Clear and Present Danger

Insider reported Sunday that new Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is giving up all of his political capital fighting for things that no one but Republican members cares about.

The GOP spent the 2022 midterm election talking about things like crime and the economy, but now that they’ve come to power, their first focus was removing Democrats from House Committees that they didn’t like based on conspiracy theories.

There were concerns from some Republicans about taking Omar off of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa since she was the only person in Congress from Africa. Still, she was booted but only from that specific committee.

In the last Congress members, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) were taken off of committees after bad behavior that the whole of Congress voted was unacceptable. Gosar threatened to kill Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) and President Joe Biden. Greene was involved in many anti-Semitic statements and spoke to a white nationalist anti-semitism conference.

“If it was tit-for-tat we would’ve picked people, took them off all committees, and said nothing about it,” McCarthy told reporters.

The vote against Omar took a lot of political negotiations and McCarthy only secured the votes at the last minute.

At the same time, Republicans have chosen to focus most of their time on hearings that attack President Joe Biden.

Now the GOP is taking on Washington, D.C., which as not a state has to have all of its laws approved by Congress. It’s one of the main reasons that D.C. people have fought for statehood. Last week, two bills were passed by the Council of D.C. One would allow noncitizens to vote in municipal elections and another overhauled the city’s criminal code. Republicans are against it, saying that it would make D.C. more dangerous.

As the GOP pushes more conservative bills, they’re not likely to bet on the same kind of whole-party unity, the report explained.

“While the House resolutions will likely hit a brick wall in the Senate, McCarthy knows that while ultraconservative bills could pass with the slimmest of margins, they would be purely symbolic,” Insider said. “Many GOP members would welcome such actions ahead of the 2024 presidential election, in an attempt to create a foil in President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats. But for McCarthy, continually arm-twisting to pass bills that won’t go anywhere may not inspire confidence among Independents that will decide legions of House races next year.”

If the House can’t do anything useful, particularly after making a number of campaign promises, it could make 2024 very difficult for House members that won in 2020’s pro-Joe Biden districts.

Another newly elected Republican House member has had doubt cast on her backstory after a deeply-reported Washington Post profile found several discrepancies.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) has described herself as a Hispanic conservative who grew up poor, survived a home invasion and lost her grandmother to HIV/AIDS due to heroin use. But those details have come as a surprise to family members and friends who knew her before she entered politics about five years ago, reported the Washington Post.

“She had everything, what she needed and more,” said her aunt Jolanta Mayerhofer, “and not only did [her mother] Monica provide for her, but my father-in-law did, too.”

Luna grew up in Los Angeles and joined the U.S. Air Force in 2009, at age 19, the Post reported. Friends who knew her then, when she used her given last name of Mayerhofer, say she described herself variously as Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European and supported then-president Barack Obama. She was a registered Democrat as recently as August 2017.

“She would really change who she was based on what fit the situation best at the time,” former roommate Brittany Brooks, who lived with Luna for six months and was a close friend during her military service, said in the report.

Luna graduated from the University of West Florida in 2017 with a degree in biology following a six-year stint in the Air Force, where she met her husband Andrew Gamberzky. After leaving the military she works as a model, a cocktail waitress at a gentleman’s club and an Instagram influencer.

She was ushered into politics by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk after making online statements about human trafficking and the Second Amendment, and she was named that conservative group’s director of Hispanic engagement. She ran unsuccessfully for Congress against Rep. Charlie Crist (D-FL) in 2020.

Luna started publicly embracing her Hispanic heritage around that time, and she changed her last name to Luna at age 29, the same year she updated her ethnicity on voter registration records to Hispanic after identifying herself as “White, not of Hispanic origin” in 2015, the Post reported.

Her mother Monica Luna disputed to the Post that her daughter had only recently identified her Mexican ancestry, although she herself only recently took steps to make her own mother’s family name part of hers.

“Anna has never not identified as being Hispanic as far as I know,” she wrote in an email, adding that Luna’s father spoke Spanish around her when she was a child. “Anna can check both boxes. She’s bicultural and biracial. It’s not easy to figure out what box to choose.”

Luna’s campaign website claims her father was incarcerated off and on throughout her childhood, but the Post was unable to find any public records of felony charges or prison sentences for George Mayerhofer in California, where she lived in those years. Monica Luna and Jolanta Mayerhofer told the newspaper that he was jailed several times for failure to pay child support.

Monica Luna said Mayerhofer, who she never married, served at least a year on a drug-related charge in Orange County, but corrections officials say they have no record of that.

Luna has claimed her father raised her as a Messianic Jew, which her mother corroborated, but her extended family say Mayerhofer was Catholic and they had no recollection of him practicing any form of Judaism.

Her paternal grandfather, Heinrich Mayerhofer, emigrated in 1954 to Canada from Germany, where he served in the Nazi Army as a teenager, though relatives told the Post he had no choice and did not harbor antisemitic views.

“It hurt for him to talk about it,” Jolanta Mayerhofer, who was married to one his sons, told the Post. “He said, ‘You getting the letter, you need to show up, otherwise your life is over. … He did not like it, but that’s what life was.”

