Toward Neutral Principles of Anti-Anti Trumpism

Anti-anti Trumpism will truly turn your mind into mush:

I, too, am concerned about the creeping authoritarianism of [checks notes] Democrats criticizing Donald Trump for holding rallies during a pandemic. pic.twitter.com/FEfTUYbb8q— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) June 14, 2020

It’s almost impressive how many logical fallacies and empirical errors Glenn is able to pack into a tweet. I wrote last year about how elite liberal law professors engaged in incredibly strained labors to try to pretend that the very, very easy question of whether state-mandated segregation done for explicit white supremacist reasons that almost always resulted in inferior facilities for black people is consistent with the equal protection of the laws was in fact very difficult if not impossible to resolve. This is like that:

• Since nobody is talking about having the state suppress Trump’s rallies, there is in fact no requirement that people be viewpoint-neutral. When evaluating the risks of going out in a pandemic one is not obligated to treat different things as being the same. Treating bottom-up demonstrations against white supremacy and top-down vanity rallies for a white supremacist demagogue differently is not “authoritarianism.”
• Even on its own terms, the “neutral principles” bullshit fails because most Democrats would, in fact, criticize Joe Biden very harshly were he to start holding indoor rallies. That he is not even considering doing so is just another illustration of why even a mediocre generic Democrat is infinitely preferable to any contemporary Republican.
• Which gets us to the most important difference: Trump is holding indoor rallies. Initial studies indicate that the risk of participating in demonstrations is relatively minimal, because outdoor transmission of the virus between people who wear masks and/or maintain social distancing is rare, and this is particularly true if people keep moving. An indoor rally where people are in sustained close contact with people who are yelling and where not wearing a mask is a point of political pride, conversely, is an enormously high-risk environment. Treating the two as equivalent risks is incredibly stupid.

Stupid, and pernicious. One of the difficulties in suppressing COVID is that too many leaders are treating “full lockdown” and “let ‘er rip” as the only options, when in fact there are quite a few things that can be re-opened with relative safety, particularly if people are wearing masks (mass transit is another good example.) Drawing an equivalence between mostly masked outdoor meetings and and mostly unmasked indoor meetings is incredibly dangerous and irresponsible, even if you’re not doing it to own the libs on behalf of Daddy Trump (whom you do not support.)