Friday, March 20, 2020

The Lie-land of Dr. Trudeau: Kevin Trudeau joins the ranks of the corona-crapitalists


In my previous post I took a look at some of the kooky conspiranoid narratives surrounding the current world health crisis, COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus. I also took some potshots at fraudsters who were (and in some cases still are) peddling remedies for the contagion. Crazy stories and frauducts continue to pop up everywhere, and I'm not sure I'll have the time or energy to keep up with all of them. But after I discovered that one of this blog's pet subjects, imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau (aka KT, aka Katie on this Whirled) had joined the corona chorus, I knew that this discovery deserved a post of its own.

You're most likely aware that for decades, Trudeau has traded in his proprietary cache of information that "They" don't want you to know. Over the years he has earned quite a loyal following of folks who look to him for this "forbidden" information. Apparently many still do even though he is currently confined in a federal prison camp, FPC Montgomery, Alabama, which he has fondly referred to as "Camp Cupcake," presumably because the livin' is so easy there. So it was all but inevitable that at some point he would glom on to the coronacrisis.
 
And indeed he has. Since March 15, 2020 it's pretty much all he's been writing about, through a proxy, on The Official Kevin Trudeau Fan Club page on Facebook.
Today he really hyped his output.
I have released 3 extremely urgent and important "Covid-19 Updates" over the last few days. If you have not read them CLICK HERE.
https://kevintrudeau.com/covid-19-updates/

They are available on this message board/blog and also on:

KevinTrudeau.com
GuruKev.com
NuggetsofGold.com

I will be releasing more updates every few days.

I have access to information directly from high-level sources that is not being revealed in the main-stream media. This is extremely urgent information that "they don't want you to know about”.

The internet is now censoring information about the virus. The "truth" and "real facts" are now being blocked. I highly encourage you to go to the websites listed above and get on our email list so that you will be able to get vital updates on the virus and the economic situation going on around the world.

I have sources in the United Nations; The World Health Organization; America's National Institutes of Health; The USA's Food and Drug Administration (FDA); The USA's Centers for Disease Control; other health organizations from several other countries; several current and past Prime Ministers of various countries; members of several Royal Families, including a King and a Crown Prince; members of The Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, Council on Foreign Relations, and Skull and Bones; and many other high-level sources in the European Union and the global banking industry, including the US Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank.

I also am in direct contact with several "Gurus" who can "tap into the ether/universal field" and access and download "information".

There are also other sources I am in direct contact with that I cannot mention here.

Check here often as there are several extremely important updates that I will be revealing.

Members of the private club, “The Global Information Network”, have access to this information, and most importantly, are part of a worldwide global support group that is vital in situations like this. If you are not a member, consider joining, as membership can be a critical part of prospering in times of crisis like this. Having access to 'insider info" before others can give you a major advantage in life. Having a support network of people helping people around the world who are upbeat, positive and have been trained to use the "Law of Attraction", can mean the difference between success and failure. Go to
GlobalinformationNetwork.com for details.

If you would like to speak to Tonya or Rahelios personally about The Global Information Network, you can contact them at:
https://gurukev.com/contact-us/

Look for updates coming very soon with major news. Remember, this too shall pass and all IS well.

Kevin Trudeau
There he goes again with those "secret" sources, some of which are so top-secret that he "cannot mention" them. This is the same steaming load of thrice-crapped crap that suckered who knows how many gullibles into GIN more than 10 years ago. (When will people ever learn?)

And the urgent call to "get on our email list so that you will be able to get vital updates on the virus and the economic situation going on around the world" is just another transparent attempt to cast an even wider net, for as all good scammers know, there are plenty of suckers in the sea. I know I've quoted
this 2014 Salty Droid post several times on this blog, but it needs quoting again because this is Kevin Trudeau (and his cronies in the GIN leadership) that we're talking about.
After a lifetime of epic grift :: serial huckster Kevin Trudeau is finally in jail … rotting like he always was. KT got ten years for failing to comply with some government paperworks he signed ten years ago as a punishment for the bullshit he’d been pulling the ten years previous to that. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been brutally sucked from the sad in the meantime :: and basically … nobody gives a fuck.

It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the total revenues from Trudeau’s life of scamjobery had topped a billion dollars. This book :: that book … whatever … the books don’t matter. It’s about cartels of badguys buying {preselected for sadness} people in bulk from media/info companies :: and then trading those people around until they become empty vessels … robbed of their money … and often of their sense of self.
But maybe you're not a sucker, but you just want to see Katie's updates because you are desperate for some entertainment, and perusing them will give you something to occupy your time besides hunkering down in a closet hiding from your cranky kids who have been furloughed from school, or standing in a three-mile-long line in front of Costco in a desperate effort to score some toilet paper. And maybe you don't want to get on any scamlist in order to get that entertainment. Well, that's why I'm here. Here we go:

Update # 1 was published on March 15, 2020.

