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10/ 21 tag key to 2nd civil war vxr

SUPPORT IS GOOD/ SANE hence spelling tweak 10 23

yikes rfk dhs trump trans 11 24

OMG LOOK AT RATIO RECALL PRONG OF TRUMP COUP

merri ok

see fail 4 covid

fox bad trinity K 10/21

see gubmint

see sci suppress

see delta covid 5

see agnotology

see mask stay at home --> MORPH MORANO CLIMATE LOCKDOWN BS

see fauci target

see florida desantis

abbott texas measles

SEE RED STATES

see truckers

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SOMEONE HAD THREE? PRONG APPROACH TO 2020 ELECTION, INVOLVED MASK LOCKDOWN PROTESTS?

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an 6 25

If you think viruses are fake, chemtrails are real and public health is a conspiracy, you’re probably up in arms about four hundred potentially diseased Canadian ostriches.

Federal inspectors are poised to euthanize the flock to contain a novel strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) that killed 69 ostriches on a remote farm in Edgewood, British Columbia.

After losing their court case to save the flock, the owners of Universal Ostrich Farms invited the dregs of the antigovernment antivax trucker convoy that paralyzed Ottawa to surround the premises to stop the cull.

The fate of the ostriches has become a cause célèbre in rightwing media. We didn’t hear a peep out of maga when Trump declared open season on migratory birds, but every self-respecting antivaxer is an ostrich fancier now. In keeping with their philosophy of governance by trolling, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and his wingman Dr. Mehmet Oz are stirring the pot.

Oz offered to adopt the enormous flightless birds and bring them to live on his 900-acre Florida estate because, apparently, we don’t have enough bird flu at home. “The Canadians should stop putting their heads in the sand,” he said, indulging in a little light colonialism. “We just have to get [the ostriches] out of Canada.”

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After initially rejecting the offer, a spokesperson said the farmers would consider it as a last resort. Oz’s grandiose gesture coincided with HHS’s abrupt cancellation of a $766 million contract with Moderna to finish testing a promising mRNA bird flu vaccine.

“I think this is an incredibly stupid idea,” said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan. Oz is pitching the move as an opportunity to study the effects of bird flu in ostriches, but Rasmussen sees zero scientific value in his plan because “[t]here are no controls, no baseline immunological data, no testing, and no clear experimental objective.”

The birds wouldn’t pose an imminent threat to the health of Americans, Rasmussen says, but they would pose a risk to Oz’s employees and the birds could also spread the virus to wild birds and animals in Florida.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza can be lethal to people. Currently, the virus does not spread readily between humans, but if it mutated, experts say, it could cause a pandemic several times deadlier than covid.

The farm’s owners insist that their birds are healthy, but they actually have no way of knowing. Ostriches can be asymptomatic carriers of the virus, Rasmussen warns. The birds could be passing the bug around like the world’s tallest kindergarten class.

The longer the virus circulates, the more opportunities it has to mutate into something more dangerous. Experts fear that someday, somewhere in some innocent-looking duck or chicken or ostrich, the virus will mutate into a human-to-human transmissible variant. It’s a numbers game. That’s one reason why the Canadian authorities stamp out HPAI wherever they find it. Nobody wants to be responsible for Ostrich Zero. Another reason is that Canada is bound by trade agreements to stamp out HPAI and British Columbia poultry farmers are locked out of key export markets until the flock is culled. Finally, stamp-out is the law in Canada and the courts have found no basis to overrule CFIA.

Showing no awareness that Canada is a sovereign nation with laws, treaty obligations, and a justice system, Kennedy tried to browbeat the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) into sparing the birds. Because “my fans love ostriches and hate the government” isn’t a persuasive argument, Kennedy insinuated that Universal Ostrich is actually an elite biomedical research outfit probing the mysteries of bird flu. The birds should be spared, he argued, because the flock is in a controlled environment where it can be studied.

However, court records paint a picture of a decidedly uncontrolled environment on an ordinary farm with lax biosecurity. The owners have produced no evidence to CFIA that any research is taking place on the premises and in the agency’s opinion, “the current physical facilities at their location are not suitable for controlled research activities or trials.” The farm has also been fined $20,000 by CFIA for failing to report the outbreak and failing to follow quarantine procedures. This lackadaisical attitude is particularly alarming because the farm is on the great Pacific Flyway, a river of migratory birds that runs from Patagonia to Alaska and is a major conduit for novel strains of bird flu. The ostriches live in giant outdoor pens that bring them into direct contact with wild birds.

To add insult to injury, the owners have invited strangers from all across the country to commune with the birds, creating even more opportunities to spread the virus. Rasmussen notes that “the avian freedom fighters of the True North are not abiding by quarantine protocols and are in the pens with the ostriches.”

Luckily, the Canadians don’t take our overexcitable Secretary of Health and Human Services any more seriously than we do. Asked about Kennedy’s pressure campaign, Canadian Minister of Agriculture Heath MacDonald said he didn’t think it was appropriate for Canadians to make major decisions based on social media. CFIA says it is still planning to euthanize the birds.

A normal HHS secretary might have qualms about egging on antigovernment protesters on friendly foreign soil, but not Kennedy. Dozens of protesters have been gathered at the farm for weeks and additional reinforcements rolled in recently. The atmosphere is festive with merch, live music and plenty of drumming for the ostriches.

However, if protesters tried to resist federal agents, the situation could devolve into another standoff like we saw at the Bundy ranch, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and the siege of Ottawa. In the winter of 2022, a convoy of antivax truckers laid siege to Canada’s capital city for three weeks. As a private citizen, Kennedy supported the convoy financially and assailed the Canadian government as “a monster” for freezing the occupiers’ bank accounts.

The Universal Ostrich conflict is unique because instead of protesting the containment of an existing pandemic, these extremists might be causing the next one. By offering to import the birds and killing the most promising bird flu vaccine, Kennedy and Oz are only too eager to help.

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texas measles

an 6 25

Two unvaccinated babies die of whooping cough in KY as disease rise is predicted to continue

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MMA

Sean Hannity has a lot to say about the “stupid flu shot” all of a sudden

Sean Hannity used to tell his audience about getting the flu shot every year and how much it helped him. Now, he’s calling it a “stupid flu shot.”

Written by Helena Hind

Research contributions from Alicia Sadowski & Isabella Corrao

Published 05/29/25

Citation

Fox News, 9/16/2020

After years of assuring his audience that he regularly gets his yearly flu vaccination, Sean Hannity has suddenly changed his tune, casting doubt on the efficacy of the “stupid flu shot” during the May 28 edition of his radio show.

The MAGA propagandist’s comments come as harmful anti-vaccine policy takes root in the Trump administration, with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bucking the normal scientific review process and removing the COVID-19 vaccine from the CDC’s recommended immunizations for children and those who are pregnant.

During the May 28 edition of The Sean Hannity Show, guest Dr. Brian Tyson claimed that COVID-19 booster vaccines are “negative effective, just like last year's flu shot.” Hannity jumped in: “Well, people don't understand that. Every year, they will start producing a flu virus. They're guessing what flu is likely to hit. They don't know for sure”

The Fox News host continued: “My understanding is they're wrong 75% of the time, and people, you know, annually go get the stupid flu shot anyway.”

Sean Hannity attacks COVID vaccines and the “stupid flu shot”

May 28, 2025

Audio

Citation

From the May 28, 2025, edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): And even the creator, who I know you're familiar with, Dr. Robert Malone, was very outspoken, and he came on this program often. And he said that mRNA technology has not been perfected. He did support emergency authorization vaccinations for people over 65 that had preexisting conditions and comorbidities because they were the ones that were more likely to be -- their lives would be put in jeopardy by the virus. He absolutely was crystal clear. It was not designed for healthy people that were younger, meaning below the age of 65, and it's absolutely not designed for children.

Now, he's the one that created the technology that allowed for the creation of this, and he's saying this. And then he gets excoriated like you got excoriated for trying alternative treatment, which, by the way, studies, since that time have proven that you were right about things like hydroxychloroquine taken early, mitigating circumstances.

How many studies now have come out confirming that? How many studies have come out showing that masks really didn't help? How many studies came out, you know, showing that your protocols actually worked? How many patients' lives did you save, and how many patients did you lose in the process?

DR. BRIAN TYSON (GUEST): Yeah. I mean, it's -- so you're 100% correct. If you go to the website c19.org, you'll be able to pull up all the different treatments and all of the studies that are listed underneath those. There's over 400 studies on hydroxychloroquine, there's over 300 studies on ivermectin.

What we found was early treatment is the key. It's not about vaccines at this point because these vaccines are not effective. Actually, they're negative effective, just like last year's flu shot. Last year's flu shot had a negative efficacy of 26%, meaning those who got the flu shot were more likely to get the flu. It's the same thing with these COVID vaccine boosters.

HANNITY: Well, people don't understand that. Every year, they will start producing a flu virus. They're guessing what flu is likely to hit. They don't know for sure. And my understanding is that they're wrong 75% of the time, and people, you know, annually go get the stupid flu shot anyway.

TYSON: Yeah. But they made $6 billion off of it last year. And that's the problem. When you continuously approve vaccines without data and without research -- this is where you know the MAHA movement is -- hopefully it's going to make some ground -- you can't continue to produce vaccines without seeing the results. And you have to start holding the pharmaceutical companies accountable.

Once upon a time, Hannity was among those who chose to “go get the stupid flu shot” every year. In April 2020, the Fox host told his radio listeners it was “my choice” to “get a flu shot every year.” Months later, he said his choice to get his annual shot is “what freedom’s all about."

That November, in an attempt to assure his listeners that the COVID-19 vaccine was safe, he said he has “taken the flu shot for many, many years with no side effects at all whatsoever… it’s helped me."

Hannity also proclaimed his dedication to regular flu immunization to his Fox News audience: “I choose to get the flu shot every year and some of my friends think I’m nuts."

Video

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From the September 16, 2020, edition of Fox News' Hannity

Hannity’s sudden reversal on the “stupid flu shot” is hardly surprising, considering his yearslong assault on the COVID-19 vaccine, his network’s dedication to pushing anti-vaccine narratives, and the Trump administration’s adoption of vaccine skepticism as policy.

Meanwhile, the American Medical Association recommends on its website that “everyone aged six months or older should receive an annual flu shot.” The AMA has more on the flu vaccine and the COVID vaccine here. On its YouTube page, the AMA also its for the flu and COVID vaccine in 2024.

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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.

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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.

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?”

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February 10, 2021

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nyt

Far-Right Extremists Move From ‘Stop the Steal’ to Stop the Vaccine

Extremist organizations are now bashing the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines in an effort to try to undermine the government.

By Neil MacFarquhar

March 26, 2021

Adherents of far-right groups who cluster online have turned repeatedly to one particular website in recent weeks — the federal database showing deaths and adverse reactions nationwide among people who have received Covid-19 vaccinations.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 ...

rww

Rumor of Joseph Ladapo landing the gig comes after the president’s first pick for the role had his appointment suddenly pulled.

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liberty counsel nanobots

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MMA March 21, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): I think — and let me let me interrupt you because we're running out of time here, and that's a great question. I live in an amazing medical freedom state here in Arizona, so I take this stuff for granted.

I want to try to work with Bobby Kennedy and President Trump to use some sort of federal money to say that you cannot force these extra vaccines on kids, especially those in religious environments. It's a serious issue, and I know producer Andrew's dealing with this right now in the free state of California. And anything beyond the 1980 schedule. And that is with — so I mean, you're talking about a — they're mandating the COVID shot now for six months old. And this is outrageous stuff, and so I think there has to be a role for the federal government. And my other piece of advice, David, we gotta go to a break, is try to work through the courts. There has to be some decision somewhere. It used to be ten vaccines. Now it's 72 shots for our babies. Something's not right, and our kids are sicker than ever.

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AN 2 25

Trump executive order would defund schools that require Covid vaccines

MEASLES

rfk2 cod liver oil vit A no full endorse of vax 97% effective; fort texas state and cty rx preTty good hotez dr but

an 3 25

**Marjorie Taylor Greene supports infecting kids at measles 'parties' as outbreaks turn deadly**

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Texas reports new measles outbreak in West Texas

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A number of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists have claimed to be “working with,” consulting, or sending recommendations about public health policy to President Donald Trump’s advisors — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been voted out of committee and is awaiting a full Senate confirmation vote to lead Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services.

During Trump’s campaign, post-election period, and now as Kennedy awaits confirmation during Trump’s second term, these figures — some of whom also traffic in other types of extremism, such as antisemitism and the QAnon conspiracy theory — have apparently been consulting or speaking with Trump officials and Kennedy’s associates.

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November 15, 2024, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

BEN FERGUSON (GUEST): I've never seen so many conservatives, by the way, now looking at following the money of Big Pharma, and realizing, like, hey, maybe we're actually being taken advantage of. Maybe they want to throw every single vaccine at you to make more money. And we know how much money they made off of vaccines. We also know that doctors were not honest with the American people because they were getting bonuses for how many vaccines they were putting out there. And the American people and mothers will not forget that. mma

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) predicted that former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) would prosecute vaccine-related "crimes against humanity" if he becomes President-elect Donald Trump's next attorney general.

During a House Oversight Committee hearing on pandemic preparedness on Thursday, Greene accused the federal government of using "the American people's hard-earned tax dollars to create viruses that can be unleashed on the world like COVID-19 was."

"Dr. [Anthony] Fauci lied to the American people, abusing his power and position and role, a very powerful role paid for by the American tax people," she said. "He lied, and many, many people died."

"Now vaccines have been mandated on the population in order to work, go to school, and live as functioning citizens in the United States," she continued. "I can tell you when you talk about vaccine hesitancy, as one sitting before you that never took the COVID vaccine, nor will I take it, thank God. I'm so glad I didn't take it."

Greene falsely suggested other vaccines were linked to "the rise of autism, learning disabilities, neurological problems, and so much more that children are suffering from today."

ALSO READ:The one belief that predicted Trump voters with scary accuracy

"Preparing for the next pandemic is actually recognizing that the last pandemic resulted in crimes against humanity," the lawmaker opined.

"People that perpetuated and continue to perpetuate these crimes need to be prosecuted, and that needs to be starting in the next administration, and I'm pretty sure our next attorney general will do that, and I look forward to seeing that happen," she added.

Watch the video at this link.

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11/4 trump will put rfk2 in charge of food, women health, fluoride

'Dire implications': Trump’s possible vaccine ban could spark US, global health crisis

David Badash an 11 24

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September 17, 2024, edition of OutKick's OutKick The Show

CLAY TRAVIS (HOST): Finally, Scientific American magazine has endorsed Kamala Harris. It's the second endorsement that this magazine has felt compelled to make in its 179-year history. The last endorsement they had was for Joe Biden. Now they are endorsing Kamala Harris. Why? What has Kamala Harris done that you look at Donald Trump if you were truly being honest and not just a victim of Trump derangement syndrome?

What has Trump done? And what has Kamala done such that you have to have a magazine that has nothing to do with politics decide to endorse a political candidate for a second time, both times anti-Trump, no matter who the candidate was, I think they would have made that choice.

...

I am of the opinion that science should be much like the First Amendment, filled with a variety of perspectives, and you should be challenging consensus all the time. I think we would have been far better off if more people had challenged shutting down schools, shutting down businesses, making people wear masks, social distancing by six feet, the COVID shot. I think if all those things had been challenged, we would be far better off as a country.

The history of science, if you study it, is actually of scientists being incredibly wrong about almost everything. And when they are initially challenged, they try to shut down anyone who challenges the conventional authority. Go back and study history, this is the truth. So I'm actually skeptical any time science lines up and says this is the answer, you cannot challenge it. I think we need robust uninhibited debate.

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MMA 8 24

Fox News is championing RFK Jr's view of public health, even as it puts your kids at risk

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 08/27/24

Fox News hosts like Ainsley Earhardt are overjoyed about notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purported ability to help former President Donald Trump’s campaign appeal to “moms” concerned with public health.

“I think moms around the country appreciate his stance for trying to make our children healthy again,” she said on Monday.

Earhardt noted that in Kennedy’s speech last week endorsing Trump, “he talked about how 75% of the budget from the FDA comes from pharmaceutical companies” and “said it's very profitable when a child is sick,” adding that Kennedy’s condemnation of “corruption in health care” is “music to every mom’s ears."

The culture warriors at Fox aren’t typically invested in talking about public health issues. But in one key health-related fight on which the network aligned with Kennedy — COVID-19 vaccines — the results have proved disastrous. Their combined assault on what Kennedy falsely termed “the deadliest vaccine ever made” helped trigger plummeting levels of support for childhood vaccinations among Republicans, with ongoing consequences for America’s kids.

Fox’s unique pull with its right-wing audience gave it a moral responsibility to encourage viewers to take the life-saving COVID-19 vaccines. Instead, the network — led by stars like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity — pandered to anti-vaxxers like Kennedy.

Fox conducted a yearslong campaign to undermine the vaccines, which the network falsely portrayed as ineffective and dangerous, while talking up the potential of fake cures for the virus. Its hosts were particularly scathing about public health efforts to require vaccination at schools and workplaces, which Ingraham described as a “crime against humanity.”

The right-wing assault on the COVID-19 vaccines led to lower rates of vaccinations among Republicans — and consequently higher death rates. But the anti-vaccine sentiment unleashed by the likes of Fox and Kennedy was not limited to COVID-19: There have been broader impacts on GOP support for the full range of childhood vaccinations.

Gallup reported earlier this month that the percentage of Americans who say it is important for parents to get their children vaccinated has tumbled since the COVID-19 pandemic — and that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are responsible for that decline.

Nearly 20% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now say that it’s “not very important” or “not important at all” for parents to get their kids vaccinated, according to Gallup’s polling.

Gallup further found that the percentage of Americans who think the government should require parents to vaccinate their children against deadly contagions like the measles has fallen to 51%, down from 62% in 2019 and 81% in 1991. That decline is largely due to Republicans, 60% of whom now oppose such government mandates.

The result is a looming crisis for America's children. It takes a 95% vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity for measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But immunization among kindergartners has fallen from 95% before the pandemic to 93% in the most recent school year. In 18 states, more than 4% of kindergartners have vaccine exemptions.

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The result is skyrocketing outbreaks of preventable and dangerous diseases among children — but things can still get so much worse.

Trump is more than willing to prioritize his political future over your kids. Playing to his base, he all but disavowed the COVID-19 vaccines his administration helped bring to fruition, and he vows that his administration “will not give one penny” to schools that require their students to be vaccinated.

He sought Kennedy’s endorsement and is dangling the prospect of rewarding him with a plum post — potentially secretary of Health and Human Services, where the anti-vaccine activist would wield incredible power. Far from trying to hold him back, Fox hosts like Earhardt and MAGA princes like Charlie Kirk are celebrating Kennedy’s supposed health bona fides.

For a glimpse of what an empowered Kennedy might mean for America’s parents, it's worth reviewing his role in “one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory,” as FactCheck.org put it:

In 2018, two infants in American Samoa died when nurses accidentally prepared the combined measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine with expired muscle relaxant rather than water. The Samoan government temporarily suspended the vaccination program, and anti-vaccine advocates — including Kennedy and his nonprofit — flooded the area with misinformation. The vaccination rate dropped to a dangerously low level. The next year, when a traveler brought measles to the islands, the disease tore through the population, sickening more than 5,700 people and killing 83, most of them young children.

That doesn’t sound like “music to every mom’s ears."

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April 19, 2023, edition of Fox News' *Tucker Carlson Tonight

Kennedy’s friendly sit-down with Carlson was characteristic of the glowing treatment he received from right-wing outlets and influencers for the Democratic run he had officially announced earlier that day. His bid drew fervent praise from the likes of Trumpist political operative Charlie Kirk and arch-conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and he became a constant presence on right-wing cable outlets and podcasts. In the early months of his campaign, Kennedy received more Fox weekday appearances than high-profile Republican presidential candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and more mentions on that network than all but three members of that field.

It’s no secret why avowed right-wingers were so interested in Kennedy’s Democratic presidential bid — they thought he could be a spoiler who would help Trump win. Indeed, Steve Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser who had spent years using his streaming show to promote Kennedy’s anti-vax conspiracy theories, reportedly encouraged him to launch the run because he viewed Kennedy as “a useful chaos agent.” Other current and former Trump advisers also talked up Kennedy’s campaign and were not shy about why they were doing so: As Roger Stone put it, Kennedy would “soften Joe Biden up for his defeat by Donald Trump.”

Kennedy was a bad fit for a Democratic campaign. He has one of the party’s most celebrated names, and played a leading role in environmental organizations earlier in his career. But in recent years, he became better known for promoting conspiracy theories about childhood vaccinations, and his extremist views on the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine put him in step with the right-wing propaganda machine. As a candidate, Kennedy thrilled white supremacists by claiming that the virus had been “ethnically targeted” to not affect Jewish people.

Kennedy’s positioning made him a better fit for MAGA voters than Democrats. So when he failed to gain traction in the Democratic race and switched to an independent run in the fall, he immediately became a thorn in Trump’s side.

The right turned on RFK Jr. when his independent campaign started hurting Trump}:

Sean Hannity, the Trump political operative who also has a prime-time Fox show, used a September 2023 interview with Kennedy to pitch the candidate on switching from his Democratic primary bid to a third-party run.

“When Sean Hannity's nicer to you than they are, you got a problem,” the Fox host told him. “You would agree with that. If they're not treating you fairly, why stay with them? If they're not going to treat you fairly, why?”

Video

CitationFrom the September 12, 2023, edition of Fox News' Hannity

But a month later, when Kennedy returned to Hannity’s show shortly after announcing his run as an independent, the host shivved him. Over more than seven minutes, Hannity characterized Kennedy as “very liberal,” and criticized him over his positions on environmental policy and for endorsing Democrats for president in past elections.

Again, there’s nothing subtle about what was going on. Trump’s campaign saw polling which suggested that Kennedy would attract more support from Republicans than Democrats as an independent candidate, so they pivoted to attacking him — and Trumpist shills like Hannity followed along.

Over the following months, the right-wing press struggled with how to cover Kennedy, seemingly hoping to use him to damage Democrats while also trying to remind their viewers that he was too liberal to actually support.

Meanwhile, reporters produced features detailing embarrassing events from Kennedy’s past, including his claims that a parasite had eaten parts of his brain and triggered memory loss, and his admission that he had once discovered the carcass of a bear cub by the site of the road in upstate New York, driven it into New York City, and dumped it in Central Park with an old bicycle to suggest that it had been killed by a cyclist (“Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” he told The New Yorker).

Kennedy had too little support in national polls to make the presidential debate stage and no path to electoral victory. All he could do was take votes from Trump — and so after reported lobbying by people like Carlson, he’s apparently planning to drop out and endorse the Republican nominee instead.

The question is what Kennedy secured in return.

An anti-vaxxer running HHS?}:

Kennedy’s campaign had reportedly been trying to secure him a future administration position in exchange for his endorsement. His efforts to meet with Harris to discuss such a deal went nowhere.

But Kennedy found Trump more amenable to such a deal. Kennedy reached out to Trump following the July assassination attempt on the former president, using a phone number reportedly provided by Carlson. The pair reportedly talked about Kennedy “about endorsing his campaign and taking a job in a second Trump administration, overseeing a portfolio of health and medical issues.” Kennedy subsequently told The Washington Post he is “willing to talk to anybody from either political party who wants to talk about children’s health and how to end the chronic disease epidemic.”

Trump has since publicly floated giving Kennedy a major job in his administration, telling CNN he “probably would” consider such an appointment.

It’s unclear what such a job might look like, and Trump is such a huge liar you’d have to have brainworms to trust him to hold up his end of such a bargain. But Donald Trump Jr. has said of Kennedy, “I love the idea of giving him some sort of role in a three-letter agency and letting him blow it up.” And Trump’s media supporters have proposed offering Kennedy a position as prominent as secretary of health and human services, with Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, suggesting Kennedy should head that department, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order “to really clear house at the agency.”

Video

CitationFrom the August 21, 2024, edition of Timcast IRL

Granting Kennedy control of HHS and its $1.5 trillion budget, or one of the “three-letter agencies” it oversees, like the FDA or CDC or the National Institutes of Health, could have disastrous consequences. As a report on the prospect from NBC News detailed, Kennedy has kooky health views and “has described wanting to dismantle those offices and rebuild them with like-minded fringe figures.”

But such a move would serve as the natural culmination of the right-wing media’s campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines developed under Trump and rolled out under Biden. Carlson and his ilk spent years waging war on those lifesaving medications, falsely claiming they were ineffective and inflating claims about their potential side effects. (By driving down support for the vaccines among Republicans, their effort surely led to the deaths of many members of their audiences.)

Thanks to that campaign, Trump was unable to take credit for the COVID-19 vaccines on the campaign trail. The former president shied away from discussing his administration’s greatest accomplishment to avoid alienating his own supporters during the GOP primary. He’s tried to court Kennedy’s endorsement by talking down childhood vaccinations, bizarrely telling him in a leaked phone call, “I want to do small doses” rather than giving infants a shot that “looks like it’s meant for a horse, not uh, you know, a 10-pound or 20-pound baby.” And on the campaign trail, he’s vowed that his administration “will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.”

All of this is troubling enough. Trump’s anti-vaccine rhetoric — and threats to enact it as policy — has come as Republicans have become generally less supportive of vaccination. But putting an anti-vax crackpot in charge of a government health agency could supercharge that process, with dire consequences for America’s children.

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Hours before announcing he had chosen U.S. Senator JD Vance (R-OH) as his vice presidential running mate, Donald Trump met in Milwaukee on Monday with conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is an independent candidate for President of the United States.

Tucker Carlson, the far-right wing former Fox News host, “helped broker the meeting,” The New York Times reports. Politico adds the meeting took place “to discuss the possibility of the independent candidate endorsing the Republican nominee, according to multiple people familiar with the huddle.” The Kennedy camp denied he has any intention of dropping out of the race, despite his inability to gain any substantial traction that would make him a serious contender for the White House. RFK Jr. is polling in the high single digits to about 10 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight, which is enough for him to be a spoiler, likely helping Trump more than President Joe Biden.

The Kennedy family back in April endorsed President Joe Biden for re-election.

READ MORE: ‘Indoctrination’: Top Republicans Kick Off National Convention With Anti-LGBTQ Attacks

But in a stunning move, the Kennedy camp reportedly “leaked” video of RFK Jr. speaking on the telephone with Trump, according to the MeidasTouch Network. That video was was quickly removed, but not before NBC News’ senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny was able to obtain a copy and post it on social media (video below.)

In that video, Donald Trump can be heard telling Kennedy, “I would love you to do stuff and I think it’d be so good for your and so big for you. And we’re gonna win. We’re way ahead of the guy.”

It was not clear in what context Trump meant “do stuff,” although he could have possibly meant endorse Trump, or hand Kennedy a post in his administration. There had been some speculation, including in the betting markets, Trump would make RFK Jr. his running mate.

Deadline reported Trump “sounded like he was wooing [Kennedy] for his support.”

“Leaked video of a phone call between the two exposes just how aligned they are,” The New Republic reported.

In his remarks about vaccines, about which RFK Jr. has “spent years stoking fear and mistrust,” and left a “trail of false and misleading claims,” Trump shared some of his own false theories.

“When you when you feed a baby a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse not a, you know 10-pound or 20-pound baby,” Trump said. “It looks like you’re giving you should be giving a horse this and did you ever see the size of it right? You know, it’s this massive – And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically. I’ve seen it too many times. And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago. And anyway, I would be, I would love you to do stuff and I think it’d be so good for your and so big for you. And we’re gonna win. We’re way ahead of the guy.”

READ MORE: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’: RNC’s ‘Chilling’ MAGA Chant Echoes Trump – and ‘1930’s Germany’

Trump in the video also positively spoke about President Joe Biden calling him after Saturday’s assassination attempt.

RFK Jr. on Tuesday posted an apology to Donald Trump on social media, writing: “When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer. I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”

“Whoops,” Zadrony reported. “Seems like RFK Jr.’s son posted and has since deleted video of a call between RFK Jr. and Trump after the shooting. In the video Trump repeats his old (false) claims about childhood vaccines, suggesting the vaccine schedule causes injuries in babies.”

She included a screenshot of Bobby Kennedy III’s statement, which reads, “I am a firm believer that these sorts of conversations should be had in public. Here’s Trump giving his real opinion to my dad about vaccinating kids — this was the day after the assassination attempt.”

Watch video below or at this link.

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the U.S. military launched a clandestine operation to undermine trust in China's COVID-19 vaccines, a Reuters investigation has revealed. Amid the global health crisis, the Pentagon used fake social media accounts to prey on vulnerable populations, sowing doubt about the safety and efficacy of life-saving inoculations.

The Pentagon's secret anti-vax propaganda campaign continued for months into the Biden administration before finally being shut down in 2021.

According to the Reuters report, "The effort to stoke fear about Chinese inoculations risked undermining overall public trust in government health initiatives, including U.S.-made vaccines that became available later."

One senior officer admitting, "We weren't looking at this from a public health perspective," said a senior military officer involved in the program. "We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud." Not suprising. It's not the military's job to protect lives, especially when corporate profits are at stake!

Infectious disease specialist Daniel Lucey of Dartmouth called it indefensible, saying he was "extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned" that the U.S. government would engage in such tactics. Public health experts warned that stoking skepticism of one vaccine can lead to broader distrust of all inoculations.

The next time the Pentagon wants to fight foreign influence campaigns, maybe they should look in the mirror before weaponizing a global health emergency.

Previously:

• Gripping oral history of the Pentagon Papers from the New York Times

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Fox News misinterprets results of study to blame millions of “excess deaths” on the COVID-19 vaccine

WRITTEN BY HELENA HIND

:{PUBLISHED:{ 06/13/24 }:

A segment from one of Fox News’ daytime “straight news” programs cited a study to claim that the COVID-19 vaccine caused millions of “excess deaths” in the U.S. The journal that published the study had clarified nearly a week earlier that this interpretation was false.

The study, published June 3, 2024, in the British Medical Journal, found that excess mortality rates in Western nations were high from 2020 to 2022 “despite the implementation of containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines.” The researchers also encouraged governments to examine the underlying causes of excess mortality to inform public health policy.

During the June 12 edition of America Reports, Fox anchor John Roberts characterized the findings differently: “A new study suggests COVID vaccines could be at least partially to blame for more than three million excess deaths in the United States and other countries from 2020 to 2022.”

:{Video

CitationFrom the June 12, 2024, edition of Fox News' America Reports

In the report, chief Washington correspondent Mike Emanuel used the study to bolster a series of soundbites from Fox News’ cadre of misinformation-pushing doctors who blamed the excess deaths on the vaccines and lockdowns. “Yet,” Emanuel noted, “the overwhelming message from public health officials was ‘you must get the shot.’"

Last week, multiple other right-wing media outlets (and at least one conservative British outlet) repeated the false narrative blaming the vaccine for excess deaths, prompting the British Medical Journal to issue a statement correcting the misinterpretation of the study’s findings.

Full statement:

Various news outlets have claimed that this research implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality. This study does not establish any such link. The researchers looked only at trends in excess mortality over time, not its causes. While the researchers recognise that side effects are reported after vaccination, the research does not support the claim that vaccines are a major contributory factor to excess deaths since the start of the pandemic. Vaccines have, in fact, been instrumental in reducing the severe illness and death associated with COVID-19 infection.

The message of the research is that understanding overall excess mortality since the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial for future health policy, but that identifying specific causes is complex due to varying national data quality and reporting methods.

“Various news outlets have claimed that this research implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality. This study does not establish any such link.” The statement continued, “Vaccines have, in fact, been instrumental in reducing the severe illness and death associated with COVID-19 infection.”

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https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/12/27/leprosy_polio_malaria_tb_measles__and_massive_unscreened_illegal_immigration_1000817.html

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Opinion}:

Editorial: Florida shows how to bungle a measles outbreak

(Jim Goodson / Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

By The Times Editorial Board

Feb. 28, 2024

As life-saving as the COVID-19 vaccines have been, the measles vaccine has been an even greater success story. Before the vaccine was developed in 1963, outbreaks that occurred every two to three years were killing 2.6 million people worldwide a year, most of them children. Others developed pneumonia, or suffered brain injury and deafness from measles-associated encephalitis.

It’s an incredibly contagious airborne disease. Put a person with measles in a room with 100 other people and 90 of them will be infected. But the vaccine is even more effective than the disease is transmissible. If all 100 people in that room were vaccinated, only four would be infected.

Pasadena, CA - October 12: Justine Castillo Martinez, LVN, right, takes a moment to show her patient Phillip Soon, 38, the syringe during a flu and COVID-19 vaccination clinic at Kaiser Permanente Pasadena on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023, in Pasadena, CA. Soon was getting both the flu and COVID-19 vaccination. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Opinion

Opinion: The U.S. is facing the biggest COVID wave since Omicron. Why are we still playing make-believe?

Jan. 4, 2024

So it’s especially disheartening to observe the new measles cases in Florida — eight and growing at last count. It’s not the biggest measles outbreak in recent years, but the ho-hum attitude of the state’s top public health official, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, is deeply troubling.

Most of the cases so far have been among students at an elementary school in Broward County. But one is a preschooler — an extremely dangerous age for complications — whose connection to the school is unclear. Something like this was bound to happen. Measles is infectious from four days before the telltale rash appears to four days after. That means parents often don’t know when their child might be infected and capable of transmitting the virus to others in and out of school.

LOS ANGELES, CA - AUGUST 03: Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a premier of a documentary film called "Midnight at the Border" at the Saban Theater on Thursday, Aug. 3, 2023 in Los Angeles, CA. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

Business

Column: Measles is again on the march across the world, thanks to anti-vaxxers such as RFK Jr.

Dec. 19, 2023

Florida has a reasonable law requiring vaccination for children to attend private or public school. Unlike California, which allows exemptions only for children with legitimate health reasons, Florida lets parents opt out for religious beliefs, a common loophole throughout the country. And the vaccination rates at the elementary school in question was higher than the national average, at 97%.

The problem in quelling this outbreak, though, is the lackadaisical attitude of Ladapo, who has earned notoriety by promoting COVID-19 vaccine skepticism. Last month, he called for a halt to using mRNA vaccines to fight COVID-19. Still it was shocking that in the midst of the outbreak, he ignored the public health standard set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which calls for isolating unvaccinated people for 21 days after possible exposure, and is allowing parents to decide whether to send their unvaccinated kids to school. He didn’t even encourage parents of unvaccinated children to get a quick, preventive dose.

