Posted on 10/30/2020 7:20:44 AM PDT by SJackson
An accelerant on all things the average Cultural Marxist holds dear.
For some time I had been struggling with a conundrum: Why is it that Covid breaks down, more or less precisely into an ideological divide? This had been clear for a while in a kind of white-of-the-eye way before I began really to focus on it. Then it struck me: Had a ‘pandemic’ occurred when I was a feature writer and reporter with Irish newspapers about 20 years ago, I could not imagine attending editorial conferences in which the matter would be discussed as though implicitly a left-right question, or that the attitude towards it of those assembled for daily or weekly conferences would be predictable on that basis. Yet, this is more or less what has emerged.
From reports all over the world, it seems an almost universal principle that ‘conservative’ and ‘right wing’ interests, groupings and individuals are opposed to lockdown, and ‘left-wingers’ in favour of it. And this means that lefties are Covid believers, whereas conservatives tend more to be sceptics. In the United States, the pro-lockdown governors and mayors have all but invariably been Dems. The sceptics tend to be Republicans or ‘alt-right’ (whatever that is) bloggers and vloggers. Likewise, across Europe, the governments locking their peoples down most viciously and for long periods are those led by socialist parties, whereas the more relaxed countries — Sweden, a special case, aside — tend to be led by parties of the populist right. We have come to take this situation for granted, as though the reasons for it are self-evident. But, actually, there are not in the least clear. If Covid is, as many authorities insist, a health issue, why would it automatically break down in this manner? Why is the attitude of your neighbour predictable on political grounds? Why does someone’s attitude to Covid predict so much else about him?
In part, I believe, it is because from the start there was this strong undercurrent that Covid was about something other than health. Almost nobody was — is, even — quite certain what the subtext is, but for some unaccountable reason almost everyone senses that it has something to do with the way the world has been breaking open in recent times, especially in the past five years or so, in ways that have been variously and exhaustively described and parsed, but really seem to boil down to a divide between people who have their showers in the evening and people who have them in the morning.
It may also, as with so many things these days, have something to do with Donald Trump. Although he moved with alacrity at the end of January to close down access to America from China, he was from the beginning a sceptic of the lockdown idea, repeatedly warning that the cure should not be ‘worse than the disease.’ This seems to have imposed a cleavage on American life, roughly dividing the country in half.
There was an interesting counter to this perspective. Around the time Trump began doing his nightly televised White House briefing sessions in early April, it was clear that the worst five US states for case numbers and deaths were all Democrat-run, and together accounted for two-thirds of total national Covid deaths. Of the worst ten states for fatalities, Democratic states accounted for in the region of 13 times the number of deaths as Republican-led states. On the percentage front (deaths as a percentage of cases — a statistically pointless but still revelatory metric) the top five states were all Democrat-run, with New York on top, followed by Louisiana, New Jersey, Michigan and Washington. After that, the figures began to shrink, falling into fairly level pegging between Democrat and Republican states. An American friend to whom I put these stats at the time offered this explanation: ‘Globalists tend to be Democrats. Globalists tend to live in global hub cities. Global hub cities are nodes of virus transmission. It's where they jump from continent to continent. Thus concentration of cases in Democrat run states. (Louisiana is the outlier in this explanation.)’
Seven months later, the latest ‘case’ data indicate a more balanced league sequence and coloration pattern — California at the top, followed by Texas, Florida, Illinois and Georgia. The pattern with up-to-date deaths is interestingly slightly different, with Texas at the top, followed by California, Florida, New York and Illinois. The patterns of April have not maintained themselves, but perhaps those early figures created an impression of some kind that caused Covid to be seen in America as a tribal issue, with this interpretation rapidly being exported to the rest of the world.
There has been for a while a view abroad that Covid is and was essentially — from a timing viewpoint at least — directed at bringing an end to the Trump presidency. Although the list of alternative conspiracies is long, with many inter-connections, this view of things still has much to recommend it. I have three different and constantly shifting theories about Trump and the virus: 1. that he's bought into it as much as anyone; 2. that he's been captured by his medical team and cannot escape until re-election is under his belt; 3. that he has a cunning plan that he's about to spring at any moment. I'm leaning towards 3. at the moment. I think the prize of the second term is so vital to him and his cause that he cannot jeopardize it by calling our Fauci, Birx etc., who have clearly been trying from the start to slyly manage the virus in a manner designed to unseat President Trump. He knows it; they know he knows it; he knows they know he knows it, but he dare not rock the boat while things are as volatile as they are. There are some worrying things in some of his public statements about vaccines, but we will have to wait about ten days for the picture to become clearer.
For a time, the ‘pandemic’ did put Trump under pressure, even looking like it might indeed unseat the president, though that moment appears to have passed. The world’s legacy media, which appear to despise Trump almost to the last journaliar, have taken to Covid like ducks to watermelon rind, lying through their face masks at every opportunity and in effect imposing on their audiences a form of mass entrancement impervious to truth, fact or stat.
