America's 'COVID concentration camps'

The return of a classic conspiracy theory

Punishment Park directed by Peter Watkins (1971)

The novel coronavirus is a scam. Lockdowns are a government psychological operation (psyop) devised to soften us up for martial law. Antimaskers and other medical dissidents are headed for concentration camps. If you veer at all from the mainstream sectors of the internet, you probably don’t need to be told any of this.

The problem with this kind of misinformation is not that it’s absurd, it’s that it obscures reality. While COVID concentration camps might be utter nonsense, they contain a kernel of truth that deserves to be confronted.

One of the publications at the forefront of this kind of fake news is Law Enforcement Today, a website for cops whose politics veer slightly to the right of Adolf Hitler. Among some of its more highly-trafficked falsehoods: “Is Washington State looking to detain residents in 2022 version of internment camps? Sure looks that way.”  

All 50 states have laws for isolating people to mitigate the spread of especially dangerous communicable diseases. In 2020, when the Washington state legislature decided to modernize the language of its HIV/AIDS code sections, some hothead noticed this and decided (for whatever reason) that the meeting’s actual purpose was establishing concentration camps for medical dissidents. The claim spread to fake news website Gateway Pundit, other fake news sites like Law Enforcement Today ran with it, and now the idea is taken very seriously in the places where misinformation is otherwise known as “do your own research.” (See this PDF for the state legislature’s response to the controversy.)

Since COVID is heavily politicized and vaccination is equated with being a godless commie, it didn’t take long for the COVID concentration camp conspiracy theory to morph into the “fact” that a police state is being ushered in on the heels of the scamdemic, complete with camps for freedom lovin’ conservatives.

It sounds absurd, and it is absurd. But then again, we live in a country that has the infrastructure in place to start popping political dissidents into internment camps. This is a holdover from the Cold War, and we have the conservative far-right to thank for this situation.

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