Year: 2020

A question was recently posed on Facebook: “What’s the big deal with wearing masks?” The person posing the question prefaced it by agreeing with those opposing mandatory vaccination programs and cited the Nuremberg code as justification for this position. The Nuremberg code lays out the rules for the use of human subjects in experiments in the field of medicine. It emerged in the wake of the revelations of the horrors of Nazism. But the questioner could not understand opposition to mandatory mask wearing.

The assumption in the question, which the questioner conformed, is that, while vaccination programs are medical interventions, which are essentially experiments conducted on large populations every year, mask wearing isn’t. This is a bad assumption. I pointed out that voluntary consent and the ability to withdraw from an experiment are two planks in the Nuremberg code. Mask wearing therefore falls under the code.

I do not consent to wearing a mask because it is a medical intervention for which I find insufficient reason to participate. Authorities would violate the code by compelling me to wear one. If people want to wear masks of their own volition, then this is okay. But if governments or businesses of public accommodations mandate masks (with the obvious exceptions of hospitals and nursing homes), then this is not okay.

I initially answered the question with the empirical justification in mind. In the light of facts, mask wearing falls in in the same category as compulsory vaccination. The idea behind mandatory vaccination is that, presuming immunity acquired by jabs, having been inoculated practically excludes you as a disease vector. Wearing a mask also presumes practically eliminating the chance of spreading a pathogen by containing respiratory droplets ejected through exhalation. I do not find the evidence compelling in either case. Moreover, mask wearing is not benign.

Masks provide a false sense of security; the practice does not approach optimum efficacy in limiting community spread. The failure of masks to protect oneself or others from disease transmission is particularly true of cloth masks. Habitual wearing of cloth masks create moist environments conductive to bacteria and viral growth. But even those wearing moisture-resistant surgical masks are emitting viruses from the sides of the mask. And those wearing N95 masks, which are reasonably effective in transmitting viruses, are often ignorant of how to properly wear them. For all masks, extended wear is associated with excessive face touching which in turn increases risk of infection. Falsely confident, mask wearing substitutes for other more effective practices, such as social distancing and hand washing. (All these practices presume that the best way to confront a virus is by not transmitting it, thus interfering with the development of herd immunity.)

As noted above, there are circumstances in which wearing a mask—a N95 mask—may afford the wearer and those around him some protection, but as a dependable prophylaxis, the evidence just isn’t there. Given that it is not obvious that one should either wear a mask or receive a jab, any law forcing a person to wear a mask is in effect the same as any law forcing a person to receive a jab. Even if we were to refuse masks on principle in the face of facts, a law mandating masks forces the compliant to do something without adequate cause.

Mask wearing is not about the science. It is a political symbol. Wearing a mask signals enlightenment and virtue. Dr. Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert who has become the face of the pandemic in America, has stated that he wears a mask “to make it be a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing,” He admits that it is not “100 percent effective,” but that people should wear masks to show “respect for another person.” Before the CDC changed its position on mask wearing, Fauci said, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences—people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.” Thus Fauci’s mask wearing is symbolic of a moral claim not a scientific one.

Mask wearing also signals political and moral opposition to the bad orange man in the White House. If Trump opposes the mask because of what it signals about the safety of America reopening (he’s right—masks indicate pestilence where there is none), then wearing a mask when it is not needed is an expression of fear and loathing for the president. It reflects a broader anxiety in the population. Journalists wear the mask to spread the perception and reinforce fear of disease. Even in the presence of the virus, there is no reason for a journalist to appear before a camera with a mask on. As soon as the shot is over, the journalist removes the mask. They aren’t wearing masks off-camera.

MSNBC: What is wrong with these people not wearing masks? Do they not care about their own safety?

REPORTER: "Nobody is wearing them."

HERO MAN: "Including the cameraman! Half your crew is not wearing [masks]."https://t.co/5lEtllOtfR

— The First (@TheFirstonTV) May 26, 2020

This is a moral panic. This is theater. The media is gas lighting the public. And we know what their agenda is: to turn citizens of a free republic into docile bodies of the corporate state.

Given the symbolic character of mask wearing, there is an analog found in the modesty dress in religious traditions secured via government force. The hijab, a head covering required in many Muslim-majority countries and communities, and the more extensive burqa and niqab, are intended as prophylaxis against sexual desire, which the Abrahamic religions drape in metaphors indicating pathologies. Women are seen as seductresses from whom men must be protected. In this view, women are analogous to disease vectors, exposed hair and skin contagions.

It may be that the hijab keeps some men from being seduced by women. But not all men are deterred by the hijab. They succumb to seduction even when women are covered. Moreover, the hijab poses some risk to the wearer in that some men find the hijab seductive in itself—for some men forcing women to cover their bodies is a fetish. So we should find the hijab’s purpose suspect. But, more importantly, a rule forcing women to wear the hijab is the mark of a totalitarian society. You cannot justify laws forcing women to wear the hijab based on evidence that it reduces fornication and infidelity.

The state forcing people to wear masks for the sake of public health is highly similar to the state forcing women to wear hijab for the sake of male lust, a problem determined by a tiny elite of clerics. In a free society, the state’s role is to protect individuals from the oppression of ideology, whether it moves under the guide of science or whether it is religion.

We have good reasons to oppose mandatory mask wearing. Masks provide a false sense of security and may actually make us sick. Laws mandating masks violate personal sovereignty and bodily integrity. Masks are symbolic of a new normal insinuating itself into the moral order. Nor should maintaining social distance, while courteous, be mandated by law. Nor should house confinement of the healthy be required.

I am within six feet of people all the time and I don’t wear a mask. Neither do the people are within six feet of me. Soon, hardly anybody will be wearing a mask because they will realize that it doesn’t really change anything. At least I hope so. If people are ever uncomfortable with me then they can tell me to back up. I can respect that. But I am not going to validate fear of the normal by donning a mask outside of a setting where an at risk person has no opportunity to avoid me.

Finally, while I appreciate the appeal to the Nuremberg code, one does not need the code to see how wrong it is for the state to pass a law or a governor to issue a rule mandating mask wearing. The principle that underpins the justification to be free from such edicts is found in universal human rights.

As readers of my blog know, I bring a lot of psychological concepts into my analysis of contemporary situations. My masters and doctorate are in social psychology and sociology respectively, and I have a bachelors degree in psychology. Psychology fascinates me, especially in the development of the methods of those who move the levers of political and social power to make their moves ever easier and more efficacious. I am thinking here of the powerful technology developed by propagandists like Edward Bernays, who developed his techniques using the ideas of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalysts. These ideas form the ideology of modern advertising, put in practice by an army of persuaders who have weaponized psychology.

In my blogs on the COVID-19 panic I have so far focused on the tactics of fear production and the war metaphor. I have also discussed the accusation, from those who want us to stay shut down forever, that those pining for a return to normal life are selfish. “We can never go back to a normal life,” they say. For them, COVID-19 changes everything. It is a virus in a class of its own. It is, the insist, extraordinarily contagious and lethal. Only the altruistic and compliant can have any legitimacy in the face of such an existential threat. Those who disagree with the dominant narrative are not merely wrong—they are bad and dangerous people. Those who don’t wear masks threaten health and safety, while those who do are the good and righteous people. They post their masked selfies on social media, shame those who refuse masks, and get lots of strokes. They would do well in a social credit system. They are wrong scientifically, but their politics are ideological, so the science doesn’t matter.

In this essay, I want to make explicit a technique that causes me great consternation, what psychologists call “priming.” I teach this concept in my course Freedom and Social Control in covering the unit “Ideology and Propaganda.” The dictionary definition of the term pretty much captures the meaning: a primer is “a substance that prepares something for use or action.” We only need to add “someone” to the definition so that it reads “priming prepares something or someone for use or action.” Wikipedia has a concise definition (since mine tend to get longwinded): “Priming is a phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.” I am moved to blog about priming after reading a blog entry by Tom Nikkola “What if we’ve all been primed?” If my Aunt Betty had not shared it on her Facebook page I would never have seen it. Nikkola identifies several priming slogans: “We’re all in this together.” “Stay home. Stay safe.” “We’ll get through this.” “It’s our new normal.” I will discuss some of these slogans in this blog entry, but I encourage you to read Nikkola’s blog (his is a more popular treatment) and I appreciate him raising the issue.

Priming, associated with automaticity (automatic response pattern or habit), is a phenomenon and a technique in which a person’s actions with respect to a constellation of stimuli can be directed and shaped by conditioning their responses to a stimulus underpinned and reinforced by normative and moral frameworks. I have worked into my explanation here the ideas of Norbert Elias presented in his 1939 The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, especially the ideas from those chapters were he explores how elites pushed the values of foresight and self-constraint (similar to the Freudian superego) down into the common people and spread among them habits of shame and repugnance. Overall, Elias provides a historical account of the development and entrenchment of the European habitus, a constellations of habituated behaviors that become “second nature,” psychic structures shaped and directed by sociocultural values and attitudes. The habitus is a system of social regulation.

