COVID TALES: Never Forget_When they mocked the deaths of those who doubted

Scientists are paying a huge personal price in the lonely fight against anti-vaxxers

Anti-vaccine protesters at a Los Angeles rally  (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

 

By Michael Hiltzik
Business Columnist
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Oct. 20, 2023 3 AM PT

 

In the preface of the new book by vaccine expert and pro-science crusader Peter Hotez, there are several acknowledgments of a kind that may never have appeared before in a book like it.

There, Hotez expresses gratitude to the Houston Police Department, the Texas Medical Center Police Department and the security force of the Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.

These are all places where Hotez plies his profession. He thanks all those departments “for keeping my family and me safe during this time of aggression.”



    The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party.

— Pediatrician and vaccine scientist Peter Hotez

These words tell a story all their own: how the anti-vaccine and anti-science movements have incorporated physical threats into their despicable arsenals. I wrote nearly two years ago that, unable to produce scientific support for their views, they had turned to stalking and intimidation to discourage critics.

Things have only gotten worse since then, as Hotez reports in his new book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.” A professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor and a courageously outspoken advocate for public health, Hotez documents how agitators on the extreme right have graduated from trying to sow mistrust in science to targeting individual scientists such as himself. 

The heart of his book is a call for government agencies and professional organizations to wage an aggressive battle against anti-vaccination and anti-science propaganda. What’s needed, he says, is something akin to an interagency task force to address the problem, because the scientific community as it’s currently organized can’t do so on its own.

“The health sector and the scientific sector don’t quite know what to do because this is a politically driven attack, coming from extremist elements of the Republican Party,” he told me. “What you see instead are responses that skirt around the edges. You’ll see public health agencies step up their pro-vaccine messages, and sure, that’s important, but it doesn’t get to what’s really driving this.”

Hotez identifies several reasons for scientific organizations’ ineffective response to the spread of scientific misinformation and disinformation. “They don’t have the skill set or the background to know how to deal with this,” he says.

Then there’s their traditional commitment to political neutrality. “They say, ‘We’re a scientific or health organization, we have to be politically neutral.’” He cites the observation by Elie Wiesel that “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” 

On Oct. 13, Hotez received the inaugural Anthony Fauci Courage in Leadership Award from the Infectious Diseases Society of America for his long public campaign against anti-science propagandists. The battle came at a considerable personal cost.

Online trolls have compared Hotez to Hitler and Stalin. He has been “doxxed” through the publication of his email address and office phone number, and showered with email threats calling for his torture or public execution. Many threats were larded with antisemitism.

Hotez is not alone. “I get hate mail, I get physically harassed, I’ve gotten three legitimate death threats that have had to be investigated by the FBI,” Paul Offit, a prominent vaccine scientist in Philadelphia, recounts in “Shot in the Arm,” a new documentary by Scott Hamilton Kennedy about the damage done to public health by anti-vaccine propaganda. (The documentary will open at the Angelika Film Center in New York on Nov. 2 and the Laemmle Glendale in Southern California on Nov. 17.)

The film includes a clip of Del Bigtree, a leading anti-vaxxer, addressing an audience with the words: “Do you think it’s a good idea to let the government own your baby’s body? Anyone that believes in the right to bear arms to stand up against your government, I don’t know what you were saving that gun for then.”

Hotez’s book and the film both trace the evolution of vaccine science, starting with the discovery by Edward Jenner in the 1790s that people exposed to cowpox via inoculation would be rendered immune from the much more dangerous smallpox (“vaccination” derives from the Latin for “cow,” vacca), and the evolution of the anti-vaccine movement.

“As both a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines and a parent of an adult daughter with autism,” Hotez writes, “I have had a front-row seat on the modern anti-vaccine movement in America.”

Anti-vaccine activism had existed almost for as long as there were vaccines, but the movement got an enormous shot in the arm, so to speak, from a notorious article in the Lancet, a respected British medical journal, in 1998. The paper by a team headed by British physician Andrew Wakefield purported to identify a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. 

The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010. After an investigation, British medical authorities effectively revoked his medical license. Countless subsequent scientific studies have established that there is no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Nevertheless, Wakefield’s paper promoted an almost immediate plummet in MMR childhood vaccinations in Britain and its claim remains central to the anti-vax movement to this day — a movement that continues to lionize Wakefield, who now lives in the U.S., as a truth-teller.

