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