The Qanon conspiracy theory has become arguably the most influential conspiracy in the world. For those who are not yet aware, the theory posits that Donald Trump is fighting a war against a shadowy cabal that is responsible for all that is bad that is happening in the United States, and indeed the whole world. According to Qanon believers, this evil cabal is torturing kids, and/or using them in their rituals for blackmail, and/or sacrificing them to Satan. Clues as to the plans by the good guys – led by Donald Trump, naturally – to put a stop to all of this are posted to a message board by someone named Q (also called Qanon), who is revealing all of this information in order to awaken people and prepare them for things to come. According to the theory, the anonymity of the message board is the only place safe enough to post this information, away from the mainstream media which prevents the truth from getting out.
That is the Qanon belief in brief, and there are longer and more detailed articles elsewhere on the internet about the Qanon movement and its beliefs and influences, but what I want to address is an element of the theory that is often overlooked. It relates to something called ‘Adrenochrome’: according to Q followers, Adrenochrome is a substance produced in the brains of children when they are terrified and even tortured, their fear creating the chemical. The elites then, apparently, use this substance to make themselves younger, or ingest it as a psychotropic drug and become hooked on its amazing high.
Interestingly, although Adrenochrome has become a key part of the Qanon belief, ‘Q’ has never once mentioned it: at the time of writing, there have been 4952 posts (‘drops’) by ‘Q’, and not a single one mentions Adrenochrome. Q mentions crimes against children, and the rituals done to them, but nothing about a supposed magical drug. Yet the Adrenochrome belief is everywhere in the Q community; it has become part of the movement to such a degree that most believers would be shocked to learn their “prophet” has never mentioned it – it appeared organically.
Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizzeria was wrongly accused of housing a paedophile network in its basement. The restaurant does not have a basement.
This organic development is interesting. We can see it in the evolution of Qanon from a previous conspiracy theory, ‘Pizzagate’, which was a precursor to Qanon and alleged that an evil cabal was torturing kids and committing acts of paedophilia in the basement of a Pizzeria. All of the ‘information’ regarding this conspiracy was found in the hacked emails of American political consultant John Podesta, which according to Pizzagate believers were filled with coded messages and weird symbolism involving Pizza. Some argue that it was the Pizzagate conspiracy where this narrative of Adrenochrome as a drug of the elite was brought up – though its origins predate that theory, too.
David Icke, a famous conspiracy theorist, has spoken for years about the elites consuming blood of their victims; Jay Meyers another prolific conspiracist, has also talked about it. Some even point to the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson, which mentions Adrenochrome as a drug that gives an amazing high. So where did it come from?
A point I often stress when understanding conspiracy theory is that they constantly repeat and reuse old narratives. These narratives are adapted to fit the latest fears and paranoias of society, but their main structure remains the same. When it comes to Adrenochrome, the old narrative it takes and repackages is about another old myth: the Blood Libel.
To understand Blood Libel, we need to go back to medieval Europe, and as such look to one of the oldest false accusations against Jews: that they ritualistically kill young Christians. Many versions of this anti-Semitic slur posit that the reason for these heinous crimes is the intention of using Christian blood for Jewish rituals. This Blood Libel has had a vast influence on anti-Semitic narratives for centuries. One such example is the case of Simon of Trent – his death was particularly important for this type of narrative, and it serves as a blueprint for Blood Libel as such.
As the story goes, the body of a young Christian called Simon, in the city of Trent, was found in the water cellar of a member of the city’s Jewish community. Understandably fearing being framed for a murder, the finder of the body reported his grisly discovery immediately. Unfortunately, this honesty counted for nothing, and the entire Jewish community was arrested and tortured, and a story was created to justify the response: that the Jewish community killed Simon, and did it in a way to specifically mock Christians: crucifying the child before using his blood in their religious rituals, even putting it in their bread, in a mockery of the Eucharist.
What we see in this false narrative is that notion that Jews mocked Christianity by carrying out a murder in a macabre, sacrilegious way, used the victim’s blood for strange rituals, and consumed flesh in the form of bread. These are very strong symbolic tropes: attacking the youth of the community, mocking their religion, and twisting their rituals by eating bread made with the corpse of a Christian. It doesn’t matter that none of it ever actually happened; it was a powerful image used to attack Jewish communities. The same imagery has served as the base of most cases of supposed Blood Libel.
So is Adrenochrome connected to the Blood Libel? There are some very clear points of similarity between the two, with the ritualistic use of young victims’ blood, child sacrifice, and the perversion of Christian rituals. The next question, naturally is: why? Why readapt an accusation against Jews and apply it to a new conspiracy belief? Quite simply, it was a powerful persuasive narrative in the time of Simon of Trent, and it remains so today.
The Blood Libel narrative was designed and molded through hate, to prey on primal fears. It talks about killing children – the innocents who are the future of a community. It is built on the perversion of traditional values – the drinking of blood and consuming it in bread, just like in Christian communion. When we look at Adrenochrome narratives, we see clear similarities: children killed for rituals that are a mockery of Christianity (as they are dedicated to Satan). We see the torture of those same kids, in order to steal their lifeforce to guarantee a high or to make the recipient live longer – an unhealthy dose of decadence thrown into the mix.
I would argue that Adrenochrome grew organically in the Qanon community because they needed another way to hate their enemies. If ‘Q’ wasn’t going to add anything beyond vague “crimes against children and rituals” then the followers would have to fill in the gaps for themselves. With the anti-Semitic Blood Libel, they had a deep well of centuries of conspiracy theory narratives to choose from, and they picked the elements that fitted this modern paranoia best.
This act of dipping into well-trodden conspiracy tropes to strengthen the fears of the day is nothing new – we saw the same elements crop up in the Pizzagate belief, and before that in the Satanic Panic. These ideas, even organically, pick the elements of what went before that fit their new fears best, and adapt them to fit the panic of the day.
As ever, conspiracy theories always adapt, and always evolve – as long as we have fears, prejudices and paranoias, they always will.
Dentistry in England changed beyond recognition on the 25th March 2020. In the middle of the morning, every dentist in the country received a letter via email from the Chief Dental Officer (CDO) telling us to down tools and cease seeing patients face-to-face. It followed similar letters from the CDOs of the other nations of the union to their respective practitioners. Although the CDO technically only holds sway over NHS practice, the majority of private practices also stopped seeing patients.
By the end of the day, routine dentistry across the UK had ground to a halt with no idea of when it would resume. If you had a dire emergency, you could be referred to an Urgent Dental Centre (UDC) which were hurriedly set up by the NHS to provide care for those who had ongoing pain. But the scope of treatment in UDCs was initially limited, often only being able to remove teeth. Understandably, the shutdown of routine dental practice has had a deleterious effect on the dental health of the nation. The cause? As with most things in 2020, COVID-19.
