“It is part of human mortality to view our own particular situation as more important and to take it more seriously than all preceding situations have ever been. However, one should be on the guard against dismissing this hyperbolic self-estimation—especially in light of the doctrine of the Last Judgement—as only a perspectival fallacy.”
-Reinhart Koselleck
The symbolism and religious imagery of COVID has become commonplace to all of us. The rituals of masking, six-foot separation, even of washing our hands in the proper sanctified way—for exactly twenty seconds, as shown on ubiquitous posters like the one above, even though we know that COVID is not spread on surfaces or stopped with hand washing—are all concealed by a faux coat of scientific paint that is presented in precise numerical language for effect. Yet these are nothing but empty rituals handed to us by doctor-priests who—as they cry out from their perches like Biblical prophets about the end of days and the need to submit to the will of the science God lest catastrophe ensue as new variants and COVID dangers threaten us all—know nothing of science, of humanism, of the Hippocratic Oath; theirs is a religious gospel that is dogmatic and unchallengeable, one entirely invented, despite their claims to the contrary, to soothe a frightened and vulnerable people who they continue to scare for their own ends, and one that has gained traction by using religious imagery and language that has worked so well in the medical religion. However, unlike our medical religion, the religion of COVID has transformed this nation into a Theocracy in which liberty and choice are stripped from us under the guise of saving our lives. We are being forced to “stay alive”—force to be medicated and follow draconian rules and meaningless rituals—even as these edicts serve to take our lives from us.
“We could say that a massive wave of fear caused by a microscopic parasite is traversing humanity, and that the world’s rulers guide and orient it towards their own ends. Limitations on freedom are thus being willingly accepted, in a perverse and vicious cycle, in the name of a desire for security — a desire that has been generated by the same governments that are now intervening to satisfy it,” writes Agamben. “[T]he recent orders…transform, in effect, every individual into a potential plague - spreader, just as the orders against terrorism considered every citizen as a de facto and de jure potential terrorist. Particularly frowned upon is the figure of the healthy or precocious carrier, who infects a multitude of individuals without affording them the possibility of defending themselves against him as they could have from the anointer.”
We have discussed how medical science has become our new religion, with its dogmas and rituals that are scripted by people and organizations who clearly benefit from their implementation, with its dismissal of any who dare challenge a singular gospel by empolying a discursive derision of their being “anti-science,” with its reliance on spreading a cloud of never-ending fear that only strict abeyance to the medical-priests can alleviate, with its faux-scientific methodology that is twisted and mystified so as to appeal to our cognitive biases, and with its division of society into the compliant good and the ignorant-dangerous other. If our medical system—which now spends $4 trillion to generate worse outcomes then when it spent a sixth of that, but whose priests and overseers continue to connive the public that its gospel is lifegiving and necessary—has been vaulted into a religious entity, then COVID has lofted it into a Theocratic totalitarianism, in which liberties and the scientific principals of free and open discourse and truthful and balanced approaches to a threat have been extirpated by a society that has been bamboozled into believing that only with a pious devotion to ritual and a voluntary diminution of freedoms can this apocalyptic threat to mankind be controlled.
Says Agamben: “We should also seriously reflect on the need for religion that the situation has exposed. One sign of this need that has made itself apparent in the incessant media discourse is the terminology borrowed from the eschatological vocabulary. In order to describe the phenomenon, the media — especially the American press — obsessively resort to the word ‘apocalypse,’ and often explicitly evoke the end of the world. It is as if the religious need that the Church is no longer able to satisfy is groping for a new habitat — finding it in what has already become, in effect, the religion of our time: science. Like any other religion, this faith can produce fear and superstition, [b]ut only tyranny, only the monstrous Leviathan with his drawn sword, can be built upon the fear of losing one’s life.”
