The Left-Right Switch & the Covid Phenomenon

 

The Covid Kinesis (political, cultural, psychological, and ideological, not virological) has brought to light and/or engendered a fascinating shift.  People are increasingly thinking the thought that occurred to me over a year ago (thanks to the Twitter account @mirnarealestate for collecting these through retweets):

 

 

 

 

Now the last one I pasted in above brings up an interesting wrinkle to this phenomenon, which I believe indicates the crux of it.  For in fact, psychologically & culturally, what we are seeing is not hypocrisy, at least not intentionally in their minds.  The Leftist who supports the international authoritarian Covid Fascist Regime (including forcing people to be injected by the State) has somehow made the connection in his heart & mind between their self-righteous Leftist activism and the dire urgency of "protecting" the planet from Covid Death -- so that there is in their mind no inconsistency here at all.  The one flows directly out of the other (and vice versa, into the other).  

What has enabled this weird inversion -- at least one major recent impetus -- was the whole Trump phenomenon.  Trump was sort of a strange hybrid of The Establishment and a Maverick Who Opposed The Establishment:  As President, he represented the former; as an alleged leader of some supposed "qanon" conspiracy to overthrow America and replace it with a new white supremacist neo-Nazi regime, he represented the latter.  Insofar as he embodied this paradox, the Leftists could have their cake and eat it too: they could continue to keep the flame of their counter-culture anti-Establishment roots alive by opposing, mocking and self-righteously condemning "The President".  Meanwhile, the "danger" he and his followers supposedly posed (e.g., the conspiracy theory paranoia surrounding the putative "coup" attempt of 1/6/20) justified, in their minds, a posture of self-defense that resembles the very fascism they are claiming to oppose (an Orwellian paradox as old as the hills).  So this TDS paradox has been carried over with Covid, where the growing movement of opposition to the Mainstream Narrative is cast as essentially the same sociopolitical-subcultural nebula as Trump supporters; eliciting essentially the same Leftist dynamic as with Trump.