The flu pandemic that hit from 1918 to 1920 ranked as one of the most miserable events in the history of the United States, but it left very little cultural impact: no novel that is still read today, no great movie. Unlike with the other calamities of the early twentieth century, artists had little meaning to plumb in the suffering. Americans could grasp the lessons easily: life is arbitrary and often cruel; the human body is very frail, and there are some things from which it cannot be protected.

So it is with COVID-19, which may end up ranking as the fifth-deadliest pandemic in history. Apart from occasional reminiscing about how strange the spring of 2020 was, many of us would like to not talk about it anymore, thank you very much. But COVID conspiracists, the folks who think the pandemic wasn’t “real,” will be living in 2020 for the rest of their lives. There’s a remarkable irony here. In the spring of 2020, while most  folks were sadly huddling at home, the COVID conspiracist was yelling that they should be at the beach. Now everyone’s at the beach, and the anti-vaxxer is still yelling about COVID.

Last weekend, a conclave of COVID conspiracists descended on Austin to celebrate their continued dedication to the Cause at the local premiere of Plandemic: The Musical, a twenty-minute offering by California filmmaker Mikki Willis, who struck gold during the pandemic with his Plandemic series of YouTube videos. Willis, a dad from Ojai with watery blue eyes and a crunchy California-dude look about him, has nurtured a long-standing suspicion of “the minions of Big Pharma.” He blames the death of his brother on the early HIV drug AZT. The government funded the development of the drug, partly under the direction of one Anthony Fauci, which helped Willis smell a rat when the COVID response kicked into gear.

On May 4, 2020, Willis dropped the first installment of Plandemic online, where it hit like lightning. In the first offering, and in subsequent ones, various interviewees predict that the pandemic response is a Trojan horse to establish a new world order, and Willis argues that the authoritarian forces behind the pandemic will never relinquish their new powers. Among the supporting evidence cited is that Bill Gates had wealthy parents and Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, is German.

The first installment featured a 26-minute interview with a scientist named Judy Mikovits, framed around what was essentially an HR dispute with a lab she led and was then fired from. You could watch the whole exchange without realizing that Mikovits’s work had nothing to do with the coronavirus; her concern was the cause of a condition called chronic fatigue syndrome, which she attributed to a specific retrovirus but much of the scientific community does not. Willis introduces Mikovits as a truth-teller about Big Pharma who was persecuted by the Man, though the truth she tells is not really elaborated on. The conversation moves to COVID without the pandemic’s relationship to her story being adequately explained.

But Plandemic commits a worse sin than being propaganda: it’s boring. Only in a climate in which folks are stuck at home and scared out of their minds could this have racked up millions of views. The follow-ups are much longer and even more tendentious, and they get a bit recursive. The second Plandemic is more than an hour long, and it contains a long critique of the critics and dreaded fact-checkers who panned the first film.

Willis describes the Plandemics as “the most watched film series in history” and has suggested that the first installment racked up more than a billion views, in between getting kicked off video platforms for violating rules against disinformation. In the hour of crisis, Willis found what every filmmaker longs for: success, a supportive community, fans, an opportunity to keep making movies. A meaningful life. But then COVID became another mundane part of life, akin to the flu. It’s rare to see a mask in the wild anymore, and the global authoritarian takeover the conspiracists predicted didn’t happen.

How to keep the rush going? Plandemic: The Musical provides one answer. Willis has said the idea of incorporating show tunes into the series was an early one, but it languished until recently, when he was searching for new projects. He has described the musical as a love letter to life and the things that the global cabal could not take away from the little people: namely, music and romance. 

Willis attracted a crowd of several hundred to the premiere at Austin’s Riverbend Church, a beautiful worship megafacility. The audience watched the sun set through windows behind the stage while ads for various supplements and CBD ointments played before the movie. “A weak immune system is like having an open border for your body,” said one ad for immune-boosting vitamins. “CBD works,” another said. “It’s not a conspiracy anymore.” As a general rule, anti-vaxxers are happy to put nearly anything in their bodies if it comes from a pitchman and not a devil in a white coat.

The musical kicks off with a Star Wars–style screen crawl returning to the audience to Willis’s glory days: May 2020. “Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, an independent filmmaker launched a rebellion against imperial forces,” the text reads. With the click of an Upload button, he transformed the world. Could he do it again?

Perhaps because so much time has passed since the peak pandemic, the movie is not about COVID, but about a COVID-like “Disease X,” reflecting the belief of a lot of Plandemic fans that a new plandemic will soon emerge. (Recent reports of the spread of bird flu are taken by many fans as proof that the Bill Gates cabal is descending again.) The spoken dialogue terminates quickly, when a jolly security guard at a grocery store quits rather than wear the mask his thuggish boss demands he don. His bravery catches the eye of a cashier, with whom he has a child later in the film. In between, an extended musical medley celebrates the “great awakening.” You may know that phrase better from QAnon, in which it referred to the moment the great worldwide pedophile cabal would be unmasked, but here it refers to something like a collective decision to ignore doctors.

Friends of the Plandemic series, from Mykovits to anti-vax film producer Del Bigtree, have cameos. The music comes from influencers and minor celebrities, including the conservative rapper Hi-Rez and an influencer who goes by DPAK. There’s a mariachi band. “Regain your sanity,” sings the cast, “return to your humanity.” I felt mine slipping away.

The Q&A after the film revealed how diverse the politics of this little community are. Willis scans as left-wing: he was a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016. Bigtree has become the communications director for the Robert F. Kennedy campaign. The conservative comedian JP Sears performed a short stand-up routine while waiting for the musicians to set up onstage and bitterly condemned the “political persecution” of Donald Trump in Manhattan court. (It’s strange that anyone here would like Trump, who, after all, sped along the development of the vaccine and put the tyrant Fauci in power.) DPAK, meanwhile, described himself as a “voluntaryist anarchist.” Sears joked that his shoes looked gay. It was a rainbow of cranks.

No matter their politics, folks onstage seemed sure the pandemic would return. “They are going to attempt to do this again,” said Bigtree, “and they are going to come with everything they’ve got.” Then, he added, to massive applause, “We are going to stage the greatest resistance the world has ever seen.”

If Bigtree and Willis fear a new pandemic, perhaps they shouldn’t. The plague years were miserable for everybody, but in a sense, they were the best years of these folks’ lives. How lucky for them if the plague would return.