The historical roots of the anti-science movement date back more than 100 years, Hotez writes, to when authoritarian regimes such as Stalin’s recognized that discrediting scientific experts assisted their path to personal power. Its appeal to the modern Republican Party has much to do with economics — challenging the scientific consensus on global warming, for example, allows the GOP to serve the anti-regulation interests of its Big Business patrons.

The anti-vaccine movement was in many respects a natural fit. Its invocation of shibboleths such as “medical freedom” and “health freedom” — coded justifications for opposition to vaccine mandates — led to its getting “picked up by the Republican Tea Party in Texas,” Hotez says.

U.S. vaccination rates against COVID show a partisan slant, with counties that voted for Trump in 2020 falling well behind those that voted for Biden. COVID death rates show the same pattern, with red counties showing higher rates than blue.

                                                                                         (ACAsignups.net)

“It was mutually reinforcing,” he told me. “The anti-vaccine groups were getting attention and PAC money that they never had before, and the far right got a new set of adherents and a new faux outrage to rally the base. It just became part of the canon.”

The anti-vaccine and anti-science movements exploit and amplify the lay public’s ignorance about the scientific method and the technical aspects of how vaccines work.

“Vaccines were compelling because vaccine-preventable diseases were compelling,” Offit explains in the documentary. Smallpox, polio and measles were recognized nemeses when they ranged the world untreated. Smallpox alone took the lives of an estimated 500 million people over the centuries, but thanks to vaccination it was judged eradicated from the world by the late 1970s.

The introduction of the polio vaccine in 1955 and the measles vaccine in 1963, accompanied by public mass vaccination campaigns, dropped the number of U.S. deaths from those diseases to zero by the early 1980s. Since then, those diseases have recurred only in discrete communities where vaccine resistance reigns, and among the unvaccinated.

Yet “vaccines are a victim of their own success,” Offit observes. “When vaccines work, nothing happens. I think that’s what makes them a little less compelling. People don’t really see what they’re doing.”

When once-common photographs of children hobbling on crutches, confined in an iron lung, or consumed with the bright red measles rash, much less perishing from the diseases, disappear from news reports, people forget how devastating the diseases once were.

“I understand how easy it was to appeal to the notion that vaccines are doing more harm than good” — a common feature of anti-vaccine hysteria — “because we weren’t seeing the vaccine-preventable diseases and their harm,” Offit says.

When the affiliated anti-vaccine and far-right movements turned their firepower on the COVID-19 vaccines introduced in 2021, the consequences were dire. Hotez estimates the unnecessary toll at 200,000 American lives lost because of vaccine refusal and anti-vaccine propaganda.

The partisan character of this outcome is manifested in a distinct divide in COVID vaccination rates between blue and red counties, with the latter having notably lower vaccination rates and higher per-capital COVID death rates. The partisanship is curious, given that Donald Trump has boasted that the development of the COVID vaccines was spurred by his own Operation Warp Speed. But COVID vaccine resistance has also been spurred by his persistent efforts to minimize the severity of the pandemic.

Despite his own efforts and those of other science advocates, Hotez sees only minor glimmers of hope that the trend toward science skepticism can be beaten back. Medical boards have fallen woefully short in enforcing their own regulations against physicians spreading misinformation and disinformation.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom just signed a repeal of one of the very few state-level regulatory initiatives — a law passed only a year ago that empowered the state medical board to treat COVID misinformation as an element of professional misconduct. The original law’s critics argued that the board already had the power to discipline doctors for spreading misinformation about COVID — and the law had been temporarily blocked by a federal judge on grounds that it infringed on doctors’ free-speech rights.

On the federal level, debate over science policy has been ceded to the Republican right wing, which has held hearings to try to humiliate scientists who have done unrefuted studies identifying the origin of COVID as a natural outbreak from wildlife to humans, debunking the factually unsupported partisan myth that it was produced in a Chinese government lab.

“They’re not even pretending at anything other than political theater,” Hotez says. Even moderate Republicans shy away from questioning the GOP right’s position.

“I don’t see mainstream Republicans coming to the defense of science,” he says. “But we’re not really hearing from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Health and Human Services agencies are pretty quiet.” He says he’s had conversations with like-minded scientists “about how we get organized better to respond to this. But it’s slow going.”

The real danger, as Hotez sees it, is that anti-science politics will become globalized. “It’s not going to stay in the U.S. We export movies, we export music, we’re going to export this stuff.”

