On white-supremacist COVID-eugenicist queers

In the original essay, COVID infection is portrayed as just another everyday risk, like falling down, having your heart broken, or catching mono. (How rom-com!)

By declaring COVID "part of life," the newsletter moves the crisis away from the realm of political abandonment and into the realm of personal fate, or bad luck.

This normalizes what was understood to be the crisis, mass exposure, by turning what could be understood as a political decision (to withdraw protection, to refuse regulatory standards, to privatize care) into a natural condition of existence.

By doing so, the newsletter does necropolitical pedagogy: teaching readers to accept living in a world that will kill them as maturity, realism… even liberation.

Necropolitics, a concept from Achille Mbembe(Mbembe 2019), looks at how power and systems of power decide who is exposed to death and under what conditions through the administration of what Mbembe calls "death-worlds:" spaces where life is systematically cheapened, where survival is contingent rather than supported. Unlike biopolitics, a concept from Michel Foucault, which organizes life through regulation and optimization, necropolitics governs through abandonment: letting some populations be continually exposed to premature death.

When the original newsletter narrates catching COVID as "rolling a 1 on the dice," it strips the disease of its politics and reframes it as chance. But that chance is structured, by workplaces without sick leave, schools without filters, public events without masking.

Necropolitics thrives in exactly this space: the shifting from political abandonment to natural risk, as readers are trained to stop seeing death as avoidable or systemic and start seeing it as inevitable.

But it isn't equally inevitable. Disabled, Indigenous, poor, immunocompromised folk like me are already allocated into the margins of society and life. When COVID infection becomes normalized, we're among the first groups to experience the consequences.

Thus, calling the infection neutral, from a position of white settlerism, is itself very unneutral: it's offering up bodies that aren't yours to death, for the sake of a story that lets the privileged feel more comfortable treating their choice to genocide others as rationalist inevitability.

The original newsletter explicitly reframes "harm reduction" as an individual practice: wear your own mask, negotiate with your own friends, but expecting a public body to negotiate is "white supremacist," and anything that looks like public action is "purity politics:" ventilation, mask norms, collective standards.

Notably there is no space in the original piece for the idea that these things could be decided upon and enacted, consensually, by a community: community does not actually have a way to exist, in the worldview of the original newsletter: any attempts to do things communally look too close to "white supremacist purity," to be understood any other way.

What's left in the haphazard web of possibilities is private optimization. The newsletter presents this as the only honest stance toward COVID: solidarity and collective care are dismissed as illusions of the early pandemic, a temporary "we keep each other safe" moment that is gone forever.

This is exactly what Elizabeth Povinelli explains in Economies of Abandonment (2011): how late liberal governance works not just through repression, but through withdrawing infrastructures of support. That is, intead of moving toward more comprehensive care toward more people, systems now distribute responsibility onto families, households, and individuals.

Crucially, this withdrawal is often narrated as freedom, choice, or gritty realism: people are taught, and teach themselves, to see abandonment as either inevitable, or an opportunity to demonstrate resilience and maturity.

Which is how all of this is framed in the original newslettter, through mechanisms that overlap with necropolitical movements: if anyone thinks that any of the values people were discussing at the start of the pandemic were anything but childish expressions of fear, they haven't developed the maturity that the original newsletter holds.

First, I don't value "maturity" as a good thing all on its own, and I'm usually suspicious of people who do. Kids are pretty great, and they have great ideas. But this isn't an essay (directly) about youth liberation.

So more importantly: what is so mature about calling people who believe in things like math and air filters "hysterical?" Because that's all that the newsletter really does here: say that wanting to use math and tools to solve problems is childish and hysterical, because the mature (manly) solution is to simply experience problems with a tough-guy attitude.

Sorry, I'm not trying to be flippant or mean here, but it's hard to seriously engage with a text that presents "white suburban Booomer dad living with cancer because real men don't go to the doctor" as some sort of liberatory brash white queerness without an ounce of self-reflection on how "white" might be the common factor here.

Anyway.

