Culture

Pete Evans Goes Off The Deep End, Is Now Sharing Completely Bonkers Conspiracy Theories

He's here to educate you on the "off-planet human slave trade", "Tibetan rainbow body ascension" and the mainstream media's cover-up of celebrity executions.

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Fresh from being booted from his cushy $800,000 a year job, celebrity chef Pete Evans has made the natural progression from sharing bone broth recipes to sharing insane rightwing conspiracy theories on Instagram.

A pro-Trump meme straight from the US president’s page is the least bizarre part of his latest Insta-story — Evans also shared several QAnon screenshots, including one that claims the media are using “code words” like “tested positive for CV” to indicate people like celebrities, billionaires and politicians are being arrested and executed. EXECUTED.

Another image features a smorgasbord of chaotic phrases, including, “inner Earth civilisations”, “off-planet human slave trade”, “pizzagate” and “cabal deep state Illuminati”.

Pete has a history of sharing misinformation — last month he was fined $25,000 for trying to sell $15,000 light machines he claimed could cure coronavirus. And who can forget the infamous “bone broth” saga, which his cookbook advocated feeding to babies (despite doctors emphatically saying it was dangerous for them).

On the fence about whether to trust doctors who have dedicated years of study to becoming experts in their field, or a chef who once told someone dairy removes calcium from bones? Trust the doctors, guys. For the sake of humanity, please trust the goddam doctors.

Ironically, the man who profits off his celebrity status by selling nonsense products encouraged people to be wary of people with “their own agendas” in another caption shared to his story.

“This is a very exciting time in human history and we can all manifest our own reality, or we can hand that over to others with their own agendas and conflict of interests. Do you trust the experts?” he wrote.

He also shared a recommendation for his doco The Magic Pill, which has already been slammed for claiming a special diet can cure autism and cancer.

Evans has been discredited over and over again over the years — something he references in that same caption: “I have personally seen what the mainstream media have “attempted” to do with me over the years”.

Of course, anyone with a victim mentality and a high profile is like crack to conspiracy theorists, who tend to gravitate towards discredited “experts” who get kudos for “rebelling” against the system.

That’s more or less how the whole concept of QAnon began in the first place.

What Is QAnon?

The QAnon fringe movement began in the internet’s dumpster fire, 4chan, back in 2017.

An anonymous user known as Q began claiming they were a United States government insider with high-level security clearance, and started posting “crumbs” of intel for people to decode.

The QAnon community spread from 4chan to 8chan, to Reddit and YouTube and finally to the mainstream Instagram accounts of Pete Evans and his 232,000 followers.

It’s responsible for a huge range of right-wing conspiracy theories ranging from your run-of-the-mill conspiracies (a cabal of global elites are responsible for all the evil in the world) through to your full blown incoherent ramblings (the Democratic Party are operating a child sex ring in the basement of a pizza shop). If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, The Daily Beast has a more detailed explainer.

More recently QAnon has dedicated itself to spreading coronavirus misinformation and trying to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic.

Theories have ranged wildly from the virus being a Chinese bio-weapon, the virus being a deep-state plot to damage Trump’s re-election chances, and the virus being a hoax made up to damage the economy.

Experts are growingly increasingly concerned these kinds of conspiracy theories are leading to complacency that could see the virus spread even faster — thereby killing more people.

Already we’ve seen rallies pop up across the US and Europe — two small protest groups even popped up in Sydney and Melbourne over the weekend, ignoring social distancing rules to do so.

Even Australia’s chief medical officer, Prof Brendan Murphy said he’d been subject to some of the “silly misinformation” directly.

“I have unfortunately received a lot of communication from these conspiracy theorists myself,” he said, directly referencing the theory that 5G is to blame.

“It is complete nonsense.”