We Silly Rabbits
I awoke on Sunday morning as if in the aftermath of a tumultuous, months-long constitutional convention, having experienced seemingly hundreds of politically-colored and emotionally intense dreams over the course of the night, including one in which it was revealed that Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer is actually Ruth Bader Ginsberg in a bodysuit, the former having died when the latter pretended to. To which revelation it must be asked: S… So?
But I deserved this subconscious chastising. Although the welcome page to this journal promises science and political criticism, I have been quite lazy on the second front. And no sooner did I receive the rebuke, than did a worthy target for such criticism fall into my lap, courtesy of The Asylum:1
Readers uninterested in a political discussion of vaccine mandates accompanied by media criticism should consider themselves warned; the following is a political discussion of vaccine mandates accompanied by media criticism.
Now, I don’t hate The Asylum; to hate The Asylum would require that it had ever done something in its recent history to earn my admiration. But it has been a cesspool of raving mental disorder for five years; a caustic tumor of political derangement, even if that derangement was still occasionally insightful or provocative before 2020.
Thus, I get none of the perverse pleasure out of reading the myriad attempts by the magazine’s spiritually stunted, paranoiac authors to process the downfall of the Covid vaccines that I get from such attempts offered by those authors who had distinguished themselves in opposition to lockdowns (only to sully themselves in support of universal vaccination). I cannot hate-read The Asylum, on this subject or any other. There is simply no pleasure in confronting their insanity.
Meanwhile, all of the supporters of the Covid vaccines, whether worthy of pity or scorn, have by now abandoned any pretense of seriously engaging with the counter-arguments. The hypothetical negatives which were waved away as absurd all spring have all ceased to be hypothetical: That the Covid vaccines would not deliver us to the illusory conditions of eradication or control promised by the Herd Immunity Fraud; that they would not really work; that they would present more risks than the virus itself for many groups, if not most; these things are all now mere reality, not hypotheticals. I already examined the mental gymnastics by which this failure, when declared at the end of July, immediately became pretext for naked endorsement of authoritarianism.2 A month later as the Juliette Kayyem article sits at the top of The Asylum’s online most popular list, the only truly interesting question is, authoritarianism for whom?
Sunday’s declaration of dictatorship might appear, at first glance, to be merely an expression of the inmate consensus within The Asylum; however, Kayyem is a guest author, one who represents directly the Legitimate Government™ that The Asylum feels was usurped in 2016. From the bio provided by the magazine:
About the author: Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Barack Obama, is the faculty chair of the homeland-security program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home.
This makes matters convoluted and incestuous, to speak broadly. If we engage with the headline and subhead, we are likely interfacing with the consensus of the inmates, as it is typically editors who approve or determine the title which adorns a given essay. Beyond which, will lie the inner musings of The Elite, intentionally disguised as rhetoric. These may amount to the same viewpoint, or not.
We will therefor consider them as self-contained arguments.
“Vaccine Refusers Don’t Get to Dictate Terms Anymore”
The title is an incredibly broad statement. What is meant by “refusers”? And in what way have they been dictating terms? According to the subhead:
People who opt out of shots shouldn’t expect their employers, health insurers, and fellow citizens to accommodate them.
Here, the politic employment of opt out clarifies what the editor who crafted this subhead meant or took to mean by “refusers” in the title: Individuals who have been or will be targeted by mandates or penalties from “employers, health insurers, and fellow citizens,” the last of those naturally being synonymous with the state. To “opt out” of a category, one must first be placed within it. Further, the subhead clarifies that “vaccine” in the title does not refer exclusively to the Covid vaccines, but to “shots” in general (though the meaning of “shots” is limited by “vaccine” in the title).
Thus, “refuser” plausibly means anyone who does not want to take a vaccine of some type, who is being or will be forced to do so by any means imaginable, up to and including state coercion.
Right away, engaging with The Asylum’s summary argument requires setting aside that the novel Covid vaccines, because they do not prevent infection or transmission of the virus, are not actual “vaccines”4 - since acknowledging this obvious fact seems to be making pro-Covid-vaxxer media heads explode at the moment.5 Let’s pretend that a debate about “vaccines” applies to these pseudo-vaccines as well, and move on.
