The pandemic emergency powers were framed as a shock-doctrine rights grab by the right

Evidence

And look, it was confusing, and also, in a gallows way, funny, even to me. Again and again, she was saying things that sounded a little like the argument I made in The Shock Doctrine but refracted through a funhouse mirror of plots and conspiracies based almost exclusively on a series of hunches. She continually called Covid’s severity into question, describing it as “a much-hyped medical crisis,” even when it had already killed hundreds of thousands in the United States alone. She told Tucker Carlson that the Biden administration was, under the “guise” of a medical emergency, using “emergency orders” to “strip us of our rights—rights to property, rights to assembly, rights to worship, all the rights the Constitution guarantees.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 108

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Klein’s Shock Doctrine concept from her earlier book, and directly to the reader’s key idea of diagonalism/convergence — this is the empirical seed of how the right reframed her analysis. — connects to: COVID restrictions were opposed by the right on economic-withdrawal grounds, not health ones. — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 146; Christian right leaders framed pandemic restrictions as unconstitutional fear-based tyranny. — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 147
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how a left analysis (shock doctrine) gets metabolized by the right into a conspiracy framework — the diagonal convergence that Klein names later.
• QUESTION: How did ‘emergency orders’ language become the shared coin of the right? Klein flags the mechanism but does it hold up across the vaccine-mandate cases specifically?