Clear and Present Danger

Probably the most disturbing aspect of the conspiracist worldview is its deliberate callousness about the harm it inflicts on other people, its fanatical certainty that the cockamamie fantasies are somehow real, brushing aside any consideration of the possibility that they might be wrong, and thus heaping mountains of fresh grief on people who are often suffering the most unimaginable losses to begin with. Alex Jones’ treatment of the Sandy Hook victims and their families is, of course, the apotheosis of this.

But it’s also more than self-evident in the conspiracy theories currently being whipped into an alternative-universe half-life by the COVID-denialist antivaxxers—namely, the so-called “Died Suddenly” pseudo-documentary fraud being peddled by Stew Peters and his anti-vaccination cohorts. Their theory claims to list hundreds of people who have supposedly keeled over without warning because of the COVID vaccine—most of which are unsubstantiated, and including dozens of people who certifiably either died or were injured from other causes or are still living. The falsely identified and their families, as Matt Shuham reports for HuffPost, are starting to fight back.

According to Peters and other antivaxxers, the COVID vaccines contain agents that cause people who get them to develop unusual levels of blood clotting, leading to various ailments and sudden death from heart attacks. They claim that the vaccines are part of a global depopulation scheme by nefarious “globalist” elites.

To prove their claims, they latch onto the news of any sudden notable deaths around the world—from Lisa Marie Presley to soccer journalist Grant Wahl to ex-NFL player Ahmaad Galloway—and claim they are cases of vaccine poisoning. When Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest during a Monday Night Football game, the conspiracists began claiming the case proved their theories—although Hamlin’s collapse was attributed to the hit he had just absorbed on his torso.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor tweeted: “Before the covid vaccines we didn’t see athletes dropping dead on the playing field as we do now… Time to investigate the covid vaccines.” Tucker Carlson interviewed one of Peters’ frequent guests—Peter McCullough, a Texas doctor who was disavowed by Baylor Medical Center after he spread misinformation about the vaccines—who cited a bogus “study” to claim that hundreds of European athletes had died suddenly after being vaccinated.

There has been a litany of bogus claims by the “Died Suddenly” crowd that tries to exploit real people’s tragedies:

• A Florida COVID victim named Claire Bridges, a model who had both legs amputated as a result of her bout with the disease. Bridges, who flatlined three times, was born with a heart condition that made her particularly vulnerable to the ravages of the disease. “My legs were amputated due to COVID/Rhabdo, not the vaccine,” she asserted.
• Dolores Cruz, whose son Eric was killed in an auto accident in 2017, penned an essay for Huffpost’s Personal Section that was a meditation on her grief in the aftermath of his death. The a screen shot of the headline from her appears in Peters’ “Died Suddenly” film as yet another incident of vaccine-related death. “An article I wrote about my son was being used in a way that wasn’t true,” Cruz told HuffPost. “To me, it’s a way of creating fear.”
• An Ohio kindergartner named Anastasia Weaver, whose death from COVID was blamed on the vaccine. She had in fact suffered lifelong health problems after her premature birth, including asthma and frequent respiratory-related hospitalization. “The doctors haven’t given us any information other than it was due to all of her chronic conditions. … There was never a thought that it could be from the vaccine,” her mother, Jessica Day-Weaver, told the Associated Press. Nonetheless, a “Died Suddenly” fanatic on Facebook messaged her to label her a “murderer” for vaccinating her child.
• Rafael Silva, a 37-year-old Brazilian television host, became a “Died Suddenly” figure when he collapsed live on air. Silva survived, and attests that the problem was a congenital heart problem. That prompted a wave of harassment: “I received messages saying that I should have died to serve as an example for other people who were still thinking about getting the vaccine,” Silva said. Peters’ film used the footage anyway.
• Tyler Erickson, a Florida 17-year-old, died while golfing near his home in September. No one is sure why his heart stopped suddenly, but it couldn’t have been the vaccine: The teenager was unvaccinated. His story nonetheless appears in the “Died Suddenly” film. “It bothers me, him being used in that way,” his father, Clint Erickson, told the AP. But “the biggest personal issue I have is trying to find an answer or a closure to what caused this.”
• After renowned soccer journalist Grant Wahl collapsed and died while covering the World Cup in Qatar, the “#DiedSuddenly” hashtag went wild on social media—even though an autopsy revealed it was an aneurysm arising from conditions long predating COVID. His widow, Céline Gounder, found herself flooded with accusatory messages: “Now you understand that you killed your poor husband. Karma is a bitch,” one said.

That hashtag, or deliberately misspelled versions of it, has surged on Twitter more than 740% over the past two months compared to the previous two months, according to the AP and Zignal Labs, a media intelligence firm. It has been featured in a blizzards of tweets making a variety of unfounded claims about reported deaths being caused by vaccination.

