Author: The FAR Platform

I fear the authorities who claim to know best have made a terrible mistake. In the absence of an effective vaccine (or any vaccine at all) for SARS-CoV-2, they have prevented the population from developing widespread immunity to the virus, what we call “herd immunity” (or “herd protection”). Since this virus is now part of the seasonal mix (that’s right, it’s not going away), this means that the same situation experienced this spring will be re-experienced in the future. If we had to lockdown on account of this virus this time, that is, if the lockdown were necessary, then we will have to lockdown again next time. But we won’t. This suggests that not only was the lockdown unnecessary, but that the whole exercise was counterproductive to the ends of reducing future outbreaks of the virus. A lot of hope is being placed on finding an effective vaccine in record time.

What is “herd immunity”? When an infectious agent enters a population that has no immunity to it, it spreads very quickly. One person can infect many people. Each newly infected people in turn infects more people. And so on. This is called “community spread.” If a sizable proportion of the population is immune to the agent, a limited number of spreaders will in turn slow the spread. For example, if 80% of a population is immune to a virus, only one out of every five persons may contract and spread the virus (exposure does not necessarily mean infection). Without 100% of a population enjoying immunity from the agent, some persons may still contract and spread the virus, but 80% herd immunity means fewer outbreaks of the virus and the virus may be effectively contained. It is generally accepted that between 70% and 90% is a high degree of herd immunity.

There are two ways to achieve immunity to a virus. The first way is to contract the virus and survive it. If a large enough number of persons get the virus and survive, the population will have achieved some degree of herd immunity. The second way to achieve immunity to a virus is an effective vaccine. For example, presently, the efficacy of the seasonal flu vaccine is around 35-40%. Others have immunity from acquiring the flu in previous seasons. The flu is still widespread. Many people get sick from it. And some will die from it. But many people won’t get sick from it thanks to their own immunity and to the immunity of others. So even with lower levels of herd immunity, the detrimental mass effects of a virus are mitigated.

Keep in mind that some viruses are more stable than other viruses. DNA viruses, such as chickenpox (varicella), mutate rather slowly. One may acquire life-time immunity after contracting and surviving a DNA virus. RNA viruses, such as influenza, mutate more rapidly. Exposure provides time-limited protection. However, not all RNA viruses mutate as quickly as others and exposure to any strain may provide some protection to mutants of that strain. This is why the flu vaccine has limited efficacy in providing herd immunity and becomes less effective over time while, at the same time, those who acquired a flu strain in years past may have immunity for this strain in future flu seasons. For example, the Hong Kong flu, influenza A (H3N2), while devastating during the 1968-1969 flu season, continues to circulate without the accompanying devastation. Many of us who lived through that virus, however much our immunity to it is diminishing over time with the mutation of the virus, acquired some degree of immunity to the Hong Kong flu. Moreover, re-exposure to the virus boosts our immunity response as our bodies learn to recognize variations on the original pathogen.

And this brings us the problem of the response of many governments to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The world population is 7.8 billion people. The number of confirmed cases of the virus is 1.9 million. Of those confirmed cases, 121,987 have died. That leaves 1.8 million who, if they all survive, with possible immunity. That’s 0.023 percent of the world population. In the United States, which has been hit harder by this virus than most countries, with 328.2 million people, and 563,820 confirmed cases (after subtracting deaths), the percent with possible immunity is 0.17 percent. That is obviously far below the levels we need to manage future outbreaks of COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. 

We know that most people who get the virus are asymptomatic (they are exposed and produce antibodies but do not develop the disease COVID-19) or have only mild symptoms. The evidence suggests that this accounts for eight out of every ten persons. Most of those persons are not tested. Moreover, there are some with severe symptoms, that is, those who experience a flu-like illness, who are also not tested. They recover without medical intervention. Let’s suppose that there is ten times the number of confirmed cases in the population who will become infected and acquire immunity. That takes us to 1.17 percent herd immunity, still far below what is needed to limit future outbreaks.

In other words, the lockdown has prevented the achievement of anything close to a desirable level of herd immunity. It seems to me that the smart thing would have been to identify those who were at special risk from the virus and protect them while allowing the virus to burn through the world population. This would have relegated the virus to the common viral mix the human population endures every year without calamity. 

One argument for the lockdown wasn’t so much to prevent people from getting the SARS-CoV-2 virus per se, but to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to save hospitals from being overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases. While this seems reasonable, and many are lauding the lockdown’s accomplishment over against the apocalyptic predictions, getting through the current period with a limited number of infections, represents a pyrrhic victory. Politicians and pundits love the war metaphors, so while we will have won the battle, we are facing much greater loses in the next season of war, which will cover many more months than the period encompassing the present pandemic. The question we should be asking of the official rational is why weren’t hospitals prepared to deal with COVID-19? But this is aside from the question raised by this essay. Or, perhaps, I might put it this way to bring this into consideration: why did we sacrifice acquiring herd immunity for the sake of the failure of the medical-industrial complex?

For those of you who have been reading my blog of late, you know that I am critical of the societal reaction to the Wuhan virus. In this essay, I want to discuss several issues that have me troubled, foremost establishment and popular apologia for the Chinese Communist Party.

First, it is clearly the case that the Chinese Communist Party suppressed information about the virus and allowing infected persons to leave Wuhan and travel the world. Despite evidence of a novel virus in November 2019, as late as mid-January, Chinese officials were denying or downplaying human-to-human transmission of the virus and censoring doctors and scientists, for example Dr. Li Wenliang, who himself became a victim of the virus altering being accused of “spreading rumors” for alerting other doctors about the appearance of a new form of pneumonia. By the time China finally publicly confirmed human-to-human transmission, it was already too late to stop the global spread of the virus. And China continues to deceive by censoring research on the origins of the virus, compelling any work to be reviewed by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

China’s lies were amplified in a disinformation campaign organized by the World Health Organization (WHO), led (since 2017) by Ethiopian Tedros Adhamon, whose praise of the totalitarian regime’s respond to the virus has been effusive. In the face of the obvious, that had China acted sooner the frequency of cases in Wuhan could have been reduced by up to 95 percent (University of Southampton), Tedros identified China’s actions as a model for the world. This was quite a turnaround from the WHO’s crisis of China during the SARS outbreak in 2003, when that organization criticized China for its obfuscations and lack of preparation. For its part, the WHO under Tedros did not declare a global health emergency until a week after China confirmed human-to-human transmission. It would take more than a month before the WHO would declare COVID-19 a pandemic. At this point, the virus had spread to nearly every continent. 

In an email to The Atlantic’s Kathy Gilsinan, White House trade advisor Peter Navarros writes, “Even as the WHO under Tedros refused to brand the outbreak as a pandemic for precious weeks and WHO officials repeatedly praised the [Chinese Communist Party] for what we now know was China’s coordinated effort to hide the dangers of the Wuhan virus from the world, the virus spread like wildfire, in no small part because thousands of Chinese citizens continued to travel around the world.” When Trump criticized the WHO, the media quickly told the story as the efforts of a president to deflect criticisms of his response. “Where were the warning signs? Who should have blown the whistle?” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo asked at a recent daily briefing. “The president has asked this question, and I think he’s right. The president’s answer is the World Health Organization should’ve been blowing the whistle.”

Why didn’t the WHO blow the whistle? It is useful to know the background of Tedros, whose official title at WHO is Director-General. Tedros is a member of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and associated with the Ethiopian People’s Liberation Front, openly Marxist-Leninist organizations until the demise of the Soviet Union led to the abandonment of communist rhetoric. In October 2017, in an early indicator of Tedros’ quality of judgment, the Director-General appointed Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabi, notorious for human rights abuses, to serve as WHO Goodwill Ambassador. It was payback for Mugabi having engineered Tedros’s candidacy for the position. This decision led the editor-in-chief of the prominent medical journal Lancet to call Tedros “Dictator-General.” 

The headline of Gilsinan’s Atlantic article (“How China Deceived the WHO”) attempts to portray the organization as a victim of Chinese deception. But Tedros’ background and his actions suggest otherwise. Taiwan notified Tedros at the end of December that a new form of pneumonia had been identified in Wuhan and that there was human-to-human transmission. In January, Tedros met with Chinese leaders, including President Xi Jinping, about would be identified as SARS-CoV-2. The WHO stated in a January 14 tweet: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.” That tweet echoes a declaration by the Wuhan Health Commission. Indeed, Berkeley research scientist Xiao Qiang, who closely monitors official statements coming from China, finds the WHO’s messaging routinely echoes those of the Chinese government. In February 2020, Tedros stated that there was no need to address the matter in the manner taken by US President Donald Trump, who, on February 2 imposed travel restrictions on China, as it would interfere with “international trade and travel.” Tedros said: “Such restrictions can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.” Throughout this period, Tedros praised China for its containment of the virus. In April, in response to criticisms of Tedros and the WHO by US President Donald Trump, Tedros admonished critics of his leadership with this highly disturbing statement: “If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it.”

Second, I am skeptical of the approach the government has taken in terms of its purported efficacy, effects, and ambitions. Sweden is pursuing a less restrictive model without the consequences suggested by those who push the more restrictive model. Health officials are well aware of the fact that, for most children and adults, infection from this virus is asymptomatic or mild. I have reported this on this blog. In the United States, most people could have continued to go about their lives, learning and working. And living. They would in the course of the pandemic acquire herd immunity, which would reduce the frequency and severity of future outbreaks. This virus is now part of the viral mix that circulates the planet every year. The practice of social isolation has severely damaged the economy, which itself comes with health effects, as well as imposing heavy emotional and psychological burdens populations.

Governments have not before responded to a virus in this manner. Governments have, with little public resistance, expanded police and surveillance apparatuses. Once instituted, such constraints on liberty are rarely lessened. Those who violate shelter-at-home and quarantine rules are being punished, forced to wear ankle bracelets. Dr. Anthony Fauci has suggested an immunity registry. Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy is advocating the idea. Why stop with this virus? Why not have certificates for every virus antibodies? What if someone forgets and leave their certificate at home? Should individuals be chipped? Or how those little tattoo animals get? Visible under a certain frequency of light? Like 9-11, this virus represents an opportunity to pull a lot of things off the shelf. House arrest, cell phone tracing, mandatory vaccination, and antibody registries are just a few of them.

Third, the way the media and governments have presented the facts of this virus feeds the hysteria that governments need to obtain compliance from the public for the shuttering of social life. For example, by reporting a case death rate in light of confirmed cases instead of a realistic model of the number of actual cases, which is likely at least 10-20 times greater than confirmed cases, the lethality of the virus has been exaggerated. Even the observation that with more testing death rates will decline is spun as if more positive cases would make the threat of the virus even greater. Once a narrative of deadly pestilence is up and running, suggesting greater numbers without at the same time helping the public understand that this makes the virus more ordinary fuels panic. Another example is the routine failure to use proportionality in reporting. The big headline of late is that the death toll in United exceeds the total death toll in Italy. But the reporting failed to remind the public to keep in mind that the population of the United States is much larger than Italy. Same with Spain. Proportionally, the US death toll is about a sixth of that in Italy and Spain. 

