Month: July 2021

We have another virus in this country. And it causes right wing brain rot:

A man apparently infuriated over the government’s advice to get vaccinated against COVID-19 sent numerous violent emails to U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci, threatening to—among other things—break every bone in his “disgusting elf skull” and sew his scalp onto a rat, while warning that the famed public health researcher would soon be “hunted, tortured, beaten, [and] enslaved,” according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday in Maryland federal court. Thomas Patrick Connally, Jr., 56, now faces charges of making threats against a federal official and interstate communications containing a threat to harm, both of which are felonies.

In addition to allegedly bombarding Fauci with unhinged threats, calling him “a sickening, compromised satanic freemason criminal,” a “disgusting piece of elf garbage,” and that his wife and daughters would each be shot in “their disgusting pig snouts while you watch,” Connally, described in the complaint as a technical writer, also menaced NIH Director Francis Collins multiple times via Collins’ official government email account, say prosecutors. “Drop the ‘mandatory vaccine’ talk, maggot, or you’re getting 6 mandatory shots in your worthless satanist faggot skull,” Connally allegedly wrote to Collins on April 24. “You and your buddies Gates and Soros too, you sick little fuck. I’ll smash every tooth out of your faggot skull.” Connally does not have a lawyer listed in court records, and was unable to be reached for comment.

How about this?

Anyway, very cool and good that Tucker Carlson was just openly mocking Michael Fanone's PTSD from being beaten to near-death.https://t.co/tckjY0BC2t

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) July 28, 2021

They’re getting worse.

Speaking of accountability, Rep. Mo Brooks (R) of Alabama faces a lawsuit over his speech at the Trump rally ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection. He has tried to argue that the Department of Justice must handle his defense.

"The record indicates that Brooks’s appearance at the January 6 rally was campaign activity, and it is no part of the business of the United States to pick sides among candidates in federal elections," the new DOJ filing says.

— Carrie Johnson (@johnson_carrie) July 28, 2021

Justice doesn't resolve the question of whether Brooks incited the crowd that day but points out that "Under District of Columbia law, an employee who 'maliciously act[s] contrary to [his] employer’s interest' acts 'outside the scope of [his] employment.'"

— Carrie Johnson (@johnson_carrie) July 28, 2021

Marcy Wheeler explains:

Last night, DOJ refused to certify that Mo Brooks’ actions laid out in a lawsuit by Eric Swalwell were done in the course of his employment as a Congressman. To understand why, and why Brooks may have given DOJ an easy way to prosecute him in conjunction with January 6, you have to look at the sworn declaration Brooks submitted in support of a claim that his call on Trump rally attendees to “kick ass” was part of his duty as a Congressperson.

Broadly, the Swalwell lawsuit accuses Brooks of conspiring with Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr, and Rudy Giuliani to violate his civil rights by trying to prevent him from performing his official duties. One of the descriptions of the conspiracy is:

169. As described more fully in this Complaint, the Defendants, by force, intimidation, or threat, agreed and conspired among themselves and with others to prevent members of Congress, including the Plaintiff, and Vice President Mike Pence from counting the Electoral College Votes and certifying President Biden and Vice President Harris as the winners of the 2020 presidential election.

It alleges Brooks committed a number of overt acts, which include a series of Tweets that mirror and in one case anticipate the public claims the other alleged co-conspirators made, as well as his speech at the January 6 Trump rally where he incited listeners to “kick ass” to save the Republic.

Mo Brooks addressed the large crowd at the January 6 rally. He said “America is at risk unlike it has been in decades, and perhaps centuries.” He told the crowd to start “kicking ass,” and he spoke with reverence, at a purportedly peaceful demonstration, of how “our ancestors sacrificed their blood, sweat, their tears, their fortunes, and sometimes their lives,” before shouting at the crowd “Are you willing to do the same?!” Brooks intended these words as a threat of violence or intimidation to block the certification vote from even occurring and/or to coerce members of Congress to disregard the results of the election.

The DOJ is not buying Brooks’ argument that he was just doing his job. Nope. Wheeler notes that Brooks’ “confession that he wrote the speech in his office, is also a sworn declaration that he violated campaign finance laws by using his office for campaign activities.”

Wheeler concludes:

DOJ’s declaration is not (just) an attempt to create space — by distinguishing campaign activities from official duties — between this and DOJ’s decision to substitute for Trump in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit. It is an effort to preserve the principle that not just Congresspeople, but all Federal employees, may be charged and convicted of a conspiracy to obstruct the vote count, particularly for actions taken as part of campaign activities.

Brooks had best activate his GoFundMe page.

Moralist teetotalers are often the worst closet drunks, a therapist friend once said. The preacher railing against immorality on Sunday is found in a motel with a prostitute, if not an underage girl. Like so much else of the right’s posturing, behaviors they condemn the loudest in public they do themselves in secret. Those who shed shame as weakness become even bolder.

Obeying the law, telling the truth, acting with integrity and with decency. All these the right demands of others but not of its favorites. Nor of its elected leaders. Accountability, too, is for others, but not for them.

Still, a modicum of accountability began unfolding on Tuesday when, over Republican objections, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection held its inaugural hearing. No one lit a torch, but the Accountability Games had begun.

