QAnon Coronavirus conspiracy theorists are too nuts even for a zombie-apocalypse movie scenario

[Celerity]

A man under the influence of QAnon conspiracy theories about the USNS Mercy's coronavirus mission attempted to ram the ship Tuesday with a locomotive he ran off the tracks.



https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/3/1933811/-Coronavirus-conspiracy-theorists-are-too-nuts-even-for-a-zombie-apocalypse-movie-scenario

The people who write zombie-apocalypse screenplays clearly missed out. In all the dozens of movies and TV shows about pandemic-fueled end-of-the-world scenarios, none of them managed to imagine whole subpopulations of characters who believed the zombie disease was actually a “deep state” hoax, a pretense for government enslavement, and rushed out into the streets to join the zombies and attacking efforts to combat them. Because that’s what we have now—not zombies, of course: rather, with thousands dead in a pandemic, there are thousands more who believe it’s all a big conspiracy. And some of them are taking action—the kind that gets even more people killed.

Take the locomotive engineer in Los Angeles who, on Tuesday, intentionally derailed a train near the docking site of the U.S. Naval Ship Mercy, which has been a major focus of the American response to the pandemic on the West Coast, in an attempt to damage the ship. The train engine smashed through concrete barriers at the track’s end, through a chain-link fence, through a couple of empty lots, and then halting about 800 yards away from the ship. As he was being arrested, the man who drove the engine—identified as Eduardo Moreno, 44, of San Pedro—told police: “You only get this chance once. The whole world is watching. … I had to. People don’t know what’s going on here. Now they will.”

The Department of Justice released a statement saying Moreno believed the Mercy “had an alternate purpose related to COVID-19 or a government takeover.” The conspiracy theory at work here is one invented by “QAnon” activists—namely, that the Mercy is actually planning to take its shipful of COVID-19 victims to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Other QAnon theorists have been claiming that the pandemic is a product of a Chinese bioweapon.

Liz Crokin, a QAnon-loving pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, has been in the forefront of the theories about the Mercy. She posted a video on March 26—viewed over 7.2 thousand times—featuring footage from the interior of the USNS Mercy, speculating that the ship “could be used to treat rescued trafficking victims especially since they’re only taking non-COVID-19 patients,” as she wrote on Facebook.

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These fuckers are crazier than a rat in a tin shithouse.



A Conspiracy Theory That 5G Is Causing The Coronavirus Is Spreading Alongside The Pandemic

Even actor Woody Harrelson has succumbed to the baseless hoax that cellphone infrastructure is spreading the coronavirus.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/conspiracy-theory-5g-coronavirus-qanon

A screenshot from the second most-shared anti-5G video on YouTube.



New Agers, right-wingers, and QAnon conspiracy theorists think global elites are using 5G to spread the coronavirus pandemic.

The paranoia about 5G — the industry term for the fifth generation of wireless communications infrastructure — has risen for the last few years, but as the world battles the pandemic, a baseless hoax has spread that the technology that runs cellphones could secretly be causing the outbreak.

On Wednesday, actor Woody Harrelson posted about the conspiracy theory on his Instagram, writing, “a lot of my friends have been talking about the negative effects of 5G.” On Thursday, a 5G tower in Birmingham, England, went up in flames after a local Facebook group was flooded with anti-5G comments. (Local authorities said that it could have possibly been an electrical issue, but are awaiting further information before investigating.)

Link to tweet

5G has so far rolled out in about 40 countries worldwide, most notably South Korea and China, but also in dozens of US cities, including Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. Before the coronavirus, fears about 5G tended to focus on cancer, the risk of which people feared could be increased from cellphone radiation. The evidence to support such a fear is weak to nonexistent, although meteorologists have worried that the technology could disrupt weather satellite forecasts.

Misinformation falsely claiming the coronavirus is a bioweapon has circulated since English-language reports of the outbreak began circulating in January. Depending on which internet rabbit hole you fall down, the coronavirus was created by the Chinese government, is part of a human depopulation scheme by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, or stemmed from a tainted batch of children’s blood that the world’s celebrities drink to stay young. So perhaps it was somewhat inevitable that these two separate conspiracy theories — that 5G had some evil purpose and that the coronavirus was a bioweapon — would graft themselves onto each other.

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[Yavin4]

1. When the president traffics in fact free narratives...

you can expect members of the general public to do the same.

[Blue Owl]

2. The fact that engineer thought he could "drive" that locomotive

past the end of the tracks an additional 250 yards shows a severe lack of critical thinking skills...

[SheltieLover]

3. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Well, hes a trump humper, so... 🤣

Seriously, though, wtf does this? 😳🤯