Iatrogenic Shudras: The Birth of COVID Casteism

How we became unwitting test subjects in the most massive social experiment in human history

We’re three and a half years into “two weeks to stop the spread,” and the jackboots of COVID are still stomping on our faces. Because, you see, so much of the pandemic had little to do with a virus beholden to the same principles of host response and immunology as the rest of its kin—but rather the iatrogenic (Greek: ἰατρός = doctor + γένεσις = origin) consequences of a public health behemoth high on emergency powers and unburdened by logic, reason and common sense wrecking unholy hell like a drunken Will Farrell streaking naked across the quad in the movie “Old School.”

This pandemic pandemonium was an iatrogenic social experiment. One that weaponized fear, panic and pseudoscience to reorder our social hierarchy into a more primitive class pyramid of autocratic nobility at its apex and a sea of serfs at the base; the two separated by an impenetrable chasm of discrimination mandated through bureaucratic fiat. It was, by every metric, class warfare conducted at a scale and intensity with no modern parallels. And like so many other paradoxes and ironies that pockmarked the pandemic landscape, was waged by the very devotees of equality and worshippers of equity. Many aspects of this iatrogenic feudalism bore uncanny resemblance to the caste order system of ancient India.

Shudra, (Sudra or Shoodra, from Sanskrit: Śūdra) was the lowest of the four classes or castes in the ancient Indian social order system circa 1600BC. Their life was subservient to the three higher castes: the Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors), and Vaishyas (merchants and businessmen). They performed the menial labor required that kept the gears of society turning as animal herders, waste scavengers, sewage cleaners, peasants and such. Other castes turned their noses up at them as mentally inferior human beasts of burden and even denied them education. The subjugation of Shudras at the hands of their higher class masters was not only an imposition of power through dehumanization but also an insidious social conditioning that twisted and reframed oppression into a virtuous moral imperative necessary to protect them from the danger of making decisions for themselves.

In an interesting parallel to the later day practice of baptism, members of the higher social classes were dvija or “twice-born.” The first birth being the physical act of coming into the world, while the second a spiritual one marked by ritual initiation into the study of scriptures, martial arts or trade apprenticeships. In contrast, the Shudras were so “impure,” "polluted" or “unclean” that they were ineligible for twice-birth baptism. Some Shudras, called Dalits or "untouchables" were so heinously ostracized and excised from society that they weren’t allowed to enter areas of worship, be in the same room or eat with members of higher castes.

The establishment of the White House COVID task force on January 29, 2020, was the earliest representation of a nascent Brahmanical order of COVID. It cleaved society into a priesthood gifted with rarified knowledge to exorcise the invisible demon and the ignorant plebeians whose only hope for salvation lay at the unquestioning supplication of their sapient protectors and who, like the Brahmins of yore, received messages from divinity. Not surprisingly, disobedience to Brahmanical diktats came to be decreed acts of heresy.  

California governor Gavin Newsom’s first statewide order in the United States on March 19, 2020, requiring all residents to remain at home with the exception of “essential workers” indelibly cemented into existence COVID casteism. It allowed a small group to vest unto themselves iron fisted control over the rest by replacing the dignity of human work with the indignity of human worth.

And there was no starker demonstration of this newly entrenched COVID caste system than the time Gavin Newsom was photographed attending a political advisor and lobbyist friend’s birthday party without mask or social distancing at French Laundry, one of the most exclusive restaurants in the world. This flew in the face of his own administration’s guidance which was so incredibly restrictive that it not only prohibited gatherings of any sort, Californians were even asked to forgo Thanksgiving dinners in the name of “COVID safety.” The stunning implication here was that swapping droplets with COVID Brahmins was perfectly safe while Shudra droplets were deadly. This was strikingly analogical to the social discrimination heaped on untouchables who were prohibited from cohabitating spaces, eating food with or sharing utensils used by higher castes. Not only did the recognition of this horrendously anachronistic parallel escape the ivory tower pundits, they went one step further: they normalized it.

President Obama's 60th birthday bash on Martha's Vineyard was a veritable masterclass, a how-to if you will, demonstrating the shocking juxtaposition of contrasts that defines caste consciousness. It featured a dedicated "COVID coordinator” to ensure only America’s cleanest Brahmins were permitted entry. On one end of the caste spectrum you had makeup adorned celebrities dressed in their brightest flashing their best smiles at adoring photographers as they drank and danced the night away. On the other, low caste waitstaff were transformed into a masked army of nameless and faceless organic robots clad in nondescript uniforms and had the unique humanness of facial expression robbed from them. These clones were programmed to please.

This ruthless exercise of power typified by two groups occupying the same physical space at the same time experiencing polar opposite realities—one with their humanity exalted and the other dehumanized beyond recognition—used to be seen only in acts of war and enslavement.

Learning no lessons from this horrendous travesty, COVID Brahmins repeated a near identical reenactment of this feat only 2 weeks later. House speaker Nancy Pelosi hosted a crowd of party bigwigs at a Napa Valley fundraiser. Dozens of unmasked upper castes sat elbow to elbow as masked low caste waiters ambled between guests. And then again barely a month later at the Met Costume Gala when self-proclaimed socialist AOC sashayed across the red carpet wearing a $1000 a night rental dress emblazoned with “Tax the Rich” while impoverished minimum wage masked servants served cocktails and catered to her every whim. Never mind that a sign posted at the museum entrance read “face coverings for all visitors age 2 and older are required, even if you are vaccinated.” In a Spinal Tap’esque turning the irony dials all the way to 11, she didn’t pay the $7,000 bill till a congressional investigation ensued and then blamed a minion Shudra staffer for the oversight. If hypocrisy were an Olympic sport, our COVID Brahmins would take home gold, bronze and silver and lay claim to victim trophies as well.

It is plainly evident that the COVID Brahmin’s endless lust for absolute safety was not predicated on any real science or even credible concern—because they had no problems hobnobbing with their own social class. But on the fixed belief that non-Brahmins were unclean, impure and polluted. And, much like the untouchables of the past, COIVD Shudras were a tolerated inconvenience contingent on servitude and conformity to their prescribed social destiny.

Two critically important things were known early on in the pandemic: that COVID risk was not evenly distributed across the population but stratified along age and comorbidity continuum, and that teachers or other individuals working with children were at no more increased risk for COVID hospital admissions compared to the rest of the population.  Imagine then the grotesque hubris displayed by Stacey Abrams, the self-identified governor of Georgia, when she tweeted out a mask less photo of herself sitting amidst a sea of masked elementary school children a full two years after the pandemic began. Anyone “following the science” would've known that children weren’t disease vectors. (At pandemic peak, neither the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control nor the WHO recommended masking children under the age of 12 and 6 respectively). Were she genuinely concerned about her own risk and believed in the protection properties of face amulets, the mask wearing should have been the other way around. A society that places the burden of disease control on the youngest by propagating the absurd notion of children as biohazards and sacrifices them at the altar of mythological safety has devolved to barbarism.

If you’re still not convinced, recall the treatment of the unvaccinated during the first two years of the pandemic. Those not twice-baptized by the vaccine became Shudras and were prohibited from entering public spaces, eating at restaurants, going to movie theaters, sporting events and concerts. They couldn’t board planes, buses or leave the country. Some were fired for being unvaccinated while government Brahmins petitioned the judiciary, multiple times, to continue enforcement of their newfound caste code. Hollywood celebrities, news media anchors and so-called experts called for the unclean to be confined to their homes, heaped choice invectives, and in some cases even wished death upon them. They couldn’t get the organ transplants they so desperately needed, and in one Canadian poll more than a quarter of the respondents said it would be acceptable to make them serve jail sentences.

Leana Wen, a physician, Washington Post and CNN uber-pundit compared unclean Shudras to drunks and called for their home imprisonment. She asserted that society had an obligation to prevent the unvaccinated from leaving their homes and infecting others the same way it had an obligation to deter drunk drivers. The cruel irony that far from being confined at home, real drunks enjoyed unfettered access to liquor stores (decreed “essential” by her elder brahmins) was completely lost on her. And lest we forget, she was talking about perfectly healthy disease-free human beings, not lepers or Ebola patients.

The excuse that these actions were a result of justifiable fear felt in early throes of the pandemic is smashed to smithereens when you consider that Congressman Jerry Nadler a few months ago demonized parents who refused to mask their toddlers as “child abusers,” a statement unmoored from science, reality or even basic human decency. Such behavior should raise four-alarm fire bells that the yawning gap between the COVID brahmins’ perception of self as immaculate beings and the Shudra serfs as unclean pus packets has not narrowed one bit despite the passage of time.

When viewed in its totality, our pandemic measures were a poison tipped Swiss army knife of destructive consequences orchestrating wealth transfers from the poor to the rich and created learning losses and mental health problems so severe that it crippled the ability of those most affected to discern, dissent and defend themselves while simultaneously enriching the elites who were immunized from its consequences.

They were a luxury accorded to laptop Brahmins who got paid to stay home while shifting the burden of enforcement to working class Shudras who suffer aftershocks that pummel every facet of their existence to this day. COVID brahmins expected Shudras to deliver their food, pick up their trash, keep tap water flowing and light bulbs glowing while teacher’s union’s withheld education from their children by coercing the CDC to ignore scientific norms and locked millions of children out of classrooms.