Republican leaders who rejected a bipartisan panel declared the hearing none of them admitted watching a “sham” and a “political charade.”

Led by Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, their No. 3, they held a press conference intended to deflect attention from testimony by four police officers injured during the attack on the Capitol. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was really to blame for the Capitol breach, Stefanik insisted, and “clearly bears responsibility for not securing the US Capitol on Jan 6th – But the drooling media is too petrified to ask.” *

Inside the chamber, Officer Daniel Hodges (seen in videos pinned in a doorway and screaming in pain) was the first among the witnesses to label the mob terrorists. He used the term consistently.

Officer Hodges repeatedly refers to the pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol as "terrorists." pic.twitter.com/RNwmQbL0gW

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) July 27, 2021

The four officers demanded that the panel get to the truth of what happened that day. They wanted to know more about Donald Trump’s role in sending the mob to the Capitol steps (Washington Post):

“I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them, and too many in this room . . . are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist or hell actually wasn’t that bad,” said D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack and concussion from being beaten and hit with a stun gun by rioters, while furiously slamming his fist on the dais. “The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful.”

Other officers made clear they hold Trump partially responsible for the attack and resent what they described as his coddling of the rioters.

“To me, it’s insulting, just demoralizing because of everything that we did to prevent everyone in the Capitol from getting hurt,” said Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell. “And what he was doing, instead of sending the military, instead of sending the support or telling his people, his supporters, to stop this nonsense, he begged them to continue fighting.”

U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn summed up their hopes for the investigation:

I echo the sentiments of all of the other Officers sitting here. I use an analogy to describe what I want is a hitman. If a hitman is hired and he kills somebody, hitman goes to jail, but not only does the hitman go to jail, but the person who hired them does. There was an attack carried out on January 6th, and a hitman sent them. I want you to get to the bottom of that.

"If a hitman is hired, and he kills somebody, the hitman goes to the jail. But not only does the hitman go to jail, but the person who hired him does," Officer Dunn says.

"There was an attack carried out on Jan. 6th and a hitman sent them." pic.twitter.com/LHE8N7w4Gl

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 27, 2021

Republican opposition to this investigation left them with no Trump defenders in the room, only Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) Meaning, for the first time since Democrats took back control of the House, Slate’s Jeremy Stahl observed, “There was no deranged counternarrative being interjected every five minutes.” Stahl continued, “I can honestly say that this is the first and only time I can remember witnessing a hearing into misconduct perpetrated by Trump and his minions that maintained its presence in objective reality the whole time.” Only because professional disrupters like Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio had written themselves out of the process.

The only sideshows yesterday were Stefanik’s and the aborted stunt outside the Department of Justice by Republican Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and several others.

Expect coming distractions by Trump, Republican officials, and Trumpists eager to avoid queries into their conduct leading up to the Jan. 6th insurrection and on the day. Jordan Tuesday night was not eager to discuss his even with Fox News:

Siri: Show me an evasive response to a straightforward question. https://t.co/gpSpVTMfyE

— Kevin M. Levin–Historian, Teacher, Public Speaker (@KevinLevin) July 27, 2021

For witnesses, there will be intimidation and threats. Officer Fanone received one by phone even as he gave his testimony.

Holy shit!

Michael Fanone shared with CNN a deranged voice mail that he received during his testimony today.

"You’re a punk f*ggot, you’re a lying fuck! … too bad they didn’t beat the shit out of you more. You’re a piece of shit!"

This is demented and despicable! pic.twitter.com/Pb7mDpnAps

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) July 28, 2021

Of all the witnesses, Fanone had insisted most he was uninterested in politics and party bickering. By Tuesday evening, his patience had worn thin.

Fanone told CNN’s Don Lemon, “This is what happens to people who tell the truth in Trump’s America.”

*To really honor her Leader-in-Exile, Stefanik should have angrily contested accounts of the Trump mob size. Officer Daniel Hodges, citing Washington Post and Carnegie Mellon University estimates, put the number of terrorists at 9,400. The terrorists themselves and their leader claimed two orders of magnitude higher.

Being a contrarian is not enjoyable but sometimes it is unavoidable and necessary. This is one of those times, unfortunately.

I think everyone is looking at the makeup of this Commission exactly backwards. I’ll start with a brief analogy:

If this were an investigation of the Beer Hall Putsch, would it make sense to include “moderate” members of the Nazi party or sympathizers in the commission investigating it? Of course not. Surely there were some party members and wannabes who were appalled with Hitler’s tactics that day, but you’d have to be insane to consider them moderates who could be trusted to be evenhanded in an inquiry and actually hold Nazi party members, including Hitler, fully accountable.*

Nearly a hundred years later, a Republican instigated a terrorist attack on the US Capitol. Other Republicans supported and helped organize it. Republicans in the US Government and possibly in the police force aided and abetted it. And Republicans implemented the terrorist attack. And Republicans in the military delayed responding to the violence.

Since this was clearly a Republican operation (that also included other white nationalist groups that are Republican-adjacent), no Republican can be trusted to investigate the party’s actions in a fair way even if they disagreed with it. Stated plainly, no Republican should hold a spot on the Jan 6 Commission.

