If you want to understand the times that we live in, you have to understand that a significant portion of this nation lives in a world of lies. They are completely, totally deluded and cut off from legitimate credible information sources. They cynically don’t trust mainstream news, they don't trust government agencies who exist to provide information, they don’t trust anything or anyone except other members of their radically deluded tribe.
This has proven problematic and not just in a single area, it’s affecting multiple issues — most urgently it’s affecting people's lives and health as they promulgate lies about Covid and the various available vaccines. Yesterday Surgeon General Vivec Murthy attempted to address these lies with dubious success.
Predictably the News station with viewers who most needed to hear his address didn't carry it. Consequently, their anti-vaccination hysteria continues to grow completely out of proportion.
“They’re going to knock on your door, they’re going to demand that you take it, and they’re going to give you a third shot,” the Fox & Friends host said. “It’s unbelievable how offensive this administration is getting with a pandemic that is clearly on the run. We’re doing better than any other country. Almost 60-70 percent of this country has taken two shots, and yet this administration is panicking and infiltrating our lives.”
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Kilmeade doesn’t seem to get it. “The focus of this administration on vaccination is mind-boggling,” he said on the same show a day earlier, neglecting to mention the Delta variant, neglecting to mention infection rates could go up in the fall, and neglecting to mention that this “focus” on inoculating people against a deadly virus is why life in America has regained some sense of normalcy while other developed nations are still stifled with restrictions.
Kilmeade’s morning musings are only a small example of the vaccine hysteria that has exploded across right-wing media since Biden gave an address on Tuesday calling for a “community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and oft times door-to-door, literally knocking on doors” campaign to get people vaccinated. The speech was pretty innocuous, but conservatives are seizing on the door-knocking image as an example of, as former White House doctor Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) so eloquently put it on Friday, “socialist communist Marxist” overreach. Conservatives are now not only questioning the vaccine, they’re pushing full-blown anti-vaccination propaganda.
In the past few weeks, the rate of weekly infections has increased over 70% to over 20,000 infections per day. This is just the beginning as largely unvaccinated portions of the country are facing the more infectious Delta variant which produces a greater more intense sickness. More and more these reluctant, hesitant portions of the country — are red states dominated by Republicans.
This fact-free reaction to the virus is becoming more like a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot.
The US's daily coronavirus cases have soared 60% in the past two weeks as the Delta variant strengthens its hold on the country. Delta now accounts for more than half of US cases, making it the dominant strain nationwide.
But the variant isn't hitting all states equally. Delta cases have risen primarily in states with low vaccination rates, which for the most part are heavily Republican - "red" states such as Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Wyoming. Overall, these states have seen higher upticks in daily cases and hospitalizations than "blue" states that voted Democratic in the 2020 election.
In Missouri, for instance, daily cases have risen around 75% in the past two weeks, from around 800 to 1,400 cases per day. Hospitalizations have also risen 34% during that time, from around 830 to 1,100 per day. Delta has made up almost 70% of all coronavirus cases there over the past two months, found data compiled by Scripps Research's Outbreak.info tracker. Less than half of Missouri residents (around 46%) have received at least one vaccine dose so far - well below the US average of 56%.
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There are reasons the vaccination rates are stalling in red states. For one, Republicans are more likely to believe that vaccines aren't safe or that the shots aren't necessary to protect their health, indicated a June survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The bottom line is that Republicans are being deliberately and strategically disinformed. They’re being lied to because they tend to believe those lies and let themselves be manipulated by social, racial and political grievance. Tell them those “socialist, Marxist Democrats” are trying to take power again and these people are “all in” with it, even when their own lives and the lives of their family is on the line.
They've gone so far in their anti-vaccine hysteria in Tennesse that they’ve fired their state health commissioner and ended all vaccinations for children, simply because she told the truth.
Tennessee officials have fired the state’s top vaccination official, who had been facing scrutiny from Republican state lawmakers over her department’s outreach efforts to vaccinate teenagers against Covid-19.
Dr. Michelle Fiscus, a pediatrician, was fired Monday as the medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health.
In an interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Tuesday, Fiscus said her job was to roll out the Covid-19 vaccine “across the state and to make sure that that was done equitably and in a way that any Tennessean who wanted to access that vaccine would be able to get one.”
“I have now been terminated for doing exactly that,” she wrote in an early statement to the
Tennessean.