These frameworks are highly partisan in the United States and knowing this allows persuaders to manipulate the levers of norm following and status seeking. In other words, implicit social norms are repurposed by associating them with known desire. If priming works, people make decisions automatically and take actions habitually in a direction beneficial to the persuaders even when detrimental to the actors themselves. If, for example, I am told that I have to do something for the good of others, when it comes at great sacrifice to me, I need to find a deeper sentiment or, more accurately, that sentiment is a target for manipulation, to find the motivation to do what I otherwise wouldn’t. I discussed this in a recent entry The New Equity Principle: Healthy People Must Forfeit Their Dreams and Freedoms for the Sake of the Infirm. Shaming is part of social regulation, where the desire for social status is redirected by peer pressure. By appealing to the desire people have for doing good and their impulses to manage others impressions of them, persuaders can move the public to embrace that which they would otherwise have resisted.

Think about the slogans we’re being subjected to during the COVID-19 pandemic. The obvious one is the “new normal.” It seems everybody in a leadership role is saying this. Dr. Anthony Fauci says this when he envisions a new world in which we can no longer shake hands and parents can no longer feel safe sending their kids to school unless there is a vaccine. When a person accepts that they live in a “new normal,” they are easily persuaded to think about and act towards things that were heretofore objectionable, such as failing to help a person in distress because they may be infected. Since people have accepted that they live in a “new normal,” they accept those things that come with the new normal. They will rely on those—the “experts”— who told them about the new normal to do the things that come with it. Of course, who said we have to live in a new normal? The goal is to prevent that question from occurring to people. “Trust the experts.” Which experts? The ones the authorities tell the people to listen to. Repetition of slogans works assumptions into the populace. Soon everybody is saying it. How do they know it? Because they hear it all the time. They assume everybody else believes it, too, so when somebody doesn’t they recoil in horror. The tactic suppresses opposition to things, for example mask wearing, while enlisting people in the project to make these things automatic and habitual.

Another example of priming is “Stay home. Stay safe” and its variant “Stay home. Save lives.” Remember hearing as a kid “Better safe than sorry”? I bet many of you have said this. The proverb is designed to constrain action by playing on fear and regret. “Stay home. Stay safe” is an updating of “Better safe than sorry.” The variant “Stay home. Save lives” operates on the different level. This slogan functions to prepare people to accept confinement for the sake of others who will die if the person doesn’t stay home. At the beginning of April, Google, master of priming, put out the doodle: “Stay home. Save lives.” In any other circumstance people are likely to understand confinement to be something that only applies to those who are sick or those who are wrongdoers. “Why are we quarantining health people? We’ve never done that before.” because, in the “new normal,” you will kill people if you don’t “stay home.” Moreover, you will endanger your own life, so “stay home and stay safe.”

Saving the lives of others by limiting personal freedom is reinforced by the slogan “We’re in this together.” This is classic in-group/out-group formation and manipulation. This priming technique makes people think they’re in solidarity with those who seek to place them under house arrest. Exploiting the human tendency to want to be a part of something, it generates false belonging. It adds members to an imagined community. Again, to be effective these slogans have to be repeated ad nauseam. And, as I am sure my readers are aware, they are. Think of these slogans as talking points for the masses to help them stay on message.

Progressives, while making little effort to actually create the conditions for social justice, are especially vulnerable to the virtue of manufacturing symbolic virtue. It saves them the time and effort of actually doing something. Mask wearing is exemplary of do-nothing busybodyism. Wearing masks is no burden to those who don’t mind being told what to do by those they follow since it asks nothing else of them but to put on a mask, take a selfie, and scold others, which is something that love doing. Narcism makes trend mongering easy with this crowd. They’re always on the hunt for the next slogan that makes them appear “woke.” Those who have a problem with being compelled to engage in an irrational action that interferes with their freedom become the targets of progressive wrath, the raw materials for virtue production.

Fear is not always irrational. But it always works on an emotional level. Operating on the basis typifications or cognitive stereotypes, ideologies, unconscious motivations and feelings, priming works on sentiments. The insider effect of “we’re in this together” means that there are those on the outside who are the “enemy.” Consider the protests in Lansing, Michigan. Progressives were prepared to throw the Bill of Rights out the window to punish those they perceived as conservatives for protesting their Constitutional rights and liberties. Progressives have demanded that those who refuse to wear masks should be forced to wear masks even when the facts suggest that wearing masks to protect oneself or others is not well-supported by the facts and, moreover, is not benign. Reflexive belief not only denies facts but resists considering them.

The argument that we should all wear masks has been a particularly effective example of priming. Some of those in my circle of friends who should know better find themselves asking “What’s the big deal?” More on that in tomorrow’s blog.

After listening to dozens of podcasts by Steven K. Bannon in his War Room Pandemic series, I realize why the propagandists for the corporate state portray a straightforward republican and nationalist as a racist and antisemite—to prevent people from investing any time in the arguments he is making by making him a pariah. The campaign of delegitimization extends to the rank and file of the working class who identify as conservative and patriotic. The elite marginalize those who listen to Bannon by describing them as “deplorable,” a term Hillary Clinton used to smear Trump supporters and advocates. Remember? “A basket full of deplorables”? Bannon openly embraces the deplorables, both in the United States and in China, the lao baixing, or “old hundred names.” These are “the people.” The “commoners.”

Progressives may dismiss Bannon, but elites are listening. I understand why. The man is a savant. I feel like I’m in a college course focused not on preparing docile bodies and cultural managers for the smooth hegemonic functioning of corporate capitalism, but on informing students about what is really going on. Almost every day, Bannon offers up puzzle pieces that lock into place and fill in the picture. I am learning things about China that every American should know—and that every Chinese already knows. Every weekend, in his “Descent into Hell” programs, Bannon gives Chinese dissidents access to his broadcasting machinery to tell the world about the terror of Chinese communism—a boot stamping on the face of humanity. I confess that I had operated under the assumption that China’s turn to capitalism signaled a betrayal of communism, not a strategy to expand the reach of bureaucratic collectivism. Now I see totalitarianism with a Chinese character, a character that dovetails with the interests of the globalist West—suppressing personal freedom and dismantling republican government.

Perhaps paradoxically for a Christian nationalist, Bannon’s interpretation of the world is Marxian-like in its grasp of the totality and commitment to critically interrogating facts across a range of interpenetrating structures. He even speaks the language of dialectics. Sometimes explicitly. Bannon brings on to his show theorists and analysts from a constellation of intellectual networks ignored and marginalized by corporate propaganda services such as CNN. His team—Raheem Kassam, Jack Maxey, and Jason Miller—provide insights along the way. I listen to a lot of podcasts, but this is the one I most look forward to each day.

Do I agree with everything Bannon says? Of course not. I listen to him in part because I learn from those with whom I disagree. I am not a Christian nationalist. But I am an atheist and a nationalist. His populist nationalism is not my type of populist nationalism. Bannon does not, apart from strong pronouncements of faith, let his theological views cloud his thinking about material things. He likes facts and metrics. I think SARS-CoV-2 is not so deadly. But I don’t need to agree with Bannon’s assessment of this virus to agree with him that we are in this situation because of China. I am not a fan of the military, albeit I recognize the necessity of national defense. Bannon sees the US military as the single greatest force for the cause of freedom in history. His outlook is rightwing and capitalist. I am leftwing and a libertarian-socialist. But on the things that matter—commitment to individual liberty and small “d” and “r” democratic-republicanism—our values intersect. 

I share with Bannon the view that the United States of America is the nation defending freedom against totalitarianism. Moreover, we share the view that our greatness and the imperative of our dominance are in peril by the quislings running our government at the behest of the transnational elite. To be sure, Bannon represents a wing of the capitalist class, namely the economic nationalist fraction. But progressives represent the other wing of the capitalist class—the corporate globalist fraction. The corporate globalist faction threatens our freedom and democracy by striving to place power in the hands of unaccountable technocrats operating as the transnational level, beyond the reach of the sovereign people. 

Democrat Joe Biden is one of those quisling trying to get back into government, an operative for the globalist elite long working with China. Biden is a functionary in the project for the managed decline of the American Republic and the West and aiding the insinuation of China into the global supply chain. We are becoming incorporated into a tributary state thanks to the work of politicians like Biden. Learn about President Barack Obama’s East Asia Strategy (2009–2017), his “pivot to Asia” doctrine. Read Hillary Clinton’s 2011 “America’s Pacific Century.” Study the history of the Nixon Administration with Henry Kissinger at the foreign policy helm. The American people have been betrayed by a bipartisan effort to build up the Chinese Communist Party while weakening the West, all for the sake of restoring profits. 

