#conspiracy nuts

[victusinveritas]

From Joohn Choe:

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic broke reality such that dismissal of epidemiology has become a purity test that signals tribal allegiance for American conservatives generally, and Trump supporters in particular. This can be seen in the way that MAGA influencers are processing the May 2026 hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius.

More below with pretty (disturbing) screencaps.

BACKGROUND

The MV Hondius is a Dutch-flagged Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship for polar expeditions with 196 passenger capacity, IMO 9818709, MMSI 244327000, callsign PCEP. As of time of writing, May 8 2026, according to MarineTraffic, it is off the coast of the non-self-governing territory known as Western Sahara.

The Hondius departed Ushuaia on April 1, with the index case - a Dutch citizen who'd done a four-month bird-watching trip across Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, including a stop at a landfill where exposure was suspected - presenting symptoms, and then dying aboard the ship on April 11.

As of May 8 the count is six confirmed and roughly twelve suspected cases with three deaths, and contact tracing has spread to South Africa, Singapore, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the UK, and the US, with about 146 passengers and crew still aboard heading for Tenerife (per redundant triplicate sourcing from NPR, CNN, and the WHO Disease Outbreak News).

The pathogen is confirmed as Andes virus, which is the only hantavirus with documented human-to-human transmission (CDC) and which causes hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) with a roughly 40 to 50 percent case fatality rate (PubMed, NCBI/PMC).

The WHO calls global epidemic risk low; the CDC has activated its EOC at Level 3, the lowest tier (ABC News live blog, CDC press statement). Argentine epidemiologists have documented at least one prior super-spreader cluster from 2018-2019 (The New England Journal of Medicine) where a single introduction cascaded to 34 infections. This is the reason for the attention.

AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL REACTION

COVID denialism, distrust of science and public health communications generally and pseudoscientific beliefs have 'hardened' into a signal of tribal allegiance for American conservatives.

This is attributable to a range of factors including racial disparities between the impact of COVID; for instance, in a University of Georgia study in 2022 white populations became markedly less likely to support non-pharmaceutical interventions when informed of COVID's disproportional impact on communities of color. A Royal Society study in 2022 found that political allegiance had a strong effect on how seriously people took the virus, and this was remarkably resistant to even Trump's diagnosis and - notably, non-ivermectin - treatment for COVID. Population-level psychological effects predisposing vast swathes of the American public towards irrational, poorly-evidenced beliefs are another persuasive theory with a strong evidence in a 2022 study summarizing antecedents of COVID conspiracy theory beliefs.

The effect of this, in 2026, is that denial of science is a tribal signal for MAGA and any new pathogen, no matter what it is, now functions as a loyalty test where the politically correct answer is a rehearsed, preset, preemptive dismissal, regardless of underlying epidemiology.

The cost function is asymmetric inside the coalition: being wrong about the danger (a pathogen turns out worse than dismissed) is treated as cheaper than being wrong about safety (endorsing measures that turn out unnecessary) because the latter is what they believe broke the right's political position in 2020.

To this point, consider the below from a right-wing Facebook meme page. It's Dr. Drew Pinsky interviewing Katy Talento, who was the lead health advisor on Trump's first-term Domestic Policy Council and is now a self-described "recovering epidemiologist," naturopathic doctor, and CEO of AllBetter Health - basically, a fixture in the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) ecosystem.

While not as alarmist as the remainder of the content, this is nonetheless notably wrong.

-- "It's not a respiratory virus. Stop it." - incorrect, Andes virus causes hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which CDC defines explicitly as a "severe respiratory disease"; Mayo Clinic describes pulmonary edema, respiratory failure, and cardiogenic shock; the clinical literature characterizes HPS as "diffuse, bilateral interstitial pulmonary infiltrates and compromised respiratory function" (NCBI/PMC). Drew may have meant "not a respiratory-route virus" (i.e., primarily zoonotic via airborne rodent excrement particles, rather than aerosolized droplets between people). Andes virus can spread person to person, however, and the clinical syndrome is a lung disease, so the claim as delivered is just plain false on both possible readings.

-- "Odds of getting hit by lightning are higher." This is defensible for an American with no Hondius contact but provably, mathematically wrong for the 146 still aboard the Hondius, the 30+ who disembarked at St. Helena, the contacts on the April 25 Johannesburg-bound flight where one passenger deteriorated mid-flight (NPR), or the woman in Spain's Alicante province who's already tested positive after taking that flight (ABC News).

This is the same wack-ass hyperbole that got Pinsky in trouble in 2020. Pinsky used nearly the exact same rhetorical device in February 2020: he said the chances of dying from COVID "lower than being hit by an asteroid" and then apologized in April 2020, saying "my early comments equating coronavirus with influenza were wrong... I got it wrong."

