Sean Hannity often refers to MSNBC as “conspiracy channel media.”
Today, MSNBC’s very own Chris Hayes appears to be trying to prove that Hannity is correct.
Hayes took to Twitter to claim that the initial death toll projections could have been intentionally inflated to give Trump the appearance of a “victory lap” when “only” tens of thousands died.
Indeed, the initial projections showed that worst case scenarios could result in over 2 million Americans dying from COVID-19.
Now, it appears the actual number may potentially be in the tens of thousands.
Mitigation efforts such as social distancing coupled with better understanding of the novel coronavirus are the reasons for the lower projections.
But that didn’t stop one of MSNBC’s top stars from propogating a dark conspiracy about President Trump and his administration.
See Chris Hayes’ conspiratorial tweet below:
The left wing media have claimed that President Trump was always "behind" and "slow" to respond to the crisis.
Now, Hayes wants people to believe the exact opposite.
According to Hayes' Twitter conspiracy theory, the Trump administration knew the COVID-19 crisis so well that they could have intentionally inflated the death projection rates to make themselves look good when the numbers turned out to be much lower.
Can someone please get Chris Hayes a tin foil hat?
Mediate has more details on Hayes' conspiracy theory:
At Wednesday’s coronavirus task force briefing, President Donald Trump set the bar for his eventual and inevitable declaration of success in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic: fewer than 100,000 deaths.
If the death toll ends up at “substantially under” 100,000 deaths, said Trump, then that would mean his administration “did a very good job.”
The clip of Trump discussing this was shared on social media, of course. And that’s where MSNBC host Chris Hayes came across it and retweeted the clip with his own hot take.
“The most cynical interpretation of all this, one I can’t quite bring myself to accept,” wrote Hayes, “is they rolled out the model showing 100k deaths after they knew it would be less than that so they could anchor everyone to that # and take a vicotry(sic) lap when ‘only’ tens of thousands died.”
The conspiracy theory that Hayes couldn’t quite bring himself to “accept” but was very able to float and share with his 2.1 million followers met immediate response, even from friendly sources.
In his subsequent replies, the defensive Hayes attempted to mitigate the conspiratorial tone, perhaps in the hope of softening the implicit indictment of Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, who likewise touted and and described the models and charts at length to the American people.
“I think I’d distinguish between the integrity of the model and the good faith reasons for them using,” he wrote in a reply, “the macabre strangeness of it as this very explicit benchmark of ‘success’ that he articulates over and over as thousands of ppl die.” Between the things he was distinguishing between was a parenthetical. The good faith reasons “(which I don’t actually really question)” he wrote, now that he was done questioning them in his tweet that had, at the time of this post, 3,700 retweets and almost 15k likes. (By comparison, his hastily inserted, sorta-kinda walk-back had 1 retweet and 14 likes. Not 14k. Fourteen.)In reply to a tweet from Washington Examiner‘s Tim Carney, Hayes objected to the objection by insisting his back door exit was the front entryway.
“I said I can’t bring myself to accept it!” he wrote with a convincing exclamation point. “But he’s been very very weird about ‘coming in under the model’ in this unnerving, disassociated way.” If you don’t recognize the format of that reply, it’s the conspiracy theory standby “hey I’m just asking questions” written as a sort of self-objection.
Social media users were quick to criticize MSNBC's Chris Hayes for the outlandish conspiracy theory.
The Trump administration was learning about the coronavirus and evaluating models that were based on dishonest information coming out of China.
As the novel coronavirus spread in the United States, our medical experts and researchers had a better understanding of the virus, how it spreads, and its lethality.
See some of the social media backlash towards Hayes below:
This isn't the first time that Chris Hayes or MSNBC have made seemingly outlandish statements about COVID-19.
The official Chris Hayes previously posted that up to 50 percent of Americans could die from coronavirus.
Not 50 people... 50 PERCENT of the population.
According to Fox News, MSNBC deleted the panic-inducing tweet and issued a correction of Hayes:
MSNBC deleted an “erroneous” tweet on Tuesday after inaccurately claiming host Chris Hayes warned that coronavirus could kill 50 percent of America’s population.
Hayes spent a portion of his Monday show criticizing President Trump and Republicans who have hinted at reopening portions of the nation that are now shuttered amid the coronavirus pandemic in order to help the economy.
At one point, Hayes claimed that 50 percent of the population could be infected with coronavirus -- but MSNBC’s official Twitter account botched the quote and said half of America would die.
The now-deleted, original tweet quoted Hayes saying, “There is no option to just let everyone go back out and go back to normal if a pandemic rages across the country and kills 50% of the population.”
MNSBC eventually deleted the tweet and issued a correction.
Instead of asking relevant questions about the strategy of dealing with the pandemic and re-opening the U.S. economy, many reporters seem intent on pushing a left wing agenda of panic and fear.
Perhaps this is why Fox News continues to outrank both CNN and MSNBC in viewership.
As President Trump likes to say, "That's Fake News!"
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