'Zero COVID': The Cringest Fringe Sect of the Branch COVIDians
Originally published via Blacklisted News:
The left notoriously houses unique, insular, and nearly intellectually impenetrable (mostly online) subcultures. The "Zero COVID" faction is among them, and arguably the most fascinating.
"Zero COVID" references a movement that earnestly advances the absurd proposition that, as if by magic, if we had just locked down harder, for longer, COVID would have gone away.
The problem, according to Zero COVID doctrine, isn't the massive economic and social damage wrought by years of forced masking, business closures and vaxx mandates, and all the wrecked mental health, collapsed supply lines, and tribalistic social division that resulted.
Those are all the acceptable costs of Zero COVID. The problem with lockdowns, according to Zero COVID dogma, is that they weren't stricter and more vigorously enforced – that more people weren't locked in their homes, accompanied by only social deprivation and alcohol; that more churches weren't forced to close; that more children's psychological developments weren't harmed.
Zero COVID people regularly Tweet about the "eugenics" state directed by the federal government, which is committing a literal genocide by allowing COVID to spread through the population (like viruses do).
Zero COVID proponents posture as the enlightened moral superiors to the mouth-breathers who won't go along with their program.
Like all of the left's most effective social control ideas, they got it from China – the "basic dictatorship" for which Canadian PM Justin Trudeau casually declared his admiration.
Fascinatingly, Zero COVID intersects with another insular, terminally online faction on the left, "disability culture." The shared ideological principle is that a eugenicist society is targeting handicapped and/or immunocompromised people for destruction, and using COVID policy to do that by exposing them to the virus intentionally. Society "wants them dead."
Challenging their narrative isn't political disagreement; it's "psychological abuse" in the same way that AOC once claimed criticism of her Congressional voting record is "literal violence."
Lately, The ZERO COVID people have begun plotting how to evade Public Health© directives – specifically, how to lie to pharmacists to receive Novavax boosters even though they're not eligible because they recently received an mRNA "vaccine."
Disobeying orders from the Lord of the Manor, the CDC? So much for "Respecting the Science©"!
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Perhaps the only meaningful political commonality shared by the Zero COVID cult and normal people is their hatred for the managerial class.
Zero COVID true believers are so fanatical and insular that they have given up fighting the #MAGA threat and instead now mostly direct their vitriol toward liberals, whom they blame for not cracking down hard enough on the non-compliant peasants.
Whereas liberals celebrate the work of Public Health© experts such as COVID Warlord Fauci, Zero COVID cultists target them most viciously of all when they deviate, even slightly, from the total-lockdown-everywhere-forever policy gold standard.
Dr. Leana Wen, previously of Planned Parenthood fame, current CNN contributor and darling of the lockdown left broadly, has been so brutal in her Public Health© prescriptions as to liken the unvaxxed to drunk drivers and called for their banning from public transportation.
All that notwithstanding, when Wen began to tepidly push for school reopening as late as 2022 in the districts that were still doing the farce of "distance-learning" because she noticed that her own child's language development was harmed by the same policies she consistently advocated for nearly two years, the Zero COVID left turned on its own, as the fracturous left is wont to do.
The Zero COVID faction meets any criticism whatsoever of the vaxx-test-mask regimen with accusations of murder and/or genocide:
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If you spend any amount of time browsing through Zero COVID content online, you will find that a large swathe of the members is also proud Antifa infantry.
The messaging and self-labeling are very confused. Seemingly unaffected by cognitive dissonance, they brand themselves as "anti-fascists" while simultaneously cheerleading unprecedented government power grabs at the behest of the oligarch class.
Small-time mom-and-pop shops when out of business by the thousands while the locked-down peasants ordered everything via Amazon and whiled away the days vegged out in front of Netflix, drunk on wine.
Yet, the Zero COVID left's ideological mission appears to be to fully invert reality. Again, because nothing means anything in this postmodern hellscape, championing the weaponized-fear-for-profit-and-social-control COVID scam that was tag-teamed by multinational corporations and government – the combination of state and corporate power being the literal definition of fascism – is actually anti-fascist.
Black is white. Selfishness is altruism. Slavery is freedom.
Sociologists -- in a saner time, when they start doing genuine research again and aren't dominated by women's studies overlords who insist on dumping all the available funds into non-binary accessibility to patriarchal ping-pong culture or whatever -- will have a heyday trying to parse out how all this happened, and what became of our collective sanity.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter.
Bitcoin public address: 14gU3aHBXkNq8bDqmibfnubV7kSJqfx5LX
Reading those Twitter threads is an express ticket to a terrible, beaten down, desparing mood.
Wish I hadn't clicked through.
Gosh. The NPC community is still strong. Those tweets were mind blowing. The level of mental gymnastics they are doing to trick their minds into going along to get along...just gets more cultish by the day. Good collection of links and insights Ben!