In the original newsletter, it is repeatedly stated that one-way masking with an N95 is "actually really good protection," and that this should be enough.

From this basis, the newsletter frames collective standards, like an event requiring masks, or designing spaces to accommodate their most vunerable members, as "white supremacist purity politics" and "surveillance."

In other words: you wear a mask, I won't wear mine, and no one can expect more.

But the contexts the newsletter points to as white supremacist surveillance… are often the sort of events hosted by communities, for themselves: not the sort of state-organized mandates that is often meant when people discuss white supremacy and surveillance in the same breath.

Robert Esposito's work on immunitas and communitas are a great frame for understanding what's going on here. In his work, Esposito contrasts communitas (the obligations and exposures that bind us together) with immunitas (the protections that exempt us from those obligations). In his framing, "immunization," is a political, not simply medical, mechanism: it names the way liberal modernity preserves the individual by suspending their responsibility to others.

By rebranding shared obligations as authoritarian or hysterical, the piece pathologizes communitas, leaving immunitas as the only possible route.

Immunitary reasoning sounds superficially liberatory - "you do you, I'll do me" - but it is profoundly eugenic in effect.

Those with the least access to immunitary tools (well-fitting masks, vaccines, post-exposure care) are forced to absorb the risks that others have refused to communally mitigate (air filters, accommodations).

In a necropolitical world already structured by racialized and ableist exposure, immunitarian privitazation serves to magnify inequality.

In practice - in reality, this means: approaches to COVID mitigation that choose immunitarian mechanisms over communitarian mechanisms are eugenicist and white supremacist.

By celebrating one-way masking as maturity, the newsletter teachs readers to treat choosing white supremacy as a personal achievement, and a milestone of maturity.

That's just really fucking gross, and I hope the similarity to that stereotypical Boomer-brained way of thinking is becoming apparent: celebrate racist closed-mindedness and misogynist abandonment as enlightened maturity.

In the next phase I'll look at how a young white queer can even feel good about believing all their neighbors should die. (Look, this many words in, I'm struggling to maintain a veil of courtesy. I had to take a day to be less pissed about this whole thing, and I'm still pretty pissed.)

In the original newsletter, risk is not just naturalized. It is praised and romanticized, and ultimately, formed into the distinction between what makes someone alive and dead, reinforcing the use of a necropolitical distinction.

The original newsletter says, "being alive involves mistakes," "live loudly," "take risks."

(As an aside, I have an essay I failed to release due to disability flare-ups from several months back that looks at how "quiet gays," will be the next facet of queerdom to be targeted for attack, and from within our own communities, and well… here we are.)

The newsletter portrays communities not communicating with themselves (about their own health standards) in favor of choosing the dominant immunitas as bravery, maturity, and joy.

In Cruel Optimism (2011), Lauren Berlant defines "cruel optimism," as an attachment to something that seems to promise flourishing, but actually undermines the conditions of life. Generally, optimism can be seen as a mechanism that mediates hope, habit, and identity, but when these relations harm, the optimism turns cruel.

And the original newsletter, at the least, does not deny that COVID can disable or kill…

…but those harms are romanticized as the necessary foundation of a full life. In doing so, it reframes abandonment as a necessary step in living fully, which is described as participation in the very forms of of life that are killing people.

And again, doing so quite unevenly: the optimism of a good life, as necropolitical immunitas, disproportionately harms non-white non-settler communities.

Elizabeth Povinelli gives us another frame here, with geontologies, which is a way that the dominant social order sorts things into Life (animate, vibrant, good) and Nonlife (inert, substance, material, bad).

Nancy Krieger's work in social epidemiology has demonstrated that health outcomes are shaped by embodiment: the way social powers (racism, poverty, labor conditions, environmental harm) is literally incorporated into bodies.

And Merrill Singer's work in medical anthropology gives us a frame for understanding COVID in this terms: not as a pandemic, but a syndemic: when multiple epidemics interact with and worsen each other. (i.e. COVID + asthma from environmental racism + lack of healthcare from classism).

