Measles Is Back. What Comes Next Will Be Worse.; The New York Times, April 25, 2026

 The Editorial Board, The New York Times; Measles Is Back. What Comes Next Will Be Worse

"The resurgence of measles — a terrible disease that can swell the brain and cause permanent disabilities or death — is alarming enough on its own. There have been more than 1,700 cases reported in the United States already this year, up from about 70 per year in the early 2000s. Three children died last year.

The rise of measles may also be a harbinger of something even worse, public officials say. “Measles is basically a canary in the coal mine for our entire system,” says Dr. Scott Harris, the state health officer in Alabama’s Department of Public Health. “When it surges like this, it signals that our vaccination programs are starting to fail, and that other diseases won’t be far behind.” Already, cases of whooping cough have surged, too. And after two Florida children died of Hib, a bacterial infection, epidemiologists worry that disease is resurgent.

The most maddening aspect of this situation is that it was almost certainly avoidable. It stems in large part from a yearslong scare campaign by vaccine conspiracists including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now serves as President Trump’s secretary of health and human services."

Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality; The Guardian, August 26, 2023

  Naomi Klein, The Guardian; Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality

"This is a twist on the disaster capitalism I have tracked in the midst of earlier large-scale societal shocks. In the past, I have written about the private companies that descend to profit off the desperate needs and fears in the aftermath of hurricanes and wars, selling men with guns and reconstruction services at a high premium. That is old-school disaster capitalism picking our pockets, and it is still alive and thriving, taking aim at public schools and national health systems as the pandemic raged. But something new is also afoot: disaster capitalism mining our attention, at a time when attention is arguably our culture’s most valuable commodity. Conspiracies have always swirled in times of crisis – but never before have they been a booming industry in their own right...

Almost everyone I talk to these days seems to be losing people to the Mirror World and its web of conspiracies. It’s as if those people live in a funhouse of distorted reflections and disorienting reversals. People who were familiar have somehow become alien, like a doppelganger of themselves, leaving us with that unsettled, uncanny feeling. The big misinformation players may be chasing clout, but plenty of people believe their terrifying stories. Clearly, conspiracy culture is fueled by deep and unmet needs – for community, for innocence, for inside knowledge, for answers that appear, however deceptively, to explain a world gone wild.

“I can’t talk to my sister any more.” “My mother has gone down the rabbit hole.” “I am trying to figure out how to get my grandmother off Facebook.” “He used to be my hero. Now every conversation ends in a screaming match.”

What happened to them?

When looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to playacting. The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, really, is that’s what they see when they look at us. They say we live in a “clown world”, are stuck in “the matrix” of “groupthink”, are suffering from a form of collective hysteria called “mass formation psychosis” (a made-up term). The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality – we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation."