Covid transformed floating conspiracy hobbyism into fixed single-issue conviction

Evidence

But as I watched Wolf’s output in the Covid-19 era, I quickly realized that something was different. She was no longer hopping from subject to subject asking questions. She seemed to have only one subject: the virus—its origins, the shutdowns, the tests, the mask mandates, the vaccines, the vaccine mandates, the vaccine verification apps. None of it was as it seemed. To hear her tell it, we were not hit with a novel and highly contagious zoonotic virus that demanded hard trade-offs from all of us, a virus our political class and health bureaucracies—hollowed out by fifty years of neoliberal clawbacks—repeatedly fumbled or failed to control, while drug companies maximized their profits by protecting patents that should never have been in place. Instead, she said, we were part of an experiment, a plot, a coup, an act of war designed to turn us into technoslaves and convince us to voluntarily relinquish our freedoms, while wiping out large swaths of humanity in the process. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 94

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core mechanism of the chapter: a hinge event converts diffuse flag-raising into settled ideological commitment. The ‘actually the opposite’ inversion — real virus + fumbled response vs. plot/war/genocide — is the structure of diagonalization laid bare.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”