The Pointless Death of Cirsten Weldon
The Politics of Fantasy (1)
Until last week I hadn’t heard of Cirsten Weldon. I didn’t know that she was a Singaporan-American interior designer and décor house sales agent in her fifties, based in Florida. I wasn’t aware that she was also an ‘author, influencer and actress’ with a 16.2k following on Instagram, where she shared ‘insights into her career and personal life.’
At the beginning of January, Weldon shared a photograph of herself in hospital wearing an oxygen mask, accompanied by a caption explaining that she ‘almost died at hospital in CA from bacterial pneumonia.’ The reason I know this is because on 6 January, she died in hospital, and it wasn’t bacterial pneumonia that killed her, but COVID-19.
That was how I discovered that Weldon was what The Daily Beast called a ‘QAnon promoter’ who ‘recorded videos with Roseanne Barr, and who urged both her followers and strangers she passed on the street not to take the COVID vaccine’. In addition to her appearances on podcasts and rightwing Youtube videos, Weldon alsod published a book called Intel Drops, in which she exposed what one website calls ‘several elite organisations and their self-propelling idiosyncratic dogmas.’
These organisations apparently included CNN, the CIA and Newsweek, where Weldon revealed various ‘loopholes’ to her followers. Weldon is generally described as a ‘conservative’ - a word that means so much more in the second decade of the 21st century than anything that Edmund Burke once imagined - and does not begin to do justice to the unhinged lunacy of her own beliefs and those of the ecosphere that she catered for.
Weldon once accused Joe Biden of accepting billions of dollars from China to test ‘weather warfare weapons’ in the US, which she believed had caused last year’s winter storm in Texas. In an appearance on a far-right and pro-QAnon podcast called Up Front in The Prophetic, she claimed that Hilary Clinton died last year of ‘kuru, a rare brain-wasting disease associated with cannibalism.
In the same podcast, Weldon also claimed that Angela Merkel suffered from the same disease, along with Clinton’s former campaign manager John Podesta and former FBI director James Comey. As for George Soros – because of course he must appear in narratives of this kind – he died years ago, and any person bearing any resemblance to him , according to Weldon, is ‘a clone.’
David Icke, eat your heart out, because the very least that can be said about Weldon’s storylines is that they lack narrative consistency. In a previous public appearance she claimed that the Clintons had both been executed some years ago, and that Trump would soon be offering pay-for-view footage of their executions as part of his secret war against ‘Satanic Democrats’.
Nice. And let no one doubt that there are many Americans who would pay for such a spectacle. No one will be surprised to hear that Weldon has called for Dr Anthony Fauci to be ‘hung from a rope’; that she once harassed people waiting for coronavirus vaccines in a video in which she yelled ‘The vaccines kill, don’t get it! This is how gullible these idiots are. They’re all getting vaccine!’
As Newsweek puts it, ‘there is zero evidence that Clinton is dead’. There is however, plenty of evidence that Weldon is. In her last video, posted in late December, she was coughing and barely able to complete a rant about ‘patriots overthrowing the US government’.
This wouldn’t have happened if Weldon had taken the vaccine that she told others not to take. And now she has been hoist on her own petard - another rightwinger operating on the outer fringes of 21st century American politics, where paranoid conspiracy theories overlap with COVID denialism, and pro-Trumpism, evangelical religious fervor and white supremacist angst, who has fallen victim not just to the disease, but to their own warped socipathic politics.
Some might say good riddance, or be tempted to believe in karma, but the real tragedy of Cirsten Weldon is not just her own stupidity, her fanaticism, or her grift, but the fact that there are so many people like her, in a modern democracy where mass education appears to have entirely failed to reach substantial swathes of the population.
Some of Weldon’s friends shared her beliefs to the point when they refused to allow her death-by-covid to interfere with what they believed, and her passing was greeted with messages like this:
Flannery O’Connor, the great exponent of ‘Southern Gothic’, would not have been surprised by the febrile religiosity of this garbled encononium, but the reference to Weldon’s ‘truth’ owes more to the 21st century than the 20th.
Another message notes simply that ‘we’ll miss her Intel’, to which one wants to reply, very clearly and slowly, as if talking to a toddler, that Hilary Clinton’s reported death from a cannibalism disease is not ‘Intel’, but the purest, flat-out coyote howling gibberish that might be acceptable if you swallowed a tab of orange sunshine at the Burning Man festival, but really ought to enjoy no more legitimacy in any other sphere beyond the desert of your own mind.
And then there is the friend who claimed that Weldon hadn’t actually died of COVID, and wrote that she had been
healing, and then I get…all these messages right now saying she’s dead…It’s just so mysterious to me…They killed…I know they did…Something is suspicious…She was just getting too close.
Sure pal. Just too close. And another woman wrote on Facebook.
She died in a California Hospital today of bacterial pneumonia. She was deliberately not allowed the kinds of meds that would help her heal. DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO NOT GO IN A HOSPITAL NOW!!
And another fan named Chris Thomas wrote on Facebook
R.I.P. Cirsten Weldon aka CirstenW -Jan.6 😢 Cirsten W was a well known activist and Intel gatherer/ journalist. Known mostly for finding credible information exposing pedophiles and high ranking gov officials like the Clinton’s, Jeffrey epstein, Bidens, list goes on. You can add her death to the 50 mysterious deaths linked back to people exposing the Clintons. I knew deep down they would eventually come for her…she knew too much. And she had credible sources….you will be missed, RIP Cirsten- glad you knew Jesus.
I really doubt that Jesus would feel the same way, or that he would approve of the ‘friends’ who threatened the medical staff at Weldon’s hospital with violence, such as the ‘Patriot Streetfighter’ who said that the medical staff who treated Weldon should be sentenced to death by military tribunal, because ‘If it’s not done in a military tribunal then it’s going to be done in the street eventually and not to my wishes.’
For connoisseurs of dystopian humour, Weldon’s adventures in conspiracyland and the ridiculous death that resulted from these journeys is dark comedy gold, but I’m not here to mock or laugh about anyone’s death - even people who really did have it coming.
Because the tragic idiocy that killed Weldon is part of a wider cultural and political shift - empowered but not caused by Trumpism - that is transforming 21st century politics and American politics in particular for the worse.
It’s a shift that poses a direct threat to democratic coexistence, that has undermined the attempts of the US and other governments to respond effectively to the pandemic, and will impede our attempts in the future to respond effectively to climate change.
It is creating and accentuating divisions in society that make it difficult, if not impossible to realise any coherent notion of the common good - and without that central aspiration, democracies wither, justice becomes ever more unrealisable, and ultimately new forms of tyranny beckon that echo tyrannies of the past.
In short, the wacky world that killed Cirsten Weldon is something that we need to take seriously. We need to consider how such things have become possible, to reflect on how we how we got here, and where we might be going, and how we might get to a better place, and that is what I intend to do in the pieces that follow.