Again it must be asked, in what way could an individual who is resisting a mandate possibly be “dictating terms” - how can refusal to accept dictated terms be described, itself, as dictating terms? It cannot be. And the assertion advanced in the subhead that dissent against mandates should not be “accommodated” does nothing to support the portrayal of dissenters as “dictating terms.” To believe it does so is only possible within the atmosphere of mass psychosis at The Asylum; where the easiest and most readily-available tool with which to shadow-box those calling for rational discourse and an assessment of the facts is projection.
Expecting accommodation, in a given context, might or might not be reasonable - as in, the expected accommodation may turn out not to be in accord with what other parties are willing to provide - but it is not itself an act of imposition. Expecting accommodation is, at heart, making a bid for fellow citizens to allow one to exercise a given liberty.
Merely making the bid - engaging in an argument, taking a stance - these actions are not “dictating terms.” They are negotiating. And negotiation is the lifeblood of consensus; and consensus is the living flesh of political legitimacy. Without negotiation and debate, all collective decisions are intrinsically not collective at all: They are the dictate of some given party, imposed over the rest of the group. Rule by authority is incompatible with representative democracy (republicanism); rule by authority is therefor only legitimate when sovereign power is defined as deriving from a royal title or party affiliation, not from the people themselves.
Rule by consensus requires debate, organic, high-friction, and sometimes rancorous as it may be; “expecting” accommodation that may not in fact arrive does not violate this process, but merely embodies a facet of tension within it. I can say that pro-Covid-vaxxers “should not expect” that some individuals who believed that taking the Covid vaccines would protect others will not now decide to wait, the fraudulent Herd Immunity sales-pitch having suddenly been upturned; that doesn’t mean that pro-Covid-vaxxers were “dictating” anything to those individuals merely by expecting something from them - if it did, they wouldn’t have even needed the mandates which arrived as soon as the expectation was defied.
The moment may come, and soon, when universal state mandates issue forth, and the vaccine “refusers” who consider compliance with those mandates to be intolerable resort to behaving like the public enemies their media overlords and brainwashed fellow citizens have vilified them to be. The moment may follow, in some regions, when they are suppressed by the state. Or the moment may follow, in others, when they receive enough support from their police and neighbors that they overturn their own governments, void the state or national constitutions which for 150 years have neglected to enshrine freedom of medical choice, and publish new documents for ratification. The entire liberal West, in other words, may soon be awash in civil wars, at the conclusion of which one side will surely be dictating terms to the other.
But to get there, the actual universal mandates must arrive, on state and national levels. And since these state and national governments are nominally democratic, there’s no legitimate means by which to impose such mandates without actually having a debate about it first, regardless of whether that debate inflicts additional anxiety into the minds of a gaggle of over-medicated, pants-soiling media lunatics who should all have their phones taken away from them and be sent to a mental health retreat to feed horses shoulder to shoulder with detransing 9 year-olds.
Merely to insist on the debate is not the same as dictating terms to anyone.
Our Homelands, Ourselves
People in the crisis-management field have made peace with blanket one-size-fits-all policies that some individuals don’t like.6
Firewalling the headline from the essay itself was necessary, because the essay itself is almost impossible to grapple with. It is a document of such intense, focused demonization directed toward ostensible fellow citizens that even the most emotionally disturbed of editors who would approve it should feel incredible shame for the rest of their lives. And it is, just, difficult to read - at least for anyone who doesn’t spend her every waking minute fantasizing about personally marching her brethren off to execution at rifle-point. I can’t even benchmark this essay on the authoritarian propaganda scale, because I’ve never read anything so deliberately, breathtakingly self-victimizing and neighbor-demonizing. I mean, I’ve, I’ve never read Mein Kampf either. Is Kayyem’s essay at least more humane than Mein Kampf? Sure, maybe - but I honestly can’t imagine how it could be!
Right from the get-go, the clear association of “refusers” with individuals who have already been subjected to mandates is rescinded. The audacious implication which results - that making a personal medical decision which diverges from an expert recommendation delivered overnight constitutes, somehow, a “refusal” of something - is instead robustly affirmed - as if, quite literally, government bureaucracies are authorized to order Americans to take a still-experimental medical intervention on a whim. This is nausea-inducing authoritarianism dressed as - wait, it’s not even dressed as anything! It’s as naked as our public health emperors themselves, if not more-so!
