Mommy, What's a Fascist?

Part 2

“But Mama,” some of my kids kept asking, “why is everybody else scared besides you? Maybe covid really IS scary.”

Well, it’s definitely scary to watch what passes for news right now, I told them. What worried me most, I further explained, was the 24-hours-per-day media flood of fear. It’s hard for anyone to think clearly when they’re scared.

I told my kids what we were being told on the news, in late March, which was that the virus was very contagious, and caused symptoms of flu and low blood-oxygen in some people, mostly much older and sick people, and hardly any problems at all in children.

But I also explained that I couldn’t connect the dots between what was being reported and the proliferation of new covid rules. Why on earth would people shopping at independent businesses transmit the virus more capably than those shopping at big box stores? Small businesses in my county (city? State? Region? It was difficult to know where the rules ultimately came from) were required to limit the number of customers who entered their buildings while chain stores were not.

From my research I found that covid seemed to be fatal occasionally, and especially in those elderly people with chronic diseases, which does describe most elderly people in the industrialized world - but even then the numbers didn’t look much worse than a bad flu year. I calculated CFR and IFR using my most generous estimates based on numbers provided by the New York Times and Worldometer and other sources, and I still couldn’t justify the fearful warnings and admonitions.

Of course, defining “worse” depended on _actual_ numbers, and it wasn’t clear who was in charge of coming up with these, or when we would have access to them. I told the kids that I was not impressed by the squirrelly data gathering which seemed to be actually lagging way _behind_ everything the news outlets were reporting nonstop with Tremendous Grave Authority. Why on earth were we advised to freak out about a theoretical death rate, hypothetical case fatality rate, and imagined infection fatality rate, if there was still no good way to determine who in a given population had active infections, who had already gotten and recovered from infections, who had died _with_ rather than _from_ covid, and how long the virus had been circulating to begin with? There was literally no standardized data, just a lot of huffy bureaucrats saying this couldn’t possibly at all for sure no way be a bioweapon, incidentally we all hate and also admire China, and also don’t forget that an election is coming up soon and Good Politicians Care About You: Stay Home and Stay Safe!

I’m fine with investigation and anecdotes and argumentative rabbit holes, I told the kids (and I’m used to tactics employed by guilty children of all ages), but I’m not cool with shutting down the entire world’s economies “just in case” one academic’s quick mathematical model turns out to predict the way one respiratory virus might behave.

“Epidemiological Modeling” involves adjusting variables to make assumptions about certain things in order to provide a simulation about what might happen in a given situation.

This can be useful, I explained to my very uninterested children, but there’s a problem with using mathematical models to come up with public health policy. They easily create circular logic: Science Sponsored By Us Says That Covid Is Highly Dangerous and Might Kill A Lot Of People, Because When We Model A Scenario In Which Covid Is Highly Dangerous And Kills A Lot Of People, Covid is Highly Dangerous And Kills A Lot of People!

I could create a mathematical simulation wherein I become a millionaire over the course of this year, but it would be dishonest if I were to imply that there’s any chance at all that this will actually happen. And if you were wanting to verify the chances of me remaining solvent and being able to repay a loan, for example, why would you take my word for it?

Data from research like this is technically correct, I told my still-bored audience, and it’s perfectly legal, but from the perspective of a person who cares about their health, the information is nearly useless.

So why were we being bombarded with fear?

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Suddenly, plexiglass windows-without-frames-or-walls had sprouted up in between customers and cashiers in most of the stores, and I took extra deep breaths when standing in front of them. Social safety talismans! Between all the acrylic, and playing hopscotch on pairs-of-feet stickers on the floors, I figured I was now about as safe as bicyclists become when they zoom around with helmets dangling from their handlebars.

I had spent the ten years prior to 2020 studying some of the relatively little that is known about the functioning of the human immune system, the pathologies of chronic vs. acute infections, and what sort of action steps might be possible in the context of an individual’s life to optimize health. During my research, I learned that while there are many reasons it makes sense to bolster a body’s defenses against serious illness, effective methods to absolutely prevent an entire population from getting sick from a virus as or more contagious than a common cold is pretty much not possible.