This is not an isolated pattern; this is from an hour before time of writing on Facebook.

Again, this is notably wrong: no national or international health authority has proposed lockdowns. The WHO is explicitly assessing global epidemic risk as low as is the CDC. We're literally talking one cruise ship and a bunch of ports of call that aren't even in America.

Then there's the MAGA groups.

Irrespective of whether or not you're even an anti-vaxxer at all, the problem with warning people "Don't take the vaccine" is that there is no commercially available hantavirus vaccine in the US or EU, and, absent a historic effort like Operation Warp speed, there is none on the horizon for literally decades. A team at University of Bath is reported to be using mRNA tech to develop one, though, despite having been used in Trump's own Operation Warp Speed, MAGA still appear to treat resistance to mRNA vaccines as a political article of faith.

It's fearmongering about something that doesn't exist which would have taken the writer of this preternaturally ignorant meme less than five seconds to Google in order to ascertain.

That is how automatic the anti-epidemiology reaction is with MAGAs. The tell is how the rhetoric repeats.

"Herd immunity is the only way out", here, is the repeating rhetorical tell, it's a straight-up category error. Hantaviruses don't sustain respiratory chains in human populations the way SARS-CoV-2 does.

Though Andes virus human-to-human transmission does happen, it's rare - the 34-case Argentinian super-spreader event was over the course of two years where people basically went around like normal. Transmission requires close, often household-level contact (CDC, Argentina 2014 cluster sequencing paper).

"Herd immunity" is borrowed COVID vocabulary, awkwardly stapled onto a pathogen to which it doesn't apply.

Even for MAGA - even for "TRUE Black American woman" Joey Mannarino - this is remarkably stupid.

WHAT THIS MEANS

These posts aren't responses to hantavirus; they're responses to the memory of March 2020 triggered by the keyword "outbreak". Mannarino's tweet says the quiet part out loud: "I don't care one bit anymore. You killed that with your COVID propaganda."

A few overlapping mechanisms operate here:

-- Response stereotypy. The script is: no lockdowns, no vaccines, it's nothing, the media is panicking, Trump will protect us, herd immunity, blah blah, turn the TV off. It's a "sausage" of 2020-2021 political rhetoric that gets deployed against any disease threat whether or not the premises map, which, for hantavirus, they pretty obviously don't. The template precedes the threat at some level.

-- The validator economy. Talento, on the Dr. Drew Pinsky show, is the same archetypal pairing as the 2020-era mainstreaming of dissent: a former government health official plus a celebrity doctor, framed as brave truth-tellers against an "exaggerated" mainstream press. The fact that Pinsky is recycling his own apologized-for hyperbole - the risk of getting hit by an asteroid, the risk of being hit by lightning - suggests either that he learned nothing from the apology or, more likely, that he's decided the apology was the mistake. Talento's MAHA-bullshit positioning (see her Daily Caller op-ed) makes her a perfect validator: just credentialed enough to dismiss the credentialed, dissident enough to be cheered for it.

-- The lockdown ghost. Allen textually screaming "NO LOCK DOWNS NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, ALIENS, HANTAVIRUS, NOTHING" is the MAGA coalition pre-committing to opposing any future public health measure regardless of justification. From a decision-theory standpoint, it's basically surrendering their judgment authority over future pandemics in advance and announcing their plans to disrupt the rest of society, which, (why would you tell me that, thanks I guess?) is a strategic liability dressed up as defiance; this is the kind of thing that gets trotted out next time an epidemic happens to prove how stupid you were, that's why you don't say things like that. The fact that such statements "poll" well inside the MAGA coalition right now signals tribal fidelity based on a kind of self-inflicted cultural trauma around non-pharmaceutical interventions of the COVID pandemic.

-- The "you killed that" framing. Mannarino treats lack of trust in public health communications as a kind of sunk cost that can't be recovered, which is convenient because it absolves the speaker of any need to evaluate new evidence on its merits going forward. The effect is a kind of tribalistic, dismiss-by-default paradigm for any new outbreak.

To be clear: while the hantavirus cluster is real, the WHO and CDC risk assessment for the general public is, real talk, low for a reason, and the lockdown panic these posts are pre-empting isn't on any policy table literally anywhere.

What we're seeing here is really the playbook that MAGA will run the next time a pandemic hits, and if Trump or someone like him is in power when - not if - that happens, it's going to be bad.

And it's a bit of a liberal trope to be sure but given that the primary means that American society offers its citizens to reform massive error is elections it really does drive home the importance of voting, because otherwise this kind of idiocy becomes policy, as it is becoming right now all over the country.

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[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Coleman Hughes: The Myth of the All-Powerful Israel Lobby

Israel has influence, but it’s far more limited than its critics claim, writes Coleman Hughes.

