Disruptions at testing center suggest online conspiracies
may be creeping into real life
Fri April 10, 2020
"Last Saturday, a man arrived at the Spokane County coronavirus testing center at the fairgrounds on a motorcycle, and made it past the first line of screeners.
He said he wanted to be screened and possibly tested for the virus, Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said. He entered the line of vehicles moving toward the tented zones, and then moved outside that line.
“He was just looking around,” Knezovich said.
When told he had to leave if he was not there to be screened, the man apparently began filming things at the site with his cellphone. He refused to stop until sheriff’s deputies intervened and hustled him away.
The sheriff said it was one of three “very odd” disruptions at the testing site last Friday and Saturday – the weekend that the #FilmYourHospital movement
spawned in the most conspiracy-sickened quadrants of the internet, had become a call to action.
None of the disruptions did great damage to operations at the testing site, though each presented a diversion that officials and law enforcement had to manage. The other two disruptions Knezovich cited were “very odd,” but didn’t suggest an affinity with the hospital-filming nonsense – other than the timing, perhaps, he said.
That week, if you remember, that
(Film Your Hospital)movement put out a call for people
to go out and do this
he said.
Last Friday, a woman was screened and made it through the line to be tested, then abruptly decided to drive through the barricades, before being routed safely away. The next day, a man driving a pickup came in and refused to leave after being told he wouldn’t be tested. He departed when he was told deputies were on the way.
Knezovich has been keeping an eye on the conspiracy-fueled chambers of anti-government groups since the stay-home orders began. He said there’s been a lot of talk about the government implementing martial law and many other examples of
some people on the extreme right claiming this is all a hoax.
==This isn’t a hoax.
The movement to film medical facilities and “expose” the fact that their parking lots aren’t busy comes from the swampiest bogs of the modern misinformation movement. The former radio host and Fox pundit Todd Starnes – who lost his radio show after agreeing with a guest that Democrats worship the demon god Moloch – wrote a piece minimizing the coronavirus impact at the very moment that images of body bags lining hallways in New York City hospitals were making the rounds.
He did this by sharing photos of hospitals whose empty parking lots did not seem, to Starnes’ wise gaze, to reflect the crisis. Another conspiracy theorist, DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero, drove past a couple of Los Angeles hospitals and determined, from the outside, that this was all no big deal, NBC News reported.
“They are very quiet & EMPTY,” Tesoriero wrote on Twitter. “We are not being told the truth. Why?? Let’s get #FilmYour Hospital trending. We ARE the news now. We can’t trust the news. Post pics of ur hospital here!”
That was retweeted 20,000 times.
It was boosted on QAnon, home of the ludicrous Pizzagate
conspiracy. Well over 9,000 people joined a Facebook group. Hundreds of viewers liked one guy’s YouTube video of the exterior of a Chicago hospital with few cars in the parking lot, concluding “the hospital is empty.”
A dude in Tallahassee, Florida, posted a video, titled “12th DAY OF THIS HOAX,” showing few cars in a parking lot, and writing, “If your local news is stating the hospitals are overrun or filled to capacity, do not simply take their word for it, go and film it and then share it.”
Someone did the same thing in Delaware; a newspaper corrected the record succinctly: “Inside is busy. Outside is not.”
Is further explanation required? This is a true Idiocracy moment – teams of self-described patriots sharing photos and videos of the parking lots of hospitals, which are of course not full right now, and using that to make claims about the situation inside the hospitals.
Knezovich is well aware that we live among a lot of people who are susceptible to this kind of thing. He’s long called it out in public, and named names to a degree far more than any other Republican in this area. For it, he’s been demonized and savaged inside what we might call Matt Shea World.
Now he is monitoring the conversations of that world online, and it’s full of conspiracies about martial law and other coming apocalypses – and arming, arming, arming yourself."
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/apr/10/shawn-vestal-disruptions-at-testing-center-suggest/