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RSN: FOCUS: Tim Dickinson | How the Anti-Vaxxers Got Red-Pilled

 

 

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FOCUS: Tim Dickinson | How the Anti-Vaxxers Got Red-Pilled
People at a demonstration calling for medical freedom against forced childhood vaccinations at the Capitol, in Sacramento, California. (photo: AP)
Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
Dickinson writes: "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."

What happens when a global pandemic, a vaccine-resistance movement, and the age of conspiracy collide? A black hole of misinformation that poses a grave threat to public health

n 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.

 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.”

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 in Clinical Infectious Diseases cited “20 epidemiologic studies” to conclude that “neither thimerosal nor MMR vaccine causes autism.” The Lancet retracted 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 paradox of conspiracy theories is that they’re not full flights of fancy. They involve imagined and invented connections between real people, phenomena, and events. There’s a structure to the irrational belief. “Conspiracy theories are not the product of a disordered mind; they’re the product of an overly ordered mind,” insists Zuckerman. “Conspiracy theories happen when you have an enormous need for order in a disordered universe.” Zuckerman quit his post at MIT in protest of the university’s links to disgraced sex-criminal financier Jeffrey Epstein and now teaches at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “I do not subscribe to the theory that Epstein was killed in prison,” he says, but points to the myriad conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein as a case in point: “Having a genuine villain out there is really important for conspiracies to root themselves sufficiently in reality so that we continue to pay attention to them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RSN: Harvey Wasserman | On January 5th and 6th, Democracy Won, Fascism Lost

  

Reader Supported News
11 February 21


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11 February 21

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KEEPING RSN DESPERATE — “Why are you always desperate?” a reader asks. Good question. The answer of course is that people don’t donate until we are desperate, which ensures a perpetual state of desperation. Which make sense in a weird, unnecessary and unproductive way. We have the readers. We need a few donations. Desperately yours. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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RSN: Harvey Wasserman | On January 5th and 6th, Democracy Won, Fascism Lost
Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won both their Senate run-off elections on January 5, 2021. (photo: AP)
Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
Wasserman writes: "The United States of America was redefined on January 5th and 6th, 2021. Never underestimate the pivotal power of these two dates in our nation's history. And do not believe that a likely Senate failure to convict Donald Trump will change any of it."

On January 5th, the voters of Georgia chose a black preacher and a Jewish filmmaker to successfully flip the empowered majority of the United States Senate. No one died. But the vote merged an epic demographic shift with a massive grassroots election protection movement to remake our nation.

The next day, Donald Trump incited an armed, violent mob to invade the US Capitol and kill his Republican Vice President, Mike Pence, before Pence could certify the nation’s choice for a new president. Five people died. The mission failed.

And it left intact nationwide what we had won in Georgia the day before … a demographically remade America, the real enemy of the Trump mob.

Since the 1600s, Georgia and the slave south have been defined by violent White Supremacy. Today that history is commemorated in a bitterly contested giant carving at Stone Mountain, where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915 – right after a bigoted mob infamously lynched a young Jew named Leo Frank on false charges of rape.

That the Peach State would someday simultaneously elect a black guy and a Jewish guy to the US Senate would seem insane – until now.

For decades the legacy of the Atlanta-born Martin Luther King has chipped away at that foul mountain of bigotry and violence. It reached a new plateau in 2018, when Stacey Abrams rightfully won the governorship of Georgia. As she was poised to become America’s first female African-American governor, the victory was stolen by a Klan-supported secretary of state who ran his own fraudulent election.

But with national notoriety and support, Abrams has helped remake Georgia’s electoral landscape. In concert with superb grassroots organizers like Andrea Miller of People Demanding Action and Ray McClendon of the Atlanta NAACP, the election protection movement guaranteed young, black, Hispanic, Asian-American, and indigenous citizens what was once unthinkable – the right to vote with paper ballots that were actually counted. It is no accident that the black senator elected in January was pastor at Dr. King’s Atlanta church.