In the past, he says, a sort of social auto-correction counteracted anti-vaccine activism. In the past, if vaccine resistance led to an outbreak of measles or pertussis, word would spread across the community, creating pressure on resistant parents to vaccinate their children.

“I don’t see that, even after 200,000 lives lost. These were victims of a predatory disinformation campaign,” Hotez says. Instead, the vaccine opponents “are doubling down, just telling a bigger lie, blaming the vaccine and the scientists. I don’t see that getting any better, at least until the 2024 election. And what happens after the election is anybody’s guess.” [SOURCE]

Reality Check: Before the Mandella Affect Erases The Facts_Obama's 'Red Line' threat was exactly what we said it was, from their own nasty mouths

 

Obama’s ‘red line’ haunts Clinton, Trump 

Hillary Clinton issued several public statements in 2013 supporting Obama's decision of a red line in Syria. | Getty

By Michael Crowley
10/11/2016 05:07 AM EDT

On Sept. 9, 2013, Hillary Clinton returned to the Obama White House for the first time since leaving her job as secretary of state seven months earlier. Still undecided about a presidential bid, Clinton kept her profile low. But the occasion — a White House summit on animal trafficking — seemed to promise a photo-op with zero political risk.

Instead, Clinton walked into a national security crisis and found herself huddling in the Oval Office with President Barack Obama about an issue that haunts them both to this day, and which Donald Trump invoked in Sunday night’s presidential debate as evidence of Clinton’s poor judgment.

The issue was Obama’s chemical weapons “red line” in Syria, an ultimatum that led Obama to threaten the use of force against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad before ultimately accepting a peaceful resolution. Although Obama defends the outcome, critics in both parties — including three former Obama defense secretaries — accuse him of dangerous indecision and lack of resolve. Trump has called the episode a national “humiliation.”

Trump told the debate audience that the episode “was laughed at all over the world, what happened,” and he sought to pin it directly on Clinton.

“She was there as secretary of state with the so-called line in the sand,” the Republican nominee said, in an apparent reference to what is usually called Obama’s “red line.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was gone,” Clinton protested. “At some point we need to get the facts out.”

But the facts are less convenient than either Clinton or Trump suggested.

Although she was a private citizen at the time, Clinton did play a supporting role in the red-line saga. As it unfolded in late August and early September 2013, she had several conversations with Obama and his top aides and with Secretary of State John Kerry. She issued several public statements supporting Obama, including unplanned remarks on the day of her White House visit.

In doing so, Clinton put her stamp on one of the most consequential episodes of Obama’s presidency, one she has sometimes defended — and at other times tried to distance herself from, as she did on Sunday night.

Trump’s own position is not simple, either. Though he now ridicules Obama’s aborted military action, at the time he urged Obama in a tweet not to follow through on his threat to bomb Syria. He did so even after many observers argued that American credibility was on the line, a view Trump now appears to endorse. But Trump also argued that Obama never should have issued his red-line ultimatum in the first place.

But it was Clinton who had the direct role in the saga.

When she arrived at the White House on Sept. 9, she found Obama’s national security team scrambling.

Two weeks earlier, Obama had threatened airstrikes against Syrian government forces to punish them for using chemical weapons — a violation of a rhetorical “red line” Obama had drawn months earlier.

Obama was wary of entanglement in Syria. Hours before Clinton’s arrival, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave him an escape hatch. Putin offered to force his ally, Assad, to surrender his chemical arsenal if Obama promised not to bomb.

Clinton had not spoken publicly on the subject since Obama’s initial threat, drawing snarky jibes for a two-week silence on Twitter — though she had already been advising Obama and his aides behind the scenes. Now she found herself meeting with Obama in the Oval Office, huddling with top White House officials, and hastily revising her planned remarks before the media to include a public statement on the Russian offer, in which she called Putin’s plan “an important step.”

Obama accepted the Russian proposal a few days later; there would be no U.S. airstrikes. But Obama traded a military conflict for a political one. On the right, the phrase “red line” has become mocking shorthand for weakness and indecision.

Clinton has mostly defended Obama’s performance, backing him at key points as the drama unfolded and declaring its outcome a “net positive.” Since she began running for president, however, Clinton has conceded that the episode left U.S. allies uncertain about American resolve.

“I do think that not being able to follow through with it cost us. I’m certain of that,” Clinton said in a September 2015 event in Washington, D.C.

