KUSI-TV 'News' Anti-Vax Astroturfing Campaign Continues
The aftereffects of the disruptions at Tuesday’s County Board of Supervisors meeting continue.
The Union-Tribune ran a front page story with a headline questioning whether a “civic breakdown” was underway. They also ran an editorial condemning hateful speech at public meetings.
Local NAACP President Francine Maxwell and Association of Justice Advocates leader Rev. Shane Harris were interviewed on TV, condemning the racist remark aimed at Dr. Wilma Wooten.
KUSI, which promoted the groups organizing the anti-mandate turnout, was quick to run with an interview with “Brittany Mayer, who is behind the extremely popular @Rooted.Wings Instagram page,” denouncing the racist comment, made by an “individual. He didn’t come representing any organization or any group.”
KUSI went on to editorialize about the individual, saying “A quick scroll through the racist man’s social media profiles (Jason Robo), and you can see that he idolized Democrat politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” (It’s impossible to confirm this assertion, since he’s made his social media accounts private)
KUSI went full-on both-sides-ism here, decrying a phone-in caller’s comments and Supes Chair Nathan Fletcher PR guy’s comments on Twitter.
Uh-huh.
Ken Stone at Times of San Diego did some digging on the speaker with the racist remark. He interviewed Kevin L. Hoover, editor-at-large and co-publisher of the weekly Mad River Union newspaper in Arcata. A few choice tidbits (There’s plenty more; this guy is trouble.)
His paper has covered several police incidents involving Robo, including a concealed weapon arrest (a fix-blade knife) that Robo says led to charges being dropped after his spending eight days in jail. (A Humboldt County Superior Court spokeswoman said Robo has been arrested three times, but wouldn’t immediately share details.)...
...“His activism earned regularly local press coverage, most notably peaking in national news for a free speech act that prevented the takeoff of Delta Flight 1165 in July 2008. He also is the creator and former host of an Access Humboldt TV program ‘Unstacking the Deck,’ formerly a radio show on KRFH-LP during his college days.”...
...In 2008, Robo drew the attention of conspiracist Alex Jones of Infowars, who had the young man as a guest after facing charges for posting “911 was an inside job! PrisonPlanet.com” stickers on a Delta airline. (Charges were eventually dropped, and Robo recounted the incident in a 5,000-word blog post.)...
...In May, Robo was banned from the Rampantly Comedy platform after numerous complaints about racist remarks during an open mic, says Joli Reichel, founder of the network calling itself a free performer community “serving thousands of up-and-coming comedians worldwide.”
Given their response, you might think that somebody at KUSI might have a guilty conscience over their role in facilitating Tuesday’s pandemonium.
But you’d be wrong. Anti-maskers and those opposed to testing for COVID 19 also got a boost.
https://twitter.com/KUSINews/status/1456133115487789063?s=20
Oh, and eyewitnesses to the above mentioned demonstration say there were more like a hundred people, not the 300 hundred claimed by the station.
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Nationally, these anti-public health demonstrations have a significant overlap with the protests targeting so-called Critical Race Theory curriculum, trans student policies, sex education, and library censorship. There certainly was a connection with the Recall Newsom effort in California, as the signage at these protests clearly indicated.
Are we talking about a vast-right wing conspiracy here? Yes and no.
If you take a look at the organizations providing organizing materials for these efforts, the same names keep appearing over and over again, as a story on NPR indicates:
The Manhattan Institute, one of the most established conservative think tanks, published "Woke Schooling: A Toolkit For Concerned Parents" in June.
Citizens Renewing America, founded by President Trump's former budget director Russell Vought, published a 34-page guide for activists also in June, dedicated to "combating critical race theory in your community." The toolkit states the following: "CRT holds that racism is not just a belief held by individuals; rather, it is a system of oppression that has been built into the very structure of our society."...
...Parents Defending Education, founded earlier this year, provides resources to activists, pursues litigation, and publishes "incident reports" on districts around the country. President Nicole Neily previously worked at the libertarian Cato Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, another conservative group that has produced a template letter for activists challenging school mask mandates.
Turning Point USA, a group closely allied with Trump through its leader, Charlie Kirk, started School Board Watchlist, a website with the names and photographs of school board members around the country. They say they are "America's only national grassroots initiative dedicated to protecting our children by exposing radical and false ideologies endorsed by school boards and pushed in the classroom." School districts are called out for requiring masks and promoting "cultural literacy and sensitivity."
