Tag: ted cruz

Republicans Are The Lannisters Of American Politics

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The HBO series “Game Of Thrones” dominated television until it ended with mixed feelings in 2019. Despite the sword and sorcery elements, the series managed to engage a wide audience through its political intrigue as the ruling houses schemed to win everything.

One of those houses, the Lannisters, was rich, incestuous and ruthless — similar to the Republican Party except Republicans have few if any of the Lannisters’ positive traits.

The Lannisters, Unlike The Republicans, “Always Pay Their Debts”

The Lannisters’ unofficial motto of “A Lannister always pay his debts” is a fine financial position but also a warning to enemies that they will always settle the score. While Republicans certainly settle their political scores, keeping a promise for repayment is more tenuous, which Republican Rep. Byron Donalds from Florida demonstrated on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

Donalds decried the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party for not just blankly giving in to the Republicans’ every demand as they hold the world’s financial stability hostage. But all the talking points collapsed after Chuck Todd played a clip of then-President Trump discussing the debt ceiling.

Donalds comes from the same political cesspool as Matt Gaetz and Ron DeSantis, so he gave the game away with zero shame.

DONALDS: Well, first of all, he also said the other day on a rival network that he said that when he was president, and when they asked why he wasn’t saying it now, he said because he’s not president. Listen, Donald Trump is always negotiating —

TODD: Do you realize how absurd that sounds?

DONALDS: That is not absurd. He’s always negotiating, Chuck.

TODD: How is that not absurd? It’s absurd.

DONALDS: Chuck, he’s always negotiating. That’s what he does. And it’s actually one of the reasons why so many deals for our country worked out to our benefit, as compared to his predecessors, both Republican and Democrat, because he’s always negotiating.

TODD: But do you realize how partisan that sounds?

DONALDS: That is not a partisan statement.

TODD: “What is – what is good for me is not for thee.” He’s basically saying, “When I’m president, –

DONALDS: Right.

You know how stupid and nakedly partisan you have to be for anyone in mainstream political media to call it out, much less Chuck “Both Sides” Todd?!

Donalds then tried a little whataboutism that was so provenly false that Chuck Fucking Todd corrected him (again).

TODD: – there’s no negotiating on this. But, hey, when somebody else is president, screw them.”
DONALDS: Well, no, here’s the thing. Let’s be – let’s be realistic now. When Donald Trump was negotiating debt ceiling with Nancy Pelosi, mind you, they negotiated that.
TODD: No, they didn’t.
DONALDS: When they were –
TODD: They raised it without any restrictions.

Losing an argument to Chuck Todd should be an everlasting political wound, like Jamie Lannister’s right hand.

The Republicans’ Lannister-Like Cruelty And Greed

Republicans, like the fictional Lannisters, think they can somehow “shit gold” by just doing cuts that hurt everyone but the rich. Republicans said as much when a reporter asked about raising revenue to “solve” their manufactured debt crisis last week.

When Republicans claim small businesses and family finances are like the federal government’s budget (they aren’t), they conveniently ignore that real world small businesses and families would have to also bring in more revenue to get out of debt. You either raise prices (businesses) or get a raise/second job (families).

The House Budget Committee Chair, Rep Jodey Arrington of Texas, was happy to show his unseriousness on ABC’s “This Week.”

RADDATZ: Well, the President said he’s willing to cut spending by more than a trillion dollars. […] But he also wants Republicans to consider raising revenue. That has been a non-starter for Republicans. But will you reconsider?

ARRINGTON: No, because you couldn’t get tax policies and tax revenues in the Senate bill. We certainly weren’t going to put it in the House bill. So […] it’s not on the table for discussion.

Then there’s full-time podcaster/part-time Republican Sen. Ted Cruz on “Fox News Sunday” spitting out all kinds of bullshit, unchallenged by host Shannon Bream.

It’s not a surprise that this lie was long debunked. But Cruz continued trying to scaremonger to protect the wealthy with some stats on revenue and spending.