When a young educated liberal blasted me for using misinformation and irrelevant personal experience to make my claims about the ineffectiveness and danger of masking and locking up old and young people, she elevated herself into a religious disciple of an undisputable faith against which I—by clinging to heresy—became an enemy. She accessed sundry “undisputable” gospels to validate her singular truth—mostly news clips from New York Times and CNN and the holy prophets including academic doctors, the CDC, Dr. Fauci—that surely could not be questioned. It was “misinformed “people like me—despite my being on the front line of COVID and writing about it—who didn’t understand the need to lock up the world and vaccinate/mask everyone in the wake of this calamity. By questioning the gospel, I in fact posed a threat to this state of exception deemed necessary to keep us alive. Agamben might say that her focus on bare life—on reducing people to lives bereft of any judicial or political existence—justifies her calls to end democracy so as to save it, to end lives so as to save lives. To her it makes sense that we must submit to this religious exigency in the wake of an unprecedented threat. She garnishes her religious beliefs with scientific wrapping paper derived from bogus studies and with bows representing academic scientists and the great Dr. Fauci as she skewers all reality beyond her well-manicured canon. Even facts are meaningless when they dare to contradict the Theocratic gospel of bare survival.
In our society, experts have coopted the religious role of bishops, monks, even the Pope. They interpret the gospel, proclaim its sanctity on CNN and MSNBC and in the print media, and their discursive absolutism becomes the singular truth, distinguished from the other which they label as misinformation or anti-science. Says historian Rodney Harrison, citing other writers, “one way in which modern societies manage risk and uncertainty is through placing increased trust in ‘experts’ and abstract ‘expert systems’ over local forms of knowledge.”
Experts need not show how they arrive at their conclusions since, like the clergy, they simply know right from wrong, truth from falsehood, and often they can create their own narrative in which, paradoxically, facts are made to seem like myths, and myths are painted as facts. Says Agamben: “I am not alone in having noticed that the data on the epidemic is offered vaguely and without scientific scrutiny. From an epistemological point of view, it is obvious, for example, that providing the number of deaths without contrasting it with the annual mortality rate for comparable periods and without specifying the real causes of death is meaningless. And yet this is precisely what is happening. [T]he infected patient who dies from a heart attack or from any other cause is counted as a COVID - related death. Why is there still faith in falsity, even when the falsity is documented?”
“Faith in falsity” is exactly what the religiosity of COVID has legitimated because falsity becomes truth if it is deemed necessary to preserve our bare lives in the wake of an apocalypse. When Copernicus showed that earth goes around the sun, and when that fact stood in opposition to Christian dogma, Copernicus had to bury his findings because his “facts” were necessarily heresy in the wake of a dogmatic truth (necessary to launch humanity into the millennium) that such “facts” threatened. The “truth” of experts vanquishes the falsehood of “facts” in any religious construct. COVID experts proclaim the sanctity of studies to prove that science and not faith is what drives their predictions and declarations. But, as we demonstrated in the last blog, such studies are no more scientific than the lore weaved up by priests and thought leaders during the Christian totalitarian epoch, in which bare life too justified any means necessary to lead humanity away from evil and into salvation. Let’s look a bit at these “scientific studies” cited by COVID experts to buttress their apocalyptic claims.
The most alluring and manipulative data is drawn from observational studies, discussed most cogently in Vinay Prasad’s book Ending Medical Reversals. Virtually everything preached by the medical-priests during COVID—then utilized by COVID devotees as proof of their position—is built with flimsy straw and mud that is observational data. Prasad and others have shown how easily observational studies is manipulated to reach a preordained conclusion, how rare it is that it is accurate, and how it can’t prove cause and effect but is used to do just that.
