Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

It is the diagonalists themselves—by systematically refusing the simple and safe measures that were our best chance of preventing a highly infectious disease from culling the more vulnerable members of our communities: the already sick, the disabled, the immunocompromised, the elderly. Culling the herd of its weaker members to strengthen the genetic stock is the central goal of eugenics. And to a large extent, it has happened. Of the first 800,000 people who died of Covid-19 in the United States, three-quarters were over the age of sixty-five. And, according to an analysis conducted by the Poor People’s Campaign, people living in poor U.S. counties died at almost twice the rate as those living in wealthy ones; during the outbreak of the Delta variant, people in the poorest counties of the country died at five times the rate as those who lived in the wealthiest areas. These numbers tell a story of Covid as class war.