This is putting Tennesse teenagers not only at risk for Covid, but also for Measles and Rubella. It's unconscionable, it's crazy — it's now par for the course.
This is the first front of the War of Lies, but it's far from the last.
Secondly, you have the “Big Lie” that somehow there was massive voter fraud during the 2020 election which somehow “stole” the win away from Trump. This is, of course, rank nonsense. The results in various states slowly shifted because so many people used mail-in ballots to avoid exposure to Covid and it took several days to tally all of those mail-in votes. There was no massive “plot”, there was no “scheme”, the election was not “stolen.”
A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on baseless claims of illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.
The 17-19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared with 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans.
About one-quarter of adults falsely believe the 3 November election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from 13-17 November which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way.
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US federal and state officials have said repeatedly they have no evidence that votes were compromised or altered during the presidential election, rejecting the unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by Trump and many of his supporters. Voter fraud is extremely rare in the US.
Yet the Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that 61% of Republicans believe the election was “stolen” from Trump. Only about 29% of Republicans believe he should share some of the blame for his supporters’ 6 January deadly attack at the US Capitol, after Trump gave an inflammatory speech encouraging the crowds. The former president was impeached by the House earlier this year for “incitement of insurrection”.
Yet again most Republicans believe the lie. Most of them support that attack on the Capitol and refuse to admit that it was inspired and incited by Trump himself.
Flouting all evidence and their own first-hand experience, a small but growing number of Republican lawmakers are propagating a false portrayal of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, brazenly arguing that the rioters who used flagpoles as weapons, brutally beat police officers and chanted that they wanted to hang Vice President Mike Pence were somehow acting peacefully in their violent bid to overturn Joe Biden’s election.
One Republican at a hearing Wednesday called the rioters a “mob of misfits.” Another compared them to tourists. And a third suggested the sweeping federal investigation into the riot — which has yielded more than 400 arrests and counting — amounts to a national campaign of harassment.
It’s a turn of events that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another target of the rioters, called “appalling” and “sick,” and it raises the possibility that the public’s understanding of the worst domestic attack on Congress in 200 years — an attack that was captured extensively on video — could become distorted by the same kinds of disinformation that fueled former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. It was the lie about the election that motivated the rioters in the first place.
Instead of admitting that the greatest insurrection since the Civil War occurred on the grounds of the Capitol as a result of a series of scurrilous lies, the GOP has denied that it was carried out by Trump fans and have instead implemented a sweeping series of changes and restrictions to voting across the country, attempted a fix for a problem that doesn't exist.
As we wrote in March, Republican state legislators — inspired by Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud — have introduced hundreds of bills this year that would make it harder to vote. Based on the latest data from the Brennan Center for Justice and our own research, at least 404 voting-restriction bills have now been introduced in 48 state legislatures.1 What’s more, nearly 90 percent of them were sponsored primarily or entirely by Republicans.
Of course, not all of those bills will pass. Of those 404 bills, we count 179 that are already dead — either because they were voted down or weren’t passed before a key deadline. Another 137 bills have not yet progressed beyond the committee stage, and at this point, that inaction bodes poorly for their chances of passage. On the other hand, 63 bills are still worth watching, having passed at least one step of the legislative process (with those that have passed two chambers closer to passage than those that have just passed committee). That leaves 25 bills that are already law (back in March, this number was only six); four states have even enacted multiple such laws.
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The highest-profile voting restriction that has been enacted since Georgia’s is Senate Bill 90 in Florida. Among other things, the law requires proof of identity for absentee voting, restricts ballot drop boxes to early-voting sites or election offices (where they can only be used if a staff member is physically present), limits how many absentee ballots a person can deliver for non-family members, and makes absentee-ballot requests good for only one election cycle (previously, they were good for two cycles). Critics also fear that the law could allow Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to stack local election boards with political cronies and intimidate campaigns from giving food and water to voters within 150 feet of a polling place (based on the law’s expanded definition of vote solicitation). DeSantis also signed the bill last Thursday at a signing ceremony that was closed to all members of the press except Fox News, contributing to the partisan acrimony over the legislation.
Of course, as in Georgia, it’s not clear whether Florida’s new law will actually boost Republicans’ chances of winning elections in the perennially competitive state. By making it less easy to vote absentee, the law discourages a voting method that was used overwhelmingly by Democrats in 2020 but was also a source of Republican strength in elections before that.
