The Healing America Summit 2024: alt-health, reich-wing politics, conspiranoia, and utter lunacy

 

I have written repeatedly on this Whirled about the unholy marriage between Scamworld and (reich-wing) politix, but the Healing America Summit -- which began May 16 and lasts through May 22, 2024 -- is not only serving up steaming piles of MAGA politix and Scamworld (particularly the alt-health sector of Scamworld), but also a hefty dose of conspiranoia and outright lunacy.

As we collectively and apprehensively grope our way through what millions of folks, for various reasons and with a wide range of emotions, view as the End Times, we can take profound (dis)comfort in knowing that there is no shortage of "experts" (i.e., grifters, scalawags, and scoundrels) offering to take us by the hand and the wallet to lead us out of fear and darkness and into their sales funnels. With increasing frequency, and more often than not under the auspices of a central grifter, these unsavory players are joining forces to pummel us with their propaganda.

There was, for example, The Truth [sic] About Cancer Live! convention back in October 2021, which featured Eric Trump and several alt-health/conspiracy crapitalists as speakers. And there's the ongoing ReAwaken America Tour, a conspiranoid Christofascist movement that was born in Oklahoma during the height of the pandemic, and has continued to spread its virulence in the years since.

And now we have the Healing America Summit, which began on May 16, 2024 and continues through May 22. The English-challenged web site says it all in the opening blurb:

USA & THE WORLD GOT CRAZY LIKE NEVER BEFORE AND WE ARE EXPERIENCING A CHALLENGING TIME!
Vaccines, Immigrants, Transhumanism, War, NWO... Bible Prophecies of End-Time & 5D consciousness rising...
The Summit offers you true science, real insider knowledge, natural medicine & Energy healing for YOU to SUCCEED in this time!
Join for FREE. www.HealingAmericaSummit.com

A smirking German huckster and "healer" named Michael König-Breuss is the host of this to-do. Here's what he tells us about himself on the Healing America Summit site:

Why do I organize this Healing America Summit?
I work as a spiritual healer like my grandfather. I knew in 2006 already, that „the mandatory vaccination with nano chips to track, manipulate or even switch of people“ will come. I saw presentations of this technique on TV already in 2014. I heard of plenty Pharma insiders how Pharma companies reduce people on purpose, how the money system is working, how Rockefeller / Rothschild are giving orders to politics in the USA & worldwide, how Chemtrails & Frequency manipulation is used and so on…. I always wanted to help people. With Covid it was enough and the Idea was born, to organize an Online-Summit to inform and wake up the people that are ready to be awakened. NOW it’s time to WAKE UP and take ACTION.

On a "Get To Know Michael" link, he adds more autobiographical details.

After living a life as spiritual Skiguide & Tourguide, I started 2006 as an energetic therapist – healer. Already my grandfather was a healer for over 40 Years, who helped even people in the hospital when Dr. couldn´t help anymore.

I am specialized expert in clearing – releasing peoples energy field of KARMA & foreign energy (old death experiences, fears, curse, black magic, demons…) and teacher for SOUL LANGUAGE – LIGHT LANGUAGE – TALKING IN TONGUES, probably the oldes [sic] Frequency healing technique on planet earth!

Since the COVID plan-demic started, I realized the ability, to significantly alleviate COVID-vaccination & COVID-testing sideffects. In the best case, i was able to eliminate them altogether.

Autum [sic] 2020 a client with migraine, aggression, depression, inner darkness, sucidal [sic] thought [sic] got a distance treatment of me via Zoom.

During the treatment I could see with my „inner eye“ a small black „Nano-Chip“ in her troght [sic]/ neck! Shocking in the first moment. But it could get taken out by SOULLANGUAGE ENERGY-HEALING work. After that happened, ALL her problems were gone in the same moment!

After that, I have helped many people with problems, that started AFTER PCR testing & COVID vaccination. These were people with enormously distressing physical, emotional and mental symptoms & problems. Depression, aggression, suicidal thoughts, headaches, migraines, foreign body feeling in the troat [sic] and whole body, unsuccessful clearing of throat, meaninglessness in life, inner darkness and restlessness, being cut off from the source, sweating, trembling and many more were symptoms that could be solved.

These things and the health problems associated with them were largely gone afterwards.

My endeavor is that with my help and gifts, people can be freed from their vaccination symptoms and can live “normally” again, AND realize the power of ENERGY, BELIEVE, HEALING & DIVINE POSSIBILITIES.

…and realize, that it seems to be a BIG plan of the divine, to wake us people UP! To get us MOVE FORWARD, UPWARD to our „true potential“.
From heart to heart,
Michael

With creds like that, you just know you're in good hands.

Of course we've heard it all before. Along with the hackneyed hype about energetic healing and other pseudo-mystical arts, plus the requisite conspiranoia about nano-chips and the NWO, the core of König-Breuss's message is simply a post-pandemic variation on the traditional New-Wage/McSpirituality theme about a bold new era of human possibility and evolution -- you know, the eternal dawning of the Age of Aquarius that the conspicuously enlightened have been yammering about for at least three generations. (As quoted above, one of the opening blurbs of the Healing America web site mentions "5D consciousness." Hmmm... 5D: fith dimension? Hey, wasn't it The Fifth Dimension that made a top-40 hit of the song from the musical Hair, "The Age Of Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In?")

My rhetorical question, and I've asked it many times, is this: When is the dawn finally going to give way to actual sunshine? Your guess is as good as mine, and my guess would be "never."

Meanwhile there's still bank to be made by promoting oneself as a wayshower or lightworker or truth-teller or savior or bearer of exclusive life-saving (mis)information. And don't think that König-Breuss isn't going to take full advantage of that.

Only the best people
The speaker lineup for the Healing America Summit includes everything from anti-vaxxers to intergalactic ambassadors to American reich-wing traitors. Here's what it says about this list of luminaries on the "summit" web site:

Your speaker [sic] are leading experts from around the WORLD.

Medical doctors, scientists, lawyers, US-Sheriff, US-General, TV-speakers, medical researchers, WHO-experts, pharma insiders, historical & political experts, healer, coaches, fitness influencer and more… They will tell YOU:

HOW the „BAD BOYS & GIRLS“ harm YOU day & night, mentally, emotionally & physically.