Populist nationalism is what the working class requires if it is to keep in place the republican machinery it requires for determining its collective fate. Globalization is the common enemy of working Americans not nationalism. If folks aren’t outraged when, today, tens of millions of Americans are jobless, while foreign workers continue to obtain visas to come here and do the work Americans can do, then you have not grasped the threat to the American working class represented by globalism. Capitalism is not the most desirable political economic system, but in its globalist modality it is by far the most destructive manifestation of this system. We have to restore the integrity of the American republic and the power of the sovereign American people or we will lose our democracy.

Recently I reviewed Bannon’s positions on a number of issues. He advocates reductions in immigration, as well as restrictions on trade, particularly with China. He is in favor of raising federal income taxes for the rich to pay for tax cuts for working people. He supports significantly increasing spending on infrastructure. He supports increased regulation of Internet companies like Facebook and Google, which he regards as akin to utilities in the modern age. He opposed the merger between Time-Warner and AT&T on antitrust grounds. Despite his pro-military stance, he is generally skeptical of military intervention abroad, opposing proposals for the expansion of U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan, the Syrian Civil War, and the crisis in Venezuela. He describes U.S. allies in Europe, the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, as well as South Korea and Japan, as having become “protectorates of the United States” that do not “make an effort to defend [themselves],” and believes NATO members should pay a minimum of 2% of GDP on defense. He supports repairing United States-Russia relations and opposes upgrading the US nuclear arsenal. He describes himself as an economic nationalist, criticizing crony capitalism, Austrian economics, and the objectivism of Ayn Rand, which he believes seeks to “make people commodities, and to objectify people.” That’s a lot of stuff I agree with.

Bannon has a worldview and much of it is plausible. This makes for a strong base from which to work a style of politics. It’s not my style, but Bannon gets what a lot folks don’t—you need a theory of the world as a foundation for your political activism. The left has a theory and a method, too. But the left is alienated from itself. The working class is fractured. We need to get back to class analysis and socialist politics. But we have to defeat globalism and save our republic first.

Update (May 26, 2020). I podcasted the announcement of this blog with a podcast and thought readers would find this useful in reflecting on the spirit of the blog.

On May 22, 2020 one of the top medical journals in the world, The Lancet, published the article, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis.” Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) is prescribed tens of millions of times annually as a prophylaxis and treatment for malaria, as well as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and other conditions. Several decades old and determined to be safe, including for children and pregnant women, it is considered one of the world’s essential medicines. Chloroquine (Aralen) is also an antimalarial agent. Macrolides are a class of antibiotics that includes azithromycin (Zithromax), clarithromycin (Biaxin), erythromycin, and fidoximycin (Dificid). Zithromax, or Z-Pak, is a commonly known broad spectrum antibiotic, also well known for its increased risk of fatal heart problems.

Despite a large body of anecdotal evidence that hydroxychloroquine alone or in combination with azithromycin is safe and efficacious in the treatment of COVID-19, as well as a prophylaxis (that is, a preventative), the Lancet study did not demonstrate the efficacy of either drug in any combination in treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients (they did not evaluate the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine as a prophylaxis). The research included a large number of patients (96,032 total) from 671 hospitals around the world (65.9% from North America).

Much has been made of these findings in the media, which has been critical of hydroxychloroquine ever since the President of the United States, who has advocated for the drug, announced that he has been taking it (as have many others, including physicians and nurses working with COVID-19 patients) prophylactically. A retrospective observational review of 368 men with COVID-19 treated at the US Veterans Affairs hospitals drew considerable press attention when it purported to show that the use of hydroxychloroquine was associated with a greater hazard of death. However, subsequent examinations of the study have found several problems with it (especially surrounding the baseline characteristics among the groups) and cannot rule out the possibility of bias. The Lancet study was careful to minimize bias in its sampling, included a much larger number of patients who were hospitalized between Dec 20, 2019 and April 14, 2020 with a positive laboratory finding for SARS-CoV-2. This was the study the media had hoping for.

Wait, what? Patients hospitalised for COVID-19 on December 20 2019? With a positive laboratory finding for SARS-CoV-2?

According to the World Health Organization, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission in China reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei Province on December 31, 2019, but the cause was mysterious and they did not believe there was human-to-human transmission (they claimed instead that the pneumonia was associated with exposure to pathogens in a wet market in Wuhan, a line WHO pushed as late as January 14, 2020). On January 7, 2020, Chinese health authorities reported that this cluster was associated with a novel coronavirus. Airway epithelial cells from infected patients were used to isolate the virus, which was named the SARS-CoV-2, and the virus sequence was publicly released. This gave authorities around the world the information they needed to develop tests for the virus.

The Lancet study identifies at least one patient hospitalized on December 20, 2019. Positive cases were not diagnosed on the basis of observation of the (ever-growing) cluster of symptoms associated with COVID-19 but were selected based on positive laboratory finding for SARS-CoV-2. From the study: “A positive laboratory finding for SARS-CoV-2 was defined as a positive result on high-throughput sequencing or reverse transcription-quantitative PCR assay of nasal or pharyngeal swab specimens, and this finding was used for classifying a patient as positive for COVID-19.” Moreover, “COVID-19 was diagnosed, at each site, on the basis of WHO guidance.”

How do doctors have tests for a virus in mid-December that is specifically unknown to scientists until the first week of January?

The first first confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the United States was reported on January 20, 2020. A man who had returned to Washington State on January 15 after traveling to visit family in Wuhan, China, sought medical attention after feeling ill. His case is reported in great detail in an article in The New England Journal of Medicine. The test described in NEJM article is the test described in the Lancet article. The NEJM article states: “Clinical specimens were tested with an rRT-PCR assay that was developed from the publicly released virus sequence.”

It is possible that preserved samples were used to retrospectively determine cases dating back to December 20, several days before the initial cluster of cases were reported by Chinese authorities. One can understand why Z-Pak would be used to treat an unidentified pathogenic in pneumonia cases (as their eitlogy may be bacteriological), but chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine? Perhaps some physicians used chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine upon suspicion that malaria was the cause of the symptoms they were seeing, but this is doubtful given the constellation of symptoms described. After all, their attention was drawn to the unusual aspects of the disease, which had caused them to strongly suspect a SARS virus.

There are questions to be asked of the time line. The question that first comes to mind: How long were the Chinese Communist Party and Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom withholding knowledge about this virus from the world?

You will have to excuse me for making similar points in this entry to points that I have made in past entries and on my podcasts, but I am perturbed by persons taking issue with my opposition to confinement by giving me the first iteration of the debunked narrative they’ve been rehearsing the whole time, as if I have not heard the narrative before—this argument that’s supposed to put me in my place. It presumes I’m ignorant of an argument they haven’t adjusted even once in light of facts and logic. Then I am faced with having to go back through their argument and fill them in on weeks of evidence while teaching them to think like a rational person. Its exhausting.

I am told as if I don’t already know that countries across the planet have experienced thousands of hospitalizations and deaths from the novel coronavirus, burdens that can be reduced if we confine ourselves to our homes, wears mask, and practice social distancing rules. To fail to do the things that will reduce suffering and save lives is immoral, they say, signaling their superlative virtue. But the same thing that’s being said about the SARS-2 virus can be said about influenza and rhinoviruses, even other coronaviruses, all of which cause lethal lower respiratory infections in tens of thousands annually in the US alone. The CDC estimates that, for the flu season 2019-20, there have been half a million hospitalizations and more than 20 thousand deaths from influenza.

If I advocated for confinement, masks, and social distancing to reduce deaths from influenza and rhinoviruses (or the coronaviruses these people don’t know about), people would think I was neurotic, a germaphobic busybody in need of cognitive behavioral and exposure therapies. And they’d be right. Life is risky. Humans are always engaging in risk-benefit analysis as a matter of survival. (See Life is Risky. Freedom is Precious.) The question is whether this virus—or any other risk we confront in our brief existence—is so lethal that it justifies throwing millions out of work, setting back the education of millions of children and young adults, allowing thousands to die prematurely from cancer and other treatable diseases, and the myriad of other awful man-made tragedies that flow from this fiasco. The virus didn’t do that to us. Our leaders did that to us.

The signs of panic are fight, flight, or freeze. Freeze has marked today’s panic—a mass hysteria unjustified by the facts (see COVID-19 and Chronic Stress Response). It is a kind of catatonia, a constellation of abnormal behaviors arising from a disturbed mental state marked by purposeless and repetitive overactivity (sans negativism in this case—of which the sane are accused). The tunnel vision associated with the phenomenon has moved millions to demand the government sink everything into a pit of despair to save humanity from a virus which, for the vast majority of people, is at worst cold-like. Like a drowning person, the panic-stricken zealot seeks to drag others down with him. How else do we explain the myopia behind moving infected people to nursing homes to free up hospital beds. That’s the actions of crazy people.

Even if we could get past the injustice of confining healthy people to their homes, an outrageous violation of fundamental human rights typical of totalitarian regimes not democracies, the public health case does not justify what authorities have done here. This virus is not what they told us it was. As those who follow my blog know (I started exposing the panic on March 26), it is what I told you.

