This image was making some rounds on social media. On Twitter, I’m sure it went unchecked, but other platforms (read: platforms not yet run by megalomaniacal Nazi idiots) took the image down. It’s fairly clear why: it’s obvious AI.
Why do right-wingers fall so easily for conspiracy theories?
They even have conspiracy theories about their conspiracy theories:
I’ve sometimes wondered what it might be like to travel back in time with our current understanding of the physical world to a time when people thought witches cast spells, that comets were harbingers of the future, that thunder and lightning were from the gods. What kind of frustrating hell would that be to experience others making decisions — occasionally life and death decisions — based solely on uneducated superstition? We would watch in horror as pseudo-physicians drilled holes in epileptics’ heads to allow the evil spirits to escape. We would watch aghast as women accused of witchcraft were burned at the stake, crushed, drowned, and killed in ineffably evil ways. We would witness the spread of the Black Death through Europe and the accompanying brutal attacks against the Jews, whom the non-Jews viewed as responsible for the plague through supernatural means.
With all this swirling around us, we would, I think, find it difficult to keep quiet. As we would attempt to explain to these scientific illiterates the reality of germs, epilepsy, and the complete lack of evidence for the efficacy of witchcraft, we would likely find ourselves labeled as perpetrators of similar acts. Our defense would get us labeled as being “in league with the devil” and likely result in our own persecution or death. If we kept quiet, the frustration of watching people killed, maimed, and tortured in the name of superstition and illogic would take quite a toll on our mental health.
Yet we don’t have to imagine what it would be like to live among the scientifically illiterate who have only the most tenuous grasp on logic because we already do. This is the reality we’re experiencing now watching Qanon proponents try to explain that there is a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who harvest adrenochrome from kidnapped babies who are then raped and devoured. This is the reality we’re experiencing now watching people make unsubstantiated claims about stolen elections even when adequate evidence to the contrary exists. This is the reality we’re experiencing now watching people fall in line behind the far-right position that Russia is the good guy in its war with Ukraine, which has in fact been in various nefarious conspiracies with this or that group bent on world domination. People are swallowing whole lies that are so obviously and ridiculously false that it strains one’s imagination that anyone could respond to such suppositions with anything other than incredulous laughter.
Why would people believe this?
It’s simple: they’re primed to believe things like this. Most of those who hold these various conspiracy theories are on the far-right of the political spectrum, and that usually aligns with the fundamentalist wing of Christianity. These individuals are disproportionally evangelical Christians, and this means they take the Bible literally. There really was a talking snake in the Garden of Eden (indeed, there really was a Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve). Balaam’s donkey really did rebuke Balaam for beating him. Jonah really did survive in a fish for three days. People really do suffer demon possession that results in behavior suspiciously similar to epilepsy. And behind this all lurks an evil spirit secretly pulling the strings of all left-leaning individuals, institutions, and ideologies in an effort to ensnare souls and drag them down to hell with him.
Evangelicals are not the only ones holding these conspiracy theories; Catholics increasingly are falling for them as well. Their view of the source of evil in the world so much the less nuanced that they have a prayer about it:
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil; May God rebuke him, we humbly pray; And do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.
Yet no matter whether Evangelical or Catholic, these fundamentalists have one thing in common: their religion itself is a conspiracy theory.
This woman has watched too much Scooby Doo.
The end of the school year always brings a lot of cleaning and paperwork. We have an entire list of things we teachers have to do before going home for the summer.
The first year I was a teacher at this school, it took three days to get everything ready because, in addition to all this (and a lot of stuff I’ve forgotten/neglected to mention), we had to put copies of the final report cards in permanent records and then organize the permanent records based on which high schools students were attending. These last two steps are now out of our hands, but it still takes a while to get all this done.
Part of the challenge is getting signatures. At the end of the whole process, we are to provide the principal with a checklist that has been initialed by everyone involved to show that we’ve done all the steps above. Sometimes, it’s a bit of a trick tracking down a given administrator.
I went to the school today for the end-of-year checkout, arriving at around ten in the morning, and by twelve, I was done.
This is just another way that this year is exceptional.
I’m not complaining: I didn’t have to move my books at all because the custodial staff, in an effort to get a head start on the summer’s duties, has already cleaned my room, most significantly the floor (cleaned and waxed). Turns out they just worked around the bookshelves. The curmudgeon in me will forever after complain, “Why can’t you just do that every year? It’s not like I ever move my room around — everything goes back to the same place, year after year.” Still, I would have preferred a regular ending to this year, and for that, I would have willingly done the whole check-out procedure — twice, if necessary.