Taken together, we can understand the original newsletter as reframing COVID as yet another part of the Nonlife that makes Life possible… for some, remembering necropolitics.

The newsletter universalizes risk: "Being alive involves mistakes. Nothing in life is zero risk." It compares COVID to everyday acccidents or infections anyone might get - ignoring the necropolitical bias of these "accidents" and infections, and instead indulges in a geontology that paints all of that as the structure we must endure to have Life.

Universalizing the risk of COVID, along with so many other non-universal risks, actively erases racial and other vulnerabilities. That the newsletter exemplifies the responses of non-white communities, while actively erasing the conditions of that responses, flattens us into a prop for its own white supremacy.

The original newsletter's representation of "harm reduction" is incredibly wrong and harmful. It suggests a litany of personal optimizations: wear your own masks, buy expensive testing equipment, negotiate your own risks, negotiate others lack of negotiation.

Dean Spade, in Mutual Aid, gives a pretty good explanation of how harm reduction and similar programs emerged from grassroots collectives, often focused on drug use and AIDs. These programs were built as communal infrastructure in resistance of state abandonment, not individuated copes designed to make abandonment feel good or survivable.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, in Care Work, does a good job explaining how disability justice requires planned collective infrastructures of care, not reactive ad hoc individual survivalism. Mia Mingus' theories on access intimacy can help express how COVID mitigations relate to this: collective infrastructure relies on a trust that others will anticipate and share in the labor of providing access to the collective infrastructure without constant renegotiation of right to access.

And Alison Kafer helps show how these conditions can be a healthier basis for less fascistic forms of hope than cruel optimism, by discussing disability politics as a reimagination of future through access and interdependence, not exclusion and abandonment.

Disability justice insists that access cannot depend on individualized negotiation: it must be built into infrastructure, policies, and norms.

But this is exactly what the original essay dismisses as purity politics, impossible, hysterical.

Instead, it suggests that "harm reduction" is to personally reduce the harm you experience, from a cruel optimism to consumerism as authentic living, by displacing it via necropolitical systems onto those already most marginalized, and use geontological thinking to make sure it feels good to abandon them.

So the original newsletter states repeatedly that it's not written by an expert in any of the fields its discussing. And then immediately begins to make the sorts of assertions and judgements that only an expert in the field can authoritatively make.

The newsletter pulls together a pseudo-bibliography that blends a couple studies with various forms of commercial content (journalism, social media, zines) into a collage that's used like a Magic Eye picture to generate a single, universal conclusion about risk.

It's a pretty sweeping conclusion from a pretty broad lack of analysis, and in the context of a relatively new Substack from someone who'd previously written non-analytical letters about their personal relationships, it's hard to accept without examining why the piece might exist in the first place.

(My first essay about COVID, COVID Broke America, was five years ago, and spoke directly on how social media platforms were accelerating the adoption of late liberal philosophies by white settlers.)

I think Vik Loveday's "neurotic academic" and Mari Lehto's "neurotic influencer" provide a useful way of looking at what a lot of going on with people's social media use, and I think a lot of this is most-amplified on Substack, for a mix of social and technical reasons that can be explored elsewhere.

Vik Loveday's "neurotic academic" looks at how, in neoliberal knowledge economies, the academic self is governed by anxiety and self-entrepreneurialism: they must constantly produce legible outputs, narrating their own competence, and take personal responsiblity for managing the precarity of their research. They're an anxiously productive authority performance, shaped by academic metrics and institutional expectations rather than disciplinary rigor.

And Lehto's "neurotic influencer" looks at how influencer labor is organized by "feeling rules," in which anxiety is both content and technique: an ambivalent, gendered performance that must appear transparent, caring, and literate to sustain credibility and engagement. This figure borrows academic cues (citations, caveates) to execute an affective performance of authority for followers and platforms.

(An aside: I am very aware that's what I do here and my personal website shares some research notes where I explore this in more freedom.)

The original newsletter perfectly performs the Loveday/Lehto neuroses: anxious transparency and audiencce reassurance take the form of a performed literacy that feels trustworthy, but without meeting the standards of "true" and "trust"in the fields in which it claims to exist.