Lately, Clinton and her aides have preferred to avoid the subject altogether. In a January debate, Clinton refused to say whether she thought the saga had harmed America’s credibility. And during a Sept. 21 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, also dodged the question, saying the decision “was made after she was out of office” and refusing to characterize Clinton’s view. Her campaign did not provide a comment for this story.

The subject puts Clinton in an uncomfortable spot, caught between one of Obama’s most criticized foreign policy decisions and her close embrace of a president beloved by Democratic voters whose support she needs in November.

Trump has eagerly exploited the awkwardness. In a Sept. 7 news release, his campaign said Clinton “strongly backed” Obama’s red line and that she “backed measures that fell far short of the steps that needed to be taken to swiftly resolve the situation.”

“According to experts, this vacuum of American influence directly led to the rise of ISIS,” the release added.

Many experts would dispute that. Trump’s release also did not specify what “steps” should have been taken.

Trump also neglects to mention his own evolving view. In a Sept. 7, 2013, tweet, he urged Obama not to follow through on his threatened attack: “President Obama, do not attack Syria. There is no upside and tremendous downside,” Trump wrote.

It is true that Clinton backed Obama’s original red line. Obama established that marker in an August 2012 news conference after being asked what could prompt him to take military action in Syria. Obama replied that “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. … There would be enormous consequence

Obama’s comment surprised some White House officials who worried about its implications. But four months later, in December 2012, Clinton doubled down on it. “We have made our views very clear. This is a red line for the United States,” she said. Clinton said she wouldn’t “telegraph in any specifics what we would do … but suffice to say we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur.”

Clinton left the State Department in February 2013. That August, Assad’s forces fired nerve gas into a Damascus suburb, killing a U.S.-estimated 1,429 people, including more than 400 children.

Obama couldn’t ignore it. “There need to be international consequences,” he said on Aug. 28, vowing two days later to take “limited, narrow” military action. Pentagon planners drew up targets and moved warships. On Sept. 3, Kerry laid out the case for action. “It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something,” Kerry said.

Clinton watched the drama in cautious silence at first. She’d been burned by her support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and knew the public had little appetite for a new military intervention in the Arab world. “Parallels were drawn with the run-up to the war in Iraq,” she recalls in her 2014 book “Hard Choices.”

But the absence from the all-consuming debate of Clinton — the presumed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee — quickly grew conspicuous.

“Hillary has no right to remain silent,” former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted on Sept. 3. BuzzFeed mocked Clinton when she finally broke a two-week Twitter hiatus not to comment on Syria but to congratulate a woman who swam from Cuba to Florida.

The plot took an abrupt twist on Aug. 31, when Obama startled the world — including many of his own advisers — by announcing he would ask Congress to authorize a strike beforehand. Critics said Obama was losing his nerve and passing the buck for his own red line.

But Clinton came to his defense. “Secretary Clinton supports the president’s effort to enlist the Congress in pursuing a strong and targeted response to the Assad regime’s horrific use of chemical weapons,” a Clinton aide told reporters on Sept. 3.

Now Clinton was drawn into the unfolding drama. In the following days she spoke multiple times with both Kerry and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, offering them political and diplomatic advice. She urged McDonough to enlist the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, to push through a quick bipartisan vote in his committee authorizing the use of force against Syria — a move she felt would give Kerry and Obama leverage before an upcoming meeting with Putin. Clinton even lobbied other senators, including New York Democrat Charles Schumer, to back the controversial measure.

The White House more than welcomed Clinton’s advice. At one point in early September, according to Clinton’s book, McDonough told Clinton that the president wanted to call her again. Clinton demurred, saying that Obama must be too busy. He phoned her anyway.

By then Obama was losing control of the situation. On Aug. 30, Britain’s Parliament unexpectedly voted against military action. Support in the U.S. Congress began to look perilously weak.

Trump, meanwhile, tweeted almost daily as the crisis played out, repeatedly imploring Obama not to strike Syria. “What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long term conflict? Obama needs Congressional approval,” Trump tweeted on Aug. 29, 2013.

But Trump also condemned Obama for having drawn the red line in the first place. “The only reason President Obama wants to attack Syria is to save face over his very dumb RED LINE statement. Do NOT attack Syria, fix U.S.A.,” he tweeted several days later.

The Trump campaign declined to comment.

Then, on Sept. 9, Clinton arrived at the West Wing for the summit on animal trafficking, joined by her daughter, Chelsea, who had made the issue a high-profile cause for the Clinton Foundation. By then, the plot had thickened further in the form of the Russian offer to force Assad to relinquish his chemical weapons if the U.S. agreed not to bomb. (Putin strongly opposed U.S military action against his Syrian ally.)

