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Seeking the truth during the COVID-19 war And what about sex, baby? By KAREN OCAMB Jewel Thais-Williams said she’d call back. She was on the other line and had been inundated with calls asking how she was doing after eye surgery. Three hours later, the almost 81-year-old LGBTQ icon was pumped, angry, going on and on about conspiracy theories – how “The Eyes of Darkness” had predicted the coronavirus in 1981 and how Donald Trump was using the virus or COVID-19 to spread fear and hate for his own political gain, just like in “The 9th Wave,” a book she read as a 12-year-old that still haunted her. The book is about political machinations that “frighten old people about having what they have now taken away that they vote for this guy.” And while one eye was patched from surgery that day, the other one was fixed on cable news as President Trump declared a state of emergency. “How do we really know what’s going on without having tests to let us know?” she asked insistently. And without widespread testing to know if the virus is real and who’s got it where and telling everyone to be afraid and shelter in place and not to have gatherings of more than 10 people, Thais-Williams added, “there are no more protests and law enforcement can just arrest people on the spot.” “This is happening to keep Trump in office,” she said. “Follow the money. We could have had pop up clinics by now. We could have converted Mobile HIV Testing vans to do coronavirus testing. But instead, Trump meets with bankers and other money men. What’s the alternative motive here?”
It was Tuesday night and former Vice President Joe Biden was cruising to victory in three more Democratic primary states. Thais-Williams was watching that, too. She’d switched from Elizabeth Warren to Michael Bloomberg, then back to Warren but was now fully onboard with Biden. “He’s the same decent, honest guy who looked me in the eye when we were talking,” she says, recalling their meeting at a White House Pride party. “Eyes are the window of the soul and that was the biggest thing between me and Joe – the dude is real. That’s what I see.” The phone call ended agreeing to disagree about conspiracy theories. But the next day, March 18, Trump took to the White House podium and insisted that the virus came from China, so it is “the Chinese virus,” a term he declared is “not racist at all.” Trump – a man who used “bone spurs” as an excuse to avoid service during the Vietnam War – also declared himself a “wartime president” in this war on the coronavirus, saying he was invoking the Defense Production Act “in case we need it.” The Korean War-era law enable presidents “to take extraordinary action to force American industry to ramp up production of equipment needed for national security,” according to Time.com. Knowing Trump listens to rightwing conspiracy theorists, it looks like Thais-Williams’ network of sources may not have been that far off. The plot of “Eyes of the Darkness” involves a Chinese military lab that manufactures a deadly virus in Wuhan city.
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JEWEL THAIS-WILLIAMS and VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN (Photo by Jamie McGonnigal)
Eerily, this theory feels like it might hatch into something akin to the fabricated “weapons of mass destruction” fiction that had America launch a first “Shock and Awe” strike against a foreign country and start the war against Iraq. The bottom line: with a president who consistently, boldly and unabashedly lies for his own self-aggrandizement, how is the American public supposed to believe anything he says – about anything, let alone a very real new virus that is claiming thousands of lives across the globe? All the respected experts say “test, test, test” to find out where
the virus is being spread. But the administration has failed on every front: containment is no longer applicable and mitigation is voluntary. And yet, the American people themselves seem to be taking on the historic and mighty task bungled by the Trump administration. Though still, confusion reigns. “This is serious. We have an emergency,” trusted Rep. Maxine Waters told MSNBC. “We have a real serious problem with testing. First of all, we have so many people who need testing who can’t get testing.” Continues on page 08