Every time we have a significant rainfall that results in the creek behind our house rising to food or near-flood levels, the Boy and I like to go out and see what has changed. The surging waters bring new flotsam and jetsom after it washes away existing flotsam and jetsom.
It changes the flow of the creek, too. For example, the spot where we usually cross was just wide enough that I could step over it with one stretching step. Now it’s much wider. As I was wearing tennis shoes during our afternoon adventure, I was unwilling to take the chance of getting them wet. The Boy kindly built a stepping pylon out of the bricks we’d brought down last year to help with the crossing in another spot.
During our exploring, the made a grisly discovery: the raccoon we thought was just inexpertly hiding the other day was in the same spot.
“So it died there?” the Boy asked. “Did it attack something there? What could kill a raccoon?!” He related some video he’d watched in which a farmer explained how raccoons killed some of his chickens. “It would have to be something really big to take down a raccoon!” I could see the wheels turning: he was thinking about what type of enormous preditor could be lurking in that wooded area we explore with seemingly careless abandon.
I suggested that perhaps it was just sick and crawled in there to die.
“Or maybe the snake we saw bit it and that’s where it died,” the Boy intelligently suggested.
That sounds reasonable.
The Boy is into survival skills. He’s been watching a couple of YouTubers who do survival stuff as their main content. The primitive building of two weeks ago, with plans to build a vast underground bunker complete with swimming pool — forgotten. Completely. Not a word about it.
He used some of his money this week to buy a survival kit.
He just had to try out the saw today.
A former student shared a video on social media. I watched about 5 minutes of it. Bill Gates and 5G networks are conspiring to spread the virus. I made a comment: “This is just getting ridiculous.”
“Why?” someone asked.
My response was admittedly a bit barbed: “If I have to explain it, there’s no point. You’ve swallowed the conspiracy theory Kool-Aid.”
My former student took me to task:
You wrote something is ridiculous without explaining why, so it’s normal to ask ‘why?’
What did you think was ridiculous? Which one of the statements that this parliamentarian was providing was ridiculous? I know we don’t hear these statements in MSM but I think that it’s better to check all information available before ridiculing anyone. It’s too easy to discredit something just because it sounds ridiculous. There were many things in history that sounded absurd to many and yet with time they proved to be true.
Anyway wherever the truth is, it’s always a good idea to ask questions and there can be nothing and no one that should be unquestionable.
After the comment, I went back to watch the video, only to find it had been flagged by fact-checkers. I simply pointed them to a couple of articles and left it alone.
What I wanted to say:
I should be used to this kind of nonsense now, but I’m not. Nor should I be. It’s normal now but it shouldn’t be.
Authors often say a lot without saying much. A good author leaves a lot for the reader to piece together for herself, and that’s one of the things that can make a book engaging. But filling in those gaps is a skill that readers must learn. It doesn’t come naturally.
This is one of the things I spend a lot of time and energy teaching my eighth graders how to do. The honors kids are usually fairly adept at it, but the on-level students often struggle. I have to model it for them, doing think-alouds in which I say aloud all the inferences that are running through my head when I read. I infer; I predict; I connect to previous knowledge; I comment on what I read. I model, model, model, then turn it over to them to try as a class before they try it in groups and finally as individuals. Scaffolding, that’s called: model it, practice as a whole class, practice in groups, practice individually — the bread and butter of my teaching.
Tom Sawyer is providing ample chance for me to begin exposing the Boy to this kind of critical thinking.
Presently [Aunt Polly] stepped into the kitchen, and Sid, happy in his immunity, reached for the sugar-bowl — a sort of glorying over Tom which was wellnigh unbearable. But Sid’s fingers slipped and the bowl dropped and broke. Tom was in ecstasies.
I pause: “What do you think will happen?” I ask the Boy.
“Aunt Polly will think that Tom broke the sugar bowl,” he said after a moment’s thought.
“Right. That’s called predicting…” I begin.
“I know, Daddy. You tell me that every time we read something.” Perhaps not every time, but often enough.
We continue:
In such ecstasies that he even controlled his tongue and was silent. He said to himself that he would not speak a word, even when his aunt came in, but would sit perfectly still till she asked who did the mischief; and then he would tell, and there would be nothing so good in the world as to see that pet model “catch it.” He was so brimful of exultation that he could hardly hold himself when the old lady came back and stood above the wreck discharging lightnings of wrath from over her spectacles. He said to himself, “Now it’s coming!” And the next instant he was sprawling on the floor!
