American Exceptionalism , Huh?

Minnesota has had to Stop Corona Virus surveys in Mennesota because of the racism and violence of the "Real Americans" in the state's agricultural heartland.

This is not a surprise, but it has gotten MUCH worse over the past few years.

It's almost as if people were deeply and pervasively bigoted, and they were only waiting for permission.

So, now they are letting their bigotry put their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, to promulgate their racist fantasies:

A door-to-door COVID-19 testing survey has been halted due to multiple incidents in greater Minnesota of residents intimidating and shouting racial and ethnic slurs at state and federal public health survey teams.

The CDC pulled its federal surveyors out of Minnesota this week following reports of verbal abuse and intimidation, including an incident in the Iowa border town of Eitzen, Minn., in which a survey team walking to a house was blocked by two cars and threatened by three men, according to state health officials. One man had his hand on a holstered gun.

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Surveyors had been fanning out to 180 neighborhoods this month — offering free diagnostic testing for active COVID-19 infections and blood antibody testing to identify prior infections — to understand the true prevalence of the coronavirus causing the pandemic.

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The surveyors trapped in the Eitzen incident were permitted to leave and did not file a police report about the gun-toting man or the two others who approached them.

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The frequency of problems became clear last weekend when surveyors discussed their experiences, Yendell said. A Hispanic surveyor was called one slur "more in the last week than in her entire life," she said.

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The forced end to the study is an amalgam of 2020's overriding tensions — the anger over prolonged business restrictions to limit COVID-19 and the racial tensions following police killings of Black people that resulted in protests and riots, and some predominantly white counterprotests.

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Incidents occurred mostly in central and southern Minnesota, rural areas where there has been pent-up resentment over the spring statewide shutdown, the indoor mask mandate and the bar and restaurant restrictions. Such measures were seen as overkill in small towns where virus transmission has been less prevalent.

If, as the Republicans insist, these sorts of rural communities are the "Real America," then the "Real America" is a profoundly nasty place.

H/T Stephen Saroff      o o  The Bear who Swims      
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