Anti-vaccine rhetoric absorbed ecofascist framing that casts mass death as natural culling

Evidence

The people Avi and I were meeting at the extreme end of this spectrum didn’t seem to deny Covid outright. Rather, they cast the virus as a kind of cleansing, or “culling of the herd,” with some mixing in ecofascist beliefs and imagining the pandemic as a means by which the natural world would be rehabilitated from human stresses. This line of thought was rampant in the early days of lockdowns, when THE EARTH IS HEALING and WE ARE THE VIRUS memes overran the internet, along with videos (plenty of them faked) of wild animals taking back our ghostly cities and towns. But now the embrace of a certain amount of human death was becoming more overt, and explicitly linked to opposing the vaccines. At around this time, Rob Schmitt, a former Fox News host who moved over to Newsmax, mused on air, “I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature. Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there—maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 555

Categorization

• SEED: The viral WE ARE THE VIRUS and THE EARTH IS HEALING memes of lockdown as a coherent ecofascist discourse worth an essay tracing the meme-cycle from self-deprecating humor to political ideology.
• XREF: Connects to Klein’s diagonalism thesis — wellness culture, anti-vax, ecofascism converging on the same ‘nature purifies humanity’ axis. — connects to: Critics say democracy-collapse warnings echo the apocalyptic rhetoric they condemn — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 681; Postwar vaccine-driven disease declines turned public fear toward pollution-linked cancers. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 255