country to fight the outbreak. Instead, from the very beginning of the pandemic, Trump minimized the threat, while at the same time, bragged about what a wonderful job he had been doing eliminating COVID-19 (Remnick, 2020). Lemire (2020) asserts that: President Donald Trump is falling back on a familiar political strategy as he grapples with the coronavirus pandemic: deflect, deny and direct blame elsewhere. As he tries to distance his White House from the mounting death toll, Trump has cycled through a long list of possible scapegoats in an attempt to distract from what critics say were his own administration’s missteps in slowing the spread of the coronavirus on American shores. (p. 2) Trump hop-scotched between several different scapegoats during the COVID-19 pandemic—Democratic governors, former President Barack Obama, federal watchdogs, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and even Americans’ underlying health conditions (Collinson, 2020; Lemire, 2020). Despite the long list of scapegoats that Trump rambled off in order to protect himself from his mismanagement of the coronavirus, China was still the administration’s main focus of attack. Due to the

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excessive negative attention on China since the pandemic began, there has been a sharp increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.S. since March 2020. There had been reports of almost 1,800 incidents of Asian assault and harassment in just two months, from mid-March, 2020 to mid-May, 2020 (A3PCON, 2020). In order for Trump to deflect from his complete and utter mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak, he and his administration continued to spread a troubling conspiracy theory about the virus and China. The most prominent lie promoted by Trump and his cronies, including the likes of Sean Hannity at FOX News and infamous Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh, was that the novel coronavirus leaked from a government virology laboratory in Wuhan, China (Lin & Pham, 2020; Osnos, 2020; Uscinski & Enders, 2020) “instead of occurring naturally and spreading to an open market in Wuhan” (Lopez, 2020, p. 3). At this time, scientists believe that the novel coronavirus evolved naturally through contact with wild animals, such as bats (Liu et al., 2020). Despite the consensus of leading scientists, the Trump administration pressured U.S. intelligence agencies to find evidence that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. While it appears that China might have mishandled the coronavirus outbreak at its inception (Osnos, 2020), there is absolutely no evidence to support that the coronavirus was created in a Chinese laboratory and either escaped or was released intentionally (Lin & Pham, 2020; Liu et al., 2020; Roach, 2020; Rudd, 2020). In particular, U.S. media coverage portrayed Doctor Li Wen Liang, a Chinese ophthalmologist who worked in Wuhan, as a whistleblower who had been reprimanded by the Wuhan CDC. Li died of the coronavirus soon after, yet as Lin and Pham (2020) assert, Dr. Li was not intentionally acting as a whistleblower, but instead had contacted colleagues via private chat messages to warn them about a potential SARS-like infection and to take precautions. Contrary to U.S. reporting, the Chinese government sent an investigative team after his death, and revoked the reprimand, apologizing to his family. The figure of Dr. Li continues to be used as a trope in conspiracy theories about the duplicity of the Chinese government and why they are not to be trusted. The fact that these efforts were in direct contrast to Trump’s own actions and statements regarding China at the start of the pandemic, created a disorienting climate, which only contributed to the ongoing uncertainty and inability to coordinate a national response to a public health crisis. Trump repeatedly did what could best be described as talking out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to China—simultaneously praising and condemning their actions when it suited his purposes. On January 24, 2020, Trump Tweeted: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States Greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will work out well.” He then followed up by thanking President Xi on behalf of the “American People.” Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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In addition, after Trump’s cabinet Secretary Alex Azar warned him that same month about the scope of the pandemic and how China was not as forthright about what was going on, Trump downplayed the situation by accusing Azar of being “alarmist” (Porter, 2020). The question remains, why would Trump and his administration double down on promoting an unfounded conspiracy theory about the spread of the coronavirus, when continuing a mix of praise and condemnation was his prior approach? Shafer (2020) asserts that Trump continued to: [harp] on China as the responsible party for the 127,000-plus coronavirus deaths in the United States. While offering absolutely no evidence of proof for the charge, Trump obscures his own neglect of the pandemic and misdirects culpability to a foreign country. (p. 5) By playing the “blame game” with China, Trump attempted to achieve both ends of, a) avoiding addressing his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and b) consolidating the support of his base during an election year by scapegoating the Chinese as the source of all of the United States’ problems.

3

Trump’s History of Racism

Donald Trump has been in the public eye for over four decades due to his real-estate ventures in New York City, television and movie cameos, and his subsequent role as a billionaire reality-show host on the television show The Apprentice (NBC, 2004–2015). Despite (or maybe due to) his time in the limelight, Trump has a detailed record of racism and bigotry spanning more than forty years. He has been documented commenting on a variety of topics involving African Americans, Mexicans (and Latinx, in general), Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, immigrants, and people with disabilities (Graham et al., 2019; Pollock, 2017). According to Karenga (2018), “Indeed, [Trump] has waded in the squalid swamp of racist comments and practice for decades, viciously attacking as citizen, candidate and president the various peoples of color: Africans, Native Americans, Latinos and Asians” (p. 4). While Trump’s vast array of racist comments and insults are too long to list in this single chapter, here are just a few choice bits: he paid $85,000 to place a full-page newspaper ad in The New York Times calling for the execution of the Central Park Five (Black and Latinx youth from New York City falsely accused of rape) before there was even a trial (D’Antonio, 2016; Graham et al., 2019); was quoted as saying that he only wanted Jewish people to be his accountants (i.e., “counting his money”) and that Black people are naturally lazy (D’Antonio, Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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2016), has never had a Black or Latinx executive ever play a major role in the Trump business organization (D’Antonio, 2016); said that Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals (Bates, 2018); referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” (Vitali et al., 2018); refused to condemn White Nationalists and Nazis immediately following the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and referred to them as “some very fine people” (Gray, 2017); called Black professional football players who knelt in protest during the National Anthem, “sons of bitches,” and said they should have been fired and out of this country (Bort, 2018) yet referred to White, armed, racist militia members protesting COVID-19 stay-at-home orders at Michigan’s state capital as “very good people” (Graham, 2020). When challenged by an Asian American reporter at a COVID-19 press briefing about Trump’s immense focus on framing how much testing the U.S. supposedly does as if it is a competition with other countries, Trump aimed his response at her racial background, “Don’t ask me. Ask China that question” (Smith, 2020). The list goes on and on. While some of Trump’s supporters might still deny that Trump is a racist, his actions more than speak for itself. While he has not been recorded calling someone the N-word or found burning a cross on someone’s front lawn, his vast array of racist comments and actions show who Trump really is, whether he attempts to deny it or not. If he talks like a racist and acts like a racist, then he is a racist. In many ways, Trump represented an intensification of racial rhetoric since the introduction of “dog whistle” discourse strategies of the late 1960s-early 1970s. After the uprisings against Jim Crow and the passage of landmark civil rights legislation, being openly racist was frowned upon and carried negative consequences. However, Republicans found they could deploy what they called the “southern strategy” by using seemingly innocuous language to still reach their voters while maintaining plausible deniability of racism. In one of his more infamous quotes, political strategist Lee Atwater outlines the function of dog whistle politics: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than Whites. (Perlstein, 2012, para. 2) Bonila-Silva (2009) views this approach as part of a larger ideology of colorblind racism where Whites loudly and defensively insist that their statements

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and actions are never racist because they do not involve overt use of “nigger” or violent acts like lynching or cross burnings. Because overt racism remains unacceptable and can carry consequences like being fired from one’s job, colorblind racism steps in as a way for Whites to use a more “polite” form of racism to maintain privilege under cover. More extreme acts are relegated to a racist past that is done and over with; therefore, the persistence of racism has to be because Blacks “keep bringing it up,” are overly sensitive/imagining things, or use racism to gain an advantage over Whites (in the form of affirmative action and reparations). These beliefs shape the Trump supporter talking points of White resentment, such as “reverse racism” or claiming perpetual victim status (Newkirk II, 2017). While they drew on these discursive strategies online, Trump’s supporters continually denied their racism by pointing to Black supporters like Kanye West or former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke as proof of their not being racist. It is clear that while continuing to deny their racism, Trump and his supporters escalated their language to incorporate talking points that were seen by White supremacist groups as a validation for their beliefs (Simon & Sidner, 2019). It has been asserted that, “by spewing his racist rhetoric during his presidential campaign, Trump unlocked a Pandora’s box of racial hatred, one which allowed oft-hidden demons to see the light of day, without shame or humiliation” (Rubin, 2020, p. 121). The reality is that Trump legitimized both harassment and hate speech (Pollock, 2017) since he was elected president in 2016, and this continued throughout the COVID-19 pandemic until the end of his term in January 2021. In particular, Trump’s use of the term “Chinese virus,” as well as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s use of the phrase “Wuhan virus” (Finnegan, 2020) were steeped in historical, discriminatory rhetoric. While it is understandable that people are nervous about the spread of the coronavirus, it is important to remember that the words and the language we use have power (Vazquez, 2020). It is also critical to note that public health officials and the WHO have stated that “naming viruses after geographic locations or groups of people is inaccurate, inappropriate and could aid in the creation of negative connotations for Asian Americans, specifically those of Chinese descent” (Somvichian-Clausen, 2020, p. 4). By referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus,” Trump is rehashing the evil, “yellow peril” Asian stereotype. Vazquez (2020) asserts that, “This behavior, and the stigma associated with referring to an illness in a way that deliberately creates unconscious (or conscious) bias, can keep people from getting care they may desperately need to get better and prevent others from getting sick” (p. 1). Therefore, Trump’s (and members of his administration’s) use of any terminology that connected this horrible pandemic with China and Chinese people

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was thoughtless and dangerous for all Asian peoples in the U.S. It has been asserted by Osnos (2020) that “the White House seized on a blame-Beijing strategy to undermine China’s growing global power and shore up Trump’s bid for re-election” (p. 5). Since Trump’s racist rhetoric helped him win the 2016 presidential election by pandering to his predominantly White base (Hooghe & Dassonneville, 2018; Schaffner et al., 2018), this might not be far from the truth. When Trump spoke (or Tweeted), his followers listened, and by placing blame for the pandemic on the Chinese, Trump created an association that will not soon be forgotten.

4

Asian Stereotypes Overview

As mentioned briefly earlier in this chapter, the Chinese (and other Asian groups) have been stereotyped and discriminated against in the U.S. for over 150 years. Asians, who comprise only 6% of the U.S. population (Jan, 2020, para. 5), have long been viewed as a “yellow peril” threatening American ideals (Nguyen et al., 2019) with evil hordes of yellow-faced soldiers ready to attack and take over the country (Shim, 1998). This negative image of Asians has been prevalent in U.S. television shows, films, comics, and novels (Shim, 1998). For example, the villainous Fu Manchu perpetuated the malicious, “yellow peril” stereotype in movies in the first half of the 20th century (Kawai, 2005; Shim, 1998). According to Kawai (2005), “the yellow peril referred to cultural threat as well as economic, political, and military threats to the White race” (p. 112). This irrational fear of Asians as being a threat to the U.S. culminated with the interning of 120,000 Japanese Americans in the country’s interior during World War II (Chung Allred, 2007), despite the fact that many of them were born in the U.S. In the twenty-first century, the “yellow peril” stereotype has morphed into the form of an economic competitor, with the Chinese trying to take over the country using their immense power and wealth (Cable, 2020; Lin & Pham, 2020; Shim, 1998). Due to this latest version of the “yellow peril” stereotype, “Asian Americans continue to be seen as outsiders and foreigners who are potential threats to the fabric of American society” (Lee, 2009, p. 2). While the image of the evil Asian attacking U.S. citizens still exists, there is also an antithetical stereotype that afflicts Asian Americans today. According to Wong and Halgin (2006), “since the 1960s, the popular press and media have portrayed Asian Americans as the “model minority”—successful minorities who have quietly moved to the pinnacle of success in various contexts through hard work and determination” (p. 38). In the media, Asian Americans continue to be seen as a model minority group due to their supposed upward

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social mobility, economic success, and low rate of criminality (Wong & Halgin, 2006). According to Lee (2009), “Asian Americans continue to be held up as exemplars of the American Dream of upward mobility through individual achievement” (p. 2). In schools and on university campuses, Asian students are assumed to be quite intelligent and especially skilled in the areas of math and science. This, of course, is simply false; there is no empirical evidence that proves that Asian Americans have higher-than-average intelligence and academic abilities (Wexler & Pyle, 2012; Wong & Halgin, 2006). While being a model minority might appear to be positive on the surface, it is quite the double-edged sword, for it creates a variety of issues that harm the Asian community. First, the model minority myth represents Asians as the exotic Other while creating a singular vision of an economically and culturally diverse group of people (Chung Allred, 2007; Nguyen et al., 2019). This stereotype also puts an enormous amount of pressure on Asian students to succeed, which can be quite harmful to their sense of self (Wong & Halgin, 2006). As an example, the media attention on the super-driven figure of the Asian “tiger mother” in the early 2010s reflected a mixture of admiration and condemnation as parents debated how much pressure was appropriate to place on young people to succeed (Chua, 2011; Corrigan, 2011). Related to this, the model minority stereotype is also detrimental because it sets Asians against other underrepresented groups in the U.S. (Chung Allred, 2007). In other words, if Asians are the supposed model minority, what does make that make African Americans or Indigenous Peoples? The model minority stereotype also feeds into the narrative of White victimhood. While Black and Latinx people are portrayed as “moochers” and “invaders” who burden hard-working Whites, Asians are presented as “taking over our jobs,” both by the outsourcing of factory work and insourcing of highly paid professional fields where Asians are better represented, such as management, computer science, and medicine (Employed Asians by Occupation, 2012). Because of their representation among professional occupations, Asians are viewed as not needing additional “special treatment” which is a different take on the “special treatment” talking point aimed at other underrepresented groups, who are portrayed as getting handouts. Xiaofeng (2007) notes that model minority Asians are often juxtaposed against the broad category of the underclass, which is applied to Blacks: By forcing characteristics of diligence, discipline, strong family values, respect for authority, thriftiness, morality, self-sufficiency, and respect for education onto Asian Americans, the double elision theory creates an artificially high “norm” or “baseline” for Asian Americans, and discounts

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the efforts and struggles of Asian Americans who are able to achieve this “model minority” success. Similarly, by forcing the characteristics of laziness, lack of discipline, weak family values, criminal inclinations, inability to defer gratification, deviance, dependency, and tendency to drop out of school onto Blacks, the double elision theory creates an artificially low “baseline” for Blacks. This starting point suggests that Blacks have little incentive to strive beyond their “underclass” characteristics, and only reinforces societal stereotypes by creating the expectation that Blacks will perpetually remain inferiors. (p. 326) Therefore, the model minority stereotype, functioning as a form of colorblind racism, justifies denying the need for structural interventions like affirmative action for both Blacks and Asians, while using different rationales tailored for each racial group. Despite these obvious concerns with the impact of stereotypical portrayals of Asians, the Trump administration blamed China for creating the coronavirus and concocted conspiracy theories that continue to be harmful to the safety of Asians and Asian Americans. This has been enabled by the decadeslong crafting of China as an economic competitor, which makes people more receptive to negative stereotyping during the COVID-19 pandemic. The yellow peril has been updated for the new millennia and the age of social media.

5

The Media Construction of China as Economic Powerhouse

Trump’s framing of COVID-19 as the creation of the Chinese government would not have had an audience without the U.S. and European media’s role in the ruling class’ positioning of China as a formidable and duplicitous economic player on the global stage. The U.S. media itself plays a pivotal role in shaping how another nation’s actions are viewed where “events are framed within ideological, political, and cultural contexts to produce representation of images from which individuals picture the world in their heads and construct their conception of “us” and “them” (Peng, 2004, p. 53). This is done through a process of making a nation “real and tangible” through the use of imagery, symbolism, and coverage of customs and other cultural rituals, especially when the general public is less familiar with foreign affairs (p. 53). Rather than promoting empowerment through knowledge, social media has moved beyond archiving information to becoming “a self-enforcing cultural environment” (Vujakovic, 2018, p. 8). It is in this environment that specific frames about China have

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been disseminated. In all of these instances, the bulk of U.S. media coverage of China has been negative (Golan & Lukito, 2015; Okuda, 2016; Peng, 2004). Throughout decades of media coverage, China has been positioned in different ways, versus being portrayed in a universally negative light. Some emphasize characteristics and practices in the form of historical “eras,” such as “Red China,” “Tiananmen Square China” and “developing and threatening China” as filtered through a Western lens (Peng, 2004, p. 64). Other frames focus on China as a growing economic power, but this is often offset by highlighting human rights abuses, accusations of intellectual property theft, and undercutting wages (Okuda, 2016). China figures prominently in anxieties about the relative loss of status of the U.S. working class, where U.S. workers are pitted against Chinese workers: “The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor with remain poor” (Robinson, 2020, p. 43). As Golan and Lukito (2015) outline regarding news coverage: China was juxtaposed to the United States and treated as engaging in illegal or unsavory behavior, in comparison to the hard-working, research-oriented United States…the impact on its image has been most pronounced in Europe, Latin America and the US, where China seems to loom as an unprecedented economic threat…a negative influence on the US economy. (p. 11) While media outlets and pundits frame China as an economic threat, others portray China as in need of U.S. assistance and guidance. As one example, Golan and Lukito (2015) note ongoing news coverage of Chinese society as on the edge of falling apart from internal struggles and the need for the U.S. to intervene. In the coverage of outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, China is presented as being on a form of probation, as in the U.S. being the ones to determine China’s participation in economic agreements as long as “an open and transparent partnership” is maintained” (p. 7). This notion of the U.S. and other Western nations being the ones to determine the appropriate criteria for China’s global membership is steeped in what Vujakovic (2018) terms as the long-standing myth of Orientalism, where the U.S. engages in: making statements about [China], authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it; in short, the Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient…Orientals are cast as living by different rules. (p. 14)

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This is also reflected in the U.S. embrace of the “clash of civilizations” narrative that the U.S., like other Western democracies, is superior because as a nation it values individualism while China prioritizes collectivism. However, it becomes harder to maintain the stance of global superiority in the face of the ascendency of the Chinese economy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, China began to fill the void in the competing superpower narrative and has sustained that spot even after being temporarily disrupted by media coverage of the Middle East and terrorism (Golan & Lukito, 2015; Hedetoft, 2020). As Okuda (2016) notes, “the world is keen to speculate on China’s future because China’s rapid ascent is without historical parallel” (p. 134). Commenting on Trump’s dealings with China prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hedetoft (2020) paints a dramatic picture of a shifting global climate: there is no doubt that his strategies are far from consistent…he is in the process of waving goodbye to the imperial position that the United States used to take for granted, because the economic foundation of the US economy is not what it used to be and the United States no longer looks like the dream location for the entrepreneurial person wanting to make it to the top. “Rags to riches” is no more realistic in the United States than in, say, Europe, actually less so, and decidedly far less possible than in India, China or South Korea. (p. 76) It is against this backdrop of imperial decline, anxieties about globalization, and neoliberalism’s grip that the media has continued to shape the narrative of China, with profound implications for Asians and Asian Americans during the pandemic.

6

Treatment of Asians during COVID-19

It has been asserted that Trump’s personal behavior, and how he treats people, created a new acceptable code of conduct for others to follow (Johnson, 2017). In support of this position, various studies have shown that Trump consistently instigated and fueled hatred in the U.S. (and has since before he was elected president) (Goldstein & Hall, 2017; Konrad, 2018; Müller & Schwarz, 2019; Shook et al., 2020). Whether intended or not, Trump and his administration “directly or indirectly encouraged hate crimes, racism, or xenophobia by using anti-Chinese rhetoric” (Human Rights Watch, 2020, p. 2). By taking aim at China and blaming the country as the cause of millions of deaths around

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the world, it was inevitable that there would be major repercussions for both Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. Anderson (2020) posits that: Like all the enemies identified in Trump’s lexicon of hate and xenophobia, Covid-19 is exoticized as the “China Virus.” The enemies of war are dehumanized, positioned on the other side of a wall between us and them. They are part of a vision of a world divided in conflict, at a time when the best way to deal with this pandemic is collectively, at the local and global levels. (p. 3) Not surprisingly, Trump denied, again and again, any racist intent by using the term “China virus,” and that he only used that phrase because China was where the coronavirus was originally detected (Rogers et al., 2020). What Trump’s intent was in using the term is irrelevant; he stirred the Asian racist pot and decided to just let it boil over, no matter the possible consequences. The damage had already been done. Rogers et al. (2020) affirms that, “Medical historians and public health experts—including some in Mr. Trump’s administration—have emphasized that pandemics have no ethnicity and stressed that associating them with an ethnic group can lead to discrimination” (p. 1). As mentioned earlier in the chapter, data show that since January 2020, there has been a significant increase in reports of hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans. This comes in the form of hate speech, racism, discrimination, violent physical attacks, and boycotts of Asian-owned businesses (HRW, 2020; Lin & Pham, 2020; Margolin, 2020; Timberg & Chiu, 2020; Wen et al., 2020). People have been verbally and physically assaulted on the streets with taunts of “Go back to China,” called various racial slurs, and even spat upon (Reports of Anti-Asian Assaults, 2020; Wen et al., 2020). As of press time, there have been 3,800 reports of slurs, physical attacks, and shunning of Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. in the past year (Yam, 2021). Online harassment of Asians and Asian Americans has also increased drastically since the COVID-19 outbreak. A recent report found that there has been a 900% spike in hate speech on Twitter aimed at China and the Chinese people with the use of such hashtags as #KungFlu, #ChinaVirus, and #BlameChina (Liberatore, 2020, p. 1; Timberg & Chiu, 2020, p. 1). In addition, anti-Chinese slurs on forum websites like 4chan have grown significantly during various points of the pandemic (Timberg & Chiu, 2020). One study shows that when Trump Tweeted the phrase “Chinese virus” in March 2020, the use of antiAsian hashtags on Twitter soared soon after (Gstalter, 2021). It was found that, “Half of the 777,852 hashtags with #chinesevirus after Trump’s tweet contained

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anti-Asian sentiment. Those who adopted the rhetoric were far more likely to pair it with other overtly racist hashtags, compared to those who tweeted with the hashtag #covid19” (Gstalter, 2021, para. 4). As is evident, not only did Asians and Asian Americans have to worry about catching the deadly coronavirus, but they also needed to be concerned about being attacked, both in-person or online, due to simply being of Asian descent. Unfortunately, much of that was due to the actions of former President Trump. The increasing dislike of China is not only affecting people on the micro level, but it has increased on the macro level as well. Polling conducted between mid-March and April 2020 found that 78% of Republicans and 40% of Democrats placed blame on China for the virus entering the U.S., with only 22% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats blaming the U.S. government (Lin & Pham, 2020, para. 15). Specifically, 90% of Republicans and 67% of Democrats felt that the government of China was the cause of the pandemic (para. 15). According to the Pew Research Center, negative views of China have continued to grow, with about two-thirds of Americans saying that they have a negative view of China. This percentage has risen almost 20 percentage points since the beginning of the Trump presidency (Devlin et al., 2020, p. 2). While this increase might not be directly caused by the COVID-19 crisis, it still shows the increasing concern with China over economic, environmental, and technological issues (Devlin et al., 2020).

7

Conclusion

President Trump and his administration completely mishandled a deadly pandemic due to short-sightedness, inaction, and lack of a coherent plan of action. In his handling of COVID-19, the record shows that, “Trump [has done] little else than create division, conflict, uncertainty and confusion” (Andersen, 2020, p. 7). Trump’s inept mismanagement of the coronavirus came in the form of scapegoating China at the expense of Asian and Asian American safety. While the belief that China was a threat to Americans’ safety and security was completely unfounded (Shupak, 2020), Trump’s rhetoric regarding COVID-19 and China created a resurgence of the harmful stereotype of the evil Asian, otherwise known as the “yellow peril.” By doing so, Trump and his minions have contributed to a significant rise of racism and xenophobia against Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. (Jan, 2020). This happened against a backdrop of decades of media coverage about the threat that China poses to the American economy.

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With his customary brand of callous name-calling and blame-gaming, Trump created a conspiracy theory as to whom is to blame for COVID-19 (China) and where scared and angry people should lay their blame (Asians). Of course, even though the conspiracy theory was completely and utterly unfounded and flat-out false, Trump claimed vociferously and adamantly that he holds absolutely no responsibility for the mounting death toll in the U.S. (Bierman et al., 2020). Through Trump’s well-known form of self-aggrandizement and self-congratulatory behavior, he stated repeatedly that he had done an amazing job handling the COVID-19 crisis (Peters et al., 2020). According to Santer (2020), “a leader accepts responsibility for personal and organizational failures. A leader cares more about saving lives than about winning reelection” (pp. 3–4). Through all of his bloviation, Trump never took responsibility for his mistakes handling the crisis, which scientists believe cost an additional tens of thousands of lives. Trump dehumanized Asians due to his scapegoating of China, and he set them up to be harassed and attacked both online and in the streets. Based on Trump’s past words and deeds, it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that racist intent was not ultimately behind his actions.

References A3PCON. (2020, May 13). In six weeks, STOP AAPI HATE receives over 1700 incident reports of verbal harassment, shunning and physical assaults. Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council. http://www.asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/ wp-content/uploads/Press_Release_5_13_20.pdf Abreu, J. M., Ramirez, E., Kim, B. S. K., & Haddy, C. (2003). Automatic activation of yellow peril Asian American stereotypes: Effects on social impression formation. The Journal of Social Psychology, 143(6), 691–706. Anderson, R. (2020, April 30). A pandemic is not a war. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. https://fair.org/home/a-pandemic-is-not-a-war/ Ankel, S. (2020, April 23). Photos show how shortages are forcing doctors and nurses to improvise coronavirus PPE from snorkel masks, pool noodles, and trash bags. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-show-doctors-nursesimprovising-due-to-lack-of-ppe-2020-4 Baron, N. (2020, April 16). Could Trump be criminally liable for his deadly mishandling of coronavirus? Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/could-trump-criminallyliable-his-deadly-mishandling-coronavirus-opinion-1498146 Bates, K. G. (2018, January 13). ‘Rapists,’ ‘huts’: Trump’s racist dog whistles aren’t new. National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/01/13/ 577674607/rapists-huts-shitholes-trumps-racist-dog-whistles-arent-new

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Bergengruen, V., & Hennigan, W. J. (2020, March 5). ‘Doomed from the start.’ Experts say the Trump administration’s coronavirus response was never going to work. Time. https://time.com/5797636/trump-botched-coronavirus-response/ Bierman, N., Stokols, E., & Megerian, C. (2020, May 8). Trump’s new 2020 message— it’s not my fault. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/ 2020-05-08/trumps-new-2020-message-its-not-my-fault Bonilla-Silva, E. (2009). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America. Rowman & Littlefield. Bort, R. (2018, June 5). Trump’s battle with the NFL has reached critical mass. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trumps-battle-withthe-nfl-has-reached-critical-mass-630123/ Brennan, M., & Schick, C. (2020, May 7). Finding coronavirus’ patient zero; and a guilty bat. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-patient-zero-batindex-case/ Cable, V. (2020, May 5). America is rekindling the dangerous myth of the ‘Yellow Peril’ to wage a new war with China. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/ voices/china-coronavirus-trump-us-yellow-peril-cold-war-a9499221.html Chua, A. (2011). Battle hymn of the tiger mother. Penguin Books. Chung Allred, N. (2007). Asian Americans and affirmative action: From yellow peril to model minority and back again. Asian American Law Journal, 14, 57–235. Collinson, S. (2020, May 18). Trump officials deflect blame for US death toll, escalate reopening push. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/18/politics/trump-us-deathtoll-blame-reopen/index.html Corrigan, M. (2011, January 11). Tiger mothers: Raising children the Chinese way. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2011/01/11/132833376/tiger-mothers-raising-children-thechinese-way Costello, E. (2020, April 21). Donald Trump’s ‘Chinese virus’: The politics of naming. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-chinese-virus-thepolitics-of-naming-136796 D’Antonio, M. (2016, June 7). Is Donald Trump racist? Here’s what the record shows. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2016/06/07/donald-trump-racism-quotes/ Devlin, K., Silver, L., & Huang, C. (2020, April 21). U.S. views of China increasingly negative amid coronavirus outbreak. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/ global/2020/04/21/u-s-views-of-china-increasingly-negative-amid-coronavirusoutbreak/ Edsall, T. B. (2020, April 15). Trump has a gut feeling about what Covid-19 means for 2020. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/opinion/ coronavirus-trump-election.html Employed Asians by occupation. (2012, May 10). U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2012/ted_20120510.htm

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Finnegan, C. (2020, March 25). Pompeo pushes ‘Wuhan virus’ label to counter Chinese disinformation. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pompeo-pusheswuhan-virus-label-counter-chinese-disinformation/story?id=69797101 Golan, G., & Lukito, J. (2015, October). The rise of the dragon? Framing China’s global leadership in elite American newspapers. International Communication Gazette, 77(8), 1–19. Goldstein, D. M., & Hall, K. (2017). Postelection surrealism and nostalgic racism in the hands of Donald Trump. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(1), 397–406. Graham, B. A. (2020, May 3). ‘Swastikas and nooses’: Governor slams ‘racism’ of Michigan lockdown protest. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/ may/03/michigan-gretchen-whitmer-lockdown-protest-racism Graham, D. A., Green, A., Murphy, C., & Richards, P. (2019, June). An oral history of Trump’s bigotry. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ 2019/06/trump-racism-comments/588067/ Gray, R. (2017, August 15). Trump defends White-Nationalist protesters: ‘Some very fine people on both sides’. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ 2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-onboth-sides/537012/ Gstalter, M. (2021, May 19). Trump reference to COVID-19 as ‘Chinese virus’ prompted increase in anti-Asian hashtags: study. The Hill. https://thehill.com/policy/ technology/543982-trump-reference-to-covid-19-as-chinese-virus-promptedincrease-in-anti Hart, C. L. (2020, April 30). Is President Trump an “outliar”? Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-nature-deception/202004/ispresident-trump-outliar Hedetoft, U. (2020). Paradoxes of populism: Troubles of the west and nationalism’s second coming. Anthem Press. Hooghe, M., & Dassonneville, R. (2018). Explaining the Trump vote: The effect of racist resentment and anti-immigrant sentiments. PS: Political Science & Politics, 51(3), 528–534. Human Rights Watch. (2020, May 12). Covid-19 fueling anti-Asian racism and xenophobia worldwide. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide Jan, T. (2020, May 19). Asian American doctors and nurses are fighting racism and the coronavirus. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/ 05/19/asian-american-discrimination/%3foutputType=amp Johnson, M. (2017). Trickle-down bullying and the truly great American response: Can responsible rhetoric in judicial advocacy and decision-making help heal the divisiveness of the Trump presidency? Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, 25(4), 445–507.

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Karenga, M. (2018). Trump’s mind, mouth and fecal matters: Racism’s red meat and raw sewage. Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, 11(4), 4–6. Kawai, Y. (2005). Stereotyping Asian Americans: The dialectic of the model minority and the yellow peril. The Howard Journal of Communications, 16, 109–130. Konrad, A. M. (2018). Denial of racism and the Trump presidency. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 37(1), 14–30. Lee, S. J. (2009). Unraveling the “model minority” stereotype: Listening to Asian American youth (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press. Lemire, J. (2020, April 9). As pandemic deepens, Trump cycles through targets to blame. The Associated Press. https://apnews.com/58f1b869354970689d55ccae37c540f3 Leonhardt, D., Philbrick, I. P., & Thompson, S. A. (2017, December 14). Trump’s lies vs. Obama’s. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/14/ opinion/sunday/trump-lies-obama-who-is-worse.html?searchResultPosition=3 Liberatore, S. (2020, March 27). Coronavirus pandemic has led to a 900 percent increase of hate speech toward China and Chinese people on Twitter, a new report reveals. The Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8161807/ Coronavirus-Huge-surge-hate-speech-Chinese-Twitter.html Lin, S., & Pham, H. L. (2020, April 22). Who’s playing the blame game? An analysis of media framing of China and COVID-19 in The New York Times. HCA Graduate Blog. https://hcagrads.hypotheses.org/2966 Liu, S., Saif, L. J., Weiss, S. R., & Su, L. (2020). No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2. Emerging Microbes & Infections, 9(1), 505–507. Lopez, L. (2020, May 8). Here’s an idea why Secretary of State Pompeo keeps spreading the conspiracy theory that coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/pompeo-spreads-wuhan-lab-coronavirusconspiracy-get-trump-attention-2020-5 Margolin, J. (2020, March 27). FBI warns of potential surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans amid coronavirus. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-warnspotential-surge-hate-crimes-asian-americans/story?id=69831920 Müller, K., & Schwarz, C. (2019). From hashtag to hate crime: Twitter and anti-minority sentiment. SSRN. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3149103 Newkirk II, V. R. (2017, August 5). The myth of reverse racism. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/myth-of-reverse-racism/ 535689/ Nguyen, J., Carter, J. S., & Carter, S. K. (2019). From yellow peril to model minority: Perceived threat by Asian Americans in employment. Social Science Quarterly, 100(3), 565–577. Okuda, H. (2016). China’s “peaceful rise/peaceful development: A case study of media frames of the rise of China. Global Media and China, 1–2, 121–138.

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Osnos, E. (2020, May 10). The folly of Trump’s blame-Beijing coronavirus strategy. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-folly-oftrumps-blame-beijing-coronavirus-strategy Paz, C. (2020, April 9). All the President’s lies about the coronavirus: An unfinished compendium of Trump’s overwhelming dishonesty during a national emergency. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/trumps-liesabout-coronavirus/608647/ Pei, S., Kandula, S., & Shaman, J. (2020). Differential effects of intervention timing on COVID-19 spread in the United States [Unpublished manuscript]. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.15.20103655v1.full.pdf Peng, Z. (2004). Representation of China: An across time analysis of coverage in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Asian Journal of Communication, 14(1), 53–67. Perlstein, R. (2012, November 13). Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s infamous 1981 interview on the southern strategy. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/ Peters, J. W., Plott, E., & Haberman, M. (2020, April 28). 260,000 words, full of selfpraise, from Trump on the virus. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2020/04/26/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-briefings-analyzed.html Pollock, M. (2017). Three challenges for teachers in the era of Trump. Educational Studies, 53(4), 426–427. Porter, T. (2020, April 5). Trump reportedly dismissed January coronavirus warnings from Health Secretary Azar as ‘alarmist.’ Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-dismissed-azar-coronavirus-warnings-asalarmist-wapo-2020-4 Remnick, D. (2020, March 15). Trump, truth, and the mishandling of the coronavirus crisis. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trumptruth-and-the-mishandling-of-the-coronavirus-crisis Reports of Anti-Asian assaults, harassment and hate crimes rise as coronavirus spreads. (2020, May 4). ADL.org. https://www.adl.org/blog/reports-of-anti-asian-assaultsharassment-and-hate-crimes-rise-as-coronavirus-spreads Roach, S. (2020, May 7). Get ready for a campaign season full of China-covid conspiracy theories. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/07/opinions/get-ready-for-acampaign-season-full-of-china-covid-conspiracy-theories/index.html Robinson, M. (2020, June 11). What kind of country do we want? The New York Review of Books, 67(10), 43–46. Rogers, K., Jakes, L., & Swanson, A. (2020, March 18). Trump defends using ‘Chinese virus’ label, ignoring growing criticism. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/ 2020/03/18/us/politics/china-virus.html

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Rubin, D. I. (2020). White stupidification and the need for dialectical thought in the age of Trump. In F. Agostinone-Wilson (Ed.), On the question of truth in the era of Trump (pp. 119–134). Brill | Sense. Rudd, K. (2020, May 7). The Murdoch media’s China coronavirus conspiracy has one aim: Get Trump re-elected. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/ 2020/may/08/murdoch-media-china-coronavirus-conspiracy-trump-kevin-rudd Santer, B. (2020, June). Ignoring science during a pandemic is poor leadership. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ignoring-science-during-apandemic-is-poor-leadership/ Schafer, J. (2020, May 12). Why Trump is peddling extra-strength conspiracy theories. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/05/12/donald-trumpsconspiracy-theories-for-junkies-252210 Schaffner, B. F., Macwilliams, M., & Nteta, T. (2018). Understanding White polarization in the 2016 vote for president: The sobering role of racism and sexism. Political Science Quarterly, 133(1), 9–34. Shim, D. (1998). From yellow peril through model minority to renewed yellow peril. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 22(4), 385–409. Shook, N. J., Fitzgerald, H. N., Boggs, S. T., Ford, C. G., Hopkins, P. D., & Silva, N. M. (2020) Sexism, racism, and nationalism: Factors associated with the 2016 U.S. presidential election results? PLoS ONE, 15(3), 1–19. Shupak, G. (2020, May 15). Corporate media setting stage for new Cold War with China. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. https://fair.org/home/corporate-media-settingstage-for-new-cold-war-with-china/ Simon, M., & Sidner, S. (2019, July 16). Trump said “many people agree’ with his racist tweets: These White supremacists certainly do. CNN Politics. https://www.cnn.com/ 2019/07/16/politics/white-supremacists-cheer-trump-racist-tweets-soh/index.html Smith, D. (2020, May 11). ‘Don’t ask me. Ask China’: Trump clashes with reporters then abruptly leaves press briefing. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2020/may/11/trump-us-latest-coronavirus-reporters Somvichian-Clausen, A. (2020, March 25). Trump’s use of the term ‘Chinese Virus’ for coronavirus hurts Asian Americans, says expert. The Hill. https://thehill.com/ changing-america/respect/diversity-inclusion/489464-trumps-use-of-the-termchinese-virus-for Spocchia, G. (2021, January 21). Final tally of lies: Analysts say Trump told 30,000 mistruths—that’s 21 a day—during presidency. Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trumplies-false-presidency-b1790285.html Sullivan, M. (2020, April 13). What is really means when Trump calls a story ‘fake news.’ The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/what-itreally-means-when-trump-calls-a-story-fake-news/2020/04/13/56fbe2c0-7d8c-11ea9040-68981f488eed_story.html

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Timberg, C., & Chiu, A. (2020, April 8). As the coronavirus spreads, so does the online racism targeting Asians, new research shows. The Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/08/coronavirus-spreads-so-doesonline-racism-targeting-asians-new-research-shows/%3foutputType=amp Vazquez, M. (2020, March 12). Calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan Virus” or “China Virus” is inaccurate and xenophobic. Yale School of Medicine. https://medicine.yale.edu/ news-article/23074/ Vitali, A., Hunt, K., & Thorp, V. F. (2018, January 11). Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as ‘shithole’ countries. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ white-house/trump-referred-haiti-african-countries-shithole-nations-n836946 Vujakovic, P. (2018). The map is the story: The u-shaped line in western news media coverage of the geopolitics of the South China Sea. International Journal of Cartography. https://repository.canterbury.ac.uk/item/88x68/the-map-is-the-story-the-ushaped-line-in-western-news-media-coverage-of-the-geopolitics-of-the-southchina-sea Wen, J., Aston, J., Liu, X., & Ying, T. (2020, February 16). Effects of misleading media coverage on public health crisis: A case of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in China. Anatolia, 31(2), 33–336. Wexler, J., & Pyle, N. (2012). Dropout prevention and the model-minority stereotype: Reflections from an Asian American high school dropout. The Urban Review, 44(5), 551–570. Wong, F., & Halgin, R. (2006). The “model minority”: Bane or blessing for Asian Americans? Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 34, 38–49. Xiaofeng, S. D. (2007). Education and labor relations: Asian Americans and Blacks as pawns in the furtherance of White hegemony. Michigan Journal of Race and Law, 13, 309–335. Yam, K. (2021, March 16). There were 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents, mostly against women, in past year. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ there-were-3-800-anti-asian-racist-incidents-mostly-against-n1261257

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CHAPTER 3

Work or Die The Dominance of the Capitalist Class in Determining Media Messaging around COVID-19

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Introduction

In the wake of COVID-19, the capitalist class faced (and continues to face) major challenges to its legitimacy, from restaurant employees refusing to work in demeaning environments for low wages to reconsidering the structure of schools and workplaces. This prompted evolving forms of messaging within the media, in what can best be described as an attempt to “have it both ways.” On the one hand, there was the need to respond to stark reality, in particular radical interruptions to the economy. Yet on the other hand, it was vital to prop up the fantasy of a “return to normalcy,” in the form of reopening businesses and schools no matter the cost in lives and health. For Pankova and Barrow (2020), these competing narratives created continual tension as the story unfolded in the media: It’s pretty obvious that the preoccupation not only with getting the economy open, but also with the tremendous threat to economic growth that the pandemic produced, together give us the stage on which much of this crisis is playing out. (para. 8) In a way, this reading of the dual narratives helps explain the seeming irrationality of people insisting on travelling, indoor dining and attending family gatherings at the very moment the second surge of the virus in fall and winter 2020 started to hit its highest numbers of cases (McMahon, 2020). For every “sober assessment” revealed in the news, the capitalist class felt obligated to push for “getting on with your lives” while denying or minimizing the risks involved. This was reflected in everything from advertising to workplace policies and organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The choice was framed as “work or die” but using more subtle messaging and scientific-sounding justifications to get the population acclimated to making hard choices (preferably doing this through consensus-building). The notion that a third option existed—that of monthly federal stipends for workers and small businesses impacted by the pandemic—was not up for long-term consideration. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004500013_003 Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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The desperation behind this grinding insistence on returning to the world as it existed before becomes all too clear when examining the economic landscape of the early period of the pandemic. After the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, 2020, states and municipalities in the U.S. began to declare stay-at-home orders, though these were uneven at best. California, the first state to act, did not issue a stay-athome order until March 16, and many Republican-led states waited to act until early April, if at all. However, between this mid-March to early April period, 95% of the U.S. population was under some form of COVID-19 restrictions (Baek, McRory, Messer, & Mui, 2020, para. 3). During this same time, nearly 16 million people applied for unemployment benefits (Baek et al., 2020, para. 3; Horsley, 2020, para. 5). By May 2020, just over 47% of Americans were without work (Li, 2020, para. 1). Added to this was the larger problem of the global economic impacts, as Heron (2020) summarized: According to the International Monetary Fund the global economy will face its worst recession since the Great Depression. In Europe, where even before the pandemic Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio was at 134 percent and Spain’s and France’s were nearing 100 percent, there are warnings of a sovereign debt crisis that could pose an existential threat to the European Union. Meanwhile, the newly “independent” UK…is forecast to see its economy shrink by 14 percent in 2020, its deepest recession on record. On top of all of this the climate crisis rages on unaddressed and unabated. (para. 7) Within the U.S., the gross domestic product (GDP) continued to shrink, hitting a rate of 32.9%, making the months of April, May, and June 2020 four times as bad as the worst quarter of the 2008 recession (Horsley, 2020, paras. 2–3). However, rather than prioritizing the containment of COVID-19 (which would have actually facilitated a faster economic recovery), Trump, seeing the pandemic as a threat to his reelection bid, immediately pressured states to reverse their stay-at-home orders, insisting on reopening (Walker, 2020). Since there had been no unified federal response to the pandemic, many states had taken important measures to control the viral spread, another irony of the battle to reopen. The overall messaging of the capitalist class was that the stay-athome measures—not people being cautious due to the pandemic—were the cause of economic stagnation. A form of magical thinking took hold where the simple act of reopening businesses and schools would somehow cause the economy to flourish on its own with no other interventions needed. By

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November 2020, on top of over 250,000 deaths, this belief system culminated in COVID-19 being the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. (para. 10). An October 9, 2020 Twitter Post by Heath Nerd, an epidemiologist and writer, laid out common talking points as well as myths about COVID-19: That herd immunity is inevitable That epidemiologists love lockdowns That it is less lethal than the flu That we can easily protect ‘the vulnerable’ That we can ‘let it rip’ without cost That government regulation to prevent disease necessarily costs money That there is no economic cost to large epidemics That ‘the vulnerable’ are a discrete, readily defined category That there are simple solutions to a COMPLEX pandemic That there is a silver bullet, whether it be HCQ, remdesivir, vaccines, etc. These myths, along with being contradictory in juxtaposition to each other, reflected the collective logic behind the capitalist class’ ideological response to the pandemic. This included approaching what was essentially a large-scale socialized crisis with ineffective, individualistic frames such as compartmentalizing (assuming that everyone lives in neatly contained age and health cohorts); magical thinking (that there will be a cure around the corner, “setting a date” for reopening will cause everyone to resume normal patterns of consumption); pushing the meme of “COVID fatigue” (assuming that shutdown orders and not self-opting to limit public exposure is the reason for a slow economic recovery) and requiring the working class to subsidize the illusion of normalcy (at the expense of human life and health). This chapter will review each in turn.

