Maladies that are particularly prevalent in Anglophone and European societies where growing inequalities in wealth distribution, deindustrialisation with its accompanying flight of jobs to the Global South flight of capital of off-shore destinations and the decimation of social capital around vanished workplaces such by trade unions and company sports and social clubs plus churches and cooperative institutions.
Concomitant to these social trends has been spiralling mistrust of those of deemed to be ‘elite,’ be they technocratic or scientific experts, the mainstream media, the ‘bureaucracy’ or transnational organisations be they the EU, WHO, NATO and the UN. Tragically, all too often legitimate grievances around the remoteness, sclerosism and lack of accountability of national and international decision- makers has been sublimated into an anti-politics mood and paranoia about the power of non-decision-making institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF) and populist bogey figures like Bill Gates and George Soros. What the voices of these discontents are not being channelled into are movements for meaningful and realisable change (one thinks of African American civil rights, women’s reproductive rights, disabled and LGBTQIA social movements).
Rather than making politics transformative, the energy of too many people has been sucked into the multiple rabbit holes of conspiracism for which social media behemoths have acted as vectors. Ironically given the crystallisation of conspiracist beliefs around opposition to Covid 19 pandemic measures and the accompanying vaccination programme, the conspiracist phenomenon can be explained in terms of viral transmission through super spreader agencies such as online hosted “alternative” media.
Conspiracy Fiction
In their coruscating takedown of “neo-liberalism” (I prefer the terms “possessive individualism” or “acquisitive individualism” to describe the legitimating or hegemonic ideology of free market driven societies, but that’s a discussion for another day) George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison critique the term conspiracy theory as a ‘misnomer’ on the grounds that there are plenty of genuine conspiracies where powerful people have come together to act in their self-interest by thwarting public scrutiny of their actions. One only has to recall the Hillsborough and Bloody Sunday Inquiries, the Infected Blood Scandal and the repeated revelations about maternity care standards, the myriad sexual abuse scandals e.g. Jimmy Saville in the light entertainment industry and the cover ups by the BBC right down to the revelations of the prolific predatory behaviour of the late Harrods owner Muhammed El-Fayed and his protection by corrupt police officers to grasp how power works and how it has always operated.[1]
What are generally known as ‘conspiracy theories’ are actually conspiracy fictions. Conspiracy fictions are stories about alleged conspiracies for which there is no evidence and which have been comprehensively debunked by evidence.[2] 9/11` Truther accounts, the Learned Protocols of the Elders of Zions and the attribution of atrocities committed by the Assad regime in Syria such as the Gouta chemical weapons attack to opposition forces or the volunteer civil defence body such as the Syrian White Knights are cases in point.
Those who peddle conspiracy fictions always invariably demonstrate no interest in real conspiracies. It is most likely that actually existing bad actors with nefarious agendas and interests to serve are behind the promotion of them. Why else are the ‘villains’ in conspiracy narratives are people who have little real power – such as town planners (who attracted the ire of the ’15-minute city conspiracists), climate scientists, public health researchers, librarians, and teachers.[3]
The modus operandi is ‘joining the dots;’ associating happenstance, coincidental events to make a ‘gotcha’ case. A particularly notorious case in point is the case brought by the digital pandemic super spreader QAnon cult against Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time of the Covid pandemic. Fauci, they discovered had connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China – or so they said. US public health bodies had funded some research in the Wuhan laboratory in the years before the outbreak of the pandemic. Fauci was the most prominent US public health official; ergo even if the funding didn’t come from his agency, it must have come from him. And if the US funded a Chinese ‘biolab’, might it be logical to infer that the reason for it was the creation of Covid.[4] In should, of course, be stated that the theory of an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab has not been completely discounted but that the broad scientific consensus remains that animal to human transmission is the most likely origin of Covid 19.
