As the global death toll from an alarming new coronavirus surged this week, promoters of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory were urging their fans to ward off the illness by purchasing and drinking dangerous bleach.
The substancedubbed Miracle Mineral Solution or MMShas long been promoted by fringe groups as a combination miracle cure and vaccine for everything from autism to cancer and HIV/AIDS.
The Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly warned consumers not to drink MMS, last year calling it effectively a dangerous bleach that could cause severe vomiting and acute liver failure. But those warnings havent stopped QAnon devoteeswho believe in a world where Donald Trump is at war with shadowy deep-state cabalfrom promoting a lethal substance as a salve for a health crisis that speaks to the darkest recesses of fringe thought.
Im going to have to get home, and MMS the whole state, prominent QAnon promoter Jordan Sather told his audience in a recent video. MMS the whole shit out of everything.
Chief Police 2, [Antifar's note: a very funny name] a prominent anonymous QAnon account on Twitter, also pushed MMS as the coronavirus spread. On Friday, the accounts operator urged its nearly 18,000 followers to buy 20-20-20 spray, an MMS concoction.
New followers protect yourself with the 20-20-20 spray, the tweet read.
QAnon, a conspiracy theory reminiscent of Pizzagate that started with a series of online posts in October 2017 from an anonymous figure called Q, imagines a world where Donald Trump is engaged in a secret war with a cabal of pedophile-cannibals in the Democratic Party, the finance industry, Hollywood, and the deep state.
Despite or perhaps in part because of such outlandish ideas, the theory has taken root with a segment of Trumps base, with QAnon believers regularly appearing at the presidents campaign rallies. Trump has also routinely retweeted QAnon content. ... QAnon conspiracy theorists and others on the fringe right, who have already adopted the idea that the disease has been manufactured by shadowy forces. Sather, for example, has cited a 2015 patent for a potential avian coronavirus vaccine to suggest that the human form of the disease was deliberately created. Conspiracy-theory hub Infowars, meanwhile, has promoted the false idea that Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates philanthropic efforts are just a cover for a depopulation agenda centered on the virus.
In the conspiracy-theory community, Bill Gates is seen as this sort of budding eugenicist, Mike Rothschild, a journalist who tracks the QAnon movement, told The Daily Beast.