What are observational studies? Let’s look at them in a religious context first, then a medical-religious one. Essentially, they observe various outcomes among different groups to see if anything within those groups is correlated to those outcomes. For instance, let’s say that a religious priest seeks to prove that devotion to religion improves one’s health. This priest then studies a village in which everyone prays and is religious and compares it to a village of atheists. He may look at a hundred outcomes and find that in the religious village there is a lower rate of death from accidents and from stomach cancer. Thus, based on his observational data—which he labels as being scientifically legitimate—he proved that being religious prevents accidental deaths and stomach cancer, something that is now proclaimed as an undisputable truth by experts on Medieval CNN. His observational study dismisses any confounding variables—such as the fact that the atheist village has more traffic and car drivers and that may explain the higher accident rate, and that there is more drinking and smoking there too which are the leading causes of stomach cancer—and ignores any other outcomes that contradict the study’s finding (such as if there is a higher rate of heart attacks in the religious village or a higher rate of sexual assault). The observational study only reports variables and outcomes that drive the conclusion the priest seeks to prove, and the priest now constructs a fictitious cause-effect link between religiosity and health, something that he and other “experts” can now assert with absolute certainty.
Observational studies litter the medical literature to prove that certain drugs or medical interventions work. They’re easy to conduct and you can always arrive at a preordained conclusion as long as you pick your populations and variables carefully, and don’t report anything that gets in the way of your objective. A drug company can conduct a study showing, for instance, that a group of healthy people who use their drug have fewer heart attacks than a group of people who don’t. They don’t have to mention any other variables that may have an impact on their results—such as if more people smoke or are obese in the control group—and can ignore any untoward outcomes of their drug—such as if those who use it develop memory loss in a few years—by burying that data or by stopping the study before such outcomes become noticeable. What they create is a fictive dogma, now proven by science, that their drug prevents heart attacks, and with that observational certainty medical priests can now proclaim on CNN and in the New York Times that everyone should be on this new miracle drug (whose efficacy has been scientifically validated) to prevent likely death. This kind of thing happens every day in health care!
Observational data is what Dr. Fauci, the CDC and WHO, TV reporters, medical experts, and the student who derided me use as proof of their positions. It is no more than bottled up fiction served as a fine wine.
Thus, with masks, even though only two randomized studies look at masks—one clearly shows no benefit, the other shows a tiny benefit (but no reduction in death or serious illness) in an older population but not a younger one—and despite voluminous historical data on the use of masks in viral outbreaks showing clearly that they don’t reduce transmission of disease, serious illness, or death, COVID experts have conducted hundreds of observational studies that have been designed to show that masks work. For instance, some compare populations that are young and healthy and wear masks to those that are older and sicker and don’t wear masks. Thus, to the authors of these studies, who dismiss the ages and illness of the two groups, it’s the masks that reduce infection and death, something trumpeted by CNN anchors and pious students as proof of mask efficacy. One could just as easily show that in wealthy areas, where there are a lot of Priuses and Goldendoodles, people suffer fewer COVID deaths than poorer areas with more Hyundai’s and mutts, thus proving that driving a Prius and owning a Goldendoodle helps reduce COVID death. But of course that’s not their agenda, so they look only as masks.
And it gets worse. Using deceptive observational data, and combining with it surrogate data (for instance, with masks, looking at how many particles of COVID may be deflected with a mask), they plug all of this into models and generate conclusions that are horribly inaccurate but are perceived as touting scientific proof that non-mask use leads to calamitous outcomes. This is why, early in COVID and even now, epidemiologic models tell us we’re all going to die unless we wear masks and isolate and close schools, even if the reality of the situation—that none of those devices have reduced death from COVID and that many have increased death and suffering from other causes—leads us in the opposite direction. As Cathy O’Neill shows in her book Weapons of Math Destruction, when you plug deceptive data (often derived by studying a few-hundred people in a manicured way) into a model and then scale that model to be valid across the entire population, the results are so inaccurate that they can lead to horrid outcomes if they are used to craft policy.
Of course, in the medical religion, amplified corrupt data are exactly what the priests use as proof of their holy cause and our impending doom, for if anyone dares dispute the COVID gospel, modeling studies demonstrate that the entire world may burn if people defy the will of the priests. Even a few people who don’t wear masks or get vaccinated can, according to modeling data and priestly liturgy, lead to massive death across all of society. CNN anchors have spoken in this religious language throughout COVID and relied on models built from epidemiologists in academia to prove the truth of their fearmongering.