I hope the rhyme between phenomena here is clear: look at how standards are rejected across contexts: air quality itself, and studying air quality. Look at how these standards are rejected using the same logic each time: if something threatens a means of attaching to optimism - a way of knowing that some thing in the present means some thing in the future - it is negated by saying the optimism is necessary for "real" participation in the "real" world, which is implicitly that world constructed by this neurotic complex of not-knowing-but-feeling.

Now, it's might be useful to explain how the newsletter fails to meet the criteria of a good analysis.

• Cherry-picking and overgeneralization:
  • Aerosol and viability studies done in narrow contexts are lifted into sweeping global claims like "lingering indoor risk is wrong" or "outdoors = clearly low risk."
  • Meanwhile, contradictory studies are dismissed as hysteria.
  • Good analysis would say the contradiction means there's no global conclusion
  • Instead, evidence that doesn't support the conclusion is dismissed.
  • That's the opposite of good analysis
• Conflating detectability, viability, and infectious doses:
  • Throughout the newsletter, it toggles between detectable, viable, and infectious, as if they were equivalent terms. They are not.
    • Even within aerosol chemistry, time-varying viability and dose-response depend on conditions that are not controlled in everyday venues (ventilation rates, occupancy, activity time, CO2 as proxy, filtration).
    • A filtered handful of studies does not eliminate the variability of environment or the legitimacy of a risk assessment that accepts that variability.
• Asymmetric uncertainty handling.
  • Any place the evidence is uncertain or mixed, the newsletter decides in favor of conevience. That's… simply directional bias; a softer form of the outright dismissal that occurred earlier.
    • Additionally, the dismissal is often reasoned based on white supremacist, including Sinophobic, reasoning.
• Category error about harm reduction:
  • Point estimates about relative risk are used to claim it is immoral for others to ask for things. A person can use science to guide their own decisions, but it doesn't guide the ethics of interpersonal communication.
  • Literally: people asking you things does not hurt you, even if you say science provides an answer to the thing they've asked.

What this performance does, politically, is police who counts as reasonable ("science-backed realists" like the author, who, I really can't emphasize enough, are not backed by the science), in a context where the author themselves cannot be policed by the standards of the things they are using to police others.

And having staged "science says," as some foundation for a civics lesson in good morals, the piece can speak with authority about COVID-cautious people, and encourages others in their judgement: cautious people are ignorant and immoral, not uncertain or experiencing different things.

This abuse of citation is something I named in Citing for Containment. The citations and studies aren't there to engage with the inquiry they're original a part of, or carry that inquiry into new spaces. Instead, they exist to process a decision that is already made into a form that can circulate as a commodity.

The original essay strings together a hodge-podge of sources, detached from their fields, their methods, and arranges them to build a feeling of depth, ("look! studies!"), to concludes: do what you want.

But… there's no disclosed analytical method, there's no systematic review: they just all happen to say exactly what the author claims they say. (The sources, in fact, do not all support the authors claims.)

There's no acknowledgement that COVID science is hetereogenous and evolving, and that COVID mitigation science is its own field, informed not just by virology and airflow, but actuarial and other risk sciences.

The function is effectively one of containment: readers are precluded from learning about alternatives, because a singular stance is presented as the expertly-, scientifically-determined answer.

This type of citation doesn't just miseducate: it trains readers to believe that answers are determinable, and once determined, immutable: once something is formatted as "proven," or "debunked," then engagement simply means accepting the conclusions provided.

This massively reshapes the horizon of political imagination. Instead of imagining air standards, readers learn to admire their own coping and dismiss community as unscientific at best, and "puritan hysteria," if they accept the newsletter in its own idiom. (Also, when did it become acceptable to call people, let alone constructed demographics, "hysterical," again? I remember that was seen as quite gauche just a few years ago…)

Anyway, to put it simply: The citations in the newsletter are not used in the reasoning, at all: the reasoning is simply, "nothing is zero risk, you do you, I do me." The citations are there to make accepting that feel good, to feel reasonable, to feel unassailable, regardless of how practically genocidal a statement it is.

