COVID-19 conspiracy rhetoric and other primal fantasies

ABSTRACT Planet Lockdown, a documentary film, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic was manufactured by finance capitalists, Silicon Valley, and the pharmaceutical industry to microchip the population, consolidate global wealth, and enslave the population. Viral videos from the film have received tens of millions of engagements throughout social networks and media, constituting a major source of COVID-19 disinformation. This article argues that COVID-19 enslavement fantasies consummate white conservative fears of racial displacement, brought on by an impending demographic shift and greater visibility of antiracist activism throughout the early stages of the pandemic. I argue that Planet Lockdown’s preoccupation with so-called “modern slavery” restages a national primal scene to resecure white power as perceptions of its dominance wanes: a fantasy of the origins of the liberal subject that omits that subject’s relationship to slavery and anti-Blackness. By imagining slavery as a future threat to white selfhood rather than the structural organization of a society underwritten by anti-Blackness, COVID-19 conspiracy rhetoric facilitates a disavowal of the structural legacy of white supremacy.