To Fight the Coronavirus, We Need a Massive Campaign of Disruption

To Fight the Coronavirus, We Need a Massive Campaign of Disruption

Gregg Gonsalves on Covid-19, plus Meagan Day on the eviction crisis.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
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The increasing number of cases of Covid-19, and of deaths, should be scary to everybody, Gregg Gonsalves says. A direct action campaign of disruption is necessary to bring the changes we need—something like the ACT UP movement of the eighties. Gregg is an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, and he writes regularly for The Nation about the pandemic.

Also: We’re heading for an eviction crisis. On July 31 the direct cash payments of the CARES act expire and right now Republicans in Congress are not renewing it or anything like it. That means millions of people won’t be able to pay their rent on August 1. Meagan Day comments—she’s coauthor of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.

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The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week.

Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.

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Start Making Sense Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon Wiener Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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