EPIC gullibility | Blogotariat

Apart from the viral or bacterial illnesses afflicting the Convoy to Canberra people out at the Exhibition Park in Canberra (EPIC) campsite which I mentioned in a previous item1, there have been some hilarious rants coming out of EPIC. It almost goes without saying that some of these have been completely wacky conspiracies. They include the following:

The government are supplying vials of E. coli, Salmonella and even Typhoid to Coles and Woolworths so they can put this stuff into the food being delivered to the Convoy people to make them sick2.
Blowpipe darts are being used to inject people with vaccines2.
Four Australian Federal Police vehicles outside EPIC are using radiation weapons against the Convoy people to make them sick2.
A big black van parked outside EPIC is using an ultrasonic machine that causes brain damage2.
People are getting sunburnt too easily. The government are putting something in the air to make them burn more easily2.
Telstra are jamming their mobile phones2.
There are bees which have been dosed with vaccine and are stinging people and injecting the vaccine.
The pink-eye and gastroenteritis outbreaks were caused by chemtrails*3.

In another instance of their disengagement from reality, the large crowd was said by some of the protesters to be hundreds of thousands strong, whereas realistic estimates put the crowd at about 10,0002.

However big the crowd was, they are a disparate bunch. They include antivaxxers, anti-mandaters, far-right activists, anti-semites, those railing against socialism (without knowing what it is), ‘sovereign citizens**’, indigenous rights activists, white supremacists and evangelical Christians2.

*Chemtrails: Conspiracy theorists maintain that there is a government program to add toxic chemicals to the atmosphere from jet aircraft and that they can be seen as a jet aircraft flies overhead. It is assumed to be part of a government plan to sterilise people, reduce life expectancy, or control people’s minds4. In reality, the plume you sometimes see from a jet aircraft is a condensation trail or vapour trail, a streamer of cloud behind a jet flying in clear cold humid air. The contrail forms when water vapour produced by the combustion of jet fuel condenses on soot particles or sulphur aerosols in the plane’s exhaust. When the ambient humidity is high, the resulting ice-crystal plume may last several hours5.

**Sovereign citizens: These people believe that the laws of the land in which they live do not apply to them. The FBI has described the movement, which lacks any organisational structure, as “domestic terrorism” and calls followers “anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States”. The ideology hatched in the 1970s and grew out of Posse Comitatus, a US anti-government group that contained many followers who were anti-Semitic and believed governments were controlled by Jews.

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