The Antisocial Darwinist

As mentioned in an earlier post, I was asked by an anti-mandate lobby group to prepare some remarks for the Alabama legislature regarding vaccine legislation during the special session in October 2021. I never got to give the speech, but I thought it was pretty good, so I’m including my notes here. Note that it went through several iterations as colleagues of mine helped me moderate the naturally acidic tone my Borderer blood lends to my off-the-cuff speech. So keep in mind this is the non-confrontational version of the speech.

I’m Dr. Jeffrey Morris, a resident of Senate District 17 and a constituent of Mr. Shelnut. I am also a tenured Professor of Biology and NSF-funded microbiologist working at the University of Alabama Birmingham.

10 days ago my employers sent out a mass email informing us that all faculty and staff who have not been “fully vaccinated” by December 8 will be terminated. I will not participate in this vaccine mandate program, so my 15-year scientific career and my entire research program will end on December 8 unless the state of Alabama finds a way to block the President’s vaccine mandate.

I could give you my personal reasons for not complying with this mandate, but they’re no different than the motivations of any of the other people facing termination at UAB. Instead, I want to give you my scientific reasons for opposing this mandate. It is my professional opinion, as someone who has studied the adaptation of microbes and viruses for most of my adult life, that even if we were able to get 100% of the people on Earth vaccinated, it would not meaningfully impact the progression of this pandemic. This respiratory virus, like all epidemic respiratory viruses before it, will spread through the population until most everyone has caught it at least once. Thus, I believe that there is no valid medical or public heath justification for forcing anyone to take the COVID shot.

Because I have based my opinion on published studies and publicly-available datasets, I am sure that the medical and political authorities who have ordered these mandates are also aware of them and know that my judgment is likely to be correct. Therefore, in the absence of a medical reason for mandating vaccination, I must assume that this order comes due to a political reason, specifically as a political weapon directed against what the current administration perceives as its political enemies.

Ladies and gentlemen that is why it is so important to oppose this mandate. The idea that a government agency could weaponize a population’s health status as a way to gain political advantage over them is nightmarish, and is exactly what many of us have warned about over the past decades as government has taken more and more control over our health care choices. If they are allowed to mandate this vaccine, it will set a precedent for future impositions that I don’t think any of us, left or right, are comfortable speculating on.

If you are like me, you’ve probably thought to yourself that all the craziness happening in the country over the last few years is at least a long way away from us here in Alabama, but it’s not. We are on the front lines of the struggle against this unprecedented power grab, and that is why it is imperative that you pass SB13 as written, which gives us not only protection against the current mandate, but also against future impositions on our health care freedom.

Just in time for Robert E. Lee’s 215th birthday, AL.com brings us this unintentionally hilarious article, where the Muslim “advocacy” (i.e., leftist activist front) organization CAIR has decided to rip on Mike Holmes, an Alabama State House member, for being a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Let’s leave aside the competing historical accounts of the Civil War that separate leftists like the AL.com journalists and the kinds of people who join the SCV. Both of them are probably not very accurate — or at least, not very complete, although I suspect Rep. Holmes has a more complex view than what the article attributes to him: “Rep. Mike Holmes believes the Civil War was about taxes, not slavery.” But that’s not what makes the article funny. What’s funny is that it’s not some run-of-the-mill commie “anti-racist” group taking issue with Rep. Holmes honoring his ancestor, it’s a MUSLIM group. In their own words:

“It is unacceptable for a lawmaker, whose duty it is to represent all constituents in his district, to be a member of an organization that honors traitors and white supremacists,” said Ibrahim Hooper, director of national communications for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.”

With all due respect to Mr. Hooper, a Muslim taking sides about the US Civil War is roughly equivalent to me getting my dander up about what a tosser that Abu Bakr was for not honoring Mohammed’s wishes as to who should succeed him. But more to the point, Muslims trying to take the moral high ground on historical slavery and racism is really rich. As nasty as the trans-Atlantic slave trade was, the Muslim version was dramatically worse, vaster in scope, and longer lasting:

It takes no more research than a trip to almost any…library to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere as compared to the meager writings on the even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic World… at least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some European slaves were still being sold on the auction block in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States…

– Thomas Sowell, The Real History of Slavery

Sowell also documents the cruelty of Muslim slavers, who left grisly reminders scattered across Africa, highlighting their lack of respect for the basic humanity of their human chattel:

The death toll on these marches [across the Sahara] exceeded even the horrific toll on packed slave ships crossing the Atlantic. Slaves who could not keep up with the caravans were abandoned in the desert and left to die… Thousands of human skeletons were strewn along one Saharan slave route alone – mostly the skeletons of young women and girls, who were more in demand than men in much of the Islamic world… It has been estimated that, for every slave to reach Cairo alive, several died on the way.