DETOXIFICATION possibilities of the COVID-Vaccine / PCR-Tests / Shedding by a MEDICAL WAY and on an ENERGY HEALING WAY.

The plan of the DARK SIDE, and the higher plan of the „DIVINE“ & EVERYBODY'S SOUL.

The „NEW NORMAL“ of the pharma lobby, big tec, NWO...

HOW YOUR „NEW NORMAL“ for YOU can look, if YOU take responsibility for YOUR OWN BODY, MIND, SPIRIT and SOUL!

SOLUTIONS if YOU like to learn and RISE ABOVE!

This "summit" first came onto my radar when, though officially blocked from doing so, I took a peek at the Facebook feed of one of the featured speakers, another German huckster/"healer" named Leonard Coldwell, whose English writing rivals that of Michael König-Breuss in its illiteracy. If you've been hanging around here for a few years you probably know Coldwell as a cancer quack, conspiracy loon, racist, and neo-Nazi who tried for years to kill this blog and even, at one point, tried to get some of his more fanatical followers to harm me. Coldwell's topic for the Healing America Summit is... well, let me let him tell you himself. (Spoiler: Apparently there are bad people out there who are trying to eliminate the entire human race.)

Dr. Leonard Coldwell
Founder of Instant Based Medicine System. Cancer healing expert

Worldwide Conspiracy to eliminate the Human Race - and what we can do about it

I do this work for 52 years and have the highest cancer cure rate in the world

25 mega best selling books in 29 languages. My own TV and Radio shows 26 Million listeners and regular viewers.

Before censorship my videos on Youtube had 2.3 Billion views. I as the Keynote Speaker on EVERY Health Freedom Expo

If you like to see some testimonial videos: [links]

...I just got off a life interview in Australia with Kate Kate Shemirani kateshemirani@tntradio.live

Attached my latest book the only Cancer Patient Cure – Confidential   900 Million books sold

Here's a link to a video. It's just a teaser, but in that teaser you get the gist of Quack-o Coldwell's "medical" wisdumb: he claims that medicine is a belief system rather than a science and that doctors even admit they don't know anything, with the implication being that he has all of the solutions that medicine can't offer. Meanwhile his interviewer and fellow countryman König-Breuss, is nodding and smirking in agreement. By the way, if you want to know the truth about Coldwell's "credentials," you'll find it in a concise form here, and in a more expanded form here (scroll down to the section with the sub-head, "Lenny's creds, such as they are"). [Spoiler: Coldwell is not a doctor, and never has been.]

Other speakers at the "summit" include:

Storm Dillenschneider [not to be confused with Stormy Daniels ~ CC]
Daughter of The Most High God, Mrs. Elite Universe 2024, stand Advocate against Fentanyl

Alas, Storm's lofty description on the home page is just a setup for disappointment. Her actual "bio" is essentially an announcement of her [2022] campaign for city council in Lee's Summit, Missouri. Boooooring. And apparently outdated; I seriously doubt that her speech at the Healing America Summit will have anything to do with a two-year-old political campaign in Lee's Summit.

More than likely her spiel will be political, though, as one of Storm's other credentials, which I had to go Googling (actually, Bing-ing) to find, is that she is a Trumpette and is apparently very involved with the movement to re-elect the Mango Mussolini -- which comes as no surprise whatsoever. On a May 15, 2024 Facebook post Storm shared a meme celebrating a dinner party that included Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. The lead blurb on the meme said, "I feel the Presidential air again, everytime [sic] I enter Mar-a-Lago. Could it be my ESP is confirming what we all expect to be true?"

I'm thinking that maybe the "Presidential" air is actually something she smelt rather than felt, but what do I know?

Christie Hutcherson
Women Fighting for America to help take back America

[Topic] Enemies at the Gate- Can america [sic] Survive the Coming Conflict?

Christie Hutcherson is the Founder, President, and Spokesperson for Women Fighting for America LLC. (WFFA). She is widely recognized as a geopolitical security expert and sought-after speaker with broad connections into the Freedom Movement. 100+ Border Ops Missions. 2,500+ Miles on the Border.

Christie is a front-line fighter for freedom. She is one of the only Americans who has traveled the entire 2,000 miles of the southern border and hundreds of miles of our forgotten northern border in her quest to save America. Christie has led 100 plus border missions establishing Women Fighting for America as a clear leader in exposing and fighting the corruption on our borders.

She has seen firsthand the devastation of illegal immigration, child and human trafficking, organ trafficking, massive amounts of lethal drugs entering the United States, and the atrocities committed by the transnational criminal organizations.

Support the Fight with Women Fighting for America and Christie Hutcherson!

Sounds like a bad case of Border Derangement Syndrome, Christie.

She helpfully concludes her blurb with Paypal/Stripe/Venmo links, which I will not share here. Those dumb enough to want to pour money into Christie's grift machine can look up the links themselves.

Eesha Patel
Galactic Embassador [sic] for the Galactic federation

[Topic] Galactic Experiences for Visionary Leaders

Eesha Patel specialises in the field of Galactic Consciousness. Eesha is here to facilitate the connection between humans and our Galactic Family.

A profound awakening and contact experience in 2015 set Eesha on a journey of exploring consciousness. In her current role as Galactic Ambassador, Eesha liaises with over 20 different galactic races, humanoid and non-humanoid, and facilitates these connections for visionary leaders and pioneers of the New Earth. Through her powerful interdimensional connections, Eesha lends her services of activation and channelling to assist other leaders in bringing through powerful visionary tools, techniques, and technologies for healing and our greater evolution.

Eesha’s vision is peaceful open contact with our galactic family by 2027 and her mission is to lead this global level awakening through her teaching, speaking, facilitation, and courses. Eesha’s galactic contact work has been featured in prominent media worldwide. Eesha Patel is available for mentoring, consultancy, and speaking. You can connect with Eesha Patel at eeshapatel dot con. [emphasis and intentional typo mine. ~ CC]

And no reich-wing/alt-health/alt-facts grift-fest would be complete without...

General Mike Flynn
Retired United States Army lieutenant general. 24th U.S. national security advisor of the Trump administration.

[Topic] We are in WW 3. Nobody will come to rescue us! No General, no white heads [??? ~ CC], no Trump. WE, the people need to change it!

