COVID-19 conspiracy rhetoric and other primal fantasies

ABSTRACT

Planet Lockdown, a documentary film, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic was manufactured by finance capitalists, Silicon Valley, and the pharmaceutical industry to microchip the population, consolidate global wealth, and enslave the population. Viral videos from the film have received tens of millions of engagements throughout social networks and media, constituting a major source of COVID-19 disinformation. This article argues that COVID-19 enslavement fantasies consummate white conservative fears of racial displacement, brought on by an impending demographic shift and greater visibility of antiracist activism throughout the early stages of the pandemic. I argue that Planet Lockdown’s preoccupation with so-called “modern slavery” restages a national primal scene to resecure white power as perceptions of its dominance wanes: a fantasy of the origins of the liberal subject that omits that subject’s relationship to slavery and anti-Blackness. By imagining slavery as a future threat to white selfhood rather than the structural organization of a society underwritten by anti-Blackness, COVID-19 conspiracy rhetoric facilitates a disavowal of the structural legacy of white supremacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Conspiracy rhetoric
• primal fantasies
• psychoanalysis
• anti-blackness
• personhood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Bill Gates Will Use Microchip Implants to Fight Coronavirus,” Biohackinfo.com, March 19, 2020, https://biohackinfo.com/news-bill-gates-id2020-vaccine-implant-COVID-19-19-digital-certificates/.

2 Jack Goodman and Flora Carmichael, “Coronavirus: Bill Gates ‘Microchip’ Conspiracy Theory and Other Vaccine Claims Fact-Checked,” BBC News, May 29, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648.

3 Ike Sriskandarajah, “Where Did the Microchip Vaccine Conspiracy Theory Come from Anyway?,” The Verge, June 5, 2021, https://www.theverge.com/22516823/COVID-19-vaccine-microchip-conspiracy-theory-explained-reddit.

4 Kelen McBreen, “Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation & Others Predicted Up To 65 Million Deaths Via Coronavirus – In Simulation Ran 3 Months Ago!,” InfoWars.com, January 24, 2020, https://www.infowars.com/bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation-others-predicted-up-to-65-million-deaths-via-coronavirus-in-simulation-ran-3-months-ago/.

5 Bob Fredericks, “Roger Stone: Bill Gates May Have Created Coronavirus to Microchip People,” New York Post, April 13, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/roger-stone-bill-gates-may-have-created-coronavirus-to-microchip-people/.

6 Rebecca Heilweil, “How the 5G Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory Went from Fringe to Mainstream,” Vox, April 24, 2020, https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/24/21231085/coronavirus-5g-conspiracy-theory-COVID-19-facebook-youtube.

7 Kathy Frankovic, “Why Won’t Americans Get Vaccinated?,” July 15, 2021, https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/07/15/why-wont-americans-get-vaccinated-poll-data.

8 Amy Davidson Sorken, “The Dangerous Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories Targeting 5G Technology, Bill Gates, and a World of Fear,” The New Yorker, April 24, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories-targeting-5g-technology-bill-gates-and-a-world-of-fear.

9 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Vintage, 2008).

10 See Brett Jacob Bricker, “Climategate: A Case Study in the Intersection of Facticity and Conspiracy Theory,” Communication Studies 64, no. 2 (2013): 218–39, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2012.749294; and Jenny Rice, Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020).

11 See Ryan Neville-Shepard, “Paranoid Style and Subtextual Form in Modern Conspiracy Rhetoric,” Southern Communication Journal 83, no. 2 (2018): 119–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2017.1423106.

12 Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

13 Melley, Empire, 11.

14 Jenell Johnson, “‘A Man’s Mouth Is His Castle’: The Midcentury Fluoridation Controversy and the Visceral Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 1 (2016): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2015.1135506.

15 See Casey Ryan Kelly, “Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of White Ambivalence,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 23, no. 2 (August 6, 2020): 195–223.

16 Paul Elliott Johnson, I, the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021); and Eric King Watts, “‘Zombies Are Real’: Fantasies, Conspiracies, and the Post-Truth Wars,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 51, no. 4 (2018): 441–70.

17 Johnson, I, the People, 3-8.

18 Watts, “Zombies,” 444.

19 Brian Resnick, “White Fear of Demographic Change Is a Powerful Psychological Force,” Vox, January 26, 2017, https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/1/26/14340542/white-fear-trump-psychology-minority-majority.

20 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2–3.

