VACCINE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY UPDATES

US Black and Latino communities often have low vaccination rates – but blaming vaccine hesitancy misses the mark

Sat, October 9, 2021

With many vaccine-eligible people in the U.S. staying away, some vaccine sites have no lines. Mario Tama/Getty Images

By early July 2021, nearly two-thirds of all U.S. residents 12 years and older had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine; 55% were fully vaccinated. But uptake varies drastically by region – and it is lower on average among non-white people.

Many blame the relatively lower vaccination rates in communities of color on “vaccine hesitancy.” But this label overlooks persistent barriers to access and lumps together the varied reasons people have for refraining from vaccination. It also places all the responsibility for getting vaccinated on individuals. Ultimately, homogenizing peoples’ reasons for not getting vaccinated diverts attention away from social factors that research shows play a critical role in health status and outcomes.

As medical anthropologists, we take a more nuanced view. Working together as lead site investigators for CommuniVax, a national initiative to improve vaccine equity, we and our teams in Alabama, California and Idaho, along with CommuniVax teams elsewhere in the nation, have documented a variety of stances toward vaccination that simply can’t be cast as “hesitant.”

Limited access hampers vaccination rates

People of color have long suffered an array of health inequities. Accordingly, due to a combination of factors, these communities have experienced higher hospitalization due to COVID-19, higher disease severity upon admission, higher chances for being placed on breathing support and progression to the intensive care unit, and higher rates of death.

CommuniVax data, including some 200 in-depth interviews within such communities, confirm that overall, those who have directly experienced this kind of COVID-19-related trauma, are not hesitant. They dearly want vaccinations. For example, in San Diego’s heavily Latino and very hard-hit “South Region,” COVID-19 vaccine uptake is remarkably high – about 84% as of July 6, 2021.

However, vaccine uptake is far from universal in these communities. This is in part due to access issues that go beyond the well documented challenges of transportation, internet access and skills gaps, and a lack of information on how to get vaccinated. For example, some CommuniVax participants had heard of non-resident white people usurping doses that were meant for communities of color. African American participants, in particular, reported feeling that the Johnson & Johnson vaccines promoted in their communities were the least safe and effective.

U.S. First Lady Jill Biden gives comfort to a patient at a vaccination clinic

Our participant testimony shows that many unvaccinated people are not “vaccine hesitant” but rather “vaccine impeded.” And exclusion can happen not just in a physical sense; providers’ attitudes towards vaccines matter too.

For instance, Donna, a health care worker in Idaho, said, “I chose not to get it because if I were to get sick, I think I would recover mostly or more rapidly.” This kind of attitude by health care providers can have downstream effects. For example, Donna may not encourage vaccination when on duty or to people she knows; some, just observing her choices, may follow suit. Here, what appears as a community’s hesitancy to vaccinate is instead a reflection of vaccine hesitancy within its health care system.

More directly impeded are community members who, like Angela in Idaho, skipped vaccination because she couldn’t risk having a negative reaction that might require intervention. Although a trip to the doctor is a highly unlikely outcome after a vaccine, it remains a concern for some. “My insurance doesn’t cover as much as it possibly, you know, should,” she noted. And we have encountered many reports of undocumented individuals who fear deportation although, according to current laws, immigration status should not be questioned in relation to the vaccine.

Christina, in San Diego, illustrates another type of practical barrier. She cannot get vaccinated, she said, because she has no one to care for her babies should she fall ill with side effects. Her husband, similarly, can’t take time off from his job – “It doesn’t work that way.” Likewise, Carlos – who made sure that his centenarian father got vaccinated – says he can’t take the vaccine himself due to his dad’s deep dementia: “If I took my vaccine and I got sick, he’d be screwed.”

Indifference, resilience and ambivalence

Another segment of unvaccinated people obscured by the “hesitant” label are the “vaccine indifferent.” For various reasons, they remain relatively untouched by the pandemic: COVID-19 just isn’t on their radar. This might include people who are self-employed or working under the table, people living in rural and remote places, and those whose children are not in the public school system.

Such people thus are not consistently connected to COVID-19-related information. This is particularly true if they forego social or news media and socialize with others who do the same, and if there are significant language barriers.

vaccine recruitment effort by CommuniVax in June

We also learned that, among some of our participants, the initial messaging about prioritizing high-risk groups backfired, leaving some under 65 and in relatively good health with the impression it wasn’t necessary for them to get the vaccine. Without incentives – travel plans, being accepted to a college or having an employer that mandates vaccination – inertia carries the day.

The indifferent are not against vaccination. Rather, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “you do you” tend to typify their views. As Jose from Idaho reported, “I’m not worried because I’ve always taken care of myself.”

We also saw a modified form of indifference in those who believed that the protective steps they already were taking would be enough to keep them COVID-19-free. A janitor said, “I am an essential worker… So from the beginning we took … all the precautions … face masks, taking [social] distance [and using] natural medicines and vitamins for the immune system.” He had, indeed, so far avoided contracting COVID-19.

The view of vaccines as not immediately necessary is magnified among some Latino people by the cultural value placed on the need to endure – “aguantar” in Spanish — to bear up, push through and avoid complaining about daily struggles. This perspective can be seen in many immigrant or impoverished populations, where getting sick or injured can be a precursor to household ruin through job loss and exorbitant, unpayable medical bills.

