deep state bull BS 404

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320, primary 520 on trump covis delay killed ppl, neg

SEE TWO AND THREE

NO MERRI

originally this was for bulletin bd, but now will be used to disambig from legit intel agy and expertise

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aha: deep state bs --> qanon --> covid/plandemic

also root of Obamagate ~ Mueller /collusion

all expertise is suspect [fail /rolled on gulf war 2 iraq invade WMD]

what is the origin? Corsi? freepers? gubmint? Church comm showed illegal acts by CIA; cointelpro illegal acts by FBI? watergate plumbers cuban bay of pigs/CIA via __; Nixon had enemies list and used exec/fed power to go after; flynn (key guy in trump campaign, steeley-eyed crew cut military macho man who would attack dems w/ BS] turned out to be a traitor to Turkey for $, what about russia? he lied about talks w/ Kisl but trumpistas could interpret that as protecting trump? just a bit eager to git her done, don't play by the rules of one prez at a time?

JBS anti-commie --> Agenda 21 black helo one world gov't takeover --> the enemy is still elite, but internal the Deep State [cia fbi cointelpro?] global pedo traffickers; sell us out to commies/EU?

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JAN 6 QANON VAXX CROSS-FERTILIZE ANTI-GUBMINT

ROLLING STONE

On Christmas Eve, Steven Brandenburg, a Milwaukee-area pharmacist, attempted to destroy more than 500 doses of coronavirus vaccine, because, he admitted, he feared the Moderna drug would “alter the recipient’s DNA.” Described in law-enforcement documents as a “conspiracy theorist,” Brandenburg, 46, had reportedly warned his wife that “the world is crashing down around us” and that “the government is planning cyberattacks and plans to shut down the power grid,” according to divorce-court documents.

IFrame Content

If you’re surprised that a scientifically educated medical professional, trusted with dispensing lifesaving medicine, could suffer a rebellion against reason and give himself over to discredited conspiracy theories, you haven’t been paying attention. In the America of the 2020s, respectable men and women surrender to this kind of unreal thinking every day. (Brandenburg pleaded guilty to federal tampering charges in January; his lawyer would not discuss Brandenburg’s conspiratorial beliefs.) The phenomenon is known as “red-pilling” — a reference to a scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves’ character chooses to take a red pill and discover the hidden truths of the world — and it affects those whose once-rational skepticism swallows them whole, pulling them into a networked community of like-minded conspiracy theorists. While the public record does not indicate Brandenburg traveled this far, many find a home in the big-tent conspiracy of QAnon, whose members increasingly see vaccination as part of a diabolical plot by the “deep state” to enslave humanity.

:{:{Why has the nation become gripped with conspiracy theories — including so many revolving around the shots that could end this devastating pandemic? “It’s precisely because we’ve had 450,000 deaths, and so much uncertainty and so much fear, that there’s fertile ground for this stuff to take hold,” says Ashish Jha, a physician and dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. The pandemic is also occurring in the context of a 20-year decline of American trust in institutions, says Ethan Zuckerman, who formerly directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT.}:

He describes the QAnon cult as a reservoir at the bottom of that slippery slope. “Q is what happens when you take that mistrust in a really damaging direction,” he says. “It’s usually people who lost trust in one institution and then found a coherent worldview that says, ‘Don’t just mistrust this one institution — mistrust all the institutions. All of them are in it together.’ ” This full rejection of confidence in doctors and drug companies, in media and philanthropy, in politicians and government agencies, Zuckerman says, is “how the anti-vax movement underwent almost a merger with QAnon.”}:

For most Americans still grounded in reality, the arrival of safe, effective inoculations against Covid-19 has sparked hope. The nine-month dash to design, test, and begin to administer inoculations against the devastating pandemic was an unprecedented medical triumph. The rollout of these drugs has already delivered protection for millions of the elderly and medically vulnerable. For younger, healthier people awaiting their shots, vaccination promises a -ticket out of social isolation and back to a life of packed concerts, subway trains, restaurants, and nightclubs.

At present, America’s great challenge is ramping up supply to meet overwhelming demand. But experts caution the country will, sooner than later, confront a formidable wall of vaccine resistance that could block our return to “life as normal.” A Pew poll in December found that only 60 percent of Americans intend to vaccinate and nearly 20 percent — or roughly 50 million adults — are dead set against it.

If that many Americans abstain from vaccination, the coronavirus will continue to circulate, and to mutate, posing a grave ongoing threat to public health.

Vaccine hesitance can be rooted in reasonable concerns, says Jha. Were the new vaccines rushed to market too quickly? Did the Trump administration’s overt politicization corrupt the approval process? Are side effects severe? Will our notoriously racist health system prioritize and safeguard communities of color that have been hardest hit by the pandemic? “We win no battles by minimizing” these worries, Jha says, “or suggesting that those people are being unreasonable or anti-science or anti-vaxxers. They’re raising legitimate concerns that should be addressed.”

But for millions of others, dread about vaccines defies logic or reason, and bleeds instead into belief systems of what Zuckerman has dubbed “the unreal” — that we’re pawns in a diabolical global game run by ruthless elites and that vaccines are somehow not medicine but poison. “Concerns about -safety have been absorbed into this other way of viewing the world,” says Jack Bratich, a Rutgers professor and author of Conspiracy Panics. “It’s about a plan to inject people with controlling substances. That’s where QAnon overlaps with the anti-vax movement.”

As demonstrated by the January 6th storming of the Capitol, perpetrated by many Americans immersed in the QAnon cult, this red-pilling can have deadly, destabilizing consequences, and not just for conspiracy-theory believers. “This may be the most important public-health issue of our time — misinformation, disinformation,” Jha insists. And unlike the coronavirus, the contagion of conspiracy theory is one against which we’re largely defenseless. “We have been blindsided,” he says. “We as public-health people have to figure out how to counter it in a way that’s effective. And we don’t have the tools.”

Exploring conspiracy theories and mass delusion can inadvertently popularize misinformation. So inoculate yourself with facts: The novel vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna are revolutionary and take advantage of our own cellular machinery to safeguard recipients against future coronavirus infection.

If you’ve seen computer renderings of the coronavirus, you know its surface is covered by spike proteins that create the “crown” that gives coronaviruses their name. Humans get infected with Covid-19 when these spike proteins pierce healthy cells, allowing the virus to invade, infect, and begin replicating.

Traditional vaccines have relied on exposing people to an inactivated (killed) or attenuated (weakened) virus. As the immune system reacts to a non-threatening inoculation, it gains the ability to fight off infection from the real pathogen. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines don’t include any virus at all. Instead, they use genetic code — messenger RNA or mRNA — to activate a few of our own cells to become spike-protein factories. The vaccine consists of tiny strands of mRNA encased in fat — a lipid particle — that allows them to slip inside a cell without being attacked. Once inside, the mRNA functions roughly like computer code, instructing cells to begin assembling coronavirus spike proteins out of amino-acid building blocks already in our bodies.

The presence of these strange proteins triggers our immune systems to create antibodies to neutralize them. Our immune system also summons T-cells to attack and shut down cells that were coded to produce spike proteins. Together, these immune responses prepare the body to fight off a real potential coronavirus infection. “It’s very elegant,” says Jha of the vaccine design. “It’s also de-risked it a lot. There’s no physical way to get Covid from this thing.” As for the conspiracy theory that an mRNA vaccine alters your own genes? “It literally doesn’t,” he says. “It doesn’t become part of your DNA.”

An anti-vaxxer at a MAGA rally in Washington, D.C. A Pew poll in December found roughly 50 million Americans are planning to abstain from vaccination, threatening herd immunity.Erin Scott/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Taming the pandemic will require both individual immunity — as produced by the vaccines — and community-level “herd immunity” created when a critical mass of individuals are resistant to infection. Herd immunity is like a firewall in public health; a localized flare-up of infection among a few individuals will be unable to spread broadly, instead burning itself out.

So far, the drugs appear to be living up to their billed efficacy of 95 percent protection from infection. And apart from some rare (and treatable) allergic reactions, the side effects seem well tolerated. But vaccine avoidance is already emerging as a troubling trend, particularly among health care and nursing-home workers on the front lines of the pandemic. Through mid-January, the CDC reported that only 32 percent of eligible nursing-home workers nationwide had chosen to get vaccinated.

Distrust of the vaccine is also high among communities of color. The reasons for this, while complex, are not difficult to understand. American public-health history is marred by institutional racism, including the horrific 40-year “Tuskegee Experiment,” in which hundreds of black men with syphilis were promised treatment that was, in fact, deceptively withheld, leading to 128 deaths. Our current health care system produces wildly disparate outcomes for people of color, including a maternal death rate that’s 2.5 times higher for black women than for white women. In the pandemic, communities of color have been hardest hit. These Americans disproportionately work in frontline positions, live in more crowded housing, have poorer access to doctors, and higher incidence of comorbidities. Meanwhile, crucial technologies like pulse oximeters, which use light to measure blood oxygenation and guide treatment, have been found to routinely malfunction on dark skin.

The hard truth is that returning to the point where Americans can go back to work or enjoy a night out at a crowded bar and be confident no one is going to get sick will require persuading millions to overcome their fear of vaccination and take a jab for the team. The 60 percent of Americans currently intending to get vaccinated is simply not good enough to establish herd immunity. “We’ve got to address the issues that help us get closer to 80 percent vaccination,” Jha says. “I’d love to get up to like 90, 95 percent.”

The larger the group of unvaccinated individuals, the more chance the virus can mutate to pose a danger, even to the already vaccinated. “Large outbreaks anywhere can give rise to variants that can escape vaccines everywhere,” Jha writes. “It’s the nightmare scenario of a never-ending pandemic.”

Long before the coronavirus hit, America had been gripped by a fierce anti-vaccine movement, which had itself become increasingly unmoored from scientific critique and drifted into conspiratorial waters.

Vaccines have always inspired popular fear. Decades ago, it was justified: The rollout of the polio inoculation in the 1950s tragically infected 40,000 children, paralyzing hundreds, and killing 10, because of botched manufacturing that failed to disable the live virus. Even with modern safety advances, vaccination campaigns expose a particularly American tension between personal choice and public safety. “In the U.S., there’s this suspicion or refusal around bodily sovereignty,” Bratich says. “People don’t like stuff stuck in them.”

Contemporary anti-vax culture took root in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when a startling rise in autism was hypothesized to be connected to childhood vaccinations. Robust science has since debunked any relationship between vaccination and autism. But at the time, the specter of vaccine injury sparked real concern among reasonable people.

In 1998, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published an article purporting to link the measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine to “developmental regression in a group of previously normal children.” In the U.S. a year later, a federal review of mercury in drugs highlighted that a mercury-based preservative in childhood vaccines could expose infants, over the first six months of life, to a potentially harmful quantity of the neurotoxic metal. Out of an abundance of caution, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that the preservative, thimerosal, be phased out of vaccines. In 2005, Rolling Stone and Salon co-published a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. piece, “Deadly Immunity,” that helped push the provocative hypothesis that thimerosal triggered autism into wider circulation. The piece drew swift criticism and required significant corrections, including to a key statistic about childhood mercury exposure.

By the turn of the decade, both hypotheses had collapsed under the weight of scientific evidence. In 2009, a paper inClinical Infectious Diseasescited “20 epidemiologic studies” to conclude that “neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism.” The Lancetretracted its MMR paper in 2010, with the journal’s editor saying he felt he’d been deceived, while calling the paper “utterly false.” In 2011, Salon retracted the Kennedy piece, writing, “The best reader service is to delete the piece entirely.” The story no longer appears on Rolling Stone’s website.

Fear of vaccination, however, didn’t disappear because scientists said it should. Instead, anti-vax beliefs spread widely, popularized by celebrities like actress Jenny McCarthy and then-Apprentice star Donald Trump, who infamously tweeted in 2014: “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes — AUTISM. Many such cases!” In a 2016 survey, 77 percent of parents who chose not to vaccinate their children cited a feared link to autism, and 71 percent cited fear of vaccine additives.

That same year, faced with a public-health threat from schools where up to 40 percent of kids were unvaccinated, California eliminated a “personal exemption” to vaccination, effectively requiring shots for all kids to attend public school. Measles had been eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, but declining vaccination rates contributed to outbreaks infecting more than 1,200 across dozens of states in 2019. That year, the World Health Organization listed vaccine hesitance as one of its top “10 threats to public health.”

