Thread by @SamBraslow

Today, a group of protesters staged a series of “maskless shopping” protests in stores across Westwood in defiance of LA’s new indoor masking order. Los Angeles has seen a large surge in COVID-19 cases in the last 2 weeks, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant.

The event was organized by an Arizona man named Ethan Schmidt, who posts videos of himself on his telegram channel harassing people wearing masks. He also promoted the WiSpa protest yesterday.

The group first went to Bristol Farms on Westwood Blvd. Staff asked them to wear masks, but said they could not do more to enforce the requirement. Two LAPD officers arrived later, though they did not get involved.

Many, if not most, of the protesters today also attended yesterday’s WiSpa protest, including the organizer of the first WiSpa protest. Here’s my coverage of that event.

One woman in line without a mask (but unrelated to the protest) thanked the protesters. She said that she regularly went to the Beverly Hills Freedom rally last year.

An anti-masker calls a shopper, Amy Fleschert, a “karen” for getting upset at the group. Amy says she has cancer and an auto-immune disease, meaning that she has to continue masking despite being vaccinated. She becomes emotional talking about the protesters.

The protesters went to Sprouts next (as shown in the first video), where things became a bit more confrontational. One shopper calls them as “merchants of death.”

Schmidt says that the vaccine is killing people, tying that to a common claim among anti-vaxxers that Bill Gates wants to kill 10-15% of the world’s population using vaccines.

Here is context on Gates’s statement relating to vaccines and population control. google.com/amp/s/mobile.r…

While in line, a protester gets into an exchange with a woman who says she works in a hospital. The protester says that if people were meant to wear masks, they would be born with one.

The shopper tells the protester and another protester filming her to “get out of my fucking face.”

A number of protesters follow the woman to her car. “This is harassment,” she says.

The same two LAPD officers arrive and tell the protesters to leave the store.

They briefly went to CVS on Westwood blvd afterwards.

The group then went to the Target on Weyburn. When a store employee says she would call the police, one protester (Shiva Bagheri, founder of the BH Freedom Rally) points to LASD’s recent statement saying they would not enforce the mask rule.

Westwood is in the City of Los Angeles, so enforcement would fall to LAPD. While the officers who interacted with the protesters ordered them out of one store (Sprouts), they did not enforce the mask requirement.

After Target, the group made their last stop in Westwood Village, right by UCLA and the Ronald Regan hospital.

As the protesters themselves brought up, other countries have seen a backlash to COVID public health restrictions and vaccine mandates, including Greece, Russia, and France. washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/…

Here is a video of some of the anti-maskers apparently mocking the woman with cancer, Amy, who cried after encountering them.