“What does ‘sprawling’ mean?” the Boy asks.
I explain, then ask, “Do you understand what happened?”
There is a lot going on in that passage, particularly in the final two sentences: “He said to himself, ‘Now it’s comin!’ And the next instant he was sprawling on the floor!” Missing from this is the fact that Aunt Polly slaps Tom so hard that it knocks him off his chair.
I explained it to the Boy. He thought it was horrible that someone would slap a child so hard that it knocks him out of his chair. I think that’s a fairly reasonable concern, to say the least. Why do we adults find that passage funny, though? I think it’s because of all the work Twain makes us do, all the thinking, all the blanks we fill in. Twain is a master of implication.
It rained all day today. K and I were concerned that it might turn out to be enough to threaten our basement again. Granted, I have filled all the termite treatment holes with hydraulic cement: those holes shouldn’t let any more water into our basement, let alone the geysers and fountains that were gushing in during our last storm. And the crack by the fireplace? I drilled it out completely and patched it with more hydraulic cement.
So part of me was thinking, “Okay — bring it on. Let’s see if I’ve got you licked” (to employ a usage from Tom Sawyer that still tickles the Boy).
But most of me was just hoping that it didn’t come to that. When the Boy and I headed out in the morning to see how much rain had fallen, things were looking bad but not dreadful.
We went back out in the afternoon after more rain. We went ahead and crossed the creek at this point like usual: the water was only a few inches above our feet. I held the Boy’s hand, and we ventured up a bit further. The rain continued, and by the time we made it back to this point, the water was waist-deep for the Boy. I held his hand firmly, and we made it across easily, but it was a lesson: “See how quickly the water can rise?” That’s the epitome of flash-flooding.
I noticed this particular meme this evening on social media:
I find it hard to imagine what kind of simplistic thinking could lead to something like this. Surely no one so naive as to believe that it’s as simple as this meme suggests. To think that we could go from Trump-istan to this worst-case-scenario, utterly exaggerated vision of progressive ideas run amuck in one election cycle — I just don’t get it.
What I do get is the fear buttons this kind of meme pushes. The left has their own versions of these memes, of course. I could probably browse the tweets of friends who lean much further to the left that an avowed centrist (don’t we all see ourselves as centrists? no — we certainly don’t) like me and find the equivalent: we’re one step away from living in a real-life Handmaid’s Tale. (Come to think of it, I believe there was a protest with women dressed as handmaids from the novel/movie/series.) Making decisions from fear is bad enough, but making them from a sense of fear that might very well have been intentionally manipulated — that in itself is terrifying.
Two things: how can a dog get that dirty in a matter of seconds? And how can it seem to disappear as soon as she’s dry?
Imagine fear nestled into anxiety burrowed into terror, and all of that is supposed, in the end, to be a source of great joy. “In my beginning is my end” T. S. Eliot wrote, but for some evangelical Christians, it might be reworded, “In my anxiety is my comfort,” for they view their everyday reality through an apocalyptic lens. They post things like this on social media:
The single comment “Scary” reveals the paradox at the heart of this line of thinking.
On the one hand, there is a sense of terror at what’s coming. Such believers look at the Bible as a roadmap for the future, seeing all sorts of ideas that, to those of us on the outside looking in, seem patently ridiculous. They see a coming world-engulfing violent cataclysm that will wipe out wide swaths of humanity and subject the survivors to near-slavery under the rule of some world-dominating ruler known simply The Beast, who will rule in what they call The Tribulation. During this time, there will be mass executions of believers and worldwide oppression.
At this point, the vision starts fracturing. What will happen to Christians, to good Bible-believing Christians who saw all this coming and gave themselves over to the Lord long ago? Some suggest that these poor Christians will have to go through all this; others (most) believe firmly that they’ll all be whisked away to heaven before all this — the rapture.
I grew up being taught that, like the rapture, God would supernaturally protect all his faithful Christians from this onslaught of literal hell on earth, but instead of being taken away into heaven, we would escape to a location of protection, which got the name the Place of Safety. Our religious leader conjectured it would be in Petra, Jordan. There we would spend the three-and-a-half years that the devil, through his Beast, would rule and torment the world, emerging at the end when Jesus returns to put the devil in his place and us in charge of rebuilding the world. Sounds crazy — but not any crazier than being whisked away like the Left Behind book series narrates.