For many students, physical school wasn’t replaced with Zoom. Rather, school closures meant no school—literally none at all. In Los Angeles the situation was so dire that 4 in 10 students simply failed to participate in any form of remote learning. While Public schools were forcing children into zoom school for over a year, Governor Gavin Newsom's children attended private school with little pandemic disruption to their education. According to one estimate, by the time schools let out for summer 2021, the average American public-school student had experienced 65 school days without any contact whatsoever from their schools and teachers or a jaw-dropping truancy level of more than 30% for the entire school year. Not surprisingly, learning losses were more severe in working class children while Brahmin children got more in-person and better zoom schooling than poor kids.

As if catastrophic learning loss wasn’t catastrophic enough, we’re now witnessing an explosion of mental illness in children the likes of which have never been seen before. One emergency room physician estimates that the number of kids seeking psychiatric emergency care in her ER has grown from approximately 30 a month in recent years to 30 a day. She says that children as young as six are coming in, often talking about suicide. The situation is so horrifying that the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP)—the same organization that 3 years ago insisted on masking 2-year-olds because “Children are incredibly adaptable and resilient”— just raised alarm bells on the deluge of children and teenagers with mental issues overwhelming emergency departments nationwide. Are we seriously expected to believe the ludicrous skullduggery that people who went to school to become experts on children haven’t the faintest clue about how non-verbal communication is the most important social stimulus for children and inextricably critical to their cognitive, psychological and emotional development? Of course they knew. This was yet another example of Brahmin barbarism sacrificing children to appease the Gods of unattainable safetyism. Instead of a mea culpa or even an acknowledgement of iatrogenic harms, the AAP blamed racial inequities and disparities and demanded we spend more taxpayer money to fix the problem they themselves had created. Because a Brahmin can never be wrong. And even when they are, it’s always the Shudra’s fault.

The most brutally effective tool in the poison tipped Swiss army knife was the reverse Robinhood wealth transfer. By designating certain corporations and businesses as “essential” (and others dispensable by extension of that logic), the ruling oligarchy consolidated, centralized and cartelized power to the Brahmanical ruling elite and their friends in high places. Corporate businesses became magically endowed with mysterious force fields that prevented the virus from infecting patrons eating at McDonald's or Wendy's or shopping at Walmart or Target. But stepping into a mom-and-pop business was like putting welcome mats outside your alveoli and begging the virus to come ravage your lungs. Consequently, large corporations like Amazon, Apple, and Walmart posted record breaking 2021 profits while nearly 60% of small businesses never recovered from pandemic closures permanently shuttering their doors forever.

A new billionaire was minted nearly every day during the pandemic while working class families lost jobs, faced homelessness and struggled to make ends meet. Instead of reopening the economy, government added insult to injury by injecting massive quantities of “stimulus” into the economy spiking inflation and kneecapping the most those who could survive it the least. The decaying carcasses of once thriving businesses and foreclosed homes are being snatched up by corporations and turned to cubbyhole high-rise tenements occupied by working class Shudras paying rent to their Brahmin slumlords. Each go-around of this cycle becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of those with little paying more to own less till they own nothing at all. The World Economic Forum (WEF) must be rubbing their hands in glee.

Pandemic policy so profoundly warped our national psyche that a colossal number of working age men between 25 and 54 years old—7.2 million by some estimates— are not working or even looking for work. You can’t have a functioning society when millions just give up and drop out of the workforce. The despair, desolation and desperation engendered by tectonic shifts in class structure has exacted a heavy toll. A record high of nearly 50,000 Americans died by suicide in 2022. A submicroscopic virus didn’t create an epidemic of hopelessness, helplessness and resignation. Tone-deaf policies that mortgaged the future of the young to pay for pseudomystical safety demanded by the gerontocracy did.

With so much self-evident carnage and little to show for benefit, why are COVID Brahmins so hell-bent on bringing back elements of failed policies like mask mandates and school closures again? The simple answer is because they can. The architects of the house of horrors were held accountable to no one, and in nearly every instance failed upward. For example, the former New York health commissioner who defended the disastrous state policy of ordering COVID-positive patients back into nursing homes co-mingling them with healthy seniors, was hired by the CDC at a senior level position. You get more of what you incentivize and immunize from repercussion.

A more complex answer requires understanding the power dynamics of bureaucracies. Every declared emergency coalesces bureaucratic power structures across government, corporate business, media and academia. This conglomerate functions as a quasi “super state” that occupies the stratosphere above constitutional protections of the nation-state and hence beholden to no citizen but only to their collective self-interests. The plug-and-play nature of the super state makes the actual nature of the emergency immaterial. Plug climate change in place of COVID and the players remain unchanged. Bureaucracy has long subsumed government to become the primary engine of domination and expansion of power in modern society. Hannah Arendt summarized it eloquently: “Bureaucracy was the organization of the great game of expansion in which every area was considered a stepping-stone to further involvements and every people an instrument for further conquest.” and “Bureaucracy is always a government of experts, of an "experienced minority" which has to resist as well as it knows how the constant pressure from "the inexperienced majority.""

Bureaucracies are authoritarian control pyramids and fractal microcosms of civilizations they shape in their image. Executive C-suite Brahmins get to sit atop hierarchies insulated from the rules of their own promulgation while bottom rung Shudras get scrutinized and coerced into conformity by indecipherably complex organizational structures of managers and supervisors. COVID casteism is the result of an unopposed bureaucratic super state forcing its reflection on the mirror of society. The vapid formality, mindless menialization and governing-by-silos pathognomonic of bureaucracy create conditions ideal for the incubation of tyranny because they simultaneously recuse any particular individual or group from public accountability and also the pangs of their own conscience. A small group of petty tyrants become imbued with limitless savagery when put in charge of the infinite force multiplier of the hive minded bureaucratic Borg whose sole purpose is the generation and accumulation of power and the imposition of authority.

Strictly speaking, we’re now a technocracy—a form of oligarchy in which the bureaucratic decision-makers are “experts” in scientific or technical knowledge and effectively supplant elected officials in controlling the state. Emergencies create experts and experts create technocracies. Did you know that the word “pundit” used to describe experts comes from the Sanskrit word पण्डित (transliterated as pandit, pundit, or pandita) and means a learned Brahmin? As with every form of bureaucratic oppression, COVID casteism was a fulcrum of wealth and power transfer from the working class to the elite using conduits created by the coalescent super state.

So how do we extricate ourselves from the swirling toilet bowl of creeping technocratic totalitarianism? It isn’t easy, but not impossible. The framework proposed by Barry Brownstein in his essay in the American institute for economic research (AIER) is worth reading and I borrow heavily from it.

1. Oppose bureaucrats with vigor, but avoid name-calling. Pandemic policy evangelists are quick to thank the blessings of masks, vaccines and boosters every time they get infected but seldom attempt to prove dogmatic self-contradictions or refute reasonable objections raised by skeptics. They resort to labelling their adversaries as anti-science nutjobs and cast suspicion on their motives. This is to be expected because they’re parroting scripted talking points cobbled together in meetings rather than espousing a deep and multi-dimensional understanding of complexities and nuances on a personal level. If you respond to their name calling with your own, you’re only being manipulated to validate their accusations of your unseriousness. Instead, use a level headed approach to expose the chinks in their amour by pointing out facts and logical fallacies every chance you get.

2. When in doubt, put humanity above science. Forsake Scientism. Science is the relentless quest for truth regardless of how many people agree with it. It guarantees that most concepts once held sacrosanct will eventually find their way into the trash bin of history. Scientism prioritizes consensus over truth. People dying alone in their hospital beds unable to see their families, feel the touch of a human hand or the sight of a human face in their dying gasps is scientism, and often times indistinguishable from inhumanity.

3. Resist the siren song of appeal to authority. Broaden your reading and listening beyond the orthodoxy. Disabuse others of the propagandist notion that one has to be an expert to understand basic principles of public health and epidemiology or any topic for that matter. You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science (a real article, by the way) is the ultimate proclamation that you’re the Shudra and they’re the Brahmins. In a technocracy, every expert is a bureaucrat first and foremost and their loyalty lies to the machine, not you. You either think for yourself or someone else will do it for you. Do not let informed consent and autonomy become vacuous and vestigial corporate buzzwords.

4. Oppose all censorship. Censorship has never about protecting people from the lie. It is about preventing them from discovering the truth. Censor long enough and people become conditioned to accept comfortable lies than risk uncomfortable truths. The censor’s ultimate prize is your self-censorship . Mental slavery is so much worse than the physical kind because the slaves see not the shackles that bind them.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that we are at a tipping point of personal sovereignty becoming an antiquated notion replaced with that of humans as interchangeable widgets and battery cells in the collectivist bureaucratic Borg. You may think this is all a tall order, too difficult, too optimistic and that we’ve descended too far and deep into the maelstrom of madness. But what other options are there? Either do what needs to be done right now, at any cost and regardless of probability of success, or make friends with the touch, taste and smell of jackboots and forever hold your peace.