The COVID "New Normal" Is A Progressive Power-Grab

Just one example--you can find any number of these. COVID, you see, is not a passing crisis...oh no! Never let a good crisis go to waste...and that now means: reuse and recycle it (by by no means reduce it!) The COVID SUPER-DUPER WORLD-ENDING CRISIS, it has been declared, will go on forever...AND it means that we must adopt the entire left-wing / globalist wish list of re-engineerings of society. Progressive sex/"gender" preferences, socialized medicine, globalization, intersectionality...even nuclear disarmament, somehow. Anyone who actually cared about COVID and the future would not use it as a political stalking-horse.

   Well, that's actually not quite right. One of the biggest problems is that progressives and progressive-controlled institutions sort of actually believe this stuff. Conservatives often say that, at root, the left just loves power, and loves controlling people's lives. The leading edge does love those things...but I think they're mostly secondary. As Orwell indicates, part of the problem is doublethink--extremists (especially leftist ones) don't have a very high wall between political preferences and beliefs. Their beliefs about the facts and their political commitments become mooshed together into a kind of epistemic/political stew. 

   And: as is so often the case, though this happens on the right as well, it's so central to leftism that it is elevated to principle: the personal is political, everything is political, objectivity is impossible, everything reduces to political power...  Conservatives and (actual) liberals slide into such bullshit often enough...but they don't elevate it to a principle. Thus you can still reason with them--still leverage their cognitive dissonance against them. They haven't come completely unmoored from facts and logic.