Like many QAnon crackpots from backward areas, Marjorie Traitor Greene often brags that she’s never been vaccinated. She also goes out of her way to deride people who have been and to deride people who wear masks. Another one just like her— although thankfully not in Congress— is (I mean was) Cirsten Weldon, known in Q-World as “CirstenW.”
According to Will Sommer, Weldon died Thursday of COVID. Many people would like to see all QAnon conspiracy theory spreaders, whether random nuts or members of Congress, contract COVID and suffer the same fate as Weldon. It would make more of their victims and potential victims aware of just how wrong and how dangerous they are.
“Weldon,” wrote Sommer, “had amassed tens of thousands of followers across right-wing social media networks by promoting the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy under the screenname ‘CirstenW.’ She was prominent enough to become a sort of QAnon interpreter for comedian conspiracy theorist Roseanne Barr and started recording videos about QAnon with her. Weldon focused on attacking vaccines and other efforts to fight COVID-19, saying in one video that Dr. Anthony Fauci ‘needs to be hung from a rope.’ She claimed the vaccine killed people and even recorded herself yelling at people standing in line to receive vaccines. ‘The vaccines kill, don’t get it!’ Weldon warned the waiting vaccine recipients in an undated video posted to one of her online accounts. ‘This is how gullible these idiots are. They’re all getting vaccine!’ She’ll be missed.
In late December, however, Weldon started showing symptoms of coronavirus infection. In her last video, posted on Dec. 28, Weldon struggled through her remarks about the coming overthrow of the United States government, coughing and complaining that she was exhausted.
Three days later, Weldon was hospitalized in Camarillo, California. She posted a picture of herself wearing an oxygen mask to Instagram and claimed she had “bacterial pneumonia.” Weldon wrote in a post on the social media network Telegram that she refused to take coronavirus treatment remdesivir, calling it “Dr Fauci’s Resmedervir (sic).”
Weldon’s death from COVID is just the latest instance of a far-right personality who opposed vaccination being killed by the virus. On Jan. 3, radio host Doug Kuzma died while infected with the coronavirus. In August, QAnon promoter Robert David Steele died of the virus shortly after posting a picture of himself in an oxygen mask and vowing to still refuse the vaccine.
…In the face of these deaths, their surviving friends and supporters have started to allege that the dead QAnon figures are being murdered, either because they were refused internet folk remedies like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, or because they were killed by the deep-state to cover up their conspiracy theories. In December, Kuzma and a number of other conspiracy theorists were sickened with COVID-like symptoms after appearing together at a conference. Rather than acknowledge that they had COVID, the far-right influencers suggested they had been targeted by an anthrax attack.
After Weldon’s death, her QAnon allies threatened to pursue violent action against staff at the hospital where she died. Scott McKay, a QAnon personality known as the “Patriot Streetfighter,” said he would publicize the names of doctors and nurses involved in treating Weldon, saying he wanted to “put the fear into these medical professionals” in a Telegram post. McKay proposed the hospital staff be sentenced to death, or be murdered in vigilante violence.
“If it’s not done in a military tribunal then it’s going to be done in the street eventually and not to my wishes,” McKay wrote. “That’s my greatest fear. But if it’s necessary, it’s going to be necessary.”
And, having been hospitalized with COVID in late November, Diamond, from Diamond and Silk, died yesterday. They had been fired by Fox for spreading misinformation about COVID and vaccines. One less vote for Trump in 2024; one less voice poisoning America with ignorance and grifterism. (Although it looks like the grifterism isn't quiote dead yet.) RIP.
As of last March, 82 Republicans and 69 Democrats in Congress had been diagnosed with COVID. The three who died were Republicans, Ron Wright (TX), Jim Hagedorn (MN) and Luke Letlow (LA). At least a third of House members and a quarter of senators have had COVID one or more times. Many of the cases Arte among members from backward states with low vaccination rates and hight QAnon followings— West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and Tennessee. Three carriers— Kevin McCarthy, Matt Gaetz (who got it at CPAC, as did Mark Meadows) and Steve Scalise— infected other people without ever having outward signs of the disease, veritable Typhoid Mary characters. The biggest congressional spreader was Mario Diaz-Balart, who infected Scalise, Ann Wagner, Stephanie Murphy, Fredeuica Wilson and Tom Cole) The following month 30 more members, including Nancy Pelosi, Susan Collins, Raphael Warnock, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Adam Schiff, Joaquin Castro, Rashida Tlaib, Maxine Waters— each vaccinated and boosted— all contracted mild cases of COVID.
This morning, Rachel Roubein summed up the House Republicans’ posture towards the on-going COVID crisis. Short version: uber-politicization.
They’re changing the direction of a special investigative panel to focus on the origins of the pandemic, the development of vaccines and treatments… things they hope they can use to attack Biden and Fauci, “as Republicans deeply skeptical of some of the nation’s scientists have been plotting a flurry of probes into the Biden administration’s pandemic response… The GOP-created subcommittee essentially replaces a Democratic-led panel commissioned in spring 2020, which focused much of its work on probing the Trump administration’s pandemic response, nursing homes, fraud in coronavirus aid programs and more. Republicans granted its panel a sweeping mandate that included investigations into pandemic-related school closures, gain-of-function research, vaccine mandates and the trillions of dollars in coronavirus aid Congress approved. The panel doesn’t yet have a Republican leader but expects to hold its first hearing next month… The differing focus of the panel under Democrats and Republicans highlights how each party is seeking to shape the public narrative around the coronavirus, though Comer rejected the notion that the covid panel’s efforts were political in nature. Late last year, Congress passed the bulk of a bipartisan pandemic preparedness bill from a pair of senators, but excluded a provision that would have established an independent task force to probe the virus’s origin and the government’s pandemic response.”
