If you reflexively think the opposite of what you’re told to think, you’re still being told what to think.

John Carter

Aug 4, 2023

We’re over three years out from the societal salve et coagula initiated in the name of SARS-CoV-2, and it’s easy to forget the prologue to the mass psychosis that gripped the world in March of 2020. For years now, positions on medical tyranny have been politically coded: if you’re on the left, it was wise and wonderful, and if you’re on the right, it was a power grab justified by a sketchy psyop.

Before things really got rolling, positions on COVID-19 were the precise opposite.

Many were shaken awake over the last few years. Before their lives were turned upside-lockdown, they were normies, perfectly content to accept that the world was more or less as they were told it was by the established authorities. As such, during the quiet lead-up, they weren’t paying much attention to the events in Wuhan. The New York Times assured them that it was just the flu, and that anyone saying otherwise was an excitable, xenophobic conspiracy theorist.

As an excitable, xenophobic conspiracy theorist, I was of course keeping a wary eye on events in Wuhan. At that point we had no reason to be skeptical of the footage of people dropping in the street. An entire city being put under medical martial law by platoons of troops clad in biohazard suits, spraying down the streets with disinfectant, and welding citizens into their apartments, was something straight out of the opening scenes a zombie flick. That the lying press was united in its insistence that there was nothing to see here, go about your lives, citizens, certainly didn’t prove that there was in fact something to be potentially worried about. But it was a strong datapoint in favour of that hypothesis.

And so, as Wuhan simmered and the media obscured, 4chan flooded with memes celebrating its waifu of the month, Corona-Chan.

Personifying a potentially apocalyptic event with a cute anime girl might seem a bit macabre, but that’s 4chan for you. Gallows humour to the end, mixed with the bored ennui of a generation so demoralized that they pray for something, anything, no matter how horrific, to burn away the timbers of the longhouse so that they can escape the smothering embrace of the devouring mother.

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