That they are on this commission rests on the baseless assumption that it makes sense to reach out to moderate, reasonable members of the modern Republican party. But there are no reasonable Republicans anymore. The two GOP members of the Committee are right wing extremists who voted the Trump agenda well over 90% of the time. In other words, their disagreements with Trump are merely disagreements over how to implement authoritarianism in the United States, not whether. And who will be in power.

Of course, I fully understand the tactical thinking behind having the Republicans on the Commission. But I think it is terrible tactical thinking and also morally bankrupt.

Why is it bad tactically? Three reasons immediately come to mind. No one should be surprised if at least one of these wingnuts resigned in protest over shock, shock! “the Commission’s leftist agenda.” And there’s another problem with this tactic: tolerance of these two members of a criminal party suggests that somehow we can transform that group of thugs into reasoned, thoughtful colleagues in small-d democratic governance. That, history proves, is a delusion when dealing with any authoritarian party. Third, providing them space on this Commission normalizes not Republicanism, that’s long dead, but modern Republicanism, which merely quibbles with the methods of Trumpism, not its goals.

As for the moral dimension: the world has seen over and again what horrors the authoritarian far right is capable of. It is simply inexcusable to consciously provide them another sounding board for their madness.

If we must continue to have Republicans on the Commission, then I see no reason to trust them with starring roles in the proceedings — they should be ignored. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument only, that they are capable of, some day, behaving like Americans. Then let them watch how actual Americans, like Schiff and Raskin, behave — and learn how it’s done. But as long as they are comfortable remaining Republicans, they are comfortable being members of the same party that instigated and perpetrated this awful attack. No matter what they say, they cannot be trusted to take this investigation seriously. **

I know this is a contrarian view and I know it will not be a popular one, not even among my most liberal/progressive friends. But I think we minimize the danger of these so-called “moderate” Republicans at our peril. They are authoritarian extremists and they cannot be trusted.

*In fact, at Hitler’s trial for the putsch, “The lay judges were fanatically pro-Nazi and had to be dissuaded by the presiding Judge, Georg Neithardt, from acquitting Hitler.[39] Hitler and Hess were both sentenced to five years in Festungshaft (‘fortress confinement’) for treason. Festungshaft was the mildest of the three types of jail sentence available in German law at the time…This was the customary sentence for those whom the judge believed to have had honourable but misguided motives… Hitler served only a little over eight months of this sentence before his early release for good behaviour.” Had Nazi sympathizers not been his judges, and Hitler actually received the punishment he deserved…

** I am, as always, happy to be proven wrong. If these Republicans remain on the Commission, if the final report is thorough and honest (meaning it investigates and names high Republicans in government other than Trump that participated in coordination, planning, and support), and if they sign it without qualifications, I’d be delighted to change my tune.

He’s following in his Dear Leader’s footsteps. He’s killing people:

Hours before federal officials on Tuesday issued new mask guidance to combat the surge of the Delta coronavirus variant across America, and even as his state’s hospitals were veering toward disaster, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis quietly met with anti-maskers.

Among the attendees at the Monday night meeting behind closed doors was at least one L.A.-based doctor who embraced conspiracist rhetoric about the same vaccines DeSantis has purported to champion as his only strategy to fight COVID-19.ADVERTISING

The event, held at the state Capitol in Tallahassee, principally featured various COVID-19 masking skeptics. They included a Stanford professor with a history of opposing lockdowns, and a Tallahassee private school student who was “very concerned about masks being required this year.”

Still, the standout may have been Mark McDonald, a Los Angeles clinical psychiatrist.

In an email, McDonald confirmed to The Daily Beast that the various speakers provided their thoughts on why “mandating masks for children in schools [is] not only unnecessary and unsupported by scientific evidence, but also harmful to children physically and psychologically.”

According to a transcript of the Monday event obtained by The Daily Beast, McDonald slammed mask-mandates in general during the panel discussion, calling his home state of California a “medical apartheid state” because of new indoor mask guidelines to curb the surge of cases.

But when asked for comment on his views, McDonald also veered into downright vaccine skepticism.

“There is no medical rationale for vaccinating children,” he wrote in an email to The Daily Beast in which he also suggested both masks and vaccines “don’t work.”ADVERTISING

This despite reams of data about vaccines and mask-use that say otherwise, at least for children 12 and older—the only groups for whom the shots have been authorized in the United States so far.

DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about McDonald’s vaccine claims. When asked for further comment, McDonald told The Daily Beast, “I am not ‘anti-vaccine’ in any sense.”

“My position is that this particular experimental vaccine, which has not received FDA approval due to absence of adequate safety testing for all populations, in particular for children, cannot be ethically offered to anyone under age 18,” he added. “The weighing of risks and benefits in other populations, such as infirm or elderly, is an entirely different calculation.”

Actual infectious-disease experts—and a slew of studies—say otheriwse. And the doctor’s social-media posts paint a picture of a coronavirus skeptic feeding on a diet of far-right outlets.

In several posts on Facebook, McDonald asks why the government was pushing “unapproved experimental vaccines” on children, refers to the deadly pandemic as the “Wuhan virus,” and insists masking minors is “child abuse.”