2

Compartmentalization

Compartmentalization was the notion that every aspect of human interaction during the pandemic could be neatly contained within minimal effort or expense, with the ability to be perfectly tailored to specific situations. On a national scale, compartmentalization was behind the belief that each state or even each city should set its own guidelines regarding COVID-19, as if the virus somehow adhered to traditional state, county, and municipal boundaries or that people didn’t regularly move across such boundaries. Compartmentalization was also reflected to varying degrees in workplace policies, Trump

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administration CDC documents, and media messaging outlining the following assumptions: 1) everyone conveniently occupies same age and health cohorts; 2) we will do “this much and no more”; 3) overlooking the role of asymptomatic spread/basing decisions only on visible manifestations of the virus; and 4) offering the consumer a choice, but not employees. 2.1 Assuming Manageable Age/Health Cohorts The first characteristic of compartmentalized thinking within capitalist discourse is the assumption that the virus can be contained by relying on traditional demographic cohort markers or boundaries. This presumes that by adhering to these definitional boundaries—more importantly, avoiding unnecessary inconveniencing of capitalism—everything will remain as normal as possible. As Pankova and Barrow (2020) asserted, there’s a madness and a conceit running through our discourse about sovereign or bounded entities, one that pertains to the idea that the microbe can be made to respect boundaries when its failure to do so is the very definition of a pandemic. (para. 34) As an example of this way of thinking, Guiterrez (2020) recounted an interview with a man who had minimized his potential of contracting COVID-19. He assumed, “as healthy as I was, I wouldn’t get it, it wouldn’t affect me,” citing his beliefs (repeated widely in the media) of the virus being a problem mainly for the elderly, immunocompromised, or those living in large cities (para. 10). However, he ended up contracting the virus, sustaining trauma to his throat due to being intubated, requiring several future surgeries. It is important to note that this individual was not adhering to conspiracy narratives but engaging in more mainstream compartmentalized thinking about the pandemic. Media and workplace policy messaging reinforced the idea that “the vulnerable” could be neatly defined and segregated out of the way in order to facilitate everyone else’s movement for the purposes of labor and consumerism. However, pinning down just who occupies this “vulnerable” category was not that simplistic and remains challenging. Prior to the availability of a vaccine, out of the 246 million adults in the U.S., over 90 million of them were at an elevated risk of serious illness if they became infected with the virus (Koma et al., 2020, para. 9). This represented more than 1/3 of the adult population. Although 55% of those at higher risk of developing serious illness were 65 years and older, the remaining 41 million at-risk adults were 18–64 years old (para. 5). One Chinese study found that 10–15% of COVID-19 patients required the more extreme measure of intubation with most of those being older adults (Gutierrez, 2020, para.

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18). Though people 65 and over still make up the majority of U.S. cases, there has been a steady growth in younger age cohorts developing serious illnesses, with one Florida hospital reporting 45% of those admitted being younger than 65 (Bernstein, 2020, para. 21). Most disturbingly, over 5 million U.S. adults in this high-risk group were uninsured (Koma et al., 2020, para. 8). The poor national health markers of the U.S. population only highlight the necessity of revising our notions of who is considered high risk to include: “older adults (ages 65 or older, rather than 60 and older) and adults between the ages of 18 and 64 with heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), uncontrolled asthma, diabetes, or a BMI greater than 40” (para. 2). It should be noted that this definition does not include those who have been diagnosed with cancer, which would make the numbers even higher. Determining who fit the definition of “vulnerable” also varied widely depending on geographic regions. Prior to the vaccine, more than 40% of U.S. adults 18 and older were at elevated risk of serious illness in many southern states, with a high of 49% reported in West Virginia (Koma et al., 2020, para. 10). In states that had the highest number of cases, the percentage of adults at high risk of developing a serious illness after infection included 42% for Louisiana and Florida and 41% in Michigan (para. 12). In November 2020, North Dakota had the highest mortality rate in the world, culminating in a rate of 1 death per 800 people (McEvoy, 2020, para. 2). Eight other states, including New York and New Jersey, reported at least one death per 1,000 people (para. 3). With few exceptions, employer policies did not acknowledge the interplay of age and health factors in determining risk. While employers were prohibited from discriminating on the basis of an employee living with someone who had a disability or heath condition that made them susceptible to COVID-19, they were under no obligation to make accommodations for employees to work from home if they had a family member who is in a high-risk category (Gould, 2020; Marnin & Cima, 2020). The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (2020) did require that employers offer COVID-related paid sick leave, but it did not specifically address working from home to lower the risk of transmitting the virus to a vulnerable family member. As Hammerstein and Falconer (2020) concluded, “because of the unprecedented nature of these laws, it remains to be seen how broadly enforcement agencies will interpret ‘caring for a family member’” (para. 8). Employment policy overlooked the prevalence of mixed age and health cohorts within a single household, which had far-reaching consequences for low-income groups:

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The majority of the dead are people with inferior health care and chronic medical conditions who live in crowded households where the asymptomatic young inadvertently infect the old—in other words, the poor. In NY, Latinos and Blacks are dying at twice the rate of Whites and Asians, partly because they comprise such a large percentage of essential workers, who are at a higher risk of contracting the disease. (Greenberg, 2020, p. 10) With the economic situation at this time, along with schools and universities that pivoted to remote instruction, young people moved back to their parents’ and families’ homes, thus introducing a key source of asymptomatic spread (Bernstein, 2020). Employment policy did not take this situation into account, which was outrageous considering how 70% of the U.S. workforce was not able to work from home (Gould, 2020, para. 8). In regions of the U.S., such as the South, 64 million people live in households with at least two generations of adults, including grandparents and grandchildren age 25 and under, representing a fifth of the U.S. population (Bernstein, 2020, para. 7). Even prior to the pandemic, nearly 8.5% of workers under the age of 65 resided in homes with at least one other person who was over 65, with many of those younger people tending to be asymptomatic spreaders (Gould, 2020, para. 8). This quickly set up a situation where the validity of relying on tidy cohort categories in shaping public health and workplace policy was in conflict with reality: The emerging trend highlights the difficulty of relying on the Trump administration’s strategy of sheltering the most vulnerable while the young and healthy return to work and school. That approach runs the risk of transmitting the virus when two or three generations share the same home and when many lower-income workers have little choice but to brave exposure to do their jobs. (Bernstein, 2020, para. 3) 2.2 This Much and No More A second characteristic of compartmentalized thinking involved doing the bare minimum regarding maintaining compliance with workplace laws for preventing the spread of COVID-19, reflecting a philosophy of “we will do this much and no more.” While different government entities had updated their guidelines and laws to address the coronavirus, the onus on requesting exemptions such as working from home largely rested with the individual employee, leaving the decision up to the employer, rather than being an across-the-board policy to begin with (Hammerstein & Falconer, 2020).

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The tone was set by the presumptively titled Trump Administration’s Opening Up America Again (2020) guidelines that used phrases like “should consider” and “where feasible” in their presentation of a three-phase process. This document essentially buttressed the “this much and no more” mindset in laying out Phase 1 where employers “should consider” extending special accommodations to employees who have high-risk family members or setting limits to the number of people in the workplace. Phase 2 continued the phase one suggestions with non-essential business travel resuming and easing of numbers of people in the workplace, along with “maintaining moderate to strict social distancing practices, depending on the type of business” (Marnin & Cima, 2020, para. 1). Phase 3 then moved to unrestricted staffing in the workplace, with individual states getting to make that determination. The lack of a unified federal response that could have used specific, across-the-board restrictions left residents of states like Florida or Texas at the mercy of relaxed restrictions in the push to reopen. With businesses and schools justifying their actions based on state-level legislation and Opening Up America Again, the bare minimum was reflected in Byzantine policies that did not cover 48% of private sector employees (Hess, 2020, para. 9). Grocery and gig workers (Uber and Grubhub drivers), for example, were classified as “essential” but had no access to paid leave. For these individuals, choosing to stay home to protect their health and the health of their family put them at risk of being fired or losing pay. Workers who were covered by recent updates to existing laws only received 80 hours of paid sick leave (part-time workers are only guaranteed the amount based on hours they normally work in a two-week period) if they couldn’t fulfill their workplace obligations because of COVID-19 related reasons (para. 8). Only those workers who could show documentation of having a medical condition that would put them at higher risk of contracting the virus were able to request to work from home, along with other accommodations (Hammerstein & Falconer, 2020; Hess, 2020). 2.3 Overlooking Asymptomatic Spread Workplace policies often stressed the more obvious preventative steps that became part of general public health procedures at most organizations and businesses: hand washing, sanitizing surfaces, maintaining 6 feet of social distancing, installing plexiglass shields, requiring mask wearing, temperature checks, and telling employees to stay home if they showed symptoms. These precautions were also emphasized in advertising, imagery, and social media posts of businesses, schools, and organizations as ways to assure clients that safety is a priority and to entice people to go out into public again, preferably

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to spend money (or to resume activities like opening schools that make working and spending money possible). The assumption was that if a business or organization was taking these precautions, then the risk of viral transmission was low-to-non-existent. Issues like asymptomatic customers coming in and out of the space were not even considered, with the workplace presented as self-contained and limited to just employees. Essentially, the virus itself was safely compartmentalized away. In combination with operating as if age/ health cohorts never crossed boundaries and minimal workplace protections, the incentive was to rest on the illusion of containment. What was most definitely not discussed or barely mentioned in the conversations around reopening was asymptomatic spread. Workplace policies cited CDC guidelines like sending employees home if they showed symptoms of the virus as a way to demonstrate adherence to protocol while assuring workers and customers that reopening was fine (Marnin & Cima, 2020). While the rate of asymptomatic spread is still unclear due to the lack of a nation-wide testing or tracing program, the percentage of people who tested positive for COVID-19 while showing no symptoms ranged between 40–50% during the first and second waves (McCrimmon, 2020, para. 1). One-third of children who tested positive for the virus during this time period were asymptomatic (Pearson, 2020, para. 3). In some cases, people assumed they had seasonal allergies, a sinus infection, or cold with no elevated temperature and did not realize they were carriers for the virus. It should not be surprising that asymptomatic spread was minimized, because to include it as a factor would absolutely limit public activity due to elevated concerns about one’s health. Additionally, the media exacerbated the problem by framing the issue around masks and personal freedom while not providing “what we need to know, what works to keep us safe and what is putting us at risk,” particularly knowledge about asymptomatic spread (Jackson, 2020, para. 6). Since people were left to their own devices to find information about the prevalence asymptomatic spread, there was an inaccurate sense of risk: They’re talking about cultural battles between people wearing masks and people not wearing masks, but it’s sort of apart from a conversation of, “Do we have evidence that that works?” Because, of course, if you know how people are catching it, you’ll also know how people maybe are not likely to catch it, and we can shape our actions around that. (Jackson, 2020, para. 8) The media, along with groups representing business and industry also circulated misinformation, including statements like “going to an office is no more

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dangerous than other activities…such as picking up groceries or gathering at friends’ homes” (Cappelli, 2020, para. 8). This was a direct contradiction to research finding that the likelihood of getting COVID-19 from an infected person in an indoor setting was 19 times higher than outdoors (Yong, 2020, para. 26). Considering how people spend the majority of their time indoors, asymptomatic spread should be one of the first things emphasized. Compartmentalization also manifested itself in assumptions about levels of safety in certain settings like schools, as a way to justify them reopening in person. Shah (2020) discusses reports that emphasized how student-to-student viral transmission was uncommon, noting that “children were more likely to get infected outside of school settings” (para. 8). The media also relayed similar findings as a way to align with business class interests in reestablishing normalcy via reopening schools, as in The Atlantic calling for relaxing restrictions on student socializing at colleges (Epstein-Levi, 2020). Reopening based on this compartmentalized rationale was a moot point considering that children live with adults (many also with older relatives) while college students interact with older faculty and staff on campus. Prioritizing reopening also ignored cases like three teachers in Arizona who planned curriculum together while wearing masks. All three contracted the virus, and one died from it (Aviles, 2020). Epstein-Levi (2020) points out how compartmentalized approaches like making decisions to reopen based on compartmentalized assumptions about the stability of who comes in and out of a workplace reflect what is considered a priority during a pandemic: It’s important to find ways to help people live their lives during the pandemic. But doing so must not come at the expense of other people’s ability to stay alive, let alone be in public at all. Defaulting to the risk profile of a less marginalized group without seriously considering the (higher) risk profile of a more marginalized group is itself a form of incorrectly flattening risks—one with deadly consequences. (para. 9) Those who were immunocompromised and disabled were not only at higher risk of severe illness or death due to COVID-19, their needs occupied a lower priority when it came to maintaining a capitalist economy. 2.4 Prioritizing Consumer Choice over Workers’ Health A final aspect of compartmentalization involved the practice of ensuring that customers, as well as parents of K-12 and college students, were offered maximum flexibility while not extending the same options to employees or teachers

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during the pandemic. This form of prioritizing consumer choice over the health of workers is an ideology extending back to the Great Depression in the 1930s “as the needs, protection, and veneration of the consumer began to supersede those of the worker” (Petersen, 2020, para. 22). After WWII, patriotism “was expressed by engagement in mass consumption” where buying things was seen as a way to contribute to the global dominance of the U.S. (para. 22). During the COVID-19 pandemic, capitalist class messaging broadcasted options like curbside pickup, in-store shopping, and carry out or delivery while schools and postsecondary institutions promoted in-person, synchronous, asynchronous or HyFlex models of instruction to parents and students. Employees and teachers were expected to subsidize these choices with their health and possibly lives; their input on the matter rarely sought. The pandemic revealed the profoundly unequal composition of the workforce where, with the exception of medical personnel, workers who received higher salaries (associated with having a bachelor’s degree or graduate education level) were able to work from home (Hess, 2020; Gould, 2020). This meant that service sector workers were at the highest risk of contracting the virus, but also the ones who did not get sick leave. In general, the younger the worker, the least likely they were to have the ability to telecommute. Additionally, close to 66% of employees who were 65 and older (over 5 million people) were not able to work from home, their age category alone putting themselves at risk (Gould, 2020, para. 1). Two-thirds of employees who occupied the age 55–65 tier were not able to work from home either, representing an additional 15 million workers (para. 7). Race and ethnicity were other manifestations of inequality with fewer than 20% of Black employees and approximately one in six Latinx employees able to telecommute (para. 7). Unless individual businesses opted to temporarily convert to employees working from home, or if individual states issued stay-at-home guidelines, workplace policies were shaped around the expectation that employees return to the work site (Hammerstein & Falconer, 2020; Hess, 2020). The only reasons that an employee could give for not returning included “a genuine belief” that there was “imminent danger” and that a reasonable person would agree that such danger of death or serious injury existed or that the employee requested that the danger be eliminated and the employer had not done so or there had not been sufficient time to do so (Hammerstein & Falconer, 2020, para. 3). If employers had taken the typical coronavirus precautions (posting notices about handwashing, marking 6 ft. social distancing, sanitizing surfaces, requiring masks), they had met their obligations according to existing workplace laws and “[did] not need to automatically grant telework as a reasonable accommodation” (Marnin & Cima, 2020, para. 50).

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Concerns about asymptomatic spread were not sufficient reasons for allowing telework. The following statement from Forbes neatly summarizes the capitalist class attitude toward workers: A harder challenge in this crisis, though, is determining what to do about employees who don’t want to come to work because they are concerned about being infected by being at their office, or because the overwhelming amount of information about the coronavirus makes them feel that they might be sick, even if their symptoms don’t match those of COVID19, the disease it causes. (To be clear, the fact that employees without paid sick leave have a financial incentive to come to work even when they may be contagious might be an even bigger problem.) (Cappelli, 2020, para. 9) In the situation of K-12 public schools and post-secondary institutions, parents and students were framed as consumers, with their perceptions and preferences given priority treatment. This overlooked the fact that the decision to fully reopen was a profoundly ethical one, not a financial one: Are decisions about whether or not to hold face-to-face classes a matter of principle, such as fiduciary duty or respect for the common good, or should they have more to do with the number of people who will benefit versus those who will pay the price…higher education decision-makers must also clearly define their values. What exactly is the price to be paid for (not) attending face-to-face classes? Is it freedom of speech, or life itself? In a democracy, which is more important? (Joseph, 2020, para. 6) Ali (2020) discussed the issue of instructional format, specifically for K-12 public schools who tried to maximize parental preference “in a panicked effort to offer an online choice to families” while not offending those who preferred in-class attendance (para. 19). The HyFlex model—where instruction is simultaneously provided on-ground and via video conference software—was initially designed for postsecondary students who preferred that format, not for emergency pandemic conditions. Additionally, the HyFlex model requires training in successful student-teacher interaction across two platforms along with sufficient technology support, which is challenging to find in unevenly funded school districts. In particular, teachers expressed concerns about losing their jobs or future retribution if they made those concerns public. In some cases, the choice to “work or die” is not an exaggeration, but a literal concept. An interview with employees of a Florida law firm who had already been offering discounts on wills for emergency and medical professionals

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described how they extended the same offer to public school teachers, explaining that “it hadn’t occurred to us to do teachers until they came to us. We just wanted to help in the best way we knew how to” (Aviles, 2020, para. 10). Within 48 hours of first making the offer, they heard from 800 teachers (para. 11). Again, the choice for workers remained nonexistent.

3

Magical Thinking

During the first phase of the pandemic, the capitalist class engaged in a form of large-scale magical thinking, where the realities of COVID-19 were denied in favor of illusory quick fixes. These included: (1) the promotion of various forms of drug therapies and quack cures along with misrepresenting the vaccine development process; (2) that “setting a date” to reopen would move things forward on its own; and (3) that you could accommodate everyone by including all points of view on public health as equally valid and trusting people to make their own choices. This magical thinking was supported by the media’s “overwhelming focus on framing news coverage as competing narratives or spin” which “clouds their own relationship to the facts” (Jackson, 2020, para. 3). While this tendency in the media is concerning, it is even more so when there are matters of health involved. 3.1 The Quick Cure Magical thinking manifested itself in the quest for the quick cure, a fast, simple, and preferably cost-effective solution to what was a highly complex problem. In some cases, the quick cure literally reflected an appeal to supernatural forces, such as Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt calling for a day of prayer and fasting for those impacted by COVID-19, while only implementing minimal public health measures (King, 2020). While this form of magical thinking openly invoked miracles or even potions like old time medicine shows, “most often it goes under disguise, mining the form of its seeming opposite by deploying the rhetoric of science” (Gusterson, 2020, para. 11). Trump himself invoked biblical language in declaring about the virus: “it’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear” while not long after promoting hydroxychloroquine, a highrisk malaria drug that increased chances of death for those who had COVID-19, claiming it “one of the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine” (para. 12). Other drugs Trump promoted included Remdesivir and azithromycin, despite published research urging caution about side effects (Freckelton, 2020). Trump’s unfounded promotion of hydroxychloroquine inspired a range of charlatans promoting quack cures, which were also quickly taken up by Trump.

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In one example, the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing promoted the use of chlorine dioxide as a way to kill the coronavirus. A few days later, Trump endorsed the treatment claiming it “knocks it out in a minute. One minute!” (Freckelton, 2020, para. 67). After Trump floated the use of bleach during a press conference, poison control centers across the U.S. reported an increase in emergency calls due to people attempting to apply the remedy (Glatter, 2020). Other COVID-19 quack cures ranged from the usual alternative herbal remedies on offer prior to the pandemic to the Dark Web marketing blood from recovered COVID patients, prompting different countries to pass laws regulating against such “cures” (Freckelton, 2020). In October 2020, Trump promised that a vaccine would be available in a matter of weeks, touting availability prior to the election (Dunn, 2020). One of the challenges facing the right-wing regarding vaccines involved on the one hand emphasizing its status as a quick cure needed for reopening businesses while on the other hand promoting conspiracy theories about mandatory vaccination or vaccines, including a tracking microchip developed by Bill Gates (Reuters Staff, 2020). Viewing vaccines as a quick cure also overlooked the problems of mass distribution and cold-temperature storage. Most of the existing vaccines required two doses, adding to the complexity of ensuring vaccination on a global scale (Saey, 2020). The sheer infrastructure required, including having enough of the right grade of sand needed to create the glass vials for the vaccines, to accessible physical locations with personnel for administering the vaccines to the necessity of continued precautions like mask wearing demanded a well-funded, national approach—not a privatized, atomized one that the capitalist class preferred. The insistence on a magical, single cure reached its apex when the Washington Post reported that in April 2020, a Pennsylvania nursing home for veterans administered a drug cocktail, including hydroxychloroquine, the drug repeatedly touted by Trump in press conferences: The drug regimen appeared to conflict with guidance from the Food and Drug Administration, which issued an emergency-use authorization for the drugs in late March but stressed they should be administered only during clinical trials or in hospitals providing “careful heart monitoring” and only after detailed discussions with patients and families about the risks. At the 238-bed nursing home, the treatment was given over the objections of some nurses, at times with little knowledge among patients’ families and largely hidden from lawmakers who have been probing the matter, according to interviews and emails. (Cenziper & Mulcahy, 2020, para. 6)

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The regimen was administered for over two weeks to 30 patients, including those who had not been previously tested for COVID-19 and who had health conditions that elevated their risk of severe side effects (para. 4). Since it was a nursing home environment, the residents were presumed positive status if two other residents tested positive. Essentially, the situation illustrated “how broadly the home turned to the unproven treatment and how a complex state bureaucracy went on to obscure critical decision-making in the midst of a pandemic (para. 12). 3.2 Setting a Date Rather than using current conditions to determine strategies for reopening, setting a date refers to using the calendar as a form of public performance to declare that “we will reopen by [insert date].” The act of date setting permeated everything from workplace and school policies to advertising, even though “the date” inevitably arrived with the pandemic still in full force accompanied by elevated infection rates and new shutdowns. As with repeated attempts at using date setting to predict the Christian rapture and the end of the world, the error was never questioned and a new date was set, thus beginning the cycle again. Trump established the standard for date setting when he declared in March 2020 that reopening by Easter would be “a beautiful timeline” since the virus would be gone by then (Perper, 2020, para. 11). He followed this by urging followers to fill up church services in celebration. This reflected the magic thinking behind date setting: There is this, I think, very comforting idea that as quickly as the coronavirus arrived, it will go away. There are these charts that have been widely circulated…that show very neat peaks, where the infections go up, and then they come right back down again. And when you look at the math behind these forecasts, you find that the assumptions that they use require that the disease go away as fast as it arrived. And in fact, when they correct their data for a steeper increase in infections, they have to correct on the other side, and have the disease going away just as fast. (Jackson, 2020, para. 15) Date setting was usually deployed at the very moment that COVID-19 infections were on the rise. For example, rather than invoking the slightest bit of paranoia—something Trump regularly did with every other issue—in reaction to the news in late March 2020 that the U.S. had passed China and Italy in terms of number of cases, he ramped up his dismissal of the threat (O’Toole, 2020a). This was followed by his and other Republican politicians’ repeated

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insistence on the need to reopen within a defined period of time. During the second wave of the virus in November 2020, the same cycle repeated itself, even though the death toll had long surpassed 250,000 with hospitals reaching capacity. While it seemed counterintuitive to rely on dates at these very moments that the pandemic was worsening, this starts to make sense when one considers what the date setting represents: The fundamental human need to confer meaning on events, particularly those bearing on livelihoods, makes people depend on mythic frameworks and “webs of meaning” not only to ennoble their daily efforts but to ward off the threat of nihilistic randomness or chaotic disorder. These frameworks serve to make sense of economic success, failure, prosperity, and devastation, not just for individuals but for groups as a whole. (Lynn, 2020, para. 2) Advertisers and politicians have long understood the psychology behind tapping into people’s deepest needs in order to create favorable conditions for capitalism. A major challenge, however, is that the pandemic itself represents “an argument against capitalism” in much the same way that the encroaching reality of climate change does (Heron, 2020, para. 34). It is itself a result of capitalism on a global scale in that the virus had readily attached itself to the flow of goods and commerce in order to spread. No amount of date setting was going to alter this fact, and infection rates continued to rise the more things reopened. However, as Jackson (2020) notes, the media had a vested interest in keeping the date-setting narrative going, especially at the point when things seemed dire: And I think that is underlying a lot of this wishful reporting, is that there’s a perceived need to get this over with, so we can get back to work. And so, you look for whatever hopeful signs you can point to, that say that it’s OK to go back to having economic activity, even though the virus is still out there. And in most places, where they’re talking about reopening, there’s far more cases now than there were when the economy was shut down in the first place. (para. 20) 3.3 You Can Accommodate Everyone Closely related to date setting was the notion reflected in the media and workplace that you can accommodate everyone by allowing all points of view and everyone’s input in making decisions to reopen, even as some perspectives

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relied entirely on COVID-19 conspiracy theories and others advocated for people risking their lives and health so that they could maintain existing levels of profit. One example of this was the disconnect between economic reality and the perception of Trump supporters during the 2020 election. In October, although the unemployment rate was down to nearly 7% from the double-digits in March, in January 2017 it was far lower at 4.8% (Peck, 2020, para.2). Evictions were escalating, 1 out of every 10 people in the U.S. reported food insecurity, and just over 1 million applied for unemployment (para. 3). However, when questioned about what issue mattered the most, 82% of those who voted for Trump stated “the economy,” with 4 out of 10 asserting that the economy was doing well (para. 5). These same voters also ranked the coronavirus at the bottom of their list of concerns. The framing of these points of view as equally valid as those who recognized the seriousness of the virus reflected the overall model of reporting in the media. Goodman (2020) analyzed this approach to journalism in the media’s presentation and coverage of “Obamagate,” an entirely fictional creation of the right-wing accusing Obama of various crimes and meant to distract from Trump’s lack of response to the pandemic. Instead of putting the testimony of a whistleblower who had documentation of Trump’s handling of the crisis, The New York Times buried the story in the middle, placing the Obamagate article on the front page. This echoed the paper’s similar approach to covering the impeachment hearings, attempting to equate both the Democrats’ and Republicans’ testimony, even though “the Republican reality was woven out of conspiratorial cloth” (para. 5). An additional example included Saturday editions of The Times and the Washington Post’s failure to cover the firing of Inspector General Steve Linick, who had opened up an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s use of a political appointee for personal services (para. 7). As Goodman concluded: The media’s methodology of false equivalence and the failure to provide proper coverage of the testimony of whistleblowers serves to foster political ignorance and cynicism in this country. If we are to avoid such cynicism, it is essential that the mainstream media provide the kind of information that enables citizens to tell the difference between fact and fiction. (para. 9) Ultimately, magical thinking in the form of being able to honor diametrically opposed viewpoints when it comes to making decisions about civil society has to do with the persistence of the populist mythologies of capitalism: meritocracy, the virtue of the work ethic in the face of eroding labor rights,

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prioritizing having jobs over the environment, and impeding solidarity by valorizing White, working-class, manual labor while dismissing other jobs as not “real work” (Lynn, 2020). This is further buttressed by religion in the form of the Prosperity Gospel, where those who are the long-suffering (White) victims of poverty at the hands of liberals and underrepresented groups will be blessed with wealth. As Lynn concludes, “even among populist and antiestablishment populations, pro-work themes have, if anything, become more central to their identities” (para. 16). Those who advocated for solutions such as universal unemployment stipends for stopping the spread of the virus were viewed as having an inferior work ethic to those who cynically advocated for herd immunity and reopening now: The last two decades provide ample evidence that conventional American mythologies have now reached such a breaking point. The rhetoric of populist politicians and surveys of the populace as a whole reveal a common sentiment: that the system is “rigged.” This sentiment has disproportionately taken hold among lower-income workers across both political parties, populations struggling to keep their heads above water as they try to cope with rising health-care costs and the disappearance of benefit-bearing jobs. (para. 8)

4

“COVID Fatigue”

An invention of the media, COVID fatigue refers to the idea that people have reached their point with public safety measures like shutdowns and limits on consumer-centered recreation, travel, bars and restaurants. This is distinct from what psychologists have identified as the manifestation of anxieties and other mental health problems due to the pandemic, also called COVID fatigue or pandemic fatigue (see Tomiyoshi, 2020). Apparently unable to sustain entertaining themselves for more than three months, consumer-centered COVID fatigue framed the customer, wallets at the ready, as helpless against an onslaught of an interfering government. COVID fatigue included concepts like: (1) overlooking that in addition to an already-retracting economy prior to the pandemic, people were voluntarily quarantining and opting out of indoor dining, events, and shopping rather than being “forced” to do so; (2) a refusal to confront the fragility of an economy propped up by tourism, recreation, and consumption rather than resources; which leads to (3) “we can’t hide forever”—a perversion of the common good where reopening was positioned as

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saving more lives than public health measures. COVID fatigue varied from initial acceptance (“I can understand shutting down the first two months, but not now”) to an all-out rejection of any type of government measures to contain the pandemic. 4.1 Overlooking Voluntary Quarantining A key component of the construct of COVID fatigue was the belief that shutdowns—not the people who are deciding to abstain from public shopping and dining—were to blame for a slow economic recovery. This involved overlooking voluntary quarantining as the primary motivator leading to a drop in consumer spending. At one point during the pandemic, within a one-week period, 778,000 people had applied for unemployment benefits (LaMonica, 2020, para. 1). Consumer spending followed the predictable path by dropping significantly, being “widespread across states and demographic groups” (Burris, 2020, para. 12). This was on top of an economy that had already been showing signs of slowing for the majority of Americans, despite the Trump administration’s hype about 401K account balances: Before the pandemic, income inequality had reached its highest levels since the Depression. Most Americans’ wages, when adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, have barely risen in four decades. In 2018, with the economy at its most robust in years, 61% of Americans said they could not cover a surprise expense of $400…53% of American households did not have an emergency savings account—including a quarter of those who earn more than $150,000 a year. (Petersen, 2020, para. 7) Rather than even taking these prior economic signs into consideration, a dominant talking point in the media was that much of the slow recovery during the pandemic could be attributed to states implementing restrictions, with the implication that the simple act of lifting those restrictions would restore the economy to its prior state. However, research conducted during the period of March-July 2020 demonstrated that shutdowns had a minimal effect on consumer confidence. These studies utilized financial, employment, credit card, and phone data to track movement and purchasing patterns, to create visual maps of these activities. One study determined that only 25% of unemployment claims were directly tied to stay-at-home orders, “suggesting that a majority of jobs that have been erased would have been lost without statewide shutdowns” (Cassella, 2020, para. 16). Instead, people holding off on spending and opting out of public places, as well as problems with supply chains, were

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major contributing factors, and these continued even after fully reopening, until the distribution of a vaccine (Baek, McCrory, Messer, & Mui, 2020). In a University of Chicago study, economists found that while overall consumer traffic dropped by 60%, only 7% of this could be attributed to legal restrictions (Burris, 2020, para. 10). As one example, the zip codes of major cities where small businesses were located had a significant impact on consumer confidence, rather than there being an identical drop across the board. For example, Chetty et al. (2020) found that during March-April, businesses located in affluent zip codes experienced a revenue drop of over 70% compared to only 30% from the least affluent zip codes: Zooming into specific subcategories, we find that spending on luxury goods that do not require physical contact—such as landscaping services or home swimming pools—did not fall, while spending at salons and restaurants plummeted. Businesses that offer fewer in person services, such as financial and professional services firms, also experienced much smaller losses. The fact that spending fell in proportion to the degree of physical exposure required across sectors suggests that the reduction in spending by the rich was driven primarily by health concerns rather than a reduction in income or wealth. Indeed, the incomes of the rich have fallen relatively little in this recession. (p. 3) In the case of more affluent people, they were able to work from home and used delivery services. These were the individuals that were holding off on significant spending in public places like restaurants, bars, and tourist attractions, open or not. Without their revenue, high-contact-sector small businesses couldn’t survive for long. Further, in states that did reopen, “spending and employment remained well below baseline levels…and did not rise more rapidly in states that reopened earlier relative to comparable states that reopened later” (Chetty et al., 2020, p. 4). Both consumer spending and employment rates also fell before the implementation of shutdowns, which suggests that people were already self-quarantining and adjusting their spending behaviors in anticipation of the virus: There is evidence that shows consumer confidence is what is sustaining the economy far more than government action. Meaning, no matter what President Donald Trump does, if people are too afraid to get out of quarantine, it won’t matter whether bars and businesses reopen or not. (Burris, 2020, para. 9)

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Echoing these findings, Baek et al. (2020) concluded that “any economic recovery that arises from undoing stay-at-home orders will be limited if the underlying pandemic is not resolved,” which required making stopping viral spread and public health a priority (para. 15). One example of this included the U.S. restaurant industry losing more than 110,000 bars and eating establishments since the pandemic started, including in states that had long since reopened fully (McCarthy, 2020, para. 1). This represented 17% of current establishments either being permanently closed or facing long-term closures (para. 2). Reopening also failed to be a panacea when it came to staffing issues. Cassella (2020) presented a common example from the food service industry, one of the key sectors impacted by people avoiding eating indoors: Think of a restaurant: They’re not going to be able to bring back their entire staff because they’re just not going to have the clientele…That’s going to hinder the return of the workforce, because while we’re going to open up, we’re not going to open up to the full capacity that we were at before. (para. 10) Even if a restaurant was able to survive by ramping up carryout and delivery, additional problems included employees or even the owners who contracted the virus and had to quarantine—in some cases, an entire kitchen staff could be unavailable for a shift, forcing temporary closures and financial losses. Businesses across all sectors were faced with the problem of “replacement planning” or how to prepare other employees to step in during these situations where “multiple jobs are likely to go unfilled at the same time” (Cappelli, 2020, para. 6). Finding temporary replacement staff wasn’t successful because several businesses were in the same situation with substitute workers in short supply. Not only did reopening have a negligible impact on businesses’ revenue, polling demonstrated strongly that the majority of people continued to support partial or full shutdowns. In one poll, 77% of participants felt that there would continue to be an increase in coronavirus cases, and this would be tied to reopening, with only 8% very certain that reopening wouldn’t lead to an increase in cases (Impelli, 2020, para. 7). Only 17% strongly opposed shutting down again compared to 57% who support additional closures (para. 4). In another poll, 63% felt that businesses were reopening prematurely (para. 10). When asked when they felt it would be safe to meet with others in groups of 10 or more, the majority of participants in yet another poll selected a time period

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ranging from late 2020 to after January 2021 (Meyerson, 2020, para. 3). Much of this hinged on the condition of a vaccine. The conclusion of those who have studied the impact of consumer confidence on the economy was that “we’ve been chasing a bit of a false narrative that the economic hit is about the restrictions and not the disease itself” (Cassella, 2020, para. 12). Instead, “it really is about the disease, and how fearful people are about getting sick, and how businesses are going to operate in a world where this virus is with us” (para. 12). For Chetty et al. (2020), rather than being an impediment, government’s role needed to be increased, not decreased. Traditional methods of stimulating the economy were not going to work because the virus required major readjustments to sectors that require close contact. Solutions like continual stipends were necessary to keep small businesses and workers afloat since close contact indoors remained high-risk until the vaccine was available. In short, this meant facing reality by abandoning the COVID fatigue frame: And this is where the pandemic, and the economic collapse that’s accompanied it, comes in. Its wreckage is so vast, so all-encompassing, that no amount of presidential rhetoric, no calls for patriotic mass consumption, can conceal it. The illusion has been shattered. We’re buying less because we’re scared for the economic future and concerned for the workers who make buying things possible, but we’re also buying less because the actual act of purchasing—at least in person—is a risk. (Petersen, 2020, para. 41) Even after the availability of a vaccine and businesses reopening by late May 2021, consumer spending continued this trend. Those who were fully vaccinated remained hesitant to resume prior spending, especially in the areas of travel, eating out, and heavily attended spaces like malls while those who were unvaccinated were driving the majority of the economic recovery to date (Cambon, 2021, para. 2). 4.2 Refusal to Confront a Consumption-Dependent Economy Embedded within COVID fatigue was a lack of analysis about the structures of capitalism, specifically its current forms that are centered on ramping up consumerism versus meeting human needs. This refusal to confront a consumption-dependent economy has exposed the fragility of having entire sectors of the U.S. economy that are built around things like tourism, recreation, dining out, and the beauty industry. In many areas of the country, such as tourist towns, this can decimate an entire geographic region. As soon as the pandemic hit, these weaknesses became apparent, and the dominoes began to

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fall in the form of job loss, primarily in low-wage sectors that served more affluent clients: As businesses lost revenue, they passed the incidence of the shock on to their employees. Low wage hourly workers in small businesses in affluent areas are especially likely to have lost their jobs. In the highest-rent ZIP codes, more than 65% of workers at small businesses were laid off within two weeks after the COVID crisis began; by contrast, in the lowest-rent ZIP codes, fewer than 30% lost their jobs. Workers at larger firms and in tradable sectors (e.g., manufacturing) were much less likely to lose their jobs than those working in small businesses producing non-tradable goods, irrespective of their geographic location. (Chetty et al., 2020, p. 4) What made this recession unique compared to past ones was that rather than there being a major reduction in spending on durable goods such as cars or appliances, the decline hit things like hotels, bars, restaurants, and personal service businesses, all of which required people to be in close contact with clients in enclosed spaces (Chetty et al., 2020). This exposed a further weakness of depending on this sector where over half of the drop in credit card spending came from households in the top 25% of income distribution (p. 2). Essentially, “the rich account for a larger share of total spending to begin with” and they cut back on expenses by 17% as compared to lower-income households who only reduced spending by 4% (p. 2). Further, cities that had more diverse economic sectors (e.g., New York, San Francisco) were able to maintain some stability as compared to locations like Houston or Phoenix that either plateaued or became harder hit (Burris, 2020). Petersen’s (2020) insightful essay I Don’t Feel Like Buying Stuff Anymore, combined analysis of her shift in thinking about the economy during the pandemic with an examination of the roots of this dependency on pure consumption. She traced current purchasing patterns to “the golden age of American capitalism” (roughly 1950–1970) where wages were high, work was more secure (at least for Whites) and certain aspirational mythologies took hold, such as the house with the white picket fence, the nuclear family, and working your way through college. These beliefs, promoted by advertising, began to attach themselves to an array of products and experiences such as commercialization of holidays or the family vacation, culminating in conflating the act of purchasing with the civic self: In post–World War II America, the vast majority of things we buy are often not what we actually need. But they’re indisputably things we want:

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manifestations of personal and collective abundance. We buy because we’re bored, or because planned obsolescence forces us to replace items we can’t fix. We buy to accumulate objects meant to communicate our class and what sort of person we are. We buy because we want to feel something or change something, and purchasing something is the quickest way to do so…We buy because, from the Great Depression onward, how we consume has become deeply intertwined with how we think of ourselves as citizens. (Petersen, 2020, para. 6) A central support system for this mindset includes the financial industry in the form of credit lines, simple loans, and payday lending, which artificially props up a consumer-based economy. Despite having limited amounts of discretionary funds, people are carrying an average household credit card debt of just over $6,000, with the average interest rate of credit cards sitting at 16.8% (Petersen, 2020, para. 8). Essentially, “the middle class is going deeper and deeper into debt to maintain the expenditures of a middle-class identity” with the working class facing even higher interest rates (para. 8). The civic self that is centered on consumption, rather than actual human needs, creates an artificial level of activity around goods and services with the requirement of always purchasing more. However, as Petersen asks, “when a society-throttling, economy-decimating pandemic comes along, what happens when that ability—and, just importantly, that desire—goes away?” (para. 10). This is reflected in a 16.4% drop in retail spending with clothing purchases decreasing by close to 80% (para. 10). While Petersen (2020) acknowledged that there was a good chance that people would find COVID-19-relevant ways to adapt their consuming behaviors, she brought up another provocative possibility: what if we don’t ever go back? She noted the increase in home-centered activities like learning to cook and mix drinks, gardening, home improvement projects, and arts/crafts, which provide alternatives to the alienated labor of capitalism. There also was a bartering-centered exchange network that formed on social media where people were giving away toys and electronics to those interested, illustrating that “just because you aren’t buying anything or buying less, doesn’t mean you aren’t experiencing new things, doing new things, figuring out new things” (para. 45). Petersen (2020) noticed how women, in particular, began to question the need for makeup and clothing, despite aggressive efforts to market sweatpants and leggings to those working from home. In articulating the nightmare of the capitalist class, one woman that Petersen interviewed declared, “I find myself wanting to be sold to less” after noticing how many products make ridiculous claims (para. 13). Another woman explained that it seemed inconsequential

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to worry about hair and makeup when people were being laid off. Noting how the experience of quarantining during a pandemic can feel both like the world is small and repetitive or “almost calming…either way, there are only so many pairs of leggings I need to navigate this new life” (para. 2). Even more frightening for the capitalist class, Petersen’s essay culminated in this provocative conclusion, which decimates the construct of COVID fatigue: What if we decided that things didn’t have to be the way they were before all of this happened? Part of that shift would involve taxing the rich and disarticulating healthcare from employment; it would involve forming and protecting unions and focusing on reimplementing regulatory systems, decentralizing production, and restoring the supply chain. And it could also mean disabusing ourselves of the idea that buying things is a solution to our problems. (para. 54) 4.3 “We Can’t Hide Forever” The culmination of COVID fatigue was the fatalistic conclusion that death and ill health are inevitable, so the priority needs to be restoring the economy at all costs, not stopping the spread of the virus. This was expressed in the flippant statement, “We can’t hide forever.” In this context, “hiding” refers to any sort of reasonable precaution like self-quarantining, avoiding indoor dining, holding off on gatherings of any size, or transitioning to working from home when possible. The implication was that people who took these steps were somehow cowardly, as if it is irrational that a pandemic might inspire protective responses: You do see a lot of coverage that assumes that the two choices are to sit in our homes and have people basically go bankrupt as they can’t work, or else to force them back into the workplace and have them take their chances with the coronavirus. And the idea that you could support people through this crisis, give people the resources they need, delay obligations like rent and debt repayment and so forth, that these things could be put off while we deal with the crisis—it’s not really being seriously considered as an option. The idea that the landlord must get paid seems to be a sacred cow that really can’t be trifled with. (Jackson, 2020, para. 29) Another implication behind “we can’t hide forever” was the notion that people were secondary considerations. Instead of ending COVID, ending COVID fatigue was the number one goal. However, there was pushback to this expectation. Responding to Trump’s remark “we can’t have the cure be worse than

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the problem,” New York Mayor Andrew Cuomo declared, “My mother is not expendable. Your mother is not expendable. God forbid, if you can’t keep up, you are expendable” (Greenberg, 2020, p. 10). Cuomo’s remarks went viral because they expressed what many people were feeling at the time and continue to feel now, leading to important questions about the roles and responsibilities of government concerning human life. Additionally, it is quite telling that polling continued to show overwhelming support for restrictions related to stopping the spread of the virus. This included close to half of Republicans and nearly 70% of people who had either lost their jobs or had a reduction in pay (Beckett, 2020, para. 9). Even states such as Georgia—one of the more relaxed in terms of restrictions—2/3 of the population expressed concerns that these restrictions were being lifted too quickly (Cassella, 2020, para. 11). Rather than being a confirmation of COVID fatigue, across the United States, all governors who oversaw the implementation of serious measures to stop the spread of the virus experienced high approval ratings, with governors of states that did virtually nothing, seeing the lowest ratings (Cassella, 2020; Krugman, 2020). Cassella (2020) reports that only 39% of Georgia residents approved of Governor Kemp’s response to the pandemic (para. 11). It seemed the only real fatigue that set in was in reaction to the absence of Republican leadership.

