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Conspiracy theorists and mass casualty events: name a more iconic duo. I’ll wait. Just kidding I won’t wait, I’m just going to keep talking.
First, let’s talk about what we know happened: in the early hours of the morning of Tuesday, March 26, a container ship known as the Dali radioed in a mayday call saying they had lost power shortly after leaving the port of Baltimore. The ship then drifted into a support for the Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing it to collapse and sending people and vehicles tumbling into the Patapsco River. As of this recording, five people are still missing and presumed dead.
Two people were rescued from the water, including one who actually refused medical treatment. When I heard that, I just figured they were some kind of badass, but a friend of mine pointed out it would be a very American story if a guy fell almost 200 feet from collapsing infrastructure only to refuse medical treatment because he doesn’t want to end up bankrupt from the pharmaceutical industry. You know what? This story is sad enough as it is. Let’s just say the guy was a badass.
Obviously, this was all very big and scary, and so no one really knew exactly what had happened while it was still happening. Why did the ship lose power? As of this recording the general public still doesn’t know, though authorities have started their investigation and reassured us that it was nothing intentional or nefarious, like a terrorist attack.
As I’ve said before, conspiracy theories thrive when fear is high and information is low, and so that announcement was not enough to stop them. Men’s rights activist and credibly accused rapist Andrew Tate wisely announced that it looked like a “cyber attack” to him, because the “lights go off and it deliberately steers towards the bridge supports.” You might wonder why Tate is an expert on this, but it’s obvious if you think about it: he and his brother have been charged with human trafficking, so clearly they were in the process of expanding their empire to the point that they were preparing to use shipping containers to move large numbers of women to Romania, giving them a comprehensive knowledge of the shipping industry. Simple. Just like the second season of The Wire.
It’s barely worth fact checking, because the idea that this is a terrorist attack is ridiculous at its core: what shit ass terrorist attacks a bridge at 1:30 in the morning when the only people on it were construction workers? A quick aside on that point, traffic was obviously minimal due to the time of day but thanks to the ship’s mayday, authorities had a few precious minutes to stop people from driving over the bridge and they managed to do it, which is incredible. They definitely saved a few extra lives.
But back to the “cyber-attack,” I have to add, what cargo ship has its navigation able to be controlled over the internet, especially while leaving port? Is that a thing? I don’t know, actually, I’m not a human trafficker OR a shipping magnate but it seems implausible.
But despite obvious problems with this cyber-attack claim making it unnecessary to fact check, fact check we will, anyway. And because I know just about nothing about any of this, let’s turn to Dr. Andrew Thaler of Southern Fried Science, who points out that “Ship tracks are public data and the Marine AIS tracks for the MV Dali are available. There is no sharp turn towards the pylon.” He then links to Sal Mercogliano of the What is Going on with Shipping YouTube channel, and I’ve watched a few of his videos and highly recommend them if you’d like to actually start to feel like a maritime shipping expert (9:05).
As always, if you’re watching me speak these words and want to click through to learn more, you can find the full transcript and links to everything available for free on my Patreon, which is linked below in the doobly do.
Despite all these issues with Andrew Tate’s hypothesis, luminaries like Alex Jones have leapt on it anyway, with Jones stating matter-of-factly that “WW3 has already started.” Ah, okay Alex. Sure.
Then of course we have kooks claiming that even though we have a very clear video showing a 950,000 TON ship that’s as long as a 10 story building ramming into the bridge, surely the bridge was actually wired to explode all on its own, for…some reason? This is basically just 9/11 Trutherism repackaged: yes, we do have video of two commercial planes flying into the Twin Towers, but for extremely complicated reasons let’s pretend those were holograms or something and IN FACT the towers fell due to explosives. By the way, if you haven’t figured it out on all your own, those electric sparks are, in fact, electricity from the wires that power the lights on the bridge. How do these people think lights light up on bridges? Is it fairy dust? Is it the ghosts of all the libs who got vaccinated and died suddenly and mysteriously? Is that what powers the lights? Vaccine ghosts?
Which brings me to my favorite conspiracy theory, which is that wokeness caused this disaster:
“Breaking News
BLM convinced Baltimore to Defund the police,
So The 3 police officers left on the force were too busy with violent crime calls to show up to the Baltimore Harbor Patapsco River Francis Scott Keys bridge is gone.
Call a crisis counselor”
Okay, a few points. First, I have to point out that the cops actually did an incredible job stopping the bridge traffic before the ship crashed. Like, truly, incredible job, give those cops some awards.
Second, Baltimore did not, in fact, defund their police department. The Black Lives Matter protests began in May of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, and it’s true that protests in Baltimore led to the city slashing the budget by $22 million. One year later, they increased the budget by $28 million, to about $555 million. This year, the budget was increased again, to $594.5 million, or more than $1,000 per Baltimore resident. Despite all that money, homicides in the city remain high, clearance rate is lower than ever, and corruption remains rampant.
Okay. And third, let’s talk logistics. How would more cops have solved this problem? Would they have been able to erect a very large crossing guard “STOP” sign that the ship would have legally had to obey? Would they have been able to do a serious investigation that found the ship was about to go rogue, and so arrest the ship before it left the port? Or would they have flung themselves into the Patapsco River, forming a solid mass of drowned cops that would have stopped the 950,000-ton ship before it hit the bridge? The water under the bridge is about 50 feet deep, so even if we assume the average Baltimore police officer is a generous two feet deep, it would take 100 cops laying on top of each other to even get to the surface, and that’s only a single layer. Math isn’t my strong suit, so if any of you would like to figure out how many cops it would take to stop a cargo ship, please let me know in the comments. I’m very curious.
Okay, one more conspiracy: diversity, equity, and inclusion, i.e. WOKENESS CAUSED THIS DISASTER!
“Shipping giant Maersk confirmed that the Dali ship, operated and managed by Synergy Marine Group, collided with the Francis Scott Key bridge in Maryland around
1:27 AM.
Synergy Marine Group promotes DEI in their company.
Did anti-white business practices cause this disaster?”
Okay. So. Synergy Marine Group is a SINGAPOREAN COMPANY. They are based in Singapore. A country in Southeast Asia. White people make up about 2.4% of the population there. A Singaporean company interested in racial diversity would not be “anti-white,” you fucking dingus.
Anyway, those are just a few of the conspiracies I’ve seen flying around on this. As for what actually happened, we probably won’t know until the full investigation is complete. Mercogliano mentioned that the ship has been inspected recently in the US and prior in various other countries, and always passed with flying colors. Reading a few studies, I learned that apparently the shipping industry has improved its safety record over the past decade, and these days the most common accident is a fire on board. I’ve heard experts say that a fire on board could easily have caused this.
All that said, it is worth noting that the ship was chartered by the shipping company Maersk, which was sanctioned by the Labor Department just 8 months ago for retaliating against a company whistleblower, and for instituting an anti-whistleblower policy that required employees report potential safety violations to the company before alerting the appropriate authorities like the Coast Guard. Again, Maersk only chartered this ship, they didn’t build it. But still, that seems like relevant information that people should know about, and slightly more relevant than Synergy Marine Group’s supposed commitment to diversity or how many cops were on duty at the harbor that night.
