It seems as if nothing will change his mind. The current outbreak of measles in Texas and New Mexico — which now counts 250 cases and two deaths, one of a child and one of an adult — has been Kennedy’s first test in his new role. So far, he has confirmed the worst fears of his opponents. While he’s acknowledged that the measles vaccine does prevent transmission of the disease, he has not urged people to get it. Instead, he’s enthused about the effectiveness of Vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatments.

It just so happens that Vitamin A and cod liver oil is the measles treatment of choice of the so called “crunchy moms” who are widely credited with powering Kennedy’s ascent. The crunchy moms are reacting online to the measles outbreak with defiance. They generally believe that measles is no more serious than the chicken pox, and even that it’s beneficial to catch it. They refuse to be cowed by what they see as an agenda-driven media circus. “Measles outbreak headlines = paid advertising,” wrote influencer Braci Dutton on Instagram last month. “The real headline? Your immune system was designed to handle life. Fear is the real virus. Sunshine, movement, and real food are the cure.”

The crunchy moms’ fervor on such matters has turned them into a potent political force, one that forms a critical part of Donald Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. They have managed to make the day-to-day business of motherhood — what their children are eating, what kind of medical care they receive, what products they use — a key political issue. And their Covid era-fueled suspicion of the medical and scientific establishment has become a defining tendency on the Right.

If you’re a mother on Instagram, it’s almost impossible to avoid this crunchy content. I became aware of the moms even before I had my son early last year. The algorithm, having picked up on the fact that I was pregnant, funneled them into my Instagram feed. They were having “wild pregnancies” with no prenatal care at all, and even “freebirthing” at home with no medical professionals present. When their babies arrived, their conflict with the medical system intensified. There would be no “pokes” or “cupcakes” — code for vaccines, used online to avoid social media filters. Checkups at the pediatrician were best avoided completely. Formula was full of dangerous chemicals, as was sunscreen, as was most processed food available in the supermarket; milk pasteurization was unnecessary, even harmful; homeschooling was a must. Every detail of home life and childrearing was a battleground, under threat by nefarious forces.

“The personal is political” was the slogan of Left-wing feminists in the Seventies, but today it has no better inheritor than the MAHA moms. In the last few decades, the Right has successfully claimed ownership of the politics of motherhood, and neatly merged them with the Covid era’s upswing in hostility to medicine and expertise. It has made space for a politics centered on motherhood as an identity and on the granular concerns of moms.

The Left, meanwhile, has taken the opposite approach, ignoring the deeply political nature of homemaking altogether. Vice President JD Vance’s remark equating Democrats with “childless cat ladies” may have been unfair, but it reflects a real sentiment that has provoked the rightward swing of the crunchy moms. On paper, during the last election, the Democrats were the pro-woman party, with a female candidate and pro-choice policy. But preoccupied by the girlboss ethos, they failed to include women whose focus is on their home and family. As a result, the kind of mothers who once may have gravitated to the “granola” Left have now completed a hard Right turn.

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This mass desertion wasn’t inevitable. The Left used to concern itself more with the domestic realm; take the Wages for Housework campaign, begun in the Seventies, which sought equal recognition for women’s work in the home. Then there was Alix Kates Shulman’s “Marriage Agreement” essay from 1970, which delineated the arrangement she and her husband made to split housework equally, and which included as its first principle: “We reject the notion that the work which brings in more money is the more valuable.” More recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s influential 2004 book, The Two-Income Trap, argued that the decline of stay-at-home motherhood had had a deleterious effect on American families. But the overall tendency of mainstream feminism today has been to portray homemaking and care work as a kind of prison — Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name” — and urge women to succeed in the workforce just as a man would. This tendency, culminating in the frenetic Lean In-style corporate feminism of the 2010s, is what the crunchy moms are reacting to.

The MAHA moms on social media often allude to their disillusionment with feminism. “I wish the ‘mainstream feminism’ would also include mothers in their advocacy instead of contributing to the anti motherhood/children culture — further promoting the undervaluing of women’s domestic labor & refusing to acknowledge that the well-being of our children lays the groundwork for the future of society,” read an Instagram video by user “radical.gardenn” earlier this year.

But if feminism is considered one dragon to slay, Big Pharma is another. Twenty years ago, the word “crunchy” evoked NPR-listening New England or West Coast liberals who shopped at health food stores and did yoga. Today, it calls to mind Right-wing homesteaders who eschew vaccines. In a typical crunchy mom reel last week, the account “empowered.mama.nest” wrote: “They lied about thalidomide. They lied about DDT. They lied about tobacco. They lied about asbestos. They lied about mercury. They lied about opioids. They lied about covid. They are lying about vaccines too. You know who doesn’t have the incentive to lie? Mothers.”

