April 7, 2020

Was April 7, 2020 the day that sealed the fate of America?

By Thom Hartmann

On April 18, Bob Woodward recorded Jared Kushner saying that Trump had taken control away from the doctors and was going to open the country back up. So what might have provoked that? What was happening right around that time?

Trump’s official national emergency declaration came on March 11, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome. The economy crashed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.

Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.

And then came April 7, 2020, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: “Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.”

Across the American media landscape, similar headlines appeared at other outlets, and the story was heavily reported on cable news and the network news that night. White American conservatives responded with a collective, “What the hell?!?”

Rush Limbaugh declared soon after that “with the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component. … The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder—harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody, disproportionate representation.”

It didn’t take a medical savant, of course, to figure out that would be the case. African Americans die at disproportionately higher rates from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth.

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Tucker Carlson, the only primetime Fox News host who’d previously expressed serious concerns about the death toll, changed his tune the same day, as documented by Media Matters for America.

Now, he said, “we can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s our task.”

White people were out of work, and Black people were most of the casualties, outside of the extremely elderly. And those white people need their jobs back!

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/10/was-april-7-2020-the-day-that-sealed-the-fate-of-america/