The country could effectively put the crippling Covid-19 pandemic behind us, but Trump supporters, including Republican officials, are making that impossible by waging a cultural war against common-sense pandemic solutions, such as wearing masks to curb the virus’ spread. As most countries now enjoy post-coronavirus recoveries, Trump’s America careens deeper into the crisis. If only somebody had warned us about how dangerous his fanatic followers are.
Hillary Clinton, of course did just that, and the press crucified her for it. In September 2016, she suggested half of Trump supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables.” The baskets included, ” “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic.”
At the time, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found 44 percent of Trump supporters viewed blacks as ruder than whites, 46 percent viewed them as more criminal and almost 50 percent viewed them as more violent. A Public Policy poll found 61 percent of Trump supporters thought Obama was born in a foreign country, and 66 percent believed he was is a Muslim— Clinton’s comment was an accurate one.
Still, the D.C. press clutched its pearls (‘How dare she?’) and staggered around for days over the Clinton statement. The press elevated the throw-away line to Very Serious status, as a Beltway full of commentators, following the GOP’s orchestrated lead, offered up ceaseless tsk-tsk analysis.
In terms of newsworthiness, the press treated Clinton’s “deplorable” story on par with Trump’s fraudulent charity, his illegal “university,” his refusal to release his tax returns, and his mocking of the disabled, among the candidate’s many blockbuster transgressions.
Looking back, “Clinton’s comments about Trump’s human deplorables were overly generous,” Salon’s Chauncey DeVega noted in January. “Trump’s reign has encouraged a wave of lethal hate crimes and other violence against nonwhites, Muslims, Jews, gays and lesbians. Trump’s foot soldiers have engaged in acts of political violence and terrorism against Democrats and others deemed to be the “enemy.””
And then came the pandemic.
Read on… Boehlert goes on to show a long list of right-wingers refusing to follow guidelines, arguing with business owners, threatening violence and otherwise acting well… deplorably.
I’m sorry that it’s unpleasant to acknowledge that we live in a country that coddles this sort of ignorant immature behavior but we do.
This is the lead singer for that obnoxious group that proudly calls itself the Deplorable Choir:
Makes you wonder how many cancer cures have been hidden and shut down when you see how hard they work to hide and discredit the cure for covid.
Rep. Louie Gohmert — a Texas Republican who has been walking around the Capitol without a mask — has tested positive for the coronavirus, according to multiple sources.
Gohmert was scheduled to fly to Texas on Wednesday morning with President Donald Trump and tested positive in a pre-screen at the White House. The eighth-term Republican told CNN last month that he was not wearing a mask because he was being tested regularly for the coronavirus.
Gohmert attended Tuesday’s blockbuster House Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General William Barr in person, where lawmakers were seated at some distance from one another.
President Trump has never confronted Vladimir Putin with intelligence indicating Russia paid the Taliban to kill U.S. troops, he told “Axios on HBO” in an interview on Tuesday.
Democrats have seized on the issue, and Trump’s reluctance to discuss it, as evidence he’s unwilling to challenge Putin even when American lives are at stake.
Trump spoke with Putin on Thursday, and subsequently deflected a question about whether he’d raised the alleged bounty scheme, saying on Monday: “We don’t talk about what we discussed, but we had plenty of discussion.”
In Tuesday’s interview, he was definitive:
“I have never discussed it with him.”
Pressed on why he didn’t raise the matter in Thursday’s call, he said: “That was a phone call to discuss other things, and frankly that’s an issue that many people said was fake news.”
Trump has spoken to Putin at least eight times since intelligence about the alleged Russian bounties was reportedly included in the President’s Daily Brief — his written intelligence briefing — in late February.
Trump’s team says he was not verbally briefed on the matter before a June 26 report from the New York Times brought the controversy out into the open.
There’s no clear consensus within the intelligence community about the strength of the evidence that Russia paid the bounties — though that’s not the case when it comes to Russia’s broader support for the Taliban.
In 2018, Gen. John Nicholson, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, accused Russia of providing money and arms to the group, saying, “we know that the Russians are involved.”
Trump told “Axios on HBO” that he was not aware of Nicholson’s comments, and said evidence that Russia was aiding the Taliban “never reached my desk.”
The backstory: The New York Times reported in June that U.S. intelligence had concluded “months ago” that an infamous Russian military intelligence unit had offered payments for each U.S. or allied soldier killed.
Those payments were funneled through middlemen and could run as high as $100,000, according to the Times.
