The trend towards a kind of disturbing unity is distilled in the hashtag #Covid911, backed by a lot of powerful players in both anti-vaccine and QAnon circles. Sex trafficking conspiracy theories-all of which are tinged with Pizzagate and QAnon influences-seem to have an especially broad appeal: Recently, a pair of Arizona influencers promoted a baseless rumor that the furniture company Wayfair was trafficking children. More mainstream internet stars, as several outlets have noted, have also been drawn in: Lifestyle influencers are promoting COVID conspiracy theories, while the virality-seeking teens of TikTok are discovering a new obsession with Pizzagate. The Freedom Angels, an anti-vaccine group based in California, are among the many such groups joining anti-lockdown protests, using language that feels heavily drawn from the Patriot movement: They're calling stay-at-home orders “tyranny,” addressing their followers as “Patriots,” and positioning themselves as “a new civil rights movements.” (They urged people to burn their facemasks on July 4th, adding, floridly: “Join millions of Americans on Independence Day as we show all these BLUE STATE GOVERNORS, SWAMP DOCS, and DEEP STATE RATS 🐀 how we feel about their latest ORDERS, DICTATES and MANDATES to wear our muzzles again.”) QAnon groups and Reopen America groups alike promoted Plandemic, a film clip jam-packed with conspiratorial claims about the causes and spread of COVID.
UFO conspiracy theorists and QAnon fans are advocating for drinking a bleach solution promoted by anti-vaxxers.
Call it the conspiracy singularity: the place where many conspiracy communities are suddenly meeting and merging, a melting pot of unimaginable density. The strain of living in this particular time, with a dragging, devastating pandemic and a global uprising against police brutality and racial injustice, crashing together at the highest speed, has accelerated something that’s been going on for years. (QAnon is an ur-conspiracy theory which, broadly, holds that Donald Trump and his allies are bravely fighting back on a number of fronts against a shadowy, Satanic Deep State.)īut it’s not just QAnon. government will impose mandatory vaccination for the coronavirus, even though it should.) He’s also started to turn towards people who can provide some explanation for what’s really going on, and some measure of hope: Cook is promoting QAnon ideas, sometimes dozens of times a day. In the months since the pandemic began, Cook has begun to claim that it’s a pretext for the mandatory testing, tracking, and vaccination that he’s feared all along. Cook is the man behind the largest anti-vaccine group on the platform, Stop Mandatory Vaccination, which, along with his personal Facebook page, serves as a central clearinghouse for anti-vaccine misinformation. Take Larry Cook, whose evolving belief system has been playing out in a remarkable way on Facebook. Conspiracy communities that have previously only brushed past each other like schools of fish borne along on different currents are suddenly, abruptly, swimming in the same direction.
In the months that followed our chance meeting, the world buckled under the weight of the novel coronavirus pandemic, and the alliances got stranger still. “BE CAREFUL WHO YOU FOLLOW,” the document warned, in bold, at the bottom, just above a large black Q. Monroe was at the New Age expo Conscious Life selling Q-branded t-shirts and promoting a YouTube show, I was there reporting, and both of us were thinking about the strange alliances and friendships that had begun to surface in various conspiracy communities. This paper was created and handed to me by Dylan Louis Monroe, a player in the QAnon world and the creator of the Deep State Mapping Project, a one-man operation where Monroe creates dense visual maps of the supposed alliances he sees between various major players and world events.
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