the myths —that Covid is mild, doesn’t hurt kids, doesn’t spread from schools, should be accepted as inevitable, is more or less like a cold now, is over, can’t be prevented by masks, is less important than education or economic activity, etc— are all easily disproven and yet they frame the worldviews of a majority of progressives, liberals, and democrats. Why?

Because to question mainstream covid myths as a body you have to question everything about what’s driving modern society and most people are just not prepared to do that. Most people just have not yet gotten to a point where they can see that it is capitalism itself that runs the society and sacrifices human health to keep itself going. Half a century of perpetual red baiting has worked.

And even if you can agree intellectually that profits before people is problematic, it still takes courage and community to begin to fight back and start questioning the crowd of intellectuals, journalists, and politicians who occupy and rubber stamp the left edge of modern capitalism. They have a hegemonic hold over the brains of many of our friends

And those friends are still logging on to corporate social media, reading their NYT subscriptions, listening to NPR, or watching MSNBC for 90% of their info intake. It’s branded center left but a great deal of all those sources rely on capital, accept capital as an implicit and unstated frame, populate users vision with corporate ads, and often ruthlessly vilify anyone who effectively questions capital

There’s a reason why ableism is last in line in the culture wars! Because it forces us to accept that humans have worth outside The Economy & judging humans according to their ability to keep up with the treadmill of capital is immoral. We have not yet accepted this. Even die hard feminists or anti racists etc will eventually dismiss the concerns of friends who can’t keep up, many of us who’ve dealt with serious illness know this. Covid forced ableism’s hand and ableism won

Ableism is really one of capital’s most powerful allies. It has a whole constellation of ideas propping it up: individualism, hustle culture, careerism, fatphobia, etc. And to see proof of ableism’s reified status in American society look no further than our anomalously violent health care “system.” We all choose at each election to keep sacrificing the sick and dying to a demonstrably corrupt billion dollar health insurance industry! We choose that!

Long rant, sorry everyone. Im just trying to get at the root of why covid mythology is so hard to slay, even among friends who we think should know better. We have got to start seeing our social frustrations as patterns within systems, and looking at how to most effectively start spinning those systems the other way. The nice thing about feedback loops is you can interrupt them anywhere and it will impact the whole system — but you have to consider interruptions from that systems perspective