CRUZ: In 2017, total government spending was about $4 trillion dollars, tax revenues were about $3.3 trillion dollars. So, we had about a $700 billion dollar deficit. Fast forward to today, total government spending has gone from $4 trillion dollars all the way up to nearly $7 trillion dollars. We nearly doubled government spending since 2017. What has tax revenue done? They’ve gone from $3.3 trillion dollars to right about $5 trillion dollars.

Lyin’ Ted Cruz “conveniently” skipped the $4.9 trillion Trump added, $1.9 of it being tax cuts for the rich by fast-forwarding from 2017 to today, as if the Trump administration never existed.

Cruz’s hate for IRS agents is also to shield his rich sugar daddies, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen made clear on “Meet The Press.”

YELLEN: We have an enormous gap between the taxes we’re collecting and what we should be collecting, if everyone paid the taxes that they really owe. And that’s really a reflection of tax fraud. It amounts to an estimated $7 trillion over the next decade. […] equipping the IRS with the funding they need to audit high-income individuals and corporations, that’s something that doesn’t cost money. It nets money substantially […]

For Republicans, protecting tax fraud by the rich and corporations is better when you can also be cruel to poor people and marginalized groups.

And there’s no sign that a single Tyrion Lannister resides within the Republican Party.

Have a week.



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Lordy, Abby Grossberg Has Tapes!

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The other evening, former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, whose lawsuit may be a contributing factor for why Tucker Carlson was so unceremoniously fired Monday morning, started making the media rounds with her lawyer. (She thinks her lawsuit is probably a factor.) She appeared on MSNBC with Nicolle Wallace, and her lawyer showed up afterward on the same network’s Ari Melber show.

News, as they say, was made.

She talked about about how Tucker had made her life a “living hell,” and what a disgusting and misogynist place Tucker’s show was to work. (That’s all in her lawsuit.) She talked about how much Tucker liked to say the C-word, about women in general who made him mad, and especially about Sidney Powell, and how Fox News’s lawyers coached her to tell common lies about whether that bothered her. Indeed, she told Wallace that after she gave her original deposition in the Dominion lawsuit, the show threw a special lunch called “Abby Day” because they were so proud of her answers.

And she talked about how bizarrely and preternaturally obsessed Tucker was with making up and spreading conspiracy theories that the terrorist attack of January 6 was some kind of false flag perpetuated by the FBI. Even though lawyers for people on trial for invading the Capitol that day were begging him to stop.

That’s all at the end of this clip, which is quite a highlight reel of the full interview:

According to Grossberg, the now-former Fox News star was “very set on finding an FBI person who was implanted in the crowd” so he could prove the insurrection was a false flag by the government.

“[He was] spinning this conspiracy that they were ultimately the ones responsible for the Capitol attack, not Fox News as they’re about to go into the Dominion trial,” she said. “It was really the FBI that set up this thing, not Fox telling the American people that the election was rigged and the voting machines did it.” Grossberg claimed that even an attorney representing some of the Capitol rioters implored her to push Carlson away from the unhinged theory, but it was to no avail because “everyone was a believer” on the show.

“I went back to them and said, look, there’s no conspiracy theory here. I called the attorney who is representing one of the Proud Boys. He told me on two occasions, ‘There’s no conspiracy, get away from this stuff, this is dangerous. Tell Tucker to stop. I will come on your show, but I’ll absolutely walk off if he asks me this.’ And the result was, find somebody else, Tucker is really intent on this.”

It was bizarre how Tucker latched so quickly on to the idea that the January 6 terrorists were all innocents, and that an attack on them was an attack on all his viewers. And he knew exactly what the assignment was when Kevin McCarthy gave him all those tapes.

Oh well, thank goodness he can’t spew that nonsense to such a big audience night after night anymore.

Maybe he can get some cats and tell January 6 Was A Planned Demolition conspiracy theories to them in his Maine “Hee Haw” studio.

And Lordy, Her Tapes!

Grossberg really did record a lot.

She says she’s got 90 tapes, that she knows of, so far, so it’s definitely not just that Rudy Giuliani tape that came out just before the Dominion trial, where he admitted out loud to Maria Bartiromo that he didn’t have shit evidence for all his voter fraud lies.

In the clip below she explains that Fox News failed to turn over a whole lot of things she provided to them during discovery for the Dominion case, and doesn’t know whether it was intentional or reckless that they failed to turn them over to Dominion. Oh well, she found ’em now! She says she’s also gotten a subpoena in the Smartmatic case.

The next hour on Ari Melber’s show, where Grossberg’s lawyer was a guest, he played a big important tape of Ted Cruz on the phone with Maria Bartiromo on January 2, talking about denying certification of the election on January 6, then standing up a fake commission afterward to investigate all the fake frauds, then use that to overturn the result:

www.youtube.com

From the Washington Post:

If the commission found “credible evidence of fraud that undermines confidence in the electoral results in any given state,” then the state would then call a special session and recertify results, according to Cruz.

“Is there any chance you can overturn this?” Bartiromo asked Cruz.

“I hope so,” he responded.

“Who gets inaugurated?” asked Bartiromo. Ted Cruz said hopefully the commission could figure all that out.

Watch that whole Melber report above to see how much Cruz was plotting. He was working hard to overthrow the government y’all!

Cruz is angrily sending out missives acting like this is all some “gotcha!” by MSNBC and insisting these were things he was saying in public at the time too. And yes, it is true that those plotting the coup were largely doing it in all our faces, because that’s what kind of craven, unpatriotic shitheels they are.

But it’s just another piece of the puzzle, and Abby Grossberg’s lawyer Gerry Flippatos has told Melber and other news media that he’s been in touch with Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating the many-pronged plan to overthrow the government and steal the presidency from its rightful winner Joe Biden.

Have they given Smith all of Grossberg’s Lordy She Has Tapes, which include the ones we’ve mentioned, plus conversations between Maria Bartiromo and Sidney Powell and other Trump campaign people? Flippatos says they’ve talked to “numerous law enforcement agencies” about the tapes, and provided info about how they’ll deliver them:

“We have voluntarily surrendered to the relevant law enforcement agencies details regarding the approximately 90 Otter tapes in Miss Grossberg’s possession and have engaged in discussions with these law enforcement agencies to receive targeted subpoenas regarding any such tapes that may be of interest to them,” he said. Otter is an app that transcribes audio recordings and is popular with reporters and producers.

In summary and in conclusion, she recorded everything and they are ready and willing to help.

Have fun with your upcoming life adventures, everyone on Abby Grossberg’s recordings!

[Daily Beast / Washington Post / CBS News]

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Texas delivers consequences to disruptive law school protesters

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Regular readers of Twitchy know about how students at Stanford shouted down conservative Federal Judge Kyle Duncan and how students at Yale Law School did something similar to a panel on civil liberties (because irony is dead).

(Full disclosure: this author is an alumnus of Yale Law School and is embarrassed for these chuckleheads.)

Now it seems that the chickens might be coming home to roost in Texas.

In order to be licensed to practice law, Texas (like most states) requires a person to have good character—which in our experience is mainly a matter of not having anything in one’s record that shows poor character. And the State Bar of Texas has some bad news for disruptive protesters:

The text of the tweet cuts off but it says ‘ … who was subjected to vulgar heckling when he attempted to deliver prepared remarks.’

Kudos to Mr. Cruz for taking action.

Again, here’s the remaining text: ‘ … Nathan Hecht, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, wrote on behalf of the bar examiners, who evaluate applications to the bar. ‘School reactions to recent violations of free-speech policies suggest that reliance is not justified.”

In other words, since Stanford wasn’t enforcing their own rules, the Bar needed to take up the slack.

The last sentence says ‘The admission process should examine whether applicants can be expected to fulfill this promise [of courtesy and civility].’

What do you think the chances are that the students who said this call themselves feminists?

