THE COLUMN: Invasion of the Body-and-Soul Snatchers

Elon Musk, after me the foremost scourge of Twitter, is much in the news these days. Not only for his high-stakes poker game against the unworthy likes of Parag Agrawal—an Indian immigrant with a bad attitude toward the First Amendment, doing the job (with a handsome pay package) that Americans just won't do—but for his direct challenge to the Wokerati whose private preserve Twitter, Disney, Netflix, and just about every other aspect of the culture have become. Naturally, the eccentric multi-billionaire immediately came "under fire," as the gun-shy media likes to say, for past sins real or imagined, and immediately turned the tables on his accuser in a way that even Bill Clinton never dared to do.

But as we've all learned over the past several decades, truth is irrelevant to the Leftist project, whose two-step program for fundamental transformation goes like this. First, posit a counter-factual. Second, act on it as if it were true while browbeating the bejesus out of your opponents. Lately, it doesn't matter how counter-factual or, indeed, utterly ridiculous it is: men can get pregnant, police should be defunded, and the "right" to an abortion can be found in the Constitution. The Hive Mind pushes these precepts and many more, and if you don't agree, then the only explanation is that you're some sort of racist or bigot, now the dirtiest words in the English language. There is no longer any such thing as dispassion, and the time for debate, disagreement, and rational discussion is over. Get with the program, comrade.

Run! It's Dave Chappelle!

This is what happens when everything—sex, race, sports, politics, music, culture, pancake mix, butter, baby formula, religion, the nation-state, your Aunt Hilda—becomes political. Musk has, correctly, described such conformity as the "woke mind virus." Such a state of affairs is in fact the end-state of "progressive" cultural-Marxist thinking, which has substituted the permanent imposition of political correctness in place of what economic Marxism had initially anticipated, which in the words of Friedrich Engels was the "withering away" of the State itself. 

The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not ‘abolished.’ It dies out.

Wrong again, Freddy! What the Marxists discovered after they sandbagged the first, anti-Tsarist Russian Revolution and replaced it with their own, is that the State and its coerced minions in private enterprise come in very handy if you're a power-mad atheist bent on cultural destruction and your own supreme power. It took 75 years of Soviet communist rule, the blunt-force application of a central-European anti-capitalist philosophy promulgated by a malevolent hobo and his rich benefactor, for the Russian people to learn the partial error of their ways. In the meantime, the State never died out.

The "withering away" of the State is in fact the last thing the Left wants, especially as the Great Reset dawns in Davos. Oh, the nation-state can go once they have captured its armed forces; after all, such outmoded concepts as a "nation" only encourage such nasty concepts as nationalism, which must be stamped out by any means necessary. The communist Left didn't win its prolonged struggle with its former ally, National Socialist Germany, to countenance allegiance to something at once both higher and baser than the abstract ideal of International Socialism. That the version the Left is currently trying to impose upon us looks much more like the fascism of the Nazis than the communism of Stalin is left unremarked. But hey—omelets and eggs.

Which brings us back to Wokism -- now, amazingly, suffering a series of defeats as the Zeitgeist turns. In Florida, the thrashing of the Walt Disney Company by Gov. Ron DeSantis—the next GOP candidate for president, if the Republicans have any sense— vividly demonstrated how far the force of will, painfully applied, and an absolute refusal to accept their literally insane premises can go toward reversing the course of degenerate political correctness. DeSantis has shown that one arrogant corporation's "progressivism" is another man's sexual perversion, and that decent folks draw the line at the grooming of their defenseless children by those who can't reproduce any other way, whether by the House of Mouse or proselytizing operatives working within the taxpayer-supported public-school systems. The withering State is not so much fun when it's punching back, is it?

The quick rout of the Ministry of Truth under its nasty Gauleiterin, Nina Jankowicz, was also an encouraging sign, although technically the "Disinformation Governance Board" is only "suspended" pending an assessment by two of the most dedicated statists in recent history, Michael Chertoff and Jamie Gorelick. Naturally, the lickspittle media is furious: "The fate of the board is yet more proof that efforts to combat even clearly threatening disinformation will always be ripe targets for the purveyors of disinformation, and officials should have better anticipated and handled this obvious dynamic," huffed the once-respected Columbia Journalism Review, echoing the anti-freedom sentiments of Walter Lippmann in his 1922 treatise, Public Opinion.

Careful! It might be Nina Jankowicz!