Why would I know anything about this? I developed a particular interest in epidemics and pandemics after the swine flu hoax back in high school in the 1970s (see Medical-Industrial Propaganda: The Swine Flu Pandemic of 1976). I thought the swine flu epidemic was the craziest thing I had ever seen. But COVID-19 is crazier. By far. The panic is indicative of a profound disturbance in our culture; people don’t normally react like this to viral threats. The response to this virus, which aligns with the response to disagreeable speech utterances, has revealed a deep pathology in Western civilization. 

In 1968-69, when I was only six years, more than 100,000 people died from H3N2 in a population of 201 million. It was dubbed the Hong Kong flu and it killed more than one million people worldwide. Some of you may be old enough to remember. The Hong Kong flu was closely related to a flu strain that killed has many as 116,000 people in 1957-58 in a population of 172 million. This they called the Shanghai or Asian flu (H2N2). These viruses caused a lot of death, but the authorities didn’t shut society down either time. American citizens trudged through these pandemics like human beings have trudged through them since time immemorial. We don’t let these things stop us. Within a few years of each of these crises, we did spectacular things—we sent a man into space and landed men on the moon. That’s the human spirit. That spirit is sorely missing today. We have lost confidence in ourselves. I will be damned if I will let the currents of irrational fear drag me out into deep waters.

Whether your fear is rational or irrational is not a one-size-fits-all judgment. If you are elderly or sick, and may or have come in contact with an infected person, your fear of is probably well-founded. If you are obese and suffer from type II diabetes and hypertension, then you should stay home and be very careful about who you allow to come near you. You should also try to resolve your health problems through medication, diet, and exercise. Many of the comorbidities associated with COVID-19 are lifestyle choices. But if you’re healthy, there is every reason for you to get on with your life. Get our there and breath the air without a mask on. If you are a healthy forty-year-old man and are scared of COVID-19, then you are irrational. The risk of you suffering complications is exceedingly small. Hell, you probably won’t even suffer symptoms. There are much greater dangers facing you that you would never allow to limit your life.

“But not experiencing symptoms is precisely why you have to confine and wears masks,” I can hear somebody saying. “You won’t know that you’re giving the viruses to a vulnerable person.” This thinking, which seems rational, is deeply disturbing and profoundly dangerous. We are encountering a strange equity principle that the old and infirm require the young and the healthy to take protective measures for their sake, that it is selfish for the young and the healthy to want to enjoy their lives to the fullest, to be free from confinement and constraints. But there is no such principle. Quite the contrary: it is unjust to expect the young and the healthy to limit their lives for the old and infirm. That why when a colleague recently dropped the term “confined” to describe quarantined healthy adults, and in a favorable way, it set my head on fire. As if it is a good and moral thing to submit to confinement. We confine the sick and the wrongdoer. We don’t confine people who are healthy and who have done nothing wrong.

In discussing this matter with a friend last night (thanks to our state supreme court we can now party in Wisconsin), I wondered aloud whether, if we had called this things SARS from the beginning, the public would have said to themselves, “Oh, we went through that more than a dozen years ago. That’s no big deal.” SARS, which stands for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, is a familiar thing. To be sure, it was scary when it appeared on the scene in 2003, but we got through it okay. We didn’t lock down society. When a much deadlier SARS coronavirus, dubbed MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), appeared in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and spread to several other countries, including the United States, killing a large proportion of the those it infected, we did not shut down society. But in the case of SARS-CoV-2, the authorities elected to call SARS the “novel coronavirus,” and an exotic and unpredictable beast entered our universe. Compounding the problem was that the vast majority of people had never heard of a coronavirus. They did not and still do not know that SARS is a coronavirus, that this viruses is a SARS virus, that moreover coronaviruses are common, that they very likely already have had one or more over the course of their lifetimes (it is, after all, a cold virus), and that they had already confronted SARS viruses that were much deadlier than the one we are all currently facing and laughed in its face. It’s like how we treat influenza and rhinoviruses: we recognize these as potentially dangerous, but they are not alien, and so we go on with our lives.

Making the risks of viruses realistic allows us to think about whether we should expose our parents to their grandchildren when the latter have the sniffles. But to tell our parents that they are never again allowed to see their grandchildren, or that they may only see them and us through plexiglass, so they can know what a prisoner feels like visiting friends and family he hardly ever sees, is cruel.

On April 16, I wrote the following on my blog (Life is Risky. Freedom is Precious): “Many things we do as free people have risks associated with them. The authoritarian approach to risk is to restrict or take away freedom. Authoritarians treat freedom as the problem. If speech motivates actions deemed detrimental to others or to society, then speech needs to be curtailed. People have to be controlled. In contrast, the humanist approach is to make things safer and make people wiser, not shut down the freedoms that make life worth living.” I concluded, “In the end, humans cannot mastermind death, disease, and injury. Nor can the government. Life is risky. And death is inevitable. We can take steps to reduce the risks for most things we face in life. But we mustn’t adopt measures that substantially diminish the freedom of all.”

You may have seen this from May 2, 2020. I missed it at the time because I don’t subscribe to this rag. But The Washington Post article “Excess U.S. Deaths Hit Estimated 37,100 In Pandemic’s Early Days, Far More Than Previously Known” is exemplary of what I years ago started calling technical lying. In this essay, I want to briefly explain the way WaPo is using statistics to make the situation look worse than it is under the guise of investigative journalism using actual facts.

I have been studying the excess death statistics (see “More on the Unreasonableness of the COVID-19 Hysteria”), so I am familiar with the data used. I also teach about the problem of visual distortion of statistical information in a university-level research methods class to make students aware of propaganda using statistics and to help them avoid unknowingly contributing to the problem. Three things about this chart from the WaPo article and reporting stand out. 

First, note how the chart above starts at 40 thousand deaths from all causes. Restricting the charts range makes the increase in excess deaths look much larger. This is a typical visual distortion used to manipulate an audience. The classic case was president Bill Clinton during a television appearance using a chart slicing off 150 billion dollars from the bottom of the range to leave the false impression that his tax hikes would nearly eliminate the budget deficit by his second term. Note the way Clinton positions his body to mask the fact that chart does not start at zero.

The Washington Post provides readers with the full range in a small rectangle on the right side, but who’s looking at that, or knows what that is, when there is this big orange spike in your face? But that small rectangle is revealing. For those who would appreciate the WaPo for anticipating my objection, the authors produce yet another distortion by squishing the chart in order to justify cutting more than half the range off the numbers. I will follow Stephen Jay Gould in his landmark The Mismeasure of Man in not insisting such distortions are on purpose, but rather that they function to support a narrative the presenter is advancing. I’m being charitable, of course. Putting that small rectangle on the chart really does give the game away.

Second, compare the date of the publication and the date for the final statistic. Why is the last statistic cited weeks before the publication date when later dates were available? Is it because excess deaths start dropping off after April 11 according to the CDC statistics that WaPo is using? (You can find the numbers here: Daily Updates of Totals by Week and State.) As of the date of the publication, the percentage of excess deaths was 103% of expected deaths for this time of year—that is, things had returned to normal. The good news that we are over the hump—and should reopen the country—is thus left out. An important note to make here is that the CDC is showing 25 thousand fewer deaths than John Hopkins is reporting. John Hopkins data is the source the media prefers to use to pump up the death toll. The WaPo was forced to use the CDC numbers because it’s the CDC that reports excess deaths. They’re still reporting the John Hopkins numbers in other articles without acknowledging the 25 percent discrepancy.

Third, the impression the article leaves is that excess deaths not attributed to reported COVID-19, which, as we have seen with states rolling back the death counts after closer examination of the data, is likely too high, should be attributed to COVID-19. The fact that the death counts are likely excessive is concealed by the suggestion that they are instead undercounted. There is no evidence suggesting this. What we know with certainty is that pneumonia cases have been rising and that the pathogens are divided among SARS-CoV-2 and other viral and bacterial infections. In the first week of April we saw considerable excess deaths and this lasted until the first week of May. These deaths are tragic. But the peak was in the first half of April and we have been on the other side of worst part of this pandemic for weeks. The evidence that we were on the downside of the pandemic was rather clear on May 2, especially in light of the fact that those who will die from COVID-19 often linger on life support.

I am sure that some folks will defend the article by noting that the headline does say the “pandemic’s early days.” But that’s beside the point. Why restrict the range of the bulk of deaths from all causes during this period? To make the spike bigger. Why squeeze the chart? To make the spike bigger. Why stop reporting the data beyond April 11? To conceal the drop in deaths after this point. This is propaganda. It’s technical lying.

