The Americans who think that coronavirus is a hoax

Big Momma Carol was her name on Twitter, and her bio read: “Conservative – Trump2020 – Illegals are criminals. The Democrats put them above Americans. Vote wisely. You and your kids’ future is at stake.” Her profile name included three stars; a signal some conservative American tweeters use to show support for three-star general Michael Flynn, the former security adviser to Donald Trump who pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Carol wasn’t usually the sort of person I’d follow, but she had popped up in my Twitter feed a few times as I watched protests against the coronavirus lockdown unfold in Michigan, Idaho, Colorado and Washington. #CoronavirusHoax, #Plandemic and #ChineseVirus were some of her favourite hashtags. “Same people rooting for the #hoax are the same people who claimed Trump-Russia collusion was a thing,” she tweeted one day. A couple of days later, when studies began to show the malaria drug chloroquine wasn’t effective in treating Covid-19, despite Trump’s assurances that it would be, she retweeted: “So are the Dr’s prescribing it purposely killing their patients because the president said something?”

As lockdown continued, Carol’s tweets became more forceful. She retweeted videos of people insulting the mainstream media. She asked a TV host who reported on the disappointing chloroquine trials to admit she was “really working for” China. She called for an ICU nurse who counter-protested against demonstrators in Arizona to be fired. She retweeted a friend claiming a vaccine was being developed by Bill Gates so he could “chip and track” everyone who received it.

Who was Big Momma Carol? There were times when she was so prolific that I wondered if she might be a bot. Her Twitter handle was “Carol” followed by a long, seemingly random string of numbers, and she had no declared location. Her background was a generic image of a deer on a mountain. But then I saw her tweet memes about people being “newly unemployed like me” and, on 20 April, she shared a video she had filmed herself at the Colorado protests (“Governor Jared Polis shut down Colorado economy. I lost my job. That’s why I participated in Operation Gridlock Colorado.”). It was perfectly possible she was simply prolific on social media because she was jobless, angry and confused.

I sent Carol a message telling her I was a reporter interested in speaking to Americans who were sceptical about the pandemic, and I’d love to have a phone conversation with her. “We could try email,” she replied, then added, “Is this for the Democrats? I don’t like being deceived.” I assured her that I did not work for any political organisation, and she gave me her email address. I was surprised to see she was using ProtonMail, the fully encrypted email server favoured by the ultra-secretive and ultra-paranoid, but I guessed she may have been advised to set something like that up if she had confided in anyone that a reporter had contacted her. I sent her a couple of emails, and a Twitter follow-up. She never responded.

At that point, I ran Carol’s Twitter profile through a tool called Botometer, developed by Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media. It declared that, on a scale of zero to five, where zero was “definitely a person” and five was “almost certainly a bot”, Carol scored just 0.6. For good measure, I reverse image-searched her profile picture to find out whether it was a stock image, but nothing came up. Big Momma Carol was, in all likelihood, a real human being. I felt slightly ashamed that I had suspected her of not being real just because I disagreed with a lot of her political opinions; accusing people with differing views of being bots is such a problem on some social media platforms now that it’s become a cliche. But it was clear that people like Carol who have been lining the streets outside state capitols across the country were more than purveyors of angry, conspiratorial hashtags – they were complex, nuanced people. She may not have wanted to speak to me outside the confines of social media, but others surely would.

So I moved on. And that’s how I found Indigo Leo.

I’m calling him Indigo Leo because, like most people who tweet about coronavirus being a hoax or the pandemic being overblown, Indigo had a deep distrust of the mainstream media (or the “MSM”) and didn’t want to reveal his name or the state he lived in (“I will say the southeast”) so I had to go by the name he used on Twitter.

“I’ve got your typical average American lifestyle,” Indigo Leo told me. “Children, wife, job. It wasn’t always like this for me, though. I’m 41. My life changed only five years ago. Easier said, I went from a criminal with drug use to a born-again Christian. I grew up in an Italian family (enough said!). When I turned my life over to Jesus Christ, things instantly changed for me. I’m unusual because I have a high intellect and an eidetic memory. Unusual in the fact that lying, cheating and robbing served me as my choice in lifestyle for so long.”

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Indigo Leo was polite and sincere in his religious conviction. He signed off messages with “Have a blessed night” and a prayer emoji. He wanted to know what had led me to him; I was following hashtags about coronavirus being a hoax, I told him. He said that his conversion from what he called “living wickedly” to “living righteously” had allowed him to “keep an open mind and unlearn junk” he’d been taught by society. “I’m personally apolitical,” he said, when I asked if he supported any particular party or politician. “All bureaucrats are corrupt and work to an evil agenda.” How about journalists? “As a reporter, I hope and pray you stick to the truth. Many are afraid of the truth... I personally would love a career in journalism or reporting. No one wants to hear or read what’s true but nonetheless I’d enjoy it very much.”

Indigo Leo had some eccentric views. He made more use of the word “sheeple” than is ever strictly necessary. He sent me memes claiming “viruses are not living, your body creates them to cleanse and protect itself from toxins” and images of phone towers overlaid with text about 5G causing “brain cancer” and “immune system dysfunction”. “AWAKEN TO OUR AWFUL SITUATION,” said an Instagram post he sent me. It featured a large, scary-looking injection next to text that claimed: “To your doctor, your decision to vaccinate your child might be worth $40,000 or much more, depending on the size of his or her practice.” Indigo Leo also said he firmly believed viruses “can’t be caught, only given” and that Covid-19 had been given to people via flu vaccines and “activated” through 5G. “See, Wuhan was the stomping grounds of both the biochemical lab owned by Bill Gates and the first large capacity activation of 5G,” he said.

Like Carol’s profile, Indigo Leo’s was full of retweets from very angry people admonishing their neighbours for “GIVING IN TO THIS BS” by wearing face masks, claiming that the Rothschilds were spreading mischief across the globe, and spreading misinformation from anti-vaxxers. “Voting doesn’t fix anything,” read one retweet. “Trump and the Democrats are on the same team.” The people on Indigo Leo’s timeline were just as angry at federal officials as they were at state officials; they thought “Zionist” Republicans were just as bad as Democrats and that international organisations like the WHO were conspiring with governments across the world to control their populations.

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It’s easy to dismiss someone like Indigo Leo, but harder to reckon with why he says what he’s saying. When oil prices fell, he retweeted a self-declared investigative journalist called Jake Morphonios declaring that his heart wasn’t about to break for Trump, Saudi Arabia, frackers, the Rockefellers or Bush and Cheney. Indigo Leo trusted nobody in charge – not the government, not the opposition, not the governments of foreign countries, and not the doctors on the frontline of the coronavirus crisis. His experience of the law was being arrested. His experience of healthcare was being charged through the nose for it by wealthy doctors who looked down on him. His experience of the government came through social media, where carefully chosen soundbites made everyone look equally useless, partisan and self-interested. People in his community got sick all the time and couldn’t afford healthcare – who cared about coronavirus? Indigo Leo had an interest in the truth, in education and self-improvement but few people ever gave him the time of day except those he followed on Twitter. He recited the number of people who die of flu per year from memory; he quoted Nikola Tesla.

The story of Indigo Leo seemed to me a story of wasted potential. He was thoughtful and often articulate. He’d taken the time to rehabilitate after a bad start in life. “Be blessed and protected while revealing the truth,” he told me, as he signed off his final message. There’s no denying that he lives in a country where he’s promised that if he just works hard, he’ll get rich; but he worked hard, and it turns out everyone else is making millions. Even worse, he lives in a country where health means money and illness means potential bankruptcy. In that context, why wouldn’t the powers that be want you unwell? Why wouldn’t they conspire to spread a disease? Why engage with what they say? Why vaccinate? Why vote?

To understand the complex relationship between religion and conspiracy theories for people like Indigo Leo, you have to go to the source: the self-styled preachers who combine a deep suspicion for the government with a deep reverence for the Bible. That’s what led me to Jesse Morrell, the only person willing to speak to me about this feature under their real name. Like Indigo Leo, Morrell said he “came to Jesus Christ out of drugs and crime”, and he now travels the country from his base in Texas with his “missionary family”, preaching on the streets and in the churches of the US and Canada. On his blog, Morrell describes himself as a “violent, drug-addicted felon” by the age of 15. In a juvenile detention centre in New Haven, Connecticut, Morrell was introduced to a “fiery” preacher who asked him if he knew he was headed straight to hell. Later, in rehab, he began sessions with a Christian counsellor. He prayed for his release and a few weeks later, his charges were dropped: it seemed to him that his prayers had been answered.

By Morrell’s early teens, he’d been arrested on charges relating to street fights, assault, marijuana and cocaine. He came to juvenile rehab vulnerable, and met Christians willing to open their arms to him. The new life he was able to lead with their guidance explains why he is so happy to call himself “born again”.

Over 14,000 people follow Jesse Morrell’s professional Facebook page, which features his smiling face in front of a microphone and a background showreel of his “greatest hits” while street preaching. “GOD HATES SIN” and “GOD PUNISHES SINNERS” are written on the placards he carries while spreading the word in his perfectly turned-out light brown suit and flat cap. On his website, he wears one particularly eye-catching placard which states: “WARNING! Fornicators, drunkards, sodomites, pot smokers, gangster rappers, immodest women, Darwinists, gamblers, feminists, socialists, abortionists, pornographers, homosexuals, jihadists, dirty dancers, hypocrites JUDGEMENT IS COMING”.

Morrell’s religion is hard line, fundamentalist and authoritative. Its rigid, rules-based modus operandi and its threats about coming to a violent end in hell have a lot in common with street justice. And although he is a preacher, his most shared article ever was written about the coronavirus pandemic earlier this month: a blog post he wrote was shared over 18,000 times and commented on by almost 4,000 people on Facebook. It’s a long and involved read, but it begins with a musing on Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases who often appears alongside President Trump at briefings: “I wonder why Fauci was so quick to want to shut down the booming Trump economy all across the nation, why he wants to keep it down for months and months, why he is resisting the drugs that doctors say are proving effective treatment already, why he made funny faces behind Trump’s back when the president mentioned ‘Deep State’, and why the liberal media freaked out when they didn’t see Fauci on stage... I wonder...” From there, Morrell dives into theories about bat colonies, laboratories in Wuhan, Bill Gates, hydrochloroquine, Democrats, the World Bank and the Ethiopian Communist Party. “I’d personally rather have the virus than the vaccine,” he adds.

Morrell was only too happy to talk when I contacted him about his well-shared article (the claims of which have since been debunked by fact-checking website PolitiFact); in fact, he even wrote up and published his own article about me interviewing him. I asked him about his personal politics and he told me: “I am a conservative, a Christian, a constitutionalist, and a capitalist that believes in the free market. I am a registered Republican only because they generally represent my values. But I am not into party politics. I am a man of principle, not party. I’m not a sheep that follows the herd.” (He did, however, tweet on 24 January: “I love our President! #Trump2020”.) He cautioned me that he was not the type of person to blindly follow Trump: “I have friends that fully supported Trump when he shut down the economy and America started to descend into a police state. They were cheerleaders for Trump even then simply because it was Trump. But I said that if it was Obama or Hillary who was doing these things, they would be freaking out.”

Morrell believes that he and his family “had the virus, and beat it” and that its dangers have been overstated (“this isn’t Ebola or the plague”). He believes that “more people will die from an economic collapse” than from Covid-19; that “small towns will never look the same”. And it’s difficult to argue that he’s wrong about it – some small towns will become ghost towns, or be plunged into unimaginable poverty, as industries they rely on make cuts and jobs and customers become scarce. Morrell told me, “I just want life to get back to normal. I was investing in real estate prior to this virus and economic crisis. I got distracted from that when the world started to fall apart.”

Morrell sent me a large volume of emails after we first spoke, containing long essays about Bill Gates bankrolling Wuhan labs. I told him that there didn’t seem to be much proof that was true, and he responded with links showing that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had given donations to a number of medical facilities in China in the past, including one in Wuhan. He was convinced that the Gates family were in cahoots with Dr Fauci, as well as other actors on the world stage. “I actually am writing a Wuhan lab timeline,” he wrote to me in his most recent email. “It’s very detailed and telling. Should be less than 50 pages, I hope.” It seems that his preaching now extends to preaching about the dangers of economic collapse and global communism aided by coronavirus. He felt a religious responsibility, he told me, to warn people of impending doom – just like it says you should do in the Bible.

Hundreds of miles away from where Jesse Morrell lives, Donald Trump stood up in front of a group of socially distanced journalists and said, during his nightly coronavirus briefing: “We were attacked. This was an attack. We have the greatest economy, and we built it in the last three years, three and a half years, we built it … The greatest ever in history and we had to close it.” Those who voted for him listened, including a woman I spoke to called Kim, who lives in West Virginia, a coal miner’s daughter and self-described “mountain mama”. “It’s a very rural state,” she told me, when I asked what life was like there right now. “I’m 46 with a 16-year-old son, and a stay-at-home mom since I married my husband 10 years ago … The community naturally keeps to themselves … Most people here despise the government, and just want to be left alone.”

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Despite the fact that Kim said West Virginians were suspicious of all government, her Twitter name mentioned supporting Trump, so I asked her about it. “Yes, I’m a Trump supporter,” she said. “He is the only reason I joined Twitter. I still don’t have any other social media.” (Kim has over 100,000 followers and regularly directs other Trump-supporting accounts to each other using the hashtag #ExtremeMAGAShoutout.) “He supports coal, which is big here. He also inspires patriotism, not racism like some people say. And people who love our country love him.” Had he met her expectations as president since she voted for him in 2016? “He has met most of them, yes. Except closing down the country. I think that was a huge mistake.”

