"It didn’t come with jackboots. It came with brunch, a fresh haircut, and a shrug: ‘I’m over it.’"
COVID-19 has not just shaped the political landscape — it is driving it. What if the virus is not just background noise in the return to normal, but the fuel in fascism’s engine?
COVID is the mechanism, medium, and metaphor for fascism’s rise, and we ignore it at our peril.
1. Asymptomatic Transmission: The Architecture of Denial
COVID is uniquely contagious because of its asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread. A virus that moves invisibly — with peak infectiousness before symptoms appear — creates a perfect environment for authoritarian denialism.
People carry the virus before they know it. They feel fine. They go to work. They post selfies. They say:
“It’s just a cold.”
“We can’t live in fear.”
“We have to move on.”
Fascism spreads the same way.
It doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It travels through influencers, coworkers, family dinners, and algorithmic feeds. It doesn’t declare “I am fascist!” — it whispers:
“You’re being too sensitive.”
“Maybe we need stronger leadership.”
“Those people aren’t pulling their weight.”
Like COVID, fascism is most contagious before you realize what’s happening — and by the time the symptoms show, it's already embedded in the culture.
2. Neuro-COVID: Priming the Mind for Control
SARS-CoV-2 causes neurological disruption — inflammation, brain fog, emotional dysregulation, fatigue. These effects can impair memory, attention, and critical thinking.
But what’s more dangerous is what this fog of war makes possible.
Infection doesn’t just make people sick — it makes them susceptible and vulnerable.
To easy answers. To strongmen. To scapegoats.
COVID primes society to accept authoritarian logic. It damages the parts of the brain that govern impulse control and complex reasoning, and it does so at scale. In a population where cognitive function is subtly impaired, the appeal of fascist messaging — clear, forceful, simple — increases.
This is not to say people are to blame for being infected. Rather, it's to recognize that repeated infections may neurologically condition populations to surrender discernment. It’s hard to think critically when you’re constantly tired, anxious, or confused.
And fascists thrive in that confusion.
3. Fascism as a COVID Management Strategy
To rule through COVID is to rule through eugenics.
This is not just indifference — it’s selection by policy. A quiet purification of the population under the guise of economic necessity and personal responsibility.
COVID becomes the tool by which states decide who is expendable and who gets access to clean air, rest, care, and survival. This is biopower weaponized — not with camps or commands, but with ventilation budgets, sick leave policies, and public messaging that erases risk.
4. AI and the Infrastructure of Forgetting
Artificial intelligence plays a silent but central role.
COVID taught the public to accept:
Now AI is being used to automate that logic — to quantify productivity, enforce compliance, and standardize normalcy. It quietly classifies who is fit and who is not, who is essential and who is excess.
These systems don’t challenge fascism. They normalize it, encoding it into dashboards and predictive scores.
The techno-political infrastructure being built today is not neutral — it is trained on a pandemic response that values the economy over the body, and denial over disability.
5. The Pandemic Is the Policy
Letting COVID rip is not a failure of governance — it is governance.
It creates:
And in that vacuum, fascism blooms — not because it has to fight for power, but because power has abandoned all alternatives.
This is why fighting fascism means fighting COVID. Not with slogans, but with systems:
Masking in public spaces
Air purification as a public utility
Sick leave and disability support as democratic infrastructure
Collective refusal to “move on” when the crisis hasn’t ended
6. COVID as a Carcinogen
COVID may not just disable or disrupt — it may plant seeds for future catastrophe.
Emerging science shows:
The virus disrupts DNA repair pathways
It reactivates latent oncogenic viruses like EBV
It causes persistent inflammation, a known cancer driver
It impairs tumor-suppressor genes
This means today’s mass infections may become tomorrow’s cancer epidemic.
We are breathing in a risk we barely understand. And those in power are choosing not to find out — because knowledge would mean accountability. Denial, on the other hand, means profit.
Fascism Is a Fever
The defining feature of this moment isn’t authoritarianism with a loudspeaker — it’s a quiet, chronic erosion, enabled by a virus we’ve been told to forget.
COVID is not just a health issue. It is the medium of control, the justification for abandonment, and the biological basis for a new hierarchy.
The fascists have figured this out. Have we?
Because if we’re serious about fighting fascism, we can’t just argue or organize. We have to mask up, filter air, support the sick, and confront the systems that chose to profit off our breath.
COVID is airborne. So is fascism.
So is the resistance.
