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Tag: anti vaxxers
Alex Jones Dumps Trump For DeSantis: ‘We Have Someone Way Better’

Alex Jones Dumps Trump For DeSantis: ‘We Have Someone Way Better’

Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has rescinded his support for former President Donald Trump’s expected 2024 bid for the White House and thrown his support behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Jones, a once-passionate advocate of “Stop the Steal”, admitted on his podcast this week that he had “pigheadedly” supported Trump for fear of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden becoming president — a decision he said had earned him persecution.

The far-right host told his audience that he had grievances with Operation Warp Speed — the Trump administration mid-pandemic initiative geared toward expediting the production of Covid-19 vaccines — but supported him anyway.

“I've been persecuted like nothing in my life for supporting [Trump], and that made me kind of pigheadedly support him a few years ago even though I disagreed with his Warp Speed,” Jones said.

An outspoken anti-vaxxer, Jones declared his support for “way better” DeSantis, who recently appointed a state surgeon general who has publicly questioned the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines.

Last year, Jones called Trump a “dumbass” for advocating Covid vaccination, said he wished he never met the ex-president, and threatened to “dish the dirt” on him for publicly supporting vaccination against Covid,” per The Daily Beast.

"This is what Trump should be like. And I've been hammering this point, and he's doing it now. And we have someone who is better than Trump. Way better than Trump," Jones said, suggesting that the ex-president emulate DeSantis.

“But that said, I am supporting DeSantis. DeSantis is just gone from being awesome to being unbelievably good ... He's getting red-pilled more and more each day ... I'm a DeSantis guy,” Jones announced.

He also insisted that he had seen “real sincerity” in DeSantis’ eyes when he reviewed footage of the governor.

“I don't just watch a man's actions, as Christ said. Judge a tree by its fruits. I can also look in his eyes on HD video and I see the real sincerity,” Jones told his audience.

Neither Trump nor DeSantis has announced their intention to run for president in 2024, despite outdoing each other on recent hypothetical conservative polling for Republican presidential candidates in 2024.

Jones’s once fervent support for Trump saw the conservative podcast host peddle the Big Lie — that widespread election fraud had cost Trump the election — and make an appearance at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The Justice Department has reportedly probed Jones’s role in the January 6 insurrection, and the House Select Committee, the bipartisan congressional panel investigating the January 6 attack, subpoenaed Jones last November. The select committee received his text messages, which were leaked accidentally during the latest Sandy Hook trial.

Jones has wavered in his support for Trump before. Last month, he called firebrand Trump-supporting Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene “smarter” than Trump and DeSantis and asked the congresswoman to run for president.

Early this month, Jones was ordered to pay $49.3 million to the parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre after a Texas jury found him liable for defamation in a default judgment issued by District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble for calling the tragedy a “hoax” and smearing the victims’ families.

Right-Wing ‘Pastor’ Wants To Hang Obama Over Covid-19

Right-Wing ‘Pastor’ Wants To Hang Obama Over Covid-19

Shane Vaughn, a right-wing pastor and conspiracy theorist who still believes that ex-President Donald Trump will be reinstated, has blamed the COVID-19 pandemic on former President Barack Obama.

Vaughn, the founder of First Harvest Ministries in Waveland, Mississippi, has a history of making baseless assertions about the coronavirus. Last December, he proclaimed that wearing a mask was promoting the "spirit of the antichrist" and that the pathogen was sent by God as punishment for Americans' supposed belief in the supernatural. He urged his followers to "get a shot of faith" instead of the vaccine and said that God told him that "miracles are attracted by faith, not mask."

His latest tantrum was on par.

In a live stream entitled Obama's Bloody Footprints that was posted to Twitter on March 28th, Vaughn falsely accused Obama and Dr. Anthony Fauci of "financing communist China's gain-of-function research" – a debunked conspiracy theory that SARS-COV-2 was engineered in a research lab in Wuhan and then deliberately released into the human population.

He then declared that Fauci, then-National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins, and their colleagues committed "treason" and should be "hung from the gallows" for their alleged crimes against the American people.

"The lengths that Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci went to to convince people that COVID-19 originated naturally; and that these blanket lockdowns were necessary; and to silence dissenting voices from prominent scientists prove that they were more interested in hiding their role in financing communist China's gain-of-function research than they were in helping their nation," Vaughn growled.

"They are treasonous," he continued. "They should be hanged on the first gallows. They turned on their nation to hide their crime. They are guilty of treason."

Watch the excerpt below via Right Wing Watch:

Twitter users accused Vaughn of racist hate speech for calling for the murder of the first Black president.

Some people want the Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into Vaughn's comments, as they may constitute a crime.

Vaughn was reminded that Trump, not Obama, was the commander in chief when COVID-19 first broke out. He too lied about the severity of the crisis, peddled fake cures and treatments, and accused China of failing to protect the United States. Under his watch, 700,000 Americans perished.