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi asked Trump to lower flags across the nation to half-staff to commemorate the dead from coronavirus when the death count passes 100 thousand when the news media claims will probably happen this weekend. 100 thousand is an arbitrary figure that Democrats find psychologically satisfying. A big round number. With lots of zeros. Like a million. But it’s not a real number. What Democrats want very much is for Donald Trump to issue the order to that makes him responsible for 100 thousand deaths. They got their wish. Trump has called for flags across the country to be flown at half-staff this weekend in honor of coronavirus victims. He also made the absurd claim that, but for the shutdown he ordered, millions would have died.

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Eighty percent of those dying of the virus are over 65 years old. The CDC reported 68,998 total deaths in the U.S. as of May 16, with 55,651 of those deaths, or 80.6 percent, covering people over 65 years old. Pennsylvania has more COVID deaths over age 100 than under age 45. There are no reported deaths for persons younger than 30 years of age (see Weekly Report for Deaths Attributed to COVID-19, May 17, 2020). This pattern is apparent in state after state. Why did authorities shutter the economy and schools?

* * *

Florida was supposed to be a disaster. Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, takes the media to task for fantasizing disaster. Check it out:

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Finally a study by Stanford University John Ioannidis “The Infection Fatality Rate of COVID-19 Inferred from Seroprevalence Data” finds that “[e]stimates of infection fatality rates inferred from seroprevalence studies tend to be much lower than original speculations made in the early days of the pandemic.” How much lower? Right in line with the numbers I have been calculating. Ioannidis calculates a fatality rate between 0.2%-0.4%, far lower than the numbers the media reports and closer to the 0.1% death rate of the flu. The death rate is not one or more in a hundred, but two to four in a thousand. “While COVID-19 is a formidable threat,” Ioannidis writes, “the fact that its IFR (infection fatality rate) is much lower than originally feared, is a welcome piece of evidence.” He concludes that “worldwide the IFR of COVID-19 this season may be in the same ballpark as the IFR of influenza.” And thus throwing the world into an economic depression was entirely unjustified.

The media is taking one of the world’s essential medicines—hydroxychloroquine (brand name Plaquenil)—and making it out to be a threat to humanity. Why? Because Trump was touting it. Now he’s taking it! Trump, at particular risk from exposure to SARS-CoV-2, and because his age leaves him at heightened risk for serious complications from the virus if infected, is taking hydroxychloroquine as a prophylaxis under the supervision of a physician. Smart. He is telling the country that he will stop after 14 days, the time since he was possibly exposed to SARS-Cov-2.

Joe Biden says Trump taking hydroxychloroquine is like injecting Clorox. “It’s like saying ‘Maybe if you inject Clorox into your blood, it may cure you,’” Biden said at a Yahoo News town hall on COVID-19 and food insecurity with celebrity chef José Andrés. “C’mon, man! What is he doing? What in God’s name is he doing?” It is nothing of the sort. Trump is one of several million Americans taking the drug. The media isn’t making this fact well know, of course, so I must—even if it makes me appear as if I am a Trump supporter when I am not. Partisan rules put truth-tellers in odd spots.

Ask yourself: why are authorities allowing more than 5 1/2 million Americans (and millions more around the world) access to a drug annually if it’s dangerous? Are we to believe that the experts haven’t known until now that the drug is a problem? Are the World Health Organization and the United Nations going to take the drug off of the list of the world’s most essential medicines? The situation is absurd. They’ve been giving hydroxychloroquine to pregnant women in all trimesters. That’s how safe it is! Even children as a matter of course of travel to places in the world where malaria is a problem are advised to take this drug. Hydroxychloroquine has save countless numbers of lives from a organism that kills more people annually than the doomsayers could even hope for COVID-19.

Follow the CDC link and click on the tab “Chloroquine” to educate yourself. Hydroxychloroquine is an essential medicine. Not just for malaria. People take hydroxychloroquine to treat rheumatologic conditions, for example. That’s not all. We know doctors are prescribing this drug to protect from SARS-CoV-2 infection and front-line doctors are even using it themselves.

Doctors have good reason to take an interest in hydroxychloroquine. This study published in premier medical journal The Lancet: Chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for prophylaxis of COVID-19 tells us why: “In-vitro studies have shown that chloroquine is effective against several viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV). Multiple mechanisms of action have been identified for chloroquine that disrupt the early stage of coronavirus replication. Moreover, chloroquine affects immune system activity by mediating an anti-inflammatory response, which might reduce damage due to the exaggerated inflammatory response.”

If you’re very sick and on a ventilator or very old or suffer from the relevant underlying conditions, hydroxychloroquine is not likely to help you. Studies using subjects at their end find the fear they seek to manufacture. It’s a cynical exercise. That’s not for the most part how this drug is being used and the media know it.

The media also know that, aside from a handful of states, long-term care, an obvious indicator of old age and severe chronic conditions, is the most dangerous situation to be in. Indeed, between 40-80 percent of deaths across the majority of states have occurred among the very old and infirm, those trapped in long-term care facilities. It is highly unlikely that any study of hydroxychloroquine in a hospital for veterans, for example, could demonstrate efficacy and safety. Yet these are the studies the media reports.

Official irrationalisms run deeply through this bizarre episode of history. Don’t you find it astonishing that public health experts and hospital administrators didn’t consider what would happen if they cancelled thousands of elective procedures? I could see the consequences from way off and I’m just a jagoff sociologist. From a study in the United Kingdom to be published in the Annals of Oncology (I tremble thinking of the numbers in the United States): “Per year, 94,912 resections for major cancers result in 80,406 long-term survivors and 1,717,051 life years gained. Per-patient delay of three/six months would cause attributable death of 4,755/10,760 of these individuals with loss of 92,214/208,275 life.” I think I discussed in a podcast my personal story with staring cancer in the face and how crucial it was that doctors caught it early and initiated prompt treatment. I shutter to think of what my chances would have been in the current context. It will suffice to say not very good at all.

The deceit is obvious. Progressives tell us to listen to doctors and scientists. But they don’t really mean it. If a doctor or scientist tells you to be wary of corporate-pushed drugs or vaccines, they’re dismissed as quacks and cranks. What progressives really mean when they tell you to listen to doctors and scientists is that you should only listen to the doctors and scientists and technocrats who advance the establishment’s profit-driven agenda. To put this Orwellian terms, the Ministry of Truth will select the experts for you. This is the scientific-industrial complex I have been writing about on my blog. It is not to be confused with the scientific method.

The establishment enjoys an army of science-as-religion zealots out there working the grassroots with memes and insults. Doctors and scientists who don’t toe the official line the Ministry dictates are ignored, marginalized, deplatformed, defamed. Ask Dr. Erickson of Accelerated Urgent Care. If you listen to the doctors and scientists not pre-approved by the industry, then you’re mobbed and mocked. The greatest irony of all is when you’re attacked for not being trained specifically in the area you must be an expert in by people who are not only untrained in that area themselves but don’t appear to understand the field at all, which—and this is key here—one does not need to be an expert in to understand. Seriously, if you have to depend on media-selected experts, then why should I trust your judgment? You could not have picked them based on your own grasp of the issue. It’s appeal to authority and confirmation bias down the line. Sure, you can share a meme. But I have the ability to read and grasp science.

Bottom line: the corporate media is lying to you, systematically and audaciously and with purpose and eve malign intent from a criminal law standpoint. You simply cannot trust the mainstream media. They look down on you as the unwashed masses. You’re the rabble. The deplorables. They tell you that you can’t understand medicine and science so you must trust them to tell you which doctors and scientists to listen to—trust the industry experts they put before you. For them, medicine is like any other commodity. The propagandists and functionaries promote the problem the corporate state rises to meet. Need to warehouse the burgeoning industrial reserve thanks to technological displacement? “War on crime!” Need to access resources in a recalcitrant foreign country? “Democratic tsuiami!” This is the force that is selling out the worker and destroying the republic.

Returning to Joe Biden’s hyperbole about Trump injecting Clorox, this is based on a lie. I watched the press conference where Trump was supposed to have said such a thing. I started watching his press conferences as soon as I became aware that the media was just going to lie about them. Trump said he was impressed by the way the disinfectants kill the virus. He wondered if we could do something like that with a medicine. Something like that. Go back and listen. For your convenience here’s what he said: “I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?” This is called analogical thinking. Trump wasn’t being literal. Obviously. He’s not a scientist. But he is a problem solver. He never suggested people inject bleach (or drink fish tank cleaner). People who make that claim are not being honest. They are also not being honest when they mock him for suggesting light therapy. That this is a wacky idea probably comes as quite a surprise to the scientists studying UV light therapy as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2.

* * *

People are lining up for the SARS-CoV-2 test. This and other motives for testing are producing a body of data. But what does testing do for them personally and those around them? If you are testing for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, then that’s a useful test. You can have some confidence that you have or have not contracted the virus in the past and therefore have acquired immunity. Studies show that nearly everybody who has had this viruses probably now carries immunity to it—temporary, perhaps, but immunity nonetheless. But if you are getting tested to determine whether you have the infection, then you can only know if you did or did not have the virus at the time of the test—assuming the viral load was sufficient to register at the time of the test. If the test is negative, which takes several days to determine, you cannot know if you will get the virus tomorrow or in the days after that or that you had only recently contracted the virus and couldn’t produce a positive test.

