Fox News host Tucker Carlson lashed out at tech companies and reporters Tuesday night, insisting that a pro-Trump group called “America’s Frontlines Doctors” was being censored and improperly ridiculed for their beliefs. Carlson, of course, is full of shit.
[referenced url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2020/07/who-are-americas-frontline-doctors-the-pro-trump-pro-hydroxychloroquine-weirdos-banned-from-social-media/” thumb=”https://gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/29/bcsmcevs3ctuf6wu14xr-300×169.png” title=”Who Are ‘America’s Frontline Doctors’, the Pro-Trump, Pro-Hydroxychloroquine Weirdos Banned From Social Media?” excerpt=”A group calling itself “America’s Frontline Doctors” held a press conference in Washington, D.C. on Monday, falsely declaring that there is a cure for covid-19 — hydroxychloroquine — and it was was being suppressed by the world’s leading health experts. The group’s videos were seen by millions on Facebook, Twitter,…”]
The part Carlson didn’t mention on his show is that the beliefs being “censored” by platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter don’t just include the false claim that hydroxychloroquine can cure covid-19. One doctor featured in a clip on Carlson’s show last night, Dr. Stella Immanuel, believes that demons can get women pregnant, that many world leaders are secretly lizard-people, and that scientists are working on a vaccine that will stop people from being religious, as the Daily Beast reported on Tuesday.
Carlson, who currently has the most popular TV show in cable news history, started Tuesday’s program by insisting the coronavirus pandemic is being overhyped in the U.S. because it somehow will get the presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden elected in November’s election. In reality, Americans are sincerely concerned about the coronavirus pandemic because the U.S. currently has the worst outbreak in the world, with over 4.3 million confirmed cases and at least 149,000 deaths. And even those patients who survive the disease can face severe illness for months, with long term health consequences that are still not fully known.
Carlson complained that Big Tech was “censoring” a group of doctors who just want to tell the truth about treatments for the coronavirus — a group that we explained yesterday has connections to both the far-right lobbying group Tea Party Patriots as well as the Trump regime. Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots and a speaker at the “America’s Frontline Doctors” event, has even attended at least one White House roundtable as a concerned mother who wants schools to reopen.
Breitbart’s video of the press conference was pulled down by Twitter, and both Facebook and YouTube removed videos from the group — after they received tens of millions of views — after it was determined the video breached standards about spreading misinformation. But one of the leader members of the group tweeted last night that she’d met with Vice President Mike Pence about restoring the videos and it’s unclear what kind of action the Trump regime might take.
Carlson made a number of false claims about members of the “America’s Frontline Doctors” astroturf group on Tuesday. Most bizarrely, Carlson defended one member from Texas, Dr. Stella Immanuel, who preaches about a number of unscientific ideas, including non-consensual demon sex.
“They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm,” Immanuel said in a sermon from 2013, as the Daily Beast first reported. “Then they turn into the man and they sleep with a man and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves.”
Carlson even mischaracterized a report from the Daily Beast that exposed many of Immanuel’s fringe beliefs, accusing the news outlet of racism, while the Fox News host neglected to mention many of her strange sermons, as you can see in this clip from last night’s show on YouTube.
Carlson implied that Immanuel had been silenced by Big Tech companies because she criticised Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most visible member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. President Trump, who retweeted a video of Immanuel on Monday, has been at odds with Fauci for months, perhaps because the American public trusts him more than the president.
“Criticise Fauci and you will disappear from the internet. And so, Dr. Immanuel disappeared from the internet. And then Google’s countless toadies online did the cleanup work, the ugly stuff,” Carson told his viewers on Tuesday.
“The Daily Beast attacked Dr. Immanuel online for the crime of getting her medical degree in Africa, and then suggested she believed in witchcraft, because Africans do that, right? Huh,” Carlson said sarcastically.
“So, political correctness is fine with the Daily Beast most of the year, but this is election season, so Dr. Immanuel must be destroyed. The Daily Beast was happy to help achieve that,” Carlson concluded.
The Daily Beast did report on Immanuel’s beliefs in witchcraft, but that’s because she does indeed believe in the evils of witchcraft.
As the Daily Beast wrote:
Immanuel built on her fascination with witchcraft in her 2015 Illuminati sermon, claiming that witches were intent on seizing control of children.
In her 2015 sermon on the Illuminati’s supposed agenda to bring down the United States, Immanuel argues that a wide variety of toys, books and TV shows, from Pokémon — which she declares “Eastern demons” — to Harry Potter and the Disney Channel shows Wizards of Waverly Place and That’s So Raven were all part of a scheme to introduce children to spirits and witches. Immanuel warned that the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana was a gateway to evil, because its character had an “alter ego.” She has claimed that schools teach children to meditate so they can “meet with demons.”
In the sermon, Immanuel preserved special vitriol for the Magic 8-Ball, a toy that can be shaken up to “reveal” any answer. Immanuel claims the otherwise innocuous Magic 8-Ball was in fact a scheme to get children used to witchcraft.
“The 8-Ball was a psychic,” she said.
The Daily Beast article does note that she was born in Cameroon and received her medical degree in Nigeria but doesn’t suggest that doing so is anything close to a “crime” as Carlson sarcastically said. One detail the Daily Beast article didn’t note, however, is that Immanuel received her medical licence as recently as November — something pointed out by the Washington Post in another article about coronavirus disinformation.
The idea that Carlson would accuse the Daily Beast of racism is pretty damn funny, to say the least. Carlson has been repeatedly praised by white supremacists over the years for his thinly veiled wink-and-nudge racism. The neo-Nazi founder of the Daily Stormer message board, Andrew Anglin, previously called Carlson the “greatest ally” of the today’s Nazi movement. David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, even endorsed Tucker Carlson as a possible vice presidential candidate for Trump earlier this month.
As Gizmodo argued back in 2017, Fox News is the reason Trump was elected and it’s the reason he could easily get re-elected in 2020, despite abysmal poll numbers. If you watched Tucker Carlson’s show on Tuesday night and that was your only understanding of the group “America’s Frontline Doctors”, you’d come away believing that reasonable health professionals were being persecuted for their entirely normal beliefs.
You’d have no idea there was dark money from a far-right lobbying organisation called Tea Party Patriots behind “America’s Frontline Doctors,” and you’d have no idea that one of the doctors Carlson was praising believes alien DNA is currently being used in medical treatments.
President Trump was asked about Dr. Immanuel specifically at a press conference on Tuesday by CNN White House reporter Kaitlin Collins, who mentioned the alien DNA conspiracy theory.
“She’s also made videos saying that doctors make medicine using DNA from aliens, and that they’re trying to make a vaccine to make you immune from the coming religious…” Collins said before the president cut her off.
Trump stumbled over his words to defend the doctor.
“I can tell you this, she was on the air along with many other doctors, and they were big fans of hydroxychloroquine and I thought she was very impressive, in the sense that, from where she came, I don’t know which country she comes from, but she said that she’s had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients,” Trump said.
“And I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her,” Trump said, trying to move on by calling on a different reporter.
Collins tried to ask a follow-up question about masks that really seemed to get on Trump’s nerves. Frustrated, Trump stormed out of the room like a fucking baby.
“I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her,” President Trump says of the video he retweeted where a woman claims masks don’t work & there’s a cure for Covid-19. Instead of explaining the contradiction given he’s endorsed masks, Trump left the room. pic.twitter.com/k8jKdrI1oz
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) July 28, 2020
It’s only going to get more weird between now and November, not only thanks to Donald Trump, but his bizarre propagandists like Tucker Carlson.