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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have a good theory here? Last I heard from Trump he was urging everyone to “take the great American vaccines” (that he, Trump, sped along, he said)

So this isn’t the Republican following the siren song of Trump. They seem to be doing their own thing. And in so doing, making their own job harder because they’ll see more infections.

What is this: a grassroots competition to pander to their base which has lumped vaccines in with other pandemic measured they like?

I have not delved into their narratives so I’m out of the loop and confused on what is driving things. It isn’t Trump that I can tell.

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Trump has encouraged a general sentiment of opposition to experts, and he's been kind of lukewarm on promoting the vaccines compared to Democrat leaders.

Unfortunately, the GOP has increasingly embraced conspiratorial thinking, and that includes vaccine skepticism and hesitation.

> Trump has encouraged a general sentiment of opposition to experts

Trump knew since May 2020 that Fauci was lying - he had the DOE LLNL investigate the lab leak theory, and LLNL reported that COVID-19 was possibly from a lab. So yeah, he doesn't believe experts who can't stop lying.

https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/exclusive-classified-stud...

> he's been kind of lukewarm on promoting the vaccines compared to Democrat leaders

Trump's Warpspeed (Spring 2020) funded the vaccines. I haven't heard him say any negative things about them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed

Republicans/Trumpists believe in personal choice, so I wouldn't expect him to be a cheerleader for getting a shot.

> the GOP has increasingly embraced conspiratorial thinking,

After Fauci lying for over a year, 2 failed impeachments, being deplatformed on social media, being told they have no standing to dispute elections, being told CRT doesn't exist - half of the country knows what a Marxist conspiracy feels like first-hand, and they're pissed.

Most of the major stories about Trump since 2019 on CNN, MSNBC and WaPo have been retracted in 2021 (after the election). I suggest you stop reading those sources and spend a couple months reading Fox and NTD - I can't think of anything they're retracted.

Do a Youtube search for "cpac trump full speech 2021" - the only full version is on Sky Australia's channel - for now. All the copies on US channels have been blocked or prevented.

People don't like the government telling them how to live their lives. They especially don't like the government telling them how to parent. And they extra especially don't like the government going behind their backs and telling their kids that their parents don't know how to parent.

The wording is "stop vaccine outreach to kids" not "stop vaccine outreach to parents"

This really doesn't seem that surprising to me.

> Anyone have a good theory here? Last I heard from Trump he was urging everyone to “take the great American vaccines” (that he, Trump, sped along, he said).

Over on Gab, TheDonald, and similar places I've seen people reconcile that with their anti-vaccination beliefs in a couple ways:

1. It's part of his long term 4D chess plan to eliminate the Libs and to MAGA. Libs will respond to pro vaccination messages, get the 5G microchip DNA rewriting population control injection being pushed under the guise of a COVID vaccine, and there will be no more Libs next generation. Patriots are smart enough to recognize this for a fake out to eliminate the Libs and avoid the vaccine, or

2. The Jews got to him.

I think it's more useful to look at propaganda channels that have wide reach, rather than Trump. For example, Tucker Carlson is doing full-on death cult antivax.

So that has created an incentive for the local politicians to make their own lives harder, more or less? Plausible.

What’s driving Carlson’s incentives?

I wish I knew, and that would shed much light on the disinformation landscape if it were known. He's almost certainly vaccinated himself (he refuses to say, and Rupert Murdoch is), so it's unlikely he believes his own bullshit.

The big propaganda channels are google, facebook, reddit, twitter, apple. They severely limited free speech and only promoted the official narrative. By making it harder to find legitimate opposition sources, people have turned to less legitimate ones.

Tucker Carlson is just riding the wave and tell his viewers what they want to hear. Many conservatives abandoned him after his refusal to to publish the Hunter Biden Laptop information.

The Vice President said she wouldn't take any vaccine Trump promoted. Maybe the denialism is entirely partisan.

She said she wouldn’t take any vaccine Trump promoted if independent scientists didn’t also promote it. Her reasoning being Trump had lied so much about COVID at that point, there was no reason to trust anything he said.

In fact she did take one of the vaccines Trump promoted, and she did so publicly, because they were independently verified to work. Interestingly Trump got his shot in private and never revealed that fact.

One theory is that Trump feels like he didn't get enough credit for the vaccines so he and the GOP politicians and media are trying to discredit them entirely. It's not clear that he's directing this but check out any republican news station or politician talking about vaccines in the last month, it's unreal. Republican & far right influencers, some of the widest reaching influencers in any category, are publicly pushing back on vaccines daily now.

Another theory is that vaccines are an increasingly easy topic for victim complex radicalization. People like to think they are smarter than their doctor, there was already a growing grift industry pushing vaccine skepticism, plus it's new. There's probably no easier way to radicalize someone already in your base than to say, "Hey you know how you already didn't trust that new guy in office (and I've been saying he didn't really win for months)? Now he is forcing you get a shot you don't need!"

It's pretty wild to think that there are people today actively encouraging people not to vaccinate against this thing but then again there have been people pushing against basically every vaccine for many years. All of them selling something: books, event tickets, snake oil type "health" products or just pulling in YouTube ad revenue.

Some people will do literally anything to get what they want in life, I guess it's really not different from a president starting a war for personal or shallow political reasons or a destructive industry leader burying a damning report but it's still super surprising to see it in real time as opposed to decades after the fact.

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