The Twitterverse also pointed out that Vaughn himself is a convicted felon, having served three years in prison for insurance and bank fraud.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Anti-Vaxxers And ‘Wellness’ Influencers Line Up Behind Putin’s Genocidal War

Anti-Vaxxers And ‘Wellness’ Influencers Line Up Behind Putin’s Genocidal War

Support for Russian President Vladimir Putin is by no means universal on the America right. Many conservatives, from Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah to media Never Trumpers like The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and the Washington Post’s Max Boot, have been blistering critics of Putin — especially during the brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Yet in the MAGA cult, Putin has had his share of apologists — from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to “War Room” host Steve Bannon to former President Donald Trump. And Mother Jones’ Kiera Butler, in an article published on March 24, focuses on a bizarre trend: far-right anti-vaxxers and online “wellness influencers” who have become cheerleaders for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Butler previously reported on pro-Putin anti-vaxxers in a March 2 article, and since then, the Mother Jones journalist stresses, the “overlap” between pro-Putin propagandists and anti-vaxxers “has only grown.”

“(On March 19), the Toronto Star reported a startling correlation between vaccination status and beliefs about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Butler explains. “More than 80 percent of vaccinated Canadians said they believed their country should help defend Ukraine, compared to less than a quarter of unvaccinated people. This dynamic is especially pronounced in extremist spaces. Some of the anti-mandate trucker convoy chats on Telegram now seem dominated by Putin cheerleading.”

Some online “wellness influencers,” according to Butler, have been claiming that President Joe Biden is “trying to pull a fast one on them by painting Russia as the aggressor” in Ukraine.

“Should social media platforms flag influencers’ content as disinformation,” Butler observes, “it only serves to reinforce their belief that they are being punished for their righteous truth-telling. Some influencers have monetized their self-proclaimed martyrdom by sharing disinformation about Ukraine and hawking their own wellness items.”

Instagram, according to Butler, is one of the social media platforms where pro-Putin anti-vaxxers and “wellness influencers” have been plentiful.

“Beyond the oils and the tinctures, influencers are selling something much more valuable: a sense of fierce and uncompromising maternal identity,” Butler observes. “The account bios frequently mention natural childbirth, breastfeeding, and attachment parenting — and their posts and stories tie events in Ukraine back to defending their families from what they see as government overreach.”

Anti-vaxxers who are sympathetic to Putin, Butler writes, are also more likely to be influenced by the far-right pro-Trump conspiracy group QAnon.

“Factions of anti-vaccine groups increasingly embraced COVID denialism and dabbled in QAnon,” Butler notes. “The Russians’ initial plan of dividing Americans had worked better than they could have possibly expected — so that by the time Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, anti-vaccine activists were primed to believe that Putin was the good guy.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

‘Peoples Convoy’ D.C. Demo Permit Is Rejected By National Park Service

‘Peoples Convoy’ D.C. Demo Permit Is Rejected By National Park Service

Truckers! Freedom! The open road! Something something vaccines and mandates and masks mean that truckers need to protest the indignity of public health measures that have been proven to mitigate the dangerous impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic. What was an astro-turfed Canadian protest has now turned into a manufactured domestic one. Think Fox News’ immigrant caravans, but with mostly white people and actually dangerous.

On Wednesday news came out that the “People’s Convoy” had hit a hurdle in its movement as the National Park Service partially denied the overblown group’s request for a permit to turn the D.C. National Mall into a trucker encampment. Why they “partially denied” the request may have been due to some of the convoy’s lead organizer Brian Brase answers to their questions. The Daily Beast reports that when the Park Service asked Brase, “Do you have any reason to believe or any information indicating that any individual, group, or organization might seek to disrupt the activity for which this application is submitted?” Brase’s response of “Antifa” was not sufficient.

Oh, wait. There’s a lot more from these freedom fighters.

Brase also may have shot himself in the foot by overselling the convoy’s size, telling the Park Service he expects somewhere between “10,000 to 100,000” supporters to show up. Considering how small the trucker convoys have been thus far, even with media vampires like Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas trying to get attention for the make-it-up-while-we-go freedom statement thing, it’s hard to believe they would be able to muster half of the low end of that range. However, as NBC News’ Terry Bouton reported a few days ago, the success of the convoy is in the right-wing optics. Maybe Brase is thinking “10,000 to 100,000” hours of right-wing news coverage?

The far-right was well represented at the convoy. Members of white supremacist and anti-government groups that were at the center of the Capitol insurrection have been heavily involved in its planning. Erik Rohde, a national leader of Three Percenters, was a “consultant” to the "People’s Convoy." (In return the "People’s Convoy" official Telegram account urged supporters to donate to a protest march on the Washington state capitol that Rohde was organizing). Three Percenter and Proud Boy Telegram channels have organized support and raised money for the "People’s Convoy." In Wisconsin, convoy organizers called on the Oath Keepers to provide security.


Maybe it’s something else that they’re working on? The Daily Beast reports that while being denied a permit didn’t figure into a Tuesday night meeting, talking about the vagaries of what the hell they’re trying to accomplish did come up. In fact, here’s how The Daily Beast explained it: “organizer Mike Landis said that while the prospect of ‘tear[ing] the fence down at the White House and hang[ing] politicians’ was ‘extremely enticing,’ he added that isn’t ‘why we are here.’” Why are they there again?

No word on that yet.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos