The cynical ivermectin culture war

I was gonna write something much longer about this ridiculous ivermectin push that people like Matt Taibbi and the rest of the new reactionary right has been involved in. But I gotta admit I’ve been sick of wasting my life and time on these never-ending culture wars and want to get back to focusing on my own writing, so I’ll just comment on it very quickly.

Culture war — that's what this sudden embrace of ivermectin by the new respectable/reactionary right is all about.

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Maybe ivermectin will be proven to have some positive effects. But the big political influencers pushing this new ivermectin narrative don’t care about public health, one way or another.

It's all about opening up a new front in the ongoing culture war: they’re holding up ivermectin as proof of how totalitarian and evil the libs are. And their pro-ivermectin push is particularly potent because it feeds big anti-vaxxer fears, and has being taken up by people looking for any toehold to prove that Covid and the vaccines against it are part of an evil plot to control “The People.” Yep, the faithful have grabbed onto this drug as more proof that Big Vax, Inc. controls medicine and is preventing cheap and safe Populist Treatments, all while killing people for profit with its super toxic vaccines. As Taibbi writes, the censorship of ivermectin shows Google is part of the cabal to suppress Populist Science to line the pockets of the Big Vax Cabal!

I don’t have to tell my readers that it’s obvious that big pharma is an exploitative, profit-driven industry — just like any and every other industry in America. But the “only for profits Covid conspiracy” narrative doesn’t make any sense. I mean, Cuba — a communist country — has developed its own Covid vaccines and has been taking Covid very seriously, more seriously than America. So Covid isn’t some sort of plot purely designed to generate profits for the global elite. Unless…Cuba’s also part of the Plandemic Globalist Conspiracy to suppress dissent and institute control? Shit! Could it be possible?

And, yes, it’s true that American liberals are shit and the censorious mainstream political and media “discourse” around Covid has been disaster from the very beginning. It’s also true that a big part of our oligarchy has enriched itself like crazy during the lockdowns — just look at Amazon. But there are other ways of handling this aspect of our degraded American politics, without resorting to whipping up a cynical and exploitative culture war campaign like this. But that’s what reactionaries like Taibbi and Bari Weiss and Brett Weinstein are doing.

It's all so fucking depressing, and such a waste of our lives. And of course it's connected to the new subs-driven business model powering alternative media today. The more that Taibbi pushes this simplified reactionary culture war shit, the richer he gets. Gotta say it’s been sorta perversely entertaining to watch Taibbi’s transformation. These days, he’s shaping up to be Alex Jones for people with a college degree. Next up: get your Hate, Inc. silver ion supplements! They'll protect you from liberal Silicon Valley censorship!

—Yasha Levine

PS: After writing this, I see that Vice published a fairly decent write up of exactly what I’m talking about: “Why Is the Intellectual Dark Web Suddenly Hyping an Unproven COVID Treatment?”