Michael Thomas Flynn (born December 24, 1958) is a retired United States Army lieutenant general who was the 24th U.S. national security advisor^[3] for the first 22 days of the Trump administration.[Note to Mike: you forgot to take the Wikipedia footnote out. ~ CC]

Ret.  President @ Resilient Patriot LLC Special Assistant to the POTUS, National Security Advisor @ United Stat es Government Presidential Campaign National Security Advisor @ Republican Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump Chairman and CEO @ FLYNN Intel Group INC. Director and Commander @ Defense Intelligence Agency / Joint Force Component Command, ISR Assistant Director of National Intelligence, Partner Engagement @ Office of the Director of National Intelligence Assistant Chief of Staff, G2 @ US Army Director of Intelligence @ International Security Assistance Forces Director of Intelligence @ The Joint Staff Director of Intelligence @ United States Central Command

Someone forgot to add "traitor," "insurrectionist," and "QAnon nut" to Flynn's credentials. Flynn, by the way, is a co-fonder of the ReAwaken America Tour mentioned above.

And that's just a very small sampling of the featured shriekers at this gathering of grifters. For the complete lineup, see here.

Now, if you are concerned about costs, or about the hassle of making travel and lodging arrangements, you needn't be. The Healing America Summit is 100 percent online -- all you have to do is sign up -- and, best of all, it's 100 percent free.

And worth every penny, no doubt.

Before you leave...
This has been, through what is no apparent fault of her own (excluding, perhaps karmic matters that are quite beyond her ability to comprehend), a nightmare of a year for the ruler of this Whirled. Money, alas, cannot make the nightmare go away, but it can make it easier to bear. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

• New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
  New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to Cosmic Connie's PayPal page.
  Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account of Cosmic Connie's husband, RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is a gift, which it is (as opposed to a conventional purchase, for which PayPal deducts a percentage for their fee).

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.

 

From TRUTH Social to alt-health scam sites: Trump & other right-wing grifters continue to battle Big Tech, fuel fascism, & rob the rubes

By now you've almost certainly heard about #NeverWasMyPresident Donald Trump's grand plan to launch yet another alternative to major social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook -- his way of sticking it to Big Tech for banning him.

I'm referring, of course, to the absurdly ill-named TRUTH Social, which will be developed by a new enterprise called Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG). Announced by Trump surrogate Liz Harrington on Twitter on October 20, 2021, TRUTH Social is being launched to "stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech."

Trump had famously already failed at least once in the social media arena, promising months ago to immediately launch a platform of his own after he was booted off of Twitter and Facebook due to his incitement of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Or maybe his big plans just got delayed. In any case, instead of the promised social media platform, a laughable blog appeared briefly... and was gone within a month. There was buzz for a while that Gettr was the new home for Team Trump and his allies... but that buzz faded too.

The idea of alternative Twitters and Facebooks and so forth is not new, of course. Right-wingers have been snowflaking for the past few years about being "censored" online, and many have taken their toxic whines not only to the courts but also to numerous alternate social media apps that have sprung up in recent times. But a Trump-branded social media alternative is truly newsworthy, because Trump unfortunately remains so high-profile, not to mention that he's the biggest and loudest whiner of all when it comes to griping about censorship.

If you think that TRUTH Social is going to be a safe haven for "free speech," however, think again. First off, the site will censor its own users. Saying bad stuff about Dear Leader or his platform or its parent company is verboten.

And if you think that this platform is destined for long-term success, you need to reconsider that too. From The Daily Kos, October 21:

...Most of the attention focused on [the announcement about TMTG] has been centered around the announcement of something called “TRUTH Social”—also known as yet-another-Trump-focused-Twitter-clone. But that’s not the real point of TMTG. The real point is that this is a scheme through which Trump can collect several hundred million dollars, even if his new social platform never posts a tweet, or a toot, or a fart, or whatever they end up being called.

The truth behind TRUTH Social is right there in the first paragraph of the announcement, which is not focused on the technology behind the platform, or anything that Trump is bringing to the table. Instead, that paragraph is dedicated to explaining how the project has been given "an initial enterprise value of $875 million" and "a cumulative valuation up to $1.7 billion." Which is amazing, because what it seems to have is nothing more than a credit line and some highly generic code that was hacked within minutes of the beta address becoming known.

No sooner had the first test invites been handed out than someone spoofed Trump's account and posted, well, as Daily Beast contributor Steven Monacelli accurately puts it, "a photo of a pig defecating on its own scrotum." Two hours after it first went up, the whole site came down.

However, it doesn't matter if the site ever sticks its head above the waste pool again. Because that's not the point. Donald Trump is potentially walking about with $340 million, even if it fails completely. That's the point.

The site seems to be up again now, but right now it's just a page that invites you to "Join the Waiting List!" or to pre-order the app in the Apple Store. The launch is supposed to happen in November of 2021.

But there seem to be a few other bumps in the road, not the least of which are credible accusations that the Trump app's developers appear to have purloined code without giving due credit to the code's creators. Oops.

Coding issues aside, it goes without saying that this whole thing was designed as yet another money op for the former Grifter-in-Chief, who was a grifter long before he infested the White House, and has continued his grifting nonstop since being legitimately voted out. (If you sincerely believe he wasn't legitimately voted out, you're in a cult. Please seek help.) Like countless other media outlets that have reported this news, the Daily Kos article cited above goes on to explain the scheme.

What Trump is attempting here is something called a SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition [Company]. It's also known as a "reverse merger" or a "blank check company." It's a scheme in which some low-value shell company that's already listed on a stock market "buys" a private company, then relists itself under the name of that new company. In almost all cases, what's really going on is that the private company is just taking over the empty husk of that shell company—a company that may have existed for no other purpose than to serve as a placeholder for some future SPAC.

Why go through these steps? Because getting listed on a stock exchange generally requires clearing a number of hurdles, including meeting requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission. SPACS can just pop into existence, taking a fast track to a stock listing while dodging almost every qualifying step.