On his Linkedin profile, McDonald also noted he joined America’s Frontline Doctors—a pro-Trump medical group notorious for featuring a COVID-19 truther who believes in the medical dangers of demon sperm—in their November 2020 summit to discuss the “delusional psychosis” around the deadly pandemic. During the meeting, McDonald also stressed that healthy Americans do not need to mask and spoke out against the irrational fear of the virus that has now killed 600,000 Americans.

“Yesterday just a statistic. Today major news. The experimental vaccines are INEFFECTIVE against the currently circulating non-deadly viral strains,” McDonald wrote in a July 19 Facebook post alongside an Epoch Times article. “So why are we still ordering everyone to get shots, rather than encourage natural immunity?”

In fact, all strains of the coronavirus are deadly, and the vaccines have proven to be effective against the Delta variant, even as there have been some signs of potentially reduced efficacy.

Dr. Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and virologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, stressed in an interview that “it’s important to protect children against COVID-19” with mask use and vaccines when applicable.

“A number of anti-vaccine groups try to claim, based on death rates, that COVID-19 is not important amongst children,” Hotez told The Daily Beast. “The reason that is not true is children can still get very sick and it can cause significant pulmonary, cardiovascular, and neurological effects. COVID-19 can also cause significant rates of hospitalizations in young people.”

Hotez added there was a significant amount of long COVID—defined as “new or ongoing symptoms” that last for several weeks or months—in younger children.

“This idea that young people don’t have to be protected or masked is not what the emerging literature says,” Hotez added, noting that studies about COVID-19 also find that vaccinations are important to curb the spread of the virus, regardless of age.

Indeed, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended last month that all children older than the age of 2 should wear masks during the upcoming school year, regardless of their vaccination status. The advisory, the leading organization of pediatrics stated, was the result of so many children not yet being eligible for the vaccination—and because masks have been proven to reduce coronavirus transmission.

During the Monday meeting in Florida, first reported by Politico, DeSantis suggested he would call a special session of the state legislature if federal or local authorities tried to impose a mask mandate affecting public-school kids as the academic year nears.

It is no secret that the Republican—who has made waves since the start of the pandemic for his resistance to following the science—opposes COVID-19 mandates of all kinds. But the roundtable with a crowd that included at least one vaccine skeptic came at an alarming time for the Sunshine State and the country.

The Florida Department of Health reported on Monday that the state’s skyrocketing caseload has tripled in the last two weeks, mostly due to the highly transmissible Delta variant. According to the CDC, every county in the state has “high” levels of COVID-19 transmission, or a test positivity rate of 10 percent or higher in the last week. Florida has accounted for as many as a fifth of new COVID-19 cases in America in recent days, as the AP reported.

The state’s rise in hospitalizations, cases, and deaths—which are almost exclusively hitting unvaccinated people—mirrors the surge in states across the country. But in Florida, hospitals are increasingly flooded with unvaccinated sick people, and some of the workers struggling to keep them alive can’t help but seethe at their governor.

An emergency room nurse at John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Atlantis, a city in Palm Beach County, said co-workers were picking up extra shifts to help cover the flood of patients with COVID-19 symptoms.

“The patients in our [intensive care unit] are 100 percent unvaccinated,” the nurse, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation, told The Daily Beast. “I keep hearing about people who don’t want the vaccine for no good reason. They are at restaurants and the bars, but they don’t wear masks.”

DeSantis, the nurse said, shoulders some of the blame. “Our governor is more concerned with opening everything and taking away mask mandates,” the nurse said. “I haven’t heard anything this time around about putting mandates back in place.”

This is really happening:

In the past week, entire families have come in with COVID-19-like symptoms, the JFK Medical Center nurse added.

“I’ve had families of three, four, and five,” the nurse said. “The family of five was unvaccinated. I ask the ones with COVID symptoms if they have been vaccinated. A majority of them are telling me no.”

A West Boca Medical Center intensive care nurse, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the unit had zero patients with COVID-19 for a few weeks. “It was the longest run we had,” the West Boca nurse said. “In as little as a week, we are now at eight COVID patients in a 16-bed unit, and are converting back to a strictly COVID ICU.”

According to the nurse, one intensive care patient in his 40s relayed that he was not vaccinated because he didn’t think the virus would affect him at his age and was unsure about the side effects. “He believed this is all being blown out of proportion and [thought] he will be fine and out of the hospital in a few days,” the West Boca nurse said. “He is now on a ventilator, on maximum life support, on a prone bed, and fighting for his life.”

Spokespersons for John F. Kennedy and West Boca did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

With the hospital system struggling in the Sunshine State, Monday’s COVID roundtable invited fresh criticism of DeSantis for putting politics over science.

He’s running. Therefore, he can’t risk upsetting the base with the truth:

During the event, he repeated the Republican talking point that Americans should have the personal freedom to decide whether to wear a face-covering or not. He also renewed his commitment to fighting against mask mandates, which he has essentially banned across Florida over the past year by rendering them unenforceable by local governments.

“Our view is that this should absolutely not be imposed. It should not be mandated,” DeSantis said Monday. “And I know our Legislature feels strongly about it, such that if, if you started to see a push from the feds or some of these local school districts, I know they’re interested in coming in, even in a special session, to be able to provide protections for parents and kids who just want to breathe freely and don’t want to be suffering under these masks during the school year.”