Katie begins by saying he has been "flooded" with mail asking about the COVID-19 pandemic. So of course he has to accommodate the information-hungry masses. He starts by listing COVID-19 mortality numbers and comparing them to the flu, and then goes on to mention heart disease, cancer, accidents, wars, and so forth. He reassures us that unlike COVID-19, World War II was a REAL problem, and "the world made it through that war and recovered." Then he goes into his globalist-agenda spiel, all of which leads into the Big Sell.
Could this hysteria cause a global economic collapse, millions of bankruptcies and governments defaulting on debt, creating that the “only solution” is a new, one-world currency and global government so that “this never happens again”?

Could this create the “need” for “marshal
[sic] law” to “protect” citizens, thus giving the government TOTAL power and control?

Maybe. Or maybe this is just a trial run for the future.

These things will eventually happen. Maybe in our lifetime, maybe the next generation.

This is just one reason why being a member of the Global Information Network (Globalinformationnetwork.com) is so important.

When these things happen, members will get the real insight from the “insiders”, not the propaganda machine called the “news”. 
To tell the truth, I worry about martial (not "marshal") law in the US, simply because of #NotMyPresident Donald John Trump's authoritarian impulses; his recent rebranding of himself as a "wartime president" in the wake of the coronacrisis should be enough to make anyone nervous. (If the Department of Justice's reported request for infinite detention powers to fight the coronavirus doesn't give you the creeps, you're part of the problem.) Trump is arguably a "wartime president," but as this incisive article in the April 2020 Atlantic explains, he is engaged in a war on American institutions. But I digress.
 
A little later on in Update # 1, Trudeau writes:

The good news is this. Look at all the people, including “famous” people that have tested positive for the virus. They all say the same thing: “I felt a little sick, like a cold, for a few days, but now I am fine”; or “I felt like I had a mild flu, but that only lasted less than a week, and now I feel fine.”

The majority of people (98%) will only show mild cold-like or flu-like symptoms and probably not even realize they have the virus.

This too shall pass.

Consider building up your immune system and keeping it strong. Take 5,000 IU of vitamin D3, 3 times a day, and 1 gram of vitamin C with bioflavonoids, 3 times a day.

I am not a doctor, but medical and health experts around the world make these very good suggestions.

There are many more “anti-viral” things you can take such as allicin (from garlic), hydrogen peroxide (35% food grade, but it MUST be diluted in water. Get instructions and be careful with this), red marine algae, propolis, honey, and many other things that you can find online easily. 
I think he forgot to mention colloidal silver.

Update # 2 was published on March 16. And, indeed, it was ripe with number two. The over-arching message seems to be that COVID-19 is NOT a deadly virus, that the world has been through much worse, and even those worse things were NBD in the end, so COVID-19 is really NBD.

I couldn't restrain myself from joining the conversation on this one, particularly when I saw this bit:
Q.) How come the media has stopped mentioning the number of new coronavirus cases and deaths in China and South Korea?

A.) Because the facts don’t fit the story they want to tell. In both countries, the number of new cases are GOING DOWN. And the number of deaths are going down. This is VERY good news, but NOT being reported. 
On the Facebook page, I responded:
I find it incredible that people are still turning to this con artist as some sort of fount of wisdom, particularly regarding medical or health advice. I won't address all of the inanities in this "update" because that would make my post far too long, but let me address one.

Actually, the media HAVE been reporting the dramatic decline in deaths in China. They've presented it as hopeful news, but with the cautionary note that the story isn't over and there could very well be new waves of outbreaks. And there have been numerous reports about the contrasts between the way South Korea handled the virus (responsibly, from the beginning, because the MERS outbreak a few years previously had prepared them); and the way the US handled it (irresponsibly at first, because our "leader" -- whom Kevin and his fans have spent so much time sucking up to in order to get him to spring Kevin from prison -- is a bumbling egomaniac who was trying to suppress the bad news until it no longer became possible for him to do so).

Here's ProPublica on South Korea v US.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-south-korea-scaled-coronavirus-testing-while-the-us-fell-dangerously-behind
[Addendum, April 2, 2020: If I'd known then what I know now, I would have added that every time someone even mentions South Korea to Trump, he gets extremely defensive and cuts them off, as he did PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor during his presser on March 30, 2020. In fact Trump has spent a great deal of tweeting and talking time falsely claiming that the US response to the coronavirus crisis has been superior to South Korea's response, as if it were some sort of competition. I suppose that to him, it is. The point is that contrary to Kevin Trudeau's claim, the mainstream media have made an earnest effort to get the facts out there, but it's Kevin's hero, Trump, who is furiously trying to suppress those facts. ~ CC]

Update # 2 also included this question:
Q.) Kevin, are you nervous about getting the virus?

