Videographer Matt Orfalea (who formerly worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign) creates mashup using ONLY video clips and statements published by corporate news outlets. Orf's video illustrates that the COVID narrative kept changing dishonestly, by silently moving the goalposts, rather than by acknowledging that the previous narrative was untrue. Google/Youtube Response: This video is not "suitable." It must be demonetized.
Let's experiment: For one year, news stories will not mention anything about the demographics of the people they describe. E.g., "Last night, a person hit another person on the head, unprovoked." Those immersed in identity politics will be confused and angered by these stories.
Maria Popova, writing at The Marginalian:
The hardest thing in life isn’t getting what we want, isn’t even knowing what we want, but knowing what to want. We think we want connection, but as soon as contact reaches deeper than the skin of being, we recoil with the terror of vulnerability. There is no place more difficult to show up than where marrow meets marrow. And yet that is the only place where two people earn the right to use the word “love.” Our avoidance of that terrifying, transcendent place holds up a mirror to our most fundamental beliefs about life and love, about what we deserve and what we are capable of, about reality and the landscape of the possible.
Matt Orfalea takes us back to March 2020:
Across the media landscape, the already hyperbolic phrase was often cut short to “Nobody is safe.”“Nobody is safe.” - Chris Cuomo, CNN (10/23/20)
“Nobody is safe.” - Rob Scmitt, Fox News (3/30/20)
“This virus is raging everywhere and no one is safe” - Senator Bob Casey, CNN (11/20/20)
By August 2021, NPR’s Tamara Keith told CBS News that the phrase had “almost become cliche”.
While the world was told “Nobody is safe from COVID-19” the actual infection fatality rate (IFR) was less than 0.5%. In other words, the natural immune systems of approximately 99.5% would defeat the original Alpha COVID variant without a vaccine. For children, the risk of dying is 0.0%. But the constant “Nobody is safe” mantras led citizens to believe the virus was more deadly than it actually was, spreading a man-made pandemic: a hyperpolarizing pandemic of fear.
Writing at Journal of Free Black Thought, Amir Zaki is more than ready to dispense with the destructive idea of "race."
In 2023, It appears painfully evident that the concept of different and distinct races is a myth. From a biological perspective, this is nearly indisputable. Yet, legends die hard. In the United States, perhaps more pathologically than most other places on earth, people seem to hold onto this race myth as if their lives depended on it, as both oppressors and victims. The topic takes up an incredible amount of bandwidth in the media. Statistics show this trend has, ironically, been increasing despite the world's ethnic populations and cultures rapidly mixing with one another. This can be partially explained by America’s unique and tarnished past, exceptionalism, and isolation/provincialism. It can also be partially explained simply by habit. We made this bed. And we’ve been sleeping restlessly in it for centuries now.
Participation in race-based language may have some utility because it’s easy to go along with social conventions, but it is ultimately short-sighted, and I argue that we have to rip off the bandaid sooner or later, and I prefer yesterday. The reification and constant reinvention of the concept of race is deeply regressive and keeps everyone in an endless, discriminatory, divisive loop. As Carlos Hoyt, Jr. beautifully puts it, “For some of us, this false logic justifies discrimination and violence. For some of us, it leads us to try the best we can to bring about some sort of state of separate but equal state of racial equality. But we can’t. Race is predicated on separation. Separations that aren’t equal. Separate and unequal is the essential logic of race.”
The concept of separate and distinct races, as we currently understand it, is somewhere around 400 years old, which counts for roughly 0.1% of our human history on Earth. For comparison, the belief in witches lasted roughly 300 years and seems utterly absurd to almost everyone now . . .
My view is that all parties trafficking in race are serving to maintain the status quo, which will always be inequitable, divisive, and exclusionary, especially toward those who don’t fit into any racial categories. Proof that these strategies are failing can be observed easily by looking at the toxic relationships between racialized groups as expressed by the loudest and most powerful voices on social media. We have a billion-dollar anti-racist movement with an invisible enemy. This is a recipe for an endless battle.