My Time Among the Anti-Maskers

 

As the third wave of the Corona virus pandemic really started to take off, with basically neo-liberal regimes at the provincial and federal levels (but, truth be told, t'was mostly the right-wing "conservative" governments that are mostly to blame) sending Canada's infection rate to that of the USA's, and with Toronto hospitals setting up tents in their parking lots to deal with emergency room overflow, I wondered how the anti-maskers/COVID-deniers could STILL be sticking to their guns.

It has long been a talking-point of mine that any oligarchy that could impose a hoax on the scale that the COVID-deniers seem to claim is happening would be an oligarchy that is simply too powerful to be resisted. And that furthermore, whether or not a bunch of shlubs decide to refuse to wear masks is going to be completely inconsequential to said oligarchies power and rule. This pandemic appears to have begun in China in late-2019. It has dominated government business (or should have dominated) since early2020. It's now the end of the first-quarter of 2021. The COVID-deniers call it a "plandemic." (So clever! Did you see what they did there?) Which is to say that the evil oligarchs have invented a health emergency out of whole cloth. (I'm not clear, and I don't care, whether these denialist shit-heads say that COVID-19 doesn't exist at all or whether they say that it does exist but is no more deadly than the ordinary annual influenza.) The World Health Organization and the USA's Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, working hand-in-glove with the world's giant pharmaceutical companies, and (for some reason) the Chinese government, have all implemented a propaganda campaign, a giant swindle, a fraud, a hoax, that there is a highly contagious virus with a mortality rate of between one percent and two percent.[Anyone who can't differentiate between getting 98% on a test in school and losing one out of every one-hundred people on the face of the earth to a virus probably won't be reading this blog] They have managed to get every government on the face of the earth and every sub-national government (states, provinces, regions, counties, cities, towns, villages) and every public health authority at all these levels (including hospitals) to play along with this hoax. For over a year. With only a few dissenters (mainly cranks and air-heads).

A genuine hoax requiring the complicity of literally MILLIONS of people would inevitably fall apart after a few months at most. (I'm assuming the oligarchy would supposedly impose threats of job losses or actual violence on whistle-blowers.) Imagine how fevered your brain must be (and full-time at that!) to believe in an oligarchic ruling class that could impose a deception of this scale for well over a year! Again, any ruling class that could do this would be far too powerful to resist. And refusing to wear a mask would have zero impact on their power. It's so stupid that it should go without saying. But a frighteningly large proportion of our fellow human beings are so fucking shit-headed that we have to have discussions like this.

Now, let's get some things out of the way right away. 1.) Capitalist oligarchs are mostly selfish psychopaths. 2.) Our governments serve power first and their people somewhere further down the list. 3.) Our governments and mainstream media lie all the fucking time.  4.) Scientists are occasionally corrupted and, more than occasionally, wrong about stuff and intolerant of dissent.  5.) Among capitalists, the owners of Big Pharma are among the greediest, corrupt and powerful. I think I've mentioned at least more than once that we leftist shlubs do share some of the concerns of right-wing shlubs, but that differences in brain wiring and other factors make genuine alliances between us unfeasible.

Are the police oppressive? Obviously they are. More and more, they're cold-blooded killers. Authoritarian goons, accountable to no one.

Is the system corrupt? Are our elites corrupt and evil and detrimental to our health? You bet they are.

So, what about these people? Aside from their murderous rampages, is there any way we could find some common ground with them?

No. First of all, us wimpy progressives believe that the best way to control the government is through firm application of the rule of law on corrupt elites. 

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Oh yeah, ... organizing to make the government strictly adhere to their obligations on citizens' rights and the rule of law is going to control governments a lot better than putting on sixty pounds and strutting around with semi-automatic weapons while ignoring the police-state abuses of protesters and the poor and minorities ever will.

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These idiots also disagree with us about the economy. They appear to believe in some mythical never-neverland, where small farmers and small business owners always make a comfortable living because evil governments and corporations don't exist to fleece them. And, decent, hard-working white people can always find a job because there aren't any coloured people with no self-respect who will work at any wage and drive down wages and cause unemployment for white people. In other words, total bullshit fantasy.

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 Maybe it was their shared recognition with us that a police-state is forming around us and that they're actually fighting back (albeit in a psychotic, stupid fashion). But they're racist conspiracy theorists. There was never any serious belief on my part that they could be our allies.