The Proud Boys, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls an extremist hate group, has taken part in school board protests in several states.
The 1776 Project is a political action committee backing school board candidates nationwide who oppose antiracist curricula. They raised nearly $300,000 in the quarter ending Sept. 30, according to FEC filings.
PragerU is a nonprofit media company founded by the conservative radio host Dennis Prager. Last year they started an online community aimed at parents and teachers that claims 20,000 members. There are videos and books for children promoting a patriotic vision of American history and conservative heroes like Condoleezza Rice, alongside a "Parent Action Guide" for parents who want certain materials removed from classrooms, and a video documentary for parents about "the battle happening right now for the minds of our children."
Organizers of the Board of Supervisors disruption are not just a one-off local group. They have been linked to more than 100 protests throughout California, according to researchers at LeftCoastRightWatch.Org,
The individual protests have earned local media coverage many times, but reporters routinely fail to make the connection that the various school-board demonstrations are centrally coordinated by a single group. Even statewide papers like the LA Times have mostly missed the story, identifying the group’s participation in the anti-mask lawsuit but neglecting to note their role in the statewide protest campaign and referring to the group simply as “a San Diego-based parent group.” The San Diego Reader, an alt-weekly, nominated the group as a finalist for “Best Local Activist Group” in their 2021 Best Of poll.
One San Diego news station, KUSI, has positioned itself as a champion of Let Them Breathe’s cause, featuring dozens of interviews with Let Them Breathe members who often spout anti-mask pseudoscience with no pushback from KUSI’s reporters. Typical KUSI stories on the group include “‘Let Them Breathe’ group says masking children does more harm than good” and “Let Them Breathe’s goal is to unmask our kids and recall our governor.” A search of KUSI’s website turns up more than 30 stories about Let Them Breathe in the past month, all of them positive. Fox News host Laura Ingraham, famous for parroting white-nationalist talking points and promoting neo-Nazis on national television, featured a friendly interview with McKeeman at the end of July.
McKeeman’s events have also attracted far-right extremists. Arthur Schaper, who leads the California chapter of SPLC labeled anti-LGBT hate group Mass Resistance, spoke in the park before the Palos Verdes board meeting. Schaper has also attended at least one other Let Them Breathe demonstration, in Torrance, California. Sarah Stephens, a QAnon candidate for California governor and getaway driver for violent far-right extremist Aaron Simmons, promoted the Palos Verdes event on her social media pages and spoke in the park that day. Jeffrey Barke, a quack doctor who was shunned from the medical community for waving a handgun on his livestream and saying he’d rather people carry concealed weapons than wear face masks, also spoke at the Palos Verdes rally.
An article at Wired, published when the anti-lockdown protests were just getting started, explains the reasoning at play here (Emphasis added):
According to Pew Research Center, three in 10 Americans believe Covid-19 was cooked up in a lab. Most people who believe in one conspiracy theory believe in several, so, on the right, they have coalesced around a kind of anti-science, anti-government, pro-gun, pro-nationalism worldview that sees itself as perennially under threat. “It’s the same kind of dynamic that applies to things like climate change. It’s the same ideological playbook,” says Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. “That’s why they’re happening so quickly.” The protests, the demonstrators, the supportive Fox News commentators, it was all a prebaked sure bet….
The protests are unpopular, even among (non-MAGA-hatted) conservatives. But, after speaking with the organizers of multiple Facebook groups, Burghart found that being well-liked by the average citizen is not one of their goals. “It’s not about the public,” Burghart says. “They are laser-focused on moving legislators.”
According to [Fordham University history professor Mark] Naison, the main power of the “white resentment ethos” that drives events like anti-lockdown protests is to elect. Last week's events are just a modern permutation of an identity crisis with roots very deep in America’s individualist history. Finding a coherent narrative in such a layered situation is a puzzle—one that ultimately has very little to do with Covid-19 or quarantines. “They can’t take over,” Naison says. “But they’ve always been around.” Right now, they’re just around each other more than is safe.
The blowback against the coronavirus precautions also carries echoes of efforts to deny climate change, both of which rely on hostility toward government action. Ultimately, these are extreme right-wing efforts to delegitimize government.
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A special shout out to NBC-7, which covered a panel of medical experts who responded to the volumes of misinformation included in presentations by people who responded to KUSI’s call to pack the Supes meeting.
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