Today’s Freakshow takes place no farther than your front window.
From your own house, right now you will be able to gawp at the Greatest Freakshow Ever Devised By the DeepState. But first draw the curtains, turn off the lights and for God’s sake, wrap your phone in foil right now!
Because if the Q Anons and allied conspiracy theorists are right - a national test of the emergency alert broadcast system will activate cells inside Covid-vaccinated people, who will develop a sudden, uncontrollable taste for human flesh.
I’m sharing this issue to get one last laugh in before we, the vaxxed, gather to feast on the unvaxxed. If the theories are right, the 5G signal will either activate the Marburg Virus or high tech nanparticles, take your pick. Either of those would have been injected into hundreds of millions of people via the Covid vaccine. Both are capable of inducing zombification.
The Associated Press last week released a fact check refuting one version of the theory which is that the nationwide test that will ping everyone’s phones today at 2:20 EST will send a signal to cell phones nationwide in order to activate nanoparticles such as graphene oxide that have been introduced into people’s bodies. The test is supposedly going to send “high frequency signals” into cell phones, radios, TVs with the intention of activating nanoparticles in human bodies, including graphene oxide.” The theory is that a substance called Graphene oxide was put into the Covid Vaccines (it was not) and somehow can be used to control and monitor people when activated by 5G communication technology.
The AP’s assessment was that the claims were false. “Next month’s test of the nationwide Emergency Alert System uses the same familiar audio tone that’s been in use since the 1960s to broadcast warnings across the country. A spokesperson for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is overseeing the test, also said there are no known adverse health effects from the signal. The claims revive long-debunked conspiracy theories about the contents of the COVID-19 vaccine.”
AP also debunked the claim that Amazon has ordered its drivers to pull over when the test beeps.
Rolling Stone yesterday identified one the origins of the theory as the “Patriot Voice” Telegram account who posted:
“According to my father, on October 4th, at 2pm EST, the government is going to use the Emergency Broadcast System to play a frequency that will activate the RFID chips in vaccinated people and trigger the beginning of the great replacement”
But as the FEMA spokesperson, uh-huh- sure! is a DeepState tool and AP is liberal media, its fact checks are unpersuasive to the many who put more faith in Patriot Voice’s father than the #fakenews. And, like the couple that drank fish-bowl cleaning fluid containing hydroxycholoruquine when Dear Leader suggested it was good for Covid - people are acting.
One Reddit user posted that a landlord wanted to shut off his power in fear of the alert actually activating an electromagnetic pulse or EMP.
American paranoia is nothing new. It may well be as us as apple pie and monster trucks. It probably arrived on these shores with the pilgrims - God-gullible, superstitious extremists - on the Mayflower.
In the mid-1960s, political scientist Richard Hofstadter published the seminal essay on the topic in Harpers Magazine, which became a book called The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter was writing in the era of Barry Goldwater, one of the precursors of fringe conservatism entering the mainstream (whose descendants are Reagan and Trump).
Note the similarities to our time in the first paragraph alone.
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
Hofstadter was humble about his claims, and made clear that he was not using the word paranoid in the clinical sense. “I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”
Nearly 60 years on, Hofstadter’s idea of “more or less normal” people may no longer hold. Like the fringe theories currently circulating in the mainstream, from Trump’s racist delusions about Mexican rapists to the widely held belief that Satanist Democrats chow down on babies under a DC pizza parlor, the people that hold to them are indeed lunatics.
Either that, or, you can join me tonight while I barbecue my neighbor.
Hofstadter in Harpers
Research provided by Grey Puett
Apologies for the typos, I was racing to beat the beep..
Wonderful, Nina. Hofstadter can't get enough plugs. Take a guess where I first read him: At West Point, assigned in my civics class.