NowThis Shows the Left’s cards on vaccine mandates
September 14, 2021
If you want to know where the Biden administration is headed with its mandate forcing larger businesses to employ only Americans who’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19, look to a climate change propaganda video from new-media site NowThis.
The video centers on Joe Biden’s comments while collecting photo ops amid the devastation from Hurricane Ida. He exhorts his audience that “we’ve gotta listen to the scientists, and the economists, and the national security experts.” What are they supposedly saying? “This is code red. The nation and the world are in peril.”
The video goes on: “Biden wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. He wants the U.S. to reach net-zero emissions by 2050” because “the climate crisis is the ‘greatest threat to global public health,’ [according to] 200 medical journals in a statement on September 5.”
What makes this different from the typical cynical exploitation of disaster by climate alarmists is that NowThis released its video on the very same day Biden announced his vaccine mandate. According to his announcement, mandates are necessary “to combat those blocking public health.” Vaccine refusal “has cost all of us.”
The same elements are present in both cases, insisting that the government must take action to protect Americans from bad actors whose behavior threatens public health and the economy. Biden says: “The evidence is clear. Climate change poses an existential threat to our lives, to our economy.” Meanwhile, he’s insisting his COVID plan “protects our economy and will make our kids safer.”
The overlap in rhetoric is more than just ideological consistency because NowThis is more than just another liberal media outlet. Sure, its workforce draws very heavily from the usual pools of mass media and elite colleges, but the connections to the Democratic Party are direct and substantial, too.
NowThis is the social-media video news “brand” of Group Nine Media, which brags that 30 million minutes of its videos are watched each day, reaching more than 115 million people every month, heavily weighted toward people under 35. In fact, the company claims to reach 60% of all Millennials every month. It’s worth noting, then, that the company’s chief communications officer, April Mellody, has been a prominent figure in Democratic Party communications since joining the Clinton-Gore campaign and presidential transition team in 1992.
Priyanka Mantha, the director of communications for NowThis, previously held the same position for the gubernatorial campaign of Democrat operative Stacey Abrams. Mantha was also the Georgia press secretary for the Hillary Clinton campaign, with Democratic Party experience going back to an internship program in the Obama White House.
Sifting through other decision-makers at NowThis produces other examples from throughout the mainstream elite and Democratic Party, like Supervising Producer of Originals Charlie Lopresto, who was previously the executive director of the Northeast Delegation of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. That delegation was made up entirely of Democrats. The president of NowThis, Athan Stephanopoulos, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which is technically nonpartisan but takes a decidedly globalist perspective that is increasingly characteristic of the Democrat position.
Interviewed by NBC News about a NowThis video promoting Beto O’Rourke against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas, Stephanopoulos told the story of three young girls telling their mom that NowThis is where they get their news.
What young viewers like that are getting from NowThis is a setup to translate Biden’s COVID-19 mandates into climate change activism, and the people serving up that message are not disinterested journalists, but operatives plugged into the broad Democrat communications machine.