A.) No! I would love to get it to show the world the hysteria is out of control. The sky is NOT falling. Look at those famous people like the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau’s wife, Sophie, who tested positive, and Tom Hanks. Both reported MILD symptoms and no problems at all. In fact, they said that it was much more mild than a flu, and more like a regular cold and not even a bad cold.

Friends, consider that when HIV (AIDS) first came out, the media said that if you contracted the HIV virus, it was a “death sentence”. Well, they lied. We now know that some crazy low number of people who get HIV actually have any symptoms and die. The media predicted hundreds of millions worldwide would die of HIV. They mislead the public. What they did then, and are doing now, is irresponsible and only being done for ratings and a globalist political agenda. 
I certainly don't want Katie or anyone else to get COVID-19, but if he did get it, and if it were really bad, I wonder if he would change his tune. Even though most people who contract COVID-19 probably will not have serious symptoms, and even fewer who get it will die of the virus, many have had serious symptoms, and so far thousands have died, and contrary to Trudeau's smug reassurances to the faithful, not all of them have been old and/or had other underlying health problems. If Trudeau really believes the claim that only the old or otherwise ill are in for a tough time and are in danger of dying if they get the virus, maybe he should try to convince the family of 12-year-old Emma in Atlanta that they're just imagining their little girl is fighting for her life.
 
But let's talk about HIV/AIDS (and I can't help but notice that Kevin didn't add that he wishes he would get that, just so he could show the world it's no big thing). Actually, the media were not deliberately misleading the public about HIV. The world was truly scared at the beginning of the epidemic in the early 1980s, when so little was known about this terrifying and seemingly new disease that was so lethal, though it seemed to disproportionately affect certain groups (most notably gay men, at least in the West). I remember the fear very well. I still grieve for dear friends I have lost to this horror.

 
This 2010 paper on "AIDS exceptionalism," published by the Journal of the International AIDS Society, gives some historical perspective.

A more recent piece (updated November 25, 2019), published on the Very Well Health site, also offers
a realistic look at HIV/AIDS. In the early years of the epidemic the mortality rate was signficantly higher than it is today.
Expanded access to antiretroviral therapy has profoundly lowered the rate of HIV-related deaths, both in the U.S. and globally. Some of the greatest reversal have been seen in sub-Saharan Africa, the region of which accounts for 75 percent of all HIV infections...

...According to the WHO, 32 million people have died of HIV since the beginning of the epidemic out of the 74.9 million who have been infected (roughly 43 percent), Moreover, of the 37.9 million people living with HIV today, just over 770,000 died in 2018.All told, AIDS-related deaths have been reduced by more than 56 percent since the peak in 2004.
Unfortunately, infection rates continue to soar in Russia and Central Asia, due mainly to intravenous drug use. In short, and contrary to Trudeau's claim, HIV/AIDS has been and continues to be a pretty big deal. The disease may not have killed the "hundreds of millions" of people that Trudeau claims was once the projection, but it has killed many millions, and has left a brutal mark on the world.

Update # 3 was published on March 18.

Here Katie is in true "all is well" motivational mode, though he doesn't miss an opportunity to return to his favorite globalist/elite conspiracy narrative.
Consider that the worldwide panic about the coronavirus does not agree with the facts.

First, there is really not a worldwide ‘Panic” among normal people.

Only in certain countries, did the mainstream media outlets create a panic. This created panic is for OTHER reasons.

Mostly this panic is designed to create a global economic disaster that leads to:

-a resetting of all debt
-a one world currency
-a one world government of non-elected officials (like the European Union)
-a one world police force

In America, there IS panic among the majority of citizens. But even with the data I revealed at the beginning of this message, there is NO reason to panic about the virus, OR the economic “disaster”. This will all pass as other MUCH more catastrophic events have all not only passed, but created a BOOM in the world economies and an INCREASE in the standard of living and quality of life for more people all around the world. Just think about what happened AFTER WWII.

The world became a MUCH better place for a much higher percentage of people.

But people have been brainwashed and hypnotized by the misleading media. 
The missive concludes:
Check back here often. I will give my next update shortly with the REAL numbers and where you can see them online. THIS data will make you feel MUCH better. I will also talk about the economy and how this media hype will affect your financial situation. I will also share more about “who” is behind this and “why”.