To fill in the cut off text: ‘ … he plans to file bar complaints against the students who disrupted Duncan, some of whom, such as Denni Arnold, have been identified.’

Good for him. Seriously.

To fill in the cut off text: ‘ … not in compliance with accreditation standards that require it to promote free speech.’

This got some praise:

Mr. Randazza is a respected First Amendment Lawyer.

This.

We’ve lived there. As long as you have air conditioning, it’s a pretty nice state.

Of course, not everyone is pleased:

Free speech doesn’t mean that you can scream all the time and let no one else get a word in edgewise. The First Amendment does allow for neutral time, place and manner restrictions, including shutting everyone up so a speaker can actually speak, especially in classrooms and in court. And the State Bar of Texas can reasonably ask that if a person can’t let other people speak at school, will that person be equally disruptive in court?

(And the Bill of Attainder issue is too silly to bother with.)

Another person thought they had the perfect solution: lie!

Ironically, maybe the Bar is hoping for a few liars. This is pure speculation, but it is probably easier to justify excluding a person from the legal profession for lying about their incivility than it is for the incivility itself. So, maybe this is designed to be a proverbial ‘perjury trap’.

Aaron (Sibarium) defended Texas’ argument:

And the principle of civility is enforced in other contexts without any difficulty. For instance, the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism’s official twitter account posted this story called: ‘The True Cost of Incivility in the Legal Profession’.

That article discussed a New York case where a deposition was constantly interrupted by childish insults by opposing lawyers, leading a judge to sanction the lawyers by forcing them to pay over $68,000. They were also ‘mandated to attend a [legal class] on civility and provide the … instructor with a copy of the deposition transcript at issue so the instructor could use it in his seminar ‘as an example of uncivil sanctionable behavior.”

Ouch. To be a fly on the wall in that class …

And if we can go off on a rant, here … law schools are not serving their students well if they don’t constantly expose them to other points of view and if they don’t ensure that they know how to express disagreement with those persons logically and civilly. In court, you can’t just shout ‘that person is a transphobe!’ and expect to win most cases. And even if a lawyer doesn’t practice in litigation, your words and behavior is likely to be scrutinized and even the subject of legal action involving people who think in ways very different from your own. A good lawyer seeks to understand how other people think, how their arguments work, and (if necessary) to tear those arguments apart, civilly, using that knowledge. A lawyer educated in a cocoon, a lawyer who can’t even cope with disagreement, is a bad lawyer.

(Gets off soapbox.)

Of course, one person was confused about the whole issue:

Occupational hazard, we suppose.



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There’s A Pube On Clarence Thomas’s Integrity (Again)

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Conscientious Americans who pay attention to the news know Clarence Thomas is probably the most corrupt and unethical piece of ass lint who ever sat on a Supreme Court throne and stank it up with his linty assfarts. And his wife? Fuuuuuuuuck that crazy batshit nutcase who’s on every “OK Boomer” right-wing chain email thread in high-powered Republican Washington.

Did she help behind the scenes in Donald Trump’s January 6 Insurrection Attack, and did she bring a crock pot full of Ro-Tel to any planning parties? And how much whispering does she do with her husband when the issues she’s doing activism on are ALSO in front of him on the entirely illegitimate partisan hack Supreme Court?

But sure, let’s pretend Clarence Thomas and Ginni Thomas don’t have any ethical issues. They just are a high-powered married Republican couple who happen to both be literal actual fucking monsters. And don’t you dare say Ginni Thomas’s power may be somewhat derived from the fact that her husband is Clarence Thomas, STOP IT YOU SEXIST.

NO IMPROPRIETIES, NO IMPROPRIETIES, YOU ARE THE IMPROPRIETIES!

But anyway, about that ProPublica piece about Clarence Thomas letting a Republican billionaire megadonor take him on mega-luxury yachting suck ‘n’ fucks around the globe for the past 20 years, without reporting any of these mega-trips as “gifts.” Hoo boy! (Obviously we use the term “yachting suck ‘n’ fucks” in its more proverbial sense. We don’t know if anybody literally sucked and fucked on any of those trips, one of which would have cost the justice over $500,000 had he paid for it himself.)

