Kill shots and mass arrests: Diving into the wild world of COVID conspiracy

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Three years ago, Brenda was worried about her mother.

Brenda posted on Facebook that the elderly woman was in a hospital, and getting tested for COVID-19 “almost every day” while she waited to get placed in a nursing home.

The Facebook page she posted on was run by a Canadian web talk-show host whose audience is heavily sprinkled with COVID and vaccine conspiracy theorists. It’s there that Brenda found people who empathized with her plight.

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“No more of their fake, fraudulent tests laced with graphene oxide,” responded a woman named Lesley, which prompted a question from Brenda: What is graphene oxide?

“It’s a chemical toxicant,” Lesley said, adding a skull and crossbones emoji. “they also put that in the mask, and the Inoculations. It’s poison.”

“omg I am so afraid for her,” Brenda replied. “I am making a phone call and telling them no more tests.”

This was one little exchange in the ocean of misdirection that swamped social-media sites after COVID-19 arrived here five years ago. Previously mild-mannered Canadians vented about the death camps, demons and genocides they believed were piling up on their doorstep. Others, who weren’t mild-mannered, found a place to swing their elbows.

Many just went along, nodding at everything, finding their place in communities that shared one commonality: They were online way too much; lured by diminished work spaces, social distancing, kinship, purpose.

It was cognitive collapse. The flip of a switch. They turned to the internet, did their research and came out the other side sharing fresh revelations with friends and co-workers, to online strangers.

“Scientists say that the shot depletes the emmune system which now the vaxxed will be HIV POSITIVE BY 2023-2024. How sad is that…,” Liz (grammar and spelling hers) posted to Facebook in January, 2022.

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“There are actually nano-routers inside the vaccines,” wrote a poster named Nathan. “They’re tracking everyone including truckers.”

“With each dose you layer up the graphene oxide in your system and you become a stronger signal to connect with the internet,” Stella warned. “Praying people wake the F up!”

Many envisioned themselves fighting the battle of their lives. This, finally, was a chance to be a hero. A resister. Some draped it in apocalyptic language — the end of days, a cause they would die for. The future of the human race was at stake.

Some on the fringe came to believe the COVID vaccine was the mark of the beast from the Book of Revelation, and that believers who took the jab were traitors to God himself — Satan’s dupes, in a battle between Heaven and Hell.

A cartoon made the rounds, showing a heroic, bleeding mother, pierced by flaming arrows, protecting her toddler with a shield that had been hit by vaccine needles.

They came to believe that politicians, scientists, police officers, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and journalists had either conspired or been duped en masse into killing vast swaths of humanity, using the COVID jab bioweapon.

They posted rapturously about Nuremberg 2.0; how everybody involved in this genocide would face a judge and swing from a gallows. They uncritically shared claims that things were already happening; the wheels of justice and punishment were turning; arrests were imminent or underway.

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They railed against Bill Gates and big pharma and big politics, and I learned much in January of 2022 when I checked out Facebook locales populated by people who thought the whole Covid thing was nonsense and the vaccines a plot.

I figured it might be worth writing about a few years down the road, and saved a bunch of it — conspiratorial pronouncements by garden-variety Canadians, who before COVID had posted about grandkids and carrot patches. They placed crying emojis on predictions that would never come to pass, and on proclamations that went nowhere.

“Stop even eating at McDonald’s… That’s where they add in human meat to cut down cost and “dispose” of the people,” Jennifer warned. “It’s a very sick thing the elites are doing.”

And so things went three years ago, at the height of COVID, during a few days of cruising through this subculture. Nothing has changed  — it feeds on itself in a never-ending cycle — but we can now revisit how some of those old predictions played out and how some of the proclamations look, given the passage of time.

Luzula: “I wonder if when the vax is forcably imposed if you’ll at least be given the choice of an assisted suiside?”

Julie: “It is the mark of the beast, you change your DNA.”

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Debbi: “I speak Jesus over the Vaxed and all demonic activity.”

Ben: “WE ARE BEING TERRORIZED BY THE SATANIC WORLD.”

Joel: “I left my parish once it used the hall for a vax clinic.”

Gary: “They are emptying the camps in the US getting ready to lock up all the unvaxed.”

Larry: “The first jab takes 2 yrs to kill, the more you take the sooner it will finish you off.”

Casey: “the nurses in Saskatoon university hospital are running around horrified because of all the still births in the jabbed right now. they went from 6 a year to 9 in one SHIFT now.”

