How COVID Mania Inspired the Events of January 6
During the year 2020, millions of ordinary Americans experienced for themselves the consequences of government deceit. Many of them publicly protested, some for the first time.
Hundreds of thousands of these citizens showed up in Washington DC on Jan. 6, 2021. An establishment that was willing to deceive them about something as life-and-death as COVID, they figured, would not hesitate to deceive them about the results of the 2020 election.
In doing research for my book Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, I stumbled on the connection between COVID and Jan. 6. Of the 10 women I profiled, eight actively protested the draconian government response to the pandemic. A 9th, a nurse, was too busy treating COVID patients, and the 10th, Rosanne Boyland, died without leaving a record.
To arrive at the truth, these women had to wade through a swamp of disinformation. A survey done by Franklin Templeton-Gallup during the last six months of 2020 confirmed just how thick was this swamp.
In the survey, some 35,000 Americans were asked a series of questions, the most revealing: “What percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?”
Democrat respondents proved scarily clueless. Some 41 percent believed that 50 percent or more of those who contracted COVID would end up in the hospital. Another 28 percent answered 20–50 percent. The correct answer was 1–5 percent. In sum, 69 percent of Democrats were deeply misinformed, and they were translating their irrational fears into public policy.
The response bordered on tyranny. Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran from San Diego who was shot and killed on Jan. 6, watched each day as some bureaucrat recalibrated the wildly arbitrary openings and closings of California beaches.
On a given day, Ashli could park at the City of Hermosa Beach but only for 15 minutes. She could swim at Escondido Creek, but not at Big Rock Beach. She could fish off the Malibu Pier but not off the Venice and Cabrillo fishing piers.
“Our response to COVID-19 has and will continue to lead with data and science,” Gov. Gavin Newsom insisted at the time. Ashli Babbitt did not take him seriously. No thinking citizen did. She had a perfectly apt name for COVID, the “controla virus.” Ashli elaborated on social media, “We are being hoodwinked. The sheep need to wake up,”
A sign on the door of her and husband Aaron’s pool supply business declared the business a “mask-free autonomous zone, better known as America.” Another sign read simply, “If you need to wear a mask outside, I’m not sure we can help you.”
Rebecca Lavrenz, a great-grandmother from Colorado, refused to wear a mask under any circumstance. As a nurse, she knew the masks were “ridiculous,” but more to the point, she did not like the idea of people “taking away her liberties.”
In 2020, Rebecca sought out people like herself willing to go maskless in a grocery store even at the risk of being kicked out. Through these new affiliations, she got involved actively in politics and worked her precinct on behalf of Donald Trump. “I knew I had to do something,” said Rebecca. “Politics are local.”
“One good thing about this whole CV crisis is that I suddenly feel very patriotic,” Rachel Powell posted on Facebook in May 2020. Outraged by the restrictions, she added, “It isn’t to [sic] late to wake up, say no, and restore freedoms.”
Soon after, Rachel posted a short video shot outside a shuttered local gym. “Police need to see there’s people that are citizens that are not afraid of you guys showing up in your masks. We’re going to be here banded together, and we’re not afraid of you,” said Rachel.
On Dec. 8, 2020, Yvonne St Cyr was arrested at an anti-mask rally in Boise, Idaho, at the Central District Health Department. She refused to cover her nose and mouth, she said, because “I have a right to breathe oxygen.”
Living in Rochester, Minnesota, the home of the Mayo Clinic, Victoria White felt like she was living in a medical police state, one in which citizens were encouraged to snitch on dissenting neighbors like herself. “I would go above and beyond not to comply,” said Victoria. She took the restrictions more personally than most as she believes the lockdown led to her brother’s suicide. “It was absolute hell,” she said. “We couldn’t mourn.”
Ohio’s Christine Priola, an occupational therapist, wore a face mask early on, but the more research she did, the more wary she became of COVID mania. The constant pressure from the media and government to compel all citizens, even the healthy, to isolate themselves was a “big red flag” for her.
The inequity of the government response troubled Christine as well. Abortion clinics were open, but not churches. Celebrities and politicians could host parties, but not the average Joe. The authorities leaned on doctors to recommend certain drugs and avoid others and tried to silence those who disagreed.
For those J6ers who lived in liberal strongholds like New York City, COVID resistance took a heavy toll on personal relations. “I tried to educate my family about COVID,” said Sara Carpenter, a retired NYPD officer. “‘Stop it,’ they yelled. They’d get furious with me.” At times, Sara felt as if she were living in a “parallel universe.”
Of the 10 women I profiled, two were killed, and the surviving eight were all incarcerated, including the great-grandmother. Only one of the eight committed what we would think of as a crime. That “criminal,” Rebecca Powell, the mother of eight, was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison for breaking a window.
Among those imprisoned was Dr. Simone Gold. The founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, Dr. Gold had a permit to speak on the Capitol grounds about medical freedom. When the east side doors of the Capitol opened from within, the crowd on the Capitol steps swarmed in, and Gold got caught in the swarm. She gave a 5-minute speech in the Capitol Rotunda and left of her own accord within minutes.
Two weeks later, Dr. Gold was at home in Los Angeles on a conference call when she heard a pounding on the door and the “most blood-curdling scream of my life, ‘FBI, FBI, FBI.’” Disoriented, she froze for about 30 seconds until the FBI broke the door down with a battering ram.
As much as it pained her to accept a plea deal, Dr. Gold did not feel she had much of a choice. Prosecutors were threatening a 20-year sentence. The final verdict — 60 days at the Miami Federal Detention Center, a maximum-security prison — was an unusually severe punishment for a single misdemeanor.
“The real agenda,” said Dr. Gold of the medical-government complex, “was to shift us to a people that would accept government control over our daily lives.” The snitching that became commonplace during COVID became formalized in the round-up of the Jan. 6 protestors.
“I was watching Nazism unfold,” said Gold. As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she did not use that word lightly. Those pundits and politicians on the right who sat silently these last four years and now slam Trump’s pardons need to talk to Dr. Gold. A mass evil cannot be deconstructed on a case-by-case basis.
READ MORE from Jack Cashill:
George Zimmerman Reflects on the Fate of Daniel Penny
How Pam Bondi Can Atone for the Framing of George Zimmerman
Jack Smith Shamelessly Withholds Evidence
The post How COVID Mania Inspired the Events of January 6 appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.