Don’t Let the Linguistic Virus of Drivelmongers Undermine the Eradication of Covid-19

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

I’ve been researching conspiracy theories since my postgraduate years at university. My first book, Beyond the End of the World, debunked a number of them — much to the fury of people who were enchanted by the notion that the world would end in 2012 and those who were so obsessed by New World Order (NWO) beliefs that it seemed they might secretly relish the idea of mass global control.

In relation to 2012 ‘apocalypse’ beliefs, which emerged from flaky and sloppy engagement with Mayan calendrics by new-agers and opportunistic drivelmongers, the most interesting thing for me was the spectrum of fantasies that individuals associated with the ‘end-date’. The date became a blank screen on which people projected their wildest fantasies and darkest fears.

Anybody who had researched the December 2012 date properly knew the flaws in the notion of it being an ‘end-date’. For a start, there are much bigger Mayan cycles and the one that was ending would simply start again. But it was nonetheless social scientifically interesting to see what got projected onto the date. Alien invasion, the return of Jesus, Satan’s rule, a global NWO government run by the shadowy ‘Illuminati’, which in a troubling number of fantasies happened to be associated with Jews. These were some of the more common…