The billionaire megadonor’s name is Harlan Crow, and he is a real estate mogul dude from Texas. Clarence Thomas gets to take rides on Harlan’s 162-foot superyacht. (Does Clarence Thomas ever say “Harlan, there’s a pube on your super-yacht?” Don’t know, ProPublica apparently doesn’t even know which journalism questions to ask.) Clarence Thomas goes flying on Harlan’s private Bombardier Global 5000 jet. (“Harlan, there’s a pube on your Bombardier Global 5000 jet!” Has Thomas ever exclaimed that? Probably won’t ever know.)

Yachting around Indonesia for nine days in 2019. A river trip in Savannah, Georgia. Another cruise in New Zealand around 10 years ago. And more!

There are so many pictures:

ProPublica says Clarence goes all kinds of other fun places with Harlan, like the “all-male retreat” of Bohemian Grove in California. Also all Harlan’s houses and resorts.

And Clarence doesn’t report any of this as “gift.” He used to report this as “gift.” But then the LA Times wrote about it and he all of a sudden stopped reporting it as “gift”!

Look, it is a paint-by-numbers portrait of Clarence Thomas sitting with all his friends at Harlan’s place in the Adirondacks. Just Clarence, Harlan, Leonard Leo, the POS who runs the Federalist Society. (You know, where the 30-year-old white fascist partisan hack judges come from!)

“There’s a pube on our integrity!” That would be a good name for that painting. Also, just emphasizing that that is literally a painting that exists.

The ProPublica Twitter thread we’re using as the CliffsNotes for this — you know damn well ProPublica’s articles are 100,000 words long before you even get out of the prologue — notes that Clarence ‘n’ Harlan really are buddies, genuine-style, but these trips put him in contact with the biggest of the Republican bigwigs from corporations and think tanks. (See above.) Far be it from us to suggest that any of those men tell Clarence what to do, because again, we’re willing to allow for the possibility that he too is just an evil monster just like them. We’re not going to say they don’t do that, though.

It sounds like a nice private resort, the one that Harlan has and Clarence gets to go to without reporting it.

We’re just going to give you a moment to reflect on the man who Clarence Thomas is, sitting at a “1950’s-style soda fountain” with all his white fascist friends. Just let that mental image linger for a minute.

Anyway!

Here is a clip a lot of people are loving right now because it’s such a hilarious illustration of how hard Clarence Thomas should go fuck himself. It’s Thomas in a recent documentary talking about how he doesn’t even like traveling abroad, such a simple man is he. He is a salt-of-the-earth guy. He is a rural America guy. He is a guy who likes parking the RV in the Walmart parking lot. (If you are not initiated in RV culture, the Walmart parking lot is a thing with them. Walmart encourages them to just to come on in and park when they need to, and RV people all know this. The editrix of this site and her husband and their kids have done it many times and thought “boy what a smart thing to do Walmart,” not even being shitty and ironic. Like we said, it is a thing.)

Who NEEDS free trips on gabillion dollar yachts with Republican bigwigs who definitely have a stake in how Clarence Thomas votes? Not Clarence Thomas! “I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that.”

We bet.

But he sure doesn’t seem to hate those sexy yachtfucker trips. And for some reason, again, he feels a need to hide them. ProPublica had to learn about all this shit from yacht employees and a scuba diving instructor.

Of course, hiding these free trips is against the fucking law.

Harlan Crow of course swears to Jesus that he ain’t never tried to make poor Clarence do nothin’ improper. He just loves sharing his yacht and plane with Clarence ‘n’ Ginni. Clarence Thomas didn’t deem these revelations to be worthy of a response. But ProPublica got comments from former federal judges like “It’s incomprehensible that someone would do this.”

