THE LOUDNESS OF THE SHEEP

This week, I watched my first TikToks. I had read of a TikTok-er screen-named smugnurse, who recently suffered a series of disabling strokes at 34. It seemed like another vaxx-driven injury.

The dictionary defines smugness as “contented self-assurance.” Watching dozens of smugnurse’s one-minute messages, one sees anger, not contentment. In her TikToks, smugnurse fractiously promoted masks and “vaxxes” because, she assumed—incorrectly, as it turned out—that these measures would stop infection and spread.

Smugnurse never mentions any negative effects of the overall Corona response. Instead, her short, petulant videos are laced with uptalking, name-calling, sarcasm, profanity, self-focus and self-righteousness. She also doxxes people who disagreed with her and “tells on” others so they’d lose their jobs for dodging vaxx mandates. Her posts show that even women can suffer from, and exhibit, toxic masculinity.

Smugnurse attributed her brain blood clots to oral contraceptives. Linking her injury to The Pill seemed like a preemptive strike to foreclose suspicion that the jabs caused the clots. One suspects that if the mRNA shots hadn’t yet been invented and her strokes really had been Pill-driven, smugnurse would have attributed the strokes to some other, less PC, cause than the beloved Pill. It seemed as if, by blaming her strokes on The Pill, she was blaming the currently less hip of two PC evils. Acknowledging that the mRNA shots that she had aggressively pushed had wrecked her life would have required more humility than she could muster.

Be that as it may, although I know many women who took or have been taking The Pill for a long time, I never knew any who suffered brain blood clots. Maybe combining The Pill and The Jab is synergistically harmful.

Overall, smugnurse seems strongly motivated by the desire for social media attention.

But she’s notable because she’s an archetype of the Coronamania supporters. As did millions of others, in her Covid pronouncements, Smugnurse went heavy on vitriol and virtue-signaling and light on facts, logic, consideration of risk/reward or the damage caused by the interventions. To Team Vitriol, “the virus” was so terrible that it justified any measure that might, at least according to some tenuous theory, prevent some unspecified number of infections or slightly extend the lives of any of the nearly exclusively old, sick or obese ostensible Covid victims. Team Vitriol officiously advocated such “mitigation” measures no matter how much harm such measures would—and did—cause. Many maintained, without a hint of irony, that all of these measures were worth it “if they just saved one life!”

The Covid overreactors assumed that if they spoke angrily enough, they could nullify anti-lockdown/mask/test/vaxx arguments, or even the need to address questions about whether the “mitigation” measures were worth all the pain they would—and did—cause. They hoped that their anger would intimidate those who perceived the terrible effects of the extreme Covid overreaction. This is the New Left’s approach: outshout those who ask questions and who apply reason. Pump up the volume and the pitch, make up facts and disregard the secondary effects of their edicts. Doing so is a poor substitute for reasoned discussion and sensible public policy. But such Covid demagoguery was rampant.

So were claims of victimization. Smugnurse bemoans having to take care of people infected by a virus. In one post, smugnurse provides a mawkish, slow-motion-walking, black-and-white video paean to nurses and their work. But claiming this righteous mantle and doing wage work with sick or injured people inevitably entails dealing with many people who don’t take great care of themselves. Those who virtue-signal about their work should accept the intrinsic challenges of that work and bear these challenges silently.

Smugnurse inveighs against those who didn’t vaxx and ended up in the hospital. But did she ever hate on patients whose deaths were accelerated by such risky behaviors as overeating, opioid use or reckless driving? Or was her anger only triggered by those outside her pro-mask/jab tribe? Further, plenty of the jabbed were hospitalized and died with “the virus.” Many more appear to have died from the shots. The shots were far from the panacea that smugnurse-alikes touted them to be.

Smugnurse also exhibits the general, imperious arrogance of many medical professionals. Instead of listening to patients’ life experiences and respecting patients’ judgment, self-education and bodily sovereignty, smugnurse and some of her counterparts with whom I’ve dealt, speak snippily to those who have the temerity to question a given medical direction or treatment. Many medical personnel are self-centered, not patient-centered. Their message is, “Listen to us superior people in scrubs: roll up your sleeve and take the shots, or pills, that we tell you to take.”

Sometime in the past few decades, it became fashionable and strategic in America to label people as “extremists,” or other forms of “-ists” simply because they questioned a given cultural notion or media narrative. This anti-intellectual, vilifying, censoring practice was particularly, inappropriately common among college students and graduates. It’s been especially prevalent over the past 40 months.

During Coronamania, Twitter and Facebook (and I guess TikTok) posters routinely name-called or cursed at those who questioned a massive overreaction. Such hostile marginalization exalted emotion over reason. Thusly peer-pressured, many people became less willing to publicly question Coronamania. If more people had ignored such bullying and considered the merits of the Covid interventions, they would have seen a Scam in progress.

During the Scamdemic, I attempted to discuss the Covid response with many dozens of people. Instead of respectful, fact and science-based dialogue, nearly all responded, like smugnurse, with anger, slogans and/or a vague anecdote about the death of some very old, sick person. They refused to consider the core truth: this virus threatened very few people, and those said to have died from the virus really died from other causes.

Most Team Vitriol members labeled the skeptics “selfish,” “grandma killer,” “science-denier,” “phony Christian” (this was the atheists’ favorite), et al. It’s easy to call someone names on a screen. They were imitating the TV talk show hosts and shock jocks who spewed angry lies. Coronamania was a return to elementary school at its worst: some people heard other people calling a third-party names and were emboldened to mimic such hostility. Doing so made name-callers feel superior. It was Lord of the Flies, 2020-22 edition.

Despite distinct deficits of knowledge and logic re: Covid, most Americans obeyed the government and medical establishment and demanded that everyone do the same. It was mass hysteria and mob rule. None of the NPIs or shots made sense, except to those who opportunistically saw the attendant disruption as a way to wield power, make money, oust the Orange Man and/or get paid to stay home.

As the Corona narrative falls further apart each week, why am I no longer hearing from Team Vitriol members?