Research Institute for Social Cohesion' tries to correlate high COVID rates with 'far-right extremism'

The demonization of those who object to have their freedoms removed continues apace, with swathes of people branded as selfish, mentally ill, feebleminded.

One group of people, however, decided that it was all rather childish to be name-calling and hardly fitting for the scientific age. And so, the aptly named Research Institute for Social Cohesion decided to conduct a proper study in order to categorize the misfits in official terms. This Institute, an alliance of eleven different German universities and research bodies, teamed up with another researcher from Munich, and together they investigated the connection between German election results and the spread of coronavirus.

According to Der Spiegel, their findings reflected “the common narrative,” which is that “in areas of Germany where the radical right is particularly strong, state-imposed protection measures designed to stem the spread of the pandemic are not well liked.” (Der Spiegel also obliged by providing an example of what “not well liked” means, by describing a violent incident in a German resort town which ended with several wounded police officers.)

The violence wasn’t the focus of the article, or the research, however – what they really wanted to drive home was that in areas where people object to “protection measures … coronavirus numbers have grown disturbingly high.”

In the town that saw the brawl, for instance, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party got almost 32 percent of the vote in the most recent general election. According to Der Spiegel, the town’s “seven-day incidence of coronavirus infections … is one of the highest in the country.”

What’s more, “the alarming situation … [is true of] almost the entire eastern German state of Saxony … [and] neighboring Thuringia. In both states, the AfD regularly receives more than 20 percent of the vote.”

And that was exactly what the study conducted by the Research Institute for Social Cohesion found: “The higher the number of votes the AfD got in a region in the 2017 election, the faster the coronavirus spread there in 2020.”

Astonishingly, or maybe it is simply a testament to true German thoroughness, “The researchers’ calculations are so precise that they can quantify the correlation to within a single decimal place,” Der Spiegel enthused. “If the AfD gained one percentage point more in a district, then the incidence there was higher there by an average of 2.2 percentage points…”

“Not every anti-vaxxer has an affinity for the AfD,” the article quoted Christoph Richter, a sociologist who studies right-wing extremism. All the same, a survey cited by Der Spiegel found that “50 percent of unvaccinated voters cast their ballots … for the AfD … which is fighting against anything that could stop the spread of the coronavirus.”

(By doing unthinkable, bigoted things like filing lawsuits against 2G rules that discriminate against the unvaccinated, barring them from all kinds of public venues.)

For Richter, and presumably for Der Spiegel too, along with all other rational, tolerant people who shudder at being associated with the AfD, this is “a problem – one for which there is no short-term solution.

“The state and society need to invest significantly more in democratic education,” he concluded. And until then? Until then, “state and society” is a category from which “misfits” are excluded. Democracy at its finest.