In January there was a long covid hearing in the US Senate.
There were brilliant and passionate testimonies. It renewed hope for treatments and cures.
But something needs raising.
The praise some advocates heaped on Robert Marshall, a senator from Kansas who spoke at the hearing.
Robert Marshall campaigned maskless in 2020 when 20,000 people were dying of covid a week. He said masks don’t work and might make things worse. He supported the bill outlawing mask mandates ever again. He recommended hydroxychloroquine for treating covid. He is also strictly anti-immigration and fervently anti-abortion, even in the case of rape.
It appears he cares about long covid because his wife has it.
A similar thing happened in Latvia.
A far-right politician in that country was photographed on numerous occasions wearing an elastomeric mask.
Some advocates praised it.
This is a man who has said there is no such thing as the patriarchy, called for the deportation of refugees and compares the actions of climate activists to Russian missile strikes. And that’s just what I found out from five minutes on his twitter and blog.
This is a mistake I saw whilst working on climate and ecology and now I’m seeing on covid: the idea that we can focus narrowly on our thing because ‘science isn’t political.’
This is wrong.
The opposite is true.
Science is always political.
The Nazi’s were really into science, but it was their own type of ethno-nationalist science to promote a super race of people.
On climate and ecology, many far-right and even fascist figures are really into ecology and how wind turbines and solar panel farms harm nature.
They are often into protecting nature, and use that as a reason to support strict border control and the deportation of refugees, usually using some iteration of the ‘we’re full’ overpopulation argument.
Of course they’ll never call for the end of the western wars that create the refugees.
They’ll never blame fossil fuel or pesticide corporations for harming nature.
They’ll never identify exploitative capitalism as the driver for low-wage migration.
They’ll never call for the measures necessary to end the virus that causes the post-viral illnesses.
They’ll never actually stand with the oppressed.
This dynamic was repeated recently around Bryan Johnson, the billionaire whose lungs were trashed by covid. Some advocates, on finding out the news, became hopeful that he would spear-head efforts for treatments and cures. It’s a little depressing. People like Bryan Johnson are birthed from and rewarded by the twisted incentives that undergird the system. They are the symptom, not the cure. Are billionaire moonshots all we can imagine now?
People are desperate for leadership. On covid. On climate. On everything. From someone, somewhere. It’s understandable. I get it.
But who we ally with matters.
It can never be right to ally with monsters because it is convenient for a single issue.
If you care about long covid suffering, its because you care about people. All people.
There is no world where you should be willing to sleep with the devil because he promises you salvation.
You can’t carve out your own liberated space. It’s not possible.
As soon as you start making these compromises, as soon as we say it’s ok to throw rape victims under the bus for a long covid cure, or throw refugees under the bus in the name of ecology, where do you stop?
Everything is connected.
We can’t understand how a pandemic is allowed to happen without understanding how a climate crisis is allowed to happen without understanding how genocidal acts are allowed to happen.
Compromises on single issues, often with limited-to-no success anyway, have led us here.
Liberation for all, or liberation for none.
Great essay.
A UK psychiatrist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, posits in his book The Master and His Emissary that we as a society are experiencing right cerebral hemisphere deficits. These deficits lead to binary thinking (us vs. them), anosognosia (inability to understand when something is wrong and create confabulated explanations for facts - covid minimizers, eh?), apraxias where even in the absence of motor deficits actions cannot be completed, i.e. we know the solution but somehow just can't execute on it. And overall, an inability to see context, interconnection, or broad view.
Thanks for writing, I enjoy your work.
Oh I think there is an issue. Why do we allow billionaires to exist? Why do we subscribe to a magic of markets ideology where the dice are loaded and the dealer deals from the bottom of the deck?
The entitlement of the few coupled with their conviction of infallibility and contempt for the welfare of mere us is the issue which much be addressed.