Thread by @jacobtwop

Trouble is we thought vaccination was about sovereignty when really the metaphor is POVERTY. That's how the antivax think about Covid: Like poverty it's something that will happen to you if you are 1) unlucky or 2) of low character - that it's mostly something that happens to POC

And just like the poor hate the poor, they hate the people who "have Covid," which is POC. It's just that they're used to hating them, so we don't think about it.
white supremacy is a huge part of antivax for this reason - white people with covid are the aberration, not the rule

The numbers don't bear it out, of course, but they never do. An antivaxxer with Covid is like a temporarily embarrassed millionaire -- that's why they don't want it on the death certificate or in the paper. Because they failed to uphold white supremacy by getting the illness.

So we can file antivax under the same pathology that brought you "white Republicans vote against their financial interest because hurting Black people is more important to them" and "West Virginia Senator blocks crucial bills that would save the poorest in his state"

We're so used to seeing conservatives treat poverty like a disease but somehow we missed them treating this disease the same way they treat poverty. A big enough difference with enough sequelae that it's worth recentering the whole conversation, in my opinion.

(And why I seemed to go lawful evil this morning -- because instead of explaining all this I jumped right past even saying "let's abuse the shit out of them" and got right to the abuse. But it's honestly what I believe.)

This is also why Libertarians/edgelord South Park Republicans like Nate Silver are coming down on this in such a weird way -- that people are "too worried" about Covid -- because "people" in this case isn't "humans" but a specific KIND of human, who is above all that business.

When you see an unmasked person, or a person half-assing it like their nose is sticking out, then, what they are saying is: "I'm not part of that tribe that gets Covid; I am doing the bare minimum but don't mistake me for a poor person who fears getting a POC disease"

It comes with such a heaping helping of toxic masculinity that we thought that's what it was about -- and of course it partly is -- but where the men act out at CostCo, the women are doing it at school board meetings. Either way, same intent: A proud recitation of white supremacy

expressed in a tantrum because they don't feel heard, which is to say they don't feel believed - because they do know the whole thing is a playacted narrative that has nothing to do with the very real, dangerous facts on the ground & everything to do with defining oneself.