In 1860 a large swath of Northern Americans voted Republican. They went with a party willing, for the first time, to directly confront the biostate of our slavocracy which (as endorsed by churches, academics, and the scientific community for decades) reduced millions of people to non-human commodities who toiled behind the veil of profit, science, fear, and necessity that had been carefully erected to justify its existence and expansion. Few before 1860 were willing to even discuss slavery let alone try to curb its voracious spread. They deflected their gaze elsewhere, worried more about day-to-day concerns, comfortable that the nation’s experts had normalized a biostate whose energy derived from swallowing up human beings and spitting out money. But in 1860 many Northerners said ENOUGH, and they turned their backs on all other issues of import to them, even dismissing their day-to-day worries, and voted based on this singular issue, the ONLY ISSUE, the ONE ISSUE that defined everything about our nation, its values, and its future.
This election too should have been about one issue: our increasingly entrenched biostate (see a recent blog and podcast for a definition of this.) Democrats were vulnerable; their hypocritical cries of pro-choice, our bodies ourselves, we care about kids, black lives matters, pro-democracy were crushed by the reality of their true actions. Democrats stripped us all of choice, forced us to be medicalized against our wills (in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions), censored any who dare question their industry-paid scientists and dictatorial politicians, used executive over-reach to dismantle the very nidus of our Constitutional democracy under the veil of NECESSITY, denied kids education and any semblance of a normal life by infusing them with fear and with deadly drugs that were mandated and which clearly do not help them or anyone else, triggered the largest excessive death rate (highest by far in the world) and a 4 year drop in life expectancy by enacting restrictive policies that harmed the most vulnerable, and lied repeatedly even under oath about the faux-science and the nonfactual statistics that they plastered over their compliant media much like Goebbels and pro-slavery newspapers did in the ugly past. The biostate erected by our Democrats for an infection that (after its initial Spring surge) killed fewer people than average flu does, killed virtually no one under the age of 40 (ten times more in this demographic died a few years ago from an unheralded flu bug), and was treatable had public health allowed us to use effective and inexpensive medicines (they took away our medical license if we even discussed it) was vulnerable to attack, and given the level of censorship, only during an election could the important questions and concerns about our COVID biostate be raised.
Then why didn’t the electorate care?
I contend that they didn’t know. As I read the tweets of irate Republicans today, and even of Democrats like me who wanted to let the liberals know that we’re not willing to fall prey to their bio-political autocracy even if they sprinkle their anti-choice and anti-science agenda with empty words that numb and silence people who believe themselves to be liberal, I saw what the problem is. Many tweets are correct when they say that women voting for "pro-choice" candidates will see their choice taken away and will not change the calculus of abortion that had already been established a decade before Roe’s execution, when they surmised that the poor and people of color will suffer more under an oppressive biostate than under a more libertarian regime, that kids are the primary victims of the elevation of COVID into a religion that must be followed without question. But few of the Republican candidates were willing to even discuss COVID. They strayed from it, either being entangled in it themselves (Pfizer and other biostate leaders feed both parties equally with donations and support) or for fear of reprisal from the COVID zealots who dominate social media and the airwaves.
DeSantis did take it on, though. As I have shown in an op-ed, his state kept schools open, didn’t mandate masks or vaccines, and had (when demographics are considered) among the lowest death rates in the country. DeSantis is an anti-abortion, pro-Christian conservative, but he’s smart. Many very liberal and educated scientists who had the courage to assail the Faucist COVID dogma said that DeSantis was the only governor to ask the right questions, to learn the science, and to enact a plan that would do the least amount of harm. He barely won his last election, but he took this one by 20 points because he was brave enough and smart enough to go after COVID liberals and their hypocritical and ultimately murderous policies. He took them on. Even someone like me, a liberal non-religious science-focused doctor, would have voted for him. Sure, he may fight against abortion rights, but he does not inject our kids with poisons or place people in a prison camps and take away the right of free speech like the most liberal governor did in California, triggering not only an economic and humanitarian disaster in that state but also the highest death rate in the nation when demographics are factored in. And if he wants kids to pray in school for two minutes—something I find to be offensive—it’s sure better than closing school, forcing kids to wear masks all day and to be afraid of each other, and to infuse our children with a zeitgeist of fear that will tinge them for the rest of their lives.
