You probably remember the pandemic. You probably remember thinking that the pandemic was over after the majority of adults got vaccinated in the spring of 2021. You probably remember the subsequent rise of the Delta variant, which exposed just how little most of us knew about how the immune system actually works.
Past that point, there is no common memory. Some people continued on with their lives and never looked back. Some people turned into doomers. And many others like me sought to balance concern over the ongoing impact of the virus with the understandable desire to return to something approaching normalcy. To this end, I started to learn significantly more about the virus, immunity, public health, and the like. One of the pieces that was most impactful in my journey was this one, which came from a website I had never heard of before. But because the owner of the website quickly became one of the more peculiar trolls on Twitter, I quickly learned that it was yet another right-wing grift. And then this morning I had the bright idea of looking the author of the article up on Twitter and immediately found some capital-r racism:
So we have ourselves a contradiction here. The article itself was immensely helpful to me and has proven to be almost entirely true. And yet it was written by a reactionary and posted on a right-wing rag. One of my general theories of the world is that conservatism and the like is on a personal level the result of incuriosity, and that the "cure" to such an ideology is, broadly speaking, knowledge. But here is someone whose level of scientific knowledge appears to have done the opposite and reified his racial animus into a racist ideology (which is basically the whole story of eugenics if you're not familiar). Such a contradiction is not new to me; I fully understand that the history of conservative thought is built on a flexibility and a deftness that allows it to address and squash insurgent movements. But it's still something to see such an obvious example of it in the wild.