Covid and the authorities’ heavy-handed vaccine implementation has much to do with this shift, drawing the battle lines definitively between Left and Right on vaccines and driving any skeptics into the arms of the anti-vaccine movement. But a deep distrust of Big Pharma was simmering well before then — and, again, it was moms at the forefront. Kennedy has said that moms of autistic children who attributed their child’s condition to vaccines inspired his initial interest in the vaccine issue, which has formed the cornerstone of his career. His running mate in 2024, Nicole Shanahan, is a self-described “autism mom” who believes her daughter’s autism stems from vaccines.

These two issues intersect in the online aesthetics of this movement. Crunchy mom content ranges from the gauzy and tradwife-inflected — women in prairie dresses kneading sourdough — to the militant, often by the same accounts. One minute you’re looking at someone’s video about co-sleeping, and the next you’re watching a woman drinking out of a jug of raw milk and talking about chemtrails. The crunchy moms seem to have it all figured out; for every thorny parenting dilemma, they have an answer. It’s easy to see why so many women have sought refuge among them amid motherhood’s flurry of anxiety and decision-making.

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And so far, their tactics seem to be working. The Food and Drug Administration, the crunchy moms’ nemesis, lost hundreds of workers during the Elon Musk-led DOGE purge. The National Institutes of Health, also under Kennedy’s purview, announced it was cutting research grants related to vaccine hesitancy. The Centers for Disease Control, another organization in the Department of Health and Human Services, is reportedly going to perform a large-scale study investigating whether there is a link between vaccines and autism (a notion that has already been studied extensively and is not supported by evidence).

Victory goes to the crunchy moms, but they may find that it’s a pyrrhic one. They want nasty ingredients and dyes out of the food supply, they want clean water and soil, and they want sterner oversight of pharmaceuticals — but they support an administration that is dismantling the federal agencies that oversee these areas. And if they hope that the Trump administration will remain steadfast against big business to defend their children’s health, they may find themselves disappointed. Kennedy’s latest move was to endorse the fast-food burger and milkshakes chain Steak ‘n Shake because it has stopped using seed oils.

This could be the moment for liberals to somehow reach out to the crunchy moms, but so far they’ve shown no interest in speaking to them on their terms — or in general, addressing the large swathes of Americans who have lost trust in the medical establishment. These women are trying to protect their children, and they think they’re doing so — even those who don’t vaccinate for measles. As long as “trust the science” is the only answer to a worried mom who has questions about the vaccine schedule, those moms will gravitate towards the side that embraces them — whether it ultimately benefits them or not.

True breakthroughs are rare (the cause of Aids; Dolly the Sheep) and almost none is granted the kind of establishment send-off as the research unveiled that morning. For months, private briefings had teased the press regarding what was coming. The hospital installed answering machines to field the alarm it expected. And both its medical school’s dean and a top professor stepped forward with a mid-rank lab researcher to introduce a “study” that wouldn’t only stalk the nightmares of a generation of young parents, but shovel trenches for a war that has raged ever since.

“The study has identified a possible link between gut disorders in children and autism,” a press release explained, with 21 minutes of video clips to maximise TV pick-up. “In the majority of cases, the onset of symptoms occurred soon after the MMR vaccination.”

Ahh, MMR: the measles, mumps, and rubella shot. What Brit beyond their teens never noticed the fallout that rained from that morning’s event? Over months and years, vaccination rates slumped, and measles returned to kill or maim children as the most agonising health scare since the early years of Aids unleashed outbreaks of fear, guilt, and disease. That night, TV news tracked the Royal Free script:

“Questions were raised today about the safety of the combined mumps, measles, and rubella vaccine…”

“Claims there could be a link between a common childhood vaccine and autism…”

This was February 26, 1998, with the paper datelined to the following Saturday. Beneath a technobabble title, 13 authors were listed. But only one wrote it: Andrew Wakefield. Then aged 41, a bowel surgeon by training, he had a large-chested voice, a patrician manner, and what admirers described as “charisma”. Dressed in a black suit at a blue-clothed table, with the dean stood to his left and the professor sat to his right, he pitched a story to draft a page in medical history. He had gathered data from a series of 12 developmentally challenged kids, anonymised in the paper by number. They had been admitted to the Royal Free for an unprecedented five-day battery of tests he had devised, including needles into their spines, tubes deep into their guts, brain scans, x-rays, and blood work.