And it bears repeating that, as soon as the Democrats destroyed the Libyan government, African slavery showed back up in Tripoli, two hundred years after the US Marine Corps crushed the Barbary Pirate slavers there in one of their first major victories.

It’s also rich that CAIR calls the Confederates “traitors”. The national identity of Southerners has always been complicated, and our differences with the Yankees date back to the old world, at least to the English Civil War but probably as far back as Anglo-Saxon times. Reducing conflicts between north and south to a single political cause, and ignoring all of that history, is foolish. Calling a Southerner a traitor for resisting the invasion of his country by Washington is as ridiculous as calling a Ukrainian a traitor for opposing a Russian attempt to restore Russia’s historical claim on the country. The term “rebel” was used during the time of the war, and still seems appropriate today.

In contrast, CAIR has notoriously tried to minimize the involvement of Islamic organizations in the terrorist horrors of the past few generations. Just last year they sent out guidance to schoolteachers about how to talk about the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with their classes, where they cautioned teachers not to suggest that the attackers were motivated by religion. “Avoid using language that validates the claims of the 9/11 attackers by associating their acts of mass murder with Islam and Muslims. For example, avoid using inaccurate and inflammatory terms such as ‘Islamic terrorists’, ‘jihadists’, or ‘radical Islamic terrorists.’” The tips also suggest that teachers focus on anti-Islamic discrimination that supposedly followed the 9/11 attacks – but presumably not the widespread anti-Western attacks and murders that persisted almost continuously from 2001 to 2016 as bin Laden respectors sought to continue the fight.

First, this looks a lot like the “Lost Cause” mythology of the Civil War, which presumably is what CAIR is taking issue with regarding the Sons of the Confederate Veterans – it attempts to act like Al-Qaeda and ISIS and their ilk were anomalies, instead of the zeitgeist of early 21st century Islamic youth, just as Lost Causers sometimes seem to argue that slavery wasn’t really all that much of a big deal in the antebellum South despite what it looks like from, say, Lincoln’s speeches and the rhetoric of both Yankee and Confederate pundits. While CAIR and the Lost Causers have a point that both the Civil War and the GWoT were more complicated than the standard narrative often admits, they are also both guilty of minimizing some really nasty shit in an attempt to make their side look better. It is undeniable that hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world supported resistance, including violent resistance, against the West in general and the US in particular, and definitely against Israel. Considering that the United States spent twenty years fighting that zeitgeist and thousands of American soldiers lost their lives as a consequence – for better or worse – CAIR’s whitewashing certainly skirts traitorousness. Certainly it’s traitorous enough to make their position on the Confederacy a case of “people in glass houses throwing stones”. I mean come on, even the organization’s name — the Council on American-Islamic Relations — implies that they aren’t on the same side as Americans.

It looks like Representative Holmes basically told CAIR, and AL.com, to go pound sand. Good for him. People that don’t respect the memory of fallen soldiers – even those on the other side – don’t deserve respect from anybody. It bears repeating here that ASD‘s perspective is that all warriors who fight honorably are worthy of being remembered and respected, and that includes huge percentages of Confederates, Nazis, Soviets and other soldiers from Communist countries, mujahideen jihadis, and whoever else you want to dig up from your dumb “bad guy” list. People who lose sight of this obvious and eternal truth have no business leading anyone.

A few days ago, our governor Kay Ivey delivered her annual “State of the State Address” to the assembled Alabama state congress.  It was a pretty standard Republican speech – invocation of Ronald Reagan in the first minute, followed by a list of accomplishments and goals that focused on individual freedom and business-friendly positions.  If you’re Southern, try to imagine your grandma re-writing a Trump speech, and you pretty much know what to expect.