Whatever the belief, though, these groups have one thing in common: the believers — the right-believing faithful — will be saved. This, then, should be a time of joy for such Christians. The end is almost here, and because they believed the right things all these times, they won’t have to endure the horrors coming.
So why the fear? Just look at the thoughts that follow the original “Scary” comment:
These poor folks are genuinely scared about Bill Gates’s supposed plans to use this pandemic and the resulting vaccine, which they fear will be mandatory (which it should be), to implant chips into them.
There is an amusing irony in all this, though:
“The COVID-19 vaccine is a trick so they can put a tracking chip in your body!” they furiously tweet out from the tracking device they willingly carry everywhere in their pocket.
— Faith Naff 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🌹🦋 (@FaithNaff) May 9, 2020
Such a strange mix of confusion, and it’s driving thousands upon thousands to outright terror.
There is, of course, one thing that these fear-stricken Christians can do: they can pray about it.
Yet what is the effectiveness of this prayer? This verse from the Bible promises that “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray” that God “will heal their land.” If that doesn’t sound like a promise from omnipotence that is directly applicable to our current situation, I don’t know what does.
But we’ve tried this before:
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 4, 2020
These Christians will point out that there are conditions: the petitioners must “turn from their wicked ways” before this promise will be fulfilled, so that’s probably the problem: America is still aborting pregnancies, fornicating, and tolerating homosexuality (the three biggies), so God is just waiting for that to stop.
On March 30 televangelist Kenneth Copeland must have decided he would not wait for the stubborn, God-hating Americans to repent and simply “exercised judgment” on the pandemic, thus ending it:
But four days later, he realized he had to try again:
And yet it’s still not over.
Here’s where another layer of anxiety enters: these poor souls must be wracking their brains and souls trying to figure out what they’re doing wrong. So it seems to me that this type of Christianity does not relieve anxiety but only heightens it. Instead of these beliefs calming you, they add another layer of anxiety when one’s prayer’s and petitions are either ignored or answered in the negative, and the natural response is to blame oneself: “God promised. I must have done something wrong.”
So by the time we get to this level, we have the following fears, some conscious and some less so.
For something that’s supposed to bring comfort, that’s an awful lot of sources of anxiety.
In a sense, these folks have a right to their anxiety. The First Amendment guarantees that right. But some of these anxiety-inducing conspiracy theories have long-reaching effects. They lead people to reject science for religious-based superstition:
Right-wing pastor Curt Landry tells his follower never to accept any eventual coronavirus vaccine because it’s a set-up for the Mark of the Beast: “That vaccine is from the pit of Hell. Do not pray for those vaccines, and do not take the vaccine. ” https://t.co/4oExoRqTbJ pic.twitter.com/OdePBeRaT1
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) April 2, 2020
Conspiracy theories have been around for ages, and fundamentalist Evangelical Christians have often been particularly willing to believe them. After all, their whole religion is a conspiracy theory: the devil is constantly trying to get humans to do his bidding unknowingly. The group I grew up in went so far as to call itself the only group of true Christians in the world: the rest of the “so-called” Christians were actually worshipping a Satan-created replacement Christianity. These “so-called Christians” were, for all intents and purposes, worshiping the devil himself. But even among the milder, less cultish groups, there is a sense of conspiracy. Indeed, this conspiracy goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, when the devil tried to usurp God’s control over humanity.
I’m certainly not the only one to notice this similarity:
Arthur Jones, the director of the documentary film Feels Good Man, which tells the story of how internet memes infiltrated politics in the 2016 presidential election, told me that QAnon reminds him of his childhood growing up in an evangelical-Christian family in the Ozarks. He said that many people he knew then, and many people he meets now in the most devout parts of the country, are deeply interested in the Book of Revelation, and in trying to unpack “all of its pretty-hard-to-decipher prophecies.” Jones went on: “I think the same kind of person would all of a sudden start pulling at the threads of Q and start feeling like everything is starting to fall into place and make sense. If you are an evangelical and you look at Donald Trump on face value, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he’s been married multiple times, he’s clearly a sinner. But you are trying to find a way that he is somehow part of God’s plan.”
So we’re at the point that we’re all living in different realities. The Atlantic has an article about this now: “The Prophecies of Q,” aptly summarized, “American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.”
The power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process—was not. The internet also enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a scale Marshall McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an AR-15 rifle to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into being where people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of state. It offers the promise of a Great Awakening, in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of the century.
