Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the efforts of white people in the confederate states to rewrite history after the Civil War. Combined with a reign of terror, they were largely successful in re-establishing white supremacy, as we have seen in their defense of things like confederate statues and flags over the last few years. Just this week, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed a proclamation declaring April to be “Confederate Heritage Month.”
In the midst of the coronavirus crisis, we’re witnessing a similar attempt to rewrite our recent history with this pandemic. While many of us have been horrified at the way Donald Trump denied the threat during the first two crucial months of its spread here in the United States, his enablers in right-wing news are spreading propaganda like this, which comes from Brian Kennedy.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump’s instincts have been far superior to the mass of government health care professionals who, to varying degrees, seem to have either their own agenda, were ill-prepared, or were trapped in a bureaucratic mindset that prevented them from addressing the crisis. This matters because we are about to engage in a full-throated debate over when to re-open the U.S. economy. Here is the common-sense case for doing it at the end of April.