A few weeks ago, I went to an antivaxx protest at a school board in Stockton, CA.
It was put on by a woman who was at the Capitol on 1/6. She called it a “revolution.” Some protesters alongside her had no idea.
The meeting was wild. The protesters won.
This is Denise Aguilar, who runs the groups Mamalitia and Freedom Angels.
She was in D.C. on January 6th. After the riot, she said, “We stormed the Capitol, and patriots broke open the doors.”
Then: “We’re gonna keep going, especially in California.”
A year after 1/6, Aguilar was outside of San Joaquin County’s Board of Ed., pushing back against vaccines for kids.
She has no children in the school district.
“We figured out that going to the Capitol... doesn't do anything,” she told me. “It's all about local legislation.”
Aguilar told me she didn’t want to talk about where she was on 1/6, but later picked up a bullhorn to address me to the crowd.
“The media asked me if I was involved in January 6th,” she said.
The crowd around her laughed.
Inside the school board meeting, Aguilar pushed back against the “quarantining, tracking, and tracing of our children in public schools.”
Then some other protesters spoke, whom she said she met through local outreach and Telegram, since she's banned from most other social media.
Immediately after the Mamalitia founder spoke, two parents took to the school board podium.
They claimed RF radiation in computers their kids were given for distance learning poisoned them and maybe gave them Havana Syndrome.
Minutes later, the board sided with protesters.
The school board agreed to effectively push back against California’s pending vaccine mandate for eligible public school students.
They received a standing ovation.
“This is a big start. Thank you for being here,” a school board member said. “That’s what America is all about.”
This is how militias and domestic extremist groups are winning since January 6th.
They’ve evolved, encouraging local action at school boards and city councils, while recruiting and spreading their messages through culture-war debates like vaccines, race and education.
Here's the full story with @brandyzadrozny on how January 6th rioters, militias, and extremists are looking to take over local governments by insinuating themselves into vaccine and school curriculum wars — and hiding in plain sight.
Kanye West's publicist showed up at Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman's home and told her she was "in danger" and had "48 hours" to admit to a crime she didn't commit or "unknown subjects" would turn up at her home.
According to Freeman's lawsuit against The Gateway Pundit, people with bullhorns did show up and marauded around her house on foot and in vehicles on January 6th. By that point she had already fled her home at the advice of the FBI.
Today, two election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, sued Gateway Pundit, alleging the site instigated a “deluge of harassment and threats.”
What Freeman alleges happened to her in the last year is deeply disturbing and is worth reading.
Ruby Freeman is a retired 911 operator who ran a small business selling accessories.
With workers dropping out due to COVID, her daughter, Shaye Moss, asked her to help count ballots in Atlanta. Freeman signed on as a temp.
Weeks later, the FBI would tell her to flee her home.
The trouble started a month after the election.
On Dec. 3, a Trump campaign lawyer presented surveillance footage to Georgia’s State Senate, claiming someone who “had the name Ruby across her shirt somewhere" found a “suitcase” full of ballots from “underneath a table.”
It would be impossible to draw up a more stereotypical antivaxxer argument than the one being outlined by Aaron Rodgers today.
For someone who believes he's a "critical thinker," he sounds identical to every old lady in my Ivermectin Facebook groups and Q Telegram channels.
The only real difference between Aaron Rodgers and the Ivermectin Facebook groups is that he sounds... behind.
The IVM groups have largely moved on, adding a litany of other "cures" because Ivermectin, to them, doesn't fully "work" on Delta. The Joe Rogan Battery is old now.
Also, the "vaccines will make you infertile" thing is not new, but it has kicked up recently, in part because people aren't dropping dead en masse as they projected.
Most people have the shot, and there hasn't been a mass death event.
It’s hard to explain just how radicalized ivermectin and antivax Facebook groups have become in the last few weeks.
They’re now telling people who get COVID to avoid the ICU and treat themselves, often by nebulizing hydrogen peroxide.
So, how did we get here?
Facebook bans explicit antivaxx groups, but they don't ban groups for quack "cures" that antivaxxers push instead.
So in the last couple of months, Ivermectin groups have become the new hubs for antivaxx messaging.
But there's a problem: Ivermectin, by itself, isn’t working.
The number of people in these ivermectin groups have exploded.
So has the number of people in the groups who have contracted COVID, since the groups are largely filled with unvaccinated people seeking "alternative therapies."