May 13, 2020 02:01 PM UTC

Colorado House GOP CoS Pushes "Plandemic" Fake News

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• by: Colorado Pols

Here’s a recent Facebook post by Colorado House Minority Chief of Staff Jim Pfaff. Pfaff wants you to watch a video that’s been circulating in far-right conspiracy forums of all kinds for a number of weeks now, called Plandemic–which asserts that the ongoing COVID-19 global disease outbreak is, like the Trilaterial Commission, the Masked Singer, and the subway under Denver International Airport, not at all what it seems. It’s not easy to find this video since uploads of it are taken down by responsible New World Order collaborator media platforms as fast as they can go up.

In case you were wondering, as the Los Angeles Times reports, Plandemic is a mashup of googly-eyed nonsense, which is why responsible media platforms are taking it down:

Presented uncritically as a courageous whistleblower, Mikovits lobs a string of unsubstantiated claims, including that the virus was developed in laboratories in China and the U.S., that health officials are deliberately inflating COVID-19 statistics and, most dangerously, that wearing a mask could increase one’s chances of “getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expression.”

…On May 6, in an effort to tamp down the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, YouTube and Facebook pulled down Willis’ video. “Suggesting that wearing a mask can make you sick could lead to imminent harm so we’ve removed the video,” a Facebook representative said. [Pols emphasis]

“Plandemic” was lambasted as the latest manifestation of a toxic internet fever swamp that breeds irrational fantasies and rampant pseudoscience. But community spread had already set in.

Politifact put a finer point on that whole “irrational fantasies and rampant pseudoscience” thing:

The film was produced by Elevate, a California production company run by Mikki Willis, who has more than 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. The video is billed as part one of an upcoming documentary.

Many of Willis’ videos highlight conspiracy theories. In one clip, Willis’ young son says Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. In another, Willis floats a debunked conspiracy that the coronavirus was “intentionally released.”

In “Plandemic,” Willis interviews Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former scientist at the National Cancer Institute. Mikovits, before her work was discredited, was lauded in the late 2000s for her research on chronic fatigue syndrome. Mikovits makes several claims that are either unsupported or outright false.

Jim Pfaff has a well-earned reputation for wildly un-mainstream views that are variably embraced and kept at arm’s length by Colorado House Republican leadership. That Pfaff reports directly to Minority Leader Pat Neville, who has been making a hard run at Rep. Ken Buck in recent weeks for the title of Colorado’s most irresponsible elected blowhard, doesn’t bode well for Republicans who would prefer to avoid the reputational harm that accompanies being a member of the same party as people like Jim Pfaff.

But if Buck and Neville (or Donald Trump) aren’t enough to affront you, Pfaff probably won’t either.