5

Subsidizing Normalcy

Subsidizing normalcy involved the expectation that the working class would ultimately suppress their concerns about the coronavirus and lay their lives on the line to sustain the illusion that capitalism will revert to its prior successes. The insistence on returning to normal included: 1) downplaying options that facilitated working or attending school from home; 2) an absolute refusal to implement national responses like employment stipends so that people could safely remain at home; 3) inevitable supply chain problems due to privileging atomized, state-level responses; and 4) maintaining “the bottom line no matter what.” 5.1 Downplaying At-Home Work and School Options Despite an emphasis on 21st century skills—including workplace and school district initiatives around telework, technology, one-on-one learning, the issuing of laptops and tablets to schools and employees, and curricular adaptations prior to the pandemic—it was remarkable how quickly these all vanished from the media after the issuing of stay-at-home orders. Because schools

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are central to the functioning of a capitalist economy (serving as childcare and career-training centers), downplaying at-home work and school options was necessary. Employers also lost some of the key surveillance mechanisms with employees working from their homes. Therefore, the idea seemed to be making working and attending school from home as inconvenient and unpleasant as possible so that people would be compelled to go back in person as part of the return to normalcy. Contrary to media portrayals, working from home is not something strange. As recently as 2016, 43% of employees in the U.S. worked remotely at least part of the time (Cappelli, 2002, para. 5). Yet during stay-at-home orders, employers seemed suddenly unfamiliar with this arrangement, increasing their reliance on surveillance-based mechanisms. These included the videoconferencing platform Zoom’s “attention tracking,” where employers were notified during a meeting if someone navigated away from the meeting screen for a few seconds (Morrison, 2020). Though initially designed by Zoom for training purposes to ensure people were viewing tutorial videos, employers saw the usefulness of this app for controlling employees away from the office. Eventually enough backlash caused Zoom to disable the feature. Other activity trackers included Slack (which gave an employer access to private messages) or TeamViewer “which mirrors everything from an employee’s laptop onto their desktop computer, which is still in the office” thus allowing the employer to view everything (para. 7). As one employee noted, “I barely get to stand up and stretch as opposed to when I am physically in the office…the TeamViewer logs me out for being idle or my manager randomly sends a check-in email that I must reply to promptly” (para. 8). Other monitoring programs took random screen shots of an employee’s laptop or register key strokes, sending this info to the employer. These solutions were also being explored for K-12 and postsecondary remote learning classrooms. Barriers were even greater for K-12 and college students attending school online. Certainly, work and childcare made this form of schooling nearly impossible for many U.S. households, with 35% facing challenges maintaining the routine of school and close to 20% having trouble finding childcare because they have to be at work (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2020, para. 15). Close to 16 million K-12 public-school students did not have access to an internet connection or device suited for remote learning (Rosen, 2020, para. 16). Even in those households with an Internet connection, 35% did not have sufficient connections to handle the demands of remote learning (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2020, para. 16). Additionally, 10% of public-school teachers lacked adequate Internet connection speed (Rosen, 2020, para. 16). Students without access to the Internet had previously relied on free Wi-Fi

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from restaurants and libraries, and many of these were closed for carryout only or had limited hours. This represented a further impact on remote learning. The privatized Internet infrastructure in the U.S. was perhaps the largest barrier of all. Telecommunications companies are designed to maximize profit, not to prioritize accessibility. Currently, the U.S. ranks 15th out of 34 countries when it comes to broadband usage, making it a second-tier communications country (Rosen, 2020, para. 11). Close to 163 million people in the U.S. are not using broadband speed Internet (para. 15). Those who do have broadband pay premium prices for it, and many of the discounts that companies offered during the pandemic are ending at the conclusion of 2020. For example, due to the pandemic, Comcast offered customers who weren’t on their expensive unlimited data plan “credit” for data usage over the limit, so that they would become accustomed to charges for exceeding the new limits (a charge of $10 per 50GB of data), starting in 2021 (Lyons, 2020, para. 2). This essentially compelled customers to sign on to the unlimited data plan, especially with more people working and attending school from home. 5.2 Refusal to Implement a National Response One of the more alarming outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic was the Trump administration’s refusal to implement a national response in the face of a clear need for large-scale solutions. Some attributed this refusal to a eugenics-influenced reliance on natural herd immunity, as when it was later revealed that Health and Human Services appointee Paul Alexander declared in an email, “we want them infected” (Diamond, 2020, para. 3). Yet hands-off, individualized approaches were simply not up to the task when you had over 20.4 million people depending on unemployment benefits, with no signs of stopping (La Monica, 2020, para. 7). In hard-hit states like Georgia, just over 40% of the state’s employees filed for unemployment assistance (Cassella, 2020, para. 2). Rural households experienced job loss or reduced wages and cut hours, with 43% falling into those situations (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2020, para. 14). One out of every five renters were evicted by the end of 2020 (Burris, 2020, para. 5). This was on top of an ongoing health care crisis where 20% of households were unable to obtain medical care, and more than 1 in 3 households with people who had disabilities experiencing challenges affording essentials like food or paying for utilities (paras. 12–13). One third of the workforce earned less than twelve dollars an hour, with the majority of those not receiving employer-provided health coverage (Hedges, 2020, para. 25). The situation was exacerbated with insurance being tied to a privatized network of employer-sponsored coverage, so if one lost their job or was laid off, they then lost coverage or had to rely on expensive alternatives.

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Further, certain segments of the population facing these problems were harder hit than others. These included Black and Latinx households, with four out of ten reporting the depletion of savings during the pandemic (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2020, para. 11). The net worth of Black households dropped 40%, with a 46% drop for Latinx households (Hedges, 2020, para. 25). Of the already large numbers of Americans who were not able to afford health insurance, over 30% of those were Black, reflecting a historical legacy of separating Black communities from access to hospitals and health coverage (Yong, 2020, para. 45). Compared to an unemployment rate of 5.8% for White males, the rate for Black males was nearly double (Peck, 2020, para. 11). Peck speculates that this “relative well-being of White men compared to all other groups was likely a factor in support of Trump…that things are returning to the proper order in terms of Black people’s relative position” (para. 16). High rates of Black unemployment were therefore not seen as enough of a justification to enact additional stimulus funding. In addition to the economic barriers facing many during the pandemic were the logistical ones. Ruhle (2020) related several challenges that remain unaddressed by existing employment policies that she encountered when she found herself asymptomatic yet diagnosed with the virus. In attempting (often unsuccessfully) to contact people she may have encountered to warn them about her positive status, she recounted: The woman who cuts my hair canceled her Thanksgiving, took her kids out of school, stopped going to work and made no money for nearly two weeks. Her test, which she spent three hours waiting to get, came back eight days later. It was negative. But how many people can put their lives, livelihoods and jobs on hold just to do the right thing? Hourly wage workers are going to work sick because they can’t afford not to work. Many of their employers are ignoring the symptoms, because they are trying to keep business alive. Testing remains a challenge—and there are no consequences for people who don’t self-isolate while they wait several days just to get results, especially if they have no or minimal symptoms. (paras. 11–12) The only reasonable approach at this point was to implement a serious, large-scale solution in the form of what countries like South Korea, New Zealand, Australia and Germany had done: widespread testing, isolating those with the virus, contact tracing, and more importantly, financial support in the form of stipends for people and small businesses for the duration of the virus (Gould, 2020; Horseley, 2020; Marchman, 2020). For example, in countries such

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as France, Japan, and the Netherlands, payrolls became nationalized in the form of continuous wage subsidies with no interruptions to paychecks (Goodman, Cohen, & Chaundler, 2020). In contrast, the U.S. Senate blocked a onetime $2,000 stimulus payment, considering that too generous while pressing for the even more miserly $600 initially proposed (Pramuk, 2020). For those still employed, an extension of paid sick leave was critical as were allowances for working at home to protect the health of immunocompromised family members. Yet, rather than addressing these pressing needs, the existing neoliberal stimulus package was woefully inadequate, as Pankova and Barrow (2020) outlined: The government is keeping corporations afloat for the long haul during a time when they can’t turn a profit while the $1200 stimulus checks were a one-time thing and unemployment insurance runs out after 4 months… the top 1% get a government benefit 1400 times the value of those little stimulus checks for those in the bottom 75%. It’s worse than the 2008 bailouts. The single largest spending package in the history of the United States is also the greatest upward redistribution of wealth in the history of capitalism. (para. 16) In the meantime, rather than endorsing the Trump administration’s decentralized approach to the pandemic, the public responded positively to those state-level leaders who took decisive action regarding public health. In particular, Greenberg (2020) traces the emergence of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who, in the absence of a coordinated national response, served as a trusted source of information and leadership during the pandemic: Almost overnight, the “establishment” politician, with intimate knowledge of the levers of power and how to use them, had become indispensable. Every day at around noon Cuomo took his seat at a long table with his advisors and rolled out the latest data. (p. 9) Even though Cuomo was initially cautious about large-scale responses early in the pandemic, he consistently acknowledged the seriousness of the virus. This was the opposite of Trump’s approach to downplaying the pandemic by discouraging testing and reporting statistics on the virus. Despite resistance from the White House, Cuomo was able to start a testing system in New York and secure emergency funding. He sensed early on that there would be no national response coming, despite the use of battlefield metaphors about fighting the

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virus: “only one side was armed in this war, and the only effective tactic against it was to retreat en masse and hide” (p. 10). 5.3 Supply Chain Problems The refusal to use a coordinated, national-level response exposed several supply chain problems in the form of shortages and access to important services like hospitalization and testing. By prioritizing reopening over other solutions, it was inevitable that this supply chain would become vulnerable to various challenges. Even the way the coronavirus relief was distributed revealed problems with making sure funds ended up where intended. For example, much of the government stimulus money that people received went to large companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart with strong mail order platforms, not small, local businesses (Chetty et al., 2020; Rosalski, 2020). While people did spend this money on durable goods, this did nothing to address the larger unemployment problem in service sectors like restaurants or salons. The same was the case with the $500 billion Paycheck Protection Program, aimed at providing forgivable loans to small businesses with less than 500 employees. Because many small businesses are service-centered, they were not able to overcome the lack of foot traffic due to people opting to remain at home, and therefore saw little improvement (Rosalski, 2020). Additionally, a significant portion of the funds ended up going to wealthy individuals (including the family of Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner), religious organizations, and already-well-off businesses (Popken & Lehren, 2020). O’Toole (2020) quotes writer George Packer who accurately compared the U.S. response to the coronavirus to countries like Belarus or Pakistan that have “shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering” (para. 4). In comparing the U.S. with other countries like Japan, France, Canada, and South Korea—who responded earlier and decisively—it was no surprise to see abysmal results in the U.S. in key areas: slow, uneven implementation of stay-at-home orders, using targeted rather than universal travel bans, not enforcing mask mandates and insufficient testing and contact tracing (Walker, 2020). Hospitals were also unprepared, facing a shortage of key protective equipment, as Yong (2020) explained: After 2014, several centers created specialized treatment units designed for Ebola—a highly lethal but not very contagious disease. These units were all but useless against a highly transmissible airborne virus like SARS-CoV-2. Nor were hospitals ready for an outbreak to drag on for

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months. Emergency plans assumed that staff could endure a few days of exhausting conditions, that supplies would hold, and that hard-hit centers could be supported by unaffected neighbors…The COVID-19 pandemic is not a discrete disaster. It is a 50-state catastrophe that will likely continue at least until a vaccine is ready. (para. 37) Pollan (2020) examined how the U.S. food supply chain centered on factory farming and large, exclusive contracts requiring specialized equipment was extremely vulnerable during a pandemic: Four companies now process more than 80% of beef cattle in America; another four companies process 57% of hogs. A single Smithfield processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, processes 5% of the pork Americans eat. When an outbreak of Covid-19 forced the state’s governor to shut that plant down in April, the farmers who raise pigs committed to it were stranded. (p. 4) The pigs were too expensive to keep alive and too big for much of the slaughtering equipment to process, so they had to be euthanized. Pollan related the case of a chicken farmer who had an exclusive contract for liquid eggs for school cafeterias, which soon became irrelevant due to schools being closed. Because he did not have the grading and packaging equipment to sell eggs for retail, even when there was an egg shortage, he was not able to quickly adapt for a different market. The irony was that “the very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to pile it high and sell it cheap” had empty shelves throughout the pandemic (Pollan, 2020, p. 4). Essentially, “the US has two separate food chains,” that each supply about half of the market: retail and institutional (p. 4). It was the second food chain that collapsed due to people staying at home, resulting in a surplus of food at the very moment food banks had cars lined up around the block. Despite this, many local family farms adapted to the existing situation by changing the formats of farmers’ markets to center on delivery and subscription produce boxes to fill in the gap as well as fostering the switch to cooking at home. People also reflected further on the problems inherent with mass factory farming, from employee abuse to environmental concerns. It is safe to say in the quest to make reopening at any cost the only priority, capitalism unfettered from any state interventions showed itself incapable of solving problems on a mass scale:

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In many ways, the pandemic has functioned as a great clarifier, making it impossible to ignore the dilapidated state of so many American systems. It’s highlighted whose work is actually essential, which leaders actually care about people who aren’t like them, and whose lives are considered expendable. The supply chain is broken; the social safety net is in shambles. And a whole lot of things we thought of as needs have revealed themselves to be pretty deeply unnecessary. (Petersen, 2020, para. 11) Whether focusing on outdated and racist concepts of borders when it came to citizenship and labor (Yuval-Davis & Wemyss, 2020) or presenting inadequate market-based solutions to address the looming climate crisis, “it is all too obvious that capitalists are improvising and improvising badly” (Heron, 2020, para. 49). 5.4 Maintaining the Bottom Line, No Matter What During the pandemic, the media made it clear that the number one priority was restoring economic normalcy, with health a secondary concern. Maintaining the bottom line, no matter what was reflective of capitalist realism, the notion that there are no viable alternatives to existing economic relations (Heron, 2020). Part of maintaining the bottom line included a focus on hyper-individualist conceptions of risk while “reinforcing existing hierarchies of race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability” which have been part of capitalism long before the pandemic, especially reflective in social support and health care systems (Epstein-Levi, 2020, para. 11). Along with maintaining the bottom line came the expectation that the working class would willingly sacrifice themselves to restore a normalcy that, in reality, benefitted very few: The “re-open now!” demand presumes some may have to be sacrificed for the economy and its link to the power and power-position of the nation. Here, the potential sacrifice (deaths!) entailed in re-opening the economy before it is safe to do so is generally wrapped in patriotism. We may just have to lose some to protect the “greater good,” the economic status of the nation. (Pankova & Barrow, 2020, para. 25) The push for normalcy overlooked the fact that, for most people, “normal” in the pre-pandemic era meant being burned out, stressed, in financial precarity, and saddled with debt in what is essentially a gig economy that has a labyrinthine health care system, few unions, and no safety net (Petersen, 2020). Yet, this was the normal that the working class was supposed to subsidize with their health and lives:

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After a brief respite where it seemed that another world was possible, we have been thrown forcefully back into this world, a world where capital reigns supreme, where it is not inconceivable to let people die so that capitalism might live and where we must bail out private companies with public money…“Whatever it takes” is the new “there is no alternative.” (Heron, 2020, para. 8) This was reflected in the claim that “the cure is worse than the disease,” implying that there was only the choice to risk your health or life or the entire economic system will collapse. The solution was to make returning to work/ school, shopping, and dining out as more appealing than “a new politics of mutuality that might redistribute power and resources in an egalitarian way” (Lowndes, 2020, para. 3). For Heron (2020), capitalist realism has given way to capitalist catastrophism, a state where “capital’s self-undermining and ecologically destructive dynamics have outstripped capitalism’s power to control them (para. 11). The problem is that “we’re in a bind, which is that the health of this destructive economic order is intimately linked to the health of human beings,” thus, the pressure to reopen before the spread of the virus can be controlled (Pankova & Barrow, 2020, para. 10). Capitalist catastrophism maintains the bottom line in the form of 130,000 to 210,000 deaths that could have been avoided if decisive action had been taken at the start of the pandemic (Walker, 2020, para. 1). It has literally come down to dying for the Dow (Krugman, 2020).

6

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The media, in reflecting the interests of the capitalist class, only intensified its emphasis on returning to normal. This was despite the U.S. entering a far more devastating second spike in cases of COVID-19 in the late fall of 2020. While the push for reopening and public acts of consumption that are built into holiday and family gatherings seemed irrational against this backdrop, it was business as usual ideologically speaking: The capitalist class, those who benefit most from the unequal system, they know it’s not sustainable…they’re desperate not to stay locked down too long, so people get used to fresh air, breathing air without carbon in it… people might get ideas of a different kind of world. (Beckett, 2020, para. 21) This opportunity to reflect on different possibilities is the very thing that is intolerable to business interests. In examining the failures of capitalism that Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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the pandemic has revealed, people began to consider the importance of structural responses rather than the stratified, insufficient ones that treat people as atomized, self-interested individuals. The alternatives to this came into focus, as Petersen (2020) outlined: What if we decided that things didn’t have to be the way they were before all of this happened? Part of that shift would involve taxing the rich and disarticulating healthcare from employment; it would involve forming and protecting unions and focusing on reimplementing regulatory systems, decentralizing production, and restoring the supply chain. And it could also mean disabusing ourselves of the idea that buying things is a solution to our problems. (Petersen, 2020, para. 54) Part of the power of these possibilities lie in the fact that rather than being the plot lines that we see in dystopian fiction and movies, “under capitalist catastrophism we no longer need to imagine the end of the world, we watch it in real time” (Heron, 2020, para. 16). The pandemic causes us to think about the larger looming inevitability of climate change and the fact that governments seem to lack the will to meaningfully respond if there is still a chance to prioritize profit. If a coronavirus that has a global death toll of over 3,400,000 isn’t enough to cause alarm, what will the outcome be if the next pandemic (an inevitable certainty due to global warming) has an even higher mortality rate? If implementing basic public health measures to contain the spread of a virus is considered “controversial” and these efforts are regularly challenged in court, what assurances of protection will be available the next time around? At least these questions are being considered and the pandemic has provided the space to think about the outcomes. Greenberg (2020) concluded that the haze of anti-expertise in the U.S. may have finally broken, based on the popularity of scientists and Democratic governors who took a firm stance in defense of public health. They have been the ones to take the lead, despite Trump and his distractions. At the same time, Epstein-Levi (2020) reminds us that “we must not lose sight of where the burden of risk management ought to fall” (para. 14). This means moving from blaming marginalized people—many of whom have no choice but to work or die—for individual behaviors and instead holding institutions accountable “for their unconscionable dereliction of duty” (para. 14). The responsibility lies with those who have allowed over 250,000 people to die “as a grim tribute to their own will to power without apparent risk to their own welfare” (para. 14). Petersen’s (2020) interviews with people who were financially able to quarantine revealed that while there was fear and uncertainty about the pandemic, their experiences offered them “time and mental space to actually think about Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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the way we spend and its effects on others” (para. 48). One man noticed “how many of these bad shit purchases are attempts to create control and satisfaction from circumstances where I seem to have little” (para. 51). He continued to speculate that if we were able to reflect and focus in this way, rather than giving our emotional energy to the current structure of our jobs, we could rethink how we consume. Other interviewees grappled with the larger question of how to confront capitalism itself, something they had not thought about previously since they had not noticed the many ways it shaped their work and life worlds. It took a momentary disruption to their daily routine to reveal that there could be other options to work or die, as one of the interviewees noted: “I don’t know that there are any answers to this…I just don’t want to return to the world as it was” (para. 62).

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Heron, K. (2020). Capitalist catastrophism. Roar. https://roarmag.org/magazine/ capitalist-catastrophism/?fbclid=IwAR0urdsXJ8ekzyoKwchY4mYpkyYhvfXFwekeN hsZFhKrPjz3zrQtENrbU44 Hess, A. (2020, March 25). Can you be fired for working from home? CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/can-you-be-fired-for-working-from-home.html Horsley, S. (2020, July 30). 3 months of hell: US economy drops 32.9% in worst GDP ever. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/30/ 896714437/3-months-of-hell-u-s-economys-worst-quarter-ever?utm_term= nprnews&utm_campaign=npr&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium= social&fbclid=IwAR3aUk3m8_gIGEfdCYwt5LONwXWkLc59scx8c1LcQGIA2JlG1A wgM4Cn7SQ Impelli, M. (2020, July 8). Majority of Americans support closing down economy again over coronavirus spike: Poll. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/majorityamericans-support-closing-down-economy-again-over-coronavirus-spike-poll1516374 Jackson, J. (2020, May 7). There’s a perceived need to get this over with so we can get back to work. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. https://fair.org/home/theres-aperceived-need-to-get-this-over-with-so-we-can-get-back-to-work/ Joseph, D. (2020, November 16). Perspectives and decisions in a COVID-19 world. Academe Blog. https://academeblog.org/2020/11/16/perspectives-and-decisions-ina-covid-19-world/?link_id=13&can_id=b588df107fb3fc1137b3f6d154f9b633&source= email-september-academe-newsletter-8&email_referrer=email_1007269&email_ subject=december-academe-newsletter King, K. (2020, November 30). Governor Stitt declares day of prayer and fasting for those impacted by COVID-19. Oklahoma News, 4. https://kfor.com/news/local/govstitt-declares-day-of-prayer-and-fasting-for-those-impacted-by-covid-19/ Koma, W., Neuman, T., Claxton, G., Rae, M., Kates, J., & Michaud, J. (2020, April 23). How many adults are at risk of serious illness if infected with coronavirus? Updated data. KFF. https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/how-many-adultsare-at-risk-of-serious-illness-if-infected-with-coronavirus/ La Monica, P. (2020, November 25). Another 778,000 Americans filed first-time unemployment claims last week. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/25/ economy/unemployment-benefits-coronavirus/index.html?fbclid=IwAR25E vqypo9YbrqTOs_PB4GMYizh8RpvSnoSCMJMErW-eaNF-TImaJ-vkCg Li, Y. (2020, June 29). Nearly half of the US population is without a job, showing how far the labor recovery has to go. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/29/nearlyhalf-the-us-population-is-without-a-job-showing-how-far-the-labor-recovery-hasto-go.html?fbclid=IwAR302LunPR2c_PC8whAWmzk_Y9e523tGn5U--8DYBhQv1qJ3WxqFcraDBo

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Lowndes, J. (2020, April 30). The morbid ideology behind the drive to reopen America. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideologybehind-drive-reopen-america?fbclid=IwAR2uoELBGp6XwavQyy9xoLIvRHLXTJuH eQ9a8dw_1zDbpOpYfyQrWUKfYlk Lynn, A. (2020, Fall). How enduring the promise? Economic myths in a time of rupture. The Hedgehog Review. https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/america-on-the-brink/ articles/how-enduring-the-promise?fbclid=IwAR1e5cTgw5ltLYXuDO8xl8Wh4Q ujSkEnh0mPJGwry7mKAYFhGKqSve3I_QE Lyons, K. (2020, November 23). Comcast to impose home internet data cap of 1.2tb in more than a dozen US states next year. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/ platform/amp/2020/11/23/21591420/comcast-cap-data-1-2tb-home-users-internetxfinity?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR2UdhU-dYOUmCR9ZNvlo11hdXpH oF7GSMc8xxWPl4YJ6uvVorhWKwfDTSU Marchman, T. (2020, April 24). The right wing wants you to die. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkej8y/the-right-wing-wants-you-to-die?utm_ campaign=sharebutton&fbclid=IwAR2EA7boh-o7mNv8ozaZAoek9LAgljtt_ hgnsV8fKNaHfVyplKtLoRXL5es Marnin, T., & Cima, C. (2020, October 7). Employment law considerations for returning to the workplace in a COVID-19 world. White & Case. https://www.whitecase.com/ publications/alert/employment-law-considerations-returning-workplace-covid-19world McCarthy, K. (2020, December 8). Good morning America. https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/food/story/restaurant-closures-top110000-industry-continues-spiral-federal-74603528 McEvoy, J. (2020, December 1). 1 in every 800 North Dakota residents now dead from Covid. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/01/1-in-every800-north-dakota-residents-now-dead-from-covid/?utm_campaign=forbes&utm_ source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_term=Valerie&fbclid=IwAR0Vahm1T ZnDOWNuWJ6N2Wuco5lL74bshWTy0o2cpMk2-Ma2cGvzYaluVVs&sh= 237c42314555 McKrimmon, K. (2020, November 5). The truth about COVID-19 and asymptomatic spread. UC Health. https://www.uchealth.org/today/the-truth-about-asymptomatic-spread-of-covid-19/ McMahon, S. (2020, November 23). TSA records its busiest travel weekend since March. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11/23/airportflight-thanksgiving-covid/ Meyerson, H. (2020, May 14). Those unrepresentative guys with guns. The American Prospect. https://prospect.org/blogs/tap/those-unrepresentative-guys-with-guns/ Morrison, S. (2020, April 2). Just because you’re working from home doesn’t mean your boss isn’t watching you. Vox. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/2/21195584/ coronavirus-remote-work-from-home-employee-monitoring

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Opening Up American Again Guidelines. (2020). https://www.whitehouse.gov/wpcontent/uploads/2020/04/Guidelines-for-Opening-Up-America-Again.pdf O’Toole, F. (2020, May 14). Vector in chief. The New York Review of Books, 67(8), 9–10. Pankova, R., & Barrow, K. (2020, June 24). “A worldwide mutual pact”: An interview with Wendy Brown. The Drift. https://www.thedriftmag.com/a-worldwide-mutualpact/ Pearson, C. (2020, December 4). One-third of kids with COVID-19 are asymptomatic, study says. Huffington Post. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-third-of-kidswith-covid-19-are-asymptomatic-new-study-says_l_5fc9105ec5b6e3f2beba7406? fbclid=IwAR1YlcDwjneh0QPoNA9-lJVRY8wGcllUqXjLGpz1-L9n1038cQ8-hfW4RlU Peck, E. (2020, November 9). Why Trump voters used the economy as an excuse to vote for him. Huffington Post. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-voters-economyelection-2020_n_5fa453ddc5b67c3259ac62f4?utm_medium=facebook&ncid= fcbklnkushpmg00000013&utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages§ion=politics&utm_ source=politics_fb&fbclid=IwAR3-tCS-u-09XN29qG7qngml8RciNlVjLlO1I3PionoBjcQi6r-fAXUbfo Perper, R. (2020, March 24). Trump says he wants to lift coronavirus lockdown by Easter because ‘it’s a beautiful time.’ Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/ trump-says-easter-beautiful-time-coronavirus-lockdown-timeline-2020-3 Petersen, A. H. (2020, May 19). I don’t feel like buying stuff anymore. Buzzfeed News. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/recessionunemployment-covid-19-economy-consumer-spending Pollan, M. (2020, June 11). The sickness in our food supply. The New York Review of Books, 67(10), 4–6. Popken, B., & Lehren, A. (2020, December 1). Release of PPP loan recipients’ data reveals troubling patterns. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/ release-ppp-loan-recipients-data-reveals-troubling-patterns-n1249629 Pramuk, J. (2020, December 29). McConnell blocks Schumer’s bid to unanimously pass $2,000 stimulus checks. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/29/covid-stimulusupdate-senate-considers-vote-on-2000-stimulus-checks.html Reuters Staff. (2020, December 4). Fact check: RFID microchips will not be injected with the COVID-19 vaccine, altered video features Bill and Melinda Gates and Jack Ma. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccine-microchip-gatesma/fact-check-rfid-microchips-will-not-be-injected-with-the-covid-19-vaccinealtered-video-features-bill-and-melinda-gates-and-jack-ma-idUSKBN28E286 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (2020). The impact of coronavirus on households across America. https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2020/09/the-impact-ofcoronavirus-on-households-across-america.html

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Rosalski, G. (2020, June 23). Why reopening isn’t enough to save the economy. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/06/23/881662948/why-reopening-isntenough-to-save-the-economy?utm_term=nprnews&utm_campaign=npr&utm_ source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR18kFcpdPjJHgK_ c1Ff2HKMJI11AILtqV1qG2I2AF9yppGKXFz01F3CBks Rosen, D. (2020, December 2). Covid-19, schools and the digital divide. Counter Punch. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/02/covid-19-schools-and-the-digitaldivide/?fbclid=IwAR0wilzaPW76y-I8xXtZfRwXXx8zB598j-hMzBEgvTgwOdOqRbahVCeG-E Ruhle, S. (2020, December 7). My family’s Covid diagnosis shows how our broken, confusing system exploits privilege. Think. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/ opinion/my-family-s-covid-diagnosis-shows-how-our-broken-confusingncna1250175?fbclid=IwAR3Wix2RyL-sYyt5v7DgSpzCwpIVYjA9Dwr5RspHRfQScR 6pdgTG9QFhOBE Saey, T. H. (2020, December 3). The ‘last mile’ for COVID-19 vaccines could be the biggest challenge yet. Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid19coronavirus-vaccine-last-mile-logistics-pfizer-moderna Shah, N. (2020, November 20). It’s starting to sink in: Schools before bars. Politico. https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/11/20/its-starting-to-sink-inschools-before-bars-1337318?fbclid=IwAR3Z31gEbC2pYWDcS45NgJkBwgVv8Vv0S M7O6zkOiMddZbmpCyIEfOp3dyk Tomiyoshi, T. (2020, July 7). “COVID fatigue” is hitting hard. UC Davis Health. https://health.ucdavis.edu/health-news/newsroom/covid-fatigue-is-hitting-hardfighting-it-is-hard-too-says-uc-davis-health-psychologist/2020/07 Walker, C. (2020b, October 22). Trump’s “lethal screwup” on COVID led to 130,000 avoidable deaths, study says. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-lethalscrewup-on-covid-led-to-130000-avoidable-deaths-study-says/?fbclid=IwAR25W BlBcXgulePXhdZEEL8XuyVCF34lxUd-3Yumwq4qOV1mguXm0bIEh8I Yong, E. (2020, September). How the pandemic defeated America. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-americanfailure/614191/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign= share Yuval-Davis, N., & Wemyss, G. (2020, June 24). Bordering under the coronavirus pandemic. Soundings Blog. https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/blog/bordering-under-thecoronavirus-pandemic?mc_cid=bdcf314158&mc_eid=ec46ded26a

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CHAPTER 4

From “Disposable” to “Essential” A Critical Analysis of the Worker

1

Introduction

There is a scene in the animated film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999) that has great value in understanding the place of the so-called “essential” worker during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the animated film, the United States is about to go to war with Canada (just go with it), and while the General is laying out the battle plans, he states that Battalion 5 will be the first attack wave in what is called “Operation: Human Shield.” It is blatantly obvious that Battalion 5 is solely comprised of Black soldiers. Battalion 14, which consists of only White soldiers, is supposed to stand behind Battalion 5 in what is called “Operation: Get Behind the Darkies.” This battalion of Black soldiers, of course, “will suffer heavy losses” (Parker, 1999) since they will go into battle first. This is a profoundly apt analogy for workers during this crisis since “Black and Latinx communities and workers are bearing the brunt of the pandemic” (Powell, 2020, p. 1). As Pollan (2020) points out, “another vulnerability that the novel coronavirus has exposed is the paradoxical notions of ‘essential’ workers who are grossly underpaid and whose lives are treated as disposable…the utter dependence on them has never been more clear” (p. 6). Additionally, these low-paying and so-called “unskilled” service jobs, such as grocery cashiers, delivery and warehouse workers, (undocumented) agricultural workers, child and personal caregivers, and janitorial staff are held disproportionately by people of color (Levitz, 2020; Powell, 2020; Ross & Bateman, 2019). A majority of these workers have been in great danger since the emergence of the pandemic due to the lack of necessary personal protective equipment (PPE) necessary for job safety, such as masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer (Schneider & Harknett, 2020; Stewart, 2020b). These laborers, now considered “essential workers,” are fighting to not only earn a paycheck to support themselves and their families, but also, stay alive. There continues to be great inequity in the U.S. in the areas of race, class, and occupation (Chetty et al., 2020), and the COVID-19 pandemic shines a light on the disparities of race and economics in the new millennium. Street (2020) asserts that in order “to stem a pandemic, capital shows its understanding of working-class people as expendable by pushing for a premature ‘re-opening © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004500013_004 Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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of the economy’” (p. 3). In reality, those fighting on the front lines are not the Black soldiers like in the South Park movie; they are the minimum-wage, disposable workers who are now considered to be essential to the U.S. economy. At the same time, Republican debates over whether to extend meager unemployment benefits so as not to “promote laziness” illustrate the esteem to which these workers are really held: Because workers are underpaid, they are often treated as dependents, as a burden on the “safety net,” which is actually a public subsidy of the practice of underpayment. Workers often do not fall into the category of “taxpayer,” a word now laden with implication and consequence. It implies respectability, a more robust participation in citizenship, and fairly or not, an extreme sensitivity to demands made on his or her assets for the public benefit. (Robinson, 2020, p. 44) During the COVID-19 epidemic, race and class predicted survival rates due to coronavirus exposure. Many white-collar workers were able to work remotely from the safety of their own homes (Brownstein, 2020; Powell, 2020), while the mega rich were safe in their home bunkers as well as on their yachts, private airplanes, and secluded islands (Harvey, 2020; Kelly, 2020; McKeever, 2020). Data show that less than 1 in 5 Black workers were able to work from home during the COVID-19 shutdown (Walker, 2020, para. 8). Therefore, it was the low-wage worker, most of whom are Black, Latinx, and female (Harvey, 2020), whose life was in jeopardy serving others. The statistics are staggering. Although Black people comprise just 13% of the population of the United States, they made up 25% of deaths caused by the coronavirus (APM, 2020, para. 7). Latinos of all ages also contracted the virus at astonishingly high rates in major cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (Olivo, Lang, & Harden, 2020). Since news of the coronavirus pandemic broke, it was the Black and Latinx worker who rushed first onto the COVID-19 battlefield in order to serve and secure others’ health and safety. It appears that the undervalued and low-paid essential workers were just like Battalion 5 in South Park—they were the sacrificial pawns used to serve the needs of the masses. This chapter will explore the role of the underpaid and undervalued worker of color during the time of COVID-19. Using a Marxian analysis, the worker and her disposability will be explained in a modern coronavirus context. It will also be explained how the essential and unskilled worker came to such prominence during this global pandemic and how the weight continues to crush both the Black and Latinx communities in the United States.

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The Value of the Worker

The essential worker was at the mercy of the rich and powerful during the time of the coronavirus pandemic. The laborer was placed in a position of great danger while the wealthy remained relatively free from harm. This plight of the worker requires analysis through a Marxist lens due to the notions of exploitation and class difference. McLaren and Farahmandpur (2001) posit that, “Today, millions of workers are being exploited by a relatively small yet cunningly powerful global ruling class driven by an unslakable desire for accumulation of profit” (p. 137). The drive for profit during the time of the coronavirus miraculously turned the underpaid, undervalued worker into an essential cog of the capitalist machine. It should come as no surprise that, in the United States (and around the world), capitalism focuses on financial gain at the expense of the worker (Marx & Engels, 1848/2005). In Capital, Marx (1867) theorized that a capitalistic society consists of two antagonistic classes: (1) the ruling class, called the bourgeoisie, that owns the means of production, and (2) the laboring class, called the proletariat, whose function is to produce goods (commodities) for the ruling class (Maisuria, 2018). Marx (1867) asserted that the goal of the ruling class (and capitalism) is, “To extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest possible extent” (p. 7). This exploitation of the worker has only increased in the past 50 years. It has been documented that, “Since 1978, CEOs’ salaries have increased by 970 percent, making nearly 300 times more than their average worker” (Fonseca, 2020, p. 6). Since day one of the pandemic in the U.S., the essential worker (the proletariat) has been serving and profiting the rich (the bourgeoisie) until it literally kills them. Marx addressed the process of the bourgeoisie preying upon the worker through use of a gothic metaphor (Neocleous, 2003). Through this metaphor, Marx (1867) graphically described capitalism as “dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (p. 3). During the pandemic, there were constant reminders of this capitalist vampirism (i.e., exploitation) in the daily news. Take, for example, warehouse workers at Amazon and Whole Foods (which is Amazon-owned), especially in California. The essential workers fought a constant battle with management since the COVID-19 outbreak began. There were worker strikes at Amazon/Whole Foods facilities across the U.S., with warehouse workers concerned about lack of PPEs (Stewart, 2020b), unpaid leave (Selyukh, 2020), loss of hazard pay (Brown & Flowers, 2020), as well as the thousands of positive coronavirus cases among

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their workers (including nine deaths in May 2020) (Hussain, 2020). Reports showed that, between March 1 and September 19, 2020, there were “19,816 confirmed or presumed Covid-19 cases across its front-line employees in the U.S., or 1.44% of its 1.37 million front-line Amazon and Whole Foods employees” (Palmer, 2020, p. 1). Unfortunately, many Amazon and Whole Foods employees continued to come in to work for fear of being terminated if they missded their shifts, even if they had to come in to work sick (Levin, 2020). All the while, Amazon’s sales (and stock value) skyrocketed. Even though the warehouse workers received a temporary $2 an hour pay “bump” through mid-May 2020 (Selyukh, 2020), Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ fortune grew by $24 billion in just the first three months of the crisis (Levin, 2020, p. 4). As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, “Amazon stock is up nearly 80% since the beginning of the year, and Bezos’ net worth…has skyrocketed in tandem” (Ponciano, 2020, p. 1). It is calculated that Bezos is the wealthiest man on the planet, with a net worth of over $182 billion, the largest net worth in history (Ponciano, 2020; Zarroli, 2020). According to data from the International Monetary Fund, Bezos’ net worth is now larger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of countries like Hungary and the Ukraine (Zarroli, 2020). Laycock (1999) posits that “in the view of Marx and Engels, modem capitalism is no less a society of exploiters and exploited, than either mediaeval feudalism, with its institution of serfdom, or the social orders of antiquity, involving slavery” (p. 125). In the case of Amazon, essential workers as toiling away for their overlord like medieval serfs. All the while profits were skyrocketing at the expense of the worker; the warehouse workers were at great risk of becoming ill for the benefit of Jeff Bezos and his net worth. Another danger facing essential workers were violent confrontations with customers who refused to wear masks. Some examples included a Waffle House cook being shot and a Family Dollar security guard shot and killed (Kenney, 2020; Kesslen & Siemaszko, 2020), customers spitting on the check-out counter (Rivera, 2020), and other forms of assault (MacFarquhar, 2020). Close to 45% of surveyed McDonalds employees indicated that they were verbally or physically attacked (Taylor, 2020, para. 1). In many of these cases, their employers did not hire security, instead relying on workers to enforce mask wearing and social distancing. So, on top of their already sub-par wages, being abused, harassed, threatened, and possibly killed was added to the job descriptions of essential workers who were supposed to adhere to the old adage that “the customer is always right.” Fromm (1961/2002) believed that, “Marx’s whole criticism of capitalism is exactly that it has made interest in money and material gain the main motive in man” (p. 14), and as such, under capitalism, neoliberal governments take

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decreasing care of the individual citizen, and people are often left to fend for themselves (Hursh, 2005). It truly was a dog-eat-dog world during this time of the coronavirus, and the needs of the worker were secondary to the desires of the business owners. As Robinson (2020) outlined: This view of things is radically individualistic, indifferent to any narrative or identity or purpose. It takes a cynical view of people as such, since no one’s true motives are different from those of the consciously selfish. Because there is only one motive—to realize a maximum of benefit at a minimum of cost—those who do not flourish are losers in an invidious, Darwinian sense. Winners are exempt from moral or ethical scrutiny since advance of any sort is the good to be valued. (p. 44) Marx (1867) believed that exploitation was inherent in the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As was evident with Amazon, the workers’ health and welfare were completely in the hands of the rich and powerful. Hill (2020) elaborates on this point when he says that, “It has become obvious to most of the population that Capital would rather have them/their children and their elderly die rather than allow business to suffer a temporary fall in profits” (p. 1). Politicians in the U.S., such as Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, have stated as much when explaining that he believed that older Americans (referred to as “grandparents”) were willing to go back to work and risk death in order to help stimulate the economy (Stieb, 2020). The workers, no matter the age and risk, showed their disposability as they were pressured to go back to work to help restart the economy. They were and are seen as nothing but spokes in the wheel of capitalism.

3

Perception of the Worker

According to Selyukh and Bond (2020), “the coronavirus pandemic…in a matter of weeks has upended millions of lives as people hunker down at home. In this lockdown, low-wage workers have been publicly declared “essential”— up there with doctors and nurses” (p. 3). What truly is ironic about this shift in nomenclature is that the workers who, before COVID-19, were some of the most disregarded and disrespected in U.S. society, were the exact same workers who were also deemed essential for the survival of the nation’s economy (Brownstein, 2020). The U.S. simply cannot function without them. A key segment of essential workers included those who handled delivery and curbside orders for stores and restaurants. Some of these workers were

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employed by the establishments themselves, where they prepared orders for customer pickup or delivery, while others worked in the gig economy for Instacart, UberEats, or Grubhub, relying on tips alone. These types of delivery and pickup prep jobs were already on the upswing prior to the pandemic, anticipated to result in the adoption of more robotics in stores since fewer employees would be needed to handle customers (Danziger, 2019). Developments like pre-paying and self-checkouts were also invaluable for maintaining social distancing in stores, while at the same time, they are usually considered as a replacement for waged workers. The problem is that these technological adaptations do not end up benefiting the worker, who still remain in a low wage, and now higher health risk, status. As Marx and Engels (1888/2005) asserted, “[The worker] becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him…[and] as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases” (p. 14). In April 2020, it was calculated that workers in essential jobs comprised about 42% of the U.S. workforce (Nunn et al., 2020, para. 7), and due to non-unionized status, low pay, flimsy benefits, and poor job security (Brownstein, 2020; Thorbecke, 2020), careers as fast-food workers, cashiers at Walmart, and meatpackers were often considered to be menial, unskilled labor. Therefore, they were deemed less important and less essential than other types of work (S. Jones, 2020a). COVID-19 has turned this perspective of the unskilled worker on its head, at least on face value. Kevin Hassett, current senior adviser for the White House said that, “Our human capital stock is ready to get back to work” (Pitt, 2020, p. 3). Even though the phrase “human capital stock” has been is use in economists’ academic jargon for decades (Weissmann, 2020), there are several things wrong with the statement referencing this critical point in America’s history. For starters, Hassett had not paid attention to (or chose to ignore) the multiple polls of U.S. citizens to ascertain whether they were willing and ready to return to work. If given the option, a majority of Americans repeatedly stated that they would choose to stay safely in their homes and not return to work just yet (M. Johnson, 2020). More importantly, and quite glaringly offensive, is that Hassett referred to working Americans as “human capital stock.” Marx must be rolling in his grave. Pitt asserts that (2020): It is far more than mere gross incompetence. This White House does not see us as human beings with intrinsic value and rights of our own. We are cattle who exist only for the profit of the few, sheep to be sheared, pigs to be hung up for slaughter. To them, we are only meat for the machine, nothing more than an entirely expendable commodity. (p. 3) Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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This was especially true for Tyson Foods, Inc., a producer of pork, beef, and chicken products in the U.S. Tyson “managers at an Iowa plant [have been] accused of participating in a betting pool on how many employees would become ill with COVID-19” (Romo, 2020, para. 1). The gambling pool was reported as being used as a morale booster for plant managers (Foley, 2020). The Waterloo plant in Iowa is the largest pork plant in the U.S. and employs 2,800 workers. It has been reported that the plant had several outbreaks of the coronavirus and more than a third of the workers became infected as of November 2020 (Fitzsimons, 2020), including the deaths of at least six workers (Hart, 2020). This disposability of the worker for the benefit of the rich is nothing new; it is just quite troubling to see actual managers and supervisors laying bets on how many employees would test positive for the coronavirus. When going back to work physically was a death sentence for many U.S. workers, this was quite repugnant, to say the least. Immigrant labor was also thrust into the “essential” worker category, creating a conundrum for the usual scapegoating aimed at these workers. Countries like the U.S. and the U.K. have utilized education and skill levels as a way to control access to citizenship, showing that “even this glaringly obvious dependence on migrant workers—those same key workers on which healthcare services are currently depending…could not deflect the government from its populist drive to restrict freedom of movement” (Yuval-Davis & Wemyss, 2020, para. 4). Immigrants were denied the protections afforded to citizens during a pandemic, such as those detained in “grey zones” like the U.S. detention centers. In key supply chain industries like meat packing, immigrant workers were especially vulnerable, as Pollan (2020) outlined: until recently, slaughterhouse workers had little or no access to personal protective equipment; many of them were also encouraged to keep working even after exposure to the virus. Add to this the fact that many meatplant workers are immigrants who live in crowded conditions with little to no access to health care, and you have a population at dangerously high risk of infection. (Pollan, 2020, p. 4) In these times, the lowest-paid and least valued workers were deemed essential because there were those who needed their services in order to safely shelter-in-place (Kagan, 2020). According to Stewart (2020a), “Some are wondering what their sacrifice is really worth, and they’re struggling with the complicated idea that they’re being forced into danger while still be [sic] grateful to have a job” (p. 3). For many essential workers putting their lives at risk every single day, there was a struggle between self-preservation and the need to pay their bills; they simply couldn’t afford to go into self-quarantine (Kagan, 2020). Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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It was truly a horrible situation to be faced with on a daily basis. Lowrey (2020) asserted that: The need for change has long been apparent. Before the pandemic, many essential workers were just getting by. Now their jobs are more dangerous than before, and many cannot afford to quit, not with the unemployment rate at nearly 15 percent. One in seven essential workers lacks health insurance, and one in three lives in a household that makes less than $40,000 a year. Millions of grocery-store workers and slaughterhouse employees and home health aides rely on food stamps. Our most essential, most useful, and most needed people are our most economically fragile. (p. 2) Time will only tell if this change in label, from unskilled to essential, will translate to greater respect, increased pay, and improved working conditions after the coronavirus pandemic subsides.

4

Effects of COVID-19 on the Black and Latinx Worker

President Trump’s gross mishandling of the initial outbreak of the coronavirus led to major concerns for essential workers in the U.S. Trump eliminated federal departments intended to address global epidemics (i.e., the pandemic response team), initially dismissed the coronavirus as a hoax and downplayed its threat, put people without any public health or medical experience in charge of the COVID-19 task force, lagged in providing necessary coronavirus testing, and had great difficulty in obtaining PPEs and other critical supplies for workers (Baron, 2020; Lerner, 2020). Scientists have asserted that if Trump had acted more decisively in the early stages of the pandemic, tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented, via use of PPEs and social distancing (Pei et al., 2020). We may never know how many essential workers would still be alive today if Trump, as well as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), had handled the coronavirus more effectively, but it is not a stretch to say that if they both had acted earlier, thousands of workers might still alive today (J. Johnson, 2020). During the initial appearance of the coronavirus pandemic, it became clear early on that race and class were influential factors as to whom became sick and died from COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Black Americans comprised almost one-third of coronavirus infections nationwide, and they had nearly twice the number of cases than their recorded percentage of the population (Godoy & Wood, 2020, para. 8). In several states, the

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infection rate was documented to be three or more times greater than their percentage (para. 8). For sake of comparison, White people have had fewer deaths due to COVID-19 than their percentage of the U.S. population (Gould & Wilson, 2020). It has also been calculated that: For each 100,000 Americans (of their respective group), about 124 Blacks have died from the coronavirus, the second-highest actual mortality rate of all groups, behind only Indigenous people (133). Asians (52), Whites (76), Latinos (87) and Pacific Islanders (90) have lower rates. (APM, 2020, para. 16) As is evident, Black people died (and continue to die) of the coronavirus at a significantly higher rate than other racial groups in the U.S., with Black Americans dying at almost three times the rate of White Americans (Pilkington, 2020, para. 1). As if those statistics are not horrible enough, what is “even more stunning is the deadly efficiency with which it has targeted young Black men” (Johnson & Martin, 2020, para. 3). Due to the realities of growing up as Black males in the U.S., chronic stress and anxiety appear to be influencing factors in their higher rate of coronavirus death (Johnson & Martin, 2020). One study by Bassett et al. (2020) found that Black people aged 35 to 44 died from COVID-19 at nine times the rate of White people in the same age group (para. 18). Due to this concerning rate of infection and death, it was asserted that the coronavirus devastated Black communities in urban areas across the country (Quinn, 2020). Brooks (2020) observed that, for Black people, the “environments where most live, the jobs they have, the prevalence of health conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes, and how they are treated by the medical establishment have created a toxic storm of severe illness and death” (p. 1). There are many different reasons why Black people were more vulnerable to the coronavirus, such as working in the service industry in essential jobs, which put them at a higher risk of exposure, the use of public transportation in order to get to their jobs (i.e., being in close physical proximity to others), living in more densely populated areas, a lack of health insurance/COVID-19 testing, and a general distrust of the healthcare system (Brooks, 2020; Ray, 2020). Harvey (2020) stated that, “The contemporary working class in the United States (comprised predominantly of African Americans, Latinx, and waged women) faces the ugly choice of contamination in the name of caring and keeping key features of provision…open or unemployment with no benefits” (p. 7). The low-paid essential workers were tasked with caring for the sick and elderly, keeping store shelves stocked, and delivering the mail, and as a result, they were at an increased risk of contracting the virus (Pan, 2020). According

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to S. Jones (2020b), “To the corporations to pay them, their work is essential. But their lives are not” (p. 2). As was stated earlier, the low-wage worker was fighting on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. It has been found that: Black workers make up about one in nine workers overall; they represent 11.9% of the workforce. However, Black workers make up about one in six of all front-line-industry workers. They are disproportionately represented in employment in grocery, convenience, and drug stores (14.2%); public transit (26.0%); trucking, warehouse, and postal service (18.2%); health care (17.5%); and child care and social services (19.3%). While, in the near term, this protects them from job loss, it exposes them to greater likelihood of contracting COVID-19 while performing their jobs. (Gould & Wilson, 2020, p. 6) There is a significant link between wage-earnings and race. Black people make up more than half of the home health aides in the U.S. and almost 40% of childcare workers (Covert, 2020, para. 5). It has been found that of all low-wage workers, “Fifty-two percent are White, 25% are Latino…15% are Black, and 5% are Asian American. Both Latino…and Black workers are overrepresented relative to their share of the total workforce, while Whites and Asian Americans are under-represented” (Ross & Bateman, 2019, p. 9). Black and Latinx workers were more likely to have to leave their homes to go to work during the pandemic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “While 37% of Asian workers and 29.9% of white workers are able to work remotely, only 19.7% of black workers, and 16.2% of Latinx workers, are able to telework” (Powell, 2020, p. 2). While there are no statistics regarding the socioeconomic status of those who have died due to the coronavirus in the U.S., in the United Kingdom it was found that, “People in low-paid, manual jobs face a much greater risk of dying from coronavirus than higher-paid, white-collar workers” (Barr & Inman, 2020, p. 1). This correlated directly to the statistics in the U.S. regarding Black and Latinx people who were more likely to die due to COVID-19. The pandemic has revealed the historical and structural aspects of capitalism’s intersection with race. It is believed that Black and Latinx workers get pushed into dangerous, low-wage jobs through prejudicial hiring practices, educational discrimination, occupational segregation, and their location of residence (Brown, 2020; Lowery, 2020). Carnevale et al. (2019) find that, “While Blacks and Latinos have made progress in educational attainment, their odds of having a good job are not as good as those of White workers with the same level of education, reflecting persistent racial disparities in the workforce” (p.

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24). It has also been asserted that Black workers with resumes comparable to White workers are still paid less money, receive inferior benefits, and are more likely to be unemployed than their White peers (Rosenberg, 2020). Another issue greatly impacting the Black and Latinx communities was unemployment due to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. Data has shown that Black people were hard hit by unemployment and lost jobs at significantly higher rates in many cities across the U.S. (Gould & Wilson, 2020; Rosenberg, 2020). At one point during the Trump presidency, the employment rate in the U.S. climbed up to 14.7% (with over 40 million unemployed), which was the highest level since the Great Depression (Gogoi, 2020, para. 3). The unemployment rate for Black workers was up to 16.7% (as of May 2020), and things were even worse for the Latinx community (para. 3). According to Labor Department Statistics, the Latinx population was the hardest hit by the pandemic, with a record jobless rate of 18.9%, which was higher than any other ethnic group (Gogoi, 2020, para. 3; Rosenberg, 2020). An important economic study found that people in wealthy communities continued to be scared of COVID-19; therefore, they were not going out and spending money in restaurants, stores, and similar businesses (Chetty et al., 2020; Rosalsky, 2020). Ultimately, this greatly affected low-income workers and their employment (Rosalsky, 2020). Due to the pandemic, there was a 70% drop in revenue at businesses located in wealthy ZIP codes, and this led to the firing of nearly 70% of their workers, mostly low-wage employees (i.e., predominantly Black and Latinx) (para. 5). In contrast, businesses located in poorer areas laid off about 30% of their workers (Rosalsky, 2020, para. 5). As was evident by this discouraging data, Black people “will continue to bear the brunt of the economic crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic” (C. Jones, 2020, p. 1), but the Latinx community is not far behind.

5

Big Business and Media Hypocrisy

It was not long after the coronavirus began spreading across the United States that major businesses and corporations began airing television/internet commercials and billboard advertisements to “thank” the essential worker for all that they did every day. Companies such as Dunkin Donuts, IBM, Uber, Burger King, FedEx, Heineken, Nike, and Hefty trash bags all created commercials focused on the essential worker during COVID-19 and the attestations to the human spirit (Gardizy, 2020; Hess, 2020). Rosen (2020) stated that “numerous companies have released statements that pay lip service to the notion that

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employees on the front lines of the pandemic response are valued, including Amazon” (p. 2). In March 2020, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote a letter on the company blog thanking the warehouse workers and delivery drivers for all their hard work (Rubin, 2020). S. Jones (2020b) asserted that, “Companies like Amazon call their workers heroes, but the praise is often a smokescreen. Behind it, frontline workers are dying, and advocates say widespread corporate negligence bears much of the blame” (p. 2). In the Amazon commercial called “Delivering Rainbows” (Amazon, 2020), a little girl colors a large “Thank You” in colored chalk on the sidewalk leading to her house while the song “This Little Heart of Mine” plays in the background. The mask-wearing Amazon delivery man (who is White, ironically) sees the message and then sees the girl smiling in the window (who also just happens to be White). They smile at each other, and all is right with the world. In commercials during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, all essential workers were anointed as heroes (Hess, 2020). The commercials were all quite similar—they had somber musical scores, overused clichés (e.g., “we’ve always been there for you”), clips of desolate big cities, essential workers wearing PPEs, and had a “we’re all in this together” message (Borden, 2020; Dan, 2020; Gardizy, 2020). According to Haggerty (2020), “Advertisers will always try to reflect and influence our cultural moment, and this one is proving to be no exception” (p. 2). The COVID-19 commercials were obviously intended to pull at the heart strings and make you, as the potential customer, see how much these businesses care about you and their essential workers. They were here for us (Haggerty, 2020). Of course, the troublesome thing about companies saying thank you to workers in advertisements is that it was not a genuine show of appreciation. These hollow “tokens of appreciation are just that: tokens, which signal nothing deeper than gratitude. That doesn’t pay anyone’s rent” (S. Jones, 2020b, p. 3). As mentioned earlier, Amazon did add a temporary $2 an hour pay raise through May 2020, referred to as “hazard pay,” but now workers are back to their base salaries again (Saibil, 2020). Where are the substantial pay raises, across the board, for the essential workers who are at a greater risk of becoming ill and dying due to the coronavirus? Unfortunately, they are nowhere to be found. While some companies, such as Walgreens, have provided a one-time bonus of $300 to full-time workers, that was simply a pittance (Stewart, 2020c). Across the board, essential workers have commented that they received small tokens of appreciation from their bosses, such as getting cookies, small food gift cards for their own restaurants, more relaxed dress codes, and receiving small, one-time, monetary gifts (Nunn et al., 2020; Stewart, 2020c). Again, this is simply not enough. Stewart (2020c) states that:

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The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that many low-paid jobs are instrumental to the engine of our economy. And even as the country is now acutely aware of how essential these workers are, it still can’t quite break the mold of how they’re treated. Many are still low-paid, many still lack benefits, and many are still left to fend for basic protections and respect. (p. 6) As the coronavirus continues to affect lives negatively in the U.S., it is critical that the essential worker be treated as valuable (or essential, if you will) as they persist in putting their lives on the line every day for U.S. society’s convenience and safety. It is important to note that even before the racial protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minnesota police, Trump’s approach to managing the COVID-19 pandemic had essentially been to do little at all. He shifted his administration’s focus away from the virus to reopening the economy and lifting economic restrictions (Phelps & Gittleson, 2020; Restuccia, 2020). Trump went so far as to force attendees at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma to sign a waiver ahead of the event to not sue the Presidential campaign if they happened to contract the coronavirus while attending the event (Nobles, 2020). Due to Trump’s apparent lack of concern for public safety and the ongoing possibility of illness and/or death caused by COVID-19, essential workers found themselves in great danger and needed to fight for protections against the coronavirus. By the end of his term, Trump’s focus was no longer on the virus (if it ever truly was), and he decided to concentrate on the issues that would excite his conservative base ahead of the November 2020 presidential election (Restuccia, 2020). Unfortunately, this continued to put the essential worker at great risk every day. Now, under the new Biden administration, workers must still fight for the PPEs needed to stay safe, higher wages that will support them and their families, and the new-found respect that they so rightfully deserve.

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According to S. Jones (2020a), “It should be obvious now, if it wasn’t before, that there’s no such thing as unskilled labor—that low-wage work is as essential and integral to daily life as the labor performed by accountants or lawyers” (p. 3). Essential workers, who are predominantly female and people of color, were exploited and treated as disposable during the COVID-19 pandemic. While low-paid and “unskilled” workers have always been treated as less than,

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the coronavirus has shone a bright light as to how they are treated by both society and their corporate bosses. Essential workers: join the millions of American workers and working class families who have died over the years—some calamitously, crushed by a machine, others their lives shortened by workplace poisons or toxins dumped by their homes or spewed into the air, or simply the result of poverty—in the name of progress. (Kagan, 2020, p. 4) Being thanked for their work via billboard, television commercial, and $20 gift cards does not even begin to address the needs of the essential worker; it is a miniscule offer of pacification and an insulting one at that. Huge American corporations, such as Amazon, need to step up and pay their essential workers a decent, livable wage as well as provide the necessary protections to keep their employees healthy. Robinson (2020) asserted that: Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. (p. 43) Added protections must be compounded with additional assistance from the U.S. government in the form of a raised minimum wage and universal health coverage, so that if a worker does become sick with COVID-19, she does not have to worry about any undue burden placed upon her and her family. It is quite tragic that the coronavirus pandemic forced many people in the U.S. to open their eyes to the needs of the low-wage worker, and changes must come from this: the traditional tools of economic policy—tax cuts and spending increases to boost demand—won’t save the army of the unemployed. Instead…we need public health efforts to restore safety and convince consumers that it’s OK to start going out again. Until then…we need to extend unemployment benefits and provide assistance to help low-income workers who will continue to struggle in the pandemic economy. (Rosalski, 2020, para. 11) Data show that, for several racial and economic reasons, the Black and Latinx communities have been the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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(Powell, 2020). The essential worker represents the metaphorical Battalion 5 from the South Park movie. They took the most damage working on the front lines in grocery stores, warehouses, and fast-food restaurants, whilst much of the middle and upper class were able to ride out the pandemic in relative safety at home. For the essential workers, their losses have been great, and this will only continue until COVID-19 is eradicated across the globe. The time to act for the essential worker is now.

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Carnevale, A. P., Strohl, J., Gulish, A., Van Der Werf, M., & Campbell, K. P. (2019). The unequal race for good jobs: How Whites made outsized gains in education and good jobs compared to Blacks and Latinos. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED600048.pdf Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Hendren, N., & Stepner, M. (2020, June 17). How did COVID-19 and stabilization policies affect spending and employment? A new real-time economic tracker based on private sector data [Unpublished manuscript]. https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/tracker_paper.pdf? utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20200622& utm_term=4631356&utm_campaign=money&utm_id=1017805&orgid=680 Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Jones, M. R., & Porter, S. R. (2020). Race and economic opportunity in the United States: An intergenerational perspective. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(2), 711–783. Covert, B. (2020, June 1). America never valued care workers. Then a pandemic hit. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/coronavirus-child-carenurses-essential/ Dan, A. (2020, April 19). Every COVID-19 commercial is exactly the same. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2020/04/19/every-covid-19-commercial-isexactly-the-same/#24da7ebb667b Danzinger, P. (2019, April 7). Walmart leads the soon-to-be $35 billion curbside pickup market. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2019/04/07/walmart-isin-the-lead-in-the-soon-to-be-35-billion-curbside-pickup-market/#8fdbe08199ea Foley, R. J. (2020, December 29). Fired boss at Tyson Iowa pork plant says COVID-19 betting pool was a ‘morale boost.’ USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/ news/nation/2020/12/29/fired-waterloo-tyson-manager-says-covid-19-bet-moraleboost/4070995001/ Fonseca, E. (2020, June 8). Worker surveillance is on the rise, and has its roots in centuries of racism. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/worker-surveillance-is-onthe-rise-and-has-its-roots-in-centuries-of-racism/ Fromm, E. (1961/2002). Marx’s concept of man. Continuum. Gardizy, A. (2020, May 7). Watch: COVID-19 commercials. The Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/07/business/watch-covid-19-commercials/ Godoy, M., & Wood, D. (2020, May 30). What do coronavirus racial disparities look like state by state? NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/30/865413079/ what-do-coronavirus-racial-disparities-look-like-state-by-state Gogoi, P. (2020, May 10). Why a historic wave of Latino prosperity is under threat now. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/05/10/853049239/historic-wave-of-latinoprosperity-is-threatened-by-devastating-job-losses Gould, E., & Wilson, V. (2020, June 1). Black workers face two of the most lethal preexisting conditions for coronavirus—Racism and economic inequality. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/black-workers-covid/

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Haggerty, M. (2020, April 8). The strange comfort of coronavirus commercials. Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/8/21212435/coronavirus-tv-ads-mcdonalds-toyota-state-farm-dominos Harvey, D. (2020). Anti-capitalist politics in the time of COVID-19. Jacobin. Retrieved from https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-politicaleconomy-disruptions Hess, A. (2020, May 22). The pandemic ad salutes you. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/arts/pandemic-ads-salute-you.html Hill, D. (2020, May 29). The good, the bad and the ugly: Coronavirus, capitalism and socialism: A Marxist response. InsurgentScripts. http://insurgentscripts.org/thegood-the-bad-and-the-ugly-coronavirus-capitalism-and-socialism-a-marxistresponse/ Hursh, D. (2005). Neo-liberalism, markets and accountability: Transforming education and undermining democracy in the United States and England. Policy Futures in Education, 3(1), 3–13. Hussain, S. (2020, May 28). Amazon won’t say how many workers have gotten COVID19. So workers are tracking cases themselves. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-05-28/amazon-wholefoods-workers-track-coronavirus-cases Johnson, A., & Martin, N. (2020, December 22). How COVID-19 hollowed out a generation of young Black men. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/howcovid-19-hollowed-out-a-generation-of-young-black-men Johnson, J. (2020, April 18). Trump’s OSHA, asleep on the job? COVID-19 infections and deaths surge among frontline workers. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2020/04/18/ trumps-osha-asleep-on-the-job-covid-19-infections-and-deaths-surge-amongfrontline-workers_partner/ Johnson, M. (2020, May 1). Two-thirds of Americans uncomfortable with returning to their workplace: poll. The Hill. https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/495644two-thirds-of-americans-uncomfortable-with-returning-to-their-workplace Jones, C. (2020, June 4). Black unemployment 2020: African Americans bear brunt of economic crisis sparked by the coronavirus. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/ story/money/2020/06/04/black-unemployment-2020-joblessness-compoundsanguish-over-brutality/3138521001/ Jones, S. (2020a, March 21). There’s no such thing as unskilled labor. Intelligencer https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/low-wage-work-is-essential-work.html Jones, S. (2020b, May 1). This May Day, honor labor by compensating it. Intelligencer. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/essential-workers-deserve-more-thangratitude.html Kelly, J. (2020, April 1). The rich are riding out the coronavirus pandemic very differently than the rest of us. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/04/01/therich-are-riding-out-the-coronavirus-pandemic-very-differently-than-the-rest-ofus/#8dcb5c4d34cb Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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Kenney, T. (2020, May 20). Waffle House worker shot a day after asking customer to wear a mask, Colorado cops say. Idaho Satesman. https://www.idahostatesman.com/ news/coronavirus/article242863546.html Kesslen, B., & Siemaszko, C. (2020, May 4). Michigan security guard killed in mask dispute; Suspect said he ‘disrespected’ them. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/ news/us-news/michigan-security-guard-killed-police-investigating-if-it-was-overn1199241 Kleczkowski, A. (2020, June 1). Coronavirus: What a second wave might look like. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-what-a-second-wavemight-look-like-138980 Laycock, H. (1999). Exploitation via labour power in Marx. The Journal of Ethics, 3(2), 121–131. Lerner, S. (2020, March 12). Republicans continue to deny coronavirus threat as public health official warns of catastrophe. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/ 03/12/republicans-continue-to-deny-coronavirus-threat-as-public-health-officialwarns-of-catastrophe/ Levin, S. T. (2020, May 7). Revealed: Amazon told workers paid sick leave law doesn’t cover warehouses. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/ may/07/amazon-warehouse-workers-coronavirus-time-off-california Levitz, E. (2020, April 7). Coronavirus is forcing the GOP to (tacitly) admit its ideology is delusional. Intelligencer. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/coronavirustrump-dhs-undocumented-workers-essential.html Lowrey, A. (2020, May 13). Don’t blame econ 101 for the plight of essential workers. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/why-are-americasmost-essential-workers-so-poorly-treated/611575/ MacFarquhar, N. (2020, May 15). Who’s enforcing mask rules? Often retail workers, and they’re getting hurt. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/ coronavirus-masks-violence.html Maisuria, A. (2018). Neoliberal development and struggle against it: The importance of social class, mystification and feasibility. Aula Abierta, 47(4), 433–440. Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A critique of political economy. Volume 1. Marxists.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch13.htm Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2005). The communist manifesto and other writings. Barnes & Noble Classics. (Original work published 1888) McKeever, V. (2020, March 27). Luxury bunkers and private islands—How the rich are self-isolating from the coronavirus. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/27/ coronavirus-how-the-rich-are-self-isolating.html McLaren, P., & Farahmandpur, R. (2001). Teaching against globalization and the new imperialism: Toward a revolutionary pedagogy. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 136–150.

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Neocleous, M. (2003). The political economy of the dead: Marx’s vampires. History of Political Thought, 24(4), 668–684. Nunn, R., O’Donnell, J., & Shambaugh, J. (2020, June 5). Examining options to boost essential worker wages during the pandemic. The Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/06/04/examining-options-toboost-essential-worker-wages-during-the-pandemic/ Nobles, R. (2020, June 12). Trump campaign says it can’t be held liable if rally attendees contract coronavirus. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/politics/trumpcampaign-rally-coronavirus/index.html Olivo, A., Lang, M. J., & Harden, J. D. (2020, May 26.) Crowded housing and essential jobs: Why so many Latinos are getting coronavirus. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/latinos-coronavirus/2020/05/25/ 6b5c882a-946e-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html Pan, J. C. (2020, April 17). Essential jobs, disposable workers. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/157334/essential-jobs-disposable-groceryworkers-coronavirus Parker, T. (Director). (1999). South Park: Bigger, longer & uncut [Motion picture]. Scott Rudin Productions. Pei, S., Kandula, S., & Shaman, J. (2020). Differential effects of intervention timing on COVID-19 spread in the United States [Unpublished manuscript]. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.15.20103655v1.full.pdf Phelps, J., & Gittleson, B. (2020, June 11). Coronavirus task force fades from view as Trump White House moves on. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ coronavirus-task-force-fades-view-white-house-moves/story?id=71196041 Pilkington, E. (2020, May 20). Black Americans dying of Covid-19 at three times the rate of White people. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/ 20/black-americans-death-rate-covid-19-coronavirus Pitt, W. R. (2020, May 26). Trump adviser says “Human capital stock” should get back to work. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/trump-adviser-says-human-capitalstock-should-get-back-to-work/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=7c4f26c6-7aab46ba-9ed7-7b2945c1b516&fbclid=IwAR0dMa9ZbPnkBQbUD0sNE05RkAs68BPe_ O8RRpKqVs4vdM9Rq9GO2x3ai44 Pollan, M. (2020, June 11). The sickness in our food supply. The New York Review of Books, 67(10), 4–6. Powell, C. (2020, April 18). Color of Covid: The racial justice paradox of our new stayat-home economy. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/opinions/covid-19people-of-color-labor-market-disparities-powell/index.html Quinn, M. (2020, April 12). Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot says coronavirus is “devastating” the African American community. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ coronavirus-chicago-mayor-lori-lightfoot-devastating-african-americancommunity-face-the-nation/

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Ray, R. (2020, April 9). Why are Blacks dying at higher rates from COVID-19? The Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/04/09/why-areblacks-dying-at-higher-rates-from-covid-19/ Restuccia, A. (2020, June 5). Trump’s focus shifts away from coronavirus. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-focus-shifts-away-from-coronavirus11591354801 Rivera, J. (2020, July 2). Woman spits on 7–11 counter after being asked to wear a mask. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/07/02/7-eleven-maskincident-viral-video-spits-counter/5368869002/ Robinson, M. (2020, June 11). What kind of country do we want? The New York Review of Books, 67(10), 43–46. Rosalsky, G. (2020, June 23). Why reopening isn’t enough to save the economy. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/06/23/881662948/why-reopeningisnt-enough-to-save-the-economy?utm_term=nprnews&utm_campaign= npr&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR2QX4fmjuj8g4BnX6mkhHSkOTEY0EWgVZVJC0ObuImpFro93hxPzrjqeU Rosen, C. (2020, April 13). John Oliver blasts Amazon for mistreating workers during coronavirus pandemic. Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/ 04/john-oliver-amazon-coronavirus Rosenberg, E. (2020, June 1). An undercurrent of the protests: African Americans are struggling more economically from this pandemic. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/01/coronavirus-impactblack-communities-protests/ Ross, M., & Bateman, N. (2019). Meet the low-wage workforce. The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ 201911_Brookings-Metro_low-wage-workforce_Ross-Bateman.pdf Rubin, B. F. (2020, March 21). Amazon CEO Bezos writes open letter to thank employees amid coronavirus. c|net. https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-ceo-bezos-writesopen-letter-to-thank-employees-amid-coronavirus/ Saibil, J. (2020, June 5). Amazon workers go back to pre-coronavirus pay, with cuts to hourly pay raise and other emergency measures. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/06/05/amazon-cuts-hourly-payraise-and-other-emergency-measures/111901564/ Schneider, D., & Harknett, K. (2020). Essential and unprotected: COVID-19-related health and safety procedures for service-sector workers. The Shift Project. https://shift.berkeley.edu/essential-and-unprotected-covid-19-related-health-andsafety-procedures-for-service-sector-workers/ Selyukh, A. (2020, April 24). Amazon to change time-off policy during pandemic, extend pay bump. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/ 24/844823221/amazon-to-change-time-off-policy-during-pandemic-extend-paybump

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Selyukh, A., & Bond, S. (2020, April 28). More essential than ever, low-wage workers demand more. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/04/27/843849435/hometownheroes-or-whatever-low-wage-workers-want-more-than-praise Stewart, E. (2020a, April 23). Essential workers are taking care of America. Are we taking care of them? Vox. https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronavirus-explainers/2020/4/23/ 21228971/essential-workers-stories-coronavirus-hazard-pay-stimulus-covid-19 Stewart, E. (2020b, May 7). Essential workers still lack basic safety protections on the job. Vox. https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/2020/5/7/21250387/essentialworker-ppe-amazon-walmart-employees-protection-hazard-pay Stewart, E. (2020c, May 15). Companies are giving essential workers bullshit rewards. Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/5/15/21259153/essential-workershazard-pay-walgreens-mcdonalds-compensation-coronavirus Stieb, M. (2020, March 23). Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick: ‘Lots of grandparents’ willing to die to save economy for grandchildren. Intelligencer. https://nymag.com/ intelligencer/2020/03/dan-patrick-seniors-are-willing-to-die-to-save-economy.html Street, P. (2020, April 29). Coronavirus capitalism and “exceptional” America. CounterPunch. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/29/coronavirus-capitalism-andexceptional-america/ Taylor, K. (2020, July 16). A new survey finds hundreds of McDonald’s workers have been assaulted by anti-mask customers, as mandatory masks become the norm. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/workers-face-verbal-andphysical-assaults-from-anti-mask-customers-2020-7 Thorbecke, C. (2020, April 17). ‘I’m not ready to die’: New ‘essential workers’ call for protections, hazard pay in coronavirus crisis. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/ Business/im-ready-die-essential-workers-call-protections-hazard/story?id=70142602 Walker, C. (2020, June 2). Black workers hit harder and earlier by COVID unemployment, new report shows. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/black-workers-hitharder-and-earlier-by-covid-unemployment-new-report-shows/ Weissmann, J. (2020, May 28). The actual problem with saying “human capital stock.” Slate. https://slate.com/business/2020/05/human-capital-stock-kevin-hassettcoronavirus.html Yuval-Davis, N., & Wemyss, G. (2020, June 24). Bordering under the coronavirus pandemic. Soundings Blog. https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/blog/bordering-under-thecoronavirus-pandemic?mc_cid=bdcf314158&mc_eid=ec46ded26a Zarroli, J. (2020, December 10). There’s rich, and then there’s Jeff Bezos rich: Meet the world’s centibillionaires. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/944620768/theresrich-and-theres-jeff-bezos-rich-meet-the-members-of-the-100-billion-club

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CHAPTER 5

Shutdown Meltdown How the Quarantine Has Revealed the Ideological Collapse of the Nuclear Family Model

1

Introduction

In addition to exposing the profound limitations of capitalism in addressing public health crises, the COVID-19 pandemic also uncovered fault lines in gender inequities and the nuclear family. While the media mostly focused on economic and health impacts of the pandemic, it overlooked contextual factors shaped how the pandemic was experienced within the home. To fully comprehend the effects of the pandemic requires a socialist feminist framing, as Johnston (2020) asserted, after noting that “we are not all in this together”: The current crisis rests on foundations of gendered structural oppression. With the legacy of austerity disproportionately hitting women, and the consistent devaluing of feminised vocations such as childcare, education and health and social care, the pandemic has exacerbated already prevalent gender inequalities. (para. 1) More specifically, the effects of the pandemic itself is an outcome of the historical legacy of women and underrepresented groups being systematically shut out of discussions around preparedness planning, distribution of resources, and how workplaces should respond and adapt. As one example, Connor et al. (2020) noted how this “gender blindness” was reflected in the only CDC publications concerning COVID-19 that focused on women addressing pregnancy. This was on top of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act failing to address how COVID-19 impacted women and transgender individuals, those hardest hit in the areas of health and economics. As the researchers noted, “omitting gender analysis from public health research, interventions, and policy development fails to acknowledge the gendered impacts of disease outbreaks on healthcare access and utilization, labor practices, healthcare financing, data collection and program evaluation” (para. 30). The result of not including gender-based analyses was a failure to understand the material ways that the pandemic differentially impacted people along the intersectional lines of race, sexuality, indigenous status, migrant © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004500013_005 Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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status, disability, and geography, along with structural factors like housing, employment, and the environment (Ryan & Ayadi, 2020; Solnit, 2020). Further, These interconnected factors occur within systems and structures of power, which may include policies, institutions, governments, and media. These processes are historically rooted in structures of privilege and oppression shaped by patriarchy, structural racism, xenophobia, colonialism, imperialism, homophobia and ableism. (Ryan & Ayadi, 2020, p. 1407) Solnit (2020) aptly described COVID-19 as a “pandemic of patriarchy,” evidenced by the hostile inaction on the part of the government which “amplified the spread and impact of the disease and has punished women in the ways it always punishes them” (para. 18). This included economic impacts, rising rates of domestic violence, increased burdens of childcare and household maintenance, women facing a greater likelihood of being laid off, elevated vulnerability for exposure to the virus based on job sector, erosion of boundaries between work and home, and closed off access to health care. These punishments played out through the imposition of the neoliberal nuclear family model. This chapter opens with a brief discussion of neoliberalism and the role of the nuclear family as sustaining the economic and social components of capitalism. This is followed by an examination of inequities as felt by families during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the areas of health, management of childcare, parenting and K-12 remote instruction, and differences in the relationship between the workplace and home. The final topic addressed is the do it yourself (DIY) movement, which experienced a resurgence due to quarantining, in the form of adaptations to shortages, formation of networks of care, culminating in a reconsideration of the nuclear family model and capitalism itself.

2

Neoliberalism and the Nuclear Family

As a sociological construct, the concept of the nuclear family as consisting of two parents (default: heterosexual, expected to be married) and children residing within a single household is a more recent invention, emerging with industrialization during the Victorian era and cementing its status by the 1920s (Agostinone-Wilson, 2010). The nuclear family is more specifically a hegemonic construct in that even the growing number of families who do not meet the definition of a two-parent household with children are still subject to its ideological, economic, and policy impacts. In fact, these demographic changes,

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coupled with the activism of the 1960s, have created a backlash among both neoliberal and neoconservative elites. This is in the form of their reassertion of the dominance of the nuclear family since the mid-1970s, as Cooper (2017) outlines: it was only when the liberation movements of the 1960s began to challenge the sexual normativity of the family wage as the linchpin and foundation of welfare capitalism that the neoliberal-new social conservative alliance came into being. What they proposed in response to this “crisis” was not a return to the Fordist family wage but rather the strategic reinvention of a much older, poor-law tradition of private family responsibility, using the combined instruments of welfare reform, changes to taxation and monetary policy. Under their influence, welfare has been transformed from a redistributive program into an immense federal apparatus for policing the poor, while deficit spending has been steadily transferred from the state to the private family. (p. 21) Contrary to conservative laments that the “threatened” nuclear family has been both unchanging as well as an ideal to strive for, a simple historical overview demonstrates that the concept of “what makes a family” has always been highly diverse, with its appearance and sexual dynamics shaped by economic forces (Agostinone-Wilson, 2010; Cloud, 2001; Coontz, 1997, 2005; D’Emilio & Freedman, 1997). As Cooper (2017) explains, “if the history of modern capital appears on the one hand to regularly undermine and challenge existing orders of gender and sexuality, it also entails the periodic reinvention of the family as an instrument for distributing wealth and income” (p. 17). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantining, the family became the centralized distribution point for education, entertainment, childcare, and basic necessities like food preparation and health needs. Neoliberalism’s emphasis on austerity for the working class has included privatizing the family itself through the nuclear household. Eichner (2017) points out how traditional welfare programs that enabled women to stay home and care for young children were either drastically cut or replaced with welfare-to-work programs: Today, however, our law and public policy are premised on the view that families should shoulder their own financial weight. How families function is therefore dictated by how well the adults within them negotiate market forces in order to form and sustain stable partnerships, how much bargaining power and skill these adults have to arrange the caretaking

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and human development that children and others require, and whether any of the many risks that can befall families—for example a child developing a chronic illness—come to pass. (p. 214) In The German Ideology, Marx (1998) outlines essential concepts behind production and reproduction that are also relevant to the family. Production “is always a certain body politic, a social personality that is engaged on a larger or smaller aggregate of branches of production” (p. 3). In the case of the family, we are looking at its role in creating the future workforce. Since unpaid domestic work is part of any household and its results are immediately consumed (i.e., the repetition of doing dishes and laundry), Marx (1977) considers it unproductive labor. It is important to note that this is not a commentary on the importance of the labor, but rather its unpaid status (consumed for use-value, not creating exchange value). A housecleaner, on the other hand, doing the same sort of labor but for a wage, would be designated “productive.” But when they head home at the end of the day to clean their own house, then they are engaged in unproductive labor. Today’s dual earner family is thus composed of a mixture of productive and unproductive laborers, creating a contradictory situation (Agostinone-Wilson, 2010). Production both requires consumption and creates consumers (Marx, 1977, 1998). The means of production have to be replaced, and in the case of workers the family is the site of reproducing the future workforce: Hence, both the capitalist and his ideologist, the political economist, consider only that part of the worker’s individual consumption to be productive which is required for the perpetuation of the working class, and which therefore must take place in order that the capitalist may have labor power to consume. (Marx, 1977, p. 718) The family oversees and bears the expense of reproducing future workers. A major part of this process involves securing education and training to place one’s children at an advantage, and individual households are responsible for handling these costs. Yet capitalists regard this transmission process of education and training as belonging to them, one of many variables they employ to turn things to their advantage (like having the pick of overqualified job applicants). In the end, production and reproduction are “a total, connected process,” producing “not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself” (p. 724). Davis (1981) and Beneria and Sen (1986) outline how capitalism has always been resistant to the concept of socializing domestic unproductive labor since

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its expense would be incalculable at the outset. The free labor of women is also used as a leveraging device against raising the wages of child-care workers and house cleaners. As Leacock (1986) explains, A real contradiction exists between women’s liberation as a goal and the enormous expense entailed by the socializing of domestic labor…industrialized countries already have forms for socializing domestic labor and child care. All manner of food preparation and dispensing services, cleaning services, and formal and informal child care arrangements are at hand. All that is required is to make them more healthy, accessible, and cheap by removing them from a profit-making structure and making them responsive to the needs of the people using them. (p. 256) It is because this labor is essential that it is deliberately kept in the realm of low wages/no benefits (Hammam, 1986; Kelly, 1986; Mullings, 1986; Wang, 2001). As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of this work was done by women, which also put them at greater risk of contracting the virus. The COVID-19 pandemic tested the already-existing limits of what the nuclear family could bear in the form of gendered care work and how this crept over into waged work (Eichner, 2017). Because many women temporarily relocated their workspaces at home, this transformed the traditional, though already tenuous boundary between employment and where one lives. As Orgad (2019) notes, motherhood itself is defined by the nuclear family form as an expression of neoliberalism: mothering is a deeply meaningful, valuable, significant as well as pleasurable activity, but it is simultaneously complex, laborious, precarious, and profoundly undervalued…advanced neoliberalism, particularly, the privatization of risk and the intensification of self-regulation and disciplinary neoliberalism inject new layers of complexity and difficulty into mothers’ work, and reconfigure sensibilities in profound ways. (p. 462) This was especially the case for households headed by single mothers who are finding it nearly impossible to “operate forever in the framework authorities envision” during the pandemic (Perelman, 2020, para. 19). Government protections like other countries have are non-existent in the U.S., which has no coordinated infrastructure for childcare, other than isolated programs like Head Start (Eichner, 2017). As one example of the outdated application of the nuclear family form, the neoliberal push to reopen businesses did not take into consideration the impacts on families who had children in school, especially

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if schools moved to remote learning as an important public health measure. Employment and reopening policies were also designed with the neatly contained and isolated nuclear family in mind, when, in reality, those groups most vulnerable to the virus—including poor and underrepresented families— resided in households more accurately fitting the older extended family model with multiple generations living together. The COVID-19 pandemic brought into focus the dependency on the nuclear family model as a stand-in for neoliberal policies that have been long eroding already-meager protections for the working class since the 1970s. How households coped with the pandemic plays out against this backdrop of privatization of health care, reduced workplace protections, “at-will” employment, and rising expenses. Households were expected to bear these social costs even though families in the U.S. spend the same amount in the form of private dollars as other countries who socialize these costs (Eichner, 2017). This is at the expense of not only economic security, but personal well-being.

