freedom and reason

“I am heartbroken,” George Floyd’s girlfriend Courteney Ross told the Star Tribune. “Waking up this morning to see Minneapolis on fire would be something that would devastate Floyd.”

Bob, I have to ask, were those MAGA protestors throwing bricks and molotov cocktails, burning down buildings, looting stores, and physically assaulting people in Lansing? They look rather laid back in the picture above. Pictures can be deceiving. But I can assure you that the protestors were peaceful. Nobody was hurt. I also know that it is not illegal to carry guns in the capitol building in Lansing, Michigan.

When, on May 2 1967, two dozen armed members of the Black Panther Party entered the state Capitol in Sacramento, California, did you freak out, Bob? The Black Panthers entered the capitol to protest the Mulford Act, a measure that repealed the law allowing public carrying of loaded firearms. Unlike the MAGA protestors who were carrying guns to protest extreme government measures, the Panthers were carrying guns to protest for the right to carry guns in public—in order to challenge police officers patrolling black-majority neighborhoods (what the Panthers called “Copwatching”).

Tell us, Bob, what did the police do in Sacramento on May 2, 1967? Did they fire tear gas canisters at the Panthers? No. After they escorted the Panthers from the capitol building, they gave them back their guns. The Mulford Act had yet to be signed into law. The situation was peacefully resolved.

Armed protestors gathered in the Michigan capitol yesterday, too. But this time they weren’t white. They were members of a political organization calling itself Legally Armed in Detroit. They were mostly black and armed with AR-15s (this was not the first time armed black men appeared in Michigan’s capitol). They were not tear gassed, either. Why not? Because they were breaking no laws. Their protest, like the MAGA protests, like the Black Panther protests, were peaceful.

The police exist to secure public order. To be sure, it is a capitalist order. But it’s an order nonetheless, one that an overwhelming majority of Americans support. Securing the public order protects people. The Michigan protestors—white or black—were orderly. The Minnesota rioters are not. This explains the differential police response. It would have been bizarre to see the police in full riot control mode for a riot that never occurred—just as bizarre as it is to see the police stand down in the face of an actually-existing riot, which is what they are doing in Minneapolis.

This is how utterly messed up the progressive establishment is in today’s America. Here is the essence of their argument: White men with guns peacefully protesting an order that quarantines healthy people in their homes represent a grave threat to democracy and should be roughly dealt with by the police. White males are privileged. What would they have to protest about? They’re protests are illegitimate. The looting of stores, setting cars and buildings on fire, and physically assaulting people, on the other hand, should be watched by the police from a distance. That’s legitimate protest. The people are angry so let them have at it. As the police chief told a local news station in Minneapolis, he told his officers to stand down for their own protection.

Of course, this can’t go on forever. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey announced yesterday that he had asked Governor Walz to activate the national guard to help local law enforcement. But he also excused the rioters: “The emotion-ridden conflict over last night is the result of so much built-up anger and sadness. Anger and sadness that has been ingrained in our black community, not just because of 5 minutes of horror, but 400 years.” How living human beings on the basis of skin color carry with them the anger of generations they never experienced is never explained in this type of rhetoric. As I have noted in previous blogs, the tone here is biblical. The fatalism of supposing that hundreds of years of anger and sadness have been genetically ingrained in people is, however, likely to produce undesirable outcomes.

Whites are said to have things ingrained in them, as well: racism and race privilege. Frey didn’t have to say it. Others said it for him. Tucker Carlson provides several examples:

Make no mistake, what the police did to George Floyd was wrong. The protests are appropriate. It was just as wrong when the police killed Dylan Noble and all the other men they have unjustly killed before and after Black Lives Matter became a hashtag. Techniques such as the one used by the police in this incident should be banned. The police kill far too many black and white men. But it is of some significance that whites don’t protest the killing of white people by the police. Perhaps it’s because the media doesn’t report facts like, in 2015, the year after Ferguson, police killed nearly twice as many white people than they did black people. Thus the potential for mass protests of police violence is redirected by the practice of racializing that violence.

I want to make it clear that the extraordinary crime and violence in Minneapolis is largely being perpetrated by a few individuals who are taking advantage of the opportunity to loot and vandalize under the cover of rage. I have watched numerous videos and those participating in criminal activities appear more interested in theft and vandalism than in making a political statement. Cracking safes is not legitimate protest action. It is certainly counterproductive to positive social change.