The White House claimed that Trump had not been briefed on the matter because the intelligence was inconclusive.
Multiple outlets subsequently reported that the intelligence was included in the PDB, but that Trump may not have read it.
Trump insisted in the interview that he does read the PDB — “they like to say I don’t read, I read a lot” — but stood by the claim that the matter “never reached my desk” because U.S. intelligence “didn’t think it was real.”
Suspicions of Russian support for the Taliban have swirled within the U.S. intelligence community since Barack Obama’s second term, though firm intelligence — including on any bounty scheme — didn’t come until later, Axios contributor Zach Dorfman reports.
“If it reached my desk I would have done something about it,” he said, adding: “I comprehend extraordinarily well.”
Mr. Trump has long taken pains not to personally criticize Mr. Putin, despite generally hostile relations between Washington and Moscow, and even seemed intent on downplaying evidence of broader Russian military and financial support for the Taliban.
Asked about claims to that effect by the former top U.S. general in Afghanistan, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., Mr. Trump dismissed the notion. “I didn’t ask Nicholson about that,” he said, before saying that the general “didn’t have great success” in his command, which ended in 2018.
Mr. Trump also suggested that Russian backing for the Taliban would be a kind of understandable payback for America’s backing of fighters opposing the Soviet occupation of that country during the 1980s.
“Well we supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia too,” Mr. Trump said.
By the way:
WASHINGTON (AP) — US to withdraw troops from Germany, sending 6,400 home and 5,400 to other countries, under shakeup sought by Trump.
Literally minutes after Esper insisted that the withdrawal of troops from Germany has nothing to do with German defence spending, Trump told reporters: "Germany's delinquent. They haven't paid their Nato fees." (which is not true. The argument is over defence spending as %GDP)
I don’t think I need to explain who benefits from the US withdrawing troops from Germany and NATO being damaged do I?
*I’m not against such a withdrawal but I would prefer that it be done in a thoughtful strategic way not by a compromised, corrupt imbecile with deep, serious psychological damage. I just think that’s not a good way to reorder the world.)
Attorney General Bill Barr finally showed up for his long-scheduled hearing before the House Judiciary Committee and once again proved himself to be Trump’s eager henchman. He didn’t read aloud some of the more incendiary parts of his opening statement (which as Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., observed, “reads like it was written by Alex Jones or Roger Stone”) but for all his braying about “the law” his arrogant attitude and slippery answers left no doubt about where his allegiance lies. Let’s just say Trump doesn’t have to worry about Barr’s loyalty.
The list of Barr’s odious comments is a mile long, starting with his fatuous answers regarding the question of systemic racism in policing. He evidently thinks it’s cute, just as his boss does, to insist that “more white people are shot by police than Black people” when responding to the question of why Black people, who make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, account for 25 percent of those shot and killed by police since 2015 while “non-Hispanic” whites, who are more than 60 percent of the population, only account for 45 percent. This answer is insulting to the intelligence of the American people.
Barr also obfuscated, dissembled, misled and evaded questions about his interference in cases on behalf of Trump’s cronies, the firing and reassigning of U.S. attorneys working on cases involving the president, the shocking events at Lafayette Square in June and his inconsistency in applying federal laws to benefit the president, while ignoring them when they don’t. As hard as it is to believe, he even took it upon himself to strenuously defend the president’s botched COVID-19 response in great detail, something he could have easily avoided by saying it isn’t his purview.
But no, Barr had the temerity to use some of Trump’s most spectacularly absurd excuses by blaming the Obama administration, which hasn’t been in office for three and a half years, for allegedly destroying the CDC and failing to replenish the national stockpile of PPE. If there was one moment that captured Barr’s total immersion in Trump’s ocean of self-deception and lies, it was that series of inane talking points.
There is a whole lot to worry about with what Barr is doing right now, not the least of which is covering up Trump’s corruption and pushing paramilitary responses against peaceful protests. But after listening to his testimony, I think it’s the potential for direct interference in the presidential election by Barr and the Justice Department that should have every American on high alert.
Consider that Barr’s opening statement referred to the Russia investigation as “bogus,” ignoring the fact that, among other things, Robert Mueller and multiple House and Senate committees have established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Donald Trump. This would also indicate that Barr is completely unconcerned about another propaganda or hacking campaign happening as we speak, despite repeated warnings from the FBI the U.S. intelligence agencies and Congress.
That just isn’t something the attorney general of the United States cares about. When asked if it was OK to solicit or accept foreign assistance in an election campaign, he even responded, Indeed, he even went so far as to answer, “It depends what kind of assistance.” He caught himself, so when he was asked the same question again he said, “No.” It’s a felony, after all. But I think it’s pretty clear that he believes when Trump asks for assistance from Russia, Ukraine and China — all of which we’ve seen him do publicly — it is just fine.
On the other hand, Barr has invented out of whole cloth a new concern that hostile governments will alter the election results by “manufacturing mail-in ballots,” citing zero actual evidence but rather his “common sense” as proof. That’s because there is no evidence. Many states provide no-excuse absentee ballots and five states have total vote by mail. Oregon, for instance, has done it since 1998, without any hint of such a problem.
Earlier in the hearing, Barr had made it clear that he sent federal troops into Portland because protesters were harming a federal building. When asked why he had backed the right of armed protesters who stormed the Michigan state capitol, some of whom threatened the governor with lynching and beheading, he claimed not to have been aware of that and mumbled something about defending religious freedom. He indicated that he’s only concerned with federal offenses.
Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., pointed out that Trump has suggested that no ballots should be counted after Election Day and asked Barr, “If the president asks you to intervene and try to stop states from counting legal ballots after Election Day, will you do the right thing and refuse?”
Barr responded, “I will follow the law.” He separately said he would “enforce” the law. So that means if a state has issued a ruling saying that votes cannot be counted if they were postmarked before Election Day but didn’t arrive until after that, he would be willing to intervene on behalf of the president to ensure those votes weren’t counted.
Anyone who lived through the Florida 2000 election debacle should know that this is not a matter for federal law enforcement. Elections are run by the states. If there’s a dispute it goes to the courts and in a worst-case scenario to the Congress. Barr has no authority to intervene at all in how states count and tabulate their votes, but judging from his recent behavior, I doubt that would stop him. With Barr, “follow the law,” seems to mean “do whatever benefits Donald Trump and hurts his enemies.”
When Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., asked Barr whether he had discussed the presidential campaign with Trump, the attorney general said he couldn’t talk about his private conversations but blithely admitted that they talk about the campaign in Cabinet meetings and said nobody should be surprised that the election comes up. Actually, they should be both surprised and alarmed. The AG is supposed to be the most removed from politics of all high-level administration officials and neither the president nor anyone else should not be talking to him about the campaign or the election. (You may recall the furious rending of garments on the right when Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton for 15 minutes in 2016. )
Perhaps most chilling was Barr’s answer to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who asked whether Barr himself would leave office on Jan. 20, 2021, if Trump loses the election but tries to remain in the White House. “Well, if the results are clear, I would leave office,” the attorney general said. He did not elaborate further, but considering that the president is already saying that mail-in voting will somehow “rig” the election, something Barr claims to believe is thoroughly possible, his unwillingness to simply say that he would leave office if Trump loses is more than a little bit disturbing.
When Nadler asked Barr whether he had ever discussed the presidential campaign with Trump he also asked whether they had discussed the “current or future deployment of federal law enforcement” within the context of Trump’s re-election campaign. Barr answered, “I’m not going to get into my discussions with the president.”
It would have been completely acceptable for him to simply say no to such an explosive suggestion. You have to wonder why he didn’t.
From as long as I have been watching — from the administrations of Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush — the GOP’s posture toward the rule of law is that rules apply primarily to their enemies. For their friends, rules are more like guidelines, and those are movable. Here’s how they define law and order down:
Find the line.
Step over it.
Dare someone to push you back .
No pushback? New line.
Repeat.
Step over it
Strategywise, Republicans love a twofer. In Portland, Ore., a federal magistrate is simultaneously violating the rights of the administration’s enemies while violating the Constitution, say constitutional lawyers consulted by ProPublica. A federal magistrate is barring some charged protesters from participating in further demonstrations:
“Defendant may not attend any other protests, rallies, assemblies or public gathering in the state of Oregon,” states one “Order Setting Conditions of Release” for an accused protester, alongside other conditions such as appearing for court dates. The orders are signed by federal magistrate judges.
For other defendants, the restricted area is limited to Portland, where clashes between protesters and federal troops have grown increasingly violent in recent weeks. In at least two cases, there are no geographic restrictions; one release document instructs, “Do not participate in any protests, demonstrations, rallies, assemblies while this case is pending.”
Protesters felt pressured to agree to those terms to gain release from jail.
