Disease is the easiest political metaphor. Criminals aren’t a social problem, but a “plague.” Certain kinds of political rhetoric are “toxic.” And “diseased” degenerates are corrupting our otherwise pure body politic.
The reason we use such metaphors is that they work. What we call tribalism or ethnic solidarity may have originally arisen as an evolutionary response to the fear of disease. The biological metaphor speaks to our deepest fears of morality. It cuts to the core of that vague entity we refer to as “the political.” For most people, the polity (however that is defined, from a tribe to a city-state) is not just necessary for a good life, but for survival. As Identitarians well understand, culture is linked to biology.
As usual in political discourse, certain tactics are permitted if one side uses them and prohibited if others do it. Analyzing and ritually decrying the Nazi use of words like “cancer” and “poison” is an easy way to pick up a PhD. After all, such rhetoric is inherently “eliminationist.”
Yet racism, homophobia, and all the other slurs that describe traditional social norms are termed as “viruses,” “diseases,” and other “plagues” that must be “eradicated” or even “exterminated.” And naturally, the best way to protect yourself if you are exposed to one of these pathogens on the internet is to “take a shower.”
Now, even discussion of actual diseases has become a matter of Who, not What.
When Ebola hit the United States, we were carefully instructed that even discussing the Lovecraftian horror of the African plague was a “racial dog whistle.”
Similarly, when conservatives expressed concern that admitting thousands of unscreened Central American “refugees” into the US might not be the best idea for public health, they were savaged as racist. American children are already dying of EV-698, a disease that mysteriously spiked around the time President Obama decided to throw the doors open to his party’s future voting base. Insofar as any reporters wrote about it, it was to present elaborate theories arguing that when Americans say they worry about their kids dying of Third World diseases, they are really engaging in a “racial panic.”
However, when there is an outbreak of measles, the American media whips itself into a frothing frenzy about supposedly anti-government “anti-vaxxers.” Needless to say, such outrage is hard to take seriously when no one has been killed by measles in the last decade while diseases which actually are killing Americans are deemed unworthy of mention. Nor does it make sense to talk about the importance of vaccines and “herd immunity” when the continual admittance of thousands of unscreened and likely unvaccinated Third Worlders is actively encouraged by the federal government.
Indeed, it wasn’t long ago that refusing to get vaccines was associated mostly with leftists. Bill Maher, always eager to mock hayseed Republicans for not believing in science, argued that people should not be vaccinated and proclaimed, “I don’t trust the government, especially with my health.” He made these statements while arguing with an incredulous Bill First, a former Republican Senator and physician.
Jon Stewart, whose retirement from The Daily Show is being greeted with something akin to national mourning by SWPLs, is gleefully mocking anti-vaxxers as stupid. But in 2005, Stewart gave a fawning interview to Robert Kennedy Jr., a leading proponent of the theory that unsafe vaccines are responsible for causing autism. As Stewart put it then, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”
Robert Kennedy Jr.’s article “Deadly Immunity” alleging the presence of toxic chemicals in vaccines was published in 2005 in both Rolling Stone and Salon, though it was later withdrawn. However, Kennedy continues to warn of the dangers of toxins in vaccines and a July 2014 Washington Post article claimed that “some researches are sympathetic to this view.”
And while Republicans from Chris Christie to Rand Paul are being hammered for expressing the opinion that vaccinations should be voluntary, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama arguably took more extreme positions. In 2008, Hillary Clinton wrote to an autism advocacy group to declare she was “committed” to removing thimersol, a mercury-containing compound that is (no surprise) still used in some vaccines.
As for Obama, he observed at a 2008 rally that “the science is inconclusive” about a link between autism and vaccines.
Polls show that more Republicans are skeptical of vaccination than Democrats, but even now it is unfair to say that the issue cuts decisively one way or the other. The common interest of the rich Bay Area SWPL and the anti-government libertarian is the desire to have an exit, a way to opt out of a centrally administered system that they no longer trust.
This refusal to get on board with a national health care effort is what is driving the media hatred against anti-vaxxers of whatever political stripe. Refusing vaccination, we are told, is turning our back on our “social duty.” Defending tradition, serving in the military, and expressing national patriotism may be hateful and racist, but the true citizen knows to get whatever shots he is told to get. And if you don’t, we should publish your address so we can name and shame you.
Anti-vaccination is also now being linked to “privilege,” and, therefore, “Whiteness.” We are now told that refusing vaccinations is a “White privilege problem” because it takes “money and time to refuse vaccinations.” As an article in Gender & Society put it, it’s creating your own “imagined gated community.”
As we can see, the definition of “Whiteness” among the “social construct” crowd is rapidly evolving beyond connoting privilege, power, or even competence. “Whiteness” now simply means any kind of agency. If you can operate independently of the managerial state, its multicultural ideology, and its collapsing infrastructure, you are privileged
and therefore hated. And as the role of journalists is less to discover the truth than to serve as the enforcers of the official Narrative, dissenters will be hunted down and shamed.
Why are vaccines part of the new social justice crusade when “anti-vaxxers” were stereotypical leftists not so long ago? Contemporary progressivism is less an ideology than a system of social cues. Today, the desire of progressive journalists to defend the system is a product of Democrats controlling the White House and being vaguely considered in charge of “the state.” We see the same thing with the sudden disappearance of the anti-war movement after Barack Obama was elected.
But there’s something deeper taking place, as the country’s empty institutions try to tighten their grip as the core of the country collapses. The Republicans had something of a point when they criticized the Democrats for saying “government is the one thing we all belong to.” Barack Obama gave a better expression of this creed in his recent interview to Vox in which he celebrates the United States becoming, in his words, a “hodgepodge” in which you go into “communities” to witness random tribes of Kurds and Hasidic Jews in the American heartland. The only thing that holds these mutually disparate tribes together is that they ostensibly live under the same government.
As Obama hints, such deracinated conglomerations prevent conservatives from airing dissenting views designed to protect their own sense of cultural solidarity. By Balkanizing America, you “overwhelm” conservatism and the White middle class base it needs. As Sam Francis’s work tells us, a multicultural society requires big government because it is no longer capable of surviving without heavy law enforcement, social conditioning, and an administrative class. Mass immigration is, in Peter Brimelow’s phrase, “the Viagra of the State” accelerating this process. And once you’ve successfully transitioned into the Third World and your community needs an “organizer,” it’s not a real community.
Unfortunately for the multicultural central planners, even the major institutions that we all “belong” to, like health care, no longer function under this system. Identitarians gleefully circulated Thomas Putnam’s finding that diversity increases social distrust, even among members of the same race. But if anything, Putnam understated the problem. Social scientists have long recognized that support for welfare programs and infrastructure investment is undermined when voters perceive it is going to people unlike themselves. Bryan Caplan (who may have gotten a few too many vaccines as a child himself, if you know what I mean) even promotes this kind of social collapse as a reason for libertarians to support open borders.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that in (formerly) homogenous Sweden, you have high rates of immunization along with low rates of corruption and high social trust. In America, this is simply impossible because you would be foolish to believe that there is any kind of a “common good” you can be a part of. The American culture of “individualism” is as much a survival mechanism as a cultural adaptation. When your government lies to you about everything important and is actively seeking to replace you, how can you trust what they are telling you about anything?
As Barack Obama’s smirking campaign manager David Axelrod told us this week, we have a system of government in which our highest leaders knowingly lie to us even about their basic policy positions. Why should they be regarded as legitimate, or as anything other than dangerous sociopaths? Who has a “social duty” to such people?
For what it’s worth, this writer is vaccinated. I get my flu shot every year and even picked up one for pneumonia after being fed up with the usual winter plague every year. My children will be vaccinated. In a normal country, I think certain vaccinations should not only be universal, they should be mandatory with no exceptions. Nothing triggers me more than obnoxiously atheist women talking about homeopathy, Alex Jones hawking colloidal silver, or people who think the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax waving around a book on “healing crystals” they found in the bargain section at Barnes & Noble.
Yet faith in the medical establishment, the scientific research community, and the media that reports their findings is only justified if we can count on the people who rule us to at least be neutral towards us. Instead, we know our national leadership consciously seeks to replace us. We know that destructive and harmful behavior is actively rewarded by our political and economic system.
While Identitarians of all people should be suspicious of ad hominem fallacies, we can’t even trust the basic information we are given in order to understand important issues. The mainstream media lies to us more consciously and explicitly than any politician. And even scientific research has become politicized and unreliable as it becomes almost entirely dependent on government grants and funding. As a leftist might put it, the “root cause” of conspiracy theories is the open and overt conspiracy of Western governments to destroy their own middle classes and displace their own peoples.
So we can’t blame those who don’t want their children vaccinated. I don’t think vaccines cause autism, that global warming is a hoax, or that the government knew about 9/11. But I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if any or all of those turned out to be true. We already know with utter certainty and by their own words that our own political leaders in North America and Europe are consciously seeking to destroy us. Given that hostile motive, what else can we expect?
Even White liberals don’t want to actually participate in the system they’ve created. Living in a diverse major city and sending your child to public schools is practically child abuse. People commute for hours to and from work every morning simply to avoid the diversity they praise so much every day. And it’s not surprising that Silicon Valley is one of the hotbeds of “anti-vaxxer” sentiment, as well as a target for the System and its media enforcers.
Everyone feels compelled to praise democracy and equality but no one actually wants to live with it. For that reason, aside from the increasingly cartoonish hucksterism of Glenn Beck and company, the American Right is increasingly obsessed by the search for a way to opt out of t
his hostile system. Libertarians are now mainstream and consciously attack the notion of a national community at all. Religious conservatives have been reduced to pleading to be left alone in their cake shops and tamed churches. Identitarians dream of secession. And Neo-Reaction is as much defined as the search for an exit as by the rejection of egalitarianism.
Unfortunately, you can’t defeat something, even a ramshackle rotten system, with nothing. The goal is to build something that our people can trust and look up to. It sounds impossible and our struggle faces the greatest odds imaginable. However, it’s the only way we can live in a society that can provide the kinds of public goods that other generations were able to take for granted. The society we want is one where people can trust the institutions we create.
For now, the amazing thing is not that some people are refusing to trust the government and the media on vaccines. The amazing thing is that most people still do.
In this particular case, you should get the vaccine. But it’s not worth arguing about (even in the comments). If you don’t get it, you probably won’t get measles. If you do get measles, you probably won’t die from it.
But when you get better, you will continue to live your healthy, all-natural life under the rule of people who hate you, lie to you, and want to destroy you. And to return to our favorite metaphor, that’s the real disease we need to eradicate.