Let me preface what I’m about to write by saying I like Kay Ivey.  First of all, she looks a lot like my Grandma, who was one of the kindest women I’ve ever known. She was also a welcome change in the governor’s mansion when she replaced the deeply corrupt Robert Bentley in 2017 – Alabama has notoriously corrupt state-level politics, an issue which I suspect I will return to regarding our COVID policies soon – and I gladly voted for her when she was up for re-election.  Most of her polices that my fellow Alabamans disapproved of seemed like nothing burgers to me.  For instance, she put a tax on gasoline to fund some highway projects and diverted some of Biden’s COVID funny money to deal with some serious overcrowding and safety issues in Alabama’s prison system that have been plaguing the state for years.  Both of these seemed reasonable to me, if not ideal – as much as I would prefer pursuing an ancap utopia where all of the above are privatized, an above-board tax increase is preferable to me in comparison to the shady hidden taxes and monetary tomfoolery that other politicians use to conceal their profligate spending.  In any case it’s clear that huge numbers of people and businesses are looking to move to the free side of the Blue Curtain and Alabama needs to have sufficient infrastructure to make us an attractive destination – if enough of these folks come, the taxes will pay for themselves in short order. As of right now Ivey is probably still my first choice in the Republican primary this year, but it’s not as sure a thing as it would have been this time last year.

The reason I have soured on Ms. Ivey is based on her relative spinelessness when it came to resisting the Biden regime’s vaccine mandates – and then her attempt to take credit for what the Alabama legislature did without her help.  If you’re reading this blog, I’m sure it’s no surprise to you that most Southern states in the second half of 2021 were driven to the brink of rebellion over the fact that Biden’s edicts were about to render some 50-60% of us unemployable over a vaccine that everyone with any sense already knew didn’t have the capacity to slow the spread of the SARS-2 virus.  Probably the only reason the country has been able to remain as peaceful as it has over the past decade is the fact that the political “squishy middle” mostly had good jobs and a lot to lose if they openly resisted Washington; take our jobs, our homes, and our savings away and that all changes in an instant, and Alabama probably starts to look like Northern Ireland in the 1980s.

The gold standard for state-level resistance was set early by Ron DeSantis in Florida who aggressively used every tool at his disposal to block the Washington regime’s overreach.  To Ivey’s credit, Alabama wasn’t completely supine under her leadership; Attorney General Steve Marshall joined many other state AGs in filing suits against the regime to block various mandates.  Marshall also promised specifically to help victims of the mandates at Alabama’s university should they lose their positions due to Biden’s federal contractor mandate (not to mention the creeping valetudinarianism of the university high command).

But what Ivey completely failed to do was to support or suggest any state-level legislation to block or stimy the mandates.  In October 2021 the Alabama legislature was even called to a special session by the governor.  In special session (as I understand it), the legislature is required to consider legislation suggested by the governor – and all she ordered them to do was to deal with redistricting associated with the results of the 2020 US Census (booooring).  This of course was during the most fervent uproar about the mandates, when other governors were in the news every day pushing back against Biden and his minions – Ivey could easily have ordered the legislature to consider something about mandates, but she opted to punt, saying that Marshall’s legal challenges were sufficient.

The problem with this, was that the legislature can’t easily consider bills in special session other than those submitted by the Governor.  Bills can be brought, but they have to be supported by two-thirds supermajorities in both the senate and the house to pass.  Even in deeply red Alabama, that’s a tall order – even taller because the Chamber of Commerce cucks oppose any legislations, no matter how obviously necessary, that restricts absolute freedom of businesses to abuse their employees however they choose.

In Ivey’s State of the State speech, she drops these lines (emphasis mine):

Speaking of D.C. politics – and I use the word “politics” intentionally here – from the moment the White House rolled out their scare tactic plans to try to force the COVID-19 vaccine on Americans, I assured the people of Alabama that we were standing firmly against it. I’ll call this nonsense what it is, and that is an un-American, outrageous breach of our federal law.

While the Legislature has stood with me in opposing these federal mandates, we have also been fortunate to have a strong leader in Attorney General Steve Marshall, who hasn’t shied away from the fight one bit. Attorney General Marshall, thank you for standing tall for Alabamians.

With all due respect Governor, this is stolen valor.  The Legislature forced you to oppose the mandates with legislation, and the people of Alabama forced them to do it.  You had nothing to do with it.

There was a huge public outcry after Ivey failed to put vaccines on the docket for the special session.  Thousands of people called their legislators, and hundreds of us actually went to Montgomery to “encourage” the elected folks not to cuck on us.  I was asked by Health Freedom Alabama (an anti-mandate lobby group) to be prepared to give an expert opinion to the senate conference committee while they were considering whether to bring a series of anti-mandate bills up for a vote (I might post my notes for that speech later).  In the end I didn’t have to because the committee overwhelmingly supported the bills.  Ultimately, we got the two-thirds votes we needed to pass two critical bills to protect Alabama jobs by forcing companies to accept nearly any exemption request, and creating difficult and time-consuming requirements for rejecting exemption requests, all of which would have to be pursued on the employer’s dime.