As you read this, many practices are back open, able to see patients. The UDC system is still running, but with an expanded scope for treatment. But what are the risks of going to the dentist at the moment? What are dentists doing about those risks? And, most importantly, is it safe?
Let’s start with some basics. As SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, has been studied, we’ve learned more about its mode of transmission. Initially, many believed that surface to surface contact was the primary method of spread, but it’s now thought that respiratory aerosols are the key route. For dentists, this, theoretically at least, causes a problem.
Dentists are quite literally in the firing line when it comes to respiratory aerosols. You lot breathe, cough and sneeze on us every single day of our practicing lives.
Dentists are quite literally in the firing line when it comes to respiratory aerosols. You lot breathe, cough and sneeze on us every single day of our practicing lives. And many of the tools we use to do our job produce significant amounts of aerosols themselves. The handpieces (drills) and ultrasonic instruments (such as the scalers that your dentist or hygienist regularly use) all spray out a fine mist of aerosol that not only mixes with your saliva but can cause it to be aerosolised itself into the atmosphere of the dental surgery.
It’s perhaps understandable then that given the theoretical risks of treatment we had to stop seeing patients face to face. But now we’re back, so what’s changed?
Well, firstly, we know more about the virus. It may sound obvious, but at the beginning of the pandemic, the precautionaryprinciple had to apply, purely due to the number of unknown factors concerning SARS-CoV-2 and the spread of COVID-19. Work done by several groups over the first period of lockdown allowed for the production of guidelines for safe practice. Each practice should by now have constructed their own Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) drawing on these guidelines, and tailor-making them to their practice. This document should give clear guidance to everyone in the practice on how to best care for patients in a safe way, from new cleaning routines to ensuring minimal contact time between everyone in the building. Most importantly, it will include many factors to ensure that any treatment provided is as safe as possible.
Talking of treatment, the way that dentists classify the treatment we provide has changed. Before COVID, no matter what you were turning up to have done, my appointments would have always had roughly the same structure: Say hello to the patient, have a chat about what we were going to do, make sure my hands were clean, pop some gloves and a surgical mask on, do whatever needs doing then say goodbye to the patient. Pretty simple.
In a post-COVID world, everything is now either an Aerosol Generating Procedure (AGP) or a Non-Aerosol Generating Procedure (Non-AGP). You can probably guess what the difference is. Procedures classed as AGPs generally include most fillings, root canal treatment and the use of an ultrasonic scaler for example. Non-AGPs include examinations (that’s check-ups to most people), straightforward extractions and the various stages of making dentures.
If you’re coming in for a non-AGP appointment, the only real difference you’ll see in the surgery is that I’ll be wearing a disposable apron and I’ll have a surgical mask on at all times. When I look in your mouth, I’ll have a visor on as well. Dental surgeries generally have high levels of infection control, with strict procedures to follow after every patient. For low-risk procedures, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, these standard precautions are adequate to ensure patient and practitioner safety.
With AGPs, it’s a different ball game. Firstly, dentists and their nurses have to wear enhanced PPE. This means some form of surgical gown and a high filtration mask. These are a bit cumbersome and reduce the ability to communicate, but otherwise, I’ve found them to be generally OK. Many others have not, with some of the masks being uncomfortable when used for extended periods.
The real issue is that once we’ve done treatment, we have to vacate the room and leave the aerosol to settle before someone can clean it. For many surgeries, this is a significant problem. If you work in a small practice, this could leave you with swathes of downtime where you can’t access your surgery to see patients. Initially, this fallow time, as it’s called, was an hour. More recently, thanks to work by the people of the Scottish Dental Clinical Effectiveness Programme amongst others, we’ve been able to adopt a more granular approach, reducing fallow times to as little as 10 minutes in some circumstances. This has enabled routine dentistry to return in many practices, but in many others, there are still issues to overcome, which is delaying their return to regular care.
There are still questions about how risky AGPs are. It may be that we’re being overcautious with our guidelines. If we stop to think for a minute about the aerosols produced in a dental setting, there are a variety of sources. Obviously, dentist, nurse and patient will be producing respiratory aerosols just by breathing. But our current guidelines suggest that face coverings and maintaining social distancing as much as possible mitigate against that, so the aerosols we’re attempting to protect ourselves from during AGP appointments are of a dental origin. They come from our handpieces and ultrasonic units. And they’re not respiratory aerosols. They’re clean water, that’s treated with a disinfectant. This clearly isn’t going to increase the risk of COVID transmission, although if it mixes with saliva and this saliva is projected into the air, then there is an escalation of risk. But guess what? That straw like device that nurses use to stop you from drowning while you’re having a filling also sucks up potentially COVID containing aerosols.
Also, if we use a rubber dam, a sheet of material that we punch holes in to isolate your teeth from the rest of your mouth, the amount of our clean water mixing with your unclean saliva is reduced to virtually nothing. It’s quite possible that actual treatment is much less of a risk than we’re assuming it is. But the evidence isn’t there. So again, we must act with an abundance of caution.
So, back to the original question of how safe is it to go to the dentist at the moment? Pretty safe, actually. The dental profession has an already high standard of infection control protocols. In addition to this, we’ve taken all kinds of extra measures to protect you, us and the outside world. And, as far as I’m aware, there have been no recorded cases of COVID transmission from dental appointments. Having said that, low risk doesn’t mean no risk. Coming to see us is riskier than staying at home, but probably not as risky as going to the pub or supermarket. You might want to consider delaying your appointment if it’s not super urgent, or if you’re in a higher risk group. But we’re here to help you if you need us.
This article was first published in April 2018, for Gizmodo UK. Since then, David Icke has re-entered the mainstream, becoming a leading figure in the COVID-denialism movement, addressing thousands of people at a number of anti-lockdown marches across. As Gizmodo UK has shut down, The Skeptic has chosen to republish this piece.
David Icke wants you to know that he is not a racist. He may be arguably the world’s most recognisable conspiracy theorist, and yes, he has ideas that he’s happy to share about how the world’s leaders are controlled by an unseen force connected and identified through their bloodline, but he is not a racist. Even though, as Icke outlines at length, he isn’t one to care at all what anyone thinks of him and, as he explicitly states, he is intends to offend as many people as possible, he does need you to be quite clear that he definitely isn’t a racist.