The Trump SPAC falls under a specific category known as a "celebrity SPAC," in which a high-profile person, known as "the Sponsor," raises capital by taking the SPAC public in an IPO. The SPAC uses the cash proceeds from the IPO and a large stock issuance to acquire a private company and make it public. But unlike traditional IPOs, the Sponsor gets a 20 percent stake without having to invest much of anything -- and there's much less regulatory scrutiny. While not all SPACs are scams, this one almost certainly is. The Kos article describes it as "nothing more than an exchange-based Ponzi scheme in which the original Ponzi is guaranteed to walk away with a mountain of cash." In short...

TMTG isn't a social media platform. It's a scam. Trump doesn't need another social media platform. He needs suckers willing to buy stock. And Trump has always been very, very good at locating suckers.

So while it's fun to point out that TRUTH Social has some of the most restrictive rules of any platform, including rules that prohibit criticizing TRUTH Social, it doesn't really matter. The whole platform can be sh#t pigs all the way down. It can collapse under its own incompetence. None of that means a thing. What matters to Trump is that he gets to walk away with a bundle.

That's pretty much all that has ever mattered to Trump.

The SPAC stock linked to Trump's platform is Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC), and granted, it was quite the talk of the market last week, when DWAC shares shot from $9.96 per share at closing on Wednesday, October 20, to $94.20 per share on Friday, October 22. That's an astounding 845% rally in a mere two days. But as CNBC reported today (October 25), DWAC was down 10 percent after 2:00 PM ET, so there appear to be signs that "the Trump-fueled craze has died down," according to the CNBC piece.

Short-seller Iceberg Research unveiled a bearish position on the DWAC on Monday, saying that investors face uncertainties in this blank-check deal as Trump could become a dominant shareholder after the merger.

“Now that initial excitement has passed, we see only risks for investors in near future. Based on Trump’s track record, at current price, renegotiation is likely to keep more of the merged company for him,” Iceberg Research said in a tweet.

“SPAC holders don’t own a piece of this project yet. Trump has leverage, not them.”

But I'm not shedding any tears for these investors. At this point, anyone who invests in anything related to Trump deserves to lose money. And as far as I'm concerned, that also goes for the countless small donors who have fallen for his myriad fundraising scams --- such as phony "membership cards" and other "exclusive" benefits (or promises thereof) designed to keep the rubes feeling like they're Someone Special. He'll almost certainly continue to run these scams long after the current SPAC cash cow has been milked dry. The cult members will just keep on forking over, feeding his coffers and his ego while he smirks and talks bad about them behind their backs.

* * * * *

Trump may be the most high-profile right-wing grifter to whine about Big Tech and try to compete directly with the major platforms, but he's far from the only one. Take Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams (please). Besides being a particularly vociferous Trump fanboy and advocate of martial law as long as a right-wing president is imposing it, Adams is a longtime peddler of alt-health frauducts and "advice" as well as a promoter of conspiracy theories and far-right-wing talking points. (He was also one of the featured speakers, along with Eric Trump and Roger Stone, at a three-day fascism/alt-health rally in Nashville this past weekend, The Truth [sic] About Cancer Live.)

Years ago Adams, apparently unhappy with the standards imposed by Wikipedia, created his own Wiki platform, "TruthWiki," which is every bit as hilariously misnamed as Trump's TRUTH Social. In an April 2016 Whirled post (under the sub-head, "Trying to conquer the Internet, one comical alt-site at a time"), I described Adams as...

...the guy who is so afraid of people finding out the truth about him and his colleagues that he started his own lame version of Wikipedia: the very ill-named TruthWiki. (Here's the TruthWiki entry about David Gorski. And while we're at it, here's Gorski, as Orac, writing about TruthWiki in 2014.)

Dr. Gorski is an oncologist who's one of the people on Mike Adams' enemies list; Adams has seriously defamed him numerous times in his Natural News blog posts.

Then there's Adams' answer to Google, GoodGopher. From the 2016 Whirled post I quoted above:

GoodGopher very carefully filters out what they consider "disinformation" and government/Big Pharma propaganda, instead stacking their search results with alt-nutty and rightwing sites (which are euphemistically called "independent news media") such as NaturalNews (of course!) as well as Breitbart, The Blaze, Washington Times (owned and run by Moonies), Drudge Report, Western Journalism and more.

It's a pretty lousy search engine, but it's tailor-made for the no-evil monkeys who want to avoid any fact or opinion that might shake their carefully constructed world of alt-health advocacy, Scamworld delusions, conspiracy theories and right-wing spin.

I went to the GoodGopher site a little while ago, for the first time in years, and typed a name in the search engine. It was a name for which I knew there were numerous results on GoodGopher; at least there had been when I checked it last. But all I got for search results was a message: "Server is busying [sic] right now, please try again later." All righty, then!

Mike Adams may not be giving Wikipedia or Google a run for their money, but what his sites lack in quality they collectively make up for in quantity. His disinfo empire includes scads of alt-health and alt-"news" web sites, some of which are no doubt generating income from suckers, and with some of these sites he also seems to be succeeding in one important task: spreading the type of political disinformation that is eroding American democracy and further nudging us down the road to authoritarianism and fascism.

On October 18, ArsTechnica published the revelation that Robert Willis, aka "Hacker X" -- the hacker who helped build an enormous US-based disinfo network that helped Trump get elected -- had confirmed that he was actually working for Mike Adams at Adams' NaturalNews.com site.

Willis had joined NaturalNews.com in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election and helped the site build out a network of anonymized websites that looked independent but secretly promoted the "health" information and pro-Trump political writings of Mike Adams and NaturalNews.com.

NaturalNews has long been linked to disinformation. In 2019, The Atlantic named it one of the top producers of anti-vax content on the Internet. The site has touted homeopathy, urged "natural" remedies for things like cancer, and warned about "chemtrails." NaturalNews content has been banned from Facebook, and the site has been called a "powerful conspiracy empire."

Willis claims to have made little money from his work for Adams, and says that he has remorse "for a few reasons." He claims that he didn't really know what Adams was all about when he first joined his site, which is kind of hard to believe.

As for all the pro-Trump, anti-Clinton "fake news" that Willis eventually helped to propagate, he claimed that the reason he "didn’t know it was fake news at the beginning is because the machine needed to be built before it could be used, so I didn’t spend time inside stories outside of overseeing social media and numbers, at which point I did not factor in the aspect of whether the articles were true or not. I was strictly breaking down stories by headlines and breaking it down into numbers. With an occasional crazy headline that seemed harmless."

Okay, sure. Willis says the whole experience has made him apolitical and that he didn't vote in the 2020 election. Here's his statement about about his actions. And here's a post about "Hacker X" and Mike Adams by the aforementioned David Gorski, the target of some of Mike Adams' most vicious defamation.

* * * * *

If you feel like climbing even further down into the pit of alt-site failures, you might stumble across a silly Facebook alternative created last year by phony doctor/cancer quack/neo-Nazi/Trump fan/alleged predator and all-around evil dimwit Leonard Coldwell, who has been in a perpetual huff for the past decade or so about repeatedly being thrown into Facebook jail. Back in October of 2020 Lenny's favorite handmaid griped about Facebook for about the ten-dozenth time on his main English-language web site:.

Make no mistake accounts are being targeted. Those who have spoken out for truth on matters such as politics, COVID-Hoax, Masks, for natural health and not big pharma, called out Monsanto and Bill Gates, or even Georgy Sorros [sic] who wants to destroy the world as we know it are being scrutinized for every word they type.

Why?

Because Facebook is a communist/socialist website who [sic] is pushing the agenda of the New Normal hard. They want you all to be obedient. They want (end game) for you to be vaccinated mindless drone of a slave to the system.

But never fear; there was a solution from the great "Dr." C:

Dr. Coldwell has created his own version [of Facebook]. Champ book. You are invited! https://champbook.tribe.so/  while much of it is currently in German we also are gaining many English speaking members and would love to have you. There will never be censorship like there is on Facebook.

Which isn't to say that there won't be censorship, I suppose. But it all seems moot because Lenny and most of the rest of the world appear to have all but forgotten ChampBook, as you'll see if you take a look at the endless stream of spam that meets the eye when you land on the site. But I have to admit that there is quite an impressive list of "Most reputable losers users," with a very reputable spammer called Мария Иванцова being number one, and Lenny himself appearing at the bottom of the list of most reputable users when I checked the other day, and not appearing on that list at all when I went back to check today. (Мария was still number one, though.) Poor little Lenny: he can't even compete with spammers and bots on his own site. Sad.

* * * * *

None of what I've written above means that I am opposed to competition, including and perhaps especially in the area of social media and other online forums. Monopolies aren't good for business or, ultimately, for democracy. Nor does it mean that I am blind to the misdeeds -- some of them quite egregious -- of the Big Tech platforms. As more info continues to spill out about Facebook, for example, it becomes ever more painfully obvious that Big Tech companies value profit over any of the other fine values, such as truth or the well-being of their users, to which they pay lip service. But the problems created by Big Tech won't be solved by right-wing scammers, whose ludicrous forums are little more than echo chambers at best, and all too often are vehicles to pick the pockets of vulnerable people.

Grifting is not just a right-wing thing, of course. But these daze, the right-wing grift machine, fueled by an unending stream of fascist bat-crap both online and off, seems to be posing the greatest dangers, not only to public health but also to the health of American (and world) democracy. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this problem, but it has been brewing for years now. Whether the grift comes in the form of a Trumpian "investment opportunity" and "TRUTH" platform, a slime trail of fake-news sites from "The Health Ranger," or a flaccid Facebook alternative from an angry and deranged little German scammer, it's all part of the same problem.

It has never been more important to stay informed, rather than misinformed or willfully uninformed. And it's never been more important for eligible voters who want to stop the madness to make sure they're registered, and then to get out there and vote.

Covidiocy continues: Canadian crackpot, COVID camps, Carlson claptrap

A year ago, I would never have dreamed that in August of 2021 I would still be blogging about the COVID-19 pandemic, and I'm pretty sure that thousands of working journos and pundits in the "legitimate" media didn't think they would still be reporting and commenting on it... yet here we are. I am far from the first or the only or the best to observe that the plagues of misinformation, conspiracy narratives, anti-vax hysteria, and dangerous (right-wing) politicizing surrounding COVID-19 are posing as much of a threat to our individual and collective well-being as the virus itself -- and in fact are directly contributing to making the virus more... well... virulent. That point can't be emphasized enough.

Some of the hucksters I've written about over the years have participated enthusiastically in the misinfo campaign, such as serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, whose contributions to the con-versation (emphasis on the first syllable) I wrote about at some length here and here last year. Another peddler of pandemic piffle, much lesser-known and far stupider than Trudeau, is one of his former grift-buddies, cancer quack/fraudster/anti-vaxxer/neo-Nazi Leonard Coldwell. Trudeau, still serving out a ten-year prison sentence and faced with restrictions to his online activity, has spread his COVID lies through proxies, but Coldwell apparently posts his own content.

A Facebook friend of mine recently expressed concern about the lies that Coldwell has been posting on his main Facebook page, regarding COVID concentration camps, microchips in vaccines, and whatnot. While COVID-19 may be relatively recent, the Facebook falsehoods problem is not new: for years Coldwell has been using social media to spread anti-vax lies, "alternative" health misinformation (especially about cancer), conspiracy tall tales, and the like. When COVID-19 emerged in early 2020, he jumped right into the deep end of the covidiocy pool.

That's really no surprise; the surprise would have been if he had passed on such a golden opportunity to spread his toxins. But my friend seemed to be really fed up with the continual flow of sludge from Coldwell's Facebook page, and wondered if it would be possible to get him permanently removed from that platform.

No doubt many have tried to do just that -- not me, believe it or not; I only reported Coldwell to Facebook a couple of times when he was posting things that directly endangered me, and once when he was publicly and falsely accusing an ally of mine of being a child rapist. All of that took place years ago. As I've been saying for years, for the most part I'm content to let people make assholes of themselves in public. It gives me something to snark about here, and I don't have to search very hard for material. Lazy bloggers like me like having easy pickin's.

But others have reported Coldwell at various times over the years, mostly for hate speech, and no doubt at least some of those folks have urged Facebook to permanently ban him. Yet the most that has happened so far has been that Facebook suspends him for 30 days...and he whines about it on his other forums (claiming Facebook has “banned” him only because he isn’t afraid to tell “the truth”)... and then he uses that as the hook to get more people to sign up for his "exclusive information" that he promises is absolutely life-changing and possibly lifesaving and that you cannot find anywhere else, but which is almost always recycled rubbish that you actually see everywhere these days.