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Middle and working class racists and right-wingers who think they're being abused by corrupt elites but who take most of their frustrations out on the weakest in society, generally out of cowardice and/or laziness. Whereas progressives seek to make common cause with the weakest so as to raise everyone up.

In the end, it would be so much easier for us if our governments and media didn't lie so often at the behest of corrupt, amoral, anti-human psychopathic oligarchic overlords. Then, when confronted with their idiotic conspiracy theories [note: not all theories about conspiracies are idiotic] we wouldn't have to filter out reports from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or CNN or what-not because all those institutions are proven, admitted, shameless, serial liars.

Anyhow, the point is that these right-wing shlubs critiques have some claim to legitimacy but only partially. Whatever is obviously true about their views of the world is distorted by their fear-filled conservative brains and the subsequent racism and other distortions that flows from that.

Anyhoooooooo ..... I'm going to confess to having considered some of claims of the COVID-deniers as possibly valid early in the pandemic. Because governments and media lie. Because pharmaceutical companies' practices are often evil. Because a pandemic that makes mass protest supposedly dangerous is so convenient for an oligarchy that is increasingly losing its grip on the mass consciousness.  Is it possible that the lethality of the disease was being exaggerated in order to justify all sorts of elite machinations?

However, at the same time it struck me as bizarre that the oligarchy would create a crisis that exposed so many shortcomings in our society. (In Canada, the case of the abysmal conditions in our Long-Term Care facilities caused a major public relations black-eye to many elites and our whole society.) Furthermore I never gave a second of respect to the asinine claims of the anti-maskers about how masks made it easier for the oligarchy to snatch kids off the street to add to their supply of sexual abuse victims, or how masks suffocate you and make you go crazy, or how wearing a mask when the world's public health experts are saying there's a viral pandemic makes you part of the "sheeple." And, as the pandemic continued to rage and evidence of it became undeniable, I became more and more disgusted with the stupidity of the COVID-deniers and more aware of how they were the same old bunch of shit-head deniers of Global Heating, the same old deluded anti-Vaxxers, the same old worshippers of racist police forces.

So, with all of that out of the way, is my summary of my attempt at dialogue with some COVID-deniers on F-Zookerbooke. I was scrolling through my newsfeed when F-Zookerbooke told me that a "friend" of mine had said something on some page that I'd never heard about. Calling anti-maskers "kooks" or something or other. So I clicked on the story and found myself on a page dedicated to businesses defying COVID-19 regulations. My friend was very much in the minority. She was receiving all sorts of pushback from the regular denizens of this page, some quite detailed. I decided to communicate with them and find out exactly why they thought the way that they did.

I asked the woman who had been responding the most to my phaze-buk friend if she was suggesting (in April, 2021) that hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers (and everyone else in any relevant authority) the world over were propagating a hoax.

This woman told me that she wasn't "suggesting" it. She was "insisting" that this was the case. It's a "fact." She said that when she offered to volunteer at a hospital the workers laughed at her because there's no crisis. (Perhaps they laughed at her for other reasons. Assuming any of this happened outside of her imagination.) Healthcare workers are telling the truth on their fazebuck pages and other venues. And, in this woman's mind anyway, there are ZERO journalists prepared to go to the mat anywhere in the entire fucking world (except, perhaps, for outlets like Ezra Levant's "The Rebel" and other sources of total bullshit) to expose what would be the biggest scandal in the history of the world.

[This is the way these people think about everything. To hear them talk about anything, they are always this tiny band of freedom fighters surrounded by hordes of liberal traitors, communist terrorists, Islamic terrorists ... who could impose Sharia Law on North America in a heartbeat ... savage "rape-fugees," environmentalist terrorists, Stalinst imposers of "political correctness" who want to abolish Free Speech, ANTIFA terrorists dragging entire societies into anarchy, ... etc., etc., ... These people are always surrounded, always in danger, everything is always one step away from total disaster if they relax their "vigilance" for even a second. Again, this is all a symptom of the stronger "fight or flight" impulses of a conservative's larger amgydala. They can't help but be afraid all of the time. Or, more accurately, ... since these people often don't have genuine threats to their very existence, they are dimly ill at ease all the time. They believe that just beyond their personal communities of families and friends and co-workers, vague, powerful all-encompassing conspiracies are at work. As I said above, there is some truth to their fears. But when you're a right-wing shit-head who seriously proposes that First Nations terrorists, aided and abetted by Justin Trudeau, are seeking to usurp the Rule of Law and Parliamentary Democracy in Canada in order to turn the whole country over to Communist China, ... well, it goes without saying that you'll be acting like an idiot.]