Would could imagine a scenario in which a prankster began something like Q and then it quickly gets out of hand. The prankster tries to step forward and point out that he began it all. “Look, I have evidence!” He could have even had the foresight to record everything he did on video and through screen-recording software, yet that wouldn’t be enough once the conspiracy had gained a life of its own. One can only imagine what such a prankster would feel as he watched his creation ravage reasonable — a modern Frankenstein, with the conspiracy theory being his unnamed monster.
Yet Frankenstein could reason with his creation, and in fact did attempt to talk to him. Conspiracy theories are like memes: they’re elements of the brain that are belong to no one and are somewhat self-replicating. In short, there’s no reasoning with a conspiracy theory, and there’s little ability to talk to a believer in one:
Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, Q frequently rails against legitimate sources of information as fake. Shock and Harger rely on information they encounter on Facebook rather than news outlets run by journalists. They don’t read the local paper or watch any of the major television networks. “You can’t watch the news,” Shock said. “Your news channel ain’t gonna tell us shit.” Harger says he likes One America News Network. Not so long ago, he used to watch CNN, and couldn’t get enough of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we always have been,” he said. “Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what’s happening. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that’s going to happen.” I asked Harger and Shock for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research myself. When I asked them how they explained the events Q had predicted that never happened, such as Clinton’s arrest, they said that deception is part of Q’s plan. Shock added, “I think there were more things that were predicted that did happen.” Her tone was gentle rather than indignant.
There’s no reasoning with them because they often don’t even see themselves as conspiracy theorists:
“Some of the people who follow Q would consider themselves to be conspiracy theorists,” [David] Hayes[, one of the best-known QAnon evangelists on the planet] says in the video. “I do not consider myself to be a conspiracy theorist. I consider myself to be a Q researcher. I don’t have anything against people who like to follow conspiracies. That’s their thing. It’s not my thing.”
So in the end, it’s hard not to be at least somewhat depressed about all this, and that in turn tends to make me just a little pessimistic about our future as a species — yet again. I can help our children develop the critical thinking skills (the painfully basic critical thinking skills) to avoid falling into this trap themselves, but that’s two in a nation of millions. These ideas are gaining momentum, and the alternative cultures they spawn are growing.
The Boy and I went out exploring again today. He had to try his new gumboots. I warned him about deep water: “If the water goes over the top of the boot, your foot will be permanently soaked.” He stepped in water that was too deep. One foot got soaked. We laughed quite a while about the squishing sounds coming from his boot.
Two radically different thoughts that rattled around my head today, completely unconnected other than the fact that I thought about them during the same 12-hour period…
It’s the first Mother’s Day without Nana. A year ago, we were just about ready to move Nana and Papa into the almost-completed living space, and we had a Mother’s Day dinner at Nana’s and Papa’s. We all sat around Nana’s bed as we ate, and L and I gave her a small succulent that was small enough to sit on her bedside table. I don’t remember what we ate; I don’t remember what we talked about. Had we known then that it was our last Mother’s Day with her, we probably would all remember those details, but that’s the problem with most lasts — we don’t know they’re the last this or last that.
It reminds me of how a priest once explained how he avoids becoming complacent and (did he say this? He might have used this word) even bored with the Mass, saying the same thing day in and day out, over and over again. “I try to treat every Mass as if it’s the first, last, and only Mass I’ll ever celebrate.” When we know it’s the last time we do something, we tend to slow down and savor it.
I used to get very upset at lasts. I wanted, as Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz sings, “to hold on to these moments as they last,” and when it’s the last one, it doesn’t last long. (That’s an odd little thing, isn’t it? “Last” as a verb and “last” as an adjective. “How long does the last one last?”) When I knew the last moments of some experience were approaching or the last time I would do something was nearing, I always grew just a touch melancholy.
The last day of school, for instance, used to be a little sad because I found myself thinking that I’d never see these kids in whom I’d invested so much. I’d forged relationships with them, some of which were hard-won and very frustrating as they developed. It had taken me a long time with some of them to convince them that I was, indeed, on their side, that even when I was giving them a hard time about their behavior, doling out consequences that they felt were unfair, I was still on their side.
But endings are often beginnings. I think of Eliot’s “East Coker,” which ends, “In my end is my beginning.” It is, of course, a reference to the afterlife, but all endings are also beginnings — an old, time-worn truth. The end of every school year promises the beginning of the next.
That is where I differ from the rest of the folks in our household: they all believe that Nana’s end was her beginning; sadly, I have my doubts. It’s a lovely thought, and one that of course I hope is true in a sense because Papa, for instance, has so much invested emotionally in that idea. But if I’m right, we’ll never know; we’ll only know if I’m wrong.
