The QAnon/Anti-Vaxxer Conspiracy Theorists Are Turning On The QAnon/Big Lie Conspiracy Theorists

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The unifying insanity of the pro-Covid, anti-democracy far-right appears to be fraying after the “Dear Leader” of their cult, Donald Trump, spoke favorably about the Covid-19 vaccinations last week. The QAnon/anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists are now turning on the QAnon/Big Lie conspiracy theorists in blind rage.

They are destroying one another – “please proceed,” as Barack Obama once famously said.

Eric Lutz writes at Vanity Fair, So Now Trump Has Decided to Push Back Against COVID Lies?

In a rare dalliance with the truth, Donald Trump championed COVID-19 vaccines in an interview published [last] Wednesday, pushing back on an attempt by the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens to undermine the shots, calling them “very, very good.” The former president’s defense of the inoculations was, of course, as self-serving as anything he’s ever done, and by no means makes him some heroic defender of public health. But it is a welcome—albeit belated—gesture that one hopes will help convince his resistant supporters to finally get vaxxed.

The exchange with Owens began, as most Trump conversations do, with an egocentric boast. “I came up with a vaccine, with three vaccines,” he said, conjuring an image of the former president in a lab coat and goggles in the Oval Office. “All are very, very good. Came up with three of them in less than nine months. It was supposed to take five to 12 years.”

Fact Check: The vaccine for COVID-19 has been nearly 20 years in the making:

Operation Warp Speed, the private-public partnership initiated by the White House during the pandemic, may give the impression the COVID-19 vaccine developed overnight, but in actuality, it depends on research dating back nearly 100 years.

COVID-19’s spike protein was identified nearly 20 years ago as a potential vaccine target during the development of the SARS vaccine, following the 2003 SARS outbreak. This helped expedite the vaccine process, given that vaccine platform technologies have advanced in recent years, as well. Another accelerant was the commercial-scale production of COVID-19 vaccine doses prior to FDA clearance, called at-risk manufacturing, when early results appeared promising.

“Yet more people have died under COVID this year,” Owens responded, emphasizing that it was more deaths “under Joe Biden than under you.” She added, “and more people took the vaccine this year. So people are questioning how…”

“Oh no, the vaccines work,” Trump interrupted, telling Owens that “the ones who get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don’t take the vaccine. [i.e., the pandemic of the unvaccinated.]

“The results from the vaccine are very good, and if you do get [COVID], it’s a very minor form,” Trump added. “People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine.”

Trump maintained that “it’s still their choice” whether people want to get the jabs or not. But in clearly saying that “if you take the vaccine, you’re protected”—even if it was in the service of annoying self-congratulation—Trump finally advocated for the most effective tool we have to fight the pandemic in a way that he should have done before. Indeed, while Trump has consistently sought credit for the vaccines that were developed while he was in office, he has sent mixed signals about the shots and declined to forcefully advocate for them, even though he, himself, has been vaccinated and boosted.

The results don’t appear to be a coincidence: Counties that went for Trump, who spent his final year in office downplaying the pandemic and politicizing public health measures, have lagged behind counties that went for Biden when it comes to vaccination rates. That resistance has put not only his own supporters at greater risk for the worst effects of COVID —it has affected the nation’s pandemic response as a whole.

With the more transmissible omicron variant surging across the country, Biden has redoubled his efforts to rally Americans around vaccines and boosters—even giving his predecessor credit for their development during an address this week. But such pleas from the Democratic president seem unlikely to move those steeped in misinformation, including those who have been conditioned by Trump to view Biden as illegitimate and by the right-wing media to view vaccines and public health measures as government tyranny.

Vaccine hesitancy can be a complex issue that incorporates multiple factors, not only political affiliation. But for those who might be inclined to listen to Trump, a question remains as to whether he can even convince such holdouts at this point.

[T]he mistrust Trump sowed in public health and the politics he injected into the pandemic response have become entrenched to the point that he may not be able to do anything about it, even if he really wanted to. When Trump revealed in an appearance with Bill O’Reilly on Sunday that he had received his COVID booster shot and suggested attendees do the same, his own supporters booed him. He said the jeers came from a “very tiny group” and that, by remaining unvaccinated, conservatives were “playing right into [Democrats’] hands.” But the reaction suggested that some in his base might be out of reach.

In fact, the Daily Wire interviewer, far-right provocateur and anti-vaxxer Candace Owens, later took to Instagram to explain why she thinks Donald Trump unexpectedly defended COVID vaccines during an interview with her earlier in the week. Candace Owens: Trump Is Pro-Vax Because He’s ‘Too Old’ to Understand the Internet:

The reason? Trump, 75, is “too old” to know how to navigate the internet and find those “obscure websites” where, it seems that she believes, the truth about COVID and vaccines can only be found. “People oftentimes forget that, like, how old Trump is,” she said. “He comes from a generation—I’ve seen other people that are older have the exact same perspective, like, they came from a time before TV, before internet, before being able to conduct their independent research. And everything that they read in a newspaper that was pitched to them, they believed that that was a reality.” Owens urged her conservative fanbase to take it easy on Trump, saying that she doesn’t think his support of the vaccine is “evil” or “based in any corruption.” But, she added, “he needs to have a larger conversation to understand what’s going on and why so many people are horrified by his remarks.”

January 6 coup plotter Alex Jones took to Twitter on Christmas Day for an “emergency Christmas Day warning.”

Fake “tough guy” Alex Jones, whose wife struck him ‘over 20 times’ – including with a soap bottle – and tried to hit him with a five-pound stone ball causing him to ‘fear for his life,’ according to a police report from their Christmas Eve fracas that was released Tuesday, REVEALED: Alex Jones ‘feared for his life’ as his wife struck him ‘with a polished club’ during Christmas Eve fight and tried to hit him with a five-pound stone ball, police report reveals, is now threatening to “dish all the dirt” on former President Donald Trump due to his recent public statements in favor of vaccines. WATCH: Alex Jones blows up on ‘pathetic’ Trump and threatens to ‘dish all the dirt’ on him:

During the recent segment of Jones’ radio show Infowars, he told his audience that it was time to “move on” from the embattled former president.

Jones insisted that their previous impression of the former president appears to have been incorrect. He also warned Trump supporters that Trump would not be the one to save them.

“Yeah, we all wish Trump would do the right thing, but listen, I’ve got the inside baseball on Trump,” Jones said. “He doesn’t know what’s going on, and I’m not even defending Trump, I’m just saying we’ve got to move on.”

“In fact,” he added, “You know what … Maybe to get Trump’s attention, ‘cause I don’t even get this from Roger Stone, I get this from people directly in Trump’s camp,” he continued.

“Maybe I should just dish all the dirt — you know what, you know what — I am going to dish it all on Trump next hour.”

Jones went on to explain the reason for his attack on Trump. Although he claimed the measure isn’t a form of retaliation to hurt the former president, he claimed to offer a “pathetic” depiction of him.

“It’s not to hurt Trump, it’s so people can know how pathetic he is, when you think he is playing 4D chess, going to save you and he’s not!”

“He’s not a bad guy, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Jones continued. “He’s surrounded by bad advisors.”

These insane people deserve one another. If only they could just destroy one another without harming the rest of America and the world in the process. We need some kind of “containment” to control this implosion on the far-right. Let them burn themselves out.





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