Observational studies and subsequent modeling thus provide expert medical-priests of COVID with declarative truths, based on science, that trump even reality. And since the public, with its cognitive biases and its fear of a virus that is painted as the end of days through unending 24 hour media coverage, believe and trust experts, people wear masks outside and in the car, they scoff at heretics who don’t, and they accept the need to lock up society and subject kids to masking and immunization as necessary to prevent a global calamity, while turning their backs on any facts or data that contradict the gospel of "science." Wearing a mask becomes an act of piety, while not wearing one is a defiance of gospel and thus an assault on society itself, a threat to all life. This is the binary of COVID that makes it so easy for democratic institutions to twist truth into dogma, magnify fear, and thus create a never-ending state of exception in which life and democracy are only preserved through ritualistic acts and a necessary curtailment of life and democracy. We have, as Agamben may say, become bare life.
To Agamben and others, the mask has become a religious symbol of compliance, one that generates persistent fear of the virus by its ubiquitous presence, one that separates the faithful from the heretics, one that takes away our humanity and transforms us into a compliant flock. He writes, “A country that decides to renounce its face, to cover with masks the faces of its citizens everywhere is, then, a country that has purged itself of any political dimension. Inhabiting this empty space, which is at every moment subjected to a control which knows no limits, individuals now live in isolation from one another.” To Agamben says, and indeed Foucault would emphasize, masks take away our individuality and make us subject to the discipline aof the theocracy that is monitored by expert medical-priests who have convinced us of the necessity of staying true to the faith lest we all die. “It is in their faces that humans unwillingly drop their guard; it is in the face—and before any words are spoken—that they express and reveal themselves. And what the face expresses is not only an individual’s emotional state but, first and foremost, their openness, their exposure, and their communication to others.” Thus, in erasing the face, our theocratic leaders have turned us into a flock of mindless, compliant devotees of religious truth.
We have, as a society, relinquished our liberties, our distrust in institutions and corporations, our very lives and ability to make our own choices, to the religion of COVID. To do that requires us to have unflappable faith in medical-priests and to disparage anyone who dares to dispute their gospel. And this is what Americans have done, many of whom proclaim to be liberals—like the young woman who attacked me—but who believe that liberty and scientific discourse must now be subsumed by the religious need for compliance to experts and their version of “science.” Such liberals see no contradiction between their faith in COVID science and their ultimate rejection of real science; the theocracy assures them that their piety is truth and that any who question the piety must by default represent false.
Thus, censorship is not a threat to liberty, because censorship expunges “misinformation” uttered by heretics who, by through their false proclamations, threaten life and liberty. In fact, the discursive deception of the COVID faith typically conflates COVID with the quarantine; it is not the quarantine the has deprived kids of their education and triggered a higher rate of drug overdose, it is COVID that causes these. Thus, to protect kids from everything that has so threatened them these past two years—all of which have been caused by the quarantine’s ramifications—we must protect them from COVID, which ironically only justifies and expands the quarantine. This is a bizarre twist of logic and a blatant contradiction that COVID devotees—even those who declare that they are scientific and liberal—find to be truthful and sensible.
When put into religious terms, it is easy to see why devotees, who believe that they are following science and are being humanistic, will relinquish their liberties, engage in ritualistic behavior as a necessary piety against the threat of an intractable satanic enemy, and accept the gospel of doctor-priests. Masks, for instance, become a performative behavior that is reinforced incessantly by a media that points to “indisputable” data and that blames all the deaths on states and nations and people who refuse to wear masks; by expert doctor-priests who declare that masks are scientifically proven to stop COVID spread and reduce death and that COVID would be eradicated if everyone had listened to them; by friends and neighbors who we respect and who are often educated and of our political bent who wear masks piously; by the visceral picture we and the media have drawn of non-maskers as being Trump-lovers and science-haters and the others who we naturally despise; by our own ritualistic use of masks that seems so natural and necessary after doing it day after day. Mask wearers believe that masking is science, humanity, and piety all wrapped into a flimsy piece of cloth. Even driving with masks seems natural and normal. Thus, when I tell my fellow student that all the hundreds of my patients who acquired COVID caught it through a mask and that no good studies show that they work, these facts don’t deter her performative conviction that masks are necessary, that they are scientific, that they are humanistic, and that they are truth; my own “facts” and experience, my own research, puts me into the camp of the other and thus must be wrong. Religion is oppositionally binary; it’s God against Satan, mask against no-mask; there is no nuance. Facts must bow to gospel for the canon to endure.