But the deadly combo of unvaccinated people and the Delta variant led the CDC to backpedal—again—on its guidance for mask use on Tuesday. The agency called for all people in K-12 schools to wear a mask, and asked that some Americans—even vaccinated ones—wear masks indoors in certain cases.

In an interview, Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a specialist in infectious diseases, stressed that there is no evidence “that vaccinated individuals are driving these cases.” He also said that in hot spots like Florida, “masks are a critical component” to making sure the local healthcare system does not get overrun with cases.

The commitment to opposing federal health officials has also become a focal point of DeSantis’ emerging re-election campaign. Last month, he sued—and eventually won—a lawsuit against the CDC for moving to implement safety restrictions on cruise ships. And last week, his campaign began to sell drink koozies and shirts that say “Don’t Fauci My Florida” in a direct hit against the nation’s leading infectious disease expert.

​​“How the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on?” one koozie says.

They know what their people care about. It’s isn’t human life.

I feel this…

As coronavirus cases resurge across the country, many inoculated Americans are losing patience with vaccine holdouts who, they say, are neglecting a civic duty or clinging to conspiracy theories and misinformation even as new patients arrive in emergency rooms and the nation renews mask advisories.

The country seemed to be exiting the pandemic; barely a month ago, a sense of celebration was palpable. Now many of the vaccinated fear for their unvaccinated children and worry that they are at risk themselves for breakthrough infections. Rising case rates are upending plans for school and workplace reopenings, and threatening another wave of infections that may overwhelm hospitals in many communities.

“It’s like the sun has come up in the morning and everyone is arguing about it,” said Jim Taylor, 66, a retired civil servant in Baton Rouge, La., a state in which fewer than half of adults are fully vaccinated.

“The virus is here and it’s killing people, and we have a time-tested way to stop it — and we won’t do it. It’s an outrage.”

The rising sentiment is contributing to support for more coercive measures. Scientists, business leaders and government officials are calling for vaccine mandates — if not by the federal government, then by local jurisdictions, schools, employers and businesses.

“I’ve become angrier as time has gone on,” said Doug Robertson, 39, a teacher who lives outside Portland, Ore., and has three children too young to be vaccinated, including a toddler with a serious health condition.

“Now there is a vaccine and a light at the end of the tunnel, and some people are choosing not to walk toward it,” he said. “You are making it darker for my family and others like mine by making that choice.”

It goes on. And it also says, as usual, that we need to be empathetic towards these people and understand that they have issues and try to help them understand that it might be better if they don’t catch the virus and give it to other people because it’s deadly. I might have thought that 630,000 dead American bodies would be enough but apparently not.

So, I’ll keep my feelings to myself. It’s not fair of me to resent people for being criminally irresponsible.

Adam Kinzinger speaks for a lot of Americans here:

Kinzinger, choking up, concludes by telling the officers, "we thank you for holding that line." pic.twitter.com/rTwq1CgBYA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 27, 2021

I don’t even want to think about what this hearing would have been like if Jim Jordan and the others were on this panel, interrupting, yelling, making jokes and otherwise turning this into a circus. Pelosi did the right thing.

He could have led. Instead he followed. And it’s not the first time. He follows the wingnut zeitgeist. Sometimes he agrees with it, often he doesn’t understand it, but it’s his only political guidance. Here you see the consequences:

In the final months of Donald Trump’s term in office, several of the then-president’s top advisers were monitoring a growing concern: that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, particularly among Republicans and Trump supporters, was going to pose a major problem as the United States embarked on its mission to vaccinate millions.

According to three people familiar with the matter, then-President Trump was repeatedly warned by some of his closest advisers and administration officials about this MAGA-specific issue during his closing weeks as leader of the free world. But in the two months since President Joe Biden took over at the White House, polls show that aversion to the new coronavirus vaccines remains markedly higher among Trump fans and GOP voters than it is among liberals and Biden supporters. That reality has stoked grave concern among public health officials and experts, and has left some of the ex-president’s friends and allies frustrated over the fact that Trump, from his new home in Florida, isn’t doing more to reach his base and combat the problem.

“I have practically begged him to get out there constantly [during his post-presidency] and make videos calling on his supporters who are hesitant to get their shots,” one person close to Trump said. “Last time I checked in, I hadn’t heard of any positive movement in that direction.”

In a small number of public appearances and TV interviews lately, the former president has encouraged—at times as mere asides—his true believers to get vaccinated, but has yet to embark on anything close to a vigorous campaign to leverage his sizable megaphone on the subject. Further, it was not publicly revealed he and then-first lady Melania Trump had been vaccinated until nearly a month and a half after he was no longer president.

Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign adviser who served as the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, told The Daily Beast that in September, shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer and departed the administration, he too talked to the president about the anti-vaccine sentiment rapidly emerging among the MAGA faithful.

“Donald Trump and I had a conversation about broader issues, and I mentioned it briefly,” he recounted. “It was a glancing conversation in the Oval Office in September, in between meetings, and I mentioned how vaccine hesitancy was likely going to be a big problem, especially among Republicans and Trump supporters. And he said, ‘Yes, I understand, and it’s a problem.’ I’ve been told there were other conversations on this after I left, and that the conversations with the president continued…We started getting more and more suspicious of [anti-vaccine sentiment on the right] as I left. We were talking amongst ourselves in HHS in August, saying that it was ironic that the most vaccine-hesitant among us were our friends, our allies. And we still face that question.”

