“If you don’t struggle, you don’t deserve to win.” – Fred Hampton
Here are two significant facts about me: One, I worked for the Department of Education for over ten years with Special Education students until I was terminated for refusing to take an experimental vaccine which has since been proven not to prevent transmission. Two, I’ve been an activist on the left for a very long time, from the opposition to globalized “trade agreements,” to protesting the War in Iraq, to opposing racial profiling and police brutality.
I don’t consider these two aspects of myself to be contradictory in any way, although many of my former comrades do. Perhaps it would help if I clarify that I don’t just object to my being forced to take an experimental medication, I object to the policy that forces all of my fellow workers to do so as well. If I were one of the hundreds—perhaps thousands—of city workers who secretly declined the shot (as indicated by the recent discovery of hundreds of fake vax cards among teachers, sanitation workers, and healthcare workers, among others), I might be accused of base individualism. But I opposed the mRNA shot publicly in hopes of organizing others to keep medical choice as the law of the land.
This was my consistent application of social justice, and “My body, my choice” (many, if not most of those declining the injection are women, for reasons that relate directly to reproductive issues). Given that there is now peer-reviewed proof that “the mRNA vaccines potentially cause increased risk to infectious diseases and cancer,” and that full vaccination is “associated with higher rates” of heart damage in young people “than following COVID-19,” I am more opposed to their mass imposition on society than ever.
There is most definitely a health crisis in this country, and most definitely a misinformation crisis. This is partly due to the prioritizing of profit above all else, and it is also due to working people losing all control over the government that purports to represent them. If it is ever going to change, we must understand that there is a class war against us, and that all aspects of the establishment—including medical and media institutions—are part of it. Through their “non-profit” foundations, the ruling class has weaponized even those organizations that once seemed neutral in this class war, and they did it long before the pandemic was declared.
Since the 1990s, the US has gone into rapid decline. Wage stagnation under the neoliberal system goes back to the 1970s, but the millennial era was when even easy credit and bankruptcy relief began to disappear, corporate power was fully unleashed, and average life expectancy stagnated. The “hope and change” Barack Obama promised was so materially reactionary that it actually provoked a protest movement from his left, Occupy Wall Street. The healthcare public option never arrived, the promised reduction in obesity (a major Covid co-morbidity) never manifested but instead increased, and US life expectancy began its seemingly endless downturn. The New York Times reported that by 2016, even urban Blacks had largely lost interest in voting Democrat.
The dueling demagogueries of the Republican and Democratic Parties have nothing to offer us, which is why popular support for a third-party is at an all-time high. “Outsider” candidates in insider parties (whether it’s Trump or Sanders) have changed nothing. We must end corporate personhood, and uplift human personhood—but with Democrats now receiving more money from Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Big Tech than Republicans, there is no way that the system can reform itself.
With virtually nothing left to believe in, many people are stricken with fear, and clinging to guideposts. The embrace of Trump as savior by much of the white working-class is notorious, but the rest of the country’s clutching at Fauci as grand Director of a Brave New World-style medical technocracy is no less tragic. Fauci once infamously conflated his persona with Science itself, and his NIH cohort Frances Collins positioned himself as an absolute “arbiter of scientific truth, the Pope for all scientists,” in the words of medical professor Vinay Prasad.
Dr. Prasad, a public health expert who teaches epidemiology at University of California-San Francisco, reminds us that the opinion of the NIH director “is just one opinion of many.” Yet declassified emails show that NIH secretly declared war on a public “memo signed by thousands of scientists” which had denounced lockdown policies. Collins and Fauci covered up “massive uncertainty around these policies” and worked with the media to squash debate. This led to a “world of social isolation…to dehumanization and irrational hatred.”
Putting aside the legalities of a state agency colluding with the press in a way that stifles private citizens’ speech, the human costs appear to have been unconscionable. New York magazine confirms that more Americans under 65 died of alcohol overdoses in 2020 than died of Covid itself. When one sees the staggering statistic of “one million Covid deaths,” that includes this unprecedented surge of self-poisoning, along with heart disease, hypertension, dementia, and substance abuse mortality. These hundreds of thousands of excess deaths were not caused by the virus, but by Collins’ and Fauci’s “Stay Home-Stay Safe” response to it.
In the end, there is no safety without democracy—and if a person does not believe in the capacity of average people to discern sound information for themselves and make decisions about their lives, then they do not believe in democracy. The opportunity for the average person to hear forthright debate among epidemiologists from a diversity of institutions was very deliberately undermined by the corporate state.
What Fauci and his ilk characterize as “science” is in fact the celebration of the machine, which is ultimately a celebration of the corporation and the military-industrial complex. The public health establishment’s concept of epidemiology is almost wholly based on computer modelling, not empirical results; In Covid, the computer models and empirical results have been at odds with each other throughout. The other fetishized machine is the mRNA technology—“the software of life” as Moderna calls it. Now that the synthetic mRNA has been shown in peer-reviewed studies to remain in our cells indefintely and alter our gene expression, the products of Pfizer and co. are becoming the hardware of life too—for those who comply with the mandates. This is a condition which the public health establishment promised would not happen.
There is now a large segment of the political left who are eager to disrupt the hardware of life. UK Labour leader Jon Cruddas has written of the “accelerationist” tendency among progressives that places technology above humanity. This growing “anti-humanist thinking within the left” denigrates the entire idea of a human essence worth preserving and sees our salvation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Without fully admitting it, they seem to be promoting the vision of Google co-founder Ray Kurzweil that most of us have “nanobots coursing through our veins” by the year 2030. (In 2016, Kurzweil called for our immune systems to be completely replaced by nanobots, and for most of the human mind to be “non-biological,” proclaiming “The Singularity is near.”) Given this open contempt for the natural condition, and the determination to do mass experimentation on whole populations, Cruddas does not hesitate to call out such “incipient transhumanism” as the “new eugenics.”
This corporate “cyborg socialism” is an imminent threat to the prospect for human liberation. While the urban professionals who enable it fancy themselves as fostering the “abolition of the working-class” through technocracy, most will ultimately find themselves fully proletarian-ized. Participating in an extended experiment is normally a compensated form of labor—to be uncompensated for it is to have one’s labor brutally exploited. With indefinite boosters and monkeypox mandates waiting in the wings, a whole economic sector is being built on this exploitation, to stand alongside the no-touch data collection economy that benefits from remote school, remote work, and the virtual reality of the looming Metaverse.
And so this newletter fights for the return of the humanist left. In the era of identity politics, it echoes Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s call for “white power to white people, Black power to Black people, brown power to brown people…ALL POWER TO ALL PEOPLE.” In the face of nationalist “great replacement” theories, it exposes the documented replacement of human agency across cultures with digitized control.
The Social Populist is devoted to shattering the illusions and healing the divisions of the American working-class.
Source: Left Lockdown Sceptics
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