The Most Dangerous Pandemic
[a thread for 2020]

I had some weird online experiences today

They culminated in me making decisions for my mental health

But they also proved to me, once and for all, that we’re witnessing the end of civil society as we’ve known it for 50+ yrs

1/

Thanks to COVID many of us are living through some form of lockdown at the moment (not my friends and family in Sweden, bless them, who have their own version of problems)

So we’re maybe spending more time online than usual, or reaching out to folks after a while

2/

So I’ve reached out on Twitter, FB, Insta, and WhatsApp to see how friends are around the world

It’s an uncertain time and people are understandably nervous about many things

Health, finances, family, life goals, relationships, pets, projects, hobbies, etc

To name a few

3/

Now one of my friends decided to post one of those “plandemic” videos on FB, and lots of people started commenting below his post

This friend of mine lives in Australia and is a classically-trained violinist as well as a tutor for kids with special needs

He’s smart and kind

4/

By all accounts, a reasonable, decent guy, who I met when he was a student in BC over a decade ago

I’ve considered him rational and possessing good critical thinking skills

He’s polite and has empathy and has never been irrational

5/

So to see him start posting about COVID as overblown, potential hoax, etc was a bit jarring

I read through his friends’ comments on FB, they were mostly in this vein:

6/

I saw some folk mentioning psyops, manufactured illness planned by Democrats, a plot against Trump, CIA operations tied to Qanon, etc

Remember this guy is down under, not the US (and he’s never lived there, only visited twice-been in Aus all his life except 4 yrs in Canada)

7/

I’m thinking “wait, so why is this guy getting full-on conspiracies about COVID from the US”?

He’s smart enough to discern fact from fiction or snake oil

Doesn’t he have better info than this shite? And other more informed friends?

8/

So I read more comments and I’m getting increasingly disturbed

I have a master’s in clinical psych, did undergrad in poli sci, minored in what was called business psychology

I’ve studied science, took stats/epi courses

I can see most “hoax” links are devoid of factual data

9/

So I wrote to my friend

First on the thread, then privately

The gist was “Some of this stuff you’re posting is questionable, some of the discourse is laughable, and some of the comments are downright dangerous and verging on delusional; what’s up, friend? Why do this?”

10/

I even said “You’re in Australia, you know this has nothing to do with the USA, per se; and it might not even have much to do w/China beyond the start.Come on, this is a global issue”

I expected a reasonable response-I’ve always had one before on any topic we’ve discussed

11/

But what I got back was stunning

It amounted to “I can’t believe you wouldn’t be questioning this obvious plot. Our civil liberties are at stake, as is the world economy”.

I have friends who’ve had COVID-one’s battling it now

A friend’s dad died of it

It’s not a “hoax”

12/

I asked why he thinks it’s a hoax instead of a legit illness

Why was the basic fact that this is a pandemic not jibing with his reality? I wondered

I was already fearing my otherwise rational friend had fallen prey to Rupert Murdoch’s SkyNews (Aussie FOX News equivalent)

13/

And that’s when my mind was fully blown


I was pulled down the rabbit hole

I was a reluctant Alice drawn into a dark online belief system full of Mad Hatters

I was just missing my blue/white apron dress, my sheer white stockings, my buckled shoes, and a Cheshire Cat

14/

So it turns out in the past 18 months or so, my Aussie friend has latched onto Alex Jones level ideas, all originating in the US, mostly from alt-right adjacent sources, about all manner of things

It’s not quite Qanon, as that’s a specific cult, but it’s the next best thing

15/

A quick rundown of his beliefs: why he’s sure COVID is part of a larger global conspiracy:

All well-to-do liberals do sex change on their children; hence when Trump was a Dem in the 1980s, his kids all got “transed”

He believes Chelsea Clinton is trans, Obama’s girls too

16/

He straight up believes we have been fooled by NASA about the moon landing; that it was a Nazi plot to trick us into spending money on rockets and the US co-opted it for monetary gain in the 1960s

When I asked why he thinks this is remotely possible, I got another shocker

17/

He began somewhat aggressively “pointing out” to me that no one wants us to know about the flatness of the earth

I questioned how he accepts such an explanation, given he’s flown on a plane, and has a university degree

He told me I’m blind to earth as a 4-dimensional disc

18/

He started bombarding me with links to convince me that the “secret truth” about the flat earth was the key to figuring out coronavirus

I was seriously questioning his mental well-being at that point

19/

It kept getting weirder

Governments are controlled by Gates and Soros in their entirety

BUT, governments are autonomously powerful enough to spread disinfo via the CIA

BUT ALSO governments want to make themselves look good falsely and a virus is the best way to do so

20/

Let’s not forgot that old chestnut, the “every part of this fits into the grand chess match played by the cabal in true power”

It really was bizarre

I tried to appeal to his sense of kindness and love of intellectual pursuits

21/

And I wanted to remind him that he’s in Australia, the coronavirus originated with outbreaks in Asia, and that we should stay informed without getting panicked

And he kept pushing me to “see the light” and begged me to “redpill”

22/

It got darker and darker; then he was on South African white farmer replacement theory, antivaxx shit, “veganism is contrary to nature,” and even (yes) Australian aborigines are a subspecies of human (a specific humanoid primate that can sometimes breed with humans)

WTF!

23/

I couldn’t fathom this
I liked this guy
I’ve always liked him
But his part of our exchange was like witnessing a psychotic break with someone in florid psychosis

We couldn’t agree on basic facts of human existence or the physical universe

24/

And he kept linking me to sites (some Australian but almost all from the US)

His brain was infested with false ideas and nonsense

There was no point arguing further; due to my pushback he was starting to question if my psychology degree was a sign I was paid by the cabal

25/

Like for ffs, what f**king cabal?

To do what?

For what gain?

Them free abortion vaccines sure do taste good when they give you COVID before you die!

26/

I gave up, I disengaged
He was almost at harassment level

I muted/unfollowed, and will potentially block, it got that bad


My old buddy! So sad
Long live his “truth” I guess
RIP 12 yrs of friendship I guess

But then came the next whammy

27/

I sent a msg to 2 mutual friends, one living in the Netherlands, the other right here in Canada (in Alberta)

I told them how crazy the exchange was, how incredulous I was, how far gone our Aussie buddy’s arguments seemed

And that they were mostly regurgitated from US crap

28/

You know what’s coming

I foreshadowed it in the title of this thread

It was almost a caricature in that I share examples from Australia, Holland, and of all places, ALBERTA, but it is what it is

Many stereotypes grow out of a kernel of truth

29/

BOTH of these friends, not just one or the other, mostly took our Aussie buddy’s side

The European was more a devil’s advocate-he couldn’t disprove the outrageous claims I discussed; he refused to use Occam’s Razor on them AND he’d read a lot of those links himself already

30/

My friend from Alberta was more admonishing in her tone

I felt like Alice again, in Dunderland or Blunderland this time

It was ludicrous

She pulled all the same arguments and a few new ones

31/

I felt betrayed

I couldn’t have this many friends infected with such far-fetched, unhelpful, utter misinformation metastasising out of American sources, could I?

And yet here we were, all evidence pointing to the affirmative

32/

It dawned on me that anyone primarily reading English media or sources (even alternative media), was likely to start encountering these fake belief systems promoting...what? What was their goal?

Bannon’s chaotic endgame? Trumpsters’ extortionate schemes? Mass confusion?

33/

And they were there in our faces
Packaged so nicely/attractively
Just click a link and you’d get more of the “insider info” ad nauseam

34/

In the end, I had to just cut off the convo (in private messaging apps) because it was becoming abusive to continue

I was (am) actually hurt, in disbelief, and very disturbed by it all

35/

What this experience showed me, after starting as an honest desire to reach out and catch up with friends in other places, is that conspiracy theories are eroding every last piece of the foundational structures of society

We literally aren’t sharing reality anymore

36/

We don’t just have different experiences in a common life; our brains are being hacked

We’re living different lives

It’s becoming that mythical tale of Aztecs not seeing Cortes’ ships because they’d never encountered such things before (a fake story, but suddenly apropos)

37/

We run the risk of not being able to relate or empathise with each other anymore because we no longer share a core sense of connection to fundamental truths about our lives

This is very dangerous

It’s an illness as bad as COVID

38/

Perhaps worse, perhaps catastrophic

Maybe it will affect humans’ intrinsic characteristics of altruism and working towards common goals and socialisation from our survival instincts

Then we’ll be automata, macro-size selfish genes fighting each other for scraps

39/

Even those pushing this upon us (and no, it’s not necessarily a cabal, but there are those who delight in the spread of misinformation) will pay the price when they flail around with the rest of us eventually

This illness, if it truly takes hold, won’t just affect plebes

40/

It’s scary to see otherwise nice, smart, reliable folk turn into rabid conspiracists in relatively short order

It’s like the coronavirus pandemic accelerated the descent and there’s so much insane stuff coming hard out of the US (again, to what end) that it’s rotting brains

41/

And mainly, it just broke my heart to see friends fade into non-existence not because of COVID-19 or its after-effects, but because of massive bullshit that has exploded into the zeitgeist as a result of the current conditions

I fear there may be no easy return

42/

And that’s a pathological condition of the human race, a pandemic that is caseating the communal body of human civic society and the compact for shared experience

If we not just figuratively but LITERALLY live life in unique bubbles, what’s the point of a society anyway?

43/

I am sad to have to essentially cut off ties with 3 friends in one day, with whom no form of rational or civil discourse was possible

I fear for us in the coming years

We’d better fight this illness with all we’ve got, or pretty soon we won’t have anything at all

44/fin