This week, I have been mostly reading:

• A last, desperate pivot: Trump and his allies go full racist on coronavirus — Amanda Marcotte in Salon: All this racism primarily serves the purpose of deflecting blame from Trump onto Asian people. It also serves an important secondary purpose: Giving conservatives an imaginary narrative where they're the victims, instead of the people who created this problem in the first place by electing an incompetent, sociopathic game-show host to the presidency. The troll game goes like this: Say something wildly racist. When called out for the racism, immediately declare yourself a victim of "political correctness run amok" and start making bad-faith arguments about why your obvious racism wasn't racism. Ta-dah! Now you're debating "political correctness" instead of the wisdom of empowering a lazy, lying wannabe fascist dictator, which is a debate that you, the conservative, will lose.
• What the Government Needs to Do Next — Jamie Galbraith via INET: The first big need is medical supplies, facilities and personnel. That is why we need to finance immediate domestic production of masks, oxygen tanks, ventilators, and the construction and staffing of field hospitals, including the conversion of existing structures such as hotels, dormitories and stadiums, and the hiring and upgrading of staff.
• Coronavirus Exposes the Virulence of American Conservatism — Eric Levitz in New York Magazine: Last week, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party unveiled a plan to keep British workers paid and employed for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. The Tory proposal would effectively cover 80 percent of sidelined workers’ salaries, while forbidding employers who accept the government’s help from laying off staff. The policy closely resembles one implemented by Denmark’s Social Democrats, except that Boris Johnson’s wage-replacement rate is slightly more generous than the Danish left’s. Although the Conservatives have a well-earned reputation for sacrificing Britain’s vulnerable on the altar of deficit reduction, even they recognize that social welfare must take precedence over budgetary concerns in the context of a historically sudden and deep economic crisis. On Friday, Tory chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that there would be no limit on the funding available for covering workers’ wages. “We are starting a great national effort to protect jobs,” Sunak said. “We want to look back on this time and remember how in the face of a generation-defining moment we undertook a collective national effort and we stood together.” America’s conservatives see things differently.
• Matt Wuerker:
  
• Medicare for All is a Great Automatic Fiscal Stabilizer — Nathan Tankus: Last summer I tweeted some things about how Medicare for All would make U.S. fiscal policy substantially more countercyclical than it is now. It turns out those tweets were far more prescient than I could have realized. The basic problem which has gotten far too little attention is that our healthcare system not only costs far more than any other system, we fund it in such a way that we’re vulnerable to large falls in employment and income. We are seeing this starkly now as employment collapses just when people need healthcare more than ever.
• 'The impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us about hope — Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian: The idea that everything is connected is an affront to conservatives who cherish a macho every-man-for-himself frontier fantasy. Climate change has been a huge insult to them – this science that says what comes out of our cars and chimneys shapes the fate of the world in the long run and affects crops, sea level, forest fires and so much more. If everything is connected, then the consequences of every choice and act and word have to be examined, which we see as love in action and they see as impingement upon absolute freedom, freedom being another word for absolutely no limits on the pursuit of self-interest. Ultimately, a significant portion of conservatives and corporate leaders regard science as an annoyance that they can refuse to recognise. Some insist they can choose whatever rules and facts they want, as though these too are just free-market commodities to pick and choose from or remake according to one’s whims. […] Although staying put is hard, maybe we will be reluctant to resume our rushing about, and something of the stillness now upon us will stay with us. We may rethink the wisdom of having much of our most vital stuff – medicine, medical equipment – made on other continents. We may also rethink the precarious just-in-time supply chains. I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process. A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that sudden and profound change is possible after all.
• Welcome to the Trumpocalypse — Bob Moser at Rolling Stone: For End Timers, the key scriptures are not the Gospels at all, but a collection of Old Testament prophecies, the Bible-ending Book of Revelation, and (purporting to explain it all in contemporary terms) the best-selling fictional series Left Behind, supplemented by various visions of self-proclaimed prophets. You know, like the ones who, around the time that Trump sewed up the Republican nomination in 2016, began to hear from God that he was anointing the reality-show star as a 21st-century version of an Old Testament “pagan king,” placed in the White house to help speed events along toward the Apocalypse. (Pompeo himself endorsed this idea of Trump as a god-sent “king” in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network.) Now, their pagan king is leading us through an actual Biblical-sized plague — with the guidance of End-Time Christians. And while evangelical leaders have echoed Trump’s messaging — don’t worry, a strongman (or God) will save you — he’s also borrowed from theirs, promising of the virus early on, “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” Trump-vangelicals’ talk about red states being “exempt” from the virus, while demon-possessed “blue cities” suffered the wrath of God, crept briefly into his talking points. And he crept into theirs: The virus “will come and it will go,” wrote Landon Stradlin, an evangelical music minister who’d been tweeting about how the virus was being used as a tool against Trump—right up until he became one of the first Virginians to die of COVID-19, last month.