By November, Trump’s focus had largely shifted—not to his management of the global pandemic that had torpedoed the U.S. economy and left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead, but to his and Republican’ court battles and anti-democratic crusade to overturn Biden’s clear victory in the 2020 presidential contest.

In the weeks following Biden’s inauguration, Trump has only sporadically called on his supporters to get their COVID vaccines, including at his headlining speech during last month’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference, and has yet to mount anything resembling a sustained campaign or effort. Just last week, Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Florida, had to partially shut down due to a new coronavirus outbreak.

Recent polling has consistently found that Trump fans and Republican men are some of the demographics most likely to decline, or be skeptical of, getting a coronavirus vaccine.

Ever since settling into his post-presidency, Trump has at times casually discussed with certain confidants the prospect of starring in his own videos or ads to promote the vaccines, and also to tout the successes of his administration’s Operation Warp Speed, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations. However, when asked if any such videos had been produced yet, a Trump adviser said last week that there was “nothing scheduled” at the moment in terms of release.

Earlier this month, former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter all starred in a public service announcement aimed at convincing more Americans to get vaccinated against the virus. Trump, the two sources relayed, has privately said that he doesn’t wish to star in PSAs with the other former presidents, most of whom he openly despises.

And for some prominent Trump allies, the 45th U.S. president’s latest entreaties simply have not sunk in. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an on-again-off-again Trump adviser who also served as the Trump re-election campaign’s Minnesota co-chair, claimed in a recent interview that the ex-president’s CPAC speech didn’t actually implore fans to get vaccinated (even though it did), and added that his upcoming planned social media website will be a “free speech” haven that will permit users to post as much anti-vaccine content as they wish, for instance. “I will never take it… and it’s against my religion,” Lindell insisted.

This type of talk among MAGA mega-fans sounds abundantly familiar to other former Trump lieutenants, some of whom find themselves clashing with fellow supporters of the ex-president who are refusing to get vaccinated during the ongoing push by the Biden administration and local and state governments. Caputo said that in his time out of government and battling cancer, he’s made it a priority to reach out to as many Trump supporters online and in his community as possible to try to convince them to get their shots.

“I’ve been on Facebook, I’ve attended Republican committee meetings, I’ve done Zoom meetings, there’s this biker hangout near me called Kipp’s that has life-size cutouts of President Trump and Melania where you can take your picture there—it’s top to bottom Johnny Cash memorabilia and Donald Trump memorabilia. I’d go there and have discussions with people about it,” he said. “Some of my closest friends are anti-vaccine or anti-mask, or even COVID deniers who believe it’s just like the flu. One of my friends is anti-mask and believes COVID was a plot hatched to bring down Donald Trump—now he has COVID. And these are the people I talk to.”

Asked what his former boss could be doing right now to get more Republicans to get on board with COVID-19 vaccination, Caputo replied, “In my opinion, the former president could do a PSA campaign with Melania Trump. And the national television networks need to be airing this now, in their primetime programming.”

For the time being, Trump has remained almost entirely M.I.A. on the matter. And when he has poked his head up publicly to urge his anti-vaccine followers to change their minds, he has at times veered in the direction of both-sides-ism.

“I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it. And a lot of those people voted for me, frankly,” Trump said during a phone interview on Fox News earlier this month. “But, you know, again, we have our freedoms, and we have to live by that, and I agree with that also…

He spent a year admittedly “downplaying” the virus. He never took it seriously. Neither did a good number of his cult. He got it and he almost died. He still didn’t take it seriously.

He is the cult and they are him and they simply don’t care that hundreds of thousands of people are dead and more are dying every day. They. Just. Don’t. Care.

This is actually quite terrifying. There are going to be future pandemics. And these people are are going to get many hundreds of thousands killed again because they belong to a death cult that fetishizes the “choice” to die for their cause — and take many of us with them.

Across the country, GOP lawmakers are rallying around the cause of individual freedom to counter community-based disease mitigation methods, moves experts say leave the country ill-equipped to counter the resurgent coronavirus and a future, unknown outbreak.© John Amis/AP Tennessee state Sen. Mark Pody, Sen. Janice Bowling, Rep. Scott Cepicky and Sen. Ed Jackson converse before a state legislative committee meeting called to discuss the Department of Health vaccine administration’s firing of Dr. Michelle Fiscus, the state’s top vaccine official, after lawmakers complained of her efforts to promote coronavirus vaccination among teenagers.

In some states, anger at perceived overreach by health officials has prompted legislative attempts to limit their authority, including new state laws that prevent the closure of businesses or allow lawmakers to rescind mask mandates. Some state courts have reined in the emergency and regulatory powers governors have wielded against the virus. And in its recent rulings and analysis, the U.S. Supreme Court has signaled its willingness to limit disease mitigation in the name of religious freedom.

