The Lockdown Left Is Still Scared to Debate Us

Rigged forums and fleeting concessions are an election year gambit. No one should fall for it.

Last year, in between struggling to keep my job in the New York City public school system, I helped manage the social media of Teachers for Choice, a group which opposes Covid medical mandates. In that capacity I participated in an “NYC Teachers Forum on Schools Reopening” on Facebook. There I saw that the most fervent enemies of keeping school buildings open were the Movement of Rank and File Educators (also known as MORE) and others associated with the Socialist Equality Party.

When I first joined the forum, my advocacy for medical choice wasn’t very popular. My posts were usually hit with scolding comments, while MORE and its allies tended to get upvotes. Slowly, the forum’s attitude began to change however, as the government’s positions became more and more contradictory and bizarre.

Perhaps it was in early September 2021 when Fauci stated that two jabs of his “effective vaccine” would not be sufficient for herd immunity no matter how high the vaccination rate rose, and three shots would soon be required.

Perhaps it was a week later, when UK state scientific advisors urged that the injection not be approved for teenagers because the risk of myocarditis was too high.

Perhaps it was when I provided documentation to show that the CDC’s systematic undercounting of “rare” breakthrough cases was not “fake news.”

Or perhaps it was when the parents of a group of disabled children sued to stop the vaccine mandate.

Whatever the particular tipping point was, I posted on all these issues and by mid-November, positive comments and votes were becoming common. But without any warning, the forum was suddenly shutdown by its administrator, an employee of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). There would be no further opportunity for me—or any dissenting voice—to make a case to the  New York educational community in an open forum. (UFT is part of the American Federation of Teachers, which notoriously took part in politicizing CDC decisions about school reopening behind the scenes.)

This epitomizes the anti-intellectual tendency I’ve seen over and over again in the pandemic debate. Those who support the dominant lockdown-or-jab narrative of Covid flee from any balanced engagement with those who disagree. This is not the openly proclaimed de-platforming that arose in response to alt-right trolls like Milo Yiannopolous in previous years—No case is made that the opponent is consciously xenophobic or hateful.

Instead there is a simple evasion of rational discussion. I recall my old comrade with publishing and podcasting connections who said that he and his friends “don’t debate liars”—without telling me what I was lying about; There was the mutual acquaintance who I share with Dr. Rob Wallace (a prominent pro-mandate socialist) who’s been dodging my offers to debate the biologist; There were the left publications that had published me previously who told me that my articles on covid had no merit despite they being extensively documented (and despite one later being accepted by a conservative journal); And last but not least, there were the members of MORE and the Socialist Equality Party itself who flatly refused my invitation to hold a formal debate (and repeatedly did the same to my friend Thomas Smith at CUNY).

Whatever rationale there might have been for this a year ago, it cannot stand now. In 2022 we live in a world where the National Black Caucus of the Green Party USA has stated:

Lockdowns, mandates and passports are the major issue of the day with millions of people protesting against them worldwide. In fact, what has become known as the Medical Freedom movement is arguably the biggest and most diverse international movement in world history. 

The National Black Caucus went on to state that, “Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports are among the most vile, unconstitutional, immoral, unscientific, discriminatory and outright criminal policies ever enforced upon the population.”

We live in a world where four of the CDC’s own researchers openly charge the agency with distorting their studies on children and Covid, and with “fearmongering regarding variants in America.”

We live in a world where the CDC now acknowledges that it refused to publish full and accurate hospitalization data broken down by age and vaccination status throughout 2021.

We live in a world where one of the top vaccinologists at the National Institutes of Health states that mandates of the mRNA injections are actually a hindrance to mass immunity and he would sooner lose his job than submit to them.

And we live in a world where The Guardian belatedly admits that,

Expert modeling and predictions around the Covid-19 pandemic…tend to wildly overestimate rates of infection, the numbers of deaths, etc, over a given period…A constellation of scholars, bureaucrats and pundits seem invested in Covid remaining a “crisis” indefinitely… They can skew policymaking and expert advice towards continued invasive policies and a continued sense of panic in ways that are excessive and pernicious.

You might say there’s a specter haunting the US left and its name is medical freedom. Measures are ongoing to ensure that it remains a specter, as we see most recently with Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith podcast. There, the obsessive Zero Covid socialist Walker Bragman made his case for extended mandates of all kinds, which means the masking of toddlers, the firing of unvaxxed workers, and the isolation of unvaxxed students—“institutional segregation” in the words of medical professors Peter Doshi and Aditi Bhargava.

Gray did not feature a socialist in the opposing camp, only right-wing libertarian Robby Soare. Soare’s opposition to mandates is far less pronounced than that of Max Blumenthal and Jimmy Dore, who Gray is friendly with; less well articulated than that of Christian and Marcie Smith Parenti, who together have decades of progressive publications behind them; and less learned than that of Dr. Vinay Prasad, the University of California medical professor who is also an avowed progressive.*

Wasn’t this just a conspiracy theory?? Commentary by Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH, professor of epidemiology at UC-San Francisco

Their glaring absence allowed the continued association of medical freedom exclusively with one political faction in the eyes of Gray’s viewers. This complements Walker Bragman’s current campaign of focusing on the conservative associations of one anti-mandate leader, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, to distract from the revelations of pandemic corruption that pour in every day.

So this is the game now: instead of debating no one, the lockdown left will exclusively debate those who can temporarily embody their strawman of a “right-wing granny killer.” And this situation only exists because the Democratic Party machine which the lockdowners orbit is sinking in the polls, and some appearance of civil discourse has to be put forward.

This is a fraud, of course. The Democrats and their orbiters have not fundamentally changed, and even their concessionary statements come with affirmations of their original delusions: that PCR tests are a full diagnostic, that community spread automatically means a health emergency, that the mRNA stops transmission and has no widespread side effects, etc.

Despite being on the left my entire life, I haven’t supported a Democrat since Bush-Cheney left office, and I will never, ever support one again. I can never wholly trust anyone who tells me to support one, especially on the issue of medical freedom. In spite of maintaining the appearance of independence, the “Bernie left” tailed the Democrats submissively. Back when the DNC elite promised no mandates and expressed skepticism of the “Trump vaccine” in 2020, then critique of forced human experimentation and the New Normal could be tolerated. Once Biden was safely elected and reversed his no-mandate position, the DNC hipsters at Jacobin and Chapo Trap House put the hammer down on the new deplorable class of “anti-vax” chuds—regardless of if they were essential workers, working-class Black women, or “the most vulnerable in society.”

As I speak, the same Democrat governor who is relaxing mask mandates on New York subways is continuing to appeal in court for the right to lock up—without due process—any and all citizens that she deems a health threat. Democrat Attorney General Laetitia James is behind her one hundred percent.

A hashtag favored by Walker Bragman’s crowd is #CovidIsntOver. As long as liberals are in power, the threat of medical tyranny isn’t over either. Rigged forums and fleeting concessions are an election year gambit by Democrats and crypto-Democrats. No one should fall for it.

*This list of notable medical freedom leftists could’ve been far longer, including for instance history professor Toby Green. The most egregious omission here may be of Gray’s former colleague Kim Iversen, who lost a lucrative job at the Rising program after a fight over whether she would be allowed to ask hardball questions of Anthony Fauci.