Anticipating that some will accuse me of downplaying the severity of this health threat, I have said all along that this virus is deadly to the elderly, those with comorbidities (such as high blood pressure and type II diabetes), and those with compromised immune systems. At the same time, influenza is deadly, yet we have never shuttered our society on account of this. The Hong Kong flu of 1968 (influenza A [H3N2]), to take a notable example, killed some 100,000 persons in the United States alone (around a million worldwide). Like the Wuhan virus, most deaths were among those 65 years of age or older. H3N2 continues to circulate as a seasonal influenza A virus. The 2017-2018 flu season also took many tens of thousands of lives in the US (H3N2 was the predominant strain). Of course I am not saying that this virus is the flu. It’s not. They’re different viruses by definition. What I am comparing is the response to viruses. As a sociologist, I am trained to ask about the societal reaction piece. Why is the reaction so radically different this time? 

Recently the media prompted Dr. Anthony Fauci to confess that an earlier lockdown of US society probably would have saved lives. It’s an obvious answer. If you believe that the mitigation regime advocated by Fauci saved lives, and it is intuitive for anybody who understands the germ theory of disease that it would, ignoring everything else, then you would have to say that, the earlier the intervention, the more lives would be saved. This response is so obvious that to ask the question of Fauci is a bit dishonest. That is, there is an ulterior motive here: in the current political climate, the no-duh answer is meant to be used against a president the establishment media has endeavored to delegitimize, first claiming Trump was a Russian agent, then claiming he sought help from Ukraine to destroy his eventual 2020 rival, currently former Vice President Joe Biden. But whether the federal government could have acted earlier depends on the information on hand. A lot of countries were caught flat-footed by this. Why? Because the Chinese Communist Party was determined to suppress vital information. The question is part of an effort by the mainstream media to lay at Trump’s doorstep the connivance of the establishment to hold China blameless for its machinations.

The establishment White House press corps is, frankly, embarrassing. It’s not just about going back to work—what they constantly harp on when Trump talks about ending or lessening the lockdown. It’s about getting back to life. The question, “Should Americans have to choose between health and work?” is asking “Should Americans have to choose between health and life.” I guess you don’t have to choose between them and you can be a germaphobic agoraphobic shut-in (hope you have an independent source of wealth to draw on). But most of us don’t want to live like that.  Establishment journalists ask questions as if we will never get back to life. “Will cases spike when we get back to life?” Of course they will. These people act as if humans have never had to deal with a virus before. People contract and die from the flu. Higher per case death rate with the flu, in fact. Do we shut down life on account of it? I haven’t seen that before. The same logic that says we cannot get back to life because people will get a virus means that we can never get back to life. The level of absurdity is astonishing. Orwellian double consciousness.

Finally, apologia for the Chinese Community Party is the piece that has me most troubled today. That so many Americans, from the establishment commentariat down to our young people, so readily apologize for the action of the Chinese government is a testament to the social logic of globalization and the corruption of common sense by postmodernist thinking. For the Chinese Communist Party, truth is subjective, serving whatever ends the party sees fit. The CCP is the epitome of the postmodernist regime. Maoism is the foundation of identity politics and New Left ideology. This is where this “woke” rhetoric comes from. It’s anti-Western in fundamental attitude. It’s Third worldism run amok. It’s why Tedros can be such an appealing figure. For those who loathe the West, an African is a powerful substitute for an objective Director-General. We are being told that China was wounded by Western imperialism, so who is the West to complain about the behavior of its totalitarian government? In other words, we had this coming to us. We hear the same nonsense when the West highlights China’s human rights record, which is appalling. What about the West’s human rights record? They decry. Please. There’s no comparison.

When I hear about how the United States’ response to the virus is the worst, but that China handled it brilliantly, and any criticism of the Chinese Communist Party is portrayed as an attack on the Chinese people and therefore “xenophobic” and “racist,” and that we should trust the China-centric WHO, my mind, in search of an explanation for such insanity, turns to the images of mobs of social justice warriors at American universities surrounding professors and hurling woke slogans at them. Such scenes are reminiscent of something else that many of you may remember: Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The parallel is not coincidental.

The New Left fascination with Maoism, anti-colonialism, and Thirdworldism in the 1960s-70s had an enduring effect on left-wing thinking. In time, leftwing ideologues became cultural managers at universities pushing anti-Western sentiment in various programs and administrative offices. If you’ve even been compelled by your employment contract to participate in a “diversity and inclusion” seminar, to learn about “microaggressions,” to be accused of “white privilege,” made to feel guilty for being of European ancestry, to go through what is essentially a reeducation camp, then you have experienced Maoism. Elites have joined regressive leftwing ideas with transnational corporate ambitions. The culture industry encourages the masses to mock and marginalize those who ask why their leaders would sell out the working classes of the West, to smear their comrades as “nativists” and “nationalists.” A new generation of politically-active Americans have been swimming in a profound anti-American stew that serves up the interests of globalists as progressive politics. The New Left has produced a menagerie of useful idiots.

Those who warned about the perils of globalization and international finance in the 1990s were branded “conspiracists” and “antisemites.” Remember that? Folks were waking up from a long nap only to be gas lit. Black helicopters.

Same with those who warned about the surveillance state and corporate domination. They were “diagnosed” with “paranoia.” Tinfoil hats. 

Now those who observe that the United States is indeed dependent on its most powerful rival, China, and the global supply chain it engineered under the cover of transnationalism are accused of “xenophobia” and “racism.” 

Same with those who ask why Western governments would subject their workers to cheap foreign labor. Do folks think capitalists are replacing native-born workers with foreign labor out of humanitarianism? They’re doing it to maximize profits and crush labor. How did they make those on the left not only okay with that but eager to virtue signal about it?

Have folks figured out yet that such accusations exploit New Left weaknesses and postmodern stupidities to suppress and derail working class concerns and interests? The left today is pathetic.

“Look at my mask. I’m such a good person.”

When war and surveillance and so on are not lines in the sand for the progressives who tell the left to vote Democrat to preserve the possibilities of progressivism, one must realize how deeply co-opted those whom you call your comrades have truly become. Progressivism is the problem. 

Without a left-wing populist-nationalist movement, the United States is doomed. The Democratic Party right down the Squad exists to prevent such a movement. The so-called “democratic socialists” are sheepdogs. The American worker is being absorbed into a global system of corporate domination. It has been absorbed into a global system of technocratic control. The system has totalitarian aspirations.

The present situation is the wet dream of the neoclassical economist. When are folks going to wake up from the nightmare? Remember the Chicago school economist telling us how much more important markets are than democracy? How commonwealth must give way to private power? We are going through authoritarian exercise to deepen the conditioning to that principle. They are enclosing everything. 

That sounds “paranoid,” doesn’t it? Good dog. 

All things considered, I would rather have personal liberty than a progressive police state that checks my thinking. Today, I live under the twin evil of corporate capitalist rule and Orwellian control over language—thought control. 

I reject contemporary left-wing politics. It’s worse than stupid. It’s anti-worker and anti-liberty. I say this as a Marxist and a socialist. I am not with you. I am a libertarian.

Based on the most recent CDC influenza report, period starting September 29, 2019 and ending March 28 2020, there were 246,842 positive specimens (influenza types A and B) and 24,000 deaths. That’s a 9.7% death rate. Of course, that not how the media report the statistic. The media reports the extrapolated numbers from the CDC, which knows that most influenza cases are not tested.

There is a slogan out in the social media world that SARS-CoV2 is not influenza. This is a red herring. I am making a point about media framing and threat selection. It’s like how we might ask why the United States bombs Libya for human rights violations when Saudi Arabia carries out human rights violations with impunity. I know a lot of people don’t ask that question, but it is the kind of question I ask all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear progressives asking this question.

This virus is not a type of flu, of course. It’s a coronavirus, which is about 5-15% of the viral mix every year. However, like influenza and rhinoviruses, coronaviruses are one of the pathogens associated with pneumonia. That’s what we’re talking about: pneumonia cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

Coronaviruses are not new. We know quite a lot about them. SARS and MERS are the more famous coronaviruses that jumped from animal reservoirs and made people very sick, so we have had years of experience with the serious forms. SARS and MERS were much more serious than the present virus, which is why they had trouble spreading. To be successful, viruses need to avoid killing too many hosts. SARS-CoV-2 is, for most people who test positive asymptomatic (perhaps because of immunity?) or very mild, so it spreads more successfully. Like rhinoviruses. Most of the people we know have probably had one or more. 

To the extent that these are pathogens implicated in pneumonia, that is what is relevant to the point I am making, which actually means to make a comparison not of the virus families but to the variable response by governments and media in light of their relative lethal character. If the reasons given for the extreme reaction of governments, media, and the public hold for coronavirus, then they should hold for influenza. But they don’t and so we need to ask why. 

If influenza was reported in the way this coronavirus is being reported, then we should be much more worried about the flu, as it spreads more widely and kills more people—at least according to the CDC and the WHO. Indeed, authorities were talking about implementing some of the same mitigation strategies with the 2009 swine flu—(H1N1)pdm09—virus, but they rolled out only some of those measures. One of the particular threats identified was the risk to younger people. But swine flu turned out to be rather ordinary. In a normal flu season, the global deaths tolls are between 250,000 and 500,000. The numbers of confirmed cases of swine flue (less than two millions) and deaths (less than 20,000) were much lower (keep in mind that other viruses killed people, too). But when you estimate an upper limit of 1.4 billion cases worldwide, the death rates drop dramatically. 

So the question is why the reporting on SARS-CoV-2 isn’t using the same order of magnitude as typical estimates. If we take the upper estimates for 2009 for H1N1, the estimated number of infections is 700 times greater than the number of positive specimens. I only need to use a factor of 10 to bring the COVID-19 deaths to less than one percent. If I use a factor of 700 it looks like a normal flu season. That is an important observation. It’s an obvious one, which is why it is so astounding that we don’t hear about all the time. Why are we relying on confirmed cases to calculate death rates in this case but not in the other case?

Saying that this bug is not the flu is not a useful point. It’s a coronavirus and not an influenza viruses. What is useful to point out is that both viruses—as well as rhinoviruses—are causes of lower respiratory illness, both pneumonia (which often involves secondary bacterial infection) and ARDS and that threat selection and societal reaction are variables in explaining an unprecedented moral panic that will impose extraordinary hardship on working people.

