In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan and the GOP settled on a strategy: Building off their “silent majority” dog whistle that signaled a backlash to the civil rights movement, Republicans conjured a racist “welfare queen” myth, pretending that too many lazy, parasitic Americans were getting rich off of unemployment benefits that deterred them from getting a job. That rhetoric was boosted by conservative Democrats, including Joe Biden, who warned of “welfare mothers driving luxury cars.”

Republicans have spent decades trying to resuscitate Reaganism, to the point where one Onion parody joked about GOP leaders trying to reanimate the former president and run a zombie version of him for president. Only it’s no laughing matter, because forty years after Reagan first took office, Republican politicians and business lobbyists have resurrected a spectral version of his ideology.

They have exhumed the Gipper’s incendiary “welfare queen” language, alleging that employers today are being oppressed by lazy unemployment beneficiaries who are harming America by refusing to get off their ass and get back to work during a historic, deadly pandemic.