In November 2020, the King-Warnock “dream” was foretold nationwide. In the decisive states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, Millennials/Zoomers of youth and color hugely rejected Trump’s racist bigotry, costing him the election.

From immigration to segregation, evangelicalism to outright fascism, Trump’s appeal has always been to White Supremacists living in terror of America’s changing demographic.

Where once the most downtrodden white man could consider himself superior to anyone darker, now multiracial citizens of the “lower caste” actually cast hand-marked paper ballots and got them counted.

In Charlottesville and elsewhere, Trump’s neo-Nazi mobs chanted “Jews will not replace us.” But it’s America’s larger diversity they fear. When they chant “Stop the Steal,” they refer not just to Trump’s 2020 defeat, but to the sense that “their” nation is no longer dominated by white “Christian” males. “This is our country,” says Trump. “They are trying to take it from us.”

Thus the January 6th assault on the Capitol was much bigger than it seemed. The punditocracy mostly compares it to 1814, when the British burned the Capitol, the White House, and the Library of Congress, forcing President James Madison to flee. (His vice president was Elbridge Gerry, the godfather of gerrymandering).

In fact, it was more like North Carolina’s infamous 1898 coup, when Wilmington’s multiracial Reconstruction regime was a rainbow alliance of liberal whites with freed slaves who still retained the right to vote. When the Jim Crow fascists did their Trump thing, they murdered some 300 black citizens and retook power.

That’s what Trump’s thugs really wanted on January 6th. Had they got their hands on Georgia’s new black and Jewish senators, they would’ve lynched them. Had they found Nancy Pelosi, AOC, or Bernie Sanders, they’d have ripped them to pieces.

But they didn’t. They killed a cop and wounded 140 more. But the center held, and the hall was filled with cameras. The function of this week’s Senate trial has been to show those pictures to the world.

We all know if that mob had been black, every one of them would have been gunned down on the spot.

We also know that in all his years of marching, no protest led by Dr. King ever devolved into anything resembling the vicious violence incited by Donald Trump. And unlike Trump, King personally marched with those he inspired. Such realities do matter, both to a contemporary populace … and to history.

America’s demographic is now relentlessly slipping away from the vile racist core that puked up Donald Trump. The Senate will not convict him. But as a private citizen, he may well be indicted in places like New York and DC, and sued by endless angry creditors everywhere.

Maybe not this week … but someday … we can dream of a broke Donald Trump in an orange jumpsuit, unable to find legal representation, perp walking to a state or local prison,

More importantly, gerrymandered Republican legislatures are desperately assaulting the fair election practices that doomed the Trump regime and can protect us from future fascism. They’re slashing at vote-by-mail, drop boxes, paper ballots, local precincts, automatic registration, and all the other democratic reforms that made a fair 2020 election possible.

The grassroots election protection movement that won these reforms now must rally to protect them. The federal House Rule One does promise some positive changes. But it’s at the state and local levels that hand-marked paper ballots must be enhanced, and gerrymandering defeated.

And it’s everywhere that we must guard against more fascist outbursts.

On January 6th, we saw the angry tip of an obsolete demographic iceberg gracelessly melting into a diverse sea. Its ultimate disappearance can only be guaranteed with free and fair elections.

On January 5th, we showed how that can be done, even in Georgia.



Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the weekly Election Protection 2024 ZOOM. His People's Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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RSN: Instagram Removes Anti-Vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr. for False COVID-19 Claims

 

 

Reader Supported News
11 February 21


Keeping RSN Desperate

“Why are you always desperate?” a reader asks. Good question. The answer of course is that people don’t donate until we are desperate, which ensures a perpetual state of desperation. Which make sense in a weird unnecessary and unproductive way.

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WE’RE REALLY TRYING TO MAKE UP GROUND HERE — It’s late in the month and we are a long way from where we would normally be and where we need to be on donations. A huge number of people who come here often are not donating. We’re getting into serious trouble over a few donations. Hit the donation link! / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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Instagram Removes Anti-Vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr. for False COVID-19 Claims
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been criticized by members of his family for spreading false information about vaccines. (photo: Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock)
Maanvi Singh, Guardian UK
Singh writes: "The prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr has been booted from Instagram for repeatedly sharing false claims about Covid-19 and the safety of vaccines."

Moves comes as platforms attempt to crack down on misinformation and conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines


he prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F Kennedy Jr has been booted from Instagram for repeatedly sharing false claims about Covid-19 and the safety of vaccines.

Facebook confirmed on Wednesday that it had removed the profile of Kennedy Jr, a vaccine skeptic who chairs the Children’s Health Defense – a group that baselessly ties chronic childhood conditions to a number of factors including vaccines – as part of the social media platform’s efforts to remove vaccine misinformation.

Kennedy’s Instagram account was actioned “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”, said a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram.

Kennedy’s Facebook account, however, remains active, despite promoting false, dangerous claims about the safety of vaccines and Covid-19 treatments. A company spokesperson said that Facebook does not automatically disable users across various platforms.

A 2019 study found that the majority of Facebook ads spreading misinformation about vaccines were funded by two groups: Kennedy’s organization, which was launched in 2016 under the name World Mercury Project, and Stop Mandatory Vaccinations, a project launched by the anti-vaccine crusader Larry Cook.

Facebook and Instagram have struggled to contain a deluge of misinformation and conspiracy theories about Covid-19 vaccines, and vaccines in general. The company pledged in December to remove all debunked claims about Covid-19 vaccines, and this week said it planned to expand that crackdown to include false claims about all vaccines.

The new community guidelines will apply to user-generated posts as well as paid advertisements.

Facebook groups, in particular, have been found to fuel the rise of anti-vaccine communities. Despite its latest policy to combat misinformation, conspiracy theories and false claims about vaccines and the virus remain on the company’s social media platforms.

Kennedy, the son of former US attorney general Bobby Kennedy, has been criticized by members of his family, including his brother, sister and niece for spreading false information about vaccines that they said was “tragically wrong”.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty)
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty)


Tense Moments Between Bernie Sanders and Neera Tanden Over Her Attacks on Progressives
Oliver O'Connell, Independent
O'Connell writes: "Joe Biden's pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget was confronted with her past tweets about Republicans and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party for the second day as part of her confirmation hearing."

Appearing before the Senate Budget Committee, Neera Tanden faced famed progressive Bernie Sanders, Independent Senator for Vermont, with whom she has sparred before.

While the pair have shared goals, and Mr Sanders has said that he would support her nomination, they have a contentious relationship dating back to her support for Hillary Clinton, his challenger for the Democratic nomination in 2016.

In her opening statement to the committee, Ms Tanden said she regrets some of her past social media posts.

Mr Sanders reminded her that her social media remarks include not just snipes at Republicans, but also: “Vicious attacks made against progressives. People whom I have worked with… me personally.”

He continued: “As you come before this committee to assume a very important role in the United States government at a time in which we need serious work on serious issues and not personal attacks on anybody, whether they are on the left or the right, can you reflect on the decisions and personal statements you have made in recent years?”

Ms Tanden acknowledged that her remarks “caused hurt to people” and that she “felt badly about that”, adding: “I apologise to people on the left or right who have been hurt by what I’ve said.”

Moving on to policy matters, where the two share common goals, Mr Sanders asked Ms Tanden if she would commit to supporting a higher minimum wage, negotiating lower drug prices, lowering Medicare eligibility age, instituting free college tuition for the middle class, and taking action on the climate crisis.

Ms Tanden replied yes to all of those policies.

Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan called out Republicans about their newfound concern about mean tweets.

“We've endured four years of the ultimate mean tweets,” Ms Stabenow said. “I don't want to hold you to a higher standard but we certainly want to turn the page.”

