Commentary: Right adds public-health efforts to enemies list
By Timothy J. Lombardo / The Washington Post
Protests against stay-at-home orders are rocking state capitals. In Michigan, motorists clogged streets and blocked a hospital after conservative groups organized “Operation Gridlock” to oppose Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s actions. Ohio protesters, including state Senate candidate Melissa Ackison, stormed the statehouse in defiance of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s stay-at-home order. And protesters at Kentucky’s state capitol interrupted a news briefing from Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear with angry chants of “facts not fear” and “we want to work.”
President Trump has blessed these operations by calling on citizens in Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia to “LIBERATE” their states, also telling Virginians to “save your 2nd amendment. It’s under siege.” Never mind that public health experts say reopening the economy too soon could have catastrophic results.
While evidence suggests that well-funded conservative groups were behind many of these protests, the rage on display has been palpable. Anger has often shaped the response to economic hardship, especially in places where reverence for hard work shaped both a sense of blue-collar identity and a nascent blue-collar conservatism. States such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky bore the brunt and severity of deindustrialization in the mid-20th century and have long resented economic disruptions beyond their control.
But protesters in Michigan came armed with semiautomatic weapons and Confederate battle flags. Members of the Proud Boys, a self-proclaimed “western chauvinists” group that the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group, flashed the white supremacist “OK” symbol in photos with a Michigan congressional candidate. While one organizer attempted to distance the protest from its fringe elements, their presence suggested that economic anxiety alone cannot account for the depths of anger on display. Trump’s tweets gave the demonstrators the go-ahead to flaunt their fury openly, but he didn’t create it, and neither did the stay-at-home orders.
Behind these protests is an underlying rage at elites, liberals, government and the media that is part of a half-century tradition of right-wing populism.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/commentary-right-adds-public-health-efforts-to-enemies-list/
What cracks me up is that when the right accuses someone of being elitist they mean educated instead of wealthy.
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