It’s not really clear that it will truly depress Democratic voting because most of the use of mail-in ballots in 2020 was because of the pandemic, these measures could hurt GOP voters as well.
The restrictions backed by Republicans in Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Texas and Arizona often take aim at mail voting, a method embraced by voters from both parties but particularly popular with older voters. The new rules, concerned Republicans note, may be billed as adding security or trust in elections but ultimately could add hurdles for key parts of the GOP coalition.
“The suppression tactics included in this bill would hurt the Republican Party as much or more than its opposition,” Texas state Rep. Lyle Larson, a Republican, said in an opinion column this week. “One can only wonder — are the bill authors trying to make it harder for Republican voters to vote?”
These measures are supposed intended to bolster “voter confidence” in the election process and keep massive droves of disillusioned Republicans from walking away from the polls.
The GOP has been told gross lies about Black Lives Matter and Antifa proclaiming they are “dangerous terrorists" when that is nowhere near the truth. And now they're being inundated with the argument that their schools are being infected by Critical Race Theory when that is certainly not the case.
White conservatives are losing their goddamn minds — again.
This time they are spun up on Fox News propaganda about "critical race theory" — which is neither taught in public schools nor is about hating white people. So mobs of white people are crashing school board meetings across the country and having loud and deeply silly tantrums over something that isn't even real. They're shutting down meetings, getting arrested, and generally making fools of themselves on camera in a way that, to liberal eyes, is idiotic and embarrassing.
It's hard not to laugh at some dude being dragged out of school board meeting half-naked, hollering about how he refuses to be oppressed on the basis of the pasty skin he is amply showing off to the world. But it would be unwise to underestimate these people, just because they act like a bunch of clowns. What they are doing has been carefully orchestrated by GOP operatives for the express purpose of stoking racism. The ridiculous behavior we're seeing from white people across the country right now is a feature, not a bug, of this strategy.
In the past few weeks, much has been written highlighting how the national freakout over "critical race theory" is not organic, but complete astroturf ginned up by Republicans who are looking for a fresh new angle on the race-baiting tactics they've used to organize their base for decades. In a heavily reported piece, NBC News exposed how what seems to be a parent uprising is, in fact, a "coordinated movement with the backing of major conservative organizations and media outlets." Both Media Matters and the New Yorker have taken deep dives into how much this entire movement is being propped up by Republican operatives posing as nothing more than "concerned parents."
All of these lies are part of a plan. All of them are part of a strategy and all of them, so far, are working at reaching their intended goal. They have the GOP electorate in a constant state of being outraged and inflamed by the "injustices” that have been heaped upon them by Democrats.
The battle lines are drawn and the field of combat is over the hearts and minds of the people.
Unfortunately, the GOP forces are working with a captive and willing audience. No matter what Surgeon General Murthy says it’s far too easy for Fox News, OAN and Newsmax to ignore it, downplay it or ridicule it.
We are faced with an intractable problem.
One suggestion is to forcibly enter their field of battle by placing paid advertisements on their stations that directly call out the lies that they repeatedly present.
The GOP themselves attempted this by placing an ad in the middle of the MLB All Star Game which attacked Democrats for moving the location of the game out of Atlanta.
I don't know how effective this ad was, but it was an attemp to step outside of their own bubble. A good example of this can be seen with the Last Week Tonight's Catheter Cowboy whose ads were played on Fox News.
I think we need to go directly after Fox, directly undermine their credibility by doing an ad that points out that Tucker Carlson's lawyers claimed that “No reasonable person" would believe what he says on his show.
Now comes the claim that you can't expect to literally believe the words that come out of Carlson's mouth. And that assertion is not coming from Carlson's critics. It's being made by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York and by Fox News's own lawyers in defending Carlson against accusations of slander. It worked, by the way.
Just read U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil's opinion, leaning heavily on the arguments of Fox's lawyers: The "'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.' "
She wrote: "Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."
Vyskocil, an appointee of President Trump's, added, "Whether the Court frames Mr. Carlson's statements as 'exaggeration,' 'non-literal commentary,' or simply bloviating for his audience, the conclusion remains the same — the statements are not actionable."
And that Trump’s election attorneys including representatives of Sydney Powell made the same claim.