Yet it’s caveated almost immediately by the issuance of the same opt out framework which was copy-pasted into the subhead. Within the essay, however, the “opt out” fig-leaf does nothing to nullify the instance wherein the “refusers” descriptor is extended backward in time, in the introduction, to explain why the employer mandates were necessary to begin with:
What [the employer mandates in the wake of the FDA approval] show is that the adults running major institutions in our society want to move forward, and they are done waiting around for vaccine refusers to change their mind.
Throughout the rest of the essay, Kayyem carefully avoids the “refusers” term when traveling back in time to describe the anguish, uncertainty, and economic turmoil somehow inflicted on the vaccinated all spring and summer by the unvaccinated - even though the vaccinated are now, everyone knows, just as capable of perpetuating the virus. This, as well, is a superfluous fig-leaf in the wake of the introduction. Present- and future-tense “refusers” are described side by side with past-tense “vaccine-hesitant,” as the essay swirls time into a meaningless goo of oppression, despair, etc., for which one eternally evil group is responsible; which oppression, despair, etc. therefore must go on forever, cannot possibly end, unless that group, the Refusers, ceases to exist.
And what should readers think about the Refusers who have been, are, and always shall be oppressing them? Kayyem is happy to offer suggestions: They are “broadly misinformed,” “afraid of needles,” and “deeply suspicious;” their “feelings and concerns” are “largely irrelevant;” they have not been carrying “the burden of the pandemic” (by uselessly masking and social distancing as much as their vaccinated brethren; never mind that Refusers are still doing so at absurdly high rates7); they must be dealt with in some manner by “the adults;” they have been begged with up until now, but “begging is not a strategy.”
Elimination of the Refusers, of course, could be accomplished by force-vaccinating them, rather than leaving their disease-ridden bodies strewn in the streets for trash day pickup. But will the former recourse do anything to change the Refusers’ myriad mental and moral deficiencies? What happens the next time there is an “emergency”? Kayyem subtly invites the reader to ponder these questions. “Begging is not a strategy,” after all, is a well-known prelude to other forms of peaceful and civically orderly persuasion.
“Refusers” is thus not a contextual description of a specific response to a specific imposed mandate, but a slur against a category of fellow citizens which Kayyem is hereby proposing for widespread adoption, to facilitate the elimination of that category. Amidst such an aggressive and radical overall tone, Kayyem can drop explicitly authoritarian policy prescriptions without even bothering to shift gear (emphasis added):
Some states are moving forward with their own vaccination-verification apps, but the failure to plan a national system will be viewed, in time, as a costly concession to a vocal minority.
The parts of the essay which do not consist of teasing proposals for bunk-bed layouts at the concentration camp mostly rehash stale, mainstream Covid Self Laceration tropes: The economic disruption pressuring companies to mandate employee vaccination is not a self-inflicted choice made by coastal polities gone mad while the rest of the country has been open for business, but a condition inflicted from without - first by the virus itself, and now by the Refusers who won’t allow the Self Laceraters to “move on with their lives,” as if they would even know how to! An undefined “ship” is meanwhile “going down” somewhere, and only universal vaccination will stop it (never mind that in Israel, Iceland, etc., near-universal vaccination has had no measurable impact on nearby boats). And “everyone” must “get vaccinated” on the grounds that this is “a potentially lethal virus,” regardless of the fact that even if everyone gets vaccinated, it will remain a potentially lethal virus.
Kayyem (falsely) claims, at the end of her introduction:
Getting a shot to protect yourself and others from COVID-19 is both a social responsibility and the best way to hasten the end of the pandemic, and if you don’t believe that, we’re not waiting around for you to step up.
But the vaccinated “don’t believe that” either! They, once again, are still “carrying the burden” of stopping the virus that they themselves now have alleged superpowers against, while simultaneously confessing that they are as terrified of it as ever! From the same AP poll-set that Kayyem cites to prove which side is shouldering her illusory burden:
Immediately after the rollout of the Covid vaccines, a certain 20% of survey-taking Americans ceased to be “extremely or very worried” about SARS-CoV-2. Immediately after mass vaccination proved to do nothing to prevent a nearly identical repeat of last year’s summer wave, with the Covid-vaccinated participating in case counts in equal measure to the unvaccinated, a certain 20% resumed their worry. And this cannot, like last year, be attributed to the appearance of the wave in of itself - those 20% who ceased worrying in late winter never would have expected the wave not to reappear this summer, but for the vaccines.
