The Atlantic Wants To Let You Die

Yeah, anti-vaxx idiots are terrible people. But wealthy vaxxed liberals are almost as bad — a fact proven by The Atlantic’s relentless campaign to force everyone to move on and forget that Americans are still dying.

The Atlantic, proving how much it rejects basic science

In America, the Covid-19 Pandemic has followed a grim and perfectly predictable trajectory — the politicians always ran the show.

Once the initial shock wore off — in other words, once rich people in New York City had decamped to their second homes in the country — America’s chattering classes immediately moved to politicize the pandemic.

“We’re following the science” has been the biggest lie Americans have been subjected to by their politicians and pundits. From day one of the pandemic epidemiologists and virologists have been countered by a tide of disinformation from both the Right and Left.

Everything in this pathetic excuse for a nation is politicized. Even science.

The total refusal of the American right to give a damn about people’s lives is callous, but most of the left has been equally as craven. No true national solidarity was ever achieved — as soon as the politicians could they started work convincing the public that the end of the pandemic was just around the corner.

It’s a hell of a lot like the Iraq War, when those dead-ender insurgents were always one operation away from defeat. Same thing with the Taliban in Afghanistan — for years they were on the ropes, according to the experts, then they took Kabul and forced America to run away and abandon many of its own citizens.

Same is true of Covid. America’s performance has been absolutely wretched, the richest nation in the world has suffered proportionally more casualties than almost any other. Russia, Brazil — these are America’s Covid peers, not Denmark or Australia.

The simple fact that a supposedly pro-science rag like The Atlantic is willing to publish a headline like “The Pandemic Is Ending In A Whimper” while a thousand Americans die every day and case counts are increasing with the onset of winter is perfect proof of how ghoulish America’s elite has become. When Trump was in office liberals took every opportunity to castigate him for all the death he allowed to happen — but Biden?

He’s on their side, so he gets a pass despite also downplaying the pandemic’s impacts, declaring it over in time for the Fourth of July when Delta was already raging. These people are invested in their faction winning and nothing else, so months in advance the editors and writers of partisan rags start laying the groundwork for massaging the truths they’ll trumpet to their readers.

The right wing media ecosystem is exactly the same. Both factions are driven to fight by the profit motive of media outlets that survive by subtly soothing their readers’ egos, blinding them to reality. Each uses morality to make us feel guilty if we don’t participate, like we’re killing America, not a broken political system colonized by the rich.

These media rags’ readers are by and large okay with this because in America all that matters is being on the right team. Morality, honesty, ethics, democracy — all a sham, the definitions of each constantly reified in partisan ways by the media. Readers are told they’re doing their part by paying attention and adopting the rhetoric of the pundits.

I think I loatheThe Atlantic more than almost any other rag because its editors self-consciously have people of color write pieces that glorify the positions of white liberals. Since day one of the pandemic the people who have suffered the most have been those in retail and other contact-intensive positions.

Nurses, checkers, and police officers have been forced to expose themselves day in and day out, while white collar writers hide in their office pushing out trite nonsense. Within a month of the first stay-at-home orders — which were not lockdowns and violated nobody’s human rights — the press was pushing for America to reopen.

Countries like Australia that are just as conservative, individualistic, and freedom-loving did lock down — and writers at The Atlantic were happy to castigate them for it. American’s can’t stand the idea that other white people are better than them at anything, so they’ll tear down any idea that isn’t sufficiently orthodox.

Under the hood every American media outlet is beholden to subscribers, advertisers, or donors. All feared what would happen if America’s economy suffered a prolonged downturn, and so they all colluded to push people back into public.

The science of pandemic response has been clear from day one, and most real scientists who work on viral outbreaks have pushed back against rapid reopenings. They warned that this would speed transmission and accelerate the evolution of new and worse variants.

Well, that all happened. And hundreds of thousands of Americans have died who didn’t have to.

Where is the democratic accountability for them? Who defends their rights?

Not the liberals of The Atlantic, or New Yorker, New York Magazine, Slate, Vox, Salon, CNN, the New Republic. Oh sometimes a piece questioning the conventional wisdom would come out, but as soon as case numbers started going down, coverage would shift to the dumbass question of when will the pandemic end.

As if a viral contagion becoming endemic rather than pandemic is a win! That only means it’s killing people at a lower rate, allowing the press to focus on more profitable concerns, like pushing the New Cold War America’s inept leaders have decided has to be waged against China and Russia to distract Americans from the fact their country is a perverse, exploitative sham and dying.

Covid-19 is still killing Americans at a faster rate than pretty much anything but cancer. I literally do not care what Russia and China might do along their frontiers when my neighbors are still being buried.

To its credit, save for the work of Sarah Zhang and Ed Yong, The Atlantic has been quite consistent in downplaying the pandemic since 2020 — except when its editors thought that would harm their political rivals.

Early on, James Hamblin at The Atlantic pretty much argued that we shouldn’t worry, everyone would catch Covid-19. This macho assumption changed only when New York City got slammed mere days after its mayor and the governor of New York State found out their hospitals and morgues would be overrun.

Funny how close brushes with death change behavior. And how once it’s hitting someone else, the fear fades.