3

Existing Inequities

Despite the widespread phenomena of quarantining at home (either voluntarily or due to state measures), the experience itself was vastly different, depending on one’s economic status, gender, race, age, workplace, and ability status (Ruhle, 2020). For women in particular, the impacts of COVID-19 were an expression of already-existing inequities, beginning within the home itself: The closure of schools to control COVID-19 transmission has a differential effect on women economically, given their role in providing most of the informal care within families, with consequences that limit their work and economic opportunities. In general, the outbreak experience means that women’s domestic burden becomes exacerbated as well, making their share of household responsibilities even heavier, and for many while they also work full time. (Covid-19 A Gender Lens, 2020, p. 6) Women who are employed outside of the household make up over 50% of the non-agricultural civilian workforce, yet still handle the bulk of care work in the home—and this was the case prior to the pandemic (Cohen & Hsu, 2020, para. 9). Even considering situations where families are better off financially, such as heterosexual marriages where both partners are employed full time, women still provide almost 70% of the child care during working hours (para. 9). With many K-12 schools utilizing remote instruction, this only increased the

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burden on women within nuclear families. This section presents an overview of gender-based inequities in the areas of health, parenting (including management of remote K-12 learning), childcare and the workplace. 3.1 Health The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated already-existing gendered inequalities in the area of health. This includes not just differences in the experiences of physical health, but mental health/wellbeing, abuse/intimate partner violence, and access to reproductive health care. As Connor et al. (2020) assert, “gender is a social determinant of health, unique from but entangled with sex differences, and an axis along which the Covid-19 pandemic is widening health disparities” (para. 5). Even prior to the pandemic, women have reported having to miss more work days due physical and mental health symptoms as compared to men, despite being more likely to utilize preventative care. As a group, women experience more serious outcomes to chronic health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease (para. 5). This only increases when demographic factors like race, education level, low socioeconomic status, geographic factors, single parent status, immigrant status, age, disability, and LGBTQI identity are taken into account. In addition to demographic factors, women’s increased health risks are often directly connected to their roles, which took on increased importance during the pandemic. This included being placed into an elevated risk of contracting the virus because of direct care work as well as employment in low-wage, high-exposure sectors (Ryan & Ayadi, 2020). Often, these jobs and roles meant that women had fewer options for having a say in terms of their own health, let alone workplace policies: “where women possess comparatively less autonomy than men, they may lack decision-making ability around whether and how to initiate and maintain hygiene strategies to prevent COVID-19, particularly problematic where population density further limits the ability to social distance during the pandemic” (p. 1405). Women in single parent households were particularly vulnerable since they were often the sole financial and care providers with few networks of support. Some of the emerging research on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender and mental health indicate that stress elevated rates of depression and anxiety in women, along with accelerating substance abuse and addiction. Wedderburn (2020) outlined how her experiences as a relatively well-off woman only highlighted those who are less fortunate: The rhythms of everyday life have been altered over the last few months for all of us, but not to the same extent, and not in the same way. It’s hard to reconcile the unbounded shapelessness of my life at the moment Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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with the furious hyper-urgency faced by medical professionals, or with the chaotic and uncertain horror the sick and their families must now be navigating. As a childless university lecturer, I am similarly insulated from the gnawing anxieties of unemployment or eviction, and from the frantic plate-spinning suddenly required of parents, carers and many others. These vast disparities bring the temporal dimensions of pandemic politics into sharp focus. (p. 32) As with physical health, even though women are more inclined to seek mental health resources, they are twice as likely to remain undiagnosed as men due to not having insurance coverage or the associated stigmas (Ryan & Ayadi, 2020; Connor et al., 2020, para. 24). The women hardest hit during the pandemic in the area of mental health included those with young children, young women who were essential workers and Black/Latina women (Johnston, 2020). Close to 50% of mothers who have young children reported elevated levels of anxiety and one third of women were overall affected by mental health problems since the pandemic began (para. 11). Further exacerbating the crisis was the lack of overall funding for women’s mental health care, which is likely to impact future recovery. Women also faced elevated levels of domestic violence and abuse, starting with how hyper-masculinity was expressed during the pandemic “as men may exhibit less health seeking behavior as a result of rigid gender norms, wanting to be viewed as tough rather than week” (Covid-19 A Gender Lens, 2020). Tensions resulting from household job loss also created conflict that led to abuse and violence (Ryan & Ayadi, 2020). Because of economic precarity brought on by the pandemic, women were less likely to seek help or were reluctant to do so because of their crucial caregiving roles. Even for those inclined to find support, many of those services were temporarily on hold due to stay-at-home orders or reduced staffing (Buttell & Ferreira, 2020). New Orleans provided a case study of an area especially impacted by COVID-19 in terms of hospitalizations and deaths. Even though crime rates had dropped for most categories of violent crime since the start of the pandemic, aggravated domestic assaults were up 37% compared to the prior year (p. 197). The final area of health affecting women was reproductive health, with one third reporting clinic closures, difficulty obtaining contraception, or delays in appointments (Connor et al., 2020, para. 14). Because medical personnel were diverted to pandemic response, resources for reproductive health care were reduced, “contributing to a rise in maternal and newborn mortality, increased unmet need for contraception, and increased number of unsafe abortions and sextually transmitted infections” (Covid-19 A Gender Lens, 2020, p. 5). Because women were less likely to have input or decision-making into the pandemic Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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response compared to men, this impacted their ability to make important choices concerning reproductive health: Drawing lessons from the Zika virus outbreak, differences in power between men and women meant that women did not have autonomy over their sexual and reproductive decisions, which was compounded by their inadequate access to health care and insufficient financial resources to travel to hospitals and health care facilities for check-ups for their children, despite women doing most of the community spread control activities. Many times, there is also an inadequate level of women’s representation in pandemic planning and response, which can already be seen in some of the national and global COVID-19 responses. (p. 5) 3.2 Unpaid Labor: Parenting and Managing K-12 Education While already challenging prior to the pandemic, managing parenting and work during periods of shutdown pushed the limits of the nuclear family model. By April 2020, 42% of U.S. employees were working from home, representing a 20% increase compared to just one year prior (Milliken et al., 2020, p. 1768; Mazzucchelli et al., 2020, p. 690). This doubled the number of people working online. Though remote work was already a growing practice within professions, the move of K-12 schooling to online formats “dissolved boundaries between work and family, which can create role confusion, interruptions, and greater work-family conflict” (Milliken et al., 2020, p. 1768; Wenham et al., 2020). Women were impacted in particular because of their already overseeing the bulk of domestic tasks and childrearing and not having a structured, separate work space to help maintain that balance. In one example, Mazzucchelli, et al. (2020) cited an Italian study from the early weeks of the pandemic that indicated one out of three women were struggling to or failed to balance work and home life, compared to one out of five men, showing that “smart working…is not so smart for working mothers” (p. 690). Stressors from parenting while working at home are a complex interplay of factors. Elevated stress is correlated with being younger, female, single, and having more than one child (Mazzucchelli et al., 2020; Power, 2020). Stress is also connected to the task of parenting itself in the context of increased demands for worker productivity and hours spent on the job, whether online or in a physical office. As Eichner (2017) points out, over 90% of people born in 1940 “had higher earnings at age 30 than their parents did at the same age” compared to only half of children born in 1980 (p. 235). Even those with college degrees are not at a guaranteed advantage, as few jobs have funded pensions and one fifth of college graduates only earn $25,000 or less (p. 235). Prior to

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the pandemic, parents were already increasing time spent on education and domestic work by 50%, with mothers putting in an average of 15 more hours than fathers (Cohen & Hsu, 2020, para. 11). It is important to note that these statistics represent those considered better off than many segments of the working class who have fewer means of financial and social support. For women who occupy the caregiver role on top of managing work, a form of stress known as “caregiver burden” is all-encompassing due to “perceived lack of agency in choosing the role, financial stress, and social isolation” (Connor, 2020, para. 11). Because of necessary public health precautions like moving K-12 instruction and workplaces to remote formats, closing childcare centers, libraries, and entertainment venues, along with eliminating the possibility of safe play groups, women found themselves not only managing household tasks and childcare, but entertaining children on their own without the usual outlets of support to make things workable. As Power (2020) points out, “it’s always been a farce to think about caretaking and family responsibilities as ‘personal life decisions’ that get handled outside of work hours. This current situation is almost prophetically designed to showcase the farce of our society” (p. 68). Considering how 65% of U.S. women are considered informal family caregivers and close to 90% of those who require long-term care rely solely on unpaid caregivers, this role has to be addressed in the reassessment of the nuclear family (Connor, 2020, para. 10). When considered in global contexts, women—including young girls—provide 75% of unpaid daily care work, which includes tasks like cleaning (King et al., 2020, p. 80). Women provide over 4 hours of unpaid labor per day, compared to close to one and a half hours for men (Power, 2020, p. 67). While called the care economy, core economy and reproductive economy, Power suggests it should also be considered the “hypocrisy economy,” when people talk about empowering women because they now also work outside the home in the paid economy, in addition to taking care of their children and home, without any systemic attempt to encourage or enable men to take more responsibility. (p. 67) These systemic inequalities in unpaid caregiving represent close to $5,000 in income lost for reduced working hours and other gender-based penalties for women, but not for male caregivers (Connor, 2020, para. 10). Caregiving remains associated with rigid gender norms, it is valued less, and assigned to women who often have few options choose whether or not to do such work. They also often cannot select the conditions for such work and situations like a pandemic tend to narrow options even further (King et al., 2020; Malisch et al., 2020, para. 11).

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Evans (2020) relates how early pandemic studies reported major increases in men spending time on childcare duties compared to 2015, “but by fall, the novelty had, apparently, worn off” as women resumed their 90% lead over men in the unpaid childcare department (para. 3). Gender differences in mental health were also pronounced, with 32% of fathers who reported a decline compared to 57% of mothers (Power, 2020, p. 68). Solnit’s (2020) darkly satirical piece examining the gender differential in parenting cites a news headline, Nearly Half of Men Say They Do Most of the Home Schooling: 3% of Women Agree as summing up the pandemic situation (para. 11). As she noted, “we are being told that the stay-at-home decrees in the U.S. have meant, for that peculiarly popular arrangement that is heterosexual two-parent families, that women are doing most of the work” (para. 10). Her critical analysis of the media’s portrayal of pandemic parenting continued: We’ve had the story told this way about so many things. About how men’s actions, in other words, are more women’s work, and what women should do more not to get raped, beaten, murdered. I’ve written here before about the use of the passive tense and evasive language to erase perpetrators. Changing the grammar changes whose responsibility it is to do something about it, or to stop doing it, and so does changing who’s the subject of the story. (para. 14) 3.3 Childcare In addition to the imbalance of gendered roles within the nuclear family, access to childcare as a service itself reflects neoliberal privatization, with costs far exceeding most household budgets. Compared to other nations, the U.S. provides virtually no subsidies for covering childcare. The median expenditures that middle-income families spend on raising one child from infancy through 17 years old is close to $234,000, representing 25% of a household’s earnings during that timeframe (Eichner, 2017, p. 221). This figure does not include college tuition, which adds on another 50% of household income (p. 221). When looking at child care expenses for a child three years old and under, the average is $9,500 (Kitchener, 2020, para. 11). Licensed infant care in large cities is even more expensive, costing an average of over $24,000 (para. 11). This is in contrast to socialized countries like Sweden, where child care costs represent 3% of household income, and caps at $1,800 per child (para. 12). An additional constraining factor concerning accessibility of childcare is the amount of household debt. Since most parents tend to have children during the early years of their careers, they do not have access to the savings of more established households to spend on childcare or enrichment

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opportunities (Eichner, 2017). Financial stressors are compounded for women having to reduce their hours at work or taking an extended leave of absence at four times the rate of men because of difficulty locating affordable childcare (Milliken et al., 2020, p. 1768). This represents a gender gap increase in work hours projected to be within the range of 20–50% (p. 1769): As parents are expected to return to work without adequate childcare in place, two-parent households will be forced to elect a parent to stay at home and look after the children. Because of the widening gender wage gap and gendered care norms, it is likely that the responsibility of staying at home will be falling mostly to mothers. With only one income to rely on, single working mothers could face even tougher challenges. (Johnston, 2020, para. 4) In spite of these profound consequences for women, childcare itself does not “count” as official work unless it is done by paid employees (Power, 2020). During the pandemic, the value the Cares Act placed on child care was an allotment of $500.00 per child for qualifying families, barely paying for one week (Kitchener, 2020, paras. 14–15). The pandemic also highlighted the dependency of affluent families on childcare provided by mostly female members of underrepresented groups, who are low paid workers while also having historically distanced themselves from this same workforce. As Pankova and Barrow (2020) note, Many domestic workers serving the middle-class live in slums where social distancing is impossible. But the middle class can’t imagine surviving without them…how does a middle class live with what it fears and depends upon…the virus is complicating the navigation of an upper class’s radical dependence on labor it socially distances from, and now seeks to spatially distance from, but needs for the most intimate practices and spaces—cleaning, cooking, babysitting. (para. 34) 3.4 The Workplace Gender-based inequalities in employment only became more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. This included wages, types of jobs held, promotions, and being penalized for providing care work at home: Prior to the crisis, women were more likely to be low earners and in parttime, temporary and zero-hours work. The consequences of structural inequalities in employment and care, and cuts to public services, meant

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women were already the majority of those in debt and were more likely to become insolvent. Women were consistently more likely to struggle to pay bills and run out of money. It is therefore no coincidence that women are experiencing greater levels of debt, mental health decline and employment and financial precarity than men; and those facing the worst shocks include Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women, mothers, and migrant, young and disabled women. (Johnston, 2020, para. 2) Young women—a significant percentage of them members of underrepresented groups—currently made up the majority of workers in those sectors more prone to being impacted during the shutdown, such as restaurants, tourism, bars, and non-grocery retail, with 26% who expected an overall drop in income (Johnston, 2020, para. 5; Milliken et al., 2020). Among grocery workers, women represented 66% of cashiers (Milliken et al., 2020, p. 1768). Women were also more likely to be underemployed, with 11% who faced this problem, compared to 4% of men (Connor et al., 2020, para. 8). Underemployment led many women to work several part-time jobs, which also increased their risk of exposing themselves and their family members and others to the virus. Overall, 17% of all U.S. households are headed by a single working mother, those who were also most likely to work in low-wage, high-contact sectors that put them at risk of contracting the virus (Milliken et al., 2020, p. 1768). Despite this, the media portrayed the economic impacts of the pandemic as unrelated to gender, including making policy recommendations that excluded women’s interests from the discussion. This became all-too apparent when it came to health care workers, where women represented 70%-76% of the global health and social service workforce (Covid-19 A Gender Lens, 2020, p. 5; King et al., 2020, p. 80; Connor et al., 2020, para. 7). Within specific sectors such as nursing, women made up 90% of nurses and nursing assistants, which contributed to the statistic of three out of four U.S. healthcare workers who tested positive for COVID-19 being women (Ryan & Ayedi, 2020, p. 1405). As King et al. (2020) explained: Being at the front line of the pandemic response places these women at risk of infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, as well as physical and psychological pressures…women are more likely to be employed in sectors at high risk of impacts from COVID-19, and also because women are more likely to be employed part time or in temporary or casual arrangements. Such employment arrangements are often precarious with fewer legal protections, meaning that women are particularly vulnerable to job loss during this pandemic, placing them

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at increased risk of the adverse health outcomes associated with unemployment. (p. 80) In addition to being overrepresented in high-risk sectors during the pandemic, women were penalized in the workplace for having to take on additional unpaid care work for their children, immunocompromised family members, and elderly relatives. While women have historically been at a disadvantage for promotions or salary increases due to having to reduce their weekly hours or taking a leave of absence to accommodate care work, other countries that provide more socialized supports are able to offset these disadvantages as compared to the U.S.: As the pandemic upends work and home life, women have carried an outsized share of the burden, more likely to lose a job and more likely to shoulder the load of closed schools and day care. For many working mothers, the gradual reopening won’t solve their problems, but compound them—forcing them out of the labor force or into part-time jobs while increasing their responsibilities at home. (Cohen & Hsu, 2020, para. 4) Since the pandemic is projected to stretch on for an extended period of time (with economic impacts lingering even longer), the likelihood of a woman being able to easily re-enter the workplace after having to leave it for a long period of time is low. Taking on care work also increases the chances for women to be laid off or overlooked for promotions, which also contributes to overall reduced lifetime earnings. Power (2020) acknowledges that many professions view care work as “taking away from real work,” viewing women with young children as being less dedicated to their careers than men. The switch to remote working arrangements also placed women at a disadvantage because of their being removed from in-person networking opportunities that arises from something as simple as daily conversations with coworkers (Milliken et al., 2020). Coupled with the removal from the physical workplace (and the loss of privacy that comes with having one’s own workspace), “the complexity of working from home…may result in decreased well-being, job, and life satisfaction in the short term, as well as lower performance ratings, career satisfaction, salary and hierarchical position in the long term” (p. 1769). Even the relatively privileged sector of academia provides a case study in gender-based workplace inequalities. Malisch et al., (2020) examined challenges women faced during the pandemic, starting with the overrepresentation

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of women in general and female faculty of color in particular in adjunct positions. These were among the first positions to be cut due to the pandemic. Even for those women who were tenured or tenure track professors, many universities stopped contributions to retirement accounts, which only contributed further to the gendered salary gap already in existence. Female academics also face higher course loads, assignment to introductory courses that have larger enrolments and needier students, and feel pressure to provide service on committees or mentorship. This makes the ability to participate in research less likely, and research is often the top priority in making decisions about tenure and promotion: By enlarging the academic pillars of service and teaching, COVID-19 will leave little, if any, time to pursue and maintain research funding or other scholarly activities. Already there are alarming signs in academia that echo the unintended negative career effects of parental leave. Whereas parental leave enhances men’s research productivity, it adversely affects that of women. For example, journals in some fields are reporting a widening gender divide in article submissions. (para. 10) One of the more profound stressors for women within academia was the necessary switch to online teaching formats, bringing with it a series of challenges. As Malisch et al. (2020) explain, “almost overnight the system faced a sudden transition to remote teaching and learning, changes in grading systems, and loss of access to research resources” which also led to “shifts in household labor, childcare, eldercare, and physical confinement” (para. 1). Because online teaching involves more planning time in order to make pedagogical adjustments, women academics placed their mental energy into offering extended office hours, providing counseling for students not used to remote learning, and faced higher enrollments because of cutting adjunct positions. Institutional stressors brought on by the pandemic also led to decision making that penalized women, such as policies about family leave or altering the tenure clock. The conditions workers faced during the pandemic are reflective of the position of workers overall under neoliberal capitalism. The standard 40-hour work week is a thing of the past, last existing in the 1960s. As a group, U.S. workers put in far more hours than those from other comparable countries. For example, compared to German workers, U.S. workers log approximately 10 more weeks a year of labor (Eichner, 2017, p. 230). Dual-earner households contribute close to 83 hours per week at work, compared to 63 hours for Dutch households (p. 231). Nineteen percent of U.S. households with children put in

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over 100 hours a week at their jobs (p. 231). Yet this rise in productivity has not resulted in appreciable increases in household earnings, savings, or in elevated job satisfaction. In Gallup polls examining workplace engagement, only 31% of workers indicated they felt “involved, enthusiastic and committed” with 17% classifying themselves as disengaged (p. 231). The pandemic further challenged workplace engagement with blurred boundaries between work and home, eroding the traditional separate spheres that once made work-life balance somewhat doable: Among the more securely employed, lockdown has demanded a move towards more flexible working patterns. The consequences of widespread working from home have been predictable: gendered imbalances of household labour have worsened, for example, with burdens of childcare, home-schooling and housekeeping falling disproportionately on women’s shoulders. Work is now woven into the rhythms of many people’s domestic lives, making demands on personal time, personal space and personal relationships…These changes are certain to endure, to some extent at least. (Wedderburn, 2020, p. 35)

4

Do It Yourself

One response of households to the inadequacies of capitalism and the nuclear family form during the COVID-19 shutdown was to seek out alternative production and distribution networks. These have emerged from the already-existing do it yourself (DIY) movement: DIY is the idea that you can do for yourself the activities normally reserved for the realm of capitalist production (wherein products are created for consumption in a system that encourages alienation and nonparticipation). Thus, anything from music and magazines to education and protest can be created in a non-alienating, self-organized, and purposely anti-capitalist manner. While production mostly takes place through small and localized means, extensive and oftentimes global social networks are utilized for distribution. (Holtzman et al., 2007, p. 44) Though technically always existing in human communities where people directly manufactured and distributed necessary goods on a local level, DIY as we know it likely began in the 1970s, as an offshoot of rejecting mass consumption and resisting capitalism by embracing frugality. Today, much of the DIY

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movement has reached the mainstream, with its more radical origins receding into the background. Those who actively participate in the DIY movement are known as makers, or DIYers, defined by Corsini et al. (2020) as “both formally trained and self‐taught individuals that work with open, peer‐to‐peer, distributed and Do It Yourself approaches in a collaborative way…for cultural change, educational and social purposes, beside entrepreneurial ones” (para. 2). Sites such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram feature endless resources for those taking on a range of tasks (also known as “hacks”) from automotive maintenance to exercise videos, gardening, cutting hair, cooking and nutrition, crafts, education, household repairs, technology troubleshooting, among other topics. People often begin as observers or users of these video resources, eventually moving to making their own instructional tutorials as they become skilled. During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses were closed, which caused families to explore some of these DIY options as a way of making do. In addition to saving money, makers often derive personal and emotional satisfaction from acquiring skills in non-formal contexts. Prior to the pandemic, many would have never been able to imagine themselves being able to cook from scratch or make household repairs. In a consumer-mediated society, these kinds of goods and services are often only purchased. Wolf and McQuitty (2011) explain how makers and the DIY movement itself are indeed different from traditional consumer-based activities: People who undertake DIY projects go beyond the construction of meaning of a commodity because these consumers are both the designer of the functional specifications and the builder. They choose among available materials and tools, engineer the work process to complete the project, and act as inspectors and evaluators when deciding whether the product has achieved the desired value. (p. 144) Wolf and McQuitty also differentiate DIY from self-service convenience technologies like ATMs, automated check-out lines, or gas stations. It is the length of time and the personal involvement that set the DIY experience apart from these consumer technologies. As they point out, “there is nothing convenient about remodeling one’s own home or landscaping one’s yard” (p. 144). Yet as with other lived experiences during the pandemic, the DIY movement was also reflective of inequalities under capitalism and remains a classed phenomenon. Patel’s (2020) analysis of the diversity of the professional craft sector in the UK revealed that only 4% of makers were members of underrepresented groups (para. 2). In interviews with these crafters, many included

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accounts of experiencing racism from other crafters, customers, or suppliers. Since the DIY movement as a whole remains majority White, this must be kept in mind as the media highlighted accounts of COVID-19 inspiring makers. As Patel pointed out, Those fortunate enough to work from home have the time and resources to turn their attention to making and baking, or developing their craft expertise. They can even choose to stay silent about Black Lives Matter and not engage at all with the protests or online conversations. (para. 5) Additionally, it is important to note that while there were those makers who repurposed recycled materials or grew their own food for cooking, the majority of DIY activities remained heavily consumer-centered, requiring at least some form of purchasing. As one example, the personal home improvement sector alone is a $267 billion dollar industry (Wolf & McQuitty, 2010, p. 145). Within the DIY movement, there are different motivations and associated systems. This section will first examine the growth of DIY as a way of adapting to supply chain shortages during COVID-19 and then look at the networks of care that could also be considered part of the overall movement. 4.1 Adaptations to Shortages As Corsini et al. (2020) explained, “what is common to makers and frugal innovators is their ability to respond quickly to problems as they arise. They work in opportunistic ways, exploiting their own social networks to develop solutions” (para. 36). This was the case during the first few weeks of the pandemic after disruptions to the supply chain of basic goods and services. Additionally, due to there being no coordinated federal response, even health care workers had to use DIY solutions to construct personal protective equipment (PPE). Using a form of “systems hacking,” individuals found themselves constructing masks, using alternatives to hand sanitizer and wipes, following tutorial videos on how to cut hair, and even making reusable toilet cloth toilet paper. During the early weeks of the pandemic, social media was quickly put into action, with trading sites set up for exchanging different kinds of goods for quarantining families. As one example, neighborhood Facebook group members would photograph used toys, puzzles, books and children’s clothing and then set them outside for free curbside pickup so people could take what they needed. People could also leave items in exchange, beginning the cycle again. Most of these Facebook groups were already set up for conducting e-yard sales, so the infrastructure and audience were in place. On a smaller scale, networks of friends who were active on Facebook would trade items, leaving

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them outside for curbside or dropping them off for those stuck indoors, posting updates as items were claimed. The established craft sector saw an increased interest in makers creating handmade items, using DIY shows and video tutorials to manufacture necessary goods for donations, household use, or a source of income. Patel (2020) described how a studio in Melbourne was able to preserve the positions of their workforce by switching production to sewing hard-to-find scrubs for the health care sectors. This mirrored efforts by local distilleries to switch from alcohol production to hand sanitizer manufacturing (Distilleries Map, 2020). Patterns for cloth masks quickly proliferated for all skill levels, during a time when the CDC and other public health policy organizations were hesitant to encourage protective face coverings. In this case, the DIY movement may have spared thousands of lives by applying some forethought and tapping into people’s desire to create needed items for themselves and others. A hallmark of DIY is its use of resources that are more likely to be on hand and affordable. An inevitable outcome of making do “results not only in the economizing of components and local raw materials, but also in the creation of simpler designs (Corsini et al., 2020, para. 8). This was the case with the creation of PPE and innovations in even the smallest adaptations such as simple elastic bands with buttons across the back of the head to relieve pressure of mask straps on the ears. Because larger numbers of people are involved with direct production and its accompanying trial and error, their ability to communicate and exchange ideas via social media resulted in heightened innovation with less expensive materials. This form of “frugal innovation” involved the production of mutually beneficial “good enough, affordable products that met the needs of resource-constrained consumers” (para. 4). Demand for this aspect of DIY is only going to increase as global climate change begins to further impact supply chains and essential resources. 4.2 Networks of Care An offshoot of DIY and maker communities and goods during the COVID-19 pandemic were informal networks of care. These included younger, less at-risk individuals agreeing to run errands for groups of those more vulnerable to the virus, dropping off prepared meals for the elderly and immunocompromised, teachers pooling their subject matter expertise during the summer to provide educational sessions via video feed or resources for parents helping children with homework, or donating the use of empty rental properties for those needing to quarantine from family members (Ruhle, 2020). These networks of care emerged across social class dimensions, but were particularly impactful for the less financially secure:

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While wealthier parents can afford to “get creative,” lower income and many single parents have far fewer options…Some are leaning on family members or just doing the best they can on their own. Others have been laid off, or have had to quit their jobs to take care of their kids. (Kitchener, 2020, para. 6) Much of the inspiration behind care networks centered around the necessity of closing schools and day care centers, and health limitations on hiring individual babysitters or nannies. Even in situations where parents lived in states that had relaxed standards for reopening, many remained reluctant to send their children to school or public indoor programs. For the more affluent, parents opted for “pods”—smaller numbers of children who are taught by a teacher who is regularly tested for the virus (Kitchener, 2020). But for those with limited finances, reliance on childcare exchanges and other rotating/ sharing solutions were the only options for those required to return to work.

5

Conclusion: Reconsidering Capitalism

The inability of the nuclear family form to provide total economic, social, and emotional support has come into focus during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, women had the most to lose and must militantly insist on being a central part of any public health planning, especially since this pandemic is not likely to be a unique event. Not only is this important for addressing the needs of women, but of improving the distribution of health care and other resources for all people: Given their front-line interaction with communities, it is concerning that women have not been fully incorporated into global health security surveillance, detection, and prevention mechanisms. Women’s socially prescribed care roles typically place them in a prime position to identify trends at the local level that might signal the start of an outbreak and thus improve global health security. Although women should not be further burdened, particularly considering much of their labor during health crises goes underpaid or unpaid, incorporating women’s voices and knowledge could be empowering and improve outbreak preparedness and response. (Wenham et al., 2020, para. 5) Because of immediately felt already-existing inequalities, people have begun to consider important alternatives to the status quo, the first of which are long

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overdue updates to antiquated workplace policies, starting with guaranteed stipends—not one-time, meager stimulus payments—to enable families to remain safely at home and stop the spread of the virus. Other employment measures include “removing the requirement for carers to actively seek work to eligible for unemployment benefits” and increased access to paid family and sick leave (Power, 2020, p. 70). To further promote the ease of working and attending school from home requires a fully funded, genuine infrastructure for a publicly accessible internet, covering rural and urban areas alike. This means challenging the atomized network of private, expensive internet providers. Within the workplace itself, businesses and organizations need to ensure that their policies do not inadvertently reinforce gender inequalities in the household. This means full support of child care and care for older adults and not penalizing women for their role as caregivers. The ability to work virtually needs to be made as accessible as possible, if the option exists: As COVID-19 shifts the ways in which we work, workplaces must enable women and men to work from home and share caring responsibilities. Workplace practices, policies, and culture regarding leave and flexible work arrangements are an important influence on fathers’ abilities to combine work and caring responsibilities, underscoring the importance of gender-neutral approaches to leave and flexible working. (King et al., 2020, p. 81) Reflecting the need for updated workplace policies, households themselves must redistribute the burden of care from being provided by mostly women, to across the gender line. This could be supported by extending income replacement to all adults in the household, not just tied to one working parent, for example, should the need to take a leave of absence to provide child care occur. It should be pretty clear by now that just as the pandemic is not a quickly resolvable public health problem, it is also creating several long-lasting impacts that could stretch over several years. Subsequent variants of the virus are emerging, potentially extending remote learning and working from home. Economic impacts are going to hit households, affecting areas like savings for retirement, paying for college, medical costs, on top of already escalating child-care expenses. While families are facing these material costs, there is also the overall cost to mental health and well-being under capitalism, with even longer-lasting effects (Mazzucchelli et al., 2020). In discussing the stressors of the pandemic on the nuclear family, Perelman (2020) expressed the hesitancy of many to do something about it due to the very conditions brought about by the cause of the problem:

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We all ask one another why we aren’t making more noise. The consensus is that everyone agrees this is a catastrophe, but we are too bone-tired to raise our voices above a groan, let alone scream through a megaphone. Every single person confesses burnout, despair, feeling like they are losing their minds, knowing in their guts that this is untenable. (para. 5) What the COVID-19 pandemic has accomplished is to reveal the fragility of the for-profit system along with strains on the ability of the nuclear family to handle it all on their own. We have the potential to think differently, and the urgency is greater than it has ever been.

References Agostinone-Wilson, F. (2010). Marxism and education beyond identity: Sexuality and schooling. Palgrave. Amazon. (2020, April 22). Delivering rainbows [Advertisement]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVvphILiYQc Beneria, L., & Sen, G. (1986). Accumulation, reproduction, and women’s role in economic development: Boserup revisted. In E. Leacock & H. Safa (Eds.), Women’s work (pp. 141–157). Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Buttell, F., & Ferreira, R. (2020). The hidden disaster of COVID-19: Intimate partner violence. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy, 12(SI), S197–S198. Cloud, D. (2001). Queer theory and ‘family values’: Capitalism’s utopias of self-invention. In M. Zavarzadeh, T. Ebert, & D. Morton (Eds.), Marxism, queer theory, gender (pp. 71–114). The Red Factory. Cohen, P., & Hsu, T. (2020, June 30). Pandemic could scar a generation of working mothers. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/business/ economy/coronavirus-working-women.html?action=click&module= RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article Connor, J., Madhavan, S., Mokashi, M., Amanual, H., Johnson, N., Pace, L., & Bartz, D. (2020, September 13). Health risks and outcomes that disproportionately affect women during the Covid-19 pandemic: A review. Elsevier Public Health Emergency Collection. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7487147/ Coontz, S. (1997). The way we really are: Coming to terms with America’s changing families. Basic Books. Coontz, S. (2005). Marriage, a history: How love conquered marriage. Penguin Books. Cooper, M. (2017). Family values: Between neoliberalism and the new social conservatism. Zone Books.

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Corsini, L., Dammicco, V., & Moultrie, J. (2020, December 3). Frugal innovation in a crisis: The digital fabrication maker response to COVID-19. R&D Management. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/radm.12446 Covid-19: A gender lens. (2020, March). UNFPA technical brief. https://www.unfpa.org/ sites/default/files/resource-pdf/COVID-19_A_Gender_Lens_Guidance_Note.pdf Davis, A. (1981). Women, race, and class. Vintage Books. D’Emilio, J., & Freedman, E. B. (1997). Intimate matters: A history of sexuality in America. The University of Chicago Press. Distilleries Map. (2020). Distilled Spirits Council. https://www.distilledspirits.org/ distillers-responding-to-covid-19/distilleries-making-hand-sanitizer/ Eichner, M. (2017). The privatized American family. Notre Dame Law Review, 93(1), 213–266. Evans, L. (2020, December 9). Men were briefly interested in domestic chores during lockdown, but they’re over it now. Jezebel. https://jezebel.com/men-were-brieflyinterested-in-domestic-chores-during-l-1845847987?rev=1607569747810&utm_ campaign=Jezebel&utm_content=1607570010&utm_medium=SocialMarketing& utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1E_fW3KAcWz3JpI8-JfPqmBszJAMUnitXKZUfsM3H9fMrWpBoJdoA9l4 Hammam, M. (1986). Capitalist development, family division of labor, and migration in the Middle East. In E. Leacock & H. Safa (Eds.), Women’s work (pp. 158–173). Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Holtzman, B., Hughes, C., & Van Meter, K. (2007). Do it yourself…and the movement beyond capitalism. In S. Shukaitis & D. Graeber (Eds.), Constituent imagination: Militant investigations//Collective theorization (pp. 44–61). AK Press. Johnston, A. (2020, August 5). Covid-19: An economic crisis for women. Soundings Blog. https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/soundings/blog/covid-19-an-economic-crisis-forwomen?mc_cid=2fc7ac9b34&mc_eid=ec46ded26a Kelly, M. (1986). Introduction. In E. Leacock & H. Safa (Eds.), Women’s work (pp. 1–10). Bergin & Garvey Publishers. King, T., Hewitt, B., Crammond, B., Sutherland, G., Maheen, H., & Kavanagh, A. (2020, June 19). Reordering gender systems: Can COVID-19 lead to improved gender equality and health? The Lancet, 80–81. https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/ PIIS0140-6736(20)31418-5.pdf Kitchener, C. (2020, December 7). The cost of child care was already astronomical: In the pandemic it’s terrifying. The Lily. https://www.thelily.com/the-cost-of-childcare-was-already-astronomical-in-the-pandemic-its-terrifying/?fbclid=IwAR1lWkbuhxlKoFh7p6d3YDWIj4MzcFQx2Vf-G_DZA6_pGKI_IVTEBAGuIQ Leacock, E. (1986). Postscript: Implications for organization. In E. Leacock & H. Safa (Eds.), Women’s work (pp. 253–265). Bergin & Garvey Publishers.

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Malisch, J., Harris, B., Sherrer, S., Lewis, K., Shepherd, S., McCarthy, P., Spott, J., Karam, E., Moustaid-Moussa, N., Calarco, J., Ramalingam, L., Talley, A., Canas-Carrell, J., Ardon-Dryer, K., Weiser, D., Bernal, X., & Deitloff, J. (2020, July 7). Opinion: In the wake of COVID-19, academia needs new solutions to ensure gender equity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/15378?fbclid=IwAR35UV0UQBb8Ex Marx, K. (1977). Capital: Volume I. Random House. Marx, K. (1998). The German ideology. Bantam Books. Mazzucchelli, S., Bosoni, M. L., & Medina, L. (2020). The impact of COVID-19 on family relationships in Italy: Withdrawal on the nuclear family. Italian Sociological Review, 10(3S), 687–709. Milliken, F., Kneeland, M., & Flynn, E. (2020, December). Implications of COVID-19 for gender equity issues at work. Journal of Management Studies, 57(8), 1767–1772. Mullings, L. (1986). Uneven development: Class, race, and gender in the United States before 1900. In E. Leacock & H. Safa (Eds.), Women’s work (pp. 41–57). Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Orgad, S. (2019). Mothering through precarity: Women’s work and digital media. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 43(4), 462–465. Pankova, R., & Barrow, K. (2020, June 24). “A worldwide mutual pact”: An interview with Wendy Brown. The Drift. https://www.thedriftmag.com/a-worldwide-mutualpact/ Patel, K. (2020, June 19). What the Covid spotlight reveals about race in the craft sector. Soundings Blog. https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/soundings/blog/what-the-covidspotlight-reveals-about-race-in-the-craft-sector?mc_cid=340398be10&mc_eid= ec46ded26a Perelman, D. (2020, July 2). In the covid-19 economy, you can have a kid or a job. You can’t have both. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/ business/covid-economy-parents-kids-career-homeschooling.html Power, K. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the care burden of women and families. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 16(1), 67–73. Ruhle, S. (2020, December 7). My family’s Covid diagnosis shows how our broken, confusing system exploits privilege. Think. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ my-family-s-covid-diagnosis-shows-how-our-broken-confusingncna1250175?fbclid=IwAR3Wix2RyL-sYyt5v7DgSpzCwpIVYjA9Dwr5RspHRfQS cR6pdgTG9QFhOBE Ryan, N., & Ayadi, A. (2020, July). A call for a gender-responsive, intersectional approach to address COVID-19. Global Public Health, 15(9), 1404–1412. Solnit, R. (2020, May 29). Masculinity as radical selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the maskless men of the pandemic. LitHub. https://lithub.com/masculinity-as-radicalselfishness-rebecca-solnit-on-the-maskless-men-of-the-pandemic/?fbclid= IwAR0rmdWbgOJYMhb-10JYxfiGnHECqJ-QhShcVgHIJq3mDh_tnLoe3UOJgfo

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Wang, H. (2001). Women’s ‘oppression’ and property relations: From Sati and brideburning to late capitalist ‘domestic labor’ theories. In M. Zavarzadeh, T. Ebert, & D. Morton (Eds.), Marxism, queer theory, gender (pp. 217–250). The Red Factory. Wedderburn, A. (2020). Pandemic time. Soundings: A Journal of politics and culture, 75, 31–35. Wenham, C., Smith, J., & Morgan, R. (2020, March 6). COVID-19: The gendered impacts of the outbreak. The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/ PIIS0140-6736(20)30526-2/fulltext?te=1&nl=in-her%20words&emc=edit_gn_ 20200317 Wolf, M., & McQuitty, S. (2011). Understanding the do-it-yourself consumer: DIY motivations and outcomes. Academy of Marketing Science, 154–170.

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CHAPTER 6

Misleading the Populace in the Age of the Coronavirus 1

Introduction

On March 8, 2020, Trump’s director of social media posted to Twitter a photoshopped picture of Trump playing a violin, with the caption “My next piece is called, Nothing Can Stop What’s Coming.” Trump readily shared the post, commenting, “who knows what this means but it sounds good to me!” The Tweet was an obvious take on Nero fiddling while Rome burns, and showed Trump’s typical strategy of shrugging off others’ suffering (O’Toole, 2020a). This was combined with a reckless, laser-sharp focus on reopening the economy at all costs, damn the consequences: Clearly, the Trump administration and its allies have already decided that we’re going to reopen the economy, never mind what the experts say. And if the experts are right and this leads to a new surge in deaths, the response won’t be to reconsider the policy, it will be to deny the facts. (Krugman, 2020, para. 2) Long before there was social media, there were spin, lies, misinformation, and deceit; they have been around forever (Wendling, 2018). Although former President Donald Trump likes to claim that he created the term fake news, it had been in existence for many years before he began using it (Beaujon, 2019). Far more than being a natural evolution of media and politics, Weigel (2020) describes fake news as representing “the culmination of decades of legal, technological, and economic changes, helped along by canny entrepreneurs who capitalized on them” (para. 6). While the term has several meanings in contemporary society, Trump used the phrase to describe any news that he did not like; if it was a negative story about him, it was simply not true (Bump, 2020). He swung the term like a cudgel with the intent to smear any reports he perceived as negative, with the news attacked as disinformation and the reporters as liars. According to M. Sullivan (2020a), “the history of the Trump administration has shown that the loudest cries of “fake news” accompany the most damning journalism. Coming from him, the phrase dependably had another meaning: “all-too-accurate reporting that damages my reputation” (p. 5). © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004500013_006 Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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Trump used the term fake news as a method to decrease the public’s trust in the media (Egelhofer et al., 2020; Ross & Rivers, 2018) and in his political opponents (Carson, 2019), as well as “position himself as the only reliable source of truthful information” (Ross & Rivers, 2018, p. 2). Studies have found that while liberals continue to associate fake news with certain conservative news organizations (e.g., Fox News), those who identify as conservative in the United States are much more likely to associate fake news with the mainstream media, with these negative perceptions corelating with a lower trust in the media, higher likelihood of voting for Trump, and having a stronger belief in conspiracy theories (van Der Linden et al., 2020). As Neiwert (2018) explains, “established facts supported by concrete real-world evidence are inconsequential to people inside the Alt-America universe—indeed, those facts are instead interpreted as further evidence of the conspiracy and its efforts to hide ‘the truth’” (p. 35). The reality is that the greatest purveyor of fake news in the modern era is none other than Trump himself and his quasi-state-run television stations— Fox News and OANN (One America News Network). It has been documented that Trump lied constantly and consistently about a wide range of subjects as President; he truly was in a category all to himself (Hart, 2020). On average, most people tell about one or two small lies per day, but Markowitz (2020) found that Trump had “averaged 23.8 lies per day since the first case of COVID19 was reported in the US” (p. 2), which is a .5-lie increase over his 2020 average of 23.3 lies per day. Trump got much of his disinformation and conspiracy theories from Fox News and OANN and then spread them via Twitter to his nearly 82 million followers (Grynbaum, 2020).1 Alternately, these cable “news” channels also took Trump’s lies and misinformation at face value and then broadcast for all of their viewers to see, as if his baseless drivel was actually news; this is similar to how propagandized state-news channels work (Duffy, 2019; Illing, 2019). Trump’s onslaught of falsehoods did not decrease during the novel coronavirus pandemic. In fact, it has been found that Trump had been, most likely, the largest driver of the coronavirus misinformation machine (Evanega et al., 2020). His lies led to great confusion and even put American lives at an increased risk of catching COVID-19 (Shahsavari et al., 2020). Trump deliberately stoked an uninformed, misplaced sense of cynicism which was absolutely aligned along partisan ends: The propensity of those on the right to adopt an anti-intellectual, unscientific, pseudo-populist point of view is what’s led many of them to accept a highly skeptical, dismissive attitude toward the Covid-19 virus—ignoring the severity of the danger or even disbelieving its existence altogether and refusing to adopt protective measures such as social distancing or

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wearing masks. These attitudes were very much reflected in the conservative media. Research shows that the higher one’s consumption of such media, the more likely people were to reject the scientific consensus regarding the nature of the virus and how to minimize its spread. (Bartlett, 2020, para. 11) The following chapter will discuss the role that Trump himself played in the spreading of misinformation about the coronavirus, which has been described as an “infodemic” (Evanega et al., 2020, p. 1) as well as “virus trutherism” (Krugman, 2020, para. 3). This section will also explore contributing factors to the rise of conspiracy-theories-as-news and how particular news sources provided Trump with much of his (mis)information and how this fueled the spreading of falsehoods and outright lies. This chapter will also review several conspiracy theories related to the novel coronavirus and how they posed significant health risks to those who believed them.