Andrea (in a discussion about adult kids getting vaccinated): “I expect that I will lose my 2 youngest in the next 5 years.”

Christopher: “If you are vaxed and so is your women…good luck, we don’t know what your kids will be like, I am sorry.”

Sasha: “We are in the End of Days. People have to make good with God, repent and be ready.”

Ken: “… all the media’s that are on TV will be arrested just give it time,” which got this reply from Marie: “I pray it will be soon,” with a praying-hands emoji.

And so it went.

“Lawyers all over the world are fighting this!” Theresa announced triumphantly. “They’ve filed claims with international criminal courts for crimes against humanity!! Criminal investigations are happening in multiple countries including the UK!! Nuremberg 2.0 is coming!”

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Twyla asked if what Theresa wrote was true – she’d checked the International Criminal Court’s home page and hadn’t seen anything about this. But another woman named Francine piped in reassuringly: “Yes. It’s true, just not on mainstream.”

Three years after this exchange, they’re still waiting for the Nuremberg hammer to fall.

Larry’s two-years-to-death scenario has proven false.

Vaccinated people did not experience waves of HIV in 2023 and 2024, contrary to Liz’s confident assertions.

The unvaccinated have not been locked up in camps emptied specifically for that purpose.

Vaccinated people are not connecting to the internet with their bodies.

Reporters and editors continue to do their jobs, outside prison cells, and it’s not looking like the gavel of justice will fall on their heads anytime soon.

McDonald’s continues to make tasty, human-free all-beef burgers.

After poring over these messages afresh, I placed a call to Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor of psychology at Cornell University. He’s also a Canadian who hails from the Saskatchewan town of Carrot River. Pennycook has studied conspiracy theories — and those who cling to them — extensively, and he says this particular outbreak was different than many that came before.

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“That’s the thing about conspiracy, is that typically, they are fringe,” he says. “There’s a small sub-group of people for whom they appeal. But these were not fringe. COVID misinformation was completely widespread. That is something that I don’t think happens without the internet.

“It’s people being radicalized,” he adds. “Psychologically, it’s not different than entering into a cult. I’m not saying these people were in a cult, but what happens when you are in that sort of environment is everyone around you is part of it. It creates a new reality for you, and it takes a lot of mental fortitude to break out of that, because that’s the world you’re currently living in. And we are very much products of our environment.”

I asked Pennycook if these conspiracies are dangerous — harmless people posting harmless fictions, or something deeper? I tell him about Brenda, mentioned at the top, and the possibility that she tried to rescue her mother after being told by somebody on Facebook that COVID tests are poison.

“It definitely could be dangerous,” he says. “It really depends on what’s happening. There are real consequences for people falling down these kinds of rabbit holes. A lot of them have to do with interpersonal things. A lot of people, there’s somebody in their family who became too online. They got crazy about COVID, and then it severed relationships, and made Thanksgiving less comfortable. That’s one important aspect of it.

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“Then there’s the other cases where people didn’t get vaccinated because of this stuff. And some of those people died. All the evidence indicates that vaccinations really improved the way that people reacted to getting COVID. I can’t (put) a number on it, but probably some thousands of people are dead because of online misinformation.

“We’re now seeing broader resistance to vaccinations that was seeded by a lot of the COVID disinformation. Literally, kids aren’t getting vaccines. Those kids grow up, and these things pass on. If you’re in a house where your parents have gone down the rabbit hole and they’re ranting all the time about this kind of stuff, you’re going to adopt these kinds of views — we kind of adopt the views of our parents.

“There’s some pushback at some point, but they do have a big influence on us, and that pushes on to the next generation. These things have an impact on people.”

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There are logical, rational, legitimate arguments worth engaging in about what happened during the COVID-19 peak — from lockdowns, to vaccine passports, to enforced public masking, to the efficacy of scientific intervention, to the gap between personal freedoms and public policy.

Study and debate is healthy. Meanwhile, people who agreed with many of the aforementioned measures were often unreceptive both to alternate ideas and to those who expressed them.

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But does it foster measured discussion when the loudest voices come from a rabbit hole? Does it carve a gulf too wide? Fair or not, do people who examine the issues in good faith and reach a different conclusion get lumped in with the aforementioned Jennifer, Larry, Ken … and Christopher, below?

“Picture 5 years from now, millions of empty houses who were ‘covid victims’ (really vax victims) so the government of Canada decides to bring in new people to replace evil whites. That is what could be coming…” wrote Christopher, who has two years left on his prediction shelf life.

Contrary to what many predicted three years ago, people who took the Covid vaccine are not dying by the millions. Stricken athletes are not dropping on their fields of play any more than they did before the vaccines came along, though conspiracists continue to insist vaccinated jocks are collapsing and dying all around us, evidence be hanged.

Rock: “The doctor are paid to kill that y they cant talk.”

Carolee: “Make no mistake the hospitals are paid for “every” Covid death!!!!”

Ro: “The masks kill also they have made live parasites inside them.”

Bob: “The boosters are all kill shots and they will all eventually die mostly from cancer in 3 to 5 years.”

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Colleen: “The people that have received or have gotten the jabs would of had been the ones that would of have taken the mark of the beast if that came out for real and Satan is their King and ruler too for sure.”

Mavis: “Dr Reiner Fuellmich has proof that the vaxx makers took turns putting the poison in the jabs. To allay suspicion about all the deaths.”

Corey: “… FYI did you know once you get vax that pharmaceutical companies own your rights and your body is no longer yours but your own by them because you have their patent property in your body.”

These proclamations are nothing new to Pennycook.

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“When you end up falling down these sorts of rabbit holes, you see so much stuff,” he says. “If you just take it out of context, each individual thing seems insane, like the mark of the beast and all that kind of stuff. But for somebody who’s inundated with all that information — they’re looking for it, or they’re just being exposed to a lot of it — it all builds up into a kind of coherent message.”

He talks about a study he was involved with, aimed at finding out if men and women who believe conspiracies think most people agree with them. Researchers discovered there was a general tendency to over-rate their own cognitive abilities, which led to “a disposition towards overconfidence” that blocked them from questioning their beliefs.

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The study showed that eight per cent of participants believed theories like, for example, the Sandy Hook murders were a false-flag operation. But when that eight per cent was asked to estimate how many people fell in line with their beliefs, “they thought 61 per cent of people agree with them,” Pennycook says. “They thought that they were in the majority, even though only eight per cent of people believed it.

“A lot of that has to do with the fact, I think, that no one (outwardly) disagrees. People might walk out of the room, they might just be like, ‘all right,’ and change the subject. We need to actually challenge each other a bit more about these things, even though it’s seemingly counter to what a lot of people talk about — (wanting) to decrease polarization and turn the temperature down. But in cases in which someone’s falling down the rabbit hole, we have to collectively, together, bring them out.”

And he has ideas.

“I think there are things you can do,” Pennycook says. “One thing we can’t do is resign ourselves to being helpless. I think that’s what feeds into it a lot of the time, where people don’t want to be rude, they don’t want to be a contrarian. They don’t want to say to the person, ‘listen; I think these things are getting a little bit out of control.’ Or, ‘I don’t know that a lot of what you’re talking about makes a lot of sense to me.’ They want to be polite.

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“And so what happens to somebody who’s down the rabbit hole is that they’re walking around and they’re engaging with people in a way where most people really disagree with them, but no one’s telling them.

“People who aren’t in the rabbit hole have to help pull the people who are down there out of it.”

Pennycook points to another study he worked on recently, where it was found that getting conspiracists to dialogue with an artificial intelligence interface could actually move them away from their beliefs.

“Human participants described a conspiracy theory that they subscribed to,” read the editor’s summary, “and the AI then engaged in persuasive arguments with them that refuted their beliefs with evidence. The AI chatbot’s ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months, challenging research suggesting that such beliefs are impervious to change.”

So an alteration in mindset could, in the end, win out with a person here and a person there. Perhaps Marilyn, quoted in the next paragraph, decided after her prediction fell apart that she was wrong about everything — though Pennycook notes that such a scenario rarely happens; that people often forget what they posted and don’t spend much time in introspection anyways.

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“Sad!!! Israel, as well as Canada, USA AND THE WORLD!!! TOTAL CONTROL/BILL GATES!! DEPOPULATION!! STERILIZATION: ONE WORLD ORDER.. THIS YEAR 2022!!! WATCH WHATS COMING!!”

And Jim: “Wait for 3-5 years when most of the Vaccinated are sick and dieing or unable to work. The government will be calling on the unvaccinated to give Pure blood to help the Vaccinated recover, from their illnesses.”

And Angel: “There is no talking sense to the jabbed. They’re are in denial.”

And Louella: “It is pathetic because people don’t read, don’t research & don’t know what’s happening. Ignorance is dangerous.”

kemitchell@postmedia.com

twitter.com/kmitchsp

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