A surveillance state with a MAHA movement.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
The rocky start of America’s 21st century has been bookended, so far, by two major crises and their fallout: the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the COVID-19 pandemic nearly two decades later. Both caused major upheavals that have continued to wreak political and societal havoc long after most would consider the moment of crisis to have passed. And both have taught us invaluable, if distressing, lessons about who we are.
After 2,977 people died on 9/11, the government completely revamped society in the direction of more surveillance and less freedom — toward which it, admittedly, already wanted to go — in a purported bid to be more secure from terrorism.
What were supposed to be temporary measures continue to this day. Significantly, leading Senate Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had campaigned on repealing the Patriot Act, which embodied that bid, then in 2006 as senators voted to extend it. As president, Obama signed an additional extension of the Patriot Act. Republicans enacting something controversial, then Democrats failing to undo it, or in fact supporting it, is exactly how the Overton Window was opened to the surveillance-state dystopia we’re now living in.
Since the pandemic started in 2020, over a million Americans have died from COVID-19 and, in response, our government has taken and continues to take steps that actually make us more (not less) vulnerable to disease. A comparable response to 9/11 might have been setting up terrorist training camps at some of our major universities.
The Post-COVID Shrug
When I recently read an analysis that Universal Health Care would be cheaper than the existing managed-care hodgepodge, and save approximately 70,000 lives a year, I asked myself why anybody now in power would even care.
They already allowed several hundred thousand of those million-plus COVID-stricken people to die unnecessarily, and there was no revolution, no uprising, not even a hint of accountability (one can only wonder whether there would have been more blowback if COVID had not disproportionately impacted non-white Americans and the forgotten old). In fact, the president whose administration had piled malfeasance upon cynicism upon cruelty upon incompetence — with one of the world’s worst responses to the worst pandemic in a century — was reelected to power just four years later.
So when Elon Musk says empathy is a weakness, at least politically he’s correct. The side campaigning on empathy — and decency and inclusion — went down to a crushing defeat in 2024, while the side peddling resentment, contempt, and cruelty somehow won.
But sadly, while Donald Trump’s vicious war on public health is perfectly symbolized by putting the anti-vaxxer-in-chief in charge of vaccines, this is not a Republican-only problem.
When the incidence of new COVID cases proved to be persistent, the Biden administration eventually followed the Trump playbook and decided testing and reporting were the problem. After all, if you don’t test and report the numbers, who can really say whether someone has died of COVID? Those tens of thousands of mysterious excess deaths, even after the pandemic was considered to be over, well, those could be due to anything, right?
But the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to track and record deaths in the US from COVID — from 963 to 3,900 monthly in 2025. So, while the US turns a blind eye to these ongoing deaths, to the WHO at least they are not so mysterious.
The UK — which, at the time, had in Boris Johnson their own version of Trump, an incompetent right-wing populist with almost no interest in actual governance — also fumbled and bobbled its way through the pandemic, despite plenty of warning as the virus made its way through Italy before really clobbering the UK. Unlike the US, though, the British government has led a multiyear COVID inquiry, dug through government records, required politicians to testify, and attempted to understand (with the hope of fixing) the problems that led to the unnecessary deaths in their country.
The US, often stubborn in its unwillingness to learn from the past, has had no such governmental inquiry. No one wants to look back. And to be fair, there is little demand from American voters to look back. It is not for nothing that Gore Vidal called this country the United States of Amnesia. And when George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” he might well have added a parenthetical “looking at you, America.”
COVID’s Role in the Turn Against Public Health
Our political and cultural response to COVID might serve as Exhibit A. No one in the US — neither the left nor the right — has really pressed for more COVID protection. Even more egregiously — indeed unfathomably — vaccines in general have become significantly less popular.
Not that there aren’t some good reasons to be frustrated with the medical establishment or angry at Big Pharma, but if RFK Jr. is fighting for anyone’s health, he’s certainly going about it in a perverse way.
In fact, quite a few voters cited RFK Jr. as the reason for their vote for Trump; they felt Kennedy was fighting for their health.
Not that there aren’t some good reasons to be frustrated with the medical establishment or angry at Big Pharma, but if Kennedy is fighting for anyone’s health, he’s certainly going about it in a perverse way.
A personal fount of misinformation and baseless, conspiratorial claims, Kennedy recently axed three-quarters of a billion dollars previously committed to developing a vaccine against bird flu, and just broke a promise made to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) to secure his Senate confirmation by ousting the entire 17-member CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the panel of experts that has long served to assess vaccine safety and efficacy.