When we think critically about frames and threat selection we engage comparative thinking. We have to compare the response to coronavirus (this particular one) to the response to other RNA viruses, such as influenza and rhinoviruses. It’s similar to comparing wars or revolutions or genocides. We’re talking about viruses. SARS-CoV-2 isn’t the Andromeda Strain. It isn’t terrorism. Coronaviruses, like influenza and rhinoviruses are a cause of pneumonia. Moreover, they’re RNA viruses.

We have to ask the critical question: Why is the death rate from influenza not calculated using the same criteria the media uses to calculate the death threat for SARS-CoV-2? If the media did that, influenza would have a much higher death rate than SARS-CoV-2. More than twice as many people have died from influenza than this particular coronavirus this pneumonia season. Are those deaths unimportant? Why didn’t we shutter society and throw millions of people out of work (to lose their homes and their health care) to save persons from influenza? Pneumonia from influenza disproportionately kills old people, yet we keep open the economy. Where is the virtue signaling mob shaming folks for going about their lives while old people die from influenza? 

Influenza is a global health problems, killing tens of thousands across the planet every year. In 2009, it killed between 150,000 to 575,000 globally. Do the comparison. You have to ask (well you don’t have to, but it seems to me that thinking people would) why this virus and not the other virus? You might suggesting I am diminishing the significance of coronavirus. Why are you diminishing the significance of influenza?

Other questions critical thinkers ask:

What are the consequences of these extreme mitigation measures—extraordinary police and surveillance measures, extreme deprivation of individual liberty, shutting people off from human contact, many in the twilight of their lives, and a host of other problems along lines of livelihood, freedom, emotional and psychological well being, etc. Who benefits from the crisis? Who loses from it? 

Why were hospitals so unprepared for this pandemic? Decades of privatization and the social logic of bureaucratic rationalization have led to drastic cost-cutting measures to increase profits for shareholders. The logic of Fordism shapes the system, the logic of just-in-time production. As a fairly bad flu seasons wound down, some hospitals were unable to handle the case load from another virus. And this should really trouble us considering the 2017-2018 flu season sent up huge red flags about readiness. By treating the present situation as unusual, that the virus is some unique demonic force, the frame functions to mask the failure of the medical-industrial complex to be prepared for an out-of-season crisis.

So here’s my question to those who get bent out of shape when the response to this virus is compared to the response to other viruses: Why do you think we shouldn’t ask comparative questions about public response to viral pathogens? Some folks clearly think we shouldn’t because they pronounce the comparison moot. Why does questioning societal reactions so trouble you? It’s what we do in social science all the time.

These are a rhetorical question, of course. I know why the slogan is being disseminated. We aren’t supposed to do the comparative work since this works against portraying the virus as a unique existential threat. By making it a novel threat, it frees governments to pull things off the shelf they have been wanting use for a long time. The justifies actions without any real popular discussion. And it creates a public that will clamor for vaccines and antivirals.

There is an interest in ramping up panic. Remember the case of Wolfgang Wodarg (Council of Europe) who, in 2009, pointed out that major pharmaceutical companies had organized a “campaign of panic” to press WHO into declaring a pandemic to move product. If a vaccine is developed (and there will be more than one product), given the panic, there will be no shortage of customers. I have to be honest, I don’t trust the corporate media to operate in the public good. They are corporations selling audiences to other corporations.

There’s a very good reason for being concerned about how governments and corporations frame such things. In 1976, pharmaceutical corporations and governments around the world, including the US government, manufactured a swine flu epidemic. Despite the fact that there were no confirmed cases of swine flu anywhere on the planet outside of five soldiers at Fort Dix, a US military facility in New Jersey (a suspicious occurrence in itself), the government rolled out a massive vaccination program accompanied by an extensive propaganda campaign involving print and television media. Scores of Americans were injected with the experimental swine flu vaccine.   

One consequence of the program was scores of people suffering vaccine injury, several hundred of them developing a sometimes lethal and always devastating paralytic condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome, or GBS.  The government, shamefaced, had to cancel the program. To this day, mainstream news organizations continue to run interference for vaccine manufacturers by denying the link between vaccines and GBS.  However, as Dr. Meryl Nass, an expert on vaccines and bioterrorism, points out, at least ten separate studies of the 1976 swine flu vaccine confirmed the link.

Ah, the war metaphor.

“Front lines.” “Coming ashore” “Hunker down.” “The trenches.” “Under siege.” Such phrases are rampant in the COVID-19 narrative. We are “at war” with a virus. These metaphors are used to anthropomorphize danger. And to manufacture glory.

In war, the soldier is lionized. The hero fighting for your freedom and security. Thank him for his service and sacrifice. He stands on that wall. Better be grateful. Don’t look beyond the soldier in the field to the forces that put him there.

The military-industrial complex needs resources and control over the narrative. Skepticism about the prudence and rightness of military action is shouted down with “Support our troops!” Dissension endangers the order that makes freedom (profits) possible. The soldier cries that the government ties his hands. And sells him short. “Let us fight the war on our terms. You do your part.”

The police borrow the language. “War on crime.” “War on drugs.” “War on cops.” We’re living in the era of the soldier-cop.

In pestilence, the healthcare worker is similarly exalted. Trump is a “war-time president.” Our heroes are on the “front lines” fighting for our health and lives.

The medical-industrial complex needs resources and control over the narrative. Free them to navigate the battlefield on their terms—which means empowering technocrats to govern the population’s movements. Don’t question the judgment of healers and scientists in the service of the “war effort.” Get in line.

Skeptics are heretics, dangers to health and well being. They’re like the peacenik.

Pharmaceutical corporations managing the scenes? What are you? A conspiracy theorist? You fancy this a plot emanating from the Deep State? You really think these brave soldiers would exaggerate a viral threat to sell their tests, their therapies, their vaccines?

Whatever else they do, and their sacrifices are noted (as are those of who die on actual battlefields), they’re fighting for the sake of corporate profits moving under the cover of glory. The medical establishment has its diagnostics and nostrums. Face masks and latex gloves are the flags and ribbons of war. Don them, brave citizen, and proudly show your uncritical support for the “war” against the “invisible enemy.” Share pictures of yourself properly uniformed on Facebook and Instagram so your friends thank you for your patriotism. Tie light blue ribbons around the tree in your neighborhood. Scold those who don’t adhere to doctrine and ritual.

Threat selectivity and fallacious comparisons are signs of propaganda. The capitalist state and the corporate media select the threats “we” fight (the criminals “we” suppress and so on). Propaganda is never an objective assessment. There, the determination of threats is ideological, in line with political-economic need, and without regard to truth. Promoting fear, the moral entrepreneur conditions and induces the public to demand action.

It is much the same with the medical-industrial complex as it is with the military-industrial complex. Medical and pharmaceutical corporations, with the government and the media at their backs—and in tow—select profitable pathogens and raise awareness (hysteria) about them. The formula: manufacture danger and then meet the threat-demand with products and services.

The companies have their vaccines and antivirals for influenza—and profit handsomely from them. The efficacy of these products are questionable, but they have them. By February 2018, a particular bad season for influenza, Sanofi had raked in three-quarters of a billion dollars in profits, and GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine business had climbed about 76 percent (“U.S. Flu Season Reaches Peak, Vaccine Profits Climb.”). A network of pharmaceutical companies produced 12 different vaccines for the 2017-18 flu season (and vaccines are but a division among divisions that pump out a myriad of chemical preparations every year). The Centers on Disease Control (CDC) dutifully reported (estimates of) tens of millions of flu cases, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and tens of thousands of deaths.

The present pathogen, the novel coronavirus, a member of a family of viruses that are always present in the viral mix every year, represents a great profit potential in vaccines and antivirals. (See “When a Virus Goes Viral.”) Seemingly to aid the manufacture of danger, the typical method of estimation has gone to the wayside, and death rates are calculated from confirmed cases. It’s terrifying.

Rhinoviruses—the other major cause of cold-like illness—are not a profit potential. They are “common.” But it won’t take much going forward to select one them (A, B, or C), reveal it to be the culprit behind pneumonia deaths (which it is is) and “we” can enjoy vaccines and antivirals for that, too.

Product designers: “How will they know they want this?”

CEOs: “We will tell them what they want.”

A recent CNBC headline warned: “Coronavirus could kill more Americans than WWI, Vietnam or Korean wars, White House projection shows.” We are at war. Using CDC’s material, CNBC could have reported that every year pneumonia/influenza kills roughly the same number of Americans who died in the Korean War. During the 2017-18 flu season, nearly as many Americans died from pneumonia/influenza as died in the Vietnam war (CNBC inflates the number of dead Americans from that imperialist adventure). Where are the great flu pandemics on this list? Spanish? Shanghai? Hong Kong?

And this headline: “Over 3,000 people have died in US from coronavirus, surpassing 9/11 death toll,” from The New York Post. “COVID-19 [it sounds like a terrorist cell or kick murder squad] has killed at least 3,170 Americans, surpassing the 2,977 victims who were killed in the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and four hijacked planes on September 11.” The article continues: “The 9/11 attacks had been the deadliest event in the continental US since the Japanese killed 2,403 Americans at Pearl Harbor in 1941.”

But viruses don’t mean to kill you. They have no agency. They don’t make war. Doctor are soldiers unless they are “soldier-doctors.”

I will leave you with this bit of wisdom from one of my favorites intellectuals, Douglas Murray.

The virus first known as the Wuhan virus or Chinese virus, then the 2019 novel coronavirus, is technically called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The disease is called the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Like influenza viruses and rhinoviruses, coronaviruses are associated with potentially severe respiratory infections. This essay identifies problems with the reporting of this virus by government sources and media outlets.

Rhinoviruses (HRVs) were discovered in the 1940s and are estimated to be responsible for more than one-half of all cold-like illnesses. There are three genetically distinct HRV groups (A, B, and C) and they are traditionally associated with upper respiratory tract infection, otitis media, and sinusitis. However, calling them “cold-like” downplays their severity in the public mind. They are, in fact, recognized as a lower respiratory tract pathogen. As such, the represent a serious threat to individuals with asthma, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems. There are presently neither vaccines nor (to my knowledge) antiviral therapies for rhinoviruses. The CDC puts it this way: “The common cold is normally a mild illness that resolves without treatment in a few days. And because of its mild nature, most cases are self-diagnosed. However, infection with rhinovirus or one of the other viruses responsible for common cold symptoms can be serious in some people. Complications from a cold can cause serious illnesses and, yes, even death.” That is, it is a source of flu-like illness.

Like rhinoviruses, coronaviruses are a family of viruses. There are many more types and they widespread in many animal species. They are usually associated with mild to moderate upper-respieratory tract illnesses, i.e., the common cold. However, like rhinoviruses, coronavirus are also a lower respiratory tract pathogen. At least three times during this century, serious coronavirus disease outbreaks have occurred as a result of a coronavirus jumping from non-human species to humans: SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003, MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) in 2012, and, currently, COVID-19. All three were associated with panics, but the panic over COVID-19 is historically outstanding.