In other words, unless you are being tested in order to determine course of treatment or are part of an epidemiological study to improve estimates for community spread and infection fatality rates—that is, you just want to know for your own peace of mind or determine whether you are a threat to others—you’re wasting time and resources. What you will learn will not very useful to you and could be potentially harmful to others. You will think you are not infected when you are and could transmit the virus to others. That’s the danger of operating with a false sense of security. (It’s the reason masks were not recommended until recently and apparently only for the propaganda value in promoting virtue signaling to facilitate controlling the masses. See What Lies Behind the Mask? Technocratic Desire.) SARS-CoV-2 isn’t like a hepatitis C or HIV test. Testing for the presence of this infection should be no different than testing a symptomatic patient suspected of an influenza infection in a doctor’s visit or under circumstances of hospitalization—or as part of an epidemiological study to bolster the validity of prevalence estimates and projections.

I recognize that this phenomenon is driven by anxiety and I have a great deal of sympathy for those who have been victimized by the fear-mongering of media and progressive influencers. At the same time, mass irrationalisms are rooted in deeper disturbances in the cultural system which must be theorized and critiqued. This panic reveals the extent of neuroses in Western societies. Obsession is in itself unhealthy. But there is an interesting side effect: as we are accumulating the statistics we can see that infection rates (as measured by testing) are declining and that the infection fatality rate is falling to influenza-like levels (see Hunkering Down for No Reason). I have been saying this all along.

* * *

Is there any greater representative of the double standard than Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi? No, Speaker Pelosi, the president is not “morbidly obese.” He is 6’3” and around 240 lbs, just slightly over the body mass index of 30 (24 or less is ideal, albeit too much less might be a problem). Trump is some eighty pounds away from morbidly obese—that’s a long way off—or about what they call a Nancy weight (the ice cream is for condescension to the proles not for eating). Trump is a George Foreman; only slightly obese and quite capable of a fight. (Maybe Don King is a better analog in appearance and attitude.)

Case in point, the media is floating Stacey Abrams, loser of Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election (and not by a little), as a possible vice presidential candidate. Abrams a person of color. She is obese. Salon is already accusing the Department of Health and Human Services of racism for noting that obesity is the significant comorbidity with respect to SARS-CoV-2, and that black Americans are disproportionately obese, in part because of lifestyle choices (which you are supposed to blame on white people if you bring it up at all). Abrams would need to be a Republican for any observation about her weight to be anything but racist.

I don’t know if you have picked up on this yet but black Republicans aren’t really black. It’s a priori impossible for a black person to be a Trump supporter—ergo the black Trump supporter is not black. In other words, if the person is Republican, then fat shaming is not a problem whatever the intersection of oppressions. There are different rules for different tribes and only Democrats can say such things without being racist, etc. Douglas Murray has documented the double standard in The Madness of Crowds. It’s a trans-Atlantic phenomenon. Just sticking to this side of the pond, for the candidate running for president on the Democratic ticket, “Me Too” doesn’t apply. You only have to believe the victim if the alleged perpetrator is a Republican. You cannot actually fat shame Donald Trump. And now “some women lie”? It’s like sex in public spaces. Ask Larry Craig about that (Heterosexism and Republican Hypocrisy).

* * *

On Tuesday, May 19, 2020, The Christian Post published: “Pastor dies from coronavirus after laying hands on infected followers, declaring them healed.” Rigobert Che, one of the pastor’s followers, told Voice of America: “This is a pastor that has been laying [on] hands and claiming that he cures COVID-19.”

Che wonders, “If you, the person that claims that you are curing COVID-19, you are dead, what about the fellow people that were affected by the COVID-19? Now that he is dead, I do not know how the people that he was laying hands on will be healed.”

Good question. What are the rules on faith healing? If you heal and keep on living, does this carry more magical power than healing and then dying? The pastor, Frankline Ndifor, certainly could not heal himself. Are faith healers even allowed to heal themselves? Some have thought they can walk on water only to drown or more sensationally by eaten by crocodiles. I confess, I don’t know the answer to this one.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

“There’s a primordial American tradition going back to the founders of being freedom-obsessed . . . to the point where we’re always so afraid of the government coming for us that we’re blind to other types of threats.” —Anand Giridharadas, MSNBC 

While much of Orwell’s description of totalitarianism in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four were drawn from critical observations of the Soviet Union and Stalinism, many of the elements of Orwell’s description—cult of personality, historical denialism/negationism/revisionism, omnipresent mass surveillance, pervasive propaganda, the thought police—are arguably more apt to China under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party led by President Xi Jinping.

These elements also appear, albeit in different form, in US society in the era of corporate rule. For example, the network of social media platforms profoundly shaping opinion in American society are aggressive in their surveillance of what are essentially utilities in a world where social interactions are increasingly virtual (See my article in Project Censored, “Defending the Digital Commons: A Left-Libertarian Critique of Speech and Censorship in the Virtual Public Square.”) Information that does not align with the “official” narrative is labeled as false or disappeared. The disseminators of “false information” are likewise labeled or disappeared (banned and deplatformed). For a recent example, see “Dr. Erickson Downplays the Threat of COVID-19. The Pro-Panic Crowd Turns on the Fog Machine.”

Anand Giridharadas’s complaint about freedom-obsessed Americans is a prevalent sentiment among the cultural managers embodying the social logic of corporatism. Consistent with Sheldon Wolin’s description of the contemporary character of the American shadow-of-a-former-republic in his landmark Democracy Inc., what he calls “inverted totalitarianism,” Americans are now more customers than citizens, a transformation that negates democracy by meeting consumer needs—transforming the republic into a corporate state. As Michael Lind points out in this new book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, the two major parties have become brands of the corporate state that organize and sell partisan sentiment to voters in stage-managed political marketplace. Likewise, the progressive practice of substituting for concrete individuals abstract categories defined by gender, racial, and religious identity populates the political landscape with branded groups competing for power. In such a world, it becomes obvious to such influencers as Anand Giridharadas that individual liberty is problematic.

As much as the corporate media has worked to paint China as the hero of the coronavirus pandemic, collective popular outrage at the chaos the Chinese government has generated by allowing the virus to wash over the planet has been difficult to contain. When governments across the world respond and legitimize the outrage, the media is obliged to report the obvious. But they have to be careful in doing so. To amend Michael Parenti’s observation that the media do not tell us what to think but what to think about, the media also tell us how to think about it. Part of making the world aware of China’s role is Trump’s constant identification of China as the culprit and contrasting his long-standing antagonism with China to the Democratic nominee’s long-standing and friendly relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. I am of course talking about Joe Biden, known to many as Beijing Biden because of his status as a fellow traveler to the CCP. But it’s not only Trump who raises awareness of the CCP. The populist movement in the West, which of course includes Australia, has opened up space for a greater understanding of the role China plays in globalist ambition. Indeed, it is the Anglo sphere that has amplified the voice to the nationalistic fraction of the bourgeoisie. (One of the major player in this is Steve Bannon, former advisor to Trump and currently the host of the popular podcast War Room Pandemic. Bannon is relentless in his criticisms of the CCP and the threat it presents to the world.)

There is a turning in the air (I do not mean here to validate the Strauss–Howe generational thesis). So CNN is out with a story: “China has been trying to avoid fallout from coronavirus. Now 100 countries are pushing for an investigation.” In the story we’re told that Russia has joined around 100 countries backing a resolution calling for an independent inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic. The highlighting of Russia’s entry into the fray is an interesting choice. The story could have identified any number of other countries joining to back a resolution. Context is important. China’s striving to avoid blame for the virus has enjoyed considerable help from corporate media outlets, CNN one among many. Given CNN’s pro-CCP slant, they have to report this development within the establishment frame, namely by suggesting the debunked Trump-Putin conspiracy pushed by the establishment through most of Trump’s first term. These are the not-so-subtle moves of delegitimization. With the tactic of dividing the world between the malevolence of the alleged Trump-Putin alliance (the populist threat), on the one hand, and benevolent US-China cooperation (the globalist wonder), on the other, criticism of China is portrayed as “racist.” So when President Trump called SARS-CoV-2 the “Chinese virus,” reporters seized the opportunity of a novel virus to treat the standard practice of calling a virus after its place of origin in a completely novel way. When Trump told a reporter insinuating that he was responsible for COVID-19 deaths to ask China about those deaths, CNN commentators called the president a racist.

Because of the way this event has devastating the working class, and the fact that more than a billion Chinese have a boot stamping on their human faces (it must not be forever—and nothing is inevitable), it would seem that, if you are truly on the left, which is marked by a choice of comrade, namely the working men and women of the various nations, then you would applaud the move to hold China accountable. Moreover, if you understand the world correctly, then you would also register surprise. This is a hopeful moment. The resolution was drafted by the European Union pushed by Australia. Australia has been particularly bullied by China. The substance of the resolution is an inquiry into China’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis. China says wait until after the pandemic when it will have a vaccine as a gift for humanity. For those who have been following the crisis, justice demands the world confront the Chinese Community Party. Of course, the world should have been confronting China all along, but COVID-19 has punctured the corporate framing of Chinese benevolence, so we must seize the opportunity.

Why should people be surprised? Because the asset classes of several leading countries have worked with China to expand its power and influence, to help it colonize Africa and command global supply chains. Some countries, like the United States, have even been investing in Chinese biotech laboratories, such as the one in Wuhan, China, a possible source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has infected the world. The corporate media, which appears to care more about undermining Trump than about the country they purport to serve, accuses Trump of trying to shift attention to China and away from his own record, which, to hear them tell it, is the worst of any president in history. “This is not normal” is the line to describe Trump without having to engage in any substantive critique of his presidency, which has been, on many levels, remarkably successful, especially in changing the conversation. Beneath the accusations of deflection and racism is a desire to keep up a favorable impression of China and defame populism. But the problem of China can no longer be effectively concealed. And this development promises to put the problem of globalism into stark relief. The crisis has opened Pandora’s box—only the treasure this time is the world’s potential liberation from the curse of globalism. Of course, from the globalist’s perspective, the box is still full of evils, the principle ones being popular democracy and personal liberty. The rabble is as unworthy of these ideals as it is incapable of managing them.

Where will the globalists find their popular forces among the rabble to close the box back up? Enter China’s useful idiots, the foot soldiers of the corporate project to elevate China’s profile and dismiss its critics as racists and conspiracists. I’m talking about the identitarian types who get upset over criticisms of China and its handling of the virus that originated in Wuhan. Who praise China for helping the world. These idiots hail from what some might find a surprising source: the left. But it is not surprising. The situation is decades old. What pretends to be the left these days—and, again, this has been true for decades—are the middle-class kids of the professional and managerial class, woke and postmodern, who drape their bodies in communist chic or the other-becoming and put up big character posters on the walls of their dorm rooms (largely abandoned thanks to the party for whom their idiocy is useful). These faux-leftists run with a much larger set: the identitarians who embrace Marcuse’s warning of oppressive tolerance and stifle fundamental freedoms. 

The character of this ideology is Maoist. They’re the ones who mob intellectuals to recreate the scenes of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, who cheer on antifa as it “keeps our communities safe.” They’re the ones who mock Christians while fetishizing Islam. Their love of China and Iran parallel the alliance. They’re the ones who, not experiencing any real aggression apart from that which they initiate, redefine the faux pas as “microaggression.” They’re the postcolonialist/third worldists who capitalize the word “Black” and not “white” in order to symbolically invert an imagined hierarchy, substituting for concrete individuals abstract categories reified by an ironic essentialism. 

These are the idiots thrown into gear when popular attention turns to the labs in Wuhan as the source of the SARS-2 outbreak, accusing the accusers of racism the same way they did in 2015 when news stories of China’s 50-lane traffic jam nightmare went viral. (Remember that freak-out on social media? That was an early indicator that a deep pathology had sunk into the youth of America. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has usefully analyzed this situation in speeches and essays. You should check it out.) Any criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, no matter how small, no matter how playful, is deeply offensive because is exposes the irrationalism of state bureaucratic totalitarianism—the same state bureaucratic logic that privileges the professional-managerial class into a technocratic structure, the administrative apparatus, that provides an opportunity for power and status. Thus the social logic of corporatism has colonized the lifeworlds of those groomed to take up positions within its structure. Indeed, the university system (which may not, unlike the vast majority of those infected, survive this virus) has been retooled to socialize the young into the necessary roles. This bunch takes up CCP’s rhetoric in obvious and dissimulated forms conflating the party’s interests with the Chinese proletariat. If you attack the CCP and its functionaries, then you attack the Chinese people, as if the CCP could possibly represent the interests of the Chinese proletariat. So why do they boo instead of cheer on the move to hold China responsible for their deceit? It isn’t obvious? Because it’s the progressives who pitch in with the transnational corporate elite striving to establish the New Serfdom.

This is the context in which young people can pretend to be on the left while serving the wishes of technocratic desire. The transnational elite, the globalists, who are denationalizing countries, dismantling Westphalia and the republican machinery the working class require to democratically transform their countries—the globalists who advance the social logic of totalitarian control of the masses. The models of governance practiced by the CCP and the corporate machine of Western civilization converge because they seek the same ends: bureaucratic collectivism in the service of the privilege and leisure of a New Aristocracy, their castles and forts far more grand than that of which any feudal lord dreamt. The social media platforms of the West surveil and censor in the manner of the CCP—the progressive doesn’t merely get in line; he becomes an agent of oppression, cancelling, deplatforming, heckling, mobbing, name calling.

This is not an accidental parallel. The globalist banker/corporate Wall Street fraction of the bourgeoisie, its mouthpiece the mainstream media, especially the agenda setters, The New York Times and The Washington Post, redirect criticism of the CCP for the sake of the asset class they represent, taking up the party’s propaganda that attempts to redefine criticism of a totalitarian ideology as racism against the Chinese people and portraying the sovereign people as freedom-obsessed troublemakers, as if this is a bad thing.  In keeping the transnationalist project going, it is vital for the globalists to disrupt the growing call for accountability, or at least shape it towards their ends. This is why Trump, the only president in decades to stand up to the CCP, is smeared as a racist and Beijing Biden (or somebody like him) must be put in his stead, so that the establishment can continue to work hand-in-hand in a beautiful relationship with China to establish a new world order based on global feudalism.

The pathology manifests itself in a profound blindness to the obvious. Loathing of the West in the West is so deep that some claiming to be on the left see the Western establishment isolating China as part of a long-term imperialist strategy, capitalists up to their old ways, apparently ignorant of the way China and elites of the West actually constitute an alliance, as if an alliance with this character would of their own volition pursue a New Cold War against the Chinese state. This presumes the establishment thinks in nationalist terms when they are really globalist. This is the world we want, not the world as it is—the world they want. To repeat: this deep confusion is fed by hatred for the West taught for decades by departments of our education system in required general education programming, pushed out into residence halls and reenforced by a woke student body. And so it was that when Anand Giridharadas decried America’s obsession of freedom, he prefaced it by repeating the mantra that we are a country founded on genocide and slavery. Former president Barack Obama did the same in his most recent address to graduating seniors.

Be not deceived. Governments have moved to confront China because they needs to deflect attention from the fact that it is globalization that lies at the heart of the woes of the working class while acknowledging the suffering of the people who might rebel against them. The globalist fraction of the bourgeoisie is in the midst of a legitimation crisis and the corporate state must at least appear to listen to the worker as they rebuild corporate state hegemony in the wake of a man-made disaster. Our job on the populist left is to encourage governments to follow through, to go beyond an exercise in hegemony and dismantle the transnational system and chart a return to Westphalia—we have to use this moment to reverse the decades-long project to transform the proletariat into the proles of Orwell’s nightmare. Thus the silver lining of COVID-19 and the overreaction to it, as pathological as that has been in itself, is the potential delegitimization of the transnational project that opens up an opportunity for the left populism that represents the genuine interests of working people, that restores the sovereignty of the people and subordinates the corporation to the popular will and individual liberty. This is why the establishment smears Trump with the fake threats of Putin and Russia while apologizing for the real threat of Xi and China, a brutal totalitarian regime with no equal.

The Conversation is a product of the Scientific-Industrial Complex. In its own words it “arose out of deep-seated concerns for the fading quality of our public discourse—and recognition of the vital role that academic experts can play in the public arena.” That state alone telegraphs its gatekeeping function.

On May 14, The Conversation published Masks help stop the spread of coronavirus—the science is simple and I’m one of 100 experts urging governors to require public mask-wearing, by Jeremy Howard. Howard is listed as a data analyst from the University of San Fransisco. Digging around one discovers that he is indeed an instructor at USF. He is also an entrepreneur, business strategist, and product developer.

Howard is also a scary man. More scary is the fact that he is not alone. There is an army of Howards out there. The claims Howard makes in this article are not about dealing with an emergency situation in which some rights have to be temporarily limited. The desire expressed is nothing short of changing the way we live our daily lives—and, not surprisingly, in the direction of serving the interests of corporate power. What he puts in this article represents a terrifyingly positive regard for the use of state power, an exemplar of authoritarian technocratic desire.

The article starts from a bad premise: it assumes that we want to slow the spread of the virus. But if we want to build herd immunity, and masks prevent that, then we don’t want people to wear masks. We want healthy people to get out there and get the virus, as they have done in Sweden. (See Who’s Safer? and Hunkering Down for No Reason.)