Republican Senator Pat Toomey asked Ms Tanden, citing her tweets about Russian meddling, if she thought Donald Trump was legitimately elected. She replied affirmatively.

At a hearing in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Tuesday Ms Tanden was also confronted by Republicans regarding her tweets.

Ohio senator Rob Portman, the leading Republican on the committee voiced his concern that personal attacks on specific senators may make it difficult for her to work with them.

He noted that in the past she has criticised Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz of Texas, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Susan Collins of Maine.

Mr Portman reminded Ms Tanden that she called Senator Collins “the worst”, said that Senator Cotton “is a fraud”, said that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz”, and called Senator McConnell “Moscow Mitch” and “Voldemort”.

He added that “there are still nine pages of tweets about Senator Cruz”.

Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma noted that, more generally, she had called Republicans “criminally ignorant”, “corrupt”, and “the worst”.

Ms Tanden described herself as an “impassioned advocate” in her previous role, adding: “I understand, though, that the role of OMB Director calls for bipartisan action, as well as a nonpartisan adherence to facts and evidence.”

While Ms Tanden's confirmation was in doubt when Republicans controlled the Senate, the results of the Georgia runoff elections have made her approval by the upper chamber much more likely with Democrats in control.

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Georgia prosecutors are investigating whether former President Donald Trump's phone call to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger to overturn the state's election results in Trump's favor broke state laws. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty)
Georgia prosecutors are investigating whether former President Donald Trump's phone call to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger to overturn the state's election results in Trump's favor broke state laws. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty)


Georgia Opens Criminal Investigation Into Trump's Call to Overturn Election
Stephen Fowler, NPR
Fowler writes: "The Fulton County District Attorney's office has launched a criminal probe into former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn Georgia's election results, including a call pressuring Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to 'find' enough votes for him."

 The county includes Atlanta, Georgia's capital.

In a letter sent to state officials and obtained by Georgia Public Broadcasting, newly elected Democratic District Attorney Fani Willis said the investigation will look into several potential violations of state law, including "the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election's administration."

Read the letter here.

Joe Biden narrowly won Georgia by about 12,000 votes. In the weeks following the election, Trump became almost singularly focused on overturning the state's results, spreading false allegations of fraud all the way through a crucial Jan. 5 runoff that saw both of the state's U.S. Senate seats flip to Democrats after some of his strongest supporters stayed home.

The letter from prosecutors asked several state officials to preserve all records from administering the 2020 election, with "particular care" given to those that "may be evidence of attempts to influence the actions of persons who were administering the election."

In the hourlong call obtained by Georgia Public Broadcasting, an angry Trump alternately cajoled and castigated Georgia's top elections official, seeking to have him toss out the November election results, which was counted three separate times, and "find 11,780 votes" to declare Trump the winner.

Raffensperger, who was one of the more high-profile GOP figures to push back against Trump's claims of election fraud, held firm.

"Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong," Raffensperger said at one point. "We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right."

There were other calls made by Trump as well, including calls to Gov. Brian Kemp imploring him to call a special session for the legislature to select a Trump-aligned slate of electors and another to a lead investigator overseeing an audit of absentee ballot signatures in Cobb County. The GOP-controlled state Senate, led by Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, held hearings into alleged voter fraud that featured the president's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. State Attorney General Christopher Carr's office defended the state in several failed lawsuits seeking to invalidate the state's votes.

News of the investigation comes after the Georgia State Election Board earlier this week initiated an investigation into Trump's actions to undermine Georgia's election results, an administrative step that could eventually see the board refer violations over to the state Attorney General's office.

Trump is also under criminal investigation in New York, where prosecutors are examining the former president's finances in Manhattan and a civil fraud case by the state attorney general.

And in this week's historic impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, the president's attempts to subvert the Georgia's election results were referred to. It is unlikely there are enough votes to convict him or bar him from holding office in the future.

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A man confronts a National Guard member as they guard the area in the aftermath of a protest against the death in Minneapolis police custody of African-American man George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 29, 2020. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
A man confronts a National Guard member as they guard the area in the aftermath of a protest against the death in Minneapolis police custody of African-American man George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 29, 2020. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)


As George Floyd Trial Begins, Minnesota Readies National Guard
Joshua Rhett Miller, New York Post
Miller writes: "Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is prepping for the possibility of widespread civil unrest amid the upcoming trials of four former Minneapolis cops charged in George Floyd's police-custody death."

Walz issued an executive order Friday authorizing the Minnesota National Guard to deploy troops in Minneapolis, St. Paul and other communities to “keep the peace, ensure public safety and allow for peaceful demonstrations” during the trials of the since-fired officers.

The second-degree murder and manslaughter trial of Derek Chauvin — the white Minneapolis officer seen pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes as the handcuffed black man repeatedly said “I can’t breathe” — is scheduled to start March 8.

The trials for the other three terminated officers charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and manslaughter — J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao — are set to begin in August.

“There are some public safety events for which you cannot plan, and there are some for which you can,” the Democratic governor announced Friday.

Walz’s order did not specify the number of National Guard troops to be deployed. The state’s adjutant general will determine how many are ultimately “needed to coordinate and support public safety and security services” in Minneapolis, St. Paul and elsewhere throughout Minnesota, according to the executive order.

Walz also called on state legislators to approve his plan to use $35 million from an emergency account to ensure there’s enough law enforcement personnel for local agencies to employ the National Guard’s help.

But the proposal was met with pushback from state GOP leaders who don’t want to lose statewide funds from their community and insist Minneapolis should foot the bill, especially following police cuts in the city after Floyd’s May 25 death.

“We are not going to bail out [the] Minneapolis City Council after they have made cuts to the public safety budget,” Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka told Fox News last week. “Actions to defund the police have consequences.”

Walz said Friday that the funding would be a “critical tool” to ensure enough officers can respond to the potential unrest.

Since the National Guard is not a law enforcement agency, its members must partner with police while on the ground, requiring significant aid from neighboring cities and counties at a substantial cost, Walz said.

Violence in the aftermath of Floyd’s death rocked Minneapolis before spreading across the globe and sparking a “Defund the police” movement that led to the public safety cuts in the city of roughly 420,000 people.

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Healthcare worker at Covid 19 testing location. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
Healthcare worker at Covid 19 testing location. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)


40 Percent of US COVID Deaths Could Have Been Averted if It Weren't for Trump: Lancet Report
Jason Lemon, Newsweek
Lemon writes: "A new report highlights the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the U.S. under former President Donald Trump, noting that some 40 percent of COVID-19 pandemic deaths in 2020 would have been averted if America's mortality rate was equivalent to other wealthy peer nations."

The report—published Thursday in one of the world's oldest and best-known medical journals The Lancet—explains that even before the pandemic, the U.S. saw 461,000 unnecessary deaths in 2018 when compared to the death rates in other G7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom). Comparing the U.S. COVID-19 mortality rate to this peer group, the U.S. would have seen 40 percent fewer deaths in 2020 if its mortality rate was comparable.

"The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on the USA, with more than 26 million diagnosed cases and over 450000 deaths as of early February, 2021, about 40% of which could have been averted had the U.S. death rate mirrored the weighted average of the other G7 nations," the report explains.

"Many of the cases and deaths were avoidable. Instead of galvanizing the US populace to fight the pandemic, President Trump publicly dismissed its threat (despite privately acknowledging it), discouraged action as infection spread, and eschewed international cooperation," it continues.

While Trump is responsible for his administration's actions in the past four years, the authors of the report point out that many problems in the U.S. date back decades due to neo-liberal policies promoted by both Republican and Democratic leaders. While people are living longer, healthier lives in peer nations—life expectancy in the U.S. is on the decline. The report points to a range of negative factors such as climate change, deregulation, soaring health care costs, lack of health insurance, economic inequality and racism.

Under Trump, an additional 2.3 million people became uninsured on top of the 28 million Americans who were already uninsured when he came into office. That 2.3 million included 726,000 children. Furthermore, the mortality gap between white and Black Americans has grown by 50 percent during the pandemic, while the life expectancy of Latinx Americans has declined by 3.5 years.

"Trump exploited low and middle-income white people's anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health. His signature legislative achievement, a trillion-dollar tax cut for corporations and high-income individuals, opened a budget hole that he used to justify cutting food subsidies and health care," the report says.

The authors of the report are part of The Lancet Commission and include prominent doctors and researchers. Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, one of the authors who works as primary care physician and as a distinguished professor of public health and health policy in the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College, told Newsweek that President Joe Biden has "moved swiftly" to address some of the worst of Trump's policies, but said the new administration should do more.

"Reversing Americans' decades of lagging health will require much larger reforms, including: Medicare for All; reparations to compensate Native and Black Americans for wealth and labor confiscated from them; passage of the Green New Deal; and added federal support for nutrition, housing, education and other programs that are essential for good health," Woolhandler said in an email. "These social needs should be funded by reductions in defense spending and increased taxes on the wealthy."

Woolhandler noted that "Trump's stoking of racism and his dropping of regulations on polluters have probably had the gravest short term effects."

Dr. Mary Bassett, a commission member and director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, said in a press release that the report "highlights how racial disparities in health have grown in the last four years, especially as COVID-19 has taken its grim and unequal toll in Black, Latinx and Indigenous people."

Bassett said that "the disastrous, bungled response to the pandemic made clear how existing, long-standing racial inequities simply have not been addressed. It's time to stop saying these preventable gaps cannot be eliminated."


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Saudi women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul is best known for leading the campaign to legalize driving for women in Saudi Arabia. (photo: Marieke Wjntjes/Reuters)
Saudi women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul is best known for leading the campaign to legalize driving for women in Saudi Arabia. (photo: Marieke Wjntjes/Reuters)


Saudi Arabia Releases Prominent Women's Rights Activist From Prison as Biden Presses Kingdom on Human Rights
Sarah Dadouch and Kareem Fahim, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Saudi Arabia released Loujain al-Hathloul, one of the country's most prominent women's rights activists, from prison on Wednesday in the clearest sign yet that the kingdom's leaders were taking steps to assuage President Biden's complaints about human rights violations."

Hathloul, 31, has been among the most visible faces of an unrelenting Saudi crackdown on human rights advocates, dissidents and civil society activists. Her imprisonment, which lasted 1,001 days, and her allegations that she had been tortured, sparked an international outcry.

Her release from prison comes at a time when Saudi Arabia faces increased skepticism, if not hostility, in Washington after the election of a new president and after the Democrats won control of the Senate.

In recent weeks, the kingdom has taken several steps that could enhance its brand, including a reconciliation with its neighbor Qatar and the release of activists jailed on what human rights groups say were bogus terrorism-related charges. The most prominent of these is Hathloul, who is well known for campaigning for women’s right to drive and for the abolition of Saudi guardianship laws, which require women to obtain a male relative’s consent for major decisions, including education and travel.

On Wednesday, President Biden welcomed Hathloul’s release. “She was a powerful advocate for women’s rights, and releasing her was the right thing to do,” Biden said during remarks at the Pentagon.

A Saudi appeals court in January reduced the prison term of Walid Fitaihi, a dual U.S.-Saudi citizen who founded a prominent hospital in the kingdom. Earlier this month, two other dual citizens were released from custody, pending trial.

Despite these steps, Hathloul and others have not been acquitted by Saudi courts and remain under tight restrictions that prevent them from leaving the kingdom. Human rights activists are pressing for these constraints to be lifted entirely.

In pictures posted by her sisters Wednesday, Hathloul looked gaunt, with a thick streak of silver in her hair. Her family had previously said that she had been transferred to a secret prison and subjected to abuse, including torture, beatings, sexual harassment and electric shocks — some supervised by Saud al-Qahtani, a senior adviser to the crown prince. Saudi officials have denied reports of torturing prisoners.

