Yes, fear peddled by conspiracy theorists sells

There are conspiracy theories spreading on the Internet about the Wuhan coronavirus! Shocked! Shocked I am! 

If one looks around online, curious perhaps about who might have spread the virus and for what purpose, one will find exactly the sort of nonsense anyone even remotely familiar today’s subculture of disaffected paranoids would expect to find. There are the rather stale old standards about the New World Order, the Globalists, the Freemasons, and the Illuminati creating this virus to rule the world, to create a one-world government, prepare the way for an alien takeover, or reduce the human population. This stuff has already turned up on Before It’s News, the Millennium Report, and State of the Nation among others, as quickly as one would expect. And these theories about the coronavirus are stale and unimaginative, I suppose, because the pressure must be high to crank out a new paranoid fantasy the moment a new story hits the headlines. Inventing a new conspiracy theory virtually overnight is not easy, so sometimes the folks behind these websites have to just slum it a little bit and blame the same bogeymen of the NWO and the Illuminati for the same old reasons. Very disappointing, guys, very disappointing!

But then check out this whole new theory about the coronavirus having been created by “Big Pharma” simply in order to then supply a vaccine for it and make money. The brains behind the theory appears to be a particularly opportunistic little jackal named Jordan Sather (in the picture above), a social-media conspiracy theory figure. A college dropout and apparent self-published author of a 35-page pamphlet about the importance of standing upright and keeping a good posture (I’m not making this up, check it out on Amazon), Sather nevertheless appears to be running a successful racket—ahem…online enterprise—exposing the “truth” about vaccines, holistic medicine, and still endorsing the delusional rantings of QAnon. 

As the article I linked to above explains, Sather’s theory—spreading across social media like wildfire—claims that the coronavirus already had an antidote created for it by the diabolical Big Pharma and the Gates Foundation, back in 2015. So Big Pharma will now unleash their virus, wait for it to kill enough people to make the world panic, and then offer up their solution in the 2015 vaccine and make a handsome profit.

Anti-vaxxers and QAnon fans are, naturally, agreeing with Sather’s theory.

The one problem with the theory is that the coronavirus vaccine from 2015 he refers to (and yes, a certain vaccine exists) is for the avian coronavirus. It’s not the coronavirus making the headlines right now. You see, people who are not college dropouts and understand the importance of expert sources on scientific information will know that “coronavirus” refers to a whole family of viruses. It’s just that the current one that has been spreading through China is not the same virus the vaccine was created for in 2015.

Thus, the moral of the story here is the importance of education and critical thinking. The kind of education one gets in an accredited institution of higher learning and not YouTube videos and social media pages run by college dropouts.

The most ironic part of the whole Jordan Sather story is when he warns his readers that a lot of money can be made from selling fear. Sather, you will find if you visit his web page, propagates many, many videos and documents “proving” other shocking conspiracy theories. For the price of a subscription, of course.

So Jordan might not have finished college, but he knows enough how to be an effective swindler.

Like I said, one of the best things on the Internet...

If you’re stressed out and need some pure gut-busting laughter, I can’t recommend the Sci Man Dan flat-earth-fail compilation videos strongly enough. I had written about the Sci Man Dan YouTube channel before, but for very concise distillations of flat Earth lunacy, do check out the channel’s compilation of the stupidest, most inane arguments made by those who believe the Earth is flat. Here is a link to one such compilation video.

In fact, these compilations are giving me ideas for this blog, as well as possible exercises for my future classes on conspiracy theorists. Wouldn’t it be just as funny to start a compilation of the most shockingly stupid anti-vaxxer or 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Hmm…although I don’t know if funny would be the right word here. Especially when it comes to vaccines. With the flat Earthers you are merely watching the mindless, uniformed ramblings of the hilariously ignorant. They might be stupid, but they hardly cause any damage in the world. 

Anti-vaxxers, on the other hand, get people sick, or worse. 

The flat Earthers are like the performers in old-time freak shows. They are intellectual grotesqueries you can stare at and laugh at and feel superior.

