Subterms
Coronavirus
68,000 new cases on Friday amid Covid-19 resurgence
Dr Fauci warns of danger of ‘high community infection baseline’
Trump to hold Wisconsin rally despite public gathering warning More
When Vernon Jones, a Black Democratic state representative from Georgia, crossed party lines to deliver a passionate endorsement of Donald Trump at the Republican national convention, the party greeted him like a rock star. Now comes evidence the label has gone to his head.At a Trump rally in Macon, Georgia, on Friday night, Jones launched arguably the most ill-advised and dangerous crowdsurf since the electro dance legend Steve Aoki broke a concertgoer’s neck in a dinghy.Thumbs raised and not wearing a mask, the 59-year-old lawmaker launched himself into a mostly maskless audience. Riding a sea of red Maga hats, packed tightly together in contravention of Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention Covid-19 social distancing guidelines, the grinning Jones was passed overhead from deplorable to deplorable, to use a term for Trump supporters Jones cited in a tweet defending the stunt.“Yes, I surfed that crowd!” Jones wrote. “To the haters – stay mad! You’ll be even more mad come 3 November.”On social media, reaction was swift and brutal. One Twitter user dubbed Jones “Captain Covid”. Others denounced him as an idiot and a loser, living in fairytale land.Republicans hope Jones, who was first elected to the Georgia state house in 1992, can help shore up the Black Republican vote in his state. Trump won Georgia from Hillary Clinton by more than five points in 2016, but recent polls show the president trailing Joe Biden by almost one and a half points.Race has also emerged as a key theme in Georgia’s tightly contested US Senate contests, in which both of the Democratic candidates, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, hold narrow leads, according to Quinnipiac polling this week.One of the Republican incumbents, David Perdue, was involved in an incendiary moment at Trump’s Macon rally when he mangled the name of Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, the first Black woman on a major party presidential ticket.Perdue’s campaign claimed it was an innocent mistake but Ossoff, in an interview with MSNBC, attacked his opponent for “vile, race-baiting trash talk”.In the other race, a special election in which Warnock, a Black pastor, faces both the Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler and Doug Collins, a serving Republican congressman, the spectre of QAnon looms large. Loeffler has embraced the endorsement of the far-right congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, an enthusiastic peddler of baseless QAnon theories who has expressed racist views in social media posts.At the Republican convention in August, as one of a number of first-night speakers of color to deliver a similar message, Jones tore into Democrats’ handling of racial issues.“Why is a lifelong Democrat speaking at the Republican national convention?” he said, in a controversial speech he later said he intended to be “a culture shock”.“The Democratic party does not want black people to leave their mental plantation. We’ve been forced to be there for decades and generations.”Jones resigned his Georgia House seat in April, after first endorsing Trump. But he rescinded his decision days later, claiming he had received “overwhelming support”. More
Trump to hold Wisconsin rally despite Covid warnings
Can Biden overcome racist legacy of crime bill he backed?
Sign up for Fight to Vote – our weekly US election newsletter
LIVE
Updated More
Donald Trump will hold a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday evening, despite state health officials declaring a crisis over the coronavirus pandemic and his own experts warning that public gatherings there risk causing “preventable deaths”.Cases are rising in Wisconsin, as they are across the American heartland. On Friday, according to Johns Hopkins University, the US passed 8m confirmed cases. The death toll is close to 220,000. Both figures are the highest in the world.The Trump rally is schedule for Janesville, a small city in the south of the crucial swing state, where Trump trails Joe Biden by about eight points in poll averages. The president had been due to campaign there on 3 October, before he contracted coronavirus and was airlifted to hospital.Earlier this week, Trump’s own White House taskforce issued a warning to Wisconsin, which is considered to be in the “red zone” for high infection rates, saying people should avoid crowds if they want do not want to cause “preventable deaths”.The warning was included in a weekly report issued to governors but not made public. It was reported by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), an investigative nonprofit in Washington.The report urged people in Wisconsin to be diligent about “mask wearing, physical distancing, hand hygiene, avoiding crowds in public and social gatherings in private”.“Wisconsin’s ability to limit … hospitalisations and deaths will depend on increased observation of social distancing mitigation measures by the community until cases decline,” it said, adding that “lack of compliance with these measures will lead to preventable deaths”.Trump’s rally will be held outdoors, at the Janesville airport. Attendees will be instructed to wear masks, but such instructions have not been enforced at other rallies, where social distancing has not been observed.Trump’s election website demands attendees absolve the campaign of any liability if they fall ill and says that “by registering for this event, you understand and expressly acknowledge that an inherent risk of exposure to Covid-19 exists in any public place where people are present”.Those registering must voluntarily “assume all risks” related to catching coronavirus.