Soon after her 1 p.m. arrival, Clinton was briefed on the latest developments, then ushered into an Oval Office meeting with Obama. With Congress poised to deal him an embarrassing defeat, she advised that he accept the Russian plan. “I told the President that if the votes for action against Syria were not winnable in Congress he should make lemonade out of lemons and welcome the unexpected overture from Moscow,” she recounts in “Hard Choices.” Clinton told Obama she was wary of a possible Russian stalling tactic, and understood that the deal would do little to resolve the larger Syrian crisis — but that it was still worth trying. Obama, in need of political cover, asked her to make a public statement to that effect.

 

Rescue workers work the site of airstrikes in a rebel-held part of eastern Aleppo, Syria, on Sept. 21, 2016. (Photo provided by the Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets.) 

After huddling with Obama’s national security speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, Clinton appeared before a press corps that had been expecting to hear her views on elephant poaching. Reading from a new introduction to her planned remarks, Clinton said that “it would be an important step” if Syrian leader Assad surrendered his chemical stockpile, one possible thanks only to a “credible military threat” by the U.S.

A few days later, Obama formally agreed to the Russian proposal and halted Pentagon planning for airstrikes. Some key U.S. allies, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, were appalled, saying Obama had sent a dangerous signal of weakness to adversaries like Iran. In the months to come, three Obama defense secretaries — Leon Panetta, Robert Gates and Chuck Hagel — would say he mishandled the situation. “The credibility of the United States is on the line,” Panetta told Yahoo News in October 2014. “It was important for us to stand by our word and go in and do what a commander in chief should do.”

“If you cock that pistol,” Gates told Business Insider in January 2016, “you have to be ready to fire it.”

“I wouldn’t have drawn the line, but once he drew it, he had no choice but to go across,” Trump argued during a Republican primary debate in September 2015. “Somehow, [Obama] just doesn’t have courage. There is something missing from our president. Had he crossed the line and really gone in with force, done something to Assad, if he had gone in with tremendous force, you wouldn’t have millions of people displaced all over the world.”

Obama’s backers call that ridiculous and contend that the final outcome was a clear success. Defying skeptics, international inspectors removed 1,300 tons of chemical weapons from Syria — some from sites now controlled by the Islamic State.

“We ended up getting rid of a weapons-of-mass-destruction threat that was worse than what the CIA wrongly estimated was in Iraq, for which we went to war. Why is that considered a failure?” said Derek Chollet, a former senior Obama Pentagon official who advises Clinton’s campaign. (Recent evidence has emerged suggesting that Assad may have hidden some of his arsenal. The U.S. also believes that the Syrian regime has since attacked civilians with chlorine gas, a substance not covered by the 2013 agreement.)

Clinton’s instincts are more hawkish than Obama’s, and since joining the presidential race she has repeatedly said she would take stronger action in Syria than Obama has. She cites her support for a 2012 plan to arm Syria’s rebels, which Obama rejected, and says she would consider imposing a “no fly” zone in northern Syria.

Yet when it comes to Obama’s “red line,” Clinton has never directly criticized him. In a September 2015 discussion about military force with The Des Moines Register editorial board, however, Clinton did argue generally that, “If we say we’re going to do something publicly,” a president must explain “why we have to go through with doing it ... so that we don’t raise expectations and cause miscalculations.”

She did not link Obama or Syria directly to that comment. And, when asked specifically about the red-line saga during a Jan. 17 Democratic primary debate, Clinton defended Obama, calling the agreement with Russia “a very positive outcome.”

“We were able to get the chemical weapons out. Getting those chemical weapons out was a big, big deal,” she said.

The debate moderator, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, then followed up by asking again whether the episode had damaged American credibility abroad. Clinton would not take the bait. “I think as commander in chief, you have to be constantly evaluating the decisions you have to make,” Clinton said.

Then she quickly changed the subject.[SOURCE]

The Hypocrisy Is Deafening: RE All Of The Pearl-Clutching Over Hegseth As Trump's DOD Nominee_preach, Sister!