We hear a lot about how SARS-CoV-2 is uniquely contagious. “Everybody’s catching it,” I was recently told. But the numbers reported so far are far less than the numbers of influenza cases every year (tens of millions in the United States alone), or rhinoviruses every year, which are more common than the flu, as everybody knows intuitively. The common cold rampages every season (viruses want cooler temperatures, shorter days, and people congregating in enclosed spaces), and they’re responsible for scores of lethal respiratory ailments. Yet we hear nothing about that in the media even though it is recorded in the medical literature. And you won’t hear in the media that many of these cold-like illnesses are caused by the coronaviruses that represent between 5% to 15% of the viral mix that circulates every year. You do hear about the flu, of course, but the stories are not framed like COVID-19. The CDC estimates an average of up to 60 thousand influenza deaths every year. Whether you or I have lost somebody to the flu, tens of thousands of people have. Every year. In fact, far more people likely die from influenza viruses than from corona viruses. Yet we do not shutter society and socially isolate on account of these lethal threats.

I don’t want to be misunderstood, SARS-CoV-2, like influenza A and B (the prevailing influenza virus this season is our old 2009 nemesis influenza A [H1N1pdm09]), is a serious health challenge. But in light of the fact that we have these challenges every year, we have to ask what is the novel circumstances that ask us to risk potentially long term damage to the economy, measures that deprive people, especially tens of thousands of people at the end of their days, of a quality social life and the company of their loved ones. Life is more than keeping hearts beating as long as possible. Life is about living. For thousands of people, they don’t have that much living left. We are also being asked to give up a considerable degree of personal liberty. Indeed, it is rather astonishing to see the way a cult of safety has produce so many people prepared to sacrifice a lot of liberty for a false sense of security. Why false? Because viruses have burdened mankind and our fellow species since time immemorial. And they won’t let up any time soon. Probably not ever.

The problems with the government and media hysteria were clear from the beginning of this panic if one worked logically through evidence and inference. Readers would be astonished by the numbers of people who die from rhinoviruses every year. Indeed, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), “rhinovirus is an underappreciated cause of severe pneumonia in vulnerable groups” (see Hai and associates 2012). The WHO estimates that some two million children die each year from acute respiratory tract infection associated with rhinoviruses. It’s not listed as the cause of death. But Coronavirus is. That’s because we now have a test for it. Moreover, it was not widely reported in the media at the time, nor has it been brought in the context of the current situations, but up to 80,000 people died of flu in the winter 2017 in the United States. That is the highest death toll in 40 years. A lot of those who died were elderly.  “I’d like to see more people get vaccinated,” the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, told the Associated Press in September 2018. Like to see more people get vaccinated? That’s it? Why didn’t he say that we should shut down the economy and shelter in place to save tens of thousands of lives? Was Redfield asked about which older person in his life he was prepared to sacrifice to keep society open?

As testing SARS-CoV-2 has expanded, the proportional death rate from COVID-19 has dropped. A lot. This was expected. The vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or presenting with mild symptoms. The problem with government and media reporting mobility and mortality in this situation is that they’re taking the death rates from confirmed cases. Those who have cold-like illness from SARS-CoV-2, or who have no symptoms at all, are not likely to be tested. It is widely recognized by scientists that the number of unreported cases of SARS-CoV-2 are 10-20 times greater than the numbers of confirmed cases. If we take the 10 percent figure, the calculations put SARS-CoV-2 at flu mortality rates. Why, for example, are Germany’s numbers so much better than those of Italy or Spain? “The biggest reason for the difference, infectious disease experts say, is Germany’s work in the early days of its outbreak to track, test and contain infection clusters. That means Germany has a truer picture of the size of its outbreak than places that test only the obviously symptomatic, most seriously ill or highest-risk patients.” If we tested a large representative sample we would find the death rate to be lower everywhere. Moreover, in tests for the suspected virus, most come back negative, which means others viruses are making people sick, in some cases, very sick. The media isn’t telling you the numbers of those who die from rhinoviruses and other flu-like illnesses. Moreover, it is one thing to die with SARS-CoV-2. It is another to die from it.

I just visited the CDC website. Based on a sample of 8.5% of the population, it is estimated that, for flu season 2019-2020, there are between 38–54 million flu illnesses (various influenza viruses), 18–26 million flu medical visits, 400–730 thousand flu hospitalizations, and 24–62 thousand flu deaths. This is from March 27, 2020. This is real-time surveillance. (Supposedly.) Why isn’t the media curious about this? Why aren’t they informing the public? This is an extremely important question to pursue. If coronavirus turns out to be as dangerous as we were told—so dangerous that we had to wreck the economy to mitigate its burden—it will be said that the swift action of the United States government prevented the full extent of the pandemic predicted. Indeed, the precautionary/preventative action will need to have produced dramatic effects to derail the apocalyptic forecast by the government and media. But given the magnitude of that effect, why would the CDC project essentially the same flu numbers as they have over the last decade? If shutting down society will sharply reduce the coronavirus pandemic, then it must sharply reduce the numbers associated with influenza, or seasonal flu, since the transmission mechanism is the same. The order of magnitude should be very great. Yet, if these CDC numbers are in real time, it is not having an effect. The numbers are the same as the yearly average. What is going on? Is there no association between isolation and quarantine and influenza infections, hospitalizations, and deaths? If so, there is no association between isolation and quarantine and coronavirus infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Given this, the only rational conclusion would have to be that the burden of the coronavirus pandemic has been fantastically miscalculated. 

Now, the CDC might claim that—if they revise the influenza numbers downward (and I will get closer to actual real-time numbers in a moment), which they will have to if isolation and quarantine work—the dramatically lower numbers indicate that the vaccine was more effective this flu season. But this still won’t make sense, because the flu vaccine, efficacy statistics problematic to begin with (for one reason because people are vaccinated against prominent strains for which they already have natural immunity), becomes less effective as the season wears on because influenza viruses (like most RNA viruses) mutates rapidly and the vaccine is produced only at one point in time. 

Let’s go deeper into this. First, I want to emphasize something the government and media aren’t but should be. When we’re talking about serious respiratory infections, we’re actually talking about pneumonia, which is the catchall term for a lung infection that ranges from mild to so severe that a person has to be hospitalized. I have reported twice to the doctor with severe respiratory infections that were diagnosed as pneumonia. What was the cause? Unknown, although both were treated a bacterial. I just had a flu-like illness last week (still affected it by it). Was it influenza? Maybe. But it could have been a rhinovirus. It also could have been a coronavirus. I may be one of the thousands—or tens of thousands—of unreported coronavirus cases. The causes of pneumonia may be bacterial, viral, or fungal. Flu viruses (influenza A and B), cold viruses (half of which are rhinoviruses), RSV viruses (respiratory syncytial virus, which affects children), and bacteria (Streptococcus pneumoniae and Mycoplasma pneumoniae). But among the causes of pneumonia are also coronaviruses, which, again, make up an estimated 5% to 15% of the viral mix every year. The media isn’t telling you this. What this means is that of the pneumonia deaths reported by the CDC every year, a proportion of them are from coronaviruses. Why influenza is often paired with pneumonia in the statistics is because influenza types, unlike rhinoviruses and coronaviruses, have vaccines and are monitored closely for vaccine production. This changes the way we perceive the threat.

Now, suppose there are 70,000 deaths one year from pneumonia. We are unsure of the mix of viruses implicated in these deaths. It could be 30,000 influenza viruses cases, 20,000 rhinoviruses cases, and 20,000 coronaviruses cases. Change the percentages if you want. It doesn’t matter. We’re dealing with huge numbers, numbers so huge that they should have panicked the public years before. This speculation isn’t off the hook. Remember, up to 80,000 people died of flu in the winter 2017 in the United States alone. The point is that all of these are implicated in lethal pneumonia. But since the CDC estimates these numbers, and since they test for influenza and not for rhinoviruses or coronaviruses, the numbers of all those who die from flu-like illness are thrown into the hopper with the influenza label, thus obscuring the numbers of people who die every year of the common cold, the assumption is that these are flu deaths. Now that we have a test for a coronavirus, it makes it appear as if a new virus is responsible for deaths that coronaviruses caused in years past that were not tested because there was no test and therefore not recorded as the cause of death. So, if the total number of pneumonia deaths this season are lower than the total number of pneumonia deaths of, say, the previous season, then whatever caused them, we are (over)reacting to the now-possible identification of a virus not to an actual new viral threat.

Based on that CDC report I noted earlier, The viral burden may actually be less this year than before. Maybe because of isolation and quarantine, but also because the death rates from pneumonia fluctuate annually. But if it is less or turns out to be the same as last year or the worst past year, you now know that influenza is not exclusively responsible for the tens of thousands of deaths every year from pneumonia. In other words, this may not be an extraordinary event, but rather a panic induced by being able to identify a virus by name thus making it appear as a new lethal force not actually a new lethal force, or at least no more of a new lethal force than every mutated virus implicated in pneumonia deaths. It will still be the case that the largest share of pneumonia deaths every year will be caused by influenza and rhinoviruses. But if we treated those threats the way we treat the threat of the less common coronaviruses, we would have to shut down society every year for the same reason we are claiming we have to do so now. That is what is novel here: the societal reaction.

Currently, the number of those estimated to who have died from pneumonia this flu season is around 24,000. Suppose we add 10,000 deaths attributed to coronavirus. That’s 34,000. That still less than half the pneumonia deaths from 2017. The death toll from coronavirus would have to be quite high to match the estimated up to 60,000 average annual pneumonia deaths. We have separated in the public’s mind the coronavirus from pneumonia deaths by a method that, for the first time, singles out the coronavirus as a special disease. This makes it feel like a novel event. But in fact coronaviruses are a mix in the viral burden annually and have always carried lethal consequences for vulnerable populations.  

As I said, this was a health crisis. Influenza is a health crisis. Diabetes (which kills more people than influenza) is a health crisis. But there may be no extraordinary event justifying shutting down society. The societal reaction may be induced by a new definition not a new threat. This would be consistent with the social profile of previous mass hysterias, such as serial killers, satanic ritual murders, child abductions, and so on. 

What strikes me as remarkable in all this—along with what is happening right now in real time—is how the H1N1 subtype of Influenza A in 2009, a variation on the virus implicated in the Spanish flu that killed so many people almost 100 years earlier, didn’t spark hysteria to the extent this coronavirus has. The CDC estimates that 151,700-575,400 people worldwide died from (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection during the first year the virus circulated. Perhaps it was because there was a vaccine available (which I did not receive). But had we panicked then as we are right now (not me, but clearly a lot of people), just think of how many lives could have been saved—if there is an association between social isolation and quarantine and infection rates.

The media is reporting that Italy has passed the 10,000 death mark. This is terrifying. But it will help to keep calm by keeping in mind that Italy always shows a higher rate of influenza-attributable excess mortality compared to other European countries, especially in the elderly. This is because of very poor air quality in Italy, a country known as the China of Europe. Consider that a study of the winter flu seasons 2013/14 to 2016/17 found an estimated average of 5,290,000 cases with more than 68,000 deaths attributable to flu epidemics estimated in the study period. That’s more than 17 thousand deaths annually. It is important to keep in mind terrain, life style, and the adequacy of health services when considering the impact of infectious agents. Almost 15,000 coronavirus victims—more than half the world’s total—have died in Italy and Spain. See the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. I would be greatly surprised to see these numbers replicated in other Western industrialized societies.

Stories emphasize how different SARS-CoV-2 is from the flu virus. Technically, this is true, because coronaviruses are not influenza viruses. They are not rhinoviruses, either. But all of these are a cause of pneumonia deaths. So when stories tells us its different, they are not wrong. However, what they are not telling us is that coronaviruses have always been different, have always been a cause pf pneumonia, and that therefore the situation is different for a different reason. And the way people are shaming those who question the government and media narrative makes this societal reaction a classic moral panic. When you are not allowed to ask reasonable questions about a scientific matter, when skepticism is treated as heresy, then you know you are in the midsts of a moral panic.

I am not denying that coronavirus is a burden. Influenza and rhinoviruses are also burdens. All of these pathogens kill people every year. Nobody wants anybody to die. So we need to deal with these burdens. What I am arguing is that shuttering an economy on account of coronavirus is novel will have serious consequences for jobs and livelihoods, not to mention emotional and psychological needs and human liberty, and, moreover, that wanting to get back to a normal life as soon as possible is not remotely the same as saying we want to kill old people. The societal reaction is following a pretty standard sociological explanation, except on steroids. It is proceeding on the basis of a novel definition of the situation more than a novel virus.  The panic is viral.

I’m a humanist sociologist. That means I think about how important it is for people to have a social life. To see our friends and relatives and colleagues. To be in the world. The social world.

As a Marxist, I know how crucial the economy is for having a foundation for social life. I am not a fan of capitalism, as my blog entries make clear, but if the economy blows up, if workers sink into poverty, if the neighborhood are disorganized, if crime rates soar, our social lives are comprised. When health and safety and well being are put in jeopardy, people are forced to scrap at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. The higher order functions of life—our one and only life—are unattainable without the lower needs met. Dreams are dashed as people lose their jobs, their livelihoods, and their experiences. Fear is a terrible thing. Feelings of helplessness wear on person’s spirit.

The importance of social life to human being means we have to think about when we can open up our society again so that folks can have their lives back. We have to focus on sooner than later. Reasonable people interrogate the facts and make arguments to make determinations. I can’t stand passively by and watch partisans shame folks away from discussions about the most important matters confronting people.

When I read memes trashing people for wanting to consider life beyond avoiding a virus, shaming people by rhetorically asking them who they think should live and who should die, when the same question can be put to any other communicable disease to doesn’t ask us to shelter-in-place and, more than that, a host of other ordinary human activities that come with some risk to health and safety, I get angry. I admit it. It offends me. We don’t stop living because life is risky. People aren’t evil or reckless for wanting to live, work, and recreate.

It’s unfair to those who are asking folks to consider all the factors determining the human situation, those activities that make for the good life, to make them out to be heartless assholes, to trash the skeptic for his skepticism. Worse, on top of that, attacks on reasonable questions are thrown into the stupid and tired partisan frame, the frame that divides people into Republicans and Democrats—“are you for us or against us?”— taking a sledgehammer to one side or the other, pile-driving a vulgar ideological wedge between working people.

I don’t accept the corporate two-party hegemony, established by the ruling class to keep the working class in line by keeping us busy thinking in racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and partisan terms in order to keep us from organizing around what we have in common as working people. Progressives are the worst. That’s why my politics are populist and my morals secular-humanist. For the record. So you can understand me better.

Finally, Maslow, as a humanist, recognized that, devoid of instinct, our species builds its humanity through the fulfillment of our animal needs (air, drink, food, shelter, sleep) and, only then, through the fulfillment of human needs. The ruling class has been taking notes. By keeping down the majority of the world’s population on the lower rungs of the needs hierarchy, our betters have prevented the masses from contemplating the higher levels of humanity to be attained, namely self-actualization and substantively meaningful achievement and respect.

Indeed, it seems our masters have stepped up the project to keep the masses ignorant by forcing them to scramble to meet their basic physiological and safety needs (and here almost entirely on an individual basis) while giving them ideologies of fear and superstition. Creativity, curiosity, higher-order reasoning and fact-acceptance are luxuries when they should be the warp and woof of daily human experience. The power elite recognize that, if our needs are met, they know we will turn our attention to them and demand to know what contribution they are making to human well being. By then, it will  be a rhetorical question. And a revolutionary one.

I am entitled to a moment of outrage. How dare people shame those who look at these realities with memes saying that they want to kill old people. Every one of you who has not heretofore clamored to shut down society to save tens of thousands of elderly people from dying from the flu every year are just as shameful by these lights. I wonder how many people before this crisis ever walked away from a death bed complaining that we didn’t shut down society for the sake of their loved one. Is the number greater than zero?

Some 80,000 people died of flu in the winter of 2017 in the United States, the highest death toll seen in forty years. Did you hear any news about this? This is almost twice as many as what health officials previously considered a bad year. A lot of those who perished were elderly people. In fact, most of those who perished were elderly.

“I’d like to see more people get vaccinated,” the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Robert Redfield, told the Associated Press in September 2018. Like to see more people get vaccinate? That’s it? Why didn’t he say that we should shut down the economy and shelter in place to save tens of thousands of lives? Was Redfield asked about which older person in his life he was prepared to sacrifice to keep society open?

The CDC estimates that, since 2010, influenza has resulted in as many as 45 million illnesses, 810,000 hospitalizations, and 61,000 deaths annually. That means that as many as 610,000 people have died in the past decade from influenza, again the vast majority of them elderly. Reflect on that for a moment: well more than half a million dead Americans from influenza. 

I know, I know, coronavirus may be worse than the flu. But in light of the fact that the flu is lethal enough, in light of the fact that some 60,000 people die every year in the United States from the flu, a number we could mitigate if we shut down the economy every flu season, where were all these obnoxious shaming memes claiming that, for Republicans, the economy is more important than your grandmother? Why this time around and not before? The data have been widely available all this time.

Aren’t all of these meme-shamers guilty of not demanding “shelter in place” every time the flu comes around for the sake of our grandmothers? In light of the numbers, the failure to sound the alarm has had lethal consequences. Were they in the habit of taking their children to see their grandmother knowing that they could be carrying viruses? A lot of people with viruses are asymptomatic and spread the virus anyway. Why haven’t people cared about this before?

Rhinoviruses, the main cause of the common cold (the agent in around 50 percent of cases), are a cause of lethal respiratory infections. Did you know that? Why didn’t you know that? The CDC reports out this stuff on a continual basis. Rhinoviruses kills a lot of elderly people. Should we have been shaming people all this time for suggesting by their silence that people should live normal lives and not shelter in place?

Why is it now that people feel moved to s silence about all the consequences of shutting down society? The millions of jobs lost. The thousands of small businesses shuttered. The memories robbed. Do these folks think that it is better to socially isolate old persons on a continual basis or to allow them, in the twilight of their days, to recreate, see their family, to live a normal existence? Or is it better to socially isolate everybody? Our children? Aren’t children inside alone enough, already?

This coronavirus is going to sweep around the globe more times. Are we going to shelter in place until it passes? What about all those other viruses? Is this the new protocol for influenza? What about all the coronaviruses that sweep the planet every year, responsible for between 5 to 15 percent of flu-like diseases and thousands of deaths? This isn’t the first lethal coronavirus. It won’t be the last. There will be this one, the old ones, some new ones. 

Maybe. Who knows. Folks are panicked. We’re in a weird place right now. We will be able to map the story of a moral panic and its folk devils soon enough. But is it too much to expect that the least folks can do is resist mounting stupid partisan attacks against their ideological enemies for asking a basic question: When are we going to be able to return to a normal life?

Don’t ask me who I am prepared to sacrifice for the economy. It’s a stupid question. There’s more to existence than dying. Indeed, the most important part of existence is living. And living is more than breathing. We’re social beings. It’s a fair question to wonder why this is happening and to wonder when is it going to be over.

Using the same logic that’s popular on my Facebook news feed right now (and I am sure the memes are rampant on Instagram and Twitter), the United States could have saved thousands of lives every year if we had just shut down the economy and sheltered in place during every flu season, but for those evil Republicans who wanted to keep the economy going and people in jobs and small businesses growing at the expense of our grandparents. Where were the Democrats during all this? Were were the progressives?

Can you imagine how crazy it would sound if folks were clamoring to shut down the economy in 2009, during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, because 50,000 Americans were going to die from the flu if we didn’t? You’d say, “What?” Don’t lie. That’s what you’d say.

Where has the “Pick which grandparent you want to die” meme been in previous years? Why have those tens of thousands of sick and dying old people not generated mass concern for the plight of elderly before now? All those visits to grandmother in her tiny house or the nursing home? “Give your grandma a kiss.” Where was our collective conscience then? With these numbers, somebody you know has watched a grandparent die on a ventilator. The media has had access to these numbers. I’ve been aware of them. The CDC is clearly aware of them. Crickets. 

* * *

To be a sociologist for a moment, and be a little daring to talk about something now that everybody will be talking about after this crisis has past, what we are witnessing today is a classic moral panic. Only this moral panic is on steroids thanks to intersecting forces. The folk devil in this panic—the scapegoat—is the President of the United States (whom I did not and will not vote for). The new American pastime is to virtue signal how horrible this man is.

The superstitious think that by banishing Trump to the margins of the social landscape during the ritual exercise we call elections—or maybe even an impeachment—we will magically cleanse our community (or the intersection of communities, for the progressives) and restore the moral order to its proper parameters. Grandmother has become the ritual fetish, the totem, in this ritual. Kai Erickson would have something to say about this. Wayward Puritan. Remember that analysis? So would its inspiration, the theories of Emile Durkheim.

Somebody is injecting memes into social media that seek to shame those who want to open up society to social and economic activity. Why? To make anybody who talks about the social and economic fallout of this sound like a cold hearted asshole. Why? It’s a lot like what happened to people who doubted the veracity of the Inquisitor’s claims. Moral panics are meant to sweep you off your feet. This current one is no less irrational.

The meme injection piggybacks off of the media-created panic over coronavirus. But the media hysteria is not occurring in a vacuum. The nation has grown uneasy because of the disruption Democrats and the media has been sowing for years in a coordinated effort to delegitimize an outsider president and strangle the populist movement.

Even before Trump was elected, the media and the left prepared the ground for moral panic. Have you seen the videos of progressives, some prostrate on the ground, almost always dressed like a ghoul from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, screaming and wailing in the wake of Trump’s election? I’d show them to you but I don’t want to see them again. Mainstream conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Rachel Maddow unable to keep her composure talking about it on TV? (Now she’s talking about censoring Trump’s new conferences.) Have you seen that? The army of psychological counselors deployed to universities to address the trauma? Did you hear about that? Left wing thugs attacking conservative and libertarian protestors? People so sensitive to disagreeable ideas that speech becomes violence? Criticism of ideology becomes genocide? Rallies and marches that look more like cosplay conventions than actual political protests? (And people thought Tea Party folks in their tricornered hats with dangling teabags were mockable. I mean, those pussy hats.) The president is a Russian agent. The president is caging children (Obama-era photos—anything goes). The president is conspiring with Ukrainians to take out a political opponent (who has already been taken out by dementia). Catholic boys are bullying American Indians in our nation’s capitol. It’s like the McMartin Preschool case mapped onto half the nation’s population, the people who pride themselves on not being hysterical.

A virus that would have been treated like the first go around with SARS (a more deadly coronavirus) is suddenly morphed into the Andromeda strain. Governments shut down economies and throw millions of people out of work, destroy thousands of small businesses, wreck the educational experience of tens of millions of children and young adults, acting as if this were a novel event, as if an asteroid had struck the earth. Meanwhile not recognizing that the cause of hospitals unable to cope with a pandemic is the result of decades of neoliberal devastation wrought by the very people who are fueling the hysteria. Pay no attention to the charlatan behind the curtain. Go melt the witch and bring back her broom.

* * *

My Facebook newsfeed is full of these damn memes. “Pick which grandparent that you want to die.” “Republicans put economy before your me-maw.” Memes celebrating that, on the day it happened, all the gains on Wall Street since Trump’s election were wiped out. “Tired of winning yet?” the gleeful memes and comments went. Did you see those? Retirement savings for millions wiped out. “Whee!” As if Trump were responsible for the virus and the panic that ensued. Of course. Trump is responsible for all bad things that happen in the. He is the folk devil par excellence. Had he not also panicked like the half the population, just imagine the pandemonium.

I’m not surprised by this. But I have to tell myself that I am to avoid the cynicism that is crouching in the corner, waiting to pounce and ravage my skeptical sensibilities. How is it that people can so easily trust the establishment media and the Democrats after they lied about Russia, the Southern border, Ukraine? Why is it that Trump’s popularity is rising in the middle of all this? Folks better figure that out.

Deaths are terrible. I don’t want to see widespread death from this or any other virus. But viruses kill people every day of every year. We cannot shut down social life for the sake of viruses. They will always be with us. Like bacteria. Like heart attacks. And cancer. Of course we should always strive to reduce disease and death. Wash your hands. Don’t cough on people. But humans have been dealing with disease and death before they were even human. It’s part of life. Life is more than dying. Life is social. You can’t mastermind this. We are mortal.

* * *

I hope this stimulus buys us some time. But there’s a huge downside to it. The more time it buys us, the more reasons the neoliberals will have to devolve the public function for the sake of curbing the debt. 

Tragically, the left is in no shape to do anything to transform our societies in a better way. Frankly, given their contempt for freedom and their loathing of their countries I’m not sure I would want them to. The major project the left faces is actually fixing the left. But they’re sheltering in place right now. Meanwhile, economic depression, which it appears we are destined for, is going to hurt a lot of people.

* * *

Note: The latest numbers (as of the date of this blog entry) identify 81,836 cases of coronavirus in the United States. There are a reported 1,186 deaths caused by this virus. That’s a death rate of 1.4 percent. We know that many people who have this particular coronavirus are asymptomatic. Many more have mild symptoms and are never tested. Let’s suppose that there are ten infections for every confirmed (tested) case. That brings the number to 810,000 cases in a population of 320 million people. The number of deaths doesn’t change. Do the math. Now the death rate is 0.14 percent. The death rate for the seasonal flu is approximately the same, at around 0.1 percent. These are not confirmed cases of the flu, mind you, but epidemiological estimates.

Thomas B. Edsall, in an opinion piece, “How Racist Is Trump’s Republican Party?” published in the March 18, 2020 edition of The New York Times, concludes that “there is a large divide not only over the definition of racism, but also over the level of racism in the nation.” Edsall does not provide a direct answer to the question posed in the title of his essay, but rather implies one in course of reaching his conclusion. His essay provides yet another example of how academia participates in the depoliticization of a new type of racism, one that insinuates racism where racism isn’t and identifies supposed perpetrators on the basis of race.

“What this boils down to is that racism is detected, determined and observed through partisan and ideological lenses.” Edsall writes. “This is hardly shocking. Yet what is still quite striking is how much the perception of the importance of racism has changed in recent years.” This could be the starting point for a useful essay on how the perception of racism has shifted from race prejudice and the imposition of legal structures rooted in it or the violation of laws against it (discrimination on this basis) to the characterization of nationalism, populism, and group-based disparities as racist in essence, as well as the assumption of concrete individuals into abstract demographic categories—and then rendering a judgment. In this critique, I will repurpose Edsall’s piece for this end.

Without any critical interrogation of the way in which the perception of widespread racism has been ramped up in the wake of a historic movement that not only dismantled Jim Crow and criminalized discrimination against non-white and non-Asian persons, but also established a system of positive discrimination (affirmative action) providing opportunities for non-white and non-Asians not available to whites and Asians, amounting to, in essence, reparations paid for by generations of Americans who cannot be tied to racial inequities, Edsall implies his opinion (that the Republican Party is racist) by leaving the definition of racism and the degree of racism in American subject to “partisan and ideological lenses.”

This obscurantism is irresponsible for a man who has been reporting on city and national politics since 1967, when he started as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, before moving to The Washington Post in 1981-2006, and then on to The New York Times where he writes opinion. His experience as a student at Brown University and Boston College over the first half of the 1960s must also be considered here. Edsall is a witness to the radical transformation of American race relations that occurred during that period—a ring-side seat. How could such a transformation escape his ability to make an opinion? From this privilege purchase he could have described the shift from the old civil rights struggle to dismantle the racial hierarchy and establish equality under the law for every person to a post-civil rights movement to reorder the racial hierarchy by defining everything post-structuralist identitarian terms, a movement organized by progressives.

Edsall’s essay starts off on shaky legs, taking as its theme Stuart Stevens’ claim that the Republican Party is the “white grievance party.” Stevens, for those of you don’t know, was the lead campaign strategist for George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 elections, elections that saw the return to power of the Cold War liberal and the affirmation of neoconservative policy, a policy that took us into wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Stevens makes this claim in his forthcoming book It Was All A Lie, which concludes that Republicans turned racist with Barry Goldwater. Stevens tells Edsall that “race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party.” Social justice warriors will find that conclusion grossly inadequate. Race is the original sin of the United States of America, in their view—indeed, race is the original sin of all white people. With this view in mind, a myriad of grievance parties has emerged, animated by the gospel of “intersectionality,” an oppression olympics that identifies whites, especially white males, as the common oppressor. This is is a movement that transforms egalitarianism in oppression.

But Stevens is a way into a discussion that allows Edsall to associate Trump and Republicans with racism. He must do this because he only a few short months ago advised Democrats to eschew political correctness and seek moderation in a piece published in The New York Times, “Democrats Can Still Seize the Center,” on November 1, 2019. There he argued that “President Trump is unpopular, but that doesn’t mean defeating him is going to be easy. Democrats will have to tackle issues that may alienate—and even give offense to—progressives, women, Latinos and African-Americans.” He continues, “Putting together a broad enough coalition to finish the job—to win 270 Electoral College votes—will require navigating fraught cultural arenas: race, immigration and women’s rights—while dodging the broadly loathed set of prohibitions that many voters, including many Democrats, file under the phrase ‘political correctness.’”

In that November piece, Edsall cites the work of Matt Grossman, a political scientist at Michigan State, who found, in a essay published at the Nikanen Center, “Racial Attitudes and Political Correctness in the 2016 Presidential Election,” that “[m]any people dislike group-based claims of structural disadvantage and the norms obligating their public recognition. Those voters saw Trump as their champion. The 2016 election produced greater candidate and voter division around the celebration of diversity and accepted explanations for group disparities.” This fact has not gone unnoticed by political strategists. For example, it led John Feehery, a Republican lobbyist, to suggest that, if they want to win, Democrats “drop the elitist attitude that currently suffuses the Democratic Party which has morphed into an insufferable army of virtue-signaling know-it-all’s who spend all of their time looking down their noses at the unwashed masses in flyover country. It has less to do with specific issues and more to do with the unbridled arrogance that is currently deeply embedded in the DNA of the once great Democratic Party.”

However, Edsall points out that the Democratic Party is no longer the party that enjoyed significant participation from blue-collar workers. Based on polling of Democratic primary voters in 2008 and 2016, the party now tilts toward minorities and well-educated whites. This demographic shift is associated with a shift in the proportion of those in the party who identified as conservatives or moderates towards those who identified as very liberal. In its efforts to weave together a multicultural coalition, which mirrors the public relations of the modern-day corporation and university with their emphasis on “diversity and inclusion,” the Democratic Party has marginalized working class Americans, whom progressives portray as disgruntled and reactionary white men. Edsall’s concern a year out from the general election is that centrism is troubled by primary voters who want a liberal candidate (liberal here meaning progressive). This does not reflect the general election. Edsall must surely be happy with where Joe Biden is at present. So the essay at hand appears meant to raise the racism specter on the other side without triggering those who Grossman found to “dislike group-based claims of structural disadvantage and the norms obligating their public recognition.”

In his latest essay, after introducing Stevens’ thesis, Edsall shifts to a discussion problematizing the definition and conceptualization of racism. Edsall starts with an actual definition by quoting Darren Davis, a political scientist at Notre Dame. Davis is co-author of “Reexamining Racial Resentment,” published in 2011. Davis: “I define racism as an attitude or a belief that stems from hatred or anti-black affect,” writes Davis. “Therefore, a racist is a person who is motivated by hatred or beliefs about the inferiority of African Americans.” Edsall next quotes Chloe Thurston, a political scientist at Northwestern, who argues that “racism, very loosely defined, is an ideology whereby racial groups are organized according to a hierarchy, and members of these groups are often thought to have immutable traits based on their group membership.” This is not very loosely defined, actually. It’s pretty tight, in line with the definition I have developed: racism is an ideology holding that the human population can be meaningful subdivided into categories differentiated by superficial phenotypic characteristics that predict abstractly cognitive ability, behavioral proclivities, and moral sensibilities. (Obviously, race realists would disagree. But the concept of race has been thoroughly debunked. See my Freedom and Reason podcast on this topic below. See also “Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation” for more details.)