“Those terms were given to me after being in a holding cell after 14 hours,” Bailey Dreibelbis, who was charged July 24 with “failing to obey a lawful order,” told ProPublica. “It was pretty cut-and-dried, just, ‘These are your conditions for [getting out] of here.’
“If I didn’t take it, I would still be in holding. It wasn’t really an option, in my eyes.”
But such a restriction is overly broad and likely not “constitutionally defensible,” Jameel Jaffer of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute tells ProPublica.
Oregon officials blasted the White House after federal agents arrested protesters in Portland. Protesters were placed into unmarked vans without explanation. https://t.co/HcpPgakJpipic.twitter.com/wh5qLe7o5u
Many protesters have been accused of minor offenses under Title 40, Section 1315 of the U.S. Code empowering the Secretary of Homeland Security to “protect the buildings, grounds, and property” of the federal government and “persons on the property.” This is the same law that allows the acting president to justify a show of force in deploying federal officers to Portland, ProPublica reports. “But the use of that same law to file criminal charges appears to be novel.”
Several protesters who were let go on July 23 had bans against demonstrating added by hand on their release documents by Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta, who signed off on them, a review by ProPublica found. Acosta’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.
For those released on July 24, the restriction was added to the original typed document, also signed by Acosta. One protester arrested and released earlier in the month had his conditions of release modified at his arraignment on July 24. The modified order, signed by Acosta, added a protest ban not previously included.
The New York Times reports that “top federal law enforcement officials” have been “gung-ho” to respond to protests against police violence. The FBI’s deputy director in a June 2 memo called not only for investigation of “violent protesters, instigators” and “inciters,” but suggested the Hobbes Act for prosecuting racketeering in labor groups might come into play. Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday called the Portland protests in fact “an assault on the government of the United States.”
The deployment has not only outraged local officials who have asked federal agents to leave, but it has also raised questions about the authority that federal officers are operating under.
So now, Donald Trump’s third-world tactic of abducting people he brands terrorists has been picked up by the New York Police Department. A bystander shot the video below at a New York City Black Lives Matter protest on Tuesday.
First it was Portland. Now it’s New Yorkers that are being abducted by unidentified officers and thrown in unmarked vans.
A tweet related to the Abolition Park protest group early this morning suggests the woman abducted by un-uniformed, un-badged men in an unmarked van has been released. Several “officers” dragged the woman into the van while others wearing T-shirts and shorts, hands on their guns, kept other protesters at bay. Bicycle officers swarmed around the van to protect the snatch operation.
Police released a statement on the abduction via Twitter:
“In regard to a video on social media that took place at 2 Ave & 25 St, a woman taken into custody in an unmarked van was wanted for damaging police cameras during 5 separate criminal incidents in & around City Hall Park,” an NYPD News tweet read. “The arresting officers were assaulted with rocks & bottles.”
Good luck finding evidence of rocks and bottles in the video.
After the abduction, massing police boxed protesters into Washington Square Park, according to an Abolition Park video posted to Instagram.
The New York Post reported after her release that Nikki Stone, 18, was charged with several counts of “graffiti and criminal mischief” and other vandalism-related charges.
Unmarked vans. Unidentified cops. Hands on guns. Massed police. Over graffiti. Tear gas and impact munitions in Portland. How great is Trump’s America?
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like. Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
Trump got a new campaign manager and he and Kellyanne Conway seemed to be convinced that Trump could go back to the podium and deliver daily commentary on the Coronavirus that would turn his numbers around.
How’s that working out?
"They think it is extremely successful, the hydroxychloroquine, coupled with the zinc … it's safe" — Trump is back to using the White House briefing to push unproven, potentially deadly coronavirus miracle cures pic.twitter.com/SfKWiDvvl8
As you can see at the end of this clip, the President called on me and I yielded to my colleague @kaitlancollins for about *three seconds* for her follow-up q – which prompted the President walked off in apparaent protest of our solidarity….. https://t.co/a0763dMetW
I don’t know what this means for a potential COVID vaccine but it’s disturbing to see so many people believing unscientific nonsense. It’s not entirely the right wingers but they’re the ones who are getting a lot stupider over time. In fact, Democrats are starting to go the other way.
A man seen in videos smashing the windows of an auto parts store in Minneapolis during protests over the death of George Floyd is suspected of being a white supremacist trying to incite racial violence, The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported Tuesday.