Don’t worry, you are not going to lose your house and become homeless and be without food. All is well my friends.

Remember, all you have to fear, is fear itself. All is well and most importantly, this ‘event” will be a trigger for a better world for more and more people.

Much love.
Your friend,
Kevin Trudeau
All-righty, then.

I know it will probably come as a massive disappointment to those who depend upon Katie for all of the information that "They" don't want you to know about, but as of today, March 20, 2020, he and his fellow inmates at Camp Cupcake are on lockdown because of the coronavirus.
That's according to a Facebook post on the "official" Kevin Trudeau fan club page. As shared by the pseudonymous Rahelios on that page:
We have all been restricted to our rooms. So we have been "locked down" until further notice. We think it could be up to a month. This means no access to phones and VERY limited access to emails. This is just an FYI. All is very well.
Kevin
Well, gee, that's too bad.

You might be wondering how Kevin, locked in his room with no phone and almost zero access to email, is going to continue receiving all of that information from his seekrit sources: you know, those multiple health orgs from several countries; and all of those Prime Ministers and members of several Royal Families; and the Bilderbergers and Bohemian Grovers and Skull and Boners; and, yes, those "high-level sources in the European Union and the global banking industry."

It's possible he will just have to rely on the "Gurus" who know how to tap into the ether and download all of that data that "They" don't want you to know about. Since these gurus are so powerful, and since Kevin himself has such a powerful brain, a fact that we know because he has told us so many times, it's possible that he can communicate telepathically with them. (I wonder if Esther Hicks, who has made millions with her imaginary-friends collective "Abraham," is one of those gurus. For years Trudeau has been an enthusiastic endorser of the Abraham-Hicks scampire, and even now some of the Abe-Hicks info-frauducts are on Kevin's "recommended" list.)

If the ether-tapping gurus fail him, perhaps Kevin can fall back on those "other sources I am in direct contact with that I cannot mention here." They probably have all sorts of amazing ways to infiltrate the lockdown.

I know that nothing concerning Kevin Trudeau should surprise me by now, but sometimes I'm still baffled by the fact that so many people seem to be looking at him for guidance in every aspect of their lives. It's not really much of an exaggeration to say that he has assumed Messianic qualities in the eyes of at least some of his followers, and sources much closer to the situation than I am have shared that they find this fact more than a little disconcerting.

In recent months Trudeau has doubled down on his efforts to rebrand himself as a spiritual leader:
a true guru nicknamed, apparently without irony, Guru Kev -- and he has a group of enablers who are helping this along, and a willing audience to lap it all up. Like so many other phenomena I've written about on this blog over the years, I think this near-worship of a serial scammer/inveterate deceptive marketer is both scary and sad.

 
This is just a small example of the near-worshipful responses on Facebook
to Kevin Trudeau's "Coronavirus updates." These appeared on
Update # 2.
As of the last time I checked, 152 people had shared that "update."

Look, I have nothing against maintaining hope and even optimism that most of us will get through this crisis, and that some good will come out of the devastation. I also agree that panicking is not a constructive response. And it's true that we can't always rely on the media or our "leaders" to present a realistic perspective about what's going on, particularly in the midst of a crisis, when news, rumors, and speculation are coming in so fast and furious that it's difficult to keep up with all of it. It's also true that the media -- both mainstream and otherwise -- do thrive on ratings, and often this involves sensationalism. We all know the drill: "If it bleeds, it leads."

But at the risk of once again over-stating the painfully obvious, it is sheer folly to look to a known con artist for wisdom and guidance on this or any other matter, particularly since so many of Kevin Trudeau's "facts" are just plain wrong, even if they do come from "forbidden secret sources." And on a smaller scale, Trudeau's counsel to his followers to totally ignore the mainstream media and view COVID-19 as trivial is arguably just as counter-productive and even potentially dangerous as the mixed messages from Donald Trump and the misinformation from governments in other countries such as Italy.

Though you may be weary of hearing this from me, I maintain that Trudeau's chief motivation for being a source of (mis)information is and always has been not to enlighten and uplift humanity, but to line his own pockets and solidify his standing as what amounts to a cult leader, sort of a latter-day L. Ron Hubbard. And all evidence points to the probability that he has been working on that pocket-lining project nonstop since he's been locked up, within the limits imposed upon him by the Camp Cupcake rules.

My best advice is to do whatever you can to stay healthy and hopeful, without looking to scammers and conspiranoids for vital information. Meanwhile, if you want a more realistic perspective about historical pandemics than what Your Friend Kevin has to offer,
start here.

