The exploitation of tragedy.

Every time we think the cesspool of today’s conspiracy culture can’t get any worse, it finds a way to sink even lower, to show a heretofore level of unseen callousness and heartlessness.

For several days now, various media outlets have been reporting on the quick spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories about the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests and riots. This is a fairly detailed story about the conspiracy theories from the BBC.

As we are witnessing an American tragedy, the reminder of how fragile our culture is because of race relations, the second tragedy is to see its exploitation by individuals in order to spur even more division, even more distrust and fear among Americans. At a time when the culture needs to come together, to find common ground, to communicate with each other and find a way to live together as one nation and one people, individuals who take this unrest as an opportunity to encourage more suspicion and distrust are little better than murderers themselves.

But as we've seen the handiwork of those who traffic in unsubstantiated conspiracy fantasies before, their behavior should be of no surprise now.

Those who fail to learn from history…well, you know the rest.

So I just ran across this article from a couple of days ago about the eerie parallels between the 1918 Spanish Flu and the current COVID-19 pandemic. More precisely, it’s an article about how the frustrations with the 1918 forced social-distancing and mandatory closing of businesses inspired many to rebel and push back. As understandable as their frustrations were, once they crossed into irrational revolt against even simple cautionary regulations like the mandates to wear face masks, the results were tragic and foreseeable. There was a second wave of the disease outbreak in the fall of 1918 and more lives were needlessly lost.

Are we on a path to repeating what happened in 1918? As we just came out of the Memorial Day weekend, in many places in the country it sure seems like it. We just saw headlining stories about acts of such mindlessness, sheer thoughtless stupidity that it makes one test which is stronger…one’s skull or the nearest brick wall. Hundreds of people packed into pool parties, backyard get-togethers, bars, and beaches while refusing to wear facemasks and ignoring social-distancing practices makes me wonder whether or not at some point in the very recent past we might have suffered from another silent pandemic. And that would have been a pandemic that quietly attacked the brains of huge swaths of the population and drastically reduced IQs. 

But as I had written before, I am completely sympathetic to the call for reopening of the country. It needs to be done before the current economic crisis slides toward a catastrophe to rival the Great Depression. Yet why do we have people asking for the restart of the economy sabotaging their own message with their madness? As infection rates are spiking in several parts of the country, why do we still have to listen to this insanity about how asking people to wear a simple facemask in certain public places is akin to a totalitarian takeover? 

Oh yeah, because despite the fact that we are living in a time when communication technology can give access to information, knowledge, facts, scientific data to virtually everyone at a fraction of a second, we are just incapable and unwilling to learn from history. Learning from absurd conspiracy theories on the internet and hysterical fear-mongering about a totalitarian takeover, sure. Learning from history and scientific authorities...forget about it.

Do you want to exercise your rights? Do it with a facemask!!

And no, making you put on that mask in a crowd while you exercise your rights to free speech and to organize protests is not a part of the creepy commie globalist menace run by International Bankers and Globalists.

Just as we started a well-justified discussion of how long and to what extent a national lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic needs to go on, the one way you could definitely derail your argument for reopening the country is to follow the lead of various gun-toting and flag- and sign-waving yahoos getting a lot of recent attention for their rallies in places like Michigan, Washington, Ohio, and North Carolina among about two dozen or so states.

And planning to reopen the country is, in fact, crucial. It must be done very soon. Daily news updates on the COVID-19 crisis will, without fail, look at the ever-worsening economic situation. At this writing 33.5 Americans are unemployed. Those are people who, through no fault of their own, are unable to pay their rent, their mortgages, or their children’s education. To feed their families, they now need to stand in line at food banks and wait for handouts. Their frustration and fear of a disintegrating economy is understandable. We must keep this pandemic from forcing this country—the world—to relive the 1930s.

This link to a recent New York Times Magazine article about how imperative it is to restart the economy presents various points of view on the issue, including the ethics of weighing the potential death tolls against the devastation wrought upon lives and families by a collapsing economy. From bioethicists to economists and healthcare and civil-rights activists, the piece presents a roundtable discussion of how common sense can somehow let us try and deal with a crisis that will have no easy solution.

If you take a close look at strip malls or any shopping centers where grocery chains and Walmarts and Costcos stand open next to various other closed small businesses, the logic of pushing for reopening is obvious. I myself live next to a Walmart and a ShopRite grocery store, both of which have been open seven days a week throughout the entire pandemic lockdown. I also live next to a very long stretch of strip malls where tile stores, electronics shops, clothing boutiques, and a TJ Max have been closed for weeks. During this lockdown, one could always find more people inside the Walmart or the ShopRite than the tile store or TJ Max at any time before the pandemic. Of course, in both the ShopRite and the Walmart the sizes of crowds had been regulated and plenty of signage is encouraging people to keep at least six feet away from each other. Although neither store, up until now, has mandated that all people wear face masks when they enter, most people do. All of the employees of these establishments also wear masks and gloves at all times. By the same token we could protect the public health and work toward flattening the infection curve and allow more small businesses to open and send more people back to work. That, I believe, is just common sense. 