Attorneys for Sidney Powell are asking a federal judge to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against her, claiming that “no reasonable person” thought the pro-Trump lawyer’s statements about the 2020 election results were factual.
Dominion Voting Systems in January sued Powell over her statements alleging the voting company helped rig the election against then-President Donald Trump. In a motion to dismiss filed Monday, Powell’s attorneys wrote that a judge must determine whether her statements could be proved and if “reasonable people” would believe they were factual, given the context and other factors surrounding the comments.
“Analyzed under these factors, and even assuming, arguendo, that each of the statements alleged in the complaint could be proved true or false, no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” the filing reads.
These are supposed to be people that the Fox audience “trusts”, but this is what their lawyers say when you challenge the factuality of their statements. Can they truly be trusted? They did call Arizona for Biden two days early.
Of course, the GOP will push back and create more lies with claims of "Big Brother" and “Limiting Free Speech” but as Jen Psaki pointed out recently, how does that stack up against lost lives? This is not “free speech" these are blatant lies. This is blatant disinformation. You don't get to shout “Fire” in a crowded theater and you shouldn't get to falsely scream “The Vaccine is tainted" in the midst of a pandemic. Neither of those is free speech.
If you want to reach a reluctant audience you need to get in their face. SG Murthy and the government should take a page from this approach and place PSAs on vaccination on Fox, OAN and Newsmax which make the case that being vaccinated doesn't just protect you, it protects our friends and family. That concerns about side-effects are extremely minor if non-existant and that having the vaccine is far better than having the virus. They should tell true stories of other people who were vaccine-resistant or a non-believer in Covid until they caught the disease and suffered.
If you going to talk to a resistant audience, you should start doing so with people who were also resistant who were eventually convinced otherwise.
I think we need similar strategies for attacking the election big lie, for responding to those resistant to the truth of the insurrection by doing PSAs with people such as Officer Fanone displaying some of his body cam footage as he was attacked.
We have to recall, people on Fox haven't seen this footage, they've been sheltered. This has played on CNN and MSNBC repeatedly, but certainly not on Fox or OAN. We need to show them this and to have ads with some of the Insurrectionists themselves after they've been sentenced for their crimes. Get the truth to them directly from the sources. No filters.
We need ads that actually talk about the fact that Critical Race Theory is only studied in Graduate and Law School - what is going on in local school districts, where teachers and administrators are attempting to update their historical curriculum with the truth about America's racial history is actually a serious conversation. History should be taught accurately, but is the full truth of centuries of slavery and racial genocide committed by America actually too much for small children to actually handle?
Robin Steenman, the chapter head of "Moms for Liberty" in Tennessee, is raising money for a family she says has been so traumatized by "critical race theory" that a first grader requires psychological help.
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According to Steenman's GoFundMe page, the mother sent a letter saying that both of her children are suffering from serious issues and her youngest child is a special needs kid about to enter Kindergarten.
"Most notably, my 7 year old (first grader) (sic) has shown the most tragic changes. We went from a normal functioning, sweet child to one who will literally crumble at the slightest challenge and word," the story explains.
"My daughter started coming home asking very pointed questions about who she is and if she is a bad person. She came home extremely upset. She told me 'Mom, I'm white. My friend is brown. I need to apologize to him for being white because white people have done bad things to people with brown skin,'" the mother said.
She cited the "Wit & Wisdom" program used by the school that they are now working to ban at the school board level.
I have some skepticism about this story being valid, the fact that the mom "blames CRT” is a big red flag, but it makes sense to me that a 7 year-old might become traumatized by the long, sad history of American white people brutalizing black and brown people in this country. Obviously, the truth should be taught - but I also think it should be handled with a certain amount of care.
We have to start acting like this is a war because the opposition is absolutely treating it like a war. We have to start getting into battle and fighting back. We can't just let these lies continue unquestioned and unchallenged. I do know that we are dealing largely with a cult, one that is naturally resistant to any information that comes from outside their trusted circles - but we aren't trying to change anyones political persuasion, just offer them better and truer facts that can not be easily denied or ignored.
Some of us may need to join the battle in the occupied territory of Facebook, or perhaps even Parler. They retreat to these areas because they can’t handle the challenge, they gather with the like-minded because they can't handle confrontation, but there should be no safe harbor where lies can fester and spread, there should be no safe space to spread dangerous life-threatening bullshit.
The cost of losing this war is far too great. It's time to get into the fight.