The AP reports that it reviewed more than 100 of these tweets and “found that claims about the cases being vaccine related were largely unsubstantiated and, in some cases, contradicted by public information. Some of the people featured died of genetic disorders, drug overdoses, flu complications or suicide. One died in a surfing accident.”

For the people targeted—especially those still living, like Bridges, or the family members who find themselves accused of murdering their loved one because they got them vaccinated—the conspiracist deluge magnifies their initial trauma exponentially. When the Died Suddenly Twitter account posted its version of her story, it claimed that after Bridges “received the mRNA vaccine,” she “ended up having legs amputated due to blood clots, and now suffers from myocarditis & kidney failure. #diedsuddenly.” That tweet had been viewed nearly 2 million times three weeks after it was published.

“It’s frustrating to have your story stolen from you,” she said.

Debunkings of the false narrative abound, but that appears to have done little to stanch its spread. And while rigorous medical studies and the abundant data from the hundreds of millions of shots that have been administered globally have proven COVID-19 vaccines safe and effective—and the same data shows deaths or injuries caused by vaccination are extremely rare—that has had little effect on the antivaxxers’ alternative universe. Telling them that the risks associated with not getting vaccinated are far higher than the risks of vaccination only produces accusations of participating in the globalist conspiracy.

The role played by Twitter—particularly under Elon Musk’s ownership—cannot be underestimated in this spread. According to Lydia Morrish at Wired, information experts have found that since Musk restored thousands of banned accounts and the platform stopped policing COVID-19 misinformation at his direction, the “Died Suddenly” claims have become supercharged.

“It has opened the floodgates for conspiracy theorizing and misinformation,” says Timothy Graham, a misinformation expert at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia.

As always, there is a human cost to all this that cannot be calculated from data. Like the Sandy Hook parents, Jessica Day-Weaver said found the spectacle of strangers exploiting Anastasia’s death strangely traumatizing, especially in the way their lies dehumanized her daughter.

Nonetheless, Day-Weaver told AP: “I wouldn’t wish the loss of a child on anybody. Even them.”

Old fat man living in a motel at a Florida golf course, shouting at the neighborhood kids to GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

Former special assistant to the New York district attorney, Mark Pomerantz wrote in his newly released book about a conversation former President Donald Trump reportedly had with his bookkeeper Allen Weisselberg and lawyer Michael Cohen.

The discussion was about Trump constantly attempting to inflate his net worth. Trump would give the bottom line number and Weisselberg would have to figure out how to make the numbers work.

“Trump decided, arbitrarily, what his net worth would be, and he wanted each year’s number to be bigger than the year before,” the book explains. “At one point his growing net worth number became so inflated that Weisselberg warned him that he was creating a large potential estate tax liability—upon his death, the tax authorities could demand taxes commensurate with his inflated net worth. According to Cohen, Trump responded by telling Weisselberg that ‘I don’t care, I’ll be dead, and the kids will have to fend for themselves.'”

Attorney General Garland has discovered that former president Donald Trump had approximately $19.8 million in undisclosed debt owed to a foreign creditor.

The debt was uncovered after New York attorney Letitia James obtained documents from The Trump Organization earlier this year. The records showed a previously unreported liability of $19.8 million listed as “L/P Daewoo.”

The debt was reportedly owed to South Korean company, Daewoo – a company with links to North Korea. The documents reveal that the debt has stayed relatively the same at $19.8 million between 2011 and 2016.

However, five months into Trump’s presidency, the balance of the debt owed dropped to $4.3 million and was then paid off shortly after that. The documents do not specify precisely who paid off the loan, but state, “Daewoo was bought out of its position on July 5, 2017”.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-owed-millions-to-foreign-creditor-which-was-undisclosed/ar-AA17d0ow

Now we know why Trump got along so well with the North Korean dictator — Kim paid off Trump’s debt — 19 million reasons for Trump to kiss Kim’s ass.

Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) on Tuesday turned the tables on Republicans during a hearing of the House Oversight Committee.

In particular, Porter zeroed in on fentanyl seizures at the United States-Mexico border and pointed to a large jump in seizures that she said occurred around June of 2020.

She then asked Chief Border Patrol Agent John Modlin if he could identify the cause of the surge in fentanyl seizures, to which he replied that he had no idea.

Porter then pointed out that it should be seen as a success that the federal government has succeeded in seizing more fentanyl to keep it out of American communities.

“For me, as a mom, that is a sign of success,” she said. “I don’t want that fentanyl in this country. It is dangerous and kills people and makes our community dangerous. And to me, this is a sign that our Border Patrol and our agents… are doing their jobs. What I find interesting is, despite success here, what we are seeing is an effort to characterize seizures as failures.”

Republicans have for the last several months used high fentanyl seizures to attack the Biden administration for lax border enforcement, even though such seizures mean that fentanyl will not be making its way into American communities.

