Left and Right turned upside down by the Pandemic

Charles Moscowitz

The left used to pose as anti-establishment which they viewed as dominated by the right, the so-called “corporate interests.” They used to rail against the soulless greedy institutions controlled by the capitalists and the police-state.

Since the Pandemic, they are now all about mandates, shut-downs, medical passports, which they used to derisively call “papers” as in “papers please” and electronic surveillance. They used to champion freedom, now they want children to wear masks in school and get vaccines. They used to scream about the FBI during operation COINTELPRO, now they look the other way when FBI agents try to derail a presidential candidate, or when the FBI infiltrates and possibly leads the mob into the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

They used to champion prison reform, now they censor talk about prisoners held without formal charge who trespassed at the Capitol. They used to advocate for free speech, in fact they launched the free speech movement in the early 1960’s at U. Cal-Berkeley, but now they support big tech censorship of speech they don’t agree with and they support the witch hunt that is cancel culture.

They used to bark about Fascism and authoritarianism until Donald Trump presided over the first year of the pandemic and their blue state mayors and governors started to cry about the need for martial law. They used to crow about “choice,” “our bodies ourselves,” bodily autonomy until they supported mandatory vaccines.

Did the left actually support freedom back before the world became enmeshed in the pandemic and the accompanying crackdowns on freedom?

The left response to the pandemic indicates that their support for all of the causes that they trumpeted in the 1960’s was merely situational. Their support for those causes was motivated by the fact that they did not yet hold the reigns of power in politics and culture. They used those causes as bludgeons against the right which was more institutional, which is to say that the right sought to preserve institutions that represented functional freedom while seeking to reign in and reform the inevitable corruption that seeps into governments and any institutions that hold power and wealth.

Today, the left holds the power and the major combines of wealth in America and around much of the world. By utilizing the Gramscian tactic of the long march through the cultural institutions, the left has come out on top at the highest levels of the administrative state, corporations, academia, media, cultural institutions and even organized religion.

They might still pretend to support the freedoms described here but it is now becoming obvious that their support is a fraud. Perhaps it always was.