Yet another dynamic we learned of is what we term “vaccine ambivalence.” Some participants who view COVID-19 as a significant health threat believe the vaccine poses an equivalent risk. We saw this particularly among African Americans in Alabama – not necessarily surprising given that the health care system has not always had these communities’ best interests at heart. The perceived conundrum leaves people stuck on the fence. Given the legacy of unequal treatment in communities of color, when balancing the “known” of COVID-19 against the unknown of vaccination, their inaction may seem reasonable – especially when coupled with mask-wearing and social distancing.

Attending to blind spots

At this point in the pandemic, those with the means and will to get vaccinated have done so. Providing viable counternarratives to misinformation can help bring more people on board. But continuing to focus solely on individual mistrustfulness toward vaccines or so-called hesitancy obscures the other complex reasons people have for being wary of the system and bypassing vaccination.

[Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Moreover, an overly narrow focus on the vaccine leaves a lot outside the frame. A wider view reveals that the problems leading to inequitable vaccination coverage are the same structural problems that have, historically, prevented people of color from having a fair shot at good health and economic outcomes to begin with – problems that even a 100% vaccination rate cannot resolve.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

 It was written by: 

Elisa J. Sobo, San Diego State University; 

 Professor and Chair of Anthropology

Diana Schow, Idaho State University,

Visiting Assistant Professor of Community and Public Health; Executive Director, Southeast Idaho Area Health Education Center, Institute of Rural Health

Stephanie McClure, University of Alabama.

Assistant Professor of Biocultural Medical Anthropology

Covid vaccine: Why these US workers won't get jabbed

Aleem Maqbool - BBC News
Sat, October 9, 2021

Demonstrations have taken place in cities around the US against mandatory vaccination

Joe Biden has been urging US employers to issue ultimatums to their staff: get vaccinated, or lose your job.

The president says he will soon bring in a mandate that requires all healthcare workers to have had the jab, and has urged states to do the same with teachers.

In Concord, New Hampshire, it is striking to see some of those attending a large protest against vaccine mandates wearing hospital scrubs.

Leah Cushman is prepared to lose her nursing job rather than get vaccinated.

"My beliefs are religious. I believe that my creator endowed me with an immune system that protects me, and if I get sick, that's an act of God. I would not take a medicine that affects the immune system," said Ms Cushman. She denies there is any conflict between these beliefs and the responsibilities of her job.

Ms Cushman argues that the Covid vaccines remain "experimental", despite the Pfizer vaccine having full Food and Drug Administration approval in the US - meaning the FDA considers that enough data has been gathered to indicate the drug is safe and effective. But she says she no longer takes any vaccines at all in any case.

Leah Cushman says she no longer takes any vaccines

Managers who have already decided to impose vaccine mandates at their hospitals say it is primarily about making patients feel safe.

But Scott Colby, CEO of the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital, acknowledges that he has lost several medical staff over the issue of the vaccine mandate, in a period made busier by the Delta variant and the backlog of non-Covid-related procedures.

The hospital manager says that on balance it is still the right decision to require vaccination, partly because serious coronavirus-related sickness among staff - more likely among the unvaccinated - is an avoidable drain on resources.

But Mr Colby also says he finds some of the opposition does not appear to have a purely medical or religious basis.

"It's not just Covid. There are other vaccines that employees are required to have, like MMR or hepatitis. So to say this is not political would be disingenuous," says Mr Colby.


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Back at the rally Leah Cushman, who as well as being a registered nurse is also a state representative for the Republican Party, says that her stance is also about freedom.

"The Biden administration is targeting our sovereign rights. We're medical professionals, but we still need the ability to choose what happens to our bodies," she says.

Some of the nurses at the demonstration felt that it was the hospitals playing politics, and that if this was really about patient confidence, the onus would be on weekly testing rather than on getting vaccinated, given that even those who have had the jab can pass on the virus.

However even the option of regular testing is unacceptable to many of those Americans who refuse to get vaccinated.

Kahseim Outlaw has just lost his job in Wallingford, Connecticut for that very reason. He was named Teacher of the Year at his high school last year, but felt the mandate to get vaccinated introduced by the state authorities was something he could not comply with.

"I do not use any kind of synthetic ingredients in my life, whether that be for medicinal purposes, supplementation or food. So the idea of becoming inoculated is something that goes directly against the way that I live my life," he said.

Kahseim Outlaw lost his job for refusing to get vaccinated

Like all teachers in the state, Mr Outlaw was offered an alternative of weekly testing but said he viewed that as an "unnecessary medical procedure" that was uncomfortable.

"The way that our soul speaks to us, that little voice that tells us when something is in alignment or not, that voice is telling me that I need to make this particular decision right now."


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One thing Mr Outlaw said he was prepared to undertake was an antibody test to show he had contracted Covid in the past, as he believes he did, and so has the body's natural immunity to the virus. He accepts that there is no telling how long a natural immune response will last.

But this is not an option being offered to him by his employer.

In the classroom, Kahseim Outlaw would of course be in close contact with students, but what of employees who work entirely in isolation at home? Do their employers have the right to require that they are vaccinated?

Rob Segrin lives close to Mount Monadnock in a remote part of rural New Hampshire, but has been told he will lose his IT job if he has not had his first Covid shot by the end of this month.

"I never go into an office, I never interact with people," Rob Segrin says

"My job is a 100% remote, work-from-home type of job for a federal contractor. I never go into an office, I never interact with people. I object to the vaccine because in my opinion there have not been enough years of study into it, but I protect my family in the ways I can," says Mr Segrin.