His first “finding” would echo down the decades like machine-gun fire in a cathedral. For eight of the 12 (aged from three to nine), the paper said their parents, quizzed by doctors running the tests, recounted a terrifyingly similar experience: a son or daughter was developing normally, received a shot of the three-in-one “live virus” MMR, and showed autistic symptoms within days.

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The paper further claimed discovery of a new medical “syndrome” of both brain and bowel disease in the children. All but one, it reported in text and tables, had developmental issues plus “chronic enterocolitis” — inflammation of both the large and small intestine. “It’s a moral issue for me,” Wakefield told his audience, calling for MMR to be suspended in favour of single shots for measles, mumps, and rubella. “I can’t support the continued use of these three vaccines, given in combination, until this issue has been resolved.” The dean equivocated, but the professor backed Wakefield. And so was born an intractable controversy as the paper was leveraged to launch a crusade: first against this vaccine, then later another… and another… all the way to SARS-CoV-2.

“It’s not a vaccine at all,” Wakefield would rail against the latter at the height of the Covid pandemic. “It’s actually genetic engineering.” Back in 1998, his ground had been firmer, even based on a mere dozen patients. Many medical insights begin with short case series. Autism: 11 kids in the Baltimore area, for example. Aids: five men in Los Angeles. That Thursday, it seemed possible the Royal Free had got lucky: maybe catching the first snapshot of a hidden epidemic of catastrophic injuries to kids. Massive studies around the world, however, found nothing to confirm this, leaving a whale of a riddle rotting on the beach. If parents of two-thirds of 12 children with developmental issues blamed the triple shot for the sudden onset of autism, why weren’t vaccine victims everywhere? Wakefield doubled down, claiming they were. But, while the medical establishment sought refuge in authority, urging the public to trust experts, not a lone-voice maverick, an old-school Sunday Times investigation, run by me, would pepper revelations across more than the next decade, revealing what this doctor had done.

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Our first report splashed in February 2004, almost exactly six years after the press conference. “Revealed: MMR research scandal,” was the front page, igniting a new media firestorm. We had discovered a monstrous conflict of interest that Wakefield kept hidden, then denied. For two years before his “moral issue” surfaced — and before any of the children set foot in the hospital — he had been payrolled by a small-town solicitor named Richard Barr to help lead an attack on MMR. Unlike expert witnesses, who give advice and opinions, the doctor was delegated to arrange the tests, building pressure for a speculative lawsuit.

“I have mentioned to you before,” Barr wrote to Wakefield, six months before the Royal Free event, “the prime objective is to produce unassailable evidence in court so as to convince a court that these vaccines are dangerous.” Barr filed the lawsuit at the Royal Courts of Justice eight months after the breathless press conference. Wakefield claimed fees of £150 an hour (about £254 an hour at late 2022 values), drawn from the government’s legal aid fund. So, as he recruited the children and wrote the paper, he had a financial incentive not only to trigger a client-grabbing furore, but to keep it going for as long as he could.

Those clients poured in — nearly 1,600 families — as journalists were duped to fuel the scare. And by late 2003, when Barr’s lawsuit collapsed, Wakefield had. been handed £435,643 (about £738,000, or nearly US $900,000, at last year’s values), plus expenses, in taxpayers’ money. But as he gazed into the glare of TV lights, his legal deal was only one of his secrets. As he’d made his call for a switch to single vaccines, he forgot to mention that eight months previously he’d filed a confidential claim at the London Patent Office for his own, supposedly safer, single vaccine.

His shot wouldn’t have worked. When I asked experts about it, they laughed. But four days after the Royal Free event, he put it to the medical school that they start a joint company to raise money for this, and other products he’d imagined, which only stood much chance of enticing investors if confidence in MMR was damaged. Yet this doctor wasn’t shy of shady stuff, even hopelessly suing me for what a High Court judge described as “public-relations purposes”. So I carried on digging for years, on-and-off, exposing secrets and lies by the bucket. “If my son really is Patient 11, then the Lancet article is simply an outright fabrication,” complained the father of a California boy brought to London for the tests, after I found the dad and showed him a copy. “I know that paper is not right and fraudulent,” the mother of another boy, from the north of England, emailed me. “I can see that from what was written about my son.”

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Confidential medical records (lawfully checked) confirmed the parents’ right to be angry. Some of the kids said to have symptoms days after MMR, actually had them before or up to nine months later. Some were reported with “autism” without this diagnosis. Tests for bowel disease came back normal. None of Wakefield’s data revealed enterocolitis: the chief gastrointestinal symptom was constipation. Parents blaming the shot, moreover, wasn’t even a “finding” — it was a covert qualification to take part. Records showed that not eight, but 11 of the kids’ families named the vaccine at the hospital (the 12th’s later joined them to file a claim in the lawsuit) — a give-away number, sure to provoke questions, if Wakefield hadn’t airbrushed the figures. The poisonous truth was that all but the American family had links with vaccine activists caught up in Barr’s plans, pointing them to Wakefield’s project. And, surprise, legal aid authorities at the time insisted that, for cases to qualify for public funding, alleged symptoms must follow within days.

Wakefield was finished, but he couldn’t say sorry. And when The Sunday Times ran with “MMR doctor fixed data on autism”, he fought back, denying all error. “The notion that any researcher can cook such data in any fashion that can be slipped past the medical community for his personal benefit is patent nonsense,” he argued, in one of countless lengthy rejoinders. He wasn’t alone in not wishing us well. Much of the medical establishment was aggrieved. “I will now defend the heretic Dr Andrew Wakefield,” sneered, for instance, Bad Science author Dr Ben Goldacre. “The media are fingering the wrong man, and they know who should really take the blame: in MMR, journalists and editors have constructed their greatest hoax.”

But tunes changed abruptly in May 2010, after a hearing longer than the trial of OJ Simpson in which the General Medical Council vindicated what we’d published and scrubbed Wakefield from the doctors’ register. The Lancet, which for 12 years defended the paper, retracted it. And, after opposing the GMC proceedings, the British Medical Journal highlighted the irony. “It has taken the diligent scepticism of one man,” the BMJ said in an editorial, “standing outside medicine and science, to show that the paper was in fact an elaborate fraud”.

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I won’t forget that, and not just for my name-check but because the establishment mobilised to vilify journalists rather than hold a mirror to themselves. How could it be that all the doctors and professors, royal colleges and government experts, steeped in more medicine than I’d know how to spell, failed to spot that the paper was a scam? It was as if they couldn’t accept the ugly truth was even possible. A chap wouldn’t do such a thing. So, in plain view of a dozen co-authors, platformed by a hospital and its medical school, and published after peer review in a most prestigious journal, he’d effortlessly exploited conceits and vulnerabilities that remain below the radar to this day.

Personally, I’d trust The Daily Mail before The Lancet (especially the football and TV data). But, if Wakefield had ploughed a field of less instant public interest — say, psychogeriatrics or kidney surgery — his chances of getting caught were close to zero. He might have published fake findings until the day he retired, and no newspaper reporter could have convinced their editors to pay for what it would take to prove what happened. So, the next time you read of some medical marvel, remember the lesson of the Wakefield scandal. As I put it in The Doctor Who Fooled the World, (published after he’d moved on to trashing Covid vaccines): “If he could do what he did — and I’ll show you what he did — who else is doing what in the hospitals and laboratories that we may one day look to for our lives?”

On Monday, the same author published an essay arguing for “a pandemic amnesty”. We should, she suggests, move on from the conflict, fear, uncertainty, and doubt that roiled the pandemic years, and focus instead on the urgent issues of today. But while I can understand why Oster might wish to put all the Covid-era bitterness back into a box labelled “the common good”, her effort to do so has not been well received. And this is a consequence of the very policies which Oster would now like everyone to forgive and forget.

Reading avidly in the run-up to my daughter’s birth, it was already clear to me that many of the so-called “mummy wars” are proxies for class issues. Against this emotive backdrop, Oster’s book felt like a refreshing counterbalance. It’s astonishing, in fact, how recently it still felt possible to weigh competing claims on the evidence, and settle on something reasonable. But a great deal has changed since then. And it’s easier to understand why when you consider the difference between trying to settle the “mummy wars” via science and trying to agree upon public health policy during a pandemic.

If the “mummy war” is a class war writ small, Covid policy followed the same dynamic. It was, in fact, a class war writ so large it encompassed minute micromanagement of nearly every facet of everyday life, for years on end, and doled out material consequences for dissenters. And it was all justified with reference to the supposedly neutral domain of science.

This tracks a slow convergence of supposedly neutral governance with partisan class differences that was well under way before the virus, a phenomenon exhaustively documented following the two plebeian revolutions of Brexit and Trump. These events gestated concurrently with my daughter; I won’t rehash the debates here, save to note that they represented the first shot across the bows of the End of History belief that technocracy could be genuinely neutral, and based in objective evidence.

