Anti-vaccine activists march in D.C. -- a city that mandates covid vaccines -- to protest mandates

[brooklynite]

Source: Washington Post

Thousands of protesters from across the country — including some of the biggest names in the anti-vaccination movement — descended on the nation’s capital Sunday for a rally against vaccine mandates.

Almost two years into a pandemic that has killed more than 860,000 Americans, the gathering on the Mall was a jarring spectacle: A crowd of demonstrators, many unmasked, decrying vaccine mandates in the middle of a city that has adopted mask and vaccine mandates to reduce sickness and death from the surge of the virus’s omicron variant, which has battered D.C. for weeks.
Anti-vaccine activists see D.C. rally as a marker of recent gains

People gather at the Washington Monument Sunday to protest vaccine mandates. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Organizers had estimated that 20,000 people would attend the rally, marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, according to a permit issued by the National Park Service. A smaller crowd of several thousand had arrived on the Mall by early Sunday afternoon.

Some were white-haired; others were being pushed in strollers. Most were White and many wore gear with slogans supporting former president Donald Trump. A group of men in front of a cart with a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag started a chant of “Let’s go Brandon” and “F--- Joe Biden” at around 10:30 a.m. to cheers. The few who wore masks risked the tirades of a man screaming “Take those masks off!” and “It’s all a lie!”

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/23/dc-anti-vaccine-rally-mandates-protest/

[OhZone]

1. Freedumb!

[Cha]

14. Right to Die & Kill!

[riversedge]

2. Full crowd shot at the anti-vaccine rally in DC today.

These are the selfish, irresponsible MAGA folks who are preventing you me others from being normal.

Link to tweet

?s=20

[Rebl2]

6. If they

were to put 1/6 committee members in jail for no reason, they truly would be political prisoners. They have followed the law every step of the way, unlike the insurrectionists who did not.

[BumRushDaShow]

15. Gingrich IS the architect of all of this

before Bannon and the rest of the ilk. It has been his 45 year project.

[Evolve Dammit]

19. Yes. And so many others. Newt has lots of connections, all bent on destroying democracy. n/t

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

20. Yep...

... I often refer to stages of the GOP transformation. What you mentioned, I label, "the advent of Gingerich". His Contract On America and his PAC activities working to get, "businessmen first, statesmen last", elected to Congress. And here we are!

[BumRushDaShow]

21. I have posted excerpts from a "The Atlantic" mag interview of him many times and it speaks volumes

The Man Who Broke Politics

Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements.

Story by McKay Coppins
November 2018 Issue

Updated on October 17, 2018

[snip]

On June 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution.

“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.” For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.

The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.”

But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”

[snip]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

22. Great source of information...

... I was a news junkie in high school, reading every Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report. Then college and Christian Science Monitor was required reading for political science classes. Later I subscribed to U.S. News and World Report until into the late 90's.

Your link is a concise and succinct source of information for those not familiar with what Gingerich has done.

[BumRushDaShow]

23. I eventually subbed to The Atlantic awhile ago

as I found I enjoyed reading their articles. I currently sub to 4 papers and 3 other news/feature mags and am a CSPAN junky.

With so much going on, it's good to be able to deep dive on it when possible. And Gingrich, like so many of his ilk (including the likes of Orrin Hatch), are native Pennsylvanians (like me) and it just boggles the mind what this state can produce.

[RKP5637]

3. Well, they can just go die. I could give a F, as long as they don't take innocents with them. n/t

[IronLionZion]

4. They can't eat indoors at any of our restaurants or bars or other venues

GTFO of my city.

These folks can go keep warm at Trump's hotel or Mar-A-Lago or something. They can get in real close together and breathe deep. Then snack on horse paste and their own urine.

[Hortensis]

11. No doubt most will. Cold day, thousands less than hoped, and

numbers dwindled to a few hundred by midafternoon,

[turbinetree]

5. I wonder if anyone had a dirt stand after all there was this gem.....

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/magic-dirt-internet-fueled-defeated-pandemics-weirdest-mlm-rcna6950

[AllaN01Bear]

7. your body, your rights ? tell that to a woman . also u dont have the rights to make me sick and die

[Mz Pip]

8. No one is holding a gun to their head

They don’t have to get vaccinated. They can just stay home and not participate in activities requiring vaccinations.