 

 

 

Gym Jordan’s Congressional committee has asked Hunter Biden’s lawyer for thousands of documents.

Hunter Biden has hired Abbe Lowell as his attorney.

On Thursday, Feb 9, Lowell — on Hunter Biden’s behalf —  rejected a request from House Republicans for records and information related to his business dealings.

In a letter to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., the lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said the committee “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose and oversight basis for requesting such records from Mr. Biden, who is a private citizen.” Lowell said they would not comply with the Republicans’ request but offered to meet with committee members “to see whether Mr. Biden has information that may inform some legitimate legislative purpose.”

Lowell’s response is the same response used by Gym Jordan and Kevin McCarthy when they did not respond to the J6 Committee subpoenas. If it was okay for Kevin and Gym, then it’s okay for Hunter.

This will be fun to watch

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made a scene and disrupted a classified briefing about the spy balloon that traveled over the continental U.S., reported The Hill on Thursday.

“Biden administration officials briefed House members behind closed doors in the Capitol Thursday morning on this weekend’s downing of a Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast, which capped off a days-long saga of following the balloon as it floated over the U.S.,” reported Mychael Schnell. “One lawmaker who attended the briefing said the exchange between Greene and the officials included profanities.”

“When she got to ask questions, she was yelling out saying ‘bulls—’ and, you know, ‘I don’t believe you,’” said that lawmaker. “Just screaming and yelling, irrational in my estimation.”

In a statement to The Hill, Greene was unapologetic for her behavior: “I had to wait in line the whole time. I was, I think, the second to last person, and I chewed them out just like the American people would’ve,” she said. “I tore ‘em to pieces.”

The balloon, which Chinese officials tried to claim was just a weather instrument that was blown off course, sparked an intense debate over whether to shoot it down immediately or wait for a more strategic moment. The military decided to wait until it was over the water, in part to prevent falling debris from threatening people and structures on the ground, and also partly to make sure it landed in an advantageous place to recover the pieces.

Greene’s outburst in the hearing comes after she drew controversy for loudly heckling and shouting down President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address, including when he was discussing how to tackle the fentanyl epidemic.

Prominent supporters of former President Donald Trump on Wednesday criticized Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.

Sanders, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, delivered a rebuttal to the president’s speech that largely focused on Republican culture war issues and accused Biden of surrendering his presidency to a “woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.”

“Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight. Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols, all while big government colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is—your freedom of speech. That’s not normal. It’s crazy, and it’s wrong,” Sanders said, later adding that the “dividing line in America is no longer between right and left — it’s between normal or crazy.”

Former chief Trump strategist Steve Bannon lit into Sanders’ speech on his “War Room” podcast on Wednesday, criticizing her for failing to mention Trump’s name.

“It was an insult to President Trump. She does not exist politically if it was not for President Trump,” he said.

Bannon called Sanders’ speech “terrible.”

“If you’re gonna give a counter speech, you gotta talk about important issues,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. The wokeism is very important. But it’s not quite the heart of the matter right now, right? It’s not the heart of the matter. She is not–and the reason is she’s just not–she’s not intellectually capable of going to the heart of the matter, right? Let’s be blunt.”

Bannon made the comments while speaking to longtime Trump booster Lou Dobbs, who was fired from the Fox Business Network for spreading false election claims.

Dobbs said the speech was a “great insult” to Trump, complaining that Sanders did not even mention his name when she discussed going on a Christmas visit to Iraq with the former president and the first lady.

“It looked like the Governors Association had written that speech and aligned themselves with Ron DeSantis. It was a shame,” Dobbs complained.

“You are right this was like written by Ron DeSantis and the entire RGA,” Bannon agreed.

Sanders also drew criticism from her hometown newspaper over her “snarling about wokeness and the radical left.”

“It got pretty dark and weird,” Austin Bailey wrote in an editorial at the Arkansas Times. “A word salad of talking points and name calling, with some attempts at folksy relatability thrown in, Sanders’ rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address was light on policy, heavy on menace.”

Conservative commentator Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, contrasted Biden’s speech focused on “the economy and concrete issues” with Sanders’ “deep plunge into dystopian culture wars.”

“These annual canned rebuttals usually come off as tone-deaf,” she wrote in an editorial at the Bulwark, “but with Sanders, there was an additional, unexpected contrast with Biden. She spoke for a dreary 15 minutes — all scripted according to teleprompter, with no audience. Biden spoke for more than an hour, with a teleprompter in front of plenty of hostile Republicans. Biden, 80 years young, rolled with it, tackling every tough subject on his agenda, inviting Republicans to join him at every turn. Sanders, 40 years old, droned on, her entire speech devoted to demonizing Biden.”

Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt accused Sanders of “abusing” viewers with “MAGA lies.”

“Sarah Huckabee Sanders positioned herself as the voice of a rising generation of Americans. No thank you,” Schmidt said on his podcast. “It was stale. It was old. It was an ugly speech from a lying governor who is unfit for any type of public service.”

 

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.”