In questioning this doctrine, the mutineers dragged an incipient class war into the open, between what N.S. Lyons characterises as the “Virtuals” of the laptop class, and the “Physicals” whose work is more rooted in the material world. Amid this conflict, Oster’s plea for amnesty is unlikely to be heard, since under those appeals to neutral science much of Covid policy served in practice as a Virtual counter-volley to the 2016 uprisings.

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In its most rarefied, de-materialised, Virtual form, the contours of that counter-volley are captured by a short series of declarations of faith. This text, a kind of Nicene Creed for Virtuals, first appeared in response to Trump’s election, and has multiplied across posters, t-shirts, tote bags, and (in America, where they do such things) signs stuck into the front lawns of the faithful.

The Virtuals’ Creed reads as follows:

In this house, we believe:
Black lives matter
Women’s rights are human rights
No human is illegal
Science is real
Love is love
Kindness is everything

Each of these dicta sounds unimpeachable in theory, but is far more contentious in practice. “No human is illegal”, for instance, sounds true; but how do we manage the welfare state, without a means of distinguishing between citizens and non-citizens?

When this lawn sign first appeared, I could have given you a critical run-down of the political pitfalls and ideological sleights-of-hand buried in all those dicta, bar the claim that Science Is Real. Since then, though, I’ve seen this line in the Virtuals’ Creed weaponised without compunction, as a bludgeon to enforce a moral consensus that wasn’t scientific, and wasn’t rational.

This consensus was, instead, far more religious in character. Even famous and high-profile dissenters have faced harassment at its hands, for airing topics that ought, you’d think, to be within the scope of objective discussion. Celebrity podcaster Joe Rogan has faced calls to be cancelled after asking Covid questions. UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers was censored for interviewing lockdown dissenter and former WHO cancer lead Dr Karol Sikora.

Nor is having expertise or evidence on your side much of a defence. Dr Peter McCullough, a top American cardiologist, argued against vaccinating those with natural Covid immunity, and voiced concerns about the effect of the Covid vaccine on cardiac health. For expressing such views, and despite evidence that natural immunity is more robust than the vaccine and that myocarditis is a recognised side-effect of the vaccine, McCullough now faces being struck off by an American medical board.

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Even as scientific debate has been stifled, obvious inferences from widely available evidence were ignored where these conflicted with settled Virtual consensus. There was, for example, no rationale for mandatory vaccination once it became clear that — as acknowledged as far back as December 2021 by even the Virtuals’ house journal the New York Times — vaccines didn’t prevent virus transmission. And yet mandates remained in place across many locations long after that date. Indeed, around the time the NYT article was published, Oster herself was advocating escalating pressure to vaccinate, from public shame to stopping the unvaccinated from travelling, working or attending events.

It may be optimistic of Oster, and others of the Virtual class, to try to restore public faith that Science Is Real. But it’s also understandable. First, for reasons of self-interest: those who drove Covid policy presented themselves not just as people doing their best, but as the sole bearers of rational truth and life-saving moral authority. Doubtless the laptop class would prefer that we judge Covid policy by intention, not results, lest too close an evaluation result in their fingers being prised from the baton of public righteousness.

But the rot goes deeper still, for the very foundation of that moral authority is a shared trust in the integrity of scientific consensus. And Covid has left us in no doubt that there is a great deal of grey area between “science” and “moral groupthink”. Where “science” shades into the latter, British care workers and American soldiers and police officers dismissed for refusing a vaccination that doesn’t stop transmission can attest that science is sometimes “real” more in the sense of “institutionally powerful and self-righteous” than in the sense of “true”.

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This touches on another source of rage that many would doubtless like to forget: the asymmetry in whose shoulders bore the heaviest load. It wasn’t the lawn-sign people who bore the brunt of lockdowns — they could mostly work from home. Rather, lockdown shuttered countless small businesses permanently, or burned them to the ground in lawn-sign-endorsed riots that were justified on public-health grounds even as others were fined for attending Holy Communion in a car park.

Our journey to this point was, at every stage, narrated as the inescapable conclusion of Science, which is Real. But nearly three years out from the start of the pandemic, it looks a great deal more like the massed consensus of “public health” officials and their journalistic cheerleaders has delivered a public that is sicker, unhappier and poorer across a host of measures.

Oster lists among the urgent issues of the day the learning loss experienced by children as a consequence of Covid policy, with the youngest and poorest hardest-hit. She notes the drop-off in routine vaccinations (also a consequence of Covid policy). To this list we might add the rise in non-Covid excess deaths, also a consequence of Covid policy, not to mention the stagnant economy and the rocketing inflation rate.

And these are all downstream of a pandemic-era public discourse that felt like the Brexit/Trump wars on steroids: a battle for class dominance, in which one side used its stranglehold on public institutions to frame censorship as “fact-checking”, and all dissenters as stupid, unscientific, or actively hateful. It’s not that “we” collectively tried to get it right, and “mistakes were made”. It’s that a self-righteous cabal arrogated to themselves a priestly right to determine the proper social order, and to excommunicate those who didn’t conform. Their record in securing the common good speaks for itself.

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Public faith in objectively shared political ground was already dissolving while my daughter gestated. If the Virtuals have a problem now, it’s that their counter-volley to Trump and Brexit consumed the last vestige of trust in that shared political ground: our faith in science. And the notion that such ground exists is the sine qua non of Virtual political legitimacy in its current technocratic form.

In this light, Oster’s call for amnesty can present itself as an effort to rebuild the neutral space of shared political endeavour after a period of conflict. But it reads as a continuation of now-familiar efforts to weaponise the appearance of such neutrality and common purpose, in the interests of one side of that conflict.

We all knew every pandemic policy would come with trade-offs. The lawn-sign priesthood forbade any discussion of those trade-offs. I don’t blame the class that so piously dressed their own material interests as the common good, for wanting to dodge the baleful looks now coming their way. But no “amnesty” will be possible that doesn’t acknowledge the class politics, the corruption of scientific process, the self-dealing, and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of lawn-sign tyranny.

Science, it turns out, is not always “real”. And nor, I suspect, will kindness now be everything.

I look at the news photos of armed, masked, black-clad police stopping people in the streets to ask for their digital papers, and I read stories of others arrested for leaving their own house more than the permitted once a day, and I hear Austrian politicians intoning that those who refuse to accede to the injection are to be shunned and scapegoated until they acquiesce.

Then I watch interviews with “ordinary people”, and they say that the “unvaxxed” had it coming. Some of them say that they should all be jailed, these enemies of the people. At best, the “anti-vaxxers” are paranoid and misinformed. At worst they are malicious, and should be punished.

Then I look across the border at Germany. I see that in Germany, politicians are also considering interning the “vaccine hesitant”, and are also discussing enforcing vaccination upon every citizen. By the end of the winter, says Germany’s refreshingly honest health minister, Germans will be “vaccinated, cured or dead”. There is apparently no fourth option.

They have been busy in Germany. Recently they put up fences in the streets in Hamburg, to separate the Bad Unvaxxed from the Good Vaxxed at the Christmas markets. Outdoors. Perhaps they will also provide the Good people with rocks to throw across those fences. The mood certainly seems ripe. A cartoon recently published in the mainstream, high-circulation newspaper Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung featured a man sitting on his sofa playing a first-person shooter game in which the targets were unvaccinated people. The caption described it as “a big hit under the Christmas tree.”

Not that Germans or Austrians have any monopoly on the current march towards authoritarianism in the name of public health. It is entirely globalised. The opinion recently expressed by Pulitzer Prize-winning American art critic Jerry Saltz to his half a million Twitter followers was typical of a new form of class hatred that is somehow acceptable in the age of cancellations and hyper-sensitivity. “My latest Covid thought is ‘Let her rip:’”, he wrote. “Meaning, we who are lucky enough to be triple & double vaxed are pretty protected. Let the rest die. I know they pose a danger to us all. But we are more than 97% protected from them. If they want to die, I say let them die. Freedom.”

Across Europe and the wider world, the picture is the same. Internment. Mandatory medication. Segregation of whole sections of society. Mass sackings. A drumbeat media consensus. The systematic censoring of dissent. The deliberate creation of a climate of fear and suspicion. The deepening demonisation of the “unvaxxed”. Something terrible is rising around us, and we are only just waking up to it.

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I am watching all this from Ireland, the country which has the highest adult vaccination rate in Western Europe, at over 94% of the population. Here, cases are accelerating so fast that we were all told recently to work from home, and another lockdown is widely feared. New restrictions for children, who are least at risk from Covid, are being proposed, and a midnight curfew has recently been imposed on pubs and nightclubs. This is odd, as only vaccinated people have been allowed into them since the summer, with the scan of a smartphone-enabled QR code being the only way to access much of society.

In an honest society, all of this would have been subject to robust public debate. We would have seen scientists of all opinions openly debating on TV and radio and in the press; views of all kinds aired on social media without fear of censorship; journalists properly investigating reports of both vaccine successes and vaccine dangers; serious explorations of alternative treatments; public debates about the balance between civil liberties and public health, and what “public health” even means.

But we have not seen this and we will not see it, for debate, like dissent, is out of fashion. The media here has not asked a critical question of anyone in authority for at least 18 months. Google’s algorithms are busy burying inconvenient data, while the social media channels from which most people receive their worldview are removing or suppressing critical opinions, even if they come from virologists or editors of the British Medical Journal.

What could possibly justify this? One answer might be: the combination of a terrible pandemic which killed or maimed large percentages of those it infected, and the existence of a safe and reliable medicine which was proven to prevent its spread. This, of course, is what we are said to be living through. This is the Narrative.

But it is clear enough by now that the Narrative is not true. Covid-19 is certainly a nasty illness which should be taken seriously, especially by those who are especially vulnerable to it. For the elderly and infirm especially, it can be a serious risk. But it is not dangerous enough — if anything could be — to justify the frightening atmosphere which is rising across the world. The authoritarian response to the virus has become the go-to solution for governments everywhere, and the climate of fear in society as a whole has often meant enthusiastic support for such a response. As the vaccines fail to end the pandemic, new variants continue to arise and every promise of “unlocking” ends with the reimposition of restrictions, so the calls grow for more clampdowns, more segregation, more isolation and internment. With each call, a new roughness comes over the culture.

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By Matthew Crawford

This roughness is what leads to the persecution, abuse and scapegoating of anyone foolish enough to stick their head above the parapet and question the Narrative, and that in turn leads to more people walking away from those who promote it. The solidarity of the pandemic’s early days already feels like a century ago. Day by day, the combination of breakdown and clampdown eats like acid through the social fabric of a society already riven by a “culture war” that seeks enemies first and understanding very much later.

All of this has descended like a flock of birds on one single technology — “the vaccine” — on which all hopes and fears converge. But the divisions that have opened up in society about the Covid vaccines are not really about the vaccines at all: they are about what they symbolise. What it means to be “vaxxed” or “unvaxxed”, safe or dangerous, clean or dirty, sensible or irresponsible, compliant or independent: these are questions about what it means to be a good member of society, and what society even is, and they are detonating like depth charges beneath the surface of the culture.

In his fascinating Substack newsletter The Stoa, academic Peter Limberg proposes an analysis of the ongoing Covid wars. He identifies two positions on the virus and the reaction to it. Both are generalisations — plenty of people will cleave fully to neither — but broadly speaking, which you identify with will inform your view of who the Other is.

Limberg describes the first position — the Thesis — like this:

Lockdowns are needed to contain the virus, masks work and need to be mandated, vaccines are safe, people should take the vaccine to protect themselves and others, and vaccine passports will help open things up quicker and encourage those who are hesitant to get vaccinated.

The Thesis is the establishment position. It is held, in Limberg’s words, by “legacy media … NGOs, Universities, Western governments, and memetic tribes on the political Left.” In contrast, the opposing view — the Antithesis — is held by a ragtag of political dissidents of all stripes, from rightwingers to anarchists, motivated to cluster for different reasons around an alternative story:

Lockdowns are not needed, masks do not work, the safety and efficacy of the vaccines are being oversold, vaccine passports will not only fail but further segregate society, and in the near future we can expect Giradian scapegoating of the unvaccinated. In other words, we are positioned on the precipice of a slippery slope that leads towards increasingly draconian biopolitical control measures, the grip of which is unlikely to release even once the pandemic is over.

What we see around us now, as the Thesis visibly fails, is more and more people looking around for explanations and landing on versions of the Antithesis. As that happens, more of those who support the Thesis feel threatened and angry. The people questioning the Thesis, to them, are not thinking human beings wondering what is going on and not getting satisfactory answers. They are “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-vaxxers” and “far-Right actors”, whose views will lead to mass death.

In response to this intolerance, the more extreme elements of the Antithesis position dig in deeper, offering up intolerance of their own, condemning the “sheeple” who still cleave to the Narrative, and proposing alternative stories which range from convincing right up to frightening. Some of the worst home straight in on old enemies: ‘the Jews’, as ever, are a popular target. This in turn allows proponents of the Thesis to conveniently represent any opposition to their line as dangerous and worthy of censorship. Fear and suspicion reign. Neither tribe is talking to the other, and each assumes the worst of their opponents.

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The Left's Covid failure

By Toby Green and Thomas Fazi

Take these two positions, electrify them, pour them through the sieve of misery that is “social” media, and you have the current vaccine wars. The rage that swirls around the attitude to the Covid jab is a substitute for something else. Underneath the arguments about whether or not to take a vaccine glides something older, deeper, slower: something with all the time in the world. Some great spirit whose work is to use these fractured times to reveal to us all what we need to see: things hidden since the foundation of the modern world.

