Republicans ramp up the racism to deflect blame for COVID surge

Everyone knows that is unvaccinated Trumpers spreading delta, but Republicans want to blame immigrants instead

By AMANDA MARCOTTE

SALON
PUBLISHED AUGUST 6, 2021

LARRY, CURLY, MOE

Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis and Tucker Carlson (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty )

The GOP strategy to tank Joe Biden's presidency was supposed to be a simple one: jack up COVID-19 rates by convincing Fox News viewers that only filthy liberals get vaccinated, then blame Biden for the surge while a media plagued by bothsidesism plays along.

But the plan hit one little, unforeseen snag: The mainstream media, which did play along for a bit with headlines blaming Biden, suddenly switched gears in mid-July. The severity of the delta variant surge pushed the media to actually start covering both the anti-vaccine propaganda apparatus at Fox News and the fact that COVID-19 hot spots appeared concentrated in parts of the country where people mainline such propaganda. Now, the whole evil scheme has gone sideways. Polling shows Americans are blaming right-wingers and the unvaccinated instead of Biden — and now Republicans are in a panic.

And what do Republicans always do in a panic? Old-fashioned race-baiting.

Rather than blame the obvious culprits for the pandemic — Fox News-addled anti-vaxxers — Republicans are increasingly accusing immigrants at the Southern border of bringing in COVID-19, and Biden of supposedly letting them. After Biden rightfully called out Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, for his part in letting COVID-19 run rampant, DeSantis pitifully tried to hit back by claiming Biden "imported more virus from around the world by having a wide-open southern border."

Other Republican politicians have been echoing this "blame Mexico" talking point, from Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas accusing the Biden administration of allowing a "super spreader event because their open border" to Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds arguing that "the problem is the southern border is open."

Unsurprisingly, Fox News is leaning hard into this "blame immigrants, not the unvaccinated" messaging, often with a side dose of contrasting the supposedly dangerous dark-skinned immigrants with the supposedly pristine lighter-skinned people around the world.

Bret Baier of Fox News was interviewing Centers for Disease Control head Rochelle Walensky last week and complained that his "in-laws live in Austria, they cannot come here to see their six-month-old baby because of the EU travel ban," but that "migrants come across the southern border from other countries with more COVID." Walensky calmly replied, "what we really need to do is spend our time getting our communities vaccinated," but of course, Breitbart and other right-wing outlets portrayed her as somehow too "woke" to deal with the scary disease-ridden foreigners who they clearly believe are identifiable via skin color.

As usual, there's a heavy amount of coordination on the right around the new, race-baiting tactic. The Wall Street Journal and New York Post are both on the blame-immigrants-not-the-unvaccinated train. And Fox News is a steady drumbeat of scare stories about COVID-positive immigrants, all meant to give viewers an excuse for remaining unvaccinated because they can blame "dirty" immigrants instead of the homegrown unvaccinated Americans who are passing the disease rapidly.

It's all, of course, completely ridiculous. Glenn Kessler wrote a Washington Post fact check that focused on COVID-19 rates among border crossers, noting "so far we do not see evidence to support" the claim that it's a major factor in the current surge. But frankly, Kessler's fact check severely understates the case, from a sheer mathematical point of view. Thousands of unvaccinated immigrants at the border simply do not have the numbers to be a greater threat to public health than literally millions of native-born Americans who refuse to get vaccinated.

Any fool who can read a map sees the main problem with the "blame the border" gambit, which is the parts of the U.S. that actually border Mexico are seeing less of a surge than parts that other parts that border water and/or border other U.S. states.

Yep, the hot spots are running through the Bible Belt more than the Southwest. We also have actual scientific data that shows the delta variant surge that's causing our current woes is flowing more through Branson, Missouri — where vaccine-eschewing GOP America goes to party — than McAllen, TX.

None of this makes any logical sense, and not just because the Biden administration does have policies to turn people away at the border for being a COVID-19 threat. Even if one accepts the premise that immigrants are adding in any significant way to the COVID-19 problem, why is that an excuse not to get vaccinated? One would think that a belief that people are bringing in COVID-19 is all the more reason to do what offers, by far, the highest level of protection: vaccination. And yet "scary brown-skinned immigrants are bringing disease!" is being used as a justification by white conservatives to avoid taking basic prevention measures.

Of course, none of it is meant to be rational.

Republicans are turning to racism for the same reason they always do, to turn off any remaining capacity for critical thinking among their base, replacing it with inchoate fear and rage over the very existence of people that don't look or talk or act exactly like them. As usual, the GOP elite doesn't care how many people get sick or die. All they care about is giving their voters some stupid thing to rant and rave about, so they can shut off their brains and not think about how foolish it is to keep voting for people who are killing them to score political points

Will this new "blame immigrants, not the unvaccinated" narrative work? It will, in the same way the "blame China" gambit worked: To give Fox News viewers a talking point to scream at relatives who express concerns about their unvaccinated status and give Republican politicians a way to make noise while running away from their own responsibility for this crisis.

What it won't do is cause the COVID-19 surge to end any time soon. For that to happen, ordinary Republicans need to suck it up and start getting vaccinated in larger numbers. And the longer that their leaders keep feeding them excuses not to do so — such as blaming immigrants — the longer this pandemic will drag out. And the longer that goes on, the angrier the vaccinated majority will get with unvaccinated red hats for being such selfish, whiny babies in the face of a global pandemic.