“Those that shout racism the loudest are those that are obsessed with race, while I see it as an experience, nothing more”, Icke explained to the 1400-strong audience at his recent lecture in Southport. Looking around the room at the surprisingly broad mix of young and old, male and female, it seems like Icke has plenty of support – few people seem to want to point out that, say, police seem pretty obsessed with crimes, and firefighters seem to bang on a lot about fires, so his point on race isn’t really the slam-dunk defence he thinks it is.
“We are all expressions of the same one consciousness having different experiences. What is race? Same consciousness, different colour vehicle. That’s all it is,” continues Icke, either deliberately or accidentally ignoring that some of those vehicles get to drive on the motorway, while others have to stick to B-roads, as a result of their colour.
It’s easy to see why Icke is so keen to dismiss the accusations of racism that have followed him for decades – those accusations have seen multiple venues turn Icke down, meaning the Liverpool leg of his UK tour took place in Southport, 20 miles away. Still, the trip did nothing to deter the crowds, with die-hard conspiracy theorists arriving en masse to see Icke tell it like he thinks it is. At the very least, punters could rest assured they’d get their money’s worth: Icke’s lecture would run for two and three-quarter hours, followed by a ten-minute break before powering through a final hour.
You may not have heard of Icke, but you will almost certainly be familiar with his theories – most notably, that the world is run by a secret cabal of shape-shifting reptilian aliens, whose ranks include the Royal family, an international cabal of bankers, and a network of political operatives the world over.
Exposing the shadowy ‘unseen’
My copy of Icke’s self-published 2017 tome
While explaining Icke’s full worldview is no small task (his latest book – self-published, naturally – checks in at over 750 pages), it can effectively be boiled down to: nation states are actually under the control of shadow organisations like the Bilderberg Group and the Rockefellers, which in turn are controlled and operated by an even more shadowy group Icke refers to as the ‘unseen’. According to Icke, we can track the arrival of the ‘unseen’ to 6,000 years ago in the Middle East, and from there its influence spread to take over the world, allowing them to sow anxiety and fear, which (according to Icke) the unseen actually literally feed on. Although he never explicitly stated it in the lecture, Icke heavily implied this unseen force is alien in origin, almost certainly the reptilians of Icke’s prior work.
The appearance of the ‘unseen’ in the Middle East 6,000 years ago seems to be no coincidence, and it’s little wonder that Icke’s work is so often accused of anti-Semitism. However, if we were to accept that Icke himself does not hold such views, and that his work is merely co-opted by groups who undeniably are anti-Semitic, we also have to acknowledge that Icke often does his case no favours. Take, for instance, his repeated attacks throughout the lecture on George Soros, who Icke labels “Mr Evil”, depicts as a malevolent figure with reptilian eyes, and even accuses, despite Soros being Jewish, of collaborating with the Nazis (a claim that has been debunked, though it continues to be spread).
While Icke’s criticisms of Soros come with a personal edge (somewhat undermining Icke’s repeated message of love and shared consciousness), they lacked internal consistency. Take, for instance, Icke’s claim that Soros is “overthrowing governments in Europe, Africa and the Middle East” – if, as Icke had previously claimed, all of those governments were put in place and controlled by the shadowy hand of the ‘unseen’ anyway, surely overthrowing them would be a good thing? Or perhaps those governments and Soros are both controlled by the unseen, in which case all of that overthrowing would surely be irrelevant? Who knows; this is the world of conspiracy mongering, where self-contradiction is no barrier to believability.
The Soros image was far from the only moment which threatened to undermine Icke’s defence against accusations of anti-Semitism. In one alarmingly busy picture, Icke outlined the multiple layers of control in the world, in concentric circles with the most sinister agencies in the middle. At the centre, atop symbols of major world religions (including the you-know-who’s), sat the imposing figure of a spider, representing the ‘unseen’ in the centre of their vast web of connections. Around the spider are six controlling groups – including the Bilderberg group, the Club of Rome, and the Rockefellers – and, of course, lines connecting those groups form an unmistakable Star of David.
As it happens, Icke has a video series called “Dot Connector”. On the strength of his imagery, he seems to have no problem connecting six dots.
For more on why all tech is evil, please ‘Like’ and ‘Subscribe’…
If Icke feels accusations of anti-Semitism are unfair, he can hardly deny the charge of glaring hypocrisy: he talked at length about how Facebook is an evil tool of the CIA, but in the next breath complained that his Facebook page would have more fans if Facebook weren’t shadow banning him – so, presumably, he wants more of his followers to submit to an evil tool of oppression. Google, says Icke, is a front of the US intelligence agency, hell-bent on uploading our minds to the cloud to form a sinister collective consciousness, and you can hear all about it via his thrice-weekly video series on YouTube. And, of course, the move towards a cashless society is an attempt by the shadow government to exert total digital control over every element of your life, which is why he was selling his latest book at the merch stall via contactless payment.
What is remarkable about Icke is his ability to incorporate yet another thread into his vast tapestry of conspiracy. There is no event that is not proof of the conspiracy, in some way or another. 9/11 was an inside job, because the ‘unseen’ wanted to instigate a series of regime changes ultimately driving the West into a war with Russia to start World War III (which “would have started by now, if it weren’t for the maturity of the Russians”). How do we know this is true? As Icke says, “look for the outcome and you’ll see the journey”. Which is another way of saying “decide what you want to be true, and then come up with facts that fit”.
Mass school shootings in America were caused by mind-controlling antidepressants, yet also somehow faked by professionals masquerading as students. The chemical attacks in Syria were obviously faked, because some of the White Helmets were filming their rescue work (or, in reality, taking part in a very ill-advised Mannequin Challenge), plus elsewhere the White Helmets were handling victims of Sarin “without protection” (except, sarin evaporates quickly, so it presents a short-lived threat…and the photo he used as evidence even shows the White Helmets wearing gas masks for protection from the gas!). Icke isn’t convinced we evolved from monkeys. Brexit is a hoax. The CIA own Jeff Bezos because they once gave him some money (side note: I now part-own David Icke). “The physicist Michio Kaku says we should fear robots, not aliens, but what if the robots are being controlled by aliens?” Chemtrails are actually nanobots built to facilitate universal control. How do we know that? Sorry, we’re already onto the next subject already. It’s staggering that a four-hour lecture could be so entirely devoid of substance.
Sometimes, Icke’s logic unravelled itself in almost successive sentences: take, for instance, his assertion that science cannot be trusted because scientists are merely religious dogmatists who never change their minds; and in the 1950s they were saying there was only one galaxy whereas now they say there are trillions of galaxies so they can’t be trusted because they keep changing minds; and we know they were wrong in the 1950s because we (well, scientists) know how many galaxies there actually are now. Somehow Icke delivers all of this as if every sentence didn’t fatally undermine the last.