You did not hear one single word from the media or the left when:

1. Ashley Biden’s diary came out where she said Joe Biden took inappropriate showers with her;

2. There were pictures of naked underage girls with Hunter Biden on his laptop;

3. Kamala Harris protected the…

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) November 24, 2024

Andy Ngo Is Right: Our current culture is shit

Being raised in an Asian immigrant household, I find white American (western) culture so bizarre that children could fathom throwing their parents out on the streets or cutting off ties because of how they voted. If this is your culture, it’s sh— and so are you. https://t.co/Uva6dSUTwi

— Andy Ngo 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) November 12, 2024

When The Sissy Asks, "How can you vote for a convicted felon???"

“How can people choose to vote for a convicted felon?!”

Psst…. Trump has never been convicted of anything. @megynkelly educates by explaining the law💥👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/KIEuR0phfr

— Spitfire (@DogRightGirl) November 10, 2024

Smug Leftists On Parade_How The Mighty Have Fallen: When America laughs back

"DONALD TRUMP WILL NEVER EVER BE PRESIDENT" montages never get old: pic.twitter.com/pXfb7SNdy7

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 10, 2024

Glenn Greenwald Explains The Trump Win To The People Who Can't See Themselves

Red Pill Diaries: The case of Tucker Carlson_When watching the brainwashed around you wakes you up

The Fifth Column At Work: Gaslighting You To Ignore Your Lying Eyes And Ears_Jimmy Kimmel weeps on cue to prove it

 

DSSO_The PsyOps Continues Within a Day Of Trump's Second Assassination Attempt: Sky News gets it

2024 Presidential Election_Saying What We All Suspected: The bombshell claims of 'ABC whistleblower' who says Harris got help in debate

By Alex Hammer For Dailymail.Com

Published: 12:01 EDT, 17 September 2024 | Updated: 17:06 EDT, 17 September 2024 

Several bombshell claims were made last week in an unverified document circulating online purporting to prove close collaboration between ABC News and Kamala Harris's team before her debate with former president Donald Trump.

The document is claimed to be a sworn statement penned by a staffer at ABC News. It was first published Sunday by an X account with the name 'Black Insurrectionist.' 

The document, said to be a sworn affidavit signed by a notary public the day before the debate, says the network gave Harris questions ahead of time while agreeing to a series of other preconditions to give the vice president an advantage over Trump.

Also prohibited at the debate were inquiries about Harris' stint as California Attorney General, as well as those involving her brother-in-law, Tony West, the document shows. It includes several other stipulations, as well as redactions obscuring the supposed staffer's identity.

A statement from ABC did not address the specific claims, instead saying: 'ABC News followed the debate rules that both campaigns agreed on... No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates.'

  

The unverified document, said to be a sworn affidavit signed by a notary public on September 9, has sparked controversy with its bevy of claims 

A statement from ABC did not address the specific claims, instead saying: 'ABC News followed the debate rules that both campaigns agreed on... No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates' 

The document, which describes containing a seal from the notary public that is not actually visible, says it was written by a New York resident. 

'I have worked for ABC news for over 10 years in various technical and administrative positions,' it reads, before stating that the staffer 'observed significant transformations in the nature of news reporting at the organization' within that span, as well as a 'shift from unbiased reporting to a model influenced by external factors.'

The purported staffer, who says they are not a supporter of Donald Trump, states that the intent of the affidavit is solely to 'address concerns regarding perceived biases within news reporting within my employer's debate.'

It was purportedly penned by a staffer who has worked at the station for some ten years, during which time they said ABC's style of reporting has become increasingly troublesome

The document goes on to cite 'promises made [that] the candidates would be held to firm discussions regarding their proposed policy stances and that the debate would not deteriorate into an ad campaign,' where 'candidates would simply make blanket statements without specific policy or explanation as to...'

The end of that sentence is redacted, along with several others.

The next section offers some purported insight into the political landscape of the ABC office, where the writer claimed employees were 'looking for a fair and honest debate' while questioning 'the clear biased [sic] that is well known throughout the company.'

It specifically mentions ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, as well as C-suite staffers at the station and its connected companies.

'It is common knowledge that Debate Moderators as well as Chief Executive Officers of my employer are well known not to support Donald Trump,' the section reads.

'This led to several employees speaking up in regards to how fair the debate was going to be.'

Pictured are some of the purported agreements reached by the two parties

That same section includes 'specific instances related to the debate' that 'raise concerns about procedural fairness.'

The first was that the Harris campaign supposedly 'received particular accommodations, including, but not limited to, the providing of a podium significantly smaller than that used by Donald Trump, and assurances regarding split-screen television views that would favorably impact [Harris's] appearance.'

