Westneat: Culture wars to continue

GRIT stands for “government resistance impedes tyranny.” According to its website, the event is co-sponsored by a slew of conservative groups, among them the Donald Trump-aligned Turning Point USA, and political candidates, such as former gubernatorial aspirant (and current quack medicine advocate) Loren Culp.

“The people and their children have been muzzled despite mountains of evidence that the muzzle doesn’t work,” the group cites as a motivating reason for the protest. Inslee and local health officials have already said the mask mandate will end on March 12. Including in schools.

So while the great pandemic may be winding down, the great grievances that have coincided with it are not. It all seems like further proof that the pandemic culture wars never had much to do with the pandemic.

It’s as if the disease and the public health measures that went along with it were simply fresh targets for the same crowd that’s always calling the government tyrannical for one reason or another.

It’s right-wing vaudeville. Remember Trump’s “LIBERATE!” tweets, back in April 2020? That was a classic tool of self-preservation distraction from the crisis at hand. If the coronavirus now fades for real, the traveling grievance circus will seamlessly transition back to protesting things like gun control instead of the mask policy.

This is the same phenomenon that has been going on for two years now with the phony debate about Inslee’s “emergency powers.” Republicans have been decrying them since at least May 2020. That’s when a group sued Inslee, arguing his disease-control efforts were overblown and the emergency was already over.

There have been nearly 900,000 COVID deaths in America since then.

Despite this terrible track record, Republicans at the statehouse are still arguing that Inslee’s use of emergency powers has been the real crisis. “Two years of solitary rule,” state Senate Republicans tweeted Tuesday. “WA families and individuals want control of their lives back.”

There are three big problems with this. One is that Washington has the 45th-lowest disease rate and the 45th-lowest death rate in the nation. Two years on, that’s an A in pandemic management.

Another is that it’s not just us — some 25 states remain under various emergency orders for COVID control. The governor of Texas, of all places, extended his emergency proclamation only last week.

Finally, every time there’s been some democratic accountability in the past two years — a vote, a poll, some oversight by legislators — Inslee’s emergency directives have won broad support.

The Legislature has ratified many of his proclamations with majority votes. Inslee was overwhelmingly reelected in the middle of the pandemic. And polls show that even the most controversial rules — such as masking and vaccine requirements — still enjoy majority support, not only in Washington but across the country.

Hey Republicans: Most people don’t care about this issue of emergency powers. What they care about is whether the government is handling the actual emergency.

In fact on Tuesday, ABC News released a national poll that suggests, if anything, Inslee and other officials may be easing up faster than many people want. “Most Americans say the coronavirus is not yet under control and support restrictions to try to manage it,” the poll found.

We don’t often hear from this elusive tribe called “most Americans.” Maybe they should try forming a trucker convoy; then we’d pay some attention to them.