. . . I mean, it’s not like any of the book banners can read anything more complicated than a first grade reader.

Professor, historian and author Kathleen Belew, one of the United States’ top experts on white supremacist and white nationalist terrorism, has often stressed that violent, racially motivated attacks shouldn’t be viewed as isolated incidents, but as part of a broader movement. And when Belew made a Monday night, February 6 appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” she explained how a Maryland woman’s role in a plot to attack five energy substations in the Baltimore area fits into the overall “white power” game plan.  (Go to this link for details on the arrest of a Nazi and his girl friend who were planning to destroy electric substations that supplied Baltimore.)

Earlier in the day, law enforcement officials had announced the arrest of Maryland resident Sarah Beth Clendaniel, who, they allege, conspired with fellow white supremacist Brandon Russell in that plot. Clendaniel and Russell, according to officials, hoped to completely disable energy infrastructure in Baltimore and deprive the city of electricity for an extended period of time.

During her conversation with Maddow, Belew emphasized that this was not an isolated incident. White supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis, according to the professor, are targeting energy infrastructure in general — not just in Baltimore, Maryland.

Belew, author of the 2019 book, “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” told Maddow, “The electrical part may be new, but infrastructure attacks by this movement are not new. This is a strategy that was pioneered by a group called The Order in 1983…. Infrastructure attacks are one kind of violence among several others that are all laid out in a strategy in common in order to bring about what the movement seeks, which is the overthrow of the United States and the creation of a white ethno-state — mass violence against communities of color and even genocide against non-white peoples.”

According to Belew — who teaches at Northwestern University in the Chicago suburbs — attacks on energy infrastructure and the January 6, 2021 insurrection are both part of the “white power” game plan.

Belew told Maddow, “Infrastructure attacks sit next to a show of forced violence like the January 6 attack on the Capitol and mass casualty violence like the Oklahoma City bombing. All of these exist together within one broad ideology in the white power movement.”

READ MORE: Why the power grid is an ‘attractive target’ for domestic terrorists and white supremacists: report

Florida is officially a laboratory for fascism in the U.S.
There is a very specific reason why Gov. Ron DeSantis targeted African-American history for erasure

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 7, 2023 5:34AM (EST)

Ron DeSantis is not a “mini-Trump” or some other diminutive. He is much more dangerous. Donald Trump has no “ideology” beyond megalomania and a deep desire to be an American god king. By comparison, DeSantis is far more intelligent and devious; he is an ideological fascist and racial authoritarian.

In a recent essay at Raw Story, Thom Hartmann summarized the danger to American democracy and society embodied by DeSantis:

Historians and political observers have been predicting that America would get our very own Mussolini ever since the days of Barry Goldwater. And there’s been no shortage of candidates: bribe-taking Nixon; Central American fascist-loving Reagan; Gitmo torturing and war-lying Bush; and, of course, Trump.

But with Ron DeSantis, we may finally be facing an all-American politician who has Mussolini’s guile, ruthlessness, and willingness to see people die to advance his political career, all while being smart and educated enough to avoid the easily satirized buffoonishness of Trump.

DeSantis and other Republican fascists have proclaimed Florida to be a bastion of “freedom” and “liberty.” In reality, Florida is now a laboratory for fascism. As part of his authoritarian project, DeSantis is enforcing thought crime laws that forbid the teaching of AP African-American studies in high school and other courses and programs across Florida’s school system (including at the college and university level) that examine questions of power, race and systemic inequality. DeSantis and his agents recently declared that the AP African-American studies course was inappropriate and will not be taught in Florida’s schools because it has “no educational value” and is “indoctrinating” (white) young people. DeSantis and his regime’s thought crime attacks on African-American studies are Orwell’s “1984” meets “Birth of a Nation.”

The purpose of DeSantis’ thought crime laws is to intimidate and terrorize all teachers, educators, librarians, and others who are committed to education, critical thinking, and the truth in Florida (and beyond). In DeSantis’ Florida — and soon to be across “red state” America if he and the other fascist Republicans get their way — there will be censors who review books and other material for thought crimes and other “dangerous” ideas that are contrary to the interests of conservatives. These censors and party officials and their designated agents will also rewrite history – and reality itself – to fit the demands of the regime. The public will no longer be able to discern truth from lies and fantasies from facts and fiction. The subversion and destruction of reality, facts, and the truth are a precondition for, and one of the primary ways that fascist and other authoritarian regimes obtain and keep power.

DeSantis’ goal is to make America into a new Jim Crow Christofascist plutocracy. Donald Trump and Trumpism were just intermediate stops on that evil journey. ………..

(more)    https://www.salon.com/2023/02/07/florida-is-officially-a-laboratory-for-fascism-in-the-us/