Today’s anti-vax movement has grown increasingly cozy with theories about dark agendas, ruthless profit motives, and powerful enemies, reserving peculiar animus for billionaire Bill Gates, whose foundation promotes vaccination globally. For his part, Kennedy continues to promote unfounded links between vaccines and autism, even though thimerosal has been phased out of childhood vaccines: “They replaced it with aluminum,” he says, “which is almost as bad.” (Aluminum salts have been safely used in vaccines for more than seven decades, according to the CDC.) “People like me get vilified and ridiculed,” he says, “but I will debate anybody about this.”

Kennedy now runs the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, where last April he published an article titled “Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination.” The piece purports to be grounded in science, but Kennedy gets the facts twisted. He claims, for example, that a 2010 Gates Foundation-funded trial of a malaria vaccine was responsible for “killing 151 African infants and causing serious adverse effects, including paralysis, seizure, and febrile convulsions, to 1,048 of the 5,949 children.” In reality, the trial was not implicated in the death of any child, and only 13 malaria-vaccine recipients had significant side effects. The trial was conducted in a region of Africa with high child morbidity and mortality, and the terrifying numbers Kennedy touts come from tallying up every health crisis experienced by the kids in the trial — both malaria-vaccine recipients and those in control groups — and brazenly attributing every dark outcome to the jabs. This includes deaths from head injury, HIV, malnutrition, and drowning. (Confronted with these facts, Kennedy admits error: “One can never definitively say that a particular death was or was not caused by a vaccine,” he says. But he adds without evidence that every death was “plausibly attributed to the vaccines,” while also baselessly alleging that the use of different vaccines, rather than placebos, in the control groups was “an act of fraud that appears designed . . . to mask death rates in the study cohort.”)

The rest of Kennedy’s piece paints Gates as a reckless and unaccountable billionaire pulling the strings of global institutions. He points to a TED Talk that Gates delivered boasting that expanded vaccine use “could reduce population.” This is meant to sound nefarious, but Gates has long spoken of reducing childhood mortality as a key to stabilizing populations in the developing world. As the conspiracy-debunking site Snopes explains: “Gates is not interested in using vaccines to reduce the population by using them as an agent of death or a tool to sterilize unsuspecting masses. Rather, Gates is interested in keeping more children alive in order to reduce the need for parents to have more children, thus limiting the overall population growth rate.”

If Kennedy dabbles in the Bill Gates conspiracy waters — writing that the coronavirus has given Gates “an opportunity to force his dictatorial vaccine programs” on all Americans — millions of others are performing cannonballs. A gee-whiz proposal, supported by the Gates Foundation, to use tiny subdermal markers for patients in the developing world to track their vaccination history, without needing a clinic to keep the paperwork, has morphed into a widely embraced conspiracy theory that Gates wants to microchip the citizens of the world. A YouGov poll last May found that 28 percent of Americans believed Gates wants “to use a mass vaccination campaign against Covid-19 to implant microchips in people that would be used to track people with a digital ID.” The belief rose to 44 percent of Republicans and to 50 percent of dedicated viewers of Fox News.

Conspiracy theories have been part of the lifeblood of American politics for centuries. In the 1820s, so many Americans were convinced that a shadowy and perhaps satanic cabal threatened the republic that they formed the Anti-Masonic Party and elected dozens of members to Congress. In the Red Scare of the 1950s, the far-right John Birch Society accused President Dwight Eisenhower of being “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.”

Trump rose to political dominance promoting the birther conspiracy theory that Barack Obama had been ineligible to hold office. And he won and sustained the presidency by encouraging his white, working-class supporters to blame their social woes on the merciless “globalists” of the “deep state.” Conspiratorial thinking, academic research shows, often takes root in groups, like many in Trump’s base, that are experiencing economic or social dislocation. “People often turn to conspiracy theories when bad things are happening around them,” says Karen Douglas, a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent in England. “They are looking for ways to cope, people to blame,” she says. “If people believe that powerful, secret forces are responsible, then it isn’t their fault that things are bad for them,” and they can make themselves feel better without having to “tease apart the complex reasons for their disadvantage.”

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 created a “perfect storm” for new conspiracy theories to take root, says Bratich, the Rutgers professor. The pandemic overwhelmed government institutions, creating enormous fear and economic uncertainty. Lockdown life also created super-spreader conditions for paranoia, with Americans searching for answers in online forums where unreal ideas circulated unchecked. New converts were then able to spread these ideas, in real life, to their pods of close family and friends under lockdown.

Eric Oliver is a political-science professor at the University of Chicago who has studied conspiracy theories since the 1990s. He argues that conspiracy belief helps conquer anxiety by giving people a feeling of “I understand what’s happening in the world. I have a narrative that explains things.” They also root free-floating fear in something that feels solid: “ ‘The reason I’m feeling anxious is there’s a secret cabal doing something terrible. And now I’ve identified it.’ ” A reinforcing factor is “a certain narcissism,” he says. “The conspiracy theory gives them a sense of special knowledge: ‘I know something that’s going on that nobody else does.’ It feels empowering to them.”

A protester holds an anti-vaccination sign as supporters of President Donald Trump rally to reopen California as the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen, on May 16, 2020 in Woodland Hills, California.David McNew/Getty Images

A paradox of conspiracy theories is that they’re not full flights of fancy. They involve imagined and invented connections between real people, phenomena, and events. There’s a structure to the irrational belief. “Conspiracy theories are not the product of a disordered mind; they’re the product of an overly ordered mind,” insists Zuckerman. “Conspiracy theories happen when you have an enormous need for order in a disordered universe.” Zuckerman quit his post at MIT in protest of the university’s links to disgraced sex-criminal financier Jeffrey Epstein and now teaches at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “I do not subscribe to the theory that Epstein was killed in prison,” he says, but points to the myriad conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein as a case in point: “Having a genuine villain out there is really important for conspiracies to root themselves sufficiently in reality so that we continue to pay attention to them.”

This search for order has taken millions of Americans to a dark place — the nihilistic worldview of QAnon. The QAnon belief system is a crossover between a conspiracy theory and a religious cult, and its ideology takes strands of many past conspiracies and weaves them into a big tent where priors are welcome and almost any theory can find safe harbor.

The core of Q is familiar. It posits that the surface world of respectable politicians, well-intentioned government institutions, and a media seeking to hold them accountable, is an illusion. The real power in the world is wielded by shadowy power brokers in the government, Hollywood, and the media called “the cabal” or the “deep state.” QAnon takes this conspiratorial boilerplate to wild extremes. The “deep state” is alleged to be insatiable in its thirst for power, and willing to do anything — from launching wars to spreading pestilence — to move closer to global domination. The Q ideology has no room for subtlety. The conspirators are believed to be the embodiment of evil, actual “luciferians” and pedophiles.

The theory may sound lunatic, but QAnon is no longer relegated to the fringe: A Civiqs tracking poll finds that even after the attack on the Capitol, 10 percent of Republicans describe themselves as “supporters” of QAnon. Tenets of the Q belief system are even more widely held: An NPR poll released at the end of 2020 found 17 percent of Americans rated as “true” the statement that: “A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.”

In the Q mythology, the heroes fighting to expose the deep state include an alleged intelligence officer, known as Q, for the “Q-level” clearance he or she is alleged to hold. The conspiracy has elements of a massive role-playing game. For years, the anonymous “Q” dropped cryptic hints or “crumbs” on message boards like 8chan and 8kun, which QAnon adherents then sought to “bake” into coherent narratives about coming events. The community also revered Donald Trump as a lonely fighter, seeking to undermine, arrest, and vanquish the deep state.

How did the anti-vax movement — which thrives in far-left communities like Portland, L.A., and Marin County, California, — get mixed up with a quasi-religious cult that held up Donald Trump as its savior? “It was very surprising to see the anti-vax community cross the streams” with QAnon, says Zuckerman. “Anti-vaxxers are people who often identify as leaning politically left. They often come to this stance because they’re anti–corporate, and they’re really concerned about Big Pharma making money.”

American political ideology is most often conceptualized as a straight line running from left to right. But an alternate visualization presents the spectrum instead as a horseshoe, where the left and right extremes bend back toward one another. Conspiracy theories can bridge these far ends like a powerful electric spark.

Oliver’s research has shown that openness to conspiracy theory is correlated to intuitive thinking over evidence-based thinking. Conspiratorial beliefs take hold in people who make gut-level decisions and place disproportionate weight on symbolic costs. He offers a questionnaire that helps tease out the personality trait.

Would you rather: Stab a photograph of your family five times with a sharp knife? Or stick your hand in a bowl of live cockroaches?

Would you rather: Sleep in laundered pajamas once worn by Charles Manson? Or pick a nickel off the ground and put it in your mouth?

Would you rather: Grind your heels into an unmarked grave? Or stand in line for three hours at the DMV?

A person avoiding actions with high symbolic costs (stabbing a family photo, sleeping in Manson’s PJs), he says, “is a very strong predictor of believing in conspiracy theories — regardless of where they are on the ideological spectrum.”

Oliver points out that conservative religious Americans — “evangelical or orthodox communities” — tend to have very high intuitionism scores, and receptivity to conspiracy theory. But so do New Age communities associated with the American left. “People who believe in conspiracy theories also believe that GMOs are bad,” he says. “They tend to like organic food or natural health remedies.”

The leap from anti-vax theories to QAnon is less mysterious, Zuckerman says, when you “think about how lonely it is to be an anti-vaxxer. You have the small group of friends who are willing to listen to you talk about mercury in vaccines,” he says. “But suddenly you have a whole group of people” in QAnon adherents “who say, ‘Oh, yeah, not just this, but did you know about this?’ You may be willing to go further, and say, ‘Sure I’ll buy this next part of the conspiracy.’ ” Finding such affirmation and community in the unreal, he says, makes it easy to surrender your hold on fact-based beliefs. “Red-pilling,” he says, “is when you move from your origin conspiracy theory to this full-conspiracy worldview.”

The anti-vax and Q movements began to merge with the release of a viral video last May. “We saw it in earnest around Plandemic,” says Zuckerman. Plandemic is the project of Mikki Wills, a 53-year-old self-described “investigative filmmaker” with piercing blue eyes and a salt-and-pepper goatee, who works from the coastal California enclave of Ojai, halfway between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.

Willis is politically liberal and his bio touts him as “a virtuoso of positive energy.” He tells Rolling Stone that he was inspired to shoot Plandemic because of his concern over the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed. “The idea that [the] administration was going to rush an experimental vaccine to market, then have it distributed to the masses by way of the U.S. military,” Willis says, “felt insane and reckless at best. I felt compelled to shine a little light on it.”

The slickly produced 26-minute video centers on discredited former federal scientist Judy Mikovits, whom Willis platforms as an Erin Brokovich-style whistleblower. Mikovits claims without evidence that her career was derailed by a federal conspiracy directed by Anthony Fauci. And she makes myriad wild, false, and unsubstantiated claims, including that the coronavirus was released from a lab and that mask wearing causes illness. The film baselessly insinuates that Fauci, Gates, and others have enormous financial interests in the pandemic. In one key exchange, Willis poses to Mikovits: “If we activate mandatory vaccines globally, I imagine these people stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars that own the vaccines.”

The film was roundly debunked, including by Science, which said in part: “Science fact-checked the video. None of these claims are true.” Major social media companies banned the video, but not before it was viewed millions of times. Willis insists he’s “absolutely not” a conspiracy theorist and knows “very little” about QAnon. But his video became a cause célèbre among the Q set. “In many ways, Plandemic is much more of an anti-vax video than it is a QAnon video,” Zuckerman says. But it fits with the nihilistic Q worldview that elites are not simply misguided or incompetent, but so evil as to unleash a global pandemic and then seek to profit from a vaccine. “The Q community loves it. Right?”

The film hit the bull’s-eye of what Bratich describes as the overlapping “Venn diagram of the antivax movement and QAnon.” At the margins, he says, anti-vaxxers have long feared there exists a dark agenda behind inoculations, and these people have found in QAnon a “ready-made, tight narrative — it’s about the great reset, it’s about a new world order, it’s about Bill Gates — that explains the vaccinations.”

