DISPATCHES FROM THE AMERICAN IDIOCRACY (updated)

This is the #1 book on the Amazon bestseller list right now:



The premise of the book seems ... apocalyptic:

With the brilliant wit one might expect if Erin Brockovich had a doctorate in molecular biology, Dr. Mikovits has seen the best and worst of science. When she was part of the research community that turned HIV-AIDS from a fatal disease into a manageable one, she saw science at its best. But when her investigations questioned whether the use of animal tissue in medical research were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases, such as autism and chronic fatigue syndrome, she saw science at its worst. If her suspicions are correct, we are looking at a complete realignment of scientific practices, including how we study and treat human disease.

Now, let's find out about the people responsible for the book.

You know about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote the foreword -- he's a well-known anti-vaxxer, and even his own relatives are disgusted by him. But what about the authors of the book?

Let's find out about Judy Mikovits.

YouTube has removed another video that’s circulating conspiracy theories amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“The Plandemic,” a 25-minute clip from an upcoming documentary, was taken off of YouTube this week for violating the Google-owned video site’s community guidelines. The video centered on Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former chronic fatigue researcher who claims the federal government is behind a “plague of corruption” to inflate profits from a potential vaccine even as COVID-19 threatens lives.

The site for Plandemic describes the film:

Humanity is imprisoned by a killer pandemic. People are being arrested for surfing in the ocean and meditating in nature. Nations are collapsing. Hungry citizens are rioting for food. The media has generated so much confusion and fear that people are begging for salvation in a syringe. Billionaire patent owners are pushing for globally mandated vaccines. Anyone who refuses to be injected with experimental poisons will be prohibited from travel, education and work. No, this is not a synopsis for a new horror movie. This is our current reality.

... Create a problem, escalate fear, then offer a pre-planned solution. Sound familiar?

Flash forward to 2020...

They named it COVID19. Our leaders of world health predicted millions would die. The National Guard was deployed. Makeshift hospitals were erected to care for a massive overflow of patients. Mass graves were dug. Terrifying news reports had people everywhere seeking shelter to avoid contact. The plan was unfolding with diabolical precision, but the masters of the Pandemic underestimated one thing... the people. Medical professionals and every-day citizens are sharing critical information online. The overlords of big tech have ordered all dissenting voices to be silenced and banned, but they are too late. The slumbering masses are awake and aware that something is not right. Quarantine has provided the missing element: time. Suddenly, our overworked citizenry has ample time to research and investigate for themselves. Once you see, you can’t unsee.

Snopes responds to a rumor that Mikovits "was thrown in jail after she refused to discredit research that led to the discovery that deadly retroviruses have been transmitted through vaccines." This claim is rated false. She was arrested in 2011, but it was "for allegedly taking lab notebooks, a computer, and other material from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, after the WPI fired her.” She was fired after a paper she coauthored alleging a connection between a mouse retrovirus and chronic fatigue syndrome was partially retracted by the authors and then fully retracted by the publisher, Science magazine, after other researchers were unable to replicate the results. She is now a celebrity on the anti-vaxx circuit and a sworn enemy of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

As for Kent Heckenlively, here's a 2013 post from the blog American Loons:

Kent Heckenlively is an antivaxxer who writes for the crank propaganda site Age of Autism, and is generally known for having taken his autistic daughter to Costa Rica for stem cell quackery and for subjecting her to all manner of biomedical woo. He is, in other words, deeply steeped in woo, and got his test results for his daughter from Doctor’sData, the favored laboratory of dubious practitioners everywhere because of its lax methodology and tendency to find high levels of mercury and other heavy metals in just about any sample. Heckenlively is also known for his participation in chelation-provoked urine testing for mercury – which is guaranteed to cause the excretion of a lot of mercury in a normal person – so that the test results would not be in conflict with his already formed opinion about the causes of autism. Of course, the fact that his daughter did not improve made Heckenlively ask a lot of questions; unfortunately none of them included the question of whether his beliefs about the causes and treatments of autism corresponded with reality.

Currently, his favored schtick seems to be that the XMRV retrovirus is the cause of autism (presumably in combination with heavy metals), in part because Judy Mikovits famously linked the retrovirus to the chronic fatigue syndrom in an appalling example of shoddy and possibly fraudulent research, and combined it with complete crank behavior that eventually got her fired. Therefore there must apparently be some truth to her claims.

Here's a sympathetic bio of Heckenlively on the site of a radio show on which he appeared as a guest:

Kent Heckenlively is an attorney, science teacher, author, and father of a daughter with autism. He is a founding contributing editor of the website Age of Autism and his work can regularly be found on The Bolen Report. In 2017 he was banned for three years from traveling to Australia for a planned lecture series on corruption at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In 2018, his articles at The Bolen Report are regularly shadow-banned by Facebook, so we can only imagine what kind of trouble he’s going to get into as the year progresses.

The book comes with recommendations from Michelle Malkin ("Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates and Big Pharma don't want you to read this book. Get PLAGUE OF CORRUPTION now and learn the truth about public health industrial complex's decades of research fraud and vaccine cover-ups") and Ben Garrison, "America's #1 political satirist" (“Kent Heckenlively and Judy Mikovits are the new dynamic duo fighting corruption in science.")

At a time when we need solid science more than ever, this is America's #1 book. If America isn't an idiocracy yet, it's not for lack of effort on the part of many of our fellow citizens.

*****

UPDATE: Will Sommer of the Daily Beast has much more. A sample:

Millions of Americans have been exposed to “Plandemic,” a 22-minute conspiracy theory documentary about the coronavirus that racked up millions of views on Facebook and YouTube before it was banned from both sites.

In the video, controversial scientist Dr. Judy Mikovits, a close associate of anti-vaccine activists, weaves an elaborate tale alleging a government conspiracy to create the coronavirus, with Anthony Fauci as a kind of murderous puppetmaster behind it all....

In “Plandemic,” Mikovits ... claim[s] that the coronavirus was somehow cooked up in collusion between United States government labs and Chinese researchers. A narrator voice-over suggests Fauci was somehow involved in the scheme....

Mikovits makes other bizarre claims that are barely remarked upon in the documentary. She says that lockdown orders closing beaches have cut people off from “healing microbes” in the ocean....

And she makes the bizarre argument that wearing a mask somehow makes a person more susceptible to the virus.

“Wearing the mask literally activates your own virus,” Mikovits said. “You’re getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expressions.”

Did I say "idiocracy"?