Answers by Margaret Anna Alice in an interview conducted by David Josef Volodzko. Dissident Dialogues, part II.
Now to the question of dehumanization. I wanted to save this for last because it deserves an essay in itself. I find it fascinating that you’re not convinced dehumanization occurred during COVID. I feel that is probably the easiest criterion in the 10 Stages of Genocide to prove, so thank you for giving me an opportunity to do so…
Every media apparatus from newspapers to magazines to billboards to television to movies to radio to social media to the Internet bombarded the public with talking points engineered to foment rage and disgust toward the unvaccinated, encouraging people to shame and shun them.
As Meredith Miller observes in response to a January 2022 Rasmussen poll:
“That survey reveals that, like a racist who confidently and openly speaks racial slurs in the presence of other racists, when fascist perspectives are condoned and supported in the media, promoted on social media and by corporations, institutions and figures of authority in society, the fascist-minded among the citizens feel free to speak their mind as well.”
It took me five minutes to find three examples of mainstream newspapers painting the unvaccinated as spreaders of disease akin to the Nazi propaganda blaming the Jews for spreading typhus as I discussed in my Letter to the New York State Department of Health.
The Guardian published an article titled Unvaccinated Could Be Breeding Ground for Covid Variants, US Officials Fear, and The New York Times followed up with a one-two punch of I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated and Fed up with Those Who Won’t Get Vaccinated. No doubt there are countless more examples in every language.
The Guardian article included the following quote from “expert” Dr. Michael Saag:
“Unvaccinated people are basically the cannon fodder of the virus. The virus needs people to infect in order to replicate and the more people it has that are vulnerable or susceptible to infection, the more likely it will mutate.”
Another “expert,” Dr. Susan Hassig warned:
“Unvaccinated populations, of whatever size, are the breeding ground where the virus will eventually generate some form of mutation that will probably be a problem for us.”
A different Guardian article was headlined Anti-Vaxxers Should Face Penalties for Their Selfish Choices, reinforcing the message that the unvaccinated are morally inferior while the vaccinated are virtuous, unselfish pillars of society.
In I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated, Charles Blow writes:
“The unvaccinated don’t leave only themselves vulnerable to the virus; they make everyone more vulnerable.”
Fed Up With Those Who Won’t Get Vaccinated compiled letters to the editor effusing their relief at seeing Blow express their own rage, with comments such as:
“So much of this catastrophe could have been prevented were it not for my compatriots exercising their misguided idea of personal freedom to the detriment of all.”
“I, too, am angered by the anti-vaccine, maskless crowd putting my life at risk. Their so-called ‘freedom’ is my imprisonment, forcing me to avoid grocery stores, restaurants, subways and any other venue where people gather.”
“the anti-vaccine people are presenting a serious threat to all of us”
Another legacy outlet, USA Today, ran the headline It’s Time to Start Shunning the ‘Vaccine Hesitant.’ They’re Blocking COVID Herd Immunity.
Calls for segregation were commonplace, from The Atlantic arguing the unvaccinated should not be allowed on domestic flights to South Africa introducing medical apartheid legislation.
Consider a headline like this Chicago Sun-Times one reading Imagine a Crazy World in Which People Are Utterly Stupid About Vaccines and Their Own Health. This buttressed the depiction of the unvaccinated as ignorant, science-denying, selfish, far-right, Trump-voting Deplorables deserving of condescending opprobrium.
The Los Angeles Times published a column titled Mocking Anti-Vaxxers’ COVID Deaths Is Ghoulish, Yes—but May Be Necessary. Tellingly, the url slug for this article is “why-shouldnt-we-dance-on-the-graves-of-anti-vaxxers,” suggesting that may have been the original title before an editor intervened with a more tactfully worded incitement to mockery of the dead.
In an article titled When It Comes to Empathy for the Unvaccinated, Many of Us Aren’t Feeling It, The Toronto Star shared the following examples of statements the vaccinated have made about the unvaccinated:
“Unvaccinated COVID patients do not deserve ICU beds.”
“I have no empathy left for the willfully unvaccinated. Let them die.”
McSweeney’s, once a respectable literary magazine, ran profanity-laden tirades like Oh My Fucking God, Get the Fucking Vaccine Already, You Fucking Fucks and Hello, We Used to Know Each Other and Now I’m a Toxic Presence on Your Social Media Feeds:
What the newspapers and magazines spouted was tame compared to the contemptuous rhetoric of the television pundits, late-night talk show hosts, and celebrities, many of whom were paid to ridicule the unvaccinated.