It’s a reprehensible endangerment of students at the affected school and the broader community, including babies too young to have been vaccinated. Children with compromised immune systems are at particular risk because they cannot safely be vaccinated. That includes children who are undergoing chemotherapy for cancer.

Children wait to get vaccinated at a health clinic in Apia, Samoa, on Nov. 18.

Opinion

Editorial: Measles outbreak in Samoa shows what can happen when vaccine opponents prevail

Dec. 7, 2019

A vaccine effectiveness rate of 96% is superb, but it still means that about 4% of children don’t get immunity from their shots. That’s why public health officials rely on “herd immunity,” meaning enough members of a community have been vaccinated to keep measles at bay. The reason more unvaccinated children haven’t been sickened in this country is because there are enough parents who do the right thing, vaccinate their kids and thus protect the other kids around them. But that may not be the case for long. Vaccine skeptics like Ladapo have been chipping away at Americans’ confidence in vaccines in recent years.

Outbreaks can happen even in a community with high vaccination rates — which is the case in this Florida school. But widespread vaccination — and proper isolation protocols — keep them small. Measles is not a minor inconvenience of childhood, and Ladapo’s let’s-downplay-the-science approach is not the way to protect the health of Florida’s children.

More to Read

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montana lawmakers are in a standoff with the state’s health department over a package of sweeping changes to child care licensing rules that includes a disputed provision to allow religious exemptions to routine vaccinations for children and workers.

Both Republican and Democratic legislators on the Children, Families, Health, and Human Services Interim Committee voted Jan. 18 to renew their informal objection to the proposed child care licensing rules, which the committee has blocked since November. The vote prevents the state’s Department of Public Health and Human Services from adopting the rules until at least March, when committee members say they will debate a formal objection that could delay the rules’ adoption until spring 2025.

Committee members renewed their objection after complaining that health department officials had not contacted them to discuss revisions to the proposal.

“It’s really quite frustrating to see some necessary rule changes that providers in our communities are really asking for, along with other rule changes that are burdensome and unnecessary,” said Democratic Rep. SJ Howell, the vice chair of the committee, during the hearing. “I do hope we can find a path forward.”

Health department leaders have not decided on a course of action, spokesperson Jon Ebelt said in an email.

“We anticipated that the interim committee would extend its informal objection to our child care rules package and we continue to weigh options,” Ebelt said. “Increasing access to affordable, high-quality child care for hardworking Montana families remains of utmost importance to us.”

Child care providers are frustrated by the delay of what they say are much-needed changes to the child care licensing rules. The package would simplify the licensing process, reduce paperwork required from providers and parents, and create a new type of license for providers who operate outside of school hours, among other changes. Rachel Wanderscheid, the director of the Montana Afterschool Alliance, told the committee that the rules have been in the works for at least three years and that the panel should let them move forward.

“They are good for providers, they are good for families,” she said. “There are a couple of different areas of contention, but I would say overall — 95% — they’re great.”

The most contentious provision in the 97-page rules package would require large child care facilities to enroll children who, for religious reasons, have not been vaccinated. Montana, like 44 other states, already allows religious exemptions from immunization requirements for school-age children. But this proposal would add a religious exemption to its immunization requirements for younger kids in the state.

Health care advocates worry that, if more parents claim vaccine exemptions, levels of community immunity to preventable infectious diseases, such as measles and pertussis, will drop and result in outbreaks.

The health department’s proposal also would eliminate a requirement that child care facilities send home infected and unvaccinated children and staffers when someone at the facility becomes sick with a vaccine-preventable disease.

Health department officials originally proposed the vaccine rules in 2022. The committee blocked the proposal then, too. In response, the department said it would not enforce the ban on religious exemptions.

In November, KFF Health News was the first to report that health department officials had tucked the exemption 45 pages into the draft licensure rules. Department officials said then that the rules package was needed to align with laws passed by the legislature in 2021 and 2023. One law, the Montana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, generally prohibits the state from infringing on a person’s right to the exercise of religion. Another act bans discrimination based on vaccination status.

Mississippi began allowing similar exemptions for schools and child care centers in July following a court ruling that the state’s lack of a religious exemption violated the U.S. Constitution’s free exercise clause. But other states, including California, New York, Connecticut, and Maine, have removed religious exemption policies during the past decade.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has called for elimination of nonmedical vaccine exemptions, arguing they are “inappropriate for individual, public health, and ethical reasons,” according to a 2016 policy statement.

The Montana health department has the option of waiting out the legislative committee’s objections and adopting the rule. An informal objection by the committee can be renewed for up to six months, after which the department can implement the rule. In this case, that renewal option would expire in April.

But if the committee votes to make a formal objection, the rule can be blocked until the end of the next legislative session, in spring 2025, said Maddie Krezowski, an attorney for the legislature. That would give lawmakers a chance to address the law underlying the rule during the session.

The committee also could file its formal objection with the secretary of state to be published with the adoption of the rule, creating implications for any legal challenges that follow. The burden of proof in court would shift from anyone potentially suing the health department to the department itself, said Krezowski.

*KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Daily Montanan is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Daily Montanan maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Darrell Ehrlick for questions: info@dailymontanan.com. Follow Daily Montanan on Facebook and Twitter.

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Following news that a session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting would be focused on the World Health Organization’s preparations for a potential epidemic of a currently unknown pathogen dubbed “Disease X,” right-wing media figures pushed conspiracy theories about a supposed plan to kill off “excess population” and fearmongered over the possibility of another pandemic and lockdowns. Some sought to capitalize on the fear by selling “medical emergency kits” that contain an unproven COVID-19 treatment.

because they “want less people.” Schlapp stated: “I think they must know something, and I’m not going to discount the fact that probably Disease X is a thing and could happen, and some people — as evil and dastardly as it sounds — thinks killing millions of people actually could be good for the rest of us who survive.” Additionally, host Chris Plante said that at the meeting, “globalists at Davos ... might not be preparing for imaginary situations, but rather assembling their next global power grab.” Newsmax, *Chris Plante The Right Squad*, [1/17/23; CNN, 12/16/23]

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conservative provocateur James O'Keefe recently attempted to ambush billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban while he was at the gym in an apparent 'gotcha' attempt, but it didn't work out as planned.

O'Keefe — who founded the far-right media outlet Project Veritas and is known for doctoring video and audio to suit GOP-aligned causes — had a run-in with Cuban as part of his ongoing efforts to discredit both vaccines and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives. Cuban posted the highlights to his X (formerly Twitter) account, including a part of the conversation where he repeatedly insulted O'Keefe to his face with profanity.

"So @JamesOKeefeIII decided to ambush me during the water break of my workout class," Cuban tweeted. "I wanted to give the highlights as I enjoyed the conversation. First the part I enjoyed the most I asked him if he was recording this. (Of course he was). He wouldn’t answer. He kept mumbling s---. So I looked him in the eyes and called him a Motherf-----g P---y."

"I asked again. I think the 2nd time I may not have MF’d him," he continued. "The next 2 or 3 times I asked, as we were walking, and he deflected , I definitely called him a motherf-----g p---y."

In a subsequent tweet, Cuban elaborated that O'Keefe asked him specifically about Cuban's previous assertion that he was a "liar" regarding a video in which O'Keefe confronted a Pfizer official. While speaking about the Pfizer confrontation to an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), O'Keefe said that the video proved Pfizer "mutated" the Covid-19 virus. Cuban asserted to O'Keefe that there was never any mutation.

O'Keefe also apparently asked Cuban why he blocked Chinese student Wei Wu, who launched an online trolling campaign to have Cuban add her to the Dallas Mavericks roster and make her the first official female player in the NBA in the name of DEI. Cuban added that he at first just muted Wei, but then became annoyed at Wei's followers brigading the replies of his tweets, ultimately leading him to block her.

"I told him only a motherf-----g moron thinks DEI is about quotas," Cuban added. "[I]t was the middle of an hour leg day, I was going to MF everything lol."

READ MORE:Embattled far-right 'gotcha' group Project Veritas fights for survival post-O'Keefe

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rww

alex Griffing @ Mediaite](https://www.mediaite.com/podcasts/floridas-controversial-surgeon-general-calls-covid-vaccines-the-anti-christ-in-bonkers-comments-to-steve-bannon/): Florida’s Controversial Surgeon General Calls Covid Vaccines ‘The Anti-Christ’ in Bonkers Comments to Steve Bannon.

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo joined former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon on his hard-right War Room podcast Thursday and railed against the Covid-19 vaccines, which he called the “anti-Christ.”

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Clay Travis accuses Pfizer and Moderna of creating "worthless" COVID vaccines | Media Matters for America

11 23

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// Arizona Republicans convene a COVID hearing chock full of misinformation — again - Alternet.org

an 10 23 no lnx

Arizona Republicans convene a COVID hearing chock full of misinformation — again

Jerod Macdonald-Evoy, Arizona Mirror

October 21, 2023

For the second time in five months, Republican state lawmakers listened intently and offered no pushback during a day-long special hearing at the Arizona Senate billed as examining the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic that was instead rife with conspiracy theories, misinformation and fear-mongering around vaccines and public health.

In May, the Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee featured testimony from a group of supposed health experts who spread myriad misinformation about vaccines and the pandemic during the committee’s time. On Friday, the committee convened again, bringing some of the same people to speak.

The committee had previously faced criticism for its awkward name, which has been promoted in abbreviated form by the QAnon-friendly political nonprofit The America Project. The abbreviated name, NCSWIC, is a commonly used abbreviation in the QAnon world, where it means “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming,” alluding to predictions of arrests and executions of members of the “deep state.”

Although the official name of the panel spells the word “southwestern” correctly, the committee was listed as “NCSWIC” on the Arizona Legislature’s website and the abbreviation was used by outside boosters.

The Republican elected officials on the panel were state Sens. T.J. Shope and Janae Shamp, the chair and vice-chair, respectively, of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee; state Rep. Steve Montenegro, who chairs the state House of Representatives’ Health and Human Services Committee; and U.S. Reps. Andy Biggs, Eli Crane and Paul Gosar.

While the state legislators were in attendance, Biggs, Crane and Gosar only appeared electronically and delivered pre-recorded video addresses. All three were in Washington, D.C., Friday as Republicans are locked in a fight over who should lead the U.S. House of Representatives.

“It’s disheartening to see Arizona’s elected officials once again provide a platform for spreading dangerous disinformation about vaccines for children,” Becky Christensen, founder and state campaigns director of SAFE Communities Coalition, the nation’s first pro-vaccine political advocacy organization, said in a statement to the Arizona Mirror. “Public health should be guided by fact-based information, not misinformation. Their actions undermine efforts to safeguard our communities.”

Christensen added that lawmakers should seek “responsible and informed discourse” to help better guide public health decisions.

Misinformation returns

Dr. Peter McCoullough once again boldly proclaimed that the COVID-19 virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China. There is no consensus on the origin of the virus.

McCoullough is known for spreading unfounded claims, especially around the origins of the virus. He previously has stated that he believed the pandemic was “planned” and has promoted the QAnon conspiracy film “Plandemic.”

McCoullough has become a darling to those in both QAnon and the broader conspiracy world, appearing regularly on shows like the one hosted by conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, who said the COVID vaccine is a “bioweapon.” Peters also was behind multiple QAnon conspiracy documentaries that made dubious claims about the vaccine, including that it included snake venom.

McCoullough has also appeared on disgraced retired Gen. Michael Flynn’s “Reawaken America” tour, where he has denounced drag shows and gender identity issues.

During Friday’s hearing, McCoullough spread even more falsehoods around COVID-19 and vaccine efficacy.

“It is called ‘turbo cancer’ for a reason,” McCoullough said, adding that he believes it is “theoretically possible” that multiple vaccines “could be related to cancer.”

The term “turbo cancer” comes from people who have spread false information about the COVID vaccine, attempting to link it to an aggressive form of cancer. There is no established link between the vaccine and cancer, and studies have found either no association or found a decreased risk of lymphoma.

McCoullough also continued to spread a false claim that 17 million people have been killed by the vaccine. The notion comes from a highly flawed analysis of data claiming that mortality rates were spiking because of the vaccine. McCoullough also spread other similar claims, such as saying that more than 500,000 people in the United States were killed by the vaccine, an idea based on a misrepresentation of United Kingdom data.

And McCoullough appeared to make claims that alluded to a conspiracy theory widely adopted by QAnon adherents, which was featured in a discredited film, claiming that blood clots found in people’s bodies were caused by the COVID vaccine.

The film, “Died Suddenly,” suggests it is all part of a shadowy plot to depopulate the world. But experts who have examined the film’s claims have said that many of the clots appear to be post-mortem clots. Cases of clots caused by the vaccine are “very rare,” according to one study that found only approximately 1,000 cases out of 2 million. The movie also featured incidents that occurred before the pandemic in 2020, but presented them as consequences of vaccination.

A member of the panel also has a direct connection to the conspiracy film.

Dr. Peter Chambers, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, appears in the film speaking about the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database, or DMED, which he claimed showed a spike in medical conditions in the military which he attributed to COVID-19 vaccines.

Chambers’ claim has been debunked since 2021 by multiple fact-checkers.

The former military doctor is also a believer in the debunked conspiracy theory that 5G cellular technology is connected to the COVID-19 virus. Chambers also was part of a failed lawsuit seeking to prevent the military from implementing a COVID vaccine mandate.

Chambers’ presentation to the committee included a slide that referred to the “globalists.”

The globalist conspiracy theory is a far-right conspiracy theory with roots in antisemitism and is also often connected to the idea of a “New World Order” and a one-world government, most often with the Jewish people at the center of the conspiracy. Peters, the conspiracy theory talk show host and the man behind “Died Suddenly,” frequently works with antisemites and white supremacists. Chambers has also been supported by the America Project, which boosted the hearing and helped fund the Arizona Senate’s partisan “audit” of the 2020 election.

Also returning to the committee was Aaron Siri, an attorney who is most well known for his work with an organization called the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN.

ICAN has been on the frontlines of anti-vaccine misinformation and is led by Del Bigtree, a television and film producer who has become an anti-vaccine activist. ICAN was listed as one of the “key organizations” tied to the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s “The Disinformation Dozen,” the anti-vaxxers who play leading roles in spreading digital misinformation about COVID vaccines. Chambers mentioned that he worked with Bigtree on anti-vaccine issues.

Siri claimed that “you can’t say vaccines have reduced chronic health issues” among children.

“I’m not saying vaccines cause those,” he said, sharing a misleading claim on chronic illness in children. “Something is definitely going on.”

The committee also heard from Arizona resident Calli Varner, who claimed that she had a stroke due to the COVID vaccine.

Varner had an ischemic stroke when a blood-clot made its way to her brain. Strokes have been on the rise in younger populations, with doctors theorizing that one cause could be patent foramen ovale, which is present in between 24 to 40% of the population and generally goes unnoticed.

Varner told the committee that she has had various health problems develop, including an autoimmune issue, since she got vaccinated. McCoullough said he had been consulting with the Scottsdale resident about her experience and used the opportunity to say that strokes, infertility and immune disorders are being caused by the vaccine.

Studies have shown that those who contracted COVID-19 have an increased risk of stroke, while those who got the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines and did not contract COVID -19 have “no difference in stroke risk.” There is also no evidence that the vaccine causes infertility and no conclusive evidence to suggest a link between the vaccine and autoimmune disorders.

McCoullough also once again spoke about the scientifically unsound plan to help people remove spike proteins from people’s bodies.

Shamp, a former nurse who has claimed she was fired because she refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, came up with the idea for the hearing and those in attendance applauded her for putting it together.

Shamp, who was present during the events of Jan. 6, has spread a multitude of QAnon conspiracy theories online for years, including a post with “NCSWIC” in it. Shamp said at the end of the hearing Friday that another one will be happening “sometime in December.”

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

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STRAIGHT NEWS POST DEBATE 8 23

  1. ### Fox News' Bret Baier runs COVID segment casting doubt on vaccine boosters and questioning the number of deaths reported

08/28/23

  1. ### Fox News' Jesse Watters calls COVID-19 vaccine booster shots “a huge scam”

08/28/23

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no lnx mma 8 23

fox’s antivax propagandists come out swinging against a new COVID-19 shot

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 08/29/23

Tucker Carlson may be gone from Fox News, but his former colleagues are still carrying on his war against the COVID-19 vaccines that have prevented millions of American deaths since they became widely available in 2021.

Fox’s propagandists responded to President Joe Biden’s Friday call for new funding for an updated vaccine booster that will be recommended for all Americans when it becomes available this fall by warning that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous and ineffective. Some even directly exhorted their viewers — generally seniors who are most vulnerable from COVID-19 — not to take the new booster.

“There's another shot that he's going to recommend all Americans take?” Jesse Watters, Carlson’s 8 p.m. replacement, asked Monday on Fox’s panel show, The Five. “This is another huge scamand no one is going to go along with another shot, especially if it's mandated.”

Several pharmaceutical companies are currently developing updated COVID-19 vaccines that are expected to provide increased protection from Eris, the variant currently dominant in the United States.

With COVID-19 cases on the upswing, Biden said Friday that he plans to ask Congress “for additional funding for a new vaccine” he would “tentatively” recommend “that everybody get.” The updated vaccine is expected in mid-September, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during her Monday briefing.

Fox hosts responded with ridicule and fury. Notably, several suggested that because the initial vaccines provided limited protection from infection from newer variants (even as they continued to provide strong protection from death or serious illness), people should be skeptical of the effectiveness of an updated shot specifically targeted to current strains. That’s a recipe for Fox’s viewers to once again put their health in danger by declining the shots.

Sean Hannity once garnered unearned credit from mainstream reporters over a tepid snippet about the vaccines. But since coming under fire from right-wing rivals and walking back even those remarks, he’s rarely missed an opportunity to demonstrate his vaccine skepticism.

“Straight ahead, COVID madness coming back,” he said, teasing a Monday night segment. “More draconian measures and a new vaccine that I'm sure they're going to tell you is absolutely safe. Like the last one? Straight ahead.”

Video

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CitationFrom the August 28, 2023, edition of Fox News' Hannity.

After the break, he introduced Biden’s comments by saying, “Here we go again,” then asked Fox contributor Tomi Lahren, “Isn't this the same Joe Biden, same government that said that if you got the vaccine, that you'd never get COVID, you'd never transmit COVID and that were proven dead wrong? Isn't that the same government?”

Lahren replied that “if the Biden administration and leftists everywhere were that concerned about a new COVID strain, a new COVID variant, that southern border would be closed,” adding, “If the American people are ever dumb enough to fall for this again, we deserved to fail as a country. But I don't believe we are dumb enough to fall for it again. Not this time.”

Hannity went on to say that while he was not giving “medical advice,” he was “not listening to them” about the vaccines because “I don't believe a word they say. They've been proven wrong again and again and again.”

Likewise, while guest-hosting Fox’s prime-time “comedy” show Gutfeld!, Jimmy Faila argued that Biden’s call for a new shot was unnecessary because “unlike the Clintons, the virus wasn’t nearly as dangerous as we were told.”

“Now, I'll admit it's nice to see this White House making news for a drug besides cocaine,” Faila said. “But there's no need to discuss any drugs because the vaccines didn't stop transmission.”

Faila went on to express confusion about why politicians would say COVID-19 “would have been way worse” if they hadn’t been vaccinated, adding, “Like, you're saying it didn't work, OK? The government was wrong about every single thing they pushed on us during COVID, especially mask mandates, lockdowns, and vaccines.”

Fox could have responded to the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, which were developed under then-President Donald Trump and are remarkably effective in preventing serious COVID-19 cases (with rare side effects), by urging viewers to get the shots. But the network instead ran a multiyear campaign against the vaccines while relentlessly hyping ineffective drugs popular among right-wing influencers. Any moral responsibility its hosts felt for their audience was apparently overrun by their reflexive opposition to Biden and their recognition that antivax commentary was “great for ratings.” 

These attacks on the vaccination campaign had deadly consequences. Polls routinely show the network’s viewers were less likely to say they were, or planned to get, vaccinated than people who get their news from other sources.One recent study found that “excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before."

But Fox is undeterred by the destructive impact of its vaccine coverage. The network is doing its best to inflame viewers as its extremist competitors baselessly fearmonger over the prospect of “new lockdowns” ahead of the 2024 election. And that means more of them are going to die.

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Pagination

Current page1

Related

Fox has pushed COVID propaganda for two years. The cost has been staggering.

03/01/22 8:30 AM EST

Fox’s antivax programming is a moral abomination, but at least it’s “great for ratings”

09/28/21 10:27 AM EDT

I went on parental leave. Three months later, Fox is still killing its viewers.

01/25/22 12:50 PM EST

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https://www.alternet.org/republicans-are-disproportionately-credulous-misinformation/

Why Republicans are 'disproportionately credulous about health-related misinformation': analysis

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 20: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) speaks to reporters following a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on July 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. The committee heard testimony about the Biden administration's ongoing plans to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and Delta variant. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images).

Brandon Gage August 22, 2023

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, conservative politicians like United States Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Georgia), Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), and former President Donald Trump established themselves as faucets of "wildly conspiratorial" "health-related misinformation," according to The Washington Post's Philip Bump, who examines why those tactics have been successful amongst Republican votersin a Tuesday analysis of KFF surveys.

"Greene, of course, has a well-earned reputation as a purveyor of conspiracy theories and misinformation," Bump notes. "But this particular bit of performed skepticism was not an area in which she was freelancing. In recent days there has been a resurgence in the idea that the government is attempting to manipulate the citizenry through COVID-19, with 'I WILL NOT COMPLY' trending — yes, in all caps — on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday morning. That refusal to comply centers on nonexistent or theoretical mandates, which doesn't seem to have dissipated the energy."

Bump adds that "new research shows the extent to which Republicans are disproportionately credulous about health-related misinformation. It's not just that there is an uprising against an imaginary imposition, it's also that Republicans are consistently more likely to express belief in false claims related to COVID-19 and other things. Greene is by no means alone."

The data, Bump explains, shows that "Republicans were on average 20 percent more likely to state that they believed the false claims were accurate. Foremost among them: the regularly debunked idea that the coronavirus vaccine has caused thousands of deaths in otherwise healthy people. Nearly half of Republicans think that's true."

Moreover, nearly fifty percent "also think thativermectin is an effective treatment for the COVID-19 virus, which it is not. This has long been a leading example of how partisanship infiltrated the discussion about COVID-19 treatments, with other research showing that in places that voted for Donald Trump, people were more likely to seek information about the drug, and more prescriptions for it were written."

Bump points out that there is a correlation between belief in fake facts about SARS-COV-2 and deaths from the disease, mainly due to doubts about the efficacy of vaccinations, stating that "research made public last year found that after vaccines became widely available, Republicans made up more of the COVID-19-related deaths in Ohio and Florida."

Bump continues, "KFF found that abouttwo-thirds of Democrats didn’t believe any of the false claims about COVID-19 or vaccines. Only about a quarter of Republicans — and not many more independents — fell into the same category."

READ MORE: 'Clearly defined body count': Florida and Ohio Republicans experienced 43 percent more COVID deaths than Dems

Respondents were questioned about "other health-related subjects, including gun violence," Bump adds. "Again, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to believe false claims about gun violence. In this case, independents landed closer to the middle."

Bump contends that partisan bias lies at the heart of the disparity, writing, "The claims centered on COVID-19 and vaccines are largely ones that have been debunked by health professionals or government actors, groups that are viewed more skeptically by independents. KFF's research shows that while most Americans trust their personal doctors' health recommendations, that trust drops off when respondents were asked about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or state and local health officials. Independents were less trusting of state and local health officials' recommendation than were Republicans."

Bump stresses that "Democrats are far more trusting of recommendations from the Biden administration than Trump; for Republicans, it's the opposite," which based on KFF's figures is attributable to the absorption of alternative media narratives

"That Republicans often cite Fox News as a source for information — and are about as likely to say they consume Newsmax as they are to view CNN — comports with the higher acceptance of false claims about guns," says Bump. "These are not generally questions adjudicated in the context of public health (despite the obvious overlap with health concerns). Things like Fox News' frequent presentations about gun crime or school shootings, generally framed through a right-wing lens, likely contribute to the imbalance."

Bump observes that "it's probably less that the respondents believe the false claims than they are willing to express some acceptance of them, given how their politics establishes that as a standard response."

Bump concludes, "In Ohio and Florida, at least, this seems to have been proved — at times — deadly."

View Bump's report at this link (subscription required).

BUSTED: ‘Right-wing misinformation’ newspaper gave a GOP presidential candidate up to $5 million in salary

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-brian-kilmeade-says-robert-f-kennedy-jr-was-right-covid

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rfk tenpenny on RT vlad boost own sput vax

COVID-19 disinformation backfires as Russian deaths ...

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Oct 21, 2021 — A systematic disinformation campaign in Russian media to foster doubts and misgivings about COVID-19 vaccines in the West has backfired as ...

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7 23 mma

chyron dems censor rfk

BATYA UNGAR-SARGON (GUEST): The problem is, he's not anti-Covid vaccine. He's skeptical of all vaccines.

RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY (HOST): I'm starting to get there too, though, Batya. I don't trust anything with pharma anymore. 

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/**how-fox-paved-way-desantis-anti-vax-hit-trump

Thanks to Fox News, the Republican Party is embroiled in a furious debate over whether it was a good idea to save millions of American lives.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ nascent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is floundering in the early going. He entered the race last month with a sizable polling deficit behind former President Donald Trump, his Twitter Spaces announcement event was a disaster, and his initial rollout hasn’t produced a bump in his support. DeSantis has seemed reluctant to go after his chief opponent, and when he has the results have been lackluster.

But on Thursday afternoon, his campaign opened a new line of attack, targeting the former president for his role in the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. The “DeSantis War Room” posted a video on Twitter of an Iowa town hall attendee telling Trump “we have lost people because you supported the jab.” The DeSantis account reported that Trump responded “by praising the COVID mRNA shots, doesn't acknowledge any of the adverse effects" [twit vid]

the DeSantis camp’s anti-vax attack on Trump speaks to the influence of right-wing media outlets like Fox in shaping the battlefield for the 2024 primary campaign.Their reflexive support for Trump over the years on issues like his role in the January 6 insurrection, his noxious racism, and his various alleged crimes put those topics off-limits for his opponents. But while some at Foxinitially credited Trump with ensuring the development of the vaccines, the network paved the way for the DeSantis campaign’s salvo by spending much of the last two-plus years stoking fears among its viewers about the shots.

Fox emerged as the most ferocious opponent of the COVID-19 vaccines, which provide crucial protection with a minimal risk profile and have prevented millions of American deaths from the virus since their initial U.S. deployment in December 2020. The network’s most popular figures regularly denounced the shots as dangerous and ineffective and the vaccination campaign as a nefarious plot to control Americans. Fox’s coverage worsened over time, and by the early weeks of 2023 a whopping 78% of the network’s vaccine segments included claims undermining vaccinations. The results have been devastating, with Republicans getting vaccinated against COVID-19 at lower rates than other Americans and dying from it at higher ones.

Fox’s lethal coverage of COVID-19 vaccines presented an opportunity for ambitious politicians like DeSantis, who is particularly attuned to what happens on the network and in the broader right-wing press. DeSantis once touted his own efforts to distribute the vaccines, which he credited with “saving lives.” But as the right’s discourse changed, he changed with it.

DeSantis cozied up to the GOP’s anti-vax wing — and used his power as governor on their behalf.DeSantis’ Florida is the only state that does not recommend the COVID-19 vaccine for children, and it “recommends against males aged 18 to 39 receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines” after a flawed study that was politically tainted by the vaccine skeptic DeSantis appointed as the state’s top medical officer found the shots were harmful for that group. DeSantis even called for a grand jury to investigate “any and all wrongdoing” related to the vaccines and “bring legal accountability to those who committed misconduct.” 

Now DeSantis’ campaign is deploying the vaccines as a wedge issue,trying to make the case that the GOP electorate should oppose Trump due to his involvement in their development. The conservative reaction has been diverse, with Never Trumpers criticizing DeSantis for promoting “anti-vax nonsense,” anti-anti-Trumpersmaking excuses, and right-wing anti-vaxxers denouncing Trump.

One person who hasn’t weighed in is Rupert Murdoch, the Fox head and reported DeSantis supporter who was among the first to get the shot — then abandoned his viewers to the virus.

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https://religionnews.com/2023/05/24/fighting-what-it-views-tyranny-**michigan-board-declares-itself-constitutional-county/

...>The resolution, which is largely symbolic, is influenced by the writings of a Wisconsin pastor who promotes the idea of resistance to civil authority. The commissioners who voted for the resolution,all Christian, are committed to the idea that God has blessed America.

We wish to highlight freedoms and constitutional rights which have been violated over the past few years as well as those currently at risk due to societal and political pressures,” said Ottawa County vice chair Sylvia Rhodea in a prepared statement prior to the vote Wednesday (May 24).

Among those violations she mentioned was a “requiredaffirmation of a Marxist DEI value systemfor some county positions,” which she said conflicts with her religious beliefs. (DEI is an acronym for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” an organizational framework that promotes full participation of people or groups that have historically been underrepresented.) She also noted individual freedoms that were “repeatedly violated” during the coronavirus pandemic.

The 9-1 vote, with the lone Democrat on the Board of Commissioners opposing the measure, came after midnight, following six hours of public comment. It was the latest foray for the newly elected board, which swept into office in January on a platform of restoring the county’s Judeo-Christian heritage and thwartingtyranny, government overreach and injustice.</p>

Hundreds of residents of Ottawa County crammed into the commissioners’ meeting room and an overflow room on Tuesday. By a 3-2 ratio, they begged the commissioners not to adopt the resolution.

;If every local governmental unit saw its role as interpreting and following the Constitution as they see fit, our democracy would collapse and our country would fall into chaos,” said Milton Nieuwsma of Holland, Michigan, who spoke up at the meeting.

The>resolution adopted ;not to authorize or appropriate funds, resources, employees, agencies, contractors, buildings, or offices for the purpose of enforcing any statute, law, rule, order or regulation that restricts the rights of any law-abiding citizen affirmed by the United States Constitution.”

It was not clear if the county intended, for example, to resist a red flag law that aims to keep firearms away from those at risk of harming themselves or others. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed the red flag law on Monday

.

Ottawa County, which voted for Donald Trump by >nearly 60% in 2020, is a deeply red county in a blue state that went for President Joe Biden.

Last year, a newly formed organization called Ottawa Impact unseated eight incumbent Republican county commissioners to win a controlling majority of the 11-member board. (Two of those commissioners have since publicly distanced themselves from the group but nonetheless voted to approve the “constitutional county” resolution.)

"Vice-Chairperson Sylvia Rhodea, second from right, speaks during an Ottawa County Board of Commissioners meeting, Tuesday, May 23, 2023, in Grand Haven, Michigan. Vice Chairperson Sylvia Rhodea, second from right, speaks during an Ottawa County Board of Commissioners meeting, May 23, 2023, in Grand Haven, Michigan.

The new commissioners became politically active after the county and state health departments shut down a Hudsonville Christian school for not complying with a 2020 coronavirus mask mandate that resulted in an outbreak.

While Ottawa County has long been the province of Dutch settlers with a distinct Calvinist brand of Christianity, it has recently been consumed by a more muscular form of evangelical Christianity common in other parts of the country. That Christianity, sometimes called**Christian nationalism,** maintains that preserving a Christian America may require overturning laws.

RELATEd  https://religionnews.com/2023/05/17/what-is-christian-nationalism-anyway/">What is Christian nationalism, anyway?

In their first meeting on Jan. 3, the new commissioners fired the county administrator and legal counsel, closed the county’s office for diversity, equity and inclusion and **attempted to demote the health officer.** They also changed the county motto from “Ottawa County: Where You Belong” to “Ottawa County: Where Freedom Rings.”

“They are about this far-right agenda of ‘We’re going to do things their way,’ and by the way, ‘we’re **going to use Scripture to get there,**’” said Roger Bergman, the sole incumbent Republican commissioner who was not defeated in 2020. He was not present at Tuesday’s meeting.

In drafting the resolution to become a “constitutional county,” the commissioners were relying on the writings of **Matt Trewhella, a Brookfield, Wisconsin, pastor who in the 1990s created an anti-abortion militia and more recently has been active in promoting the idea of resistance to civil authorities based on the ideas of John Calvin and the Magdeburg Confession of 1550, which called on Protestant pastors to resist political tyranny.**<

Pastor Matthew Trewhella gives an online sermon in an Oct. 2022 video>Pastor Matt Trewhella gives an online sermon in an October 2022 video. Video screen grab

Trewhella gave a talk at an Ottawa County GOP fundraiser on May 10, where his self-published2013 book, “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates,” was available. His newest venture is a website called County Before Country: Expanding God’s Kingdom through Christian Localism.

Both Joe Moss, the new chairman of the county commission, as well as Rhodea, his vice chair, endorsed Trewhella’s book and made a YouTubevideo to promote his ideas.

“Understand, the wicked tyrants always count on the blithe compliance of the lesser authorities in order to get their evil down in the fabric of society,” Trewhella said at the May 10 GOP fundraiser, according to an audio recording of his talk. “The interposition of the lesser authorities is massively important to stop evil in a nation.”

County commissioners are generally tasked with overseeing the health and safety of residents. They supervise those who plow the roads, maintain the parks and issue licenses and certificates.

Resolutions like this, say law experts, have no teeth.<;re assertions of ideological spleen,” said Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “It’s a way for the counties to signal that they are unhappy with the direction the state is going. But legally the declarations are meaningless.”

Still, many residents expressed shock and dismay at their county commissioners’ actions Tuesday. They included a Michigan State University student who was barricaded in a gym on campus during the Feb. 13 mass shooting that resulted in the deaths of three students. She  begged commissioners not to disregard new gun safety laws.

David Barnosky, a retired pipeline surveyor who began a Facebook group called Ottawa Objects, said the new commissioners have abrogated power that is not theirs.

“They think they know everything,” said Barnosky. “They’re not even close.”