I asked this woman about how the pandemic exposed the deplorable conditions in our Long-Term Care facilities. Was this black-eye to the private-sector parasites and their political servants all part of the hoax? Or wouldn't it be better to look at it as an unintended consequence of responding to a genuine pandemic health crisis. She chose not to answer me but instead babbled about my slavish obedience to wearing a "muzzle" (re: a cloth or paper mask) and how I was more interested in arguing than asking for information. [Poor woman. Only trying to inform. NEVER being confrontational!] It was all part of the Communist playbook for subversion. "Divide and Conquer." By asking her questions I was playing right into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

I asked her how she seriously believed refusing to wear a mask could have any impact on a ruling class so powerful as to impose a GIGANTIC worldwide hoax. She asked me why anyone was wearing a mask in the first place. We never did before. [!] (I think that statement's stupidity speaks for itself.) Perhaps her rejection of masks is due to the Conspiracy's admission that "there's no asymptomatic spread." Obviously, this is false. But it shouldn't require any research to understand why that claim is also ridiculous. COVID-19 is a virus. It is spread by aerosols released from the nose and the mouth. If you have it, you have it. Regardless of whether you're showing symptoms. And if you have the virus, you will be breathing it out. How in the sweet name of fuck is the virus supposed to become inert just because the host doesn't show symptoms? How does it transform from being infectious to non-infectious just because the host (of which the virus knows nothing since it doesn't think and isn't even alive) shows no symptoms? Perhaps if your being asymptomatic is the result of having taken a relatively small viral load, it would be possible. But that's not going to be the case for everyone who is asymptomatic.

[Now, obviously, COVID-deniers will claim that "Snopes" is just another source for "FAKE NEWS." Along with most of the goddamned liberal-dominated mainstream media. And in that they have some claim to legitimacy. "Snopes" has shown itself to be unreliable in some areas. As is Wikipedia. As is most mainstream media. But they aren't all complete lies from start-to-finish. ONLY in the fevered mind of these conservative nutbars can there be a world where their embattled information sources are the only truth-tellers with everything else being lies, lies, lies. I'm no fan of the Globe & Mail. But I recognize the fact that they have good journalists who often provide good journalism. Relatedly, "Project Veritas" is a hacktacular partisan shit-show run by a scumbag. But when they published a video showing a CNN producer admitting that "Russiagate" was nothing but the network's shows were being ordered to fixate on it for political/partisan reasons, I wasn't going to discount this evidence because of the source. ]

The woman then began babbling about the "Great Reset" and listing off the names of villains (Klaus Schwab, Anthony Fauci, George Soros, Bill Gates and the Rothchilds) and spewing out all manner of theories (Bill Gates' concerns about over-population are evidence of his plans for deliberate mass-murder of tens of millions of people; Trudeau trying to get a seat on the UN Security Council as evidence of something - she could not say -; inflated death count statistics; "false positives" from PCR tests, and empty emergency rooms.) I noticed that this was this woman's main method of discussion. She'd get a question and ignore it except as a springboard to mention anywhere from three-to-five conspiracies, never bothering to reinforce anything she was saying with facts or arguments. 

The "Great Reset" is simply a title for the 2020 Davos Oligarch's Ball. A theme to re-package their usual high-level spit-balling about the future of international capitalism and humanity. As Naomi Klein wrote in The Intercept it's just a slurry of the usual neo-liberal rhetoric, the lip-service to the environment and "stakeholder capitalism." An attempt to put a human face on their pathological greed and narcissm.  Perhaps these COVID-denying shitheads see the grim spectre of Stalinist/Maoist totalitarian communism in these "globalists" schemes. But given the fact that they're totally incapable of explaining how capitalist billionaires and bankers are "communists" it's totally unimportant what they think, except for the hellish reality that we have to share a society with these hopeless fuck-ups.

The "false-positives" from PCR tests is yet another bone-headed, evidence-free bit of drivel. Just picture the arrogance of this woman (and all her yahoo comrades) who believe that all these lab workers are ignorant of the flaws in their daily work, and that if they'd only listen to some of her bullshit ranting the scales would fall from their eyes.