"It felt like this 'do this or you will lose your job' order was a personal attack against me and my family. Like they are coming after my livelihood," he continues.

Mr Segrin says his discussions with his employer have so far been unfruitful and as things stand, he will lose his full-time job, and as a result his health insurance and his family's health benefits too.

Across the US, there have been huge inconsistencies in public policy relating to the vaccine, just as there have been inconsistencies at every turn during this pandemic, and Republican states continue to fight vaccine mandates.

But as the US grapples with the arguments over personal freedoms and public health, figures show the virus is still claiming nearly 1,500 American lives a day.

NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins 

says it's 'truly heartbreaking' 

to see fellow evangelicals refuse 

the COVID-19 vaccine because 

of misinformation, urges them 

to 'look at the evidence'

Sarah Al-Arshani

Sat, October 9, 2021, 

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, receives his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at the National Institutes of Health. Patrick Semansky-Pool/Getty Images

• NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said each day over 1,000 people die from COVID-19.

• In an interview with CNN's Jim Acosta, Collins said most of those deaths are among the unvaccinated.

• Collins called on fellow evangelicals to look at the evidence and get vaccinated.

Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, is urging fellow evangelicals to get vaccinated.

In an interview with CNN's Jim Acosta on Saturday, Collins said misinformation is causing evangelicals to be hesitant about getting vaccinated. Calling it "truly heartbreaking," he urged people to look at the "evidence."

"Let me make a plea right here that if you are a Christian, or if you're anybody who has not yet gotten vaccinated, hit the reset button on whatever information you have that's causing you to be doubtful or hesitant or fearful and look at the evidence," Collins said. "The evidence is overwhelming, the vaccines are safe, they're effective, they can save your life."

A June survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 22% of Evangelicals said they will definitely not get vaccinated.

Collins told Acosta there are still more than 1,000 people dying every day because of COVID-19, almost all of them unvaccinated and "therefore didn't have to happen."

"Christians of all people are supposed to be particularly worried about their neighbors and this is also a really critical situation where if you're not vaccinated you may be the one spreading this virus to somebody vulnerable who can't necessarily resist it," Collins said.

Some Christians have argued that they can't get the vaccine because fetal cell lines played some role in the development of the vaccine, the Associated Press reported.

The AP reported that the Vatican's doctrine office has said it is "morally acceptable" for Catholics to get the vaccine even if it was based on research on fetal cells. Pope Francis said not getting the vaccine was "suicide."

Collins, who has served as the NIH director for more than 12 years announced last week that he was stepping down at the end of the year.

FAUX News celebrates 25th anniversary as critics point to network’s dark history


Oliver Laughland in New Orleans

THE GUARDIAN
Fri, October 8, 2021

FAUX NEWS

As the conservative cable news juggernaut Fox News marked its 25th anniversary on Thursday, commemorations were as polarized as many of the channel’s primetime shows.

The channel, founded in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch, entered its anniversary week as the most watched cable news channel in the United States, with third-quarter ratings this year showing a primetime audience of 2.372 million viewers, well ahead of its closest rivals MSNBC and CNN.

On Thursday evening a number of the channel’s famed conservative stars, including Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, paid tribute to their employers live on TV.

“Nobody ever thought we would be successful. Nobody ever thought we would compete. And they were all dead wrong,” Hannity claimed. “This channel now has dominated the airwaves for decades, all while giving a voice to the forgotten men and women in this country.”

On Thursday, the Hill reported the Empire State Building in New York City would be illuminated in red, white and blue this weekend to celebrate the anniversary. The report drew outrage online, with some users on Twitter suggesting the building should, in fact, be under “total blackout for spreading lies and falsehoods”.

A spokeswoman for the building did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation from the Guardian and the report had not been confirmed elsewhere.

As the channel celebrated its anniversary into the evening, hosts on different networks were keen to mark the event with an entirely different take.

The late-night talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel, who presents on the ABC network, used his opening monologue to remind viewers of the channel’s frequent extremist rightwing rhetoric and racist dog whistles, with a reference to the realm of evil created in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy he added they had been “celebrating all day over at Mordor”.

“That’s right,” Kimmel said on Thursday. “Fox News is now old enough to rent a car, fill it with immigrants, and claim it’s heading to your grandma’s house to bury her alive.”

Despite financial and ratings success, Fox News continues to reel from a series of sexual harassment scandals that led to a number of its senior staff including former presenter Bill O’Reilly and founding CEO Roger Ailes departing the company in recent years.

On Thursday other commentators made reference to these , with Trevor Noah’s Daily Show airing a reel of the network’s worst on-air moments of sexual discrimination and harassment.

Trump received 'undisclosed preferential treatment' on a $170 million loan from Deutsche Bank for his DC hotel, House Oversight Committee says

John Haltiwanger

Fri, October 8, 2021

The north entrance of the Trump International in Washington, DC. Mark Tenally/AP

• Deutsche Bank gave Trump "undisclosed preferential treatment" on a $170 million loan for his DC hotel, the House Oversight Committee said.

• The German bank allowed Trump to delay making principal payments on the loan, the committee said.

• "Trump did not publicly disclose this significant benefit from a foreign bank while he was President," the committee said.

Former President Donald Trump "received undisclosed preferential treatment" on a $170 million loan from the German financial institution Deutsche Bank on his Washington, DC, hotel that he "personally guaranteed," the House Oversight Committee said on Friday.

The committee's findings are based on documents obtained from the General Services Administration (GSA), a sprawling agency that helps keep the federal government running.