The next stipulation was that Trump 'would be subjected to fact-checking during the debate, while Kamala Harris would not face comparable scrutiny.'

It adds how Harris' team supposedly 'required assurances that Donald Trump would be fact checked,' allegedly 'via multiple communications with the Harris campaign. 

'The Trump campaign was not included in the negotiations,' it goes on to state.

It then claims that 'the Harris campaign was provided with sample questions that, while not the exact questions, covered similar topics that would appear during the debate.'

The document then gets into 'Harris campaign-imposed restrictions on the scope of questioning,' including: 'No questions regarding the perceived health of President Joe Biden', 'No inquiries related to her tenure as Attorney General in San Francisco,' and lastly, 'No questions concerning her brother-in-law, Tony West.'

West, a prominent attorney who once worked as the general counsel for Uber, 'faces allegations of embezzling billions of dollars in taxpayer funds,' according to alleged affidavit.

One post on X featuring the document has been viewed nearly 8million times in a little over 24 hours

Those claims are also unproven and have never been reported.

The document claims that West, who is married to Harris's sister, Maya, 'may be involved in [her] administration if she's elected.'

The New York Times recently reported that West is 'a major force behind Ms. Harris's campaign and its record-setting fund-raising,' and serves as a 'critical point of contact for business leaders and major donors.' 

The document then claims ABC 'employees expressing favorable views toward [Trump] experience significant concerns about potential retribution.'

The assertion is made before several lines of redacted text.

The purported staffer further claimed to have sent the document to House Speaker Mike Johnson. 

'I have also dispatched a Federal Express package containing this affidavit, sent on September 9th, 2024, and delivered to my residence on September 10th, 2024, which will remain unopened for potential investigative purposes,' the document states.

The document alleges that ABC News gave Harris questions ahead of the debate, along with agreeing to preconditions to give her a leg up on former President Donald Trump

The staffer then claims to have 'secretly recorded several conversations that will prove that the Harris Campaign insisted upon not only the Fact Checking of Donald Trump, but also insisted on what questions were not to be asked under any circumstances.'

'I make these statement under the penalty of perjury and without coercion of any kind,' it concludes.

Despite being unproven, the document has picked up steam on social media, being shared by several high-profile figures.

They include Senator Ted Cruz, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, billionaire hedge-funder Bill Ackman, and Elon Musk, with the latter reposting statements expressing belief in the claims made by Ackman.

Days earlier, before the documents were shared, Trump himself reposted an account claiming an 'ABC whistleblower allegedly will release an affidavit' showing that 'the Harris campaign was given sample questions.'

Such claims first surfaced on the account of right-wing influencer and January 6 participant Philip Anderson last week, two days after the debate.  

 

 

 

 

Despite being unproven, the document has picked up steam on social media, being shared by several high-profile figures. They include Senator Ted Cruz, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, billionaire hedge-funder Bill Ackman, and Elon Musk, with the latter reposting statements expressing belief in the claims made by Ackman, and Greene sharing an erroneous report about the person who penned the article dying in a car crash - before walking it back

That same day, a verified account with the name 'Black Insurrectionist' claimed it would release 'an affidavit from an ABC whistleblower' by the end of the weekend. On Sunday, the account posted the document.

A review by the left-wing Media Matters of recent activity on the account mentioned a post last month calling Harris and Tim Walz as 'disgusting creatures' and their supporters 'the delightful cesspool of humanity we are fighting here today.'

The account - which joined X in November 2023 - adds that the pair may be 'just plain flat out disgusting pedophiles.'

Another post called for '70 million people to do mass civil disobedience that will halt this country' to avoid a Harris win.

'The government just does what we want,' it added. The poster did not reveal how they came in contact with the supposed writer of the document.

ABC News has denied all of the allegations aired in it. [SOURCE]

DSSO_When The Evidence Of Conspiracy Is Overwhelming: How did Ryan Routh know where Trump would be? The six unanswered questions about assassination attempt

 

Members of FBI are seen at the crime scene outside the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida - AFP/Chandan Khanna

Story by Benedict Smith

Sept 16, 2024

As the investigation into the attempted assassination of Donald Trump enters its second day, a number of questions remain unanswered. 

Chiefly, how could suspect Ryan Wesley Routh have known where the Republican candidate would be? And why would he have decided on such a drastic course of action?

Here The Telegraph rounds up the key questions that remain for law enforcement.

Trump on course last year

Trump did not have any events listed on his public schedule, while his most recent campaign stops had taken place in Nevada.