Bill Gates is an asshole. But he did not say he wanted to kill 10-15% of the world's population with vaccines. I took this up with my phazebuck disputant. I asked her why would Bill Gates insist that Oxford University apply for a patent for their Astra-Zeneca vaccine and produce it with a European phamraceutical manufacturer at a profit, thereby making it inaccessible to people in low-income countries if his goal is to kill as many people as possible? My debate participant eventually farted out how Gates (or products associated with him) was banned in many poor countries, because he's committed "genocide.") Which, you'll notice, doesn't really answer the question about why he'd make the vaccine inaccessible if he wants to commit mass-murder. For what it's worth here's a Reuters article dealing with many of the accusations against Gates. For my money it's too exculpatory, but whatevah.

Next I asked the general membership of this fasebuk group why was it that they didn't have ANY politicians on their side? Why did politicians like Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson, Kenney, ... who seem to say that the virus is a hoax, always seem to be forced to concede to its reality? Why did Trump implement "Operation Warp Speed" to deliver a vaccine for a virus that was no more deadly than the flu? Why isn't Bolsonaro just forcing his critics to acknowledge the reality that the emergency wards are empty and that there is no health crisis? Why did Boris Johnson abandon his strategy of minimal lockdowns and the pursuit of "herd immunity" from most people contracting and surviving the virus? Why does Jason Kenney occasionally have to change his act from seeming to not care about people violating safety protocols to pleading with people to comply with them?

The first response came from a fella who said only that Kenney, having been to Bilderberg, was a "globalist plant." Which makes you wonder how out-and-out fascist a politician has to be to earn these people's trust.

The second responder brought up the Great Reset again. Also, "Agenda 21" and "Agenda 2030" and the New World Order. To repeat: The Great Reset is nothing but the usual Davos rhetoric. Which is to say that the world we inhabit (already controlled by the Davos crowd) won't look radically different were the Great Reset to be implemented in its entirety. Inequality would continue to increase. The destruction of the planet would continue. There would just be a few programs (probably voluntary so as not to offend the freedom and values of oligarchs who disagree) to salve the consciences of "woke" billionaires. What with the fact that EVERY politician is against them, and society itself, from health care workers, to climate scientists, to the education system, etc., is out to get them, ... these people are (as I've said above) a fearful lot. Of course, they have GOD on their side. So there IS that. And God has his own schedule. He's gonna save them. But at His own pace in His own Good Time. 

Anyway, I had to know that none of this is about our health. It's about the Chinese Communists, aided and abetted by Trudeau and the United Nations and the WTO, to TAKE OVER THE WORLD! This [other] woman works in health care. People arent' dying OF COVID. They've got co-morbidities and they're dying WITH COVID. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening. People go to the hospital for the flu and die of cancer or heart failure or whatever, all the fucking time, every fucking year.

I could go on but what's the point? I know that the world is round because I rode a bus up to Thunder Bay and saw the rain turn into snow as I got further north. More importantly, I saw that it took longer for the sun to set.  I know global warming is happening where I live because we always had snow on the ground at Christmas up until sometime in the late-1990s and now it's hit-or-miss. And I know that COVID-19 is real because my experience of previous flu seasons is that I don't get the vaccine and I don't get the flu and I don't hear of anyone else getting the flu. Whereas this year, I've met five people at work who got infected by COVID-19. And there's somebody else in my department who caught it, survived it (as 98% of people will do) but who hasn't returned from quarantine. And there's a guy in my old department who caught it and was hospitalized for it and who isn't coming back to work until the danger is totally passed because he apparently suffered greatly. And there's a guy in that same department whose brother (in the Old Country) died of it. And everyone in the factory heard that a woman on the assembly floor brought it back home and her father caught it and died from it.

Plus, I am not an insane, gibbering idiot who believes that a hoax like this can be perpetrated all across the planet at every level of government, by literally millions of people, with nobody being able to expose it. These people's claims of working in healthcare and knowing there's no crisis are pathetic, stupid lies. Because these people are pathetic and stupid liars. They read shit and it turns their stupid brains into shit. EVERYTHING is a threat to their WAY OF LIFE. And their "way of life" is to work at their stupid jobs and to buy stupid shit and to go to their stupid churches and believe their stupid crap and eat the usual foods and barbeque their meat and to basically do things the same way they've been doing for decades and they're so goddamned terrified all the time that even non-binding UN resolutions to tone-down some of our most damaging behaviour to the eco-system causes these idiots to see themselves wearing rags behind barbed-wire fences in a Stalinist gulag.

Because they're stupid idiots.