The documents show Deutsche Bank in 2018 provided Trump a "significant financial benefit" by permitting him to delay making principal payments on the loan for a six-year period, the committee said in a statement.

"Without this deferral, the hotel may have needed to pay tens of millions of additional dollars to Deutsche Bank at a time when it was already facing steep losses. Mr. Trump did not publicly disclose this significant benefit from a foreign bank while he was President," the committee said.

The statement also said that while Trump was president the Trump International Hotel received more than $3.7 million from foreign governments between 2017 to 2020, which raises "concerns about possible violations of the Constitution's Foreign Emoluments Clause."

Trump in financial disclosures reported over $150 million in income from the hotel.

But the hotel lost over $70 million between 2016 to 2020, the committee said, "leading the former President's holding company to inject at least $24 million to aid the struggling hotel."

The committee said that Trump "grossly exaggerated" the financial status of the hotel with "misleading" disclosures, and seemingly hid "potential conflicts of interest stemming not just from his ownership of this failing business but also from his roles as the hotel's lender and the guarantor of its third-party loans."

The Trump hotel in the nation's capital is located in the federally owned Old Post Office Pavilion, and the GSA manages the lease. The House Oversight Committee said the GSA failed to comply with its investigation into the hotel during the Trump era, but "finally" produced a "subset of requested documents" in July.

Committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney and subcommittee on government operations chairman Gerald Connolly sent a letter to the GSA requesting additional information.

"The documents provided by GSA raise new and troubling questions about former President Trump's lease with GSA and the agency's ability to manage the former President's conflicts of interest during his term in office when he was effectively on both sides of the contract, as landlord and tenant," the letter stated.

Collectively, the documents show "that far from being a successful investment, the Trump Hotel was a failing business saddled by debt that required bailouts from President Trump's other businesses," the letter went on to say.

Daniel Hunter, a spokesperson for Deutsche Bank, in a statement to Insider said, "The Committee's letter makes several inaccurate statements regarding Deutsche Bank and its loan agreement."

In response, a House Oversight spokesperson told Insider, "The Committee's letter merely highlighted what was written in audited financial statements that the Trump Organization provided to the federal government and certified as 'correct, accurate and complete.'"

"For example, on December 28, 2016, Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg submitted a copy of the Trump Hotel's audited financial statements certifying them to be correct," the spokesperson added. "The statement indicated that no principal payments were required 'until August 12, 2018.' The certified 2017 financial statement included the same information. The 2018 financial statement, however, stated that principal payments were not due 'until maturity,' which will be in 2024."

The spokesperson went on to say that if Trump believes "these financial statements are inaccurate, the Trump Organization has a duty to correct the certified statements it previously submitted" to the GSA.

Representatives for Trump and the GSA did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.

Trump's refusal to divest himself from his business empire while president raised myriad conflict of interest concerns. The former president broke from his predecessors by not placing his assets in a blind trust, and scoffed at calls to distance himself from his businesses.

In 2019, Trump called the emoluments clause "phony" as legal experts accused him of violating it.

The foreign emoluments clause is enshrined in Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 8 of the US Constitution. The provision prohibits public officials from receiving gifts or cash from foreign governments without congressional approval.

It states: "No Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."

A New York Times review of Trump's tax returns released last year showed he earned $73 million in revenue from the Trump Organization's interests in foreign countries across the first half of his single-term presidency alone.

Additionally, there's a domestic emoluments clause that bars the president from receiving money from the US government other than an annual salary.

It states: "The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them."

In September 2020, The Washington Post reported that Trump's properties raked in $1.1 million in tax dollars from the Secret Service since he entered the White House.

Donald Trump’s endorsements are the latest example of his misogyny
Eric Garcia
Fri, October 8, 2021

Trump Rally (Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Donald Trump may no longer be president, but for much of the GOP, especially those who wrongly believe the 2020 election was stolen from him, his endorsement essentially clears a GOP field. But his vanity means that he often endorses whoever heaps praise upon him in the most pathetic or obsequious ways, without considering whether the candidate is actually electable.

That impulse can cause headaches for Republicans and those close to him. The Associated Press reported that Trump has failed to properly vet Republican candidates with sordid histories with women that often include allegations of abuse. This includes former football player Herschel Walker, who Trump urged to run for Senate for months and froze out other likely more electable Georgia Republicans, and the AP revealed allegations that he threatened to kill his wife. Similarly, as his former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham has conducted her book tour, she has alleged that Max Miller, who worked in the administration with him, abused her even after she confided in Trump about it. Miller denies the claims and has filed a libel lawsuit against Grisham.

The slew of candidates with allegations of being abusive or generally terrible towards women prompted one Trump donor to tell the AP: “There is no vetting process – at least not on policy and electability.” But another theory might be that Trump hasn’t refrained from endorsing them because as a man who has consistently shown disdain for women who challenge him, misogyny is not a disqualifying factor.


During the first Republican primary debate, one of the first questions Megyn Kelly asked him was about his history of misogynistic comments, including “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals”. But rather than backing down from it, Trump retaliated by calling her a “bimbo” and said Kelly “had blood coming out of her eyes. Or blood coming out of her wherever.” Such crude comments would have in the past disqualified Republican politicians (indeed, Todd Akin, the former Republican Missouri Senate candidate who talked about “legitimate rape” and sunk his campaign was a political cautionary tale; he died this week ). But Trump faced no consequences; he still spouts nonsense on Fox News, while Kelly is no longer on the network.

Trump’s history of misogyny doesn’t need explaining, but he found that he would face no consequences for his poor treatment of women. He said Barack Obama “schlonged” Hillary Clinton, whom he called a “nasty woman”, and bragged about sexually assaulting women, infamously declaring on a leaked Access Hollywood tape, “when you’re a star, they let you do it”. After perfunctory Republican outrage, the party rallied around Trump and he won the presidency.

Similarly, he’s defended both friend and foe when they faced sexual assault allegations. When Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were younger, he not only supported Kavanaugh steadfastly (which helped the judge get confirmed), he mocked her at a rally with glee. If anything, Kavanaugh facing allegations likely made Trump more sympathetic to him because it reminded him of how multiple women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct of varying degrees.

Even when his opponent Joe Biden faced allegations of sexual assault, instead of using them to bludgeon Sleepy Joe, he empathised with Biden by saying “I’ve had many false accusations made” and that “And maybe it is a false accusation. Frankly, I hope it is for his sake.” For Trump, the impulse is to always side with men because he sees this as the way men should behave and to hold it against them is tantamount to criticising a man for what he considers normal conduct.

But not every candidate is a former reality television show host who was broadcast into people’s homes while he was cosplaying as a billionaire blowhard. Even after Trump’s election, Republican and Democratic men alike, from Roy Moore to Al Franken, have faced consequences for inappropriate behaviour that stems from male entitlement. If someone doesn’t have that wide name recognition, they won’t shake the allegations as easily as Trump did.

That may be the reason why Republicans are fretting that they might lose otherwise winnable races in Pennsylvania’s open Senate race – where Trump has backed Sean Parnell, whose wife requested restraining orders during their divorce – and in Georgia, where Republicans have a legitimate chance to beat Sen Raphael Warnock with a Republican candidate who doesn’t have a litany of allegations against him like Walker. Republicans’ unconditional loyalty to Trump now risks their otherwise winnable races.

But for Trump, loyalty to him precedes any other trait. In fact, if a Trump ally is accused of sexual misconduct, it’s an opportunity for the former president to declare a case of fake news. For Trump and the party he now dominates, dominance and a distaste for “political correctness” makes a candidate worthy of a MAGA endorsement.

Jim Acosta to Andrew Yang: What the Hell Were You Doing on ‘Tucker Carlson’?

Laura Bradley
Sat, October 9, 2021

CNN

Andrew Yang might be pitching himself as the guy to head up a new, more “inclusive” third party, but Jim Acosta had some questions about the entrepreneur-turned-politician’s methods during a CNN interview on Saturday afternoon. Specifically, he asked Yang to answer for his decision to appear on Tucker Carlson Today.

“Tucker Carlson... I mean, let’s just say he’s a bad person,” Acosta told Yang. “And he represents so much of what is wrong in television news these days. You know this all too well; he spouts off white nationalist talking points. So why would you even go on his show?”

During his appearance on Carlson’s daytime show, Yang discussed leaving the Democratic party to chart a new path—and Carlson responded by praising the Unabomber (admittedly a “bad person”) for his “smart analysis, I think, of the way systems work.”

“His argument is that large organizations over time morph into purely self-preservation projects,” Carlson continued. “A big system in the end protects itself and that’s kind of all it does.”

This prompted Acosta’s second question for Yang on Saturday: “Why didn’t you go after [Carlson] when he’s citing the Unabomber and just talking about crazy stuff?”

Yang’s response? He’s working to “take the temperature of the country down” by reaching across that proverbial aisle to meet folks “where they are.”

“As you know, Tucker commands a massive audience, and if you wanted to try and build a unifying popular movement that does call attention to the fact that our system’s not working, really, for anyone, you have to, again, reach out,” Yang continued.

“And that’s what I was doing on that show. I mean, the goal is to have Republicans who are discontent to channel their discontent in a positive way. And right now, in my view, it’s not going in a positive direction. I’d like to help change that.”

QAnon’s Deadly Price

LONG READ

Kevin T. Dugan
Sat, October 9, 2021

ROLLING STONE

q-anon-surfer-murder - Credit: Illustration by Brian Stauffer for Rolling Stone

The sun had only just risen over Rosarito, Mexico, on August 9th when a neighbor told Roberto Salinas Ramirez about the blood spattered across the dry creek outside his small pink home. Ramirez, 47, lives on a farm next to fields of tomatoes and lettuce, in full view of the mesa-colored Cerro el Coronel, the area’s largest mountain. It’s a quiet place, removed from the tourists who go to the oceanside restaurants and strip clubs in nearby Tijuana. Ramirez hadn’t heard anything the night before, but the neighbor looked shaken. So he went out with his son’s dog, a white mutt named Kobe, to investigate.

Ramirez unlatched the fence — four strands of barbed wire wrapped around wooden stakes — and first saw the blood over a patch of dried-out brush and rocks. There was more on the bushes farther in, so he went deeper, but didn’t find anything. “My eyes were set over there,” he tells me as we walk along the brush, pointing to the northern swoop of the creek. “I figured I would see a big body.” He didn’t see anyone on first inspection, but soon, Kobe was barking at something about 65 feet in. “Maybe I was nervous, but I couldn’t figure out if I saw two feet or three. So I got a little closer, and I realized it was two little children,” he says.

There they were, Kaleo, two, and Roxy, 10 months, hidden under the leaves of a willow shrub, their small, pale bodies lying on their sides, backs together, naked save for diapers.

