Mommy, What's a Fascist?

Part 6

As we know, the extreme ultra Scientism and vaccine mandates picked up steam in late 2021, and like many people, I saw them coming but did not have any idea what to do. I watched the progressive, left wing (and many conservative, right wing) administrators and directors and CEOS of all those companies and government agencies and Elite so-called Educational Institutions like colleges, and even alternative and homeschooling organizations, schools, nonprofits, and camps, fall into lockstep.

My sense of humor all but disappeared. My heart was pounding so loudly that my powers of cognition were certainly dulled, but it was impossible to miss the irrational, non-evidence-based, corporately-spun propaganda machine, and all the people Just Following the Rules: here were mandates requiring hundreds of thousands of unwilling people (the shots had already been “free” for anyone who DID want one, for months) to get a vaccine that had shoddy, insufficient, and non-transparent safety and efficacy data, and _did not prevent infection with nor transmission of covid_.

It didn’t prevent transmission!! The talking heads at the FDA actually said so on camera. Regulators were leaving the agency in unprecedented numbers, citing extreme disagreements with the regulatory process that had more holes every time I looked it up. The media spouted not facts, but instructions and orders: “BELIEVE covid shots are Safe and Effective and will allow you to Go Back to Normal. TAKE the shots. Take the shots. BELIEVE in the shots. Covid will continue. BLAME the unvaccinated.”

There was literally no basis for vaccine mandates, and yet people were implementing them. Good Germans were everywhere.

Bad Sara, That’s Not a Nice Thing To Say!

But what else could possibly explain such behavior except a mass hypnosis? Somebody else put it more bluntly: Everyone thinks they’d be a Schindler, but it turns out…well, we know how it turns out. Most people aren’t Schindlers.

I knew better than to imagine that most of those who still called themselves progressives would see the irony which was SO freaking ironic, I would have been laughing constantly if I wasn’t still in mourning for any last vestige of a sense of humor.

I went into our backyard that week and dug a fish pond: three feet deep, eight feet wide, and thirteen feet long. I moved thousands of pounds of dirt, and channeled my rage by digging myself into exhaustion for eight days straight.

In L.A. and NYC and many other places, thousands of police officers, fire fighters, first responders, teachers, and municipal employees were given an ultimatum: get vaccinated, or get fired. A disproportionately large number of these formerly-“front-line” workers were from black and other minority populations.

A covid-recovered Catholic New York City Police Lieutenant described the situation (after the rejection of his religious exemption application) that caused him to take an early retirement from the force after 18 years:

Personally, I had to give up my career. I’m not where I thought I would be. I thought I would getting ready to be a captain in the NYPD and pursue higher ranks. At the end of the day, I’m still blessed, but I’m worried for New York City. I love New York City, I worry for all the young guys that are still living in that city and trying to raise a family, and anyone, any city worker like teachers, nurses, these are great people and they’re being demonized. As crime runs wild in the city, all of a sudden, the people that pay their taxes, that bear the brunt of everything in the city, they are turned into the bad guys, and I just pray for New York. I really do.

There were MANY of my colleagues who took this vaccine and they did not want to take this vaccine. They took it to keep their employment, to put food on the table, and I would never judge anyone for doing that, but it was horrible, the way they were being pushed into it.

The days before you were allowed to submit an exemption, people felt the pressure. Even myself, and I’m not a guy who feels much pressure, I tell you, my right eye at the time was fluttering. It was fluttering for weeks and months leading up to that day…and in that line, at One Police Plaza, everyone’s there lining up to get the shot. And I’m seeing hundreds of guys lining up, day in, day out - as the days got closer it was more and more. It went from 40% vaccinated, to 60% vaccinated, 75% vaccinated… And people were feeling the pressure, and the unions weren’t there for them, they felt they had nowhere to go, and I felt the same way. Which is why I started to look for different career options. I was like, I can’t believe I’m doing this, in my 18th year, looking for different career options! I’m down there at work, I’m watching grown men, with tears in their eyes, sit down, take a shot that they don’t want to take, stand up enraged, and immediately storm out of there: “I had no choice. I had no choice!!!” Same thing with women.

And you know, these are not your average New Yorkers, these are tough, tough people. They’re New York City police officers, they see and go through things that other people have nightmares about. They deal with these things numerous times per day, they are not your average people, and you watch that response to the mandates…it really just cemented my own conviction even more: Hey listen, I can’t do that, I can’t violate my conscience. I can’t sit there and tell my children to do the right thing, to speak up for the truth, and to protect the weak, I can’t tell that to them if I don’t do it. If I were to succumb to take this thing just as compliance, none of it making sense to me, none of it in my religion…I can make money doing something else. If New York City doesn’t want people like you there, if they don’t want people of faith there, it’s time to move on, then.

---

I felt gratitude for the growing number of friends I now kept on speed-dial in my virtual rolodex, who were also speaking up. People were speaking up everywhere. As a result of our big mouths, we were losing jobs and career opportunities, friendships and relationships; getting social media accounts suspended; finding our letters rejected by legacy media outlets. We commiserated and made attempts at humor while refusing to condone biomedical facism. It appeared that the only differences between “red” and “blue” these days consisted of yelping about “hot-button issues,” and who to blame first. I was disgusted with pretty much every politician and unelected leader of the “free world”…actually, it was now obvious, a one-party system controlled by the industries making the most money: Eds and Meds and Military and Tech, currently pumping out covid propaganda with caffeinated industriousness to rival any global war effort. We really were already living in a corporate/state oligarchy.

Wikipedia: “Oligarchy - “rule by few”…is a conceptual form of power structure in which power rests with a small number of people. …Throughout history, power structures considered to be oligarchies have often been viewed as tyrannical, relying on public obedience or oppression to exist. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as meaning rule by the rich, for which another term commonly used today is plutocracy.”

Fat lot of good my friends’ and my small revolutionary acts were doing, since most of our (former) fellow revolutionaries appeared totalitarized. But one must stand up for what one believes to be true, I kept telling my kids. We were luckier than most.

I was so very angry.

Britannica: “science - any system of knowledge that is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena and that entails unbiased observations and systematic experimentation. In general, a science involves a pursuit of knowledge covering general truths or the operations of fundamental laws.”

“Determined as I am to unearth the full truth, I must confess that I’m afraid of what the consequences may be in a deeply divided and frightened citizenry where hatred has been stoked for years at both ends of the mainstream political spectrum and where confidence in even the most essential of political institutions appears to be at an all-time low. I really do not know where we are heading. I only know that truth, justice, humanity and mercy are ends in themselves and should never be relinquished or compromised.”

—A Fellow Thinker in Challenging Times

As near as I could tell, the political left with which I used to align was in the throes of an ideological collapse. In less than two years, political discussions had moved from Ensuring That Wealthy People Pay Their Share of Taxes…and Getting Money Out of Politics In Order To Aspire Toward A Real Democracy…and Removing Equal Protection Under The Law For Corporations Since They Aren’t Actually Human Beings…to a feverish level of identitarian wokeness, a peculiar and unstable ideology that appears to value appearances and Politically Correct Language above anything resembling acknowledgement of the physical and economic realities of the working class.

It has been especially fascinating to watch CEOs, politicians, and even military and FBI leaders embracing, for example, a habit of stating their pronouns. How handy, no? You get to be politically virtuous simply by stating whether you’re a man or a seahorse, or if you’re for or against global warming, and you never have to discuss crimes against humanity or the reality of the unwashed masses living in poverty.

This strange shift within liberal circles is something I have recently learned can be described through the lens of postmodern political thought.

Wikipedia: “…Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism [which itself as a philosophy explicitly embraces concepts such as reason, rationality, truth, and “objective reality”], opposition to epistemic certainty or stability of meaning, and emphasis on ideology as a means of maintaining political power.”

As far as I could tell, in no universe besides the pages of the New York Times et al in the USA circa 2021 would postmodern identitarian wokeness be described as standing for progressive or liberal political values.

And the postmodern affiliation explains why it is nearly impossible to have a constructive conversation about woke topics with somebody who possesses differing views from oneself, because such conversations rely on a shared understanding of the nature of reality. Wokeness allows its followers to construct their own little bubbles of ideology, complete with Personal Business standing in for universal truths, and handily disconnect from anyone or everything else in the world.

---

It’s a tragic feature of modern intellectual life that its practitioners are more interested in confirming ideological biases than they are in finding out what is true.

[Also]…There is an enormous problem in the intellectual world that no one has yet figured out how to solve. The issue is that there is not a great deal of demand for their services.

—Jeffrey Tucker