COVID MADE RIGHT-WINGERS INSANE

The Washington Post and The Guardian have stories today about moderately conservative American communities that have recently swung to the extreme right. The Post story focuses on Ottawa County, Michigan:

The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to “thwart tyranny” in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people....

The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.

... Sylvia Rhodea, the board’s new vice chair, put forward a motion to change the motto that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery. “Whereas the vision statement of ‘Where You Belong’ has been used to promote the divisive Marxist ideology of the race, equity movement,” Rhodea said.

And so began a new era for Ottawa County.

The radicals are led by the new chair of the county Board of Commissioners, Joe Moss, who's 37 years old and only recently became interested in politics.

He ran a small technology business and was focused on raising his children. Then, in the fall of 2020, the Ottawa County health department learned of a coronavirus outbreak at his daughter’s Christian school and ordered the school’s leaders to comply with the governor’s mask mandate. When they refused, state and county officials chained shut the school’s doors for more than a week and warned parents that continued resistance could bring fines and imprisonment.

Suddenly, Moss realized that those dangerous people that his pastor had been talking about on Sundays were not just in Washington and Lansing, the state capital. They were in West Olive, where the county government was headquartered. “In 2020, I became a threatened parent,” Moss said on the campaign trail. “I was threatened specifically ... by Ottawa County.”

... He saw evidence of this leftist campaign in the county health department’s decision in the fall of 2021 to impose a school mask mandate for children who were still too young for the vaccine.

There's more beyond that, of course -- Moss also saw leftism "in the $470,000 that local corporations had donated to jump-start a county office of diversity, equity and inclusion" -- but public health initiatives at the height of the pandemic made people like Moss insane.

You can see the same thing in the Guardian story, which focuses on Doni Chamberlain, an independent journalist in Shasta County, California:

... when people don’t like her pieces, Chamberlain said, they tell her she’s a communist who doesn’t deserve to live. One local conservative radio host said she should be hanged.

Never before in this far northern California outpost has she witnessed such open hostility towards the press....

For 10 years, she wrote a beloved column at the local newspaper, telling the stories of community characters and sharing her personal experiences, like her son’s deployment to Iraq. When she was laid off, a hundred people picketed outside the newspaper’s office.

With help from her son, she started A News Cafe, an online magazine that documents local affairs, and readers came with her. Just before Covid hit, she had considered selling the website....

But then Covid shut down the state, and laid bare the bitter fault lines that divided this community.

Residents angry over pandemic closures began filling county meetings, sometimes forcing their way inside, and directed their ire at elected officials who enforced only the minimum restrictions required by the state. One local resident, Carlos Zapata, warned the board of supervisors at a meeting in August 2020 to reopen the county or things wouldn’t be “peaceful much longer”.

“When the bullet box is gone, there is only the cartridge box. You have made bullets expensive, but luckily for you, ropes are reusable,” another resident said at a board of supervisors meeting in January 2021.

Religious leaders defied state orders and continued holding events. Bethel church, a Redding megachurch with more than 11,000 members and a major footprint in this city of 92,000, reported hundreds of cases at its school of “supernatural ministry”.

When people try to understand why the right is so feral these days, they generally blame Donald Trump, or maybe they reach back and say, We elected a Black president and half the country went crazy. Some of us look back further, to Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, and Newt Gingrich.

The fires burned for years, but COVID was a real accelerant.

I'm not sure why. I think it's because right-wingers don't like the modern world, but they like living their lives their own way in their own insular communities, where no one tells them what to do. COVID upended that. The rest of us recognized that public health measures were for the good of society -- they were a way to try to keep us alive, and our fellow citizens alive, including our sick and elderly relatives. We didn't like the restrictions, but we cared about other people, so we tried to do what was best for society.

Not the angry right. Like modest gun restrictions, COVID public health measures imposed inconvenience on right-wingers. They couldn't do exactly what they wanted to do! That was unfair! It was un-American! It was communism!

Churches and religious schools were a particular line in the sand for these right-wingers. I have a family member who attends a culturally conservative Christian church in the Northeast, but there the parishioners accepted the idea of Zoom worship while the virus was spreading unchecked. In Ottawa County and Shasta County, however, that was clearly unthinkable. To the angry worshippers there, protecting members of the community from a frequently deadly disease was less important than sticking up for your own right to do whatever you want to do, even when other people's health and welfare is at stake.

That seems to be the core principle of the angry right.

We know they don't want their communities invaded by undocumented immigrants, trans people, or laws that even temporarily impede their enjoyment of firearms. They don't want to be told America has had moral failings or that their cop friends sometimes harm the people they're supposed to serve. They don't like losing elections and can't believe it when it happens, because they don't know anyone who voted for Biden.

But having to change their way of life for the common good made them nuts -- and it's still making them nuts.