When wildfire ripped through Hawaii’s Maui last August, the impact was devastating: a whole town reduced to ashes, more than 100 lives lost. The inferno was described as the “largest natural disaster in state history.”
But some on Instagram suggested, without evidence, there was something much more nefarious at play.
Wellness influencer @truth_crunchy_mama told her 37,000 followers to “stop blaming things on nature that were actually caused by the government.” They’re “going to keep setting wildfires until we all submit to their climate change agenda,” she said in another post.
Health influencer @drmercola suggested to his 504,000 followers whether, while the media focused on climate change, the fires might have been deliberately set to “to facilitate a land grab” to make the area a “smart city” — referring to a technology-focused urban design idea.
A natural parenting influencer, whose Instagram page is filled with soft-focus pictures of herself against pretty pastel backgrounds, inferred to her 76,000-strong community that Hawaii’s wildfires were started by “directed energy weapons” — systems which use energy such as laser beams.
These posters are all wellness influencers — a loosely-defined umbrella term for a wide range of accounts including yoga, lifestyle, fitness, alternative health and new age spirituality.
…
But for years there has been a merging of wellness, disinformation and conspiracy, as a subset of influencers use the backdrop of aesthetically pleasing, pastel-colored posts to spread much darker messages, weaving together alarming conspiracy theories with calls for users to buy their supplements or services.
This phenomenon exploded during the pandemic, when anti-vax sentiment took hold in large parts of the wellness community. As interest in the pandemic waned, experts say some wellness influencers have latched on to climate change to galvanize followers.
Their concern: Those influencers — some with hundreds of thousands of followers — are exposing new, and younger, audiences to a slew of misinformation and undermining efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
I don’t know about the other two, but Mercola belongs in prison. He is one of, if not the, biggest anti-vax propagandists out there. I can’t imagine how many deaths he’s responsible for. And not only is he a doctor, he’s a doctor who went to the University of Illinois Chicago Medical School, the largest medical school in the country. In other words, he’s intentionally killing people.
Put him in prison.
And he plays dumb by just “asking questions”:
Joseph Mercola, the man behind the @drmercola Instagram account, told CNN that “humans are absolutely impacting the environment and the climate.” When asked about his comments on Hawaii’s wildfires, he said he accepts the consensus that dry conditions and strong winds fueled the blaze. “It was never stated that it was definitely intentional,” he said, “although some have speculated that is a possibility.”
His climate posts are often framed in this way, not making definitive claims but rather asking questions like: Is the idea of eating insects “part of globalists’ ‘green agenda?’” Or advertising guest posts suggesting the “war on climate change” follows “the same playbook used by nefarious individuals who lust for complete power over the citizens.”
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Yours is fun, but It does have a real term, which is JAQing off.
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Can’t the school pull their diploma? If any of my kids were going into the medical field at least I know what college not to look at.
I have no idea, but I doubt it matters at this point. Dr. Phil has made an entire career out of being a psychologist despite having no license to practice psychology.
I forgot about that guy but the other one actually has a degree in the field he’s making crack pot claims in and is making the school look bad. I think I saw something about some schools pulling honery diplomas when something got controversial and the school didn’t want to have the association. I just wasn’t sure about earned degrees.
At the very least the doctor association should pull his license for giving bad advice. I thought that was a thing during the covid years.
Any influencer or youtuber who calls themselves doctor should immediately not be trusted. Also, 9 times out of ten they are a chiropractor, not an actual MD.
My wife fell down that well during covid. It took the death of a family member to finally make her get the shot.
Chiropractors should not be allowed to call themselves doctors. They ain’t doctors
The people that believe this are the real issue
Crazy people always existed, but it takes believers to cause a problem
I dunno, it seems crazy people with reach are the problem. Thats the part that’s new.
Gullible and easily influenced people are not new.
Thats the part that’s new.
…they said in a culture where nearly a third of humanity believes a dead person came back to life, floated up into the sky, and is one day going to float back down to judge everyone because of the reach a guy rambling on about trumpets and monsters had when he got his book included into an anthology being compiled by the Roman empire.
I read just a few lines of the article and I’m pretty sure I now have eyeball cancer.