For anyone in Alabama who needs it, here is the link for the specifics about these bills, and how to apply for assistance from the state if your exemption request has been denied: https://vaxexemption.alabama.gov/

For me, the two weeks I was involved with that process was a real eye-opening and life-changing experience.  I had never previously been so directly involved in the political process, but I spent a whole day wandering around in the State House talking to legislators, and watching fat-cat lobbyists tailing me trying to pressure the people I had just talked to into not supporting the bills.  In the end, I think our pressure made it clear to every Republican in Montgomery that not supporting those bills was a political death sentence – I suspect state legislators start to feel really antsy when their constituents notice they exist.  In Ivey’s defense, she signed the bills into law without hesitation, and I think she understands now that she should have been on the right side of this one.  We’ll see how things shape up in the primary campaign, and whether she can survive that mistake.

Of course our laws haven’t really had to be tested yet, as federal courts have blocked most of Biden’s mandates.  Time will tell whether that will hold, but I am glad to know that the people who run this state at least appear to care what happens to us.  But the real take-home message is that the Biden regime has clearly gotten out over its skies.  To the degree that what we did in October was replicated in other states, the Democrats should be shaking in their boots – the squishy middle has awakened, and it is red as fuck, bro. 

I was absolutely floored by eugyppius’ decision to publish my email (and link to this blog!) in his recent column, and have been amazed by the support that has been directed toward my writing by it. I’d like to welcome all of my new followers — based on the analytic reports about the many many countries you are coming from, it’s clear that resistance to covidphobia is truly worldwide. Y’all give me hope that we’re nearing the end, at least of the current phase of the struggle.

Just a quick word about what you’re likely to find on this blog. While recently my attention has been directed mainly toward covid, I hope that won’t last forever. Normally, I publish once or twice a week and mostly write about issues related to evolutionary biology, and the political troubles surrounding the field of academic science. I am a personal victim of leftist cancel culture, thanks to this blog — although to my university’s credit they resisted the urge to break the law and try to fire me. I’m an unapologetic right-winger — I have described myself as a libertarian mugged by reality on several occasions — and sometimes post straight-up politics as well, although I do try to keep my political speculations grounded in some of the tools we use in evolutionary biology (e.g. game theory, competition dynamics, etc) as opposed to indulging in basic partisan shitposting. I also post about underground heavy metal music from time to time, as I am an OG metalhead who spent about a decade in between undergrad and grad school LARPing as a musician. There is a chance I’ll start adding content related to homestead farming and homeschooling in the near future, as both of these are my latest “hobbies”.

So anyway I’m glad to get a chance to share my thoughts with you all, and it’s an honor to serve next to you in the trenches of this, our stupidest war ever. Onwards and upwards!

December 7, 1941

September 11, 2001

January 6, 2021

That’s the comparison the leadership of the United States made today, to the cheers of, as best I can tell, the entire Democrat party.

What happened after the first two dates listed? The United States unleashed a nightmare of annihilation on the people it blamed for attacking it. Millions dead. Whole nations reduced to rubble and anarchy. Thousands of years of history ground into dust. Massive bomb raids — including nuclear attacks — on civilian targets. Torture dungeons. Internment camps. Terror and misery on an almost unimaginable scale.

So what’s the idea behind lumping in the mostly peaceful January 6 protest with those events? Seems pretty obvious to me. They’ve already set up the torture dungeons. I would take a modestly sized bet that they use a drone to kill a Red American at some point in 2022. Let’s see. Wouldn’t be surprised to see Merrick Garland explaining to the UN how there are weapons of mass destruction in rural Alabama.

Regardless, you can’t get past one glaring thing. Most people on my side of the aisle agree wholeheartedly with the reason for the January 6 protest, even if many believe it went too far. And the people on the other side of the aisle a) are totally cool with political violence and b) appear to believe we are dangerous enemies of the state. Seems pretty obvious where that’s going, no? The terrorists accuse us of being terrorists as an excuse to terrorize us. It’s so meta it would be funny if I wasn’t living in the middle of it.

May you live in interesting times.