The full convergence of the anti-vax movement and QAnon belief can be seen in the trajectory of Larry D. Cook — a onetime healthy-lifestyle guru who became a high-profile anti-vaccine activist before he red-pilled, choosing to anchor his beliefs in the open harbor of QAnon.

Cook is 56 but looks perhaps a decade younger. He has a lanky runner’s build and an open, calm, somewhat flat affect when he speaks. He has made his home in Los Angeles for the past 15 years, and a profile picture on his personal website shows him beaming at a farmers market, holding aloft a bunch of kale in each hand.

In 2005, Cook wrote The Beginner’s Guide to Natural Living, touting the optimal conditions to express “the divine intelligence flowing through us.” He describes having become a vegan in 1990 and preaches the virtues of organic food, yoga, and alternative healing. There are seeds of distrust in Cook’s writing: He encourages readers to “question toxic medicine” that “makes more money by keeping us slightly sick.” But little in Cook’s rhetoric would have been out of place in a left-coast magazine like Mother Jones from the same era. He urges caution of “mainstream media . . . owned and controlled by its advertisers,” and of a government that can be “hoodwinked into allowing harmful products onto the market.”

Cook’s career path is nontraditional. He jumped from “being a sound guy in Hollywood” to a gig as executive director of the California Naturopathic Doctors Association. Cook did not respond to interview requests but told a radio interviewer that his fear of vaccines took root when he was researching a book about attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and “came across some information that mercury in vaccines cause autism.” As a side gig around 2010, he started creating YouTube videos interviewing doctors who pushed the thimerosal hypothesis and parents whose children were allegedly harmed by vaccines.

The hobby would become a calling, and a conviction, for Cook in 2015, when California proposed ending the personal-belief exemption from public-school vaccination requirements. Cook started a site called Stop Mandatory Vaccination to oppose this and future legislation and describes how this anti-vax activism got him “fired” from his executive-director post and led to his becoming a full-time activist. “I found my voice,” he said. The deeper he dove into the anti-vax world, the more distrustful Cook became, decrying what he calls the “cover up” of children who die after being vaccinated as “a medical mafia conspiracy.” (No serious science suggests vaccination is secretly killing kids.) In 2016, Cook voted for Trump, he explains in a recent court document, because of Trump’s own claims that vaccines were linked to autism.

To popularize his anti-vax beliefs, Cook came up with a “system,” which involved raising money on GoFundMe to pay for alarming Facebook ads that he’d target at young mothers. “I was doing things in a certain way,” Cook explained. “Grabbing attention of parents and driving them into my Facebook group, where they could get their questions answered.” The idea was to spur the young moms to “go anti-vaccine. . . . Once they learn the truth,” he said, “they become activists.” A 2019 study by the journal Vaccine revealed that Cook was second only to Kennedy in promoting anti-vax sentiment on Facebook. “Many advertisements featured stories of infants allegedly harmed by vaccines,” the study reports, “using tag lines like, ‘Healthy 14 week old infant gets 8 vaccines and dies within 24 hours.’ ”

The social media giant didn’t have qualms about taking tens of thousands of dollars from Cook to promote the outrageous claim that vaccines kill babies until it was called out in a letter by Rep. Adam Schiff, who demanded information from Mark Zuckerberg in February 2019 about the company’s practice of monetizing and promoting misinformation about vaccines. Facebook soon tweaked its algorithms to stop recommending anti-vax content, which was instead downgraded on the platform. The move decimated Cook’s online reach from 2 million views a month to about 100,000. Facebook also turned off his ability to advertise on the site. YouTube likewise demonetized his channel.

This throttling by social media giants only appears to have pushed Cook further away from the mainstream. As he described his own conversion, in February 2020, Cook read a QAnon book titled Calm Before the Storm that opened his mind to the Q worldview. And he “red-pilled,” as he described in an hour-long video posted last July, in which he appears flanked by a giant Q in one corner and an American flag underscored with the hashtag #WWG1WGA — short for the Q battle cry of “Where We Go One We Go All!” — in the other.

Cook described how discovering QAnon suddenly gave him a context for his distrust of mainstream medicine and his sense of being persecuted and silenced by social media. “When you wrap your head around the idea that it’s the deep state that is facilitating the vaccine mandates,” he said, “all of a sudden it makes complete sense.”

Cook cast mandatory vaccinations as just one expression of the deep state’s “luciferian” agenda of “controlling everyone on the planet.” The mandates are “all part of the deep-state plan,” he claimed, because “when you inject poison into someone, you can incapacitate them very quickly, especially if you’re doing it at birth . . . as soon as a soul comes in — incarnates.” He called vaccination of children a “deliberate assault designed to suppress their consciousness, designed to shut off their connection to God.” But there’s hope, he insisted: “If you take the deep state down completely, we take down the vaccine mandates.”

Through the same jaundiced lens, Cook sees the coronavirus pandemic as part of the deep state’s sinister plot: “It’s a plandemic,” he said, borrowing Willis’ coinage. “It was planned, it’s a false flag. . . . Q would say these people are sick. They want complete control of our planet . . . And if that means killing . . . millions of people, they could care less.”

For Cook, as for most QAnon adherents, the fight is overtly political. “Democrats are lockstep with the deep state,” he insisted. “Our role is to educate the rest of humanity . . . who’s on the side of justice and truth and who’s on the side of God.” The good guys, for Cook, are Trump and the “Q Team.” And he celebrates the promise of redemption: “You shut down the deep state and we can have heaven on Earth,” he said, adding: “We are in the throes of the final battles.”

The attack on the Capitol on January 6th was a wake-up call for America that online conspiracy theories and QAnon’s nihilism are a serious threat not just to the mental health of individual believers but also to innocent life, not to mention the functioning of our democratic government.

The mass delusion of conspiracy-theory belief also constitutes a public-health crisis. As the WHO put it last fall, an “infodemic” is “endangering countries’ ability to stop the pandemic,” adding that “misinformation costs lives,” and that a lack of trust in science will cause immunization campaigns to “not meet their targets, and the virus will continue to thrive.”

Public-health experts say the addictive appeal of conspiracy theories has left them exasperated, but with few solutions. “I really had this mental model,” Jha says, that “you get the evidence, you speak it in plain, simple terms, and share with people what is true — and that’s it. Like, you win the game,” he says. “I have learned very much the hard way, from April on, that that is just naive.”

In January, a mob of anti-vax protesters briefly shut down a mass inoculation site at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, holding up signs like “COVID=SCAM,” “Don’t be a lab rat,” and “Tell Bill Gates to Vaccinate Himself!” The inability to respond effectively to this kind of mass delusion, Jha says, is a “huge liability in the public-health community. We should try to engage with people,” he insists. “But it is not done by giving them facts. They’re not actually lacking in facts; they don’t believe.”

Zuckerman says the core obstacle with QAnon is that its doctrine of blanket distrust leaves few avenues for intervention: “ ‘Scientists? Oh, they’re all at universities; they’re all part of the deep state. What about the media? Oh, my God. The media actually run the deep state.’ That’s epistemic closure,” he says.

Social media companies that had profited from allowing such conspiracies to run riot have recently booted QAnon and anti-vaxxers from their platforms. But that also creates problems, says Bratich. “It’s just riled up the radical emerging right that sees themselves as being not just censored, but persecuted,” he says. This brings with it notions of a “dangerous self-sacrifice and martyrdom” and risks “more conflagrations before it subsides.”

Shortly after the election, Cook found himself completely de-platformed. In mid-November, he was kicked off Facebook as part of the social network’s purge of QAnon. Twitter shut down his account simultaneously. Cook has attempted to launch his own social media properties: Covid-19 Refusers — which features a 14-part video indoctrination on why to reject vaccination — as well as Medical Freedom Patriots: a $5-a-month, subscription-based group he touts as “Anti Vaccine, Pro Alternative Medicine, QAnon friendly.” Cook makes plain he’s seeking to spread the gospel of QAnon: “We are in an INFORMATION WAR,” he writes. “The first step is for us all to be informed — I am giving you the path to that — and then to share it yourself with others.”

As with many, many Q believers, Trump’s election loss has been hard for Cook to absorb. On December 7th, he posted on Parler that Americans should consider fleeing to “Republican held states” to avoid forced vaccination. “This is war,” he wrote. “We don’t need to be up front getting the kill shots when we know there’s Higher Ground.” In late January, he posted to Telegram his belief that the military would help Trump reseize control of America: “I have now seen enough pieces of the puzzle to believe that *THE PLAN* is in fact going EXACTLY as it was PLANNED to go for our US Military and President Trump to secure the United States of America and thereby *end* the Deep State’s rule over us once and for all,” he wrote. “In fact I do believe it will be BIBLICAL.”

Zuckerman argues that what’s required to reach the far edges of the anti-vax and QAnon communities resembles cult deprogramming. “The question that I think everyone would love to have a definitive answer to is, ‘Can people be unpilled?’ ” he says. He points with encouragement to forums on Reddit for people who have escaped Q and are trying to help others. “They talk about the incredible damage — that this is a belief system that ends marriages, ends friendships.” Bratich likens these groups to “QAnon recovery” and suggests that “the deprogramming that happens might be as networked and distributed as the way these people [originally] came together.”

But Bratich cautions that the pull of QAnon remains devilishly strong, and that the conspiracy theory has shown itself to be incredibly plastic and adaptable. He warns that as the notion of Trump as superhero fades, the fight against vaccination may well open up as the organizing battle in QAnon’s resistance against the deep state. “If Trump goes away or goes to the margins,” he says, “I think this will be the next thing that becomes front and center.” The far edge of the anti-vax movement, he says, “keeps talking about how the vaccine is ‘the beginning of the end.’ For QAnon there’s a code in there,” he warns. “It’s the beginning of the end of America, right?”

This video file cannot be played.(Error Code: 102404)

Although negative reactions have been relatively rare, the numbers are used by many extremist groups to try to bolster a rash of false and alarmist disinformation in articles and videos with titles like “Covid-19 Vaccines Are Weapons of Mass Destruction — and Could Wipe out the Human Race” or “Doctors and Nurses Giving the Covid-19 Vaccine Will be Tried as War Criminals.”

If the so-called Stop the Steal movement appeared to be chasing a lost cause once President Biden was inaugurated, its supporters among extremist organizations are now adopting a new agenda from the anti-vaccination campaign to try to undermine the government.

Bashing of the safety and efficacy of vaccines is occurring in chatrooms frequented by all manner of right-wing groups including the Proud Boys; the Boogaloo movement, a loose affiliation known for wanting to spark a second Civil War; and various paramilitary organizations.

These groups tend to portray vaccines as a symbol of excessive government control. “If less people get vaccinated then the system will have to use more aggressive force on the rest of us to make us get the shot,” read a recent post on the Telegram social media platform, in a channel linked to members of the Proud Boys charged in storming the Capitol.

Image

A “Stop the Steal” rally at the Pennsylvania State Capitol in November.Credit...Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

The marked focus on vaccines is particularly striking on discussion channels populated by followers of QAnon, who had falsely prophesied that Donald J. Trump would continue as president while his political opponents were marched off to jail.

“They rode the shift in the national conversation away from Trump to what was happening with the massive ramp up in vaccines,” said Devin Burghart, the head of the Seattle-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which monitors far-right movements, referring to followers of QAnon. “It allowed them to pivot away from the failure of their previous prophecy to focus on something else.”

Apocalyptic warnings about the vaccine feed into the far-right narrative that the government cannot be trusted, the sentiment also at the root of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The more vaccine opponents succeed in preventing or at least delaying herd immunity, experts noted, the longer it will take for life to return to normal and that will further undermine faith in the government and its institutions.

Last spring, a common purpose among far-right activists and the anti-vaccination movement first emerged during armed protests in numerous state capitols against coronavirus lockdown measures. That cross-pollination expanded over time.

On Jan. 6, while rioters advanced on the Capitol, numerous leading figures in the anti-vaccination movement were onstage nearby, holding their own rally to attack both the election results and Covid-19 vaccinations.

Events overshadowed their protest, but at least one outspoken activist, Dr. Simone Gold of Beverly Hills, Calif., was charged with breaching the Capitol. She called her arrest an attack on free speech. She was one of several doctors who appeared in a video last year spreading misleading claimsabout the coronavirus. Mr. Trump shared a version of the video, which Facebook, YouTube and Twitter removed after millions of viewers watched it.