A Saudi court in December had sentenced Hathloul to five years and eight months in prison but suspended a portion of her sentence and included time served, ensuring a relatively speedy release from custody — widely interpreted as a gesture to the incoming Biden administration.

For four years, Saudi Arabia benefited from having a close ally in President Donald Trump, who staunchly defended the kingdom as it was criticized for abuses. But Biden has vowed to reassess the relationship, with human rights a key component.

“For years, there has been constant pressure” on Saudi Arabia, said Taha al-Hajji, a Saudi lawyer and legal consultant for the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights (ESOHR). “Pressure on the government, pressure from [international] media, but it was relying on the Trump administration to have its back.”

“I am sure the change in the U.S. administration increased the pressure a lot,” he said.

Some of the most notable demands that Biden raised during his presidential campaign have so far gone unaddressed — including accountability for the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and for the high number of civilian casualties caused by the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen.

But even before Biden was inaugurated, Saudi Arabia had taken some steps welcomed internationally.

Last month, for example, Saudi Arabia agreed to reopen its borders and its airspace to Qatar after sealing them in 2017 as part of a blockade imposed by the kingdom and three other Arab countries. The rift had been the most serious in decades among the Persian Gulf monarchies, and it divided U.S. allies in the region considered crucial for confronting Iran.

As the result of negotiations, Saudi Arabia had dropped a list of 13 demands, including that Qatar cool its relations with Iran and close the popular news channel Al Jazeera, and Qatar agreed to freeze legal action it was pursuing against the kingdom, according to a person familiar with the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations.

Saudi Arabia has also tightened rules governing when it applies the death penalty, a step welcomed by human rights advocates. Before the changes, the kingdom had faced international criticism for its status as a world leader in capital punishment, lagging only behind China and Iran, and because of the manner in which the punishment was meted out. Saudi Arabia generally beheads prisoners, in ceremonies performed by sword-wielding executioners. Until recently, beheadings were carried out in public squares.

Beginning in early 2020, the judiciary imposed a moratorium on the use of the death penalty for nonviolent offenses, including for drug-related crimes, which accounted for nearly 40 percent of the roughly 800 executions carried out in the kingdom over the last five years. In April, the government announced that minors would no longer face the death penalty in certain cases.

Saudi Arabia has undergone a transformation under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who became heir to the throne in 2017, and is also defense minister.

Mohammed spoke of a new Saudi Arabia, and took steps to bring that vision to life. He removed a ban on women driving, promoted job creation for Saudi nationals and began to wean the country off its dependence on oil. But throughout his tenure as the kingdom’s de facto ruler, he has also made clear that the only reforms permitted are those bequeathed by the government and that political activism of any kind would not be tolerated.

The crown prince enjoyed a warm relationship with Trump and even more so with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and critics of Saudi policies said that relationship earned Mohammed a pass.

During Trump’s administration, Saudi Arabia not only led an effort to blockade Qatar but also detained female activists and rounded up business executives and held them in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh. In October 2018, after Saudi agents killed Khashoggi — the CIA concluded that Mohammed was responsible for ordering the operation — Trump argued that the slaying should not intrude on bilateral commercial and diplomatic ties.

During a presidential debate in 2019, Biden answered yes when asked if he would punish Saudi leaders for Khashoggi’s murder, as well as for executing nonviolent offenders. “Khashoggi was in fact murdered and dismembered, and I believe [on] the order of the crown prince,” Biden said. He then said he would halt sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

“We were going to in fact make them pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”

Biden added: “They’re going in and murdering children, and they’re murdering innocent people. And so they have to be held accountable.”

Last week, Biden announced an end to U.S. support for offensive operations in Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemeni rebels has been criticized for repeatedly striking Yemeni civilians.

The change in U.S. administration has come as Saudi Arabia is facing economic challenges because of the coronavirus outbreak and plummeting oil prices.