The corporate media tells us that we can learn a lot from China. China is learning a lot about the consequence of aggressively slowing the spread of the virus. According to Business Insider, “China could be hit with a second wave of the coronavirus because of a lack of immunity among residents.”

“Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a leading Chinese epidemiologist and the country’s senior medical adviser, told CNN Saturday that a lack of immunity among Chinese residents could be a cause for concern in spurring another wave of infections.”

In other words, China was so good at locking everything down—because that’s the promise of totalitarianism we should all envy—that the Chinese population lacks the antibodies to protect them from the next wave of SARS-CoV-2.

“A new study found that 99.8% of recovered coronavirus patients that were studied tested positive for antibodies, suggesting that those who have recovered are immune to reinfection.” Remember when Dr. Anthony Fauci said in early April that recovered coronavirus patients will likely be immune to a second wave of infections that’s likely to spread in the early fall? That’s the logic of the Swedish strategy.

So open up and let healthy people get it. Vulnerable populations will be protected when the numbers of people with whom they will interact have immunity from this disease. Yet the science-as-religion folks are rewriting the history of the science of immunology (see Science and Conspiracy: COVID-19 and the New Religion). They are rejecting natural history. Why would they do this?

More on that in a second. But I want to dwell for a moment on the absurdity of all this from a rational standpoint. If we accept the Howard’s premise, then we must also accept an argument that we must wear masks to prevent the spread of influenza viruses and rhinoviruses. After all, these viruses kill people, too. Influenza vaccines are notoriously ineffective. At best they are not very effective. And we don’t have vaccines for rhinoviruses at all. So we must wear masks. We should have been wearing masks all along.

What does natural history tell us? If people contract rhinoviruses and influenza viruses (as well as coronaviruses) healthy immune systems will respond and protect the body. On the other hand, if people are not exposed to these pathogens then their immune systems won’t develop and they will be susceptible to disease. Our immune systems are like our speech and visual systems. They need activity and stimulation to develop properly. Without the necessary inputs, they are undeveloped and we personal health care system is impoverished. Relatively harmless viruses will become deleterious. And up go the demands for more vaccines—because only corporations can save us.

Why would we work against the body in this way? It is almost as if we are to become dependent on corporations for our health rather than on healthy bodies. There might be some money in that. For his part, Howard assumes that we need to stop the spread of the virus until a vaccine is developed. Of course he does.

Reading this stuff one cannot avoid feeling that what influences the choice of premise is the convenient belief that vaccines are the appropriate method for dealing with viruses. I am not suggesting that a SARS virus broke out of a US-funded lab in Wuhan, China working on a vaccine for SARS in order to create a market for a vaccine that looks set to appear in record time. What I am arguing it that we need to fear viruses until there are vaccines for them. In the meantime wear masks and stay home. The mask and your unfreedom will be a reminder that we need a vaccine, that other humans are disease vectors, and that corporations are friend. The world is perilous, but corporations and technocrats will keep your safe. But you have to follow orders and not question authority.

How did humans live for those tens of thousands of years—possibly several hundreds of thousands of years—without masks and vaccines? This is not science. It’s religion; its doctrine is the profit motive. 

What about those people who don’t wear masks? What if they cannot be shamed into wearing them. There will be laws mandating it and police officers to enforce it. Howard brags that he and one hundred other experts called on state governments in an open letter to compel people to wear masks. If there is ever a vaccine, Howard and his ilk will write an open letter calling on state governments to compel that, too. People will be dragged into rooms and jabbed against their will. And the injuries will be rationalized in the light of the common good. They already are.

The experts of the scientific-industrial complex have authoritarian minds. This is clear now. This is the social logic of state corporate totalitarianism.

According to the Wikipedia data most commonly cited by the news and talk shows, as of May 17, 21 people have died in Brown County, Wisconsin from COVID-19. As I have shown on my blog, Freedom and Reason, this number is likely exaggerated given that authorities are counting all person dying with COVID-19, or SARS-CoV-2, the virus underpinning COVID-19, as COVID-19 deaths. But let’s accept this number for the moment. 

Using the same source, the number of confirmed cases in Brown County is, as of May 17, 2,034. We calculate the case fatality rate, or CFR, by dividing the number of deaths by the number of confirmed cases. Doing this, we find that the CFR for Brown County is just over 1%. We know—the media have stopped reporting this and irresponsibly never assume it in their reporting—that based on research by Stanford University and the University of Southern California (as well as conducted by scientists across Europe) that the figure of 2,234 is but a proportion of the actual number of cases in Brown County. This is because most people with the virus are not tested. In other words, the infection fatality rate, or IFR, is lower than the CFR. Much, much lower.

Anybody who reports on the lethality of SARS-CoV-2 who does not tell you this is either ignorant or lying. Why I keep hammering this point is because I want you to know what is actually happening so you can cut through the tangle of ignorance and lies and base your behavior on reason instead of fear.

I am now going to show you that the SARS-CoV-2 viruses is not nearly as dangerous as you have been told and that the lockdown policies are irrational, should never have been implemented, and must be discarded. The good news in Wisconsin is that the state supreme court stopped the extension of Governor Evers’ stay-at-home order. And while it is disappointing that Evers is scrambling to produce a new order that would lockdown the state for 150 days, it seems now that such an order is highly unlikely to survive the court’s judgment. You may have noticed that, with the economy in a tailspin, the lockdown rules are not benign. We cannot end them soon enough. Already the damage they have caused will last for a long time.

Okay. Here we go. Because of population density, we should probably not assume the upward end of the range of these studies, which produce an actual infection rate as much as 85 times higher than the confirmed case counts. I will use a conservative estimate of tenfold, which is much less than the lowest range of these studies (at around 25 times). This is the calculation I worked with back in March when I knew the government and the media were wrong in their statements and reporting about the lethality of the virus. Remember, and sorry to appear boastful, but studies subsequent to my estimates not only confirm the spirit of my calculations, but show that my estimates were well below the estimates of the best studies produced on this subject to date. In other words, I was more right all along then I knew. As I have explained, I did not want to exaggerate the numbers and so my calculations are modest even if I am not.

Based on my method, I am estimating 20,240 actual cases of COVID-19 in Brown county out of a population of 264,542 (as of last year), or 7.65% of the population. Keep in mind, scientists are confident that more than 20% of New York’s population has already had and survived SARS-CoV-2, so my estimate may be too low. At any rate, this calculation yields an IFR of 0.10%. I know you understand basic math, but I must emphasize the result—that’s one-tenth of one percent. The number of people dying from this virus is not one in a hundred or greater, which is what the media have been telling you, but more like one in a thousand. And that is using a conservative estimate.

The IFR is likely much lower than this. Even if we take the lower end of the range the scientific studies are finding and assume around 19% of the population has the virus we find a IFR of 0.04%. The more people actually have this virus, the lower the actual fatality rate. That’s why the number of confirmed cases rising is not a reason to panic, but a reason to celebrate. It means the actual fatality rate is lower than the case fatality rate and, moreover, that the confirmed number of people with antibodies is rising and thus we are progressing towards herd immunity, which is absolutely necessary to acquire if we want to minimize the impact of SARS-CoV-2 when it joins the seasonal flu in the fall. Remember, according to the CDC, influenza is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year in the United States. I am wearing one of my many Sweden caps today to emphasize the point that the Swedes did the right thing by keeping their society open. When American reporters are aghast at Stockholm reporting more than a quarter of its residents having contracted the virus they are ignorant to the fact that this is what Sweden’s epidemiologists wanted to happened.

The news gets even better. Given what I put to the side earlier, that a proportion of those counted as dying from COVID-19 actually died with COVID-19 and not from it, the fatality rate is even lower than that. Moreover, only a small proportion of the population is at risk of dying from the virus. In other words, the IFR for healthy adults and children is vanishingly small. The vast majority of persons who contract SARS-CoV-2 are symptomatic or experience on mild to moderate symptoms with no complications. Most of those who do experience severe symptoms will recover. Those who are elderly or who suffer from compromised immune systems or obesity are at risk and our resources should be focus on protecting these vulnerable populations. One strategy in this area is to more aggressively promote proper nutrition, exercise, and immune-boosting activities. That means going outside, getting plenty of sunlight and fresh air, and engaging in social activities with others. We also need to encourage children to leave their bedrooms and their devices and get outside and play to steel themselves for the future. But right now, for the vast majority of the population, there is no reason not to go to work, attend schools, or recreate outside in all the myriad of ways Americans have done so for decades—without masks and scornful looks.

What becomes clear when one applies basic scientific reasoning to this problem (a capacity that seems to have escaped those who in charge of governing populations and those who hunker down in terror upon hearing their messages and following their orders) is that (a) this virus is not so dangerous that we had to shutter society, (b) now that we know that it is not particularly dangerous we must end the lockdowns immediately, and (c) those who continue to shelter-in-place and demand people wear masks and all the rest of it are operating on the basis of an irrational fear and need to strive to raise the level of their scientific literacy and become better consumers of news.