Similarly, we need to fear the rise of technology and the oncoming robotic revolution, because, as Icke said, “I’m 65, I’m old enough to remember when the world was run by humans” – although, he said this three hours into a lecture about how the world has been run by ‘unseen’ aliens for 6,000 years. Pick a lane, David. Those aliens, it’s worth noting, literally feed on human anxiety and fear to survive, which is why their grand plan is to wipe humans out and replace them with robots.
Elsewhere, we’re told that the UK government are bringing in 5G technology (which is a “stratospheric and dangerous leap from 4G technology”) without testing it, but that they have already announced where it will be tested, but secretly they have been testing it already. And we know it is harmful because 5G technology is “what American police use, in a higher power, to disperse crowds”. It’s worth pointing out that police also use water to disperse crowds. According to Icke’s logic, the existence of water cannons means your kitchen taps are evil.
Argument by quote memes
Peppered throughout Icke’s lecture were quotations from great thinkers, like Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Einstein and (on quite a number of occasions)… David Icke.
However, even those quotes weren’t as straightforward as they might have seemed – take, for instance, Icke’s repeated quoting of that time Albert Einstein said:
“Everything is energy… Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. This is physics.”.
If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound like something Einstein would say, that’s because he never said it – it, like many other quotes, has been misattributed to Einstein. Who is the quote actually from? As best as anyone can tell, it was first said by Bashar, a multidimensional being from the future who is channelled by a psychic medium called Darryl. It’s a shame Icke thinks that Google is evil, because two minutes with a search engine might have shown him that the quote was a fake.
Perhaps most annoying (beyond Icke’s infuriating habit of pronouncing “minutiae” as “my-new-tie”, making me want to strangle him with a recently-acquired cravat) was Icke’s use of Orwell throughout his lecture. According to Icke, the echoes of accuracy in Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian future in 1984 were no coincidence: when studying at Oxford, Orwell rubbed shoulders with the shadowy elite, and was able to glean insights into their plans, which he then used to inform some of his writing, as a warning to the world of what was to come. This is of course perfectly consistent with Orwell’s character, as he clearly wasn’t the sort to throw himself into the fray when it comes to fighting fascism.
Repeatedly, Icke referred to his drive for free speech by quoting Winston Smith’s iconic line, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four”; that objective truths should not be suppressed. It struck me as I watched him speak for almost four hours, that Icke is far more invested in the right to share an opinion regardless of how much it runs contrary to reality and objective truth. In short, Icke is fighting for the freedom to say that two plus two equals five.
Unfortunately, on the strength of the audience in Southport at least, people are buying it. When Icke joked that the UK government wants us to believe there has never been any conspiracy by anyone ever, unless it involves the Russians, “in which case it’s all true”, he received a startling round of applause. By the end, an alarming proportion of the audience gave a standing ovation.
Standing up to the ‘unseen’
As he came to conclude his talk, Icke advised the audience that the way to change the system and repel the shadowy hand of the unseen is to realise our strength in number, and to non-violently refuse to do as we are told. Illustrating the point, he showed a still from a Nazi rally, pointing out the thousands of people listening to a single “nutter”. David Icke said that if thousands of people just decided to stop listening to a “nutter”, he would have no power or importance at all. On this, Icke and I are in total agreement.
David’s abhorrence of violence, for the least part, does seem sincere. However, what struck me about his worldview is that it was almost as if he is a pacifist unable to believe that a human being could wish to harm another. Those that bomb countries at the behest of the government must have been malevolently “programmed” to do so simply because a right-thinking person never could – there is no other plausible explanation, for Icke. Perhaps this is why he is so ideologically committed to the position that terrorist attacks and chemical attacks are false flags orchestrated by the shadowy unseen hand of the unseen alien controllers: to accept that they are human actions jeopardises his core belief that violence doesn’t come naturally to some.
What’s more, if Icke had to accept that a government regime in the Middle East really were using chemical weapons to innocents, he would face the kind of impossible dilemma many people in Western democracies are currently facing: do you do nothing, and allow the atrocities to continue? Or do you intervene, and perpetrate violence in doing so? To write the whole affair off as a fake perpetrated by sinister aliens affords Icke a third way, albeit one that is unconnected to reality.
After leaving the lecture, I was struck most of all not by how extreme and out-there Icke sounded, but how comparatively tame. The lizards barely got a look in, sanitised instead behind euphemisms like “unseen” and avatars like “the spider”. I felt like I had seen Icke–lite, all of the paranoia but none of the specifics, none of the claims that might send an audience recoiling back to reality (I’ve subsequently discovered that his book contains no such restraint).
By sanitising some of his more outré claims, and playing to the gallery on hot button issues of free speech and gender rights, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Icke is edging closer to the mainstream.
I was also surprised by how much of the evening he’d given over to extended rants about freedom of speech, PC culture, safe spaces and the giving and taking of offence – rants that, stripped of their context and author, could have appeared verbatim on a million Facebook threads and in the comments of every other article on Spiked Online. A number of asides about trans rights and gender fluidity – notably that activists are pushing an agenda that is designed to cause gender confusion in children who otherwise wouldn’t be confused at all – could have come straight from the blogs and forums of some who would otherwise consider themselves feminists. Those people may argue it is a stopped-clock phenomena, but when your opinions can be accurately and eloquently expressed by David Icke, it may be time to re-examine the factual basis of your worldview.
By arguably sanitising some of his more outré claims, and playing to the gallery on hot button issues of free speech and gender rights, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Icke is edging closer to the mainstream. And at a time when there is a noted rise in anti-Semitism and acceptance of Russian propaganda regarding incidents from Syria to Salisbury, I can’t confidently rule out Icke’s views being accepted back into everyday discourse. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.
The origins of modern spiritualism, the belief that the dead can talk to the living through the agency of specially gifted persons called ‘channelers’ or ‘mediums’, are usually traced to the town of Hydesville, New York, in 1848, when two teenagers, Maggie and Kate Fox, began communicating with a ghost. Decades later, both sisters would, at several occasions, confess to fraud and denounce the movement they had unwittingly started, but with little to no effect on its popularity.
Existing initially in the crossroads between religion and science – often seen as a source of empirical, scientific validation for beliefs that are tenets of several religious and metaphysical systems, such as the survival of the personality after bodily death – spiritualism, in the English-speaking world at least, later fragmented into a variety of populist religious cults or crowd-driving spectacles, not too different from the faith healing business, and similarly plagued by shady operators and exploitative practices. Meanwhile, the most scientifically-minded wing of the movement divested itself, at least in public, from the metaphysical pretensions of their forebears to found the field of parapsychology.