Erick Kaufmann, to whom Edsall next turns, presents a four-fold definition: “Attitudes or behavior that assert that one race is superior to another, or that is intended to promote fear, anger or hatred toward a racial group.” This is well put and uncontroversial. “Favoritism that results in denial of equal treatment under the law to people with regard to race.” A matter of established law. “Race essentialism: the belief that races have biologically sharp boundaries; a belief in racial purity.” (See the various sources above.) Finally, structural racism. This is “institutional practices put in place for racist reasons which have not been modified,” also “where non-racist people behave in a racist way to fit into an institutional norm/peer pressure which applauds racism.”

Kaufmann is a political scientist at the University of London and author of Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (2019). He insists that racism must “be defined rigorously.” The first three folds of his definition are consistent with the way “racism” and “racialism” were defined and understood when coined in the first decade of twentieth century. The fourth fold conceptualizes the world as fundamentally shaped by abstract social forces that concrete persons animate. Individuals are personifications of general categories. This is a sociological view and it demands a lot of those who claim it.

Edsall picks up on the shift and pivots on Kaufmann’s fourth fold. He cites Lafleur Stevens-Dougan, a political science at Princeton, who, in an email, tells him that America (and presumably the trans-Atlantic community) has “baked racism into our political institutions and economic systems.” She argues that if the answer to why black and Latino neighborhoods struggle with poor schools and high crime rates, is that blacks and Latinos are “less smart, less hardworking, or less disciplined,” and so on, then the answer is “racist.” This would be racist if the claim were that blacks or Latinos (an ethnicity not a race, but let’s put that aside for the moment) were all these things because they were racially inferior to whites or other races who do not have these struggles. But these struggles could result from cultural forces. Culture is not race. Culture is a set of attitudes, beliefs, customs, habits, and values. Race is a creature of racism, which I have defined above.

The difference between culture and race is crucial to grasp. Culture is a shared set of instructions for navigating daily life, for finding meaning in one’s existence, and for organizing social roles. Poor whites struggle with poor schools and high crime rates, too. In fact, in concrete numbers, there are many more of them than there are poor blacks. Is it racist to suggest that culture plays some role in determining the situation of whites? I think most of us would agree that it isn’t. Of course, those of us who study poverty know that it isn’t nearly a complete theorization of situation, either. Poverty, black and white, is substantially a consequence of capitalism. So why is it automatically racism if the poor person is black? As I have argued on this blog, because it obscures class relations. This is the function of progressivism: to normalize corporate capitalism.

The point of Edsall’s pivot becomes clear when he turns to this question, which he puts to Davis: would he find racist Asian-American protests of “the potential elimination of entrance exams as the sole determinant of entry into selective high schools”? He asked Davis several questions along these lines: Is “the opposition of well off suburbanites to affordable housing in their neighborhoods racist? Is the number of African-Americans in prison evidence of racism? And is white opposition to the decarceration moment or the prison abolition movement racist?” Davis answers that “not all racialized behavior and expressions stem from racial hatred or hating African Americans.” However, people, “without being racists themselves, may do and say things that are consistent with a racist ideology.” In the example of Asian-American protests, he does not believe they are racist because there are other motivations beyond “just beliefs about the inferiority of others.” What Davis is pointing out here is why it is so important to retain the standard definition of racism. Defining racism as things that lack racist motivation makes it impossible to oppose these things without appearing to be a racist. Racism becomes a smear used by those who lacks the consideration and patience for making actual argument, a tactic to delegitimize oppositional arguments.

Yet, surprisingly, Davis draws the opposite conclusion. “My overall point is that we have forgotten what racism means,” he tells Edsall. “In doing so, we have focused attention on bigots and white nationalists and not held ordinary citizens accountable for beliefs that achieve the same ends.” But would that not involve holding ordinary citizens responsible for racist acts that had no racist motivation? Moreover, holding them collectively responsible? Edsall buttresses Davis’ conclusion by suggesting that immigration restrictionists concerned with backgrounds stubborn to assimilation are racist in effect. But, once again, culture is not race. Finding some cultural systems stubborn or undesirable is not necessarily a racist argument. Furthermore, one can be an immigration restrictionist on economic grounds, for example in defending the livelihoods of citizen workers against foreign competition, and still have that position characterized as advocacy consistent with the ends racists seek. That makes workers trying to find and keep jobs complicit in racism because supporting restrictions on immigration is by definition racism. Thus is absurd. It puts people in a no-win situation. Thurston expands on this view. “People can participate in and perpetuate racist systems without necessarily subscribing to those beliefs,” she argues. “People can recognize something they participate in or contribute to as racist but decide it’s not disqualifying. And people can design racist policies and systems. These are distinctive manifestations of racism but not all of them require us to know whether a person is expressly motivated by racism.” Rather than meeting the burden of proof that comes with making the accusation, the logic here is that situations so defined are by definition racist.

This is critical race theory. This is not social science, but ideology, the (il)logic foundational to identity politics. The (il)logic shifts principle, from assigning the burden of proof to the party making an accusation, while presuming the accused is innocent of the charge, what critical race theorists call the “perpetrators perspective,” to a prima facie assertion of injustice presumed inherent in inequitable conditions with a guilty party assumed. This is called the “victim’s perspective” in this standpoint. Questioning whether the accuser is a victim becomes “victim blaming.” Victim blaming is racist. (See my essay “Committing the Crime it Condemns” for more discussion of this.)

His sense of charity in gear (or perhaps strategically), Edsall provides a nice counter view from Cindy Kam, a political scientist at Vanderbilt. In an argument consonant with Randall Kennedy’s essay “The Boundaries of Race,” published in the Harvard Law Review (which I summarize in the essay “Race and Democracy”), Kam writes that, as a social scientist, she would entertain a variety of other motivations, including economic consideration, self-interest, and values, such as commitment to a free market, that shape a person’s attitudes and decisions. Examples of the latter are the cases of Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater with respect to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which both opposed on the grounds of the rights of businessmen. She “would hesitate to label an action as ‘racist’,” she tells Edsall “unless racial considerations seem to be the only or the massively determinative consideration at play, based upon statistical modeling or carefully calibrated experiments.”

The debate over Barry Goldwater’s racism illustrates the controversy and challenges Stevens’ claim that the Republican Party’s racism starts there. Martin Luther King Jr. said that although he did not consider Goldwater a racist, but that the Senator “articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racists.” This is Thurston’s view. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, agreed. “Senator Goldwater himself is not regarded as a racist in their minds” he said, referring to black Americans, “but they note with dismay that among his supporters are some of the most outspoken racists in America.” Wilkins clarified: “Their quarrel with the Senator lies in their opinion that the federal government must act to protect the rights of citizens against infringement by the states, and the Senator’s belief that the federal government has no such rule.”

Kaufmann’s views are useful not only for Edsall’s recent essay, but could have been used in Edsall’s November 2019 essay. Kaufmann expresses concern over using the racist label others have worried about. He worries that “fear of being labeled racist may be pushing left parties toward immigration policies, or policies on affirmative action, reparations, etc., that make them unelectable.” He is also concerned that “overuse of the word ‘racist’ may lead to a ‘cry wolf’ effect whereby real racists can hide due to exhaustion of public with norm over-policing.” This phrase “real racists” sticks out in the piece. Indeed, Edsall writes, “[n]one of the examples I cited, in Kaufmann’s view, ‘are racist’ unless it could be explicitly demonstrated ‘in a survey that those espousing the policies were mainly motivated by racism.’ If not, he said, the ‘principle of charity should apply.’” I won’t hide this from the reader. I agree with Kaufmann in this debate on this point (I do not agree with Kaufmann when he characterizes antipathy towards Mexicans or Muslims as “racist.” Nor do I find his overall approach, which roots in psychology, to be the most useful way to approach these questions.)

LaFleur Stephens-Dougan does not share this view. “In all the examples you have provided [speaking to Edsall], communities are marshaling their resources to exclude other Americans, who are disproportionately black and brown.” She sees this as racist action. This is a familiar refrain in the immigration debate. However, this view ignores the fact that American communities have been resistant to marshaling resources to those of European descent or supporting immigrations from European countries. These populations are not racialized (see my “Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation”). Since it would make no sense to claim this was racism, it makes no sense to assume racism in the other cases. These are cultural prejudices and self-interested economic choices.

Satisfied that The NYTimes reader has a definition of racism that is useful to him, Edsall turns to the question of the popular definition racism held by partisans of the two-party system. Edsall cites a 2017 survey of 2,296 American adults to rank on a five-point scale ranging from racist to not racist ten statements (see below). The results show that Republicans have a better grasp of racism than do Democrats by a substantial margin. A majority of Democrats see racism everywhere. At the same time, Republicans consider things racist that have nothing to do with race, demonstrating the creep of the post-civil rights redefinition of racism.

Standpoint epistemology has turned the anecdotal account and categories of demography into badges of truth. But anecdotes don’t stand in place of general facts. A lazy person doesn’t explain the rate of joblessness. It only tells us why that person may not be working. And demographic categories are abstractions that cannot represent particular concrete situations. As I have said before on this blog, my whiteness reveals nothing about me as a person. As a white person, I could be anything beyond that meaningless classification. Now, anecdotes and demographics are stand-ins for objective or reasoned accounts of situations or interpretations of information. Our culture is shot through with these fallacies.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the latter fallacy—what I am calling the “appeal to identity”—better than the confrontation between Nina Turner and Hilary Rosen on CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time. In an argument intended to paint Joe Biden as bad on civil rights (a truth that may be accomplished in a myriad of other ways), Turner, a surrogate for the Bernie Sanders’ campaign, alerted viewers to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “warning” about “white moderates,” who, in a 1963 letter written from a Birmingham jail cell, suggested were “more devoted to ‘order’ than justice.”

Rosen, defending Biden, countered that she understood MLK Jr. to be saying that “we should worry about the silence of white moderates.” Turner insisted Rosen’s interpretation was wrong. But instead of carefully explaining why, she responded indignantly with “Don’t tell me about Martin Luther King Jr. Are you kidding me?” Rosen interrupted. “Don’t use Martin Luther King against Joe Biden.” Then she said, “You don’t have that standing.”

