How global pandemic and the social justice movement have undermined America

No one is safe in a society that thrives on fear and victimization

Photo by Kyle Cleveland on Unsplash

I have a confession: I’m unvaccinated.

Do you hate me?

Before you jump to conclusions, let me explain. My partner and I are relatively young with no pre-existing conditions, and our research early in the pandemic revealed that children our son’s age (he was 12 at the time) were at minimal risk of hospitalization or death. Moreover, after our relatively mild bout with COVID-19 in 2021, blood tests established that spike protein antibodies had gifted us with natural immunity, thereby obviating the need for a vaccine. We balanced the risk of harm from the virus against the unknowns of a novel vaccine and made the decision to opt out.

I rarely mention my vaccination status now, even a year after the pandemic ended. Though I don’t get as many scowls and raised eyebrows as I used to, there’s still a lot of judgment.

I’ve also refrained from calling attention to my status because I’m semi-traumatized by what I witnessed and experienced during the pandemic. For two freakish years, as the country dipped into a paranoid, obsessive compulsive, alternate reality, people like me — who made the choice to remain unvaccinated — were shamed, “othered,” demonized, and treated like second-class citizens.

I have a friend, Adam, who lives in New York City. It was one of the worst places to be unvaccinated during the pandemic. I remember vivid descriptions of his painful isolation and struggle to survive. Health care workers, teachers, and employees of private businesses were denied the right to work if they were unjabbed. They couldn’t access indoor facilities like stores and restaurants, go to concerts or gyms, or attend college. Their families were denied death benefits. It was like The Handmaids Tale, without the crimson frocks and white bonnets.

More than anything else, I remember how betrayed Adam felt by friends who turned a blind eye. An email he sent me in August 2021 remains stuck in my mind like a glyph etched into a cave wall:

“Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been rethinking who my friends are. A lot of them have been vaccinated, and it’s been very, very weird. It’s like I don’t recognize some of them. Or maybe I never knew them? I’ve always accepted people as human — they can make mistakes, say things I don’t agree with, have a different perspective — and I still find some love for them as a human being. But I’ve taken note of how people are reacting, how they’re treating their fellow man. And I won’t forget. I won’t forget what fear revealed.”

During the height of the pandemic, 50% of Democrats supported fines and jail time for the unvaccinated and anyone who questioned vaccine efficacy. We were even denied organ transplants. Noam Chomsky argued that we should remove ourselves from society and access food without coming into contact with others. This sentiment persisted even though it was an established scientific fact that the non-sterilizing COVID-19 vaccine might reduce hospitalizations and deaths, but it could not prevent infection or transmission. Months later, we would learn the unvaccinated spread the virus at roughly the same rate as the vaccinated. But that didn’t matter. We were still punished.

It was even worse for the unvaccinated in other countries. The Canadian government froze bank accounts of truckers who protested vaccine mandates. The Greek government imposed monthly fines for unjabbed over the age of 60. Austria fined unvaccinated people $4000 for violating lockdowns that were lifted for the vaccinated.

The unspoken consensus was that the unvaccinated deserved to be humiliated and ostracized because we were dangerous. We were a menace to society. Such callous treatment wouldn’t have been shocking in China or Turkmenistan, but watching it take root in Western democracies was surreal and chilling.

Why am I reflecting on the experience of the unvaccinated?

Because I can’t imagine what would have happened to us if the pandemic had continued for another six months. Our experience set a dangerous precedent of a self-righteous “mob mentality” toward people who entertain unpopular positions. I believe this precedent also laid fertile ground for the rise in unbridled antisemitism we’re seeing now. Fear bred during the pandemic, combined with an increasingly aggressive and divisive social justice movement, have created toxic conditions that leave America primed for the unthinkable: a rapid descent from the values and ideals of a free society into…whatever comes next.

The horrifying rise in hate crimes against Jews following the brutal Hamas attacks on October 7 has shocked many Americans, but we shouldn’t have been surprised. For the past two decades our country has been slowly transforming into one that’s decidedly un-American.

During that time, we’ve seen the lengths to which people will go to keep themselves safe and be seen as good citizens belonging to the “right” group. We’ve discovered that allies we long trusted can be convinced to betray us out of guilt, or to signal and maintain a sense of virtue. Worst of all, we’ve been conditioned to believe that we can dehumanize anyone we have “othered.” And history has shown that whenever any society dehumanizes any human being, horrible things follow.

Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency we were warned of threats to our democracy. I harbored these concerns, too — but long before Agent Orange set foot in the White House.

Since 9/11, Americans have been quietly stripped of civil liberties, one crisis at a time. After Edward Snowden’s hair-raising revelations of a surveillance state that tracks our movements and phone calls, our government made no apologies. It didn’t restore rights it had taken. Instead, it doubled down on dystopia and convinced us that we needed to surrender our freedoms for safety.

By the time Trump took office, America was turning into a country many of us neither recognized nor understood. The First Amendment became a tool of misinformation; the Second Amendment a weapon of terrorists. We sensed what was happening wasn’t right. We knew that whenever humans lose rights they also lose a vital piece of their existence. Yet we complied because we were scared. We craved safety. We wanted to be good citizens.

But it wasn’t until after Trump left office that many of us became terrified. That’s when we realized we’d entered a more disturbing chapter in the strange metamorphosis gripping our country.

In the summer of 2020, Americans grieving the death of George Floyd had a collective epiphany: our System was broken because “bad” people had rigged it. It seemed easy to identify the obvious culprits: racists and white men. No reasonable person would defend a racist, and white men had run the world for as long as anyone could remember. They were privileged, which was almost as bad as being racist. With a little encouragement, it was even easy to see this bigoted and privileged class as “oppressors.”

Social justice crusaders offered a simple fix: promote diversity, equity and inclusion (“DEI”) to level the playing field so privileged/oppressors would no longer have an advantage. For a while, this seemed to work — until DEI efforts took a bizarre turn. Suddenly and inexplicably, people without privilege became members of the “oppressor” class.

First, DEI turned on women and lesbians. When female athletes complained because they were forced to compete with biological male athletes, and lesbians refused to date gay “women” with penises, they were branded TERFs. Those who had long suffered under patriarchy inexplicably became accomplices of cisgender patriarchy. People still fighting to be seen and heard were intimidated into silence. It happened to me when I tried to speak up as a black lesbian with concerns that my hard-won rights were being usurped.

Asian-Americans were the next targets. Despite a long history of discrimination, they were reassigned to the privileged class because their intellectual prowess gave them an unfair advantage over their Black and Latino peers. To level the playing field, Harvard adopted a “personality” scorecard that gauged applicants based on “likability, courage, and kindness.” As a result, admissions rates for Asian-Americans fell because their personality scores were lower than other racial groups. In keeping with the equity model graphic analogy, crates were taken from them and given to other non-white groups that “needed” them more. Asian-Americans spoke up, but no one cared.

Then DEI came for Jews.

Since the October 7 massacre in Israel, antisemitism that has long simmered under the surface in the U.S. is now bubbling over. Survivors of genocide who represent 2% of the U.S. population have joined the ranks of the oppressor class because, as Bari Weiss notes, the binary worldview of victim-based social justice contemplates only “the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad).” Israelis, who are perceived as having acquired more wealth and power than their Palestinian counterparts, and disproportionate to other ethnic groups, must necessarily be the latter.

And herein lies the fundamental problem with DEI.

The ideology thrives on creating victims of oppression, which “works” so long as racists and privileged white men are the oppressors. But as the number of victim groups grows and their interests collide or compete, this ideology must cannibalize its own ranks to sustain itself. Every oppressed victim must becomes someone’s oppressor. Everyone becomes a danger to someone else.

This is peak social justice.

What happened in Israel has set another dangerous precedent. When Hamas raped, tortured, and murdered 1,400 Israelis, social justice elites offered no condemnation. Instead, they justified and even celebrated these crimes against humanity as “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Because oppressors get what they deserve, no matter how savage the punishment. You don’t have to be a Zionist to see the danger in this mindset. Praising brutality, for any reason and under any circumstances, is anathema in a civilized society. Full stop. Can you imagine Martin Luther King Jr. exhorting civil rights activists to rape, torture, and murder white people in Mississippi after Emmet Till was lynched?

The pandemic may have given us permission to punish “bad” people without mercy, but October 7 gave us explicit permission to do something far more terrifying: massacre them. This is the end game, the dangerous downward moral spiral that inevitably follows when any society allows itself to vilify, punish, and dehumanize the designated “bad” members with impunity, without restraint.

But there’s a bigger problem. As a society approaches peak social justice, sooner or later everyone becomes a “bad” person. It’s just a matter of time.

Whether you’re Jewish or Gentile, vaccinated or unvaccinated, a woman by birth or by choice, Black or Asian-American, this should concern you. It should be setting off alarms. If any of us can be labeled dangerous or an oppressor, how can we ever feel safe? Which rights can be stripped from us, in the blink of an eye, because we threaten someone with less power or privilege? More importantly, who gets to decide which class we’re in?

To paraphrase Voltaire, “Anyone who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities.”

The absurdity of believing that the world consists solely of oppressors and victims, the powerful and the powerless, the dangerous and the endangered, is a corrosive mindset that poses an existential threat to any civilized society. When we give ourselves permission to punish people we despise or we’re told to despise — by any means necessary — we risk surrendering our collective humanity to forces that may have no concern for our welfare. Once that happens, the quest for social justice, safety and freedom becomes an illusion.