How Influencer Leftists Failed On Covid

Covid was the biggest transfer of power from bosses to workers in 75 years. Billionaires were so angry at this they demanded governments inflict pain on the economy to punish arrogant workers. Yet so little left wing analysis of the last 5 years makes this point. It’s amazing.

I’m not just saying things.

A real estate magnate called Tim Gurner said these things, and then more. He said this:

"The problem we had during covid is that people decided they didn’t want to work as much. People were paid a lot to do not too much and that needs to change. We need to see pain in the economy, unemployment has to rise 40 or 50 percent. We need to remind people they work for the employer not the other way around. There’s been a systematic change where the employee feels the employers is lucky to have them. We have to kill that attitude. We have to do that by hurting the economy and get back to some sort of normality. And governments are now doing that. We’re seeing less arrogance in the employment market.”

You can see the full video of this creep saying this here in a tweet I posted about it.

Open, naked, balls-out capitalist chat. The kind of thing I’m sure they were and are all saying privately.

I’ve covered these issues before but the response to the tweet made me realise it’s time for a refresher.

I read popular leftist media, listen to popular leftist podcasts, and in nearly five years none of them have ever articulated a covid story for their followers that positions the backlash to covid policies as a coordinated attack by the capitalist ruling class against broadly redistributive policies.

Worse than that, some of them push reactionary lines about covid, that it was exclusively an attack on civil liberties, that it was a period of tyrannical rule we must never fall for again. Fake fool leftists like Jimmy Dore are the worst, full covid reactionaries who sprinkle on antivax shite to boot.

It’s not just him. Most leftists with a big platform show a total inability, unwillingness, I don’t know what, to apply critical theory about class and capital to the biggest global crisis of our lifetimes.

If there’s any reason why the left is cooked, it’s this.

Cooked.

Much of what we’re seeing now in the US and more broadly in the west is because the liberal centre and the left, together, ceded the ground to right wing reactionaries in the critical period during early covid when the story was not yet written, when the future was still up for grabs.

And in that critical period, whether they were openly spouting reactionary sentiment like Dore, dribbling covid out of their mouths only in reference to how bad stay-at-home was for the kids, or staying silent as the brief expansion of the social safety net was unwound, influencer leftists and liberals largely conspired with the billionaire class to agree on a cultural story about covid which led us to where we are.

Here’s some of the objectively very good things that happened during early covid, things in many cases without precedent.

Direct cash transfers to citizens.

Evictions banned in the US, UK, EU.

Debt collection banned.

Homeless people provided shelter. (The UK ended homelessness).

Child poverty halved to record lows.

Food poverty eradicated. The US government was giving out free food boxes for fucks sake.

Plummeting suicide rates, adult and child.

Wildlife without the boot of industrial capitalism on its neck flourished.

Remote work was normalised.

These policies happened broadly across the west, regardless of the government type. From the right in the UK to the centre in Canada to the left in Spain. The US did redistribution and social protection under Trump and then Biden and at the state level, red and blue.

The crisis provoked a pro-social response independent of government ideology.

There was also a true sense of the collective, a true understanding that we lived in a society for the first time in my life. From mutual aid efforts to clapping for workers to wearing masks in healthcare as a basic courtesy to disabled and vulnerable people.

As well as this, the biggest anti-racism protests in decades erupted in the US and UK because for the first time ever, many people had time. They were educating and organising. George Floyd was the spark in the US. But previous sparks had not ignited protests like we saw in 2020. People just had time. It wasn't a coincidence. And they burned down police stations and tore down slaver statues with that time.

(Incidentally in the covid story that has metastasized into the bones of the culture these things couldn’t have happened because we were locked down under threat of arrest).

These were very good things. Things without precedent. Things that many on the left had been fighting to achieve for decades, happened. The veil was pulled back. We saw what was a choice and not an inevitability. They happened and then they disappeared and these big libs and leftists together, from Pod Save America to Chapo to Novara in the UK, failed to explain why. They didn’t fight for them. They just let it all quietly turn to dust.

And into this vacuum slunk the likes of Joe Rogan, Elon Musk and Jimmy Dore with their stories about ‘scamdemics',’ and freedom and liberty and government overreach.

Dore and others occasionally throw some crumbs down: Pfizer made a lot of money. Rich people got richer. Wow, well done, thanks for this penetrating capitalist critique. Definitely wasn’t happening before. Definitely needed a pandemic for this to happen. Galaxy brains illuminating the conditions. No wonder they earn the big Patreon bucks.

And now America has a government almost perfectly crafted in the image of this reactionary covid story.

With the Faragists leading the polls in the UK, that cursed place might be next.

And the conditions are back to where they were or worse. Homelessness above pre-covid levels in Britain, child poverty in America doubled.

We had a glimpse of what could be and most people failed to defend it because, truthfully, they wanted normal back too. Normal in this telling not being any kind of civic-minded freedom, but consumptive freedom. Freedom to restaurant and bar and comedy store.

And we have to understand that a return to normal was contingent on erasing covid from the collective consciousness.

Normal being poverty, hunger, homelessness. The necessity for a permanent and visible underclass to keep the working and middle classes on their toes. The elites making sure we have visible examples of who we could be should bad luck strike or we stop grafting for the man. Homelessness and poverty is capitalism’s live stream, broadcast everywhere to ensure we can never fully escape the sense of precarity about what might be.

Clearly we couldn’t have lived under crisis conditions permanently. But the good things could have stayed while we went back to a better version of normal.

And fine, the fact this didn’t happen is not primarily on liberal and leftist influencers. It’s on the people with power, the capitalists, billionaires, political elites and central bankers who needed to shut the pandora’s box they’d opened before we all started getting ideas above our station, as Gurner so eloquently revealed. But the influencers could have resisted the reactionary freedom narrative and said something into their big furry microphones once for an hour among the thousands?

The attack on government functions in America now underway cannot be divorced from this context. Musk, a regular booster of the online ‘scamdemic’ blob complex, saw the cultural triumph of the freedom narrative that blamed the administrative state for the hardships of covid and has seized the opening. Billionaires saw what the government was capable of during early covid, it freaked them out and now they’re dismantling the functions that made those things possible. They saw how the administrative state proved it could, in the right hands, challenge capitalist hegemony.

It is being made dead because of it.

And letting the virus itself rip has been a boon for those like Musk and Doge going after social spending in the name of financial efficiency. It was just reported that the 1.7 million excess deaths of Americans 25 and older to 2023 have saved the US government $294 billion in social security retirement payments that no longer need to be made.

Eugenics ~handshake~ capitalism.

The fact that the story of covid is not this and is instead a story that doesn’t threaten billionaire interests in the least (and in many ways aids those interests) is another one of those not coincidences.

I don’t suppose any of the leftist or liberal influencers with big platforms will read this.

But if any of you do, maybe give your heads a little wobble and start telling a better story.

(p.s. shoutout to the smaller leftist podcasts who do get it discourse pod and punchup pod)