[Progress4ever]

27. That would be reasonable

I live in a blue area but live near a red one. The Darwin Award types come into our community all the time and just refuse to obey reasonable laws and ordinances. They will come into your place of business with no mask and I swear to you, sometimes wearing t-shirts advocating against the VAX. Its insane. If you ask them to leave they will verbally assault you and demand service. You can say no and call the police. That's easy to say. Police response times weren't great before the pandemic and they are very slow now, especially for a minor crime like criminal trespass. So you end up with an enraged, mentally unhinged person scaring away all your customers. There are thousands of videos of this type of stuff online. And sometimes they come in huge packs. In D.C. yesterday there were too many to jail if it came to that. I don't know what the answer is, but they are NOT going to stop. "I won't comply" is their stupid rallying cry. If you think shaming them will work, good luck. They have none. These same people proudly voted for TFG.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

9. "Let's go Darwin!"

Link to tweet

[oasis]

16. +1

[llashram]

10. well

here are 10,000 super-spreaders identified...

[Hortensis]

12. Interest in this event soared after it was promoted on Joe Rogan's show.

That "provoked a condemnatory letter to Spotify, which hosts Rogan's podcast, from hundreds of doctors and public health experts. Tucker Carlson also plugged the event..."

I'm a lifelong liberal Democrat, so I don't appreciate the insults from people like the woman interviewed below who claim to have been a liberal Democrats until we forced them to switch to Republican. Liberal isn't an issue, it's a personality type and a very strong ideology with strong ideals and principles. She voted for Bernie Sanders before switching; apparently she missed that Sanders is proudly not -- and has never been -- a liberal Democrat, or chose not to notice. Sanders knows what that means (I think), at least it's something to do with his refusal to be a member of the liberal Democratic party, but I'd bet a very big sum this proud-idiot disease spreader doesn't.

Suzanne Robertson, 52, traveled from New Jersey for the anti-mandate march, carrying a sign that said she was a lifelong liberal Democrat until the last year. ... She said she campaigned for Bernie Sanders and voted for President Biden and had never before voted for a Republican until recently — when she stopped identifying with any political party, disappointed in Biden’s chastisement of those who choose not to get the shot.

Idiots, nutcases, extremists, hatemongers and depraved populists.

[riversedge]

24. I wonder how many other Democrats like this Suzanne think and now vote

Repug??? damn. I just do not understand the anti-vax people or why they think like they do. It is beyond the pale. No doubt she herself received the early polio vaccines along with other vaccines--and her kids for certain [if she has kids].




............Suzanne Robertson, 52, traveled from New Jersey for the anti-mandate march, carrying a sign that said she was a lifelong liberal Democrat until the last year. ... She said she campaigned for Bernie Sanders and voted for President Biden and had never before voted for a Republican until recently — when she stopped identifying with any political party, disappointed in Biden’s chastisement of those who choose not to get the shot.

[Hortensis]

26. Yeah. I'm sure that for most like her anti-vax isn't about the vaccine,

Riversedge, it's about belonging to a faction or cause opposing mainstream Democrats. Repubs and IL-liberal left.

That's why "liberal" pushed my button. Her self-admitted history is typical of many on the il-liberal left who vote third-party and Repub opportunities against liberal Democrats whenever offered one. Calling herself "liberal" while absolutely cluelessly betraying liberal principles is a huge clue. Lack of moral, intellectual AND ideological ballast are all typical of opposition-powered zealotry.

Like now, imagining anti-vax as so high-minded as to justify voting for the anti-liberal, anti-progressive, fascist-leaning, white nationalist, crimes against humanity, treason party. Doesn't get much more clueless-hypocritical than that.

Oh, well. The Repubs could have her, but my guess is she'll continue to wobble between the oppositional left and right. Right now Senator Sanders left her hanging by joining with his Democratic colleagues to defeat fascism, and no LW third-party leader has caught fire. But she has the anti-vax opposition "movement" to fill the void. Bless her zealous heart.

Hope she took the flu and a bad head cold home with her. Nothing that'd add her to the burden at the hospitals, though.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

13. COVIDIOT free dumb march

[SouthernDem4ever]

17. Perfect title!

[JohnSJ]

18. and speakers at that rally were headlined by RFK jr

https://www.rawstory.com/proud-boys-ant-vaccine-washington-rally/

[Progress4ever]

25. They aren't going to stop willingly

For every MAGAT in that crowd there are who knows how many RETHUGs back where they come from. These people are not going to see reason, and they are not going to obey rules. I guess the question is, how do we as society enforce compliance against so many people, especially when hundreds or even thousands of them descend like a plague rat infested ship on your community? The million dollar question is what are we prepared to do to stop these people?

[GB_RN]

28. The Utter Irony Of That T-shirt...

I can practically guarantee that the owner of it doesn't feel that way when it comes to women's reproductive rights.

I hate these people...🤦?♂️