The latest and perhaps most incredible (if that is possible) iteration of conspiracy fictions have been the firestorm of misinformation directed at US meteorologists accompanying the devastation wreaked in the last two weeks on Florida by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. It apparently originated with the far-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene who wrote on X “Yes, they can control the weather. It is ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” Among these conspiracies are that there are Category 6 hurricanes (there aren’t), meteorologists or the government are creating and directing hurricanes and even that scientists should not be killed, and radar equipment should be destroyed.[5]
Predictably violent and intimidatory threats towards scientists and those working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has followed often amplified by Donald Trump and his followers. Posts across TikTok, Facebook and X have said that FEMA workers should be beaten of “arrested or shot or hung on sight.” :Posts aimed at Katie Nickolaou have said “Stop the breathing of those that made them and their affiliates” and that she had created and steered the hurricane” It is probably moot to point out to such deranged minds that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and so beyond the ability of humans to control it.[6]
Alongside these ultra-fantastical claims are more standard but no less preposterous assertions by Trump that FEMA has run out of cash for hurricane survivors because it has been given to illegal immigrants.[7] Even in the realm of ‘alternative facts’, the notion that governments can create meteorological events such as hurricanes belongs in a category of its own exceeding even the claim that chemtrails from aircraft are the primary cause of climate change. However, a perverse logic does follow; there is a progression from remotely plausible but false assertions that Covid 19 was biologically engineered, that 5G technology causes cancer, that the Deep State or global cabal seek totalitarian control of people to science and nature defying claims that governments can control the weather.
To understand the thought processes and demonology (while trying to preserve one’s sanity!) it is instructive to look at some of the institutions and personages around which conspiracist narratives have taken hold. Let us look first at the World Economic Forum.
The World Economic Forum, or WEF as it is often shortened to, describes itself as a not-for-profit foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland, which ‘engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.' Its founder is the octogenarian Klaus Schwab, and, unlike other non-for-profit concerns, it has an annual budget of around £300 million for its projects. The WEF is most renowned for its annual Davos forum of political and business leaders and as such it does showcase the one of the uppermost elite gatherings in world affairs.[8] A gilded existence maybe but it does not have any executive or regulatory functions unlike genuine global power brokers like the UN, WTO or the EU.
However, the very eliteness of WEF makes it an automatic bugbear for conspiracists. The focus for their ire was book cowritten by Schwab in June 2020 in his eighty-second year titled Covid-19: The Great Reset. Something of a technocratic policy manual, only around 250 or so pages long, it advocates ‘greater collaboration and cooperation within and between countries’ and proposes shared action against nuclear threats, climate change, ‘unsustainable use of resources like forests, topsoil and fresh water’ and ‘the consequences of the enormous differences in standards of living between the world’s peoples.’
So, nothing controversial there and much that progressives of many hues would endorse. However, QAnon and other conspiracists seized on the title of the book and its alleged “genocidal” content as fulfilment of their dark prophecies. But what was this genocidal content and was it for real?
Conspiracists claimed that Schwab had written the following in Covid-19. The Great Reset:
A dystopian agenda characterised by extreme inhumanity. Something that Hitler would have conceived on the eve of Operation Barbarossa or out of Pol Pot’s Year Zero programme for Cambodia.
Except that the book said nothing remotely like it. The passage was instead lifted from a conspiratorial 1992 book by John Coleman entitled Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300; a book which in turn had falsely claimed that the paragraph was contained in the 1928 H G Wells book The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution.
However, the genie was out of the bottle. Book reviews on Google stated that this is a book by two of the perpetrators of this crime against Humanantity [sic] who ‘if allowed to get away with this’ would come up with a new Bioengineered Virus intentionally released into society; that “I suggest you wake up. Stop getting jabbed from a case of the cold and did I say wake up? I don’t want to be killed by child diddling satanists like klaus schwabstein" [sic]; that “it was the great reset and covid19 was used to implement it."[9]
But it was ultra-Catholic blogs and Facebook pages that really kickstarted the hue and cry against WEF. The influential conservative Archbishop Carlo Vigano in an open letter to President Trump in June 2020 asking the Lord to protect him in a clash between ‘the children of light and the children of darkness’ a battle against the new world war. Soon the idea of WEF as an agent of darkness across multiple social and media outlets including Russia Today and the conspiracy site Epoch Times and, disturbingly, Sky News Australia who refused to hear from WEF spokesperson in the seeming interest in satisfying the tiny sector of their audience who traded in climate denialism.[10]
At the heart of most conspiracist narratives is that pandemic measures, climate change targets such as Net Zero, attempts to reduce urban traffic congestion through mythical 15-minute cities or indeed any state intervention in the lives of its citizens are all about digital surveillance in accordance with WEF globalist plans. The common source of all these tributaries of disinformation is Schwab’s co-authoring of the admittedly provocatively titled book Covid 19: The Great Reset. It brought Schwab into membership of the club of conspiracists’ bogey figures such as Fauci, Bill Gates and George Soros. WEF staff became the targets of email and social media abuse and threats. But the most serious legacy of the online war on WEF was, in the words of Adrian Monck, the WEF managing director for public and social engagement, the compromising of the role in fact-checking journalists. He found that news organisations were being paid by social media platforms, effectively acting as conveners and radicalisers, to ‘fact check’ the very poisoning of the public sphere that they were making a living out of enabling. In his words “It was like tobacco companies paying people to pick up cigarette butts.” [11]
The neutering of the role of fact checkers as firewalls against online disinformation, the degradation of the public sphere and the rise of alt-right movements such as MAGA Republicans who seek to destroy democracy through the medium of rumours on X. It is to the possible and dreaded triumph of conspiracism through the alliance between the social media behemoth Elon Musk and Donald Trump that I now turn to.
