Decades of racialized anti-welfare messaging could not vanish once the pandemic arrived.

Evidence

It is worth remembering that it took decades to desocialize people to accept neoliberalism’s cruelties. Anti-Black racism and anti-migrant hysteria played powerfully enabling roles, with a steady stream of politicians and media titans equating social programs designed to help everyone in need with Black “welfare queens,” “super predators,” and “illegals.” There is no need to rehash the 1980s and ’90s yet again. But in mapping the contours and happenings of the Mirror World, we do need to understand this: the legacy of generations of messages that pitted members of society against one another does not disappear overnight simply because there is a pandemic. And yet, strangely enough, when Covid hit, that was precisely the expectation among most centrist politicians. Which was itself a form of magical thinking. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 767

Categorization

• XREF: This is a core mechanism of the diagonalism thesis: the right’s racial scapegoating (welfare queens, super predators) manufactured the distrust the Mirror World later channeled.