RELATED: https://religionnews.com/2023/01/06/a-christian-nationalist-taxonomy/">Who are the Christian nationalists? A taxonomy for the post-Jan. 6 world

This story was reported with support from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation

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https://www.alternet.org/ron-desantis-surgeon-general-altered-key-data-on-19-vaccines-safety-report/

no lnx

DeSantis’ surgeon general 'personally altered' key data on COVID-19 vaccines’ safety: report

Ron DeSantis’ surgeon general 'personally altered' key data on COVID-19 vaccines’ safety: report

Alex Henderson April 26, 2023

Throughout most of his career, Dr. Anthony Fauci, now 82, was hardly an object of hatred among Republicans. Fauci, who began working for the United States' federal government in the late 1960s, served under several conservative GOP presidents without any problem: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

The younger President Bush, in fact, praised Fauci when he gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award in 2008. George W. Bush's exact words: "As a physician, medical researcher, author, and public servant, Dr. Anthony Fauci has dedicated his life to expanding the horizons of human knowledge and making progress toward groundbreaking cures for diseases. His efforts to advance our understanding and treatment of HIV/AIDS have brought hope and healing to tens of millions in both developed and developing nations. The United States honors Anthony Fauci for his commitment to enabling men, women, and children to live longer, healthier lives."

But that was before Donald Trump's presidency, the far-right MAGA movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. Attacking Fauci's response to the pandemic became a badge of honor among MAGA Republicans, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — whose surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, disagreed strongly with Fauci and President Joe Biden on the value of COVID-19 vaccines. DeSantis and Ladapo made vaccines a culture war issue in Florida, and according to Politico reporter Arek Sarkissian, Ladapo "personally altered a state-driven study about COVID-19 vaccines" in 2022 "to suggest that some doses pose a significantly higher health risk for young men than had been established by the broader medical community, according to a newly obtained document."

READ MORE: Inside Ron DeSantis' plan to take on Trump from the right: report

Politico published Sarkissian's report on Ladapo and the study on April 24. And CNN's Jamie Gumbrecht offered additional reporting in an article published on April 26.

Gumbrecht explains, "Politico said it obtained a document as part of a public records request that shows Ladapo's changes to the eight-page analysis. The changes deleted comments that said a link with slightly increased risk of cardiac-related deaths after COVID-19 vaccination was 'no longer significant' for multi-dose vaccines and 'there is little suggestion of any effect immediately following vaccination.' The document shows an added line that says mRNA vaccines may be driving an increased risk of cardiac-related death in males, especially those ages 18-39."

The CNN reporter adds, "The version released publicly in October 2022 said COVID-19 vaccination was 'associated with a modestly increased risk for cardiac-related mortality 28 days following vaccination,' and says the vaccines may be driving the risk, especially among younger men."

Gumbrecht notes that the "Florida analysis" of last year "was not peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal, but was posted online by the Florida Department of Health and shared in a news release" published on October 7, 2022.

READ MORE: Inside Ron DeSantis' plan to take on Trump from the right: report

The Florida Health Department, on April 26, said it stands by Ladapo's 2022 statements. But Gumbrecht points out that the Sunshine State "is an outlier in its recommendations against the COVID-19 vaccine for young men and healthy children" and is "at odds with" the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."

Fauci and Biden, in contrast to Ladapo, have been aggressive proponents of COVID-19 vaccines — which they believe have saved countless lives. Both Fauci and Biden had mild COVID-19 infections in 2022 and believe that their infections might have been worse had they not been vaccinated.

COVID-19 has been the world's deadliest health crisis since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918/1919. According to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, COVID-19 has killed more than 6.8 million people worldwide since it was first reported in Wuhan, China in late 2019. That death toll includes over 1.1 million people in the United States.

But much has changed since the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Although COVID-19 is still highly contagious, most of today's COVID-19 infections are not fatal and do not require hospitalization. Many COVID-19 restricts around the world have been lifted.

READ MORE: Inside Ron DeSantis' plan to take on Trump from the right: report

Read CNN's full report at this link and Politico's full report at this link.

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https://www.alternet.org/anti-vaxxers-invading-autism-groups/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-use-misinformation-around-15-minute-cities-pivot-toward-climate

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Misinformation surrounding a plan to reduce traffic in the city of Oxford, England, is the latest example of how three years after the onset of COVID-19, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have seamlessly transitioned into climate change denial, and how this message is proliferating not just in Europe, but now in the U.S. as well.

The Oxford plan, which aims to cut down on daytime traffic and greenhouse gas emissions from cars, has been conflated with a broader “15-minute city” urban planning concept, which calls for communities where necessities are within walking/biking distance. The plan recently made headlines when right-wing media influencers presented it as one component of the sprawling “Great Reset” conspiracy theory, saying its goal is to lock down residents and essentially turn cities into open-air prisons. Backlash, led in part by climate change denier Jordan Peterson, was so severe that academics and politicians who support the plan or the related idea of a 15-minute city got death threats.

What is a 15-minute city?

In a nutshell, the concept of the 15-minute city is that life’s necessities such as schools and grocery stores should be just a short walk or bike ride away. According to Carlos Moreno, an urban planning professor who helped lay out the plan in Paris, cities should be “designed so that we can live, work and thrive in them without having to constantly commute elsewhere.” The goal is to foster healthier habits and stronger social relationships between neighbors by prioritizing green space, accessibility, and safety for human bodies, bikes, and public transportation, rather than cars.

The City of Oxford is implementing a separate strategy, Local Plan 2040, to help achieve these goals. But that’s not what has drawn so much attention in the media.

The traffic plan approved by the Oxford County Council which triggered backlash is meant to reduce commuting time and greenhouse gas emissions from excess traffic. According to a fact check from the Associated Press: “Oxfordshire has approved a plan to put ‘traffic filters’ on some main roads, restricting drivers’ access during daytime hours and freeing up space for buses, cyclists and pedestrians. But car owners can apply for daylong permits to bypass the new rules, and many other vehicles are exempt. All parts of the county will remain accessible by car, officials said.”

Right-wing opposition to the 15-minute city has been firmly rooted in COVID conspiracy theories

Despite what is actually happening in Oxford, right-wing influencers have painted the plan as a thin veneer for controlling every aspect of residents’ movement with the goal of preventing them from owning cars or leaving town at all. According to DeSmog, in 2022 in England, COVID-19 conspiracy theorist David Fleming, along with figures tied to climate denial think tank Global Warming Policy Foundation, created a group to oppose the plan and spread false claims via leaflets to Oxford residents. One founding signatory was Del Bigtree, a U.S. filmmaker and founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, an anti-vaccine group.

The seeds for the conspiracy theory to take root in the U.S. were planted back in April 2020. Frequent Fox News guest and climate change denierSteve Milloy warned of an impending “climate lockdown”and the idea proliferated, with figures like Laura Ingraham and Alex Jones claiming in 2021 that COVID-19 lockdowns were conditioning the public for even more stringent mandates in the name of climate change.

15-minute city fearmongering comes to the US

The ideas driving the 15-minute city are not new. New urbanism and public transit enthusiasts have been gaining traction on social media as Gen Zers and millennials lament their childhood confinement to suburbs that felt unnavigable and isolating. For years, but especially post-pandemic, cities across the globe have prioritized walkability and mixed-use development.

Right-wing media are working hard to maintain the status quo in part through elaborate conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities or anything seemingly related. Right-wing media figures including Australian anti-lockdown campaigner Bernie Spofforth, Turning Point USA contributor Drew Hernandez, and Swedish climate change denier Peter Imanuelsen have insisted they are being spearheaded by The World Economic Forum. In truth, the WEF has mixed things to say about the concept. 

Right-wing culture warrior James Lindsay, said in a March 7 segment on One America News’ Morning News with Stephanie Myers that 15-minute cities are a means of “more social control.” He went on to say that they would lead to “new kinds of car non-ownership subscription borrowed models, kind of like Uber, but with no owner. All these things going, so that you don't have freedom of movement” before falsely claiming that in Oxford, “you can only leave your zone so many days a year” and “absolutely no vehicle that emits any kind of ah, you know, I guess CO2 or whatever was allowed to drive during certain hours.”

In the same segment, host Stephanie Myers again suggested that residents of 15-minute cities would be allocated 100 passes per year permitting them to leave their designated zones. In reality, Oxford drivers will always be able to get wherever they want using alternate routes, as only some roads will have traffic filters. Both Myers and Lindsay are misleadingly referencing the fact that local residents will have to apply for 100 day-long permits per year, where they can use any road at any time of the day free of charge.

On an April 6 segment of OAN’s Tipping Point with Kara McKinney, Jeffrey Tucker, former editorial director for the Koch-funded Foundation for Economic Education, blamed Dr. Anthony Fauci for 15-minute cities. Tucker said Fauci, who served as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and was a lead member of the White House COVID-19 Task Force under Trump, wanted people “imprisoned in our local communities and condemned to forage and eat bugs” and that he and the ruling oligarchy would insist on “no football games, no concerts, no amusement parks, certainly no church. They want us doomed to a kind of a pre-medieval existence with them in charge.”

In the interview, Tucker also used the familiar trope of Democrats supposedly being soft on crime, but he claimed it was intentional. “They really want to dismantle our cities. There’s no better way to do that than through crime,” he said. And the fact that cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco are “collapsing in a miasma of blood and weed” would supposedly give them an excuse, he said.

Climate change denier Marc Morano spoke about 15-minute cities on an April 10 segment of OAN’s In Focus. Morano told OAN contributor Alison Steinberg that 15-minute cities are “conjuring up a little place called … East Germany, where you literally had to apply to the government in order to go from place to place. … All of this again is so that we will stay at home. That's actually the goal. They loved COVID lockdowns.” Steinberg asked of “radical leftists”: “Do you think they really realize — hey, you're not going to be able to drive to go get your little soy crackers that you like eating every night while you’re watching and playing your video games?”

In an April 11 segment of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle,Laura Ingraham spoke with U.K. professor Norman Fenton, who claimed 15-minute cities are “absolutely catastrophic” and that “the idea is essentially to stop you — yeah, it’s to stop you going out of the zone, stop you traveling wherever you want. … But in practice, people will have to go out of the zone to get to work, to take their kids to school and stuff like that.”

Fenton is a memberof HART (Health Advisory and Recovery Team), described by The Daily Dot as “a group of prominent proponents of an anti-vaccination, anti-lockdown, anti-mask strategy.” He has inaccurately suggested that the spike in second-wave COVID-19 deaths in 2021 may have been caused by vaccines.

Before turning his attention to 15-minute cities, Fenton also railed against the UK government's net-zero emissions target, misleadingly conflating it with a report on absolute zero emissions, which is not a current policy goal. He suggests that the government might prohibit airplane travel and shipping in the U.K. by 2050. This is not happening.

Online, one American anti-vaccine group seems particularly concerned about Oxford. Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vax group, promoted a video of a young girl making a speech at a protest in Oxford calling 15-minute cities a “dystopian reality” on Telegram and on Twitter. One article on the group’s news site gives credence to the idea that 15-minute cities could in fact lead to “climate lockdowns.” The group also promoted a February protest against 15-minute cities in Oxford. Kennedy recently announced his bid for the presidency.

Infowars promoted a video that compares a hen house to a 15-minute city because “it’s a spot-on illustration of how they view the people as vassals, or serfs – who only exist to produce eggs to be harvested.” The Telegram channel for the anti-vax group The Truth About Cancer wrote that 15-minute cities are proof that “we are under attack” from the “globalist ghouls.”

For online conspiracy theory networks, anti-15-minute city propaganda has been a gateway to climate change denial

On social media, an infamous COVID-19 conspiracy theory network has also signaled a shift to climate change denial, with the 15-minute city as a catalyst.

A channel that has been promoted by White Rose, an international disinformation group that operates on a network of Telegram channels, is among those promoting conspiracy theories about the 15-minute city, in addition to climate change denial.

The channel, Wide Awake Media, has 26k subscribers on its Telegram channel and has recently been gaining traction on Twitter. It has occasionally featured posts about climate change but started posting more often on the topic in January 2023 when the topic of 15-minute cities was becoming popular in right-wing media. This topic has provokedviolent responses suggesting that leaders who support green policies should be killed.

On March 31, Wide Awake noted on both Twitter and Telegram that it had turned its attention to climate change, calling it a scam and comparing it to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[twit]

members of White Rose, which made headlines for distributing anti-vax stickers, posters, and leaflets, have also discussed the group’s shift to 15-minute cities. The group has repeatedly promoted Wide Awake, which primarily sells merchandise promoting conspiracy theories, in its channel.

The continued popularity of 15-minute city conspiracy theories proves that climate change denial is the perfect place for anti-vax and anti-mask enthusiasm to thrive as COVID-19 becomes less prominent in the news cycle but their need to prove they are “wide awake” persists. We have also seen that it can be easily adapted for U.S. audiences with their specific villains, such as Fauci, and framed as an affront to American values, such as our obsession with cars.

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STEVE DEACE (HOST): Which one of your books would Pfizer and Moderna land in?

WAYNE ALLYN ROOT (GUEST): Pfizer -- you know, here's the interesting thing. When I wrote this book, I didn't want to get banned by Amazon or anyone else so I kind of hid my real beliefs inside the book. It sounds like it's just a boycott book, great patriotic companies, but about half the book are my opinions of what's happening in America and then the other half, the other half of the book,the back half are all the companies with a full page on each company, the products they sell, and why I rated them as conservative.

But the first half of the book, Steve, is what I believe is happening to America. A communist takeover of the United States. Not socialist, not progressive, communist takeover, and I tell you why. Rigged elections and I tell you why. I absolutely believe in every cell in my body -- and I'm a pretty smart guy. I'm no dummy and I don't wear antennas on my head -- I'm telling you, elections are being stolen, not just the 2020 election. Kari Lake was just stolen. I think that Adam Laxalt in Nevada for U.S. Senate was just stolen. There's a lot of stolen elections. Our country's rigged.

And then I've got an entire third of the book about the COVID vaccine and how dangerous and deadly it is and the lies and propaganda that have been told to fool you. This book is about the COVID vaccine being dangerous and deadly, but you don't know it until you open the book. I sneak it in. So, I think I did it in a way that, you know, nobody will say, oh, let's censor the book, because it doesn't look like it's about the COVID vaccine, but it is.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/clay-travis/youtube-has-done-nothing-stem-tide-covid-19-misinformation-outkicks-clay-travis

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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/guide-stew-peters-violent-rhetoric-white-nationalism-anti-lgbtq-bigotry-and

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stew Peters is a right-wing streamer and influencer who has hosted numerous Republican officials and helped spread viral misinformation. He is also a white nationalist who alleged that Black people are genetically prone to criminality; claimed that Jewish people control the media and Judaism is a “death cult built on the blood of murdered babies”; repeatedly attacked LGBTQ people with slurs and suggested that they be shot; and told his audience that politicians, pro-vaccine advocates, and journalists must be executed.

Additionally, Peters is a purveyor of bizarre and dangerous conspiracy theories, including those related to QAnon, COVID-19, Pizzagate, flat Earth, the Uvalde and Sandy Hook mass shootings, and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Peters is the host of The Stew Peters Show and distributes other programs on his streaming network. In the past, he has worked as a bounty hunter and had run-ins with the law. Peters also attempted to be a rapper with no apparent success.

Numerous Republican politicians and officials have appeared on Peters’ show, including Reps. Paul Gosar, Bob Good, Pete Sessions, and Louie Gohmert; Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers; Trump lawyer Christina Bobb; Trump administration officials Kash Patel and Peter Navarro; Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward; Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin; failed Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake; and Florida Surgeon GeneralJoseph Ladapo.

Peters routinely spreads false information through his show and online, including through Rumble (over 500,000 followers), Twitter (over 240,000 followers) and Telegram (over 270,000 followers) accounts. He is also a regular guest on the right-wing channel One America News.

Stew Peters pushes for the executions of politicians, pro-vaccine advocates, and journalists

Stew Peters is a white nationalist who uses bigoted rhetoric: “Diversity isn’t America’s strength”; “white replacement operation taking place in America”; “Jews control Media”

Stew Peters on LGBTQ people: “F------,” “I hate their -------,” “This country is run by a bunch of cuck f------”

Stew Peters’ conspiracy theories: QAnon, COVID snake venom, Pizzagate, Sandy Hook, flat Earth

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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/cdc-fda-eviscerate-doctor-antivax/?anplus

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo went mask-off (so to speak) at a press conference in Winter Haven, Florida, Thursday, revealing himself to be an unvarnished antivaxer.

"These vaccines have a terrible safety profile at this point in the pandemic," Ladapo said of the covid vaccines, "You know, I'm not sure anyone should be taking them and that's the honest truth."

"Respectable" antivaxers are normally at pains to convince the public that they're only concerned about the mRNA vaccines, or the use of vaccines in certain populations. For example, they'll say they're not against covid vaccines per se, they're just worried that the risks don't justify the benefits for young men, or for boosters, or whatever. That was Ladapo's tack until the CDC and the FDA eviscerated him in a letter last week, debunking his insinuation that an uptick in reported adverse events is an indication that the covid vaccines are unsafe.

READ MORE: DeSantis to run on 'We were right, they were wrong' COVID results slogan when Florida ranks among the worst

Last month, Ladapo wrote to the heads of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Like so many antivaxers, Ladapo has been doing his own research. Unlike most cranks, he briefly came under investigation for allegedly falsifying the data his department put out about covid vaccines. In his letter, pointed out that reports of adverse vaccine events to the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database had risen since the covid vaccines were introduced.

Judging by his grumbling about federal health agencies at the press conference, Ladapo's feelings were hurt by the reply he got last week from FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. Anyone would be. The two agency heads neatly dismantled Ladapo’s claim that an increase in adverse event reports since the advent of the covid vaccines is an indicator that the covid vaccines are unsafe. The two agency heads also accused Ladapo of fuelling vaccine hesitancy and undermining public health.

"The claim that the increase of VAERS reports of life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere represents an increase of risk caused by the COVID-19 vaccines is incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public," the commish and director wrote. They went on to explain exactly why Ladapo's inflammatory statistics are misleading.

"Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination do not mean that a vaccine caused the event," Califf and Walensky said, zeroing in on the logical fallacy behind Ladapo's inflammatory claims, and adding that "The Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for the COVID-19 Vaccines require sponsors and vaccine providers to report certain adverse events through VAERS, so more reports should be expected."

rEAD MORE: 'I obviously don't have evidence': House Republican has a wild new conspiracy about COVID-19 origins

In other words, anyone can submit a report to VAERS if they think there's any connection between a vaccine and a symptom. Moreover, covid vaccines are special because healthcare providers are required to report adverse events even if they don't believe there's any link between the shot and the symptoms. This extra-low reporting threshold is part of the most intensive vaccine safety monitoring program in US history. As Califf and Walensky pointed out in their letter, the CDC and FDA are already well aware of the VAERS reports and that they've been actively looking into them to make sure they're not signs of a larger safety problem.

"Both FDA and CDC have continued to collect outcome data from multiple sources that demonstrate the clear benefit of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing death, serious illness, and hospitalization from SARS-CoV-2 infection, along with indicating a modest benefit in the prevention of infection and transmission that wanes over time, even as new variants have emerged."

ladapo's shift to a hardcore antivaxery may also reflect the presidential ambitions of his boss, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis believes that antivax is the fast lane to the White House, and Ladapo is his eager co-pilot.

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis and Florida's Doctor Antivax

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https://boingboing.net/2023/03/13/capitol-officer-sicknick-time-traveled-then-died-from-the-covid-vax-suggests-far-right-radio-host.html

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https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/laura-ingrahams-anti-covid-vaccine-campaign-reaches-new-low-should-it-even-be

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-remains-source-anti-vaccine-conspiracy-theories

https://www.mediamatters.org/google/youtube-has-monetized-videos-baselessly-connecting-celebrity-deaths-covid-vaccines

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cALLER: I wanted to thank you for all of your truth and you telling it like it is and explaining things to us that the people that are in charge are supposed to be telling us the truth, but they're not. Example: COVID. You've never sugarcoated COVID. You had told what should have been said to the American people. It was never explained to us the way it should have been. But you always tell, you know, what you know, who you know it from. You bring in experts who know what they're talking about and you're always truthful.

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Well, I appreciate your kind words. I will tell you, there was a lot of pressure, Leslie, brought on this show and my TV show, for me to tell people what to do and I refused to do it. In retrospect, I am so grateful that I allowed my common sense to guide me and didn't give in to the pressure.  But there was a lot of pressure being brought to bear on me to tell people, "Oh, you've got to get the shot." And I'm like, "I don't believe that's the case. I don't think everybody should."

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Actor Woody Harrellson recently hosted Saturday Night Live for the fifth time, performing an anti-vax monologue that triggered awkward silences and a few disgruntled laughs in the audience — and an uproar on Twitter.

Harrellson started his six-minute spiel describing himself as a "redneck hippy" who identifies as "purple," politically — a "joke" that clearly fell flat, according to The Daily Beast.

The Daily Beast reports:

Harrelson began to tell a bizarre story about a script he read in 2019 after the last time he hosted the show, but continually interrupted himself to talk about his penchant for weed and the fact that he spent seven months without alcohol last year… 'and five glorious months.'

READ MORE: Sam Smith's 'full-on Satan worship' Grammys number sets conservatives into a frantic anti-vax Satanic panic

But the comedian's speech quickly went downhill.

"So the movie goes like this," Harrelson said. “The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes. And people can only come out if they take the cartel's drugs and keep taking them over and over."

He continued, "I threw the script away. I mean, who was going to believe that crazy idea? Being forced to do drugs? I do that voluntarily all day long."

Variety reports:

In the past, 'Saturday Night Live' has been publicly COVID-conscious, choosing to film out the quarantined season from inside their cast member's homes.

READ MORE: 'Politics masquerading as science': Specialists rebuke Florida surgeon general's 'dangerous' anti-vax claims

Social media users were unamused.

Nick Brennan: "What on earth was this anti-vax nonsense?"

Ryan M. Spaeder: "I am shocked that Saturday Night Live did not cut out of this, let alone the fact that they tweeted it."

@FairyTaleMindy: "Who approved this?"

@Dan__Stevens: "Locked in your home until you take the cartels' drugs"

@antibrews: "My guy made the SNL crowd sound like a half-empty comedy club on open mic night."

Meanwhile, Twitter's billionaire owner Elon Musk – who has enabled conspiracy theories to propagate on the platform – appeared to appreciate Harrelson's perspective.

"Good one," he commented.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Spoiler: It was political liberals and MAGA folks, according to the Death Panel Podcast.

The liberal-conservative binary is related to the left-right binary bequeathed to the world in 1789. The categorical binary is a consequence of what side of the hall the anti-monarch revolutionaries and the elite aristocrats sat on when the French National Assembly drafted a new Constitution in 1789. The Partisans sat to the presiding officer's left, while the monarchist reactionaries sat to the right. This binary impacts how to differentiate between liberals and conservatives and if there are substantial differences in their politics, specifically concerning public health.

To be clear, I am talking about the politics of masking and the assumptions made about which political perspectives have influenced public opinion to stop masking in public.

Contrary to the assumptions that seem to be circulating online, in academia, and pushed by political pundits, MAGA supporters, conspiritualists, and the crusty-to-alt-right communities who deny COVID are not the only force influencing how we interpret the information and research about long COVID, masking, vaccines, and other public health issues.

The Death Panel podcast has been killing it since November 2018, before the ongoing global pandemic began. "The Death Panel is a twice-weekly podcast about the political economy of health co-hosted by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Phil Rocco, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Abby Cartus."

In a recent episode available to everyone, "How Liberals Killed Masking," the hosts take on one of the sacred cows of the liberal imaginary – that they (liberals) are not responsible for policies that ensure people will continue to get sick from COVID-19.

"We look back at how such a basic intervention as masking during a pandemic became increasingly scrutinized, undermined, and ultimately stigmatized in mainstream discourse over the last three years."

This episode highlights the impact that liberals, progressives, and other people that might identify with the Democratic Party have been a force behind the anti-mask masking politics in the United States. That might come as a surprise to some. Yet, for people who have to live with the consequences of COVID deniers and COVID downplayers, the Venn diagram that demonstrates liberals are closer to the MAGA cultists and COVID deniers than disability studies is not a surprise.

You can follow Death Panel on Instagram here.

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https://www.alternet.org/conservatives-grammys/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlsons-fox-news-show-undermined-vaccines-99-days-it-covered-them-biden

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austin Fitts on Wednesday to share her theory that the financial system is creating “digital concentration camps.” Fitts is a prominent 9/11 truther and anti-vax activist who has written that “Ziocons” control top U.S. officials as “puppets.”

Carlson began the segment by alleging the shuttering of some bank branches and ATMs indicates that a shadowy global cabal is planning to eliminate cash in order to control the world population and leave people with “no power whatsoever.”

He then brought on Fitts, whom he identified as the founder of The Solari Report and a former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, saying that she had been “monitoring this.” Fitts explained to Carlson’s primetime audience that thanks to this purported plot by “the central banks” and other unidentified entities, “we're going into a system where literally our homes, our cars, our communities become digital concentration camps." [vid]

fitts became a prominent figure in the 9/11 Truth movement following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. She was “a board member of 911Truth.org -- a Web site organized by citizens who believe the government is covering up the true cause of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” according to a 2004 report from the South Bend Tribune that was republished on that website. That group’s mission statement alleges that “elements within the US government and covert policy apparatus must have orchestrated or participated in the execution of the attacks for these to have happened in the way that they did.” Fitts is also identified as a prominent 9/11 truther in a 2006 Washington Post report, which states that she believes “that the ‘most unbelievable conspiracy’ theory is the one retailed by the government.”

FItts signed a 2004 petition “facilitated by” 911Truth.org “which calls for immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” That document earned notoriety in 2009 after Fox reported that then-Obama White House adviser Van Jones’ name appeared as a signatory (Jones stated that he was misled about the petition, which was “something that I never saw and never signed onto,” but resigned amid the firestorm). Fitts told Salon.com following that controversy, “I signed the 9/11 truth statement and stand by my signature.”

More recently, Fitts has made a name for herself by promoting COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories. (She also alleges more broadly that childhood vaccination has caused “disabilities and death inflicted on our children by what I now call ‘the great poisoning.’”) 

Fitts gained viral fame for her appearance in the 2020 documentary Planet Lockdown, which was eventually banned by Facebook and YouTube. Media Matters previously reported of her role in the film:

The video, which came out in late December, features Fitts making a variety of false claims that amount to an elaborate conspiracy theory in which a “committee that runs the world” is using the pandemic to enhance its power. She claims that a coronavirus vaccine will “modify your DNA and for all we know make you infertile” (it does not and will not); explicitly endorses the false conspiracy theory that the vaccine will include microchips; and falsely claims that we have a “have a fake virus and a magic virus and a fake president” and that there was “massive voter fraud.” (She also says people don’t have to pay their taxes “because the government is breaking all the laws related to financial management.”)

At the end of her interview, Fitts refers to the government operation to create a coronavirus vaccine and explicitly urges people to reject it, saying, “Don’t help the military build Operation Warp Speed, OK? Don’t help the tech guys figure out how to inject nanoparticles into your body and hook them up to the cloud. Don't help big pharma, you know, make injections which are poisoning American children to death.”

The Post further reported that Fitts “has worked with anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.to promote unfounded claims about the pandemic and to oppose lockdown measures put in place to slow the spread of the virus.”

The Solari Report, the Fitts-founded website Carlson plugged in his introduction, largely features financial commentary – but it also regularly publishes anti-vax commentary. Fitts, for example, authored for the site a glowing review of a recent book by Kennedy’s anti-vax group Children’s Health Defense, which she describes as providing “a critically important and sobering contribution to our understanding of the dangers resulting from injecting or ingesting poison masquerading as medicine and doing so without full and fair disclosure of the potential consequences.”

In 2022, Fitts posted to her website what appears to be a threatening letter addressed to numerous top U.S. health officials, including then-acting FDA commissioner Janet Woodcock, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky, and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. In the document, titled “Notice of Liability,” Fitts warned the recipients that if they approved the COVID-19 for children, the government could not “protect you and your families from the laws of God or from the social and economic ramifications of your family and neighbors understanding what you have done and the resulting death, disease and bankruptcies they have experienced at an intimate level.”

She added, “Please act in the highest and best interests for all concerned and, if you are not free to do so, resign before more genocide is approved and the personal consequences to you and those you love are irreversible.”

Fitts’ appearance on Carlson’s show drew attention that night when CNN reporter Oliver Darcy noted that the chyron during the interview read, “It’s looking more likely that we will see the day when our lizard overlords ban cash.”Responding to the chyron, conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild commented, “‘Lizard Overlords’ just means Jews. Tucker is saying Jewish bankers will use their incalculable power and influence to ban paper money to help usher in the New World Order and global government.”

Fitts has similarly warned in her own writing of the pernicious influence of “Ziocons,” as The Bulwark writer Christian Vanderbrouk noted. In 2017, she wrote, “Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Nancy Pelosi – these people stopped caring long ago about the conditions that create civilization. They are puppets on Ziocon strings.”

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In February 2020, the late far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh insisted that COVID-19 was no more dangerous than “the common cold” and that it was “being weaponized” by Democrats “as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump.” Limbaugh, who repeatedly claimed that smoking cigarettes wasn’t dangerous before dying of lung cancer in February 2021, believed that mainstream media reporting on the dangers of COVID-19 was overblown. But according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, COVID-19 has killed more than 6.8 million people worldwide; that includes over 1.5 million deaths in the United States.

Three years after Limbaugh tried to convince his listeners that COVID-19 was a political issue instead of a health/medical issue, the MAGA far right is still politicizing the pandemic. Libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young, who is very much a Never Trumper, calls out MAGA “covidiots” and “conspiracy theorists” in an article published by The Bulwark on January 31.

Young isn’t without criticism of Democrats, liberals and progressives in her article, pointing out that some of them are now acknowledging that they were overly “aggressive” in 2020 when it came to “school closures and lockdowns.” But Young is much more critical of MAGA “covidiots” who continue to push unscientific claims, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and Twitter owner Elon Musk.

READ MORE: How right-wing 'bloviation' over 'military wokeness' may harm the US armed forces: journalist

“The covidiot ecosystem on the right — and, to some extent, in ‘anti-woke’ and ‘cultural dissident’ circles that don’t always explicitly identify as right-wing — continues to flourish,” Young observes. “Most recently, it’s been manifesting itself in the rather fanciful notion that people didn’t ‘suddenly’ die of heart attacks and strokes before ‘the jab’ came along.”

By “the jab,” Young is referring to COVID-19 vaccines, which even Donald Trump credits with saving lives. MAGA “covidiots,” she notes, are pushing anti-vaxxer claims while saying that Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top White House health official, deserves criminal prosecution for his response to the pandemic.

“Once again,” Young writes, “covidiocy — usually dressed up as ‘COVID dissent’ — is not just the province of some radical and marginal right-wing fringe: It also implicates mainstream figures on the right. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s nowadays being touted as kinder, gentler, saner heir to the MAGA mantle, falsely claimed earlier this month that people who get the bivalent booster shot are ‘more likely to get infected.’ And in December, he threw a big, juicy chunk of red meat to the conspiracy theorists by asking the Florida Supreme Court to investigate ‘wrongdoing’ related to the COVID vaccines, including supposedly false claims about their safety and efficacy.”

READ MORE: How right-wing 'bloviation' over 'military wokeness' may harm the US armed forces: journalist

Read The Bulwark’s full article at this link. ===

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In February 2020, the late far-right radio host Rush Limbaugh insisted that COVID-19 was no more dangerous than “the common cold” and that it was “being weaponized” by Democrats “as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump.” Limbaugh, who repeatedly claimed that smoking cigarettes wasn’t dangerous before dying of lung cancer in February 2021, believed that mainstream media reporting on the dangers of COVID-19 was overblown. But according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, COVID-19 has killed more than 6.8 million people worldwide; that includes over 1.5 million deaths in the United States.

Three years after Limbaugh tried to convince his listeners that COVID-19 was a political issue instead of a health/medical issue, the MAGA far right is still politicizing the pandemic. Libertarian/conservative journalist Cathy Young, who is very much a Never Trumper, calls out MAGA “covidiots” and “conspiracy theorists” in an article published by The Bulwark on January 31.

Young isn’t without criticism of Democrats, liberals and progressives in her article, pointing out that some of them are now acknowledging that they were overly “aggressive” in 2020 when it came to “school closures and lockdowns.” But Young is much more critical of MAGA “covidiots” who continue to push unscientific claims, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and Twitter owner Elon Musk.

READ MORE: How right-wing 'bloviation' over 'military wokeness' may harm the US armed forces: journalist

“The covidiot ecosystem on the right — and, to some extent, in ‘anti-woke’ and ‘cultural dissident’ circles that don’t always explicitly identify as right-wing — continues to flourish,” Young observes. “Most recently, it’s been manifesting itself in the rather fanciful notion that people didn’t ‘suddenly’ die of heart attacks and strokes before ‘the jab’ came along.”

By “the jab,” Young is referring to COVID-19 vaccines, which even Donald Trump credits with saving lives. MAGA “covidiots,” she notes, are pushing anti-vaxxer claims while saying that Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top White House health official, deserves criminal prosecution for his response to the pandemic.

“Once again,” Young writes, “covidiocy — usually dressed up as ‘COVID dissent’ — is not just the province of some radical and marginal right-wing fringe: It also implicates mainstream figures on the right.Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s nowadays being touted as kinder, gentler, saner heir to the MAGA mantle, falsely claimed earlier this month that people who get the bivalent booster shot are ‘more likely to get infected.’And in December, he threw a big, juicy chunk of red meat to the conspiracy theorists by asking the Florida Supreme Court to investigate ‘wrongdoing’ related to the COVID vaccines, including supposedly false claims about their safety and efficacy.”

READ MORE: How right-wing 'bloviation' over 'military wokeness' may harm the US armed forces: journalist

Read The Bulwark’s full article at this link. ==

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/sean-hannity-vaccines-and-boosters-do-not-work-they-have-told-us

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no lnx

Prominent QAnon anti-vaxxer who called for Anthony Fauci’s execution dies of COVID-19

Alex Henderson

January 10, 2022

QAnon supporter Cirsten Weldon was among the far-right anti-vaxxers and coronavirus truthers who railed against COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 — and on Thursday, January 6, according to the Daily Beast — she died of COVID-19.