And if you want some real numbers, don't wait for Kevin Trudeau's "exclusive" information that is being "censored" from the Internet. Start here.


PS added March 31, 2020: Well, that "lockdown" at Camp Cupcake sure didn't last long. Only a couple of days later, Trudeau was right back at it, pumping out COVID-19 "updates" without missing a beat. Since this post is already long enough/too long, I wrote a new one. Here's the link.

Friday, March 13, 2020

Coronacrazy: COVID-19 virus brings out the conspiranoids & fraudsters

To even the most casual observer of popular culture over the past couple of decades, it will probably come as no surprise that the current world health crisis -- the disease now known as COVID-19, caused by the coronavirus called SARS-CoV2 -- has been the focus of some pretty nutty conspiracy narratives, while presenting a golden opportunity for fraudsters claiming to sell all sorts of wacko preventatives or cures. In some cases, the conspiranoids are the same folks who are peddling the frauducts.

Fear-porn mongers and alt-health crapitalists are always on the lookout for new crises, real or manufactured, to help them line their pockets, so in a sense there's nothing new here. And the fact that
some governments have been remiss (and I'm being very polite here) in their responsibility to keep the public informed about the present contagion (now a pandemic) makes it even easier for the conspiracy peddlers and the frauduct pushers to spread their toxins. Ignorance and fear are their best friends.

The most popular coronaspiracies
One of the most talked-about coronavirus-related conspiracies, which has only recently receded into the background a bit (but don't count it out yet), was the Trumpublican narrative that the mainstream news media and the Democratic party were engaged in some sort of conspiracy to make Donald Trump look bad/tank the stock market and the economy/sabotage his chances for re-election. Trump himself was braying about this until he finally realized that hey, the virus is a real thing, and as a result valuable time was probably lost. There's buzz that his d-bag son-in-law, Jared, may have been at least partly responsible for the big delay. But another factor could very well have been what Vox calls the GOP's decades-long war on expertise. Even after Trump began taking the crisis more seriously he remained on the defensive, seeming to focus more on bragging about his administration's actions than actually responding in a rational way to the pandemic -- and he was still sending mixed messages.

And don't be fooled by Trump's new, somber re-branding of himself as
a "war time president." While on the one hand the re-brand could be viewed as yet another indicator that he is taking COVID-19 seriously, the war talk is also clearly an attempt to improve the ratings of his ongoing reality show: to restore confidence that may have been wavering in some of his base, and to win new supporters. With his now-daily briefings, flanked by experts who actually have useful information to offer, and to whom he defers for at least some questions, he is taking full advantage of this opportunity to paint himself as a heroic leader. I can't help getting the impression that this is all still a game to him. And at this point, it's anyone's guess as to how some of the supposedly temporary measures he may take to fight this "war" could morph into permanent restrictions on our already endangered civil liberties.

* * * * *
 
But let's focus now on some of the more traditionally wackadoodle conspiracy narratives, which, while infused with politics in some cases, are not uniformly political. On March 12, 2020, Listverse posted a piece about
the top 10 crazy conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19. The theories range from the US government being the creator of the virus (or the Chinese government, or the Canadian government -- take your pick); to Microsoft's Bill Gates being behind it all; to a meteorite explosion back in October 2019; to a Chinese woman eating bat soup; to Corona beer being somehow involved; to 5G internet being the culprit.

The 5G theory has gained quite a lot of traction with online conspiracy fans, although there's no evidence linking 5G and COVID-19. From the Metro UK site, 25 February 2020:
The theory centers on the fact that Wuhan was the first city in China to receive 5G (it wasn’t just Wuhan), that 5G damages the immune system (there is no evidence to suggest it can) and that COVID-19 is just a more virulent version of a cold (it isn’t – its genome has already been sequenced).
Earlier in the crisis -- January 27, 2020, to be exact -- Vice.com published an article about the exciting opportunities the virus presented for some of the most well-known professional conspiracy pushers, most notably, Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams and Alex Jones. From the Vice piece:
“It’s over for humanity,” Mike Adams declared the other day. The self-proclaimed Health Ranger and one of the internet’s more prolific conspiracy-mongers offered a dark prophecy. “There will only be lone survivors. The strategy must now shift. You can be a survivor. We can help you survive, the information here at Infowars and what I do.”

