Some days you really can’t do more than roll your eyes or yell “WTF!?” Just skim the headlines to see what I mean (you can also go read the articles for all the grim details

Rockingham North Carolina’s 16 COVID-19 cases connected to single church.

For Salem, Oregon congregation, a stunning concentration of COVID.

180 Exposed To Coronavirus During Mother’s Day Service At Defiant NorCal Church.

Texas church cancels masses following death of priest possibly from coronavirus – Five other members of the religious order also tested positive for COVID-19.

CDC: Arkansas fatal coronavirus outbreak linked to church services.

Catholic church in Houston closes again after 3 priests test positive for COVID-19.

Conservative Church Network Launches Plan to Defy California Social Distancing Orders.

Coronavirus Continues To Move Into Previously Insulated Red Counties In Battleground States.

I’ve been seeing people refer to rightwing dominionist so-called christians as a death cult, and I used to think that was a (very) slight exaggeration, but now I’m rethinking that.

Let’s shift gears a bit. The following headline and the opening of the article would appear to contradict one of the articles I linked to on Friday, but that actually don’t:

The Coronavirus Class War.

The problem is that the phrase “class war” is being used to mean very different things. The article I link to today shows that poor other working class people overwhelmingly support continuing shelter in place/stay home orders. While only a slightly smaller percentage of middle class people also support it. Opposition to quarantines comes not just from a very small minority, but almost entirely from the very well-to-do and the stinking rich.

Folks like the executives and highest-paid pundits at Fox News, for instance, while they all continue to work from home, are egging governors to “reopen” the economy, by which they mean, stop the unemployment payments and force people who aren’t well off enough to quarantine voluntarily to go out and work and expose themselves and their families to the pandemic.

The polls in the above article clearly indicate that it is the rich who want to reap the benefits of social distancing, while making the working poor shoulder most of the risk of the pandemic.

Friday’s headline, which claimed that was no evidence of a class war was using the class war phrase much differently. And, IMHO, poorly. They were using it not to refer to actual economic strata within society, but instead to refer to a mostly mythical division. Fox News and their ilk have been trying to portray the protestors as representing the working class, while saying the only people who want the quarantine orders to continue are leftwing elites. The article then quoted virtually identical findings as the one above: the overwhelming majority of the country favor the quarantine measures, and the lower income the people are, the more likely they are to support it.

By adopting the disingenuous definitions of class, they wind up writing a headline that says the opposite of what the article showed.

Because the so-called “left elite” isn’t an economic class. It mostly is a myth, because inherent in the way the phrase is usually used is the notion that no one in the working class support any liberal policies, at all.

Isn’t language fun?