Monday, May 25, 2020

Trumpsters Are Already Revolting Against COVID Contact Tracing

The latest villain is the one that health officials say is integral to stopping the reemergence of the disease.


Will Sommer May. 25, 2020 


Mark Makela/Getty
Donald Trump’s allies in conservative media have a new villain in the coronavirus fight: contact tracing, the rigorous efforts to track the virus’s spread that public health experts say is essential to safely restarting society. 

Fox News host Laura Ingraham devoted much of her show Thursday night to raising questions about contact tracing, the process where interviewers try to figure out who has been exposed to the virus by literally figuring out whom the infected had contact with. As a Fox News chyron warned that contact tracing should “concern all Americans,” Ingraham claimed that calls for more contact tracers were just an “excuse” to keep businesses closed, and compared being interviewed by a contact tracer to being groped by a Transportation Security Administration agent.

“Instead of rummaging through your luggage, these contact tracers will be prying through the most intimate details of your life,” Ingraham said. 

A wide range of public health officials and experts have insisted that the country needs to vastly expand contact tracing, with one Johns Hopkins study calling for the hiring of at least 100,000 additional contact tracers. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said earlier this month that coronavirus deaths will “of course” increase without additional tracing and testing. Workplace contact tracing is included in the White House’s own reopening plan. 

“Contact tracing” sounds sensible —and a federal jobs program for 300,000 Americans! Yet concerns about our privacy rights are real—who protects your data? Here’s my take: https://t.co/RLJuzI7i9b #TheAngle

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) May 22, 2020
But Ingraham isn’t alone on the right in sowing doubts about contact tracing. Conservative columnists Andy and John Schlafly—best known as the sons of late right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly—co-authored a column at Townhall.com criticizing Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) for budgeting nearly $300 million for contact tracing. The Schlaflys laid out a dystopian vision of contact tracing, comparing it to a “dark episode in the history of the communist Soviet Union” and claiming that contact tracing could be used to separate children from infected parents. 
They even imagined contact tracing details being used to embarrass Republican candidates. 

“The real goal of the contact tracing is to use COVID-19 as a pretext to monitor the whereabouts of every American, perhaps through our smartphones, and take away our liberties,” the Schlaflys wrote. “Republican political candidates will be tracked and leaks of their private information to the media would be inevitable under this scheme, while Democrats such as Joe Biden are given a pass on their far greater misconduct.” 

Instead, the Schlaflys called for Abbott to flood the state with hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that’s become a darling of Trump supporters as a potential coronavirus treatment—even as clinical studies suggest it has no effect on the virus and actually increases mortality.

“The $295 million that Abbott is spending on contact tracing could have purchased HCQ treatments for half of the entire State of Texas, to reopen the state without the need for oppressive monitoring,” the Schlaflys wrote. 

Emerald Robinson, the White House correspondent for conservative Newsmax TV, which is run by a close Trump confidant, compared contact tracing to “mandatory vaccination” and 5G towers, which conspiracy theorists have claimed spread coronavirus. 

Contact tracing. 5G. Drones. AI. Mandatory vaccination. Digital ID.

Nobody in America voted for any of this stuff.

So why are these projects moving ahead anyway?

Big Tech is out of control. It must be regulated before it's too late.

— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) May 22, 2020
Pro-Trump activist Tom Fitton, the head of conservative activist group Judicial Watch, put contact tracing on a list of his coronavirus grievances, declaring: “I’m done with it.”

I'm done with it. No masks, then masks, unprecedented shutdowns,the "models" collapse, the curve, hospital capacity, then its "testing", then "contact tracing" and now the VACCINE. And now CDC tells us it does NOT easily spread from surfaces! #ConstitutionOverCoronavirus https://t.co/4GSRn4DB3G

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) May 22, 2020
Other concerns on the fringe right about contact tracing have been driven by outright hoaxes about H.R. 6666, legislation from Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) that would put $100 billion into coronavirus testing and contact tracing. 

RELATED IN POLITICS

It’s Official: Laura Ingraham Wants Your Grandmother to Die
https://www.thedailybeast.com/its-official-laura-ingraham-wants-your-grandmother-to-die

Trump World Turns in the True COVID Villain: Surgical Masks
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-world-turns-on-the-true-covid-villain-surgical-masks

These ‘Reckless’ Docs Are the New COVID-19 Stars of Fox News
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-newest-fox-news-doctor-duo-have-been-emphatically-condemned-by-physician-groups

The bill’s number alone puts it perilously close to the supposedly Satanic number “666,” right as conspiracy theorists have become convinced that any coronavirus vaccine would be the “Mark of the Beast.” Prominent conspiracy theory outlet InfoWars declared that the bill was the “Bill of the Beast,” while rumors spread on social media claiming that the bill would authorize contact tracers to abduct children.

