The anti-vaccine right absorbed a nationalistic East-versus-West framing

Evidence

Since The End of America, Wolf has leaned heavily on U.S. patriotism as a reason to resist restrictions on civil liberties. (“The founders did not create liberty for America, but America for liberty,” was typical fare.) These vaccine passport dispatches, however, took a far more nationalistic and pro-capitalist tone than anything I had seen from her previously. She painted a world in which Covid health measures are the front lines in a civilizational war between East and West. Again and again, she invoked the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—in her fifteen-minute “slavery forever” video, she referenced “the CCP” five times, the same number of times as she said “the West.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 257

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader diagonalism thesis of this book — how anti-vax messaging borrows America-first civilizational-war rhetoric. — connects to: the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”