Anyway, if you read the whole story, there are tons more little details that will make your jaw drop. Like this one, a picture of Clarence Thomas swearing in Trump-appointed Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho in Harlan’s library, and it looks like maybe Harlan flew Clarence there, and Ted Cruz tweeted this out, and good God this is all so incestuous:

Read the entire ProPublica piece when you have time, like maybe when you are summering on YOUR yacht and you’re waiting for your new butler to bring you your mid-afternoon fruity drink. (You threw your old butler overboard for failing to cut your lime the way you like. It happens, AMIRITE, JUSTICE THOMAS?)

(We don’t mean to imply that Clarence Thomas threw a specific butler overboard into the ocean for failing to cut a lime the way he likes. We are just talking shit.)

Now, in a sane and functional country, Clarence Thomas would be packing up his office and getting the fuck out right now, to save himself the humiliation of being impeached and forcibly removed from the Supreme Court. (Haha, in a sane and functional country, an unqualified right-wing hack like Clarence Thomas would never have been confirmed.)

And Senate Democrats do say they’re gonna do something.

Unfortunately, that’s as far as it’s likely to go, because an unprincipled power-hungry Republican slut named Kevin McCarthy runs the House of Representatives right now. But it’s not just that. Click on this thread and read the whole thing to see why:

“One Democratic House member” told Democratic strategist Max Burns that “Public trust in SC is already bad. A big circus would destroy it completely.”

Fuck OFF.

The Court is fully 1,000 percent illegitimate right now, a fascist activist partisan hack organ that only exists to impose the will of a rapidly dying minority of white supremacist Boomers on the rest of us who will have to live in this country once they’re all rotting corpses. Donald Trump and his loyal Republican string-pullers made sure of that. The only place the Supreme Court’s integrity can go is up.

If the Court is ever to be legitimate again, Thomas should either resign or be pushed out, and Joe Biden should get to select his replacement. And since Trump was an illegitimate president who likely wouldn’t have “won” the 2016 election had it not been for his own crimes, the crimes of Russia and whatever was happening at the FBI at the time, and who then incited a terrorist attack as part of his plan to overthrow the government and overturn the 2020 election, his justices should be told gently but firmly to GTFO.

Then pack the Court with only the most brilliant legal minds in America who also happen to be drag queens, trans folks, racial minorities and people who started drinking Bud Light this week.

It is the only way.

[ProPublica]

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Celebrities may have helped shape anti-vaccine opinions during Covid-19 pandemic, study finds | CNN

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CNN
 — 

Covid-19 vaccines are known to be safe and effective, and they’re available for free, but many Americans in the US refuse to get them – and a recent study suggests that celebrities may share some of the blame for people’s mistrust.

Celebrities have long tried to positively influence public health, studies show, but during the Covid-19 pandemic, they also seemed to have a large influence on spreading misinformation.

Decades ago, in the 1950s, people could see stars like Elvis Presley, Dick Van Dyke and Ella Fitzgerald in TV ads that encouraged polio vaccination. This celebrity influence boosted the country’s general vaccination efforts, and vaccination nearly eliminated the deadly disease.

In 2021, US officials used celebrities in TV ads to encourage more people to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Big names like lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, singer Charlie Puth and even Senate Minority Leader Mitchell McConnell showed up in spots that had billions of ad impressions.

The world isn’t restricted to only three TV networks any more, so celebrities like actress Hilary Duff, actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, singer Dolly Parton and even Big Bird also used their enormous presence on Instagram and Twitter to promote a pro Covid-19 vaccine message.

But social media also became a vehicle for celebrities to cast doubt about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine and even to spread disinformation about Covid.

Their negative messages seemed to find an audience.

For their study, published in the journal BMJ Health & Care Informatics, researchers examined nearly 13 million tweets between January 2020 and March 2022 about Covid-19 and vaccines. They designed a natural language model to determine the sentiment of each tweet and compared them with tweets that also mentioned people in the public eye.