In Brazil, however, things happened quite differently: here when spiritualism fragmented, one aspect – called “spiritism”, “Kardecism” or “Kardecist spiritism” – supplanted all others, and was embraced by relevant members of the intellectual and professional elites – including medical doctors, lawyers, judges, politicians. This became the main nexus of Brazilian pseudoscience, incorporating ufology, parapsychology, faith healing and all kinds of “magnetic”, “energy-based” alternative medicines.
Allan Kardec
Kardecism takes its name from Allan Kardec, the pseudonym of French writer and educator Hippolyte Rivail (1804-1869), who wrote extensively on the subject, building a “spiritist doctrine” all of his own, including successive reincarnations and the progression of the soul. Kardec ideas were influenced by the “animal magnetism” of the 18th century Mesmerists, and by Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1668-1772) supposed conversations with spirits from other planets.
Kardec’s ideas failed to impress most of the spiritualists of his time – the Scottish medium D.D. Home (1833-1886), a veritable “rock star” of the Victorian spiritualist scene, described them as “delusions” and “fantasies” – but they took root in Brazil and went through a very Brazilian process of syncretism, the fusion of diverse doctrines into very nimble ideological chimeras.
For instance, one of the main proponents of Brazilian Kardecism, the medical doctor Bezerra de Menezes (1831-1900) left a posthumous psychiatric tract, “Insanity Under a New Prism”, saying that mental disorders that occur without a noticeable brain lesion should be attributed to spiritual interference. The book ends with a letter supposedly written by the ghost of Samuel Hahnemann (1775-1779), the creator of homeopathy. As a result, in the late 19th century, it was common for spirit mediums in Brazil to prescribe homeopathic medicine while in trance.
During the 20th century, Kardecist syncretism mingled with ufology (UFOS and aliens could be manifestations of extraterrestrial spirits of Swedenborgian inspiration), alternative medicine (homeopathy, and acupuncture), faith healing (transfers of “energy” to patients via hand-waving, not unlike reiki or therapeutical touch, and the more dangerous psychic surgery), parapsychology (the canonical book on the investigation of poltergeists in Brazil, by Hernani Guimarães Andrade (1913-2003) is a spiritist work), and even jurisprudence.
When the Brazilian dictatorship of 1964-1985 came to an end and the country drafted a new democratic Constitution, spiritists were on the forefront of the effort to institutionalise alternative medicine in the healthcare system. Spiritists leaders demanded “a New Epistemology for a New Republic”, and the First International Congress on Alternative Therapies that took place in São Paulo in February, 1985, was a de facto spiritist Congress. If Brazil was to have political freedom, why not epistemic freedom? So now, 36 years on, we have 29 complementary and alternative therapies paid for with government funds.
The problem with epistemic freedom is that we can’t vote to decide if an antibiotic works or not, we have to test it in rigorous clinical trials. And if the trials show that the antibiotic works, it doesn’t matter how you feel about it, or if you don’t believe in it: it will work regardless.
When the scientific method is criticised for not being a perfect method, we can draw a useful comparison with democracy: we know democracy is not perfect, as sometimes authoritarian or incompetent governments get elected, but it’s the best system we have so far. Similarly, science is the best system we have for testing hypothesis and developing technologies and therapies that actually work.
However, the overall feeling of freedom in our young Brazilian democracy back in the 1980s may have given rise to an environment where, as Isaac Asimov puts it: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
In this environment, alternative medicine flourished. Endorsed by both public opinion and religious sentiment, it quickly gained official recognition as medicine, and went unchallenged for several decades. Very few questioned its presence in our public healthcare system, and soon alternative therapies were introduced in Medical Schools and private healthcare. Speaking against alternative medicine was considered “scientism”, and disrespectful towards the wisdom of “the people”.
Such a mindset strongly impacts how a society reacts to evidence-based medicine. It’s no wonder Brazil has been the hub of miracle cures during the pandemic. Magical thinking extends from homeopathy to chloroquine, ivermectin, nitazoxanide, and all sorts of bogus ‘cures’ currently endorsed and promoted by our Ministry of Health.
The arguments are the same ones endorsed by the “epistemic democracy” of the 80’s: the valuing of anecdotal evidence, the inversion of the burden of proof demanding that scientists prove that these treatments don’t work, the misuse of the old trope “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
Our history with spiritism and alternative medicine shows that we have a long way to go if we want to promote science literacy. It’s not just an issue of explaining how science works, but of understanding decades of cultural habits and religious beliefs that got mixed up with science and medicine, and worse, religion disguised as science. The epistemic exceptionalism of science exists for a reason: science-based therapies can be proven to work.
The nature and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic was the subject of intense discussion throughout 2020, both inside and outside of science. Some argued that with severe lockdown measures the government was overestimating the problem, others considered those measures to be appropriate and proportionate, and still others believed that the government was taking irresponsible risks in removing restrictions.
However, everyone seems to agree on one thing: the disease is caused by a new virus, which has been given the name SARS-CoV-2. Or, at least, everybody except a small group of natural healers, who hold a completely different opinion. According to this committed bunch, viruses don’t exist at all. And if they do exist, they aren’t that dangerous at all. And if they are really dangerous, it’s all a big conspiracy. Scientists, they say, just don’t understand it at all.
David Icke, the British former football player and sports journalist who became an influential propagator of conspiracy theories around 1990, was interviewed in April this year by the online platform London Real. The conversation accumulated 65,000 live viewers before YouTube removed it “for recommending medically unsound methods to prevent the coronavirus.”
In the interview, Icke stated that COVID-19 (by which he meant the virus) does not exist, that the reported symptoms are actually the result of 5G radiation, before explaining that he believes Bill Gates belongs in prison.
To back up his 5G claims, Icke brought up the work of forensic psychiatrist Andrew Kaufman, who offers a range of detoxifying health advice on his own YouTube channel, including a holistic root canal treatment. Kaufman has also argued that COVID-19 could be the result of all manner of causes, but that it is certainly not caused by a virus. Instead, he claims the disease is the result of stress, improper nutrition, pollution, ionizing radiation and a variety of unspecified conditions. However, for a direct relationship with 5G, he said he had found no data in the research literature. So much for him supporting Icke’s 5G theory.
Koch’s Postulates and chain reactions
Kaufman makes even more dubious claims in his COVID-19 video, which has now been viewed 225,000 times and is frequently referred to on the internet in the alternative circuit. For example, he claims it is not proven that SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of COVID-19 according to Koch’s Postulates – the criteria that Robert Koch established in 1884 to identify microorganisms as the cause of a disease. In particular, the virus had not been isolated – a claim that has become a common complaint in these circles.