This is the wreckage that Santa Barbara, California, surf instructor Matthew Taylor Coleman, the father of these two children, admitted to leaving behind in one of the most inexplicable and gruesome crimes in recent memory. Coleman, 40, was a staple of his community, an evangelical Christian who ran a surfing school and tutored Spanish, the kind of person who was known to comfort those who’d lost their own children. But when he was arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border just hours after the bodies were found, another side of him emerged. According to a federal criminal complaint, Coleman told an FBI agent he’d recently been “enlightened” by QAnon — the satanic panic that helped fuel the January 6th insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. His children, he said, had “serpent DNA” they’d inherited from his wife, and he was “saving the world from monsters.”

Coleman has since pleaded not guilty to two counts of foreign first-degree murder, setting up the deaths of these two children — and the basis for Coleman’s beliefs — to the scrutiny of prosecutors and internet conspiracy theorists alike. Already, online trolls have sought to undermine the story about Coleman’s history as a false flag, a planted piece of fake news by the powers that be to discredit a movement. But deeper concerns lay ahead. A third of Americans had once been open to believing that cabals of devil-worshipping elites, aided by “deep state” government officials, steal children and kill them for their blood, the basis of QAnon’s belief system — that has some eerie similarities to the crimes Coleman stands accused of.

Now, looming over Coleman’s prosecution is a bigger question of QAnon’s place in the American political order. Has the U.S. populace drifted so far from reality that QAnon is just another ideology, and Coleman was a true Q believer fully in command of his faculties? Or would only the criminally insane believe in the conspiracy so deeply that they’d act on it?

There should be a word for cities like Santa Barbara, these good-vibes enclaves with all the trappings of wealth — high art, second homes, a sense of outdoorsyness — but removed from the industries that created it. “The American Riviera” appears on the city’s tourist literature, and its outskirts are miles of beaches where surfers wade for hours and plovers peck for food in the sand. About two hours up the coast from LAX, Santa Barbara residents boast that the city of just more than 91,000 people is a welcoming community where everyone knows everyone, and it just so happens that Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and Prince Harry and Megan Markle live one town over. But it’s also a place with a dark undercurrent. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses to keep Black residents out of white parts of town in the 1950s, and a restaurant called Sambo’s — which had displayed racist cartoon characters as decorations — only agreed to change its name last year. In 2014, a self-described incel killed six people and injured 14 more after online men’s rights groups radicalized his frustration over being single into a murderous rage.

Coleman in 2016

Coleman was born here in 1981. He’s the first biological child of John, owner of a carpet-cleaning business, and Lori, a potter; Michael, his older brother by about two years, was adopted. Known as Matty, Coleman had light shaggy hair and a wide smile that revealed a slight overbite — a trait inherited from his father. By most outside appearances, he had an idyllic childhood, with a home that was a regular spot for neighborhood kids to play Nintendo or climb up the treehouse out back. When they got older, they’d attempt ollies off a homemade skateboard ramp. “He always was popular, but he didn’t act like it. He acted very — I don’t know, the opposite of arrogant, he was humble,” a childhood friend, Adrian, tells me. (Like most people in this story, Adrian didn’t want his full name used, out of concern of social reprisal.) Adrian looked up to him as a role model, and recounted how, when they were seven or eight, Coleman helped him when he got stuck climbing the rickety ladder into the treehouse: “He wasn’t just making fun of me because I was stuck. He was like, ‘Oh, no, I can’t have Adrian be scared. Can’t have him be in danger.’ ”

Coleman’s biography, up until this August, is one that sticks out only for being so unremarkable. He surfed, he liked dirt bikes, he made friends with girls easily. He was sensitive; he told a friend he’d witnessed an act of animal abuse as a boy, and it had affected him deeply. At one point in his early teens, he seemed to push boundaries further than some other kids his age. Coleman was with another boy who tried to corner a girl in a room, in what the girl said was an act of “sexual harassment,” according to a friend told directly about the incident. While the source says the other boy was expelled, Coleman got off with writing an apology letter. When he got to high school, though, his interest in Christianity grew more intense, and he would routinely carry around a Bible in which he’d scribble in the margins. Not one of more than a dozen people who knew him during the next three decades could recall any violent or disturbing incidents. In his high school yearbook, his parents bought an ad. There are two pictures of him, one as a boy holding a stuffed monkey, the other nearer to graduation, with gelled hair and iced tips. “Matt, your name means Gift of God,” the ad reads. “We thank God for the gift of you.”

While Coleman grew up religious, Adrian recalled little, if any, Christian iconography in the house. (When I visited the home in September, there was a cross and a small poster with the word faith on it hanging in the living room, near pictures of Matt and Michael. John, their father, declined to comment.) Still, Matt’s faith seems to have become the central axis of his life. He went to an evangelical college in San Diego, where he surfed and went on missionary trips to Spain and Mexico. As he got older, he hopped from church to church, mentoring local kids in the Bible or helping with homework. “I always viewed him as just wanting to care for the kids. He just loved people and wanted to help people,” says Shoreline Community Church assistant pastor Jon Harris, who knew him for about eight years.

