The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'a woman in a medical mask sitting on a chair.'
There is a store in my neighborhood called Speakeasy. The place advertises itself as a thrift store that supports mutual aid. They sell cool clothes and vintage housewares, offering sliding-scale pricing for low income customers. On the surface, this seems like exactly the kind of business I would support. But I have never set foot in Speakeasy, because they have a sign on their door that says Masks Required.
Recently, I sent Speakeasy an email explaining my desire to shop there and my unwillingness to do so masked. Part of me was expecting them to respond with something to the effect that they'd just forgotten to take the sign down when the pandemic ended. Instead, they wrote back saying that they are requiring masks indefinitely in their store. Apparently, they're doing this out of "love for the immunocompromised."
That was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard and I didn't write back. But the proprietors of that establishment aren't unique in their folly. Minneapolis is absolutely teeming with people like this. These are the ones who began double-masking on the advice of NPR, and who still cling to their ineffectual face coverings when they shop at the co-op. They're a branch of the new left. They support Biden and medical fascism. They support war. They support censorship. And they scare the hell out of me.
This group's identity politics recast everything as political while reducing the political to a multiple jeapardy math equation. This approach breaks down immediately upon contact with reality's nuances, of course. So they ignore reality, fixating on their math of oppression and finding increasingly clever ways to signal their virtue to their perceived peers.
The reason these blues scare me so much has to do with their relationship with authority. They're reflexively obedient to corrupt establishment figures and they demand that everyone else be obedient to the new social rules they dogmatically espouse. They actively police language and try to cancel anyone that doesn't play along with their nonsensical games. This is the kind of stuff that happens in societies edging towards revolution.
This group may be on track to gain real power in this country. If they do, there will probably be a civil war. No one wants that, but it's what happens when ideological zealots try to replace the prevailing order with a whole new set of prescribed language and behaviors. Even casually glancing at history makes that clear.
Don't get me wrong. I do think the prevailing order is broken and needs to be transformed. And making society more fair for everyone should obviously be part of the basis for that transformation. But a main goal of these blues seems to be a basic inversion of cartoonishly simplified social power hierarchies. They want the marginalized to become the bosses of everything, and to strip the privileged of their resources. That's not a path to making things more fair for everyone. It's a path to creating new harmful power structures.
I like to think of myself as the kind of person who can talk with anyone. But these new blues are challenging this idea. Their epistemological impoverishment is on par with Flat Earthers, and they're just as impervious to logic. So, unless the situation changes, I probably won't be talking to them at all.
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