It’s been barely a day since Joe Biden criticized the “Neanderthal thinking” of officials in Texas and Mississippi, and Republicans’ statements on the matter have certainly escalated. Tate Reeves, the Mississippi governor who quickly followed Greg Abbot’s lead in repealing his state’s mask mandate, noted Wednesday that “Mississippians don’t need handlers” before folding Biden’s comment into the universal theory of the political elite against the everyman. As he told Fox, “When President Biden said that we were all Neanderthals, it struck me as someone who needs to get outside of Washington, D.C., and actually travel to Middle America.” (That’s not quite what Biden said.)
Perhaps sensing an opportunity to fold identity politics into a comment about a species that went extinct 35,000 years ago—or make a self-parodying joke?—Senators Marsha Blackburn and Marco Rubio have taken up the cause that Neanderthal lives matter today:
Perhaps the idea came from this blog, which actually was a bit, published nearly 24 hours ago, before the political take singularity occurred.
The Neanderthal Museum, meanwhile, came out in support of Biden. I bet the museum is a great place to learn they went extinct due to disease, climatic change, or a combination of both. Haha.