“I thought her voice was an important voice,” he added, “but I know nothing about her.”
Trump’s
Sober New COVID Tone Involves Pushing Conspiracies From “Astral Sex” Doctor
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube yanked a viral
COVID-19 video from Dr. Stella Immanuel, who’s made medical claims featuring
aliens and demons. The social media clampdown even landed Don Jr. a Twitter
timeout.
BY CALEB ECARMA
JULY 28, 2020
It took Donald Trump only a few days to abandon
his so-called tone shift. After just a few days spent vouching for the utility
of masks and acknowledging the severity of the ongoing pandemic, on Monday the
president retweeted a post from Stella Immanuel, a Houston
doctor who touts hydroxychloroquine as a solution for COVID-19. “Covid has [a]
cure,” read the tweet. “America wake up.” Twitter removed the post for
violating its misinformation policy, but not before the president’s oldest son
posted a video from the same doctor asserting that people “don’t need a mask”
to combat the pandemic. Donald Trump Jr.’s account was
temporarily suspended, disciplinary
action his father dodged because he didn’t post Immanuel’s clips directly to
the site. The social media company restricted access to Trump Jr.’s video and
requested that he take it down, writing in a statement that “Tweets with the
video are in violation of our COVID-19 misinformation policy.”
There was a time when
Trump said or tweeted the word “hydroxychloroquine” seemingly every other day.
But his obsession had died down of late, after several studies suggested the
drug is not effective when
used on coronavirus patients. On Monday night, however, he came back strong,
retweeting another tweet accusing Dr. Anthony Fauci of lying
to Americans about the effects of the drug, and rekindling, via Immanuel, his
skepticism of protective masks.
Immanuel helped fan the
flames, going so far as to “double dog dare” Fauci to send her urine samples to
prove he’s taking hydroxychloroquine himself. Fauci, who appeared on
ABC’s Good Morning America this morning, denied the
accusations. “I have not been misleading the American public under any
circumstances,” he told the network, adding that hydroxychloroquine’s
“overwhelming prevailing clinical trials” indicate that it is “not effective in
coronavirus disease.” thank Immanuel, whose video
Trump Jr. commended as a “must-watch” source on coronavirus prior to his
Twitter account’s suspension, has racked up tens of millions of views on her
latest COVID-19 videos, one of which has now been removed by Twitter,
Facebook, and YouTube. But the doctor and self-proclaimed deliverance minister
has a history of medical quackery. She has previously claimed health disorders
like cysts, endometriosis, miscarriages, and infertility are the result of
patients having “astral sex” with demonic “spirit husbands” and “spirit wives”
in their dreams, according to the
Daily Beast’s Will Sommer. “We call them all kinds of
names—endometriosis, we call them molar pregnancies, we call them fibroids, we
call them cysts, but most of them are evil deposits from the spirit husband,”
she asserted, per the Daily Beast, in a 2013 sermon posted on YouTube.
Immanuel, a Cameroonian
immigrant who reportedly received her medical training in Nigeria, has gone so
far as to push conspiracy theories about the world being run by an Illuminati
cabal of reptilian humanoids, à la David Icke. According to
the Daily Beast, she also believes the human world is at risk thanks to
abortion, children’s toys, and TV shows—including but not limited to Pokémon;
Harry Potter; and Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana—and same-sex
marriage, which she described as “homosexual terrorism” shortly before the
Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling. Another one of her fears is that medical officials
and scientists are using “alien DNA, to treat people” and are plotting to force
microchips on the world’s population.
Despite her
Trump-promoted claim that masks are an unnecessary precaution, Immanuel, in a
Facebook video advertising her medical services, advised prospective patients
to put on “a mask, or a scarf, or anything to cover your face” before seeking
treatment at her clinic. During her Monday appearance lobbying Congress in
Washington, according to the Daily Beast, she maintained that employees at her
clinic avoided contracting COVID-19 by using medical masks, though at least one
recent video of Immanuel on the job appears to show her wearing an N95 mask.
Now, Immanuel seems ready to capitalize on her moment in the
Trump orbit. “Mr President I’m in town and available,” she wrote in a Monday
night tweet. “I will love to meet with you.” During his coronavirus press
conference on Tuesday afternoon, a reporter asked Trump about Immanuel’s past claims,
such as doctors making medicine using “DNA from aliens.” Trump said Immanuel
was “very impressive” in the hydroxychloroquine video he tweeted. “I thought
her voice was an important voice,” he added, “but I know nothing about her.”
