How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy

It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it. After more than two centuries at the vanguard of the struggle for freedom, the American left, broadly defined, executed a volte face and embraced anti-working-class policies marketed as purely technical public health measures.

 

by Christian Parenti

 

Part 2 - Theory of the crime

 

Here is my theory of the crime: a reckless smash and grab operation by Big Pharma, assisted by our totally captured public health agencies, has been allowed to run unchecked, like a cytokine storm of bad policy, because of the unique political dynamics of the 2020 presidential election in which mass Trump Derangement Syndrome short-circuited the critical faculties of almost the entire journalistic class and Democratic Party ecosystem, including the so-called movement left – that milieu of nonprofits, trade unions, pressure groups, and alternative media personalities.

Dating back to the Swine Flu fiasco of 1976, a corrupt symbiosis between industry and the regulators has fueled a dynamic of pandemic-hyping moral panic. In the pre-Trump era these would-be moral panics had limited traction because the critical capacities of journalists and politicians were intact enough to thwart the worst excesses of the pharmaceutical-public health “pandemic industrial complex.” But the fear created by Trump destroyed that capacity for correction. 

While it is the mainstream media and the Democratic Party that drive Covid hysteria and the ensuing biosecurity state of emergency, the activist left bears responsibility for not opposing the repression, and even for cheering it on. It is also worth noting that Republican opposition to the Covid lockdowns was relatively ineffective because a dysfunctional Trump administration was incapable of controlling its own Covid Taskforce, and thus enabled technocratic administrators like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx to hijack White House policy. 

Below, I address: agency capture, disease severity, vaccine efficacy, the damage of lockdowns in the Global North and South, freedom as a political goal, and finally how Trump Derangement Syndrome allowed the pandemic industrial complex to run out of control.

Source, links, references:

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/31/left-covid-lockdowns-mind-autopsy/

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