The hypocrisy of blaming the unvaccinated for what is either a profound disappointment in the vaccines or a perverse sort of joy that the virus isn’t going away after all, therefor, speaks for itself.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The hypocrisy and hysterical stupidity of Kayyem’s essay is altogether too transparent. It may be that The Security Mom has in fact drunk her own Kool-Aid; perhaps, like some other semi-high-profile Democratic insiders, she has spent too much time on Twitter, and now thinks “rationally” in terms of what generates impressions; I don’t profess to know anything about her beyond her work history. But everything about the essay reads as too pitch-perfect - neither the polished psychological projection nor the unironic confession of descent into mental disorder that have characterized the works of our demented media and political elites all summer - but something more self-knowingly flimsy, something sly. It reads, quite simply, like a psy-op.
The goal of the psy-op seems to be to template an improved and streamlined version of the worst, most flawed arguments that pro-Covid-vaxxers have already been using to scapegoat the unvaccinated for the failure of the vaccines. But that Kayyem herself is authentically frustrated by vaccine hesitancy seems unlikely from her tone. Needlessly linking to Asylum senior editor David Frum’s hilarious, outdated July 23 plea for the unvaccinated to stop “perpetuating” the same “pandemic” that the CDC would declare him just as capable of perpetuating a mere one week later, she concludes by writing:
Vaccination mandates are essentially a recognition that vaccinated people also have feelings too [sic] and that the burden of fighting the pandemic shouldn’t be on them alone.8
I know, I know: I should try harder to understand the feelings of unvaccinated Americans. Being more patient and empathetic would make me sound nicer. But do you know what’s really nice? Going back to school safely. Traveling without feeling vulnerable. Seeing a nation come back to life.
Kayyem is a well-connected DC and Massachusetts state government serial insider, failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate, decades-long Harvard educator, and senior advisor to the Israeli spyware firm the NSO Group. It is not plausible that she is unaware that much of the country has already moved on from pandemic theatre, nor that her home state is more than capable of rolling out authoritarian vaccination mandates without her encouragement - nor that Massachusetts is already second in the nation in rate of Covid vaccination uptake9, and yet every county but one is currently deemed at “high risk for transmission” by the CDC10; all conditions which broadly prevail in Israel as well. Kayyem’s brother, meanwhile, has operated and advised successful companies in northern San Diego County’s little-known Biotech Research Ridge for nearly three decades; it is not plausible that, through him, she would not possess an accurate, insider-understanding of the overblown risks of SARS-CoV-2 and the under-acknowledged risks of the novel Covid vaccines (as well as an appreciation for northern San Diego’s ongoing ambivalence toward pandemic theatre, and the lack of disaster which has followed).
Kayyem’s husband, meanwhile, is another former Washington insider who served the Obama administration, and personally helped author the legal memos used to justify the President’s execution by drone-strike of an American citizen - a mark on the security expert’s party credentials which helped to tank her chances in the 2014 Massachusetts Democratic primary.11
And while Kayyem and her husband might have been among the sacrificial 300 souls who were “scaled back” from their former benefactor’s birthday bash in the beginning of this month, it is not plausible that she is not otherwise free to do whatever she wants. She can send her kids to mask-less private schools if they are still of age - if they aren’t, she can just send someone else’s, purely for the thrill of freedom; she can travel without “feeling vulnerable;” she can see a “nation” come to life - just by moving to somewhere where citizens have chosen to do so.
It is not plausible, in other words, that she is either sincerely worried about the virus or sincerely convinced the vaccination of her fellow citizens will offer a deliverance she somehow cannot take for herself.
In the opening paragraphs of her 2016 opus Security Mom, Kayyem schizophrenically alternates between clunky, everyman syntax and a more scholarly tone. In “Vaccine Refusers,” she maintains the vacillation in voice, but appears to have become more adept at disguising herself as a non-elite.
