Rabbit holes and dog whistles
Elon Musk's recent tweet denouncing America's top medical officer is the latest example of how the Covid pandemic has turbochaged conspiracy theories and provided a platform for QAnon.
When Elon Musk tweeted on Monday that his pronouns were “Prosecute/Fauci”, then issued a second tweet urging his followers to “follow [rabbit emoji]”, he provoked a backlash that even he couldn’t have anticipated.
Musk’s condemnation of Anthony Fauci, the veteran director of the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical officer to the President, was "dangerous" and "disgusting", commented White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
Musk is “like a smirking bully in the schoolyard”, wrote the former CBS newsman Dan Rather on his Substack. Musk using his position as Twitter CEO to “scurrilously” attack a dedicated public servant who had devoted his career to fighting infectious diseases is “a sad but instructive snapshot of our times”.
But perhaps the most perceptive comment came from Caroline Orr Bueno, a behavioural scientist who studies the spread of online misinformation and conspiracy theories. Pointing out that the rabbit emoji could be read as a dog whistle for “white rabbit”, a meme popular with adherents of QAnon, the group behind the storming of the US Capitol in January, Bueno tweeted:
“Elon Musk is now explicitly encouraging his 120 million followers to start following QAnon. Put differently, Elon Musk is encouraging 120 million followers to join a domestic terrorism movement.”
This is not the first time that Musk and others have attacked Fauci for standing up for science. Ever since it emerged that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) helped fund research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in China, fuelling theories that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of a “lab leak”, Fauci has become a lightning rod for conspiracy mongers and Covid deniers.
Within hours of Musk’s tweet, for instance, the Republican Senator for Kentucky, Rand Paul, had called for Fauci to be compelled to testify to Congress as part of a “full-throated investigation” into Covid’s origins. Others compared Fauci to the “Angel of Death” Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed deadly experiments on Jewish detainees at Auschwitz.
There is nothing new in the employment of antisemitic tropes and ad hominem attacks on the medical profession. Nor is this the first time that a mob has been incited to violence against a doctor because of a conspiracy theory due to an infectious disease outbreak.
In 1831, for instance, irate citizens gathered in Sennaya Square in the centre of St Petersburg inflamed by rumours that the cholera epidemic then ravaging the city was a plot to repress the poor. Convinced that doctors had been poisoning their drinking water, the mob marched on the city’s main cholera hospital, where they proceeded to ransack the building and murder several medics. On that occasion, further violence was only averted when Czar Nicholas I arrived in Sennaya Square accompanied by his Imperial guards and ordered the mob to fall on their knees.
And something very similar happened when, the following year, the cholera arrived in Paris. To halt the outbreak, the city’s sanitary commission ordered mounds of rubbish suspected of spreading the disease to be hauled beyond the city’s limits, angering ragmen who made their living sorting through the debris.
Complaining that the order violated their traditional rights and privileges, the ragmen began spreading rumours that pharmacists were poisoning the poor with white powders and that cholera was a lie.
“The more extraordinary these reports were, the more eagerly were they received by the multitude,” observed the German poet Heinrich Heine who was living in Paris at the time.
The difference today is that thanks to Twitter and other social media platforms, hate speech travels much faster and further than in the nineteenth century, fuelling increasing attacks on scientists and ensuring that misinformation reaches far larger constituencies.
The other factor is the Covid pandemic itself.
The uncertainty surrounding Covid’s origins and the unprecedented measures required to contain the virus have triggered widespread fear and cognitive dissonance, prompting some people to look to social media and the internet for answers and existential reassurance. There, furloughed from work and with plenty of time on their hands, many fell down rabbit holes where they became easy prey for cranks eager to convert their gullibility into hard cash.
In his book, The Storm is Upon Us, Mike Rothschild documents how so-called QAnon “gurus” have made fortunes online punting bleach and other unproved Covid “cures”, such as invermectin, a drug used to treat intestinal parasites in animals. And although neither the claim that Covid is a bioweapon or a hoax designed to justify lockdowns originated with QAnon, the group has rapidly incorporated these claims into its all-encompassing conspiracy theory.