Kaufman also claims that the numerous electron microscopic images available of the virus are either animations or that they show very small but normal cell parts, called ‘exosomes’, which few people have heard of. Exosomes are small membrane bound structures released by cells into the space surrounding them; they are about the same size as coronaviruses. Could it really be true that the virologist community mistakenly confused these with viruses? And that a forensic psychiatrist is now helping the world clear up this misunderstanding? I will come back to that later.
Kaufman also discussed the reliability of the PCR test, the Polymerase Chain Reaction, a method for detecting minute amounts of hereditary material. He says that its inventor, Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis, had already warned that the method is not suitable for detecting viral material. The test could only detect common – in this case human – genetic material. And this, according to Kaufman, would explain why so many people are given a positive result on this test, and thus are wrongly labeled as infected persons.
Obviously, the PCR patent already explicitly states that the method is suitable for detecting viral material. Moreover, this test is precisely designed to search very specifically for genetic material that only occurs in the targeted micro-organism and not in others. Even though the total genome of SARS-CoV-2 consists of 30,000 bases, it is sufficient to detect only 1 per thousand (30 bases) to make sure that we are dealing with this specific virus. It appears that the forensic psychiatrist Kaufman missed this revolution in microbiology.
In conspiracy circles, in short, the pandemic is all about a non-existent disease, which they explain away by suggesting the evil medical profession, led by the World Health Organization, is doing everything it can to artificially add to the number of cases. In addition, all deaths that could indicate even the slightest indication of COVID-19 are ‘unfairly’ included in the statistics.
Measles virus challenge
Kaufman in turn refers to yet another scientist, Stefan Lanka, to substantiate his theses. This German biologist and anti-vaxxer briefly made international headlines when, in 2011, he offered a reward of 100,000 euros if someone could show him one scientific article proving both the existence and, among other things, the size of the measles virus. According to Lanka, measles was nothing more than a rash from some kind of psychological trauma. When his countryman David Bardens, then a medical student, sent him six articles and claimed the reward, Lanka refused to pay it. Bardens filed a lawsuit, which he won. Lanka was nevertheless right on appeal – after all, he had asked for one article and not six. An attempt by Bardens to challenge this decision at an even higher legal level failed. In the alternate world, this outcome is presented as definitive proof that viruses don’t exist.
Lanka also believes that even if viruses exist, they cannot be detected with current technology. The fact that the entire genome of SARS-CoV-2 had been unraveled within a very short time, and that people can be tested on that basis, makes little impression on him or on Kaufman.
Lanka is now again challenging the experts and has published an open letter to German virologist Christian Drosten accusing him of ‘crimes against humanity’ for advocating vaccinations on unscientific grounds and developing a virus test prematurely. Drosten is thus, according to Lanka, responsible for ‘the increase and globalization of the Chinese disease panic’.
And what is Lanka’s view of health based on? It is based on the ideas of Ryke Geerd Hamer, a well-known figure in the Netherlands and Germany who claimed at the end of the last century that he could offer a new “Germanic” alternative to “Jewish medical science”, which he believes is aimed at exterminating the non-Jewish population. Hamer, in turn, based his ideas on those of the Nazi physician Gerhard Wagner, adding, among other things, his own ‘observation’ that most German oncologists these days were Jewish, and that no Jew in Germany receives chemotherapy… because the needles used to deliver it also implant nanochips containing venom compartments which can be activated via artificial moons.
Here we end up in a morass of anti-Semitism, pseudoscience and paranoia from which some people seem unable to escape.
The virus exists. Period
In order to make a final attempt to see if there could be any truth in Kaufman’s claims, I contacted several researchers. Kaufman quite prominently quotes in his video American virologist James Hildreth, who allegedly claimed that “the virus is an exosome in every way.”
Now, first of all, this is a quote taken out of context: Hildreth wanted to point out that in some cases a virus can behave like an exosome, if it is looking for a way to leave the infected cells – his 2003 “Trojan exosome hypothesis”. When I pointed out this interpretation of his work to Hildreth via Twitter, he resolutely replied, “The virus exists. The pandemic exists and is caused by the virus. Period.”
Swedish researcher Jan Lötvall, himself an expert on exosomes research, interviewed American molecular biologist Kenneth Witwer in April of this year for his YouTube channel about the views of Kaufman and associates that researchers would confuse viruses and exosomes. In the interview, Witwer confirmed the presence of viruses is no longer determined by means of a microscope, so it does not matter whether they look like exosomes.
And on the statement that the virus does not exist at all, or at least is harmless: “Why anyone would believe that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is unclear.”
This article first appeared in the Dutch Skepsis FoundationSkepter magazine in September 2020.
You probably encountered the very idea of ‘urban legends’ thanks to the labours of Jan Harold Brunvand, retired Professor of English and eminent folklorist. He did more than anyone else to promote awareness of those short, perfectly-formed morality tales that were told as true, but whose ultimate source – a ‘friend-of-a-friend’ – was distant enough to make the story unverifiable. This urban legend story form is now well enough known that listeners may identify anecdotes as urban legends simply by their story structure.
He called his first classic volume after the most popular trope: ‘The Vanishing Hitchhiker’. Broadly: a traveller stops to pick up a hitchhiker. The hitchhiker sits in the back of the vehicle and when they reach their destination, the traveller finds that the passenger has disappeared into thin air. The hitchhiker is then identified by a person at the destination as somebody who died prematurely and whose ghost has done this many times before. There are sometimes chilling or poignant additions. In one, for example, the driver lends the (young female) hitchhiker his overcoat which he finds draped over her gravestone at their destination.
A folklorist who has spent hours reading historical accounts can’t help but notice the parallels with older stories, set well before the popularity of the automobile. I found one of a Madam Pigott of Chetwynd Hall (p 90) who died during a medically-botched childbirth. Her ghost took to riding behind people in the district on horseback at night, especially if they were on the way to collect a midwife. Her spectre disappeared whenever the horse and rider crossed running water.
Brunvand reports a variant of this tale from the US in the 1890s, where a young woman would jump on young men’s horses when they passed through a certain wood on their way to parties and then disappear when they arrived.
Other versions from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries place the traveller and hitchhiker in the more modern configuration of a vehicle, albeit a horse-drawn one. As you would expect, the automobile variant emerged and proliferated at the same rate as the machines themselves, to the point where most people now identify the theme exclusively with cars.