To be sure, the desire to loot and pillage is driven, at least in part, by the alienating conditions of capitalism. Crime of this sort is what Marxists have called “primitive rebellion.” Engels, in The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845), argues that the degrading working conditions prevailing under industrial capitalism demoralize the proletariat, leading to a loss of social control among workers and their children. The discontents of capitalism provide workers with the temptation to engage in deviant behavior and wear down their moral capacity to withstand the temptation to take what they believe they should have. Capitalism thus generates the social conditions that motivate some members of the working class to behave in criminal ways. Engels characterizes “primitive rebellion” as the “earliest, crudest, and least fruitful kind,” which, because of its expression at an individual level, is not only suppressed by the state but also condemned by the working class. For this reason, Marx and Engels are skeptical that working class criminals could be of much use to their revolutionary goals (which might explain why progressives applaud rioting). Indeed, Marx and Engels write in the Communist Manifesto that the conditions of capitalist society make more probable that working class rogues will play “the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” Marx and Engels don’t mince words, describing street criminals as “lumpenproletariat,” “social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.”

All people have a moral obligation to desist from unjustified violence—even if agent provocateurs get the ball rolling (an apparently white man in black clothing smashing windows at an AutoZone in Minneapolis has lit up the internet). And if I were in the streets of Minneapolis protesting excessive force by police I would be troubled by those standing with me lumping our protests with looters and vandals. But the justification for crime and violence as the consequence of white privilege by the US media and progressive activists licenses more of it. Rioting is almost expected in this context. Perhaps even useful. Now that the reality of the COVID-19 hysteria is dawning on people, those in the service of corporate power desperately need a new propaganda wedge to distract the public from the reality of the world elites have made—and the potential for class solidarity threatening those arrangements. Reinforcing the divisive narrative of black victimization and white privilege, Black Lives Matter was a successful propaganda project. It is not unexpected that progressives would return to it. My Facebook feed is overflowing with virtue signaling and self-loathing from woke white crowd (the same crowd that praises the Peoples Republic of China as a forward-looking entity). The white progressive wants the black man to know she’s no Karen.

Make no mistake about it, racial politics will be used against Trump in the upcoming election. Indeed, hysteria over the upcoming election is feeding the narrative in Minneapolis. But the strategy may backfire. Crime and violence demand law and order in the eyes of many, and not just in the heartland. Trump wasted no time talking tough, taking to Twitter to wax belligerent. His apparent threat to shoot looters was over-the-top but nonetheless strategic [see note below]. The president knows how to cut through the noise—even if much of his rhetoric is noise—with a powerful signal to his base. As Nixon showed us, law and order rhetoric stirs the silent majority to action. A little historical reminder is in order: Nixon won reelection in 1972 with 96.7% of the electoral votes, while his opponent, the George McGovern, 3.2%. Nixon would have one more had a Republican elector not switched his vote for the candidate for the Libertarian Party. Nixon received 60.7% of the popular vote.

So why are these memes so wrong? After getting the situation wrong in 2016, I have written several blog entries about the social profile of police shootings in order to clarify the claims made by progressives about the role race plays in this phenomenon. On the claims made about the role of race in police shootings, see The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter, Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect, Death by Cop Redux: Trying to Save the Narrative in the Era of Trump, and, more recently, Did Arbery Die to Perpetuate a False Narrative About Contemporary American Society? It is not true that police officers are more likely to shoot black people than they are white people.

I have supported this argument in the past by citing the work of Ronald G. Fryer, in “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2016, who, when turning his attention to the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—found no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. For those who may feel that one study is insufficient to determine the claim, I want to add some studies to the review. First, Joseph Cesario, David J. Johnson, and William Terrill, in “Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016,” published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, in 2018, found, adjusting for crime, no systematic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. They conclude that, when analyzing all shootings, exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks. This is the argument I made in my blog entry Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste, where I marshaled facts to show that black men are overrepresented in the crimes of violence that increase the likelihood that they will come into contact with the police and that, therefore, police actions must be understood in light of the patterns of violent crime officers confront. In another study, “Disparity does not mean bias: making sense of observed racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings with multiple benchmarks,” published in the Journal of Crime and Justice in 2019, Richard K. Moule Jr. and Bryanna Fox found that, when focused on violent crime arrests or weapons offense arrests, black citizens appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers. Finally, Charles E. Menifield, Geiguen Shin, and Logan Strother, in “Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects?” published in Public Administration Review, in 2018, found that, although minority suspects are disproportionately killed by police, white officers appear to be no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers. These are all rigorous studies published in peer-review scientific journals.

For another way to understand how race-craft constructs false realities, see Everything Progressives Say About Mass Shootings is Wrong…and Racist. Here I disprove the claim that whites are overrepresented in mass shootings. For those who think my arguments are pro-police, please see There are No Blue Lives and Let the Jury Do the Wrong Thing. I am neither pro- nor anti-police. I am pro-justice and pro-truth. Street crime and violence is no method for solving systemic problems. It should be suppressed for the sake of the working class.

That black males are neither subject disproportionately to police killings or to white-on-black killings was not a conclusion I had expected based on the politics in which I have long been immersed. I used to identify as an anti-racist and on a number of occasions repeated slogans that committed both the ecological fallacy and the fallacy of reification, that is, substituting for concrete individuals aggregate statistics and abstract demographic designations. I even flirted with the new civil rights ideology of white privilege. But stubborn devotion to facts and reason compelled me to pull back from the precipice and change my understanding of the situation. After a long time studying the problem, I came to the conclusion that America has never been less racist than it is today. And then I came to see hi-tech race-baiting are too effective of a weapon in diverting the working people of this country from the solidarity necessary to rise up together and restore democratic-republican government and an economy that works for all the people to let it sit on the shelf. So once more I have to confront a false narrative promulgated by the corporate media and progressive activists. It isn’t easy sharing the good news. People get mad at you.

There is a terrible consequence to the identitarian rhetoric in which progressive activists partake: people are given permission to rationalize crime and violence in the name of justice that has already been achieved. While we can disagree with tactics pursued in addressing it, the collective anger that erupted in protests and rebellion in the 1950s-1960s when institutionalized racism was the order of the day is understandable, maybe even necessary. But that order was abolished more than fifty years ago. Not only is institutional racism a thing of the past, but the administrative state and business firms have designed and implemented policies that pay special attention to the situation of blacks in educational and occupational institutions. The frustration people feel regarding their personal situation is due to individual failure and the workings of the class system (there is agency and there is structure). The workings of the class system call for worker solidarity and mass democratic action. However, this frustration the conditions generate is redirected into race resentment. Race resentment cripples the worker movement. Woke progressivism and its fetish for violence gets in the way of justice.

Here’s another bad comparison in the spirit of Robert Reich. The framing here is particularly obnoxious. Friedman says that Trump supporters are storming state houses. They are doing so because they “dislike” something.

The left is getting this one wrong. Fact and principle are not with them. First, the comparisons are false. The police do not treat equivalent protect action in a differential way based on race. Second, the claim of ongoing institutional racism is a myth. The United States abolished institutional racism over fifty years ago. Third, living people do not carry historic oppression in their beings. Trauma from one era does not carry over to the next era except by indoctrination. Those who preach intergenerational trauma constitute the source of trauma. Fourth, mounting evidence contradicts the specific claim of racial disparate police shootings. Police kill far more white males than black males. And if white Hispanics are included, even more than that. What the victims of police killings have in common is their proletarian status. This means that protests against police violence should not be couched in racial terms but in class terms. Fifth, criminal violence in the streets of Minneapolis does not constitute legitimate protest of police violence. Moreover, primitive rebellion is not a useful strategy for social change. It is wrong to egg on street crime. It is anti-working class to lump criminals with the cause of combating police violence.

Do the right thing. Call for nonviolent protests of police violence. Condemn criminality. Stop glorifying violence.

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Note: I may have erred in suggesting that Trump was advocating the shooting of looters. He may have been making an observation. Calvin L. Horton Jr. , was fatally shot outside a pawnshop Wednesday night in Minneapolis. The shooter, who owns Cadillac Jewelry, was arrested and remains jailed ahead of possible murder charges. The storefront suffered significant damage and was looted. Does anybody believe Trump knew Miami’s police chief, Walter Headley, used this phrase in 1967?

Working class politics do not really fit in today’s left verses right frame. That frame artificially divides the people. Nor are our politics white verses black. The politics of race is a centuries-old lie to fracture the masses. It’s time we were on to all that. Here are the relevant dynamics: nationalism verses globalism, populism verses progressivism, democracy verses technocracy, republicanism verses corporatism. These are the actual bifurcation points. 

Transnational elites, through globalization and regionalization (for example, the European Union), are denationalizing the world and replacing the Westphalian system with a world order defined by corporate feudalism and run by progressive technocrats. The globalists occupy the institutions of free and open societies, subverting their freedom and openness. In the plan of the transnational elite, the citizens of free societies are destined to become serfs of the corporate state, docile consumers managed by the administrative state and a vast culture industry. Actions to bring about this plan have been pursued for decades. We are now quite a ways down the road to serfdom.

This is not a conspiracy. The project operates in the open. We see it in the global financial system, international monetary systems, trade relations, and foreign direct investment. We see it in the off-shoring of production and the importation of cheap foreign labor into the West, resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars of lost income among native-born workers. We see it in the vast corporate communications apparatus operating an Orwellian Ministry of Truth against the interests of the working class. The hegemony of transnational corporate power is becoming total, legitimized in the grassroots by progressive “movements” preaching a divisive religion of resentment and victimhood.

The new world order grows out the business class war on labor and the left in an effort to restore high rates of profit and concentrate capital in the hands of the minority of the opulent. The fall in the rate of profit resulted from rising organic composition of capital and unprecedented union density. High growth rates and falling poverty set in motion by technological development, national unity, and labor peace were sacrificed on the altars of power and wealth.

The war on democratic-republicanism was kicked off in the 1960s by Kennedy and Johnson’s policies of tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals to free up capital for foreign investment, and the elimination of immigration quotas to draw cheap labor into the United States, moves decoupling productivity from compensation and the destruction of the post-WWII Bretton Woods in the early 1970s and the establishment of Bretton Woods II which, over time, shifted the capitalist periphery from Europe and Japan to Asia, particularly China, which became a vast export processing zone from the standpoint of the West, but an avenue for global expansion for the Chinese Communist Party, which rivaled the US in foreign direct investment prior to the Trump Administration.

Today, the Democratic Party, occupied by the progressive corporate establishment, embodies the globalist project in the United States. Those of their ilk occupy higher education and the mass media, key institutions of ideological hegemonic production. Their allies in the Republican Party are dwindling, a positive development that would likely be reversed if the populist turn were successfully suppressed.

Imagine elements in the United States government and powerful Western corporations and influential institutions allied with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union in the open manner in which Democrats ally with the Chinese Communist Party today. Imagine a politician in the United States Senate pushing a resolution, joined by more than two dozen of her Democratic colleagues, to condemn references to the Holocaust or the Gulag as “anti-German” or “anti-Russian” bigotry. Imagine the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, at the forefront of pushing for open trade with Nazis and Bolsheviks, bragging about 25 hours of private dinners with Hitler or Stalin and then entombing the content of those conversations in the University of Delaware archives. Yet this is where we find ourselves today.

All this is why the international populist movement is so vital to the promise of restoring democratic-republicanism and the international system—it is disrupting the corporatist globalist project. The election of Modi in India, Brexit in the United Kingdom, the election of Trump in the United States, the election of the conservatives in the UK, with Johnson as prime minister—whether you agree with particular ideological or moral points, these popular shifts are stifling the transformation of the system of nation-states into a one world order, an order dominated by corporations and administered by an unaccountable cadre of technocrats.

The media dwells on the right-wing character of current populism. What we are not supposed to see is that the populist movement represents a democratic-republican challenge to state corporate tyranny. We are supposed to see a popular democratic and nationalist uprising as nativist, racist, and xenophobic. But this is not an expansionist fascistic movement. Rather it is a response to the inverted totalitarianism of the corporatist project that represents the actual authoritarian threat to human freedom. Even with their near total control of the apparatus of ideological production, the elite are met by working people demanding back the keys to their respective countries. Their inability to contain populism terrifies elites. We see them growing shriller day by day as desperation sets in. They thought they had a chance with the COVID-19 pandemic. They were wrong.

When it organizes the world in real terms, sees the control apparatus for what it is, and rededicates itself to the democratic-republican principles of civic nationalism, the working class will see the task before it. The liberal will no longer be able to utter such idiocies as “blue no matter who.” Every conservative will see the Bush family for what it is. The deceits of progressivism and social democracy will be exposed. This is the paradigm shift that will forge a new popular mass movement against the elite. The neoliberals and the neoconservatives are losing their grip on the governing institutions of free societies. It’s high time.

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Note (late afternoon): I’m going to hijack my own blog entry to bring some news. Donald Trump signed today an Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship calling out Twitter and other social media platform for the practice of editorializing by censoring and labeling user content, actions that violate the neutrality required for these companies to enjoy immunity from liability created by section 230(c) of the Communications Decency Act (section 230(c)).  47 U.S.C. 230(c). By censoring and labeling content, Twitter and other social media platforms are providing content, which is inappropriate for a communications platform designed with user-generated content in mind, platforms that are, as I pointed out in the article in Project Censored, “Defending the Digital Commons: A Left-Libertarian Critique of Speech and Censorship in the Virtual Public Square,” public utilities. Fact checking is editorializing and that means that social media is not a neutral platform.