Rothschild also documents how, long before the storming of the US Capitol, QAnon’s posts were causing real-world harms. A good example came in June 2020, when Alpalus Slyman, a 29-year-old baggage handler at Boston’s Logan airport, lost his job and threatened to kill his wife and children in the belief he was about to be murdered by the “deep state”. It later emerged that Slyman, who was eventually arrested after a bizarre car chase through Rockingham County, New Jersey, had been radicalized by QAnon videos describing a secret war against Americans orchestrated by Hillary Clinton and a cabal of Satanic Democrat paedophiles.
Rothschild’s fear is that the pandemic has turbo-charged this dangerous nonsense, prompting conspiracy memes and tropes that were previously confined to the fringes of the internet to migrate to Twitter and other prominent social media platforms. Musk’s rabbit emoji is simply the latest example of how such memes have moved to the centre of public discourse.
Even more concerning is the way that the protests which accompanied lockdowns brought together conspiracists from across the political and social spectrum, fomenting the exchange of antisemitic conspiracy tropes and identification with each other’s grievances, whether those grievances be opposition to vaccines and mask mandates, or the alleged machinations of shadowy paedophiles.
A good example is the arrest in Germany last week of two dozen far-right radicals for plotting to install the great-grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II as Germany’s head of state in bid to reinstate the country’s pre-1918 borders and revive the Kaiserreich.
These plotters were not the usual cranks and loons but subscribed to a group called “Citizens of the Reich” and included aristocrats, property developers and former and active members of the police and the German armed forces – in other words, supposedly upstanding members of the German middle classes. As a Social Democrat MP and police detective informed the Financial Times: “This is a form of terrorism that has emerged out of the mainstream of society”.
So far, thankfully, no scientists have been killed for standing up to Covid misinformation. But for how much longer?
Last year, England’s chief medical adviser Chris Whitty was accosted in a London park by two men who filmed him on their phones while pinning his arms. And in another notorious case, Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst and his family were placed in a safe house when a military sniper went on the run after leaving a note outlining his intentions to target virologists.
But perhaps the most worrying threats are those that have been directed against Fauci and other scientists who have come out strongly in favour of Covid’s natural origins.
A good example is Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based NGO which worked closely with the WIV sampling coronaviruses from wild bats, which act as reservoirs for the virus in nature (Daszak is also accused of funnelling NIH grants for so-called gain-of-function experiments to the Wuhan lab, an accusation he denies).
Earlier this year, Daszak’s home address and other personal details were published online – a practice known as “doxing”. Soon after, he received a letter containing a white powder resembling anthrax. To protect his family, Daszak, who is originally from Britain, has now hired a private security guard.
Similarly, Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist who has been vocal in confronting disinformation about Covid online, recently learnt that someone had posted a direct threat to kill her and other scientists associated with a paper arguing for Covid’s natural origins.
“These threats are real and very serious”, she told the BBC. Ramussen, who works at the University of Saskatchewan, immediately reported the threat to the Canadian authorities but fears that threats like this are having a chilling effect and help explain why so few scientists are willing to join her in speaking out.
Thankfully, Fauci, who retires at the end of this month and who is used to taking on his critics, has no such qualms. Describing Twitter as “a cesspool of misinformation”, he informed Nature that he had no intention of responding to Musk directly and would continue to speak truth to power. “Of course, it’s a risk. That’s why I have armed federal agents with me all the time”, he said.
But the costs are high. “I can’t enter my office now without having to show my pass,” a close colleague of Fauci, who has also been the recipient of death threats, told me recently. The source added that they would dearly love to speak out but had been banned from doing so by the White House and the US Department of Health and Human Services.
“They don’t want me to tell the press anything that will make the Republican firebrands any angrier, like saying there WAS NO lab leak. It’s a strange world out there.”
Strange and increasingly dangerous.