I am a one issue voter because there is only one issue on the ballot that matters. This election should have been about stopping the biostate. By denying COVID’s monstrous decimation of all we hold sacred in this country we are no different that the compliant Northerners who for 40 years between 1820 and 1860 enabled the South to expand its slave labor camps because they didn’t want to open their eyes to this one issue that mattered and they felt other issues were more germane. Because they waited so long to finally acknowledge this one issue and vote Republican it was too late; only a war could dismantle the southern biostate, and even then its horrid stench of racist Jim Crow persisted for another century.
Unless we confront this now, unless we tell the Democrats that we refuse to live in a perpetual biostate, unless we put our other issues aside for now and strangle the beast before it grows too large to be slain, then we will be in the same predicament. For all you pro-choice, pro-kid, black lives matter Democrats, by refusing to slap your party and telling it to stop doing everything we have previously ascribed to the other side (anti-choice, anti-science, anti-kid, anti-democracy, censorship, executive over-reach), by closing your eyes to the horrific monster that is decimating our country’s values and laws and sliding your myopic gaze on more comfortable issues that you think are more important (Issues that the biostate has pushed to the forefront so as to blind Democrats from their power grab), you are responsible for what the future portends. Expect incessant cries of fearmongering and impending doom, constant mask mandates, school closures and accentuating childhood depression, policies that strip us of our rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the wake of NECESSITY, marginalization of and discrimination against those who refuse to be part of the biostate, and an entrenched group of executives who believe that when an exaggerated biohazard is deemed to be present they can simply turn off the Constitution and oppress those who defy it. This is on you.
But the Republicans didn’t make it easy. Other than DeSantis and a few others, few addressed COVID, few gave the electorate a real choice between the biostate and liberal democracy. In a neighboring county, the Democratic executive shut down schools with abandonment, forced masks and vaccinations on everyone, spit out a fictive science buttressed by those who profited by COVID’s proliferation, and exercised unconstitutional executive over-reach that penetrated the lives of everyone. His pro-life, anti-choice, anti-kid agenda was as stark as the sun itself and should have made him vulnerable. And when the elected council in that county voted to eliminate a mask mandate, this executive simply dismissed their democratic vote and stated that he wouldn’t abide by it, much as did those who ruled the slavocracy for all those decades turn off the Constitution. I was part of that debate, and the leading Republican taking him on—and who I found to be incredibly smart and scientific and reasonable—decided to run against him in the county election. But never once did she bring up COVID, she hid from it, hid from what the Democrat did to reverse the will of the people and take power in his hands, hid from the excessive deaths in the county from drug overdoses and suicides among kids, hid from the humanitarian anti-science policies of the sitting Executive. She never brought any of that up, instead focusing on the trite Republican talking points that have very little pull among independents and caring liberals. As a result, she lost. As did many other similar Republicans.
Perhaps she too was bought off by Pfizer. Perhaps she feared the reprisals of COVID zealots who would inevitably spit out false statistics and mangled science to paint her as a monster. But by hiding from the ONE ISSUE, the ONLY ISSUE that matters, she gave voters a bleak choice, and she enabled the monster to continue his reign of terror propped up by the voting public.
As we move forward, as the biostate sharpens its claws and seeks to expand its reach across a compliant landscape much as did the slaveocracy of the antebellum south, we do have a choice. We will see where the next two years bring us. Likely there will be more fear and shots pumped into our veins, more discrimination and censorship, more mandates and forced medicalization, more lies and executive over-reach, more death and damage done to our kids. Will we wake up? Will one party or the other—or at least brave members of these parties—decide to take on the beast and deliver to us real choice and an open society as we move forward? Will Republicans decide that their only chance is to hit the Democrats where it counts?
DeSantis knew, and despite the many issues he advocates to which I am opposed, he is smart and effective on the ONE ISSUE, on the ONLY ISSUE, on the issue that will determine if our democracy, the sanctity of our choice and bodies, the soul of science, the health and happiness of our kids will prosper or will be enslaved. Much as many Americans had to swallow hard to vote for the Republicans in 1860 because they knew that they had to, I and many liberal-leaning Americans would vote for DeSantis in 2024 because—given the bankruptcy of our party—we have to. Just remember, many Jews and other social progressives voted for Hitler, because they discarded the ONE ISSUE in that campaign and focused on what mattered to them, whether low taxes or a battle against Communism or their personal greed or racism. Hitler remained popular in Germany right up to his suicide because he was able to expand his biostate under the veil of NECESSITY and for the good of most Germans; his was not a tyrannical rule as much as it was a rule propped up by propaganda and lies and calls for saving the Germans from an imminent threat. Just like today’s biostate, just like the slavocracy that drove our nation into a ditch and ultimately triggered a Civil War, unless we take it down now, the future is indeed bleak.