“The legal framework has evolved in ways that will complicate and perhaps undermine efforts to deal with the next public health crisis or even routine health threats,” said Wendy Parmet, director of the Northeastern University Center for Health Policy and Law, who also said she has been a “long critic of emergency laws and their potential for abuse.”

A key issue, Parmet and others say, is that the legislative backlash is based on partisan assumptions about this pandemic, limiting states’ options in the face of a new threat.

Whatever your feelings are about what health officials did in March of 2020, I can talk to you about a future threat that might be different, that would disproportionately affect a different population, that you would feel differently about,” said Lindsay F. Wiley, director of the Health Law and Policy Program at American University and an expert on emergency reform.

“Please don’t constrain authority as a reaction in a way that will tie officials to the mast for a future crisis”

At least 15 state legislatures have passed or are considering measures to limit the legal authority of public health agencies, according to the Network for Public Health Law, which partnered with the National Association of County and City Health Officials to document the legislative counterpunches. Lawmakers in at least 46 states have introduced hundreds of bills relating to legislative oversight of gubernatorial or executive actions during coronavirus or other emergencies, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The measures, as described by the Network for Public Health Law, include a North Dakota law that prohibits a mask mandate, even during an outbreak of tuberculosis, and a new Montana law that prohibits the use of quarantine to separate people who have probably been infected or exposed but are not yet sick. Many bills are modeled on legislation originally crafted by conservative think tanks and activist groups, according to state lawmakers who introduced them.

Among them is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has touted its model legislation aimed at reining in emergency powers so it is more “narrowly tailored to serve a compelling public health or safety purpose.”

In an interview, Jonathon Hauenschild, ALEC’s staff policy expert on the model legislation, said that from early in the pandemic he viewed governors’ use of emergency powers as problematic.

“I started to see . . . that once a branch realizes power they didn’t have before, they don’t give it up unless they are forced to,” Hauenschild said. “Some governors still aren’t giving up their power.”

The group’s legislative members wrote their model Emergency Limitation Act in 2020. It was finalized in early January, in time for states’ new legislative sessions.

Hauenschild said he has seen the model act’s influence in new laws in Indiana and Kentucky, where certain emergency orders now expire after 30 days unless the General Assembly approves an extension and there are new protections to purchase firearms. The group’s model legislation, which public health experts believe would leave states relatively defenseless in an emergency, is not motivated by ideology, Hauenschild argues.

“It’s really just trying to inject a little bit of accountability into the system,” he said.

ALEC is not the only conservative group behind the flurry of recent bills.

An aide to Massachusetts state Rep. Nicholas Boldyga (R) said his office worked with Pacific Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based libertarian group, on legislation imposing a 30-day sunset on emergency orders. Daniel Dew, legal policy director for the Pacific Legal Foundation, estimated that the group has had discussions with lawmakers in more than half the states and has been able to trace at least 18 bills to its model legislation or other activities.

Montana state Rep. Matt Regier (R) said he received input from the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the political network funded by the Koch fortune, on his bill, which limits the sort of executive actions that can be taken during an emergency, including by enshrining certain religious exemptions and ensuring the legislature gets to weigh in after 45 days. The measure gained approval in May over Democratic objections, and it was signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte.[Resistance to vaccine mandates is building. A powerful network is helping.]

That’s because McColley, like other advocates of similar legislation, views the incursions on personal liberty as grievous enough to rival the loss of life from the pandemic. “Coronavirus is serious, but we can’t make decisions in a vacuum,” he said.

“I start with this premise: If you would have asked any of us in January or February of 2020 if we could ever have foreseen the amount of unprecedented executive authority used over the coming 12 to 15 months, many of us would have scoffed at that idea,” McColley added. “No way that would happen in a country like the United States, in a state like Ohio. Yet it did.”

The recent passage of Ohio’s SB 22 has left local officials grappling to understand its future effect on everything from closing restaurants to quarantining residents.

Keary McCarthy, executive director of the Ohio Mayors Alliance, said that in a public health emergency, local officials need immediate clarity.

“If executive and legislative branches get into a dispute about all of these things, it really creates some challenges for local officials,” McCarthy said. “What are the rules? How do we implement them? How do we keep our folks safe?”

The measures are also motivated by the perceived randomness of some business restrictions. Particularly irksome to Boldyga, the Massachusetts lawmaker, was a rule against golf carts, which was designed to limit the use of shared equipment and lifted last May. “A golf cart was too difficult to be in by yourself because of covid, I guess,” he said. “It was absurd.”

Eighteen months ago, few people anticipated an infection that was as deadly, spread as stealthily or acted as disproportionately on certain groups in the way the coronavirus has done. With responsibility for protecting the public’s health falling historically to state and local government, many governors turned to general emergency powers, intended for disruptive but short-lived events like wildfires or tornadoes. As the pandemic persisted, they re-upped their powers, with many GOP lawmakers fighting back.

Some battles between Democratic governors and Republican-controlled legislatures have landed in state courts. The supreme courts of Michigan and Wisconsin, respectively, ruled that their governors didn’t have the power to renew executive orders relating to the pandemic or to declare multiple public health emergencies.