The suspension/whinefest/reinstatement cycle has occurred again and again and again with Coldwell. I wrote about it back in May of 2016, but it's happened numerous times since then.

My normally laissez-faire attitude to public discourse notwithstanding, however, I find the new COVID-19 surges due to the Delta variant alarming. And I share my friend's concerns about the effects, whether direct or indirect, of COVID lies and misinformation posted by Coldwell and a host of other cranks. What I worry about are not just the effects these lies and rumors have on the course of the pandemic and public health, but also on the future of critical thinking and rational discourse.

Oh, Canada!
A couple of Coldwell's recent COVID offerings stood out for me. The first one occurred earlier this month when he posted a link on his Facebook page to a video on BitChute, which is sort of an online refugee camp for conspiranoid nutcakes and far-right hate-speechers who were booted off of YouTube. Or maybe "toxic waste dump" would be a better description than "refugee camp." My apologies to refugees.

The video to which Loony Lenny linked is about an Alberta, Canada man named Patrick King, who'd apparently ended up in court after being fined for not wearing a mask. Coldwell didn't make any comment on his own post; he merely posted the link to the vid, which bears the teaser headline, "YUGE!!! Canadian Court Victory Proves Covid-19 Is A Hoax & All Restrictions Have Now Been Dropped." Here's the blurb on the BitChute page, complete with typos and spelling and grammatical errors:

Patriot Patrick King represented himself in court after being fined $1200 dollars for protesting against the Covid-Hoax, he slew the beast and emerged VICTORIOUS. He issued a subpoena to the Provincial Health Minister for proof that the so-called Covid-19 Virus exists, and they were forced to admit that they had no evidence whatsoever. The virus has never been isolated, and thus the government had no legal grounds to impose any of the punishing restrictions they have inflicted on society. Since this shocking confession came to light, the Province has since rescinded all Covid-Restrictions and now officially treats Covid-19 as nothing more than a mild flu! WE WON

King has shown the template to be followed WORLDWIDE. This is what can happen when you are not re-presented by a BAR (British Accredited Registry) Lawyer who's first obligation is to the Corrupted Courts and not their client.

THIS IS HUGE

That's pretty much the gist of the narrative that has appeared all over the right-wing/COVID-is-a-hoax looniverse, and it's no surprise that, as is the case with most covidiocies, Coldwell is far from the only person to spread this one. I've seen it in numerous other places myself -- even, I'm sad to say, on a forum that once upon a time, before the Age of Trump, was in sync with this Whirled, particularly on matters regarding Coldwell's general idiocy. Those were the days, my friend.

To my pal who was concerned about Facebook letting people like Coldwell continue to rant, I pointed out that one encouraging sign is that Facebook has become more vigilant about flagging misleading or false posts, and explaining why they are flagged, while providing links to correct info. I noted that maybe this is the best course; they leave the posts up so the potential martyrs can’t whine about being “censored” (as right-wing ranters are wont to do), but readers have easy access to correct information. And even if the true believers refuse to follow the links, it does take some of the wind out of the sails of the original post.

Indeed, Coldwell's post about the Canadian anti-masker was flagged by Facebook as false information, and immediately under the post were these three links:

• Fact Check: Alberta Man Did NOT prove COVID-19 Is Hoax, Restrictions NOT Dropped Because Of Him (Aug. 6, 2021)
• Fact Check -- Alberta court case not linked to lifting of COVID-19 restrictions (Aug. 7, 2021)
• Canadian court case unrelated to lifting of Covid-19 restrictions in Alberta (Aug. 10, 2021)

The headlines reveal the basics, but there's much more detail in the respective articles.

Not surprisingly, Coldwell objected to being corrected, and wrote that the video content he'd shared is 100 percent true.

One small story, one large (and stupid and dangerous) narrative
This whole little Canadian drama would be just another silly story if not for the fact that it provided yet another reinforcement of the (almost exclusively right-wing) narrative that COVID restrictions (masks, vaccines, etc.) are a dire threat to freedom, and that those who flout those restrictions are exemplary heroes who have taken a bold stance against looming tyranny. And you can be assured that this narrative is alive and well, and that there are many Americans who actually believe that the republican governors (e.g., Florida guv Ron DeSantis and Texas guv Greg Abbott) who are working so hard to quash basic COVID safety measures are in fact fighting for the "freedom" of all of us. Here's one example of this delusion; it's on one Floridian's public Facebook page.

I am amazed at just how many people do not appreciate freedom. [cute little flag icon to demonstrate patriotism]
Our Governor is standing up against big government and so many Floridians can't even grasp that. Just because you don't happen to agree with his current stance just shows that you aren't smart enough to realize it's a lot more than just the current news uproar that he is fighting for.
It's being done in an attempt to preserve YOUR rights and freedoms... That YOU don't even appreciate and are ready to throw away so easily. It would be far easier for him to just "go along"...
Stop being so ungrateful.

I should note that this post is from a former enthusiastic follower of Kevin Trudeau -- one who was eventually convinced by others to see him for the scammer he was and is, but who was not smart enough to see that Leonard Coldwell is actually even worse than Trudeau, and apparently is not savvy enough to understand that politicians such as DeSantis are not motivated by altruism or principle.

I mention Kevin Trudeau again because there are striking parallels between Trudeau's propaganda about being a freedom fighter, and the propaganda of the republican "leaders." For years Trudeau -- and his loyal fans -- have insisted that Kevin has been battling for the rights and freedoms of all of us, when in reality he has only been interested in furthering his own scam agendas. Similarly, republican pols such as Governors DeSantis and Abbott, and even lesser ones such as Texas' dumbest box of rocks, Rep(rehensible) Louie Gohmert, claim to be taking their "bold" stands on COVID in order to stand up for "freedom," with their supporters endlessly and annoyingly echoing those claims. The reality is that the repubs are doing nothing more than pandering to a fairly significant base of misinformed or stupid voters, the public good be damned. They just want to get re-elected. With them, it's all politics.

(Besides, isn't it the height of "big government" for a governor to issue an executive order banning mask and/or vaccine mandates, even if the individual businesses or institutions deem that such mandates are necessary to protect the health and safety of their staff/students/customers? Just wondering.)

