“Live free and die,” Nick Hanauer tweeted Tuesday night in response to reports of anti-mask protesters gathering outside Idaho’s Central District Health’s Board of Health.
The Washington Post reports:
Minutes into a public health district’s virtual meeting to vote on a local mask mandate in Idaho on Tuesday evening, Ada County Commissioner Diana Lachiondo tearfully excused herself after getting a phone call that anti-mask protesters had surrounded her home.
“My 12-year-old son is home by himself right now, and there are protesters banging outside the door,” she told the Central District Health’s Board of Health, which serves four counties in the state’s most populous region. “I’m going to go home and make sure he’s okay.”
A visibly upset Lachiondo then disconnected from the video call, leaving her colleagues at the meeting stunned. They soon learned that protesters had gathered outside the Central District Health office and one other board member’s residence as well, targeting the public officials who were meeting virtually from their homes and private offices as a precaution amid the worsening pandemic.
Minutes later, Boise police and Mayor Lauren McLean (D) asked the board to cancel the meeting out of concern for requested the board cancel it out of concern “for police, staff and board members who were dealing with protesters on their doorsteps.”
Protests on Friday and Tuesday, the Post adds, “were organized by a multistate network of right-wing activists … founded by Bundy, a vocal anti-masker …”
Remember the weeks of conservative outrage when the co-owner of the Red Hen in Virginia asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave the restaurant in 2018? Michelle Goldberg reminds readers it was three days after people yelled at Kirstjen Nielsen, then-homeland security secretary, at a Washington Mexican restaurant over Donald Trump’s family separation policy. Oh, the incivility!
But conservatives terrorizing opponents? A string of incidents like those in Boise or armed protesters screaming epithets outside the home of Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, do not prompt similar media calls for the Republican Party to rein in its extremists:
The radically different way the media treats boundary-pushing on the left and on the right is about more than hypocrisy or double standards. It is, rather, an outgrowth of the crisis of democracy that shields the Republican Party from popular rebuke. There’s no point asking if the G.O.P. can control its right. It has no reason to.
But you know anti-mask fervor is all fun and reindeer games until one of your own dies. Assembled from TikTok postings, the video below appeared yesterday chronicling one Alabama woman’s journey from anti-masker to grieving niece and granddaughter.
She caught a lot of grief in comments, including suggestions her posts were staged. They are not. I checked. The obituaries of her grandfather and aunt are linked on her Facebook page. Her grandfather died Nov. 15. Her aunt died four days later.
Covid is not a hoax. Masking is not about your personal freedom. It’s about personal responsibility. But personal responsibility is a dog whistle that only applies to non-Republicans, especially non-white ones. Amazing that would-be Minutemen with AR-15s are ready to die for Donald Trump but are unwilling to defend the “colonists” next door from a virus he’s declared a foreign invader. Dying is righteous. Masking is a bridge too far.
It’s a warped conception of freedom. So, what else is new?
UPDATE: Added Tweet containing video of the Idaho meeting.