No offense to Amy McGrath on that last RT but if this state was "better than this" it wouldn't be happening.

We are not better than this.

As I pointed out earlier today we have short periods of progress and then long violent backlashes against it. https://twitter.com/ZandarVTS/status/1264599660712415239

Those backlashes always follow whenever enough of white America decides that the progress the country as a whole is enjoying allows marginalized groups to start closing the disparity gap that keeps us marginalized in the first place.

Then reactionary politics takes over.

Then it becomes "handouts" and "fraud" and "cheating" for *those people* and that progress has to be rolled back for those at the bottom of the ladder, even if it means rolling back progress for 95% of the country.

Not the for the top 5% and certainly not the top 1% though.

And I have to say the COVID-19 relief package backlash cycle may be the largest (certainly in nominal terms) and definitely the quickest.

As soon as people figured out the folks dying from COVID-19 were overwhelmingly black and brown, and that the people most at risk of getting COVID-19 were service and health care workers, the virus became a hoax and that $1,200 check became too much for *those people* to get.

So now a white male Democratic governor in Kentucky is hung in effigy because he's a "tyrant" for inconveniencing people who want to go to Golden Corral during a goddamn pandemic. The entitlement around "Well *I* won't catch COVID-19, it only hurts *those people*" is staggering.

COVID-19 is something only pussies and wimps and losers have to worry about, not Real 'Mericans™ so Real 'Mericans™ don't need Andy Beshear to tell them a damn thing, because they believe they are above actually contracting and suffering from it because of their status.

So here we are with the whole effigy thing, Beshear is a traitor for protecting "those people* who are beneath protection and certainly not worth spending Real 'Merican Taxpayer Dollars™ on.

All this came on with lightning speed when the basis was "we all are in this together".

Cause folks, we have *never* been "all in this together".

Silly virus, not respecting the status of Real 'Mericans™. That "great equalizer" thing and "not caring about who you are" crap of a global pandemic?

Well that had to all go in the dumpster real fast.

Americans got bored of the pandemic because for the first time maybe ever, there was something that might truly threaten all of us regardless of race or creed, and when that made us confront the existing racial inequality in our health care system, well, it became a "hoax".

American exceptionalism as brutal pandemic eugenics, baby.

Hey, maybe this thing will get rid of all the weak and then we don't have to waste Real 'Merican Taxpayer Dollars on them anymore!

So yeah, anyone in the way of that?

"Sic Semper Tyrannis" sign on your hanged effigy.

And the orange dude who we should be blaming for all this? The biggest reactionary racist anti-progressive of all time, juggling nitro for ratings and retweets in the middle of the biggest gasoline tanker farm in Explosionville on Planet Flammable.