Even though friends recall him wanting a family and children back when he was a kid, it wasn’t until January 8th, 2017, that 36-year-old Coleman married Abby Droogsma, a Texas woman five years his junior, who he met through a church group. “It seemed fast,” Harris remembers of their courtship. “He desired it and wanted it. He was stoked to be with her.” Her social media shows she was into CrossFit and Christianity, a proud aunt to her siblings’ newborns, and for a few months, wrapped up in a multilevel marketing company that sold weight-loss powders and promises to get people out of debt. In one 2013 post about what she desired in a future husband, her interests were broad: “food (Mexican), music, alcohol,” the list starts. “Must hate the sin and love the sinner :)”

Soon after marrying, they rented a small blue ranch house off a cul-de-sac near Hendry’s Beach, a popular Santa Barbara surfing site. When I visited, a piece of wood covered a window, and another renter, who lived in the garage, refused to talk. In 2019, their son, Kaleo, was born. To the neighbors, Abby was warmer, quicker to chat, known to bring banana bread or trade gardening tips. After Roxy was born in late 2020, Abby would take the two kids out for walks and stop at a neighbor’s garden to play with the statues of flamingos, seals, raccoons, and other woodland creatures. “Every time she walked by with her kids, she would stop and talk, either coming or going,” says Richard, a neighbor across the street. As the adults chatted, the kids would play with the menagerie of animal statues on his front lawn and eat loquats, an apricot-like fruit, from his garden. “She was a good mom to those kids. She really watched over them, took care of them,” he says.

Whatever strains that may have come out during the pandemic weren’t clear to outside observers. Coleman’s surfing school, Lovewater — where Abby also sometimes worked — appeared to be doing better than ever. “He was the go-to person to do any kind of surf lessons in Santa Barbara County,” says Jethro Acosta, owner of the local dive shop Blue-water Hunter, who last saw Coleman just a few days before the killings. “I’m sure he was busy. And of course, after the whole Covid thing, he was probably triple-busy, because every parent is like, ‘What am I going to do with my kids? Oh, let’s call Matt.’ ”

There’s no formula for a filicide, no algorithm that leads a father to stab his children to death. QAnon, the Illuminati, lizard people — there are millions who believe theories like these and don’t commit crimes. By the time Coleman is said to have abducted and killed his children, nearly a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, these ideas were part of his world. Abby, for one, followed anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook that post lies about the danger of vaccines. A close member of her family spread the “Plandemic” video, which falsely claims the coronavirus outbreak was a political conspiracy, and stories claiming that “Satan has found a home in Dem party leadership.”

It was just after dawn on August 9th, 2021, when Roberto Salinas Ramirez found the bodies of Roxy and Kaleo near his home in Rosarito, Mexico. His son’s dog was barking at something several yards out: “I realized it was two little children.”

 - Credit: Kevin Dugan

Coleman’s own posts look ominous in retrospect, using language borrowed from Q-Anon’s “Great Awakening” — the idea that Donald Trump would make mass arrests of child abusers and usher in a new era — to describe the birth of his daughter last year. “While waiting for her to come, I kept feeling this sense that she was going to be born at a very pivotal time in history, and that she would represent a dawn, or even awakening, to years of great blessing for our family and nation,” he wrote in an Instagram post since taken down. For Coleman, these darker undercurrents that had apparently taken ahold of him weren’t visible in his day-to-day life. Friends have tried to reconcile the person they thought they knew with the man on the nightly news, and still come up short, relying on half-remembered stories to make sense of the senseless. For his part, Coleman remains in federal custody, and his lawyer didn’t respond to questions sent by Rolling Stone.

Still, Coleman is a case study in how enmeshed QAnon has become into the fabric of American life during the pandemic — and how it can be more insidious than other kinds of conspiracies. “QAnon is really interesting because it serves as a master conspiracy-theory belief into which lots of other beliefs can feed,” says Philip Corlett, an associate professor at Yale University’s Department of Psychology, and an expert on paranoia and conspiracy theories. The conspiracy’s adherents easily incorporate related theories, like the anti-Semitic belief that elites are secretly lizard people from space, or that 9/11 was an inside job, because of how wide-ranging they are, he says. It’s also spurred a growing number of murders. Earlier this year, one Kentucky woman allegedly killed a man who was giving her legal advice, after believing he had joined forces with the government in a custody battle; in 2020, a Q-obsessed Staten Island man was charged with killing a reputed Gambino-family crime boss to reportedly “save the American way of life.” And in a case that more closely resembles Coleman’s, one California mother admitted to drowning her three children because she felt powerless to stop them from being sex-trafficking victims.

Part of what has made QAnon and other all-encompassing conspiracies so hard to pin down is that elements of them have long been widespread. “Calling something a delusion versus a conspiracy theory is a normative claim,” Corlett says. “You can find people who have as many weird beliefs as patients with schizophrenia, and who endorse them with a similar degree of conviction, but it’s very rare to find a person who is deeply into conspiracy theories who is as distressed by them as patients with schizophrenia.”

In Santa Barbara, where evangelical Christians make up a small but influential minority, QAnon has been spreading among the faithful. “It’s everywhere,” Pastor Harris says. But it’s not just a local phenomenon. QAnon has had a hold on white evangelical communities, in part because of its apocalyptic message, and the focus on Trump as a messianic figure who will usher in a new era, says Dr. Jason A. Springs, a professor of religion at the University of Notre Dame. “QAnon is a conspiracy theory that really is, in its contours, tailor-made to attract certain tendencies in white evangelicalism,” he says. He also believes the marriage between the Christian right and Republican politics — particularly the grievances about the shrinking white, Christian population — made it propulsive in the past few years: “The fact that the QAnon conspiracy theories and white evangelicalism are infused with Republicanism, the fact that Donald Trump is a Republican president — and he is so extremely brash and tries to fight against political norms of propriety — it just ramps up the attraction.”

