A Democratic Party official in California wants to “deprogram” tens of millions of Americans who watch Fox News and get information from other right-wing sources.
David Atkins, a regional director for California Democrats, posted a tweet on Tuesday asking how to “deprogram 75 million people” who watch Fox News and, presumably, voted for President Trump in the 2020 election. He compared the task to what was done in “post-WWII Germany or Japan.”
“No seriously…how *do* you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?” Atkins asked. “We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South.”
“This is not your standard partisan policy disagreement. This is a conspiracy theory fueled belligerent death cult against reality & basic decency,” he continued. “The only actual policy debates of note are happening within the [D]em coalition between left and center left.”
This is not your standard partisan policy disagreement. This is a conspiracy theory fueled belligerent death cult against reality & basic decency.
The only actual policy debates of note are happening within the dem coalition between left and center left.
— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) November 18, 2020
As his tweet gained traction on Twitter in the following days, he posted follow-ups attempting to clarify his position.
“I know conservatives are upset by some of the responses here. And yeah, many are out of line,” Atkins said. “But what do you expect people to do in self-preservation? The Right has been running 4 years on ‘f*** your feelings, my conspiracy theories are valid opinions, and we have more guns.’”
“You can’t run on a civil war footing hopped up on conspiracy theories hating everyone who lives in cities, mainlining Fox/Breitbart/QAnon, threatening to kidnap governors and shoot protesters, without people trying to figure out how to reverse the brainwashing,” he continued. “[I] mean, for chrissakes, conservatives are literally giving themselves COVID just to own the libs. They’re dying in COVID wards insisting they don’t have COVID because it must be a liberal plot. People are gonna try to figure out how to defend themselves.”
On Thursday, he posted the latest update to his thread, saying that he was not calling for “re-education camps.” He asserted that right-wing news is “propaganda” that acted as “cult programming.”
“And no, of course I’m not advocating ‘re-education camps’ or anything like that. The point is that conservative infotainment is disinformation propaganda indistuinguishable [sic] from cult programming, and social media algorithms enable it,” Atkins said. “And yes, it might be healthy to break the spell of the cult programming by showing COVID wards, the kids in cages and other victims and consequences of the conservative infotainment cult on the local news, the newspapers, social media, etc, so that people see what they have done.”
On Monday, a South Dakota nurse criticized conservative patients who were hospitalized with coronavirus.
As The Daily Wire reports:
CNN hosted a nurse from South Dakota on Monday morning who ripped her conservative patients of the novel coronavirus for allegedly being filled with “anger and hatred” and denying the virus’ existence until their last dying breath.
“They come in, they’re horribly ill, they’re gasping for breath, and, yet, they don’t believe they have COVID?” CNN “New Day” host Alisyn Camerota teed-up registered nurse Jodi Doering.
“They don’t want to believe that COVID is real,” said Doering, claiming that this isn’t coming from “one particular patient, it’s just a culmination of so many people.”