Rosen apparently knew who Turner was going in, knew of her methods and politics, and expected that she was likely to pull something like this. Nina Turner sits on the faculty of Cuyahoga Community College where she teaches, among other things, African American cultural and intellectual history. One can see Turner in action on The Nina Turner Show, hosted by The Real News Network. There, for example, she has interviewed and expressed solidarity with Linda Sarsour, an Islamist and ally of the Nation of Islam, who expressed on Twitter a wish to take away outspoken secularist Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s vagina (Ali is a victim of female genital mutilation), saying that Ali didn’t deserve to be a woman. Bizarrely, Sarsour, who (sometimes) claims to be a “woman of color” (she is Palestinian), who argues that “oppression of women is absolutely shunned in the Islamic faith” (she entered into an arranged marriage at the age of seventeen), was tapped to co-chair the Women’s March on Washington. Turner’s interview with Sarsour was not a critical one. Like Sarsour, Turner is a paradigm of identity demagoguery.

With this awareness in mind, Rosen’s argument essentially took this form: “You don’t own the definitive meaning of King’s words on the grounds that you are black.” That’s what she meant by “standing.” Indeed, Turner doesn’t have standing as a black woman in this regard. This is nothing against Turner; nobody has standing in this regard. One’s racial identity lends no validity to one’s arguments. It’s a fallacious appeal to authority. It’s like supposing I have a special right to interpret the United States Constitution because I am a white man. Who would accept this claim but a white supremacist? However awkwardly she put it, Rosen wasn’t going to let Turner use skin color as an authority on the meaning of a text. Turner’s response was essentially said, “Yes, I will.”

The point of Rosen’s defensiveness was affirmed by Turner’s response. Rosen’s dismissal of Turner’s tactic infuriated Turner. She shot back, “Don’t tell me what kind of standing I have as a black woman in America! How dare you!” Rosen responded, “You have a lot of standing as a black woman in America.” “You don’t have a standing to attack Joe Biden using Martin Luther King’s words. That’s my point.” Turner came back with “Listen, don’t dip into what I have to say about the Reverend Martin Luther King. How dare you, as a white woman….” I have italicized key phrases to make sure the reader recognizes that Rosen did not inject race into the dispute. Turner was the one who asserted her race and insisted that it leant her point validity. She did this while diminishing Rosen’s interpretation on the basis of Rosen’s white identity. The appeal to identity is rooted in standpoint epistemology. This error is the basis of identity politics.

Predictably, the response has been overwhelmingly anti-Rosen. She “disrespected” Turner as a black woman. She “whitesplained” MLK Jr. to a black woman. That the backlash was directed at Rosen and not Turner tells us how far we have gone down the identity politics path. Turner is making a claim that being black means her understanding of Dr. King’s words automatically superior to that of a white person’s. She became apoplectic at the notion that a white woman would say such a thing to her (I suspect this does not happen very often). The left applauded.

Not to beat a dead horse, but you really do have to ask yourself: What does skin color have to do with the accuracy of interpretation? What special standing does a black person have to interpret another black person’s words? Do people working at Wal-Mart have a better understanding of Marx’s arguments in Capital than the Waltons, their class enemy? Why would poverty make people better able to grasp the complex economic and sociological forces that create and reproduce their situation? What on earth could explain the lack of class struggle and consciousness among the poor? Wouldn’t they organize and rebel against their conditions if they grasped the truth? Why are capitalists so damn good as keeping capitalism in place? How are the rich so damn good at keeping people poor?

Nina was trying to win the argument on the basis of her skin color. That’s not just nonsense, it’s racist. Imagine if the white woman tried that angle. What would the audience think? They’d think her a racist, of course. And they’d be right. Yet, in this case, the white woman sounds racist to many ears for not letting Turner use race to win an argument. Turner’s claim makes it appear as if Rosen is trying to erase Turner as a black person. This is a classic mark of identity politics. You can’t win an argument by asserting race or sex privilege. At least not rationally. You win arguments with facts and reason. You have to work from a theory.

Consider the correct method for going about such arguments. Karl Marx theorizes that there’s an objective structure shaping our lives, that one’s relationship to that structure determines his class location. These are material relations. One’s social location in the relations of production is not an imagined community. The proletariat is a class-in-itself. Some recognize the social class they’re in (the role of theory) and organize politically to become a class-for-itself. The capitalist class is a class-for-itself; because of this, its intellectuals have obtained a clearer grasp of the system. The bourgeois sees better because of its material advantage in knowing how the system works and in controlling that system. It does not see better because of its identity. Many capitalists are falsely conscious of their social location. Indeed, very few capitalists would admit that their power and privilege is oppressive and exploitative—and not because they are lying.

The counter to my argument might go something like this: “That’s like saying women don’t have any more insight into women’s suffrage.” Indeed, this was actually said to me by a comrade. But why would women have special insight into this? Some do. Some don’t. I know women who don’t know very much about women’s suffrage. Some know nothing about it. There is nothing about woman’s sex that makes her any better at interpreting a historical document or moment. This same comrade wondered about Bernie Sander’s privilege position with respect to the Holocaust on account of his Jewish identity. I asked him, why would Sanders be better able to grasp the history of the Holocaust on this basis? Is this a religious argument wherein God has put in Jews a privileged insight to have special standing in interpretations of this history? I put it sarcastically, but I was seriously. There’s a real problem here: if only Jews can see the truth of the Holocaust, then how can the rest of us know it? Is this an exercise in faith? Just trust the Jew? The argument reduces knowledge to ethnicity or religion and then gives ethnicity and religion privileged standing with respect to interpretation.

All my life I have had to listen to Christians tell me that I cannot have an opinion or valid interpretation of the Bible because I’m atheist. “How dare you, as an atheist, tell me, a Christian, what the Bible says!” But it turns out that, if you engage them in discussion, Christians routinely reveal a profound ignorance of the Bible. Of course, there are Christians who express opinions about the Bible that are quite sophisticated. But whether Christians get their Bible wrong or right has nothing to do with them being Christian. I don’t find this “As a Christian,” “As a Muslim,” “As a black women,” “As a gay man,” tactic convincing in the least. I find it obnoxious. Of course, the righteous indignation embedded in the throat clearing is strategic. But why do we put up with it?

Concerning Dr. King’s letter. I greatly admire Martin Luther King, Jr. But no man’s claims are infallible or always relevant. The Letter from Birmingham Jail, as it is most famously known, an open letter to King’s fellow clergymen, was unknown to the vast majority of the population at the time of its writing, even among many of those who were following or involved in the civil right movement. Its publication in the Atlantic Monthly under the title “The Negro is Your Brother” elevated its profile. The letter is strident in tone, roiling in anger and frustration. King writes:

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

Powerfully written, but it must be remembered that the white moderate, the liberal, was an ally to the civil rights movement. Without the support of liberals, the civil rights movement would not have accomplished nearly as much as it did—and in such a short time. What the movement accomplished within a generation was nothing short of a Second Reconstruction of American society, with court decisions, legislative action, and administrative policies dismantling the system of racial segregation, a system that had grown up over the decades following Emancipation, and criminalizing racial discrimination targeting blacks and other minorities. The fact is that Blacks were not in power during that period. White moderates were. White leaders were pressured by King and the movement, to be sure, but all the same, white leaders fought to change law and policy. They won, and the United States is a much better place today.

In our pursuit of justice, we must take care not to erase the work that people—black and white—did during this period by wrenching a polemic from its context. We must, furthermore, take care in using this polemic against persons living today, as if it’s a magical incantation that makes one’s point for her. It’s not that Joe Biden isn’t a problematic figure (it’s remarkable that he is earning so much support from the black community). It’s that the current period in which we live is such that an argument from 1963, written from a dingy jail cell in Birmingham by a man who was alone and frustrated, at a time when Jim Crow was the law in many states, is given more rhetorical prowess than it actually possesses. Much more relevant for our period is King’s words concerning the content of our character and equal treatment before the law. His sacrifice should at least have yielded that opportunity. It’s folks like Nina Turner who are keeping alive racial antagonisms.

Which brings me to the current situation in which Bernie Sanders and his supporters find themselves. It’s not over, but why is Sanders blowing it? He is blowing it. The 2016 version of the Sanders was on-message. His campaign eschewed identitarian nonsense. He told Americans truths that matter to everybody, such as the fact that mass immigration hurts American workers. (See Bernie Sanders Gets it on Open Borders Rhetoric—At Least He Did in 2015.) The 2020 version of Sanders is surrounded by such deeply unpopular figures as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Linda Sarsour, and Nina Turner. While he still advocates many of the same policies, his campaign has become corrupted by identity politics. These associations have compelled him to change one of his most pro-working class issues, his advocacy for restrictions on immigration. Indeed, he has taken it in the opposite direction (and this is still not extreme enough for Ocasio-Cortez, who has become a reluctant surrogate). The influence of identitarianism comes at an otherwise welcome moment in which people are rejecting progressivism and seeking to return the keys to the nation-state to the citizens. (See Bernie Sanders, Immigration, and Progressivism.) Working people don’t like people who run down their country. They want jobs and safe neighborhoods. They want their country to look out for them, to focus on their concerns. Tying socialism to identity politics kept working people home or casting their votes for Biden on Super Tuesday.

The left will wander in the wilderness until it recognizes the meaning and importance of patriotism and sovereignty for working-class Americans. For example, the period of greatest progress and prosperity came after the nation restricted immigration and reduced the percentage of foreign-born from more than 13% of the population to less than 5%. During that period, it was the political right that wandered in the wilderness. Ever since those restrictions were removed (in 1965 by Democrats), working class fortunes have diminished and rightwing populism has flourished. Sanders could have represented a popular leftwing movement at a moment when populism is politics’ animating spirit. He could have made America American again. Instead his campaign has been hijacked by progressive identitarians, ideology extremists whose politics are quite useful to capitalism because they obscure class relations.

Nina Turner is not merely the surrogate for Sanders that she was in 2016. She is no less than the national co-chair of the Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. This means that Sanders has placed at the top of his leadership team a person who sees the world in racialist terms. Turner is part of a constellation of figures whom working-class Americans find profoundly alienating. Not because they are black or Muslim or whatever. But because this crowd doesn’t articulate the common interests of working-class America—at least not without smearing working class Americans as bigoted, nativist, and xenophobic. These cosmopolitan elites represent divisiveness when popular unity is needed. They speak ill of the very people with whom they claim solidarity. They call themselves socialists while disrupting class consciousness with identity politics. They’re misdirecting the left.

One cannot dismiss all this by claiming that identity politics are alienating to white working class folks because the latter are backwards and racist. All this is troubling to many blacks, as well, who are not going all in for Sanders. The immigration problem is particularly troubling for black Americans. Why do progressives defend mass immigration when so many black Americans are in need of work? It’s as if the power structure of America always wants black on the bottom. Foreign-born workers are desired more than black workers. Ocasio-Cortez and “the Squad” can get so exercised about immigration control. But why haven’t progressive cities established themselves as sanctuaries for members of the black community? Urban elites can’t allow ICE to find and remove criminal aliens from their cities, but the police kicking down doors and hauling black Americans to prison for drug possession is okay? No family separation there? The identitarian left seems to be all about immigrants. But not so much about citizens (black and white).