AMANDA MARCOTTE
is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself." Follow her on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte and sign up for her biweekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only.

Ted Cruz Knows Why Delta Variant Raging In Unvaxxed, Unmasked Americans: LOOK, ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS!

Doktor Zoom

August 05, 2021 01:59 PM

 

Would you trust the word of a booger eater? (See, that's an ad hominem fallacy!)

Ted Cruz is just the latest Republican to try to distract from the deadly rise in coronavirus cases by blaming it all on undocumented immigrants. And why not? It's a convenient way to shift the blame for rising hospitalizations and deaths from people who refuse to get vaccinated or even so much as put a cloth over their mouths and noses to a favorite rightwing target, even if it doesn't make a lick of sense. If Republicans thought they could get away with blaming the surge of new infections on gay people or on abortions, they absolutely would (and we're sure we'll see that happening soon enough, too).

Cruz took to the friendly cablewaves of Sean Hannity's Old Time Xenophobia Hour on Fox News last night to join Hannity in accusing President Joe Biden of fomenting the "biggest super spreader event that has been ongoing since January 20th" because immigration authorities aren't keeping all migrants locked up forever or deporting them. A few facts to keep in mind before we get to the "diseased immigrant" panic here:

1) The only migrants being released into the US now are families with minor children who are claiming asylum in the US. That means they're authorized to be in the country until their cases are heard. 2) Migrants who test positive for COVID are for the most part being released to charities that then place them in local motels or hotels while they're under quarantine. 3) Vaccination rates in Mexican border cities are far higher than in most US red states, thanks to outreach efforts by the Mexican government and the lack of a political party trying to get people to die.

Nonetheless, Hannity was happy to imply that the real crisis in America isn't that COVID is rampaging through unvaccinated Americans, many of whom have been scared away from getting vaccinated by his own network — a situation that's finally starting to change even just the tiniest amount, thank Crom.

Naturally enough, Hannity had high praise for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's attempt to rave about immigration to distract from his own state's explosion of COVID cases, and said that if we really want to get serious about fighting the pandemic, we should "close the border."

Yes, really.

Then he brought on Cruz to insist that efforts to control the spread of the virus are really about "control," not science, because Ted Cruz will lie about anything.

Hannity: Now I'm going to argue, you know, the high rate of COVID positivity at that border, any American that is infected because Joe's not enforcing the laws of this country, you can blame Joe Biden for COVID, and if you die, I would put the blame on him too.

Why — why won't they stop this super-spreader event? Because it's happening in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands.

We'll just jump in here and note that earlier in the broadcast, Hannity had been fulminating about the release of 7,000 migrants who had tested positive in — and remember, most of them quarantined in hotels paid for by charities. Now it's like millions or maybe billions!

Cruz agreed it's just horrible, raising every possible scary thing in the world:

Sean, you're exactly right. People across the state of Texas, across the country are pissed and should be pissed. People are dying and Joe Biden doesn't care. Kids are getting assaulted, sexually assaulted, raped, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don't care.

We've had over a million illegal immigrants in the last six months under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and they don't care.

You take the city of McAllen, releasing 7,000 illegal immigrants into McAllen, all of whom are positive with COVID. And I put that in perspective, McAllen is a city, its population is about 141,000. That means 5 percent of the population of the city consists now of illegal immigrants who've tested positive for COVID that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are just dumping there one after the other after the other because they won't enforce the law.
And instead what does Joe Biden do? He lectures the state of Texas. He lectures the state of Florida. He cannot stand that our states are opening. He cannot stand that our schools have been open. He cannot stand that people are going back to work.

He wants to get back to the jack-booted thugs.

Again, Cruz is talking about legally admitted asylum seekers who have quarantined away from the public. You know, before their children went and murdered everyone.

This is a familiar refrain for Cruz, who made essentially the same bogus claim back on July 15 as well. It may soon be added to the 2024 Republican platform for all we know.

Again, just to emphasize who's really a danger to Texans and the rest of America, let's also note that today, Cruz continues to promote the virus in the name of "Freedom":

As for migrants, Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez (despite the title, he's the county's chief executive, not a judicial official) makes clear that asylum-seekers are tested on release from federal custody, and that they have a positivity rate of about 8.3 percent, which Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, notes is far lower than the 12 percent positivity rate for Texans overall, and that even those numbers may be misleading since at this point in the pandemic, ordinary Texans seeking testing are more likely to be experiencing symptoms, "so the true rate of COVID in the Texas population as a whole is unknown."

Not that facts are likely to get too much in the way of the ongoing "Scary Diseased Immigrant" panic, which as we've noted is one of the oldest anti-immigrant lies this nation of immigrants has.

[Fox News / Border Report / Border Report]

 Doktor Zoom

Doktor Zoom's real name is Marty Kelley, and he lives in the wilds of Boise, Idaho. He is not a medical doctor, but does have a real PhD in Rhetoric. You should definitely donate some money to this little mommyblog where he has finally found acceptance and cat pictures. He is on maternity leave until 2033. Here is his Twitter, also. His quest to avoid prolixity is not going so great.