What a time to be alive. The libertarian right is suddenly rediscovering their balls after years of watching the GOPs steady entrenchment of presidential power under Trump. And their memes are here to tell you tyranny is upon us!

Perhaps youve seen some of these floating around your social media newsfeed, or at least seen a version of them. You may ask, how do I know these are specifically libertarian memes? Well, like all memes, ownership is fluid but I will say I did take them from popular posts in libertarian Facebook groups and Reddit. Even if the creators were not libertarian themselves (perhaps Russian?), the audiences sure ended up being so.

There are far too many memes to repudiate comprehensively, let alone in a Medium post, but I thought Id grab a few recurrent ones Ive seen. When given even a dash of scrutiny, the memes find themselves collapsing faster than Trumps poll numbers.

The I dont know what quarantine means meme

Americas school system has failed again! This meme doesnt know what quarantine means, and for some reason the creator didnt bother to Google the dictionary definition. Quarantine is not just about sick people its also about exposed people. Because COVID-19 is so virulent (with an r-nought of perhaps up to 5.7, meaning its super spreadable) and also often asymptomatic, we 1). have to assume its been spread a lot more than it has been and 2). a lot of people have it and we dont know it.

Hence the widespread measures that look like quarantines the public health strategy assumes that a lot of people have been exposed, and its so many that there is no viable neighborhood by neighborhood strategy, let alone an individual by individual one.

The meme also just totally ignores modern quarantine practices: immigrants and cargo crews coming into the United States are routinely quarantined if its believed they may have been exposed to some kind of infectious disease; often, the threshold is as simple as Been anywhere near Ebola lately? Many of them are healthy. Most of all, this has been standard practice since the word quarantine was invented in the 14th or 15th century.

At its core, quarantine is about individual rights the rights of millions of people not to get sick and die. The exchange is the temporary suspension of movement for others. And thats the real problem here: its not just that the meme doesnt understand quarantine, its that its arguing that the temporary interruption of daily life for some is pure tyranny. My God, what if I cant visit the Olive Garden for unlimited breadsticks for a few months?

The I want to bring back gilded age depressions meme

Woof here! This meme suggests that businesses affected by COVID-19 lockdowns should be slaughtered like the sickened wild hogs they are. There are a few libertarian fetishes tickled by this meme: hunting, blood, and disproportionate punishment for personal failure. In the 21st century, the only ones who survive should be the ones who trick their fellow citizens into purchasing artificially scarce goods and services.

Of course, this memes underlying principles are based on an often fatal combination of myth and fantasy. The myth is that businesses are entirely responsible for their own success and not part of an interconnected economic and political system in which even good ideas do not immediately achieve success. The fantasy is that adopting Darwinian capitalism would somehow be a better world, and not revert the U.S. back into the late 19th centurys murderous cycle of booms and depressions rather than Americas current cycle of booms and recessions.

The I dont understand how laws work meme

Ah yes, proof positive that we are but on the cusp of totalitarianism. Apparently, this really did happen but the meme is still stupid. According to reports, the man was part of a group told to disperse; everyone else did, but because this guy is probably a dick, he refused to. So he was arrested.

And yet this libertarian meme makes it out as if this is 1). widespread and 2). not reasonable. First of all, we dont have any evidence that police across the nation are arresting thousands of people for lockdown violations, and the arrests that are happening are resulting in fines, not concentration camps. Its like the memes creator thinks that Hitlers rise to power was paved with traffic tickets.

So to answer the memes question, yes, its about a virus, because law enforcement had a non-compliant individual violating a reasonable anti-pandemic order multiple times and had no choice but to end social distancing to ensure the order still had any meaning. Pretty sure tanks didnt roll out the next day in LA.

The Im really bad at history one

Heres the problem with historical comparisons: they most often tell you how things are not repeating themselves. You can do the broad strokes things (Rome got so corrupt it fell apart, so corruption is bad), but when you get into specific policies, let alone your news of the day, youre gonna end up looking dumb.

The idea behind this meme is that the tyranny of the British in 1776 is somehow the same as the tyranny of public health officials in 2020. But boy does that ignore a lot of history including all the times public health officials used to quarantine our asses before vaccines were invented for pandemics like measles, polio, and the Spanish flu. Somehow that all gets ignored, in addition to the very big fact that the American Revolution wasnt even remotely fought over Britains right to impose quarantines during pandemics.

Instead, this is just lazy libertarian ahistorical math: one tyranny is the same as all the others. It says something foolish and wrong, and contributes nothing to the public debate happening over how the U.S. should approach COVID-19.

That surely wont stop more from coming, though. The best we can do is lambast them.

See the rest here:

The insipid libertarian memes of COVID-19 - Ryan Bohl - Elemental