Adams is the founder and main voice at
Natural News, the often demented “health site” which has trafficked for years in anti-vaccine misinformation, bogus cancer cures, and heated warnings about what the globalists are up to. Adams has recently claimed that unspecified shadowy attacks are making it difficult for him to share information on the coronavirus on his own site (which has, in fact, run dozens of specious articles on the coronavirus.) On a recent afternoon, in a change of venue, he was calmly predicting the end of humanity on InfoWars’ live webcast, where he shared a segment with its founder, Alex Jones. Over the course of an interminable two hours or so, the two men had a couple of aims: to lavish each other with mutual praise over their bravery against the Deep State and, more importantly, to foment as much fear and panic as possible about the coronavirus, the epidemic which originated in Wuhan, China and has, to date, killed at least 81 people. [Obviously the numbers have increased considerably since then. ~CC]

It’s not surprising that
conspiracy theories and hoaxes have begun circulating about the coronavirus. Conspiracy peddlers make their money and retain their audiences by selling panic, and they’ve leaped onto this new epidemic with glee, using it to sell all kinds of bullshit theories, market questionable products, and—in a particularly depressing twist—push the Trump administration to impose new, xenophobic travel bans.
That pretty much sums it up.

The article drove home the point that both Adams and Jones, regardless of what they might actually believe, were pushing the theory that the coronavirus is just another attempt by "the elites" or the "New World Order" or the "Deep State" or [insert name of scapegoat here] to depopulate the globe, for whichever nefarious reason or reasons make the most compelling stories. As for the nefarious reasons behind the compelling stories themselves, it's not all that difficult to figure out.

Luckily, they had a solution: Every InfoWars story we’ve seen about the coronavirus has concluded with a link to one of Jones’ products. “People who know what’s coming,” one read, “are taking advantage of the up to 50% off savings on our storable food.”
But it wasn't the storable food that ultimately drew the attention of the authorities. I'll get to that shortly.

I haven't actually watched
the Jones/Adams video mentioned in the Vice article. I figure that's nearly three hours I'll never get back, and I have other things to do. But if you watch it, let me know what you think. And if you really want to get into Mike Adams' (cynical marketer) noggin, take a look at the coronavirus "reporting" on his infamous Natural News site. I will say one thing: though he has been a devoted Trumpster for years, in at least one piece he castigated Trump for not being able to "do the math" about the spread of the virus. But mostly, you'll see Adams patting himself on the back about being correct re "predictions" he made, and warning that people who continue to ignore his screeds are dumb sheeple. And of course you'll see scads of ads for various frauducts to help you through COVID-19 and any other apocalyptic scenario that comes down the pike.

Suffer the little children
Perhaps the most nutcakey narrative of all, and one that hasn't been mentioned in most of the articles I've seen about these coronaspiracies, is the claim that the coronavirus crisis is an elaborate hoax, employed by the Trump administration as a cover while they carry out mass arrests of pedophiles.
Blame Q Anon for starting this one, which was actually hatched long before COVID-19 was even a glimmer in Mike Adams' or Alex Jones' shifty eyes. Here's some background, from the March 2019 Daily Beast piece linked to in the previous sentence.
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy that falsely accuses President Trump’s opponents of involvement in child sex-trafficking and sometimes cannibalism. Over its 17 months of existence, QAnon fans have regularly invented new “deadlines” for the pseudo-fascistic purges of their enemies, which they claim are coming at any moment. But the movement hasn’t passed with its deadlines. The original theory is morphing with time, not diluting as much as it is seeping into America’s bloodstream.

When QAnon began with a
series of anonymous posts in the troll-ridden forum 4chan in late October 2017, the theory promised near-immediate results. The poster, “Q,” implied he was a military official with access to privileged information about Trump’s foes. Former Hillary Clinton aides John Podesta and Huma Abedin would be indicted on Nov. 3 and 6, respectively, the anonymous poster claimed.

Readers on the right-leaning forum rejoiced. When the date passed without the predicted arrests, Q spun up more predictions. New revelations about “taking back our great country” would come in the following days, he wrote. Trump opponents in the media would be arrested. Trump opponents would commit suicide over a specific weekend.

None of the prophecies came true, and some followers defected. But rather than turn on their anonymous prophet, other followers simply adopted looser interpretations of Q’s claims...
Since devotees of Q's narrative have continued to find a way to fit it into events as they unfold, it's no surprise that earlier this month two conspiranoid right-wing Trump fans brought the coronavirus crisis into the story. On March 10, 2020, RightWing Watch reported that wingnut and "firefighter prophet" Mark Taylor appeared on a video in which he really let loose with the crazy.
...Taylor suspects that the current coronavirus outbreak is possibly a cover to get leading Republicans—like Reps. Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Doug Collins, and Sen. Ted Cruz, who are all under self-quarantine after coming into contact with a coronavirus-infected attendee at the recent CPAC conference—out of Washington, D.C., so the Trump administration can carry out the mass arrests.

