How White House COVID Memos Contradict Administration’s Public Face- Important due to blatant messaging hypocrisy to pander to nonsense
Richard Spencer , a far right icon rallying next to the US reflecting pool in support of D. J. Trump
In order to appease this base, Trump is obscuring the very real COVID 19 memos which call for penalties for those who do not wear masks
See this
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-white-house-covid-memos-contradict-administrations-public-face?ref=home
The Mask Hypocrisy: How White House COVID Memos Contradict Administration’s Public Face
MASKLESS MONSTERS
Trump and Mike Pence join crowded rallies where many do not wear masks. But behind the scenes, the White House is recommending states adopt mask mandates and even fines.
Published Sep. 30, 2020 7:01PM ET
By Lauren Weber and Katheryn Houghton | Kaiser Health News
While the president and vice president forgo masks at rallies, the White House is quietly encouraging governors to implement mask mandates and, for some, enforce them with fines.
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In reports issued to governors on Sept. 20, the White House Coronavirus Task Force recommended statewide mask mandates in Iowa, Missouri and Oklahoma. The weekly memos, some of which have been made public by the Center for Public Integrity, advocate mask usage for other states and have even encouraged doling out fines in Alaska, Idaho and, recently, Montana.
Masks, a political flashpoint since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, are considered by public health officials to be a top safeguard against spreading the COVID-19 virus as the country awaits a vaccine. But the president’s own actions on masks have wavered: He has called them “patriotic” but often doesn’t wear one himself and has contradicted the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director. During the presidential debate Tuesday, the president said masks were "OK" and then mocked Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s mask-wearing habits. In the audience, some Trump family members and staffers were not wearing masks, despite the rules set by the Cleveland Clinic, which hosted the debate.
Trump Family Goes Without Masks to Presidential Debate
The mixed messages and ensuing confusion leave governors, and often state and local health officials, holding the bag of political consequences.
“At some point, we have to turn the corner on this ridiculous separation of what we’re being told is best practice and being guided by science and data, and what the actual practices are by the people who issue them,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
So far, 16 states have yet to enact mask mandates for the general public — all of them are run by Republican governors. Three out of 4 Americans support enacting state laws to require mask-wearing in public at all times, according to an August NPR/Ipsos poll.
To be sure, messaging and the science on masks have evolved: U.S. public health officials did not recommend mask-wearing until April. And the White House argues the president has been clear.
“He recommends wearing a mask when you cannot socially distance,” White House spokesperson Brian Morgenstern told KHN. “He has worn masks on numerous occasions himself when appropriate and regularly encourages others to do so, as well, when social distancing is not possible.”
The pandemic task force sends weekly memos to states to share data and recommendations with leaders to help them make decisions, Morgenstern added. “They’re free to share that information as they see fit.”
Courtney Parella, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said that the staffers check the temperature of every attendee before admission to rallies, provide masks and encourage attendees to wear them, and offer hand sanitizer.
However, campaign events that President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence attend often feature crowds of maskless attendees.
On Sept. 14, Pence stood before a crowd of hundreds in Belgrade, Montana, to stump for the state’s Republicans, including Sen. Steve Daines, gubernatorial candidate U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte and congressional candidate Matt Rosendale. Photos show that most who attended went without masks, including the vice president, despite a mask order in effect for the surrounding county.
Montana calls on everyone to wear masks at outdoor gatherings of 50 or more people in counties with at least four active cases when attendees don't stay 6 feet apart.
Pence: It’s Your Right to Get COVID at a Trump Rally
Hunter Woodall
Photos show people sitting and standing close together at the event in southwestern Montana. Pence signed hats as people gathered shoulder to shoulder by the rails of a crowd divider.
Six days later, the White House coronavirus reports recommended Montana officials issue fines for those who ignore mask mandates in places the disease is spreading fast.
“What would be helpful from the White House is consistency in their recommendations and their actions,” said Matt Kelley, health officer for the Gallatin City-County Health Department. “It’s one thing to make a recommendation to state and local health officials to fine people. It’s made more difficult to do that when we have the vice president coming here to a rally where no one, very few people, were wearing masks.”
During a press call last week, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock said he didn’t plan to follow the White House advice to punish those without masks. The Democrat, who is running for Senate, said it’s better to encourage people to use masks than rely on fines.
But Bullock said the point of the White House’s request was clear. “Even the federal government says we need to be taking wearing masks seriously,” he said. “It’s not just governors saying that we should do this and it’s not just health experts saying we should be wearing masks.”
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson is among the Republican governors who have resisted a statewide masking order, despite the White House’s recommendation.