In the wake of the killings, there has been a sense of reckoning, with pastors at some of the more conservative churches coming out in force against QAnon. “It’s a betrayal of God’s goodness, and God’s hope, and God’s hope for families,” Pastor Tommy Schneider of the Calvary Chapel Santa Barbara said in a sermon after Coleman was arrested.

But attitudes toward these conspiracy theories — maybe because they are so endemic among evangelicals — were sometimes equivocal. “I’ve talked with people about conspiracy theories and things like that, but whether it’s a conspiracy theory or not, it’s ultimately what somebody wants to believe, or believes to be true,” Harris said. “I have friends that are conspiracy theorists of the military jets that fly over with the chemtrails. That’s true to them. Whether that’s true to me, it’s neither here nor there.”

Ramirez has since erected a memorial. 

- Credit: Kevin Dugan

Coleman awaits trial at an undisclosed federal prison in Southern California. As of publication, his only public statements since his arrest have been rote answers to a judge, affirming procedural questions about understanding the charges against him, entering his plea. While he has reportedly undergone a psychiatric exam, it’s not clear if he will use insanity as a defense. If he does, it would be a significant challenge for his legal team, says Heather Cucolo, co-owner and partner at Mental Disability Law and Policy Associates, and a New York Law School professor. Standing in the way is the Insanity Defense Reform Act, a Reagan-era law that restricted a federal insanity defense to those with “severe” mental illness, after a jury found John Hinckley Jr. not guilty of attempting to assassinate the president by reason of insanity. “The purpose was to make it significantly more difficult to get a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity,” Cucolo says.

The set of allegations in the court documents “makes you think about the kind of classic mentally ill parent who kills their child,” says Dr. Ziv Cohen, a forensic psychologist who has focused on conspiracy theories. “But it’s also possible he does not have a severe mental illness, and he just became so wrapped up in conspiratorial thinking that he appeared like a psychotic person, but he wasn’t. He was really just wrapped up in conspiratorial beliefs and acted on that.”

Working against Coleman is an apparent admission in the federal complaint. “They asked him straight out, ‘Did you know what you did was wrong?’ He said yes,” Cucolo says. “It would seem that the cards are stacked against him.”

Even with his admission, however, there are still outstanding questions about what actually happened on the Mexican ranch that night. Ramirez, the man who found the bodies, says he called 911 around 7:30 that morning, and told authorities that he’d found two American children — he knew because they were so blond. Roxy and Kaleo had bruising on their faces, he says, and each had a single stab wound in their backs about “this size” — making a circle with his forefinger and thumb — the diameter of a bloody stake he found nearby, torn from the barbed-wire fence.

Official reports from Mexican and U.S. officials not only contradict each other, but also Ramirez’s account. According to the attorney general of Baja California in Mexico, Roxy was stabbed 12 times in the chest, while Kaleo was stabbed 17 times. The FBI doesn’t enumerate the stab wounds, but says that Coleman admitted to “using a spear-fishing gun, piercing [Roxy] in the heart.” The complaint is also unclear on whether Coleman used the same method to kill his son, but says that he “described that he had to move the spear around [to kill Kaleo], thereby cutting his hand in the process.” Ramirez also believes they were naked when they were killed, and says he was told later by Mexican authorities that the clothes didn’t have blood on them — contradicting the FBI complaint saying that Coleman admitted to throwing away “bloody clothes.”

It’s also unclear what happened the night of the alleged abduction. According to the complaint, after Coleman took the two kids in his Mercedes Sprinter van on August 7th, Abby called 911 to say she was concerned he’d left for an unknown destination without a car seat for their youngest, and wasn’t answering texts — but said that she wasn’t worried about their safety. (In another apparent contradiction, a surveillance still from the hotel where they stayed shows Coleman holding a car seat that appears to be too small for Kaleo.) Neighbors tell me they didn’t hear any fighting or anything else unusual that night, and Abby said as much during the call with police. The next day, she followed up with the Santa Barbara Police Department and an officer came to her home, where they used the Find My iPhone app to locate his last known location — a mall in Rosarito, Mexico. The SBPD won’t release the recording of the 911 call, or even the time or location of the calls, citing the ongoing investigation. The DOJ refused to answer questions about the case. Abby, for her part, didn’t return a request for comment. Her family has since raised more than $113,000 in a GoFundMe drive.

After the news about Coleman’s arrest first broke, many of the largest right-wing news outlets have opted not to cover the case, or downplayed Coleman’s belief in QAnon. While the conspiracy’s die-hards tend to incorporate contravening facts as proof of their beliefs, the blackout is also a missed opportunity for a larger reevaluation of the QAnon movement. “So long as Trumpism is there to fuel it, and there are people benefiting from this politically and religiously, I don’t think we’re close to the end,” Springs says. “Insofar as white evangelicals hope to deal with this, they need to come to terms with some of the tendencies that have made this affinity and connection between evangelicalism and the QAnon conspiracy so fruitful.”

Ramirez says he couldn’t sleep for two weeks after he found the bodies. He’s since put up crosses in the ground where he found Roxy and Kaleo, their names written in black marker, and is finally able to sleep. He’s planning on laying cement over the area to create a permanent memorial, in case the family ever wants to see the site, though only reporters and authorities have visited.

“It was the saddest day of my life,” he says of finding the children’s bodies. “That bastard. Why didn’t he just leave them with me? I would have taken them. Even if they were just naked, I would have taken them, without anything.”