Image

Dr. Simone Gold in a video for America’s Frontline Doctors, an organization accused of spreading misleading information about the coronavirus and possible treatments. She was later charged with breaching the Capitol.

In the months since inoculations started in December, the alliance grouping extremist organizations with the anti-vaccination movement has grown larger and more vocal, as conspiracy theories about vaccines proliferated while those about the presidential vote count receded.

With their protests continuing, far-right groups deployed many of the same talking points as the vaccination opponents. Prominent voices in both the “Stop the Steal” and the anti-vaccination movements helped to organize scattered rallies on March 20 against vaccines, masks and social distancing in American cities including Portland, Ore., and Raleigh, N.C., as well as in Australia, Canada and other countries around the world.

In April, a conference with the tagline “Learn How to Fight Back for Your Health and Freedom,” is set to bring together Trump allies like Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell along with high-profile members of the anti-vaccination effort.

Maligning the coronavirus vaccines is obviously not limited to extremist groups tied to the Capitol riot. There is deep partisanship over the vaccines generally.

One third of Republicans surveyed in a CBS News poll said that they would avoid getting vaccinated — compared with 10 percent of Democrats — and another 20 percent of Republicans said they were unsure. Other polls found similar trends.

About 100 members of the House of Representatives, roughly one-quarter, had not been vaccinated as of mid-March, according to Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader.

It is unclear where Mr. Trump will fit into the vaccine battle. The former president, who has been vaccinated, endorsed getting the shot recently, provoking some disbelief in QAnon and other chatrooms. “I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it, and a lot of those people voted for me frankly,” he said in an interview with Fox News.

Image

Protesters at anti-vaccination demonstrations are using similar imagery as those at “Stop the Steal” rallies.Credit...Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

Across right-wing channels online, certain constant memes have emerged attacking the vaccine, like a cartoon suggesting that what started with mask mandates will end with concentration camps run by FEMA for those who refuse vaccinations.

Numerous channels link to the government website called VAERS, for Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, to energize followers. It had reported 2,216 deaths among people vaccinated for the three months before March 22, with 126 million doses administered. The Covid-19 vaccines in use, like most vaccinations, are considered overwhelmingly safe, but inevitably a small percentage of recipients suffer adverse reactions, some of them severe. The deaths have not been directly linked to the vaccinations.

The raw, incomplete VAERS statistics are meant for scientists and medical professionals, but are widely used among extremist groups to try to undermine confidence in the vaccine. One video consisted of a person reading the details from the chart aloud barking “Murder” where the chart said “Death.”

On Telegram, channels frequented by tens of thousands of QAnon followers are full of videos warning of the dire consequences of taking the vaccine.For example, David Icke, a British serial conspiracy theorist, posted a video called “Murder by Vaccine” saying that it transformed the nature of the human body. (The claims that the vaccines change human DNA are false.)

Mr. Icke was previously best known for pushing the idea that the world was controlled by shape-shifting alien lizards who inhabited a global network of underground tunnels.

The general proliferation of conspiracy theories by QAnon followers for years has helped to create a shared vocabulary among far-right organizations, experts said, which smoothed the way for spreading false information about the vaccines. “The last year with Covid has just been a perfect storm that whatever your crazy conspiracy belief is, there is someone who has a Covid conspiracy to match it,” said Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation.

Image

Anti-vaccine protesters shouted and waved signs at health care workers waiting in line to enter the Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., in February.Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times

The vaccines are sometimes referred to as a “potion,” sometimes as a “bioweapon,” and there are claims that vaccinated people are “shedding mutant viruses.”

Telegram is the locus of much of the disinformation and fear mongering. On one channel, there are claims that the vaccine is an instrument of depopulation. “A massive death wave will be witnessed later this year among those who took the vaccine,” read one posting.

In Idaho, the far-right activist Ammon Bundy helped to push for a proposed state law to ban any mandatory vaccines, although work stalled after the legislature suspended its work on March 19 for more than two weeks because too many lawmakers contracted the coronavirus.

The question is where this newly forged alliance goes from here. Some analysts believe its life span will prove limited, with the far right pivoting to some other issue, like immigration. Eventually, hundreds of millions of Americans will be vaccinated, they noted, and vaccine skepticism is not the same thing as being anti-vaccination. Some doubters will soften if time proves the vaccines effective.

A new reportby the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University noted, however, that although the de-platforming of extremist groups made their campaigns harder to follow, the alliance has the potential to meld disparate factions into a large anti-government movement united around public health issues.

“It increases the opportunity for a big tent enemy,” said Joel Finkelstein, a fellow at Rutgers who runs the institute. “If you are feeling dispossessed, like all these right-wing groups are, boy do I have a tent for you.”

Ben Decker contributed research.

Neil MacFarquhar is a national correspondent. Previously, as Moscow bureau chief, he was on the team awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. He spent more than 15 years reporting from around the Mideast, including five as Cairo bureau chief, and wrote two books about the region.

:{:{A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Moving On From ‘Stop the Steal,’ Far Right Now Vilifies Vaccines}:

See more on: U.S. Politics

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4 25 duck qanon vaxx

Rolling Stone

https://www.rollingstone.com › culture › culture-features › qanon-anti-vax-covid-vaccine-conspiracy-theory-1125197

QAnon: How the Anti-Vaxxers Got Red-Pilled - Rolling Stone

The full convergence of the anti-vax movement and QAnon belief can be seen in the trajectory of Larry D. Cook — a onetime healthy-lifestyle guru who became a high-profile anti-vaccine activist ...

tucker one man escalator?

U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) is demanding the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Dept. of Justice tell Congress what they know about their own alleged "participation" in Donald Trump's January 6 insurrection, which led to at least seven deaths. Gohmert falsely claims the attack on the U.S. Capitol – which in reality was an attempted coup designed to overturn a free and fair election – was instead a "monumental entrapment scheme used as a pretext to imprison otherwise harmless protestors" and used to “frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists."

News organization The Recount calls Gohmert's assertions "a bullshit baseless conspiracy theory."

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) spews a bullshit baseless conspiracy theory blaming the FBI for organizing the January 6th insurrection to “frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists." pic.twitter.com/LZI5bQfx65

— The Recount (@therecount) June 17, 2021

The Texas Republican congressman, explained on Thursday on the floor of the House that his "friend," Fox News white supremacist host Tucker Carlson "covered this last night," called the conspiracy theory "really disturbing... because we don't like to see government agents stirring up trouble or find that there are criminal acts that would not likely have occurred had not the federal government been participating."

Having no evidence that January 6 was an "inside job," which is what Gohmert is asserting, he goes on to make up possible scenarios, again, without any basis in fact.

"Whether they were actual agents, or an undercover agents, or informants that were working for the federal government. But this is scary stuff this is, This is kind of third world stuff, this is not only third world stuff but this is like Putin-like kind of activity. So, if there were federal agents that were involved on January 6, we really need to know what the FBI knew and when they knew it, and not only that, we need to know how much participation did any of our federal friends either at DOJ, FBI, or any of the Intel Community,what kind of role were they playing?"

Gohmert, on the House floor, suggests federal agents were involved in Jan. 6: "We don't like to see govt agents stirring up trouble... This is not only third-world stuff, this is like Putin kind of activity." pic.twitter.com/Tku3tDIjbI

— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) June 17, 2021

It's almost like he is demanding Speaker Pelosi form a Special Committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection.

ref no guns allowed in DC

https://www.mediamatters.org/infowars/militia-leader-stewart-rhodes-says-he-has-men-stationed-outside-dc-ready-engage-violence

no vid

Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes said that he has armed men on standby outside of Washington, D.C., to supposedly prevent the 2020 presidential election from being stolen from President Donald Trump. Echoing elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory during an appearance on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ program, Rhodes said the only way to prevent his men from engaging in a “bloody fight” would be Trump declassifying information to supposedly expose pedophiles in the “deep state” and allow the president to stay in power.

Rhodes also indicated his militia will be involved in a rally to support Trump planned for this weekend in the nation's capital.

Rhodes’ Oath Keepers militia, which comprises “former law enforcement officials and military veterans,” is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S. today.” But, as Rhodes recent public comments have made clear, the organization’s purpose has shifted from opposing the government to instead act as a pro-Trump vigilante group that is willing to violently support Trump’s unjust attempts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

Rhodes joined Jones and Infowars host Owen Shroyer during the November 10 broadcast of The Alex Jones Show. Rhodes claimed that, in order to stop the election from being stolen from him, Trump needs to declassify information exposing members of the “deep state” so that Americans will “all know exactly who the pedophiles are.” According to Rhodes, judges -- including Supreme Court Justice John Roberts -- politicians, and members of the legal community, academia, and media are all part of the “deep state.”These comments echoed a central tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that Trump is engaged in a battle with a cabal of pedophile elites.

[vid CitationFrom the November 10, 2020, edition of Infowars' The Alex Jones Show]

rhodes said Trump should task special forces leaders in the military to gather and process the information because “he cannot trust the normal military intelligence services.” Noting that he has previously been opposed to U.S. military intervention in domestic matters, Rhodes said that in this case Trump should invoke The Insurrection Act to accomplish this goal.

Rhodes then said that, in support of Trump, “we have men already stationed outside D.C. as a nuclear option in case they attempt to remove the president illegally, we will step in and stop it” and emphasized that these men are “armed” and “prepared to go in, if the president calls us up.” In addition to activity outside of the capital, Rhodes said he will have Oath Keepers inside the city this coming weekend to support a caravan of Infowars supporters being led by Shroyer who say they will hold an event on November 14. The Infowars contingent is one of several far-right groups that say that they will rally in the city to support Trump. Stewart added that his group has been doing “recon” for the past week in the Washington, D.C., area.

Rhodes called on supporters of Trump to converge on the capital in the same manner as far-right militia members gathered at a Nevada ranch in 2014 to threaten federal law enforcement officers who were attempting to enforce a court order against rancher Cliven Bundy. He also made it clear during his appearance that the only alternative to Trump staying in power would be violence, saying, “It’s either President Trump is encouraged, and bolstered, [and] strengthened to do what he must do or we wind up in a bloody fight. We all know that. The fight’s coming.”

Rhodes previously claimed during an appearance on Jones' show to have Oath Keepers stationed outside of Washington, D.C., for Election Day, to prevent an unhinged scenario he predicted in which opponents of Trump, aided by foreign terrorists, would storm the White House, and the Secret Service would run out of bullets, necessitating backup from members of his militia. While making those comments, Rhodes hyped the prospect of his Oath Keepers members engaging in widespread violence against the left in a civil war scenario.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/7-bombshell-allegations-in-a-damning-new-trump-administration-whistleblower-report/

a new whistleblower complaint from U.S. Department of Homeland Security employee Brian Murphy released Wednesday provided a slew of provocative and disturbing allegations of criminal behavior and abuse of authority within the Trump administration.

The document was released by the House Intelligence Committee, and it actually summarizes numerous previous complaints that Murphy, the principal deputy under secretary for the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, has previously filed with the inspector general.The complaint alleged that he has since faced professional retaliation from his superiors because of his previous allegations, despite the fact that he is protected from such actions by federal law.

While the retaliation is condemnable on its own, most striking are the series of allegations the complaint described. It paints a picture of a department completely warped by the president’s distorted priorities and determined to cater to his whims and prejudices, regardless of the facts — sometimes putting the country in danger.

Here are seven key details:

1. Murphy said he was illegally directed to manipulate intelligence assessments to support aggressive border policies.

On or about October 29, 2018, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that instructions from Mr. Taylor and Ms. Marquadt had been issued for Mr. Murphy to ensure the intelligence assessments he produced for Secretary Nielsen’s review supported the policy argument that large numbers of KSTs were entering the United States through the southwest border. Mr. Murphy declined to censor or manipulate the intelligence information, viewing it as an improper administration of an intelligence program, and stated to Mr. Glawe that doing what was being requested would constitute a felony.

2. The complaint makes a compelling case that former DHS Secretary Kirtjen Nielsen repeatedly and deliberately lied to Congress to exaggerate the threat at the border.