“You don’t need government to tell you to wear a dang mask,” Parson said in July at a Missouri Cattlemen’s Association steak fry, according to the Springfield News-Leader. “If you want to wear a dang mask, wear a mask."
Parson and his wife, Teresa, tested positive for COVID-19 last Wednesday.
Spokesperson Kelli Jones said last Thursday that the governor does not plan to enact a mask order, based on an assessment of current COVID data. She added state officials consider the White House reports “really more of an FYI” than a mandate.
“It’s kind of a bizarre document, truthfully,” she said. “We read them and look at them — and make our own policy.”
The reports, which are sent to the governors, also leave local and state public health officials in the dark, said Freeman, of NACCHO.
“If the White House were truly serious about making these — what sounds like solid, scientific-backed, data-backed recommendations — if they were truly serious about it, tell the world, share them, be transparent,” she said.
Instead, former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden said, the White House has fueled the partisan breakdown on masks.
“One of the many failures of this administration is the politicization of masks, and that has really cost lives,” Frieden said. “There is no reason masks should be partisan.”
Meanwhile back in Montana, Gallatin County appears to be heading toward its third surge in cases since the pandemic began.
“I don't really have a lot of time to worry about inconsistency of messaging from the White House,” health officer Kelley said.
The county now has outbreaks in nursing homes and several confirmed cases in schools, he said, and the county’s positivity rate is heading toward 10%.
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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This sickening pandering to the far right is on par with Trump pandering to the Proud boys terrorist group, and also Q'Anon, both of which have been flagged as domestic terror threats by the FBI, in spite of Trump pandering.
We need to be clear as to what this is, this is PANDERING to our domestic terrorists while the USA has had defacto over 100 times the number of deaths due to 9-11 and Osama Bin Ladin, and the world trade towers , September 11, 2001
A war non stop has been waged since November 2001 as to that loss of 3000 lives on one day of terror.
Where is the urgency when 210 thousand, more like over half a MILLION lives have been lost due to COVID 19?
DING, DING , DING
This pandering should not only be stopped but a Manhattan level project on stamping it out , the far right, should commence in 2021, with as many resources devoted to it, as what was done by the USA in developing the US Atom bomb , Fat Man, and Little Boy, used on Japan
See the following
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/8/25/trumps-far-right-legacy-will-remain-regardless-of-the-election
quote
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Trump’s far-right legacy will remain regardless of the election
The far right ‘isn’t going anywhere’ after November, activists and researchers say. It will likely become more deadly.
Supporters of Confederate statues and symbols display Confederate flags along with one supporting United States President Donald Trump as they gather on a street corner during the Lee-Jackson Day state holiday in Lexington, Virginia in January 2020 [Jonathan Drake/Reuters]
By
25 Aug 2020
As United States President Donald Trump prepares to accept the Republican presidential nomination this week, researchers and activists fear his legacy could impact the country’s political landscape for decades by both legitimising and disenfranchising the far right.
Trump’s 2016 election ushered in a new era of white nationalist movement mobilisation, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Movement members had a renewed belief they could enact political change, thanks to Trump’s popularity, but the reality of Trump’s era left them jaded, and the issues they champion are not going away. The movement could potentially become more dangerous.
Racism gets a new look
Newer groups such as the National Policy Institute, headed by Richard Spencer, became the face of the new “Alt-Right” during the 2016 campaign. These groups joined veteran racist organisations like the Ku Klux Klan in voicing support for Trump. Online forums facilitated organising and helped indoctrinate new followers.
After the election, Trump’s rhetoric made many on the far right believe they “actually had some connection to mainstream politics and that they had a shot at achieving to actual political power”, Miller said.
White Nationalist leader Richard Spencer chants back at counter-protesters as self-proclaimed ‘White Nationalists’ and ‘Alt-Right’ supporters gather for what they called a ‘Freedom of Speech’ rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC on June 25, 2017 [File: Jim Bourg/Reuters]
To ease their normalisation, far-right supporters had adopted a new strategy: optics. They were featured prominently in media after Trump’s victory and white nationalists, many of whom had long kept their identities secret, demonstrated openly.
Spencer, along with members of the Proud Boys, an all-male group founded in 2016 by Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, donned a “new uniform” of khakis and polos. McInnes denied the Proud Boys was a racist group but instead promoted “Western chauvinism” – the idea that “The West” and its ideals “are best”.
On August 12, 2017, white nationalism with its new, clean-cut look would clash with its opponents. The “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia saw thousands of white nationalists – including those from Spencer’s and McInnes’s groups – march on the upscale Virginia city, where antifascist and anti-racist counterdemonstrators met them in equal force.