Trump advises that the law circumscribes immunity such that it should not extend beyond its text and purpose to provide protection for those who purport to provide users a forum for free and open speech and prevents the abuse of power these companies have over a vital means of communication to engage in “deceptive or pretextual actions stifling free and open debate by censoring certain viewpoints.” The demand for viewpoint neutrality is thus central to the function of social media platforms. Trump is using his office to call these companies before the sovereign people to answer for their violations of the principle of free speech. Trump cites court decisions holding that, if an online platform restricts access to some content posted by others, it becomes a “publisher” of all the content posted on its site for purposes of torts such as defamation. Trump notes that Congress sought to provide protections for online platforms that attempted to protect minors from harmful content and intended to ensure that such providers would not be discouraged from taking down harmful material, but that this protection was not intended to allow for the censoring and labeling of political speech. Indeed, as Trump points out, the provision was intended to further the express vision of the Congress that the internet is a “forum for a true diversity of political discourse.” The order states: “The limited protections provided by the statute should be construed with these purposes in mind.”

Trump is absolutely right. A communications platform cannot be a neutral platform and editorialize. Either it stays neutral and enjoys immunity or it provides content and loses immunity. It can’t have both. The bias is clear and the executive order details examples. “At the same time online platforms are invoking inconsistent, irrational, and groundless justifications to censor or otherwise restrict Americans’ speech here at home,” quoting from the order, “several online platforms are profiting from and promoting the aggression and disinformation spread by foreign governments like China. One United States company, for example, created a search engine for the Chinese Communist Party that would have blacklisted searches for ‘human rights,’ hid data unfavorable to the Chinese Communist Party, and tracked users determined appropriate for surveillance. It also established research partnerships in China that provide direct benefits to the Chinese military. Other companies have accepted advertisements paid for by the Chinese government that spread false information about China’s mass imprisonment of religious minorities, thereby enabling these abuses of human rights.  They have also amplified China’s propaganda abroad, including by allowing Chinese government officials to use their platforms to spread misinformation regarding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to undermine pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.”

Social media platforms are projecting corporate state hegemony by censoring and labeling content. The sovereign people have the right to regulate social media platforms and it is imperative that it does so in defense of liberty and democracy. I’ve been waiting for Trump to drop the hammer on this for a long time. He has been too patient for too long. Americans don’t need social media platforms telling them what’s true and what’s not, what they should trust or what they should doubt. As I wrote in my Project Censored article, having Facebook inform viewers as to their opinion about whether something is false or misleading is like AT&T listening to your phone calls and intruding to tell the person on the other end whether what you’re saying is in their opinion false or misleading. This is Big Brother.

The notion of a corporate entity presuming to check facts is absurdity. And given the bias of the communications establishment presently, dangerous. Social media platforms don’t have a special position from which to be the arbiters of truth. They’re bias entities with an agenda. As the order states, “Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet. As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets. Unsurprisingly, its officer in charge of so-called ‘Site Integrity’ has flaunted his political bias in his own tweets.” On War Room Pandemic Yesterday, Congressman Matt Gaatz put it succinctly: “They [social media platforms] are trying to define the nature of truth and change the way in which we have discussions.”

Facebook is as egregious as Twitter in labeling and censoring. “Zuckerberg Says Politicians Can’t Say Whatever They Want on Facebook After Criticizing Twitter For Trump Fact-CheckFacebook,” reads the headline in a Newsweek story today. Zuckerberg: “Just because we don’t want to be determining what is true and false, doesn’t mean that politicians or anyone else can just say whatever they want.” (Zuckerberg said this in an appearance on CNBC Thursday). He said the social networking company’s policies are “grounded in trying to give people as much a voice as possible,” but if it involves harm, violence or false information, Facebook will “take that down no matter who says that.” Taking down a post for false information is by definition determining what is true and false. We cannot have social media employees making such determinations.

I was recently a victim of Facebook labeling:

This was not my first run in with the Facebook censors. I discuss another act of Facebook censorship in this blog from a couple of years ago: Art in the Age of the Mechanical Enforcement of Political Correctness. This time my post was removed. I appealed to no avail. It’s time the sovereign people did something about corporate tyranny. I applaud President Trump’s actions. He is giving the people a voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REPORTER: "Nobody is wearing them."

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

— The First (@TheFirstonTV) May 26, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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