Anti-vaccine messaging recruited genuine progressives through surveillance fears

Evidence

What many of us who were cringe-following Wolf at the time missed was the extent to which her new messaging had struck a chord—not only with Fox’s audience but also with a sizable cohort of people who identify as leftists or progressives and were terrified of the Black Mirror surveillance world she was describing. Her “slavery forever” video was personally forwarded to me by several sources. One was a known conspiracy theorist who urged me to “study” it and said we had to fight the new threat “with every last ounce of our strength.” One asked if I had advice for deprogramming a loved one, a Black Lives Matter–supporting alternative health practitioner who had taken Wolf’s words as gospel and was in a QAnon-like spiral about this being the last frontier in the fight for “freedom versus slavery.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 261

Categorization

• XREF: This is core evidence for the diagonalism thesis — left-aligned people converging with the far right on vaccine measures. Directly builds on the book’s central argument.
• SEED: Angle for an article: how legimate surveillance anxieties get metabolized by conspiracist-sphere messaging, the exact mechanism Klein names as diagonalism.