The man was seen in videos wearing all black and carrying a black umbrella as he smashed windows with a sledgehammer during protests two days after the death of Floyd, an unarmed Black man who was killed in Minneapolis police custody on May 25.
Police say prior to that, the man spray-painted “free shit for everyone zone” on the double front doors of the Auto Zone in question.
The man is a suspected member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang, as well as the the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, according to the Star Tribune.
“This was the first fire that set off a string of fires and looting throughout the precinct and the rest of the city,” police said in a warrant affidavit this week. “Until the actions of the person your affiant has been calling ‘Umbrella man,’ the protests had been relatively peaceful. The actions of this person created an atmosphere of hostility and tension. Your affiant believes that this individual’s sole aim was to incite violence.”
Police have reportedly identified the man through an email tip, but he has not yet been charged with any crimes and the Star Tribune is not naming him.
I have no doubt that there’s a lot of this. And there are also groups like the Boogaloo Bois and others fomenting violence for their own reasons.
This is one reason why the fatuous hand-wringing over violence in Portland is so ridiculous. The paramilitaries are doing the agitators job for them.
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 28, 2020
I think a lot of us feel this. And those who are older feel it very acutely. There’s nothing more valuable than time and being locked down is robbing a whole lot of them of precious moments they can’t get back.
A lot of people seem to think it’s just fine to tell older people, people who are sick or have underlying conditions that make them vulnerable, that they need to lock themselves in their houses for the foreseeable future and then everyone else should be able to go out and live normally if they just stay away from these people. That’s consigning all those people to a much longer period of painful isolation and everyone else to a longer period of being unable to see their loved ones.
If everyone observed the mask wearing and social distancing rules, the period of isolation would be much shorter for everyone because the virus will be contained as it is in civilized countries right now.
There’s never been a better example of how collective action for the greater good can work for everyone. And I suspect it’s American radical individualism, along with government malfeasance, that’s made the US response to the pandemic the worst in the developed world.
At least 17 anesthesiologist residents and a fellow at one of the premier university hospital systems in Florida contracted COVID-19 earlier this month after attending a private party together, according to hospital insiders and internal documents.
The outbreak at University of Florida Health occurred after a party at a private home, according to people familiar with the situation. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they said UF Health prohibits employees from speaking to reporters without authorization.
The cases included 14 junior residents, two senior residents, a fellow and an administrative employee, the email said, noting that it was providing the “latest data from yesterday.” It said the anesthesiology department “wishes them well and a speedy return to good health.” It was unclear whether or when the employees were returning to work with patients.
The UF Health outbreak illustrates the difficulties of stemming the spread of the pandemic, when even trained health care professionals can be sickened from a private party in Florida — one of the nation’s hot spots for the virus — after explicit warnings about the risks from social gatherings.
A copy of Morey’s email was obtained byFresh Take Florida, a news service operated by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.
In response to questions, UF Health’s chief communications officer, Melanie Fridl Ross, said in a statement: “UF Health educates its faculty, staff and students on best practices to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 on and off-duty. Our goal is to minimize the spread of the illness on our campus and in our community, recognizing that it’s impossible to prevent all cases given the way pandemics naturally work.”
In his email, Morey also reminded hospital employees not to come to work sick and to wash their hands frequently. The message did not mention a party or say anything about social gatherings, such as parties. Morey did not respond to emails and a voice message left at his office over days.
They just had to party, I guess.
It isn’t just young residents. Read this extremely well-reported piece in Mother Jones about a highly respected Stanford scientist:
Stanford University scientist John Ioannidis has declared in study after study that the coronavirus is not that big of a threat, emboldening opponents of economic shutdowns — and infuriating critics who see fundamental errors in his work.
But even before the epidemiologist had any of that data in hand, he and an elite group of scientists tried to convince President Donald Trump that locking down the country would be the real danger.
In late March, as COVID-19 cases overran hospitals overseas, Ioannidis tried to organize a meeting at the White House where he and a small band of colleagues would caution the president against “shutting down the country for [a] very long time and jeopardizing so many lives in doing this,” according to a statement Ioannidis submitted on the group’s behalf. Their goal, the statement said, was “to both save more lives and avoid serious damage to the US economy using the most reliable data.”
Although the meeting did not happen, Ioannidis believed their message had reached the right people. Within a day of him sending it to the White House, Trump announced that he wanted the country reopened by Easter. “I think our ideas have inflitrated [sic] the White House regardless,” Ioannidis told his collaborators on March 28, in one of dozens of emails that BuzzFeed News obtained through public records requests.