X Hits The Spot
Social media as we have seen has been a remarkably effective handmaiden for conspiracy fictions such as the bio-lab origins of the Covid 19 pandemic, the satanic paedophile ring around Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee and the globalist agenda of the WEF. What is disturbing is the active weaponisation of rumours and unfounded conspiracy stories in the US by Republican elites in concert with a major Tech Titan - Elon Musk, the owner of X formerly Twitter.
Gossip, rumour mongering and unverified claims are as old as human communication. As the experiences of many who have flocked to conspiracist forums shows, sharing a rumour is a form of community participation, a means of showing solidarity with friends, ostracising some out-group or both.[12] Twitter had been steadily been acquiring a gladiatorial type arena reputation where more heat than light was generated in partisan exchanges between users bound up in their respective echo chambers. Its mission seemed less educate and inform, more prove a point.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in April 2022, he argued that it had become too quick to censor heterodox and conservative ideas, proclaiming that “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral … which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”. However he soon indicated the direction of travel for the now rebranded X forum as he stripped out most of the Trust and Safety team that addressed false and misleading content and, almost uniquely and disturbingly for such an uber-influencer, he has been quick to nails his political colours to the mast of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Sporting a MAGA hat in his profile picture and at Trump rallies, he has presided over the degeneration of X into the centre of a right-wing political culture built upon a fantastical rumour mill.[13]
It has been in the backdrop to the 2024 Presidential Election that this super conspiracist monster has been released. The false narrative about pet-eating Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio which Donald Trump announced to the offline world in the Presidential debate began when one woman posted to a Facebook group that her neighbour’s daughter’s friend had lost their cat and had seen Haitians in a house nearby carving it up to eat. After the sharing of a screenshot of the post on X, it accumulated 900,000 views within a few days. J.D. Vance, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, pushed it on social media for several days.[14] But no credible evidence for these claims ever emerged.
The inevitable consequences ensued. Dozens of bomb threats made, according to the state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who has attempted to correct the record. Local Republican business leaders who praised their Haitian workers received death threats. The rumours alleging that FEMA was abandoning Trump voters in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene followed the same pattern. Claims about abandonment or incompetence were sometimes enhanced by AI-generated images of purported victims designed to provoke maximum emotional impact, such as a viral picture of a non-existent child and puppy supposedly adrift in floodwaters. As mentioned previously, FEMA workers were attacked and threated and local fire chiefs and elected Republican officials pushed back on the rumours.[15]
In conclusion, conspiritualist fictions which originated in the peripheries of the online world are now, arguably, at its front and centre. The Covid pandemic created opportunities these narratives to more fully resonate with the antipolitics zeitgeist of the 21st century with its cynicism towards elected politicians, the “mainstream media”, experts and officialdom of any sort. The takeover of X/Twitter by Elon Musk and his facilitation of the emotionally manipulative lying and disinformation movement that is MAGA represents a consummation of the bonds between conspirituality and the far right. We await in trepidation as to whether it will enable the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
[1] George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison (2024) The Invisible Doctrine. The Secret History of Neoliberalism (|& How It Came to Control Your Life) London: Allen Lane p.98
[2] Ibid, p.99
[3] Ibid.
[4] James Ball (2023) The Other Pandemic. How QAnon Contaminated the World. London: Bloomsbury Publishing p.146
[5] It’s Mindblowing: Meteorologists Face Death Threats as Hurricane Conspiracies Soar. The Guardian 12th October 2024
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ball (2023), p.160
[9] Ibid, pp.161-62
[10] Ibid: pp.162-63.
