I don't see where "elitism" comes in here. When you are wrong, you are wrong.
As Henriquez inadvertently makes clear, he doesn't need to address the facts. He can simply say that his course of events is just as valid as that of the "elites", with their "evidence" and "facts". He can (and does) dress it up with bullshit wordy adjectives, and he can (and does) make it somehow not even about the facts, not even about reality, but instead about some kind of weird fucked up culture war. You'll note he doesn't mention facts even once; the very idea of evidence isn't present. Those who deal in fact, the people he rails against, are powerless when people ascribe zero weight to those facts.
1. Does the coronavirus pandemic exist? Yes.
2. Has it killed a lot of people? Obviously.
My point is that how we respond to that threat is a public policy debate. The author of this piece doesn’t make his position clear or offer evidence either, instead he simply compares disagreement with his preferred consensus to a genocide and related coverup, all the while drawing parallels to “some kind of weird fucked up culture war” (as you put it) and vaguely posing the “how did we even come to this” drama trope.
“disagreement == genocide”; statements like that are how we’ve come to this and why we face the institutional decay the author decries.
TFA is arguing in bad faith pure and simple. That’s why facts aren’t relevant here, not to be confused with facts don’t matter. Facts matter, but you don’t argue with [not an argument].
I don't think the article says that, but people have been using the word in relation to covid elsewhere.
I've recently reacted to someone else using the word with a vague feeling of discomfort, wondering why people are so eager to talk like that.
But then, like practically the next day, I had a visceral reaction to something in the news, and I felt like "this is why people are talking about genocide" because then the events were giving me the same sense of fear and dislocation that extreme rhetoric was previously.
The events that made me react that way were how the (white male) governor of Georgia was suing Atlanta whose (black female) mayor recently got covid. Trying to prevent health precautions from being enforced.
It's like, sure it's hyperbole in some sense, but I suddenly understand the reaching for something that expresses the enormity[1] of the situation, and the maddening incomprehensibility of why people are acting in this way.
And on top of that are the "little green men" in Portland, and I wonder where are all the right wing anti-government paranoiacs these days?
[1]I am not using this to mean enormousness, see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enormity
To answer, I wasn’t there, I don’t know but based on the information available I assume it _did_ happen.