It was with all these thoughts in my head that I drove the family to visit Nana’s grave today for Mother’s Day. Papa bought a couple of new bouquets of artificial flowers — lovely ones of multiple shades of blue with yellow and white roses to off-set the sea of blue. Nana would approve, no doubt. Blue was her favorite color, and there are enough shades of blue in the bouquets to fill the sky.
I’m currently reading Stalin: In the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a book about Stalin’s Great Terror ( I love the Russian name, Большой террор — makes me think of the ballet!). At its heart, the Great Terror was unimaginable without Stalin, but it was also impossible without others. Many others. How do you get so many people to go along with that? Simple: conspiracy theories.
Today it seems impossible that virtually every factory and railway line was being sabotaged by Trotskyite terrorists within their management, but Soviet industry was riddled with mistakes and cursed with thousands of accidents thanks to poor management and the breakneck speed of the Five-year Plans: for example, in 1934 alone, there were 62,000 accidents on the railways! How could this happen in a perfect country? “Enemies” among the corrupt elite had surely caused the failures. The arrest of saboteurs and wreckers in the industrial factories and railways spread.
By the time the Terror turned to the army and the Party itself, Stalin was most definitely in complete, unquestioned control. At his word, people lived and died, and very few people questioned his decisions.
Reading this got me thinking about the current situation in America and the conspiracy theories that seem to be popping up like mushrooms are growing positively dangerous.
Some people belittled her, others suggested she was a paid actor or was a healthcare professional who had no direct involvement with the treatment of Covid-19. Others accused her of being an abortion doctor.
“It was heated, people were very fired up about what they had to say,” she told CNN. “A lot of the top comments we got were about us being fake nurses, there was a huge majority of them that still believe this virus is fake, that it’s a hoax and not real at all. They were convinced that we’re fake nurses and that’s why we weren’t talking.”
Quite the opposite of a fake nurse, Ms Leander volunteered to work at her hospital’s Covid-19 unit full time, and has been on the front line working with infected patients for the past month.(Source)
I saw footage of this on Now This but can’t find it now. There is a definite political element to this: all the protestors were wearing “Trump 2020” paraphernalia, and I would bet that every single one of them believes the Deep State conspiracy nonsense. So I read the passage in Montefiore’s book and started wondering what it would take for something like that to happen in America.
Could these people support wholesale executions of people they see as participating in anti-state conspiracies? I don’t know.
We all want to say, “No, no — we’re better than that.” We think about our neighbors and even those nameless faces we see in our own towns and think it impossible. Would Vasili Blokhin’s neighbors or acquaintances have thought he was capable of the acts he committed? He was a prolific executioner who killed many during the Great Terror but most infamously executed over 7,000 Polish officers personally in 28 days in the forest of Katyn.
Just as we never know when an end of this or that is coming, we never know how current events are going to play out. COVID-19 was a problem in China, over there, far away until it wasn’t. With quarantines being lifted around the country before we even really have adequate testing capabilities in place, it’s not inconceivable that we might experience a sharp increase in the number of cases, forcing states to decide whether or not to reimpose restrictions. What will these protesters do then? We’ve already seen armed protesters storm the Michigan statehouse; what else are they capable of? If something happens that results in bloodshed, how will protesters (i.e., rabid Trump supporters) react in other states? We already see signs reading “Give me liberty or give me COVID.”
That’s not a far cry from the original formulation that encouraged revolution.
Our weed eater — I think that’s a brand name but I could be wrong — has been broken for some time. How long? Embarrassingly so. Today, we finally got a replacement, but we didn’t get as sturdy a model as might be expected. The reason? Turning things over to the Boy.
A battery-powered, small trimmer that E can handle. His reaction? “I love, love, love this!” He’s going to want to trim every day.
K and I were talking a few nights ago about how this whole tragedy perhaps could have been significantly lessened if our inept president weren’t the egomaniacal narcissist that he is when our talk turned to how this might affect the country. K suggested that it would be a turning point, that the fact that America — the most powerful country in the world, the richest country in the world, the superlative-in-every-sense country in the world — was brought to its knees like this will necessitate some change, a whole new way of looking at things.
I disagree.
What I fear is that instead of turning this country’s populace into a science-first, technology-led country where politics and religion take a backseat to what science says (and if this were the case now, we might not be in the situation we’re in), it will only reinforce the same backward thinking that continues to threaten us now. Instead of seeing it as a science problem, they’ll see it as a religious problem. “God took his protection away from us because of X, Y, and Z” — fill in your favorite liberal boogieman.
