When I watched that interview with Mayor Goodman I struggled to balance her being completely insane with the fact that Las Vegas is probably uniquely gutted by the shutdown. It’s a one industry town based on packing people into confined spaces and enabling their risky behavior.

2/ The suffering of the ordinary workers who run the city is simply staggering. And yet Goodman slowly made clear that most of her conversations were with the casino owners, very sensitive people, as she described them. The backstory here is that Goodman has been Mayor ...

3/ for like a decade and before she was mayor her husband Oscar was mayor for like a dozen years. Oscars a mob lawyer. He was a Democrat and I think she was until maybe a decade ago when she formally switched her affiliation to La Cosa Nostra. Anyway, party affiliation doesn’t ..

4/ seem to be the immediate issue with her. But what this all makes me think about is that just after the shutdown began there were a series of articles about billionaires down in south Florida who thought the price of the lockdown was just too high.

5/ One example of the genre from late March. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-03-25/billionaires-want-workers-coronavirus

6/ Its a common thing. Billionaires want to go back. But most workers seem much more skeptical. Or rather the billionaires don’t want to go back. They want the workers to go back. This is perhaps not terribly surprising. But it’s not just the ultra-rich. Or not all of them.

7/ Whatever others think, the ones going public, talking to the press like this is a certain kind of crude ultra wealth. The Who made their money in some other part of the country but have estates in Florida. The kind of people who are members at mar a lago. They’re ...

8/ people like President Trump. And unsurprisingly as a failed casino owner, it’s a mentality common in the casino and gambling industry. Indeed if you go back and look at the timeline from March and April it was guys like Tom Golisano if not Tom himself who got to ...

9/ Trump and started pushing him on them “the cure being worse than the disease” and hydroxychloroquine and opening by Easter and all the rest. It all fits together. For these folks it’s not quite about partisan affiliation and Trumpism the way it seems to be for ...

10/ Gov Kemp in Georgia or perhaps DeSantis in Florida. It’s something deeper and more instinctive, albeit with a great deal of overlap. Living as a shut in at the moment I can’t say I have much of a feeling for mass opinion. But consuming the news and watching poll data ...

11/ there seems to be very little hunger in the bulk of the population for this reopen the economy stuff. People want to survive financially but they also don’t want to get sick. But the living isn’t the only important thing philosophy espoused by Texas’ lt gov seems to have ...

12/ mass appeal. Mayor Goodman, in addition to being a crazy person seems drenched in the milieu of casino magnates for whom this kind of thinking appears to come naturally. In many ways this is the seed bed, the progenitorive soil of Trumpism, not the revanchism, but its ...

13/ cousin, the mar a lago, New York, Vegas, south Florida circuit money culture.