When cases are rising, the American media is wondering if it’s really happening. When they’re spiking, the media is asking when we’ll hit the peak. When cases peak, the media is talking up how quickly they’ll decline.

The future course of Covid-19 — at least the Delta variant — is now clear. Some fraction of the people who get vaccinated — especially seniors — aren’t protected by it because the immune system weakens with age.

No matter how many people get vaccinated, if Covid-19 is still transmitting even at a low rate, it will find and kill these people one by one.

Anti-Covid medicines are finally coming online, and will help, but it’s too late to save people this winter. Boosters can help mitigate transmission, but they won’t protect people with compromised immune systems as well as those with functioning ones.

That is the dark truth no American leader or pundit wants to admit. By moving on from the pandemic, shifting attention elsewhere, the media is rendering hundreds of thousands of preventable future deaths invisible.

A nice preview of what will happen with climate change a few years down the road. Once politicians decide what science is and which policy options are feasible, they spin their decision to the media as the only one.

Vaccines are absolutely vital, a miracle of science and proof scientists and engineers are still more trustworthy than politicians and journalists. But they aren’t perfect, and it was only the hope of reaching herd immunity that protected the immunocompromised — a fight lost the moment America pushed to reopen without adequate testing.

The Atlantic and all the other liberal rags are true to the deep spirit of Liberalism, their Christianity-derived dead wealth-worshiping faith when they obscure this hard reality from their readers. Their editors have, as a community, chosen to try and push the pandemic off the front pages because rich people are bored of it.

All they care about is the stock market going up and up, even if inflation makes the Dow’s numbers less meaningful every day.

This represents a criminal abandonment of the hundreds of thousands of American seniors who will be killed of Covid-19 because their government and society decided the cost of victory was too high for their wicked fake nation. And no matter how privileged writers try to move on, the families of the victims aren’t going to just forgive and forget.

The Covid-19 pandemic won’t end. It will just kill people at a lower rate, letting the media and politicians insist it isn’t a big deal. Soon enough, they’ll be shaming anyone who doesn’t brave the storm, saying they’re not “following the science” and should accept that Covid is now just like the flu.

Yes, it is — a cruel disease that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year, to say nothing of people around the rest of the world. America spent twenty years and a few trillion dollars fighting a “War on Terror,” even longer waging a “War on Drugs.”

Why on this good Earth is a War on Covid not worth the same level of commitment? Are Americans over 80 — the average age of a breakthrough death is right around there — not worth protecting?

Truth is, to the high-and-mighty who write for esteemed national publications, they aren’t. The perverse logic of cost-benefit analysis has given them a pseudoscientific justification for not caring.

Small wonder why Americans are turning their backs on the news. The cognitive dissonance is just too much to take.

This is the lie of America written in blood for all the world to see. Zero Covid might not be practical, but as a goal you can’t fault it. And just trying to get there means deploying the kinds of public health infrastructure that benefits people on multiple levels for years to come.

Many people’s lives would have been materially improved had a decent public health system been built over the past two years. This didn’t happen, dooming Americans to an even worse fate in the next — probably much worse — pandemic.

But in America, everything must feed back into the Red-Blue forever war. The Atlantic’s editors want to do their part in stitching the broken nation back together like a modern day Frankenstein.

Why? $$$, plain and simple.

The Atlantic is a propaganda outlet not materially different than Breitbart or Pravda. I’ve monitored it long enough to feel absolutely confident marking it as one of the most pernicious media outlets in the English speaking world.

It is part of a new millenarian ecosystem rising in America, exemplified here on Medium by writers like Jessica Wildfire and Umair Haque. This perspective sees the world ending soon unless everyone everywhere magically changes the way they live.

A classic trope, that unfortunately pulls in suckers generation after generation. Millenarians more or less see a changing world and give up, writing off humanity and promoting a self-centered and narrow vision of life that promotes a kind of learned helplessness.

It’s disaster prepping for Liberals and Progressives, a form of social alienation that lets them feel good about whining about the world instead of working to fix it. The only solutions these writers offer is fear, angst, and the dream of a global revolution that changes everything and saves us all.

Worse to my mind, I’ve caught all of them making wildly inaccurate factual statements. Science is a tool to them, used to justify their take on the world, not teach people how to understand it for themselves.

This perspective tells a single story of people and history, warning that we must all change our ways lest we perish together. That’s derived straight from Liberalism and its Christian parent, neither of which can accept diversity or independent thought and instead fights to force everyone to adopt the same worldview.

This splits people into groups that can be safely oppressed by the majority. Ironically, it’s the direct counterpart to the Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene style of fear-mongering.

And it’s a big part of why America has surrendered to the pandemic. When both the Right and Left see a future filled with conflict and death, why fight for either of them? If the world is already miserable, why make it even more so?

Most people, throughout history, have worked to avoid getting caught up in no-win wars. The average person isn’t the idiot pundits and politicians think they are — that’s why a third don’t vote and more than half aren’t strongly affiliated with either side.

History will vindicate my position, of that I no longer have any doubt. America’s politicians and pundits can try to deflect our attention from the truth, but as time passes the survivors of this disaster, the worst foul-up in American history, are going to come to the same bitter conclusion.

America’s leaders abandoned their people. The American nation does not exist.

The United States of America is dead. It’s leaders killed it.