Weldon, who called for Dr. Anthony Fauci — President Joe Biden’s top White House medical adviser — to be executed,was known for posting videos of herself berating people who were waiting in line to get vaccinated for COVID-19. Weldon falsely claimed that COVID-19 vaccines were dangerous, and she said that Fauci “needs to be hung from a rope.”

The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer reports, “Cirsten Weldon had amassed tens of thousands of followers across right-wing social media networks by promoting the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy under the screenname CirstenW.’ She was prominent enough to become a sort of QAnon interpreter for comedian conspiracy theorist Roseanne Barr and started recording videos about QAnon with her.”

    Cirsten Weldon, a leading QAnon promoter who urged both her followers and strangers she passed on the street not to take the COVID vaccine, died Thursday of the coronavirus.https://trib.al/tNErWGu

    — The Daily Beast (@The Daily Beast) 1641604802

:{:{}:

In one of her videos, Sommer notes, Weldon can be seen yelling at people who were waiting to get vaccinated for COVID-19 — saying, “The vaccines kill, don’t get it! This is how gullible these idiots are. They’re all getting (the) vaccine!”}:

READ: 'Traitor' Jim Jordan mocked for refusing to comply with Jan. 6 committee — after declaring 'nothing to hide'

Weldon became ill in December, describing her symptoms in her videos and saying that she had “bacterial pneumonia.” But she continued to oppose COVID-19 vaccines.

In a December 27, 2021 video posted on Facebook, Weldon told viewers, “I didn't think I was going to make it. I'm sorry. I'm exhausted, and I have no — I'm very, very weak. I have no strength. I haven't eaten in four days.” Weldon described having “fever, chills, sweats.”

According to Sommer, Weldon posted her final video on December 28, 2021 and was “hospitalized in Camarillo, California” three days later.

Sommer points out that Weldon is “just the latest instance of a far-right personality who opposed vaccination being killed by the virus.” Others have included radio host Douglas Kuzma, who died on January 3 — only three days before Weldon — and QAnon supporter Robert David Steele, who described COVID-19 as a “hoax” before dying from it in August 2021. QAnon supporter Veronica Wolski, another anti-vaxxer, died of COVID-19 the following month.

READ: Cult survivor explains how Trump 'weaponizes' the 'us vs. them' tactics of a 'cult leader'

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an 1 23

Benjamin Franklin liked to say the only certainties are death and taxes. We can now add a third certainty: Antivaxers alleging that the deceased are killed by the covid vaccine.

You might wonder how they know the vaccine status of all these strangers. They don’t! But 80 percent of Americans are at least partially vaccinated. It’s a good bet that anyone who dies will from now on have been vaccinated. Sadly, while the shot greatly reduces the odds of dying by covid, it doesn’t make you immortal.

That means endless grist for the antivax rumor mill.

READ MORE:This popular church app has become a ‘dark’ hotbed of anti-vaxxer extremism: report

Staying alive

In the scramble for antivax clout, it’s critical to hurl the accusation as quickly as possible, before inconvenient facts come to light. The cause of 54-year-old singer Lisa Marie Presley’s fatal cardiac arrest is still unknown and the antivaxers are taking full advantage of the uncertainty.

It’s a race against time. If antivaxers had hesitated before blaming the vaccine for high-profile deaths, they might have learned that beloved comedian Bob Saget shattered his skull in a hotel room, sports journalist Grant Wahl succumbed to an aneurysm and guitar legend Jeff Beck died of bacterial meningitis

Staying alive won’t save you from the antivax ghouls either.

READ MORE: Antivax, anti-mask Maine legislator has COVID — and he doesn't sound too good

Just ask singers Celine Dionne and Justin Bieber.

If you think dying at a ripe old age will get you off the hook, think again. Supplement peddler Peter McCullough alleged that Queen Elizabeth II died of the vaccine, as opposed to being 96. Anti-vaxers even circulated a fabricated quote to make it look like actress Betty White had just gotten her booster before she passed peacefully in her sleep at nearly 100 years of age.

Some antivaxers don’t even wait for the victim to die.

Substacker Steve Kirsch speculated the vaccine had rendered Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin braindead on the field when in fact he was recovering in hospital.

Someone’s braindead in this scenario, but not the 24-year-old Hamlin, who was released from the hospital last week. The cause of his cardiac arrest has not been released, but given that the player collapsed shortly after taking a blow to the chest on national television, the most likely culprit is a rare condition called commotio cordis. Scientists have known since the 1930s that an ill-timed blow can stop a healthy heart by disrupting its rhythm.

They have a list!

The flurry of rumors about Hamlin’s cardiac arrest are part of a larger pattern of antivaxers falsely implying that vaccines have caused a sudden surge in sudden deaths among athletes

:{:{Tucker Carlson said that, “since the vax campaign began, there have been more than 1,500 total cardiac arrests in [European sports leagues] and two-thirds of those were fatal.” Carlson was riffing on a letter to the editor by none other than Peter McCullough who was riffing on a list he saw on the antivax website, “GoodSciencing.com.”}:

}:

The list purports to be a compendium of “vaccine-related” illnesses and deaths since the vaccines came out. Many of these deaths are neither cardiac, sudden, nor plausibly vaccine-related.

These include the deaths of 81-year-old soccer star Pele, who died of colon cancer; a 69-year-old who apparently fell off a cliff; a snowboarder who mysteriously crashed through a window; an accidental drug overdose; a car crash, some drownings, a kidney infection; and sepsis from Strep A.

The list includes all ages, and a grab bag of sudden and not-so-sudden deaths, lovingly cherry-picked from all over the world.

Rather than limiting themselves to competitive athletes, the authors appear to have included almost anyone with a connection to physical fitness, including a gym owner who keeled over in his parking lot; an NFL official; some referees in their 70s; assorted weekend warriors; and a nameless little girl who died in dance class.

The anonymous authors swear they have more stories they didn’t include because they weren’t confident of the connection to the vaccine.

Based on what they put in, I shudder to think what they left out.

Fear and deceit

The GoodSciencing folks attempt to show an increase in something or other by comparing their giant pile of random clippings to a study that only looked at competitive US athletes under the age of 25 who were perfectly healthy before they died suddenly and whose cases found their way into a special registry.

By comparing a list with no standards to a list with very strict standards, the GoodSciencing crew observe that their pile is larger and declare victory. This is not good sciencing.

Sadly, young athletes have always been at increased risk of sudden cardiac death. Scientists have known for decades that a small percentage of apparently healthy young people have heart conditions that are silent until they push their bodies to the limit. The ignorance and malice of the antivaxers is so profound that they think nothing of exploiting these tragic deaths to advance their narrative.

Antivaxers are resorting to increasingly desperate and manipulative rhetoric because they’re losing. Now that most people have been vaccinated, they’re gloating that we’re all going to die horribly because we didn’t listen.

It is estimated that the covid vaccines have saved over 3 million lives in the US and over 14 million lives worldwide. The vaccines have also prevented countless illnesses and hospitalizations and saved global health care systems trillions of dollars.

Antivaxers ghoulishly exploit the deaths of celebrities, because they have no compelling data. Their only weapons are fear and deceit.

READ MORE: The inherent racism of anti-vaxx movements

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On Sunday, The Washington Post Editorial Board published a brief piece blasting Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis for waging a political war against mRNA COVID-19 vaccines despite their overwhelming success at saving lives as well as their proven track record for safety.

"DeSantis last week demanded a grand jury investigate 'criminal or wrongful activity in Florida' involving the 'development, promotion and distribution' of coronavirus vaccines. As public opinion shows vaccine hesitancy is growing, Mr. DeSantis’s move is not only absurd but also dangerous," the Board wrote.

"Vaccines work. A mathematical model, based on country-level data, found they directlysaved some 15.5 million lives worldwide in the first year they were available, and millions more indirectly," the editors said, adding that "the speed with which mRNA vaccines reached people was a spectacular scientific achievement, given the history of vaccine development. Three decades of research has yet to produce a viable vaccine to prevent or treat HIV/AIDS."

READ MORE: DeSantis faces deep criticism for 'Orwellian' investigation on vaccines

And while there have been some unanticipated setbacks – like the need for periodic boosters to offset waning immunity – the Board stressed that overall, the inoculations have been a net positive for the population that chose to get the jabs.

"Vaccines remain a bulwark against severe illness, hospitalization and death," the paper's leaders said. "Adults who received the latest booster shots cut their risk of having to visit an emergency room or being hospitalized by 50 percent or more, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Dec. 16."

The editors also tore into DeSantis for instigating public skepticism about vaccines – and science in general – as part of his presumed strategy to challenge former President Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination:

He has taken it a step further with a petition to the Florida Supreme Court seeking empanelment of a statewide grand jury — which in Florida can carry out broader investigations of government — on vaccines. In a crude appeal to the anti-vaccine movement, Mr. DeSantis’s petition darkly implies that public reassurances of vaccine efficacy were driven by 'financial gain.'

The Board further noted that this kind of deceptive messaging has had a devasting impact:

Professor Peter Hotez, who co-led development of a vaccine for low- and middle-income countries at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has pointed out that some200,000 Americans 'needlessly lost their lives in the last half of 2021 and into early 2022 because they refused a coronavirus vaccine during our terrible delta wave.'

READ MORE: 'Political theater': Conservative rips Ron DeSantis for 'sucking up' to the ‘conspiracist anti-vax fringe’

The Board's conclusion was thusly unambiguous.

"A scientific achievement so overwhelmingly beneficial to humanity ought not be forsaken in the interest of scoring political points," it stated in its closing remarks. "The truth is as simple as this: Vaccines save lives."

READ MORE: DeSantis says he'll ban 'vaccine passports' in Florida

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/ron-desantis-and-triumph-anti-vax-right

no lnx vid

fox News founder Rupert Murdoch became one of the first people on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 when he received his first jab in December 2020. He thanked “the amazing scientists who have made this vaccine possible,” in a statement at the time, adding, “I strongly encourage people around the world to get the vaccine as it becomes available.”

Two years later, such unqualified gratitude and support for the miraculous medicines are scarce among American conservatives, even as a new study found that COVID-19 vaccines have saved the lives of more than 3.2 million Americans and prevented more than 18.5 million hospitalizations. Instead, thanks in no small part to the paranoid rants of Murdoch’s employees, Republican anti-vaccine sentiment has spiraled to the point that former President Donald Trump’s role in their development may hurt his chances of gaining the party’s nomination in 2024.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was on Murdoch’s Fox on Tuesday night talking up his call for the state’s supreme court to impanel a grand jury to investigate “any and all wrongdoing” related to the vaccines and “bring legal accountability to those who committed misconduct.” It’s unclear precisely what such a grand jury would target or the impact it might have. As a signaling effort, however, DeSantis’ announcement put him squarely on the side of the anti-vax kooks at Fox and the faction of the GOP they influence.

DeSantis fielded softball questions from primetime hostLaura Ingraham, who praised him for having “fought relentlessly against [the] medical cartel’s silencing campaign.” As the governor spoke, on-screen text touted him as “still leading on COVID” and drawing mainstream press outrage for “challenging Covidians.”

Video

CitationFrom the December 13, 2022, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle.

DeSantis is likely to challenge Trump for the GOP presidential nomination. He enjoys broad support in recent primary polls and across the right-wing media spectrum, from Fox primetime hosts to anti-anti-Trumpers at publications like National Review to, reportedly, Murdoch himself. And it is clear to everyone – including Trump’s advisers – that in preparation for that run, he is staking out ground as the vaccine-skeptical candidate.

DeSantis is following the path blazed by Fox hosts like Ingraham and Tucker Carlson. Anti-vaccine sentiment would likely have become a problem for the vaccination campaign under any circumstances. But it took the network’s patented ability to manufacture grievances to turn it into a compelling primary issue for Republican politicians.

Fox spent the last two years sabotaging the U.S. vaccination effort. The network had a unique moral responsibility to try to convince their viewers to get vaccinated. Instead, its most prominent and trusted figures waged a nightly battle against the shots, stoking fears that they were useless or dangerous and that their distribution was part of a sinister plot to control Americans. The discourse was “great for ratings” – but deadly for Republicans, who were vaccinated against COVID-19 at lower rates and died from it at higher ones.

Some right-wing commentators, even at Fox, tried to push back against that narrative and encourage vaccination. But ultimately, they lost the argument within the movement.

DeSantis followed the shift in right-wing public opinion, choosing to preserve his political viability rather than the lives of his constituents.DeSantis once touted his own efforts to distribute the vaccines, which he credited with “saving lives.” But once he saw which way the wind was blowing on the right, he started trying to appeal to the anti-vaccine right. Meanwhile, Trump himself has been flummoxed, getting booed by a crowd for saying he got his booster and eschewing the word “vaccine” on the stump.

It is a testament to the power of Fox’s propaganda that the network was able to turn life-saving drugs into a poisoned chalice for Trump – and that perhaps his greatest rival adjusted his views on them to appeal to its viewers.

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300K KIA GOP?! 3 million US saved

an 12 22

following Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' (R) announcement to launch an investigation into the potential safety risks of the COVID-19 vaccine, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci offered a critical reaction to the governor's effort.

On Wednesday, December 14, Fauci appeared on CNN where he described the potential move as pointless. Fauci, who now serves as the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, argued that DeSantis' effort would only undermine Americans' confidence in the effectiveness of the vaccine.

READ MORE: Republicans once praised Anthony Fauci for saving lives -- and now he’s the boogieman of MAGA attack ads

“We have a vaccine that, unequivocally, is highly effective and safe and has saved literally millions of lives,” Fauci said Wednesday on CNN. “What’s the problem with vaccines?”

In a new analysis, Senior White House Correspondent Alexander Nazaryan expounded on Fauci's arguments explaining one of the main reasons for the apprehension around vaccinations.

"The problem is vaccines have become part of America’s polarized politics," Nazaryan wrote. "Since the advent of COVID-19 vaccines late in the Trump administration, skepticism of the established medical science has become a kind of creed for many conservatives, as well as for some on the far left."

He added, "Political disagreements about lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine requirements have hardened into antipathy toward the vaccines themselves."

READ MORE: Miami Beach mayor slams Ron DeSantis for 'leading everybody off a cliff' as COVID-19 rages in Florida

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ah

far-right Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn’t officially announced a presidential run for 2024, but his admirers — from author Ann Coulter to Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch to writers at the National Review — are hoping that he will. As they see it, a DeSantis presidential campaign would be the way for the Republican Party to quit Donald Trump (who announced his 2024 campaign in mid-November) while still satisfying the MAGA base. And if DeSantis does run, he may have found a way to show MAGA voters how he differs from Trump: pandering to the anti-vaxxer crowd.

Never Trump conservative and former GOP strategist Rick Wilson is quite skeptical about DeSantis’ prospects as a 2024 presidential candidate. Wilson, a North Florida resident, believes that DeSantis, for all his bombast, will be crushed in a Republican primary if Trump fully unleashes his cruelty on the Florida governor (who was reelected by 19 percent in the 2022 midterms).

In a biting article published by The Bulwark on December 15, Never Trumper Amanda Carpenter emphasizes that DeSantis’ latest anti-vaxxer theatrics are designed to fire up “fringe” MAGA voters ahead of a likely presidential run.

READ MORE:'He is so done': Ann Coulter doubles down on Republicans to abandon Donald Trump

“As he seeks to elevate his profile further and distinguish himself from potential 2024 presidential rivals, DeSantis is sucking up to the anti-vax crowd and styling himself as a crusader against what he calls the ‘biomedical security state,’” Carpenter explains. “And, like most of DeSantis’ political stunts, his overtures to the fringe are pretty cringey. On Tuesday, (December 13), as the state legislature was embroiled in a complex debate about skyrocketing home-insurance rates,DeSantis hosted a roundtable in West Palm Beach that brought doctors and scientists together with other Floridians to question the efficacy and safety of COVID vaccines.”

DeSantis, Carpenter notes, featured Steven Ordonia — an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who claims that COVID-19 vaccines have “horrible side effects” that the “mainstream media” are covering up.

“When the roundtable concluded,” Carpenter observes, “DeSantis made a series of planned announcements. He called for investigations into vaccine manufacturers and public officials who he alleges lied about the life-threatening side effects of shots.”

These theatrics, according to Carpenter, reflect “a desperate wish to kiss up to cranky, conspiracist anti-vax voters.”

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an 12 22 // morano lockdown BS

A new analysis is explaining how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) could use the COVID-19 pandemic to his advantage if he opts to run for president in 2024.

"The federal COVID response has become a red-meat issue for the party's base, and DeSantis' 2020 actions are much more aligned with the GOP's tone today," Axios’ Caitlin Owens reports.

Owens also noted that the Republican governor has admitted he wished he'd pushed back against Donald Trump and his administration during the critical moments when he disagreed with the former president's course of action in responding to the pandemic. As Owens notes, this includes "the Trump administration's calls for lockdowns early on in the pandemic."

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis sending 'very dangerous sign' to GOP voters — and Trump’s worried: religious scholar

Multiple political strategists weighed in with their predictions about a possible 2024 presidential run for DeSantis, explaining why COVID could be a key platform issue for the Florida governor.

Republican strategist Alex Conant, who worked with Sen. Marco Rubio's (R-Fla.) election campaign back in 2016, noted how DeSantis' conservative values appear to align more with the party.

"DeSantis is a conservative rock star in large part because of how he handled COVID in Florida," said Conant. "He'll certainly make the implicit contrast with Trump. Whether he makes an explicit contrast at some point depends on how the campaign plays out."

A number of other strategists also pointed out different ways DeSantis could use the pandemic against Trump. Brendan Buck, a former adviser to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, recalled the COVID shutdown in 2020 and how Trump initially aligned with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Republicans have widely condemned.

READ MORE: ‘The epitome of hypocrisy’: Ron DeSantis 'bashes' POTUS' tax policies while reaping the benefits

"He introduced the country to Dr. Fauci, and the far right is not going to forget that. Not that Trump handled the pandemic like Dr. Fauci would have wanted him to, but if you're looking at a way to hit him from the right, that's a big fat target," said Buck.

Although Trump was widely popular among Republican voters, Conant noted that the COVID-19 pandemic response was the biggest drawback of his presidency.

"Trump's handling of COVID is clearly one of the president's biggest vulnerabilities with independent voters and conservative voters for very different reasons," Conant said. "No one is going to forget putting bleach in bodies and downplaying the initial threat, and conservatives won't forgive him for pushing some of the more restrictive policies.”

Matt Gorman, a former Republican campaign operative, also offered a brief take on how the political battle could play out. "Trump benefits if you're chasing him down every rabbit role and fighting with him everywhere. If you be strategic and fight with him on terms favorable to your candidacy, that is where you can take advantage of him," said Gorman.

"COVID is one of those examples where, when it comes to DeSantis, where he could fight him on favorable ground," Gorman added.

READ MORE: How Ron DeSantis wields 'a tremendous amount of power' over Florida politics: 'Cross him once, you’re dead'

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ironical that the minimal shit he did right --> liability?! right up there with griner release

an 12 22 // morano lockdown BS

A new analysis is explaining how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) could use the COVID-19 pandemic to his advantage if he opts to run for president in 2024.

"The federal COVID response has become a red-meat issue for the party's base, and DeSantis' 2020 actions are much more aligned with the GOP's tone today," Axios’ Caitlin Owens reports.

Owens also noted that the Republican governor has admitted he wished he'd pushed back against Donald Trump and his administration during the critical moments when he disagreed with the former president's course of action in responding to the pandemic. As Owens notes, this includes "the Trump administration's calls for lockdowns early on in the pandemic."

READ MORE: Ron DeSantis sending 'very dangerous sign' to GOP voters — and Trump’s worried: religious scholar

Multiple political strategists weighed in with their predictions about a possible 2024 presidential run for DeSantis, explaining why COVID could be a key platform issue for the Florida governor.

Republican strategist Alex Conant, who worked with Sen. Marco Rubio's (R-Fla.) election campaign back in 2016, noted how DeSantis' conservative values appear to align more with the party.

"DeSantis is a conservative rock star in large part because of how he handled COVID in Florida," said Conant. "He'll certainly make the implicit contrast with Trump. Whether he makes an explicit contrast at some point depends on how the campaign plays out."

A number of other strategists also pointed out different ways DeSantis could use the pandemic against Trump. Brendan Buck, a former adviser to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, recalled the COVID shutdown in 2020 and how Trump initially aligned with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Republicans have widely condemned.

READ MORE: ‘The epitome of hypocrisy’: Ron DeSantis 'bashes' POTUS' tax policies while reaping the benefits

"He introduced the country to Dr. Fauci, and the far right is not going to forget that. Not that Trump handled the pandemic like Dr. Fauci would have wanted him to, but if you're looking at a way to hit him from the right, that's a big fat target," said Buck.

Although Trump was widely popular among Republican voters, Conant noted that the COVID-19 pandemic response was the biggest drawback of his presidency.

"Trump's handling of COVID is clearly one of the president's biggest vulnerabilities with independent voters and conservative voters for very different reasons," Conant said. "No one is going to forget putting bleach in bodies and downplaying the initial threat, and conservatives won't forgive him for pushing some of the more restrictive policies.”

Matt Gorman, a former Republican campaign operative, also offered a brief take on how the political battle could play out. "Trump benefits if you're chasing him down every rabbit role and fighting with him everywhere. If you be strategic and fight with him on terms favorable to your candidacy, that is where you can take advantage of him," said Gorman.

"COVID is one of those examples where, when it comes to DeSantis, where he could fight him on favorable ground," Gorman added.

READ MORE: How Ron DeSantis wields 'a tremendous amount of power' over Florida politics: 'Cross him once, you’re dead'

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morano control BS?

Fox News is returning to its pro-COVID-19 stance by attacking Los Angeles, California, for considering an indoor mask mandate as infections in the county skyrocket. The right-wing propaganda channel, which has long spewed pandemic-related misinformation, is again lying about the efficacy of masks for slowing the spread of the disease.

The Los Angeles Times reported that LA County’s case rate “has been increasing since late October and is now triple what it was in the autumn low,” and is currently 188 weekly cases per 100,000 residents, with a case rate of 100 or more being considered high. The LA Times also reported that the county is suffering about 60 deaths from COVID-19 each week. According to City News Service, the county’s COVID-19 hospitalization rate already exceeds one of the two thresholds that County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said would trigger a universal indoor masking mandate.

Fox’s response to this news is to return to its history of killing its viewers by spreading medical misinformation that has contributed to the staggering national COVID-19 death toll exceeding 1 million people. In particular, Fox has spread lies about the usefulness of face masks in slowing the spread of COVID-19. Some Fox personalities have bizarrely claimed that wearing masks makes people crazy, while others simply told lies about their effectiveness. Fox as a whole worked very hard to incorporate masking into their deranged culture war, even though at least one Fox prime time host early in the pandemic repeatedly gushed about their potential in keeping people safe. (Fox also for a time required staffers to wear masks at the workplace.) Besides attacking face masks during a respiratory disease pandemic, Fox has also urged its viewers to distrust public health officials.

And with the possibility of a mask mandate coming back to LA, Fox personalities reacted with incredulity, pretending that masking is ineffective and attacking the county public health director as “power hungry.”

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Surg gen vxr fla

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/politics-masquerading-as-science-dangerous/

In contrast to President Joe Biden and his top White House medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci — both of whom have aggressively encouraged Americans to get vaccinated for COVID-19 — Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo has been critical of COVID-19 vaccines, often inspiring vehement rebukes from medical experts. Ladapo revisited the subject of vaccines on Friday night, October 7, when he urged younger men to avoid the COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer and linked them to an “abnormally high risk” of heart-related deaths. And once again, health experts are pushing back against his claims.

Dan Diamond, reporting for the Washington Post in an article published on October 12, explains, “Ladapo’s recommendation — extrapolated from a short state analysis that has not been peer-reviewed, carries no authors and warns that its findings are ‘preliminary’ and ‘should be interpreted with caution” — was swiftly condemned by medical and public health leaders, who said the Florida surgeon general’s announcement was politics masquerading as science and could lead Americans to forgo lifesaving interventions.”

Ladapo, picked for the Florida surgeon general position by far-right Gov. Ron DeSantis, has been a highly controversial figure in the medical community. And according to Diamond, medical experts are taking issue with his latest claims about COVID-19 vaccines.

READ MORE: Florida's surgeon general says Twitter violated his 'human rights' by removing COVID-19 anti-vax post

“More than a dozen experts interviewed by The Washington Post — including specialists in vaccines, patient safety and study design — listed concerns with Florida’s analysis, saying it relies on information gleaned from frequently inaccurate death certificates rather than medical records, skews the results by trying to exclude anyone with COVID-19 or a COVID-related death, and draws conclusions from a total of 20 cardiac-related deaths in men 18 to 39 that occurred within four weeks of vaccination,” Diamond reports. “Experts noted the deaths might have been caused by other factors, including underlying illnesses or undetected COVID.”

Daniel Salmon, who heads the Institute of Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, slammed Ladapo’s claims as “dangerous” and unscientific.

Salmon told the Post, “If you submitted that to a peer-reviewed journal, unless you were paying them to publish it, it would get rejected. Putting out half-baked reports from a Department of Health is a dangerous thing to do.”

Salmon strongly disagrees with Ladapo’s recommendation that younger men avoid Moderna and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines, saying, “The vaccines are not perfect, but the benefits still outweigh the risks.”

READ MORE:Florida pediatricians slam Ron DeSantis’ 'irresponsible' surgeon general for opposing COVID vaccines for kids

Robert Wachter, who chairs the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, told the Post, “We’re talking about a very small number of deaths. An extra death or two would potentially change these results. I’m hesitant to even call it a paper; it isn’t published anywhere. The idea that (the analysis).… is being used to change policy — it does not have the scientific chops to do that.”

COVID-19 was first reported in Wuhan, China in late 2019. Since then, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, the pandemic has killed more than 6.5 million people worldwide —including over 1 million people in the United States. Although COVID-19 continues to be highly contagious, fewer people are dying from it — a fact that many medical experts have attributed to the availability of vaccines. Biden and Fauci were both infected with COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated, but they suffered only minor symptoms.

Another critic of Ladapo’s latest vaccine recommendation is David Cutler, a health economist at Harvard University. Cutler described the study that Ladapo cited as seriously flawed, telling the Post, “If I was a reviewer at a journal, I would recommend rejecting it…. Anytime you tell people to do something incorrect, you risk causing harm.”

READ MORE:A 'highly contagious' COVID subvariant has scientists worried about the 'next wave of infections': report

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an 9 22

On Sunday’s 60 Minutes, Joe Biden declared the covid pandemic was over. He said, “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over.”

That pronouncement was news to the president’s healthcare staff who scrambled for explanations after Biden's comments went viral on social media and prompted a hashtag #TheCovidIsNotOver.

A half dozen unnamed officials told the Post the next day that Biden’s unequivocal statement undermines his own rollout of a new covid booster campaign and also damages coming efforts to get the Congress to authorize $22 billion in pandemic response funding.

READ MORE: 'MAGA violence' and 'domestic terrorism' are driving 'dual citizenships' among America's wealthy: report

But why do it if the pandemic is over?

Biden’s statement also contravened fact.

On the previous Friday, 107,066 cases of the covid were reported. That number does not include people who took a covid test at home and never reported their cases to local public health departments. So there are tens of thousands of unreported cases as well.

Between 400 and 500 Americans are dying each day from the covid – more than 3,000 a week. On Sept. 21, there were 419. There are about 30,000 hospitalizations daily. Among those, about 10 percent land in ICU. One in five covid cases results in the mysterious and disabling syndrome, long covid, which is, apart from the human toll, costing the economy billionsin lost wages and unfilled jobs.

READ MORE: 'Never again': Progressive lawmakers observe 9/11 with calls to 'do better and learn from our mistakes'

As disturbing as these numbers are, Biden is right in that January 2022 saw an average of 800,000 cases per day. From that vantage, it does look like the pandemic has ceased to peak.

But we know from three years of pandemic data that covid cases ebb in the summer and surge in the winter when people are more likely to be indoors and confined in unventilated spaces, unmasked.

The numbers rarely discussed are the vaccination numbers. Set aside for now (a story for another time) the uniformly terrible way the Centers for Disease Control has handled the pandemic.

The shift from the Trump administration to the Biden administration was barely noticeable. Major mistakes have been made by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky – so much so that she investigated the CDC herself and found it, but not her, wanting.

The area of biggest failure is vaccines.

By never clarifying that boosters were not boosters at all, but a third and essential shot to have full immunity, CDC botched their rollout.

The CDC also never stipulated that vaccinations were essential public health tools for schools and workplaces, and should not be viewed as arbitrary. Vaccines, already politicized by the MAGA right as a “woke” trend to “take away personal freedoms,” became even more politicized without the agency tasked with teaching the public.

As a consequence, the vocal phalanx of anti-vaccine protesters grew louder and even those who were not vaccine hesitant simply never bothered with the third “booster.” So while poor nations remain desperate for vaccines, Americans are hand-waving their necessity.

While the CDC website states that 79 percent of Americans age 5 and over have at least one shot, it also states that only 34.9 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated with two shots and a booster.

That’s not just redhat Magaland failing to get vaccinated. That’s also a lot of liberals, Democrats and progressives. Only 24.2 million Americans – that’s 7.2 percent – have had the second shot.

Biden’s dismissal of a pandemic that has killed over 1.1 million and disabled another 25 million with long covid unintentionally polarized the country on the issue of vaccines. People who call themselves not anti-vaxxers but “pro-vaccine choice,” “pro-safe vaccine” or “vaccine skeptical” feed off the administration’s convoluted messaging.

Still, if the only issue were vaccine hesitancy, it could be somewhat manageable – at least until the next eventual surge. But it isn’t.

Anti-vaxxers – people who oppose vaccinations for a range of reasons from religious proscriptions to QAnon to Big Pharma conspiracy theories – are in the forefront of a growing political divide over vaccinations and its implications for public health.

Anti-vaxxers are also making us sicker.

The failure to immunize has resulted in more mutations and more – and more dangerous – variants of the coronavirus.

Anti-vaxxers have also brought back measles, mumps and now polio. As Rolling Stone reported in “Polio Is Making a Comeback. Thanks, Anti-Vaxxers!”: “If it seems like infectious diseases are coming at us faster, spreading more widely and persisting longer than they have in generations, it’s because they are, health experts say.”

"There are some more conservative states where we are likely to see other non-covid vaccine mandates under attack, and it is very worrisome," Marcus Plescia of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials told *Newsweek*. "If we have some of these pediatric infectious diseases come back, it will be horrific."

And coming back they are – in outbreaks of measles, mumps, whooping cough and tuberculosis.

The CDC’s own database bears this out.

There are fewer vaccinations among under-50 people nationwide, but those numbers are lowest in red states. The reappearance of polio and other diseases in wastewater underscores Plescia’s view that Gen X parents refusing to vaccinate their kids is a trend.

The World Health Organization (WHO) released a report in July with the alarming statisticthat the the covid-19 pandemic had fueled the largest continued backslide in [childhood] vaccinations in three decades. In 2019, just before the pandemic hit, WHO listed growing vaccine hesitancy as one of its top 10 threats to global health, citing an “infodemic” on social media and internet websites creating distrust of vaccines and urging it be addressed.

While Biden was making his declaration, Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the president, was sounding the alarm over vaccines. In a Sept. 18interview in *Financial Times*, Fauci said, “I’m concerned the acceleration of an anti-vaxxer attitude in certain segments of the population … might spill over into that kind of a negative attitude towards childhood vaccinations.”

A few days earlier, Fauci had commandeered the Twitter account of HHS to discuss this issue. The longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and world-renowned infectious disease specialist said, “If you fall back on vaccines against common vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, that’s where you wind up getting avoidable and unnecessary outbreaks.”

And deaths.

The covid was theleading cause of death among US law enforcementin 2020 and 2021 due to vaccine resistance. For the second year in a row, the covid was the third leading cause of death in all age groups in the US in 2020 and 2021 and in line to be so in 2022 as well.

Misinformation and disinformation related to covid vaccines fomented by Fox, celebrities and conspiracy theories have caused this dramatic uptick in parents refusing to vaccinate children against diseases that only a few decades ago killed kids on a regular basis.

That these parents are often, as one *Times* reportshowed, literal rocket scientists who have still been caught up in these disinformation campaigns and who were themselves vaccinated as children is concerning to pediatricians nationwide.

Kate Williamson, a pediatrician, said she’d seen a rise in vaccine resistance. She told the Times, “I have this worry in the back of my mind — that we’re up against something that we have never seen before. To have something that could be anti-science as part of a political identity and culture is very concerning.”

Peter Hotez, of the Baylor College of Medicine and contributor to CNN and MSNBC, said, “The anti-vaccine movement is so strong, so well organized, so well-funded, I doubt it will stop at covid-19 vaccines.” In August, Hotez published a research paperin *Nature* on the damage done by this movement. He was unequivocal:

“I think it’s going to extend to childhood vaccinations.”

Vaccines have been settled science since the 18th century when British physician Edward Jenner discovered the smallpox vaccine, saving the world from a ravaging disease that had killed more than 20 percent of the world population. George Washington had a vaccine mandate for his troops at Valley Forge.

The monkeypox outbreak, with its painful and disfiguring pustules similar to smallpox, gave people a glimpse into what might happen if long-dormant diseases resurge.

Smallpox was eradicated in the US in 1949, globally in 1980. Polio was eradicated in the US in 1979, measles in 2000, whooping cough in 1945, mumps in 2003 – all due to vaccine protocols. But in recent years, outbreaks of each of these debilitating and sometimes fatal diseases have reappeared due to failures to vaccinate.

Initially, these outbreaks were local to religious communities, but then spread into suburban communities where families fell prey to internet misinformation about links between vaccines and autism.

Some of that misinformation was spread by celebrity parents of children with autism like Robert DeNiro and Jenny McCarthy.

The most prominent anti-vaxxer is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy’s own family has disavowed his stance. He has written an anti-vax book published by Simon & Schuster. He established an anti-vax foundation, Children's Health Defense (CHD). In August, it was kicked off Instagram and Facebook for misinformation. The group had ahalf million followers at the time. Kennedy was kicked off Instagram in 2021 but has an active account on Facebook and CHD is on Twitter.

Regardless of the source of vaccine misinformation, the result could be catastrophic if the 22 diseases children are vaccinated against prior to their fourth birthday begin a comeback.

The herd immunity that eradicates diseases is created when more than 80 percent of a population is vaccinated. Lower that number even marginally and outbreaks turn into full-blown pandemics.