Even more fun has been the collapse of Netflix, a company that is living proof of Erick Hoffer's maxim that "every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." What started as a way to make movies available to everybody for a small subscription price turned into a market-cornering monstrosity and ultimately into the woke "Streaming Service," which sought to replace the studios as the principal financier and greenlighter of motion pictures. It borrowed a fortune, produced next to nothing of value, drove good scripts out of the market, and has damn near destroyed the picture business by replacing professionalism with aspirationalism.

Faced with a subscriber exodus, a shareholders' lawsuit, and a loss of some $200 billion in market capitalization, and finally paying the financial penalty for trying to force endless remakes of Moonlight and other woke sermons down everyone's throat, Netflix has suddenly had an attitude adjustment: 

More significantly, the document adds a new directive for employees to act with fiscal responsibility — a change that comes as Netflix in Q1 saw its first decline in subscribers in more than a decade. The updated Netflix Culture memo also includes a new section called “Artistic Expression,” explaining that the streamer will not “censor specific artists or voices” even if employees consider the content “harmful,” and bluntly states, “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

And then there's Nancy Pelosi and her effective excommunication from the Catholic Church. Who says there's no good news? Would that Robinette—just banned from entering Russia— could be next. 

Still, in the aftermath of the Great Covid Panic of 2019-22, the American economy continues to crater. Soaring gas prices at the pump, occasioned by Biden's cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline and all the anti-energy policies that have since followed, are only the most outward manifestation of the rot at the heart of the American experiment. Not just content with your body, the spirit-sapping demons unleashed by the Frankfurt School hunger for your soul as well. They want their passionate desire to kill children in the womb to remain uncensured by society and have not only protested but threatened violent riots should the Supreme Court stick to its convictions and overturn the moral enormity of Roe v. Wade this term. 

Just close your eyes and everything will be all right.

The stock market also recently has had one of its worst weeks ever, and polls show most Americans have utterly lost confidence in the Biden administration. Even worse, Biden's crack foreign-policy team is now encouraging historically neutral Finland to join a superfluous and outmoded NATO and thus fall under the alliance's Article 5 provision of "collective defense" should the Finns, as they often do, get into a spat with the bear next door. For those scoring at home, this is essentially how World War One started, but who reads history any more?

To add insult to injury, the country and its nursing moms are suffering through an absolutely predictable, government-created shortage of baby formula, apparently on the moral principle that if you can kill babies in the womb right up to the moment of birth, you might as well go the extra mile and starve them to death after they're born. In a reversal of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift, airmen from the Ramstein Air Base in Germany have shipped over pallets of Nestle Health Science Alfamino Infant and Alfamino Junior formula: Operation Fly Formula.

The formula shortage will eventually ease. But something else will take its place. The litany of potential disasters under Joe Biden is endless, each baleful new development replicating like the pod people of Don Siegel's classic 1956 film, sucking the life out of human beings and institutions, absorbing mind and memory, and leaving nothing but husks behind. They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.

You wanted "malaise," America? You "voted" for it—and you got it. 

By the way, have you heard about monkeypox? Not a worry for you, you say? After all, "most initial cases of monkeypox have been among gay or bisexual men who have had sex with other males." Silly fellow. The Disinformation Governance Board, currently disguised as a giant watermelon, would like a word with you. As Kevin McCarthy (the actor, not the politician) warns at the end of Body Snatchers: "You're next!" 

Slouching Toward the End Times

I recently received a note from a friend commenting on a syndrome he calls “Covid retardation,” which manifests literally as “a general across-the-board slowdown in everything—not merely cognitive, but walking slowly, shoulders slumped, looking at the ground, refusing to make eye contact with people, driving slowly (well under the speed limit) or reacting slowly at green lights, as if the person truly has nowhere to go and nothing to do.” The malady entails “dull conversation and lazy thinking, repetition of clichés and government/media-repeated falsehoods, and on and on. People have a choice. They're not yet in camps. They choose to behave that way.”

I know precisely what he’s getting at and have remarked on this distemper many times. I was observing the stance and posture of a procession of masked ghouls again from my balcony this morning. It's scary as hell and reminds me of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Younger people for the most part still enjoy a fund of natal vitality that keeps them reasonably vertical, but middle-aged to older people tend to succumb more readily to a visibly manifest despair. They mumble almost inaudibly through their masks and visors at shop counters or when they stop to chat. They shuffle and stoop, bend their heads and spines as they walk, as if slouching toward the end times. The scapular droop is palpable Bodily comportment is a pretty good sign of general depression and intellectual surrender. This is another consequence of the draconian and utterly misconceived response to the virus, almost never remarked but starkly evident.

