Pandemic-era wellness culture recruited Canadian leftists into far-right politics

Evidence

Even after months mired in the Mirror World, I was shocked by some of the things that Avi and I were seeing and hearing from our neighbors. At the start of the pandemic, there had been various loud voices calling for the sick and elderly to be sacrificed in the name of keeping the economy going. But those had been smarmy Republicans; cruel, but on brand. What I did not expect was to find lifelong voters for the NDP—the party pivotal in securing Canada’s system of universal public health care—shrugging off mass death. Nor did I expect someone from whom I might have taken a Vinyasa class to actively advocate a die-off of the physically weak (“I think those people should die”). Or for a People’s Party sign to appear right next to the one for Bliss or Bust Deep Meditation and Deep Tissue Massage. Or to hear longtime environmentalists say, in private conversations, that the right to be unvaccinated was their single issue in this election, a principled stand, as they saw it, against Big Pharma. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 551

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on the diagonalism concept presumably introduced earlier in the book; connects current data point of Canadian leftists to the chapter’s chapter thesis of the far right and far-out converging.