Hotez told the Times that the anti-vaxxer movement is incalculably dangerous. “This is a deadly movement,” Hotez said. “With things like terrorism and nuclear proliferation, we have lots of infrastructure.

“For this, we don’t have anything.”

READ MORE: 'No exit': Signs are pointing to 'a civilization in terminal decline'

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/19/mask-mandate-midterm-elections/

wapo no lnx

Military

Building on anti-mask activism, far-right groups pivot from mandates to midterms

Energized by their fight against government coronavirus restrictions, far-right activists are rallying supporters to engage in politics and show up to vote.

Image without a caption

By Hannah Allam

March 19, 2022

A person holds a sign advocating for the recall of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee during a protest against coronavirus vaccine mandates and other issues, on March 5, 2022, at the Capitol in Olympia, Wash. (Ted S. Warren/AP)

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Melanie Gabriel became the teen idol of Washington state’s anti-masking movement last fall when she showed up to school and, claiming a medical exemption, marched barefaced to class.

As Gabriel’s protest continued and she was barred from campus, she drew support from self-styled militia groups and other far-right extremists who saw the anti-mandate movement as a chance to rally conservatives toward more-militant stances. Members of the Proud Boys offered to escort Gabriel to class, prompting a security lockdown of three schools.

Now, with the lifting of most mask and vaccine requirements, Gabriel and her far-right backers are mobilizing the networks they’ve built over the past two years toward a new goal: November’s midterm elections.

Gabriel spoke this month at a gathering that was emblematic of the increasingly blurry lines on the right — it was organized by the far-right Washington Three Percent and sponsored by a conservative student group, Turning Point USA. With the state Capitol dome in the background, speaker after speaker told supporters not to get complacent with mandates gone.

“Just because they’re lifted doesn’t mean they’re going to stay that way, and that’s why we’re all here,” said Gabriel, a striking figure in a bright crimson bob, cat-eye makeup, and a T-shirt with the anti-Biden slogan “Let’s Go Brandon.” Her bullhorn was decorated with stickers that read “Say No To Critical Hate Theory” and “Allergic to socialism.”

A man in the audience yelled that Gabriel should run for governor.

“I will!” Gabriel replied. “I will run for governor. And I’ll run for president. And I’ll run for everything!” She waited a beat before adding: “Once I’m of legal age.”

That’s the kind of youthful energy far-right movements are working to harness across the country as they teach the pandemic’s newly minted activists how to get out the vote.

A school board race in Washington state shows how far-right groups are thinking locally

Extremism trackers say the past two years of fighting pandemic restrictions have given far-right groups a new generation of recruits and a blueprint for taking the lead in conservative organizing. The midterm season, they warn, brings a heightened risk of political violence, as armed groups build on those gains to push deeper into the mainstream.

“In Olympia today, we saw paramilitary groups and a range of other anti-democracy activists aggressively working to recruit young people and making pledges of unity against what they see as their common enemies,” Eric K. Ward, executive director of Western States Center, a regional extremism watchdog, said in a statement after the event where Gabriel spoke.

Anti-mandate activists galvanized a broad cross section of political conservatives by melding disparate agendas into one fuzzy call to “fight tyranny.” By now, most of their big demonstrations look like a right-wing soup, featuring Trump and MAGA logos, self-styled militia insignia, Confederate flags, references to the debunked QAnon movement, and Christian nationalist prayers.

Researchers say connections forged early in the pandemic allowed once-fringe groups to take on more visible roles in other kinds of organizing, such as the “Stop the Steal” effort to overturn the 2020 election results, or the campaign to whitewash U.S. history by attacking the teaching of racism and its impact.

New laws on teaching about race have teachers scared, confused and self-censoring

The nonstop focus on grievances, researchers say, has created a tinderbox of disenchanted Americans who view themselves as foot soldiers in a struggle against mandates and other perceived attacks on personal liberties. Many right-wing politicians and media personalities are stoking the outrage in pursuit of a “red wave” in November.

“The grievances are there as a reservoir for mobilization, but they still have to be triggered.They have to be activated towards specific action,” said Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor leading an in-depth study of the rioters who violently breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “And it rarely happens spontaneously.”

The event where Gabriel spoke was called GRIT, for Government Resistance Impedes Tyranny. Several hundred people participated, along with a convoy of big rigs, part of the U.S. version of the Canadian trucker demonstrations that united a variety of conspiracy-minded protesters.

Unlike at previous far-right gatherings in Olympia, no leftist counter protesters showed up, and the event was peaceful.Journalists were encouraged to refer to it as a “freedom festival,” not a rally. On the damp statehouse grounds, leather-clad bikers chatted about gas prices with khakis-wearing politicians. Gun rights activists told college students that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an example of why they consider the Second Amendment untouchable. A voter registration table sat next to a self-styled militia’s information booth, a reminder that, in this milieu, there are two paths to making change.

Organizer Matt Marshall, founder of the Washington Three Percent and a member of his local school board,called the rally “a networking event” to connect pandemic-era upstarts with more established groups and reliable donors. A dozen or so Republican candidates for congressional and local races worked the crowd, urging constituents to serve on precinct committees as a first step into politics.

Some had clear-cut ties to extremism, with documented support for and interactions with parts of the anti-government movement. Take, for example, a former police chief named Loren Culp, a failed gubernatorial candidate now running to unseat U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of 10 members of the House GOP who voted to impeach President Trump after the Capitol riot. Culp has close ties to a far-right sheriff’s organization that believes local authorities have the power to decide whether state and federal laws are constitutional; in 2018, he pledged he wouldn’t enforce a statewide gun-control law.

Many other candidates, however, fall into a gray area. They espouse views or cultivate relationships that only a few years ago would have put them on the far-right fringe, but which are now broadly shared, or at least tolerated, by Republican leaders. Extremism researchers say it’s startling how quickly it became socially acceptable for relatively mainstream groups like Turning Point USA to provide funding and speakers to an event led by the anti-government Washington Three Percent.

“This kind of meshing of people is typical of the landscape we’re seeing right now — the blurring of the line with an extremist host and mainstream sponsor,” said Carla Hill, associate director of the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, which is tracking more than 100 political candidates who have documented ties to extremist groups or conspiratorial movements.

Black, brown and extremist: Across the far-right spectrum, people of color play a more visible role

Rachel Anderson, 29, head of Lewis County Young Republicans in the western part of the state, told the crowd how in the space of a year she went from being politically unaware to joining other nascent activists in “taking over” the county party. She said she has helped four Young Republicans get elected and contributed to a threefold increase in local GOP fundraising — work she calls vital to electoral success next fall.

“We can’t be complacent anymore,” Anderson told the crowd, to cheers. “We have to go out there. We have to canvass our voting rolls, make sure that every single vote counts and we elect proper, conservative patriots into office.”

As they stump for votes, some Republican hopefuls are encountering a problem of their party’s own making. After two solid years of being fed lies about a stolen election, a bloc of Republicans no longer see the point in voting and refuse to participate in what they regard as a corrupt system.

“We still get a lot of people who say, ‘Nah, I just don’t believe it matters,’” said Joe Kent, a former Green Beret trying to oust Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R), whose vote to impeach President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot made her a pariah within much of the GOP. “And there’s where we’ve got to come back, to tell people we’re taking real stands.”

When asked whether he had qualms about appearing at an event alongside groups like the Washington Three Percent, Kent looked puzzled and said he didn’t know the organizers.

“All I know is that there’s a bunch of people with flags,” he said.

[How the Jan. 6 Capitol riot happened: A Washington Post investigation

Within days of the event, Kent was under scrutiny again for another far-right link: a phone call with white nationalist Nick Fuentes in which the two discussed working together on social media strategy for Kent’s campaign. In an interview, Kent told Oregon Public Broadcasting that he had no association with Fuentes beyond the conversation last spring.

Federal authorities are careful to say they don’t police protected views, including the racist or anti-government stances often articulated at anti-mandate events, and don’t want to overhype a fringe threat. The problem is, violent messaging is now laced throughout the planning for big gatherings, making it difficult to separate “keyboard warriors” from real-life provocateurs.

John Cohen, the top Homeland Security counterterrorism official, said in public remarks last month that the current threat environment is “more volatile and even more dynamic than it was even back in December.” A recent report from the global nonprofit conflict-monitoring group known as ACLED said current trends in guns and violence at U.S. protests “raises the specter of further escalation in armed demonstration activity going into the upcoming midterm elections.”

At the Olympia gathering, guns were concealed, in accordance with a recently changed law that bans open-carry near protests and the state Capitol grounds. The event was legally permitted, and organizers had asked participants not to display hateful imagery. Three Percenter logos, a few Confederate flags and a Proud Boys shirt were visible, but most of the participants wore generic MAGA, anti-Biden, or red, white and blue attire. Families brought their dogs. Children blew soap bubbles on the lawn.

Speakers repeatedly invoked civil rights language to refer to their perceived persecution, a common theme throughout the anti-mandate movement. Online and at rallies, protesters regularly compare themselves to enslaved Africans, dispossessed Native Americans, Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the Founding Fathers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi and Jesus.

“It’s about trying to give themselves some historical cache, and it’s remarkable how they do this,” said terrorism analyst Juliette Kayyem, a former Homeland Security official now at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “It’s not like, ‘We’re just upset about vaccines.’ It’s ‘This is the arc of history, and we’re on it with all of these other quote-unquote freedom fighters.’”

The idea of historical significance resonated with Don and Carol Moody, a married couple in their 60s who were eating smoked-pork sandwiches in side-by-side lawn chairs at the Olympia event. Speaking over loud honking as another trucker convoy arrived, Don said that this was a moment, “to make a stand with what you believe in your heart.”

The couple said they’re confused and frightened by the bloodshed in Ukraine; the right-wing news outlets they watch tell them it’s a precursor to World War III. They worry about whether their unvaccinated grandkids will be cleared to play sports. They said they’ve heard that the government might introduce a “vaccine passport.”

They still plan to vote in the midterms — it’s worth a try, they said — but they firmly believe lies about the “stolen” 2020 election and suspect the Biden administration is already cooking up new ways to disenfranchise the right.

“Everything they do seems to be poking us to be more angry,” Don said.

Carol said that’s why she’s suspicious of the lifting of mandates. In her conspiratorial world, it’s not the time to celebrate.

“They’re thinking up something next,” Carol said. “And that’s what scares me.”

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mma 922

BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving blasting New York city Mayor Adams decision to end the COVID vax mandate for the private sector employees while leaving the municipal workers out of luck. He says the mandate is "one of the biggest violations in human rights history." Might be an overstatement, but I understand the sentiment. Clay Travis, Outkick founder and Mr. Everything joins us now. Clay, he's right. Eight-hundred fifty teachers are off, a couple of thousand cops are fired. Let alone the military that were told to take a hike.

CLAY TRAVIS (OUTKICK FOUNDER): Yeah and it's not just New York City, Brian. I'm going to keep hammering this, because it is so incredibly frustrating to me. He's a hundred percent right about New York City but here's the reality: Military, teachers, so many federal employees, so many private sector employees, as well, all for COVID shots that, Brian, they told us would prevent you from getting or spreading COVID. That's now not true. Effectively, in my opinion, these COVID shots are like used cars that didn't work. We have lemon laws everywhere, right? The American taxpayer has enriched Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. I give credit to Kyrie Irving, Novak Djokovic, and to Aaron Rodgers. Players in different leagues who all stood against these mandates. But the American taxpayer deserves to get back all of the profits from these shots. And what should happen in my opinion, is everyone in the military and everybody who lost their jobs for refusing, all those teachers, everyone who lost their jobs for refusing to get the COVID shot should get their jobs back with back pay, funded by the profits that the American taxpayer paid for all these COVID shots that didn't do what they told us they would.

KILMEADE: President ended the pandemic, said we are out of it, we knew that already. We are also three variants into this. The new variant booster, they want to sell that after telling us the pandemic's done? Forget it.

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mma 9 22

Then-President Donald Trump ordered Alex Azar, then his health and human services secretary, to immediately approve the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment because Fox News host Laura Ingraham had said it was effective, according to a new book.

Trump, an avid Fox viewer who regularly turned the network’s programming into White House policy, became transfixed by the drug after his trusted Fox hosts started talking it up in mid-March of 2020, as the novel coronavirus swept across the country. If hydroxychloroquine had worked as the COVID-19 miracle cure Fox claimed, it would have allowed Americans to swiftly return to normal life without fear of becoming seriously ill from the virus. Unfortunately, hydroxychloroquine is not an effective coronavirus treatment, according to numerous studies as well as U.S. and international health agencies.

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser shed new light on the role Fox played in convincing Trump that hydroxychloroquine would be a COVID-19 “game changer” in their new book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.

They chronicle a phone call between Trump and Azar that took place on March 18, 2020, two days after Ingraham had praised the hydroxychloroquine’s potential during an interview with the Long Island lawyer Gregory Rigano, who championed the drug.

“Laura says hydroxychloroquine works. It’s perfectly safe, so just approve it,” they write that Trump told Azar during the phone call.

When Azar protested, the then-president told him, “Laura takes it. It’s safe,” Baker and Glasser report.

“I want it approved today. That’s an order,” he ultimately demanded, according to the book.

After Trump publicly touted hydroxychloroquine at a press briefing the day after his call with Azar, the Fox-Trump feedback loop went into full swing: Fox ran hundreds of segments talking up the drug’s benefits; Trump tweeted praise of the drug in response to the coverage and successfully pressured health officials to issue guidance supporting the use of the drug as a coronavirus treatment; and Ingraham visited the White House with two members of her “medicine cabinet” to meet with Trump and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn and push for additional support for the treatment.

The federal government ultimately amassed a stockpile of 66 million doses of a drug that is not effective in treating COVID-19 because Fox hosts told Trump that it worked and he believed them. Meanwhile, the network moved on to peddling ivermectin, another drug studies show is ineffective in treating COVID-19, while slandering the actually effective COVID-19 vaccines. The results for Fox’s viewers have been devastating.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/anti-vaccine-accounts-instagram-are-using-link-bio-loophole-monetize-their-content-and

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https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-considers-eliminating-its-covid-19-misinformation-policies-even-dangerous-content

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aha doh on covid, part of larger rejection of expertise; in emergency pandemic only gov't can protect us, but seen as rights infringe/tyranny; maybe // heartlAND reverse engr

mma 922

not sure what to say beyond fox job 1 trash dems; tails you lose? if pandemic still, it is b/c dems failed to fix, or claim lockdn --> perm power tyranny

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): People on the left are freaking out because Biden claimed the pandemic is over, regarding covid. Pandemic's over. We still have a problem with covid, we're doing a lot of work on it, but the pandemic is over.

Don't viruses mutate, and aren't there some things called new variants? Can anyone say scientifically with any degree of certainty that new variants, more virulent variants aren't possible?

I'm not so sure I'm trusting doctor Joe on anything, or the NIH, or Doctor Fauci, or the CDC, which finally admitted, "We were wrong about those vaccine things we were telling you to take day in and day out."

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/michael-flynn/

vax --> zombies

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oann jesse waters chiro nuttery/grift 7 22

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8 22 omfg

STEVE KIRSCH (GUEST): They told -- the agencies, the FDA, the CDC, the NIH said that these vaccines were safe and effective. And when I started seeing my friends die and be injured and I started looking at the data, there was no question that this vaccine is the most dangerous vaccine ever created by man. It is a thousand times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine and that's too unsafe for people to use.

...

BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): You did your own research. What did you find was effective and what was the reaction when you put it out there?

KIRSCH: Well, what I found was that hundreds of thousands of Americans have been killed by this vaccine and millions have been injured. And, you know, there -- clearly, you are more likely to be injured or dead from the vaccine than if you were unvaccinated.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/laura-ingraham-says-her-fox-show-will-target-any-republican-who-supports-vaccines-mandates

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raw story

READ MORE: 'More insane than usual' QAnon 'documentary' claims vaccines will transfer Satan's DNA into your blood

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ohio gop

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/vaccine-mandate/

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an 6 22

no lnx twt many

Michael Flynn busted showing a fake Statue of Liberty in video asking for donations to sketchy charity

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (screengrab/@RonFilipkowski/Twitter).

Brandon Gage June 17, 2022

Retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who briefly served as former President Donald Trump's national security adviser and twice pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation over his foreign contacts during the 2016 election, released a video this week begging Trump followers for money to "help change the course of history."

In the half-minute-long spot, Flynn, an outspoken right-wing conspiracy theorist to whom Trump granted clemency for his crimes after losing the White House to President Joe Biden 2020, said that "by supporting the Save Freedom in America campaign,you are helping change the course of history, and I mean it."

Flynn warned that "if we don't, our liberties and freedoms may be lost forever, and that is no joke. It's serious, and we, as I always say, local action equals a national impact. So get involved in your communities like you've never been involved before."

Flynn added that "if you feel as passionately about saving the freedoms we enjoy as many Americans do, as much as I do, I would like to ask you to join our nationwide effort and donate today."

Watch below via Ron Filipkowski:

The "Save Freedom in America" effort that Flynn referenced does not appear to have a website, and Flynn failed to specify where individuals who want to give their money to Trump-backed causes can go to do so.Instead, users are directed to a FundFreely drive, where they can pledge financial solidarity with "defending the following freedoms:"

Election integrity

Medical tyranny

Border security

Defend yourself [guns]

Parental freedom

Freedom of religion

Freedom to work [unions?]

The absence of any additional information led to suspicions on social media that Flynn's charity may be yet another scam....

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an 6 22

When the COVID-19 pandemic was at its worst in 2020 and 2021, a combination of far-right conspiracy theorists, Christian nationalists and so-called “wellness influencers” added to the death count by pushing bogus, unscientific “cures” and falsely claiming that the lifesaving vaccines being offered by Moderna, Pfizer and others were dangerous. But COVID-19, although still highly infectious, hasn’t been in the headlines as much in recent months — and some fake “wellness influencers” and conspiracy theorists, according to Daily Beast reporter Cécile Simmons, have turned their attention to monkeypox.

“Though little is understood about the mysterious outbreaks of the monkeypox virus in Europe and North America,” Simmons reports in an article published by the Beast on June 15, “scientists agree on one thing: It’s nothing like COVID. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped some influencers in the alternative health and wellness community from repurposing COVID misinformation and using this new public health crisis to further their own agendas.”

Simmons adds, “In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, alt-health and wellness online influencers — from yoga teachers to fitness instructors — became some of the most active propagators of conspiracy theories about COVID-19. With cases now on the decline in much of the West — thanks in no small part to widespread vaccination campaigns — monkeypox has provided new material to rehash the narratives that brought these influencers attention in the early days of COVID, including claims that monkeypox is a plot engineered by global elites to profit from diseases and restrict individual freedoms.”

One of the conspiracy theorists who promoted dangerously false information about COVID-19 during the worst parts of the pandemic was anti-vaxxer Sayer Ji,founder of the alternative medicine website GreenMedInfo.com. In 2022, Simmons reports, Ji has turned his attention to monkeypox.

“Sayer Ji has dedicated his social media channels to making repeated unproven claims about nightmarish vaccine side effects, including death, and that COVID vaccination is a plot masterminded by big pharma and ‘the global government,’” Simmons explains. “And now, with monkeypox on the rise, Sayer Ji has taken to his Telegram channel and Twitter to spread ludicrous claims that monkeypox is the mainstream media’s way of covering up side-effects caused by COVID vaccines to his roughly 50,000 and 11.5k followers, respectively. His Telegram channel includes multiple posts claiming that cases of monkeypox have coincided with the purchase of vaccines by the U.S., among other bizarre theories.”

Another “wellness” influencer/conspiracy theorist pushing wacky claims about monkeypox is Hiighhopess,who, according to Simmons, “recently used her Instagram stories to describe monkeypox as a profiteering ploy manufactured by Bill Gates, and shared claims that the U.S. government is stockpiling vaccines and planning to impose vaccination against monkeypox.”

During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Simmons notes, Hiighhopess, an anti-vaxxer, “used her Instagram channel to share anti-vaccine and anti-mask content, including posts depicting vaccination as a plot by elites to manipulate the public into submission.”

“This repurposing of the COVID playbook by alternative health and wellness gurus should come as no surprise,” Simmons observes. “COVID has provided a blueprint for conspiracy theories, allowing influencers to develop broad-ranging anti-elite and anti-institutional narratives that can be adapted to emerging public health crises.It has also allowed conspiracy-spreaders to use various techniques, including decontextualizing scientific data and cherry-picking facts to give themselves a veneer of credibility.”

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omfg

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/oan-falsely-reports-upwards-25-million-people-have-been-killed-covid-19

pEARSON SHARP (CORRESPONDENT): Our government is trying to kill us. It's not the first time it's happened, and it probably won't be the last. Of course, that's just a conspiracy, though, isn't it? Our government would never do anything to harm us. Just like the CIA didn't spend 20 years secretly conducting hundreds of illegal mind control experiments on American citizens, without their knowledge, under theMK-ULTRA plan.

The CIA used colleges, universities, prisons, and got the help of doctors and hospitals and even pharmaceutical companies to carry out these illegal tests on thousands of patients who didn't know they were being experimented on. Sound familiar? It's all real. Look it up. It happened -- a proven case where our government illegally experimented on us. And you think that was the only time?

We could wonder about what else they're doing, but it's really not much of a mystery. Just look at the experimental vaccines they forced on hundreds of millions of unwitting Americans. The forced vaccination program has been the largest human experiment in the history of the world, and so far the consequences have been appalling.

Conservative estimates from the VAERS programs show upwards of 2.5 million people have been killed by the vaccines, and that's just here in America. Another 100 million have suffered injuries ranging from persistent headaches, to paralysis, to amputation of all four limbs. In fact, there are so many injuries that the federal programs set up to help treat patients who suffered from injuries are totally overwhelmed. Even Politico, of all places, admitted programs like the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program doesn't have enough staff to handle the thousands of people flooding through their doors, all of them suffering from injuries after getting the experimental injections. These numbers are way up from previous years. 

…

At this point, it's more of a conspiracy to believe the vaccines work than to believe they're causing us harm. But that's just what the government wants you to think, and they're doing their level best to cover up any evidence that exposes how dangerous these injections really are. It turns out the CDC has been quietly going through and deleting official records on the U.S. government's VAERS website, which is used by health professionals, doctors, and insurance companies to track injuries and deaths from vaccines. According to data analysts, the Center for Disease Control has been erasing reports of deaths or injuries caused by the COVID vaccines and has already deleted about 10,000 reports so far. 

This isn't the first time this has happened, either, with reports that the CDC went through and deleted up to 6,000 deaths from the database last year, but only for reports on the COVID vaccines. It's already been confirmed that both the FDA and Pfizer knew before the vaccines were released that they were dangerous and ineffective, and yet they decided to release them anyway. Now we're seeing the gruesome consequences of that decision.

No one can guess how many more innocent lives will be lost because of these toxic injections. But as we said in the beginning, this isn't the first time our government has illegally experimented on us. And although we don't know what their true purpose is, we do know one thing. Our government doesn't care how many of us it has to kill to achieve its goals.

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relATED

Tucker Carlson's blatant lie about the COVID-19 vaccines, debunked

05/06/21 10:14 AM EDT

Emergency room doctor: Hospitalized patients repeat VAERS conspiracy theory that Tucker Carlson has pushed

07/29/21 5:12 PM EDT

On YouTube, Charlie Kirk speculates that 1.2 million people could've died from the COVID-19 vaccine

07/21/21

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/ron-johnson-falsely-claims-it-may-be-true-that-19-vaccines-cause-aids/

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brags not vax

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/tucker-carlson-2657142877/

recall hypoc of fox corp widely reported?

for months, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson tirelessly promoted anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories on his show but wouldn’t say whether or not he had been vaccinated for COVID-19. According to Daily Beast reporters Justin Baragona and Lachlan Cartwright, however, Carlson bragged about being unvaccinated during a Saturday, April 2 appearance at an evangelical Christian fundamentalist megachurch in La Jolla, California.

Certainly, not all Christians are anti-vaxxer extremists. Many Catholic and mainline Protestant churches have helped their members find COVID-19 vaccines. But anti-vaxxer attitudes are common among far-right white evangelicals, including those who attend Awaken Church in La Jolla (a San Diego suburb) and applauded Carlson’s speech on April 2[beat twt]

For more than a year now, Fox News star Tucker Carlson has gone out of his way to avoid confirming whether or not he’s vaccinated,” Baragona and Cartwright report. “This month, however, he bragged about having not gotten a single jab. While speaking at Awaken Church earlier this month, the prime-time star heaped praise on the San Diego megachurch for defying COVID-19 restrictions throughout the pandemic before mocking the need for additional booster shots.”

Carlson’s visit to Awaken Church inspired a protest from Ukrainian-Americans, who were critical of the Fox News host for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Fox 5 San Diego.

During his Awaken Church speech, Carlson mocked the COVID-19 vaccines as well as their booster shots. Carlson, according to Voice of San Diego, told the crowd, “I skipped the first three, I’m not getting that one either.”

Those comments drew applause from anti-vaxxers in the crowd.

Carlson also told Awaken attendees that he isn’t opposed to vaccines in general, only COVID-19 vaccines.

Carlson said, “I’ve had like a million of them…. I look at these people, like, this just does not make sense at all.And I have no idea what’s up here, but whatever you’re telling me, it’s just not true.”

Baragona and Lachlan Cartwright note, “Additional audio provided to Source Material by the nonprofit investigative outfit confirmed Carlson’s remarks, which further included him citing hishaving grown up ‘next to the Salk Institute in La Jolla’ as evidence that he is ‘obviously’ not opposed to vaccines.”

Although Carlson and others at Fox News have often downplayed the severity of COVID-19, the pandemic has been the world’s worst health crisis since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918/1919. According to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 6.1 million people worldwide — including over 985,000 in the United States. But thanks to COVID-19 vaccines, many of the infections that are occurring at this point are not life-threatening.

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wow:

Alex Jones complains about “Sandy Hook charade” and claims the lawsuit against him is part of a “one-world government” plot

https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/alex-jones-complains-about-sandy-hook-charade-and-claims-lawsuit-against-him-part-one

jONES (HOST): Front and center for them is to demonize and attack anyone that talks about this. I am here in Connecticut with the whole Democratic Party-funded, -run, anti-free speech, anti-gun Sandy Hook charade that's going on with their attempts to demonize me and set the precedent to ban everybody's speech.

And the first thing they brought up was, “You believe in a new world order, you believe in one-world government. You believe in an armed overthrow of the new world order." So again, they're trying to demonize me as a terrorist who opposes the one-world government that doesn't exist at the same time because The New York Times says so, even though just last week, Klaus Schwab had their big event in Dubai titled World Government Conference. And at it, Schwab and Harari, and all the rest of the same cast of characters -- James Bond villains -- said the post-human world is here and that the world economy is collapsing. But don't worry, they're going to build a new green system on its ashes, Build Back Better and Buttigieg came out and said the same thing here in the U.S.

But that's OK because again, they're allowed to push world government, corporate world government. We're just not allowed to oppose it. When we talk about it, we're crazy and violent, and it doesn't exist. That's gaslighting, that's brainwashing. So here's this former federal prosecutor who's prosecuting the First Amendment and all of our freedoms; in the first 20 minutes he spent hammering me for believing in an imaginary new world order and global government, and that I want to be violent and overthrow people -- which goes the whole January 6 narrative and how they're trying to brand any political opposition as violent. What they're doing, but all the Democrat violence is mostly peaceful. And Kamala Harris bailing out rioters and looters and people trying to burn down the federal courthouse in Oregon there in Portland, that's all OK as well.

Now, I'm going to segue out of that. I'm just pointing out how we have global government up here, and we have their prosecutors now withlawfare trying to shut down our free speech at the grassroots level. And that's so that we cannot oppose the worldwidebio-medical tyrannythat is the basis of the world ID, the world social credit score, the world carbon tax that they admit is now being rolled out on a planetary scale under the auspices of the vaccine passport.

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maga q vaxxers self ID as good marks for grift, so they are targets for extraction?  will pay for simple immediate  solution?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/these-anti-vaxxers-and-wellness-influencers-have-been-applauding-putins-ukraine-invasion-report/

no lnx

These anti-vaxxers and ‘wellness influencers’ have been applauding Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion: report

Alex Henderson March 25, 2022

Support for Russian President Vladimir Putin is by no means universal on the America right. Many conservatives, from Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah to media Never Trumpers like The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and the Washington Post’s Max Boot, have been blistering critics of Putin — especially during the brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Yet in the MAGA cult, Putin has had his share of apologists — from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to “War Room” host Steve Bannon to former President Donald Trump. And Mother Jones’ Kiera Butler, in an article published on March 24, focuses on a bizarre trend: far-rightanti-vaxxers and online “wellness influencers” who have become cheerleaders for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Butler previously reported on pro-Putin anti-vaxxers in a March 2 article, and since then, the Mother Jones journalist stresses,the “overlap” between pro-Putin propagandists and anti-vaxxers “has only grown.”

“(On March 19), the Toronto Star reported a startling correlation between vaccination status and beliefs about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Butler explains. “More than 80% of vaccinated Canadians said they believed their country should help defend Ukraine, compared to less than a quarter of unvaccinated people. This dynamic is especially pronounced in extremist spaces. Some of the anti-mandate trucker convoy chats on Telegram now seem dominated by Putin cheerleading.”

Some online “wellness influencers,” according to Butler, have been claiming that President Joe Biden is “trying to pull a fast one on them by painting Russia as the aggressor” in Ukraine.

“Should social media platforms flag influencers’ content as disinformation,” Butler observes, “it only serves to reinforce their belief that they are being punished for their righteous truth-telling. Some influencers have monetized their self-proclaimed martyrdom by sharing disinformation about Ukraine and hawking their own wellness items.”

twt

Instagram, according to Butler, is one of the social media platforms where pro-Putin anti-vaxxers and “wellness influencers” have been plentiful.

“Beyond the oils and the tinctures, influencers are selling something much more valuable: a sense offierce and uncompromising maternal identity,” Butler observes. “The account bios frequently mention natural childbirth, breastfeeding, and attachment parenting — and their posts and stories tie events in Ukraine back to defending their families from what they see as government overreach.”

Anti-vaxxers who are sympathetic to Putin, Butler writes, are also more likely to be influenced by the far-right pro-Trump conspiracy group QAnon.

“Factions of anti-vaccine groups increasingly embraced COVID denialism and dabbled in QAnon,” Butler notes. “The Russians’ initial plan of dividing Americans had worked better than they could have possibly expected — so that by the time Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, anti-vaccine activists were primed to believe that Putin was the good guy.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/marjorie-taylor-greene-russian-propaganda

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, continuing to move closer and closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin, says “real Americans” only care about “open borders,” gas prices, and inflation but not Ukraine. She also declared that “COVID doesn’t exist.”

“What real Americans care about is gas prices they can’t afford, inflation that goes up enough to where grocery bills are unaffordable, and they’re very concerned about our out of control open border,” Greene said on the floor of the House Thursday. “Crime is out of control,” she added, ignoring that major crimes like murder are “out of control” mostly in just red states.

“But yet Washington has completely disconnected and seems to care more about sending our sons and daughters to a potential war where they do not belong,” she claimed, saying “we need to focus on our country first.”

“America first” is a Trump-era “policy” that essentially says America first and only, period.

The extremist Republican Congresswoman from Georgia just yesterday,in what she claimed was an “address to the nation”that was carried only on Facebook Live, inaccurately announced “both sides” – Russia and Ukraine – have violated their treaties.

The Washington Post called her Facebook Live speech a “10-minute riff,” noting she repeatedly called Ukraine defending itself from the harmful and dangerous Russian attacks and slaughter “a war they cannot win.”

“False claims, debunked nonsense, echoes of Russian propaganda,” is how the Post describes her remarks from Wednesday, in its piece titled “A layer cake of misinformation, dishonesty and pro-Russia apologism.”

Watch Greene on the House floor today:

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/florida-pediatricians-slam-ron-desantis-irresponsible-surgeon-general-for-opposing-vaccines-for-kids/

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an 2 22 edit bd

On February 15, Bloomberg ran a story about the “freedom convoy” that seemed to illustrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the German resistance to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler’s rise. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, is a meditation on “The Sermon on the Mount” in which Bonhoeffer splits the Christian concept of grace in two.

On the one hand is “cheap grace,” which is “without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

On the other hand, Bonhoeffer said, is “costly grace.” It “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him.”

Indeed, resisting fascism by submitting “to the yoke of Christ” and following him cost him dearly. At age 39, the Nazis hanged him.

His theory of stupidity is featured in a letter written to friends a few years earlier. The letter, which is now known as “After Ten Years,” argues that evil like the Nazis isn’t the worst thing. Stupidity is.

“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force,” he wrote. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”

Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

Bloomberg reporters Jen Skerritt and Robert Tuttle were covering protests of the Canadian government’s requirement that truck drivers delivering freight across the US-Canadian border must be vaccinated.

Protests in Alberta and Manitoba, dubbed the “freedom convoy,” took the form of blockades of bridges and trucking routes, at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of emergency powers.

Skerritt and Tuttle interviewed one trucker. His name is Jake Klassen. His two campers and semi were in the blockade. He said Trudeau’s emergency powers were an attempt to “take everything from us.”

Then there is this part:

Klassen said he hasn’t been able to visit his nine-year-old daughter in months. She is receiving palliative care at St. Amant, a care residence in Winnipeg, but due to restrictions that require visitors to be fully vaccinated, Klassen and his wife can’t see her.

“Yes, that's absolutely stunning and sad,” said Victoria Barnett.

Barnett was director of programs on ethics, religion and the Holocaust at the National Holocaust Museum. She’s the author of many books on interfaith history. She edited a 2017 translation of “After Ten Years.” I asked if Jake Klassen exemplifies Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Maybe, but as part of a bigger phenomenon. “After Ten Years” was his attempt to understand the first 10 years of National Socialism and what had happened to his compatriots, his church, his country.

He's trying to figure out why most Germans caved to Nazi ideology and why they became integral to what happened. The historian Klemens von Klemperer (himself a refugee) called the Third Reich a "consensual dictatorship" -- which is a pretty good description.

Go into that a bit more please. How was it consensual?

His main point is that stupidity is a moral failure, not an intellectual one. He's reflecting on the process by which people willfully become part of a larger movement or political group, etc. As they become increasingly involved, two things tend to happen:

  1. They become isolated(or they isolate themselves) from those who disagree with them or challenge them (and I would say also from news sources that would challenge their worldview) and
  2. They get a lot of reinforcement. One of the things that happened in 1933 after Hitler came to power was that Nazi Party organizations were founded for every demographic group – teachers, housewives, kids, etc. Everyone suddenly had a badge, a uniform, meetings to go to, new friends to meet etc. — and that was a big factor in creating a new sense of a larger German community serving a "grander" purpose (in the Nazi mindset).

A big part of that, of course, was identifying enemies and those who needed to be excluded -- Jewish citizens, political opponents, critical journalists, etc. But that early formation of consensus made life much harder, even by the end of 1933, for people who didn't agree with it.

What you're describing is collectivism, no?

The self-understanding of the German Volk was a collective concept personified by the "Fuhrer.” That's a big part of authoritarian or fascist regimes. Authoritarian leaders can do things without parliamentary approval, because they represent the "true" will of "the people."

But that also created a dynamic in Nazi Germany in which there was this mass adoration – almost a mass hysteria – for the person of Adolf Hitler. There are paintings portraying him as a messianic figure.

Bonhoeffer said there is no defense against stupidity. But if it's a moral failing, wouldn't a defense be private and public morality?

Ideally, yes.

Bonhoeffer's essay is an exploration of why that didn't happen. (Elsewhere, he explores the lack of civil courage) But Nazi Germany is a disturbing case study in the failure of leaders, institutions (such as the church), etc., to stand up in an effective way to National Socialism.

The best and bravest people were either arrested early on or got out. But he's pondering (and I think this is autobiographical) the failure of good decent people critical of the regime to be more effective.

That didn't happen. (Along the way, one must acknowledge that many of them became complicit). But by staying in and working from inside the regime, they also failed to offer a clearer example of resistance.

That's why by 1942 Bonhoeffer believes (as he writes here) that "only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity."

The trucker above says he's seeking liberation, too. Liberation from responsibility. How would Bonhoeffer persuade a man that he has agency and can visit his dying daughter by making the right choice?

One thing DB ignores is the psychology of all this. (He describes stupidity as a sociological problem). In Nazi Germany, we're also looking at the pressures and dynamics within a fascist police state.

In other circumstances, however (eg, the truckers' protests), this gets back to the peer pressures within a group that’s getting its information only from certain sources, in which there is a lot of pressure to conform to the will of the group (and a reward for doing so).

I've studied this in terms of the psychology of group behavior in Nazi Germany, but the literature on personality cults, mob behavior, etc., shows that the longer and more deeply a person gets involved in something like this, the less individual agency they perceive they have.

For Bonhoeffer personally -- he wrote as a theologian and person of deep faith -- that faith has the capacity to make someone see more clearly. But “After Ten Years” is a rather bleak assessment.

I'm reminded of something Michael Josephson said in 1989:

Success can be defined so many different ways but right now it is defined in a kind of how high is your position, how many people work for you, how high is your salary. When you get into that kind of yuppie version of success,you’re going to sacrifice things along the way.There’s not enough commitment to the ground rules of civil virtue.

A society focused on "success" (greed, selfishness) is a society in which a man won't do the right thing to see his dying daughter and as a consequence, will make sacrifices he can’t reverse along the way.

He's making an important point about what we value publicly and how that affects the individual's ethics and sense of responsibility.

I've been very disturbed by some of the very callous reactions during the pandemic – eg, the minimization of the deaths in nursing homes, the rush to get back to normal when thousands of people are still getting sick and dying (and when large sectors of the population -- children under the age of 6 -- can't yet be vaccinated).

But as I saw somewhere, the scale of the callousness has been on display for some time now in how we've dealt with school shootings, the high level of violence in our society and the much higher levels of violence experienced by people of color and the poor.

A society is measured in part by what we are willing to live with and by whether we are willing to change to make life better. Bonhoeffer, in his text, addresses this when he writes about the responsibility we are willing to take upon ourselves for the sake of a different future.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to be doing what Bonhoeffer wished more Germans had done. He called out conservatives in the Parliament for standing with the Swastika and the Confederate flag.

I interviewed a number of Germans back in the 1980s when I was working on my first book (a collection of oral histories from people who had been in the Confessing Church) and I recall Kurt Scharf (a very brave pastor, who would later became a bishop) saying thatif Germans had held mass demonstrations and marched in 1933 in solidarity with German Jews, they might have changed things.

Impossible to know in retrospect, that’s what’s important here (and for understanding Bonhoeffer as well) -- taking a public position not only draws a line for what can be tolerated, but it also serves as a model to others that it is possible to speak out. That's what he was writing about in the section on the lack of civil courage among Germans.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/anti-vaxxers/

c weldon kia

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OMFG IS THAIS WHY FOX BOOSTER THIS bs?

02/07/22

OAN reporter: The survival of our country depends on COVID-19 vaccines killing liberals

https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/oan-reporter-survival-our-country-depends-covid-19-vaccines-killing

vid?

SHARP (REPORTER): More and more Americans are standing up and fighting back against thetyranny of the COVID conspiracy theory. Convoys of outraged truck drivers are sending a message loud and clear to cowardly leaders all over the world, from Canada to Australia and even here in the U.S., and that message is simple: Back off, or else. We, the people, will not tolerate this oppression any longer.

We have had enough. Enough of watching our businesses get destroyed, while hypocritical politicians like Gavin Newsom dine out at fancy restaurants with their friends during lockdowns, [NOT BORIS?] or go maskless to public events they demand that we wear masks to. We've had enough of watching our loved ones get sick and die pointless deaths, all because the media and despots in Washington refused to let us treat our sick with the safest and most effective drugs in the world, like ivermectin. We've had enough of being denied basic services,[LIKE HAPPY HOUR?]  like being refused entry into a grocery store or restaurant,or being refused a life-saving organ transplant unless we have a dehumanizing passport proving we're dumb enough to sign over the rights to our own bodies to these murderous tyrants. Enough of seeing our children die after being forced to take this same poisonous drug that's making Big Pharma companies like Pfizer and Moderna over $100 billion a year. Enough is enough.

They can try to cover up their crimes. But the evidence is mounting, and they can't hide it forever. The story that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated is laughable. How do they explain the hundreds of fully vaccinated cruise ships coming down with the Fauci flu? Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, and right now nearly 1% of their entire population is coming down with the China virus every single day. Think about that. Really let that number sink in: 1% of the entire country gets sick with this engineered virus, every day. And they're all fully vaccinated.

Wayne Allyn Root over on Townhall put together a great article on this, demonstrating how the German government claimed up to 90% of the infected and dead are unvaccinated. But that was a flat-out lie, because it turns out the German government was actually classifying every sick and dying person as unvaccinated, regardless of whether they were or not. Same goes for Canada, where they claimed 60% of the COVID deaths were unvaccinated. But that was a lie, too, because in reality, they just classified anyone who got sick or died within two weeks of getting the vaccine as unvaccinated.

And surprise, surprise, our own beloved CDC -- the Centers for Democrat Control -- pulled the same trick on us. The CDC claimed that anyone who died within 14 days of getting injected wasn't vaccinated. Even though the majority of the deaths and injuries from the vaccine happened within that first 14-day period. Good way to cover up all the people they're murdering, just say they're not vaccinated. Sneaky, sneaky.

Daniel Nagase, a Canadian doctor for over 15 years who was fired after saving the lives of three patients with ivermectin, says this is just the tip of the iceberg. Nagase said looking at Pfizer's own clinical trial data, the number of deaths and injuries from the vaccine are staggering. According to their data,fully 31% of the people who got the vaccine either died or had permanent disabilities.

Even more shocking is what's happening in the military. Since the armed forces rolled out the vaccine, in one year cancer rates are up 300% among military members.But that's not all. Infertility is skyrocketing as well, up 500% in women, along with miscarriages, which are up another 300%. But those numbers pale in comparison to the rates of clinically diagnosed neurological disorders, which went up an astronomical 1,000% from 82,000 to nearly 900,000. And that happened in one year since the vaccines were introduced. Just think about what that's doing to America's ability to defend itself. Our young warriors crippled by their own government. And we still insist on giving this experimental drug to our children.

Even research published in theToxicology Reports Journal, one of the most well-respected medical journals anywhere, found that children have almost no risk from COVID, but suffer severe consequences from what the researchers themselves called toxic inoculations, including paralysis, heart attacks and even death. The study found the spike proteins from the injections cause permanent damage in children's critical organs, including their brains, nervous and reproductive systems. After being ordered by a judge in December, Pfizer released its own data, which showed that out of 32 known pregnant women who received the vaccine, 28 women experienced fetal death and lost their babies. This is tantamount to child sacrifice on the altar of Big Pharma.

Young athletesare another prime group to be targeted by this deadly vaccine with 500% more soccer players in the E.U. dropping dead from heart attacks than one year ago -- 500%. Who is actually braindead enough to think that this is just a coincidence, when Pfizer and Moderna's vaccine are known by the FDA to cause heart attacks. This is a pandemic of the ignorant, and it's killing our country.

So, for all of you progressives and Democrats and radical leftists out there. Do us all a favor, please, and go get vaccinated. In fact, don't stop there. Get double vaccinated, and be sure toget all your boosters. All three or four of them. Why stop there? If more is better--- get five, six, get 10 boosters. All the rest of us sane, freedom-loving Americans are counting on you to get your injections. The survival of our country depends on it.

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mothertrucker

an 2 22

Canadian officials have a message for US Republicans hyping anti-vax protests in Ottawa: Butt out

Sen. Ted Cruz (Screengrab)

Alex Henderson February 08, 2022

In Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, anti-vax truckers have been protesting a Canadian law that went into effect on January 15 and requires truckers entering Canada from the United States to show proof that they have been vaccinated for COVID-19. And far-right Republicans, from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to Sen. Ted Cruz to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, have been pandering to the United States’ anti-vax fringe by praising those truckers in Ottawa.

Some Republicans have been donating to their cause. But Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a message for those Republicans: butt out.

During a debate in the Canadian Parliament, Trudeau explained, “Individuals are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens’ daily lives. It has to stop.”

Trudeau stressed that the border restrictions will not last forever.

“Canadians trust science,” Trudeau declared. “A few people shouting and waving swastikas does not define who Canadians are.”

Other Canadians who have been critical of the anti-vax protests in Ottawa range from Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson.

In a letter to Trudeau, Watson complained, “What was initially described as a peaceful protest has now turned into a siege of our downtown area.” And Mendicino, obviously referring to Republicans in the U.S., said, “We need to be vigilant about potential foreign interference.... Whatever statements may have been made by some foreign official are neither here nor there. We’re Canadian. We have our own set of laws. We will follow them.”

Although former President Donald Trump is not an anti-vaxxer — he said he has received a COVID-19 booster shot and has encouraged others to do the same — he took offense at Trudeau’s comments, calling the Canadian prime minister a “far-left lunatic” and saying that he has “destroyed Canada with insane COVID mandates.”

According to the Associated Press, there have been incidents of violence in connection with the raucous Ottawa protests.

AP reporters Rob Gillies and Tracey Lindeman note, “Steve Bell, the city’s deputy police chief, said aperson from Ohio was arrested in connection with a threat against Ottawa police headquarters. Meanwhile, Ottawa police were investigating a fire at an apartment building that was apparently set by protesters. Matias Munoz said residents of the building south of Parliament Hill were already at their wits’ end Saturday night as the noise of the protest blared through their homes for the ninth night in a row. When he came downstairs Sunday morning, Munoz said the carpet and floor were charred, and there were blackened fire-starter bricks strewn across the lobby.”

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/its-gonna-get-bloody-anti-vax-qanon-conspiracy-theorist-scott-mckay-threatens-to-put-bullets-inside-health-care-providers/

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/this-is-world-war-iv-qanon-conspiracy-theorist-scott-mckay-vows-to-wage-war-on-doctors-and-nurses/

‘This Is World War IV’: QAnon Conspiracy Theorist Scott McKay Vows to Wage War on Doctors and Nurses

By Kyle Mantyla | January 19, 2022 12:17 pm

Scott McKay was among the cavalcade of election, COVID-19, and QAnon conspiracy theorists who spoke at the most recent ReAwaken America tour stop in Phoenix, Arizona, last weekend, where he declared war on health care providers, whom he accused of using the COVID-19 pandemic to murder people.

McKay, a prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist known online as Patriot Streetfighter, was outraged by the death of fellow QAnon and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Cirsten Weldon earlier this month and blamed the doctors and nurses at the hospital where she died of COVID-19 for her death. As such, he used his speaking slot at the ReAwaken America tour to stalk the stage while brandishing a tomahawk and declaring that “World War IV” is underway.

“Any of these doctors or nurses around the country that are involved in the murder of our people, they’re going to be spotlighted,” McKaysaid. “I’m dragging them out in the open. We’re going to spotlight them, show them to the whole world, I’m going to be naming them by name. If you have the courage to kill our people, you better have the courage to stand in a direct crosshairs of Patriot Streetfighter because this is now going to happen.”

“There’s no playing nice in this war because this is World War IV,” he continued. “World War III was a cold war; World War IV has been underway for decades. The elite powers in this world have decided to come after all of us and eliminate us from the planet. And I don’t mean maybe. It should be coming apparent to people in this day and age that they have created a global matrix system to kill us, to help us murder ourselves through chemtrails, through the corporate food industry, from big pharma, from the influence of the big media. This is all built not for your benefit or commerce; it’s built to create a commerce machine that they can keep you working to keep that matrix running, taking the money and profit from you—even the stores you buy in—to use that money to try to kill you. This is where we are.”

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sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) is being lambasted by fact-checkers yet again for circulating false claims. A new piece published by The Houston Chronicle's Laura Schulte lays out the remarks made by the Republican senator and fact-checkers rebuttal torching his baseless claims.

This particular ordeal centers on Johnson's January 26, 2022, appearance on "The Charlie Kirk Show." At the time, Johnson and Kirk discussed COVID vaccines.

"We’ve heard story after story. All these athletes dropping dead on the field," he said during a conversation about the possible adverse effects of COVID vaccines. "But we’re supposed to ignore that. Nothing happening here, nothing to see. This is a travesty, this is a scandal."

Schulte immediately zeroed in on Johnson's exaggerated claim about athletes "dropping dead on the field."

"Is Johnson right?" Schulte asked as she immediately followed with a sharp answer to the question with a resounding, "No."

She continued, "Let’s take a closer look."

In wake of Johnson's outlandish remarks, he was asked to provide evidence of his claim. His spokeswoman Vanessa Ambrosini reportedly told The Houston Chronicle that Johnson "has been alarmed by stories he has heard of athletes dying on the field."

"The Senator’s point in raising these issues," Ambrosini said via email, "has always been that our federal health agencies should be concerned about reports on adverse reactions related to COVID-19 vaccines and they should fully investigate and make their findings available to the American people."

While Schulte did acknowledge the validity of those remarks, she argued the specifics of Johnson's remarks. "The claim was that there are stories about all sorts of athletes dying in the midst of competition, or at least while practicing," she specified.

Although Johnson has a tendency to cite information from the federal database documenting adverse events, Schulte noted that "the database itself notes the claims are not vetted to establish a cause between them."

Patrick Remington —a former epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and director for the preventive medicine residency program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison— offered a detailed explanation of what the CDC actually looks for: "causation, not just coincidence"

"The burden is on credible scientists to study whether vaccination could be associated with this outcome, and no credible science exists to say it is," he said. "We continue to do ongoing surveillance, the vaccine surveillance system is in place to study any possible associations that come up. But to date, I am not aware of any studies or any credible research that suggests that vaccines cause death in young athletes."

Ambrosini also provided a copy of an article published by GoodSciencing.com that suggests "hundreds" of young athletes have died as a result of vaccine complications. "We found no proof of a causal relationship in any of the cases between the vaccines and the injuries or deaths," the fact-check refuted Johnson's claim confirming there were 6 deaths.

Another fact check also broke the claim down. Schulte noted: "Days before Johnson took to the Charlie Kirk Show, former NBA All-Star John Stockton on Jan. 23 2022 claimed more than 100 professional athletes who were vaccinated have dropped dead "right on the pitch, right on the field, right on the court."

PolitiFact National along with a group of doctors, have also pushed back.

"PolitiFact National rated this False in a Jan. 26, 2022 fact-check. In it, Matthew Martinez, a sports cardiologist with the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and Major League Soccer and who is director of sports cardiology at Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey said he was not aware of a single COVID vaccine-related cardiac complication in professional sports."

The same report went on to address misinformation about the risk of myocarditis; a claim Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also misstated.

As for Johnson's false claim, The Houston Chronicle rated it as "false" and offered an explanation of why.

"There is also the obvious problem with those cases, as they relate to supporting Johnson’s claim, so far as that the two athletes are not, well, dead," Schulte wrote.

In conclusion, she wrote, "Finally, health experts have also said that no research shows the link between sudden death incidents in sports players and vaccines."

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/ron-johnson-s-vaccine-claims-busted-in-brual-fact-check/

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anti-vaxx 'expert' claims vaccines will turn people into ‘transhumanist cyborgs' controlled by 5G

Kyle Mantyla

Sherri Tenpenny is an influential religious-right anti-vaccine activist who has testified before the Ohio state House, appeared on Charlie Kirk’s podcast, and been a speaker...

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mma 122  https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/alex-berensons-antivax-commentary-killing-fox-viewers-because-thats-what-network

Pandemic conspiracy theorist Alex Berenson’s latest turn on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show, in which he called for the withdrawal of the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 and said that “no one should get them” or “get boosted,” based on the false premises that the vaccines do not work and are “dangerous,” has rightly spurred a wave of revulsion.

As everyone from progressive MSNBC hosts to conservative National Review writers has noted, programming like this is killing Fox’s viewers by discouraging them from taking shots that are incredibly effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths from the virus.

And that’s apparently how the Fox brass likes it.

Berenson’s pattern of spreading coronavirus misinformation is well-documented – he’s been described as “the pandemic’s wrongest man” and banned from Twitter over his constant falsehoods. But his “contrarian” willingness to denounce any and all measures to contain the pandemic, from masks to vaccines, has made him a fixture on Fox: Tuesday marked his 105th appearance since January 2020, 47 of which have come on Carlson’s show.

While Carlson himself is a constant font of anti-vaccine talking points and doubtlessly wants to host people who agree with his lies, the responsibility for Berenson’s ongoing presence on the network’s most-watched programs ultimately rests with Fox’s executives, like Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and Suzanne Scott. Even if they aren’t willing to part with Carlson for the sake of their viewers, they could dispense with Berenson in a second if they wanted to. Over the years, they have repeatedly – and effectively – banned particular guests from the airwaves based on their off-air behavior or on-air commentary. Carlson has obeyed those diktats when they have come down, just like his fellow prime-time stars.

Fox hosted Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) hundreds of times from August 2017 to March 2021, including at least three dozen hits with Carlson, according to the Media Matters guest database. But on March 30 of the latter year, The New York Times reported that he was under federal investigation for alleged sex trafficking. After one last bizarre appearance on Carlson’s show to respond to the story that night, the network apparently left him for dead.

Fox’s executives were responsible for Gaetz’s disappearance from the network, with The Daily Beast reporting a few weeks later that Fox’s executives had put the congressman “on an informal blacklist” for trying “to rope the Fox News star into the congressman’s scandal.” Gaetz regularly appears on other right-wing networks like Newsmax, but he has not returned to Fox. Carlson, who was reportedly initially “livid” with Gaetz but subsequently suggested on-air that the congressman had been treated unfairly, has not defied that corporate mandate.

Something similar appears to have happened to Republican lawyers Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing,both longtime fixtures at Fox who were apparently banished from its airwaves in fall 2019. Both of them stopped appearing on Fox News amid reporting that they were deeply involved in the genesis of the Ukrainian dirt about Joe Biden that they were often called upon to opine about. The pair continued to appear on Fox Business, vanishing from that outlet as well after diGenova was widely criticized for an odious antisemitic rant about progressive philanthropist George Soros.

Fox refused to respond to reporters’ queries about whether the pair had been formally banned in the months after they disappeared, but they have not returned in the years since – including to Carlson’s show, which had hosted diGenova at least 27 times, according to the Media Matters guest database.

Similarly, in October 2018 a top Fox executive publicly condemned the rhetoric of Judicial Watch’s Chris Farrell, and a spokesperson said he would not be allowed to return to Fox News or Fox Business, following an uproar caused by the conservative political operative using an appearance on the latter network to falsely accuse Soros of masterminding a caravan of migrants headed toward the U.S. border from Central America.

Fox does not have anything resembling a consistent standard for this type of despicable commentary – indeed, Carlson just did an odious anti-Soros special for Fox Nation – but what matters for this discussion is that the ban stuck and Farrell has not been allowed back in subsequent years. Likewise, no Fox program has violated the network’s public bans of Harlan Hill (who tweeted in 2020 that Kamala Harris “comes off as an insufferable lying bitch,” or retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (who said on-air in 2018 that torture “worked” on then-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Fox’s executives have proved themselves to be capable of keeping unsavory guests off the air when they chose to do so. But with Berenson, they haven’t bothered trying. The network has made the calculation that keeping its viewers from needlessly dying isn’t worth it. As one Fox insider explained, the network is running anti-vaccine commentary because it is “great for ratings.”

The more than 3 million people who tuned into Carlson’s show on Tuesday heard a kook denounce lifesaving vaccines and urge them not to take them. If they listen to him, they could die. And Fox’s leadership is entirely uninterested in preventing that dire outcome.

https://www.mediamatters.org**/tucker-carlson**/fox-guest-demands-covid-vaccines-be-immediately-pulled-market-calls-them-dangerous

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https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/oan-guest-claims-coronavirus-vaccines-are-effective-if-you-want-kill

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-hosts-rally-behind-ron-desantis-push-provide-covid-drugs-dont-work

cf trms govt stopped shipping 2 do not work omicron (3rd hard to get?)

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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/see-right-wing-diatribes-falsely-comparing-vaccine-mandates-nazis

See the right-wing diatribes falsely comparing vaccine mandates to the Nazis

In fact, the Nazis withheld vaccines from conquered populations — and spread propaganda that vaccines were bad

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD & JOHN KERR

PUBLISHED 01/28/22 no lnx vid

Right-wing media personalities have relentlessly pushed a disgusting set of talking points comparing present-day vaccine requirements to the atrocities of Nazi Germany — a comparison that is not only wrong in ethical terms, but also contrary to the actual history of Nazi policies on vaccines.

The commentators spreading this message have included Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson, Infowars’ Alex Jones; podcast host Joe Rogan; religious right broadcaster David Brody; YouTuber Steven Crowder and his co-hosts; One America News Network host Dan Ball; and others. (And just to top it off, Fox host Will Cain has compared vaccine requirements to life under East Germany’s post-war communist regime.)

In fact, Nazi Germany overturned the mandatory vaccination laws it had inherited from the earlier Weimar Republic. The regime also deliberately withheld vaccines from conquered peoples, with Adolf Hitler explaining that providing such benefits would “would result only in an enormous increase in local populations.” Furthermore, Hitler told his chief of staff to propagandize against vaccines for this very reason: “No inoculations and other preventative measures for the natives! We must even try to stifle any desire for such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous.”

Oddly enough, Fox News’ Carlson has pursued a dual-pronged approach: On the one hand, he has fearmongered against “eugenics” and warned that “whites would go last” in line for the vaccines. But at the same time, he has compared universal vaccine requirements to “what the Imperial Japanese Army and the Nazis did in their medical experiments.” And, of course, Fox News is waging a propaganda campaign telling its own viewers that the vaccines are dangerous, while the company also practices a strict vaccine and testing regimen for itself.

And in a truly outrageous comparison, multiple right-wing hosts including Jones and Brody have invoked the Nuremberg Code, a set of medical ethics adopted in the wake of Nazi war crimes including medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates. These claims about vaccines have circulated online since mid-2020, before the COVID-19 vaccines had even become widely available.

In fact, the codes do not declare that medical care such as vaccines “could never be imposed on anyone,” as Carlson claimed— if that were true, it would prohibit all the other vaccine requirements that already exist for schoolchildren. Instead, the Nuremburg Code was formed in response to the gruesome and evil medical experiments the Nazi regime forcibly conducted on concentration camp prisoners, who were often murdered immediately afterward if the experiment itself did not kill them.

As a result, the Nuremberg Code’s text governs the circumstances of any medical experiments on human subjects, and says they must involve only subjects who have consented and be conducted under circumstances that would “avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.” The COVID-19 vaccines are no longer experimental, precisely because they went through vigorous testing on volunteer subjects as required by medical ethics.

And just to make it clear how outrageous this comparison really is — and how people like Carlson, Jones, and Brody are trafficking in sheer historical ignorance — consider exactly the sort of conduct the Nazis committed, to which the Nuremberg Code was written in response:

For the benefit of the German Army, whose frontline soldiers suffered greatly from gas gangrene, a type of progressive gangrene, doctors at the Ravensbruck concentration camp performed studies to test the effectiveness of sulfanilamide and other drugs in curbing such infections. They inflicted battlefield-like wounds in victims, then infected the wounds with bacteria such as streptococcus, tetanus, and gas gangrene. The doctors aggravated the resulting infection by rubbing ground glass and wood shavings into the wound, and they tied off blood vessels on either side of the injury to simulate what would happen to an actual war wound. Victims suffered intense agony and serious injury, and some of them died as a result.

In short, to compare a vaccination campaign providing the public with lifesaving drugs to the genuine war crimes against captive subjects that gave birth to the Nuremberg Code is simply a moral abomination.

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rand Paul claims the COVID vaccine increases heart health risks but fails to mention that the virus could do more harm

Meaghan Ellis

January 22, 2022

poses a much greater risk for myocarditis.Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is criticizing the COVID-19 vaccine while failing to mention key details that change the scope of his assessment. On Friday, January 22, the Kentucky....

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fla official fired for promote vaccine

1 22 an

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an 1 22

Rogan's controversial interview with anti-vaccination virologist Dr. Robert Malone caused such an uproar that more than scientists, doctors, and other health professionals signed an open letter to Spotify as a petition for his podcast to be removed from the platform.

While Rogan's spread of misinformation is quite alarming, a new analysis published by NPR's Shannon Bond explains how the controversy surrounding his situation underscores a bigger problem; one that appears to be a bit more difficult to regulate. In the open letter, health professionals and members of the scientific community argue that online platforms like Spotify have enabled right-wing figures who have become adept at spreading misinformation.

"We are in a global health emergency, and streaming platforms like Spotify that provide content to the public have a responsibility not to add to the problem," said Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago's School of Public Health.

"Their friends and family were sending it to them as evidence that the vaccines are dangerous and that they shouldn't get it," she said. "It provides a sense of false balance, like there's two sides to the scientific evidence when, really, there is not. The overwhelming evidence is that the vaccines are safe and that they're effective."

Researchers specializing in the study of misinformation have suggested that it was inevitable for podcasts to become a point of contention. Like social media platforms, Bond notes that podcasts give individuals the ability to reach build large audiences. But despite the long reach, podcasts have not faced the type of scrutiny social media platforms have. So, why is that? Podcasts give influencers the ability to spread misinformation by way of audio.

Evelyn Douek, a research fellow for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, explained why podcasts are far more difficult to regulate as it becomes a matter of words compared to audio.

"Wherever you have users generating content, you're going to have all of the same content moderation issues and controversies that you have in any other space," said Douek.

According to Bond, Douek also noted that "it's also harder to ferret out falsehoods and hate speech in podcasts compared with posts written on Facebook and Twitter."

Valerie Wirtschafter, a senior data analyst at the Brookings Institution, also weighed in with a similar perspective noting the distinction of audio and the potential problem it poses in the podcast world. "Audio can be a powerful way to spread misinformation because of all the qualities that make the format so compelling to listeners," said Wirtschafter.

Wirtschafter also stressed the importance of scrutinizing audio in the same manner written social media posts are.

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5? 21

WT BS

project Veritas jumped into the debate over vaccine mandates with an undercover video that shows two Pfizer scientists agreeing that naturally acquired immunity offers more protection than vaccination from the novel coronavirus.

The 10-minute video released late Monday featured three men identified as scientists at Pfizer, maker of the widely used two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

A man identified as Pfizer biochemist Nick Karl was shown explaining that after recovering from COVID-19, “your antibodies are probably better at that point than the vaccination.”

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F&F says not work

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/anti-vaxxers-2656441568/

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2 gop gov sick?

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ivermectin

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/glenn-beck/

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jen vs doocy

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/matt-gaetz-ron-desantis/

rand paul vs fauci  https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/rand-paul-fauci/

ar 15 guy

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https://www.mediamatters.org/lawrence-jones/fox-host-claims-booster-shots-are-plot-hold-your-freedom-hostage-until-you-comply

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rww semi random

January 7, 2022 

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an 1 22

 Utah-based technology company’s founder and chairman who is also a big GOP donor is falsely claiming the highly-effective COVID-19 vaccines are part of a plot by “the Jews” to “euthanize the American people,” while insisting to a local reporter, “Some of my closest friends are Jews.”

David Bateman, who founded Entrata, a property management technology company, sent the email title “GENOCIDE” to fellow tech company CEOs and to political leaders including the Governor of Utah. Some subsequently shared it with Fox 13. Bateman has admitted to sending the message, while claiming he “loves” Jewish people.

“I write this email knowing that many of you will think I’m crazy after reading it. I believe there is a sadistic effort underway to euthanize the American people. It’s obvious now. It’s undeniable, yet no one is doing anything. Everyone is discounting their own judgment, and dismissing their intuition,” Bateman wrote in his email, Fox 13 reports.

The missive gets wildly antisemitic and conspiratorial.

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turns ppl blue

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/candace-owens-cures/

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paradox trump wants to boast about vaccine ~ vaxx

conspiracy theorist Alex Jones issued an "Emergency Christ Message" to Donald Trump following the former president's defense of Covid-19 vaccines.

“Oh no, the vaccines work,” Trump told Candice Owens. “But some people are the ones — the ones who get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don’t take the vaccine. But it’s still their choice. And if you take the vaccine, you’re protected.”

Jones blasted Trump for acknowledging the reality of vaccines.

“This is an emergency Christmas Day warning to President Trump. You are either completely ignorant about the so-called vaccine gene therapy that you helped ram through with Operation Warp Speed or you are one of the most evil men who has ever lived to push this toxic poison on the public and to attack your constituents who they simply try to save their lives and the lives of others," he said.

"We're about to lay out the basic, incontrovertible facts that you told Candace Owens just a few days ago is nothing but a raft of dirty lies," he said....---

When Owens implied that the vaccines weren’t having much of an effect because there were more COVID-19-related deaths in 2021 than in 2020, Trump responded, “The vaccine worked, but some people aren’t taking it. The ones that get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don’t take the vaccine. But it’s still their choice. And if you take the vaccine, you’re protected. The results of the vaccine are very good.When Owens implied that the vaccines weren’t having much of an effect because there were more COVID-19-related deaths in 2021 than in 2020, Trump responded, “The vaccine worked, but some people aren’t taking it. The ones that get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don’t take the vaccine. But it’s still their choice. And if you take the vaccine, you’re protected. The results of the vaccine are very good.”

...right-wing media personality Candace Owens on Thursday urged supporters of former President Donald Trump to go easy on him for promoting COVID-19 vaccines.

In a video Owens posted on social media, she explained that Trump was an "old" person who came from a generation where people believed the advice of medical professionals.

"People oftentimes forget that, like, how old Trump is," she said. "He comes from a generation -- I've seen a lot of people who are older, have the exact same perspective, like, they came from a time before TV, before internet, before being able to conduct independent research. And everything they read to them that was in a newspaper that was pitched to them, they believed that that was a reality."

In fact, Trump has lived with television for his entire life and also became famous throughout his presidency for telling followers not to believe things they read in newspapers.

Owens went on to explain that Trump's trust in vaccinations was why he wasn't paying attention to all the videos posted on right-wing website Rumble that document purported instances of vaccine "injury."

==

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bill o and djt say they are boosted

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/trump-qanon-believers/

qAnon believers, also known for their adamant disapproval of COVID vaccinations, have been left befuddled by former President Donald Trump admitting that he'd taken the COVID vaccine booster shot.

Following Trump's appearance on Bill Reilly's "No Spin News," Trump confirmed his third jab. When O'Reilly, "Did you get the booster?" Trump replied: "Yes. I got it too."

In addition to boos from the crowd, QAnon believers are speaking out. According to Newsweek, disgruntled QAnon believers have criticized and "turned on" Trump due to his latest announcement.

In wake of the latest controversy, John Sabal, also known as QAnon John, weighed in with explained why he believes Trump made the decision as he suggested that it would be a form of "political suicide" if he publicly disavowed the COVID vaccine and booster shot. He also urged QAnon believers to make their own decision.

"Knowing what we know. Whenever POTUS 45 promotes something, the other side does the total opposite. They get disgusted by that thing," Sabal said. "Trump derangement still runs deep. Trump still says that those who don't want the vax should not be forced to take it. That is the most important thing he said. The messaging here is clear.

"Imagine for one second what would happen if Trump all of a sudden started to backtrack on the vax. Operation Warp Speed was necessary for reasons I already discussed. He would lose all credibility with those who took the jab. It would be political suicide for him."

One QAnon influencer offered a delusional explanation for the former president's remarks but also condemned his support of the vaccination. Sharing a message with his 58,000 followers on Telegram, he admitted that he disagreed with Trump but still expressed support for him.

"We don't always understand everything," the influencer said, per Newsweek. "I love President Trump. I disagree here.I think we may find out something about this soon imo [in my opinion] either way, think for yourself. You are in the right spot here. Just don't cuss up a storm, we have so many twists and turns already."

The influencer continued, "I believe the end will explain the middle. But, we are all to think for ourselves and most of you guys are still with me on this vax crap. If we are confused by Pres Trump's comments, I'm sure Deep State is. Maybe he would be a danger to society arrested otherwise idk [I don't know] but I'm gonna continue locally and here doing what we all must every day."

