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Tea’s Weird Week: Demon Sperm, Reptilians, and Alien DNA…Meet Trump’s Latest COVID Expert
In January I attempted an ambitious project called #TrumpConspiracyCounter, which would document every Trump promotion of a conspiracy theory or theorist. I settled into a routine a couple times a week of Google searches and sifting through Trump’s non-stop tweets. However, when the pandemic struck, I found myself feeling a bit like Lucy and Ethel in the I Love Lucy episode where they’re trying to keep up with a chocolate factory conveyor on high speed, shoving candy in their pockets and mouths.
Overwhelmed, I left the conspiracy counter at #236 at the end of April, but had learned a lot about who Trump was promoting and getting information from. I still follow and write about his conspiracy promotion (“Trump’s Joe Scarborough Conspiracy Obsession,” for example).
One of Trump’s most frequently retweeted “news” sites, I observed, was Breitbart News, who have often promoted conspiracies and hate. This week a Breitbart video of a “White Coat Summit” on the stairs of the Supreme Court of a group calling themselves America’s Frontline Doctors went viral, getting roughly 13 million views before social media platforms began to pull it.
The summit was organized by the Tea Party Patriots, and the video featured a group calling themselves America’s Frontline Doctors who spoke about the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump retweeted it to his millions of followers and later described it as “very impressive.” In the speech, one of the group’s doctors, Dr. Stella Immanuel, states that hydroxychloroquine cures COVID and that there isn’t a need to wear masks. Immanuel is a registered physician in Houston, where she runs a practice next door to her church, Fire Power Ministries.
Dr. Stella Immanuel surrounded by other members of America’s Frontline Doctors on the steps to the Supreme Court.
Don’t always trust someone wearing a lab coat. You can buy them from American Science & Surplus for $23.65.
Among Dr. Immanuel’s beliefs:
- “Alien DNA” is being used in today’s medical field.
- Dr. Immanuel teaches in her seminars that miscarriages and medical issues like infertility, impotence, and cysts, are a result of “astral sex” from “spirit husbands (or incubus)” or “spirit wives (or succubus),” which are sex demons that seduce you with their powers and bang you in a “sleep world.” Immanuel says that cysts and fibroid tumors are a result of demon sperm, which can also impregnate you to create li’l demons.
- Reptilians or “lizard people” (a group of sinister extra-terrestrials) have infiltrated our government disguised as humans. Please see a chapter of my new book American Madness titled “Reptoid Royalty.”
- Dr. Immanuel says that vaccines are a secret plot to microchip people, a classic anti-vaxxer line.
- Also, the government is developing a vaccine to prevent people from “becoming religious.”
- She believes Dr. Fauci and CNN (the whole organization?) are secretly taking hydroxychloroquine and she has challenged them to deliver urine samples to her to analyze if they dispute her claim.
Reptilians? “Night husbands?” Secret microchip vaccines?
Wowwwwww-wee. Gizmodo reports that the rest of America’s Frontline Doctors include a bitcoin hustler, Tea Party members, and someone who went on a rant about George Soros conspiracies on FOX.
These COVID conspiracies, pushed by groups like QAnon and spread through media like this video and the conspiracy doc Plandemic (which was seen 8 million times in May before being pulled from YouTube and social media sites) show how dangerous conspiracy theory can be. They give people the falsely comforting idea that COVID isn’t a real threat and therefore, they shouldn’t bother socially distancing or wearing a mask.
When the press pushed Trump on Immanuel’s beliefs at the end of a press conference on Tuesday, Trump did as Trump does– he deflected the question, shut down the conference, and booked it the fuck outta there. Trump’s propaganda machine– Rush Limbaugh and FOX’s Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham picked up the defense and were soon hard at work at the sticky situation of trying to spin demon jizz to their viewers–but the stain remains.
This story shows the Trump media ecosystem in full orchestra– trash sites like Breitbart News and InfoWars launch some crazy fake story, QAnon and “patriot” groups help spread it, Trump retweets it himself, then it gets kicked up to the hucksters at FOX who promote it and call legit journalists and fact-checkers who dispute it as “fake news.”
As for Immanuel, she’s not happy that social media is removing the video. In fact, she says God is going to crash Facebook because of it in this tweet (I left original word errors intact):
Hello Facebook put back my profile page and videos up or your computers with start crashing til you do. You are not bigger that God. I promise you. If my page is not back up face book will be down in Jesus name.
Absolutely incredible. Disinformation is killing America.