Still, the truth comes tumbling out. As the figures for excess deaths in 2020 become solidified, it is emerging that this has been in no sense an exceptional year for fatalities almost anywhere, which means that there is no additional burden of death arising from Covid.
We also now know that more than 50% of deaths worldwide have occurred in care homes, and that most of these deaths were not caused by Covid but most likely arose from psychological stress due to media-generated panic among people nearing the end of their lives. (Those who doubt this explanation should read the studies and watch the videos of Canadian scientist Denis Rancourt.) There are also numerous as yet to be investigated concerns about the untested admission of people who subsequently emerged as infected into care homes during March. New York exhibited the most marked of such patterns, with the NY state governor Andrew Cuomo issuing on March 25 an order permitting nursing homes to readmit sick patients without testing them for Covid-19. Facing allegations regarding the underestimation of fatalities, Cuomo resisted pressure for more stringent reporting of Covid nursing home deaths, and also, in his annual budget, introduced a measure indemnifying New York hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities against liability for Covid-related deaths.
From the Covid-unrelated death in late May of George Floyd, the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests — again incongruously — seemed to jell as an intrinsic element of the Covid narrative. On its face, the idea made no sense, but the controversy concerning the differing attitudes of various authorities to BLM protests as against anti-lockdown demos effected an underscoring of the ideological pattern. Police officers who had been enthusiastically truncheoning Covid sceptics just the week before were to be seen taking the knee in public in tribute to America’s latest and most dubious hero, and governors who had been coming down like hailstorms on Covid dissenters turned a blind eye to breaches by the masses of Woke warriors who took to the streets for the summer.
Even though it makes just a limited amount of sense, it does at this stage appear that, in some odd and irrational way, Covid is actually a left-wing phenomenon. This undoubtedly has to do with authority, indeed with the authoritarian tic that seems to afflict many leftists. It is not unreasonable to observe that, in general, when you scratch a progressive you uncover a fascist underneath, and this discovery is in no way discredited by the fact that said progressive will be calling you a fascist.
Covid, as has been seen everywhere, is an intensely authoritarian phenomenon. The first measures introduced by governments practically everywhere were directed not at protecting pubic health but awarding powers to themselves to restrict and coerce their citizens and impose draconian penalties for breaches or dissent. This kind of thing suits leftists just fine and dandy. Not only do they enjoy seeing the boots of the regime on the face of fellow citizens, but they themselves seem to enjoy, like masochists under the whip of the master, the lick of leather on their own hides.
There is, moreover, something fundamentally neurotic about the latest incarnation of the leftist in culture. Your average Cultural Marxist tends to be overanxious, ill-educated, resentful, hung-up and irrational. He or she, after all, believes in an ideology that makes little sense unless you behold the world in an intensely neurotic fashion, seeing everything as the culmination of a history that spent every waking moment trying to stitch up everything for patriarchs and Christians. The ends simply refuse to tie together, and your fellow human beings appear to be utterly oblivious to the things you learned for four years at college. Clearly, then, state coercion is essential to bringing the world to order and everyone else around to your view of things.
At a basic human level, the kinds of people who gravitate to left or right tend to divide also, generally speaking, in terms of physique, occupation, and mentality. Leftists, shall we say, tend less towards muscularity, work generally in offices, salons or cubicles, and think the world owes them a living, an expectation the world generally speaking appears to honour and come up, as it were, trumps on. They also consider themselves better educated, but in reality this means that they spent more time than others being indoctrinated with the virus that now afflicts their brains. I find it interesting that working class/blue collar people seem to see through Covid in a flash, whereas the average college graduate goes around in what appears a terrified trance thinking he’s going to meet his death around every corner.
Covid has emerged, in one aspect of its operation, as an accelerant on all things the average Cultural Marxist holds dear: restrictions on practice of religion and public assembly, cycle lanes and other green stuff, compulsory face masks which make everyone as unattractive as the average blue-tinted Cultural Marxist, disincentives to voting in person, and so forth. It emphasizes the ‘common good’, which somehow reveals itself (who knew?) as extending to the state the right to restrict citizens as though self-evidently some kind of criminals on the mere possibility that they might be ‘infected’ with a non lethal disease. It has no regard for charter, proclamation or constitution. It does not care for family, nation of God — is, in fact, the enemy of all three.
On the other hand, Covid has none of what might be called ‘right wing’ characteristics. It seeks not to make America, or anywhere else, ‘great again’, but to destroy everything before it and grate on everyone’s nerves until they surrender to the New World Order.
The Irish commentator John Waters, not the moviemaker
excellent piece....
but wat we gonna do about it?
i guess step 1 starts Tuesday
WTF?
Actual reporting?
He’ll have his journalism degree revoked for that.
Ping for a great read!
I am certain that if President Trump had pushed for a national lockdown and wearing facemasks, the leftists would have been against it because, orange man bad.
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