Part of the Series
Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19
That moment when you step back from yourself and realize every cell and fiber in your body is a gusting scream of fury and fear so encompassing that you are thrumming on a subharmonic level, yet simultaneously you are so quiescent that the purring cat asleep on your chest has no idea of your condition — that is my personal resting face today.
There are cruise ships stacked up off the coast of Florida filled with sick people and corpses: 808 guests and 583 crew on the good ship Rotterdam, 442 guests and 603 crew on the Zaandam. Neither Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, nor the Republican president of the United States, Donald Trump, seem to know what to do about it.
“Trump on Tuesday night said he had planned to discuss the situation with DeSantis,” reported CNN. “‘People are dying on the ship, or at least very sick, but they are dying on the ship,’ Trump said. ‘So, I’m going to do what is right.’” As of this morning, those ships remain outside U.S. waters, waiting for the word.
Those ships, and those trapped people, are a metaphor for what the entire state of Florida — indeed, whole swaths of “Red State America” — are on the verge of experiencing, thanks entirely to an expeditious virus and the Republican hucksters who helped it spread. Thus far, COVID-19 has spent its wrath in places like New York, Seattle and Detroit. The storm is now coming to the farther reaches, to Fox News, to the doorstep of Trump’s most devout adherents, and it will be a horror when it happens.
“A review of hundreds of hours of programming and social media traffic from Jan. 1 through mid-March, when the White House started urging people to stay home and limit their exposure to others — shows that doubt, cynicism and misinformation about the virus took root among many of Mr. Trump’s boosters in the right-wing media as the number of confirmed cases in the United States grew,” reports The New York Times.
Here is the present truth: A doctor can go on Fox News, speak basic and elemental facts about the coronavirus pandemic and become an immediate folk hero not for what he said, but for where he said it. Rishi Desai went on the mothership of right-wing folderol — live, no less — and lit into the Trump administration’s ongoing failure to get COVID-19 testing up and running on a national level. It was a moment of pure astonishment, a shard of light cracking the clouds.
Meanwhile, the core personality of that pestiferous network — Sean Hannity — can almost simultaneously spend an entire broadcast melting down at critics who correctly point out that he and his co-workers have been lying their own loyal viewers into early graves because protecting Trump is more important than protecting people in Florida, or anywhere else.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, of course, but if I don’t say it out loud, my head will become a pillar of fire and that purring cat will run screaming. Never in history have two organizations — Fox and the GOP — been more utterly devoted to destroying their own foundations, and it is a dismal thing to encompass.
Fox News and the Republican Party exist today because of older white people who live in rural and suburban places. If you had sat down last December and hatched a plan specifically calculated to damage that sector of the populace, you could not have done better than Fox and the GOP have through their defense of Trump and their simple greedy negligence. COVID-19 is almost perfectly designed to attack older Americans, and still the Republican governor of Florida balks at protecting his aged population, because doing so might make Trump look bad.
We are told by the minute and the hour that ours is a divided nation, that conservatives hate liberals and vice versa, and that nary the twain shall meet unless it is at the point of bayonets. Yet my shoulders today are so tense you could use them as a whetstone because — just as I am terrified for older and immunosuppressed people everywhere — I am terrified for Florida, for “Red State America,” for the millions of people who are going to suffer and die because they trusted this president.
My heart is shattered at the thought of what is to come. I wish most devoutly that it was going to be different than it is, but that is futility. All of us — Red States and Blue States — are on the verge of bearing witness to a bloodletting that will leave us on our knees. It did not have to be this way, and I can’t stop weeping.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.