“Church of Bleach” family gets years in prison for deadly “miracle” solution

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 317 points –
“Church of Bleach” family gets years in prison for deadly “miracle” solution
arstechnica.com
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Throughout the trial, the Grenons represented themselves but did not speak in their defense, seemingly as a form of protest. They had court-appointed defense attorneys who stood by during the trial, but the Grenons did not allow them to speak for them.

In July, it took a Miami jury just 30 minutes to return the guilty verdicts for the four men, according to the Miami Herald.

The Herald reported that the men broke their silence during sentencing last week to plead for mercy and protest their prison terms.

Didn’t work out like ya hoped, huh?

The real miracle is that someone actually believed it.

I have the displeasure to know someone that believes in this. They believe in many other kinds of bullshit as well...

People ain't coping well with modern conditions.

People have always believed in crazy shit.

With each new communications technology Telegraph, voice recording, radio, Tv and the internet its proponents believed it would end ignorance and usher in an age of reason and enlightenment.

They have ben wrong, every time.

The only thing stronger than human ingenuity is human stupidity.

I think it's more like the contradiction of progress. Things feel less safe while they're statistically still safer than the past kind of thing. As humanity itself grows up with a more informed memory due to communications and education, there is far more to cringe at and change simply because more people observe it now.

People don't change as much as we like to pretend. It takes generations to fix bad things like bigotry and willful ignorance. The ability to communicate quickly across the entire globe for commoners is new.

Hell, I'm not even old enough to have grand kids and I remember thinking that talking to a European on the telephone would be really neat as a kid. Now I get to talk to them on the regular.

Humanity WILL wisen up some day, if we don't kill ourselves off, first. I hope some day it doesn't take entire generations to learn basic concepts like, "trickle down economics is a complete lie".

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It's worse than that... this church isn't the only one touting it, and people are giving it to their autistic kids to "cure" them.

They know exactly how to push the buttons of desperate and impressionable people.

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How did they come up with this, and why? Did someone told them to "drink bleach lol", then had an eureka moment?

Did someone told them to "drink bleach lol".

Um, Trump did several times when he was president

Not really, but the bleach and UV thing was even worse than most think.

All you can find now are videos of his dumb comments, but what led up to those was even dumber.

Trumps getting ready to take the stage and pauses to read a CDC infographic poster. A poster on how to sterilize surfaces. No lie.

Like an idiot child who didn't do his homework, he went up and there and just started spouting bullshit he had just read moments before.

And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.

The whole thing was like the "light house on fire to kill spider" meme...

Like sure, bleach kills COVID... it just also kills people too.

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Well, a certain ex-president made an offhand remark trying to belittle the seriousness of covid and compared actual medicine with disinfectant

The internet being the internet, the meme became "drink/inject bleach!" and I guess some people actually took it seriously despite its obvious insanity.

Drinking bleach as medicine has been around longer than Trump, this church was started in 2010 and I don't think they were pioneers.

It was (somehow) worse than belittling COVID. Trump took the tiny amount of knowledge he had on a subject ("this sign says bleach kills COVID in surfaces"), extrapolated it out into a "solution" that was obviously wrong in so many ways, and then insisted that he must be right because he's an Amazing Genius That's Smarter Than Anyone Else.

Then, the Trump sycophants online took his statement and ran with it because he's an Amazing Genius That's Smarter Than Anyone Else. If doctors told them that bleach was dangerous to use in that way, they were dismissed as liberal intellectual elites trying to stop them from getting the real COVID cure.

It's stupidity following stupidity while announcing themselves as the height of intelligence.

Bleach is a legitimate way of sanitizing drinking water. It's not a particularly long stretch to get from the sensible idea of properly using bleach to kill pathogens in your drinking water to the idiotic idea of using bleach to kill pathogens in your body. Even more so if you don't subscribe to germ theory, and bleach just "magically" improves the safety of your water supply.

Edit: disregard. Apparently, they were using an entirely different chemical. I can't even fathom how they could have thought it would work.

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Surprised that Alex Jones wasn't somehow involved in this scam.

Alex Jones seems to have stayed in the "supplement" market. That market is completely unregulated. You can pretty much put anything into pills and sell it as "supplements" without needing FDA approval.

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They are not feeling like #1, nor are they shining bright for everyone, but for a while they were living out their fantasy