Enough is enough.
A series of elected officials from the presidential majority denounced, Friday, November 13, the "conspiratorial propaganda" around the Covid-19 pandemic conveyed by the film "Hold-Up".
A 2h40 documentary, officially released on the Internet the day before, whose poster was even relayed by actress Sophie Marceau.
"It is not a docu, it is not journalism, it is a conspiratorial propaganda with a blockbuster budget. Shamefully supported by some wandering politicians", denounces the deputy president of the LREM deputies Coralie Dubost, on Twitter.
Funded by online jackpots, this documentary brings together a galaxy of skeptics and experts of all kinds attacking the measures taken against the Covid-19 crisis, until the final explanation of a global conspiracy whose pandemic would be the 'object.
In a column on the FranceSoir site, a regular relay of controversial positions regarding the pandemic, the documentary's producer, Christophe Cossé, describes a "virus no more offensive than another seasonal Covid" and protests against an "incredible and phenomenal enterprise of global manipulation ".
The film concentrates "all the international recipes of conspiracy. The stuff is licked. They managed to bring in a lot of speakers, using the best US recipes", denounces the former secretary of state for digital and LREM deputy Mounir Mahjoubi , at a time when the conspiratorial theories of the pro-Trump QAnon movement are making a lot of talk in the United States.
A "wave" of infox
The documentary was discussed within the presidential movement Wednesday evening, with differing opinions on the attention to be given to it.
"The risk when we talk about it is to advertise it", but "when a threshold of audience is exceeded, there in my opinion, it is necessary to say stop", estimates lCoralie Dubost.
The "infox", "it is no longer scum, it is becoming a wave," she fears, punctually advocating "common messages" from the different political parties "so that people can have benchmarks and not doubt ".
The deputy does not ambition "to address convinced conspirators", it is "too late", but to those who are "in doubt", to whom we can say "we are talking about it" and who "listen" .
The documentary "Hold-Up" is "an argumentative millefeuille", which tries to convince with a "mass effect" of arguments, analyzes the digital specialist Tristan Mendès France.
The "problem" for him is that the "counter-poison" of "fact-checking" will come after the viral wave "of online documentary and" the damage will be done ".
Skepticism and criticism of "one thought"
Philippe Gosselin, deputy LR, explains receiving daily messages "a little conspiratorial, in particular against the wearing of the mask. It remains relatively few people, but it is not negligible. This morning, it was a mishmash that spoke masks and contesting the election of Joe Biden ".
"We are trying to engage in dialogue. The answer does not satisfy people, but they are sensitive to the fact of having been able to say what they had on their mind," he testifies.
The president of the Agir Ensemble group, Olivier Becht, an ally of the majority, has already received "multiple messages about the film 'Hold-Up'", from "people who are in a real denial of reality".
During the "first wave", which had hit his Haut-Rhin territory hard, the Alsatian elected official remembers "people of a good intellectual level, a high school teacher for example, who told me that it was all made up. and that the people at the Colmar field hospital were Hollywood actors ".
"We need pedagogy and people can see. It is very complicated to implement. This raises the question of the discrediting of the words of political leaders and the media," he insists.
In "Hold-Up", the media are thus strongly singled out.
Asked by AFP, one of the speakers in the film, ex-LREM deputy Martine Wonner (Libertés et Territoires group) criticizes a "single thought" on the Covid: "Me, I am not talking about manipulation at all, but about lack of balanced information, ”she said.
This Alsatian elected official, a psychiatrist by profession, has created controversy in recent weeks by believing that wearing a mask "is absolutely useless" or by asking the difference between Covid and "huge flu".
With AFP
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