We really don’t have to wait for that — it’s already happening. The amount of religious stupidity coming out of this is just mindblowing. Stuff like this.
One would think that given the evidence, anti-vaxxers would be shutting up about now:
The person credited with saving the most lives ever is Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine. The disease had a much higher mortality rate than the novel coronavirus that is confining many people to their homes right now; about 80% of children and 60% of adults who contracted smallpox died of it. In the 20th century alone, it killed more than 300 million people before the vaccine eradicated it worldwide in 1979.
The polio vaccine is estimated to have saved 10 million people from paralysis just since 1988, and prevented 500,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. A global vaccination campaign for measles that began in 2000 prevented an estimated 23 million deaths by 2018, the organization reported. (LA Times)
One would think — but then again…
And this old nonsense about Bill Gates ushering in the apocalypse. (Money says he’s using a Windows computer here…)
And people trying to call judgment down on a virus as if it’s an incorrigible child.
And when you mix in bat-feces crazy like Alex Jones and people who take him seriously, well…
When you see everything — everything — as part of some conspiracy that was foretold in a book written by Bronze Age soothsayers, no amount of science, logic, or critical thinking can penetrate your worldview.
It’s not just a pessimistic sense that there’s a problem: there’s quantifiable data to show there’s a problem. Google has begun compiling reports on the changes in people’s mobility during this time.
As global communities respond to COVID-19, we’ve heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as Google Maps could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19.
These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.
What do the data show? Well, as a disclaimer, Google warns about doing what I’m just about to do:
Location accuracy and the understanding of categorized places varies from region to region, so we don’t recommend using this data to compare changes between countries, or between regions with different characteristics (e.g. rural versus urban areas).
Still, data from three locations show the vast difference in national and local response.
Here’s the data from our county:
Now, we made the news recently as being the most mobile county in the nation during this time, so our stubborn little county is an outlier, but it’s where I live, so it’s the data I’ll use.
And here’s the data from the administrative district in Poland where K grew up, where Babcia still lives, and where I spent seven years:
A randomly selected district in Italy.
Are these two countries faring better than America? I suppose in raw numbers, they are. The long term picture looks better there. Why? Because they don’t have people going around saying, “I’m covered in the blood of Jesus — I’m saved and safe” like we do here.
Of course, in Poland, some bishops and priests are desperately trying to get churches reopened on some kind of limited basis, but even there, they understand the risk and want to have limited attendance. These bloody American Evangelicals — i.e., “covered in the blood of Jesus,” which is itself a disturbing image, but the second, British meaning of “bloody” works as well — want to have full, regular church services. The data makes their claims a little spurious, though:
And it’s not as if this virus is enough: we as a species can’t even go through this without some people turning it into a hell on Earth for those who are stuck with them:
In Hubei province, the heart of the initial coronavirus outbreak, domestic violence reports to police more than tripled in one county alone during the lockdown in February, from 47 last year to 162 this year, activists told local media.
“The epidemic has had a huge impact on domestic violence,” Wan Fei, a retired police officer who founded a charity campaigning against abuse, told Sixth Tone website. “According to our statistics, 90% of the causes of violence [in this period] are related to the Covid-19 epidemic.”
It is a pattern being repeated globally. In Brazil a state-run drop-in centre has already seen a surge in cases it attributes to coronavirus isolation, the Brazilian broadcaster Globo said.
“We think there has been a rise of 40% or 50%, and there was already really big demand,” said Adriana Mello, a Rio de Janeiro judge specialising in domestic violence. “We need to stay calm in order to tackle this difficulty we are now facing.” (Lockdowns around the world bring rise in domestic violence in the Guardian)
The virus is always teaching me something new:
The increased threat to women and children was a predictable side effect of the coronavirus lockdowns, said activists. Increased abuse is a pattern repeated in many emergencies, whether conflict, economic crisis or during disease outbreaks, although the quarantine rules pose a particularly grave challenge.
Predictable for some, that is. I hadn’t even thought of this — that’s how privileged I am.
So, no, I don’t think anything will change. At all.
Listen to David Duke on the Obama election.
Obama is really going to advance radically the Zionist neocon agenda.
You probably won’t make it through more than the first six, seven minutes — I couldn’t, anyway.
The Illuminati. Who would be better to expose this fantasy than the one and only Bill Schnoebelen? Bill
was a Satanic and Voodoo High Priest, 2nd degree Church of Satan, New Age guru, occultist, channeler, 90th degree Mason, Knight Templar, and a member of the Illuminati.
A lot of titles. Sounds like someone who’s been searching.
Bill’s got a great story. He was born a Catholic, but like all good Catholics, he eventually became a Satanist. A Wiccan. A Mason. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Bill got interested in the occult because some professor in his seminary — oh, he was going to be a priest — said that, in order to become more like Christ, seminarians should study what Christ studied: the occult, because Jesus was really nothing more than a magician. Rather, someone who practiced Magick.
Odd seminary professor, that.
Eventually Bill fell into the Wicca movement and then progressed on to Satanism, and his career in the Church of Satan was going quite well until it came time for him to become a Satanic priest. Why? Bill explains for us that, before he could become a satanic priest, he had to become a Catholic priest.
That’s news.
So he found a priest willing to ordain him in return for an ordination as a witch something-or-other.
A priest can simply ordain someone else a priest? I thought that’s something a bishop would have to do. Maybe I’m just getting too hung up on the details.
At some point in his walk down the dark road, crosses over the abyss or some similar formulation. What that means, Schnoebelen explains, is that he stands above good and evil. He is a god, and all other humans are like little more than cattle.
At this point, he was told that “to move through what is called eight degree” one has to make choice: either study Lycanthropy or vampirism. He says, “I knew a couple of werewolves and I learned from them, and it’s rather a painful process.”
Not being one who likes pain, he chose vampirism.
How’d that go?
I was made to drink the blood of what I now believe to be a fallen angel, and he in turn drank my blood, and by doing that, something happened to my blood and I was actually physiologically transformed in many subtle ways. My blood type changed. It became impossible for me to eat[ …] except blood. The only solid food I consumed was the Catholic communion host.
Next time I’m at Mass with my wife, I guess I’ll have a hard time suppressing the knowledge that a good many of the parishioners could simply be vampires looking for — what? I’m not sure.
Where did Bill get the blood? By this time he had around 160 witches under them, and many of them more more than willing to let him bite into their jugular — literally. At least that’s what he says.
It got so bad, he says, that he literally had urges to jump on prostitutes, rip their throats out, and drain their bodies. What kept him from doing that? He really loved his wife, and he knew getting caught doing something like this could shatter their marriage.
But didn’t he view all other humans as beneath him — little more than animals? Why would he care about his wife anymore?
The story continues that Bill got back from the bank one of the checks he’d sent to the Church of Satan, and a bank teller had written on the check that she would be praying for Bill.
Within a day or two, I lost all my magical power. I lost all my vampiric power. I lost my job. I got sick as a dog. My wife even got sick.
Bill did what any self-respecting vampire would do. He cried out to Lucifer for a sign.
Who showed up?
Mormon missionaries!
I’d been told many years earlier by this grand druid fellow down in Arkansas, that if I ever got in really deep spiritual trouble, what I needed to do was join the Mormon church, because the Mormon church had been started by witches, for witches, for the express purpose of giving people a place for people like me [sic] to hide out and appear to be nice, conservative, white-bread, Republican Christians.
So the Catholic host is all the solid food a vampire needs and Joseph Smith was a witch.
Who knew?
I couldn’t make it any further. Half an hour had yielded so much, well, crap:Wicca, Mormonism, Catholicism, Satanism, and Masonry, all united in an unholy conspiracy to rule the world. It’s all within the first half hour of “Exposing the Illuminati from Within.”
Bill has other videos available, including a nine-hour special Interview with an Ex-Vampire (Google Video). A few minutes of this reveals stories of battles with demons that leave physical marks, a Wicca ceremony to call up a demon that results in the conjurer being whisked immediately to hell before Bill’s very eyes (at the very least, the guy disappears), of casting spells that result in people’s deaths, and numerous other fantastic (as in “fantasy”) stories.
One has to ask, though, what’s going on here. Is this guy delusional? Did he simply spend a lot of his youth searching for a spiritual home and now that he’s a born-again Christian, he embellishes his life’s story — for the greater good? Is he simply lying? He has to be, because look at what he’s saying: All your childhood fears of beasts under the bed, of werewolves and vampires, of withes casting death-spells, combined with all the urban legends you’ve ever heard, are true — and Wicca, Mormonism, Catholicism, Satanism, and Masonry (one and the same, really) are all behind it.
Who can take this stuff seriously?