Re: 2019 Coronavirus (COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2)
rareboy said:
What is fascinating during this time is the actual awareness of the how the politicization of illness has created viewpoints and how effective one television network (FOX) and a handful of radio jocks have been in molding the opinions of the less educated by sowing mistrust and conflating opposition to wearing masks with patriotism and taking a stand for liberty in the US.
/\ I believe the people he is talking about are people who lack empathy. People who are incapable of caring about others.
They indeed do suffer from mental illness. They are psychologically/emotionally under developed.
The people he is talking about are emotionally retarded to the extent of being a danger to themselves and to society.
The battle over masks is a weird phenomenon. Where normally a person would mask as a means of self-protection, with COVID-19 the mask protects the rest of the community from the person wearing the mask. The government message of "masks are not mandatory" and the actions of these pseudo-libertarians does send an unfortunate message of, "My self-serving refusal to wear a mask is more important than the survival of others in the community".
The other phenomenon that we're seeing is irrational thought patterns that aren't new either. It's a perverted type of groupthink that amplifies irrational thinking in a group of people. Examples exist all through history- for example, the mass hysteria that preceded the Salem witch trials. Even 50 years after the Warren Commission, there's still a significant group of people who believe that President Kennedy's assassination was the result of a larger conspiracy. We have a President in the White House who actively pushed stories that Barack Obama was a Muslim and he was born in Kenya.
What we're seeing now with the pandemic started much earlier with bizarre conspiracy theorists,
End Time eschatology,
New World Order groups and
groups like QAnon. For example, QAnon has been pushing narratives that the US government ("the Deep State") is a plot to harm children and Donald Trump is the savior fighting to protect the children from the Deep State. The pandemic just got incorporated into this world of conspiracy theorists. The QAnon conspiracy theorists are now saying that the coronavirus pandemic is a media conspiracy that is designed to keep Donald Trump from being elected so that the Deep State can continue their child molestation ring.
Below are some excerpts from a public meeting in Palm Beach County, Florida. When you listen to the public commentary, it sounds like individual people saying irrational things. But, after you read some of the conspiracy theories from groups like QAnon or the ministers who are pushing End Time theories, you realize that this is a mass hysteria. Many of the speakers are using conspiracy theory phrases- notice how many of the speakers mention "God". Listen for words like "
plandemic", "5G", "political", "pedophiles". Listen for phrases like "masks are killing people", "the devils laws", "human sex trafficking", "communist dictatorship". These are all buzzwords from the internet conspiracy theories that have been in circulation for a decade and the mask controversy has now been incorporated into those conspiracies.
Notice another theme running through all these instances of "mask hysteria"- the accusations that the person refusing to wear masks knows "the truth" and all the experts who are recommending or requiring masks don't know "the truth".
There's three points that Caroline Mimbs Nyce makes in
her article about QAnon that has some relevance to what we're seeing with the anti-mask hysteria. These same points can be extended to the other conspiracy groups that are very visible in the anti-mask and anti-quarantine protests:
- It’s a real-time participatory conspiracy theory.
- It’s a mass rejection of reason and Enlightenment values.
- It’s not going anywhere. In QAnon, we are witnessing the birth of a new religion.
This sidebar set of posts will probably get moved over to CE&P since it's discussion more of what is happening in politics and it's a topic that is much larger than the pandemic.