By: Coleman Hughes

Published: Mar 26, 2026

There has been a lot of discussion today about my podcast episode with Glenn Greenwald—much of it revisiting the same arguments I debated with Dave Smith in October. Both claim that an all-powerful Israel lobby effectively controls American foreign policy.

The idea that the most powerful country the world has ever known is being puppeteered by a country the size of New Jersey—and by a group that collectively accounts for 0.2 percent of the world’s population—is an extraordinary claim. You would expect overwhelming evidence. In reality, there’s little to substantiate it.

Criticize America’s foreign and domestic policy as much as you want—there’s plenty to criticize. But don’t blame it on Israel or its supporters.

The centerpiece of this narrative is a historical claim: that Israel got the United States into the Iraq War. In reality, Israel’s prime minister came to the White House to caution President Bush against invading Iraq, warning that it would empower Iran, Israel’s real enemy. Bush listened politely, then ignored him and invaded anyway, because American presidents make their own choices, for good and for ill.

At the same time, the IDF chief of military intelligence said on TV in the fall of 2002 that Israel did not believe Saddam Hussein could obtain nuclear weapons, contradicting U.S. intelligence assessments. It’s hard to imagine a clearer discouragement. Again, the United States ignored this and proceeded for its own reasons.

So why did the United States invade Iraq in 2003?

The 9/11 attack created an atmosphere of extreme threat sensitivity among the U.S. security establishment. The failure to preemptively destroy al-Qaeda in the 1990s was suddenly seen as a huge mistake never to be repeated. The lesson that the U.S. took from this was that we must preemptively act against theoretical security threats, even if they’re low probability and thousands of miles away.

Saddam Hussein fit that framework. He had been reckless since the 1980s, invading multiple countries, and importantly, previously hiding his nuclear program from the CIA. In 1991, when the CIA discovered that Saddam was a year to a year and a half away from a nuke, they were stunned. That lesson led them to discount the absence of a smoking gun in the lead-up to 2003: If Saddam had hidden it before, he could be hiding it again.

People often cite Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2002 pro-war testimony before Congress as proof of Israeli influence. Netanyahu, while now the prime minister of Israel, was then a private citizen and had no power at the time. Meanwhile, Israel’s actual leadership expressed caution before the invasion. More importantly, Bush and crew made the final decision to invade Iraq before that testimony even happened. There is no evidence that Netanyahu’s testimony moved anyone’s needle.

If Israel did not get us into Iraq, where is the evidence for the “all-powerful” Israel lobby?

Glenn brought up in our debate that there are anti-BDS laws at the state level in some 38 states, as if this is proof of the Israel lobby’s incredible power. To be clear, I oppose these laws (designed to block a campaign to “boycott, divest from, and sanction” Israel) on principle: the government should not require contractors to take a position in a foreign conflict as a condition of doing business—a basic matter of freedom of conscience. But in reality, the anti-BDS laws perfectly demarcate the limits of the lobby’s power.

State governments are relatively easy to lobby. The federal government is far more difficult. Notably, all anti-BDS legislation has failed at the federal level. The idea that a lobby that is too weak to pass even a single federal contracting law could orchestrate the United States’ involvement in multiple wars is ridiculous.

For comparison, dozens of U.S. states—and the federal government, in 2019—have passed resolutions or legislation recognizing the Armenian genocide, largely due to advocacy from the Armenia lobby. These decisions arguably strained relations with Turkey, a NATO ally far more powerful than Armenia. Does that mean the Armenia lobby controls America? The logic does not hold.

The Israel lobby is relatively small. According to OpenSecrets data on lobbying expenditures, industries like finance and energy spend many times more—finance, insurance, and real estate by about 142 times and oil and gas by almost 30 times. If raw spending translated directly into control, far larger domestic industries would dominate U.S. foreign policy.

Additionally, there are numerous instances where Israel failed to get what it wanted. The United States did not recognize Israeli sovereignty over Golan Heights for almost 40 years, and that would have required only the stroke of a pen. In 2007, Israel asked the United States to bomb Syria’s nuclear program. Bush said no. Israel asked Condoleezza Rice to add one word to Bush’s Palestine speech in 2002—to change Palestine to New Palestine. Condi dismissed it out of hand. Most significantly, the Israel lobby pulled out the full extent of its power to block the Iran nuclear deal. It failed.

Glenn and Dave will dismiss this argument with the line “Yeah, those are exceptions that prove the rule. They don’t always get what they want. They just mostly do.” But when asked for evidence, they return to the same weak claims: the Iraq War, this Iran war, anti-BDS law, and foreign aid to Israel.

The United States annually sends $3–4 billion in military aid to Israel. To some, that seems extraordinary. In reality, it’s in line with America’s military posture all over the world.