Privacy watchdogs have raised legitimate concerns about how contact tracing data could be used, especially when the data is collected through apps. On Monday, the ACLU called for additional safeguards to protect contact tracing data. A report on a North Dakota contact tracing app found several privacy flaws. 

QAnon conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine tells her viewers/followers not to get tested for COVID-19 because *SHE* doesn't want to be contacted by contact tracers if they test positive. pic.twitter.com/I2V2sVQeDU
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 20, 2020

But much of the fearmongering about contact tracing seems to be driven by ignorance of what it actually is. Failed Republican congressional candidate and QAnon conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero, whose call to “#FireFauci” Trump retweeted in April, has urged her fans to not get tested for COVID-19. She also appears to misunderstand contact tracing, claiming that contact tracers go through phone “contact” lists, rather than in-person contacts. 

“I don’t want people to get tested, because I don’t want to be in their phone, in their contact list, and if you guys are all following me on Twitter and following me on YouTube, then I’m probably going to be in your contact list,” Tesoriero told her fans in a video. “So I would prefer not to be there. They specifically said if they find one person, then they’re going to make sure they call all of that person’s contacts, whether they have 5,000 contacts or 5 contacts. And I really don’t feel like being called, I want to get off the grid of this system.”





On her Thursday night show, Ingraham positioned herself as perhaps conservative media’s leading contact tracing skeptic. But her guests went even further than her, with Claremont Institute senior fellow John Eastman adopting what was meant to be a German or Russian accent to imitate a contact tracing interviewer. 

Ingraham guest Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the DiscoveryInstitute's Center on Human Exceptionalism, claimed that contact tracing meant that the “French revolution is attacking the American revolution.” Ingraham agreed, comparing contact tracers to radical French revolutionaries. 

“The Jacobins, they’re back,” she said 

YEP 
JACOBINMAG.COM


BOTH THE AMERICAN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION INCLUDING THE JACOBINS WERE INFLUENCED BY THE INTERNATIONALIST, GLOBALIST, HUMANIST, REVOLUTIONARY THOMAS PAINE


Thomas Paine and the French Revolution. Tom Paine was the most pro-French Revolution propagandist. He had helped the Americans in their conflict against Britain with his pamphlet Common Sense and possibly had also had a hand in writing the Declaration of Independence. He had tried to encourage democracy in England.

SENIOR FELLOW MY ASS WHAT ACADEMIC STANDING DOES HE HAVE 
SENIOR FELLOW IS NOT AN ACADEMIC STANDING 
I GUESS AMERICAN HISTORY LET ALONE EUROPEAN HISTORY WAS
 NOT PART OF INGRAHAM'S CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGIST DEGREE EITHER 

NEITHER OF THESE KNOW WHAT THEY SPEAK OF.

EUGENE PLAWIUK BA
SENIOR FELLOW, HISTORY
FREE UNIVERSITY OF BRUDERHEIM 


Citizen Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense helped ignite the American Revolution, was an enthusiastic early supporter of the French Revolution. He ...
Oct 23, 2019 - Thomas Paine was an England-born political philosopher and writer who supported revolutionary causes in America and Europe. ... to Europe and offered a stirring defense of the French Revolution with “Rights of Man.
Jump to Funding the Revolution - Paine has a claim to the title The Father of the American Revolution, which rests on his pamphlets, especially Common ...
by M Philp - ‎2013 - ‎Cited by 3 - ‎Related articles
Jul 18, 2013 - Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer, controversialist and international revolutionary. ... was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution. ... Paine contemplated writing a history of the French Revolution but he ...
Sep 11, 2019 - During the American RevolutionPaine served as a volunteer personal assistant to General Nathanael Greene, traveling with the Continental ...
Thomas Paine, political propagandist whose Common Sense pamphlet and Crisis papers influenced the American Revolution.
Apr 12, 2019 - Thomas Paine, the most widely read political thinker in the late 18th century, played a notable role in the American Revolution, in the ...
This simple quotation from Founding Father Thomas Paine's The American Crisis not only describes the beginnings of the American Revolution, but also the life ...

No comments:

Post a Comment