Read the whole thing. Scientists disagree and that’s to be expected. But there’s a lot more to this than that and it’s highly disturbing.:
And the group’s attempt to convey these preliminary ideas directly to the White House is highly unusual for scientists, said Sheila Jasanoff, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who studies the role of science in politics.
“It creates the impression that the work that the scientists are intending to do will be shaped by a political purpose, maybe even before they have started doing the work,” Jasanoff said. Their decision to push an untested theory to influence federal policy, she added, went “against the ethos of science.”
A Houston doctor who praises hydroxychloroquine and says that face masks aren’t necessary to stop transmission of the highly contagious coronavirus has become a star on the right-wing internet, garnering tens of millions of views on Facebook on Monday alone. Donald Trump Jr. declared the video of Stella Immanuel a “must watch,” while Donald Trump himself retweeted the video.
Before Trump and his supporters embrace Immanuel’s medical expertise, though, they should consider other medical claims Immanuel has made—including those about alien DNA and the physical effects of having sex with witches and demons in your dreams.
Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.
She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.
Immanuel gave her viral speech on the steps of the Supreme Court at the “White Coat Summit,” a gathering of a handful of doctors who call themselves America’s Frontline Doctors and dispute the medical consensus on the novel coronavirus. The event was organized by the right-wing group Tea Party Patriots, which is backed by wealthy Republican donors.
In her speech, Immanuel alleges that she has successfully treated hundreds of patients with hydroxychloroquine, a controversial treatment Trump has promoted and says he has taken himself. Studies have failed to find proof that the drug has any benefit in treating COVID-19, and the Food and Drug Administration in June revoked its emergency authorization to use it to treat the deadly virus, saying it hadn’t demonstrated any effect on patients’ mortality prospects.
“Nobody needs to get sick,” Immanuel said. “This virus has a cure.”
Immanuel said in her speech that the supposed potency of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment means that protective face masks aren’t necessary, claiming that she and her staff had avoided contracting COVID-19 despite wearing medical masks instead of the more secure N95 masks.
“Hello, you don’t need a mask. There is a cure,” Immanuel said.
Toward the end of Immanuel’s speech, the event’s organizer and other participants can be seen trying to get her away from the microphone. But footage of the speech captured by Breitbart was a hit online, becoming a top video on Facebook and amassing roughly 13 million views—significantly more than “Plandemic,” another coronavirus disinformation video that became a viral hit online in May, when it amassed roughly 8 million Facebook views.
“Hydroxychloroquine” trended on Twitter, as Immanuel’s video was embraced by the Trumps, conservative student group Turning Point USA, and pro-Trump personalities like Diamond & Silk. But both Facebook and Twitter eventually deleted videos of Immanuel’s speech from their sites, citing rules against COVID-19 disinformation. The deletions set off yet another round of complaints by conservatives of bias at the social-media platforms.
Immanuel responded in her own way, declaring that Jesus Christ would destroy Facebook’s servers if her videos weren’t restored to the platform.
“Hello Facebook put back my profile page and videos up or your computers with start crashing till you do,” she tweeted. “You are not bigger that God. I promise you. If my page is not back up face book will be down in Jesus name.”
Immanuel is a registered physician in Texas, according to a Texas Medical Board database, and operates a medical clinic out of a strip mall next to her church, Firepower Ministries.
Immanuel was born in Cameroon and received her medical degree in Nigeria. In a GoFundMe legal defense fund, which swelled from just $90 to $1,616 hours after her speech, Immanuel claims without offering any proof that members of a Houston networking group for women physicians are scheming to take her medical license away over her support for hydroxychloroquine.
It’s not clear whether anyone is actually trying to take Immanuel’s license. But many of her earlier medical claims are definitely ludicrous.
Apparently, she believes that people are infected with alien DNA and that many gynecological problems are caused by having sex with demons. Among other things, all just a batshit crazy.
Immanuel has seized on her newfound celebrity, tweeting a video demanding that CNN hosts and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci give her jars of their urine so she can test if they’re secretly taking hydroxychloroquine even as they caution against its use.
“I double dog dare y’all give me a urine sample,” Immanuel tweeted in her challenge.
The president tweeted out this lunacy last night. Trump Jr was even suspended for tweeting it out. And now The Death Cult is embracing this.
It’s all a liberal plot to deny the Hydroxy cure and endometriosis caused by demon sex.
