Thread. Why the push to "re-open" is based on ideology, not science, & the return of astroturf Teabaggers. Let's focus on one state: MO. The GOP Gov says MO will start to re-open May 3. @GovParsonMO has said in re-elex ads that D's are "socialist", so you know his politics. 1/
Gov Parson's big-money donors have been pushing him to re-open. He didn't want to close in the first place. 41 other states had implimented stay-at-home orders before he acted. But the damage is real. His own eco-devo people project 15% of all MO biz are gone *permanently*. 2/
Gov Parson, though, & the GOP super-majority in the MO Leg, already have an abysmal public health record. They refused to expand Medicaid. In fact, they shrunk it, kicking 100,000 MO children off Medicaid. A half-dozen rural hospitals, as a result, have been forced to close. 3/
Dr. Randall Williams, MO state Health Dir, raided Planned Parenthood offices & seized records. He used those records to create spreadsheets to track menstrual periods of patients, just in case MO wants to charge them criminally for getting "late" abortions. 4/
Dr. Williams came to MO after being fired as Health Dir in NC for telling people there it was safe to drink water contaminated w/coal ash. So those are the people setting public health policy in MO. Those are the people deciding the state should "re-open". 5/
Why pi k May 3? Apparently b/c after that, MO will be past its peak of cases. People w/coronavirus will still be highly infectious, COVID-19 will still de deadly, & there still won't be widespread testing. MO officials misread projections like this from U of TX. 6/
MO officials think "past peak"="no danger". And in a rush to "re-open" & boost Gov Parson's elex chances in Nov, they ignore warnings like this from Univ of WA, which warns restrictions can't begin to be lifted b4 June, & only then w/widespread testing, which MO won't have. 7/
Gov Parson also has said COVID-19 is mainly a "St. Louis problem", not affecting rural MO. It's the same line he used to avoid implimenting a biz shutdown weeks ago. In MO, "rural" is usually code for "white", & "St Louis" means "those people". 8/
On top of all that, Tea Party pro-gun anti-government pissed-off pro-Trump culture warriors have decided to descend on the State Capitol April 21 to demand MO "re-open" even faster, & more widely, pished by the same right-wing groups that decided Obama was a Muslim. 9/
Besides the usual Trumpian racists & "militia" gunslingers, the "reopen" MO group has some crackpots. Josh Schisler, one of the organizers, is a fmr GOP Leg staffer who pimps "alternative" cures. He also froze his girlfriend's brain, for reanimation later. Honest. 10/
With MO health policy being influenced by a Gov who kicked kids off Medicaid, a Health Dir who tracks menstrual periods of PP patients, & a guy who froze a brain, who needs epidemiologists or Dr. Fauci? Who needs science when you have avatars of extremist ideology in control? 11/
