Writer Kurt Andersen has written a provocative essay in The Atlantic titled “The Anti-Vaccine Right Literally Brought Human Sacrifice to America.” The author finds disturbing parallels between the anti-vaxx conservative campaign and societies such as the Aztecs that practiced human sacrifice on a wide scale. It’s almost as if Andersen had done a socio-cultural analysis of Kos’ diaries about how anti-vaxxers needlessly sacrificed their lives.
Andersen notes that as far back as the summer of 2020, as the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic spread across the U.S., there was a panicky focus on resuming business as usual to prevent a stock market crash. He said some observers made “metaphorical” references to ritual human sacrifice as Republicans advocated an anti-testing, anti-lockdown, and anti-masking policy. For example, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said it was like a “like a policy of mass human sacrifice” at a congressional hearing with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Andersen posted a tweet himself about Donald Trump’s June 2020 Tulsa campaign rally—which likely led to Herman Cain’s death from COVID-19—that it was like a “human sacrifice to please the leader.”
The author said the debate over “how governments should intervene to keep people and businesses financially afloat, and how many lives were worth how much of a hit to the economy … was at least fundamentally rational, a weighing of social costs against social benefits.”
But he then comes to the crux of his essay when he looks at the current situation:
Today, however, the economy is no longer in jeopardy; unemployment rates and salaries have returned to pre-pandemic levels; GDP per person is higher than it was at the end of 2019; personal savings are growing, and businesses are starting up faster than ever; corporate profits and stock prices are at record highs. And for more than a year, we’ve had astoundingly effective vaccines that radically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19. All of which means that for a long time now the right’s ongoing propaganda campaign against and organized political resistance to vaccination, among other public-health protocols, has been killing many, many Americans for no reasonable, ethically justifiable social purpose.
In other words, what we’ve experienced certainly since the middle of 2021 is literally ritual human sacrifice on a mass scale—the real thing, comparable to the innumerable ghastly historical versions.
Anthropologists define ritual sacrifice as societies’ organized killing of people in order to please supernatural beings and—the unspoken real-world part — to fortify the political and economic power of those societies’ elites. The tradition is right there in the first book of the Bible, when God commands Abraham to prove he loves him by murdering his son, and then only at the last second lets Abraham off the hook. For thousands of years in societies all over the world, small-scale and large-scale human sacrifice was common.
Andersen notes that one big difference between the present-day U.S. and past civilizations was that hundreds and thousands of years ago almost all of those chosen to die died, whether or not they had volunteered, “whereas only a fraction of the people now volunteering to die by forgoing vaccinations actually do. It’s the new and improved modern version of mass human sacrifice.”
But Andersen observed that has he surveyed the anthropological literature, he was struck by “how well that scholarship describes the factors responsible for the thousands of deaths of Americans each month.” He cited a 2016 study of scores of socially complex cultures across the Pacific and East Asia which found that “sacrificial victims were typically of low status.” In various places around the world, the victims of human sacrifice tended to be elderly, ill, or both, he observed.
Today in the U.S.—the world’s most powerful empire and third-most-populous nation, possessor of a strong government and social and political complexity, a culture both advanced and decadent— two-thirds of COVID victims have had incomes below the median. Three-quarters have been 65 or older, with a median age of over 75.
Andersen then cites studies that linked human sacrifice to times of crisis—for example in response to natural calamities—because people felt the need to appease angry supernatural powers whom they believed were punishing them for sins committed by the society. He referred to a 2020 study that showed that three in five white evangelicals agreed that the pandemic and its ramifications were “evidence that we are living in what the Bible calls the ‘end times’”—for example those evangelicals who reject the vaccines because they consider them the Mark of the Beast.
Andersen then highlights the dangerous intersection of politics with faith: “According to the literature, human sacrifice occurred in societies where highly supernatural religion and state governance were deeply intertwined.” And that’s a description of the modern GOP base, where evangelicals make up about a third of Republicans, and 78% of all U.S. evangelical voters chose Trump in 2020. White Protestant evangelicals are less likely than any other large American religious demographic to be vaccinated.
He then draws a comparison to the Aztecs who sacrificed thousands of people a year. Science’s Mexico-based archaeology and Latin American correspondent wrote in 2018 about the Aztecs that “political power as well as religious belief is likely key to understanding the scale of the practice” of human sacrifice. Andersen wrote that millions of Americans in 2021 were tricked by propagandists of the political right, such as Tucker Carlson, “into forgoing vaccination and thus volunteering for death by COVID.”
At the extreme end, Andersen pointed to an essay by Joy Pullman, the executive editor of the well-funded right-wing magazine The Federalist, headlined “For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is a Good Thing.” Andersen observed that there is one distinguishing characteristic of cultures that practiced human sacrifice from those that did not. A summary of research into a hundred traditional societies from the eastern Pacific to Australia and East Asia found that: “Ritual human sacrifice played a central role in helping those at the top of the social hierarchy maintain power over those at the bottom.”
“Whatever their reasons, millions of Americans have been persuaded by the right to promote death, and potentially to sacrifice themselves and others, ostensibly for the sake of personal liberty but definitely as a means of increasing their tribal solidarity and inclination to vote Republican,” Andersen wrote.
That explains why Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott has prohibited businesses from requiring customers to be vaccinated or why Missouri’s Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now running for the U.S. Senate, informed the state’s local health and school officials in December that any “mask mandates, quarantine orders, and other public health orders” concerning COVID are unconstitutional and thus “null and void,”
Back in 2020, COVID-19 wasn’t killing many more Republicans than other Americans, Andersen wrote. But he said that “changed dramatically” in the second half of 2021, at a time when vaccines were widely available:
Of the 20 least-vaccinated states today, Trump carried 17 in the 2020 election. … More and more, the unvaccinated (three out of five of whom are Republicans) and those killed by COVID are distinctly GOP subsets.
At their imperial peak 500 years ago, the Aztec rulers sacrificed 20,000 or more people each year, some estimates suggest. By the reckoning of experts at the Kaiser Family Foundation, counting only the “COVID-19 deaths [that] could have been prevented by vaccination,” the number of Americans unnecessarily and avoidably killed in the U.S. from just last June to November is 163,000.
Trump sowed the seeds of the politicization of the response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, but now is realizing the monster he created. He was among the first to get vaccinated—albeit in private—and got a booster shot. He realizes that his base is shrinking month by month as he considers another presidential bid in 2024, but he now finds himself outflanked on the right by the likes of Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Andersen concluded:
The pandemic will eventually finish its course, and the supply of sacrifice victims will run out. But the people who politicized and badly exacerbated this current mass-fatality event must now realize, if only unconsciously, that large-scale human sacrifice can be a useful modern political tool for a party ideologically committed to extreme inequality. What might be the next public-health crisis they can exploit? After all, for 40 years now they’ve proved their righteous power by sacrificing thousands of lives each year to the quasi-religious American fetish for guns.