Murphy said that the secretary purposely tried to blur the distinction between “Known or Suspected Terrorists” (KSTs) and other categories of migrants, thereby misleadingly suggesting the border posed a greater threat of terrorism than it actually does. Even after he explained these distinctions to Nielsen, Murphy said, she consistently misled Congress about the matter:

Prior to Secretary Nielsen’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on December 20, 2018, Mr. Murphy attended a preparation session that went over the information within the proposed testimony. During that session, Mr. Murphy sought to clarify for Secretary Nielsen the distinction between a KST and a Special Interest Alien (“SIA”). An SIA is a term of art created by U.S. Customs and Border Protection meant to describe a category of migrants who come from countries where there is a significant terrorism threat but regarding whom there is no individualized basis for suspecting the person is themselves a terrorist. An SIA does not constitute a KST.

Notwithstanding the clarification provided by Mr. Murphy, he has a good faith belief that the testimony Secretary Nielsen subsequently provided on December 20, 2018, regarding KSTs constituted a knowing and deliberate submission of false material information. This assessment formed the basis of the anonymous OIG complaint Mr. Murphy submitted on November 2, 2018. On January 9, 2019, without consulting with Messrs. Glawe or Murphy, DHS issued a document – apparently crafted by Messrs. Wolf and Taylor, and Ms. Marquadt – entitled “Myth/Fact: Known and Suspected Terrorists/Special Interest Aliens”. The document contained erroneous information regarding the number of KSTs and SIAs encountered along the southwest border.

On March 5, 2019, Mr. Murphy participated in another preparation session with Secretary Nielsen, this time in advance of her testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Messrs. Wolf and Taylor were also present. During the session, Mr. Murphy provided Secretary Nielsen with documentation reflecting that the number of documented KSTs crossing the southwest border only consisted of no more than three individuals, not 3,755 individuals as she had previously attested to in her testimony on December 20, 2018. 3 Mr. Wolf and Mr. Taylor responded by saying Secretary Nielsen should claim the details were classified, state any KST crossing was one too many and deflect away from addressing the significant discrepancy in the data. Mr. Murphy advised Secretary Nielsen that he did not believe that was appropriate, and noted that the few “known” KSTs who were apprehended were derivative contacts, in so much as they merely had a name or phone number of a person who was known to be in contact with a terrorist. At that point, Mr. Murphy was removed from the meeting by Mr. Wolf. He then informed Messrs. Glawe and Hanna what transpired that evening.

It is Mr. Murphy’s good faith belief that the testimony Secretary Nielsen delivered on March 6, 2019, regarding KSTs again constituted a knowing and deliberate submission of false material information. Mr. Murphy outlined that assessment in his anonymous May 13, 2019, OIG complaint.

3. Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli illegally tried to distort intelligence reports he viewed as too favorable to asylum seekers, claiming they were concocted by the “Deep State,” the complaint said.

In December 2019, Mr. Murphy attended a meeting with Messrs. Cuccinelli and Glawe to discuss intelligence reports regarding conditions in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The intelligence reports were designed to help asylum officers render better determinations regarding their legal standards. Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed the intelligence reports and he presented them to Mr. Cuccinelli in the meeting. Mr. Murphy defended the work in the reports, but Mr. Cuccinelli stated he wanted changes to the information outlining high levels of corruption, violence, and poor economic conditions in the three respective countries. Mr. Cuccinelli expressed frustration with the intelligence reports, and he accused unknown “deep state intelligence analysts” of compiling the intelligence information to undermine President Donald J. Trump’s (“President Trump”) policy objectives with respect to asylum. Notwithstanding Mr. Murphy’s response that the intelligence reports’ assessments were consistent with past assessments made for several years, Mr. Cuccinelli ordered Messrs. Murphy and Glawe to identify the names of the “deep state” individuals who compiled the intelligence reports and to either fire or reassign them immediately.

After the meeting, Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Glawe that Mr. Cuccinelli’s instructions were illegal, as well as constituted an abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program.

4. Under Secretary David Glawe was reportedly almost fired by Trump after he testified about the threat posed by Russian election interference.

In approximately September 2018, Mr. Glawe testified in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Mr. Murphy was not present during the testimony. Immediately following that hearing, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that he had been “challenged” by Republican members of the Committee regarding Mr. Glawe’s confirmation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Mr. Glawe was subsequently summoned to the White House a few days after his testimony. Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that Secretary Nielsen had warned him that President Trump had demanded Mr. Glawe be fired. However, Secretary Nielsen and White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, had convinced President Trump to “give Glawe another chance”. After that meeting at the White House, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that while he (Mr. Glawe) would continue to support him on most matters he (Mr. Murphy) was on his own when it came to election interference assessments.

5. Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf told Murphy to stop reporting on Russian interference and to focus on China and Iran, which Murphy believed “would put the country in substantial and specific danger,” the complaint said.

In mid-May 2020, Mr. Wolf instructed Mr. Murphy to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran. Mr. Wolf stated that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien. Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Wolf he would not comply with these instructions, as doing so would put the country in substantial and specific danger.

6. Officials were concerned that discussing the threats posed by white supremacists and Russian intelligence operations would reflect badly on Trump, and they preferred that Murphy’s team work on “violent ‘left-wing’ groups” like “antifa.”

These changes would clearly better match Trump’s preferred rhetoric, though not reality.

In March 2020, Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed a Homeland [Threat] Assessment (“HTA”). Completion of the HTA was a requirement set forth by Acting Secretary Kevin McCleenan prior to his departure from DHS. Mr. Murphy was intimately involved in the editing and crafting of the HTA. Following its completion, the HTA was distributed by Mr. Glawe to Messrs. Wolf, Cuccinelli, and Gountanis. Shortly after the distribution, Mr. Glawe was informed that further distribution of the HTA was prohibited due to concerns raised by Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding how the HTA would reflect upon President Trump. Two sections were specifically labeled as concerns: White Supremacy and Russian influence in the United States. Mr. Murphy stated to Mr. Glawe that this constituted an abuse of authority by Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli, and Mr. Glawe concurred with that assessment.

In May 2020, Mr. Glawe retired, and Mr. Murphy assumed the role of Acting Under Secretary. In May 2020 and June 2020, Mr. Murphy had several meetings with Mr. Cuccinelli regarding the status of the HTA. Mr. Cuccinelli stated that Mr. Murphy needed to specifically modify the section on White Supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent “left-wing” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to make the requested modifications, and informed Mr. Cuccinelli that it would constitute censorship of analysis and the improper administration of an intelligence program.

…

During multiple meetings between the end of May 2020 and July 31, 2020, Mr. Murphy made protected disclosures to Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program with respect to intelligence information on ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups operating throughout the United States. On each occasion, Mr. Murphy was instructed by Mr. Wolf and/or Mr. Cuccinelli to modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to modify any of the intelligence assessments based upon political rhetoric, and advised both officials he would only report accurate intelligence information as collected by DHS I&A.

7. Classified material

Much of what is concerning about the complaint is what it doesn’t mention. At several points, the complaint makes clear it can’t repeat the substance of allegations regarding DHS officials because the material involved is classified. This is particularly concerning because other parts of the complaint indicate that officials abused the classification system to cover up embarrassing or inconvenient facts.

Additional point: One interesting point to note is that Murphy tried to push back on some reporting that was critical of DHS because it supposedly implied falsely that DHS was collecting intelligence information on journalists and reporters.

Murphy claims this didn’t happen. Putting aside the particulars, this detail in the report may be seen as bolstering Murphy’s credibility. Defenders of the administration will likely argue he’s a disgruntled employee trying to hurt Trump and DHS, but it’s notable that he seems to be willing to defend the department when he thinks the facts have been unfairly reported. This suggests Murphy is someone who cares about getting to the truth, rather someone who is trying to hurt the president and the administration no matter the cost:

To be unequivocally clear, the press reporting was significantly flawed and, in many instances, contained completely erroneous assertions. For example, DHS I&A never knowingly or deliberately collected information on journalists, at least as far as Mr. Murphy is aware or ever authorized. There were, to be sure, efforts to track publicly available media reporting that included information that had been leaked from the U.S. Government, including publicly-accessible posts by journalists on social media, but DHS I&A did not seek authorization to and was not engaging in surveillance of journalists’ private data.

aha-ish: a la roy cohn: ctr-punch lie is knee jerk move, has limited # of smears eg fake news, deep state, hate america, // nicknames twitter algo? these degrade opposition, red meat trumpistas love, but deflect crits, plus activates various schemas that plug into overall narrative? cf xian have all -phobes. In Qanon there are apprently inconsistent strands but actually fit together if you are in the club/know and/or watch Fox news?

this was fallback on hydroxychlor, stall for time on vaccine?

trump called FDA deep state on announcement, relative vs absolute

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-and-his-fda-commissioner-grossly-misrepresented-data-on-blood-plasmas-benefits-in-treating-19-patients-scientists/

yates srch duck 8/20 suggest indictment -->

omfg

https://phibetaiota.net/2020/04/breaking-indictments-coming-the-list/

[big red treason stamp]

PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE BLOG

The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

2020/04/28

BREAKING: Indictments Coming — List

09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Officers Call

PBI we have no direct knowledge but this feels right, along with the forthcoming exoneration (no pardon needed) of American Hero General Mike Flynn. May Justice Be Done!

The VIDEO in a LockBox [suggests secrecy but $? paywall?]

Who is named in this order

Loretta Lynch – Former Attorney General

3 counts of Conspiracy to Overthrow a Government

2 counts of Obstruction of Justice

3 counts of Lying to Congress

Sally Yates – Former United States Attorney General

3 counts of Conspiracy to Overthrow a Government

3 counts of Obstruction of Justice

John Brennan – Former Director of the CIA

3 counts Conspiracy to Overthrow a Government

3 counts Lying to Congress

2 counts Lying to Investigators

1 count Conspiracy to Commit Treason

3 counts Obstruction of Justice

James Clapper – Former Director of National Intelligence

3 counts Conspiracy to Overthrow a Government

2 counts Lying to Congress

4 CIA Operatives

No charges known yet

James Comey – Former Director of the FBI

3 counts Conspiracy to Overthrow a Government

6 counts Perjury

4 counts Obstruction of Justice

4 counts Falsifying Government Documents

Andrew McCabe – Deputy Director FBI

3 counts Conspiracy to Overthrow a Government

3 counts Lying to Congress

2 counts Perjury

1 count Falsifying Government Documents

Bruce Ohr – Department of Justice, Former Deputy Attorney General

3 counts Conspiracy (of what is unknown at this time)

1 count Falsifying Government Documents

James Baker – Former White House Chief of Staff

Charges unknown at this time

Peter Strzok – Former FBI Counterespionage

3 counts Conspiracy to Overthrow a Government

4 counts Perjury

3 counts Falsifying Government Documents

Lisa Page – Former FBI Lawyer

3 counts Conspiracy to Overthrow a Government

3 counts Perjury

1 counts Obstruction of Justice

Rod Rosenstein – Former United States Deputy Attorney General

5 Charges Unknown at this time

Susan Rice – Former National Security Advisor

Illegal Use of Government Systems

3 counts Perjury

3 counts Obstruction of Justice

Powell: Unsealed FBI Handwritten Notes And Emails Reveal Agents Plotted Perjury Trap On Flynn

Robert Steele: John Brennan to Be Indicted? General Michael Flynn Exonerated?

SHORT URL FOR THIS POST: https://tinyurl.com/witchhunt-indictments

Opt in for free daily update from this free blog. Separately The Steele Report ($11/mo) offers weekly text report and live webinar exclusive to paid subscribers, who can also ask questions of Robert. Or donate to ask questions directly of Robert.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/510818-trump-yates-either-lying-or-grossly-incompetent

no lnx vod

trump: Yates either lying or grossly incompetent

BY MORGAN GSTALTER - 08/06/20 08:16 AM EDT 1,747

President Trump on Thursday accused former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates of “either lying” or being “grossly incompetent” after her testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Justice Department investigations into election interference in 2016.

“It is not possible she could have known so little about Dirty Cop James Comey (and others) from her high position in the Department of 'Justice,'" the president tweeted early Thursday. “Thepolitical Crime of the Century, [// fox hanty tucker rhet on obamagate]and she had no idea what they were doing?”

Yates told the committee that the FBI, under the leadership of then-Director James Comey, in January 2017 interviewed incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn without her authorization or advanced knowledge.

