system wants to control; antivirus
keeps telling me to turn on antivirus
Question marked as
What keeps telling you to turn on an anti-virus program? E-mail spam? Some pop-up Web notification that's using a copy of the System Preferences / Setting icon to fool you into thinking that the notification is from macOS?
I'm pretty sure that messages like this are from third parties – not from macOS and not from Apple. You may find the following to be interesting reading.
Recognize and avoid phishing messages, phony support calls, and other scams - Apple Support