The anti-vaccination activists make you wish that a law could be passed to keep people whose IQ’s are below a certain level from voting. That way we could be sure that no one who actually believes the anti-vaxxer drivel will ever be able to cast a ballot in any election.

The anti-vaxxer terror movement

A couple of recent articles here and here give an overview of the mistake that had been made in the New Jersey State Senate in December which will hopefully be corrected when the legislature reconvenes in February. In a development that helps make New Jersey an embarrassment, a bill to bar all religious exemptions to vaccination requirements was defeated in the senate, thanks to the concerted thuggery and propaganda campaigns of anti-vaxxers, fringe religious zealots, and conspiracy theorists.

I just realized what the anti-vaccination movement and its vocal activists remind me of. They make me think of several recent criminal cases where people who encouraged their depressed friends to commit suicide. Take the Conrad Roy case, for example, where the troubled teenager was coerced into killing himself by his girlfriend through a series of texts and phone calls. Then there was the case of Boston College student Alexander Urtula who was allegedly (the case has not gone to trial as of this writing) harassed, demeaned, and goaded by his girlfriend through a series of some 47,000 text messages into killing himself. 

The anti-vaccination movement similarly preys on the fears and insecurities of parents, bombarding them through a twisted cyber network of blogs, web pages, and social media sites with deceptive and destructive messages that wind up leading those parents to harm their own children. Telling parents not to vaccinate their children, propagating the lies and fabricated conspiracy theories of Internet charlatans is no different than pressuring someone who is depressed or struggling with various forms of mental illness into committing suicide. There is absolutely no credible scientific evidence to suggest that childhood vaccines are dangerous. Read this op-ed about the issue of vaccine safety and this story about yet another major study that proves no connection between vaccines and autism for a detailed discussion about vaccines and science for more details. And, again, telling a worried parent to the contrary is akin to pressuring and goading a dangerously depressed person into harming themselves. In fact, the woman who had allegedly sent her boyfriend 47,000 texts telling him to kill himself looks like an amateur when compared to the sewage of lies and distortions that flood the internet from the anti-vaccination movement every day. As the Globe and Times articles point out, the New Jersey legislature was basically caught off guard by the sheer size and organization of the anti-vaxxer extremists and the power their deception has over people who are scared, who have to medical training, who are alienated from institutions of expertise and authority. Unfortunately this reprehensible, destructive movement has the power to pressure and intimidate lawmakers as well, intelligent individuals who should know better.

So how frustrating is the defeat of the religious exemption bill in light of the fact that New Jersey’s Lakewood community was hit with a measles outbreak in 2019? It’s frustrating enough to make me wish that anti-vaxxers who encourage parents not to vaccinate their children be treated exactly the same way by the law as the people who manipulate others into committing suicide. Yes, I am most often a knee-jerk, free-speech, staunch libertarian, but cases like these shake the very foundation of some of my beliefs. It almost makes me wish that the purveyors of the anti-vaccination propaganda and the conspiracy theories they are founded on would not be protected by the First Amendment. We can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, after all. Moreover, religious liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment are not absolute either. For example, if your religion tells you to commit human sacrifice, the law would certainly take issue with you. And no, parents do not—and should not—have absolute authority over every aspect of their children’s lives. You DON’T have the right to do anything to your children and be free of government interference. You can’t beat your children, for example, and you can’t sexually abuse them either. So you also shouldn’t be allowed exemptions from vaccines based on your religious and philosophical beliefs.

Last year, in fact, I was glad to see the stories about the FBI memo suggesting that some circles of today’s conspiracy community should be viewed as a new form of domestic terrorism. I had written about that on this blog, and it was energizing to see that society is opening its eyes at last to the destructive threat people like the Alex Jones crowd, the Millennium Report, State of the Nation extremists and the rest of their ilk pose to this country. The anti-vaccination movement should be added to this new domestic terror list.

So let’s hope that New Jersey’s elected representatives come to their senses in February and reject the lies, fearmongering, and (what should be criminal) manipulations of the anti-vaxxer terror movement.

No, the Earth is not flat. You're just a moron!

So this appears to be a thing now…every reference to space and the space program gets an automatic reply by the flat Earth believers, as in this article about pictures of the Earth taken from the International Space Station. The piece quickly triggered a set of mental defectives to trot out their conspiracy theories about doctored photos that only create the illusion of a curved Earth.

Now a story like this is probably run in this paper to illicit the incredulous chuckles from readers. It could lead to several head-shakes and jokes about the silliness a of a few people who still believe in nonsense like a flat Earth. As the article details, the Earth was know to be a sphere over 2000 years ago. Simple calculations have been able to prove it.

So I guess I might be in a slightly surly mood right now, but I’m not getting the urge to chuckle at this. Even one flat Earth believer in the world in 2020 is too many. As a growing body of psychological research in conspiracy beliefs is demonstrating, people who believe in idiocy like this are the alienated, the mentally unfit, clinical paranoids, and the sufferers of various mental and personality disorders. They are the antisocial misfits, the inept outsiders who are so alienated from the rest of society that they need to concoct narratives of vast evil cabals that are responsible for all of society’s ills. The creation of these fantasies by these chronic misfits lets them feel like the heroes of their own private universe. It lets them feel like heroic crusaders saving the world from conspiracies no one else is smart enough to see. These conspiracy beliefs are the ultimate ego trip.

Or, in plain English, people who believe in the Earth being flat - or the anti-vaccination agenda, for that matter, or the faking of the Moon landing, or mass shootings being perpetrated by "crisis actors" - are a collection of frigging morons who should be committed to mental asylums against their will. It would certainly be for the betterment of society. 

Damn, that's stupid!

When it comes to the wild and zany world of special-interest groups attempting to protect “America’s families” from all the so-called “filth” and “trash” of the mass media, a special prize needs to go out to the One Million Moms organization. An adjunct organization of the American Family Association—a rabidly anti-gay evangelical group that had once been correctly labeled as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—it’s a collection of nutty extremists who have somehow managed to make headlines recently for the various (spectacularly) failed attempts at influencing popular entertainment. 

Their latest attempt at imposing their bizarre value system on mainstream culture is their call to boycott Burger King for their use of the word “damn” in a new Impossible Whopper ad. You can check out one of the stories on the kerfuffle right here. Apparently they seem to believe that “damn” is a curse word that will corrupt “impressionable” young children. How exactly the corruption will happen is not explained. What form the “corruption” will take is not explained either. So an impressionable youngster saying the word “damn” will lead exactly to what? Will that impressionable little tyke now turn into an ax-murderer? Maybe he’ll join a gang? Become a drug dealer? Not certain, and the million moms don’t seem to have any clear answers among them. I mean, maybe one or two of those million moms might have been able to elaborate.

Now these people seem to be gluttons for public punishment. Some might recall that just before Christmas the Million Moms called for a boycott of the Hallmark Channel for airing an ad that featured a lesbian couple’s wedding and their kiss. Although the Hallmark Channel at first cravenly caved to these yoyos, the channel soon realized that their ratings and business would be hurt much more severely by the backlash from…well, normal, tolerant, decent human beings who, luckily, make up a greater percentage of the American population than the members of homophobic fringe religious fanatics do. So then if the Hallmark Channel boycott wasn’t an embarrassing enough failure for the Moms, they now move on to something as idiotic as this Burger King “damn” boycott.

So I’m certain that Burger King will not lose too much sleep over the angry Moms and not give in to this silly request to change their commercial…that is if they know what’s good for their business. I’m sure they wouldn’t want to be known as the second business to cave in to the demands of cultural terrorists.

Oh, and one more note on the issue of cursing and its effects. What research exists on the subject seems to suggest that those who curse regularly in order to vent their frustrations in a stressful situation might actually possess a higher level of intelligence. Check out this article right here. This doesn’t surprise me since cultural conservative extremists like the American Family Association, One Million Moms, or the Parents Television Council appear to have IQs that make Flat Earth believers look like MENSA members.