2

Laying the Groundwork

Since their implementation of the Southern Strategy, Republicans have regularly used populist appeals to the “common man” in an attempt to divert from their anti-worker pro-business policies and platforms (Bartlett, 2020). This is reflected in appeals to common sense or portraying experts as out of touch, especially when it comes to regulation of industries that could threaten profits. But as Krugman (2020) noted, “the right’s determination to ignore the epidemiologists is politically reckless in a way previous denials of reality weren’t” (para. 5). Bartlett (2020) points out the dramatic nature of this change by comparing public opinion polls from 1973 to 2016. In 1973, 41% of Republicans stated they trusted scientists to act in the public’s interest while only 35% of Democrats agreed (para. 9). By 2016, those numbers had reversed, with only 27% of Republicans stating they trusted scientists while 41% of Democrats did (para. 9). Clearly something had caused this massive shift. While fake news and anti-intellectualism are not new problems, what is new is the sheer scope of distribution combined with micro-level targeting, arising from the application of marketing to the distribution of information (Freedland, 2020; Neiwert, 2018). This problem of anti-intellectualism and hostility toward expertise can be partly attributed to the overall commodification of news, where information is presented in pre-packaged segments “laden with hidden assumptions, saving consumers the work of having to interpret it for themselves” (Williams, 2020, para. 46). Coupled with the immense volume of information

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distributed via television and social media, it becomes difficult to wade through the onslaught of pre-formatted information, especially in a climate of “both sides are equally valid” reporting (Freedland, 2020; Williams, 2020). There are several structural features of the Internet and social media that create the perfect conditions for the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories. A major factor was the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allowed carte blanche conditions for the consolidation of media into a few larger companies along with stating that websites could not be held liable for what their users posted (Weigel, 2020). This created a veritable playground for White supremacist groups, which face more content restrictions in other countries (Neiwert, 2018). The lax content climate combined with the funding structure of sites like Facebook, which rely on click-through ads, made larger social media companies reluctant to challenge Trump. Molloy (2020) describes how right-wing groups will look for minor issues to inflate into breaches of civil liberties in their endless quest to show how social media sites have a “liberal bias.” This then magnifies their sense of collective grievances to a larger audience. In one example, Trump supporter celebrities Diamond and Silk testified in a Congressional hearing that they had been censored, even though that wasn’t the case. As Molloy explains: Hearings like these do not provide answers, nor are they designed to. They exist as a way to build on the appearance of a liberally biased tech world. For example, Fox News continued pointing to Diamond and Silk as evidence of anti-conservative bias long after the claim had been debunked. (para. 23) This has the double benefit of House and Senate Republicans gaining concessions from social media companies by holding the threat of regulations over their heads while creating a sense of legitimacy to the claims of “liberal bias.” Other structural features include the way that information is networked. Williams (2020) provides the example of recommendation engines, which instantly drive traffic to other similar conspiracy theories without the viewer having to do anything to find them. Another problem is what Williams calls the “asymmetry of passion” where people will spend more time engaged with content they connect to emotionally (para. 80). Because most fake news and conspiracy theories use emotionally and politically charged language (i.e., distinct terminology like “sheeple”), they get more views, likes, and shares. People are therefore more willing to put the time into crafting these narratives than in pursuing journalistic or scientific information. At the same time, more valid

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sources tend to be distributed through “slower” or harder to locate channels, like academic journals or subscription-based services. In one particularly concerning example, early media coverage of the coronavirus in January 2020 generated very few conspiracy talking points. However: as the outbreak continued through March 2020, the reporting on conspiracy theories gradually moved closer to the reporting on the broader outbreak. By the middle of April, reporting on the conspiracy theories being discussed in social media…had moved to a central position. (Shahsavari et al., 2020, p. 11)

3

Fox and the COVID-19 Misinformation Machine

The Fox News network is viewed by many as nothing but the propaganda arm of the Trump administration (Sherman, 2018; Wade, 2019). In her extensive research about the relationship between Trump and Fox News, Mayer (2019) asserted that, “As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword” (p. 3). The relationship between Trump and Fox News was dangerously entwined and self-serving, and it was often difficult to know where Fox News ended and the Trump administration began. According to Ecarma (2020a): Much has been made of the Fox News–Trump feedback loop, in which information passes from Fox’s hosts to the president’s Twitter feed to his comments to the press to, at times, official White House proposals. There’s flexibility and nuance in the loop, of course; sometimes talking points find their way back to Fox before they make their way into policy, and sometimes other White House officials come into the game. (p. 2) It became quite concerning when a powerful political leader, such as the President of the United States, watched little other than Fox News, turned to aggressive tweeting about what he saw, and eventually, created government policies based on that information (Gertz, 2020). It has been reported that Trump spoke regularly with Fox host Sean Hannity (Illing, 2019) and that Hannity was basically a de facto member of the Trump Administration (Mayer, 2019). Trump and his administration had even gone so far as to welcome Fox News alumni into his administration after they left Fox. For example, former Fox News contributor Ben Carson became Trump’s Secretary of Housing and

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Urban Development, and John Bolton, another former Fox commentator, was penned as Trump’s national-security adviser (Mayer, 2019). Nothing to see here. Hill (2004) asserts that, “The freedom of the press and the media belongs to those who own the press and media” (p. 513). This is certainly the case with television stations like Fox News, founded by billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is consistently the most-watched cable news network in the United States and has been ranked #1 for 18 years now (Joyella, 2020 para. 1). It is important to note that Fox viewership is 94% White and has a median age of 65 years old (Schaal, 2019, para. 9). Statistics show that more than half of Fox News viewers are older than 65 (para. 4); therefore, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), they were at a higher risk of becoming ill due to COVID-19. This fact did not stop Fox News from broadcasting misinformation, if not flat-out lies, about the coronavirus that put its own viewership in grave danger (Gertz, 2020). Based on a Pew Research Center study about COVID-19 news coverage, 79% of Fox News viewers believed that the mass media exaggerated the risk of the coronavirus pandemic (Jurkowitz & Mitchell, 2020, para. 4). Fox viewers were also the most likely to believe that, intentionally or not, the coronavirus was created in a laboratory (Jurkowitz & Mitchell, 2020). Contrary to these beliefs, there is simply no evidence to support this accusation (Liu et al., 2020). In other words, Fox viewers were more likely to believe that the coronavirus was less deadly than it actually was, and they were also more likely to believe falsehoods about the virus’ origins. This was the culmination of the populist project of building distrust in expertise, with Trump at the helm (Bartlett, 2020; Williams, 2020). Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, Fox viewers were told that COVID-19 was a hoax, a ploy used by Democrats to hurt Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, and even a method to bring about a second Trump impeachment (Ecarma, 2020a; B. Sullivan, 2020; Uscinski & Enders, 2020). Moore (2020) charges that, at the outbreak of the pandemic, “Hannity downplayed coronavirus as just the flu and emphasized that Democrats were politicizing the virus to undermine Trump” (p. 3). It has been asserted that the coronavirus was minimized in such a way that it could have hindered efforts to slow the spread of the virus (B. Sullivan, 2020). Rubin (2020) posits that, “The people who listen to Fox News got not merely biased information but wrong information—information that might have induced them to expose themselves unnecessarily to deadly risks (e.g., ignore social-distancing instructions)” (p. 2). Even when news broke that Trump intentionally downplayed the dangers of the coronavirus at the start of the outbreak, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson adamantly came to his defense (Collman, 2020). Carlson blamed Senator Lindsey Graham for suggesting Trump be interviewed by Bob Woodward (in

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which Trump admitted that he downplayed the risk of the virus), while Hannity “said the president’s decision to downplay the virus was comparable to how President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the country during the Great Depression and World War II” (Collman, 2020, p. 4). Researchers have been studying Fox News and their misrepresentation of the dangers of COVID-19 from its onset, and the initial results were quite concerning (Bartlett, 2020). For example, in their working paper, Bursztyn et al. (2020) found that increased exposure to Sean Hannity’s primetime program on Fox (called Hannity) increased the total number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the early stages of the pandemic. In another study, Simonov et al. (2020) found that an increase in Fox News viewership (10%) within a particular zip code led to a decreased tendency to stay at home, despite instructions from health agencies (para. 1). Ingraham (2020) asserts that studies such as these “paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others” (p. 1). Therefore, Fox News appears to have had a negative impact on its viewers becoming sick and dying from the coronavirus. Ball and Maxmen (2020) noted that, “Fox News has been particularly scrutinized for its part in amplifying dangerous misinformation” (p. 12). The poor reporting on the coronavirus outbreak by Fox News was so concerning that a nonprofit group in Washington state, the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE), sued Fox News for purportedly violating Washington State’s Consumer Protection Act (B. Sullivan, 2020).2 In addition, in early April 2020, over 70 journalism and communications professors from across the U.S. wrote a letter to both Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch complaining about the channel’s spreading of misinformation and their lack of accurate and reliable information regarding the coronavirus (Walker, 2020). Providing misinformation can have grave consequences in the time of a pandemic, and Fox News failed miserably in its job as an actual news network. Fox News was not the only “news” organization supportive of Trump’s every move in the age of COVID-19. Smith (2019) noted that, “Donald Trump and Fox News are said to have one of the strongest marriages in political showbusiness. But there is a young rival hoping to outfox Fox and catch the US president’s wandering media eye [OANN]” (p. 1). A new, small news organization based out of San Diego, OANN openly declared that they supported Trump (Bump, 2020); unfortunately, they thrived on conspiracy theories (M. Sullivan, 2020b) and the use of fake news supportive of Trump (Bump, 2020). Trump Tweeted and Retweeted about OANN multiple times at the start of the pandemic and

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even allowed (welcomed, really) their White House correspondent into press briefings. It appeared that Trump had been upset by Fox News’ total lack of adherence to his every thought and whim. In particular, Trump was furious that Fox host, Neil Cavuto, dared to refute the former president’s claims that hydroxychloroquine was a good method of preventing exposure to COVID-19 (M. Sullivan, 2020b). Even now, after the end of his presidency, it is uncertain if Trump will ever truly turn his back on his greatest cheerleader (Fox News). It is comforting to know that he has OANN as a backup mouthpiece.

4

Trump, M.D. and the (Non) Experts

Fox News made bold, and quite inaccurate, assertions about the coronavirus’ potency and threat to the populace. Gitlin (2020) asserted that: viewers of Fox News, including the president of the United States, have been regularly subjected to misinformation relayed by the network – false statements downplaying the prevalence of Covid-19 and its harms; misleading recommendations of activities that people should undertake to protect themselves and others, including casual recommendations of untested drugs; false assessments of the value of measures urged upon the public by their elected political leadership and public health authorities. (pp. 1–2) This use of misinformation posed a great health risk to Fox viewers at the beginning of the pandemic (Bursztyn et al., 2020) and continues to do so. In addition to parroting Fox News, “The messages of US President Donald Trump and his administration are sowing their own political chaos. This includes Trump’s insistence on referring to the ‘Chinese’ or ‘Wuhan’ coronavirus and his advocacy of unproven (and even hazardous) ‘cures’” (Ball & Maxmen, 2020, p. 6). This was certainly the case with the malaria drugs known as hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. Based on a small handful of flimsy research studies, Trump touted hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as potential “game changers” against fighting the coronavirus. In particular, Trump sang the praises of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, as a treatment for COVID-19. Unfortunately for Trump and his cronies, medical researchers found no evidence to suggest that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for preventing or combatting the coronavirus (McDonald & Rieder, 2020; Millican, 2020). Nonetheless, Fox News hosts, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, “repeatedly promoted the drug as a

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game-changing treatment for the disease, as well as touting its supposed benefits as a prophylactic” (Millican, 2020, p. 1). While successful in preventing and fighting malaria, both hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine have been found to offer more risk than reward (FDA, 2020), for it can cause dangerous heart rhythm abnormalities in COVID-19 patients and has even resulted in several deaths (Rogers et al., 2020). Trump even admitted to taking hydroxychloroquine himself for two weeks. He stated that he took the unproven drug: Because I think it’s good. I’ve heard a lot of good stories. And if it’s not good, I’ll tell you right—you know, I’m not going to get hurt by it. It’s been around for 40 years for malaria, for lupus, for other things…I take it. Frontline workers take it. A lot of doctors take it. (Trump, 2020, p. 63) As an aside, there is absolutely no proof that there were thousands of essential workers, medical doctors, and nurses taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent getting the coronavirus (Timm, 2020). On Fox News, hosts Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and other commentators promoted hydroxychloroquine (Stolberg, 2020). On Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson had several guests on his program suggesting that taking hydroxychloroquine may help prevent getting COVID-19 (Millican, 2020). Despite the sound medical advice of Trump and Fox News, there is absolutely no evidence supporting the use of either hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for preventing and/or treating COVID-19. Trump also mentioned other unfounded cures for the coronavirus that had the potential to greatly injure people who followed his medical advice. For example, Trump talked about using disinfectants to get rid of the coronavirus inside the body. He stated that, “The disinfectant knocks it out in a minute. One minute…Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside?” Trump said that it would be “almost a cleaning. It gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on the lungs” (Brown & Sink, 2020, p. 2). In New York City, Chicago, and other cities across the country, calls made to poison control centers spiked soon after Trump made these comments (Folley, 2020; Glatter, 2020). The makers of the Lysol and Clorox brands even came out and made statements asking people not to ingest or inject their products (Rogers et al., 2020). It is interesting to note that after being confronted about his disinfectant suggestion by the media, government officials, and medical professionals, he backtracked and said he was just being sarcastic and was only trying to provoke the news media (Rogers et al., 2020). According to A. Blake (2020), “The

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just-joking defense has become a popular one for Trump when he says something highly controversial…And it’s often a ridiculous assertion, as it is in this case. Trump’s expression gave no indication whatsoever he was joking” (p. 2). It was obvious to most involved that Trump was being dead serious and making a query to his COVID-19 Task Force about the use of disinfectants, and that was certainly not anything to joke about, even with the slightest chance that he was being sarcastic. In the same COVID-19 press conference, Trump, without any scientific evidence, also questioned whether powerful light and heat could be introduced into the body to kill the virus (Relman, 2020; Samuels, 2020). Trump also insinuated that being outside in the warm weather might help kill the virus, but with the high rates of COVID-19 cases in countries with warmer climates, such as Brazil, there was absolutely no truth to this assertion (Samuels, 2020). According to Robert Glatter, MD (2020), “While UV light and disinfectants may have a role in treating surfaces exposed to coronavirus, there is absolutely no medical evidence that they have any role in treating the virus inside the human body, in any form or…manner” (p. 3). Unfortunately for Fox viewers, Fox News also had other medical correspondents, with no expertise working with infectious diseases or epidemiology (M. Blake, 2020), who had been less than helpful in their advice. Take, for example, Dr. Mehmet Oz. Dr. Oz rose to fame thanks to Oprah Winfrey and her popular daytime talk show (Darcy & Liptak, 2020). Caulfield (2020) explains that, “Now [Dr. Oz] has moved on to Fox News, a media network with a massive U.S. reach and an aging audience that are among the most vulnerable of populations. The fact that he has the uncritical ear of the president only magnifies any potential harm” (p. 6). On the Fox morning program Fox & Friends, the popular celebrity cardiothoracic surgeon claimed that hydroxychloroquine may actually have been a way to prevent getting COVID-19 (Caulfield, 2020). As stated previously, this was simply untrue and potentially harmful. It has been found that taking the drug can lead to negative side effects, such as eye and heart damage in addition to nausea and diarrhea (Darcy & Liptak, 2020; Scher, 2020). Dr. Oz eventually backed away from his comments on hydroxychloroquine and told Fox and Friends that it was important to wait for more definitive scientific proof before deciding on the drug’s effectiveness (Rupar, 2020). Another medical advisor who made his rounds on Fox News to discuss COVID-19 was celebrity therapist Dr. Phil (McGraw). While Dr. Phil has a popular eponymous television program and a PhD in clinical psychology (although he is no longer licensed to practice psychology), he is also not an expert in epidemiology or infectious diseases (M. Blake, 2020). Just like Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil was another one of the “daytime TV-famous doctors-cum-talk-show-hosts who have made misleading, if not outright inaccurate, comments about COVID-19

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and social distancing” (Dickson, 2020a, p. 2). On The Ingraham Angle with host Laura Ingraham, Dr. Phil suggested it was dangerous to shut down the economy in order to stop the coronavirus pandemic (Lee, 2020). Dr. Phil minimized the threat of COVID-19 and compared the death rate from the virus to those of the average yearly number of automobile deaths, deaths from smoking cigarettes, and even by drowning in swimming pools. He queried why the U.S. didn’t shut down the economy for any of those causes but it did for the coronavirus (M. Blake, 2020). Maybe Dr. Phil was unaware that COVID-19 is an infectious disease; therefore, it is contagious (Lee, 2020). In other words, there are completely different causes and preventive measures needed to reduce the death toll from COVID-19 than there are from, let’s say, driving accidents. It truly was a situation of comparing apples and oranges. It was just too bad that Dr. Phil did not seem to know the difference.

5

COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories

Shafer (2020) asserts that, “Trump has long loved stirring the pot with charges of conspiracy” (p. 4), and this was certainly the case with his accusations regarding China and his allegation that the coronavirus leaked or escaped from a government virology laboratory in Wuhan, China (Osnos, 2020; Uscinski & Enders, 2020). Trump also went so far as to use an offensive and racist term, “Kung Flu,” to refer to the coronavirus at his political rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma (Moreno, 2020). Despite Trump’s vociferous claims, there was absolutely no evidence to support the allegation that COVID-19 was created in a lab (which is discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 2). Although there are many false and misleading reports to the contrary, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has found that China was “the first to detect the virus, alert the world and provide a model for containing it” (Cho, 2020, p. 8). This was certainly a far cry from the accusations coming from Trump and the White House. Unfortunately, there were many other conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and its origins to contend with. Most of these fell into one of two contradictory camps: (a) that the virus was created on purpose (and/or escaped from a lab) or (b) that its threat was overblown (whether to make Trump look bad or as a way to usher in socialism) (Uscinski & Enders, 2020). According to Muller (2020), “Research shows that conspiracy theories satisfy unmet psychological needs and provide security of knowledge in a time of uncertainty. When increased anxiety and powerlessness are present, conspiracy theories provide answers to complex questions and help relieve these unpleasant feelings” (p. 2). In addition, conspiracy theories are often fear-based,

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reinforce existing biases, and function to maintain control and power of people’s political, religious, or racial group over another (Cramer, 2020; Gutsterson, 2020; Svoboda, 2020). Unfortunately, the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 led to many conspiracy theories that continue to make their way around the internet and the Twitterverse. It appears that, “In times of crisis conspiracy theories can spread as fast as a virus” (Ahmed et al., 2020, p. 1), and in reality, an entire book can be written exclusively about these theories, so this section will focus on just a few of the most prominent cases. In their analysis of emerging conspiracy theories about the coronavirus across social media, Shahsavari et al. (2020) arrive at several key aspects at work. These include folding COVID-19 topics into already-existing conspiracy theories, like narratives about wealthy Jews (George Soros) or creating totally new ones, like the virus being caused by 5G cellular networks (Wolf, 2020). These newer theories can remain small in size, grow quickly, or become absorbed into other narratives (Shahsavari et al., 2020; Wolf, 2020). Established conspiracy camps can also become aligned, where Bill Gates’ quest for world domination through global surveillance happens to dovetail with the creation of a vaccine, forming a partnership with the anti-vaxxers (Shahsavari et al., 2020). Finally, these conspiracy theories can also come into contact with news media, such as Q-Anon seizing on verifiable events (the building of coronavirus testing centers or triage units) as further proof of nefarious plans in the works (meant to hide extensive tunnel networks for child trafficking). Since the virus was a relatively new event with several competing interests, there was a massive contest under way to become the single “big idea” as Shahsavari and colleagues outlined: different narratives fight for attention, while also trying to align the disparate sets of actants and interactant relationships in a manner that allows for a single narrative framework to dominate and, by extension, to provide the “winning” theorists with the bragging rights of having uncovered “what is really going on.” (p. 16) Wolf (2020) discusses the narrative structures of conspiracy theories in terms of folklore development and finds that a key difference between conspiracies revealed during journalistic investigations and unverified conspiracies have to do with how well the connections hold up between different players within the narrative. Anecdotes within folklore, whether distributed on social media or through other means, rely on pre-existing accounts and shared worldviews; they do not appear out of nowhere and they are created over time (Shahsavari

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et al., 2020). However, if only a few parts of the equation are removed from a conspiracy narrative, it tends to collapse. This was the case with Pizzagate, where just the removal of Wikileaks caused the entire narrative to fall apart. With verified accounts, like the reporting in New Jersey’s Bridgegate, the connections between the political officials involved in causing traffic backups for political reasons were interconnected at multiple points within the narrative. If one was missing, there were several others that could be verified. The single thing holding Pizzagate together was the Wikileaks email dump. Conspiracy theories also represent a form of magical thinking—the notion that there is one miracle cure if we could only expose and remove the nefarious forces at work in our lives. This continual search for patterns involves the use of heuristics, or shortcuts in thought which generate many of the supposed connections that drive the conspiracy narrative (Niewert, 2020). This is in contrast to the development of expertise, which uses a more verifiable form of heuristics: This kind of insight takes time to develop; most internet users are looking for a specific answer right now. The ability to reach for an answer at our fingertips has made us skip nuance for ease of access. Infotainment that is easy to digest and provides the answer you want to hear is easier than digesting the nuance of experts. (Williams, 2020, para. 39) Social media, combined with pocket-sized smart phones, have made access to information more rapid than ever, which sustains the illusion of everyone being an expert without the need for time, experience, and reputation. As time passes and the conspiracy narratives gain steam, people tie themselves more closely to particular narratives. This was not that dissimilar to the rock-solid defense of Trump by his supporters. Aronson and Tavris (2020) explained how this solidification of belief can be hard to dislodge once it gets rolling: The minute we make any decision—I’ll buy this car; I will vote for this candidate; I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I’m sure it is a hoax—we will begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative. Before long, any ambivalence we might have felt at the time of the original decision will have morphed into certainty. As people justify each step taken after the original decision, they will find it harder to admit they were wrong at the outset. Especially when the end result proves self-defeating, wrongheaded, or harmful. (para. 4)

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What makes conspiracy theories far more dangerous than folktales is their vulnerability to manipulation by political leaders who are also looking for simple messages and quick fixes. Uscinski and Enders (2020) explain that “conspiracy thinking is most predictive of beliefs in specific conspiracy theories when partisan leaders don’t stake out positions, and least predictive when they do” (para. 15). As an example, Republicanism is now a stronger predictive factor about believing that climate change is a hoax than adhering to any specific climate conspiracy theory. Currently, this is not the case with AIDS or even anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, where the theories themselves are a stronger predictor than political affiliation. They warn, however, that “should theories such as these become fodder for popular political and ideological leaders, the beliefs in them could increase rather quickly” (para. 15). Unfortunately, we saw this happen with several coronavirus conspiracy narratives. A popular conspiracy theory that arose at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was that 5G wireless network technology was to blame for the virus (Ahmed et al., 2020; Destiny, 2020). According to Duffy (2020), “5G is the next generation of wireless network technology that is steadily being rolled out…It provides faster data speeds and network capacity than existing 4G LTE technology” (p. 2). While being complete and utter nonsense, some decided to go as far as physically attack and set fire to cell towers in countries such as the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands (Brodkin, 2020; Destiny, 2020). Conspiracy theorists asserted theories such as that 5G radiation can weaken immune systems, thereby making people more vulnerable to the coronavirus, that the radio waves directly transmit the virus itself, and that 5G technology can even help the “Deep State” control the U.S. population (Ahmed et al., 2020). The World Health Organization (WHO) and a plethora of scientists found that there was absolutely no danger from exposure to electromagnetic fields from 5G telephone networks; this was evident by the fact that there were many cities around the world without 5G service that had high rates of the coronavirus (Brodkin, 2020). In summary, for those in the back, 5G networks do not spread COVID-19, and viruses do not travel over radio waves and mobile networks (Destiny, 2020). There was also a conspiracy theory circulating around the web about the dangers of wearing face masks. Some believed (and may still believe) that wearing face masks could result in lower oxygen levels (Lin II & Kambhampati, 2020) as well as carbon dioxide poisoning, called hypercapnia (Forster, 2020). The fact of the matter is that when you exhale while wearing a face mask, the carbon dioxide in your breath is still able to escape through and around the mask (Goodman & Carmichael, 2020b). Therefore, there is absolutely no truth in the assertion that wearing a face mask, especially for a limited time, will

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cause any harm at all (Goodman & Carmichael, 2020b; Lin II & Kambhampati, 2020). Unfortunately, wearing masks became a major political issue in the U.S., with Republican leaders less likely to require wearing them (Stanley-Becker, 2020). In particular, some politicians feared that mandatory mask-wearing was a form of government overreach and an infringement on one’s civil liberties (Hellman, 2020; Stanley-Becker, 2020). A poll in June 2020 found that “Democrats and those who lean Democratic are more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to say they personally wore a mask all or most of the time in the past month (76% vs. 53%)” (Igielnik, 2020, p. 3). The same holds true for vaccinations for the coronavirus. According to Ivory et al. (2021): The disparity in vaccination rates has so far mainly broken down along political lines. [We] found that both willingness to receive a vaccine and actual vaccination rates to date were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in 2020. (para. 2) From the time COVID-19 arrived in the U.S. until the end of his presidency, Trump refused to wear a mask in public, be photographed with one on, and even stated that he did not believe that using face masks and other facial coverings worked to prevent COVID-19 because people touched them too much. He had even mocked (then) Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden for wearing a mask (Victor et al., 2020). Trump even speculated that some Americans only wore face masks to spite him personally (Walker, 2020). To the contrary of Dr. Trump’s scientific advice from his “very, very large brain” (Choudhury, 2018, p. 1), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advised strongly that face masks be worn whenever one had to go out into public spaces and/ or gatherings, whether large or small, especially if social distancing was difficult (Goodnough, 2020). Scientific studies showed that wearing face masks greatly reduced the spread of the coronavirus (Chu et al., 2020; Walker, 2020). In addition, research also found that in countries where masks were worn from the outset of the coronavirus, there had been significantly fewer deaths (Cain, 2020). Although impossible to ascertain, it was quite possible that Trump’s lack of mask-wearing led to him contracting the virus in early October 2020. It had been speculated that, “His failure to wear a mask regularly may have left himself vulnerable to receiving a heavy dose of the virus, which is correlated with worse outcomes” (Brulliard et al., 2020, p. 2). Another increasingly popular conspiracy theory was that the coronavirus pandemic was part of a larger plot organized by the mega rich, the likes of Bill Gates (co-founder of Microsoft) and George Soros (Hungarian billionaire

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philanthropist). The supposed plan was to vaccinate people worldwide with formulas that secretly contained tracking chips, which would then be activated by 5G waves (Ahmed et al., 2020). The purpose being to monitor the movements and actions of the populace (Wakabayashi et al., 2020). This accusation echoed “centuries-old conspiracy theories and Anti-Semitic tropes about global elites pulling the world’s strings” (Scott & Overly, 2020, p. 6). This was truly one of the most bizarre conspiracy theories out there, but it gained great traction on the web. It goes without saying that there was absolutely no evidence to back up this theory (Goodman & Carmichael, 2020a). The last category of coronavirus conspiracy theories to be discussed include those that intentionally used a veneer of faux medical professionalism and scientific authority and were widely distributed via YouTube. While there were many of such videos too numerous to mention, two in particular stood out for their viral (pun intended) reach. The first was a movie about COVID-19 by discredited virologist, Judy Mikovits. The 26-minute segment of the movie titled Plandemic, released in early May 2020, makes wild assertions about COVID-19, such as that U.S. “public health experts and vaccine companies are complicit in creating the deadly coronavirus pandemic, and using it to make a profit” (Landsverk & Woodward, 2020, p. 3). It is reported that more than 8 million people viewed Plandemic before YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook removed the video for violating their COVID-19 anti-information policies (Landsverk & Woodward, 2020, para. 3; Spring, 2020), yet the video still continues to make its rounds on social media (Dickson, 2020b). One of the many falsehoods mentioned in the film was that the use of face masks was harmful (Briot, 2020) and that the novel coronavirus was actually “activated” by using face masks (Enserink & Cohen, 2020). These assertions were completely unfounded (Briot, 2020). Mikovits also spent a great deal of time making accusations against Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She insinuated that the official statistics regarding COVID-19 deaths are manipulated and that hospitals and doctors in the U.S. have been “‘incentivized’ to count deaths unrelated to the disease as having been caused by the coronavirus infection because of payouts from Medicare” (Neuman, 2020, pp. 5–6). Again, there has been no evidence found to support this accusation; if anything, it was speculated that the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus has been underestimated (Landsverk & Woodward, 2020). Mikovits also asserted that the coronavirus was created and released via several laboratories in North Carolina, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick (Maryland), and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Again, there is no evidence to support this

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accusation (Neuman, 2020; Spring, 2020). In summary, “With a frightened public inundated with misinformation and primed toward governmental mistrust, it’s all too easy for bad ideas to gain traction, and social platforms…have played a crucial role in facilitating the process” (Dickson, 2020, p. 4). The second “medicalized” YouTube video was a press conference featuring Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, owners of urgent care clinics. Donning scrubs for the occasion, Erickson and Martin claimed to have the results from over 5,000 COVID-19 tests, but they opted for a press conference rather than a peer-reviewed paper to distribute this information. Their opening salvo was that the mortality rate from COVID-19 is 0.1%, a number they arrived at through badly applied statistics on a highly biased sample that just happened to dovetail with the flu mortality rate (Shoddy Statistics, 2020, para. 2). A major problem with the sample was it being based on people who were showing symptoms of the virus and did not include people who were asymptomatic. Since the United States did not test or contact trace at sufficient levels, we had an incomplete picture of the scope of the situation, something that Erickson and Massihi do not address in their video. As time goes on, Erickson and Martin’s message culminated in the usual COVID-19 conspiracy talking points: invoking the “success” story of Sweden (who didn’t use public health measures and still ended up with a massive mortality rate), that ER doctors were forced to record deaths as COVID-19 to elevate numbers, insisting that “underlying health conditions” are the real killer, that masks aren’t effective, stay-at-home orders are harmful and that the priority should be reopening in order to save the economy (namely their urgent care clinics). As usual, when pressed for evidence to support these claims, they insisted that it was not needed because they “just knew it.” It is concerning that many people actually believed these conspiracy theories despite there being no data to prove their validity. For example, a YouGov poll “suggests that 28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people—with the figure rising to 44% among Republicans” (Goodman & Carmichael, 2020, p. 3). Uscinski and Enders (2020) ranked levels of belief in the general category of COVID-19 conspiracy theories to be in the middle of the conspiracy continuum, which they estimate to be around 20 percentage points lower than beliefs about Jeffrey Epstein being murdered but twice as high as narratives about “false flag” school shootings or that the Holocaust death toll was exaggerated (para. 8). They connected this level of support with other medical conspiracies, such as 30% of Americans agreeing that the dangers of vaccines have been hidden and 26% viewing 5G technology information as suppressed from the public (para. 8). This is truly astounding and equally terrifying.

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There is fact and there is fiction, and Trump and his echo chambers at Fox News and OANN consistently and intentionally blurred the line between reality and fake news. They created a cycle of misinformation that has potentially translated into increased deaths for the exact people the television stations were trying to court and manipulate—older White viewers. These news channels have pushed misinformation and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus as well as lies about the validity of unproven and dangerous treatments. They have also welcomed celebrity medical experts, with absolutely no experience dealing with viruses like COVID-19, and they continued to advance misinformation and logical fallacies to circumvent addressing the realistic dangers of the coronavirus. During the “vacuum of political leadership” (Baker & Witherspoon, 2020, p. 2) of the Trump administration, Trump himself was quite blatant in his spreading of misinformation. When confronted with questions he was uncomfortable with, Trump branded them as fake news, often verbally abusing news reporters and labeling them as “dishonest,” “terrible,” and “fake,” all for supposedly asking him “nasty questions” (Colarossi, 2020; Darcy, 2020). This made it harder to communicate what should have been a simple and direct message about basic public health: Because of the intense polarization in our country, a great many Americans now see the life-and-death decisions of the coronavirus as political choices rather than medical ones. In the absence of a unifying narrative and competent national leadership, Americans have to choose whom to believe as they make decisions about how to live: the scientists and the public-health experts, whose advice will necessarily change as they learn more about the virus, treatment, and risks? Or President Donald Trump and his acolytes, who suggest that masks and social distancing are unnecessary or “optional?” (Aronson & Tavris, 2020, para. 9) As is evident throughout this text, Trump was a prolific liar during his presidency, and “Trump’s lies are problematic because they force us to question our institutions and the value of information” (Markowitz, 2020, p. 3). This intentional attack on the national media continues to sow seeds of doubt in the areas of science and technology, and this has helped support the creation and adherence to conspiracy theories about the coronavirus and the use of vaccines as a cure. It is imperative that our government and our news media

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refrain from addressing conspiracy theories until they are ever proven to be factual. Until that time, this country will continue to fight two major fires at once—one against misinformation and conspiracy theories coming out of propagandized news stations, and the other, the coronavirus itself.

Notes 1 That is, until he was banned permanently from Twitter on January 8, 2021 due violating their policy of against using glorification of violence (Fung, 2021). 2 It is important to note that the lawsuit was dismissed on grounds of violating Fox News’ First Amendment rights (Ecarma, 2020b).

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Moore, N. (2020, May 4). Study finds more COVID-19 cases among viewers of Fox News host who downplayed pandemic. NPR. https://www.npr.org/local/309/2020/05/04/ 849109486/study-finds-more-c-o-v-i-d-19-cases-among-viewers-of-fox-news-hostwho-downplayed-pandemic Moreno, E. (2020, June 20). Trump refers to coronavirus as ‘kung flu’ during Tulsa rally. The Hill. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/503756-trump-refers-tocoronavirus-as-kung-flu-during-tulsa-rally Muller, R. T. (2020, April 24). COVID-19 brings a pandemic of conspiracy theories. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-abouttrauma/202004/covid-19-brings-pandemic-conspiracy-theories Neiwert, D. (2018). Alt-America: The rise of the radical right in the age of Trump. Verso. Neuman, S. (2020, May 8). Seen ‘Plandemic’? We take a close look at the viral conspiracy video’s claims. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/05/08/852451652/seen-plandemicwe-take-a-close-look-at-the-viral-conspiracy-video-s-claims Osnos, E. (2020, May 10). The folly of Trump’s blame-Beijing coronavirus strategy. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-folly-oftrumps-blame-beijing-coronavirus-strategy O’Toole, F. (2020a, May 14). Vector in chief. The New York Review of Books, 67(8), 9–10. Relman, E. (2020, April 23). Trump directs experts to see whether they can bring ‘light inside the body’ to kill the coronavirus, even as his own expert shuts him down. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-wants-bring-lightinside-the-body-to-kill-coronavirus-2020-4 Rogers, K., Hauser, C., Yuhas, A., & Haberman, M. (2020, April 24). Trump’s suggestion that disinfectants could be used to treat coronavirus prompts aggressive pushback. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/us/politics/trumpinject-disinfectant-bleach-coronavirus.html Ross, A. S., & Rivers, D. J. (2018). Discursive deflection: Accusation of “fake news” and the spread of mis- and disinformation in the tweets of President Trump. Social Media + Society, 4(2), 1–12. Rubin, J. (2020, April 1). Fox news has succeeded – in misinforming millions of Americans. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/01/ fox-news-has-succeeded-misinforming-millions-americans/ Rupar, A. (2020, April 22). Trump and Fox News want to send their hydroxychloroquine hype down the memory hole. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21230982/ hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-trump-fox-news-hype Samuels, B. (2020, April 23). Trump suggests using light, heat as coronavirus treatment. The Hill. https://thehill.com/homenews/coronavirus-report/494428-trumpsuggests-using-light-heat-as-coronavirus-treatment Schaal, E. (2019, January 11). How old is the average Fox News viewer in America? The Cheat Sheet. https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/how-old-is-the-averagefox-news-viewer-in-america.html/

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Schafer, J. (2020, May 12). Why Trump is peddling extra-strength conspiracy theories. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/05/12/donald-trumpsconspiracy-theories-for-junkies-252210 Scott, M., & Overly, S. (2020, May 12). Conspiracy theorists, far-right extremists around the world seize on the pandemic. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/ 05/12/trans-atlantic-conspiracy-coronavirus-251325 Shahsavari, S., Tangherlini, T., Holur, P., & Roychowdhury, V. (2020, April 30). Conspiracy in the time of corona: Automatic detection of covid-19 conspiracy theories in social media and the news. UCLA Previously Published Works. https://escholarship.org/content/qt0pq269hb/qt0pq269hb.pdf?t=qa7weu Sher, I. (2020, April 8). Dr. Oz is offering Trump advice for handling the coronavirus. Here are 8 times he’s made false or baseless medical claims. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/dr-oz-false-misleading-baseless-medical-claimscoronavirus-2020-4 Sherman, G. (2018, January 11). “A safe space for Trump”: Inside the feedback loop between the president and Fox News. Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/ 2018/01/inside-the-feedback-loop-between-the-president-and-fox-news Shoddy statistics and false claims: Dr. Erickson dangerously misled the public on coronavirus. (2020, April 29). The Logic of Science. https://thelogicofscience.com/ 2020/04/29/shoddy-statistics-and-false-claims-dr-erickson-dangerously-misledthe-public-on-coronavirus/comment-page-1/#comments Simonov, A., Sacher, S. K., Dubé, J. H., & Biswas, S. (2020). The persuasive effect of Fox News: Non-compliance with social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic. NBER. Working Paper No. 27237. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27237 Smith, D. (2019, June 15). Trump has a new favourite news network – and it’s more rightwing than Fox. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/ 15/oan-oann-fox-news-donald-trump Spring, M. (2020, May 8). Coronavirus: ‘Plandemic’ virus conspiracy video spreads across social media. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52588682 Stanley-Becker, I. (2020, May 12). Mask or no mask? Face coverings become tool in partisan combat. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ in-virus-response-riven-by-politics-masks-are-latest-rorschach-test/2020/05/12/ 698477d4-93e6-11ea-91d7-cf4423d47683_story.html Stolberg, S. G. (2020, June 16). A mad scramble to stock millions of malaria pills, likely for nothing. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/us/politics/ trump-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus.html Sullivan, B. (2020, April 10). Fox news faces lawsuit for calling COVID-19 a ‘hoax.’ Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/legalentertainment/2020/04/10/covid-19-lawsuitagainst-fox-news/#7c7de6757392

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Sullivan, M. (2020a, April 13). What is really means when Trump calls a story ‘fake news.’ The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/what-itreally-means-when-trump-calls-a-story-fake-news/2020/04/13/56fbe2c0-7d8c-11ea9040-68981f488eed_story.html Sullivan, M. (2020b, June 10). When Fox News disappoints, Trump has a backup: The conspiracy theory-peddling OANN. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/when-fox-news-disappointstrump-has-a-backup-the-conspiracy-peddling-oann/2020/06/10/c2a6ec8e-ab1f11ea-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html Svoboda, E. (2020, May 11). Why the pandemic is turning so many people into conspiracy theorists. Discover. https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/why-the-pandemicis-turning-so-many-people-into-conspiracy-theorists Timm, J. C. (2020, May 26). Trump says he’s no longer taking hydroxychloroquine. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-he-s-nolonger-taking-hydroxychloroquine-n1214301 Trump, D. (2020, May 18). Remarks by President Trump in a roundtable with restaurant executives and industry leaders. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/ remarks-president-trump-roundtable-restaurant-executives-industry-leaders/ Uscinski, J. E., & Enders, A. (2020, April 30). The coronavirus conspiracy boom. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/what-cancoronavirus-tell-us-about-conspiracy-theories/610894/ U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2020, June 15). Coronavirus (COVID-19) update: FDA revokes emergency use authorization for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19update-fda-revokes-emergency-use-authorization-chloroquine-and van Der Linden, S., Panagopoulos, C., & Roozenbeek, J. (2020). You are fake news: Political bias in perceptions of fake news. Media, Culture & Society, 42(3), 460–470. Wade, P. (2019, October 12). With Shep Smith gone, is Fox News’ transition to propaganda complete? Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ shep-smith-fox-news-propaganda-898293/ Wakabayashi, D., Alba, D., & Tracy, M. (2020, April 17). Bill Gates, at odds with Trump on virus, becomes a right-wing target. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/ 2020/04/17/technology/bill-gates-virus-conspiracy-theories.html Walker, W. (2020, June 19). Trump says masks are worn to spite him, Fauci warns against “anti-science bias.” Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/trump-says-masks-areworn-to-spite-him-fauci-warns-against-anti-science-bias/?fbclid= IwAR2Mp7yd_5IEBlEndBmV7NeM-2IsuMgfTf7v3yukZ-gB4ud_fUgtS0NBDQ0 Weigel, M. (2020, July 14). The pioneers of the misinformation industry. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/158025/drudge-revolution-bookreview-breitbart-talk-radio-pioneers-right-wing-media

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Wendling, M. (2018, January 22). The (almost) complete history of ‘fake news.’ BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42724320 Williams, R. (2020, April 18). Anti-intellectualism and the war against experts in America. https://raywilliams.ca/anti-intellectualism-and-the-war-against-experts-inamerica/ Wolf, J. (2020, June 26). How conspiracy theories emerge—and how their storylines fall apart. PhysOrg. https://phys.org/news/2020-06-conspiracy-theories-emergeandstorylines-fall.html?utm_source=nwletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign= weekly-nwletter

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CHAPTER 7

Unmasked A Dialectical Exploration of the COVID-19 Protests

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Introduction

Not long after several states implemented shutdowns in order to contain the spread of coronavirus, several small protests emerged—particularly in states run by Democratic governors. Rather than protesting the lack of a national response, demonstrators demanded that states fully reopen, blaming the economic situation on liberals who were overly inflating the seriousness of the virus in order to (a) control the populace or (b) ensure Trump’s failure. A particular feature of the protests was an aggressive refusal to wear masks in public, ironically one of the best means for opening businesses until a vaccine is made available (Stewart, 2020d). Masks and social distancing immediately became something to fight against, an extension of the right-wing’s decades-long manufacturing of outrage against a pluralistic society: For conservative zealots and media figures, the pandemic is quickly becoming just another culture war battleground—an axis of postmodern symbolic conflict, another vent for bottomless grievance, and fuel for a screeching victimhood complex. The practical effect will be to fuel infection and hamstring economic recovery. It’s a stark obstacle before fixing this or any other crisis. (Cooper, 2020, para. 2) Virtually all of the neoliberal narratives of self-reliance, hard work, and the privatized family unit have been revealed by the virus to be a profound fiction for the majority of Americans. The White middle class—who were, up until recently, offered some degree of protections—have seen these evaporate before their eyes, yet they have turned inward instead of targeting the causes (Hedges, 2020). Hedetoft’s (2020) analysis of contemporary forms of authoritarian populism finds that individual liberties overshadow measures that one might take to stabilize the economy. This is exhibited in the COVID protesters prioritizing not wearing masks over the economic stability that masks and other measures might bring, as Lowndes (2020) outlined:

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The rhetorical oppositions of work to welfare, self-reliance to dependence, individual to state, citizen to foreigner—oppositions animated by race, gender, and class—run deep in American political culture. All are reflected in the politics of the pandemic right now, making for a grim political vision of American freedom. (para. 6) The very things that a pandemic requires—coordinated national level response, access to health care, and networks for delivering food/necessities while providing income support during unemployment—are consistently opposed by a significant minority of Americans. Here, the core ideologies of “freedom” and “minimal government interference” have ossified into a quasi-religious revival of the Protestant work ethic where letting the virus run its course is viewed as just and right (Gusterson, 2020). There is no doubt that Trump’s dismissal and non-response to the pandemic provided the energy for anti-mask and reopen protests. As he also became the symbolic head of these events (as evidenced by numerous Trump campaign signs and flags) the rhetorical differences between the protests and his own re-election rallies became barely detectable in tone and format: With this stream of disparaging commentary, Trump himself became a vector of the coronavirus. His followers got the message that the whole thing might well be a media and Democratic conspiracy, and therefore that they did not need to take the threat seriously. (O’Toole, 2020a, p. 20) Along with Trump’s scapegoating rhetoric of paranoia about China and economic collapse leading to socialism was a casual message of refusing to acknowledge the reality of the virus to begin with. His public appearances often featured him surrounded by several people in close proximity, with no one wearing masks. This continued even after his diagnosis and treatment for COVID-19. What makes this current situation extraordinary is that Trump used the pandemic to extend his wrath beyond his typical targets onto the American population as a whole, as Dartagnan (2020) outlined: Unlike his selective abuse of certain groups and individuals, this malevolence was directed in effect at all American citizens. He offered them a stark choice—believe what he said about the seriousness of the SARSCoV-2 virus, or face demonization and more abuse. He directed that abuse and mistreatment towards Democratic governors and by implication, towards the citizens who had elected those governors to manage

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their states, for their efforts to resist his blanket exhortations to reopen their businesses. He directed that abuse towards teachers who repudiated his edicts to reopen the schools even in the face of clear danger, and by implication towards the children and young people forced with no choice but to abide by premature and ill-advised school re-opening decisions that he himself pushed for. (para. 9) Trump’s inaction invalidated the notion of “being taken by surprise” by the pandemic, especially since warnings were on the horizon as early as January 2020. Instead of openly acknowledging the seriousness of the situation, Trump, in partnership with Fox News, enforced a culture of silence readily taken up by Republicans. This level of contempt for an entire population was stunning, especially when the simple actions of wearing a mask and supporting measures to control a virus should not be controversial (Bartlett, 2020; O’Toole, 2020b). The Center for Disease Control (CDC), in their efforts to not offend the Trump Administration, presented confusing information and shifting guidelines during the early phase of the pandemic. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) initially told people that masks were not effective, in an attempt to prevent a run on supplies needed by medical professionals. When the messaging for wearing masks was eventually dispersed, it then seemed like a sudden switch, further disorienting the public (Stewart, 2020d; Yong, 2020). This left many doubting scientific sources, instead “opting for cherry-picked and unverified sources of information found on social media rather than traditional news sources” (Stewart, 2020d, para. 6). Conversations that Stewart had with virus doubters nearly always had the feature of them first pointing out the confusing messaging by the government and scientists, then easily slipping into conspiracy narratives. One 65-year-old woman he spoke with decided against going to the emergency room after she hurt her hand because she was convinced that she would be given a positive COVID test status and placed on a ventilator to die. The media’s role as enabler of Trump and inflating the importance of the reopen protests also played an important role in spreading conflicting messages about the virus. From “both sides-ism” where one perspective had to be “balanced” by another so as not to be unfair to conservatives to the handsoff e-libertarianism of the Internet, conspiracies about the virus were readily distributed. These conspiracies gained validity simply by being covered in the media, which played the dual role of covering every small lockdown protest, while simultaneously reporting every scientific sounding finding, whether or not it had been peer reviewed (Yong, 2020). On top of Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic response, the media was forced to cover his individualized rants

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and scapegoating, with little in the way of a unified counter-response, because “his gargantuan world-historical failure cannot be admitted, but neither can it be avoided” (Cooper, 2020, para. 9). In the meantime, any attempt (often at the state level) to prevent the spread of the virus was read as tyranny. After addressing the background of the backlash to public health efforts, this chapter will discuss six discursive themes that arose from the coronavirus re-open protests and anti-mask rhetoric. These included: (a) eugenics and other annihilation-centered discourses which called for eliminating the weak by opening up businesses and letting things play out; (b) liberty constructed within the narrow realm of absolute freedom to act as one would normally act, without any constraints, even in the midst of a public health emergency; (c) hyper-individualism, or the idea that one is only responsible for one’s own actions and any negative consequences are the fault of someone not acting responsibly; (d) anti-government sentiment where any kind of state regulation was to be opposed and framed as interfering with autonomy, which went along with questioning the authority of states to declare emergencies, when all state constitutions had that written into law; (e) denial as a form of aggressive magical thinking, that the economy will immediately return to what it once was and accusations toward anyone prioritizing health as wanting to destroy the economy; and f) veneration of recklessness and risk, with those taking health precautions portrayed as being cowards. It is important to note that much of this discourse was infused with racism, sexism, and ableism even if those concepts were not directly stated.