And like I wrote in Governing by Confusion, power systems today don't simply dominate, but stabilize themselves, and one means they do this is by inducing confusion in the populations they manage.

One way this confusion is induced is by performing intellectualism. In the original newsletter, this intellectualism is framed around:

• a thesis, that COVID-cautious people are holding back people like the author
• an antithesis, that COVID-cautious people are hysterical purists
• and a sublation: fuck those people.

This antagonism doesn't resolve: it churns. Readers affirm, argue. Rebuttals and supports circulate. Substack pushes notifications, algorithms amplify the debate. I'm part of that now, and that's part of why I'm so pissed: something that is a real physical illness in the real physical is showing up shoved in my face as affective dogmatic slop, and I'm supposed to believe that I'm the over-focused puritanical supremacist?

And this churn itself does a lot of the governance that the original newsletter says is being made impossible by other people: by keeping publics confused, interpreting and re-interpreting risk discourse, systemic abandonment continues.

And so, by calling others puritanical and white supremacist, the original newsletter effectively mandates one pure stance toward COVID and risk, that is materially white supremacist.

My most recent newsletter is on fascist grammars and (post)liberal vocabularies, and I… am truly saddened that its six-step narrative of fascist rhetorical logic is so applicable here.

In that essay, I outline the movements of two speeches by two white supremacists as:

• Declare crisis
  • Here, the original newsletter, the crisis isn't COVID, or state abandonment, but white COVID-cautious queers policing everyone else into their purity politics.
    • An existential problem for our species is… a culture war?
• Name a pure community
  • The author and the readers who agree with them are reasonable "grown-ups," the community that understand "life is risk" and embrace "harm reduction" "honestly".
• Denounce the enemy as sterile
  • Meanwhile, cautious queers, particularly white ones, are irrational, delusional, clinging to "false binaries" and "mystical cocoons."
  • The original newsletter's portrayal of these people as decadent is stunningly in-line with white nationalist rhetoric, where here the nation is "grown-up white queers."
• Reframe suffering as sacrifice
  • The author grieves their COVID infection as personal bad luck rather than systemic abandonment, a sacrifice they risked, bravely, to pursue their destiny:
• Promise destiny
  • A future that belongs to those who "live loudly, brightly, and take risks."
• Assert inevitability
  • "Nothing in life is zero risk," and "we're not going back."
  • The superficially "science-based," "rational," "realist," analysis that takes up most of the text isn't used
  • Instead, it's conclusions are pointed to as a pre-determined natural law, a further corruption of the scientific method of handling evidence that the newsletter performs.

The original newsletter recodes the grammar of white nationalism into a queer-progressive idiom, the way Goebbels did it into a Nazi idiom, the way Miller did it into a postliberal idiom, and in doing so, speaks white nationalism into queer progressive being. Miller says, "we are the storm," the original newsletter says, "We are the risk." Infection, mass disabling, eugenics: these are not crises to be dealt with, or conditions to be solved, but a destiny to be embraced.

The repetition of inevitability closes the horizon of politics into the narrow lane of individual relationship with that horizon, and the original newsletter says there is exactly one way to have a good relationship with that horizon: abandon everything for it.

This inevitability doesn't just normalize abandonment: it creates a foundation where desiring otherwise is pathological.

It fuses necropolitical pedagogy with neurotic influencer affective relief: once inevitability is accepted, readers can join the community of cruel optimists in coping with risk by abandoning others as the true essence of life.

By presenting it in a queer-progressive idiom, and placing the text in a social media network, the essay launders fascistic inevitability across populations of readers who would otherwise be more equipped to see and reject that logic.

And the result is chilling. The very communities who once built real harm reduction are teaching themselves to adopt logics and grammars structurally equivalent to those that abandoned them, and trying to use those tools to solve the abandonment in new forms.

But this cannot work: to not abandon, you must not abandon. Simple as.