Science Is Real Propaganda

There’s a lawn sign that I see on my regular walks through the rural outskirts of our little town here in Virtuous Vermont:

A Nice Person could hardly dare to disagree with any of the noble sentiments expressed so eloquently on this sign. I must not be a very nice person, therefore, because I now see parts of this sign as a reality-denying virtue signal. In particular, the slogans “SCIENCE IS REAL” and “KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING” were certainly belied by the actions of ordinary lawn-sign-owning Good Citizens over the last three-plus years.

SCIENCE IS REAL: What does this mean, exactly? Science used to be thought of as a method for learning about and understanding the nature of reality. As such, the theories and explanations it created were always subject to challenge, skepticism, revision, and replacement. But I’m pretty sure the SCIENCE represented on this lawn sign is what I like to refer to sarcastically as The Science™: an authoritative-sounding but fraudulent set of dogmatic statements crafted as propaganda in the service of government control. This is the fact-free Science™ that told us that natural immunity wasn’t real; that a cloth mask could stop an aerosol-borne respiratory virus; that SARS-CoV-2 was so deadly that we had to stay locked up in our homes and stand six feet apart from other people; that the only thing that could save us was an experimental mRNA drug that had never before been used successfully on humans, that had no long-term safety data, and that was never tested to see whether it could stop transmission. This is The Science™ that could tolerate no dissent, no challenges, and no revision. The popular slogan, Trust the Science™, was a command and an implicit threat to skeptics and the non-compliant dissenters.

KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING: I’d be willing to bet that the Nice People displaying this lawn sign forgot about this particular slogan when they were told by politicians and health officials like Dr. Fauci to not allow non-compliant family members and friends into their homes. They took to Twitter and Facebook to repeat the idea that this was a “Scamdemic of the Unvaccinated”, that the unvaccinated were the problem, that the unvaccinated were anti-science right-wing conspiracy-theorizing murderers who should be locked out of normal society. Thus the KINDNESS represented by this sign probably means KINDNESS ONLY TO THOSE WHO ARE COMPLIANT LIKE US.

The insanity of the last three years, exemplified by lawn signs like this, is the reason why I no longer want to be a part of “normal” society. Besides, “normal” society doesn’t want me anyway. I’m still shut out of venues that I used to pay good money to enter. I regularly hear friends of friends (who don’t know I’m a non-compliant granny killer) talking about how much they distrust and shun the unvaccinated. My mother refuses to hug me now. My circle of real-life close friends is now small enough to be counted on one hand, with my thumb left over for other purposes.

But all this is not such a bad thing in the long run. The scamdemic opened my eyes even wider to Reality. The world has turned upside down, so that my supposed allies turned out to be my enemies, and vice versa. However, I realize that “enemy” is perhaps too strong word here. To keep from going over too far into the nihilist camp, I have to tell myself that my former best friend who called me a murderer and a conspiracy theorist isn’t really my enemy: she was brainwashed by ubiquitous propaganda, as were the people displaying the lawn sign above.