Teachergate and Gay Frogs

This fall semester I am teaching my class on the history of conspiracy theories and conspiracy entertainment again, and this time we’re busier than ever. As I post supplemental materials on the course Blackboard shell, it becomes harder and harder to keep ahead of the students. They’re often able to top me finding the most outlandish conspiratorial claims in the shortest amount of time. It’s especially gratifying—or is that disturbing?—to see them find older theories that somehow still finds some adherents.

 

For example, when one of my students found Alex Jones’ rants about the New World Order introducing chemicals into the water supply that turn frogs gay, lots of laughs were had in class. Check out this YouTube clip where someone edited Jones’ histrionics into a music video. While the clip was posted three years ago, there are still Jones fans out there worried about those homosexuality-causing chemicals in the drinking water.

 

The frog theory and video, aside from being hilarious, were also quite useful for our discussion of the fluoride-in-the-water conspiracy theory of the 1950s and 60s. That was a theory Stanley Kubrick had already lampooned in his 1964 classic, Dr. Strangelove. Yet fluoridated-water theory still has its staunch believers to this day.

 

The students’ final project will be the Do It Yourself Conspiracy exercise, where they will have to create their own conspiracy theory using the typical conspiracist’s tricks of the trade: cherry-picking facts to support preconceived ideas, quoting people out of context, making spurious connections between unrelated variables. Usually in the past I had seen some remarkable creations of conspiracy fiction that rival the professional charlatans like Jones or the people at the State of the Nation and the Millennium report sites. This year, however, I’m not sure how the students’ work will stack up against the unadulterated madness of the pros.

 

I mean QAnon? Really people? A vast cabal of human-sacrificing Satanists led by Tom Hanks congregating in tunnels deep underground to drink human blood? Take a look at this Time article to see how committed the QAnon followers are to their cause.

 

And then I noticed a series of posts on the Before It’s News site that quite impressed me. No major news event is left unexploited by the truly committed conspiracists. School closings, apparently, are suspect for a writer named Hank Wolfe, with online education being just a part of a vast 5G mind-control plot he calls "Teachergate." In his posts, Wolfe draws a line between school closings, 5G towers, the New World Order, brainwashing, and all the way to Elon Musk’s neuralink microchip and teachers being replaced by perfectly realistic artificial intelligence simulations on the screens of millions of students across the country.

 

Wolfe’s complete thesis can be read across the following four postings:

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/07/online-education-and-5g-mind-control-exposed-2517291.html

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/08/teachergate-school-cancellation-agenda-exposed-2517416.html

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/08/elon-musk-brain-implants-and-nwo-mind-control-2517431.html

 

https://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2020/09/musk-5g-and-the-school-shut-down-scam-2517449.html

 

The one disappointing thing about Wolfe’s posts is the way he didn’t weave Satan, the Antichrist, or blood-drinking, devil-worshipping celebrities into his yarn. Perhaps it’s because A Call for an Uprising is working that side of the street. Or maybe Wolfe just didn’t get around to it yet. Perhaps that will be his next major revelation.

 

But with theories like Wolfe’s out there, my students will be challenged to reach deep inside their creative core and really work extra hard to top harebrained craziness. 

Belief in the 5G/Coronavirus connection: A study of a world gone mad

This is a recent article I was quoted in about some of the most demented conspiracy theories involving COVID-19. There is an especially strong focus on the claims of a link between 5G technology and the virus, something I'm certain most rational people can't quite wrap their minds around. As I had written in the previous post, the idea of cell-phone radiation having anything to do with a respiratory infection spread by saliva droplets is so ludicrous that it should barely be addressed. Except a growing subculture of the paranoid out there are willing to believe it and there are unscrupulous charlatans all across cyberspace who are more than willing to profit off of telling them what they want to hear.

So check out the article for more of the 5G craziness and other COVID-19 theories. Like the link between testing for the infection and the Mark of the Beast...

And the prize goes...

To the 5G-Coronavirus-link conspiracy theories for the most moronic of all the conspiracy theorizing oozing through the Internet.

The idea that a respiratory illness could be caused by low-frequency cell tower radiation is almost on par with the Flat Earth theories and the QAnon theories. It is so absurd that skeptics really needn’t waste any time even answering them. It is a theory so irrational and illogical that they make the claims that a vast, global Satanic child abuse ring run by Hollywood’s top celebrities out of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor sound sane.

And then you have people in England setting 5G towers on fire!

So check out this article where a medical director for NHS England and an associate professor of cellular microbiology at the University of Reading do have to take the time to explain why the idea that there is any sort of a connection between COVID-19 and 5G radiation is “absolute and utter rubbish.” Basically, if your computer were to be infected by a virus after you had perused too many disreputable web pages—say web pages purveying particularly deviant pornography—would you suddenly get nervous that you, too, might get sick? You woudn’t now, would you? So the idea that an illness spread by droplets of saliva should have anything to do with cell phone radiation is just as deranged.

If one wants to worry about any unscrupulous parties having a hand in exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic, they should pay attention to the article’s points about Russian disinformation campaigns playing a part in the spread of conspiracy theories. As it writes, “some state and state-backed actors seek to exploit the public health crisis to advance geopolitical interests.”

A much more realistic bit of food for thought than then 5G secret weapon of the Illuminati New World Order, isn’t it?