So it made me think twice when, just before Christmas, Professor Owen Davies (@odavies9) asked: “Serious folklorist’s questions. Anyone seen a phantom hitchhiker recently? Haven’t seen any physical hitchhikers for years.” Unreal Irish Folklore (@unrealpod) brought up a valid point, had “… this one became so widely known that it reached the level of literary trope (which sometimes seems to kill off the oral legend)”. Had familiarity bred disinterest?
Icy Sedgwick (@IcySedgwick) made another incisive observation: “I wonder how Uber has impacted them”.
That’s not as frivolous as it may sound. Our stories contain important themes of change and danger, they are informative… and they are relevant. They contain the themes and technology we encounter every day.
Freakonomics Radio asked ‘Where have all the hitchhikers gone?’ and concluded that lower air fares, higher earnings and higher rates of car ownership had contributed to a lower incidence of hitchhiking. In addition, movies like Tobe Hooper’s ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ had made people more alert to the potential dangers.
Julian Portis in ‘Thumbs Down: America and the Decline of Hitchhiking’ agreed that media had made awareness of the dangers higher (even though the danger itself had not increased in the same time). He also pointed out that modern high-speed roads simply make hitchhiking physically more difficult.
So we may have lost one trope through over-exposure and reducing relevance. But it seems we have not lost our desire for pithy, scary stories. ‘Creepypasta’ is a type of first-person, micro-blogging, creepy urban-legend for the internet age. A 2010 New York Times’ article described it as “bite-sized bits of scariness that have joined the unending list of things-to-do-when-you’re-bored-at-work”.
Urban legends haven’t gone away. In fact they have adapted very well to the digital age. If phantom hitchhikers say something about previous eras, what do the preoccupations of our contemporaries say about us? I leave you with one: ‘Black-eyed-kids’. Popular since the ‘90s, these tales feature sinister panhandling children with pale skin and totally black eyes. They speak in monotones and sometimes try to enter houses at night under the pretext of wanting to use the phone or the bathroom.
Betteridge’s law of headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” In the name of falsification, I will argue that the correct response to the headline of the current article is, in fact, not a blunt no. It is instead almost definitely no.
At the time of writing, there have been lots of headlines over the previous couple of weeks referring to the claim by Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s Defense Ministry’s space directorate, that there is an agreement between a “galactic federation” of aliens and the US government to work together performing scientific experiments. He further claims that outgoing President Donald Trump wanted to reveal this fact to the world but was persuaded not to do so in order to prevent mass hysteria. I am sure that we can all agree that stirring up mass hysteria is the very last thing that President Trump would ever want to do. Eshed further claims that there is an underground base on Mars where there are already both aliens and American astronauts (although it is not clear from the reports I have seen whether or not Eshed believes that the moon landings were faked).
Inevitably, such sensational claims were reported widely including by NBC, the Independent, the Express, the Daily Mail, and many other daily newspapers. If such news outlets had taken these revelations seriously one might have expected the story to be the most prominently featured for at least a day even in the face of competition from the pandemic, Brexit, and the US election. Clearly, the claims were not being taken very seriously and the tone of the reporting reflected that. The reports typically included the following statement from a NASA spokesperson: “Although we have yet to find signs of extraterrestrial life, NASA is exploring the solar system and beyond to help us answer fundamental questions, including whether we are alone in the universe.”
I must confess that I had not really given the story much thought until I was contacted by journalist Matt Rozsa who was writing a feature about the psychological factors that might lie behind such “outrageous claims” for Salon. This caused me to reflect on the question of how one should react to such sensational claims from such an ostensibly authoritative source. Here is my reply to Matt:
Without further information, it is impossible to know what psychological factors might underlie these claims from Haim Eshed. There are three possibilities. The first is that he is telling the truth. Given the outlandish nature of his claims and the lack of any direct evidence to support them, this strikes me as extremely unlikely.
Secondly, he may believe the claims he is making. If this is the case, I would want to know his reasons. Has he seen any actual evidence or is he basing his claims on reports from others? If the former, is the evidence convincing? If the latter, are these others credible? What are they basing their claims upon? Is it possible that Eshed is delusional? This certainly is a possibility.
Thirdly, Eshed may be knowingly lying. If so, what are his motivations? It is noteworthy that he has a book to promote and he has already garnered much attention by his claims. He will no doubt become the latest ‘darling’ of the UFO community and be invited to address UFO conferences, not to mention appearances on talk-shows, and so on. Maybe it’s all a practical joke and he is laughing all the way to the bank?
The problem here is that these claims will fuel conspiracy beliefs of all kinds. After all, if the US government are lying about this, what else are they lying about? Maybe the COVID vaccination programme really is just a cover to inject us all with microchips to control our minds? This way lies collective madness – and thousands more unnecessary deaths.
If Eshed has any solid proof to support his claims, he should tell the world what it is. Until he does so, we should feel no more obliged to believe him than we would any other conspiracy theorist.
As I argued in a previous article, an important part of proper scepticism is to always be open to the possibility that you may be wrong. However, another important principle for sceptics is that the burden of proof for any claim always lies with the claimant. If Eshed actually has any convincing evidence to support his claims, he should, as stated, present us with it. Since the initial ripple of media interest in his claims, I have been looking out for further reports of him actually presenting such evidence. So far, I have only spotted an article in which Robbie Williams expresses his delight that Eshed has “confirmed” that the Galactic Federation exists. I guess it’s a case of “Watch this space…”.
Of course, if Eshed surprises me and actually does present proof of his claims before this article goes live, I for one will be absolutely delighted. From what he says, they appear to be a co-operative bunch rather than aggressive space-invader types and I am sure we could learn a lot from them.
I wish I could open the new year with an optimistic article, but that’s just not where things sit at the start of 2021. The removal of Trump, whatever muddling through post-Brexit option is currently gaining traction, these are not signs we’ve turned a corner. They’re ventilators in a pandemic where we’ve yet to find a vaccine. The most dangerous public health risk of our time is epistemic in nature, it’s the virality of misinformation that continues to run rampant across poorly managed media.
There’s a deep irony to our epistemic crisis: we live at the peak of accessible knowledge, yet there’s so much anxiety about our ability to justify our beliefs. There’s no single cause for this epistemic crisis; it’s a perfect storm of society, psychology, and technology. Rapid social change brought about by technological and political upheaval lead to substantial polarisation, then the internet flooded our lives with the culture war and made everyone compulsive participants. Now social media entities have weaponised cultural conflict on a scale that would make Goebbels do a full Grinch smile.
