America This Week: December 26, 2021

4 min readDec 27, 2021

Vaccine Enthusiasm, The January 6th Committee, Christmas Spirit

From the front lines of the Disinformation War: A weekly news roundup for people fighting for the right to be self-governed.

Vaccine Enthusiasm

This week, former President Trump stunned some of his supporters when he hailed the COVID-19 vaccine as “one of the greatest achievements of mankind” and confirmed that the people who get very sick and go to the hospital are the unvaccinated.
In response, conspiracy theorist and (former) Trump fanatic Alex Jones prepared an “emergency Christmas Day warning” to Trump, calling him “one of the most evil men who has ever lived.”
The QAnon community is particularly lost and upset by Trump’s enthusiastic call to get vaccinated against a global pandemic:

If you think this is pathetic or a joke, remember that people are profiting off the destruction of this person’s life, including the lives of his wife and his daughters. Someone is targeting Americans on purpose. The targets have been groomed to distrust all expertise in the areas of governing, medicine, journalism, and science. The operation is so effective that the targets choose conspiracies over their own children.

The quest to understand why Capitol Police were abandoned for so long on January 6th continues. Was it merely an inefficient and ponderous bureaucracy or something more nefarious? Trump replaced numerous high level officials with loyalists at the Pentagon and the Department of Justice after he lost the 2020 election, preventing the transfer of power and putting the country at risk.
However, Just Security presents a horrifying third option, in which Trump was hoping the military would be there so he could invoke the Insurrection Act and use the troops to illegally stay in power. Such a possibility was a real fear in both Trump’s cabinet and at the Pentagon, which may be why officials put in place such unprecedented constraints for use of the National Guard. Or it may be how they…