[11] Ibid, pp.163-64
[12] Renee DiResta Rumours on X Are Becoming the Right’s New Reality. The Atlantic 11th October 2024
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
Conspiracy Fiction
In their coruscating takedown of “neo-liberalism” (I prefer the terms “possessive individualism” or “acquisitive individualism” to describe the legitimating or hegemonic ideology of free market driven societies, but that’s a discussion for another day) George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison critique the term conspiracy theory as a ‘misnomer’ on the grounds that there are plenty of genuine conspiracies where powerful people have come together to act in their self-interest by thwarting public scrutiny of their actions. One only has to recall the Hillsborough and Bloody Sunday Inquiries, the Infected Blood Scandal and the repeated revelations about maternity care standards, the myriad sexual abuse scandals e.g. Jimmy Saville in the light entertainment industry and the cover ups by the BBC right down to the revelations of the prolific predatory behaviour of the late Harrods owner Muhammed El-Fayed and his protection by corrupt police officers to grasp how power works and how it has always operated.[1]
What are generally known as ‘conspiracy theories’ are actually conspiracy fictions. Conspiracy fictions are stories about alleged conspiracies for which there is no evidence and which have been comprehensively debunked by evidence.[2] 9/11` Truther accounts, the Learned Protocols of the Elders of Zions and the attribution of atrocities committed by the Assad regime in Syria such as the Gouta chemical weapons attack to opposition forces or the volunteer civil defence body such as the Syrian White Knights are cases in point.
Those who peddle conspiracy fictions always invariably demonstrate no interest in real conspiracies. It is most likely that actually existing bad actors with nefarious agendas and interests to serve are behind the promotion of them. Why else are the ‘villains’ in conspiracy narratives are people who have little real power – such as town planners (who attracted the ire of the ’15-minute city conspiracists), climate scientists, public health researchers, librarians, and teachers.[3]
The modus operandi is ‘joining the dots;’ associating happenstance, coincidental events to make a ‘gotcha’ case. A particularly notorious case in point is the case brought by the digital pandemic super spreader QAnon cult against Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time of the Covid pandemic. Fauci, they discovered had connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China – or so they said. US public health bodies had funded some research in the Wuhan laboratory in the years before the outbreak of the pandemic. Fauci was the most prominent US public health official; ergo even if the funding didn’t come from his agency, it must have come from him. And if the US funded a Chinese ‘biolab’, might it be logical to infer that the reason for it was the creation of Covid.[4] In should, of course, be stated that the theory of an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab has not been completely discounted but that the broad scientific consensus remains that animal to human transmission is the most likely origin of Covid 19.
The latest and perhaps most incredible (if that is possible) iteration of conspiracy fictions have been the firestorm of misinformation directed at US meteorologists accompanying the devastation wreaked in the last two weeks on Florida by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. It apparently originated with the far-right Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene who wrote on X “Yes, they can control the weather. It is ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” Among these conspiracies are that there are Category 6 hurricanes (there aren’t), meteorologists or the government are creating and directing hurricanes and even that scientists should not be killed, and radar equipment should be destroyed.[5]
Predictably violent and intimidatory threats towards scientists and those working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has followed often amplified by Donald Trump and his followers. Posts across TikTok, Facebook and X have said that FEMA workers should be beaten of “arrested or shot or hung on sight.” :Posts aimed at Katie Nickolaou have said “Stop the breathing of those that made them and their affiliates” and that she had created and steered the hurricane” It is probably moot to point out to such deranged minds that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and so beyond the ability of humans to control it.[6]
Alongside these ultra-fantastical claims are more standard but no less preposterous assertions by Trump that FEMA has run out of cash for hurricane survivors because it has been given to illegal immigrants.[7] Even in the realm of ‘alternative facts’, the notion that governments can create meteorological events such as hurricanes belongs in a category of its own exceeding even the claim that chemtrails from aircraft are the primary cause of climate change. However, a perverse logic does follow; there is a progression from remotely plausible but false assertions that Covid 19 was biologically engineered, that 5G technology causes cancer, that the Deep State or global cabal seek totalitarian control of people to science and nature defying claims that governments can control the weather.
To understand the thought processes and demonology (while trying to preserve one’s sanity!) it is instructive to look at some of the institutions and personages around which conspiracist narratives have taken hold. Let us look first at the World Economic Forum.
The World Economic Forum, or WEF as it is often shortened to, describes itself as a not-for-profit foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland, which ‘engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.' Its founder is the octogenarian Klaus Schwab, and, unlike other non-for-profit concerns, it has an annual budget of around £300 million for its projects. The WEF is most renowned for its annual Davos forum of political and business leaders and as such it does showcase the one of the uppermost elite gatherings in world affairs.[8] A gilded existence maybe but it does not have any executive or regulatory functions unlike genuine global power brokers like the UN, WTO or the EU.
However, the very eliteness of WEF makes it an automatic bugbear for conspiracists. The focus for their ire was book cowritten by Schwab in June 2020 in his eighty-second year titled Covid-19: The Great Reset. Something of a technocratic policy manual, only around 250 or so pages long, it advocates ‘greater collaboration and cooperation within and between countries’ and proposes shared action against nuclear threats, climate change, ‘unsustainable use of resources like forests, topsoil and fresh water’ and ‘the consequences of the enormous differences in standards of living between the world’s peoples.’
So, nothing controversial there and much that progressives of many hues would endorse. However, QAnon and other conspiracists seized on the title of the book and its alleged “genocidal” content as fulfilment of their dark prophecies. But what was this genocidal content and was it for real?
Conspiracists claimed that Schwab had written the following in Covid-19. The Great Reset:
At least four billion ‘useless eaters’ shall be eliminated by the year 2050 by means of limited wars, organised epidemics of fatal rapid-acting diseases and starvation. Energy, food, and water shall be kept at subsistence levels for the non-elite, starting with the White populations of Western Europe and North America and then spreading to other races. The population of Canada, Western Europe and the United States will be decimated more rapidly than any other continents, until the world’s population reaches a manageable level of 1 billion, of which 500 million will consist of Chinese and Japanese, selected because they are people who have been regimented for centuries and who are accustomed to obeying authority without question.
A dystopian agenda characterised by extreme inhumanity. Something that Hitler would have conceived on the eve of Operation Barbarossa or out of Pol Pot’s Year Zero programme for Cambodia.
Except that the book said nothing remotely like it. The passage was instead lifted from a conspiratorial 1992 book by John Coleman entitled Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300; a book which in turn had falsely claimed that the paragraph was contained in the 1928 H G Wells book The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution.
However, the genie was out of the bottle. Book reviews on Google stated that this is a book by two of the perpetrators of this crime against Humanantity [sic] who ‘if allowed to get away with this’ would come up with a new Bioengineered Virus intentionally released into society; that “I suggest you wake up. Stop getting jabbed from a case of the cold and did I say wake up? I don’t want to be killed by child diddling satanists like klaus schwabstein" [sic]; that “it was the great reset and covid19 was used to implement it."[9]
But it was ultra-Catholic blogs and Facebook pages that really kickstarted the hue and cry against WEF. The influential conservative Archbishop Carlo Vigano in an open letter to President Trump in June 2020 asking the Lord to protect him in a clash between ‘the children of light and the children of darkness’ a battle against the new world war. Soon the idea of WEF as an agent of darkness across multiple social and media outlets including Russia Today and the conspiracy site Epoch Times and, disturbingly, Sky News Australia who refused to hear from WEF spokesperson in the seeming interest in satisfying the tiny sector of their audience who traded in climate denialism.[10]
At the heart of most conspiracist narratives is that pandemic measures, climate change targets such as Net Zero, attempts to reduce urban traffic congestion through mythical 15-minute cities or indeed any state intervention in the lives of its citizens are all about digital surveillance in accordance with WEF globalist plans. The common source of all these tributaries of disinformation is Schwab’s co-authoring of the admittedly provocatively titled book Covid 19: The Great Reset. It brought Schwab into membership of the club of conspiracists’ bogey figures such as Fauci, Bill Gates and George Soros. WEF staff became the targets of email and social media abuse and threats. But the most serious legacy of the online war on WEF was, in the words of Adrian Monck, the WEF managing director for public and social engagement, the compromising of the role in fact-checking journalists. He found that news organisations were being paid by social media platforms, effectively acting as conveners and radicalisers, to ‘fact check’ the very poisoning of the public sphere that they were making a living out of enabling. In his words “It was like tobacco companies paying people to pick up cigarette butts.” [11]
The neutering of the role of fact checkers as firewalls against online disinformation, the degradation of the public sphere and the rise of alt-right movements such as MAGA Republicans who seek to destroy democracy through the medium of rumours on X. It is to the possible and dreaded triumph of conspiracism through the alliance between the social media behemoth Elon Musk and Donald Trump that I now turn to.