The United States maintains hundreds of military bases worldwide and spends vast sums sustaining its global presence. For example, the U.S. stations 30,000 American troops in South Korea and loses $3–4 billion every year because of its deployment there. But no one argues that an all-powerful South Korea lobby controls American foreign policy.

Glenn tried to argue that the fact that we have troops deployed in South Korea makes the $4 billion a year we lose there a lesser commitment than the aid to Israel. But if the situation were reversed—if we had troops deployed in Tel Aviv and not Seoul—then he’d argue the opposite! Dave and Glenn are always reasoning backward from their conclusion—they start from the premise that Israel controls us, and fill in the reasons afterward.

An intellectually honest America Firster would question the entire global military posture, arguing to get out of South Korea, Europe, and the Middle East. Instead, they focus more on Israel than on any of the other spending that we do. There is no explanation for this other than Israel derangement syndrome.

By the way, approximately 80 percent of aid to Israel returns to the U.S. economy because it is largely spent with American companies. Legally, it’s foreign aid, but economically, it functions more like a domestic subsidy supporting U.S. workers.

Which brings us to the current Iran war. In my debate with Glenn, the only direct evidence he could give that somehow Israel had pulled us into the war was a comment from Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggesting the U.S. acted in part because it expected Israel to strike Iran first, and the resignation letter from counterterrorism official Joe Kent.

Rubio explained that “we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. . . [and] if we didn’t preemptively go after them. . . we would suffer higher casualties.” This comment had nothing to do with the Israel lobby or Israel having power over our decision-making apparatus. It was that Israel was about to attack Iran, and U.S. bases in the Middle East would be affected, so it made sense tactically to attack first. His point was about war tactics and initiative, not Israeli control over U.S. decision-making.

As for Kent, he’s not credible. Kent wrote in his resignation letter that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” To put Kent’s conspiracy-filled theories into perspective, consider that Kent insinuated on Tucker Carlson’s show on March 18 that Israel might have been behind the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Follow this logic: Trump is the most pro-Israel president in history. Why would Israel have tried to kill him in 2024—in order to get a President Vance or Harris? Kent is so far out of touch with reality that he cannot be taken as a credible witness.

There is a simple explanation for the Iran war: Trump has been tough on Iran for decades. He believes that Iran tried to kill him and he took that personally. Iran’s regime has been branding themselves as the common enemy of America and Israel since 1979. Iran is the number-one exporter of terror regionally and worldwide. No state is close. They’ve bragged about enriching kilograms of uranium to 60 percent—a fact verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Every single country that has made it that far has gone on to develop nukes. There are, literally, zero exceptions. We know they’re angling for a bomb. It was only a matter of when they chose to sprint from the 10-yard line to the end zone.

America benefits from a weaker, non-nuclear Iran. Lots of countries also benefit from a weaker Iran—Israel and Saudi Arabia, primarily. That’s what it means to have a common enemy. But just because they benefit too doesn’t mean they manipulated us.

Moreover, Trump, being amazingly shameless, is invulnerable to blackmail, and refuses to be told what to do. That’s why he fires every adviser who tries to push him around, and replaces them with yes-men. (That is not a great quality, but it does make the foreign influence theory that much more ridiculous.)

In sum, the Israel lobby is real, but not uniquely powerful. Like many other lobbies, it can secure modest legislative achievements—and mostly at the state level. The idea that it dictates, or even significantly influences, our foreign policy is total nonsense driven by ideology.

[odinsblog]

👉🏿 https://news.immunologic.org/p/fluoride-a-natural-substance-that

👉🏿 https://news.immunologic.org/p/everyone-wants-better-health-rfk

[envyingrams]

The 9/11 Truther to Anti-Zionist™️/Hamas and IRGC Sympathizer pipeline should not be underestimated.

This specific group are usually 80's Babies.

[dankronamemeuniversity]

[vigilantsycamore]

“Just because I blame George Soros for everything I don’t like doesn’t make me antisemitic! You know, George Soros was a Nazi” what kind of history books are you reading that you can believe a Jewish kid who was 15 when WW2 ended would have been a Nazi?

[tomorrowusa]

How clueless Trumpster conspiracy nuts handled the blizzard which struck Virginia and other parts of the mid-Atlantic region early this week.

On this chart, heavy snow from that storm is represented in navy. That watermelon pink band represents “wintry mix” which can mean anything from sleet to freezing rain. In general, not a good time to be caught out on the road – especially I-95. .

[autistic-goblin666]

Scientists: hey this virus is highly contagious and can kill or become severe in the immunocompromised, the elderly and people with other preexisting conditions.

Sane Governors: oh hey let's have everyone stay home as much as possible to flatten the curve like the scientists suggested.

Lockdown protestors who go around without masks and stand close together: