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Many still live in an alternate history where Hillary won, where the experts were right; ‘the resistance’ was always resistance to truth — to reality. The rhetoric of ‘the resistance’ paved the way for the rhetoric ‘mask up!’. ‘The resistance’ sits at home, listening to Hillary’s guest podcast appearances, consuming meme’s comparing Trump to Hitler, and Tweeting support of rioters in Portland.
The heroic Millennial Blue Check tweets how they haven’t left home in 134 days; the secure ahistorical suburban mentality survives, virus-like, in the dark corners of a Bushwick apartment where all that matters is the defeat of the dialectical straw man. What the Blue Check can’t confront is themselves — the state of involuntary self-parody they’ve fallen into. As the COVID-19 hysteria (gradually and not without denial)inevitably fades, the pseudo-nobility of the Blue Check will fade into an orgy of craftbeer, binge-watching, and profound inner sadness.
The ‘safe space’ is a near cousin to any public space in the COVID era: sterile and empty.
The incessant, largely unconscious craving for absolute safety is expressed by media meritocrats who have benefited from institutions their whole lives; to them, suspicion of Dr. Fauci is like suspicion of their favorite Harvard or Yale professor — suspicion of the whole system of knowledge from which their sense of the world is derived.
