Scapegoating the Unvaccinated

The wolves are after Dennis Prager. He made a comparison between the scapegoating of gays around the time of the AIDS epidemic with the current scapegoating of the unvaccinated at the present moment. His unforgivable crime is that he noted that the ruling class came out and protected gays from being the pariahs to blame for it all. But today, of course, the ruling class is all-in on blaming the unvaxxed. Said he:

During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users, who were the vast majority of the people with AIDS, had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are? But it would have been inconceivable.

Only, of course, IT WAS gays that were to blame. It was their unprotected anal sex that was the prime vector of AIDS.

But hey, gays are the Little Darlings of the ruling class, so don't you dare blame them, bigot.

But the scapegoat is as old as humanity. René Girard is the chap that has done most to point this out in his Violence and the Sacred. And I have been writing about this since 2008. My first scapegoating article was about blaming bankers for the Crash of 2008.

But this week I have been reading Girard's The Scapegoat. Which is more of the same, but more focused. And what I am getting is that, when a human community experiences a disaster that it can't explain then it unites and turns on some convenient scapegoat. He uses the example of the Black Death, in which about one third of humans in Europe died.

We now think we know what the Black Death was all about. It was a disease that originated in the port of Kaffa in the Crimea and was transmitted by rats. But people back then didn't know that. So they blamed the Jews for poisoning the water.

You can see that when any disaster occurs the cause is, at least initially, uncertain. So it is natural and physical to, e.g., blame gays for AIDS. But fortunately there was St. Fauci at hand who said that "AIDS may be transmittable through casual household contact." Blessed be his name.

We have a similar situation with COVID. We have a vaccine that is turning out to be rather less effective than originally promised by the ruling class. We really don't know why. Looks like "Houston we have a problem." So what is the obvious thing for politicians to do? Find a scapegoat.

Now, the art of scapegoating is to find some small minority, such as Jews or gays, without good contacts in the ruling class, and blame it all on them. You accuse them of being ignorant or malevolent, and whip up the mob to deal with them. And now we have Twitter mobs that can be mobilized in a moment.

Girard points out that "mob" and "mobilize" come from the same Latin "mobile."

I'd say that the unvaxxed are a good, but not ideal, scapegoat to blame for the continuance of the COVID epidemic. In fact, blaming the unvaxxed may turn out to be a strategic error, for a variety of reasons, from the fact that the unvaxxed are not a helpless marginalized minority to the uncertainty about the ultimate effectiveness of COVID immunity from vaccination versus immunity from actually contracting the disease and surviving.

I get why the Biden administration went all-in on vaccination and mandating vaccination through OSHA. And a political leader needs to appear to be leading us -- for the men -- and protecting us -- for the women.

Reality is that politicians can't really do that much to help us on anything. But we don't want to hear that, especially when people are dying: "if we can just save one life!"

Of course, scapegoating the unvaxxed is just one of the scapegoating operations that our liberal friends in the ruling class are conducting right now. The most obvious one is blaming the problems of blacks on "white supremacists" and "white oppressors." Otherwise, how could it be that blacks lag in almost all the good things and lead in all the bad things like murder? It could not be -- it could not be -- that the problems of blacks all lead back to liberal programs like welfare and Affirmative Action / Diversity / Equity.

Actually, that's a good point. It cannot be, it can never be that the ruling class is to blame, because we rulers are the good guys, the educated evolved people who care. It must be some racist / deplorable / bitter clinger that's to blame.

Of course, the opposite is true.

I say that almost always, every ruling class in history Makes Things Worse. And do you know why? It is because government is force, and "Justice is the Absence of Force." (I just thought of that in the middle of last night). So you can't really do anything useful with government except defend the borders from the invaders. Everything else that government does Makes Things Worse. Even when there's a hurricane the Cajun Navy is out well before the gubmint folks.