The people who write zombie-apocalypse screenplays clearly missed out. In all the dozens of movies and TV shows about pandemic-fueled end-of-the-world scenarios, none of them managed to imagine whole subpopulations of characters who believed the zombie disease was actually a “deep state” hoax, a pretense for government enslavement, and rushed out into the streets to join the zombies and attacking efforts to combat them.
Because that’s what we have now—not zombies, of course: rather, with thousands dead in a pandemic, there are thousands more who believe it’s all a big conspiracy. And some of them are taking action—the kind that gets even more people killed.
Take the locomotive engineer in Los Angeles who, on Tuesday, intentionally derailed a train near the docking site of the U.S. Naval Ship Mercy, which has been a major focus of the American response to the pandemic on the West Coast, in an attempt to damage the ship. The train engine smashed through concrete barriers at the track’s end, through a chain-link fence, through a couple of empty lots, and then halting about 800 yards away from the ship.
As he was being arrested, the man who drove the engine—identified as Eduardo Moreno, 44, of San Pedro—told police: “You only get this chance once. The whole world is watching. … I had to. People don’t know what’s going on here. Now they will.”
The Department of Justice released a statement saying Moreno believed the Mercy “had an alternate purpose related to COVID-19 or a government takeover.” The conspiracy theory at work here is one invented by “QAnon” activists—namely, that the Mercy is actually planning to take its shipful of COVID-19 victims to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Other QAnon theorists have been claiming that the pandemic is a product of a Chinese bioweapon.
Liz Crokin, a QAnon-loving pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, has been in the forefront of the theories about the Mercy. She posted a video on March 26—viewed over 7.2 thousand times—featuring footage from the interior of the USNS Mercy, speculating that the ship “could be used to treat rescued trafficking victims especially since they’re only taking non-COVID-19 patients,” as she wrote on Facebook.
Those haven’t been the only “contrarian” right-wing conspiracy theorists spouting coronavirus-related nonsense, however. Far more common have been claims that the pandemic is being “blown out of proportion” by the media, part of an attempt to impose “government control” over the American populace, often accompanied by outright resistance to social-distancing measures. (Will Sommer at The Daily Beast assembled a roster of offenders.)
James O’Keefe’s scurrilous Project Veritas operation has been leading that particular parade. A recent video on its website featured O’Keefe conversing in a parking lot (through closed windows) with a worker at a Glen Island Park coronavirus site telling him the media have overblown the pandemic: “It’s the flu!... I’m in the tents with them!”
Other COVID-19 conspiracy theorists have taken to recording videos of empty parking lots at New York-area hospitals, promoting a social-media hashtag to connect the reports, #FilmYourHospital. Crokin has also been one of the louder voices promoting it.
On Facebook, Crokin posted videos in which she pulled into hospital lots and found them empty. In one posted March 29 from Scripps Hospital in San Diego, she works hard to creep out her audience: “It is fucking creepy. It is a ghost town here. It is so weird, you guys. There’s no one even walking around.”
The theories are getting airtime on Fox News as well. Fox contributor Jason Chaffetz, a former Utah congressman, livened up a panel discussion March 29 by remarking: “I would love to see statistics, for instance, on how full our hospitals really are. I mean, I see these passionate—you know, these people coming out of caring for these people, and it's hard to watch and I believe them from their heart—but I would love to know what those real numbers are.”
Another regular Fox contributor, Sara Carter, chimed in:
People are driving by their hospitals and they're not seeing -- in the ones that I'm seeing -- they’re not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They're not seeing anybody drive up. So, people are wondering what's going inside the hospital. How many people are actually in the hospitals that are suffering from coronavirus, how many ventilators, are the ICUs really being filled, how full are they?
Other Fox News figures have offered similar thoughts. Tod Starnes, a regular on Sean Hannity’s show, tweeted a photo showing an empty Brooklyn hospital’s parking lot: “This is the “war zone” outside the hospital in my Brooklyn neighborhood,” he commented.
On Wednesday, Crokin dismissed the locomotive engineer in a Facebook post: “The Deep State is activating their MKULTRA sleepers.”
