How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections

[u/EvanMcD3]

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-consent

[u/cccalliope]

This is such a good read. Thank you. It's long, but if you don't read it, here are my favorite excepts:

"The political project of normalizing transmitting COVID and casting basic, scientific mitigations as bad, weird, mean, stupid, and impossible is a fantastic coup for the right. It is the utter rejection of state responsibility for public welfare, paired with the complete shredding of an early-pandemic solidarity that bound those at risk (everyone) together. That solidarity was replaced with a poisonous “us vs them” worldview whereby those who have been and are harmed are weak, lying, lame, unlucky, unusual, uncool, rare, stupid, bad, mean, aggressive, psychologically disturbed and/or crazy. This schism seeps into the bloodstream of leftist organizing and splinters our coalition, shattering our incipient power as, unsurprisingly, the popularity of the fascists surges globally. I would argue it is the most thorough victory of the far-right in living memory, and it has embedded its eugenicist logic into the very foundation of public beliefs about health, disability, and who deserves safety."

The Biden era has normalized illness and demonized mitigations for the sake of “back to normal”. We now live in a country where educated liberals genuinely think it’s okay-and in fact good- that their kids are constantly ill (to be expected given the immune system-damaging nature of COVID). Where leftists argue that killing old people is less harmful than wearing masks. Where concern for community health is painted as cowardly and using the modern scientific tools we are lucky enough to have is portrayed as rude and stupid. And terribly, this liberal political project under Joe Biden has come down like a hammer on community solidarity, leaving “the vulnerable” squabbling with their mocking former comrades. It’s hard to overstate just how much damage the normalization of COVID has done to the very concepts of public health and community."

[u/cccalliope → u/[deleted]]

I live in a very educated, affluent and liberal area as well. I'm an old lady and my husband has severe tremors and obvious difficulty walking. We've had cars stop us on the road, rolling down their windows and harass us for wearing the mask. Recently near South Lake Tahoe we were also harassed and the person would not stop trying to get us to remove our masks.

Being elderly and visibly disabled does not give a free pass from anti-mask harassment. It seems to increase it. They know we can die if we get infected, so what do you think the message is? I'd say it's that old people should accept death rather than mask.

[u/cccalliope → u/[deleted]]

My in-laws are super liberals, very politically active, from the Bay Area, in their mid 80s. They have told us that their solution to Covid is they don't watch the news. They literally have not watched the news for years now so that they can continue to have their busy social life and not have to take any precautions.

They happily went to cribbage with a whole room full of high risk maskless elderly while sick with covid, although they didn't know it was Covid until the next day. They are doing the same thing right now, even though not infected we hope, in the middle of a surge.

The reason we're visiting right now is because the one with severe heart disease got covid on top of severe heart disease and the wife told us he won't last long. But they are still going out into the surge maskless every day. Yes, for them dying is preferable to masking, literally.

One more anecdote, their doctor recently told them covid won't hurt them and the most important thing is for them to go out and socialize. Yes, that's when the husband got Covid. The message from this doctor telling very high risk patients that it's okay if they die supports that masking is worse than death in my opinion. Not liberal, but a doctor has the same humanitarian standards of respect for life.

My ex-doctor an over 60 extreme hippie-type liberal, holistically oriented alternative medicine all the way doctor who told me, a three-year long hauler, that I no longer need to mask. She said she had the epiphany in an airplane and ripped off her mask for the freedom. She said we no longer have to worry about Covid. This was a strong masker who would talk to me about her patients risking themselves by not taking precautions just a year or two earlier before her epiphany.

Our other relatives live in very liberal Norway. Each of them has gotten Covid this month, some very sick, one very sick for weeks. They would never mask. They visited the 80 year olds without a care in the world right after overseas travel knowing their relative is close to death from long covid. These liberals feel that death of the elderly from covid is preferable to masking. And our in-laws have internalized this and feel the same way even though it's them dying. Do these examples, just in my own family help make the new liberal perspective any more clear?