The Canada tale is also one more instance of the refusal of COVID deniers to perform even the most rudimentary research before they regurgitate content on their social media or blogs.

This one time, at COVID camp...
Another tale that has the conspiranoid tongues wagging is the "news" that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is plotting to set up COVID "concentration camps" for the unvaccinated or those exposed to COVID. Right-wing rabble-rouser Candace Owens was apparently the one who got this particular balderdash ball rolling, on Twitter.

Another Facebook friend of mine shared a video about the alleged COVID camps a few days ago on her feed. The teaser/headline was ominous: "They are coming for us." The source of that video was Rumble, which has also become popular with conspiranoids and haters who were exiled from YouTube. In response to my friend's post I shared a link to a debunking article, and she responded that she just hopes people will do their own research and then make up their own minds, without resorting to calling each other names. (Okay, I'm a name-caller and not ashamed of it, because some names deserve to be called.) To my friend's comment, I responded that while I have a similar wish to hers, people who rely on conspiracy sites to "research" and reinforce their anti-vax convictions are endangering all of us.

It will come as no big shock that Loony Lenny had to sound the COVID camp alarm too on the blog on his main website. His August 10, 2021 entry, under the category "The War on America," contains an embedded link to yet another Rumble vid, this one from conspiranoid nutcake radio host Stew Peters. The teaser on Coldwell's blog reads:

YOU HAVE TO STAND UP NOW! There is no more time. They are trying to separate vaxxed/unvaxxed and put the unvaxxed in internment camps…………………….DO not be bullied into taking this v a x. It is NOT an immunologic! IT IS intended to kill you.

I hate to piss on the parade of the paranoid... oh, you know I really don't, but anyway, let me let Reuters set the story straight (and this is only for those of you who don't fervently believe that Reuters is part of the big "Them" that are trying to shield us from The Truth and kill us). This is from August 13, 2021:

One Aug. 9 tweet saying that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had written a document “to discuss putting high risk people into camps to ‘shield’ low risk people” during the pandemic can be seen here .

Other tweets making similar claims can be seen here and here .

Posts replicating the claim can also be seen on Instagram (here) and Facebook (here).

However, this claim is misleading as presented. The document, last updated in July 2020 (during the Trump administration), is a discussion of pandemic approaches for people who already live in “humanitarian settings” such as refugee camps and displaced populations. It is not a strategy relevant to the U.S. general public (here).

Then there's this, from USA Today on August 17, 2021 (I know, I know, USA Today is yet another corporate media monster, but if you're interested in what the monster has to say, follow the link).

If you need more sources, help yourself.

Camp, schmamp
I suppose it was inevitable that the conspiranoids would start foaming at the mouth about government camps in America again, now that a Democrat is back in the White House. During the Obama administration, the nutcakes absolutely could not stop talking about "FEMA camps." Loony Lenny was an enthusiastic promoter of that narrative. Supposedly Obama and FEMA and George Soros and the rest of the usual gang of suspects were plotting to herd Americans into big internment camps, where they would be forcibly vaccinated and microchipped and who knows what else'd. It didn't happen.

They weren't nearly so paranoid during the Trump reign of ruin. They didn't utter a peep when real internment camps became, for all practical purposes, more of a thing than they'd been since World War II, thanks to the cruelty-is-the-point immigration "policies" of Trump and his reincarnated Nazi helper, Stephen Miller. Those camps didn't and don't matter, because they were built for "illegals" who are scarcely human and clearly have no right to be on hallowed American ground.

But now that there's a Democratic president again -- and one who actually seems to care about taking real steps to end a deadly pandemic -- it's time to dust off the "camp" narratives and update them for the times. Deja vu all over again...

Is fact-checking a losing battle?
Despite the time and effort have I put into writing this post, and every other post I've written on these subjects over the years, I am fully aware that fact-checking sites don't faze the conspiranoids and covidiots one bit. In their eyes, the fact-checkers are part of the MSM (mainstream media) or "Them" or the Deep State or the Killuminati and/or whichever other force(s) they imagine are trying to shield us from The Truth. Fact checkers are just there to placate the sheeple, while the awake and aware crowd knows what's really going on.

So much of the misinfo/disinfo industry, which formerly was relegated to the fringe, has become all too mainstream, and particularly in recent years, its products have leeched into American politics, which is the core reason that this formerly apolitical blog has become so political at times. And so much of the misinfo/disinfo is just plain silly or stupid. But silliness and stupidity have consequences, and some of them are dire.

An August 23, 2021 opinion piece on Slate, written by Amanda Marcotte, suggests that much of today's politically-oriented stupidity has become strategically weaponized. Marcotte frames her piece around Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who is one of the main sources of right-wing toxicity these days (and has made no small contribution to COVID-19 misinfo himself). The arguments Carlson makes are maddeningly stupid on purpose, Marcotte asserts, with the goal being to destroy rational discourse itself.

For instance, there's Carlson's assertion that refugees are mainly to blame for the housing crisis in America. Intrepid Media Matters analyst Matt Gertz quickly debunked that claim, but on Twitter, Gertz acknowledged that "it's fruitless to fact-check a wildly dishonest demagogue like Tucker Carlson." Gertz' pessimism is understandable, Marcotte acknowledged.

The whole incident illustrates one of the most pernicious problems with modern right-wing discourse: stupidity is strategically weaponized. And the strategy is as simple as it is sinister: make arguments so transparently false and silly that it makes people feel stupid for even engaging with you.

Carlson, in particular, is the master at playing dumb. It is a tactic that requires none of the hard work of learning, only shamelessness and a lack of basic morality. Carlson regularly makes claims so preposterous that it's unlikely even the most QAnon-addled conspiracy theorist can take him seriously...

...While deliberate stupidity is, well, stupid, it's also maddeningly effective. Carlson's playing dumb act works primarily as permission to his audience to let go of any lingering attachment to good faith or rationality. He allows them to instead glory in bullshit. After all, asinine arguments that don't make any sense at all drive the liberals up the wall, and nothing matters more than "owning" the liberals. Why bother being correct when you can be glib instead? ...