2

Background

The coronavirus presented a somewhat unique challenge compared to other pandemics because its impacts allowed society to retain just enough normal functions for it to not be taken seriously, along with its initial targeting of older and health-compromised individuals that allowed complacency to set in. Preventative measures could easily be portrayed as “overreacting,” with people pointing to lower numbers of positive cases or death rates as “proof” of the virus not being as serious after all. There is no way to “win” against a pandemic other than full retreat into one’s home. While it is capable of killing millions, it is also asymptomatically spread by people who will likely never experience symptoms. This allowed the virus to spread rapidly, but the numerical impacts were not felt immediately. Once the spike in cases hit, hospitals became quickly overrun and had to move into reactionary triage mode, the time for successful prevention having passed (Yong, 2020). When combined

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with a neoliberal capitalist economy which values hyper-individualism and privatized approaches instead of social organizing, the features of this virus were a drawn-out crisis waiting to happen. Signs of this were apparent in the non-response of Republican governors, buoyed by a lack of a unified federal response. By the conclusion of March 2020, 15 Republican governors took no actions to limit businesses or issue stay-at-home orders with Alabama governor Kay Ivey waiting until April 3rd to issue one (O’Toole, 2020b, para. 1). The worst offenders included Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who led a populous state with a large number of retirees and Georgia’s Brian Kemp. DeSantis insisted on keeping beaches open, allowing a flood of spring break travelers into the state along with issuing exemptions for religious services and other recreational activities—known to be among the worst places for viral spread. Kemp, who waited until April 1st to issue stay at home orders, explained his delay as one of not knowing until 24 hours earlier that the virus could be spread asymptomatically—a fact that was widely understood and regularly communicated by epidemiologists (para. 13). The patchwork response provided fuel for the protests who often recruited state-level Republicans to erode support for public health policy. After these same states reopened in June without sufficient testing and contact tracing, the already terrible average of 20,000–30,000 new cases started to climb again, undoing all of the positive effects the lockdowns produced (Yong, 2020, para. 62). The anti-mask and anti-mandate protests represented the more vocal, populist arm of business class messaging discussed in Chapter 3, “Work or Die”: The anti-lockdown demonstrations at state capitols have attracted a messy jumble of protesters: anti-vaccine activists and other conspiracy theorists, rightwing provocateurs, members of known anti-government militias, gun rights advocates, established conservative groups backed by wealthy billionaire donors, Republican stalwarts and people who were actually out of work. (Beckett, 2020, para. 11) While elites used more nuanced messaging (though it is hard to call suggestions that we let the elderly die to reopen the economy as “nuanced”), the anti-mask protests utilized open aggression and threats while portraying themselves as victims of oppression. The protests also served as populist cover for the Trump administration to protect the capitalist class (Lowndes, 2020). As Hedges (2020) explains, what we saw happening was “ultimately the logical outcomes of neoliberalism, with its privatized individual decoupled from the moorings of citizenship or any sense of obligation to others. However, now it has taken on more dangerous and nihilistic forms” (para. 1).

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Rather than representing a grassroots effort, the reopen protests—framed as being “about people who want to get back to work and leave their homes,” were supported by conservative groups connected to the White House who immediately pushed for restrictions on businesses to ease, such as FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots Save Our Country, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (Vogel, Rutenberg, & Lerer, 2020, para. 8). Part of their efforts included filing lawsuits against state-level executive orders shutting down businesses, targeting primarily Democratically run states. These efforts also had the effect of drawing together diverse conservative coalitions who were angered at the shutdowns, including churches, libertarians, and small business owners who were eager for the media to spotlight their efforts, as Marchman (2020) explains: Presenting the iconography of a populist uprising while expressing a position unpopular even within the Republican Party, these sham protests’ purpose is to draw attention to their own existence. They’re a function of an attention economy in which the willingness to say the most outrageous thing you can think of is a kind of power that can be effortlessly weaponized. (para. 2) In this way, the protests were a manifestation of information distribution via social media platforms working in tandem with current political organizing preferences that reject traditional hierarchies and group affiliation processes in favor of conspiracy narratives (Neiwert, 2020; O’Toole, 2020b). The anonymity of the Internet combined with lax content controls have allowed for a growth of conservative worldviews with the protests serving to reinforce these ideas in person without all of the traditional inconveniences of organizing. The demonstrations did not have to be large. Those who were not inclined to present themselves publicly at the protests could still see themselves as supporters and propel the message forward by reinforcing the same rightwing talking points online while receiving immediate feedback. This served to artificially inflate a sense of representing the majority of Americans, when in actuality, the protests were sparsely attended and represented primarily the conservative capitalist class interests. Additionally, the majority of Americans supported mask wearing, social distancing, and restrictions on businesses as public health measures, though there were significant differences between political parties (Quinnipiac, 2020). Rather than being a novel phenomenon, the protests represented a carrying forward of small government ideology that manifested during the Reagan campaign and was revived during Obama’s presidency with the Tea Party movement (Lowndes, 2020; SemDem, 2020). Health care in the form of the Affordable Health Care Act became the touchpoint for populist Republican Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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resistance, with middle class conservatives refusing to pay to cover the health care women and underrepresented groups (Lowndes, 2020). The success of recruiting working- and middle-class Whites to conservatism relied heavily on issues of race and class, and those connections lingered with the coronavirus where many of the former slave states already had the worst health metrics and were among the first to reopen (Yong, 2020). Lowndes noted how race and class were highlighted by Republicans as the economic situation became untenable, as “the right will do all it can to enlist the loyalty of middle- and working-class victims of the crisis” (para. 9). By associating the Democratic Party with “liberal elitism,” preferential treatment of underrepresented groups and giving handouts, the reopen protests not only reinforced these messages, but “the Republican Party is now visibly and authentically aligned with racism, vulgarity, sexism, and brutality” (O’Neill, 2020, p. 45). Trump’s own actions were an integral part of the anti-lockdown protests in the form of his holding re-election rallies without safety measures as a way of communicating that nothing had changed significantly: By effectively endorsing these claims and inviting his fans to share them, Trump showed support for the belief not just that the restrictions on social gatherings could be defied, or if that they should be defied, but that they must be defied. (O’Toole, 2020a, p. 21) In fact, jobless claims exceeded 26 million, indicating that the economic impacts of COVID-19 were more far-reaching than initially thought (Lowndes, 2020, para. 2). Rather than accepting this reality, Republicans continued to downplay the situation, promoting a “re-open and we’ll see” herd immunity approach that had morbid outcomes. At the same time, the inadequacies of neoliberal institutions and policies in this situation had the effect of people starting to militantly demand that government take actions in the areas of employment support and health care. An additional factor that the right wing did not take into account was the enormous amount of support for simple measures like wearing masks, which helped to slow the spread (Yong, 2020). But rather than build on this opening by implementing public health measures on a large scale, the Trump administration engaged in ideological fantasy and exhortations to “reopen now.”

3

Core Themes

The reopen now and anti-mask protests reflected a combination of right-wing ideologies that have reappeared throughout different periods of conflict and Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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economic upheavals in U.S. history. These core themes appeal to the conservative mindset because they are also reflected in government and other U.S. institutions, along with neoliberal capitalism. They were readily promoted by the ruling class and found an ever-willing audience in a mostly White, middle class constituency who saw themselves as continually victimized by “big government” and underrepresented groups. Decades of messaging via Fox News, talk radio, and social media culminated in the following six themes seen in the COVID protests and anti-mask efforts. 3.1 Eugenics A major feature of the messaging arising from the reopen and anti-mask demonstrations was an overt one of eugenics, an insistence that those vulnerable to the virus need to be sacrificed in order to restore the economy. As Berlatsky (2020) explains, “conservatives have repeatedly and publicly trumpeted their disregard for the lives of the old and sick” as a form of “vice-signaling,” where people proudly advocate for the death of weak as a necessary price for capitalism (para. 3). Examples of this included protest signs reading “sacrifice the weak” or Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick declaring that “there are more important things than living” (Marchman, 2020, para. 1) as well as insinuating that “he and other grandparents would be willing to risk their health and even lives in order for the [United States’ economy to get jump started]” (Knodel, 2020, p. 1). Ramping the up the “deathcourse” even further, conspiracy video host Alex Jones stated that if the virus created food shortages, “he would eat his neighbors in order to feed his children” (Berlatsky, 2020, para. 9). For Hedges (2020), eugenics discourse has specific ties to White Christian nationalism, which was a key component of Trump’s core support. Here, the virus provided an opportunity to justify the conservative agenda: The poor, the vulnerable, those who are not White or not Christian, those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the chant of a perverted Christian nationalism, will be offered up in a crisis to the god of death, a familiar form of human sacrifice that plagues sick societies. Once these enemies are purged from the nation, we are promised, America will recover its lost glory, except that once one enemy is obliterated another takes its place. (para. 15) Aspects of eugenics discourse included: (a) advocating for herd immunity, (b) eliminating the biologically weak, (c) placing blame on pre-existing conditions, (d) viewing members of underrepresented groups who were victims of the virus as disposable and (e) demanding sacrifice in order to maintain one’s comfort and convenience. Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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One of the primary talking points featured in anti-shutdown discourse was herd immunity or the idea that the virus should just be allowed to run its course through the population, sans government interventions, in order to build up enough of a natural resistance. In particular, Sweden’s hand’s-off public health approach was held up by conservatives as a positive example of social policy, despite Finland (with similar demographics and public health measures) only having one-sixth of per capita deaths (Jackson, 2020, para. 25). In addition to releasing the capitalist class from its financial obligations, herd immunity provided a scientific veneer to eugenics discourse, despite the fact that conservative use of the phrase represented a profound misunderstanding of epidemiology. For example, to reach herd immunity from a highly contagious virus like COVID-19, you would need close to 90% of the population being exposed (Novella, 2020, para. 4). It is speculated that over 200 million people would have to be infected for herd immunity to work in the U.S., and based on the current death rate from the coronavirus, such a large number of cases would kill millions of Americans (Johnson, 2020b). Without a vaccine, “any proposed approach to achieve herd immunity through natural infection is not only highly unethical, but also unachievable” (Goodman, 2020, para. 6). Studies in Spain, one of the initial locations of the outbreak, reported only 5% of the population who had developed antibodies to COVID (Goodman, 2020, para. 1). Representative cohorts in China and the U.S. showed the majority of their populations remained unexposed, including those in densely populated areas (para. 5). Within the U.S., it was estimated during the height of infections, that just over 9% of the population as a whole had developed SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, though this is difficult to determine due to lack of testing, contact tracing, and asymptomatic spread (Novella, 2020, para. 6). With the majority of the population that remained unexposed, when businesses reopened, rates returned to or exceeded prior levels in fall 2020. An additional challenge to reaching herd immunity was the lasting impact of antibodies, something that is not yet definitively known. For example, early studies indicated that immunity lasts about 3 months, but more research is needed to track the lasting effects, as part of vaccine distribution (para. 8). As Novella concluded, “we would need about five times as many cases as we have already had in order to reach the low end of herd immunity” which translated into one to two million additional deaths (para. 7). Herd immunity resonated with Trump supporters because of their inherent fondness for Spencerian “survival of the fittest” ideology, “a kind of toughlove, individualistic ethos which trumpets callousness as a good itself” while highlighting the biological superiority of White conservatives (Berlatsky, 2020, para. 5). This ideology—which is not a new phenomenon—is woven into a longstanding prioritizing of capitalism above all else. In recalling Ayn Rand’s Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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1982 appearance on the Phil Donahue talk show, SemDem (2020) pointed out how Rand argued that the government had no obligation to address the health needs of “subnormal” children and the “handicapped” as a whole (para. 6). SemDem also notes how Trump himself, along with figures like Stephen Miller or the Koch Brothers, grew up in households that advocated the concept of the right to rule based on their biological superiority and wealth. The Republican Party has also made it clear that they see the utility of garnering the support of White supremacists in order to further their political goals. These groups are advocates for genocide. As Marchman (2020) notes, the very nature of the Republican response to the pandemic illustrated that they felt there was no need to take it seriously, because they believed as society’s winners that they would not be impacted. By framing the pandemic as a division “between those who deserve to survive and thrive and those who do not” (O’Toole, 2020a, p. 22), this provided the opportunity to implement a “let the losers perish” solution, which is always the feature of right-wing populist governments: A moral definition of the people is superimposed on the legal one, which allows populists—politicians as well as citizens—to apply their own moralizing definition and weed out the rotten part of the population, including newcomers with other cultural and ethnic backgrounds, from the “real people”…It engenders a new kind of political, cultural and plain human divisions in the national landscape, which cannot be mediated through dialogue and mutual recognition of the opposing side. (Hedetoft, 2020, p. 31) Biological superiority extended into a hyper-focus on pre-existing conditions as a way to both minimize the Trump administration’s lack of response to the pandemic as well as emphasize one’s own stellar health and self-sufficiency. The logic behind this assertion is that it was not the coronavirus that is causing deaths, it was instead a series of prior health problems where cases were being “over-counted.” What is ironic is that Trump’s own supporters were “disproportionally prone to the chronic illnesses that make COVID-19 more likely to prove fatal” (O’Toole, 2020a, p. 20). As Jackson (2020) noted, close to half of the U.S. population has conditions that make them vulnerable to the effects of the virus including being overweight, having elevated blood pressure, heart disease, and type-2 diabetes, conditions that are far more prevalent in Republican states (para. 13). Additionally, factory farms and food distribution systems under capitalism result in meat-heavy diets lacking fresh fruits and vegetables, further contributing to these conditions (Pollan, 2020).

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Closely related to deflecting to pre-existing conditions was conservative victim blaming of underrepresented communities for their higher COVID positivity and death rates rather than correctly attributing those to structural racism. As a form of “they brought this on themselves” reasoning, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy attributed higher COVID case rates in the Black community to their having 60% greater chance of developing type 2 diabetes and being overweight; therefore, inaction regarding the virus was justified (Beckett, 2020, para. 45). Similarly, Trump Administration Health Secretary Alex Azar noted that Blacks in the U.S. have “significant underlying disease” (para. 2). In particular, it is notable that the anti-shutdown protests began only one week after the media emphasized the higher proportion of Black and Latino COVID cases, indicating that “systemic racism created the health disparities…and now the same racism is also shaping and undermining the country’s political response to the pandemic” (para. 19). Ultimately, the eugenics message of the protests was one of sacrifice of the weak in order to not inconvenience the rest of society. In an interview, then White House Economic Council Larry Kudlow stated that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease and we’re gonna have to make some difficult trade-offs” (SemDem, 2020, para. 20). Texas Leiutenant Governor Dan Patrick speculated that “lots of grandparents” were willing to “take a chance” on surviving the virus to save the economy (para. 20). Not to be outdone, Fox News’ Brit Hume declared it was “entirely reasonable” to let family members die for the stock market (para. 20). The notion of vice-signaling that saturated eugenics messaging was encapsulated in conservative author Bethany Mandel’s Twitter post where she declared she was proud to be called a “grandma killer”: I’m not sacrificing my home, food on the table, all of our docs and dentists, every form of pleasure (museums, zoos, restaurants), all my kids’ teachers in order to make other people comfortable. If you want to stay locked down, do. I’m not. (Berlatsky, 2020, para. 1) In these above comments, how one responded to the virus was portrayed as yet another set of free market “choices” with those who “decided” to stay home committing the ultimate offense of not going out to eat or shop. They were not making the sacrifices they should be making. O’Toole (2020a) saw this inversion of the concept of sacrifice—where the protesters viewed themselves as the ones unfairly making the sacrifice and not those who they felt should have to expose themselves to the virus (essential workers, caregivers) in order to preserve normalcy. For the protesters, “the freedom of the market economy comes at the price of severe material sacrifice,” (p. 21) but it was other people’s

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sacrifices, not theirs that were called for (SemDem, 2020). In other words, “their passing discomfort is more important than the lives of others, or of others’ loved ones” (Berlatsky, 2020, para. 14). For Marchman (2020), a key function of the protests was to “amass power” while working in tandem with employers who wanted to maintain their profit margins by forcing businesses to fully reopen and unemployment support to end (para. 3). This required not only forcing employees back into the workplace, but compelled consumers to “get back out there.” This level of irrationality overlooked other safer forms of commerce, like no-contact online shopping and carryout services: Putting aside the immorality that making money for rich people should take precedence over a public health emergency, the very concept of allowing vast numbers of Americans to die to “save the economy” is completely illogical. By relaxing social restrictions too soon, the death rate will skyrocket. Our extremely fragile healthcare system will then collapse, and more businesses will crumble. Ironically, opening prematurely won’t just kill more people, it will cause even more devastating economic harm. (SemDem, 2020, para. 24) 3.2 Absolute Freedom Absolute freedom, in the context of anti-mask and anti-mandate sentiment, meant that unfettered and unconditional movement in public spaces should be restored to the mythical wide-open economic frontier of how things were prior to the pandemic. In particular, conservative White men (and to a large degree conservative White women) considered any sort of public health restrictions to be gateway to a totalitarian (read: liberal) state and an insult to their ability to make sound choices during the pandemic: Many of the people pushing to reopen see the issue in terms of freedom. They argue that quarantine and government-mandated closures infringe on their individual rights to do as they please, to make their own choices about health risks. The United States was founded on the idea that individual liberty—for White men, at the time—is inviolable, and for many of its residents this argument resonates deeply. (Mooney, 2020, para. 2) A hallmark of absolute freedom was encompassed in the repeated suggestion in social media posts and op-eds that those who were “afraid” of the virus should “just stay inside” to allow everyone else to “go about their lives.” In this way, absolute freedom also drew from eugenics discourse to maintain the separation between the free and productive (White) population and unproductive

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others who either had health problems or were able to choose to avoid public spaces and were therefore the ones holding things up. In this framing of freedom, concern for others built into the mitigation of viral spread was an impediment to the American way of life and the social importance of mandates were minimized by portraying them as “being told what to do.” Within anti-mask ideology, absolute freedom included three key assumptions: (1) my freedom to do what I want is more important than your freedom to live; (2) inconvenience is oppression, and (3) my definition of freedom will be imposed on everyone else. Racism was intimately wrapped up with these three tenets which granted White males the optimal freedom of movement that they were used to having and a refusal to be inconvenienced by anyone perceived as weak or undeserving. Nor was there any sense of obligation toward others or shared responsibility. The first important aspect of absolute freedom was that it prioritized some people’s freedom over others’ freedom. My freedom to do what I want is more important than your freedom to live is currently part of right-wing interpretations of the Second Amendment, where one’s freedom to carry a gun supersedes everyone else’s safety. The only way to distinguish a “good” gun owner from one who has “bad” intentions is to wait to see what they do with the gun. Likewise, with the risk of asymptomatic spread, this interpretation of freedom placed the onus on everyone else to hope they did not end up with positive COVID test results. Risk was thus “shared” involuntarily: The issue with the freedom argument is that wearing a mask is about more than protecting yourself—there’s growing evidence masks are useful for protecting others from those who may have COVID-19 and not know it. Not wearing a mask may encroach on another person’s freedom to go out in relative safety. (Stewart, 2020d, para. 23) The second aspect of the absolute interpretation of freedom included inconvenience is a form of oppression. This messaging was part of the anti-mask and anti-mandate rallies, with protest signs reading “don’t let the mask become a muzzle,” “social distancing = communism” and “let my people go-lf.” In particular, the right to get a haircut was framed as a major freedom being infringed upon and held up to the same significance as a civil right (O’Toole, 2020b; Stewart, 2020d). For Aronson and Tavris (2020), declarations about desiring to return to work or going to a local bar was at odds with these actions being designated high-risk, and therefore, introduced a dissonance that could be resolved in different ways:

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People could avoid the crowds, parties, and bars and wear a mask. Or they could jump back into their former ways. But to preserve their belief that they are smart and competent and would never do anything foolish to risk their lives, they will need some self-justifications: Claim that masks impair their breathing, deny that the pandemic is serious, or protest that their “freedom” to do what they want is paramount. (para. 11) In actuality, mask wearing has shown considerable effectiveness in slowing the viral spread with minimal inconvenience (Cooper, 2020). For example, contact tracing in salons—indoor settings with close personal contact—demonstrated that the salons’ policy of requiring universal facial coverings for employees and customers prevented spread of positive status stylists to hundreds of clients (Frankel, 2020; Wu, 2020). Mooney’s (2020) historical overview of British public health responses during the 1800s draws several parallels with the current situation where “COVID-19 has joined diseases like scarlet fever, diphtheria, and cholera as a quintessential example of a threat that requires giving up one sort of liberty in order for people everywhere to enjoy their right to be healthy” (para. 14). During that time, there were no vaccines available. As Mooney describes, whenever public health reformers attempted to control the spread of these diseases, civic groups would emerge to act against these measures, with names like the Anti-Compulsion Society. This prompted The Lancet in 1883 to side with reformers and state that while “a man with smallpox has the natural liberty to travel in a cab or omnibus…society has a right that overrides his natural liberty and says he shall not” (para. 10). This interpretation of freedom is widened to address the needs of society as a whole, with measures such as laws, isolation, tracking, reporting, sanitary measures, and as a result, has kept infectious disease rates low. The third aspect of absolute freedom involved imposing a reactionary definition of it onto others. This imposition of freedom boiled down to, “I don’t have to follow your rules, but you have to follow mine.” This declaration was a mass delegitimization of core aspects of government, civil society, and traditional definitions of the First Amendment. Neiwert (2020) identified this contradiction as a key aspect of alt-right ideology, which places itself in perpetual victim status only to then impose their wills on the rest of the population: Alt-Americans fret and stew over imagined plots to round up Americans and place them in concentration camps or even execute them in a mass genocide, and fear the imposition of a dictatorial regime in which they have no say. Yet their own political agenda would result in the rounding

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up and incarceration of millions of people, while imposing a dictatorial regime shaped in their own political image that would silence any kind of leftist impulse. (pp. 44–45) Dartagnan (2020) clarified that what was often invoked as “freedom” could more accurately be described as “absence of responsibility” (para. 5). With the COVID pandemic, this mindset no longer became sustainable, since the virus “was coming for everyone” and only shared responsibility can slow its spread (para. 6). This enraged conservatives, who insisted on continuing down the failed path of hyper-individualism and absolute freedom while asserting their birthright to these as “real Americans” (Krugman, 2020). Solnit (2020) noted that the common analogy of “my right to swing my arm ends where your nose begins” had been transformed from one of balancing personal freedom with societal obligations to one of “unlimited armswinging” (para. 4). For Solnit, this armswinging during the pandemic was indicative of the intersection of Whiteness and maleness of the alt-right: The maliciously gendered rhetoric of the National Rifle Association, the incels and pick-up artist subcultures, Trumpism, and a lot else have proposed, in recent years, that actually their right to swing their arms doesn’t end and my nose and your nose are not their problem or are just in the way and need to move. Wearing masks, it turns out, is not manly, when the definition of manly is not having to do fuck-all out of concern for others. (para. 1) 3.3 Hyper-Individualism Closely related to absolute freedom, hyper-individualism distilled public policy down to the atomized person, whose actions were neatly self-contained with a limited orbit. Responsibility and obligation only extended that far and no further since all forms of collective action were indicative of communism. Hyper-individualism was encompassed in the often-seen comment on social media, “I assessed all the risks and made a choice that was best for me.” This comment disregarded what was known about the virus and assumed that its spread was just limited to what will happen to the person who individually decided to take on the risk. The notion that the person could be asymptomatically spreading the virus was not even taken into consideration, or it was viewed within the lens of, “as long as I don’t show symptoms, I’m okay with engaging in my normal activities.” Hyper-individualism was also reflected in employment policies, such as only releasing people to work from home if they had a medical condition that put them at risk for COVID. The fact that people

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might live with others who were at risk was not addressed, as if people lived within conveniently arranged like-age or health cohorts. A major contributing factor to hyper-individualism was the veneration of the lone individual under capitalism, who is supposed to bear any negative situations by themselves: The idea of any collective responsibility—of a social compact between Americans—was always inherently poisonous to that shiny, conservative ideal. And that aversion to any responsibility for the country as a whole has manifested itself in ways we have seen constantly unfolding during the course of this horrific pandemic, as conservative attitudes have been exposed and highlighted again and again under the harsh glare of reality. (Dartagnan, 2020, paras. 5–6) Solnit (2020) notes how, under capitalism, the desires and needs of the lone individual, who is typically White and male, are prioritized over others. This introduces a contradiction between rugged stoicism and being used to having one’s needs be the first priority. Situations such as a pandemic have revealed the fiction of the aggressively vocal, self-reliant individual “who could live alone in the post-apocalyptic woods off what they could hunt with their bare hands [now] suddenly claim they need help right away with their hair” (para. 7). Relatedly, hyper-individualism was about this individual making social decisions for others in the form of their being the one to “weigh the options” and make the decisions, thus negating others as unimportant. As Naftulin (2020) puts it, “agentic narcissists don’t believe preventive measures will help them personally, and they find the effort required to take precautions outweighs the personal benefits” (para. 9). This was reflected in Hedetoft’s (2020) analysis of authoritarian populism where the individual “regards itself as the center of the universe and only accepts cooperating with others if it clearly benefits themselves” (p. 27). This represented a fundamental shift in nationalism away from an outward projection of state power into “a self-serving, inward-looking, and chauvinistic type” (p. 27). A corollary to individualism was the perception of social conditions like poverty or illness as being the fault of those in that situation. This was manifest in Republican Ohio State Senator Stephen Huffman declaring that Blacks are more at risk for contracting the virus because they don’t practice personal hygiene enough (Yong, 2020). A gun rights activist in an interview with Beckett (2020) noted that “Americans don’t have much of a national vocabulary for talking about collective action and sacrifice” (para. 17). He later acknowledged

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that he was frustrated that his friends did not understand that living with a virus “required a different kind of politics…these call for a collectivist response; they don’t work without one” (para. 18). Ultimately, hyper-individualism is a rejection of the concept of society itself. By framing mask wearing and social distancing as personal choices and protecting one’s self, collective responsibility is rejected: The idea that social distancing is actually a collective social pact—a worldwide mutual pact not about any individual but necessary to contain the spread of the virus—is incomprehensible from a perspective in which there are only individuals. So, what do we get? Social distancing regarded as an illegitimate political encroachment on individual choice and the retort, “I can do what I want, and no state can tell me otherwise.” Interdependence isn’t just rejected here, it’s illegible, it doesn’t exist. (Pankova & Barrow, 2020, para. 7) This anti-society attitude is reflected in how the virus was initially allowed to spread in prisons and nursing homes, locations housing the most vulnerable on the margins of society. Yong (2020) noted how the approach to emphasizing preparing hospitals while neglecting larger preventative measures to minimize transmission was also reflective of the notion that reactionary individualism is how our institutions view “health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good” (para. 30). The limits of hyper-individualism being used to make health-based decisions become all too apparent in situations like attending public events. In Maine, a small wedding ceremony with 62 attendees, most of whom were not wearing masks or social distancing, resulted in 170 identified cases of COVID-19 (Plater, 2020, paras. 3–4). Most strikingly, eight deaths total were traced to the event, and none of those individuals had even attended the event (para. 5). In this situation, as with many others, those who died did not have the opportunity to “assess all the risks and make a choice to attend.” That choice was made for them. 3.4 Anti-Government At the core of protesting against public health measures was a reaction against the notion of civil society. Anti-government refers to the rejection of the public role of governance, particularly anything to do with the social safety net or protections for citizens. In particular, authority that can be associated with liberalism was rejected as illegitimate (Neiwert, 2020). As Stevens (2020) explained, “for decades a certain percentage of those who called themselves

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conservatives had been cultivating a country within a country, a sort of virtual secession from the United States of America” (p. 108). This form of nullification has been rapidly building since the Reagan era, with current manifestations in the form of businesses seeking religious exemptions from discrimination policies in the courts. It was no accident that at the time of the state and municipal shutdowns in April 2020, polling showed that only 47% of Republicans indicated they wore masks in public as compared to 69% of Democrats (Karson, 2020, para. 6). This was despite the same poll showing 82% of Republicans concerned about the virus, not too far from the 90% of Democrats who indicated the same (para. 7). Anti-government discourse was at its peak after governors declared states of emergency, issuing stay at home orders, and closing businesses according to current public health guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The backlash was swift, as in Stillwater Oklahoma’s mayor rescinding a mask requirement for businesses after receiving threats (Cooper, 2020; Jones, 2020). The evolution of this backlash was well-represented by Stewart’s (2020d) account of Amy, an Ohio mother who was initially afraid when the pandemic started, and even made masks for people she knew after she heard the government’s recommendations. However, after Republican Governor DeWine announced an extension of the state’s shutdown, she was suddenly “done” with the pandemic, becoming “vehemently anti-mask,” doubting if the virus “was really that big of a deal” (para. 2). At that point, a switch in her mindset from public health-oriented actions to victimhood reflected the larger right-wing movement toward seeing themselves as targets of a big liberal government (Jones, 2020). As long as she was able to determine her level of response, fine. But collectively? No deal. Pankova and Barrow (2020) described how the right-wing simultaneously maintain allegiance to authoritarian expressions of the state, such as the military, police, prisons, and legal system so long as it is limited to oppressing others (particularly underrepresented groups), while rejecting the concept of civil governance, or at the very least, reducing accountability to the smallest possible unit: On the other side, however, there’s a constant devolution of responsibility to states, to individuals, to the market. This oscillation is part of Trump’s extraordinary political wiliness, to be able to identify himself with a White patriarchalist sovereignty and with an anti-statist devolution of responsibility. (para. 27) Added to this is “an alignment between the extremes of the Republican Party and the new conspiracism—a congruence founded in hostility toward

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government” (Stevens, 2020, pp. 99–100). This was also reflected in resistance to public health measures in the 1800s, where people who opposed government intervention likened hospitals to prisons and believed rumors that patients moved to hospitals “would be killed and their bodies dissected for medical research” (Mooney, 2020, para. 5). The ultimate irony, of course, is that those governors who took early, decisive action to prevent the spread of the virus received approval ratings above 70% while those of Republican states pushing to reopen were far lower. In particular, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who expressed shock that the virus could be transmitted asymptomatically months after that was commonly known, faced a 61% disapproval rating (Meyerson, 2020, para. 6). Only 25% of Michigan residents disapproved of Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s safety measures and she was one of the key targets for the anti-shutdown protests (para. 5). 3.5 Denial Referring to efforts to minimize the impact of the pandemic, denial was the glue that held together several deeply contradictory beliefs surrounding the virus. On the one hand, the extreme nature of eugenics discourse discussed earlier almost had to, by default, accept COVID’s seriousness in order to prompt “solutions” such as letting older people die off so life could get “back to normal.” Likewise, hyper-individualism and anti-government rhetoric needed the virus to have something to play off of, or something to endure by bearing the costs on your own, without state intervention. Yet on the other hand, denial in the form of “it’ll be gone soon” or “it’s like the flu” permeated anti-mask protests and social media sentiments, downplaying the seriousness. The mixture of “survive or die” and “it’ll disappear” served to keep people atomized and disrupted larger efforts to contain the virus. Denial was the backbone of the dissemination of anti-science information and justification for the Trump administration’s criminal non-response: In an economy experiencing Depression-level morbidity, with a population desperate for work and a return to “normalcy,” it’s impossible to find any rational support for this attitude. Yet Republicans continue to cling to it because it provides them with cold comfort, even as the country threatens to crumble around them. To admit the necessity of a social compact—the idea that that those most fortunate should come to the aid of those less fortunate for the preservation of our society—is an implicit admission of failure that Republicans, blinded by their ideology, cannot make. (Dartagnan, 2020, para. 9)

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In particular, denial involved downplaying a sense of urgency by emphasizing recovery rates, comparing the virus to the flu, or telling younger people that they weren’t likely to get the virus as compared to older or less-healthy individuals (Jackson, 2020). Asymptomatic spread was ignored. The thrust of the message was that people should not panic or let their lives be consumed with the pandemic. This message was repeated in op-eds, social media posts, memes, YouTube videos, and on television, all of which were shared widely. Trump himself was the most prolific at spreading this messaging, making minimizing of the pandemic a central message of his reelection campaign “with the hope that voters will follow his lead of whistling past the COVID-19 graveyard” (Wade, 2020, para. 1). It was no surprise that a news content analysis study found that Trump was the largest driver of misinformation about the virus (Scott, 2020). This happened in the face of a rising death toll and only intensified as the pandemic began to significantly impact rural areas. Trump’s strategic use of denial was dramatically exposed when Bob Woodward released his interview tapes from early 2020 where Trump admitted that COVID was indeed serious, even as he proceeded to promise the country that the virus would disappear by spring (Wise, 2020). While this revelation was shocking and showed an unmatched degree of cynicism and contempt in retrospect of the administration’s non-response, it was not surprising that Trump later told Woodward that he was not afraid of catching the virus himself (Gangel, 2020). The message of denial was, “it’s serious, but as long as I don’t get it, I don’t plan to alter my own habits.” This helps to explain the dynamics of denial and how it can hold contradictory beliefs under one umbrella. A major driver of denial involves conservatives seeing themselves as victims and never taking ownership of the situation. The victim role is critical because if one’s efforts fail, then blame can be placed onto others, the “fake” media or the deep state, which are set against decent White citizens. As Hedetoft (2020) explained, “the advantage is that you can always appear to be in the right, at least morally, even if your goals are not met. Either way you win” (p. 79). For Hedetoft, this is part of populist regimes in that “it swops structural truths for personal characteristics” (p. 79). Trump the person was the savior, protecting against a hostile government in the form of mask mandates and stay at home orders. Those who were opposed to Trump were therefore the enemies and a major reason why he failed. As Hedetoft concludes, Nothing seems to belong in the world of objectivities; everything is subjective and individualized. It follows that people who want to do what’s right and proper just need to set that goal for themselves. The world is

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a quasi-religious struggle between Good or Evil, national vindication or global perdition. In the meantime, “we” can enjoy our revenge. (p. 79) 3.6 Risk Often used to justify inaction, risk refers to the notion that the world is unpredictable and hostile, so safety (in the form of mask mandates, shutdowns) can’t be assured, and it is not worth the effort. At the same time, taking risks is valorized as an enforced masculine characteristic that actively seeks out danger, as in the case of trying to catch or even spread the virus. Those who take measures to protect themselves are labeled weak, afraid, cowardly, or “snowflakes,” to use the vernacular. In many ways, risk is the imposition of hyper-individualism onto others. As Glick (2020) explained, The refusal to wear a mask undermines the message that the rest of us should take safety precautions…Leaders who are more concerned with preserving a macho public image put our lives at risk as they prove their manhood by showing resistance to experts’ opinions, hypersensitivity to criticism and constant feuding with anyone who seems to disagree with them. (para. 3) It is no coincidence that the most authoritarian populist leaders—Trump, Vladimir Putin of Russia, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro—were also the most ardent virus minimizers with the results to show for it. By contrast, science-following female leaders like New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Arden, took immediate action and oversaw lower infection and death rates in their countries (Glick, 2020; Solnit, 2020; Williams, 2020). O’Toole (2020a) analyzed conservative ideology as an interplay of two incompatible aspects: paranoia and risk. Paranoia includes inflating fears about immigration, White displacement, and foreign contamination while risk is about showing one’s toughness and subversion of communal norms. However, these two aspects are meant for different constituencies within the right wing: The paranoia is for the little people: their ‘way of life’ is under threat (from Muslims, Mexicans, liberals, socialists, political correctness, feminism, anti-gun movements, and so on) and Trump alone can save them… the embrace of risk, on the other hand, is for the actual beneficiaries of casino capitalism, for whom safety is a bad thing. Trump has managed

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to hold these two notions of security and danger together. His problem with the virus is that it makes that double act impossible: the risk impulse is deadly for his voters, but the conservative intellectual establishment cannot give it up. (p. 21) For example, one would think that right-wing paranoia could have been channeled into things like taking the virus seriously or ramping-up hygiene practices. Instead, conservative concepts of risk took over in the form of virus denial/minimization, xenophobia, opposition to mask mandates, and insistence on re-opening businesses. Because the virus wasn’t attached to a particular sub-group (as HIV/AIDS initially was), there wasn’t the ability to scapegoat as easily, so measures against the virus became the target. Starting at the top, examples of prominent Republican politicians who made public appearances without masks were numerous, including Trump himself, who removed his mask after his release from Walter Reed medical center while still testing positive for COVID (Cooper, 2020; Liptak & Reston, 2020). When casting their votes for the coronavirus relief bill, a dozen Republican representatives did so without wearing masks (Lowndes, 2020, para. 7). Even when visiting patients with COVID-19 in the hospital, Pence refused to wear a mask (Cooper, 2020). Pence also shared a campaign headquarters photo of a crowded room where none of the staffers, including Pence, wore masks and stood close together (Wade, 2020). Republican lawmakers who appeared maskless to events immediately after having tested positive included Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Utah Senator Mike Lee (Cooper, 2020; Kane 2020). Trump campaign workers reported a climate where people were pressured not to report whether they tested positive and made fun of if they wore masks (Wade, 2020). Lowndes (2020) speculated that Republicans deliberately selected certain photo ops to attend sans-masks in order to stake out their claim as part of “a tough guy taunt” for the purpose of highlighting “the weakness of their opponents” (para. 7). This was the case with Trump’s campaign appearances (Miller, 2020), Republican votes on COVID relief, and general statements about public health guidelines. Risk was especially about displaying an aggressive form of masculinity as part of refusing to acknowledge public health guidelines, such as calling mask wearers “pussies” or the ubiquity of carrying assault weapons at anti-shutdown protests (Gusterson, 2020; Williams, 2020). Reacting to former Vice President Joe Biden’s consistent mask wearing, Tomi Lahren tweeted that he might as well carry a purse, associating masks with effeminate and weak characteristics (Nash, 2020). The notion of showing no weakness forbade any admission of uncertainty, relying on one constituency—Trump and his

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supporters—as being the only ones who could solve problems, not experts. Further, disdain for weakness meant framing everything as a “dog-eats-dog competition,” whether applying the dynamics of capitalism to public health or seeing criticism or consulting experts as “losing” (Glick, 2020, para. 5). The flip side of the macho opposition to masks was endless persecution, where those inconvenienced by stay-at-home orders—not the ones who had the virus or were working to stop it—were the real victims. At first glance, this seemed hard to pull off because the right-wing has consistently portrayed things like demands for civil rights as excuse making for personal failures. Additionally, those most vocal about persecution had vast media representation, such as their own segments on Fox News or newspaper columns (Miller, 2020). However, in order to close the logical loop, conservatives had to invert the situation where they were the ones being unfairly targeted and held back by a resentful Left (Cooper, 2020). This was encapsulated by Trump’s complaint of “presidential harassment” any time he was criticized by the media. As O. Jones (2020) explained, this conception of victimization did not have to correspond with reality in order to work: Rightwing politicians have long understood better than their leftwing counterparts that politics is more about sentiments than facts. From their positions of power and influence, rightwingers can portray themselves as the defiled victims of a dangerous rabble; the crybully is an effective silencer, forcing their opponents on to the backfoot, and to debate on their terms…on the brutal battlegrounds of the culture war, better to be seen as the victim than the aggressor. This is not just the tactic of the modern right: it is their art form. (para. 9) Risk was also about demonizing the communal aspects of safety and sacrifice, which were necessary for preventing viral spread. Denouncing safety was a common tactic in virus-denier YouTube videos, where statements such as, “when they use the word safe…if you listen to the word safe, that’s about controlling you” or “who says what’s safe? Are you smart enough to know what’s safe for you or is the government gonna tell you what’s safe for you?” (Shoddy Statistics, 2020, para. 31). Those who promoted safety were seen as interfering with the natural order of a high-risk world. When applying these same concepts to food regulations or tornado warnings, one can see the irrationality behind conservative notions of risk. Likewise, sacrifice was portrayed by virus deniers as an unfair imposition because sacrifice is only supposed to be what others do for you to subsidize your fantasy of normalcy. This was manifest in the dichotomous framing of sacrifice in the media:

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On the one hand, there’s universal genuflection to the sacrifices made by health workers, first responders, grocery store and farm workers, delivery truck drivers, all those “essential workers” who are risking their lives to keep the rest of us alive. There is an almost religious relationship to the sacrifice of these “essential workers.” On the other hand, there’s a political rebellion against demands for sacrifice by those who understand their individual rights as supervenient, who regard political restraints as inherently tyrannical or socialist, and are furious at being asked to sacrifice in any way for the well-being of the whole. (Pankova & Barrow, 2020, para. 24) Beckett (2020) sees risk as an extension of earlier Puritan beliefs of how misfortune was evidence of falling out of favor with God. Those who became ill, like Native Americans after colonization, were part of “divine dispensation” where “the very fact that people are dying is taken as both pragmatically offering market opportunities” while providing “a theological vindication of your own survivorship” (para. 28). A more extreme manifestation of risk included those who displayed “dark triad” personality traits of narcissism, manipulation, and psychopathy, which were associated with not following public health protocols (Naftulin, 2020; Dolan, 2020). Examples of these behaviors included hoarding, not washing hands, defying stay at home orders, or not wearing masks in public. Reports of people intentionally coughing on food, spitting, or licking doorknobs in public places were common after public health measures were implemented, taking dark triad traits to an even further extreme (Dolan, 2020). In one study, meanness and disinhibition were correlated with deliberately seeking to put others at risk of infection: “people scoring high on these traits tended to claim that if they had COVID-19, they might knowingly or deliberately expose others to it” (Dolan, 2020, para. 13). In this case, it was no longer enough to show your defiance through acts of individual risk, you had to then impose risks onto others. Ultimately, the conservative conceptualization of risk was highly myopic and self-centered, much like the brand of capitalism they promote. In discussing a 1990s interview of Trump by radio host Howard Stern, O’Toole (2020a) drew parallels between both men’s attitudes toward HIV/AIDS transmission and condom use and Trump’s approach to COVID-19. In the interview, Trump and Stern discussed their sexual histories during the AIDS crisis and reluctance to wear condoms, because they were not gay, and therefore, did not need them. This is similar to rarely hearing conservatives admit that they could be spreading COVID-19: Neither seemed even to imagine the possibility that they themselves might be carriers of disease who could infect the women they slept Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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with…they enjoy the invulnerability bestowed by nature and heredity on life’s winners. Condoms, like social distancing and restaurant closures, are restrictions on freedom that might keep others (women, gay men) alive—but to obey such restrictions would be to accept that one is on the same level as these losers. The embrace of risk is as much the badge of heterosexual alpha maleness as it is of American free market capitalism. (p. 22)

4

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What has resonated with the public most in response to the anti-mask and reopen protests wasn’t so much their opposition to science or expertise (as disturbing as that was) as a complete lack of empathy concerning whose lives matter. The hyper-individualism that manifested from the protests cause us to wonder if the “realness” of COVID-19 is only confirmed by personal experience, where the rest of the cases do not matter. Or, as Stewart (2020d) asks, “does one person’s right to ignore public health advice really trump someone else’s right to live?” (para. 8). Further, the lack of a national response to the pandemic only intensified the level of denial coupled with aggression, displayed by Trump and his supporters: Trump’s wild zigzagging has destroyed, for his followers, the possibility of a single, coherent, rational narrative of the pandemic: it is a dark conspiracy and nothing much to be worried about; it demands wartime restrictions on freedom and such restrictions are totalitarian and un-American; we all have to act but we don’t need to do anything; you should wear a mask but I won’t. (O’Toole, 2020a, p. 22) It is also clear by now that contrary to the notion of Trump being a conservative anomaly, the Republican Party “has surrendered abjectly to him,” meaning that one of the two major U.S. political parties “has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety” (O’Toole, 2020b, para. 10). Further, the GOP’s rejection of expertise has left them bereft of ideas beyond tax cuts and deregulation, so they literally cannot govern beyond displaying moments of policy theater, typically unrelated to the pandemic (Krugman, 2020). This is in line with authoritarian masculinist organizations where everyone is only looking out for themselves and competing for the leader’s approval, so they lack the ability to form the consensus needed to respond to a national crisis (Glick, 2020). What this has done is left the public vulnerable to a group of Trump supporters that were hell-bent on not only Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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refusing to follow public health procedures, but on deriving enjoyment from exposing others to the virus while holding the economy hostage: Already this has created an ideal coronavirus transmission pool—a critical mass of right-wing extremists who are unwilling to obey government pandemic control measures and are convinced personal measures to do so are beta male cowardice. Many will become sick as a result, and some will die—but not only conservatives, as the virus will infect any available host. This will keep the pandemic raging, and hence further delay the restoration of the economy. (Cooper, 2020, para. 11) However, they are not the majority. Though there was widespread media coverage of the anti-mask and reopen protests, the views expressed were definitely in the mi proportional to the intensity of the coverage. Polls consistently showed that an increasing number of Americans, from all demographic and age groups, wore masks since initial awareness of the virus in spring and summer of 2020. One poll found that nearly 75% indicated they “always” wear a mask when in public with 6 out of 10 viewing people favorably who wore masks (Whang & Elliott, 2020, paras. 2–3). After Trump’s positive COVID status was revealed, an October 2020 poll indicated that close to 66% of Americans (along with 50% of Republicans) believed that if Trump had taken public health precautions, he could have prevented his contracting the virus (Dartagnan, 2020, para. 1). Further, Trump’s continued inaction regarding the virus, along with his lack of empathy, was a factor in his eroding political support. Close to 70% of Americans disapproved of his response to the pandemic with his national disapproval number hitting 57%, his worst showing (Wade, 2020, para. 9). Rather than taking public sentiment into account, Trump, along with his supporters, only dug their heels in further. He continued to insist on not wearing a mask during campaign appearances, only donning one begrudgingly when he absolutely had to. This pattern of ramped-up behavior began with the kickoff of his reelection campaign that had been delayed due to COVID19, with an indoor rally in Tulsa. The rally featured no requirements to wear masks, and campaign workers deliberately removed social distancing markers from the arena (Miller, 2020). Despite these efforts, the hyped rally only drew a fraction of the crowds, resulted in a spike in COVID infections in Oklahoma, and exposed Trump as a weak and ineffective leader. Later, Trump himself would contract the virus, prompting an entirely fitting public response: Into this befouled environment—teeming with sheer, wanton disregard for American citizens—came the unsurprising revelation that the Trump White House has now become a bubbling Petri dish of COVID-19 infecDaniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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tion, entirely as a result of its inhabitants’ own arrogant behavior—and now, that Trump himself is among the infected. But as the polls reflect, Americans by and large simply don’t care. That’s not a reflection of the president’s political positions, but a reflection back of the behavior he has exhibited towards Americans during his entire tenure in office. (Dartagnan, 2020, para. 11)

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Gangel, J. (2020, October 2). “I’m just not”: Trump told Woodward he wasn’t concerned about catching COVID in newly released audio. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/ 10/02/politics/trump-woodward-interview-covid/index.html Glick, P. (2020, April 30). Masks and emasculation: Why some men refuse to take safety precautions. Scientific American. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ observations/masks-and-emasculation-why-some-men-refuse-to-take-safetyprecautions/ Goodman, M. (2020, May 19). How the New York Times enhances Trump’s propaganda. Counterpunch. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/05/19/how-the-new-yorktimes-enhances-trumps-propaganda/ Gusterson, H. (2020, May 12). COVID-19 and the turn to magical thinking. Sapiens. https://www.sapiens.org/column/conflicted/covid-19-magic/?fbclid= IwAR3jsjovvvyfIUituQH2FT30MdGVIacdU5qZjSx92mOb8LrvjrS2Hfcvy6s Hedetoft, U. (2020). Paradoxes of populism: Troubles of the west and nationalism’s second coming. Anthem Press. Hedges, C. (2020, August 10). Chris Hedges: America’s death march. Consortium News. https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/10/chris-hedges-americas-death-march/ Johnson, J. (2020, September 16). Trump touts herd immunity approach that experts warn would kill millions. Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/trump-touts-herdimmunity-approach-to-covid-experts-warn-would-kill-millions/ Jones, O. (2020, July 16). The right are in power everywhere—but they can’t stop playing the victim. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/ jul/16/right-power-victim-britain-media-no-10-millennials-twitter?fbclid= IwAR1VLgh0N95xWtqdNxKDoIQ5CjNWh1qpmsjhBGbg8AijuaXY_uwlIMRqIZE Kane, P. (2020, October 12). Sen. Lee, recently infected with coronavirus, speaks without a mask at Barrett hearing. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ powerpost/senate-barrett-coronavirus-lee/2020/10/12/97fa17be-0ca8-11eb-8a35237ef1eb2ef7_story.html Karson, K. (2020, April 10). More than half of Americans wear masks as coronavirus’ new normal takes hold: Poll. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/halfamericans-masked-coronavirus-normal-takes-hold-poll/story?id=70073942&cid= social_twitter_abcn Knodel, J. (2020, March 24). Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggests he, other seniors willing to die to get economy going again. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/ us-news/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-suggests-he-other-seniors-willing-n1167341 Krugman, P. (2020, May 14). COVID-19 reality has a liberal bias. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/trump-covid-experts.html?smid= fb-share&fbclid=IwAR1WtLHOVSuSZd0RHE53m-nbjGNQbYjNQ4L1kehqzRkQbTWH_p_FnUCWp0

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Liptak, K., & Ruston, M. (2020, October 5). Trump returns to White House and removes mask despite having COVID. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/05/politics/ donald-trump-covid-condition-walter-reed/index.html Lowndes, J. (2020, April 30). The morbid ideology behind the drive to reopen America. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/157505/morbid-ideologybehind-drive-reopen-america?fbclid=IwAR2uoELBGp6XwavQyy9xoLIvRHLXTJuH eQ9a8dw_1zDbpOpYfyQrWUKfYlk Marchman, T. (2020, April 24). The right wing wants you to die. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkej8y/the-right-wing-wants-you-to-die?utm_ campaign=sharebutton&fbclid=IwAR2EA7boh-o7mNv8ozaZAoek9LAgljtt_ hgnsV8fKNaHfVyplKtLoRXL5es Meyerson, H. (2020, May 14). Those unrepresentative guys with guns. The American Prospect. https://prospect.org/blogs/tap/those-unrepresentative-guys-with-guns/ Miller, T. (2020, June 20). Make arenas empty again. The Bulwark. https://thebulwark.com/make-arenas-empty-again/?fbclid=IwAR0nnuvdMPxgwL RHfly_2noKVomBMv23Z8IxV4G4I-6XaCVlBe4NYdGMW9k Mooney, G. (2020, May 19). How to talk about freedom during a pandemic. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/freedom-pandemic-19thcentury/611800/ Naftulin, J. (2020, July 23). People with narcissistic traits are more likely to ignore pandemic safety guidelines, such as hand-washing and staying home. Insider. https://www.insider.com/narcissists-more-likely-hoard-toilet-paper-skip-handwashing-pandemic-2020-7 Nash, C. (2020, October 6). Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren mocks Joe Biden as effeminate for wearing face mask: ‘Might as well carry a purse.’ MSN. https://www.msn.com/ en-us/news/politics/fox-nation-host-tomi-lahren-mocks-joe-biden-as-effeminatefor-wearing-face-mask-might-as-well-carry-a-purse/ar-BB19KZgs Neiwert, D. (2018). Alt-America: The rise of the radical right in the age of Trump. Verso. Novella, S. (2020, September 29). COVID: Not close to herd immunity. Neurologicablog. https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/covid-not-close-to-herdimmunity/?fbclid=IwAR0FFjLxWpXJ4SUpAur89o588S9r26q3KL6AGBxF3T4BFEGhoVDdbyqffg O’Toole, F. (2020a, May 14). Vector in chief. The New York Review of Books, 67(8), 9–10. O’Toole, F. (2020b, April 25). Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintano-toole-donald-trump-has-destroyed-the-country-he-promised-to-make-greatagain-1.4235928?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F% 2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Ffintan-o-toole-donald-trump-hasdestroyed-the-country-he-promised-to-make-great-again-1.4235928

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Pankova, R., & Barrow, K. (2020, June 24). “A worldwide mutual pact”: An interview with Wendy Brown. The Drift. https://www.thedriftmag.com/a-worldwide-mutualpact/ Pollan, M. (2020, June 11). The sickness in our food supply. The New York Review of Books, 67(10), 4–6. Quinnipiac Poll. (2020, March 9). The coronavirus. Quinnipiac University. https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3657 Scott, D. (2020, October 5). Trump has been the biggest source of COVID-19 misinformation, study finds. Vox. https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/21497221/donaldtrump-covid-19-coronavirus-news-misinformation-study SemDem. (2020, May 1). Trump’s Nazification of the GOP is why there’s serious discussion of killing off the ‘unfit.’ Daily Kos. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/ 2020/5/1/1934455/-Trump-s-Nazification-of-the-GOP-is-why-there-s-seriousdiscussion-of-killing-off-the-unfit Shoddy statistics and false claims: Dr. Erickson dangerously misled the public on coronavirus. (2020, April 29). The Logic of Science. https://thelogicofscience.com/2020/ 04/29/shoddy-statistics-and-false-claims-dr-erickson-dangerously-misled-thepublic-on-coronavirus/comment-page-1/#comments Solnit, R. (2020, May 29). Masculinity as radical selfishness: Rebecca Solnit on the maskless men of the pandemic. LitHub. https://lithub.com/masculinity-as-radicalselfishness-rebecca-solnit-on-the-maskless-men-of-the-pandemic/?fbclid= IwAR0rmdWbgOJYMhb-10JYxfiGnHECqJ-QhShcVgHIJq3mDh_tnLoe3UOJgfo Stevens, S. (2020). It was all a lie: How the Republican Party became Donald Trump. Knopf. Stewart, E. (2020d, August 7). Anti-maskers explain themselves. Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/8/7/21357400/anti-mask-protest-ralliesdonald-trump-covid-19 Vogel, K. P., Rutenberg, J., & Lerer, L. (2020, April 21). The quiet hand of conservative groups in anti-lockdown protests. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/ 2020/04/21/us/politics/coronavirus-protests-trump.html Wade, P. (2020, July 10). Trump campaign staff: ‘You get made fun of if you wear a mask.’ Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trumpcampaign-staff-get-made-fun-of-if-you-wear-a-mask-1027170/?fbclid= IwAR1DUfFRrebK9mP7TUp0wDJu_-CTSekS1eUOTUlUBm950TQjiy_PfvSMk8s Whang, O., & Elliott, K. (2020, October 5). Poll finds more Americans than ever think we should wear masks. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ history/2020/10/poll-increasing-bipartisan-majority-americans-support-maskwearing/ Williams, T. C. (2020, July 2). Do Americans understand how badly they’re doing? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/america-landpathetic/613747/?utm_source=feed

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Wise, A. (2020, September 9). Trump admits playing down Coronavirus’s severity, according to new Woodward book. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/09/911109247/ trump-admitted-to-playing-down-the-coronaviruss-severity-per-new-book Wu, K. (2020, July 14). Two stylists had coronavirus, but wore masks: 139 clients didn’t fall sick. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/health/ coronavirus-hair-salon-masks.html Yong, E. (2020, September). How the pandemic defeated America. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-americanfailure/614191/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign= share

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Conclusion The George Floyd Protests as a Rejection of “Returning to Normal” President Donald Trump was the worst possible person to lead the United States during a deadly pandemic (Chotiner, 2020; Gordon, 2020; Mathis, 2020; Opal & Opal, 2020). As Yong (2020) asserted, “Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID-19 pandemic. He isn’t solely responsible for America’s fiasco, but he is central to it” (para. 58). Whether it was his narcissism, his rebuke of science, his constant lying, his disdain for reading, or his inability to grasp complex concepts, it was shown repeatedly during the COVID-19 pandemic that, “there has been no meaningful centralized leadership of any kind” (Wallace-Wells, 2020a, p. 4). It can be argued quite easily that Trump caused more harm than good since the coronavirus outbreak began in the U.S. (J. Smith, 2020). In brief, once the pandemic broke, Trump sat idly by and did little to contain the virus; he continually dismissed the coronavirus as merely the flu and minimized its threat; he left the individual states in charge instead of creating a national plan to address the coronavirus; he chose people with no medical experience to head the coronavirus task force; he was incredibly slow in providing necessary COVID-19 testing; he had difficulty in obtaining PPEs and other critical supplies for essential workers; and ultimately, he pulled out of the World Health Organization (WHO) (Atwood & Gaouette, 2020; Baron, 2020; Dickenson, 2020; Lerner, 2020). To say the least, Trump’s response to the virus was a complete and utter disaster for the American people. Under Trump, this nation was rudderless and lost at sea when it came to the handling of COVID-19. It was observed that, “With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter” (Packer, 2020, p. 2). It is now apparent that Trump, along with the majority of Republican politicians who enabled him, gave up on fighting the virus and had left Americans to fend for themselves (D’Antonio 2020; D. Smith, 2020). At the same time, Trump still maintained that the virus was practically harmless and would magically disappear on its own (Egan, 2020; Rabin & Cameron, 2020). Since the U.S. government had so inadequately handled the pandemic, we are now past the point of even using contact tracing in many parts of the country (Holcombe, 2020). Even with 133,000 COVID-related deaths as of July 8, 2020, Trump had the audacity to say that, as a country, “we are in a good place” (Quinn, 2020, p. 1). All the while, Canada had closed its border to the U.S., and the European © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi: 10.1163/9789004500013_008 Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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Union had also blocked entry to U.S. travelers (Read, 2020). In a turn of great irony, even some of Mexico’s border towns attempted to stop U.S. citizens from entering their country (J. Smith, 2020). It appeared that the U.S. had become the “shithole country” that Trump once accused others of being (Applebaum, 2020). Unfortunately, the U.S. did not seem to be able to learn from other countries (e.g., New Zealand) to ascertain how to battle the coronavirus successfully. According to Wallace-Wells (2020b), “many other countries that failed similarly at first [to contain the virus] have managed to quite dramatically turn things around. But not the United States, which is failing again every single day” (p. 6). In summer 2020, while the U.S. was still struggling to get the coronavirus under any semblance of control, many other countries were beating the virus and were beginning to lift restrictions and get life back to “normal,” albeit with some needed restrictions for continued safety (Brooks, 2020; Langfitt, Beardsley, & Schmitz, 2020; Willsher, 2020). According to Goodman, Cohen, and Chaundler (2020): The pandemic has ravaged Europeans and Americans alike, but the economic pain has played out in starkly different fashion. The United States has relied on a significant expansion of unemployment insurance, cushioning the blow for tens of millions of people who have lost their jobs, with the assumption that they will be swiftly rehired once normality returns. European countries—among them Denmark, Ireland, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Austria—have prevented joblessness by effectively nationalizing payrolls, heavily subsidizing wages and enabling paychecks to continue uninterrupted. (p. 1) This difference in approach—one in which the government strongly supported its citizens—stood in direct contrast to the response from the U.S. government. The reality for Americans was that the “social safety nets are minimal, leaving people to struggle with scant relief” (Goodman, Cohen, & Chaundler, 2020). The coronavirus has taken its toll on the American people, with the brunt of the damage landing squarely on the shoulders of Blacks, Latinxs, and the poor (Packer, 2020).

1

The Tipping Point

There are times in a country’s history when a specific event occurs that sends shocks waves through society. The emergence of the coronavirus, the first

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major viral pandemic in a century, shook many people to their core. Then came the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police. This was the tipping point that “captured the public consciousness unlike few other events in American history” (Nakhaie & Nakhaie, 2020, p. 1). George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a local Minneapolis convenience store. A White police officer, who was called to the scene, restrained the unarmed Floyd and pressed his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes (Hill et al., 2020), while three other officers knelt on Floyd’s body (P. P. Murphy, 2020). Floyd died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital as a result of cardiac arrest caused by asphyxiation (Johnson, 2020). The incident was caught on camera, and Floyd was recorded begging for his life, saying, repeatedly, that he could not breathe (P. P. Murphy, 2020). The murder of Floyd led to mass protests around the world for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, calling for an end to racial inequality, police brutality, and systemic racism in the U.S. In other words, as Bollen (2020) described, “protesters were not satisfied with a quick march to city hall” (para. 21). While Trump condemned the murder (Oprysko, 2020), he appeared much more concerned with displaying a show of force and stopping any looting and rioting than actual concern for the racial issues that emerged (Klein, 2020). Oprysko (2020) asserted that: Trump has been widely criticized for his response to the protests, making incendiary comments in which he routinely has made little effort to distinguish protesters from “thugs” or “domestic terrorists” or written them off en masse as operatives of leftist anti-fascist groups…At the same time, he has repeatedly praised law enforcement for cracking down on the events, pushing for a more militarized response to the unrest while declining to say whether he thinks there is systemic racism in law enforcement. (p. 4) Once again, when the American people were in need of leadership and wanted justice, Trump was nowhere to be found. Klein (2020) posits that, “After botching the nation’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, Trump is now botching this, dividing America and drawing lines in a failure of presidential leadership that is shocking, even for him” (p. 6). George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police was the spark that ignited significant change in U.S. popular culture and public opinion in an incredibly short amount of time (Bannon, 2020). Across social media, people began to pose questions such as, “might a collective desire to return to normal obscure the pervasive injustices that structure ‘normality’ for so many, or blind us to the opportunities for social transformation that our present moment presents?” Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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(Wedderburn, 2020, para. 4). According to Westneat (2020), “it appears to have suddenly dawned on White people that African Americans and other people of color were right all along: We really do still live in a racially tilted, inequitable, unfair society” (pp. 1–2). This epiphanic moment for White people in the U.S. has led to a significant shift in attitudes towards race. According to Brooks (2020), “Roughly 60 percent of Americans now believe that African-Americans face a great deal or a lot of discrimination” (p. 1). As a result of the BLM protests, public symbols of racism and colonization, such as confederate Civil War monuments and statues of Christopher Columbus, have been torn down and/or removed all across the United States (Machemer, 2020; Morris, 2020). There has also been renewed discussion regarding the use of “Native” sports team mascots. In particular, there was immense pressure to change the name of the Washington Redskins of the National Football League, as “redskins” is considered to be a slur against Indigenous Peoples. Due to both social and corporate financial pressure, the Redskins nickname and logo were officially retired in July 2020 after nearly 50 years of protests (McCartney, 2020). Soon after, in December 2020, the Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball decided to change their long-held name due to being considered racist (Waldstein & Schmidt, 2020). This discussion of the use of Native mascots continues to include other sports teams’ names that represent and denigrate Indigenous Peoples, such as the Atlanta Braves baseball team (Kilgore & Stubbs, 2020). The current antiracist movement in the U.S. has also inspired country music artists like The Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum (now The Chicks and Lady A, respectively) to change their names due to their associations with racial inequality (Tsioulcas, 2020). Household food products, like Uncle Ben’s rice and Aunt Jemima syrup, also changed their names and branding due to racist stereotypes and “mammy” imagery (Taylor, 2020). In addition, an exhibit dedicated to the actor John Wayne at the University of Southern California’s (USC) School of Cinematic Arts closed down due to several months of student and alumni protests. The exhibit was to be removed due to Wayne’s homophobic and racist beliefs, such as his vocal support of White supremacy (Drury, 2020). It is quite apparent that the BLM protests have had a wide-ranging influence on all aspects of American life—from the entertainment industry to professional athletics.

2

There’s No Going Back

The coronavirus pandemic and being directed to shelter in place, fueled by the BLM protests, forced many people to see the world differently. Westneat Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

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(2020) asserted that, “it’s become a cliché that the pandemic has exposed the deepest inequities in our society, for all to see. But maybe it’s a cliché because it’s true” (p. 3). There have been many Black people killed by police in recent years, both children and adults, but no social movement resulted from their needless deaths. Besides having Trump as President and the increased use of camera phones, the main difference between the murder of George Floyd and the killing of previous Black victims was that the killing occurred during the coronavirus pandemic (Altman, 2020; Fagan, 2020). Up until this moment, neoliberalism and its attendant ideologies of rampant individualism, privatization, and valorization of risk remained relatively unchallenged, with the 2008 economic collapse being a notable exception. As Robinson (2020) observes: Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago. The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. (p. 43) The disruption to the non-stop capitalist narrative provided a moment where illusions were shattered and that one’s value as a worker is tied to expectations that one is supposed to die in order to keep the economy afloat. The capitalist class had made this expectation all-too-clear even as it barely enforced mask wearing policies so as not to upset their base. Therefore, it is no longer sufficient to be content with things as they are, but rather, to demand things such as universal health care, living wages, and sick leave not tied to individual employers (Pollan, 2020). We must demand a shift from privatized conceptions of health to a public health model, along with other militant demands: The only good that can come out of the lockdown is that enough people recognize that everything needs to change and then force those changes to happen. Potentially, the ruination that the virus leaves in its wake will force us to demand massive shifts in the way we practice medicine, education, business, and law. And it has already led to loud and effective protests of the police, calls for defunding and abolition, and demands for student debt forgiveness and rent reductions. We need to come out of the lockdown fighting—fighting the predatory pharmaco-businesses that lie waiting to capitalize on the vaccine and fighting the resumption of business as usual. (Bollen, 2020, para. 11)

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The fight must continue during, and even after, the time of the coronavirus. It was found that the virus “has contributed to making these protests more enduring and widespread. COVID-19 exacerbated the problems of racial injustice, isolation, frustration and stagnation and caused higher unemployment, which provides the time to air these grievances” (Nakhaie & Nakhaie, 2020, p. 2). Due to various reasons discussed in this text, many people continued to work from home and had more time to focus on social issues that they might not have given their attention to previously (Wedderburn, 2020). According to Nakhaie and Nakhaie (2020): When people have discretionary time, they are more likely to participate in social movements to effect change. Prior to COVID-19, the cycle of work and life limited extra time for taking to the streets to demonstrate for a cause, particularly when a choice had to be made between protesting for a better tomorrow and earning a paycheck. (p. 4) In other words, working from home created avenues for awareness of current events that struck a chord and helped create a new generation of protesters for racial justice. In addition to the additional opportunities that the COVID-19 pandemic has created to support the BLM movement (e.g., vast rates of unemployment), there are also psychological theories as to why so many people are now fighting for racial justice. Cable and Gino (2020) theorize that the overwhelming amount of negative information on social media about the increasing death toll caused by the coronavirus has triggered what is called “terror management theory,” which forces people to deal with the thought of their impending death. It is because of that fear that many people have begun to form a social group or collective that make them feel that they can make a positive difference in society (Ramsden, 2020). This method of dealing with possible death “provides members with meaning and purpose,” and as a consequence, a fear of the coronavirus “has been minimised because of the focus on mass gatherings and belonging-ness. It is this desire for a collective that is helping to advance the rise in protests and the mobilisation of people who previously might not have joined in” (Ramsden, 2020, p. 3). While some people reacted to the coronavirus by hoarding toilet paper and canned foods, others had a more positive, proactive approach—to help fight alongside others for racial and social justice. Madrigal and Meyer (2020) note that, “The risk of transmission [of COVID19] is complicated by, and intertwined with, the urgent moral stakes: Systemic racism suffuses the United States” (p. 2). Therefore, many White people felt

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compelled to risk their personal health in order to be seen and speak out against injustice (Fisher, Jamison, & Wallace, 2020). There were some concern that the BLM protests that occurred across the country (and around the world) might have increased the spread of the coronavirus due to people’s lack of social distancing, (potential) lack of mask wearing, and shouting that occur at protest demonstrations (Meyer, 2020). Despite understandable concerns to the contrary, the protests did not increase the coronavirus infection rates in the U.S. (Lewis, 2020; Lopez, 2020). It was speculated that this was due to the fact that the protests have led to more people staying home during the times of the protests themselves, which limited opportunities for transmission (Dave et al., 2020). It is important to note that, a couple of weeks after Trump held a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma (June 20, 2020), where most people were neither wearing masks nor social distancing, there was a major surge in new coronavirus cases in the area. Experts at the Tulsa City-County Health Department stated that they believed that it was highly likely that the event, as well as coinciding protests, caused the spike (S. Murphy, 2020). Ultimately, the pandemic caused many people to think about the structural factors—otherwise known as “the normal”—that have contributed to the lack of response by the ruling class. More importantly, there are continued pressing concerns about what will happen when (not if) we face far worse pandemics in the future: Despite its epochal effects, COVID-19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound and reopened scar. (Yong, 2020, para. 7) However, the question remains: will people start to see the insufficiency of hyper-individualism and capitalism and demand something more? Time will certainly tell.

References Altman, A. (2020, June 4). Why the killing of George Floyd sparked an American uprising. Time. https://time.com/5847967/george-floyd-protests-trump/

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Applebaum, A. (2020, July 3). Trump is turning America into the ‘shithole country’ he fears. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/whentrumps-understanding-of-the-world-is-flipped-on-its-head/613840/ Atwood, K., & Gaouette, N. (2020, July 2). Trump administration moves ahead with plan to open new pandemic office as coronavirus crisis intensifies. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/politics/trump-state-dept-new-pandemicoffice/index.html Bannon, B. (2020, June 15). Seismic shifts on race leave Trump in the dust. The Hill. https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/502715-seismic-shifts-on-race-leave-trumpin-the-dust Baron, N. (2020, April 16). Could Trump be criminally liable for his deadly mishandling of coronavirus? Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/could-trump-criminallyliable-his-deadly-mishandling-coronavirus-opinion-1498146 Bollen, C. (2020, July 14). Ask a sane person: Jack Halberstam isn’t here to comfort you. Interview. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/ask-a-sane-personjack-halberstam-is-not-here-to-comfort-you?fbclid=IwAR0U_j5DwyQ8ZJJULm65I 9fQPkqjfyHZ9ztEA-N7R0saRKThljK8fimOb7w Brooks, D. (2020, July 2). The national humiliation we need. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/opinion/coronavirus-july-4.html Cable, D., & Gino, F. (2020, May 13). Coping with ‘death awareness’ in the COVID-19 era. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coping-withdeath-awareness-in-the-covid-19-era/ D’Antonio, M. (2020, June 15). Unable to ‘win’ the coronavirus fight, Trump moves on. The Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/15/opinion/unable-wincoronavirus-fight-trump-moves/ Dave, D. M., Friedson, A. I., Matsuzawa, K., Sabia, J. J., & Safford, S. (2020). Black lives matter protests, social distancing, and COVID 19 (NBER Working Paper No. 27408). https://www.nber.org/papers/w27408.pdf Dickinson, T. (2020, May 8). Rolling Stone timeline: Coronavirus in America. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/rolling-stonetimeline-coronavirus-america-982944/ Drury, S. (2020, July 11). USC removing John Wayne exhibit after student protests over actor’s racist comments. The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/usc-removing-john-wayne-exhibitstudent-protests-actors-racist-comments-1302888 Egan, L. (2020, July 1). Trump says he thinks coronavirus will ‘just disappear’ despite rising cases. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trumpsays-he-thinks-coronavirus-will-just-disappear-despite-rising-n1232709 Fagan, K. (2020, June 2). Why rage over George Floyd’s killing is more explosive this time. The San Francisco Chronicle. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/ Why-the-anger-over-George-Floyd-s-killing-is-so-15307054.php

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Fisher, M., Jamison, P., & Wallace, A. (2020, June 7). The nexus between coronavirus and protests: ‘The virus was the kindling. Police brutality lit the fire.’ The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/protests-coronavirus-risk-choice/ 2020/06/07/06721ec4-a50e-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html Goodman, P. S., Cohen, P., & Chaundler, R. (2020, July 3). European workers draw paychecks. American workers scrounge for food. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/business/economy/europe-us-joblesscoronavirus.html?smtyp=cur&smid=fb-nytimes&fbclid=IwAR1giCEEZteWVOUV 6nNqZW6OjsOibfZ8HA1Kph62LLClEKmu7Vwj4iVC3OQ Gordon, M. (2020, June 7). Trump is the worst possible president for this moment. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-worst-possiblepresident-coronavirus-george-floyd-protest-moment-2020-6 Hill, E., Tiefenthäler, A., Triebert, C., Jordan, D., Willis, H., & Stein, R. (2020, May 31). 8 minutes and 46 seconds: How George Floyd was killed in police custody. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floydinvestigation.html Holcombe, M. (2020, July 7). Contact tracing is no longer possible across the US South due to rapid coronavirus surges, health expert says. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/ 2020/07/07/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1nf9mWhLX tCo1FXHBZeUzOobM9QqQb-nRVbamFVB6oWONi1fAsp75SwXk Johnson, M. (2020, July 8). Transcript of George Floyd death shows he said he was dying, officers said he was fine because he could speak. The Hill. https://thehill.com/ homenews/state-watch/506491-transcript-of-george-floyd-death-shows-he-saidhe-was-dying-officers Kilgore, A., & Stubbs, R. (2020, July 9). To Native American groups, Redskins name is ‘worst offender.’ Now they hope for more changes. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/07/09/native-american-groupsredskins-name-change-indians-braves-blackhawks/ Klein, C. (2020, May 30). In Trump’s response to the George Floyd turmoil, an abject failure of presidential leadership. Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/ 2020/05/05/trumps-response-to-george-floyd-turmoil-abject-failure-presidentialleadership Langfitt, F., Beardsley, E., & Schmitz, R. (2020, July 3). A look at how Europe is getting back to ‘normal’ after coronavirus lockdowns. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/ 03/887128848/a-look-at-how-europe-is-getting-back-to-normal-after-coronaviruslockdowns Lerner, S. (2020, March 12). Republicans continue to deny coronavirus threat as public health official warns of catastrophe. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/ 03/12/republicans-continue-to-deny-coronavirus-threat-as-public-health-officialwarns-of-catastrophe/

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Lewis, T. (2020, June 22). How to evaluate coronavirus risks from Black Lives Matter protests. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-toevaluate-coronavirus-risks-from-black-lives-matter-protests/ Lopez, G. (2020, June 26). The effect of Black Lives Matter protests on coronavirus cases, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2020/6/26/21300636/coronaviruspandemic-black-lives-matter-protests Machemer, T. (2020, June 12). Christopher Columbus statues beheaded, pulled down across America. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/christopher-columbus-statues-beheaded-torn-down-180975079/ Madrigal, A. C., & Meyer, R. (2020, June 7). America is giving up on the pandemic. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/06/americagiving-up-on-pandemic/612796/ Mathis, J. (2020, March 23). The worst possible president for this crisis. The Week. https://theweek.com/articles/904068/worst-possible-president-crisis McCartney, R. (2020, July 13). Corporate money, Black lives matter protests and elites’ opinion drove Redskins name change. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/corporate-money-black-lives-matterprotests-and-elites-opinion-drive-redskins-name-change/2020/07/12/6103a6dec2c6-11ea-b178-bb7b05b94af1_story.html Meyer, R. (2020, June 1). The protests will spread the coronavirus. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/protests-pandemic/612460/ Morris, A. (2020, July 9). An interview from Birmingham city hall: Mayor Randall Woodfin on toppling racist monuments. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/ politics/politics-features/birmingham-alabama-mayor-randall-woodfin-confederatestatues-racism-1026205/?fbclid=IwAR2TBDiA8MXUb8bVAXhb98xXoLWS_eTN_ X1VZs9mI4A-vY2tnNZk0fovOWM Murphy, P. P. (2020, June 3). New video appears to show three police officers kneeling on George Floyd. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/us/george-floyd-newvideo-officers-kneel-trnd/index.html Murphy, S. (2020, July 8). Tulsa health official says Trump rally ‘likely contributed’ to surge in COVID-19 cases. Time. https://time.com/5864434/tulsa-trump-rallycoronavirus-surge/ Nakhaie, R., & Nakhaie, F. S. (2020, July 5). Black Lives Matter movement finds new urgency and allies because of COVID-19. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-movement-finds-new-urgencyand-allies-because-of-covid-19-141500 Opal, J. M., & Opal, S. M. (2020, April 1). Trump’s not the first president to face a deadly epidemic. But he may be the least suited for the task. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-04-01/trump-coronavirusepidemics-presidents

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Oprysko, C. (2020, June 12). Trump: ‘A lot’ of George Floyd protesters were ‘just following the crowd.’ Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/12/trump-georgefloyd-protesters-315532 Packer, G. (2020, June). We are living in a failed state. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/ 610261/ Pollan, M. (2020, June 11). The sickness in our food supply. The New York Review of Books, 67(10), 4–6. Quinn, M. (2020, July 8). Trump splits with Fauci over coronavirus surge, says “we are in a good place.” CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fauci-coronavirussurge-in-a-good-place/ Rabin, R. C., & Cameron, C. (2020, July 5). Trump falsely claims ‘99 percent’ of virus cases are ‘totally harmless.’ The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/ us/politics/trump-coronavirus-factcheck.html Ramsden, P. (2020, June 15). How the pandemic changed social media and George Floyd’s death created a collective conscience. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/how-the-pandemic-changed-social-media-andgeorge-floyds-death-created-a-collective-conscience-140104 Read, J. (2020, July 7). Here’s where Americans can travel now. But should they? National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/2020/07/whichcountries-can-americans-safely-visit-this-summer-cvd/ Robinson, M. (2020, June 11). What kind of country do we want? The New York Review of Books, 67(10), 43–46. Smith, D. (2020, July 2). Trump has ‘gone awol’ as president amid coronavirus pandemic, says ex-CIA director. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/ jul/02/trump-coronavirus-awol-crisis-leon-panetta Smith, J. (2020, July 10). The contagious presidency. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-attacksschools-mishandles-covid-1027105/?fbclid=IwAR2bcEpRCAoaCWUdnV7jx1MrY twro6QBNzq-KAroa1yZfYE5JQ0xqBea6nI Taylor, K. (2020, June 20). 6 brands that revealed plans to change and reexamine names, mascots, and logos with racist roots this year. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/brands-that-announced-plans-to-changereview-racist-mascots-logos-2020-6 Tsioulcas, A. (2020, June 25). Dixie Chicks change band name to The Chicks. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/25/ 883328370/dixie-chicks-change-band-name-to-the-chicks Waldman, D., & Schmidt, M. S. (2020, December 13). Cleveland’s baseball team will drop its Indians team name. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/ sports/baseball/cleveland-indians-baseball-name-change.html

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Wallace-Wells, D. (2020a, March 12). America is broken. Intelligencer. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/coronavirus-shows-us-america-isbroken.html Wallace-Wells, D. (2020b, July 9). America is refusing to learn how to fight the coronavirus. Intelligencer. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/coronavirus-casenumbers-surge-in-texas-and-arizona.html Wedderburn, A. (2020, July 28). Pandemic time. Soundings Blog. https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/soundings/blog/pandemic-time?mc_cid=c2fed2806b& mc_eid=ec46ded26a Westneat, D. (2020, June 10). Why White people seem to be changing their minds, suddenly, on the justice system and race. The Seattle Times. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/why-white-people-seem-tobe-changing-their-minds-suddenly-on-the-justice-system-and-race/ Willsher, K. (2020, June 21). ‘Please come back’: Out of coronavirus lockdown, Europe begs tourists to return. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/ story/2020-06-21/after-coronavirus-europe-begs-for-tourists-americans-included Yong, E. (2020, September). How the pandemic defeated America. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-americanfailure/614191/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign= share

Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

Index 1/6 insurrection 2, 5 2020 election 3, 5, 47 activism 8, 96 Asians 6, 10, 14–20, 22–25, 37, 81, 82, 106 Black Lives Matter (BLM) 8, 111, 180, 181, 183, 184 Blacks 7, 8, 15–17, 19, 20, 37, 41, 59, 73–75, 80–83, 86, 101, 106, 111, 157, 162, 179, 180, 182 capitalism 1, 2, 5, 6, 35, 46, 47, 52–54, 56, 60, 62–64, 66, 75–77, 82, 94–97, 108–110, 113, 114, 154–156, 162, 167, 169–171, 184 China 5, 6, 10–18, 20–25, 45, 129, 134, 148, 155 conspiracy theories 5–7, 10–12, 14, 15, 20, 25, 44, 47, 120–123, 125, 129–137, 151 coronavirus/COVID-19 1, 4, 7, 10–15, 17, 20, 23, 24, 33, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 51, 55, 56, 61, 65, 73–75, 77, 79–86, 94, 106, 119–121, 123–130, 132–134, 136, 147, 148, 150, 153, 155, 156, 168, 172, 178–184 Democrats 2, 24, 47, 121, 124, 133, 164 discrimination 10, 11, 23, 82, 164, 181 Do It Yourself (DIY) 95, 109, 110 economic 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 16, 18–22, 24, 32–34, 37, 46, 47, 49, 51–53, 59, 63, 63, 73, 83, 85, 86, 94–96, 99, 101, 106, 107, 113, 114, 119, 147, 148, 153, 154, 157, 158, 179, 182 economy 6–8, 21, 22, 24, 32, 33, 40, 46–50, 52–55, 57, 63, 74, 77, 78, 85, 86, 103, 119, 129, 135, 147, 150–152, 154, 157, 158, 165, 172, 182 essential workers 6, 37, 73–77, 79–81, 83–87, 101, 127, 170, 178 eugenics 7, 58, 150, 154, 155, 157, 158, 165 fake news 4, 7, 119–122, 125, 136 fascism 5 Fauci, Anthony 6, 134

Floyd, George 8, 85, 178, 180, 182 health care 2, 12, 37, 48, 55, 58, 63, 65, 79, 81, 82, 94, 95, 99–102, 106, 111–113, 148, 152, 153, 158, 182 individualism 1, 2, 6, 7, 22, 150, 151, 161–163, 165, 167, 171, 182, 184 inequality 4, 41, 49, 94, 100, 103, 105, 107, 110, 113, 114, 180, 181 jobs 13, 17, 19, 25, 37, 42, 48, 49, 51, 53, 56, 58, 59, 66, 73, 76, 78–83, 85, 95, 100–102, 105–107, 109, 113, 125, 179 Latinos 15, 37, 74, 81, 82 lies 3, 7, 11, 12, 65, 119–121, 124, 136 Marxism 6, 74–78 masks 1, 4, 5, 7, 12, 38, 39, 40, 44, 61, 73, 76, 84, 111, 112, 121, 132–136, 147–149, 152, 153, 159, 160, 163, 164, 166–168, 171, 172, 184 media 1, 4–8, 11, 13, 14, 18–22, 25, 32, 35, 38–40, 43, 46–49, 54, 56, 57, 63, 64, 83, 94, 95, 97, 104, 106, 111, 112, 119–125, 127, 128, 130, 131, 134, 136, 147–149, 152, 154, 157, 158, 161, 165, 166, 169, 172, 180, 183 neoliberalism 1, 7, 11, 22, 95, 96, 98, 151, 182 nuclear family 1, 6, 7, 53, 94–96, 98, 99, 102–104, 109, 113–115 populism 4, 147, 162 public health 1, 4–8, 13, 14, 17, 23, 37, 38, 43, 49, 51, 60, 65, 80, 86, 94, 99, 103, 112–114, 126, 134–136, 150–153, 155, 158, 160, 163–165, 168–172, 182 race 1, 8, 18, 41, 63, 73, 74, 80, 82, 94, 99, 100, 148, 153, 181 racism 2, 4, 11, 15–17, 20, 22–24, 95, 111, 150, 153, 157, 159, 164, 180, 181, 183 Republicans 2–6, 16, 24, 33, 45, 47, 56, 74, 121, 122, 132, 133, 135, 149, 151–153, 156, 157, 162, 164, 165, 168, 171, 178

Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3

192 right wing 1, 5, 44, 47, 122, 147, 151–153, 156, 159, 164, 167–169, 172 shutdown 7, 34, 45, 48–51, 74, 94, 102, 106, 109, 147, 152, 164 socialism 129, 148 stay-at-home order 16, 33, 49, 51, 56, 57, 61, 101, 135, 151, 169 stereotypes 6, 11, 17–20, 24, 181

index Trump, Donald 1–8, 10–20, 22–25, 33, 34, 37, 38, 43–47, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 80, 83, 85, 119–129, 131, 133, 136, 147–149, 151, 153, 154, 161, 171, 172, 179, 180, 182, 184 work from home 36–38, 41, 50, 74, 111, 114, 161, 183

Daniel Ian Rubin and Faith Agostinone Wilson - 978-90-04-50001-3