“They’re using the coronavirus as a cover to go in, shut places down, and go in and start making arrests,”
Taylor said. “Are they pulling these guys out, like Matt Gaetz, are they getting them out of D.C. for a reason?”

“They’re pulling these guys out of D.C., the good guys, before they lock D.C. down, possibly, and go in and really start arresting people,” Taylor speculated. “Or could they be sending these guys home, and then they lock D.C. down in a way so that it’s secure, and then they go get these guys at their houses? I don’t know.”
And on March 12, RightWing Watch reported that another Trumpster conspiranoid (and friend of Mark Taylor), Liz Crokin, reinforced that narrative.
“I do believe that when these mass arrests happen that we will be in martial law for our own safety,” Crokin said. “I believe that the coronavirus, which the president of the United States and many doctors have said is no more serious than the flu, is the cover to put the country into lockdown—just like Italy is in lockdown—to possibly declare martial law, get people off the streets, keep them in their homes, so they’re safe so when the military and the National Guard sweeps in and conducts these mass arrests, it is done in a manner where people are kept safe.”

“Since 2017, Q has been talking about these mass arrests, and Q has also been talking about how when these mass arrests happen, there will probably be many days of darkness, social media might go down, the National Guard is going to come in, and the military will be used to arrest these people,” she added. “That is what I believe is happening right now.”
I'll say one thing about this lunacy: at least it brings some context to a March 9 Facebook post by one of this blog's least favorite fraudsters, Leonard Coldwell, aka Not-Doktor Stoopid.

I was honestly puzzled when I first saw that post, because it didn't link to any article about pedophiles being "arrestet." Instead, it linked directly to Coldwell's own web site. I thought perhaps he was making a confession. But now I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was referencing the latest miasma from the QAnon fever swamp.

Like many other right wingnuts, Coldwell has seemingly been obsessed with pedophilia for years. When poking around the Interwebz for some more insight on this obsession, I came across
this excellent article from the July/August 2019 issue of Mother Jones by reporter Ali Breland. As the teaser blurb notes, and the article explains in depth, it's not really about the kids; rather, it is about fears of a changing social order. It didn't begin with QAnon in 2017, or with "Pizzagate" during the 2016 US presidential campaign, or even with the McMartin preschool scandal of the 1980s. Arguably, it began centuries ago.
Conspiracies centering on the vulnerability of children are neither new nor distinctly American. Wild claims of Jews killing Christian children and using their blood in rituals—the “blood libel”—date back to at least the 12th century and have popped up every so often since then, and long before that Christians were suspected of performing similar rites. “Hurting children is one of the worst things you can say someone is doing. It’s an easy way to demonize your enemy,” says Kathryn Olmsted, a professor of history at the University of California-Davis, who has studied conspiracy theories.

Why do child-abuse conspiracies explode into public consciousness at certain moments? Explanations offered for the peculiar resonance of Pizzagate and QAnon tend to focus on pathologies in the media ecosystem—epistemic bubbles, polarization, the unruly growth of social media. But years before the fracturing of mass culture and the dawn of Reddit and 4chan, the McMartin accusations fed a national spectacle during which scores of people were wrongly accused of sex crimes against children.

The continuities between the McMartin case and Pizzagate suggest a broader explanation for pedophile conspiracies: They aren’t the residue of malfunctions in our media culture. They’re an outgrowth of the normal workings of reactionary politics.
Take some time to read Breland's article; it provides some good insight.

Hi ho silver!
The aforementioned Coldwell, being the chronic conspiranoid that he is, has been posting continually on Facebook about the coronavirus. He flatly declares it's a hoax; for now he seems to favor the 5G theory. In a couple of Facebook posts he promoted
a March 1 article published on the nut-hub Before It's News (and in both cases Facebook flagged the source as "false information," as verified by independent fact checkers). Yet on his own web site he allowed an article written by his long-time cohort and site admin Sarah, who writes as if COVID-19 is indeed a virus, and a real one.

But just so he has all of his bases covered and maintains his cred as a phony medical "expert," Coldwell is also promoting one of his go-to remedies, colloidal silver, claiming that it "eliminates EVERY bad Micrope [sic]".


He has been promoting colloidal silver for years, in his books and online; here is a link to a 2009 Wordpress blog that he has probably long since forgotten.

Here's the rundown on colloidal silver in medical usage. The bottom line is that there is very little evidence to back up the health claims about colloidal silver, and it can be dangerous to your health. It's true that some forms of silver, particularly topical silver solutions, actually have legitimate medical applications, but that's not what Coldwell and his alt-health colleagues are promoting.

Coldwell, by the way, has gotten some mainstream media lovin' in the past year or so, most notably as one of the subjects of a critical article in the Washington Post in June 2019. Just in case you can't access that article due to pay-wall issues, here's a good summary, published in July of the same year on the Science-Based Medicine blog. The post focuses on the ways that social media platforms have enabled, but are now making efforts to counter, the health misinformation peddlers.

Coldwell is far from the only person pushing silver frauducts, in or out of the context of the COVID-19 scare. The aforementioned Alex Jones, for instance, just got a dressing-down from the New York Attorney General for suggesting that the products he's been selling fight coronavirus. In a letter sent to him on March 12, AG Letitia James' office advised him to "immediately cease and desist from making misleading claims as they violate New York's consumer protection statutes." From Mother Jones (no relation to Alex, of course):
Jones—who has promoted the idea that COVID-19 is a manmade bioweapon—has been using his massive platform to hawk products for sale on his Infowars website that he has claimed are “literally a stop-gap” against coronavirus. That includes supplemental pills called “DNA Force,” as well as a special nanosilver toothpaste with ingredients that he said had been tested by both the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.

“For just your daily life and your gums and your teeth and for regular viruses and bacteria, the patented nanosilver we have—the Pentagon has come out and documented and Homeland Security and said this stuff kills the whole SARS-corona family at point-blank range. Well of course it does, it kills every virus,”
Jones said on March 10, in comments first reported by Media Matters.
Here is a link to the letter the NY AG sent to Jones.

Apparently undeterred, Jones seems determined to continue business as usual. From Mother Jones again:

Jones, who was arrested Monday night on charges of driving while intoxicated, seems to be unfazed by the threat of legal action. On his show Thursday, Jones dismissed the effort to stop him from selling his coronavirus-related products. “They claim that I am selling toothpaste that I say will cure you of the coronavirus,” he said. “Never said that. We have a company that makes it out of Colorado that has certified that it takes out viruses in general, and in that same family of corona, not this corona, but it’s the same deal. I sell the toothpaste as a tooth whitening toothpaste with nanosilver.” He then went on to advertise more nanosilver-related products that he claimed will boost immunity.
COVID-19 seems to be keeping state AGs busy. Disgraced televangelist and born-again huckster Jim Bakker was sued on March 10 by the Missouri Attorney General for peddling a frauduct called Silver Solution in an infomercial in which his "guest" was a "natural health expert" named Sherrill Sellman. Sellman strongly implied that the potion would eliminate the coronavirus.
"Well, let's say it hasn't been tested on this strain of the coronavirus, but it has been tested on other strains of the coronavirus and has been able to eliminate it within 12 hours," Sellman said. "Totally eliminate it. Kills it. Deactivates it."

Silver Solution "has been proven by the government that it has the ability to kill every pathogen it has ever been tested on, including SARS and HIV," Sellman continued. Four 4-ounce bottles could be yours,
a message on the screen said, for just $80.
Here's a link to the lawsuit. Although Missouri is the first state to file a lawsuit against Bakker for selling this phony "treatment (which makes sense, as his company is based in Missouri), others have also been warning him to stop. On March 3, the New York AG's office, which seems to be really on the ball, and more power to them, sent him a cease-and-desist letter, accusing him of defrauding the public. NPR reports that as of March 11, Bakker's web site was no longer selling the solution, but his production company did not respond to NPR's request for comment. And a spokesman for the Missouri AG's office said that they will continue their pursuit of a temporary restraining order to keep Bakker from selling the "miracle cure" again in the future.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have also jointly sent warnings to Bakker, as well as to six other companies that have been pushing colloidal silver, teas, tinctures, or essential oils as treatments for coronavirus.
Here's a link to the FDA's March 9, 2020 press release.
 
Of course, warnings from those "alphabet agencies" are pretty much meaningless to the alt-health faithful, who still flock to the phony experts for potentially dangerous advice. For instance...
What's even more pathetic than "Dr." C's awful spelling,
and the blatant lies in his post, and the fact that the post links
to yet another one of his fraudulent web sites,
is the fact that a vulnerable person asked him
a medical question that he is not qualified to answer.
My guess is that he will not answer it on a public forum like this,
because he knows he could get in trouble for giving "medical" advice.
But at least the government agencies, with all of their shortcomings, are attempting to stem the tide of phony coronavirus remedies.

I'm optimistic that there will be a real cure, or at least a safe and effective vaccine, soon. For now, I just wish someone would come up with a cure for stupid.


This post has been updated since initial publication; I have made some clarifications and have added the information about the New York AG's warning to Alex Jones; in addition, I added commentary and links to the section about the "Trumpublican" conspiracy theory and Trump's response to the pandemic.
~ CC