Recognising that every crisis is also an opportunity, enterprising individuals have entered this dysfunctional marketplace of ideas and set up shop with a variety of pernicious wares. Skeptics are likely to already be familiar with the sorts of overt conspiracy theorising and woo that are running rampant in the poorly regulated corners of the internet, so I want to focus on a problem that’s endemic to the skeptic community: the rise of cheap talk skepticism.
We’re all intuitively familiar with the idea of “cheap talk”, but I want to make explicit the key features and how they manifest in some acts of superficial skepticism. ‘Cheap talk’ refers to talk where the person doing the talking is at little to no risk of suffering any serious consequences for their comments. Cheap talk is at the heart of such beloved internet personalities as virtue signalers, keyboard warriors, and sea-lions (as my good friend C. Thi pointed out). The last group are closest to my concern around cheap talk skepticism.
Cheap talk skepticism occurs when someone expresses skepticism in a way that comes at little cost to them, though it frequently comes at a significant cost to others. For example, if I express glib doubt about the personhood of another group of sentient beings, when my personhood is highly unlikely to be questioned, that would be cheap talk skepticism. Furthermore, if I received praise and positive reinforcement for my skeptical signaling, we could see that skepticism as effectively free of cost.
Skepticism, both as a broad perspective and with regard to specific issues, has traditionally come at substantial personal cost. Humans are generally a credulous species, our belief formation consisting of a mixed bag of heuristics with the thinnest veneer of rationality. That allows for quick and decisive belief formation, but it also arguably creates a hardwired animosity towards skeptics. Skeptics are seen as risking social instability with their skepticism about deeply held community beliefs. So, it’s no surprise that skepticism about things like the existence of god still comes with substantial social costs in supposedly secular nations, and the death penalty in others. For many, skeptics are most charitably seen as busy bodies who should really stay quiet during family meals.
In the age of the internet though, there’s an audience for mass produced skepticism, and the cost for producing that skepticism has dropped to almost nothing. At first glance, that could seem like a good thing. One might argue that the goal of Mill style liberalism, the sort that’s highly valued by free speech advocates, is to create a space where speech in general comes with little to no cost, since that will promote the greatest free exchange of ideas. While I sympathise with this principle in theory, the unfortunate reality is that talk is rarely free – it’s more a question of how much the cost is externalised or carried by the speaker. I’ve discussed before how radically unmoderated speech comes with substantial costs, but it’s not hard to understand how completely unfettered cheap talk skepticism could quickly spiral into dangerous conspiracies. The same rising distrust of institutions that is making space for more secularism is also making space for more anti-vaxxers, more Q-anoners, and as always more anti-Semites.
Cheap talk skepticism feeds on all the situational factors I’ve mentioned. It’s understandable that many people would respond to the overwhelming deluge of the information age by craving the skeptical freedom of suspending judgment. There is an undeniable joy in saying “I don’t know and neither do you, leave me alone” in response to the constant demands for verification that we all face. As Marsh recently wrote, we need a sympathetic approach to the way that human psychology makes us all vulnerable to cheap talk skepticism. We’re all drowning in a sea of information, it’s hard to judge people for grabbing any skeptical life preserver that comes along, even if it turns out to be attached to conspiracy theories.
If there is any room for criticism in this explosion of cheap talk skepticism, I believe it should be focused on the individuals with the platforms that allow them both the time for proper skepticism and the obligation to skepticism properly. In the parts of the skeptical world referred to as the Intellectual Dark Web, there has been rampant cheap talk skepticism around both Covid and the recent American election. Under the umbrella of “distrusting institutions”, there has been such an absurd amount of “just asking questions” that Sam Harris felt compelled to very publicly “turn in his IDW membership card”. Unfortunately, Harris neglected to explicitly criticise anyone by name, which makes is hard to determine if his criticism was meant just for the brothersWeinstein, or if he was including folks like Maajid Nawaz, who he has frequently promoted and who I’d argue has been one of the worst of the cheap talk skeptics.
Nawaz has also engaged in cheap talk skepticism around Covid conspiracy theories, favorably retweeting a thread by a guy who thinks Covid is caused by 5G and directly quoting his claim about “the myth of a pandemic”. Similar cheap talk skepticism towards Covid and the Covid vaccine has arisen from Brett Weinstein and unsurprisingly from James Lindsay, given his ongoing businessrelationship with conspiracy theorist Michael O’Fallon. James recently attended a Sovereign Nation conference and a conservative event in California with Covid lockdown skeptic Dave Rubin. Rubin has attended several anti-lockdown events and posted cancel bait tweets implying that he’s hosting dinner parties in violation of social distancing rules. Again, the cost of their skepticism is far less likely to be born by them than by medical workers and vulnerable individuals, like my aunt Sue who suffered a stroke while being treated for Covid. Society doesn’t even condone the desire that they should directly experience the consequences of their skepticism. We’re forced to hope that their cheap talk remains cheap.
Quality skepticism is research intensive. It’s not easy to do quality skepticism and still produce hot takes across a wide range of topics… Properly justified belief lags behind misinformation in the best of times. Cheap talk skepticism widens that gap by forcing skeptics to correct this internal misinformation alongside all the other forms of cheap talk.
Besides putting lives at risk by promoting a cavalier approach to a global health crisis, cheap talk skepticism externalises a social cost by driving quality skepticism out of the marketplace of ideas. Quality skepticism is research intensive. It’s not easy to do quality skepticism and still produce hot takes across a wide range of topics, which is something that public intellectuals are unfortunately pressured to do in order to stay relevant. Properly justified belief lags behind misinformation in the best of times. Cheap talk skepticism widens that gap by forcing skeptics to correct this sort of internal misinformation alongside all the other forms of cheap talk out there.
So, how do we tell between cheap talk skepticism and the real thing? As usual, it’s not easy. When you’re engaging with a skeptics’ argument, we somehow have to include questions like: Does the skeptic genuinely have skin in the game, even if it’s just in terms of reputation? Does the skeptic circle back around and update their skepticism on the subject? Do they make explicit the potential costs of their skepticism and discuss ways to avoid externalising that cost? Is their framing catastrophising or contextualising?
These are hard questions, which is why I’m not especially optimistic that we’ve seen the peak of cheap talk skepticism. We’re all epistemically exhausted and the crisis is just coming to a middle. That said, if 2021 turns out to be an epistemic bonanza, I promise to come back and eat my skeptical words.
![The store front of Comet Ping Pong, the pizza place at the centre of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. The store is painted dark green and has the word "comet" written in lighted yellow letters. Image by DOCLVHUGO [CC-by-4.0]](https://www.skeptic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Comet-ping-pong-pizza-pizzagate-podesta-brock-375x200.jpg)