The following two video compilations, Matt Orfalea’s Nobody Is Safe! and Tom Elliott’s Media: The Unvaccinated Are Scum!, provide ample evidence of “hate propaganda … used to vilify the victim group,” which is “equated with filth, impurity, and immorality,” even going so far as to call being unvaccinated a “sin,” betraying the religious nature of the Covidian sacraments:
Having already shock-and-awed the public into an amygdala-triggering state of fear, the propagandists now blamed the unvaccinated for the Biderman’s Chart of Coercion tyrannical torture techniques that had inflicted so much pain, the public was now begging for it to stop. But it wouldn’t stop, the pundits told them, because of those filthy, selfish breeding grounds for dangerous variants, so it was now society’s responsibility to shame these untouchables into submission.
Sean Penn said, “If someone chooses not to be vaccinated that they should choose to stay home, not go to work, not have a job” and argued that choosing not to be injected “seems criminal to me.”
One of the most notorious dehumanizers, Howard Stern not only called the unvaccinated “idiots” but also said they should be denied hospital service:
“When are we gonna stop putting up with the idiots in this country and just say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated? Fuck ’em. Fuck their freedom.… The other thing I hate is that all these people with COVID who won’t get vaccinated are in the hospitals clogging it up.… And I’m really of mind to say, ‘Look, if you didn’t get vaccinated [and] you got COVID, you don’t get into a hospital.’… ‘Go fuck yourself. You had the cure and you wouldn’t take it.’”
“Idiot” was one of the most common epithets slung at the unvaccinated, this Economist headline capturing the self-righteous revulsion many doctors felt toward their noncompliant colleagues: “We’re the Idiots, Now”: A California Doctor on His Unvaccinated Colleagues.
Some doctors even agreed with jettisoning traditional bioethics. Harvard Medical School and Université de Montreal bioethics professor Vardit Ravitsky posed the question, “Can we use vaccination status as one criterion within triage protocols?” He explains:
“If we have two patients with the same level of clinical need, same age, same context, but one is vaccinated and one isn’t, could we de-prioritize the patient who is unvaccinated by choice? There is a minority of bioethicists who are becoming more accepting of this logic at this point in time.”
Coeditor of the Bioethics journal and Queens University Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics Udo Schuklenk said of the unvaccinated:
“If you’re telling me that they are unable to make a sensible choice, then we should take this choice away from them. But we should not, on the one hand, give them this choice, and then not hold them accountable for it.”
Princeton Professor of Bioethics Peter Singer wrote an article titled Victims of the Unvaccinated in which he said the unvaccinated had made “foolish, selfish choices,” concluding:
“When both a vaccinated and an unvaccinated patient with COVID-19 need the last available bed in a hospital’s intensive care unit, the vaccinated patient should get it. Those who view vaccination as a ‘personal choice’ need to bear personal responsibility for choosing to place others’ lives at risk.”
VerywellHealth ran an op-ed titled Unvaccinated People Are Not Oppressed—They’re Dangerous that read in part:
“By refusing to get the vaccine and not wearing masks, you are being selfish. You are saying that you do not care if vulnerable people die as long as you get to live your life.
“It’s about time that people who refused to get the vaccine faced the consequence of their actions—and that is all that is happening here.
“They refused to get a vaccine that would allow themselves and others to live safely. Therefore, they will not be able to participate in a society that is attempting to do the best by all of its members.
“You are not oppressed. You are dangerous. It is not safe for you to be around others. It’s about time that we all stand up and say we’re not going to take that risk anymore.”
In January 2022, the National Post reported that a quarter of Canadians “support jail time for the unvaccinated.”
When ruling that all prospective jury members must be vaccinated, US District Judge Robert Scola didn’t even try to hide his biased attitude toward the unvaccinated:
“It is the court’s belief that the vast majority of the unvaccinated adults are uninformed and irrational, or—less charitably—selfish and unpatriotic.”
Noam Chomsky said the “right response” to the unvaccinated is to “insist that they be isolated” and that access to food is “actually their problem.”
One woman was caught on camera throwing a temper tantrum when seated next to an unvaccinated person on an airplane.
Sarasota Memorial Hospital’s Dr. Daniel B. Case said unvaccinated people “are the reason why people are dying and why covid is spreading” and “that’s why they should take you guys to the firing line.”
Terminally ill patients were repeatedly denied organ transplants due to their unvaccinated status, from Duke Children’s Hospital refusing fourteen-year-old Yulia Hicks’s kidney transplant to Emory Healthcare rejecting the application of a forty-one-year-old Georgia mother of seven to multiple Canadian hospitals denying thirty-five-year-old Garnet Harper a kidney transplant. While Yulia was able to obtain the life-saving surgery from ECUHealth, the Georgia mother and Garnet both passed away due to the hospitals’ lethal discrimination.
Before dying suddenly on October 28, 2021, forty-one-year-old Florida congressional candidate Richard Rowe made numerous venomous tweets about “anti-vaxxers,” including this August 9, 2021, rant:
“Let me be real clear…. I do not give a FUCK what happens to anti-vaxxers. I dont. Let Darwin do his work. They helped to kill 700,000 Americans. I do not have the pity or tears to spare for any of them. It’s all dried up now. Sorry. At this point. I’m just hoping they feel 1/10th of the pain theyve caused everyone else. The kids will be fine. THEY’RE going to suffer. And I fucking well think they’ve earned it.”
After getting his first Pfizer shot on August 12, 2021, Rowe virtue-posted a photo of his vaccination card along with these words:
“Yeah, I’m mostly here for personal ego. Already had COVID last year, so not worried about catching it. But I want to maintain my smug sense of moral and intellectual superiority while making fun of Darwin’d anti-vaxxers. It’s pretty noble, really.”
Similarly, food writer Julie Powell snidely remarked, “I would argue that COVID does kill some of the right people. The anti-vaxxers/maskers are dying in legions.” That was around a year before the forty-nine-year-old died suddenly of a cardiac arrest.
One Burger King customer told another customer, “I hope your mother gets sick and dies, and your kids, too” because he and his children were unmasked.
Jimmy Kimmel notoriously joked, “Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in. We’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.”
World leaders magnified this hateful, bigoted attitude.
In his September 9, 2021, remarks on fighting the pandemic, Joe Biden famously uttered the phrase that was to get regurgitated by every talking orifice and legacy media outlet for months to follow: “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” He later stated:
“The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning the emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or pancreatitis, or cancer.”
Tony Blair echoed Stern’s slur, stating:
“Frankly, if you’re not vaccinated at the moment and you’re eligible and you’ve got no health reason for not being vaccinated, you’re not just irresponsible, I mean you’re an idiot.”
Emanuel Macron haughtily proclaimed:
“The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And so, we’re going to continue doing so, until the end. That’s the strategy.… You won’t be able to go to the restaurant anymore, you won’t be able to down one, won’t be able to have a coffee, go to the theatre, the cinema.”
Justin Trudeau repeatedly spoke contemptuously of the unvaccinated, saying they “don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists.” He then said, “We have to make a choice … Do we tolerate these people?”
Perhaps the most unabashedly scornful despot was Jacinda Ardern. When a reporter suggested it seems like there are “two classes of people: if you’re vaccinated or unvaccinated. You have all these rights if you are vaccinated,” she interrupted with a chipper, “That is what it is, so yep, yep!”
New Zealand and Australia were among the most tyrannical countries in the world, closely followed by Canada. I documented dozens of examples of these fascist police states in the Down Under edition of my Recommendations Roundup and my Profile in Courage on the Canadian truckers.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was one of the few leaders in the world brave enough to say of the unvaccinated:
“The community that faced the most restrictions on their freedoms in the last year were those who made a choice not to be vaccinated. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a situation in my lifetime where a person was fired from their job or not allowed to watch their kids play hockey or not allowed to go visit a loved one in long-term care or hospital or not allowed to go get on a plane to either go across the country to see family or even travel across the border, so they have been the most discriminated against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. That’s a pretty extreme level of discrimination that we have seen.”
Smith was immediately fusilladed for daring to make such a statement, sending a clear message that it was unacceptable to express sympathy for the unvaccinated.
A December 2022 Nature article titled Discriminatory Attitudes Against Unvaccinated People During the Pandemic notes:
“[W]e demonstrate that vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards unvaccinated individuals at a level as high as discriminatory attitudes that are commonly aimed at immigrant and minority populations.… our findings suggest that discriminatory attitudes—including support for the removal of fundamental rights—simultaneously emerged.”
In a PLOS One paper titled It’s Time to Be Disgusting About Covid-19, the authors suggested using disgusting images to sway the unvaccinated to submit to injection, indicating researchers are aware of the power of disgust to motivate action.
At the height of the mass hysteria, if the belligerently bamboozled had undergone functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while viewing images, videos, or articles about the unvaccinated, their disgust regions of the brain would have surely lit up like the aurora borealis.
I have read and watched the testimonies of hundreds if not thousands of people who have suffered excruciating maltreatment because of their unvaccinated status.
As I shared in my article documenting the impact of Mistakes Were NOT Made, one viewer wrote the following comment after watching Tess’s video during Dr. Pierre Kory’s appearance on The Jimmy Dore Show:
“Jimmy Dore just had Dr Pierre Kory on as a guest and about an hour in they played this video of Tess Lawrie and I started watching it, Tess was really making strong points, outlying the facts, then she started to get faster while saying more impactful things and then all of a sudden in about a span of 5 seconds out of nowhere I erupted like an unsuspected volcano of tears.
“I’m a 38 year old male and can usually control my outward emotions even if I’m having an emotional moment from within but Tess’s words essentially ripped the million times I thought ‘wait a sec, this doesn’t make sense’ to only be met by a billion dollar vax campaign from the Pharma Industrial Complex that kept a constant tsunami of daily gaslighting which made me question myself, shaming skeptics with names like plague rat or some name to imply we had a 60IQ, coercive measures, banning me from the gym which was the glue that once kept me together, the blatant censorship of people, even people who had scientific backgrounds and an impeccable career from anywhere between 10–40 years.
“The whole time I just knew my instincts were right and even though I don’t have the credentials to back up why I certain I was right and my super power has always been to be able to hear both sides of an argument and know who’s right and who’s not.
“I’ll never forget reading massive amounts of people posting the most vile and [hateful] comments about how they gleefully celebrated stories of unjabbed peoples deaths and that was the moment several horrific historical events made much more sense on how they arose. Even after reading the many, MANY posts about how euphoric it made some people feel when they read about the unjabbed suffering in hospitals and the commonality of people saying ‘they don’t deserve a hospital bed’ or ‘take their children from them’ I was honestly shocked that in response to how they felt about me(us) that I didn’t share their orgasmic impulse to leap in the air every time somebody who was hurt from the jab. [It] was a truly proud moment that the cv-19 era hadn’t stolen my humanity like I had witnessed the way it had successfully done to so many people on the other side.”
In the October 2022 essay A Lost Small Town featured in her new book Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, & Resistance in a New Dark Age, Naomi Wolf poignantly reflects on each instance of exclusion, prejudice, and humiliation she suffered in her town because of her unvaccinated status.
Perhaps you were fortunate enough to live in a place where you didn’t witness the degree of dehumanization and inequitable treatment documented above, but I assure you, many, many, many people did. I have readers whose family members still refuse to talk to them. You can see a few examples of hurtful behavior people endured in the comments of my post What Caused David Miranda’s Death?
Here is one:
“My family’s deranged brownshirt is my sister, a doctor at Kaiser Permanente in LA (she’s a hospitalist). She told me if we didn’t get vaccinated, ‘You don’t give a shit about anyone but your own selfish selves. As far as I am concerned you are dead to me and I do not want to hear from you again. GO FUCK YOURSELVES.’”
My poem Eulogy for the COVID Kapos also catalogs the dehumanizing behavior we were subjected to for resisting COVID tyranny.
The story you shared about Richard Bilkszto committing suicide because of being maliciously bullied is heartrending. There are more accounts than I can possibly cite of people who committed suicide due to their treatment during the COVID era. Multiple parents, for example, shared with me that their sons committed suicide after losing their jobs due to refusing vaccination.
On January 21, 2023, a new reader of mine named Arby left a comment on Letter to a Colluder. I wasn’t able to reply until January 25—only to later learn from Celia Farber that he had committed suicide the day before. In my comment on Celia’s post, I wrote:
“Oh my goodness, Celia, this cracked my heart open and tears are streaming down my face. I only just met Arby on January 21 when he left an incredibly thoughtful and lengthy comment on one of my posts. I was so mired in deadlines, I wasn’t able to respond until January 25—which I discovered was after he departed 😭💔🥀
“I then recalled another comment he had made to me at one of your posts, Celia, and I *did* manage to reply to him that same day, thankfully. I know it doesn’t matter to him now, but I’m grateful I at least made that minute connection with him before he ended his life.