I say “pretty much” because in theory one could devise bubbles for everyone and live in them always - or stay home for ever and not go out - but no one apart from mad scientists live in Theory, and no one besides wealthy people can afford to stay home all or even most of the time. Also, health is SO much more complex than Mechanistic Exposure Between Viruses and Hosts, and in my opinion - not that anyone was asking - it is poor public health policy to announce that Preventing Exposure is The Most Important Thing For All People to do, indefinitely, and nothing (except for hooking you up to a dangerous ventilator) can be done if you get sick, full stop.

Among other problems with this mechanistic vision of health (in addition to humans not being machines) is that it ignores the literally millions of variables that, with tremendous nuance, influence whether a person gets sick with a stuffy nose or flu-like symptoms vs. no symptoms at all…and why very occasionally, somebody with the exact same infection, dies. Also, our immune systems evolved with “germs” and they need to encounter them more or less constantly in order to continue to function. And in any case, I couldn’t see how population-wide contagious-disease prevention would be worth it if it required quarantining healthy people and preventing all social interactions. It would literally be impossible to be successful at such population-wide avoidance unless you shut down society indefinitely, and the damage from such a plan would be so incalculably huge that risk of death from the disease in question would need to be _extremely_ well-understood and much more serious than any contagious-disease pandemic that has ever been described - not just a series of vague hypotheticals like the covid 19 risk-of-death still remained.

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I still remember where I was standing when news came of lockdowns IN CALIFORNIA. At first, others in my social circle expressed disbelief too, but within moments many people had inexplicably picked their jaws right back up off the floor. We were all supposed to wear masks when in the presence of anyone not in our immediate household. And not see anyone outside of our household. But what about outdoors? What about indoors with the windows open? We were supposed to stand far apart. Oh, and singing was bad - really bad. And you could get a ticket if you went to the playground, and my kids were petrified of getting a ticket, and the CAUTION tape on the slides and monkey bars really freaked me out. What if we’d already had the virus? How could all the experts know that covid was brand new without large-scale population-testing initiatives? Why were they touting PCR testing instead of diagnostic testing? It didn’t make any sense to me that individuals should go to a special testing center in order to determine whether or not they were sick. I was amazed by the number of rules being created and changed every day.

“Sara, you’re always so negative,” friends told me. “Scientists are doing the best they can to understand the virus, and people are scared. All we’re being asked is to stay home for three weeks to flatten the curve.”

“They don’t want to flatten any curve!” I sputtered. “Since when does a bad flu year close down the world?! Every year, _millions_ of people die from zillions of health problems AND diseases, and since when does ANY actual crisis shut down the economy?!?! The math doesn’t even make sense, because there’s no curve to flatten, because nobody knows the CFR!! And what will three weeks of staying home possibly do, besides postponing this week’s cases for two more weeks? I just looked it up, and USA hospitals, right when they privatized and specialized, got rid of most of their extra ICU beds - and that was years ago. We have pretty much the fewest hospital beds per capita in the industrialized world! Nobody’s gonna change the medical system, let alone in three weeks. If the issue really was needing beds or ventilators, there are ways to get them - but it’s not even clear if ventilators are helpful, or just kill people faster. No, what the pharmaceutical companies want is to scare you so that you are begging for the vaccine that’s coming next. We won’t be done in three weeks.”

“You are such a conspiracy theorist! Not everyone is going to change their diet and try to improve chronic health problems in order to deal with a global pandemic. We live close together. Vaccines will be something people want. People are scared, and people want to help NOW. That’s why I’m wearing a mask: because the cashier at the grocery store deserves to know I care. And now I’m done talking about covid - it’s too triggering.”

I wondered if I should feel guilty about something - my friends and also most of my extended family seemed offended every time we discussed the covid response.

But this response seemed inSANE to me! Surely lockdowns, even in the Peoples Republic of California, would be stamped out by uprisings, and surely these would be coming any day now, to alleviate this “three weeks and counting” bullshit, not to mention my growing and depressing sense of my little family becoming an island, rapidly losing connections to the mainland while the waters rose all around.