“That indicates they know the reality, because if they weren’t worried about it then they wouldn’t bother,” William Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, told the CPI. He said the virus could spread amid crowding at the rally, even outdoors, and at any indoor celebrations.“Given the rates of disease currently in Wisconsin, we can say pretty categorically this is going to produce opportunity for transmission,” Hanage said.Janesville is in Rock county, which earlier this week reported its highest levels yet for coronavirus infections, hospitalisations and positive tests, according to local media.The county has almost 1,000 cases and 143 new positives were reported on Monday, the most in a single day, according to state health data. Of test results reported, a new high of 83% were positive.Trump first planned to rally in Janesville after officials in La Crosse, on the border with Minnesota, urged him not to hold an event there because the city was a coronavirus “red zone”.Rock county board chairwoman Kara Purviance asked Trump not to hold the event in Janesville either, saying: “It is irresponsible of the president to hold a rally that will put Rock county citizens in danger of contracting and spreading the virus.”Rock county administrator Josh Smith told the Janesville Gazette the county was now taking a different approach, because he didn’t think asking the president not to visit would “result in any different outcomes”.“Based on our previous conversations with the campaign and information we put out, we believe everyone is aware of the concerns we have about mass gatherings and the need to comply with public health guidance. At this point, we’re encouraging all attendees to wear a mask, remain physically distant, sanitise.”With more than 1,000 Covid-19 patients in hospital in Wisconsin, the state this week opened an overflow facility, the Wisconsin State Journal reported.“We are in crisis here in Wisconsin, and so we are ready to accept patients as the need arises,” said Julie Willems Van Dijk, deputy secretary of the state health department. “The trajectory does not look good. We need to be prepared for that.” More
On Thursday, the US reported 65,000 new cases of Covid-19 and Donald Trump falsely told a television town hall 85% of people who wear masks contract the disease. With more than two weeks to the election and a record-shattering 17 million Americans having already voted, the rhythms and tropes of the past seven months will only intensify between now and 3 November.Early in the pandemic, Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings emerged as must-see television, counter-programming to the campaign commercials that masqueraded as presidential press conferences. The New York governor was forthright and reassuring, even as the body count mounted.Covid-related deaths in the Empire State now exceed 25,000, the highest in the US. New York was both frontline and lab experiment. What happened there foreshadowed national tragedy. Red states were not immune. Right now, the plague rages in the heartland.Cuomo’s new book, subtitled Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic, is his effort to shape perceptions of his own performance amid the pandemic while pointing a damning finger at Trump and Bill de Blasio, New York City’s woefully inept mayor. Like the governor, American Crisis is informative and direct – but not exciting.I believe that this was on a par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl HarborAndrew CuomoThe book reads like a campaign autobiography except that Cuomo, by his own admission, will never run for president. It contains its share of heroes, villains and family vignettes. Cuomo’s three daughters appear throughout.Like the governor, American Crisis is programmatic, neither poetic nor poignant. Indeed, in a final chapter tritely titled A Blueprint for Going Forward, the governor offers 28 pages of policy proposals.Covid has taken nearly 220,000 American lives. The US suffered 58,000 combat deaths in Vietnam, 116,000 in the first world war. Only the second world war, the civil war and the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 resulted in greater casualties.Not surprisingly, Cuomo saves his harshest words for the Trump administration: “New York was ambushed by Covid. I believe that this was on a par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl Harbor.”On that score, Cuomo compares Trump to FDR and of course finds him wanting. The administration did deliver early warnings – to members of the financial community and Republican donors. With that in mind, Cuomo’s take is almost mild.Cuomo’s relationship with the president was already fraught. On top of Trump and congressional Republicans capping deductions for state and local taxes, the governor acknowledges fighting with the administration over “immigration policy, environmental policy, you name it”. He adds: “I found his pandering to the far right alternately disingenuous and repugnant.”American Crisis also relays a conversation with the president in which the governor urged the former resident of Queens, a borough of New York City, to invoke the Defense Production Act and mandate private industry to produce tests and personal protective equipment. Trump declined, claiming such a move would smack of “big government” – as opposed to issuing diktats to big tech, directing that companies relocate, unilaterally imposing tariffs on imports and offering private briefings to those favored by the administration.Time has passed. In the 1980s, Governor