The stars they picked to analyze included people who had shared skepticism about the vaccines, who had Covid-related tweets that were identified as misinformation or who retweeted misinformation about Covid.

They included rapper Nicki Minaj, football player Aaron Rodgers, tennis player Novak Djokovic, singer Eric Clapton, Sen. Rand Paul, former President Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, TV host Tucker Carlson and commentator Joe Rogan.

The researchers found 45,255 tweets from 34,407 unique authors talking about Covid-19 vaccine-related issues. Those tweets generated a total of 16.32 million likes. The tweets from these influencers, overall, were more negative about the vaccine than positive, the study found. These tweets were specifically more related to antivaccine controversy, rather than news about vaccine development, the study said.

The highest number of negative comments was associated with Rodgers and Minaj. Clapton had “very few” positive tweets, the study said, and that may have had an influence, but he also caught flak for it from the public.

The most-liked tweet that mentioned Clapton and the vaccine said, “Strongly disagree with [EC] … take on Covid and the vaccine and disgusted by his previous white supremacist comments. But if you reference the death of his son to criticize him, you are an ignorant scumbag.”

Trump and Cruz were found to have the most substantial impact within this group, with combined likes totaling more than 122,000.

They too came in for criticism on the topic, with many users wondering whether these politicians were qualified to have opinions about the vaccines. The study said the most-liked tweet mentioning Cruz was, “I called Ted Cruz’s office asking to make an appointment to talk with the Senator about my blood pressure. They told me that the Senator was not qualified to give medical advice and that I should call my doctor. So I asked them to stop advising about vaccines.”

The most-liked tweet associated with Rogan was an antivaxx statement: “I love how the same people who don’t want us to listen to Joe Rogan, Aaron Rodgers about the covid vaccine, want us to listen to Big Bird & Elmo.”

Posts shared by news anchors and politicians seemed to have the most influence in terms of the most tweets and retweets, the study found.

“Our findings suggest that the presence of consistent patterns of emotional content co-occurring with messaging shared by those persons in the public eye that we’ve mentioned, influenced public opinion and largely stimulated online public discourse, for the at least over the course of the first two years of the Covid pandemic,” said study co-author Brianna White, a research coordinator in the Population Health Intelligence lab at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center – Oak Ridge National Laboratory Center for Biomedical Informatics.

“We also argue that obviously as the risk of severe negative health outcomes increase with the failure to comply with health protective behavior recommendations, that our findings suggest that polarized messages from societal elite may downplay those severe negative health outcome risks.”

The study doesn’t get into exactly why celebrity tweets would have such an impact on people’s attitudes about the vaccine. Dr. Ellen Selkie, who has conducted research on influence at the intersection of social media, celebrity and public health outcomes, said celebrities are influential because they attract a lot of attention.

“I think part of the influence that media have on behavior has to do with the amount of exposure. Just in general, the volume of content that is focused on a specific topic or on a specific sort of interpretation of that topic – in this case misinformation – the repeated exposure to any given thing is going to increase the likelihood that it’s going to have an effect,” said Selkie, who was not involved in the new research. She is an adolescent health pediatrician and researcher with UW Health Kids and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Just as people listen to a friend’s thoughts, they’ll listen to a celebrity whom they tend to like or identify with because they trust their opinion.

“With fandoms, in terms of the relationship between musical artists and actors and their fans, there is this sort of mutual love that fans and artists have for each other, which sort of can approximate that sense that they’re looking out for each other,” Selkie said.

She said she would be interested to see research on the influence of celebrities who tweeted positive messages about the Covid-19 vaccine.

The authors of the study hope public health leaders will use the findings right away.

“We argue this threat to population health should create a sense of urgency and warrants public health response to identify, develop and implement innovative mitigation strategies,” the study says.

Exposure to large amounts of this misinformation can have a lasting impact and work against the public’s best interest when it comes to their health.

“As populations grow to trust the influential nature of celebrity activity on social platforms, followers are disarmed and open to persuasion when faced with false information, creating opportunities for dissemination and rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation,” the study says.



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