And actually there's nothing particularly new about this tactic; fascists and Nazis have been using it for decades. Today's right-wingers have found that this time-dishonored strategy works. Concluded Marcotte:

It's why Tucker Carlson's arguments are often transparently stupid, to the point where they self-debunk. He is training an audience in the bad faith that Sartre so eloquently described when he wrote that fascists [specifically anti-Semites, but pretty much the same thing ~ CLS] "delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert." It is what modern people call "gaslighting." It's different than lying because liars are often trying to legitimately deceive people about the truth. This isn't about trying to deceive anyone, so much as it's about taking a hammer to the very idea that words mean things, facts matter, and rationality is important.

The right knows they can't win in a debate based on facts and reason. Instead, they're turning political discourse into a whirlwind of meaningless noise. 

While I am inclined to believe that Leonard Coldwell, various other right-wing ranters, and many of their most loyal followers are, in fact, stupid enough to actually believe many if not most of the lies and bad-faith arguments, the points in the Slate piece are well taken. And whether the spewers of spurious content about COVID-19 (or a "stolen" 2020 election or US withdrawal from Afghanistan or any other burning issue of the day) are genuinely dumb or disingenuously faux-dumb, the effects may be the same, and they're harming all of us.

Nevertheless I believe that it's more important than ever to try to keep hammering away at the nonsense, even if the effort does seem at times to be a losing battle. And one of the ways to do this, if you're so inclined, is to report lies and misinformation to Facebook or other forum hosts when you see them. After all, their bots and human fact checkers can't do it all.

Covidiocy and the new waves of anti-vax lunacy

 Over the years I've written a few times about the anti-vaccination, or anti-vax, movement, mostly in conjunction with some of the Scamworld hucksters who perpetually sound the (false) alarm about vaccinations chiefly in the service of promoting their own frauducts, flopportunities, and general quackery and crackpottery. (Leonard Coldwell and Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams, I'm looking at y'all.)

For years the hero of the anti-vax movement was a disgraced former doctor named Andrew Wakefield, an arrogant Brit whose work regarding the dangers of vaccination has been soundly debunked. To this day, however, fervent anti-jab believers defend him and falsely claim that he has been completely vindicated. In their eyes, he's nothing short of a saint.

Well, move over, Wakefield: the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has injected fresh new triple-doses of crazy into the anti-vax crusaders and conspiranoids, who are all over the Internet with dire warnings about the deadly dangers of COVID vaccines. Among these Covidiots are rising stars such as a right-wing rabble-rouser named Bret Weinstein, and a veterinary virologist named Vanden Bossche. One of my favorite journalists and commentators, Jef Rouner, has taken aim at this newest wave of dangerous anti-vax nonsense (link is in the next paragraph). I first discovered Jef's work when I was writing a post about the fact-checking web site Snopes a few years ago, and came across Jef's guide to arguing with Snopes deniers. I've been reading his work ever since.

What the hordes of anti-vax zealots apparently don’t realize — and that Jef deftly documents in this June 29 article for the Houston Press — is that Saint Wakefield’s own anti-vax crusades were motivated far more by money than by any genuine concern about public health. And Jef makes a good case for the exact same thing being true for today’s loudest voices in the fight against COVID-19 vaccines, like the aforementioned Weinstein and Bossche.

Whenever Jef writes just about anything, he gets a volcanic mountain of responses from various types of crazies, and his writings about COVID are apparently no exception.

Two months ago, I implored people to get vaccinated against COVID instead of taking horse dewormer, and my email has been a circus train of screwballs ever since. By far, the largest number of messages I get implore me to seek out the work of Bret Weinstein, a “professor in exile” and podcaster. I did just that, and I now believe the world is now in the beginning stages of Andrew Wakefield 2.0...

Following this, and for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the history, Jef goes into the story of Wakefield's folly, and then segues into the current darlings of the anti-vax lunacy legions, Weinstein and Bossche.

It's pretty obvious that these alarmists all love attention, which as I've often said is its own powerful form of currency, particularly in today's shallow social-media-dominated "culture." But like all hucksters and scammers, they also love real money. Concludes Jef:

The people who claim that current vaccination efforts are harming us, such as Weinstein and Vanden Bossche, do not appear to be arguing in good faith. It looks like a con, an old one at that, and we fall for it at our peril.

Amen to that. Here's that link again.

Related on this Whirled:

• March 2020: Coronacrazy: COVID-19 virus brings out the conspiranoids & fraudsters -- I wrote this when the pandemic was still pretty new. Not a whole lot has changed, except for the millions of deaths from COVID-19 (worldwide) that have occurred since then.
• March 2020: The Lie-land of Dr. Trudeau: Kevin Trudeau joins the ranks of the corona-crapitalists -- Talk about someone who promotes "health" advice and conspiracy narratives solely in the service of lining his own pockets; serial scammer Kevin Trudeau has been the master of this art for decades (even from prison). Pretty early on, he jumped on the COVID crisis as an opportunity to once again market himself as a one-of-a-kind source for seekrit information that "they" don't want you to know, and that you could only get from him (and you could find out more if you joined the seekrit club he founded, GIN (the Global Information Network)). Never mind that everything he wrote was a repeat of various conspiranoid narratives that were growing wild on the banks of the online fever swamps. He took all of that crap and branded it as his own.
• April 2020: Lockdown, schlockdown -- Kevin Trudeau is still pooping out COVID-19 nuggets from Camp Cupcake -- More of the same corona-crapitalism. Through a proxy, Trudeau wrote quite a few of these missives -- although interestingly enough, he's been silent recently, about COVID and everything else, since he's been on "home release."
• April 2020: "Dr." C: the "C" is for Covidiot -- Cancer quack, fake doctor, faux-tivational speaker, right-wing nutcake and alleged predator Leonard Coldwell is one of the most hysterical voices among the anti-vaxxers. It's too bad for his sick and bloated ego that most of the world hasn't heard of him, but in any case, his Covidiocy (and general idiocy) are pretty typical of the science-denying, conspiracy-swallowing masses who are both amusing and dangerous.
• April 2020: Bless this mess with MMS: phony church (and possibly a phony president?) tout bleachy cure-nothing for COVID-19 -- More quackery, this time involving The Former Guy in the White House...
• August 2020: Oleandrin: Are Trump and cronies trying to crapitalize on a new phony COVID-19 cure? -- And still more quackery, involving the same Former Guy.
  
  
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