SEE ALSO: Don’t forget that these type of people aren’t just shooting viral videos, some of them are running for office in the 2020 election: “Trump Inspired QAnon Followers, Proud Boys, Gun Nuts, Racists, all Have 2020 Campaigns”
Please Clap Dept.: I got advance copies of my book American Madness (out Aug. 25, Feral House)! Among the things in this column discussed more in depth in the book: Trump, Reptilians, Anti-vaxxers, extra-terrestrials, InfoWars, and QAnon. You can pre-order: Lion’s Tooth: CLICK HERE Bookshop.org: CLICK HERE Amazon:CLICK HERE
You can enter a Goodreads Giveaway for a FREE COPY here!: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/309615-american-madness-the-story-of-the-phantom-patriot-and-how-conspiracy-th
Tea’s Weird Week: Watch Out for the Phrase “Do Your Own Research”
Let me tell you a little bit about Young Krulos– when I was 18, I graduated high school, then I moved out of mom and dad’s. I moved to Milwaukee’s east side into a house full of roommates, got a string of jobs like washing dishes, telemarketing, and cashiering. I lived a carefree life. I didn’t have much money or even wanted much… I dined on Ramen noodle packs, and frozen pizzas. Not having much money, I spent many days hanging out at the East and Central libraries. I would spend hours browsing and reading books, magazines, CDs, and videos.
A lot of times I’d be on some random kick– I’d be reading all the books I could find about comic book history or UFO case studies or famous gangsters of the 1920s…whatever struck my interest. I guess you could say I was “doing my own research,” so I understand the appeal.
“Do your own research.” That’s a phrase I ran into a lot while working on my book American Madness, which is about conspiracy theory culture, and it’s a term I’ve heard many times in the last few months. It kind of makes my eyes roll and my skin crawl when I hear it now.
Over the course of working on American Madness, I was told I should “research” 9/11 and vaccines and flat earth theory and other stuff I’ll just let you read about in the book.
I have mixed feelings about conspiracy theory, depending on the topic. Some of it, like UFO cases and the JFK assassination, I find to be really interesting. Stuff like the moon landing hoax or Jimi Hendrix faking his death and becoming Morgan Freeman, are just goofy and amusing. Theories like the Sandy Hook shooting being fake are pretty disgusting. There’s a fine line that’s hard to navigate sometimes.
I think my irritation with “do your own research” was already there, but blew up with all the COVID-19 theories from an internet army of people who were suddenly “researchers.” Someone on Facebook told me I was dumb for believing the pandemic was a real threat. This person had “researched,” they said, and their findings was that the “plandemic” was fake.
Really? Did you? Did you do this research in a lab? Did you have it published in a peer-reviewed journal? Or did you just watch something floating around YouTube?
Ok, let me take a breath here. I’m not saying you need a PhD to educate yourself. We should all strive to be better informed. Media literacy is more important than ever.
Fake news is a real problem in 2020. Conspiracy sites, foreign interests (like Russia), bots, data mining, deep fakes, far right sites–some that have deceptive, Orwellian names ( justthenews.com, for example is definitely not “just the news”) have formed a tidal wave of misinformation. Unfortunately, I don’t think a lot of people want media literacy. They’d rather follow their “hunch,” like Trump does, and find faulty resources that support their idea that the world is flat, or that vaccines cause autism, or that Democrats have imprisoned “mole children” under Central Park.
Here’s some things we should ask ourselves when searching for information:
- What source is this and is it credible? Is it “fake news”–not the type that Trump yammers on about because they report information that hurts his ego, but heavily skewed, conspiracy peddling, Photoshop fear-mongering sites like Breitbart News, InfoWars, FOX, OANN, etc.?
- Who authored it and when was it written? I periodically see people mourning the recent loss of Gene Wilder on Facebook– but he died in 2016.
- What sources are provided for the article you’re reading or the video you’re watching? Some outlets use an echo chamber– they might use articles on their own site or other similar bad sources for information.
- Is this source heavily biased, an opinion piece, or a satire site? It’s hard to tell these days if we’re looking at the New York Times or The Onion.
- Am I looking for the truth, or am I just looking to have my opinion validated? Research follows facts, not emotion.
- Appeal to authority is a misunderstood logical fallacy. It says that a claim isn’t necessarily true just because an expert says it is without other evidence. It doesn’t mean all authority figures are wrong, it just means that they aren’t always right. Appeal to false authority is using evidence from someone who claims they are an authority on a subject when they are not.
- Who pays for the site the source comes from? Are they owned by a non-profit, or a special interest group? Those are things to consider. Do they fund their site by selling scam products (ahem, Alex Jones)? Are they really owned by George Soros, or is that something you saw someone say on Reddit?
Doing your own research can be a fun and rewarding thing, a way to understand life better. Just be careful where you get your information from.
Freelance Dept.: I interviewed members of Antifa for local paper the Shepherd Express this week: https://shepherdexpress.com/news/features/what-is-antifa/
“Tea Krulos has forged a fascinating collection of work by immersing himself in various sub-cultures that exist on the fringes of society.” —Cult of Weird
American Madness: The Story of the Phantom Patriot and How Conspiracy Theories Hijacked American Consciousness by Tea Krulos from Feral House on Vimeo.
teakrulos.com 