35 Comments

Top notch. Every day I become more and more convinced these people don’t believe their own bullshit.

My absolute favorite vaccine conspiracy theory is the allegation that non-vaccinated women experience menstrual irregularities after they spend time in close proximity to a person who has been vaccinated. So that’s really a twofer: it not only attributes such evil superpowers to the vaccine itself that it negatively impacts people who haven’t even received the shot, but it targets women’s reproductive cycles – and the functioning of ladyparts has been an obsessive fetish of conservatives since forever.

Expand full comment

Ee-yikes! Where've you seen this?

Expand full comment

I can’t remember specifically, but someone on twitter posted a letter sent by a private school, informing staff and parents that this “phenomenon” was an actual thing, so any vaccinated staff would be either fired or put on leave so they didn’t negatively impact others. It’s obviously from the bowels of the right wing conspiracy machine. Don’t know if it will catch on more broadly.

Expand full comment

Oh, I'm sure it will. It's just such a perfect fit for justifying not only refusing to get vaccinated but also for punishing those who have been vaccinated. And it has the added bonus of being perfect for the puke-funnel media pipeline:

It starts in the fever swamps of the Right, gains a little traction, and then gets picked up by someplace like the NYT because "it's out there" and the NYT simply MUST report the controversy. Couched in terms of "some say" and "experts disagree," the entire idea now has mainstream media endorsement. And off we go!

Expand full comment

I saw it too —it might have been that paragon of the scientific method Christiane Northrop?

Expand full comment

I vaguely think the school may be in Florida, but that could just be Florida Man projection on my part, LOL. I do remember somebody posted a photo of the couple who were the owners of the school, and they were Trump and Melania clones sitting in their opulent home, etc.

Expand full comment

Thank you kind sir! And yeah, Florida.

Expand full comment

Thank you for saving this thread from mirror world.

Expand full comment

Oh, and Naomi Wolf (naturally) tweeted about it too.

Expand full comment

She really needs to check her sources better.

Expand full comment

Write and selling a book based on inarguable false premise -- she got a very basic, easy-to-confirm fact wrong -- may have broken her or was the last straw, as the case may be. Book had to be withdrawn after publishing. BTW: I think that's an actual cancelling.

Expand full comment

Speaking of Naomi Wolf, words to live by or whatever:

https://twitter.com/Manqueman/status/1389359583840325635?s=20

Expand full comment

And you wake up thinking poor people benefit from money the same way as rich folks when we all know that's just not true. Because they didn't earn it, you see?

Expand full comment

Mentioned this at the mothership the other day.

From the email they sent to parents:

"It is our policy, to the extent possible, not to employ anyone who has taken the experimental COVID-19 injection until further information is known. … It is in the best interests of the children to protect them from the unknown implications of being in close proximity for the entire day with a teacher who has very recently taken the COVID-19 injection.

Tens of thousands of women all over the world have recently been reporting adverse reproductive issues simply from being in close proximity with those who have received any one of the COVID-19 injections, e.g., irregular menses, bleeding, miscarriages, post-menopausal hemorrhaging, and amenorrhea (complete loss of menstruation).

No one knows exactly what may be causing these irregularities, but it appears that those who have received the injections may be transmitting something from their bodies to those with whom they come in contact."

Expand full comment

You know where women actually have reported “irregularities?” In Oregon, after being tear-gassed at protests last year. (So I heard reported at The Majority Report with Sam Seder anyway. I don’t remember his source offhand.)

Expand full comment

I believe the source was a physician in the Portland area who treated a whole bunch of cases

Expand full comment

Fine people.

Expand full comment

I, too, feel that the "subjects" have been playing the questioners for the last couple of years.

Expand full comment

On KCRW today, either on "Press Play" or "Greater L.A.", there ws mention of misinformation aimed at Latinos claiming that the vaccine was a white plot to re-write their DNA and make them 'lose their race'.

Expand full comment

Well:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/health/covid-heard-immunity-vaccine.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

Thanks, fine people from the heartland of the homeland.

And what's really fucked up here is that we're much better than most. But a global crisis requires a global solution and coordination and that's not happening, not when the ruling class puts extraction before everything and, at least here, we keep electing unfit, unqualified leaders.

Expand full comment

(They have to know by now that they're being used to catapult propaganda. I wonder how many of them *believe* what they're being told?)

Expand full comment

I don’t even know if it’s a matter of belief vs gullibility so much as it’s “my team says X, so I say X too.” It’s the mindless, rabid devotion of college football fans repurposed for politics and cultural identity.

Expand full comment

(Most of the places here in the American South with college football fanaticism also have retrograde politics.)

Expand full comment

"I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified."

This was in a Washington Post article over the weekend - part of their endless series helping us to understand the hopes, dreams , aspirations and yes, deep disappointments of real true heartland (white) Americans.

You and I might wonder if she was conceived, born and spent her formative years living over a superfund site eating lead paint chips. She is from Michigan , maybe near Flint where she washed down the paint chips with lead based tap water. Maybe she was dropped on her head repeatedly. Maybe she is just a shit person who instinctively backs Team Stupid/ Evil. Maybe she's a Baptist.

Expand full comment

When I read that bit about Trump never actually having been wrong my eyes rolled so hard I almost gave myself a concussion.

Regardless of her childhood background, she definitely needs to be dropped on her head multiple times in the present.

Expand full comment

This is why Rick woke up to find all of Georgia had been infected with the zombie virus. If “Walking Dead” had ended there, it would’ve approached documentary-level verisimilitude.

Expand full comment

These people have questions. They are just looking for answers. They seek the truth. And this is America after all - there's a Seeker born every minute.

Everything I know I learned off of a Firesign Theatre album in the mid 70's.

White people have too much free time.

Expand full comment

"JAQ-ing off", so to speak.

Expand full comment

Firesign Theater, Beyond the Fringe, Tom Lehrer, Monty Python, Bob and Ray. When dementia has removed all the other knowledge from my brain, I will still be able to recite large parts of these sacred texts verbatim, thanks to the residence they have taken up in my right cerebral cortex along with TV jingles and 50's doo-wop songs.

Expand full comment

I worry that I'm going to introduce some fact into my left ear and to make room in my head something like my address or name in going to fall out of my right ear and then won't I be fucked. It might be happening already. How would I know.

What is this place anyway? Is this Mr. Ed Roso somebody famous?

Expand full comment

To be fair to the "Times", a true and just report consisting in merely repeating the dialogue in "Blazing Saddles" between Bart and The Kid as to the nature of the inhabitants of Rock Ridge would get boring after the third or fourth time.

Expand full comment