And among his early “achievements,” Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a supposedly groundbreaking report on children’s health that is riddled with false citations and dubious conclusions, and appears to have relied on a bunch of unvetted AI searches for its sourcing.
Say what you will about the scientific and medical establishments, but such shoddiness and deception is not, as a matter of course, tolerated in either.
Trump’s Burn-It-Down Crusade
More generally, the Biden administration — for all of the flaws in its approach to public health — can’t come close to matching the malevolent glee of the second Trump administration as it burns down to the ground the very concept of public health.
Trump’s anti-science crusaders have replaced boffins with buffoons at every turn and made the government website a clearinghouse of COVID conspiracy theories. Some of the theories vilify Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was the head of the CDC during Trump’s first term. Then there’s the page — shockingly fronted by a studiously heroic portrait of a striding President Trump you have to see to believe — that presents the dubious Lab Leak Hypothesis for the origin of COVID as fact: “THE TRUE ORIGINS OF COVID-19.”
But both facts and logic have become irrelevant with the advent of Trump 2.0. It is confounding why such a large segment of the public supports anti–public health measures, but that’s nonetheless where we are. We might look to the fact that the lockdowns impacted people’s daily lives, and that such an impact is much more tangible than something abstract like a virus. When people experience something so potentially devastating that they can’t control, there’s a tendency among many to flock to the kind of wellness delusion RFK Jr. is selling — that they can avoid disease through diet, exercise, and snake oil alone.
But alternative and complementary health care have long coexisted in the US with a functional and essential public-health infrastructure and policy. Trump and Kennedy and the MAHA (“Make America Healthy Again”) movement have wrenched this comparatively peaceful coexistence into a zero-sum game in which the goal seems to be to undermine Americans’ trust in and support for not just vaccination but the entire public-health concept.
It’s all pretty rich: While Kennedy rails about the dangers of toxins, the Trump administration proceeds to deregulate the industries that spew those toxins into our soil, air, and water supply. While Kennedy pumps iron and drinks blue water — methylene blue dye being one of several recently popular ivermectin-class curealls — MAGA takes aim at Medicaid and Medicare, both on the chopping block of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
Perhaps with diet, exercise, and MAHA miracle supplements, folks won’t need Medicaid or Medicare or have to worry about industrial toxins — though the wealthy will of course still have concierge care to fall back on if MAHA doesn’t keep them in the pink.
While MAHA, like most aggressively marketed magic elixirs, has made a big splash — what’s not to like about taking control of your health? — there’s evidence that it is already, like Elon Musk in the White House, wearing thin with Americans who have begun to take a harder look at what Kennedy and his movement are actually selling.
We have learned better, however, than to expect unpopularity to get in the way of this administration’s crusades, as it would in a functional democracy. Does it even make sense to discuss ordinary democratic politics with its ordinary political incentives during an administration that has gone from flirting with fascism to heavy petting?
The 9/11 terrorist attacks arguably set us on the road to authoritarianism, but I’d argue it was the lessons learned from COVID — how politically driven mass negligent homicide, and various other scams and crimes against one’s own public, would be greeted with a yawn and shrug — that pushed us across the finish line.
The grim reality is that we are changed. We are a society whose leadership, in the manner of dictatorial regimes in places like Russia and North Korea where life has little value, will gladly expend human capital — ruin or end millions of lives with no justification.
Because dictators don’t have to worry about being voted out. They need only worry about assassinations and revolutions, not democratic elections.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks arguably set us on the road to authoritarianism, but I’d argue it was the lessons learned from COVID — how politically driven mass negligent homicide, and various other scams and crimes against one’s own public, would be greeted with a yawn and shrug — that pushed us across the finish line.
If it’s not yet clear to one and all: Yes, we’ve now joined the bad guys of the world — our true nature, ironically, unmasked by COVID. Should the US wish to resume leadership of the free world at some point, and not be on the same side as the worst oligarchs and dictators, it would need to stop being a country that turns a blind eye to its hundreds of residents dying easily preventable deaths every week.
Last week, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told an Iowa town hall audience, in response to a constituent’s voiced concern (“People will die”) about Medicaid cuts, “Well, we’re all going to die.” I suppose to a truly religious person, the afterlife is all that matters. But Joni Ernst is a senator, not a priest, and it is concerning that she sees no great value in preserving the lives of her constituents.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t make her an outlier among her fellow Republicans, just more willing to admit it.
Doug Ecks is a lawyer and writer. He holds a JD from the University of California, Hastings and a BA in philosophy from California State University, Long Beach, Phi Beta Kappa. He also writes and performs comedy as Doug X.