"I was upset that Director Comey didn't coordinate that with us and acted unilaterally," Yates said.

"Did Comey go rogue?" Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked.

"You could use that term, yes," Yates responded.

Despite her criticism of Comey’s handling of the process, Yates defended the FBI’s need to interview Flynn due to his conversations with the then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak after the November 2016 election.

"Interviewing General Flynn was really right at the core of the FBI's investigation at this point to try to discern, what are the ties between the Trump administration and the Russians?" she said during her testimony.

Flynn was fired in 2017 for misleading Vice President Pence about those conversations. He had initially entered into an agreement in 2017 to cooperate with the Department of Justice and pleaded guilty, but he subsequently withdrew from the plea agreement and was fighting the charges.

The Justice Department decided earlier this year to drop the case against Flynn, a decision that sparked outrage among Democrats, who claimed Attorney General William Barr was politicizing the agency.

Yates, asked about the decision to drop those charges on Wednesday, said she thought it was “highly irregular.”

Prior to her testimony,Trump lashed out at Yates and tweeted that she has “zero credibility.”

“She was a part of the greatest political crime of the Century, and ObamaBiden knew EVERYTHING! Sally Yates leaked the General Flynn conversation? Ask her under oath. Republicans should start playing the Democrats game!” Trump tweeted.

Trump fired Yates in January 2017, while she was serving as acting attorney general, after she refused to defend his controversial travel ban

When asked if she doesn’t like Trump, Yates told senators, "I don't respect the manner in which he has carried out the presidency."

[Trump attacks Cuomo after his Democratic convention speech

Roger Stone drops appeal of felony convictions]

“You despise Donald Trump, don’t you?” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) shot back.

“I don't despise anyone, senator,” Yates added.

The GOP is ramping up their Obama-era investigations and Graham is centering his efforts around the origins of of the FBI’s investigation into Russia's election interference and the Trump campaign as well as former special counsel Robert Mueller’s subsequent probe.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/putins-useful-idiot-this-gop-senator-is-promoting-a-russian-disinformation-campaign-to-help-get-trump-reelected

Senator Ron Johnson is basically using his position as chair of the Homeland Security Committee to do what Trump was impeached for asking Ukraine to do—smear Joe Biden based on his efforts to end corruption in that country during his tenure as Obama’s vice president.

Even Republican Senators Richard Burr and Marco Rubio are warning Johnson that his efforts could aid the disinformation campaign that Moscow is spearheading against Biden. As Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa document, Johnson seems to be getting his information from three sources.

There are three channels of Russian disinformation that have apparently affected Sen. Johnson’s Ukraine-related investigations.

Channel 1. Russian-linked Ukrainian operatives communicating directly with Sen. Johnson and his staff.

Channel 2. Russian-linked Ukrainian operatives spreading disinformation via media outlets, which have been picked up and expressly relied upon by Sen. Johnson.

Channel 3. Russian-linked Ukrainian operatives providing information via “Team [Rudy] Giuliani.”

That is bad enough. But then this week,Johnson actually said the quiet parts out loud.

“The more that we expose of the corruption of the transition process between Obama and Trump, the more we expose of the corruption within those agencies, I would think it would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection and certainly be pretty good, I would say, evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden,” Johnson said in a little-noticed Tuesday interview with Minneapolis-based radio hosts Jon Justice and Drew Lee.

In other words, the senator from Wisconsin is engaging in a Russian disinformation campaign, which he admits is designed to damage Biden and help Trump get reelected. Johnson is doing so four years after he joined Biden in demanding that Ukraine “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.”

All of that raises questions about whether Johnson is acting as a “useful idiot” on Vladimir Putin’s behalf. But it is important to keep in mind that the senator isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. After all, this is the guy who turned a joke from Lisa Page into a claim that he had an “informant” who said that there was a “secret society” of FBI agents meeting off site. The inference was that they were plotting to destroy the Trump presidency. He is also the senator who issued a report, wrote an op-ed, and held a hearing to make the unconscionable claim that Medicaid is responsible for fueling the opioid epidemic.

For Johnson, there doesn’t seem to be an Alex Jones-type conspiracy theory that he won’t peddle. Most often, he jumps in and gets pilloried for failing to do an even basic review of facts. That’s why, whether he intends to or not, he is certainly playing the role of being Putin’s useful idiot.

nancy let wa mo

an 720

rep scanlon refs to him as conspir theory, flynn emails "unmasking" deep state BS?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/rep-jim-jordan-yells-and-throws-a-hearing-into-chaos-over-his-fringe-conspiracy-theories/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/bombshell-report-reveals-trumps-careless-belief-early-on-that-covid-19-was-deep-state-conspiracy

CNN’s Jake Tapper did a special walking through the timeline of the COVID-19 crisis and the denial from President Donald Trump leading up to the middle of March.

While the virus was spreading across the world, President Donald Trump believed that all of the warnings from his government were just more from the “deep state” trying to conspire against him and his presidency.

“His focus, much of it, was on the U.S. Senate,” said Tapper of Trump in January.

“In his view, it was the so-called deep state, people in government who were hell-bent on bringing him down,” said Mark Mazzetti, New York Times investigative reporter. “So, by the time the coronavirus pandemic really started to worsen in the United States and scientists and experts were telling him of the problem, he saw some of these people as just an extension of the deep state, and so that led to I think, some of the skepticism that he had towards the advice he was being given"

Trump issued his China ban, but according to the report, public health experts said that Trump assumed it would take care of everything. He then took his foot off the gas for weeks, ignoring the virus and having political rallies throughout the country instead of focusing on the crisis.

Political correspondent Sara Murray explained that public health experts “really look with despair at those couple of weeks because they say whatever your feelings were on the travel ban at the time, it was a perfectly fine and reasonable step to take, and he bought himself a little bit of time, and then he just squandered it.”

While the FDA acted quickly to issue test kits, they quickly found that the tests weren’t working. Precious time was wasted because the FDA blocked anyone else from creating a test.’

“There was a test available from the world health organization, but the CDC did not choose to get it, and nobody inside the government asked outside labs to help,” said Tapper.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta said that it was clear in early February that there was human to human contact.

Warning stacked up health experts, but they all went ignored. When one Trump official crafted a memo about the crisis, the president became enraged that someone put something down on paper about the virus. In the notorious “Red Dawn” email chain on Feb. 9, the government health experts were calling for social distancing. It was five weeks later that Trump would finally agree to it. But on that same day, Trump’s team was giving a briefing to governors where they were saying it was a serious problem.

“They gave us a pretty detailed outline of what they felt was happening with this virus,” said Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R). “We knew this was going to be a serious crisis.”

In early February, Trump was telling everyone that the virus was going to be down to zero cases in the United States, but behind the scenes, his experts were preparing for cases to go from 15 to millions.

See clips of the special below:

https://www.conspiracyarchive.com/2020/02/24/the-truther-temptation-the-russiagate-skeptics-the-mueller-report-part-1/

Will Banyan

TRUMP: Look, Putin…… from everything I see, has no respect for this person.

CLINTON: Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.

TRUMP: No puppet. No puppet.

CLINTON: And it’s pretty clear…

TRUMP: You’re the puppet!

:{Donald J. Trump & Hillary Clinton,

Third Presidential Debate, October 19, 2016}:

“…I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected.”

President Donald J. Trump tweet, :{30 May 2019:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:600;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

As anticipated, the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election earlier last year elicited an abundance of earnest commentary from various parties. For President Donald Trump and his supporters the release of the redacted version of the report on 18 April 2019, which had been preceded a few weeks earlier by a carefully crafted letter by Attorney General William Barr summarising its main findings (March 24, 2019), this was a moment to savour. “No Collusion, No Obstruction!”, Trump tweeted; adding in a subsequent posting that Mueller had found “there was NO COLLUSION WITH RUSSIA. The Russia Hoax is dead!”

“The left’s favorite conspiracy theory is now dead, it is buried,” announced Fox News presenter and Trump confidante,¹ Sean Hannity, “There was no collusion, no conspiracy, no obstruction, nothing.” Pro-Trump intellectual gadfly Victor Davis Hanson, writing on the American Greatness website, took issue with the “Mueller fiasco” for confirming what was “self-evident from the outset of this ill-starred inquest: Donald Trump did not ‘collude’ with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton…” The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway congratulated herself for having successfully “resist[ed] the overwhelming pressure to join the conspiracy theorists…” Lee Smith over on The Tablet (Mar. 27, 2019), celebrated that the “entire collusion theory” had now been “publicly and definitely proclaimed to be a hoax” by Mueller, the very individual the “elite pundit class” had placed their “hopes of redemption.” Celebrating the downfall of the “Trump-Russia collusion fairy tale”, pro-Trump commentator, Julie Kelly, admonished “Citizen Collusion Truthers” and warned that: “History will not be kind to the Trump-Russia collusion truthers in Congress, the expert class, Hollywood, and the media” (*American Greatness*, Apr. 04, 2019).

Mueller’s report, wrote noted leftist skeptic Glenn Greenwald had “obliterated…in an undeniable and definitive manner” the “conspiracy theory that has dominated U.S. political discourse for almost three years.” According to *Rolling Stone’s* Matt Taibbi, Mueller’s report makes it “crystal clear” that “[t]here was no Trump-Russia conspiracy….” Mueller’s findings, mused another progressive skeptic, Aaron Maté, “should finally put to rest the ‘collusion’ theory that has consumed the mainstream media and the political class for more than two years” (*The Nation*, Mar. 26, 2019). Indeed, noted Maté in a follow-up piece, Mueller’s report not only refuted the “sinister collusion plot”, but “presents what amounts to an extended indictment of the conspiracy theory itself” (*The Nation*, Apr. 26, 2019). “[T]hose advancing the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government were wrong, and those of us voicing skepticism of this were right,” declared self-styled Australian “rogue journalist” Caitlin Johnstone.

This victory chorus was accompanied by harsh commentary predicting that proponents of the Russia-Trump collusion theory would, like all conspiracists faced with information that debunked their claims, inevitably invent reasons to reject Mueller’s findings. Conspiracy theory researcher and Qanon-watcher Travis View, for example, warned in the Washington Post (Mar. 26, 2019), that people who held “unrealistic expectations” of the Mueller’s investigation “will dig deep into conspiracy theorizing rather than adjust to the new facts.” He claimed to have already detected a “QAnon-like rejection of reality” amongst some “Russia-gate” pundits. Brian Feldman at New York Magazine, (Mar. 28, 2019) similarly noted that Barr’s letter had “[n]ot been great” for the credibility of the “Russiagate gang.” Feldman portrayed them as grifters who built online brands based on “wild speculation and invented facts” who would, nevertheless, find new ways to continue to theorize:

The Mueller diviners who have seen their predictions and promises go up in flames are now pivoting from knowing everything to pointing out everything we don’t know. We don’t know what’s in sealed indictments, we don’t know what’s in the actual report, we don’t know what other investigations into Trump are uncovering. After making grand promises and failing to sit and wait, the #resistance tweeters would like you to sit and wait, listening to them craft ever more fantastical meta-realities…

The collusion skeptics and Trump sympathizers were also quick to deride the “Russiagate truthers” as grimly hanging onto their now discredited theories, as they desperately tried to ignore or explain away the inconvenient facts uncovered by Mueller. These “Collusion Truthers” needed to be treated with “scorn and ridicule”, tweeted a gloating Donald Trump Jr. Amber Athey at the Daily Caller (Mar. 30, 2019) claimed that “Democrats and the establishment media” were already “floating conspiracy theories” about Mueller’s investigation “in order to discredit his finding of no collusion.” National Review columnist Deroy Murdock lambasted “Democratic flat-Earthers” for their refusal to accept the findings of the Special Counsel, and the House and Senate Intelligence Committees “that ‘Trump-Russia collusion’ is a hoax” (*National Review*, Mar. 29, 2019). On twitter, a magnanimous Glenn Greenwald admitted to feeling “pity” for those people who “still cling to the hope that they were right all along about Trump/Russia conspiracy theory…” After reading Barr’s letter, “Bernhard” of the Moon of Alabama blog confidently concluded:

The case is closed. Neither was there a Trump campaign ‘collusion’ with anything Russia nor was there obstruction by the Trump administration.

Unfortunately Russiagaters will not give up on their conspiracy theories anytime soon.

Such analysis, in the face of Barr’s brief letter summarising the main conclusions of Mueller’s report and the subsequent release of the “lightly” redacted version of that document, which appears to refute the “collusion” accusation at the centre of the “Russia-gate” narrative, seems compelling. But there are good reasons to dispute this narrative of the fact-averse “Collusion Truthers” supposedly rejecting Mueller’s findings for more personally and politically comforting conspiracy theories. On the contrary, the worst outbreak of “Trutherism” has been amongst the “Russia-gate” skeptics who have clung to their “Deep State coup” theories even though Mueller’s findings did little to directly support their claims.

The evidence for this is fourfold: first, in their uncritical embrace of Barr’s highly misleading letter which sought to frame the narrative about Mueller’s findings as unequivocally exonerating Trump; second, following the release of the Special Counsel’s report, in their questioning and rejection of many of Mueller’s more nuanced and troubling findings about the extent of Russian interference and interactions with the Trump campaign; third, their strong support for US Attorney John Durham’s inquiry into the origins of the FBI’s investigation in the clear expectation it would confirm the “Deep State Coup” theory; and finally, in the continuing invocation of the “Deep State coup” conspiracy theory to explain why Trump was (albeit unsuccessfully) impeached over the Ukraine scandal.

The Secret Team

The term “conspiracy theory”, though seemingly neutral, has long served as a term of derision.² As a writer for the *Pacific Standard* once observed, “the term suggests a certain level of looniness, conjuring images of paranoid people struggling to find sinister patterns in random events.”^3 Certainly, when many media commentators and academics describe something as a “conspiracy theory” it is in reference to types of analysis, specifically those positing sinister cabals behind significant events, which they regard as inherently illogical, empirically defective, and ultimately divorced from reality. Controversial commentator Daniel Pipes, in his book Conspiracy (1997), for example, defined “conspiracy theory” as the “fear of a non-existent conspiracy” (p.21). In his Voodoo Histories (2009), journalist David Aaronovitch describes conspiracy theories as: “the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable” (p.5). According to Professor Robert Brotherton from the University of London, a conspiracy theory is:

…an unverified claim of conspiracy which is not the most plausible account of an event or situation, and with sensationalistic subject matter or implications. In addition, the claim will typically postulate unusually sinister and competent conspirators. Finally, the claim is based on weak kinds of evidence, and is epistemically self-insulating against disconfirmation (PsyPag Quarterly, September 2013, p.9).

The alternate perspective is that “conspiracy theory” is a label applied quite deliberately to discredit and delegitimise analysis that exposes abuses of power. This view is articulated by Professor Lance deHaven-Smith from Florida State University, author of Conspiracy Theory in America (2013). The term “conspiracy theory”, he contends, is in fact a “pejorative put-down” employed by “political elites to suppress mass suspicions” that may arise in response to “shocking political crimes” committed by those same elites (p.9). More recently, Australian academic David Coady argued that,

the net effect of terms such as “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracism” is to silence people who are the victims of conspiracy, or who (rightly or wrongly) suspect conspiracies may be occurring. These terms serve to herd respectable opinion in ways that suit the interests of the powerful (*The Conversation*, Sep. 13, 2018).

In their profligate use of “conspiracy theory”, the champions of “Russiagate” skepticism clearly seek to both discredit the entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative as baseless speculation, andsmear its advocates as irrational and deranged. Of course, there are some “Russiagate” theories, particularly those that paint Trump as a long-term, utterly compliant Russian puppet (now obviously beholden to Putin), that arguably warrant the “conspiracy theory” label. Proponents of these more extreme collusion scenarios include such luminaries as MSNBC’smuch–maligned Rachel Maddow, Malcolm Nance, journalist Jonathan Chait,^4 academic^{Seth Abramson}, and the infamously unhinged Louise Mensch. The lodestar for these theorists (though not all refer to it) is the so-called Steele Dossier, produced by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, a Washington DC based research and strategic intelligence firm, for the Clinton campaign. The dossier, only small fragments of which have been verified, is filled with lurid claims about Trump’s sexual deviancy, corrupt dealings in Russia, and deep involvement in the hacking of the DNC.

Yet, if we apply the criteria employed by academics to describe and identify conspiracy theories, much of the “Deep State coup” narrative also warrants that same despised label, probably to an even greater extent than the Russia-Trump Collusion narrative. This becomes evident if we consider the salient features of the “Deep State coup” narrative, starting with the description of the alleged conspirators behind the “coup” against Trump.

A key feature of a “conspiracy belief”, according to Professor Michael Barkun in his A Culture of Conspiracy(2003), is that “an organization made up of individuals or groups was or is acting covertly to achieve some sort of malevolent end” (p.3). As the late Richard Hofstadter observed in his classic essay on the “Paranoid Style”:

The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional) (*Harper’s Magazine*, Nov 1964).

The journalist Jonathan Kay in his book, Among the Truthers (2011), for example, noted that 9/11 “Truthers” had a particularly Manichean view of US power structures:

In the Truther vision of America, our elected government is nothing but a smokescreen for Deep State actors—arms dealers, oil companies, neoconservative ideologues, Strangelovian Pentagon warmongers—who pull our elected politicians puppet strings, and control our society at all levels through bribery, murder and extortion(p.xxi; emphasis added).

The “Deep State Coup” counter-narrative also promotes a sinister interpretation of US power structures, claiming that the entire “Russiagate” affair is a devious plot implemented by a cabal of Democrats and the “Deep State”, represented by corrupt law enforcement and intelligence agencies, aided by a compliant and complicit mainstream media, to overthrow Trump with a false “collusion narrative”. This can be seen in the description of the alleged plot by Patrick Henningsen, founder and editor of the 21^st Century Wire website:

…a very real cabal comprised of embedded civil servants, intelligence agents and partisan political operatives in the media – all working to fabricate a grand Russian conspiracy designed to discredit and unseat the 45^th President of the United States of America (New Dawn, May/June 2019, p.16; emphasis added).

A similar combination of conspirators was also identified in Caitlin Johnstone’s post-Barr victory dance. “Russiagate”, she wrote, was in fact:

a pernicious lie advanced by secretive government agencies who’ve been plotting to shove Russia off the world stage since the fall of the Soviet Union, by the Democrats who’ve had a vested interest in avoiding accountability for their failures and malfeasance in the 2016 election, and by the mass media who’ve been reaping extreme profits by peddling the clickbait sensationalist conspiracy theory that the Kremlin has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government [emphasis added].

For the duration of the FBI and Special Counsel investigations into this affair, this conspiratorial counter-narrative has a been a constant theme in countless articles and social media posts on websites and publications as varied as Gateway Pundit, Infowars, RealClearPolitics, World Net Daily, American Greatness, The Federalist, Consortium News and Judicial Watch. Other proponents of note include: Fox News contributor Sara A. Carter,; some anonymous twitter accounts, particularly Techno Fog and Undercover Huber; and a number of lawyers involved in defending Trump and his associates, specifically Michael Flynn’s current lawyer Sidney Powell, and husband-and-wife team Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing. It has also been promoted by mainstream conservative outlets such as the National Review (by Andrew McCarthy and the recently pardoned Conrad Black), Fox News (specifically Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson), The Hill (in articles by John Solomon), the Wall Street Journal (mainly by Kimberly Strassel), and Tablet (Lee Smith).

Conrad Black, for instance, a former long-time member of the secretive Bilderberg Group,⁵ itself the object of conspiratorial fascination since the 1950s, accused the directors of a number of US intelligence agencies of “trying to rig and then to undo” the result of the 2016 election by promoting the “fraud of collusion” (*American Greatness*, Jul. 18, 2018). At the heart of the “Trump–Russian collusion argument”, according to Black, was the Steele dossier, which was a “pack of lies”; but the Democrats were successful in “subverting high levels of the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department and FBI to pursue this canard with the zeal they did” (*National Review*, Sep. 12, 2018).

This “Deep State” coup conspiracy theory has also been the subject of numerous books, many written by Trump supporters and surrogates, mostly from the Fox News stable. Key examples include: Judge Jeanine Pirro, Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy(2018); Dan Bongino and D.C. McAllister, Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump (2018); Gregg Jarrett’s The Russia Hoax (2018) and Witch Hunt (2019); Lee Smith’s The Plot Against the President(2019); and Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig and Election and Destroy a Presidency (2019). Although claiming not to be endorsing a “conspiracy theory”, Bongino and McAllister nevertheless argue there were “intersections among the Clinton Campaign, the Obama Administration, intelligence agencies and foreign operatives” that created the “false narrative” that nearly cost Trump the presidency (Spygate, p.xii). In his first book Jarrett dismisses the Russia collusion narrative as a “hoax manufactured by unscrupulous high-ranking officials within the FBI and the Department of Justice” (Russia Hoax, pp.87-88). According to Judge Pirro:

This plot against Donald Trump and every American who voted for him goes all the way to the top of the previous administration. It was conceived and planned at the top and executed by like-minded Deep Staters in law enforcement, the intelligence community, and their Swamp Party talking heads in the media (Liars, Leakers and Liberals, p.81).

McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and contributing editor to National Review, offers almost the same formulation of the “real collusion scheme”:

In 2016, President Obama put the awesome powers of the United States government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in service of the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, the Democratic party, and the progressive Beltway establishment. This scheme had two parts…

Plan A was to get Mrs. Clinton elected President of the United States…

Plan B was the insurance policy: an investigation that Donald Trump, in the highly unlikely event he were elected, would be powerless to shut down. An investigation that would simultaneously monitor and taint him. An investigation that internalized Clinton campaign-generated opposition research, limning Trump and his campaign as complicit in Russian espionage. An investigation that would hunt for a crime under the guise of counterintelligence, build an impeachment case under the guise of hunting for a crime, and seek to make Trump un-reelectable under the guise of building an impeachment case (Ball of Collusion, pp.vii-viii; emphasis added).

Also advancing this theory in a slew of recent publications and other media are a motley collective of individuals questioned and, in some cases, indicted and convicted by Mueller’s investigation. These include: Jerome Corsi’s Killing the Deep State (2018) and Silent No More (2019); Ted Malloch’s The Plot to Destroy Trump (2018); George Papadopoulos’s Deep State Target (2019); and Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie’s Trump’s Enemies (2018). In his book, Killing the Deep State, for instance, Corsi claimed that:

President Trump is the target of coup d’etat being undertaken by the Deep State, including the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies that maintain a commitment to a globalist New World Order (Killing the Deep State, p.146).

While Papadopoulos asserted in his book:

The deep state is the movement of anti-Trump operations in America’s three branches of government who have been working against Donald Trump, his campaign, and his administration to strip it of authority (Deep State Target, p.112).

Similar theories have been promoted by the supposedly leftist critics of “Russiagate”. Greenwald, for example, has repeatedly accused the “Deep State”, primarily the CIA, of not only opposing Trump, but actively “subverting” him. Pointing to the implicit endorsement of the Steele dossier by US intelligence agencies, Greenwald claimed that the “military industrial complex” that Eisenhower had warned about, was “engaged in open warfare against a duly elected president” (*The Intercept*, Jan. 12, 2017). As he told Democracy Now in 2017, this was because: “The CIA and the intelligence community were vehemently in support of Clinton and vehemently opposed to Trump, from the beginning.” The CIA opposed Trump, Greenwald wrote in the Intercept, because he had rejected their agenda:

Clinton defended and intended to extend the decades long international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while Trump — through a still-uncertain mix of instability and extremist conviction — posed a threat to it.⁶

Greenwald repeated this argument in an interview with *Dazed* in December 2018, where he provided his thoughts on the growing attractiveness of conspiracy theories, and why people had lost faith in traditional mainstream sources of information:

Some stem from truth – with the Trump presidency, there is a very powerful faction in Washington, the Deep State, military-industrial complex, the forces of the CIA or FBI, whatever you want to call it, who have been conspiring to subvert the Trump presidency because they dislike the outcome of the election [emphasis added].

Focusing on the leaks of “intercepted communications” supporting the Russiagate theory, Michael Tracey had expressed concern that “unelected spooks [were] arrogating to themselves the power to directly undermine the elected president.” And following Mueller’s indictment of Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC, Aaron Maté suggested that “[w]hoever supplied the intelligence that has fueled this thing from the beginning…” and even proposed that US spy agencies were “inventing intelligence…” for this purpose.

Rush to Judgement

On March 24, 2019, Attorney-General Barr wrote to the heads of the Judiciary Committees in the US Senate and House of Representatives, to advise of them of the “principal conclusions” reached by the Special Counsel’s lengthy investigation. On page 2 of his missive, Barr provided this headline finding:

The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

...

note atkinson // to fauci

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/are-trump-and-his-allies-setting-up-dr-fauci-as-their-elite-scapegoat/

no lnx

Are Trump and his allies setting up Dr. Fauci as their ‘elite’ scapegoat?

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 6, 2020

This has gotten buried under the pile of horrific news about both the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump’s multiple failures to handle the crisis, but there was a moment during Trump’s daily propaganda dump on Sunday that was even more disturbing than usual. It came while Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was speaking, which usually means a respite from Trump’s firehose of misinformation and self-aggrandizement and an opportunity to get real information from an actual expert who is not a sociopath.

A reporter started to ask Fauci about the use of hydroxychloroquine, the now-legendary anti-malarial drug, to treat COVID-19. Fauci was almost certainly about to say, as he does every time he’s out of reach of Trump, that there’s no real evidence that the drug works, much less that it’s the “game-changer” that Trump desperately wants it to be.

But Fauci wasn’t able to answer the question, becauseTrump stopped him. “You don’t have to ask the question,” the president said, stepping in front of the podium, waving his hand in the air and using his girth as a physical barricade between Fauci and the reporter.

Earlier in the press conference, Trump had offered yet another glowing recommendation of hydroxychloroquine, which has no substantive evidence to recommend it. He literally cited “rumor” as a reason to give it a spin and said, “What do you have to lose?”

People actually have a lot to lose, as the drug has been known to damage the nervous system, cause psychological trauma and lead to heart attacks.

During this exchange, there was a hint of one reason Trump is championing this drug as a of miracle cure, despite the lack of evidence: He’s starting to workshop the excuses he will use and the scapegoats he will sacrifice in order to escape the blame — which he richly deserves — for how badly this crisis spun out of control. And the person most in danger of becoming the primary scapegoat for Trump and his minions is Fauci himself.

“If it does work, it would be a shame we did not do it early,” Trump said about hydroxychloroquine during the press conference Sunday.

At that point, it became clear to me what Trump hopes to get out of this endless hype about an unproven and dangerous drug: A QAnon-style conspiracy theory he can roll out, after the worst of the crisis has passed, about his heroic efforts to save everyone with a miracle drug, which were thwarted by shady “deep state” forces who denied the public this lifesaving drug as part of a plot to make him look bad.

Unfortunately for Fauci, he’s the most obvious candidate to become the villain in this conspiracy theory, in much the same way former FBI director James Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller were framed as part of a sinister anti-Trump conspiracy during the investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.

Tucker Carlsonof Fox News has been leading the pack in the effort to cast Fauci as the villain in the right-wing conspiracy theories that will pour from the spigots as soon as the spread of the coronavirus and the associated death rate start to ebb.

Dr. Fauci is prescribing “national suicide,” Carlson claimedon his show last week, declaring that the economic collapse caused by social distancing protocols is “a far bigger disaster than the virus itself, by any measure” and declaring that our “response to coronavirus could turn this into a far poorer nation.”

There are plenty of people who must share the blame for this national disaster. Trump, for one, is to blame because he twiddled his thumbs and denied the virus was serious until it had exploded across the country. If he’d actually taken this seriously and contained the disease, it’s likely none of this would be necessary. Carlson, of course, isn’t blaming Republicans, who seem determined to stop the kind of New Deal-level federal investment in our workers that is needed not just to keep people from falling into dire poverty, but to get the economy back on the road to recovery.

But instead Carlson is blaming Fauci, saying that the doctor “has bulletproof job security,” with the clear implication that he doesn’t care about people who are losing their jobs.

To make matters worse, there are reports that Fauci is conflicting with White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a major booster of hydroxychloroquine. This isn’t surprising, since Trump’s right-wing economics advisers are eager to grasp at any thin straw to suggest that the economy can be “reopened” without causing mass loss of life from COVID-19. It just happens that this fantasy is not scientifically feasible.

It’s easy to see where all this is going. If the social distancing works to contain the virus, conservative pundits will point to the lower-than-feared death toll as evidence that the virus was never that serious — but not, of course, that the severe restrictions on daily life actually worked. They’ll claim that quarantine measures were never necessary, and suggest that hydroxychloroquine was a real solution that was available the whole time but got left on the table thanks of the “deep state” conspiracyagainst Trump. (Rather than because there’s no evidence this often-dangerous drug is actually a cure for COVID-19.) And Fauci will be held up as the straw-man villain in this conspiracy because he supported social distancing and was skeptical of Dr. Trump’s miracle drug.

Will this conspiracy theory work? In the sense of shoring up Trump’s support with his loyal base, there’s no doubt about it. There’s been a run on hydroxychloroquine from Trump supporters, who trust their president’s ill-founded rumor-mongering over any and all medical evidence. These are folks who feel justified in voting for a racist reality TV star and will cling to whatever nonsense Trump and Fox News dish up as a rationalization.

It’s unclear, however, how much traction this nonsense will have outside of that Trumpian bubble. There is definitely room for concern, since conspiracy theories about “secret” cures that regular doctors are holding back for mysterious reasons never seem to go out of style. But as Rutgers professor David Greenberg argued in Politico this weekend, “Politicians may be able in the short term to cover up their failed programs or weak leadership with clever messaging and images,” but in the end, with the economy down the toilet, the public is more likely to blame Trump than whatever scapegoat he and his propaganda team at Fox News serve up.

Still, this “deep state” theory seems close to inevitable, and the attacks on Fauci have already started. Trump’s opponents need to anticipate the twists and turns ahead and have a strategy to counter them. In an election that’s already being compromised by the pandemic itself, the prospect of widespread voter suppression and Trump’s apparently immovable popularity with his base, every weird Trumpian dirty trick could turn the tide.

deep state BS gave cover for?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trump-fires-people-for-telling-the-truth-president-blasted-for-dead-of-night-decision-to-fire-intel-watchdog/

‘Trump fires people for telling the truth’: President blasted for ‘dead of night decision’ to fire intel watchdog

President Donald Trump was harshly criticized on Friday for firing intelligence communityInspector General Michael Atkinson.

House Intel Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Senate Intel Ranking Member Mark Warner (D-VA) were among the lawmakers who took to Twitter to criticize Trump on his favorite social media platform.

Here’s some of what people were saying about Trump’s decision:

Adam Schiff

@RepAdamSchiff

Trump’s dead of night decision to fire ICIG Michael Atkinson is another blatant attempt to gut the independence of the Intelligence Community and retaliate against those who dare to expose presidential wrongdoing.

It puts our country and national security at even greater risk.

...

Mark Warner

@MarkWarner

In the midst of a national emergency, it is unconscionable that the President is once again attempting to undermine the integrity of the intelligence community by firing yet another intelligence official, the ICIG, simply for doing his job.

Mark Warner

@MarkWarner

The work of the intelligence community has never been about loyalty to a single individual -- it’s about keeping us all safe from those who wish to do our country harm. We should all be deeply disturbed by ongoing attempts to politicize the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Rep. Gerry Connolly

@GerryConnolly

Donald Trump tramples the Constitution again. This time, late on a Friday night under the cover of global crisis.

Congress may be at home, but we can see you, Mr. President. And we’re the one group of people you can’t fire. https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1246262473977561088 …

Kyle Griffin

@kylegriffin1

Breaking: Trump has fired the intelligence community's chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, who was the first to sound the alarm to Congress about an "urgent" complaint he'd received from an intelligence official involving Trump's communications with Ukraine. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287 …

244

7:55 PM - Apr 3, 2020

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117 people are talking about this

David Cicilline

@davidcicilline

How many civil servants will be victimized by this President before Republicans wake the hell up?

1,779

7:52 PM - Apr 3, 2020

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531 people are talking about this

Jim Himes

@jahimes

Captain Crozier and Inspector General Atkinson. Decent patriotic men of service doing their jobs with honor. And of course @realDonaldTrump can’t abide that.

Both fired in one week.

There is no bottom to this administration.

Chuck Schumer

@SenSchumer

Whether it’s LTC Vindman, Captain Crozier, or Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson:

President Trump fires people for telling the truth. https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1246261657086672896 …

Natasha Bertrand

@NatashaBertrand

BREAKING: Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, saying he no longer has confidence in him. He will be removed 30 days from now. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287 …

Chuck Schumer

@SenSchumer

Michael Atkinson is a man of integrity who has served our nation for almost two decades. Being fired for having the courage to speak truth to power makes him a patriot. https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1246261657086672896 …

Natasha Bertrand

@NatashaBertrand

Rep. Eric Swalwell

@RepSwalwell

America, time to fire @realDonaldTrump https://twitter.com/natashabertrand/status/1246261657086672896 …

Natasha Bertrand

@NatashaBertrand

BREAKING: Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, saying he no longer has confidence in him. He will be removed 30 days from now.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287 …

an 320

Rush Limbaugh argues that medical experts are just part of the ‘Deep State’Alex Hender

no lnx

Rush Limbaugh argues that medical experts are just part of the ‘Deep State’

Written by Alex Henderson March 27, 2020

Far-right talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, like President Donald Trump, has been a frequent source of nonsense during the coronavirus crisis: on his February 24 show, he equated COVID-19 with “the common cold.” And on Friday, the 69-year-old Limbaugh argued that health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) cannot be trusted because they are part of “the Deep State” and have an anti-Trump agenda.

In audio that Media Matters has posted on its website, embedded above, Limbaugh can be heard on Friday telling listeners, “We’ve talked about the Deep State all these years since Trump was elected — the Trump-Russia collusion, the FBI — well, the Deep State extends very deeply. And the American people did not elect a bunch of health experts that we don’t know. We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know.”

Limbaugh added, “And how do we know they’re even health experts? Well, they wear white lab coats, and they’ve been in the job for a while — and they’re at the CDC, and they’re at the NIH…. But has there been any job assessment for them? They’re just assumed to be the best because they’re in government. But these are all kinds of things that I’ve been questioning.”

Limbaugh, who lives in South Florida, went on to criticize social distancing measures in that part of the U.S.

“I’ve been watching people routinely accept whatever the authorities say,” Limbaugh told listeners. “Where I live, the local town government is driving around town, trying to spot people violating the social distancing ordinances. And when they see it, they publish it on their web site: ‘This is very troublesome. We at the town are very troubled by groups of people congregating, violating the social distancing.’ Well, what do you think people are going to do? People are not just going to sit around here and stop living.”

Limbaugh and Trump have both repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus crisis. Back in February, when thousands of people were dying from it in mainland China, Trump insisted that his critics were exaggerating the threat posed to other parts of the world.

On February 24, Limbaugh insisted that the mainstream media were exaggerating the threat posed by coronavirus as a way of attacking Trump, telling his audience, “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

That day, Limbaugh also told listeners, “Thedrive-by media hype of this thing as a pandemic, as the Andromeda strain, as, ‘Oh, my God, if you get it, you’re dead’.… I think the survival rate is 98%. Ninety-eight per cent of people (who) get the coronavirus survive. It’s a respiratory system virus.”

Stephen King

@StephenKing

Rush Limbaugh says coronavirus no worse than the common cold. Sage advice from a lifelong cigar smoker who has lung cancer.

In late February, Trump told reporters he had a “hunch” that the death rate from coronavirus was lower than what the World Health Organization (WHO) was reporting. And it was also during that period that Trump denounced coronavirus warnings coming from Democrats as a “hoax.” Since then, the number of deaths from coronavirus has passed 25,000 worldwide, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

On March 11, Limbaugh argued that the cancelations of major events like basketball games and the South by Southwest convention in Austin, Texas were an overreaction.

“Where does this end?,” Limbaugh asserted. “Especially when you realize there are diseases out there that kill many more than are being killed by this.”

looks like 80's?

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May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better	May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better	May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better	May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better	May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better	May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better	May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better	May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Skepticism and critical thinking is not panacea, but can help to understand the world better

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