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mtg trash but own stock in 3 vax co? am 12 21

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palin

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/anti-vaxxers-2656084265/

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Trump gets booed by his own fans for encouraging COVID vaccine after hypocritical pandemic stance

Meaghan Ellis

How anti-vaxxers are making life total ‘hell’ for restaurant workers: report

Alex Henderson

Fox News host makes ludicrous argument against COVID-19 vaccines

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/fox-news-screed/

grt pix robes hillary, joe fauci]

no lnx fox News host delivers 7-minute screed calling Democrats a ‘cult in a never-ending fight with reality’

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement December 10, 2021

Fox News is auditioning hosts for its 7 PM “Fox News Primetime” show, and on Thursday night longtime Fox contributor Tammy Bruce went full-force far-right extremist to get the job.

Bruce is no stranger to controversy. In the mid-1990’s she exited as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) after being accused of “racially insensitive comments.” Later, during the first months of the Obama presidency she remarked, “We’ve got trash in the White House.”

But on Thursday night for seven minutes and 13 seconds Bruce was on fire, berating the left and Democrats – blaming them for just about everything by using everything that’s wrong with the right. It was an example of epic projection.

According to Bruce, the left “is a cult in a never-ending fight with reality, hell-bent on making the world bend to their lies, all while trying to silence and destroy anything and anyone who dares to question the orthodoxy.”

READ: Justice Sotomayor blasts the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority: ‘Should have put an end to this madness’]

Sound familiar? Like the right wing of America, who refuse to accept the reality of the coronavirus pandemic, the fact that vaccines, masks, and social distancing work? Refuse to accept that climate change is real and massive voter fraud is not?

Bruce actually uses the word “cult” eleven times in seven minutes.

“I know you’ve heard that the cancer of woke-ism is the left new religion, but it’s actually not. It’s their cultic foundation, a set of rules and instructions met to manipulate and control,” she claimed, never offering up any actual concrete evidence. “Now keep in mind a cult has some basic tenets and behaviors we see not just with the so called progressives, but now being applied by the Biden administration itself, among other aspects, including groupthink as its foundational requirement, questions are not encouraged, and even punished followers are to worship a group leader.”

Here’s a question: Does the left worship President Joe Biden? Hillary Clinton? No.

READ: 'Their sphincters will tighten': Matt Gaetz goes after the FBI

Does the right worship Donald Trump? What do you think?

[pix djt on cross]

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“The cult follows and controls all aspects of members lives, fear and paranoia are instilled to keep followers close and trusting only a fellow members,” Bruce continues. “Outsiders, those who escaped, and opponents are smeared and cast as evil and dangerous and members are monitored constantly to ensure conformity and allegiance to the cultic system. Sound familiar? Yeah.”

Yes indeed.

We need no more recent example than the Fox News Christmas tree, which a 49-year old homeless man set on fire just past midnight on Wednesday. Fox News spent two days declaring it was an attack on America and an attack on Christianity – both of which are false. Police even said it was not a political act. But Fox News got so ramped up they literally compared the attack on their tree to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

READ: Tucker Carlson’s ‘baseless conspiracy theory’ about the Jan. 6 rioters has been forcefully debunked]

“Or what about on COVID?” Bruce asks, somehow pretending it’s not a deadly airborne disease that’s killed 800,000 Americans, “Where double-masked big city liberals meander aimlessly around Manhattan using facial coverings as some sort of partisan signaling exercise, despite being double-vaccinated, many with their boosters, while being socially distanced? That’s not science. That’s insanity. It’s also a way to condition people into having every aspect of their daily lives controlled by a faceless bureaucratic cult. And what about young children still being forced to suffer under masked learning, despite no science to back it up?”

That’s just plain coronavirus disinformation unworthy of any “news” organization. Maybe Bruce should chat with her co-workers over at The Wall Street Journal, who published a report detailing two studies showing students and staff in schools need to be masked. Or the CDC.

After her lie-filled rant Fox News immortalized her fallacious attack by posting the text of part of her speech online, as if it were a valid news story.

It’s not.

See for yourself:

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chris hayes WITH good series on loss of democ 12/21 incl linear step by step lock-picking of trump coup

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an 12 21

aha bek says koch network ~ vax to fwd goal of gubmint?!  netflix unnat slection libtard rhet fuels all?!

yale history professor Joanne Freeman has a stern warning for the United States: the worst may still be yet to come for America. In a new op-ed posted by The Washington Post, Freeman noted how “tempting" it is "to conclude that the insurgency failed" nearly one year after former President Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

But she is making it clear that Trump's failure does not mean the attack on the American government is over. Freeman also explained why the situation is so much more critical now.

“Our government is still under attack. The offensive is quieter now but no less menacing, eroding the government from within,” the professor noted. "The fundamental right to vote is under siege. The regulation of elections is being corrupted. Andfaithin the electoral process is fading; the “big lie” about Donald Trump’s supposed victory in 2020 has staying power for just that reason."

In addition to the attack on the government, Freeman also highlighted how Trump's strategic attack has also impacted Americans' ability to trust and rely on its government in other areas such as law and public health.

"Americans question the role and reliability of the Supreme Court and wonder whether they can trust health and safety institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration — during a pandemic," Freeman wrote. "For too many, the old idea that government is the enemy has a newly magnified appeal."

From Republican-led bills to restructure America's election systems and erode election integrity to their attacks on other critical issues such as abortion, Freeman went on to note other factors that are problematic. Congress' lackluster response, according to Freeman also “virtually guarantees more of the same."

“With no clear line in the sand, the attack on democracy will continue," Freeman said, adding, "unchecked and empowered, with the worst yet to come.”

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12 21 4 from am fl dr chases ca vaccine into car garage?!

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aha omg vax is everywhere basically = neg?!

gw denial eroded faith in sci for decades and made us vuln to vaxxer BS --> civil war?!

fox murdochs burn down the world for money and power (vax and AGW) ; koch gop anti-gubmint erode norms, 

fox briefly forgot trump TV hacks and acted like a news org and reported FACT that trump lost AZ, immediate threat from oann newsmax reb mercer soc media play

no lnx

Black flag:Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021

It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply.

Trump and his followers were loud, exuberant and enthusiastic on Jan. 6. The lethal attack on the Capitol had been publicly announced weeks in advance, and should have come as no surprise. Trump's rallies and gatherings continue to celebrate violence and the prospect of revenge — and specifically of "getting even" with Trump's "enemies."

Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign chairman and White House strategist, has now threatened to recruit Republican-fascist "shock troops" with the apparent goal of undermining the U.S. government, and by implication multiracial democracy, if and when Trump and the Republicans regain control of both Congress and the White House.

On a daily basis Fox News and other elements of the right-wing disinformation propaganda machine use stochastic terrorism and other techniques to radicalize their audience into committing acts of political violence. To this point, the Democratic Party and the political and news media class in general have remained in denial, and largely passive in response.

In one troubling new development, Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents — meaning nonwhite people,"socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America." As media critic Eric Boehlert recently noted, the liberal opinion site Living Blue in Texas is sounding the alarm about the specific meaning of the black flag and the Republican-fascists support for terrorism and other political violence. That post, "Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning on Killing You?", merits lengthy quotation:

It didn't take long to find hundreds of videos where these Trumpers and so-called patriots were hanging black American flags. ...

Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender.

According to the people on TikTok and the Sun (British tabloid), the black American flag originated in the civil war and was flown by the Confederates.

It means that they will not surrender, will not take prisoners, and are willing to die for their cause. It means they will execute their enemies.

Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated. ...

So, we're the enemy, and they're openly professing to want to execute us. … So, why are they doing this

Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.

Yes, they say civil war, and they say it's already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.

An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It's alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.

The biggest message they have been sending out is, "it's time" or "the time is now." ...

Although showing guns on Tik Tok is supposed to be against community guidelines, they show lots of videos of their guns, shooting them, wearing them, or sitting on their bed.

They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.

However you interpret these videos posted by Trump followers and other neofascists — which could be mainly performative — it is clearly true that the American right is increasingly willing to accept or condone violence as a means of expanding and protecting their social and political power. (Salon did not find licensed news photographs of these flags, and has made the editorial decision not to reproduce the images mentioned above, which are easy to find on social media.)

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that millions of Republican voters and Trump followers would support the use of violence to remove Joe Biden from office because of the "Big Lie" and their belief that that he is not a legitimate president. Similarly, a large proportion of Republicans believe that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were "patriots" whose use of violence was justified.

And a new poll from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics even suggests that more than 50 percent of Trump supporters want "red states" to secede from the Union. Republican elected officials and other right-wing opinion leaders have continued to escalate their threats of political violence against Democrats and other targeted groups.

In a recent speech to the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Salt & Light" conference, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., issued what sounded like a declaration of war:

:{:{}:

}:

It is time for the American Christian church to come out of the shadows to say, "No longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in…. We are going to stand valiantly for God's incredible inherent truths that predate any version of government. Because, my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is. It's our duty to stand up, Let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country.

During an interview with MSNBC's Joy Reid, terrorism and national security expert Malcolm Nance said that Cawthorn's video "picks up on the themes that are not just coming from the Steve Bannon level and Donald Trump level, they are coming from the Republican street — and that Republican street is armed. They're angry. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longer America and that they no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. And they`re willing to take up arms for it."

Nance also noted that Cawthorn's propaganda video is thematically similar to the type of propaganda used by Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida to radicalize and recruit members.

During an interview with Scientific American magazine, Dr. Bandy Lee, the principal editor of the 2017 bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," explained how a mentally pathological leader can "infect" his followers and perhaps even an entire nation:

I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence — while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a "lock and key" relationship….

"Shared psychosis" — which is also called "folie à millions" ["madness for millions"] when occurring at the national level or "induced delusions" — refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person's symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia andpropensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

Trump and his regime gave permission and encouragement to his followers and other supporters to engage in antisocial and other anti-human behavior on a national scale. Once such a process has begun, and those forces are unleashed, it is not easy to stop. Fascism is not a simple machine with an on-and-off switch. In practice, fascism is given life and takes corporeal form through its followers, with each one being a potential carrier of the pathology.

As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. No one but Republicans themselves can cure it. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar."

Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body – but not before spreading the disease to many other people. In fact, if the original host dies, he or she can be elevated to the status of martyr for "the cause," serving to inspire existing followers and lure in new ones.

Ultimately, Donald Trump, like other fascist and authoritarian leaders, is the symptom of a sick society. Trumpism is not actually the core disease. For America to counteract the deep underlying illness that has made Trumpism possible will require a long-term cultural and moral reckoning. Anything less, and the disease of American fascism will only go dormant until it is resurrected again — perhaps in a more dangerous and virulent form.

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okla replace head of nat'l guard then ordered him not to comply?

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nice pix sign: evil vaccine agenda]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/personality-traits/

ME

a new study explains how a number of dark personality traits are connected to the ideology of conspiracy theories. According to PsyPost, a study recently published by Personality and Individual Differences was conducted by Sara Hughes and Laura Machan. It indicates that "Machiavellianism, primary psychopathy, and collective narcissism" are traits that appear to coincide with the beliefs of those who buy into conspiracy theories.

Science Direct reports that the study, which focused on 406 participants from the United Kingdom, was based on an assessment of a number of personality measures. It also delved into individuals' "susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs and the mediating role of Covid related conspiracy beliefs on links between personality and intentional dissemination of Covid-19 conspiracies and willingness to obtain a Covid-19 vaccine."

The study focused on the characteristics of those who possess the dark triad traits and how they have a tendency to hold more hostility toward other groups.Participants completed a questionnaire to assess conspiracist ideation where they had the opportunity to provide their opinions with answers like: "There is no hard evidence that COVID really exists."

"To assess intention to be vaccinated against Covid-19, participants were asked what they would do if a vaccine were tested and approved and they had the opportunity to be vaccinated next week," the study indicates.

READ: 'You were gullible': Federal judge torches Trump's election lies — and a rioter who believed them]

Per PsyPost, their findings indicate the following:

"Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and collective narcissism have been previously linked to conspiracy mentality. Machiavellianism is concerned with the strategic manipulation of others. Primary psychopathy is characterized by callousness and lack of emotion, while secondary psychopathy is characterized by impulsivity and antisociality. Collective narcissism refers to an inflated sense of superiority extending to one's in-group."

Their research also highlights three potential limitations.

"First, rather than obtaining behavioral measures, participants were prompted to provide self-report ratings of their intentions to disseminate COVID-19 conspiracies. Second, given participants' knowledge relating to COVID-19 was not assessed, it could be the case that those with greater beliefs in Covid-19 conspiracies were lacking in factual knowledge. Lastly, given the cross-sectional nature of this work, the researchers do not make causal inferences about their findings."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/ron-desantis-vaccine/

lies

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pentagon to order military members to comply with Biden federal employee COVID vaccination requirements

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

August 01, 2021

The Pentagon said Thursday evening it will order members of the military to comply with President Joe Biden's requirement that all federal employees get vaccinated against the coronavirus or face a regime ...

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omfg, 2x HOW MUCH OF THIS WAS TEED UP BY CPP BS? ANTI-GUBMINT

no lnx an 11 21

'Pro-death cult strikes back': Right-wing judges block Biden’s vaccine rule for big companies

Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams November 08, 2021

Progressives concerned about workplace safety and public health responded with dismay after a federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily blocked the Biden administration's attempt to require workers at companies with 100 or more employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 or tested weekly.

Citing "grave statutory and constitutional" problems with the rule, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued the stay in response to a joint petition filed Friday by a coalition of businesses, conservative advocacy groups, and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah.

That legal challenge, and separate lawsuits from Republican-led states, came just one day after President Joe Biden announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would begin enforcing its newly unveiled Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) in the coming weeks. Companies with at least 100 employees have until December 5 to require unvaccinated workers to wear masks indoors, and by January 4, they must require vaccinations or administer weekly tests.

Decrying the decision of the "right-wing Fifth Circuit," labor journalist Steven Greenhouse said on social media that "it's terrible for worker safety and public health that three conservative activist judges have suspended Biden's... new rule requiring workers at companies with more than 100 workers to get vaccinated or tested."

"OSHA's mission is to protect workers' health," Greenhouse continued, "but the appellate judges seem to forget that Covid has killed thousands of meatpacking, retail, and other workers."

More than 750,000 people in the U.S. have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic started last March, and the disease continues to kill nearly 1,100 people per day, most of them unvaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Recent studies confirm that vaccines save lives.Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services analyzed the relationship between county-level inoculation rates and Covid-19 outcomes among U.S. seniors and found that vaccines helped ward off 265,000 infections, 107,000 hospitalizations, and 39,000 deaths during the first five months of 2021.

And in September, CDC researchers found that individuals in the U.S. who were not fully vaccinated last spring and summer were 11 times more likely to die after being infected with the coronavirus—and over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized—than those who were fully inoculated.

Greenhouse said that "the judges evidently sympathize with [Texas Republican Gov.] Greg Abbott's let-people-die stance—that it'soverreachfor OSHA to act strongly to protect workers from Covid."

David Michaels, a leader of OSHA during the Obama administration, also rebuked the federal appeals court, describing its decision as legally dubious and politically motivated.

"The same activist court that refused to stay Texas' law that permits bounty hunters to sue anyone who aids an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy has stayed an OSHA rule that is clearly within OSHA's authority, will save lives, and make workplaces safe," he told the New York Times.

According to the Times, "At the core of the legal challenge is the question of whether OSHA exceeded its authority in issuing the rule and whether such a mandate would need to be passed by Congress."

The newspaper reported:

The suit against the mandate stated that President Biden "set the legislative policy" of substantially increasing the number of Americans covered by vaccination requirements, and "then set binding rules enforced with the threat of large fines."

"That is a quintessential legislative act—and one wholly unrelated to the purpose of OSHA itself, which is protecting workplace safety," the suit said. "Nowhere in OSHA's enabling legislation does Congress confer upon it the power to end pandemics."

Corporate executives asked, and the Biden administration agreed, to delay implementation of OSHA's new ETS "until after the New Year, citing concerns about worker shortages during the important holiday season," Reuters noted.

Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda, meanwhile, said in a statement that the Labor Department, home to OSHA, is "confident in its legal authority" to issue vaccine requirements.

The vaccine rule for companies with 100 or more employees "applies to 84.2 million workers at 1.9 million private-sector employers," Reuters reported. "OSHA estimates that 31.7 million of [those] workers are unvaccinated and 60% of employers will require vaccinations, up from 25% today, resulting in another 22.7 million employees getting vaccinated."

Several million additional workers are covered by the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for employees of the executive branch, federal contractors, and staff at healthcare facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding. OSHA officials say they are considering expanding the jab-or-test rule to include companies with fewer than 100 workers.

"The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them," Nanda said. "We are fully prepared to defend this standard in court."

The Fifth Circuit panel's two-page order directs the Biden administration to respond to the request for a permanent injunction against the rule by 5 p.m. ET Monday.

As the Times noted, it remains unclear whether the court's stay "would be a procedural blip for the Biden administration or the first step in the unwinding of the mandate."

The newspaper explained that "after both sides have filed briefs, the court will decide whether to lift the temporary injunction, allowing the rule to proceed as planned, or whether to grant a permanent injunction. OSHA could then take the case to the Supreme Court."

While some legal experts argue that the Labor Department has the regulatory authority to compel private employers to protect the health of workers and the broader public through mandatory vaccination amid a deadly global pandemic,Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, told Reuters that "there will be so much litigation it will never see the light of day."

Twenty-four attorneys general threatened to sue the Biden administration over the rule back in September, and several followed through immediately after it was published in the federal register on Friday.

In addition to the petition filed with the Fifth Circuit, attorneys general in 11 states—Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming—filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

And in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, the states of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia sued, with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis saying at a press conference that "the federal government can't just unilaterally impose medical policy under the guise of workplace regulation."

Roughly 70% of U.S. adults are fully inoculated against Covid-19, and about 80% have received at least one shot, according to the CDC. Recent polling shows that a majority of U.S. adults favor Covid-19 vaccination requirements, with only about one-fifth to one-quarter of respondents opposed.

OSHA, Reuters pointed out, is "fighting history. The agency has issued 10 ETS over its 50 years. Of the six that were challenged in court, only one survived entirely intact."

Donald Verrilli, U.S. solicitor general during former President Barack Obama's administration, however, told the news outlet that the Biden administration "wouldn't move forward unless they thought that they could defend it legally... I think the constitutional challenges are all going to fail."

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an 11 21

vocal proponent of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and pandemic misinformation recently described her bout with the virus and how she traveled through airports while experiencing symptoms of "serious COVID exposure."

During a recent discussion onInstagram Live,Dr. Sherri Tenpenny recalled a number of times she attended public events while suffering from symptoms of COVID. Back in late August after she first began feeling ill, she told viewers attended the Bards Fest — described as a Missouri-based "assembly of Patriots coming together to pray with truth."

After that outing, Tenpenny told viewers "'just about everybody' got sick," according to NPR. "They got what we would call conventional COVID," she said. To make matters worse, one attendee was reportedly hospitalized and died following complications of COVID.

She also detailed her struggle to breathe as she walked through an airport. "I was really sick for about three weeks with diarrhea and profound fatigue and even though I powered through it I still wasn't feeling very well," Tenpenny said on November 2, adding, "And what was the most difficult part for me was the shortness of breath, that I just felt like I couldn't take in a full deep breath."

Tenpenny went on to explain just how difficult it was to walk from one area of the airport to the next. Tenpenny added, "And when I was going through the airport I would have to stop multiple times and kind of catch my breath and just felt this tightness in my chest."

Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has repeatedly insisted that travelers should not fly if they are experiencing symptoms or waiting for test results, Tenpenny defied those recommendations and traveled anyway, which means she could have potentially exposed others to the virus.

Despite having a disturbing case of COVID, Tenpenny also insisted that she treated herself with a number of controversial drugs including "ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, and colloidal silver." While all of the drugs she named have been deemed unsuitable for treating COVID-19, they have all been embraced by anti-vaxxers.

Tenpenny has been added to the Center for Countering Digital Hate's infamous"disinformation dozen**," a group described as "12 people it said were responsible for spreading a majority of anti-vaxxer falsehoods on Facebook."

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ref report

https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_750e5af82aea4920a270b1c5a8b094c2.pdf

no lnx

KEY FINDINGS

Analysis of a sample of anti-vaxx content that was shared or posted on Facebook and

Twitter showed up to 65% of anti-vaccine content can be traced to the leading online

anti-vaxxers, who we label the Disinformation Dozen.

? Individuals were selected based upon their high social media followings and high

volume production of anti-vaccine content.

? Our sample of anti-vaccine content was shared or posted on Facebook or Twitter a

total of 812,000 times between February 1 and March 16 2021, with 65% of that

sample attributable to the Disinformation Dozen.

? In the last two months, our analysis of anti-vaxx content posted or shared to

Facebook 689,000 times shows that up to 73% of that content originates from

the leading anti-vaxxers included in this report.

? Analysis of 120,000 anti-vaccine tweets and shares during this period finds that

up to 17% feature the Disinformation Dozen.

Deplatforming repeat offenders is the most effective way of stopping the proliferation of

dangerous misinformation.

?The Disinformation Dozen -- including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Joseph Mercola, and

Ty and Charlene Bollinger, among others -- continually violate the terms of service

agreements on Facebook and Twitter. While some anti-vaxxers identified by

CCDH have been removed from a single platform, comprehensive action has yet to

be taken, and most remain active on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

? CCDH’s ongoing tracking of 425 anti-vaxx accounts finds that the total following

across platforms reached 59.2 million in December 2020, an increase of 877,000

since June

https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen

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when why did NMX 180 on vaxx?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/newsmax-distances-from-its-own-white-house-correspondent-over-false-vaccine-claims/

newsmax is pushing back against the bizarre conspiracy theory its White House correspondent circulated about the COVID-19 vaccine.

On Tuesday, November 2, Newsmax issued statements to address Monday tweets from Emerald Robinson. The network's White House correspondent claimed COVID-19 vaccines "contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked."

Robinson echoed a satanic conspiracy theory that has been circulating on the Internet for the last couple of months, according to Mediaite. However, there is no truth to it.

Although Robinson's tweets were removed from the social media platform, Eliot Jacobson, Newsmax's executive vice president and chief content officer, released a statement to show the network's support of the vaccine.

"Newsmax is a strong proponent that Covid 19 vaccines are overarchingly safe and effective, while at the same time raising concerns that mandates infringe on personal liberty and privacy," the network wrote. "We have seen no evidence to suggest LUCIFERASE or LUCIFERIN are present in any vaccines or that they are used as any sort of bioluminescent marker."

"Newsmax strongly believes and has reported that the Covid 19 vaccines are safe and effective," the network said. "We do not believe the vaccines contain any toxic materials or tracking markers, and such false claims have never been reported on Newsmax. The many medical experts appearing on Newsmax have supported the use of the vaccine."

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mma 12 20

newsmax is emerging as one of the new voices in right-wing media that are competing with Fox News for the viewer base of Trump supporters — and it helps that the network’s CEO openly says that the company makes no guarantee of its hosts’ accuracy.

But one story the company may now want to take a closer look at involves its own White House correspondent, Emerald Robinson, who has been spreading rampant anti-vaccine conspiracy theories on her social media accounts — which also cut against the network’s main messaging that vaccines for COVID-19 should be counted as one of President Donald Trump’s great accomplishments.

Just on Wednesday, Robinson posted a tweet, which was mirrored at her Facebook account, declaring that the public did not need a COVID-19 vaccine — but rather that it was a tool of government control. (Robinson’s tweets are also largely mirrored at her account on the right-wing social media platform Parler.)[twt says 99% survive]

[twt]

Even besides Robinson seriously understating the disease’s mortality rate — it’s about four times higher, even with improving trends — she also disregards other negative impacts of “long COVID” in which symptoms persist for three months or more after infection, such as organ damage in younger patients.

In other tweets, Robinson has called for Vice President Mike Pence to shut down the coronavirus task force, warned that mandatory vaccination would be “part of the move to one-world government” linked to “The Great Reset” conspiracy theory, and joked that for Christmas, people should “donate your Fauci/Gates coronavirus vaccine to a garbage dump of your choice!” She has also spread theories about the vaccines rewriting DNA while repeatedly seeking to implicate Dr. Anthony Fauci and philanthropist Bill Gates in some kind of global conspiracy — even suggesting “the plan” for global public health policy involves “using vaccines to track people.”

And back in July, Robinson said that Trump was making a political mistake by pushing for a vaccine at all — and thus getting out of touch with his real supporters. [twt]

robinson even replied this past Monday to one of Trump’s tweets in which he boasted about the vaccine developments, in order to tell him: “I don’t know anyone who voted for you who is going to take these Fauci/Gates vaccines.”

On air, Newsmax has argued that Trump should have received more credit for vaccines (even as vaccines are developed and approved outside the United States).

“If it were not for President Trump and his determination in pushing Operation Warp Speed on the drug companies, the vaccine would still be months away,” host Grant Stinchfieldthundered, in a November 9 monologue attacking Pfizer for not announcing their vaccine’s trial results until a week after the election. “Pfizer owed it to the president to announce this terrific news before the election. He deserved that, at the least. Instead, they apparently sat on the news.”

The network also featured a friendly interview two weeks ago with one of thevolunteer participants in the Moderna vaccine trial, who described what the whole experience was like. And this week, anchor John Bachman interviewed a doctor who explained that the vaccines now being announced all looked highly promising. Bachman even stated explicitly that he was “playing devil’s advocate here” by asking skeptical questions about the experts’ advice so the doctor could answer them.

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an 11 21

nYPD union claimed a vaccine mandate would force 10,000 cops off the streets — the real number is 34: report

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

November 01, 2021

On Thursday the union representing 50,000 current and former New York City Police Dept. officers claimed Mayor de Blasio's vaccine mandate would force "10,000" officers off the streets. According to the...

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ref

https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/militias-with-badges

chls sykes

yes, it could get worse.

The Claremont Institute — the home of John Eastman, author of the blueprint for overthrowing the presidential election — has a new initiative for undermining the rule of law.

And if you are not alarmed, you ought to be.

The Trumpian institute is launching a programto weaponize "patriotic law enforcement officers" to counter "the perversion of the justice system by which the revolutionary left seeks to advance its totalitarian agenda."

In announcing its new "Sheriff’s Fellowship" the institute tied together last year’s urban disorders, Covid-19 lockdowns, and “the electoral disaster of 2020,” and declared that “our nation's conservative movement needs a countervailing network of uncorrupted law enforcement officials.”

Specifically, Claremont envisions a cadre of sheriffs “not beholden to bureaucratic masters, and whose geographic boundaries, jurisdictional latitude, and - most important - direct connection and responsibility to citizens, places them on the frontlines of the defense of civilization.”

Think of it as militias with badges, guns, and formal law enforcement powers. Or, if you like, secession-by-sheriff.

Indeed, Claremont is late to the game. The so-called Constitutional Sheriffs have been a thing for quite a while now.

“Although the Oath Keepers, another anti-government extremist group that recruits from law enforcement, have garnered more media attention in recent years,” the Anti-Defamation League said in their report, the Constitutional Sheriff movement “has arguably had more success infiltrating law enforcement, including at the executive level.”

The central tenet of [the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association], borrowed from the anti-government extremist sovereign citizen movement, is that the county sheriff is the ultimate authority in the county, able to halt enforcement of any federal or state law or measure they deem unconstitutional.

This is no longer simply a fringe movement confined to a few rural counties.

Trump and members of his administration cultivated and encouraged the sheriffs’ movement, and openly embraced leading figures like Arizona’s Joe Arpaio. Former Attorney General Sessions famously praised what he called “the Anglo-Saxon heritage” of the office.

“Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people’s protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process,” Sessions said. “The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office.”

Milwaukee’s Sheriff David Clarke — who was named Constitutional Sheriff of the year in 2013 — became a prominent Trump surrogate and was, reportedly in line for a position in Trump’s Department of Homeland security.

More recently, Clarke urged January 6 participants to refuseto cooperate with law enforcement authorities.

"ALERT!!!," Clarke wrote. "If you attended the Trump rally in Washington DC last Wednesday and are contacted by the FBI or they come to your home, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TALK TO THEM. DON'T LET THEM IN YOUR HOME EITHER. POLITELY TELL THEM TO LEAVE AND CLOSE THE DOOR."

"If you did not go into the US Capital (sic) you do not have to explain why you exercised your Constitutional right to assemble," Clarke wrote. "TRUST NO GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL right now." [twt pix]

clarke has since fallen into well-deserved obscurity, but the hot new face of the movement is Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona.

In a new Politico profile, Lamb calls himself ‘America’s Sheriff,’ who “fashions himself as more of a vigilante resister, with a heavy dose of anti-government, sometimes militant rhetoric.”

Sheriff Lamb is the very model of the modern Trumpian law enforcement official. Politico reports:

Lamb supported the “stop the steal” campaign in Arizona and has expressed sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters. He has called vaccine mandates “garbage” and spoke at a recent anti-vaccine rally in Phoenix, where he told supporters, “We’re going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We’re going to find out who is willing to die for freedom.” He also makes direct appeals to citizens, an effort that looks more dangerous after former President Donald Trump riled up supporters on Jan. 6. For example, Lamb, an ardent defender of the Second Amendment, has spoken in support of the formation of private militias — “well within the Constitution,” he told a group of supporters in March — and emphasized the power of sheriffs in Arizona, an open-carry state, to call local civilians into service to “suppress all affrays, insurrections and riots that comes to the attention of the sheriff.” Last year, as Black Lives Matter protests swept across the country, he formed a local civilian “posse” to assist his office with law enforcement, even though there were no such protests in Pinal County.

**

Now, fresh off its role in trying to overthrow the 2020 election, Claremont wants a piece of that action. Here is how a recent fund-raising letter for Claremont described the Trumpian think tank’s new program:

• The current revolution against the American regime, involving as it does both crime and political malfeasance, requires a coordinated response from patriotic law enforcement officers. Those whose "chain of dependency" is directly to the people of their region - officers not beholden to the centralized ( and often corrupt) bureaucracies of federal or state governments, nor the vicissitudes of easily pressured city officials.

• Sheriffs are appropriate for this response. Since their beginnings as "shire-reeves" ("county watchmen") centuries ago in England, sheriffs have been intimately connected with, and answerable to, the people of their "shires" and therefore the first layer of protection, and last line of defense, for the people's rights.

• Our project will equip sheriffs with strategic knowledge and end their isolation. Their efforts will be supported, enhanced, and multiplied through a reliable like-minded network of fellow sheriffs and others with complementary areas of expertise and potency.

(Here is a screen shot of the letter.)

If Claremont gets its way, there will be sheriffs like Joe Arpaio, David Clarke, and Mark Lamb all across the country.

You are not worried nearly enough about what that might mean.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-vaccinated-spread-covid-just-unvaccinated-theres-no-difference

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https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/the-constitutional-sheriffs-and-peace-officers-association-cspoa-and-richard-mack

no lnx

report

Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) and Richard Mack: How Extremists Are Successfully Infiltrating Law Enforcement

Constitutional Sheriffs

Sections

Key PointsIntroductionThe Emergence of Richard MackMack’s Public Speaking Crusade - Including White Supremacist VenuesRichard Mack and Indoctrinating Law EnforcementMack and CSPOACounty Membership'Training' Law EnforcementPolicy Recommendations

FULL REPORT

KEY POINTS

The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) is an anti-government extremist group whose primary purpose is to recruit sheriffs into the anti-government “patriot” movement.

CSPOA is led by Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who gained celebrity on the right in the 1990s after suing to overturn a prominent gun control measure, the Brady Law, especially after the Supreme Court ruled largely in his favor.

The central tenet of CSPOA, borrowed from the anti-government extremist sovereign citizen movement, is that the county sheriff is the ultimate authority in the county, able to halt enforcement of any federal or state law or measure they deem unconstitutional.

Mack primarily marketed this (false) claim as a way to oppose gun control measures, but in 2020-21, he has also used it to exploit anger and frustration over federal and state measures to combat Covid-19.

Mack crisscrosses the country for speaking engagements where he promotes himself, CSPOA and his county sheriff thesis.

Increasingly, he seeks out law enforcement audiences, billing his extremist events as “trainings.”

In a disturbing development, in 2021, Mack was able to win official state approval for his “trainings” in Montana and Texas, which allows attendees to receive continuing education credit for attending Mack’s events.

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xian say good kia?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/anti-vaxxers-2655324736/

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these GOP governors saw their approval plummet after fighting vaccine requirements: report

Alex Henderson

October 18, 2021

Some Republican MAGA governors have not only been slamming President Joe Biden for his vaccine/COVID-19 testing mandate — they have also been forbidding school districts or private businesses from having...

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aha: chicken-egg layers ampl feedback? me vs we = self-ish vs compassion and solidarity, seeing self in other, on same side? no sides?

cawthorne sez raise boys to be monsters, ayn says altruism is evil; capitalism social darwin says winners deserve to, invis hand means we all benefit; nutron jack welch is a hero, musk? strict father yaweh

an 10 21

It happened three times yesterday, and I only watched or half-watched a few hours of TV news. It happens every day, it seems. Somebody wonders out loud (yesterday's most prominent was Alex Witt with Dr. Anthony Fauci) why over 60 million Americans who are eligible to be vaccinated are still refusing — including hospital workers in some parts of the country.

Everybody treats it like it's a confounding question with no easy answer. The actual answer, though, is pretty straightforward: the psychopaths running the rightwing media ecosystem dominated by Fox "News" and social media, and echoed by 1500 radio stations across the country, have decided people dying and being disabled is both profitable and politically advantageous to them.

When Joe Biden was elected president the Republican Party and their joined-at-the-hip rightwing media did a sudden about-face from praising Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" to encouraging their followers to remain unvaccinated so President Biden would struggle to get the economy back on sound footing.

That, they figured, was their best bet to take back Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, and they've stayed on-message ever since Biden took office on January 20th. As I noted in considerable detail back in July, death is their political strategy.

And now, as if to put a punctuation point on it, the headline at Raw Story warns: Fox News host uses Colin Powell's death to launch anti-vax rant: "Fully-vaccinated are dying of Covid."

Almost 750,000 Americans have died of Covid and recent research published by the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that at as many as half of the 45 million Americans who've been diagnosed with the disease will suffer long term consequences, the main ones being dementia, exhaustion and damage to the heart and kidneys.

It used to be in American business that you knew where the psychopaths were: tobacco. It's an industry producing a product that, when used as directed, kills around a half-million Americans every year.

Being able to comfortably fall asleep every night knowing that the product of your workday had killed another 1,300 people is a rare competence that typically requires the mental illness of psychopathy.

About 1% of Americans are psychopaths, although such people tend to be concentrated in some areas: as many as 12% of major corporate CEOs are believed to be psychopaths, and about 15% of people in prison.

A psychopath, for all practical purposes, believes that he's quite literally the only "true human being" on planet Earth.

Everybody else is an actor of some sort, a prop, in the grand play of the psychopath's life. Everybody else is here to make him happy and meet his needs, and he doesn't have to worry about hurting them or not meeting their needs because they are not "real people" like he is.

The clinical terminology is that psychopaths "lack the ability to feel empathy." Weirdly, this lack of empathy can make them more successful in big business and politics, as well as in criminal and prison environments.

Thus, the CEO of Fox "News" — the network that daily spreads vaccine misinformation leading to deaths that are tearing apart American families — tells the Hollywood Reporter that she sleeps "well at night." Just like the tobacco CEOs.

Meanwhile, people who watch Fox and all its imitators across various media are taking the implicit advice of Fox's primetime hosts and avoiding vaccination…and getting sick and in some cases dying.

They're embracing quack cures promoted on the network and across rightwing media, including hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, giving their viewers the false sense of security that if they get sick with this awful disease there's a ready cure at hand…so there's no need to get vaccinated.

Even worse, consumers of this media are doing their best to disrupt rational public health efforts like mask and vaccine mandates by harassing public health officials, school boards, and elected representatives across the country — all leading to even more disease and deaths.

When Americans realized, mostly as the result of massive lawsuits in the 1990s, that the CEOs of the tobacco industry were knowingly killing people (and even reaching out to addict children) we took action.

We limited access to this death-dealing product, from outlawing television advertising to limiting placement of cigarette vending machines and strict enforcement of age-limited retail sales. We also required that the product be honestly labeled: "Tobacco kills."

This isn't an option for media, and rightly so because of our First Amendment protections of the press (including this article). And nobody wants to take those freedoms and protections away.

But the most important and effective campaign our nation embarked on to cut tobacco use was the nationwide campaign to educate people about the dangers of tobacco use. We taught adults and schoolchildren alike how the industry was trying to addict them and showed them the consequences of using that deadly product.

Now that rightwing media has arguably caused more Americans to die in the past year than has tobacco, it's time to consider a similar strategy to balance the lies and misinformation streaming out of them every day.

If we can't rely on the news and social media industries' content producers or executives to stop spreading death-dealing misinformation, we can at least wake people up to the dangers of their products.

#RightwingMediaCausesDeath

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https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-warns-government-going-tie-you-down-and-put-jab-you

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-laura-ingraham-attacks-small-minded-control-freaks-implementing-vaccine-mandates

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died of covid tho vaccinated, fox tried to use for disinfo vaxx pulled twt

no lnx twt

Fox News reporter deletes tweet after being blasted for using Colin Powell’s death to promote vaccine disinformation

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement October 18, 2021

John Roberts, Fox News' co-anchor of "America Reports," and the right wing network's former White House correspondent under Presidents Trump, Bush, and Clinton, came under intense fire Monday morning for using the COVID-19 related death of former U.S. Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell to promote the network's position of vaccine disinformation.

Fox News has long suggested there was a wall between its daytime "straight news" reporters and their coverage, and its nighttime opinion hosts, but that wall over the past few months has largely disappeared. It is now common for Fox News daytime viewers to be served "reporting" on the opinions of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.

For that to happen Fox News reporters have had to become mirrors of the disinformation campaigns the network's nighttime personalities promote.

Like vaccine disinformation.

Vaccine disinformation is "a big reason behind low inoculation rates," the L.A. Times recently reported.

"Fox News aired claims that undermine COVID-19 vaccines on 99% of days in the last six months, according to research by progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America," HuffPost reported earlier this month. "Only two days from April through September didn't feature the sowing of doubt about the safe and effective shots."

The news of the death of former U.S. Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell has hit many across the nation hard. Secretary Powell was 84 years old and died of complications from COVID-19, with his family noting he was fully vaccinated.

Powell was also battling "multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that impacts the body's ability to fight infections," and Parkinson's.

But according to Fox News' John Roberts, Secretary Powell's death "raises new concerns about how effective vaccines are long-term," which is both manipulative and false, given the facts surrounding his health – namely that he was 84 and battling a cancer that impacts the body's ability to fight infections.

Journalists and many others are blasting Roberts so mercilessly that he ultimately deleted the tweet with no apology or explanation, but here's a screenshot:...

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/economist-paul-krugman-increasingly-radical-republicans-are-scaring-businesses-in-gop-led-states/

1021 an

For generations, the GOP has pushed itself as the "pro-business party." But when MAGA Republicans take extremist measures in states they control — voter suppression, opposing vaccine requirements and public safety measures during a pandemic — it makes a compelling argument for operating businesses in blue states. And liberal economist Paul Krugman, this week in his New York Times column, argues that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other GOP governors are frightening businesses with their "radicalism."

Krugman explains, "Big business is overwhelmingly in favor of requiring that workers get vaccinated against COVID-19. A recent CNBC survey of chief financial officers found that 80% of them say they 'totally support' the Biden Administration's plan to impose a vaccine-or-test mandate on companies with more than 100 workers — and many companies have already announced vaccination requirements for their employees. Yet Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, just issued an executive order banning vaccine mandates in his state. That is, he's not just refusing to use his own powers to promote vaccination; he's interfering in private decisions, trying to prevent businesses from requiring that their workers or customers be vaccinated."

The GOP and large corporations, Krugman notes, were joined at the hip for many years.

"Republicans have been closely allied with big business since the Gilded Age, when a party originally based on opposition to slavery was in effect captured by the rising power of corporations," Krugman notes. "That alliance lost some of its force in the 1950s and 1960s, an era in which the GOP largely accepted things like progressive taxation and strong labor unions, but came back in full with the rise of Ronald Reagan and his agenda of tax cuts and deregulation."

But thanks to the "rise of Trumpism," Krugman adds, "Republican politicians are at odds with Corporate America on crucial issues."

"It's not just vaccines," Krugman observes. "Corporate interests also want serious investment in infrastructure and find themselves on the outs with Republican leaders who don't want to see Democrats achieve any policy successes….Just to be clear, corporations aren't being good guys. They support vaccine mandates and infrastructure investment because they believe that both would be good for their bottom lines."

In the past, Krugman writes, businesses "could live with a bit of craziness" from Republicans "so long as they got their tax cuts and deregulation. But "Trumpism," according to Krugman, has made the GOP's "craziness" much worse.

"The conflict between the GOP and corporations is a striking new turn in American politics," Krugman emphasizes. "And I wonder if some corporate leaders find themselves asking, in the privacy of their own minds, 'My God, what have we done?' For the truth is that the Republican Party has been growing increasingly radical — and decreasingly rational — for a long time."

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no lnx

no twt

'A horrible liar': Ted Cruz torched for spreading lies about Southwest Air pilots and the COVID vaccine

Meaghan Ellis October 12, 2021

Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took to social media to attack President Joe Biden while attempting to escalate the Southwest Airlines protest over the airline's COVID-19 vaccine mandate. However, his attempt quickly backfired when he was called out for spreading misinformation.

On Sunday, October 10, the Texas senator tweeted a link to CNBC report about the airline's mass flight cancellations as he targeted Biden over his vaccine mandate. He tweeted, "Joe Biden's illegal vaccine mandate at work! Suddenly, we're short on pilots & air traffic controllers. #ThanksJoe."

However, Cruz's tweet prompted backlash on Twitter. Shortly after Cruz's remarks, CNBC airline reporter Leslie Roberts asked Cruz for clarity tweeting, "Where did you hear that there is a shortage due to the vaccine mandate?"

The senator replied, "Because I read your article…. All of these challenges have led to an added distraction in the cockpit," he said. "This week's COVID-19 vaccine mandate announcement by the Company only exacerbates the situation."

New Jersey-based historian Kevin Kruse quickly fired back at Cruz as he highlighted the senator's blunder. "By the company," Kruse said as he clarified, "It's not Joe Biden's vaccine mandate, it's Southwest Airlines. Biden's vaccine mandate hasn't even been implemented yet and is still under review at OSHA. But you're blaming it? You're a horrible liar, and by that, I mean you're horrible at lying."

Although Cruz's remarks were not entirely true, other right-wingers and anti-vaxxers also began echoing the claims. In fact, according to The Daily Beast, Fox News' Tucker Carlson also said, "We've spoken to several people with direct knowledge of what actually did happen. We can tell you the shutdown of Southwest Airlines over the weekend was a direct consequence, it was a reaction to Joe Biden's vaccine mandates."

The Republican senator's lies came shortly after reports circulated about Southwest Airlines' cancellation of approximately 1,800 files nationwide. Initially, the airline claimed the cancellations, which stranded thousands of passengers, were the result of "[air traffic control issues] and disruptive weather."

On Monday, October, 11, the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) released a statement saying, "None of the information from Southwest, its pilots union, or the FAA indicates that this weekend's cancellations were related to vaccine mandates."

However, the airline's claim raised speculation because no other airline had cancellations despite facing the same weather. Like multiple other airlines, Southwest recently announced that the COVID-19 vaccine was a requirement to maintain employment.

The Beast also noted: "The same day that flight cancellations began, Southwest's pilots union filed a motion in federal court to block the company's employee vaccine mandate which they say 'unlawfully imposes new conditions of employment.'"

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mma

in National Review Online on Friday, the conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty called for a new public approach to those who have not yet been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus. The arguments of the vaccine advocates, Dougherty says, are “poisoned by condescension” and disrespect those who haven’t received shots by treating them as conspiracy theorists, and thus end up reinforcing the concerns of vaccine skeptics rather than convincing them. What’s more, he writes, the advocates fail to recognize that they have undermined their credibility with the skeptics through, among other things, the “​​the ongoing and bizarre public-health treatment of children.” To reignite vaccine uptake, Dougherty suggests “abandoning efforts that seem like open manipulation in defiance of the evidence.”

It’s worth reading Dougherty’s piece, in spite of its flaws. He is correct that vaccinations have leveled off, and while there are multiple categories of people who haven’t had shots, a large swath of the unvaccinated are members of his political tribe. Nearly half of Republicans say they don’t plan to get vaccinated, according to a recent poll, and there’s a sizable divide in vaccination rates between places that voted for President Joe Biden and places that voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. As the delta variant spreads and a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” looms, it’s reasonable to turn to someone on the right for a sense of how to reach those people and prevent more unnecessary deaths.vid twt w. great chart

But therein lies the problem: Many of the most influential figures of the right-wing movement, the ones with the greatest understanding of how to speak to its members, aren’t trying to convince them to get vaccinated. Instead, they’ve decided that their interests lie in fueling that skepticism. Any public health effort thus needs to cope with the results of self-interested, deliberate sabotage from media outlets that Republicans leaders have propped up for generations.

Dougherty’s National Review Online colleagues have encouraged vaccination, but they speak to a relatively small audience of conservative elites. The mass audience that needs convincing is more likely to be watching Fox News and listening to talk radio. The most influential figures on those venues frequently suggest to their audiences that the vaccines may be ineffective and dangerous, stoking their grievances about the Biden administration’s vaccination efforts.

A few hours after Dougherty’s piece was published, for example,Alex Berensontold Tucker Carlson’s Fox News viewers that the COVID vaccines are “declining in effectiveness very quickly.” NRO writers have questioned the credibility of both Berenson and Carlson in the past. Yet Carlson maintains the trust of his audience, and segments like this one still reach millions on a nightly basis.

...carlson’s show provides perhaps the most prominent platform for right-wing vaccine skepticism, but it’s not alone: Berenson reiterated his false claim on a different Fox show over the weekend. Other Fox figures have since falsely claimed that COVID-19 is “99.999% survivable” and defended the “choice” of the unvaccinated against a government that is supposedly overstepping by trying to keep people alive.

These segments amount to permission slips for unvaccinated viewers, telling them that they have good reasons not to get their shots and that the people trying to convince them otherwise are just trying to control them. But at least no one feels disrespected.

Such sentiments aren’t confined to the right-wing airwaves. Some Republican lawmakers are stoking fears about the vaccine effort and even proposing laws to curtail it. Trump, who was vaccinated in January, is now drawing a straight line from the lie that the election was stolen from him to his supporters’ suspicions about the vaccines.

It’s important for vaccine advocates to use the most effective messaging possible. But any message is going to run into the misinformation buzzsaw of the influential right-wing figures who have decided that it is in their best interest to undermine the vaccination effort.

Dougherty seems aware of this. Toward the end of his piece, which largely deals with what vaccine advocates are doing wrong, he offers some advice about what to do instead. This includes some vague language about “leveling with people” -- and one very specific suggestion.

“A public-health campaign would give context to the information about vaccine reactions reported on the government’s own websites -- such as the VAERs system -- and explain how the government assesses them,” he writes. “In the absence of this, skeptics will take the word of whoever is willing to give this information context.”

Dougherty appears to be referencing Carlson’s repeated lies that VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, shows that thousands of people have died in connection with the COVID-19 vaccines. But the problem Dougherty is pointing to isn’t the system -- it’s that Carlson keeps lying about it, and his viewers trust him. The solution is for Carlson to stop lying, or for his bosses to make him stop. Since neither of those options is apparently on the table, Dougherty is left with the fantasy of creating a public health campaign that instantly and convincingly responds to lies from the people conservatives trust.

Perhaps instead, the vaccination effort needs to find a way to get the right-wing culture war’s endless outrage cycle working for its messaging, for a change. What if Democrats started adopting the message that they are happy Republicans aren’t getting the vaccine because, when they contract the disease and die, it will be easier for Democrats to win elections and enact socialism? Might that get the right’s propagandists to change course and encourage their supporters to get vaccinated out of spite and partisan interest?

That argument is both distasteful and untrue. But as Dougherty writes, “If vaccine advocates really do want vaccination uptake to increase more than they want to feel superior, they have to change course.”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/fox-news-laura-ingraham-attacks-vaccine-mandates-if-they-really-wanted-return-normal

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wacko? flanking gov little

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/lt-gov-janice-mcgeachin/

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mma 1021 matt g

Fox News has provided a friendly platform to dozens of people who refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine in recent months. The network’s propagandists often portray those guests as heroes fighting for freedom against “authoritarian” mandates -- even though Fox itself has a vaccine requirement for employees.

Twenty-eight individuals who said they were defying COVID-19 vaccine mandates by  rejecting vaccination appeared a total of 30 times on Fox’s weekday programs from August 2 through October 5, according to a Media Matters review. The tally includes nine appearances by nurses, six by law enforcement officers, five by teachers, and two by members of the U.S. military. These individuals were often featured on Fox’s most-watched shows, including Fox & Friends (13 such appearances), The Ingraham Angle (8), and Tucker Carlson Tonight (4).

Some told Fox’s hosts that they had quit or been fired from their jobs rather than take the required shots. Others were seeking exemptions or preparing to lose their employment.

Fox’s hand-picked guests are outliers. Employees are overwhelmingly responding to vaccine mandates by getting vaccinated rather than quitting their jobs or getting fired, which is undoubtedly saving lives. It’s not surprising that most Americans would prefer to take vaccines that are free, safe, and remarkably effective at preventing serious cases of a viral disease that has killed more than 700,000 Americans rather than seeking new employment. But that’s not what Fox’s viewers are hearing.

Fox has ignored its moral responsibility to keep its viewers informed (and thus healthy) since the COVID-19 pandemic began, instead treating it primarily as a new culture war issue to exploit for political and financial gain. The emergence of vaccines made no difference. Rather than consistently encouraging viewers to take them, Fox hosts regularly undermined the vaccination campaign, doing so on 181 of 183 days from April 1 through September 30. The network paced the right’s broader anti-vax sabotage effort, which has been devastatingly effective in limiting vaccine uptake among Republicans and thus ensuring higher death tolls among those populations.

Over the summer, as vaccinations leveled off in part due to that Republican hesitance, officials began implementing vaccination requirements, particularly for government and health care workers. In September, President Joe Biden announced a plan for federal regulators to compel businesses with more than 100 employees to require their employees to either be vaccinated against or regularly tested for COVID-19.

This presented yet another off-ramp for Fox’s propagandists, who could have pivoted to telling their viewers that such vaccine mandates are commonplace and encouraging them to take the vaccines rather than risking their jobs (and lives). Instead, they branded vaccine mandates as “immoral,” “authoritarian,” and a “war” on both “freedom” and “millions of Americans” who are not vaccinated. They warned that the unvaccinated would now be subjected to “vaccine apartheid” and should “fight back” by purchasing fake vaccination cards to foil the mandates and engage in “civil disobedience” against the “tyrants” implementing them.

And they found new culture war heroes who risked or quit their jobs rather than taking the shot and put them on the air.

in August, for example, network star Tucker Carlson touted the “brave souls” who refuse to “go along” with the “lunacy” of vaccine mandates, particularly health care workers, who he claimed must know more than those encouraging them to get shots. He then brought on one such person, a nurse from North Carolina who chose to leave her job rather than follow its requirement that she be vaccinated.

“What do you know that the rest of us don't know?” Carlson asked. “No one can claim that you're uninformed or you don't believe in science.” The former nurse responded by disputing the safety of the drug, saying that “we don't know enough about this vaccine” because “it is experimental,” and thus may not be “safe.”

“I think you've made an entirely fair decision. It's your decision, and I’m grateful that you're willing to talk about it tonight in public,” Carlson said as he concluded the interview, adding that he hoped “many more” would come on his show to tell similar stories.

Similarly, a few weeks later, the network’s insipid morning show Fox & Friends hosted John Knox, the leader ofFirefighters 4 Freedom, which co-host Ainsely Earhardt described as “an effort to fight for the right to choose whether or not they should get the shot.”

“It's not necessarily whether I want to get vaccinated or not. The point that we’re bringing to the table here is that we should have a choice in the matter,” Knox told her. “We feel that we have the right to have informed consent and that we should be able to make the decision what we do with our bodies, not be told what we need to do.”

And later in September, primetime host Sean Hannity hosted Lt. Col. Paul Douglas Hague, who resigned from the U.S. Army rather than comply with its requirement to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Hannity praised Hague as a “principled” hero who had been “pushed into a corner” by the military mandate.

Hague explained that he had willingly taken all the other vaccines the military requires, but the COVID-19 vaccine is somehow different for reasons he did not articulate. “This is really about the freedom of the American people,” he said. “The right to choose your own medical procedures. The right to decide, you know, what’s gonna be injected into your body and what’s not. That’s a natural human right that we can’t take away from people. And I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution which affords those rights to the Americans.”

These segments have continued, even as the evidence of the mandates’ effectiveness has continued to mount. On Monday, for instance, The New York Times reported that “roughly 43,000” doses had been administered to employees in New York City’s public schools since the late August announcement that they would be required. About 96 percent of teachers were at least partially vaccinated, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio.

But that night, Fox’s Laura Ingraham hosted repeat guest Michael Kane, the founder of Teachers for Choice, to discuss how unvaccinated New York City teachers like him “went from being hometown heroes to villains” and had been barred from the classroom. The segment featured the chyron, “Teachers Fight Back On Vaccines.”

Kane complained that “There has never been a vaccine requirement to teach New York City public schools” and argued that COVID-19 vaccines “do not provide sterilizing immunity.” He warned that the vaccination campaign had become “far more political” than “about science.”

The Fox hosts providing these people with access to their viewers work for a company that has a rigorous vaccination mandate, and are likely vaccinated themselves. None of them are publicly denouncing Fox for its “authoritarian” requirement that they either get vaccinated or submit to regular testing, nor are they quitting their jobs to protest the purported tyranny.

They are hypocrites and cowards who are happy to profit while loyal viewers who take their commentary seriously sicken and die. And they are in that position because Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are willing to trade moral abomination for ratings victories every chance they get.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-guest-pfizer-vaccine-available-us-not-fda-approved

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lachlan and rupert

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-has-undermined-vaccines-nearly-every-day-last-six-months

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THREAT FAUCI INJECT LEAD

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/fauci/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/an-idaho-bill-would-jail-or-fine-anyone-who-enforces-19-vaccine-mandates/

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1021 an

According to New Hampshire Public Radio, New Hampshire GOP state Rep. Ken Weyler is now facing bipartisan calls to be stripped of leadership — including from GOP Gov. Chris Sununu. According to the accusations, the state house Finance Committee chairman circulated a series of bizarre COVID-19 conspiracy theories laced with attacks on the Catholic church.

"Sununu's statement comes after Weyler, 79, emailed colleagues materials full of COVID conspiracy theories, including a discredited, false report that claims COVID deaths are driven by a plot orchestrated out of Vatican City, Washington D.C. and London," reported Josh Rogers. "'It's all one huge puppet theatre, where the majority of the people — even most of those who are complicit — haven't got the slightest clue what is going on, and how everyone is being played,' the report states. Among other false claims, the report says some COVID vaccines include 'living organism(s) with tentacles.'"

According to WMUR's Adam Sexton, Weyler also called the Catholic church a "criminal network" full of "Satanists" and "Luciferians" dabbling in "dark ancient spiritual practices."

Weyler also spread COVID-19 conspiracy theories in a hearing in September, where he flatly refused to believe the state health commissioner's data that 90 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations in the state were unvaccinated.

"Rep. Mary Jane Wallner, the ranking Democrat on the House Finance Committee, also criticized Weyler in a statement," said the report. "'The continued dissemination of disinformation on COVID from Rep. Weyler is a danger to public health in New Hampshire and to the credibility of the legislature as a whole,' she said."

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1021 an kos?

There's a meme commonly shared on social media that goes something like this: "If you drank from a garden hose, stayed outside till dark, rode in the back of a pickup truck, ate dirt, licked random amphibians, taunted apex predators, and slapped yourself repeatedly in the face just to feel something in the midst of your cosseted, banal, utterly meaningless existence, then SHARE." I may be paraphrasing, but the meaning is plain enough. Kids these days need fresh air and a maybe a good dose of COVID-19 to teach them that life is an adventure!

The problem with that meme is that the person who drank from a garden hose and got a parasitic condition that turned their brain to ricotta cheese before they briefly took up prop comedy, and then unceremoniously shuffled off to an Elysian afterlife (where premium champagne flows 24/7 from sketchy garden hoses) never gets to share that meme. Because they're fucking dead.

So, we're a nation of rugged individualists. I get it. Unfortunately, that attitude has put us behind the eight ball when it comes to COVID-19 mitigation. As in, we pretty much suck at it. Because too many of our fellow citizens are, well, pretty fucking dumb.

Enter the Koch brothers. Or, rather, the Koch brother. (David Koch drank from too many garden hoses, apparently, and is no longer with us.) Turns out that the same deep-pocketed creeps who were behind the astroturf tea party are now associated with a burgeoning movement to keep masks off the faces of our precious, cherubic children. And I could not be more depressed.

The Washington Post has obtained a form letter suggesting that the recent "grassroots" effort to turn our schoolchildren into little disease vectors of freedom is not so grassroots after all. The Koch(s) is (are) behind it.

According to The Post, a letter that sounds "passionate and personal" has been circulating among parents who are concerned that their kids might be called nerds or something (really, who knows what the fuck they think?), and they've been pestering local school officials with it.

The Washington Post:

But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.

That makes the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post, the latest salvo in an inflamed debate overmask requirements in schools, which have become the epicenter of partisan battles over everything from gender identity to critical race theory. The political melee engulfing educators has complicated efforts to reopen schools safely during a new wave of the virus brought on by the highly transmissible delta variant.

The document offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a well-financed conservative campaign to undermine regulations that health authorities say are necessary to contain the coronavirus. The frustration of many parents who want a greater say is deeply felt, school superintendentssay. But their anger is also being fueled by organized activists whose influence is ordinarily veiled.

Why? Seriously, why? What is it about the freedom to spread virus globules from sea to shining sea that's so appealing?

The letter has been distributed since Tuesday to members of the Independent Women's Network (IWN), which calls itself a "members-only platform that is free from censorship and cancellation." Unfortunately, these "mothers" don't appear to care if COVID-19 cancels their kid.

You can follow the link to the form letter the group is circulating, but if you'd rather not step into that den of disinformation, here's a particularly egregious excerpt:

It's a great blessing that COVID doesn't pose as serious a health risk to children as it does to adults. Critically, young kids do not significantly spread COVID either. Furthermore, now that the adults in our community (teachers, school staff, parents and family members) have had a chance to get vaccinated, the risk to adults of serious illness from COVID infection is even smaller.

Uh, no. As one doctor interviewed by The Postnoted, that's totally wrong. David Kimberlin, a physician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said the data "clearly [show] that children can transmit the virus, perhaps to a lesser extent than older adolescents and adults, but that second part is still not clear."

Kimberlin added that letters like the one promoted by the Koch-funded Independent Women's Network "will cause more deaths, more funerals and more white flags on the National Mall."

Meanwhile, the phony grassroots aura that the IWN has cloaked itself in stands in stark contrast to most parents' attitudes about masking mandates. According to an August Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 63% of parents think unvaccinated students and staff should be required to wear masks in school. But, hey, they tend not to show up on the news, ripping masks off people's faces while screaming anti-intellectual nonsense.

So what's the anti-mask furor about, really? Hell if I know. It's like these people are from another planet. And with an entire major political party already on the side of the virus, knowing that big, evil money is backing this dangerous nonsense is beyond depressin

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mark fucking meckler

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-the-conservative-networks-backing-anti-quarantine-protests/2020/04/22/da75c81e-83fe-11ea-a3eb-e9fc93160703_story.html

wapo no lnx

Politics

The anti-quarantine protests seem spontaneous. But behind the scenes, a powerful network is helping.

Protests with honking horns, anti-shutdown signs and angry Americans continued in Maryland, Texas and Wisconsin on April 18. (The Washington Post)]

By

Isaac Stanley-Becker

and

Tony Romm

April 22, 2020

The ads on Facebook sounded populist and passionate: “The people are rising up against these insane shutdowns,” they said. “We’re fighting back to demand that our elected officials reopen America.”

But the posts, funded by an initiative called Convention of States, were not the product of a grass-roots uprising alone. Instead, they represented one salvo in a wide-ranging and well-

financed conservative campaign to undermine restrictions that medical experts say are necessary to contain the coronavirus — but that protesters call overkill and whose economic fallout could damage President Trump’s political prospects.

A network of right-leaning individuals and groups, aided by nimble online outfits, has helped incubate the fervor erupting in state capitals across the country. The activism is often organic and the frustration deeply felt, but it is also being amplified, and in some cases coordinated, by longtime conservative activists, whose robust operations were initially set up with help from Republican megadonors.

Protesters assemble near the Texas State Capitol during a recent demonstration April 18 in Austin.

]

The Convention of States project launched in 2015 with a high-dollar donation from the family foundation of Robert Mercer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican patron. It boasts past support from two members of the Trump administration — Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development.

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It also trumpets a prior endorsement from Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Floridaand a close Trump ally who is pursuing an aggressive plan to reopen his state’s economy. A spokesman for Carson declined to comment. Cuccinelli and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment.

The initiative, aimed at curtailing federal power, is now leveraging its sweeping national network and digital arsenal to help stitch together scattered demonstrations across the country, making opposition to stay-at-home orders appear more widespread than is suggested by polling.

“We’re providing a digital platform for people to plan and communicate about what they’re doing,” said Eric O’Keefe, board president of Citizens for Self-Governance, the parent organization of the Convention of States project.

A longtime associate of the conservative activist Koch family, O’Keefe helped manage David Koch’s 1980 bid for the White House when he served as the No. 2 on the Libertarian ticket.

“To shut down our rural counties because of what’s going on in New York City, or in some sense Milwaukee, is draconian,” saidO’Keefe, who lives in Wisconsin.

Polls suggest most Americans support local directives encouraging them to stay at home as covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, ravages the country, killing more than 44,000 people in the United States so far. Public health officials, including epidemiologists advising Trump’s White House, agree that sweeping restrictions represent the most effective mitigation strategy in the absence of a vaccine, which could be more than a year away.

White House aides, outside groups launch effort to reopen economy

Still, some activists insist that states should lift controls on commercial activity and public assembly, citing the effects of mass closures on businesses. They have been encouraged at times by Trump, whose attorney general, William P. Barr, said in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday that the Justice Department would consider supporting lawsuits against restrictions that go “too far.”

Further afield, the protests have been encouraged by some of the president’s allies outside the White House, including Stephen Moore,once considered for a top post at the Federal Reserve.

The swelling frustration on the right coincides with major policy changes in some states, especially those with Republican governors. Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee have begun relaxing their restrictions in recent days after bowing to pressure and imposing far-reaching guidelines.

The protests are reminiscent in some ways of the tea party movement and the demonstrations against the Affordable Care Act that erupted in 2010, which also involved a mix of homegrown activism and shrewd behind-the-scenes funding.

For the Convention of States, public health is an unusual focus.It was founded to push for a convention that would add a ­balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. That same anti-government impulse is now animating the group’s campaign against coronavirus precautions.

“Heavy-handed government orders that interfere with our most basic liberties will do more harm than good,” read its Facebook ads, which had been viewed as many as 36,000 times as of Tuesday evening.

Asking for a $5 donation “to support our fight,” the paid posts are part of an online blitz called “Open the States,” which also includes newly created websites, a data-collecting petition and an ominous video about the economic effects of the lockdown.

The group’s president, Mark Meckler, said his aim was to act as a “clearinghouse where these guys can all find each other” — a role he learned as co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. FreedomWorks, a libertarian advocacy group also active in the tea party movement, is seeking to play a similar function, creating an online calendar of protests.

“The major need back in 2009 was no different than it is today — some easy centralizing point to list events, to allow people to communicate with each other,” he said.

Meckler, who draws a salary of about $250,000 from the Convention of States parent group, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service, hailed the “spontaneous citizen groups self-organizing on the Internet and protesting what they perceive to be government overreach.”

So far, the protests against stay-at-home orders in states including Washington and Pennsylvania have captured headlines and drawn rebukes from some governors and epidemiologists. Experts say a sudden, widespread reopening of the country is likely to worsen the outbreak, overwhelming hospitals and killing tens of thousands.

The protesters so far have not aimed their ire at Trump, though it is his administration’s experts whose guidelines underlie many of the states’ actions.

Trump’s public comments — including his recent tweets calling for supporters to “liberate” states including Michigan, a coronavirus hot spot — have catalyzed some of the broader public reaction. Following those tweets, tens of thousands of people joined Facebook groups calling for protests in states including Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the efforts are coordinated by a trio of brothers who typically focus their efforts on fighting gun control.

Pro-gun activists using Facebook groups to push anti-quarantine protests

In recent days, conservatives have set their sights on Wisconsin, where a few dozen protesters turned out at the Capitol to air their frustrations with Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, after he extended his state’s stay-at-home order until late May. Ahead of the demonstration, Moore, the Trump ally, revealed on a live stream that he was “working with a group” in the state with the goal of trying “to shut down the capital.”

Moore, who served as a Trump campaign adviser in 2016, said he had located a big donor to aid in the effort, though he never elaborated. “I told him about this, and he said, ‘Steve, I promise to pay the bail and legal fees for anyone who gets arrested,’?” Moore said in the video. He likened his quest to the civil rights movement, adding, “We need to be the Rosa Parks here and protest against these government injustices.”

Moore, who has also worked at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, did not respond to a request for comment.

In Michigan, among those organizing “Operation Gridlock” was Meshawn Maddock, who sits on the Trump campaign’s advisory board and is a prominent figure in the “Women for Trump” coalition. Funds to promote the demonstrations on Facebook came from the Michigan Freedom Fund, which is headed by Greg McNeilly, a longtime adviser to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

McNeilly said the money used to advance the anti-quarantine protests came from “grass-roots fundraising efforts” and had “nothing to do with any DeVos work.”

Many of the seemingly scattered, spontaneous outbursts of citizen activism reflect deeply interwoven networks of conservative and libertarian nonprofit organizations. One of the most vocal groups opposing the lockdown in Texas is an Austin-based conservative think tank called the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which also hails the demonstrations nationwide.

“Some Americans are angry,” its director wrote in an op-ed promoted on Facebook and placed in the local media, telling readers in Texas about the achievements of protesters in Michigan.

The board vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, oil executive Tim Dunn, is also a founding board member of the group promoting the Convention of States initiative. And the foundation’s former president, Brooke Rollins, now works as an assistant to Trump in the Office of American Innovation.

Neither Dunn nor Rollins responded to requests for comment.

The John Hancock Committee for the States — the name used in IRS filings by the group behind the Convention of States — gave more than $100,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2011.

The Convention of States project, meanwhile, has received backing from DonorsTrust, a tax-exempt financial conduit for right-wing causes that does not disclose its contributors. The same fund has helped bankroll theIdaho Freedom Foundation,which is encouraging protests of a stay-at-home order imposed by the state’s Republican governor, Brad Little.

“Disobey Idaho,” say its Facebook ads, which use an image of the “Join or Die” snake woodcut emblematic of the Revolutionary War and later adopted by the tea party movement.

In 2014, the year before it launched theConvention of States initiative, Citizens for Self-Governance received $500,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation,a donation Meckler said helped jump-start the campaign. Mercer declined to comment.

While groups and individual activists associated with the Koch brothers have boosted this far-flung network, Emily Seidel, the chief executive of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity advocacy group, sought to distance the organization from the protest activity, which she said was “not the best way” to “get people back to work.”

“Instead, we are working directly with policymakers, to bring business leaders and public health officials together to help develop standards to safely reopen the economy without jeopardizing public health,” Seidel said.

But others see linkages to groups pushing anti-quarantine uprisings.

“The involvement of the Koch institutional apparatus in groups supporting these protests is clear to me,” said Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University whose research has focused on climate lobbying. “The presence of allies on the board usually means that they are deeply engaged in the organization and most likely a funder.”

Brulle said the blowback against the coronavirus precautions carries echoes of efforts to deny climate change, both of which rely on hostility toward government action.

“These are extreme right-wing efforts to delegitimize government,” he said. “It’s an anti-government crusade.”

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rando srch result (ggl duck? 1021)

Vaccine Turns Us Into Mind-Controlled Slaves | SOTN ...

Search domain stateofthenation.costateofthenation.co › ?p=41388

The mRNA vaccine makes your cells manufacture SARS-CoV-2 Spike proteins, which WILL compromise your blood-brain barrier if you take the vaccine. Then, follow-up shots will administer silicon nanowires that will pass through your blood-brain barrier, into your neurons, and be taken up by your cells as though they were an extra organelle.

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