And in Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis (D), who has been under fire from Republican legislators, took matters into his own hands, announcing last month that he would phase out his emergency powers. In New York, some fellow Democrats earlier this year moved to strip Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) of unilateral emergency powers.[Growing number of Republicans urge vaccinations amid delta surge]

The state’s immunization manager, Michelle Fiscus, had alluded to the doctrine in a memo circulated to enrolled vaccine providers. The information enraged some conservative lawmakers, who disputed the doctrine’s validity.

Less than a month later, Fiscus was fired for what she argued were political reasons and the state scaled back on adolescent vaccine outreach.

“It’s an absolute travesty that individuals are putting their own political agenda ahead of the health and well-being of the people they were elected to serve,” Fiscus said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Tennessee Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey said Friday that almost all vaccine outreach was being restarted, with the exception of 11 social media posts that depicted a child without a parent. The pause in communications, she said, was to ensure that all forms of outreach — from postcard reminders to consent forms — “were appropriately directed at parents and not kids.”

The article notes that after 9/11 there was resistance to “public health” legislation which granted emergency powers to state governors. This is true. I’m sympathetic to those concerns. Too much power in the hands of officials can be a threat. But if you recall what was going on then, they were actually rounding up humans and the nation was in a state of hysteria that was potentially leading to some very ugly consequences. It is simply not comparable to the challenge of dealing with COVID-19 — or the inevitable subsequent pandemics.

A pandemic is not an act of war. It’s not a terrorist attack. It’s a contagious disease in our communities that is intent upon invading as many people as possible. There are limited ways of dealing with that. Running around screaming and yelling about “freedom” in that situation is just mindless bullshit.

“If those responsible are not held accountable, and if Congress does not act responsibly, this will remain a cancer on our constitutional republic, undermining the peaceful transfer of power at the heart of our democracy system.” — Liz Cheney

Liz Cheney's opening statement to the January 6 Select Committee: "On January 6th and in the days thereafter, almost all members of my party recognized the events of that day for what they actually were … no member of Congress should not attempt to defend the indefensible."

US Capitol Sgt Aquilino Gonell: "What we were subjected to that day was like something from a medieval battle. We fought hand to hand … the rioters that attempted to reach the Capitol were shouting, 'Trump sent us' … I recall thinking to myself, 'this is how I'm gonna die'"

Sgt. Gonell gets emotional recalling how when he returned home early on the morning on Jan 7, he had to push his wife away because of all the chemicals he had on his clothes

"There are some who express outrage when someone kneels while calling for social justice. Where are those same people expressing the outrage to condemn the violent attack on law enforcement, the Capitol and our American democracy? I'm still waiting for them" — Sgt Gonell

"We are not asking for medals or recognition, we simply want justice and accountability" — Sgt Gonell

DC Officer Michael Fanone's opening statement to the January 6th Select Committee: "I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm, as I heard chants of 'kill him with his own gun.' I can still hear those words in my head today."

Fanone: "I was aware enough to recognize I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm. I was electrocuted again and again and again with a taser. I'm sure I was screaming, but I don't think I could even hear my own voice."

Fanone: "I thought about using my firearm … But I knew if I did, I'd be quickly overwhelmed & in their minds that would provide them w/the justification for killing me. So instead I decided to appeal to any humanity they might have. I said as loud as I could, 'I've got kids'"

Fanone pounds the table as he says, "the indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful!"

"Nothing has prepared me to address those elected members of our government who continue to deny the events of that day and in doing so betray their oath of office," he adds

DC officer Daniel Hodges: "A man attempted to rip the baton from my hands & we wrestled for control. I retained my weapon. After I pushed him back, he yelled at me, 'you're on the wrong team!'…another [shouted], 'you will die on your knees!'"

The look on Adam Kinzinger's face during law enforcement's opening statements to the January 6 committee says a lot

"The mob of terrorists were shouting 'heave, ho' and they pushed their way forward. A man in front of me grabbed my baton … he bashed me in the face and head with it … I did the only thing I could do and screamed for help" — Officer Hodges

Capitol Officer Harry Dunn on what he saw on January 6: "Until then I had never seen anyone physically assault Capitol police or MPD, let alone witness mass assaults being perpetrated on law enforcement officers."

Officer Dunn: "I told them to just leave the Capitol, and in response they yelled, 'no man, this is our house. President Trump invited us here. We're here to stop the steal.'"

He goes on to detail how crowd yelled racial slurs at him.

fficer Dunn: "I sat down on a bench in the rotunda with a friend of mine who is also a black Capitol police officer and told him about the racial slurs I endured. I became very emotional and began yelling, 'how the blank could something like this happen. Is this America?'"

Reminder: this is Officer Daniel Hodges

Sgt. Gonell: "My time, compared to [serving in] Iraq, totally different. This is our own citizens, people who we've sworn an oath to protect, but yet they are attacking us with the same flag they claim to represent. It was bad."

Officer Dunn on racial abuse he received on January 6: "It was just so overwhelming and so disheartening and disappointing that we live in a country with people like that"

Originally tweeted by Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) on July 27, 2021.

I still can’t believe what happened on January 6th. It’s like something out of a bad movie. But I know that the Republican Party is trying to cover it up — and the Trump base is proud of it.

It’s still stunning to see their shameless hypocrisy acted out in such living color. These are supposedly the law and order Real Americans who respect authority. Surprise …