X Hits The Spot
Social media as we have seen has been a remarkably effective handmaiden for conspiracy fictions such as the bio-lab origins of the Covid 19 pandemic, the satanic paedophile ring around Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee and the globalist agenda of the WEF. What is disturbing is the active weaponisation of rumours and unfounded conspiracy stories in the US by Republican elites in concert with a major Tech Titan - Elon Musk, the owner of X formerly Twitter.
Gossip, rumour mongering and unverified claims are as old as human communication. As the experiences of many who have flocked to conspiracist forums shows, sharing a rumour is a form of community participation, a means of showing solidarity with friends, ostracising some out-group or both.[12] Twitter had been steadily been acquiring a gladiatorial type arena reputation where more heat than light was generated in partisan exchanges between users bound up in their respective echo chambers. Its mission seemed less educate and inform, more prove a point.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in April 2022, he argued that it had become too quick to censor heterodox and conservative ideas, proclaiming that “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral … which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”. However he soon indicated the direction of travel for the now rebranded X forum as he stripped out most of the Trust and Safety team that addressed false and misleading content and, almost uniquely and disturbingly for such an uber-influencer, he has been quick to nails his political colours to the mast of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Sporting a MAGA hat in his profile picture and at Trump rallies, he has presided over the degeneration of X into the centre of a right-wing political culture built upon a fantastical rumour mill.[13]
It has been in the backdrop to the 2024 Presidential Election that this super conspiracist monster has been released. The false narrative about pet-eating Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio which Donald Trump announced to the offline world in the Presidential debate began when one woman posted to a Facebook group that her neighbour’s daughter’s friend had lost their cat and had seen Haitians in a house nearby carving it up to eat. After the sharing of a screenshot of the post on X, it accumulated 900,000 views within a few days. J.D. Vance, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, pushed it on social media for several days.[14] But no credible evidence for these claims ever emerged.
The inevitable consequences ensued. Dozens of bomb threats made, according to the state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who has attempted to correct the record. Local Republican business leaders who praised their Haitian workers received death threats. The rumours alleging that FEMA was abandoning Trump voters in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene followed the same pattern. Claims about abandonment or incompetence were sometimes enhanced by AI-generated images of purported victims designed to provoke maximum emotional impact, such as a viral picture of a non-existent child and puppy supposedly adrift in floodwaters. As mentioned previously, FEMA workers were attacked and threated and local fire chiefs and elected Republican officials pushed back on the rumours.[15]
In conclusion, conspiritualist fictions which originated in the peripheries of the online world are now, arguably, at its front and centre. The Covid pandemic created opportunities these narratives to more fully resonate with the antipolitics zeitgeist of the 21st century with its cynicism towards elected politicians, the “mainstream media”, experts and officialdom of any sort. The takeover of X/Twitter by Elon Musk and his facilitation of the emotionally manipulative lying and disinformation movement that is MAGA represents a consummation of the bonds between conspirituality and the far right. We await in trepidation as to whether it will enable the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
[1] George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison (2024) The Invisible Doctrine. The Secret History of Neoliberalism (|& How It Came to Control Your Life) London: Allen Lane p.98
[2] Ibid, p.99
[3] Ibid.
[4] James Ball (2023) The Other Pandemic. How QAnon Contaminated the World. London: Bloomsbury Publishing p.146
[5] It’s Mindblowing: Meteorologists Face Death Threats as Hurricane Conspiracies Soar. The Guardian 12th October 2024
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid
[8] Ball (2023), p.160
[9] Ibid, pp.161-62
[10] Ibid: pp.162-63.
[11] Ibid, pp.163-64
[12] Renee DiResta Rumours on X Are Becoming the Right’s New Reality. The Atlantic 11th October 2024
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid
[15] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
Think that is a good term conspiracy fiction rather than theory. Mick O pointed out a while back that because something is a conspiracy theory does not mean that no conspiracy has taken place. That sort of stuck with me as a useful rule of thumb.
ReplyDeleteMarjorie Taylor Green is seriously weird - you might recall her Jewish space lasers nonsense.
She also tormented parents of Sandy Hook dead, believes Trump won and is a high priestess of QAnon.