Contributing to an atmosphere that does not encourage active coping or even simple curiosity, these people have been gradually but systematically deprived of agency. One wonders if they have not been “cancelled” in their essence. The data about the absurdity and harmfulness of the mask-and-lockdown mandates were always there to be found, even if the Internet is awash with partisan disclaimers and meretricious “fact-checkers”, even if Forbes, in an article plentifully larded with misinformation and false assumptions, has instructed us not to do our own research.

Moreover, the thoughtless rush to vaccines, which are not “vaccines” as we understand them but experimental mRNA strands injected into and systematically altering a person’s genetic code, may severely exacerbate the degree of catalepsy we are seeing. (Interestingly, Italy is presently launching a criminal manslaughter investigation against the BioPharmaceutical Company AstraZeneca, which uses a replicating vector-based vaccine as a delivery system that inserts genetic material into the cells’ nuclei.)

Of course, the slowdown we are witnessing is not only local or age-specific, so to speak, but cultural and national in its sweep. The economy has slowed to the point of near-irrecoverable stagnation. Entrepreneurial activity is sluggish. Small businesses are being decimated. The productive classes are almost paralyzed. Schools are closed. Elderly people are dying in nursing homes and senior residences. Prospects for the future seem positively narcoleptic. “Can do” no longer applies. A general sense of hopelessness has begun to pervade every aspect of common life, every major enterprise and plan for investment in long-term projects. 

Run for your lives!

One sees the signs of demoralization and lethargy everywhere in the little things: the way people avoid each other and isolate in their portable “bubbles”; the way people murmur and mutter behind their face swaddlings; the way some people drive, fully masked, breathing in their own drowsy-making CO2, idling at stoplights, executing unpredictable maneuvers, and oblivious of traffic merges—as I can ruefully attest; and, most emphatically, in the way people walk, especially though not exclusively among the older population, tilting downward, phlegmatic and heavy, like sagging bladders of terminal despondency. This is terrifying to see.

True, there are places that are coming to or have come to their senses. Even The New York Times admits that Florida, for example, an open state with many seniors, outperforms most other regions and jurisdictions in the anti-COVID sweepstakes. Nonetheless, judging from my observations and the reports I receive from other parts of the country, the general impression of something like perithanatic anomie, a kind of corporeal melancholy afflicting a large segment of the population, appears to be valid.

Where is responsibility to be assigned? The arrogance, stupidity and coercive power of the political class on the whole and of the so-called medical “experts” who conform to and abet their masters’ agendas cannot be forgiven. They have been wrong across the board and, along with their Big Tech and media collaborators, have caused vastly more harm than they have prevented, crippling economic and social life as well as generating an “excess” mortality count that is staggering.

A JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) study covering the period from March 1 to May 30, 2020 in the U.S. reveals that “the number of excess all-cause deaths was 28% higher than the official tally of COVID-19–reported deaths during that period,” owing to delayed medical care, economic hardship, substance abuse, emotional distress and “suicides of despair.” In my own country, Statistics Canada has belatedly concluded that “the number of excess deaths has been higher than the number of deaths due to COVID-19, and these deaths are affecting younger populations.” 

With a Great Reset on its way soon.

In fairness, however, it should be acknowledged that the majority of people, young as well as older, have accepted the diktats of government officials and their public CMOHs (chief medical officers of health) as oracles, without questioning the information they dispense or consulting independent, non-governmental-aligned epidemiological authorities, such as The Great Barrington Declaration, the American Institute for Economic Research, JAMA and many others. Public obeisance is at the root of the travesty of voluntary disempowerment, the effects of which are now on popular display. “Those who know the least obey the best,” wrote George Farquhar in The Inconstant. 

I have seen the identical syndrome my friend mentions at work in the members of my own family, who implicitly believe everything the lying media tell them about masks, lockdowns and vaccines, and treat my warnings as merely conspiratorial. The respect they have, amounting almost to adulation, for health bureaucrats and medical hired guns, who may not “know anything” and who have occasionally violated their own proscriptions, is quite discouraging. My relatives refuse to look up anything for themselves or credit the clear evidence when it is presented to them. The mental disposition of those I care for reproduces the physical deportment they increasingly exhibit, the signs of a profound distress which they cannot disguise. And it seems, despite my best efforts, there is nothing I can do about it.

All one can manage at this point is to bear witness and stay upright. Observing these legions of abulics shambling by, tentatively fumbling with their masks and looking wilted, I find this posture of desuetude truly appalling and ask myself, to adapt a phrase from Henrik Ibsen, whether the dead will ever awaken. For it is an exhaustion of spirit, a reduction of vital energy, a lasting expression of defeat and a morbid depletion of the will that may be among the greatest and most gratuitous harms the Covid panic has produced.

Sometimes, anatomy speaks.