How the Republican candidate’s would-be assassin worked out where he would be is the “million-dollar question”, according to Will Snyder, the Florida sheriff whose officers arrested Routh on Sunday.

“It’s hard for me to imagine how he got within rifle range of president Trump,” he told Fox News.

At a press conference on Monday afternoon, the Interim Director of the Secret Service said they were examining whether the suspect knew Trump would be on the course.

What was the gunman’s motivation?

Routh had voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, yet eight years later he is suspected of making an attempt on the former president’s life.

He became disillusioned with the Republican, referring to him in a 2023 self-published book as  “buffoon”, a “fool” and “brainless”. But it is unclear why he would apparently turn on him so violently, or what he believed he might accomplish by shooting him.

While Right-wing commentators have claimed Routh is a “radical leftist”, his politics appear to be mudded.

           A suited Ryan Routh in front of the Capitol building in Washington (left) and in Kyiv (right)

After voting for Trump in 2016, he donated to Democratic candidates in 2020, and backed Nikki Haley’s challenge to Trump in the 2024 Republican primary. A vehicle outside his home in Hawaii displays an old “Biden-Harris” sticker.

Routh’s politics seems confused and his motivations unknown. Authorities say he is not speaking following his arrest on Sunday.

Why did the gunman have a Go-Pro?

A Go-Pro was discovered at the scene after the gunman fled, which authorities said showed they planned to record the assassination attempt.

However, it is not clear precisely what the compact camera – usually used for capturing adventure sports – would have been used for.

The Go-Pro camera, seen left, attached to the fence - Reuters

Would the gunman have kept it to watch the shooting back himself? Or was he planning to upload the footage to social media?

How long had the gunman been in the area?

Routh is registered as living at an address in Hawaii.

By contrast, Thomas Matthew Crooks – who fired at Trump at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in July – lived a relatively short distance away. Routh’s movements remain a mystery, at least for the moment.

That means it is unclear how long the gunman had been in Florida before taking up position with an AK-47 at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Secret Service and Homeland Security agents check a former home of suspect Ryan Routh - Jonathan Drake

The assault rifle was found along with ceramic body armour at the scene – something Andrew McCabe, a former senior FBI official, said indicated “a very high level of pre-planning”.

But whether Routh travelled to Florida with the intention of shooting Trump, or could have drawn up those plans later, is unclear.

The FBI said at at a press conference on Monday they were in the process of investigating how long he had been in the South Florida area.

Why wasn’t the gunman spotted by security?

Another unanswered question is why the gunman was not spotted by the Secret Service while he lay in wait at the golf course for almost twelve hours.

Officials claimed that Routh had taken up position at the course in the early hours of Sunday morning, citing data from the 58-year-old’s mobile phone that placed it at the treeline from 1:59am to 1:31pm.

Yet Trump’s security detail only noticed an AK-47 pointing out of the trees while the former president was playing golf just one hole away.

The Secret Service revealed on Monday that because Trump’s round of golf was not scheduled, agents did not sweep the perimeter. 

The suspect had been in the bushes for the 12 hours that corresponded with his phone data, the FBI confirmed on Monday.

The assault rifle has a maximum effective range of some 330 yards, while the former president is estimated to have been some 300 to 500 yards away. 

his was “not a long distance” for an AK-47 equipped with a scope, as Palm Beach county sheriff Ric Bradshaw noted.

Moreover, it comes after weeks of scrutiny and criticism of the Secret Service following the attempt on Trump’s life in July.

Law enforcement will likely be attempting to recreate the steps of the gunman on the day in question, but have so far not set out how the individual was able to get so close.

What was in the gunman’s car?

Routh was arrested on the I-95 highway, some 50 miles from Trump’s golf course, in a black Nissan.

The vehicle would have been searched by law enforcement after Routh’s apprehension.

Sources told CNN that the vehicle belonged to Routh’s daughter, which suggests that a background check has taken place. Court documents state that the number plates are registered to a different vehicle that was reported stolen.

 

The car in which Ryan Routh was arrested (circled)

The contents of that car, which have not been made public, could potentially shed light on the plans on the assassination attempt.

There is speculation that the car contains maps or other documents that could reveal what Routh knew of Trump’s movements and the planning that had gone into the alleged assassination attempt.

Warrants are out for the FBI to search a number of addresses linked to the suspect as well as vehicles, cameras and mobile phones. [SOURCE]