But readers ingesting the otherizing propaganda offered by her essay should ask themselves: If Kayyem thinks vaccination mandates and passports are such a non-invasive idea, why doesn’t she start the essay by affirming her own vaccination status? Why doesn’t she affirm it anywhere in the essay? Why doesn’t she declare and proove the “purity” of her immediate and extended family, to boot? If it’s no big deal, according to her own rhetoric, shouldn’t her essay have included an image of her official medical proof of vaccination? This is what she is proposing for the rest of the country, after all. But in an essay purporting to justify the obliteration of fundamental privacy rights, the author - Kayyem - is barely present at all: She remains anonymous, a shadowy apparition lurking in the margins, only emerging at the end and only in the inauthentic guise of the “I know, I know” construction.
So, readers should ask, just who is the “we” that Kayyem asserts is done “waiting around”? Is it the same “we” suggested by the title to her Our Homeland memoir - a polity of potential threats constantly monitored and, if necessary, summarily executed to ensure the tranquility of mind of their elite overlords? Are they, the readers the “we” who will actually get to “dictate terms,” once the Refusers have been eliminated?
Or will their “safety” be regulated from on high; will it be overseen by drones, legal memos, smartphone surveillance, and perpetual testing, no matter how many mandatory injections they consent to?
After all, wouldn’t that be really nice - for Kayyem.
Play us out, Knower.
(The September Unperson Trilogy)
We Silly Rabbits - Fully Vaccinated (Revokable) - Reducing the Number
Kayyem, Juliette. “Vaccine Refusers Don’t Get to Dictate Terms Anymore.” (2021, August 29.) The Atlantic.
See “Lurking Leviathans.”
See Berenson, Alex. “Goodbye Twitter.” (2021, August 28.) Unreported Truths. Berenson himself is currently the target of another “Most Popular” artifact of mass psychosis and projection at The Asylum, “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man.”
(Kayyem, Juliette.) It’s really not clear what Kayyem is referring to, here. While “emergency measures” and “crisis management” might often conflict with individual judgements and contextual nuance, that doesn’t mean that no attempt to account for and incorporate those things is even made. Kayyem’s own earlier, scholarly book is entirely devoted to proposing means of (achieving the impossible goal of) balancing centralized absolutism with individual rights.
Kayyem cites the recent AP poll, whose implausible results like all modern polls suggest significant over-reporting of the “right” answers among both the vaccinated and the deplorables, producing figures that might as well have been fabricated by the pollsters without bothering to lift a phone. At best, for example, 35% of unvaccinated survey-takers were merely telling themselves that they are “avoiding other people as much as possible”:
One wonders if the article’s editor (potentially Frum, himself) inserted the hyperlink to Frum’s July on-paper mental breakdown; and in so doing, accidentally edited in either the superfluous “also” or “too.”
See “All But One Massachusetts County At High Risk For COVID-19 Transmission, CDC Says.” (2021, August 29.) CBS Boston.
See “What Rand Paul and Drones Have To Do with Juliette Kayyem.” (2014, May 5.) Boston Magazine. Kayyem went on to disappear from the polls in June, despite not withdrawing.
/ Substack tracking scrambler link (?): Knives, Choppers, and Cutters (Big Bazaar) /
The strange psychology of the pro-vaccine people is in some ways eerily fascinating. If the vaccines worked as originally promised, they would have nothing to fear from the "refusers."
So...while on the one hand they seem to understand they are still vulnerable, and that the vaccine does not prevent them from catching and dying from covid, they still insist on their immune superiority. As if the unvaccinated were solely responsible for their current covid problems.
They completely ignore natural immunity, have no tolerance for people (such as myself) with medical conditions that make a covid vaccine a bad crap shoot, and are resorting now to brute force to try to push their will on everyone else. If you try to direct them to possible covid treatments, they'll bizarrely push it away from you as if it were poison, and I'm not just talking ivermectin but very safe herbs and supplements.
The fear is palpable...they are terrified, angry, and completely lost. It's almost a psychosis.
Now, whether this particular writer is simply manipulating that fear on purpose or actually buys into her own BS is not for me to say. But it does infuriate me that someone who is, as you say, so spiritually stunted is writing for The Atlantic, and has such a huge platform, while you and Alex Berenson have to hide out on Substack.
We have a very diseased society right now, and by that I don't mean covid.