“He did not seem at all suicidal. It sounds like he made this decision soberly, but it is devastating nevertheless when someone makes that irreversible choice.”
Arby left a suicide note at his blog explaining why he was about to take his life. I’ll let him have the last word as he captures the degree to which he felt dehumanized and despondent due to COVID propaganda and policies.
“I’ve been living on death row for many months. I saw no way, other than by luck, to avoid death.…
“I live alone and am dirt poor. I don’t have savings. You can’t have savings when you work for minimum wage.… I lost my full time job with G4S on October 29, 2021 when I refused to let them jab me with their garbage covid injection.… With only the pathetic Canadian government old age security and pension cheques, that I’m getting, I’ve got nowhere near enough to live on.… My family doesn’t want to take in an old man with opinions and facts that they don’t want to be exposed to.… (I have two days left to live. One brother called once and I really couldn’t talk to him. He thinks I’m a conspiracy theorist; As if there’s no conspiracy happening, as Andrew Kaufman points out.) … Choosing suicide isn’t easy. I want to live like everyone else. But I have my principles and I’m wide awake and I won’t live in hell. There are things worse than death.
“Only those who have committed suicide can know how terrifying and undesirable making the decision to kill oneself is. The rest of you have no clue. Just the stress of thinking about what I’m facing may kill me before I do the deed. (It makes you sick. And now that my body is very banged up from a couple of bad accidents I had on my ebike, I’m not doing well. I have a huge sack of pooled blood or something on the side of my leg. I was terrified that it would starting hurting before I killed myself. Fortunately, It hasn’t bothered me much at all.) I wake up every day, when I can sleep properly (not often), and the first thing on my mind is the imminent death I face. I’m anguished, fatigued beyond what you can imagine, terrified, heart-broken and sort of incapacitated. My head spins a lot as well. It’s awful. I have a book out that I started reading and I look at it now and think, ‘Why bother?’ …
“And here, to paraphrase my sister’s warning, is how she (and my brother Ed who called me on Jan 8) lets herself off the hook when it comes to thinking rationally and clearly about this evil, destructive pandemic hoax: ‘You are highly intelligent but so stupid at the same time.’ I’m stupid and don’t know what I’m talking about, after having done over 200 blog posts just on covid. I’m a conspiracy theorist. It’s called rationalization and self-justification. There was nothing in her email about what our fascist government’s policies did to me. There was zero sympathy. It’s like it played no role in my, and others’, destruction. How convenient. I’m a conspiracy theorist; Therefore she doesn’t have to think about anything and can just go along with what the fascist medical and political authorities, via pharma-funded tv, say, without doubting it (or enough of it) and without understanding what it’s all about.…
“But when I finally lost my full time job in October of this year, that was the nail in my coffin. My landlord, a covid crazy who called me a conspiracy theorist when I told him (early on in the covid hoax) that they were going to mandate vaccines, warned me, when I told him about my recent job situation, that I needed to give him two month’s notice per our contract.… And so, when it became clear that G4S Security wasn’t going to find me a site where I could work, unjabbed, I gave him my notice. I effectively lost my full time job on October 29, 2021, both because I was out of work, but also because there wasn’t going to be any work for me, even though I wasn’t straight out fired. My supervisor and the human resources staffer straightforwardly told me that there were no bosses out there who weren’t demanding that their employees get jabbed.…
“I’m 65 (66 on Jan 23), without special skills and not willing to be tested for covid and not willing to wear a mask all day at work and squirt chemicals on my hands every five or ten minutes. I am very emotional right now. It’s a weird situation. I realize that I need to stay focussed. I can’t ‘not’ go through with my plan. I can’t psych myself out of it because there truly isn’t anywhere for me to go but the street. I have not got what it takes to live on the street, especially when I’d be going there in the winter.
“I can’t let anyone or anything psych me out. If I don’t act, it will be worse for me than if I achieve my rest. And, because I’m honest, I haven’t been able to talk a lot about aspects of my situation. If I told people what my plan is, I could possibly be stopped. Sorry, sorry, sorry. If I was to be honest – and I was dangerously honest a few times – I’d have people possibly taking steps to stop me and that would lead to great grief for me, not rest. Please understand.”
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