Kristin Smith Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said the recent shifts in Saudi policy, such as reconciliation with Qatar, are caused by two things: “the shift in the political environment because of the new Biden administration, but also coronavirus.”

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Former San Carlos Apache Tribe chairman Wendsler Noise Sr. Speaks to activists opposing Resolution Copper's mining project at Oak Flat. (photo: Eli Imadali/The Republic)
Former San Carlos Apache Tribe chairman Wendsler Noise Sr. Speaks to activists opposing Resolution Copper's mining project at Oak Flat. (photo: Eli Imadali/The Republic)


San Carlos Apache Tribe Sues US Forest Service to Stop Resolution Copper Mine
San Carlos Apache Tribe, PR Newswire
Excerpt: "The San Carlos Apache Tribe filed a federal lawsuit late Thursday seeking to stop the U.S. Forest Service from transferring sacred tribal land at Chich'il Bildagoteel, or Oak Flat, to two foreign multi-national mining companies planning to construct the Resolution Copper Mine."

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court of Arizona one day before the Forest Service released its Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) earlier today. The publication of the FEIS triggers a 60-day window where 2,422 acres of Tonto National Forest, including 760 acres at Oak Flat, must be exchanged with land owned by Rio Tinto PLC and BHP Copper Inc. Oak Flat is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property.

The land exchange mandate was included in a rider attached to the FY2015 National Defense Authorization Act. The Resolution Copper Mine could not be built without the transfer of Oak Flat from public ownership where federal laws would prohibit its destruction into private ownership where these laws would not apply.

"The Trump Administration rushed to publish a seriously-flawed FEIS just five days before President Trump leaves office," San Carlos Apache Tribal Chairman Terry Rambler said today. "This callous, immoral and illegal action is being done to enrich wealthy foreign mining interests while knowing that mining will destroy Oak Flat that for many generations has been the heart of Apache religious and cultural practices. We were left with no choice but to file this lawsuit to prevent the transfer of Oak Flat after release of the FEIS."

The Forest Service informed the Tribe that legally required appraisals of the federal and private land to be exchanged were not completed nor subject to public review prior to the publication of the FEIS.

"The Forest Service is grossly derelict in its duty to assure the American people that the appraisals are legitimate and reflect the actual value of the lands rather than just another one-sided government give-away of public land to benefit wealthy foreign mining conglomerates at the expense of the American people," Chairman Rambler said. "The land exchange must not go forward prior to publication of the appraisals and an opportunity for public review and comment."

The lawsuit documents that the Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to conduct a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. The suit states that the Forest Service ignored significant and technically substantial new information consisting of at least a dozen new studies and reports totaling thousands of pages that are relevant to the environmental impact of Resolution's proposed massive mine tailings dump that threatens regional groundwater supplies.

"A Supplemental DEIS must be prepared and made subject to full public review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)," Chairman Rambler said. "This is the only way to ensure full compliance with NEPA by the Tonto National Forest."

The suit also states that the Forest Service violated the National Historic Preservation Act by failing to adequately consult with the Tribe about ancestral land with great historic, cultural, and religious importance to the Tribe and its members.

Rio Tinto and BHP are the world's two largest transnational mining companies with operations based in Australia and Britain. The companies have a notorious record of destroying sacred indigenous sites around the world.

Last year, Rio Tinto blew up the 46,000-year-old sacred Aboriginal Juukan Gorge site in Western Australia, leading to the resignation of its chief executive officer. BHP ignored Australian Aboriginal groups' concerns about the future of dozens of heritage sites when it obtained government approval last year to destroy them as part of a mine expansion project.

"The United States must not provide rubber-stamp approvals for these companies to destroy sacred sites on our homeland in Arizona," Chairman Rambler said.

[Editors' Note: The Court filing can be downloaded here. The Tribe's lawsuit is separate from a federal lawsuit filed earlier this week by the nonprofit Apache Stronghold.]

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