Common sense, however, seems to be at a frustratingly all-time-low supply in this country. The anti-lockdown protest movement gives evidence to this. One needs to take one look at their absurd signs waved around at the rallies—demanding the right to risk their own lives and those of others by refusing to wear masks—listen to their conspiracy theories about Bill Gates implanting people with microchips at the behest of the global fascist takeover, and any inclination to speed up the reopening of the country will evaporate from most sane people’s minds. The dialogue about the crisis of our times is being derailed, the argument for the need to restart the economy as soon as possible has been poisoned by, hijacked by a conspiracy-addled lunatic fringe. This is a lunatic fringe that insists on living in its own self-aggrandizing fantasy world where they see themselves as collection of action heroes saving freedom and democracy from jack-booted forces of evil. 

To be sure, this anti-lockdown conspiracy crowd is relatively small and their position is not shared by most of the country. The majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, support precautionary measures against the spread of COVID. Yet the reckless gatherings of these “patriots” where a lack of precautions against infection is a sign of idealism and defiance will keep prolonging the disease, will keep adding to the death count. That, in turn, will prolong the return to normalcy and will keep the economy sinking further and further into an abyss.

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?

"Conspiracy theories as dangerous as the Coronavirus itself..."

Check out this piece in the New York Times that perfectly hits the nail on the head about why people believe in the most patently ludicrous conspiracy theories, especially in times of crisis. As I had written here before, it’s one thing to let the imagination run away on occasion and indulge in oddball speculation about global cabals and secret societies orchestrating all of the world’s major events. Sure, the Illuminati communing with aliens from secret lairs underneath Denver International Airport sounds like harmless X-Files fun. And then the world is facing a once-in-a-century crisis and people are dying. And then the conspiracy theorists turn their talents for spinning creative fantasies to telling the fearful, the insecure, the unsophisticated to put their lives in danger by ignoring the advice of medical professionals and scientists.

The virus being caused by 5G cell towers, anyone? Had a novelist come up with a plot where conspiracists are able to make people believe such an idiotic theory, he would be told that such a story could never be published because no readers would ever believe it.

As the article details, there are enough scared people out there that they are willing to believe in the most absurd theories in an attempt to give them some sense of control over the unknown.

And there are enough unconscionable, sociopathic monsters out there willing to tell those scared people exactly what they want to hear. That, as the article concludes, is as dangerous as the Coronavirus itself.

Unconscionable Monsters...

That’s the only phrase I could use in a recent reply I wrote to a comment on my October 29, 2018 post about the Call for and Uprising YouTube channel that has recently shifted from its laughably ridiculous obsession with Satanists in the entertainment industry to its jumping on a series of repugnant, morally bankrupt Coronavirus conspiracy theories. The worse of these theories—to be found all over the online conspiracy community—all amount to attempting to convince people to ignore the scientific and medical establishment’s guidelines on avoiding the COVID-19 virus. People who actively try to convince others to ignore the safety warnings about this disease can hardly be classified as human. Can there be no clearer example of true evil in this world today than someone who willfully attempts to deceive others into endangering their lives and health? Such behavior is on par with attempted murder.

Among some of the most repellent examples of these theories, found all across web pages like State of the Nation, The Millennium Report, Before It’s News, or Alex Jones’ Infowars, include claims that the virus just simply does not exist, that the illnesses are caused by 5G cell towers, that the entire outbreak was engineered by some mysterious “they” to depopulate the Earth, or that the virus is real but it had been created to then compel people to take vaccines that will kill them. 

Alex Jones, the most high-profile and prolific of these professional scumbags, has also just been warned by the New York State attorney general’s office to stop peddling a “natural” remedy he claims will cure COVID-19. Check out an article about it right here. Jones, of course, knows full well that tens of thousands of his readers and listeners hang on his every word every day. And he knows that there is no cure yet for the virus. Attempting to sell his listeners this modern day version of snake oil (a concoction called colloidal silver that has absolutely no scientifically proven medicinal properties) is the act of one of the most brazen, the most audacious sociopaths in the conspiracy world.

There indeed are a couple of horrible diseases spreading the world right now. The Coronavirus is just one of them. The other one is the conspiracy theory.