Christian Parenti

In this episode, Christian Parenti, professor of economics at John Jay College (CUNY), discusses his recent article “How the Organized Left Got COVID Wrong, Learned to Love Lockdowns and Lost Its Mind: An Autopsy” elaborating on the power of the pharmaceutical industry that has dominated media discourse surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic along with the medical industry’s fixation on vaccines over treatment. Analysing how Covid became politicised by both parties in the US, Parenti discusses how social and medical policies were fomented based entirely upon politics leaving no room for any type of public rethinking of lockdown much less accommodating shifts in current policies as new facts regarding the virus emerged. Parenti explains how the left was caught in “Trump derangement syndrome” while Trump had lost control of his own Covid task force early on, such that there was hysteria being whipped up as the pandemic had been entirely politicised by April 2020 where “everybody with power is abusing it in the name of public safety.” Laying out how the left abandoned the working class during the pandemic, Parenti criticises the way class dynamics have been entirely elided noting how “a bunch of American oligarchs…have masked capitalist exploitation in this fog of woke identity politics.”