"Team Reality" versus "Living In Fear"
"Team Reality" versus "Living In Fear"
Institutionalized Denial as Population Management
As October is spooky season, it's worth taking this opportunity to look back on the past few years of "discourse" around the concept of fear in regard to the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Before we begin, let us start from accepting the reality that you are alive today because your ancestors, at one point or another in their lives, "succumbed" to fear - fear of a deadly animal, a natural disaster unfolding, or maybe even a deadly disease. Growing up in the wilderness, you spend a great deal of time packing & planning hiking, fishing, and camping trips. These practical rituals teach you that there's a vast divide between fear and preparedness. Wearing "bear bells" to ward off predators as you go hiking, wearing a lifevest so you don't fall in a river and drown, packing a firearm to defend yourself in case a bear disturbs your campsite are just a few "tools" of preparedness one can use in justified fear of a bad outcome, such as being eaten alive or drowning. During a pandemic with a socially transmitted airborne virus that has killed and disabled millions, one would protect themselves and others from such bad outcomes by wearing an N95 respirator.
Preparedness is not “living in fear.” Preparedness is accepting the tangible reality of the present situation and responding accordingly in a way that best protects the health of oneself, one's family, and one's community.
However, "Team Reality," a moniker adopted by anti-public health crusaders early in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, is anything but preparedness. In fact, it's a eugenicist off-ramp from civil society into sadistic, depraved fascism, that inevitably ends in tears, bombs, and total obliteration.
“Any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is no true king.”
Defining “Team Reality”
Let’s make one thing very clear: If you have to declare that you're on “Team Reality,” you're already completely detached from it.
"Team Reality" claims that there is nothing that can be done to prevent SARS-CoV-2 deaths, which are obviously overcounted or non-existent, and that Long COVID disability is entirely fictional and a mental illness - the delusion of "Team Reality" is actually thus: that SARS-CoV-2 is just another mild flu virus that only kills the elderly and infirm (disposable to capital, and thus not worth saving) and it was the mainstream media's sensationalist campaign that drove people to imagine that SARS-CoV-2 was such a danger to them personally, (despite mountains of scientific research on the tangible harms from even mild acute infections) that when they were inevitably infected (not as a result of policy choices by corrupt government officials owned by corporate executives, but because simply "virus gonna virus") they developed a severe mental illness and imagined a newfound disability as part of a manufactured "mass formation psychosis" by the (Jewish) elites in the “mainstream media.”
None of the above is based in any legitimate scientific or medical research, or at all attached to actual, tangible reality. In truth, this snakes & ladders logic is all cocked up post-humously to confirm their prior beliefs and personal policy preferences, regardless of the scientific facts or the basic morals & ethics required to participate in a civic democracy. All of the extensive mythology of the anti-public health crusade, the anti-maskers, the anti-vax cranks - it's all nothing more than elaborate fiction. You have people who have totally detached from reality and embraced an elaborate cinematic universe of denial - as a coping mechanism.
Who is Truly “Living in Fear?”
"Denial" is one of the strongest and most immediate primal human coping mechanisms to deal with fear. Pandemic denialism is, as a matter of fact, the greatest fear response of them all - you have people like Kelley Brogan and "The End of COVID," who would genuinely have you believe that there are no such things as viruses. That all of the scientific field virology is a lie, an entirely fictional construct, because they can't cope with the fear that something microscopic and invisible to the naked eye could kill them.
You have the rabid anti-maskers who spend all day screeching, scolding, and threatening on social media because they're terrified of the guilt they know they should feel - because they prioritized avoiding mild discomfort over the responsibility of not spreading around a highly infectious virus that has killed and crippled millions of their fellow countrymen, including hundreds of thousands of American kids losing a primary caregiver - many of these kids were infected at school, and forced to infect their families, playing a central role in these needless deaths.
You have the sadistic anti-vaccine cranks who ascribe all bat outcomes of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the vaccine, and have developed a mental Wikipedia of established lore with more bitter and repulsive flavors to choose from than the limitless seafood buffet at a budget Vegas casino, peddling absolute junk "treatments" and "cures" from Ivermectin to Hydroxychloroquine to "Spike Support." As an aside, as part of our "post-pandemic" charade, unregulated "gamer" supplement companies are now selling treatments for "brain fog," aka cognitive impairment.
You have the carny hacks, backed by right-wing billionaires, in a naked political crusade against any form of public health authority as part of a larger agenda to dismantle the American regulatory state. Meaning whatever pathogen arrives next on our shores, your children will be thrown at it face-first with zero protections. "Focused protection" becomes a luxury for the wealthy that can afford it. "Normalcy" - the luxury consumerist comforts enjoyed by the upper economic classes off the backs of an ever growing viral underclass, is prioritized over preventing mass death in the "disposables." This establishes precedent for any sort of prevention or mitigation efforts required by our ongoing climate collapse, as well. The party has to go on, until Mother Nature finally turns the lights out.
It's a carnival of bullshit, selling a captive audience delusions and fictions that nothing was wrong - it was the liberals, the antifas, the minorities, the LGBTs, the "elites," who artifically disturbed the natural order of things. Nothing was actually wrong. There was no reason that your routine life of suburban privilege & overconsumption ever needed to be disrupted in any meaningful way. This is an audience that is being sold pacifiers and blankies to placate their fear, whilst being rallied to lash out in anger and even violence when faced with the real world.
Dragging the Cave Dwellers Back to the Light of Reality
The fascist project requires loyal individuals who are immersed in a constant state of paranoid terror at vague unknowns and absolute mistruths, easily manipulated and misdirected, entangled in an endless hive of contradictory thorns and vines. At the same time, this group needs to feel strong and empowered - so they beat their chests, abuse disabled women, and call themselves proud members of "Team Reality," claiming they're the mature adults in the room insisting we do nothing as countless Americans are killed and crippled by a virus, one that they're too terrified to admit exists & are responsible to protect their children and communities from.
These people - the anti-vaxxers, the anti-maskers, the pro-viral scyophants for a virus that has harmed so many - are terrified. Denial and anger are all they have, and they have to preform on social media and in other venues to reinforce their shared delusions - to hide from the very real fears that they've gotten this all wrong, and they've been a total piece of shit in the midst of a global crisis.
Remind them. Remind them constantly of how terrified they are to face reality, and how pitiful their actions truly are - terrified and manipulated into becoming pawns for a political agenda that completely dehumanizes them and their children. You're not "living in fear," you're facing reality and adapting to protect yourself, your family, and your community, even against the very federal and state governments that have continued to minimized and mislead the public on the many harms of this virus.
That makes you a bold, even "fearless" leader - now start acting like one.