21 Mignolo, Modernity, 6.

22 Eric King Watts, “The Primal Scene of COVID-19-19: ‘We’re All in This Together,’” Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture 1, no. 1 (2021): 2.

23 See Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 6th edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974), 19.

24 Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017); and Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

25 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 5, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871.

26 See Dana L. Cloud, Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture (Ohio State University Press, 2018).

27 In mainstream-oriented white nationalism and antisemitism, the term “globalist” has replaced “international Jew” to refer to long-standing conspiracy theories about Jewish control of international finance. See Marouf Hasian, “Understanding the Power of Conspiratorial Rhetoric: A Case Study of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Communication Studies 48, no. 3 (1997): 195–214, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510979709368501.

28 Johnson, “Visceral Public,” 9.

29 Armond R. Towns, “‘What Do We Wanna Be?’ Black Radical Imagination and the Ends of the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 75–80, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1723801.

30 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 72.

31 See Joshua Gunn, “Father Trouble: Staging Sovereignty in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 1 (2008): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295030701849332; and Paul Elliott Johnson, “Fear of a Black City: Gender and Postracial Sovereignty in Death Wish (2018),” Women’s Studies in Communication, (online first, July 26, 2021), 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1941465.

32 Allison L. Rowland, Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020).

33 Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 15.

34 Moten, Stolen, 16.

35 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81, https://doi.org/10.2307/464747; and Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

36 See Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997).

37 Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (New York: Routledge, 2000).

38 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 106.

39 Hartman, Scenes, 7.

40 Frank R. Wilderson III argues that one of the core tenets of “Afropessimism” is that “Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.” Such scholarship is pessimistic about theories of liberation insofar as they fail to account for how conceptions of humanness exclude comprehension of Black suffering. See Frank R. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020), 15.

41 Hartman, Scenes, 21.

42 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

43 Karma R. Chávez, “The Body: An Abstract and Actual Rhetorical Concept,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2018): 242–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2018.1454182; Michael Lechuga, “An Anticolonial Future: Reassembling the Way We Do Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 378–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1829659; and Armond Towns, “Against the ‘Vocation of Autopsy’: Blackness and/in US Communication Histories,” History of Media Studies 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.32376/d895a0ea.89f81da7.

44 Charles Wade Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8.

45 Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91, https://doi.org/10.2307/1341787.

46 See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

47 Johnson, I, the People, 157.

48 See Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the Threat of Race: On Racial Neoliberalism and Born Again Racism,” Communication, Culture & Critique 4, no. 1 (2011): 23–30, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-9137.2010.01090.x; and Vincent Pham, “Our Foreign President Barack Obama: The Racial Logics of Birther Discourses,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8, no. 2 (2015): 86–107.

49 See Matthew Houdek, “Racial Sedimentation and the Common Sense of Racialized Violence: The Case of Black Church Burnings,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 3 (2018): 279–306, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2018.1486035.

50 Freud’s primal scene was found at the moment a child witnesses parental coitus, something believe to be experienced but only reconstructed through fantasies. See Sigmund Freud, The “Wolfman” and Other Cases (New York: Penguin, 2003); and Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1954).

51 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; See also Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 327. See also Luz Calvo, “Racial Fantasies and the Primal Scene of Miscegenation,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89, no. 1 (2008): 55–70, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-8315.2007.00001.x.

52 Calvo, “Fantasies,” 68.

53 See Watts, “Primal.”

54 Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence (New York: Verso, 2020), 37.

55 Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2012), 30.

56 Alex Kaplan, “YouTube and Facebook Allowed Another COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory Video to Go Viral,” Media Matters for America, February 8, 2021, https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-COVID-19-19/youtube-and-facebook-allowed-another-COVID-19-19-conspiracy-theory-video-go-viral.

57 All 34 interviews are available at on the film’s website at https://planetlockdownfilm.com/full-interviews/

58 Catherine Austin Fitts, “Second Interview,” November 25, 2021, https://rumble.com/vpt2uq-catherine-austin-fitts-2nd-full-interview-planet-lockdown.html

59 Reuters Staff, “Fact Check: The World Economic Forum Does Not Have a Stated Goal to Have People Own Nothing by 2030,” Reuters, February 25, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wef-idUSKBN2AP2T0.

60 Fitts, “Second Interview.”

61 Carrie Madej, “Full Interview,” February 4, 2021, https://rumble.com/vdknuv-carrie-madej-full-interview-planet-lockdown.html

62 Astrid Stuckelberger, “Introduction to a Pandemic,” June 11, 2021, https://rumble.com/vie5xr-astrid-stuckelberger-introduction-to-a-pandemic-planet-lockdown.html

63 Lilian Held-Khawam, “First Interview,” July 2, 2021, https://rumble.com/vjcb7x-lilian-held-khawam-first-interview-planet-lockdown.html

64 Catherine Austin Fitts, “Full Interview,” January 24, 2021, https://odysee.com/@PlanetLockdown:6/Catherin-Austin-Fitts---Full-Interview---Planet-Lockdown:3?&sunset=lbrytv

65 Madej, “Interview.”

66 Fitts, “Full Interview.”

67 Michael Yeadon, “Full Interview,” April 26, 2021, https://rumble.com/vg4inv-michael-yeadon-full-interview-planet-lockdown.html

68 Held-Khawam, “First Interview.”

69 Held-Khawam, “First Interview.”

70 Alessandro Fusillo, “Full Interview,” August 21, 2021,

https://rumble.com/vli96k-alessandro-fusillo-full-interview-planet-lockdown.html

71 Carlo Maria Viganò, “Full Interview,” September 11, 2021, https://rumble.com/vmclv7-archbishop-carlo-maria-vigan-full-interview-planet-lockdown.html

72 Pam Popper, “Full Interview,” December 29, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hirou0W8Pt8

73 Madej, “Interview.”

74 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

75 Fitts, “Second Interview.”

76 “Ludwig von Mises Institute,” Source Watch, https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ludwig_von_Mises_Institute

77 Jeffrey Deist, “Full Interview,” September 22, 2021, https://odysee.com/@PlanetLockdown:6/Mises-Institute-Deist:2

78 Joseph Solerno, “War on Cash,” June 28, 2021, https://rumble.com/vj6o5n-joseph-salerno-war-on-cash-planet-lockdown.html

79 Fusillo, “Interview.”

80 Mads Palsvig, “Full Interview Part 1,” April 27, 2021, https://rumble.com/vg5g7n-mads-palsvig-full-interview-part-1-planet-lockdown.html

81 Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that the modern nation-state is construct as a white possession and that Blackness and Indigeneity serve as epistemological and sense-making devices for the social reproduction of whiteness. See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2015).

82 Solerno, “Cash.”

83 John Stuart Mill, J. S. Mill: “On Liberty” and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

84 See Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); and John A. Lynch, The Origins of Bioethics: Remembering When Medicine Went Wrong (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019).

85 Stuckelberger, “Interview.”

86 Fitts, “Full.”

87 Fitts, “Full.”

88 Madej, “Interview.”

89 Held-Khawam, “Interview.”

90 Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Giner, “American Exceptionalism in a Democratic Idiom: Transacting the Mythos of Change in the 2008 Presidential Campaign,” Communication Studies 60, no. 4 (2009): 359–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970903109961; and Jeff Motter, “American Exceptionalism and the Rhetoric of Humanitarian Militarism: The Case of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Relief Effort,” Communication Studies 61, no. 5 (2010): 507–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2010.514834.

91 See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2020); and Robert T. Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

92 Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 64.

93 Kirt H. Wilson, “Dreams of Union, Days of Conflict: Communicating Social Justice and Civil Rights Memory in the Age of Barack Obama,” Carol C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, 2016 National Communication Association Conference, https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/annual-convention/NCA_Convention_Video_Archive_2016_Arnold_Lecture.pdf

94 Robert A. Williams Jr., Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2005).

95 Angela J. Davis, Policing the Black Man (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2017).

96 Fitts, “Full.”

97 Sharpe, In the Wake.

98 Fitts, “Interview.”

99 Fusillo, “Interview.”

100 Fusillo, “Interview.”

101 Viganò, “Interview.”

102 Viganò, “Interview.”

103 Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 20.

104 Solerno, “Cash.”

105 Brown, Ruins, 20.

106 Fitts, “Second.”

107 Deist, “Interview.”

108 Madej, “Interview.” Emphasis added.

109 Madej, “Interview.” Emphasis added.

110 Deist, “Interview.” Emphasis added.

111 Deist, “Interview.”

112 Fusillo, “Interview.”

113 Held-Khawam, “Interview.”

114 See Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

115 Matheson, “Jade Helm,” 139.

116 Melly, Empire, 11.

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Notes on contributors

Casey Ryan Kelly

Casey Ryan Kelly is Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln