Rise of a New COVID Confederacy
Defiant COVID-age states are beginning to look more like treasonous Civil War-era Confederate states
Publisher’s Riff
Based on events unfolding at the top of this week, the recent CPAC conference now feels like it was the first convention of the New COVID Confederacy. We have Texas first announcing that it's lifting all mask restrictions at the worst possible moment: right in the wake of a major climate-deregulation catastrophe that hammered it. Mississippi just followed suit. A few days ago, 22 Governors announced their opposition to the pandemic relief bill because "a proposed allocation of money 'punishes' states that did not fully lock down businesses amid the pandemic" (they call it a "bipartisan" statement ... but only one Democratic Governor from Kansas signed on). While that was happening, every last Republican in the House voted against the pandemic relief bill, so the assault on needed relief - in the middle of an economy-destroying pandemic - is fully underway. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the conservative-led Supreme Court hears a historic case from the Arizona GOP to let stand and impose onerous voting restrictions in two separate state laws, and leaves the Supreme Court to hint that it is ready to obliterate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and, thus, all but destroying that. Here’s their stated rationale for doing that …
And while that's happening, there are 253 bills in 44 states being introduced to destroy our right to vote. Groups like AllVotingIsLocal in multiple states are currently working overtime against that effort.
Keep in mind, these are all White Republicans, conservatives and evangelicals working in close coordination to simultaneously disenfranchise and, in essence, kill Black, Brown and Indigenous people. It's an impressively sinister attack on dual flanks: public health and voting rights. The resistance to masks and basic, common sense public health protections to get us through pandemic is, basically, the front line battle cry for a resurrected and rapidly consolidating New Confederacy.
In 1860, the first collection of 11 states to defy the federal government did so over maintaining white supremacist governing and control - slavery - under the guise of "states' rights." Since President Lincoln was too exhausted by the Civil War and couldn't stomach additional post-war punishment of the treasonous enemy combatants, here we are 161 years later with a collection of states defying the federal government to maintain some semblance of white supremacist governing and control ... under the guise of an anti-mask and anti-pandemic rules movement.
Should more states with Republican governors (or red states with nervous Democratic governors) lift mask restrictions (and there are 5 more Republican governors to go that are mostly situated in the Northeast), we may see this political map nearly resembling the old Confederate States of America map. Would that trigger anti-federal violence?
If violence did break out, it won't be conventional and it won't be front-based like the Civil War; 20 years of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Special Forces deployments elsewhere, will have taught these defiant bad actors valuable lessons in asymmetrical warfare. What many tend to call "mass shootings" will really be an escalation of organized armed conflict (see "Bushwick" movie).
Some of the methods used alongside armed insurrection will be the deterioration of public policy through more disenfranchisement as a way to electorally neutralize Black, Brown and Indigenous populations from protecting themselves. If this keeps up without aggressive action from Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration, we could see these states become even more hostile (than they are now) to the very large Black populations, disappearing Indigenous populations and growing Brown populations in their states. Punitive measures could include a spike in heavy-handed policing and incarceration, loss of healthcare access, increased workplace and job discrimination (leading to loss of job), the spread of clever "Right to Work" laws, as well as the sabotaging, confiscation or selective distribution of COVID vaccine to keep certain communities "compliant" (see Dallas example). Ultimately, the goal could be a cemented "slave" futurism, particularly where the entrenchment of the "haves-have-not" mindset breeding asset class is totally acceptable.