Among the “Mask Police:” Why Expert-Elites Call Sick and Disabled People “Cops.”
Some Covid-cautious experts are not just unmasking for photos, but also showing us their teeth.
I am among “the mask police”—by which I mean, this is what a prominent scientist and advocate for Covid mitigations (including masking) called the largely disabled and chronically ill people criticizing him on Twitter (myself included) about posting an unmasked photo of himself in public.
Without some more context, this might seem relatively innocuous. This prominent scientist actually posted the unmasked photo in a show of solidarity with a well-known physician and fierce masking advocate who was coming under fire for an unmasked photo themselves. This physician was being scrutinized specifically for the very same reasons she felt her actions were justified: she was having her photograph taken with a prestigious political figure. Instead of seizing the opportunity to display the importance of masking in a very public situation, she deferred to the norms of the ruling class—including the norm (smiles over masks) she had spent the last two-plus years advocating against.1
This isn’t worth discussing because these incidences are so outrages, but because although the rhetoric is reactionary, the sentiment is representative I believe, at least to a degree—with some exceptions—of those few elite-experts who have been filling the void left by Public Health when it comes to providing information about the true harms of COVID-19—most of whom are also proponents (or claim to be) of masking in public settings. Even when they have profound disagreements (supposedly) about such consequential subjects as genocide, you can count on them to throw sick and disabled people under the bus in order to protect those of similar privilege and prestige. And the rhetorical comeback of calling us “cops” is, along with being offensive, quite indicative of this.
Only someone who does not think critically about the function of police under capitalism would use the word “police” or “cops” for sick and disabled people (particularly those who form the surplus class) who aside from having zero State power behind us, suffer the State-policing of “proving” we are deserving of meager disability “benefits” and are more likely to be victims of police brutality, especially if also a racialized person.
Calling such people “cops” is both asinine and telling of how little interaction, as upper middle-class property owners, such expert-elites tend to have with cops (unless to report a crime against them or, more often, their property): in truth, the expert-elites, calling us cops, are the ones who need the police and however unfashionable it is for them to say so, in fact, love the police because they love their privilege, and preserving class hierarchy is what cops do. And what expert-elites love most about said privilege is the power and authority it gives them. And this, fellow sick and disabled plebs, is our crime: questioning their authorial positioning above us.
Being called ‘a cop’ by a person of such class privilege caused me to reflect on a depressing reality of the situation many disabled and sick people find themselves in—over four years since the pandemic began; however much we can gain from the knowledge and advocacy of Covid Cautious elite-experts, the majority are not our comrades or even allies. However, much they claim to care about the chronically sick and disabled, they often will, as many on “covid twitter” can attest, block you from their account if you criticize them. Though they have presented their accounts as providing vital health information in the public interest, it will, in the face of criticism, become a private account. They will, in other words, deprive you of their expertise as punishment for stepping out of line. But we’re the cops.
In a way, I am glad that some Covid cautious experts are not just unmasking for photos, but also showing us their teeth—for it’s best to shed any illusions we might have about them. The height of their stature is only matched by the extent that we are, ultimately, on our own—and can only count on each other.
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Notably, this person had already lost credibility within the progressive wing, we could call it, of the Covid-Cautious community, because of her hardline Zionism, which the ruling class is, of course, in support of.