NYT: Racked by rain and enraptured by a QAnon-infused "miracle cure" called "medbeds"
Eli Saslow at NYT:
The company was co-founded in 2020 by Warren Armour, a conservative with no media experience who runs a flooring company in Tennessee, but Michael admired the Patriot Party News slogan when he first saw it shared on Facebook last year: “If you hate mainstream media, you are going to love us!” Michael started watching the site’s daily videos about election fraud and vaccine pseudoscience, some of which have now been viewed more than a million times. He signed up for the company’s social media platform and paid $8.99 a month to join the audio channel, which functions like an old ham radio and promised him the chance to “meet comrades in our battle for the soul of America.”
On some days, Michael listened to the channel for as many as 12 hours, with the audio feed piped directly into his hearing aids to drown out the tedium of his pain. He narrated his daily ranching tasks for the group and sent photos of his crops. Other members responded with recipes, virtual prayers for rain and a steady drumbeat of extremist political ideology that increasingly mirrored his own. In a fracturing country, here was an echo chamber with the power to turn fringe conspiracy theories into widely accepted political dogmas — that the Covid vaccine was poison, the mainstream media was deceitful and the federal government was controlled by a “deep state cabal” that had stolen the 2020 election from former President Donald J. Trump and was now trying to orchestrate his assassination.
[...] Cheryl Chesebro, 61, had known her husband to be a realist for most of his life. Michael had enlisted in the Army at 17 because he couldn’t afford to pay for college and then agreed to jump out of planes for a $2,500 sign-up bonus. But after a total of 42 surgeries on his back, shoulders, ankles and knees, he’d come to distrust the government he’d served. He invested in wind and solar power so his family didn’t have to rely on the U.S. power grid. He bought gold in case the U.S. financial system collapsed and then started collecting shoe boxes full of foreign currency from the Middle East and Africa, believing that it could eventually be as valuable as the U.S. dollar. For the first time in his life, he became consumed by politics and then enamored with Trump, another government skeptic who sometimes spoke in the language of conspiracy theories. The former president had helped popularize lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace, widespread election fraud and the “hoax” of climate change — all of which had become part of the founding DNA of Patriot Party News. [...]
Of all the wild conspiracies he’d discovered on Patriot Party News, the concept of medbeds had initially struck Michael as the most far-fetched, even if it was also among the most popular. Every few days, someone else on the platform shared an illustration of a futuristic-looking chamber, sometimes with a doctored image of Trump superimposed in the foreground. The founder of the site, Armour, sometimes mentioned videos or podcasts about medbeds that had become popular on the far-right corners of Telegram, Discord and Rumble, and Michael clicked on the links, as did millions of others. The videos claimed with no evidence that the U.S. military was already in possession of advanced, or possibly even alien, technology that could cure all disease and extend human life. There were said to be at least three types of medbeds already in existence in secret military tunnels. One, a “holographic medbed,” scanned the body to instantly diagnose and then heal any sickness, no matter how severe. Another bed was able to regenerate personal DNA so people could regrow missing limbs in a few minutes. A third was designed for reverse aging and could rewind people’s bodies to the age and condition of their choosing.
The only holdup, according to the videos, was that a collection of liberal billionaires kept hoarding the technology for themselves. On the Patriot Party News audio feed, people speculated that medbeds wouldn’t be available to the public until Trump was back in control of the White House, at which point everyone would be invited to make appointments for free at a secret underground military base. “We are about to cross that start line into our medbed future,” said an Australian woman who called herself Skye Prince and claimed to be a military expert, in a video shared on Patriot Party News that has been viewed several million times. “We are leaving a life of poverty, ill health, uncertainty, and moving into wealth, abundance, perfect health. You could almost say we are about to be born again.” “Thank God the wait is almost over!” Michael heard someone say on the audio channel in the last days of spring. “Medbeds are finally coming. I hope I can get my mom to the front of the line since she’s Stage 4.”
[...] Instead, there was only repetition — the same medbed fantasies repeated over and over each day on the audio feed until the initial shock wore off within a few weeks and Michael’s skepticism wore down into curiosity and then into the beginnings of hope. He knew from experience that the military was capable of harboring secret, advanced technology. He remembered talking to members of his unit on a satellite phone years before one was made available to the public. “The military always gets the fancy toys way ahead of anyone else, so I suppose it’s plausible,” he said on the audio channel.
He’d already tried and failed to treat his pain by scheduling dozens of appointments each year through his health care with Veterans Affairs. He’d tried fentanyl, Percocet, Vicodin, acupuncture, water therapy, nerve blockers, deep-tissue massage and light therapy. Following his doctors’ advice had resulted in only temporary reprieves, along with dozens of opioid prescriptions and an elective surgery that led to a life-threatening staph infection. “The conventional route hasn’t done me any good,” he said on the channel. “When you’re desperate, you’ll try anything. This whole medbed thing has become personal for me.” It was part of Armour’s strategy when he first started Patriot Party News from his home after the 2020 presidential election: to build an audience by focusing on personal issues such as religion and health. He’d watched other far-right media sites like Victory Channel, The Elijah List and Right Side Broadcasting Network amass millions of subscribers in what Armour called the “Christian, MAGA universe” by mimicking Trump’s tendency to favor emotional appeals over facts.
[...] Several other companies had started producing their own versions of medbeds in the last few years. One company, Tesla BioHealing, had purchased a half-dozen old motels in places like Tampa, Fla., Dubuque, Iowa, and Butler, Pa., and then turned them into “medbed centers,” where each room came equipped with proprietary canisters under the bed that provided what the company called “life force energy.” Other groups were running scams on Facebook and charging $800 for “redemption cards” with a photograph of Trump’s face and a code that they said would provide secret passage into the underground military bases where medbeds were said to be ready for use. Baxter’s company was still in its infancy, and he had sold some of his products to churches, private clubs or millionaires who he said were “invested in longevity.” The medbeds at Andrea’s spa were the first to be available by appointment to the public, and he planned to expand into spas across the United States and Mexico. Andrea had decided to charge $85 an hour for use of the beds, but insurance didn’t cover the experimental treatment, and she didn’t believe in turning anyone away.
The New York Times takes a look at the QAnon obsession with “medbeds”, which are a “miracle cure” rooted in pseudoscience.