At the same time as Kim and I conversed, Trump was tweeting that he wanted to “LIBERATE” states which had been on lockdown due to the pandemic. Presumably he’d realised that people like Kim, who thought he was a breath of fresh air for the country and referred to West Virginia’s lockdown as “the governor pulling that stay-at-home BS”, weren’t fans of social distancing. “Americans, well, most believe freedom is the cornerstone of our country,” she added. “And people who would like to take some of those freedoms away are loving this right now.”

Jesse Morrell had told me the same thing, but I’d never been able to get to the bottom of what either Kim, Indigo Leo or Morrell thought people had to gain from taking away Americans’ freedoms. Morrell dismissively told me that China wanted to spread communism throughout the globe. Kim told me: “What’s in it for them is control. That’s what it’s all about.” Like Morrell and Indigo Leo, she believed the virus was a glorified flu and that numbers had been exaggerated: “Even here in West Virginia, the local news says Covid-19 ‘related’ [when someone dies]. Suddenly there are no heart attacks, strokes – they are all being lumped in.”

Kim and I had a pleasant conversation about how important it was to speak to people who have other opinions; I told her I wasn’t a Trump fan myself, but I was interested in understanding the viewpoints of people who are. She was worried people in her community were being arrested for “praying” or “celebrating Easter in their cars” outside church. She retweeted a follower who said: “I’m one of the biggest supporters of the president but I’m not a sheep.” He, like other Republicans such as Rand Paul, was calling for the end of the lockdown. On that same day, Kim retweeted Breitbart’s latest video which claimed a “HIJACKED PANDEMIC” had been engineered to “TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHTS”. The people she conversed with for the next few hours were fellow Trump supporters confessing to be gripped with fear that their president – a supposed outsider and champion of the working class – had been absorbed into a corrupt global hierarchy or tricked into following the lead of shady conspirators. Jesse Morrell had been moved to speak up, he said, because he thought “Dr Fauci was giving the president bad advice”.

American society is full of people like Jesse Morrell, Indigo Leo, Kim and Carol. “These people have a high distrust of government and the mainstream media,” said David Ludden, a professor of psychology and expert in conspiracy theories at Gwinnett College in the state of Georgia, when I asked him what he thought about my interactions with them. “And to an extent, they have a reason. They have been lied to and taken advantage of before.” However, he added that he guessed everyone I had spoken to was “mostly rural and mostly lower-educated. It really has to do with a lack of critical thinking skills – and also, if they’re rural, a lack of world experience. They haven’t seen points of view different to their own, so it almost seems normal.”

As Ludden and I spoke, protests were erupting across the US in response to coronavirus lockdowns; armed protesters had stormed the statehouse in Michigan, and some governors had begun to end stay-at-home orders; other local sheriffs had started refusing to enforce them. It seemed the country was full of disenfranchised people now putting themselves at risk by exposing themselves to a deadly virus. Is there anything we can do to reach out to them, I asked Ludden. “Well, first of all, the good news is that they’re a minority – but yes, they’re very vocal. And generally speaking, you can’t reason people out of their beliefs because they haven’t been reasoned into them. We’re emotional creatures and we’re swayed by pleas to our emotions.” Then why aren’t all of us conspiracy theorists? “All of us have a worldview that we cherish and we are very resistant to changing it. But most of us will reluctantly modify when presented with overwhelming evidence. Others will very stubbornly stick to our prior beliefs and won’t accept anything to the contrary. We call that confirmation bias.”

Do we have to accept that groups of people who are deeply suspicious of the media and politicians to the point of hurting efforts during a pandemic will always be around then, I asked? “Well, yeah. But it comes down to effective leadership. You don’t have to suppress these people so much as take control of the situation, sympathise with them and then make an effort to unite. With this political climate, there is no counterweight in American society right now – instead there are politicians using the virus to get ahead, inflaming people… The US was highly polarised before this epidemic. If we had had stronger national unity, it might have been a different story.”

The people I’d spoken to were pleasant and polite, often compassionate and interesting, I told Ludden; they bore little resemblance to the angry faces on TV. I found it hard to square what they were saying with the protests they seemed to support, some of which had turned aggressive and frightening. “Think of football hooligans, lynchings, that sort of thing,” Ludden replied. “In those situations, people undergo depersonalisation, they lose all their individuality. It sounds like you were able to get them out of the group, get them back to being individuals and access the nice, normal person behind that.” That doesn’t mean they might not act unrecognisably in future when members of a group, he added.

“Again,” he said, “there is huge social confusion when you don’t have effective leadership. And this is a novel social experiment we’re going through right now … The fact is that the only solution to this epidemic would be if we all cooperate. But we’re so divided that it can’t unite us – it’s just exacerbated what was there before.”