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Brittanica: “liberalism - political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the American Revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best “a necessary evil.” Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual’s life and liberty, but their coercive power may also be turned against the individual. The problem, then, is to devise a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power.”

Wikipedia, concerning both the republicans and the democrats: "Ideologically, all US parties are liberal and always have been. Essentially they espouse classical liberalism, that is a form of democratised Whig constitutionalism plus the free market. The point of difference comes with the influence of “social liberalism" and the proper role of government.”

“Mama, does anyone else agree with you? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go along with the rules? Why do you need to argue about everything?”

Why indeed. Well, children…remember back in Germany, when Hitler was coming to power? There was a time, over many years in fact, when people were starting to behave in certain ways, “just following the rules,” that were dangerous: even though no one had been sent to the gas chambers…yet.

I was scolded both by friends and family members for this, and my own children, most of whom said my horrible analogy was disturbing, completely false, and totally melodramatic. Hitler ran a totalitarian state that was targeting Jews and other deviants by using completely falsifiable theories of eugenics, whereas right now We Are All In This Together and living in a democracy, apart from those idiotic Trumpers who are obviously “covid-deniers”, “anti-democratic”, and “anti-science.”

It had been startling how quickly it happened: over the course of a couple of weeks, me not-wearing a mask in public caused many people to glare, step away, yell, refuse entry, and otherwise howl with virtuous rage, even while I still could not find evidence that masks prevented transmission of respiratory viruses. The only studies I found that investigated mask use in community and hospital settings found no causal link between mask wearing and a reduction in infections, serious illnesses, or deaths (and noted a statistically small increase in respiratory infections in mask-wearers as compared with unmasked persons).

Luckily, mathematical models were once again to the rescue! Hypothetically (a plethora of new studies were brilliantly proving this), once the right numbers were plugged into the models, masks that had for years failed to prevent the transmission of disease were suddenly highly effective at doing so. Also, I learned, good democrats always wore masks. Sometimes even while driving alone in their cars.

Things were different at the auto mechanic, however. He was a republican, and in his shop, I could breathe and smile freely.

And what an incredibly bizarre thing, all these new sets of confusing rules that seemed perfectly designed to encourage people to make healthcare decisions based on political ideologies. Was I now similarly expected to go consult my congressman if I wanted an appropriate treatment for diarrhea?? Or perhaps I should next ask my doctor to advise me about campaign finance reform. I found this aspect of “the news” to be the definition of insanity!

Yet still, now a few more weeks into lockdowns, legislated “social distancing,” and face masks, I felt quite alone in wishing for any nuanced discussion of human immunity, health, and successful prevention of and treatments for respiratory viruses, not to mention the rising political fervor. I held out hope that soon my voice would be joined by My People.

We progressives were the ones, after all, who were perfectly equipped to point out the dangers that lurked behind the profusion of covid rules (rules, rules, and more rules characterize totalitarian societies); we of all people would remember how “public health emergencies” have historically been used to justify “temporary” restrictions on or elimination of civil liberties (remember the “typhus quarantine” in WW2 Germany https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abc0927 ); and we would certainly want to avoid promoting dehumanizing and separatist ideologies that encourage neighbors to turn against neighbors, families to turn each other in, and many, many ordinary people to follow authoritarian orders.

I learned that in some places, 311 hotlines were now in place so people could rat on any neighbors caught socializing with Unacceptable Numbers of friends. At the same time, I heard that there were some states where all was business as usual. My theory: governors enacting strict lockdown policies were politicians who in the future wished to run for President.

(Off topic thoughts concerning retrospective limitations of my theory: if lockdown governors had indeed been those persons seeking future presidential bids, that ultimately would have meant approximately 37 new presidential candidates…while we are shepherded toward a maximum of precisely two in the USA. How come we are allowed to choose from an entire store’s worth of inventory in order to pick our most favorite alcoholic beverage to serve with dinner, but we get only two choices when voting for the leader of an entire country?? Who makes this stuff up? Who actually selects the two candidates out of all possibilities in the entire country, thereby excluding voters from 99.99999% of the voting process??)

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“We’re just following the rules.” Countless anonymous people throughout modern history have said this while mysteriously following directives that with hindsight are clearly horrendous, but at the time are justified by calm appeals to “science” and “hygiene”.

The USA was now in an Official State of Emergency, as were many states. The reality of this wartime loophole - “Sara, how can you question this?! People are DYING from covid!!!” - meant that certain of our constitutional rights were suspended. This seemed like a huge deal! Presidents and governors and other officials could now make orders, laws, and regulations without due process nor checks and balances. It seemed like this had little if anything to do with a respiratory virus, nor would it help a severely sick covid patient in any way. Instead, this looked like an acceleration of government control and censorship that had emerged into the public view during the war in Vietnam, and again during the war in Iraq and 9/11, and at so many other moments when I hadn’t been alive or paying attention.

Now I was finally paying attention, and I couldn’t un-see the present and future possibilities.

Surely we, the Superior Left-Leaning Social-Justice Types, would quickly and collectively revolt - any day now - against the tsunami of….What The Media Was Telling Us. I didn’t want to be melodramatic or anything, but what else could one call this constant stream of gushing Encouragement to Fear and Believe and Buy Stuff (but not TP) and Stay Home, besides “propaganda”? It absolutely WAS propaganda, it seemed to me, that was bound to strike a dangerous chord within the particularly divided, precipitous political and economic tenor of The Industrialized World, Circa 2020.

Britannica: “propaganda - dissemination of information - facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies - to influence public opinion.”

In 2020, instead of being encouraged to “do” science, or “understand” science, we were supposed to “believe in” science. The legacy media newscasters might as well be announcing brightly, dozens of times per day, “Tune in All The Time for more Scientism, our new state religion, with further instructions brought to you by our very own Priests Of Science!”

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You know what made me actually weep in front of my kids? The net corporate profits for the biggest companies (Walmart, Amazon, Blackrock, etc.) during the summer of the 2020 lockdowns, when in my community, nearly every non-chain restaurant and small business was forced to shut its doors, in most cases never to reopen. Hardly any politicians were saying anything except Stimulus Checks Are Coming. Yet these obscene corporate profits were the largest ever recorded!! The actual numbers boggled my mind. Pronouncing the numbers was physically painful.

For instance: Walmart became $63 billion richer during the first few months of lockdowns, while paying wages so low that 14,541 of their workers in 9 states needed food stamps — all subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.

I mean, I didn’t claim to have all the answers. But plans to infuse an additional 40% of the existing total amount of US Dollars into the economy over a two-year period, while allowing most of it to funnel directly upward to create several dozen new billionaires and trillionaires even as working class Americans were plunging into poverty at record rates…didn’t feel like progress to me.

The more I thought about it, in the summer of 2020, the less possible it seemed that the left wing ideal of a Benevolent Big Government could ever come to be. The reality seemed more like this: Corporations Enjoy The Rights of People Except More So —> Government Control Tightens For Ordinary Non-Corporation Citizens —> Government and Corporations Get Bigger/More Incestuous/More Powerful —> Citizens Argue Amongst Themselves While Dividing a Rapidly Shrinking Portion of the Pie —> Government Control Tightens Even More For Ordinary Non-Corporation Citizens —> Cycle Continues And Everything Gets Worse. Even when democrats are in power. Even when republicans are in power. No matter who wins, government gets bigger, and opportunities expand for increased Control.

This was the first time I was finally connecting the dots, not that I was proud of being late to the party: The top priorities of Big Government and Big Business would NEVER be the things actual people want and need; the system couldn’t allow such priorities. Many greater minds than I have spent a lot of time articulating why this is (e.g. this nice short infographic concerning how “Corruption is Legal in America”:

). Many philosophers talk about it too.

It would be better maybe, more peaceful for sure, to ignore my gut feelings about the world situation. But how??

My kids drew the line at discussions concerning economics, because they said everything was too awful for me to justify discussing stressful topics that were so incredibly boring.

I kept obsessing after they went to bed.

This all seemed a lot bigger than a virus, which, despite padding “covid death” statistics by including deaths WITH covid instead of deaths FROM covid, still didn’t justify such a large-scale, non-health-focused governmental response. When I looked it up, I found evidence that the shutdowns were directly padding the pockets of most Americans who have investments, but especially Large Corporations. In fact, it seemed arguable to call the Corporate Sector our third - and possibly most powerful - political party, and they don’t really care about American elections at all: no matter who wins, their profits get increasingly large while working class persons are increasingly squeezed and ill. Handouts for these corporations have grown during Every Single Administration since Jimmy Carter, while wages for working class Americans have remained effectively flat for decades.

I had changed my opinions concerning a couple of important issues in my life, but I had never done what progressives appeared to be doing, which was opening a wholesale black hole into the metaphorical basement, into which ethics, morals, and ideals were being deposited. If a few hundred dollars per citizen - plus a teeny bit for small businesses, plus a shit ton for Big Business - were the best policies that the left wing could stand up for as “stimulus”, I was severely disappointed in the counterculture.

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It was then I had to start facing what was coming from Progressive circles: crickets.

But there was not just silence: apart from now two identified exceptions in my personal life (later many more, but only two people at first), all my dear friends and family members were following these non-evidence-based new “health” mandates, handed down first by the military industrial complex after implementing the State of Emergency. What came next, of course, were equally fear-mongering orders emerging from “public” “health” agencies: We shouldn’t get together with friends; We should get used to policies changing daily and without notice; Children should not play with each other; States without lockdowns are dangerous hotbeds of conservative extremism and contagion; Adults’ Fears Trump Kids’ Needs; Beaches and Skate Parks should be closed; Public schools should be replaced by “online learning”; People should stay home from work whenever they are sick despite no paid sick leave; Authorities should be listened-to, just as long as they say the opposite of whatever Donald Trump says.

Progressives were now actually _leading_ the calls for lockdowns, while scapegoating those who would question authority by, for example, attempting to share information concerning effective, easy, and cheap treatment protocols for seriously ill covid patients. Or noting that lockdowns were hurting elderly, poor, or vulnerable populations most of all. Or discussing the ways in which people’s biology affects their illness severity. Or questioning the administrators and CEOS who seemed hell bent on virtue-signaling their way to the top by implementing ridiculously-so-called “health” initiatives.

The list of topics that could get one’s content Disappeared or Canceled now included an incredible array of issues and states-of-being, reminding one of the Precrime unit in a particularly dystopian science fiction movie. Doctors, nonprofit organizations, citizen scientists, students, lawyers, activists, environmentalists, political organizers, homemakers, and academics, among many others, found themselves “violating community standards” and losing access (without notice) to their own data and hundreds of thousands of subscribers on many different platforms. In other cases, these same Super Definitely Possibly Dangerous and Always Super Positively Absolutely Racist Conspiracy Theorists received Warnings and lost their jobs.

At one time, this would have triggered left wing outrage; now, it was progressive administrators and CEOs doing the censoring. Were the puppeteers in government, or Big Business? Or was there even a difference anymore? And if there weren’t puppeteers…then what the hell was going on?!

This was insane, and soon SOME additional people would see it, I still felt sure, regardless of their political affiliation. I told my kids that I would never forgive myself if I pretended to agree with the ridiculous stuff coming out of the mouths of the mainstream news reporters. I found small comfort in standing up for truth as I saw it, even while my family and friends were chastising my opinions and confusing my children (who were experiencing the psychological effect of lockdowns). I couldn’t imagine how horrible things must be for families whose income had gone away during this time, and there were a TON of people feeling the squeeze. Indoors or outdoors, we rarely saw children anymore. Also, why were so many people’s feelings getting hurt whenever somebody disagreed with them?

In August, one of my kids asked angrily, “How long has it been again?” Five months, I said. “Well then, these lockdowns make me feel like I’ve been wasting my time for five whole months, and I think it must be WORSE for grownups because they have less time left to live!”