> The virus is not selective of political beliefs

I'm not really this much of a hack, so forgive me, because what you are saying is true in the most literal sense.

But if you believe in capitalism, a political system, the virus will treat you better if you're rich -- a beneficiary of that system. It's not as reductive as better health care. As a rich person, you can easily stay at home without working, infinitely. The federal government's most effective anti-COVID intervention was actually saving the markets, it's the one promise the government delivered. And the biggest parts of that story are (1) that our society is oriented to protect capitalists, so of course there will be an effective and fast intervention nowadays that protects equities, like a five trillion dollar equities buying scheme, and (2) you can go ahead and sell your stocks to the government now, essentially, and live off this largess. You can go on ordering shit from Amazon and working from home for Facebook. You can shelter in place pretty much indefinitely.

We're not even talking millionaires, we're talking about middle class people, programmers, health officials, pretty much everyone on this forum working for more than the 75th percentile income.

This point of view doesn't even require the bullshit of categorizing your preferred kind of protestor. The reopen people, the peaceful protestor, even the looters all share a common political belief - let me illuminate it for you. None of those teenagers looting Best Buy have trusts, they don't have savings or anything that goes "up" and lets them or their parents stay home when the government props up the stock market. It's not as reductive as simply being poor (i.e. being on the wrong side of the system), or even being bored or angry. It's in opposition to the system.

Imagine 18-78 years of "fuck you, you have to choose to die for money or die from homelessness and starvation" every single day. It's not just the pandemic times, though that exacerbates it immensely, for millions of people. It's like being born directly into jail. You'd go blow up a Best Buy too! You'd show up at the state capitol threatening people with guns!

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren lost the Democratic primary, to the relief of basically every venture capitalist I know. But a series of idiosyncratic votes, as should be obvious to everyone, isn't the end-all be-all refutation to socialist politics, even temporarily.

And just because you don't hear political leaders or even ordinary people taking the leap and asking, "Well is there a point to looting a modern art store?" doesn't mean that there isn't a point. It might be political suicide, send along the down votes, but I can sympathize with people who are mad as hell about not being given the resources to shelter at home as comfortably as rich people do while simultaneously being told to shut the fuck up about it. The only solution to that is straightforward socialism, which lost in the primary but did not lose in the hearts and minds of millions of people. It means allowing stocks to drop, IPOs to dry up, tech workers get laid off, and people being paid to stay at home long past July and not work -- all ideas verbatim rejected by Republicans, venture capitalists and seemingly most on this forum.

Socialist politics are stronger than ever. That health care officials may sympathize with those politics -- that it's a very specific capitalist system we have that is culpable for brutalizing minorities and failing to protect many people from a pandemic -- isn't surprising; they're smart people who have a very special perspective on what suffering really means. They, like many peaceful protestors, want to show solidarity with losers of the capitalism system without appealing to violence or coercion in the pursuit of an abstract goal like declining infection rates or whatever.