Ironically, the most pious and proselytizing of all the devotees of the new COVID religion—the ones most likely to defame and ridicule anyone who dares to question the priest-doctors and who preach that COVID is the one and only issue that defines our nation—are typically areligious, self-declared liberals, and have a strong belief in science and humanity. Conversely, the people most critical of the COVID dogma—other than many doctors and scientists who see through the religiosity and totalitarian aura of our doctor-priests and their misguided liturgy but who have been marginalized and silenced—are conservative religious Americans; they have their own faith and their own religion, and they resent the intrusion of the government and medical authorities into their private lives. These heretics also rightly point out that despite our faith in COVID doctor-priests, more Americans have died of COVID than in nations that eschew the COVID religion, and more Americans have suffered and perished at the hands of these doctor-priests who—by reducing us to bare life—sacrifice the living to save them from the sin of not following the gospel.
From a medical and humanitarian perspective, the two groups most viciously victimized by our COVID Theocracy are the oldest and youngest Americans, and both for different reasons. We’ll spend the next and last blog demonstrating how the COVID religion has morphed this nation into a willing biopolitical form of totalitarianism where freedom and science are crucified on a cross of religiosity. But what is the medical fall-out of our theocracy? Many of the medical heroes I talk about in a previous blog warned us that the gospel of Fauci would not stop COVID’s deadly bite but would cause tremendous harm to people and to society, both in terms of life lost and life ruined. Tragically, they have been proven correct.
Let’s talk about the kids first. Nothing demonstrates the sinister repercussions of our COVID religion, and the blind faith citizens and leaders have placed in its priests, then the fate of our children. And I say this with some hesitation, because many of our kids—those, like my fellow student, who label themselves as liberal and progressive and science-oriented—embrace their own suffering as a necessary sacrifice for the good of the world. Perhaps they view this as a crusade in which they seek to play a role, a battle against the heathen in which their participation will be crucial to determine the very fate of humanity and our nation, playing the role of savior for a people who have gone off the tracks.
And yet, nothing we have done to our kids and young adults is based on science and is going to help them or humanity. In fact, it is barbaric. Early in COVID I had a motto shared by many of the medical heroes who I discuss in prior blogs: Protect the old, infect the young. For a disease that is 1,000 times more lethal in people over the age of eighty than under the age of sixty, for a disease that barely touches our youth and in the vast majority of younger people enters the body harmlessly and asymptomatically but leaves behind enduring natural immunity, this moto makes scientific sense. The only way to eradicate a pandemic is to generate immunity in a population not vulnerable to the disease’s sting, and this virus made such a goal achievable by being pathologically dangerous to a very small demographic slice of people—the elderly--while leaving kids and young people largely unscathed.
But, of course, that is not what happened. When Scott Atlas and others dared suggest that kids should be left alone, he was called a mass murderer on CNN, a sentiment that spread like wildfires through the liberal community and its medical priests and journalists. My statement to protect the old and infect the kids was viewed as callous and cruel. And so, we frightened our youth to such an extent that many parents refused to let kids out of the house, we closed schools, we forced our kids to wear masks, to get vaccinated with an experimental vaccine that the FDA said could not be tested and thus the mass vaccination would show how dangerous it might be, to be afraid of other kids and of their families. We tossed kids into a gulag and told them that the COVID monster lurked in every corner ready to leap out and kill them; best for them to hide away and relinquish their lives for the good of our nation in this, the darkest time of all human history.
Not only did this selfish and misguided approach prevent us from building a wall of population immunity early in the pandemic that could have ended it quickly, but it also severely damaged our kids both physically and psychologically. We know that COVID itself has killed and hurt very few of them, even though watching CNN you would think otherwise. In the first year of COVID about 300 were killed by the virus out of a population of over 90 million; COVID was less lethal than being in a car, walking down a city street, or than many other diseases and infections that we don’t even care about. I discuss this in one of my blogs, showing that three years ago a flu epidemic killed over 3000 kids in this country, and no one batted an eye; the CDC even suggested that that number was too low to think about vaccinating kids for flu. But now we’ve put out other messages: kids must be vaccinated, even though it’s clear that the vaccine is much more likely to kill them and injure them then COVID ever could, and even though we have no idea what the long-term impact of this novel untested vaccine could be on our youth. Kids must wear masks, because somehow, we’ve convinced them and their parents that a mask is effective against a virus that is not harmful to them, even though every mask study—even those done in the right way—show that they’re not effective in slowing transmission of virus in young people, and even though the mask clearly can cause psychological and physical damage when used for long periods of time, facts well described by Vinay Prasad. Kids must stay apart from other kids, from their family, from society; they can go to school, but it is a school replete with rules and fear and wardens, it is a prison, it is a religious penitentiary in which the specter of death and illness fill the air with a thick haze and in which the diabolical wrath of Satan hovers every minute of every day and will strike and kill lest the kids be compliant with the rituals of the medical-priests.
And so, because COVID is religion and not science, our kids will forever suffer. Many will die from our treatment, many will drop into deep gutters of depression and will fall prey to suicide and drug overdoses, many will be permanently scarred and fearful, and all will have been robbed of a seminal experience in their lives, forced to live within the walls of a prison monitored by rituals and liturgy that has now been sold to them as science. What will become of this generation that has been so brainwashed and frightened and beaten up? It is a crime against humanity, but one carried out with religious vigor by our science president and medical priests and the many devotees of the COVID religion.
What about the second part of my slogan, protect the old? How did our religion do on that score, especially given the reality that we knew before it even hit our shores that COVID was most dangerous to the vulnerable elderly, that the death rate in the long term care population was 70/1000 of those who were hit by the disease (compared to 1/2000 in the rest of the population including older people who live independently, which is lower than the death rate of flu), that older people are less able to mount a good immune response? Again, because we placed our faith in medical-priests instead of science and instead of reality, because we focused on ritual and dogma rather than science and common sense, because (as Agamben says) we focused only on bare life—counting deaths from the virus but not caring about anyone who died and suffered from our cure—we essentially massacred the older population in our crusade to save them.
Says Agamben: “[W]e have divided the unity of our vital experience — which is always and inseparably corporeal and spiritual — into a purely biological entity (bare life) on the one hand, and a social and cultural life on the other.”
In doing so, we slaughtered our elderly without protecting them. From the start of the pandemic, the dictatorial power of our public health experts—based on the gospel of Fauci and the CDC and our medical-priests—forced our hand in long term care. We were not able to care for our patients. We were told that masking, locking everyone up, and preventing visits by families would take care of these vulnerable people. And so, we did that, and COVID swept through these institutions and murdered and maimed those unable to fight it. When we protested that this ritualistic liturgy was not effective, we were told to shut up and to keep doing it; to this day, it is still our one and only policy. We lock up vulnerable elders, we deprive them of the very interactions and care that keep them alive and well, and thus do we not protect them as we actively kill them with our cure. Public health cares not about actual life, only about COVID’s transformation of people into bare life. If hundreds of elders die and wither away from the lockdown for every one COVID infection prevented, that is a victory to our public-health COVID priests, even if nothing they did actually prevented the one COVID infection that they count. The failure of public health in this pandemic, its regression into an instrument of Totalitarian coercion without any concern for science or humanity, has been a legacy that we may never shed. The deaths and suffering in long term care are unconscionable, but it is the natural consequence of the COVID religion, one that few people question.
“Just wear the damned mask,” as my Governor said. But, I responded in a tweet, the masks aren’t working. And when I said that, the State Board of Medicine threatened to take away my license. When any of us protested the cruelty of locking up elders and depriving them of family and socialization and physical activity—indeed, replacing the love and caring they need with fear and isolation, of turning them into bare life that we willingly sacrificed to keep the COVID numbers low—we were told to shut up. Long term care became a killing field because we didn’t protect these people from the virus we knew was a threat and because we murdered them with a series of lethal rituals spelled out by the gospel of COVID and one that was not ever scientifically tested or scrutinized.
Many of those with whom I work—nurses, aides, practitioners, families, patients—saw the feckless cruelty of our approach but were powerless to stop it, for to question faith in our COVID theocracy is to be in league with other heretics and with Satan himself. And, ironically, the more that our elders died of any cause, the more our doctor-priests ascribed those deaths to the misinformation and heresy of the other, and the more they tightened their liturgical grip upon long term care and killed even more people with their rituals. It wasn’t the rituals that were killing people, they proclaimed, but the questioning of ritual; the rituals could not be perfidious or else the entire Theocracy would tumble. The very failure of the COVID religion—the mounting deaths despite an eradication of life—ironically gives more power to the medical-priests to demand even tighter control over the liturgy and more fuel to their disciples to blame all of this on the heretics.
Yes, we could have studied this population, seen if masks work for instance, implemented policies (such as daily testing of everyone who enters the building or who lives there) that would have afforded these vulnerable elders freedom and joy while still protecting them, but in the midst of an apocalypse, and in a cloud of intractable fear and religious abeyance, there is no time for scientific studies or for questioning the gospel, especially when the gospel itself was science. The world is binary: you follow the dictates of public health, or you are marginalized and labeled as a dangerous renegade.
When my (former) friends and family tell us—as one did recently—that the scientists are doing the best they can, that forced immunization of kids makes sense, that watching a school play in which all the kids are wearing masks and shields is OK, that masks and distancing are going to be with us forever because they have to, that it’s ok when our leaders institute mandates that restrict our freedoms and force us to medicalize ourselves, that is when I know that the COIVD religion has won the hearts and minds of people who I had hoped were smarter and better than that. All of those who blindly turn their head away—even those who say “I don’t agree with everything Fauci is doing, but we might as well go along with it because what else can we do?”—from the horror that has overtaken our world, who participate in the religious barbarism or who simply accept it, are—as I said in a previous blog—Fauci’s willing executioners. No theocracy—whether during the Middle Ages or in the slave south or Hitler’s Germany—can function without some degree of cooperation from our citizens, and the COVID religion has ample adherents, many of whom believe themselves to be liberal and scientific, but who in fact are the instruments of our democracy’s destruction.
Concludes Agamben: “As the law begins to deal explicitly with the biological life of citizens as a good that needs taking care of, this interest immediately takes a dark turn towards the idea of a life that is, as the title of a well-known work published in Germany in 1920 puts it, “unworthy of life.” Every time a value is ascertained, a non-value is, necessarily, established: the flipside of protecting health is excluding and eliminating everything that can give rise to disease. We should reflect carefully on the fact that the first case of legislation by means of which a state programmatically assumed for itself the care of its citizens’ health was Nazi eugenics. Soon after his rise to power in July 1933, Hitler promulgated a law for the protection of the German people from hereditary diseases. This led to the creation of special hereditary health courts…that decreed the forced sterilization of 400,000 people. Less well known is that, long before Nazism, a eugenic politics was planned in the United States—particularly in California—with robust funding from the Carnegie Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation, and that Hitler explicitly referenced this model.”
In the next and final blog, we will show how our COVID theocracy has relinquished our liberty in the wake of a state of exception, something that we are blindly enabling, and which likely will mark the doom of our democratic experiment.