Mario Cuomo and his son Andrew were Trump allies, of a sort. Back then, Trump retained the services of twentysomething Andrew Cuomo’s law firm, in connection with commercial leases on Manhattan’s West Side. According to Trump, they were “representing us in a very significant transaction”. Not any more.The president is not the only member of the administration to come in for criticism. Mark Meadows, the latest White House chief of staff, receives a large dollop of Cuomo’s wrath. In Cuomo’s telling, Meadows conditioned assistance to New York on it conveying hospital test results for hydroxychloroquine, Trump’s one-time Covid treatment of choice.Cuomo said the state would provide the test data once it was available, not before. Meadows told him the federal government was ready to release hospital funding to states, but “strongly implied” that if the test results did not soon arrive, New York would not “receive any funding”. To Cuomo, that reeked of extortion. More
Harris’s communications director and a ‘non-staff flight crew member’ tested positive
Senate Judiciary committee to vote on Amy Coney Barrett nomination on 22 October
Trump and Biden to hold town halls tonight
Civil rights and Qanon candidates: the fight for facts in Georgia
Sign up for Fight to Vote – our weekly US election newsletter
LIVE
Updated More
The Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, on Thursday abruptly canceled her travel for the coming few days after two people associated with the Joe Biden-Harris election campaign tested positive for coronavirus.Harris was on a flight with both individuals two days before their positive Covid-19 tests. The individuals were Harris’s communications director, Liz Allen, and a “non-staff flight crew member”.Because Harris and these contacts wore medical-grade N95 face masks during the flight and they were not within 6ft of the vice-presidential nominee for more than 15 minutes, they do not meet the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’ (CDC) definition of “close contact”.For that reason, Harris does not meet full quarantine criteria, which would normally require an individual to be in isolation for two weeks.But “out of an abundance of caution” the campaign has canceled her events through Sunday. She will still attend virtual campaign events.The individuals were not in contact with the Democratic president nominee, Joe Biden.The Harris campaign put out a statement saying the news of the positive tests came in late on Wednesday.NEWS: Sen. Harris’s campaign communications director and a non staff flight member have tested positive for COVID-19. The Biden campaign is canceling some of Harris’s planned travel. pic.twitter.com/TBme8kjFv4— Daniel Strauss (@DanielStrauss4) October 15, 2020
It added that the California senator and vice-presidential candidate would “deep a robust and aggressive schedule of virtual campaign activities to reach voters all across the country” and that she intended to return to in-person campaigning on Monday.The precautions, the statement noted, are “the sort of conduct we have continuously modeled in this campaign”.The campaign said that Harris last tested negative for coronavirus on Wednesday and she will be tested again.More details soon … More
Europe’s radical-right parties have quickly understood the benefit they can derive from criticizing their respective governments in managing the COVID-19 health crisis. Their communication focuses on three main areas. First, they question the animal origin of the epidemic through the use of several conspiracy theories. Second comes the criticism of globalization presented as the root cause of the pandemic. And, finally, they criticize the threats that lockdowns and other measures, such as the wearing of face masks, impose on the individual freedoms of European citizens.
Did a French Far-Right Thinker Predict 2020?
READ MORE
The conspiratorial mindset of the European radical right is evident in the current COVID-19 moment. Like other extremist milieus, the idea of a hidden cause according to which any historical event occurs is prevalent. The search for mysterious reasons that the powerful media and political elites would like to hide from the people is never far away in the far-right diagnosis of the origins of the pandemic. In particular, as the origin of the virus is still disputed in public discourse, the pandemic is the ideal issue for those who are prone to such conspiratorial thinking.
Orwellian Society
We shouldn’t get too carried away with ourselves here, however. Not all radical-right actors have reacted to the pandemic with conspiracy theories. One of the most interesting issues is that some of them have reactivated the theme of the West having to fight communism, embodied no longer by the USSR but by China as a new bête noire. Swedish MEP Charlie Weimers, for example, accused China of using opacity and lies to downplay the scale of the epidemic, an attitude which he says stems from the command-and-control nature of communism itself.
Other parties or figures on the European radical right have raised questions not only about the responsibility of the Chinese government for a late and inappropriate response to the pandemic, but also put forward the idea that the virus escaped from a virology laboratory in Wuhan. This theory, propagated in mid-April by Professor Luc Montagnier, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine, was relayed in France by the elected representatives of the National Rally (RN), Julien Odoul and Gilbert Collard. The RN, however, did not fully follow in the footsteps of Professor Montagnier and calls for the creation of an international commission of inquiry into the origins of the epidemic.
Added to this, the pandemic has allowed the European radical right to develop the notion that “elites” are using the health crisis to hasten in an authoritarian form of government. For example, Spain’s Vox MEP Jorge Buxadé accused President Pedro Sanchez’s left-wing government of authoritarianism when it withdrew from parliamentary control lockdown measures limiting freedom of movement. The RN, which published “The Black Book of the Coronavirus: From the fiasco to the abyss,” a brochure criticizing the French government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis, accused the authorities of using “guilt, infantilization and threats” against the French people in order to enforce a lockdown.
Other more marginal movements, which do not have to worry about achieving political credibility, have protested against outright “dictatorship,” such as the Italian fundamentalist neo-fascist and Catholic New Force party. In Hungary, the nationalist Jobbik party, which now seeks to defeat Viktor Orban by allying itself, if necessary, with the center-left opposition, decided to denounce government attacks on media freedom during the pandemic.
The European radical right everywhere has fired bullets at incumbent governments, accusing them of failing to meet the challenges of dealing with the epidemic. In March, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, accused President Emmanuel Macron of ordering the state to lie and cover up the extent of the pandemic by giving the French people incomplete or false information in order to hide his incompetence. It was the only French political party to absolutely refuse any policy of national unity in response to the pandemic and to support the hydroxychloroquine-based treatment recommended by Professor Didier Raoult.
The Spanish Vox party also issued very strong words against the government, using such phrases as “criminal management,” “obscurantism,” “loss of all credibility” and “insulting” (in respect to the people of Spain). The situation in Italy also prompted the far-right League party to attack the coalition formed by the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the center-left Democratic Party. On the night of April 29, for example, the League’s leader Matteo Salvini showed his contempt of parliament by occupying the senate hemicycle with a dozen other elected officials to denounce economic restrictions, delayed aid to Italian citizens and small businesses, the limitations on freedom of movement and the side-lining of parliamentary powers by the Conte government.
But a poll carried out on May 8 shows that even if the League remains in the lead, with 26.7%, when it comes to voting intentions, its popularity has been declining since the start of the health crisis while another nationalist party, the Brothers of Italy, is credited with 14.1% — more than double of the 6.2% it won in the 2019 European elections.
No Coherent Response
Despite all this, the European radical right seems to have failed to develop coherent responses to the COVID-19 crisis. The speed with which the pandemic spread was unrelated to the limited migratory flows observed on the Greek island of Lesbos at the end of February, thus depriving the radical right of the possibility of singling out immigration as the cause of the pandemic. Instead, in all European countries, the radical right put the blame on globalization.
Their idea, therefore, is that the pandemic was caused by globalization itself, which generates continuous flows of travel and international exchange, immigration notwithstanding. Globalization, they say, allows multinationals to make financial profits in times of crisis, while the poorest are hit hardest by unemployment and the overwhelmed national health systems. Thus, as a way of example, the Hungarian Mi Hazànk party writes: “We are happy to note that the government accepted our idea of a special solidarity tax on multinationals and banks” and calls for a moratorium on debts and evictions.
Embed from Getty Images
For the European radical right, the health crisis was an opportunity to denounce the European Union, which leaves the competence over health policy to individual member states, and to underline the absolute necessity of returning control of the borders back to member states. As Thierry Baudet, the leader of the Dutch far-right Forum for Democracy, says, “the Nation-State is the future.” During the COVID-19 crisis, European radical-right parties, including the National Rally, have continued to reiterate that they were the first to have warned of the dangers of bringing “back home” potentially strategic industries such as pharma away from China and India.
The European radical right has failed for several other reasons as well. In Hungary and Poland, the conservative, illiberal right who are in power very quickly closed their borders, which led to the pandemic being contained. In addition, the governments of the most affected countries, Spain and Italy, have (belatedly) managed the crisis well, as had Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has dropped to its lowest levels in voting intentions since 2017.
To add insult to injury, the AfD is even faced with the birth of a single-issue party, Resistance 2020, that is even more conspiratorial than the AfD and lobbies for the complete rejection of all government-sponsored measures to fight the pandemic. At this point, Marine Le Pen’s popularity rating only rose by 3%, to 26% in May. Were presidential elections set for 2022 held today, she would lose to the incumbent Emmanuel Macron by 45% against 55% — a sobering thought for theorists who suggest that extremism inevitably grows in a crisis.
*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