ReplyDelete"In (sic) should, of course, be stated that the theory of an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab has not been completely discounted but that the broad scientific consensus remains that animal to human transmission is the most likely origin of Covid 19."
ReplyDeleteOh bullshit Barry, if it was a zoonotic spillover they would have hunted far and wide for the host animals and the simple fact that the y did not screams that they knew exactly whence it came. They would have shown the world's media with much fanfare the incriminating animal and allowed international inspection.
The first case just so happened to originate in close proximity to a Level 4 containment lab working on, get this, "Gain of function research" specifically using bat coronavirus. Doesn't that strike you as just a teensy weensy bit of a coincidence?
The "Broad scientific consensus" is protecting it's own financial interests by not pointing and talking too loudly about this because they know were their money comes from. Do you not remember the WHO being laughably denied access anywhere near the origin point? The labs computers being mysteriously (!) wiped and the sheer obstructionism the CCP engaged in around it?
You do make good points regards a lot of the quackery around but with some conspiracy theories there comes a point where you have to say on the balance of probabilities it becomes a conspiracy fact.
Everyone believed Oswald acted solo until the Zapruder film surfaced showing clear evidence to the contrary for example.
Steve - that seems to imply you don't trust science which is the opposite of what you actually do trust? By your reasoning here you could go a bit further and argue that the broad scientific consensus that evolution/billions years old earth/biological definitions of male and female is all made up because somebody paid it to spoof. It is a tobacco industry wet dream.
DeleteScience corrects science. There is no better form of human knowledge.
As to Covid, it never much interested me how it originated. I took the view that over the course of time we would find out through science. Admittedly, I had a very lazy approach to understanding Covid. There seemed so many better things to be doing.
Anthony,
DeleteI am being very specific regards the origin of this particular virus but it does lead to very serious questions regarding stifling enquiry regarding who actually funds this 'gain of function' research and for what benefit. China is a relevantly recent player on the market but have thrown enough money around particularly in Universities ( which are oft tied to Hospitals and Pharmaceutical research) that even the international bodies that are supposed to be independent like the World Health Organisation were VERY cautious about identifying the origin point.
By this stage there is substantial genetic sequencing evidence to show that there has been interference in the original virus structure that extremely strongly indicates manipulation.
Like I asked Barry, do you not remember the WHO being denied access to the lab? Or their computers being wiped? Here in Australia we found evidence that China had started a huge purchasing operation of PPE from Australia TO China just a few weeks after the first case was reported. The speed alone of this operation was one reason why Australia jumped up and down and demanded an investigation into the origin, thus beginning a trade war with Beijing.
Better science corrects science, but science creates avenues for wealth and ergo attracts the inveterate capitalist and the very willing to steal intellectual property malcontents across the globe. This was no different.
Steve - I haven't followed it close enough to give an informed opinion on the specificity of your example. But science is not a unified body of thought. The application of the scientific method is to be trusted in a way that particular individual scientists might not be. That method invariably corrects bad science.
DeleteI think caution is the watchword when seeking to identify rather than scapegoat he cause of any virus.
I don't doubt for a moment that manipulation could easily have played a part but science will show that rather than YouTube. Seriously, who is going to believe what comes out of the organs of any Communist Party? Lysenkoism and the effective usurpation of Darwinism - factoring in the repression of scientists to propel it on its journey - tells us that much.
The public evaluations are essential because while science is crucial I doubt a scientific dictatorship is a good thing for any society. It has to be questioned.
All human beings are fallible all of them. Those with out power and those with it. But they also get flashes of brilliance, very astute. It's just not consistent.
ReplyDeleteIf someone in Dublin said that the government was trying to kill them that would be a bit mad but a couple of miles up the road 20 years ago some people wouldn't be mad for saying it.
Maybe instead of those people, stay away from playing the man and go for the ball, do what you did in the article, look for sources. The theory falls or it doesn't. That's it. Is Jeremy Corbyn an anti semite or was he bumped out, the latter sounds a bit mad but it looks more plausible than the former but then 'they' would say that.
All the covid stuff. Some countries are doing public evaluations. Personally think that is very healthy because human beings are fallible and its not trouble making or what ever to say things in hindsight may have been wrong.
But anyway in america Mark Zuckerberg is saying that in hindsight there are things Facebook got wrong. They to catch the conspiracy stuff but the hunter biden story got cought in the net because it was getting dismissed as conspiracy.