Those Who Hate

Half of Democrats seek revenge against the unvaccinated

We live amidst people who hate us. That becomes clear when we consider a recent poll demonstrating the extent to which Democratic voters seek to punish individuals who resist the horrors of vaccination. Fifty-nine percent of Democrats favor confining the unvaccinated to their homes except for emergencies. Forty-eight percent of Democrats support fining or imprisonment of individuals who question in public the efficacy of existing Covid-19 vaccines. And forty-five percent of Democrats would support requiring the “vaccine hesitant” to be “temporarily” housed in “designated facilities or locations” (i.e., concentration camps) for the crime of resisting a largely inefficacious and perhaps dangerous experimental “vaccine.” 

Much of the contempt and hatred for the unvaccinated seems to arise from the assumption that the vaccine-resistant pose a threat to the rest of society (i.e., to the vaccinated). But how can that be? Assuming that the vaccines work as advertised (admittedly a very dubious assumption), then those who are vaccinated should have absolutely nothing to worry about, because they’re “protected.” Under such assumptions, it is only unvaccinated who are at risk—but in that case, this is a risk they have freely chosen to place upon themselves. If it is further argued, as is sometimes the case, that the unvaccinated pose a threat to our hospital system, because they are likely to get sick and need hospitalizations in overwhelming numbers—well, even if that were true (we have yet to see convincing evidence that it is), the obvious solution is simply to deny medical care for the unvaccinated as soon as the hospitals are in fact over-burdened with excess cases. If excess cases never emerge, then it’s not a problem and can be safely ignored.

Further evidence for the hatred of the left towards the unvaccinated is provided by their habit of using malicious slurs to describe those who have participated in protests against vaccine mandates and other Covid related restrictions. Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” of truckers provides an illustrative case in point. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who spent several days in hiding once the convoy reached Canada’s capital city of Ottawa, has slandered the truckers as “racists”  with “unacceptable views.” But Trudeau is only repeating the slurs of his supporters, hundreds of whom have repeated similar insults on twitter. 

His eminence Mr. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s race-obsessed PM

Why do leftists repeatedly call people they dislike racists and bigots? The primary reason, I would modestly suggest, is to provide a pretext or justification for their hatred. As experimental psychology has shown, the emotions, motivations, moral intuitions—in short, the hatred—comes first, and then ex post facto theories are concocted later to provide a veneer of rational justification for what is in its essence neither rational or just. In other words, the feelings of hatred and loathing existed all along, and then a pretext is found (i.e., the truckers are all white nationalists and nazies) to justify the hatred. Nor is it difficult, once a rationalization is trotted forth, to find “evidence” for it. In a protest involving tens of thousands of people, there will likely be few unsavory incidents that arise here or there; or, if nothing of the kind should happen, it’s not hard to plant a few agent provocateurs to create the justifying example. After all, the pro-vaccine mandate establishment only needs one or two anecdotes to tarnish the entire Freedom Convoy. Confirmation bias does the rest.

Of course, logically none of this passes muster. The bad actions of one or two people cannot be used to define an entire movement consisting of tens of thousands of people. That anyone should believe the contrary testifies to the real motivations involved in the sorry business. When ideologues use logic and reasoning that is this wretched and fallacious, we can safely assume that rationalization is involved. People sincerely interested in the truth don’t accept arguments that are so palpably absurd. When the left reflexively calls people they disagree with politically racists and bigots, these are expressions of the intensity of their contempt and hatred for normal people. The question then arises: where does this hatred and contempt come from? 

How this question is answered depends on whether we are examining political elites (i.e., members of the “ruling class”) or the rank-and-file (the broad “masses”). Political elites despise and hate those who resist vaccination because they regard such people as a threat to their status and power. The unvaccinated in America and Canada largely come from the ranks of their enemies—that is, from the people who helped get Donald Trump elected President in 2016 and who are currently involved in supporting the Freedom Convy in Canada. Leftist elites, being men of low character, struggle to be magnanimous toward those who oppose them. Hence the tendency to demonize Trump and his supporters as racists and “deplorables” and the Freedom Convoy as “white nationalists” and Nazi extremists.

The hatred of rank-and-file leftists toward the unvaccinated has a more complicated genesis. It is partly a religious hatred. Leftists adhere to the secular religion of progressivism. Among the many doctrines of progressivism holds is the conviction that vaccines are exemplars of “progress” and “science” and therefore must be regarded as holy and sacred, above and beyond all criticism. One casts aspersions on them at one’s peril. Religions that have been corrupted by worldly values always tend to foster a fanatical mixture of dogmatism and sectarianism among their adherents. Of course any secular religion, by virtue of its secularity and its preoccupation with things of this world, will likely be very corrupt, both intellectually and morally. This corruption will cause the progressive faithful to react with mistrust and hatred toward those who refuse to genuflect to progressive pieties. To the progressivist’s typical way of thinking, those who reject the orthodoxy of their secular religion are not merely mistaken or ignorant, they’re evil. They are infidels and deserve to be treated with contempt and loathing.

Now when you add this religious hatred the fact that many leftists are genuinely frightened by Covid-19, it is little wonder that so many of them would like to send the unvaccinated to concentration camps. How frightened of Covid are those on the left? One poll found that forty-one percent of Democrats believe that half or more of Covid sufferers will end up requiring hospital care after contracting the virus. Combine this fear of covid with an unquestioning faith in the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, and it becomes crystal clear why so many left regard the unvaccinated as the most despicable kind of chandela. But this hatred, let us not forget, existed well before the Covid-19 pandemic. The controversy over the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines has only intensified it.

The vaccines are in the process of being discredited. If we reach the point where even the leftist establishment is forced to admit that the vaccines didn’t work, will the left’s hatred for the unvaccinated at last cease? Don’t bet on it.