People of colour were attacked by groups of white nationalists, leading to various trials, and 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer was killed in a car-ramming attack. It was political violence in the US not seen for decades.
White nationalist demonstrators clash with counterdemonstrators at the entrance to ‘Unite the Right’ protest [Steve Helber/AP Photo]
Trump said there were “fine people” on “both sides” of the protest, which drew resounding condemnation.
While his statement was interpreted as a presidential endorsement of the far right, shakeups in the Trump administration followed.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, architect of some of Trump’s most controversial policies such as the border wall and the “Muslim ban” – both of which many white nationalists supported – left the White House that month.
The following year saw shrinking media exposure – an important recruiting tool – for the increasingly violent far right as the US soured on its ideology and as news outlets turned their attention towards the probe by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.
Many in the white nationalist movement “were frustrated by the fact that they didn’t feel like they were getting the kind of recognition that they deserved, that they believed they would get from the Trump administration”, said the SPLC’s Miller.
Hardening violence
As their movement continued to suffer losses without institutional support or recognition, white nationalists’ broad disillusionment with Trump resulted in an “indictment of the system as a whole … that the system itself needs to be taken down”, Miller explained.
A shooting allegedly inspired by white nationalism at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania killed 11 and injured seven in 2018. Twenty-three people, mostly of Latino heritage, were killed in a mass shooting committed inside a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas in 2019.
First responders surround the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where a shooter opened fire on Saturday, October 27, 2018 [Gene J Puskar/AP]
Prosecutors say the alleged shooter in the latter attack, Patrick Crusius, published a far-right manifesto on an online forum before the shooting.
McInnes left the Proud Boys in November 2018, as the group was tied to increasingly violent and racist protests. Other groups splintered through 2019. As of 2020, far-right groups have returned to the underground, Miller said.
The political rallies of 2017 have been replaced with provocation – and murder – to push the US into a second civil war, as with the “Boogaloo Boys“, a far-right militia that goes to already-planned demonstrations, such as Black Lives Matter events, and allegedly stokes tensions while attempting to blend with protesters.
They have allegedly killed at least two security and law enforcement personnel.
Others, such as a group called “The Base”, have expressed plans to construct accelerationist “training camps”, according to leaked encrypted messaging conversations detailed in an SPLC report.
“I had a dream about a international training camp,” a member of The Base told others in a chat conversation in February 2019. “I don’t think anyone cared much about keeping a low profile because we were making bombs, ammo, and deadly gasses. Everyone looked a bit more seasoned than I’d expect as well. It totally felt real though.”
The future
While many have “crawled back into their holes … on the internet”, some white nationalists are still operating in the open, Jalane Schmidt told Al Jazeera.
Schmidt, a professor at Charlottesville’s University of Virginia, is also a community activist and local public historian who leads tours of the city’s historic areas and its monuments, including those erected to honour Confederates like General Robert E Lee.
A group called the “Virginia Flaggers”, which works to fly Confederate flags in public, has dispatched “guards” to Charlottesville’s parks to protect the statues, and has hassled Schmidt during her tours.
Some of these guards are reportedly linked to the far-right groups present at the Unite the Right rally.
Grace Aheron, an organiser with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a group that organises white people to fight racism, acknowledged the threat of accelerationist groups, but said there has also been progress in slowing the movement.
Activists have made strides in “deplatforming” white nationalists online, with forums and social media companies like Facebook and Twitter banning far-right accounts and removing posts that praise racist ideology.
As the white nationalist movement retreats from the mainstream, politically unaffiliated white people are “up for grabs”, Aheron said.
SURJ is working on several initiatives to reach out to these people, including “calling every white voter in Georgia who has never voted”, Aheron said, noting, “These are almost all poor and working-class people who would benefit substantially from economic and racial justice reforms.”
But Aheron, Miller and Schmidt all agreed that whether or not Trump wins another term, his legacy will affect the US for years.
Schmidt noted the number of federal appointments the president has made, including almost a quarter of active federal judges.
Some Congressional candidates are also running on pro-Trump, far-right platforms, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fervent Trump supporter who won a primary against an establishment Republican in Georgia – and who also lent credence to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the president is battling satanic paedophiles in the US government.
Whether in the courtroom, Congress or Charlottesville parks, the far right is “not going away no matter who wins in November”, Schmidt concluded.
SOURCE : AL JAZEERA
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FTR
This pandering should not only be stopped but a Manhattan level project on stamping it out , the far right, should commence in 2021, with as many resources devoted to it, as what was done by the USA in developing the US Atom bomb , Fat Man, and Little Boy, used on Japan
Andrew Beckwith, PhD