Covid is a revelation. It has lain bare splits in the social fabric that were always there but could be ignored in better times. It has revealed the compliance of the mainstream media, and the power of Silicon Valley to curate and control the public conversation. It has confirmed the sly dishonesty of political leaders, and their ultimate obeisance to corporate power. It has shown how ideology, on all sides, can mask itself with the pretend neutrality of “science”.

Most of all, it has revealed the authoritarian streak that lies beneath so many people, and which always emerges in fearful times. In the last month alone, I have watched media commentators calling for censorship of their political opponents, philosophy professors justifying mass internment, and human rights lobby groups remaining silent about “vaccine passports”. I have watched much of the political Left transition openly into the authoritarian movement it probably always was, and countless “liberals” campaigning against liberty. As freedom after freedom has been taken away, I have watched intellectual after intellectual justify it all.

I have learnt more about human nature in the past two years than in my preceding 47. I have learnt some things about myself too, and I don’t especially like them either. I have noticed my ongoing temptation to become a partisan: to judge and condemn those on the other side of the question, to find a tribe I can join. I have noticed my tendency to seek out only sources of information which confirm my beliefs.

Most of all, though, what the Covid apocalypse has revealed to me is that when people are frightened, they can be very easily controlled.

Of all the stories we are watching play out right now, this is the biggest one: the manipulation of public fear to impose unprecedented levels of control on populations. The ongoing nature of the Covid threat — the endless boosters, the endless variants — means there is no end in sight to this “new normal”. Like the War on Terror before it, the control and monitoring of citizens in the name of “public health”, the segregation of the virtuous vaxxed (or, any day now, boosted) from the antisocial unvaxxed, the internet-wide censorship of whatever Silicon Valley labels “disinformation”, and the widespread obedience of the once-mainstream press to an agreed story towards which they clumsily try to nudge their readers — none of this has any sell-by date.

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The American Right's civil war

By Mary Harrington

This is the story of the times. Across the world we are seeing an unprecedented claim to control staked by the forces of the state, in alliance with the forces of corporate capital, over your life and mine. All of it converges on the revealed symbol of our age: the smartphone-enabled QR code that has, with frightening speed and in near-silence, become the new passport to a full human life. As ever, our tools have turned on us.

The Covid vaccines, whatever their other virtues, have not prevented transmission of the virus, as governments have now publicly acknowledged. If they had, we would not be where we are. For this reason alone, there can be no justification for systems as divisive and anti-democratic as vaccine passports or lockdowns of the unvaccinated. If we were operating, as we pretend to be, from the ground of reason — if we really were “following the science” — then we would be dismantling these systems at this point. Instead we are moving deeper into them.

We are being herded into a future in which scanning a code to prove you are a safe and obedient member of society may become a permanent feature of life, as unquestioned as credit cards and driver’s licences. We are moving towards enforced mandatory vaccination of entire populations — including children — with potential prison sentences for those who refuse.

The Thesis, if left unchecked, leads straight to tyranny. But the danger of cleaving entirely to the Antithesis is a potential descent into paranoia. Both positions thrive on fear of the filthy Other, who must be destroyed with a barrage of claim and counter-claim, backed up by links to studies about ivermectin or vaccine side-effects.

Limberg puts his hope in the possibility of forging a Synthesis of the two positions. But in order to get there, he says, both sides must discover and inhabit the fears of the other: something which looks less likely by the day. As someone who began this pandemic journey cautiously cleaving to the Thesis, but who has tipped towards Antithesis as the Narrative has unspooled and the dishonesty of its proponents has become clear, I can explain my own fears easily enough.

In a short but momentous two years, we in the West, who have spent decades, if not centuries, lecturing the rest of the world about “freedom”, and sometimes trying to bomb them into accepting it, have abandoned ours without so much as a murmur, and begun enthusiastically scapegoating those who question this path. We who invented this thing called “liberalism” are now burying it, and building on the bare soil some technocratic state-corporate hybrid; a China-style social credit society, centralised, monitored, powered by algorithms, emphatically unnatural and unfree.

We are in a revolutionary moment. Societies are being transformed, with no public discussion and no consent, into a version of a Silicon Valley nerd’s wet dreams. Unless we can reach some form of synthesis soon — unless the sheeple can address the fears of the covidiots, and vice versa — then we risk being blinded to where the real power lies, and what is being constructed around us as we bicker and insult and pontificate.

Covid has been both revelation and accelerant. Now the direction of travel is increasingly clear. Unless we actively refuse it, our future looks like a QR code flickering across a human face forever.