The people Avi and I were meeting at the extreme end of this spectrum didn't seem to deny Covid outright. Rather, they cast the virus as a kind of cleansing, or "culling of the herd," with some mixing in ecofascist beliefs and imagining the pandemic as a means by which the natural world would be rehabilitated from human stresses. This line of thought was rampant in the early days of lockdowns, when THE EARTH IS HEALING and WE ARE THE VIRUS memes overran the internet, along with videos (plenty of them faked) of wild animals taking back our ghostly cities and towns. But now the embrace of a certain amount of human death was becoming more overt, and explicitly linked to opposing the vaccines. At around this time, Rob Schmitt, a former Fox News host who moved over to Newsmax, mused on air, "I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature. Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there—maybe there's just an ebb and flow to life where something's supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that's just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that."

DEFINE: Clarifies the ecofascist belief that aligns pandemic deaths with natural selection/evolution, treating vaccination as interfering with that process.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 555