Proud Boy Anitvaxxer Under Arrest

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong.

There is a major overlap between the antivax movement and right-wing extremism.

Zachary Petrizzo at The Daily Beast:

The leader of the right-wing and COVID anti-vax 1776 Restoration Movement—formerly called The People’s Convoy—was arrested near the National Mall on Wednesday after his group came to town protesting non-existent mandates. Far-right Proud Boy member and leader David “Santa” Riddell was taken into custody for a warrant out of Maryland, D.C. Metropolitan Police officers told The Daily Beast on scene. “He was placed under arrest for the arrest warrant that he had issued for him,” D.C. Metropolitan Police assistant chief Jeffery Carroll told The Daily Beast. “We can’t allow somebody out here with an arrest warrant.” D.C. Metropolitan Police also impounded Riddell’s black big rig. The arrest follows the group’s July 4 “attack” on D.C. area highways, where they blocked traffic in upwards of three lanes in each direction on major highways. city.

Antivax Rally

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong.  

Peter Jamison and Ellie Silverman at WP:

As anti-vaccine activists from across the country prepare to gather on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, they are hoping their rally will mark a once-fringe movement’s arrival as a lasting force in American society.

That hope, some public health experts fear, is justified. 

Almost two years into the coronavirus pandemic, the movement to challenge vaccines’ safety — and reject vaccine mandates — has never been stronger. An ideology whose most notable adherents were once religious fundamentalists and minor celebrities is now firmly entrenched among tens of millions of Americans.

Baseless fears of vaccines have been a driving force among the approximately 20 percent of U.S. adults who have refused some of the most effective medicines in human history: the mRNA vaccines developed against the coronavirus by Pfizer, with German partner BioNTech, and Moderna. The nation that produced Jonas Salk has exported anti-vaccine propaganda around the globe, wreaking havoc on public health campaigns from Germany to Kenya.

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The scientific case for the full range of vaccines recommended by public health authorities in the United States remains as solid as ever. Research has shown that those vaccines — which have all but eliminated diseases that once sickened, debilitated or killed millions every year — to be safe for the vast majority of those who receive them. The 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that claimed a link between a common childhood vaccine and autism, launching the modern anti-vaccination movement, was exposed as fraudulent.

Jamieson and Silverman also report:

Organizers estimate that 20,000 people will attend the rally, marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, according to a permit issued by the National Park Service. D.C. police were fully activated from Friday Jan. 21, during the annual March for Life, through today for the anti-vaccine mandate rally, spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said.

The march is billed as a protest of mandates, rather than the medicines themselves. But similar rhetoric — emphasizing individual autonomy rather than untenable scientific ideas — has long characterized the broader anti-vaccine movement, and the march’s speakers include movement veterans such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree, founder of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network.

Other speakers include physician Robert Malone, a prominent critic of the coronavirus mRNA vaccines, and former CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, who in a November appearance on Fox News compared White House chief medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Public employee associations that have formed to protest their employers’ vaccine mandates, such as Feds for Medical Freedom and D.C. Firefighters Bodily Autonomy Affirmation Group, are also participating.

 

 

A Protest in Utah

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss interactions between police and autistic people.  Police officers need training to respond appropriately.  When they do not, things get out of hand. A recent incident in Salt Lake City is getting national attention.
 Ashley Imlay at The Deseret News:

When 14-year-old Gabe Smith learned from his parents Saturday that a 13-year-old boy on the autism spectrum was shot and injured by police last week while having a crisis, it hit close to home.

“I felt pain, felt physical pain. I felt like I was having a heart attack. It just hurt, and I ignored it the best I can,” recalled Gabe, who is also on the spectrum.

The news brought back his own memories.

“At my school, when the police officer took me down when I was upset and hitting my head against a window, (he) grabbed my arm and pushed me on the ground and held me for five minutes, I remembered that,” he said.

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That’s why the family showed up for a small but emotional rally Saturday in support of Linden Cameron, the 13-year-old who was shot and injured by police.

About 40 people gathered in front of the Ogden Municipal Building to speak against police brutality and call for understanding and compassion for those with mental illness and disabilities. Some of the ralliers were also members of the Black Lives Matter movement in Utah.

During the rally, a few carried signs with slogans such as: “You have no authority to shoot a child,” “Crisis management not cops,” “Justice for Linden Cameron, we stand with you.”

On Sept. 4, after police came into contact with Linden in the area of 500 South and Navajo Street (1335 West), the boy ran from officers. A short time later, shots were fired. Salt Lake Police Sgt. Keith Horrocks told reporters at the scene that night that the boy “had made threats to some folks with a weapon,” but also stated he did not believe any weapon was recovered from the scene.

Election Politics, Social Media, and #CripTheVote

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss the issue's role in presidential campaigns.

Juliet Isselbacher at STAT:

“To watch the shift from us having to beg candidates — like literally beg candidates — to include the word ‘disability’ as they rattled off diversity categories to [them] coming to us to say, ‘I want to engage with your folks’ … [this] was such a powerful shift,” said Rebecca Cokley, founder and director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy think tank.
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A 2017 bill poised to slash Medicaid coverage — which was introduced by GOP lawmakers and which Trump supported — became a flashpoint for many in the community. Advocates came out in force to protest the proposal on Capitol Hill, and dozens even staged a “die-in” at the door of Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mconnell’s office. In widely publicized photos, security forcibly arrested many of these protesters, dragging some from their wheelchairs.

“I think the increased media attention on those protests definitely shaped how the emerging field of candidates … treated the disability community,” Cokley said. “We saw a shift in the power dynamic. It went from candidates treating disabled people like a photo op — almost like a puppy — to actively treating us as engaged voters and stakeholders.”

Cokley said that social media also “blew open the doors” for community activism and coordination. In particular, the nonpartisan #CripTheVote hashtag has given people with disabilities, who account for 20% of the U.S. population, a way to unite and amplify the power of their voting bloc. Disability advocate Tiara Mercius described #CripTheVote — launched by disability activists Alice Wong, Gregg Beratan, and Andrew Pulrang in 2016 — as a “virtual coffee shop” for people with disabilities to discuss what they want out of elected officials.

Cokley said that nearly all the candidates with whom she consulted told her they had staff assigned to monitor the hashtag #CripTheVote. Taking advantage of this attention from campaigns — as well as their wide reach on Twitter — the movement’s co-founders put out an open invitation for presidential candidates or President Trump to join them in a live Twitter chat. Warren and Buttigeg both took them up on the offer.

Disability Rights and Civil Rights

In The Politics of Autism, I write:

“Civil rights” usually referred to the fight against racial segregation.  In several ways, this struggle set the template for other civil rights issues, including disability rights. First, cases such as Brown v. Board of Education demonstrated that disadvantaged groups could gain protections in the courts.  Second, movement leaders found that nonviolent protests could gain public sympathy and put pressure on elected officials. Third, civil rights statutes that helped African Americans would also point to means by which the government could protect other excluded groups. 

President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act 30 years ago today.

Vilissa Thompson and David J. Johns write at CNN:

In remembering disabled activists who were instrumental in the creation of America's disability rights movement and imagining what a more inclusive movement for social justice and full civil rights for the future could look like, we keep coming back to the partnership during the late 1970s between the Black Panther Party and the 504 activists, disability rights advocates who were pushing for implementation of a long-delayed section (section 504) of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Prior to the 1990 enactment the Americans with Disabilities Act, section 504 was the most important disability rights legislation in the US. Modeled on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Section 504 prohibited those who received federal aid from discriminating against any "otherwise qualified individuals with a disability." This stellar example of bridging movements resulted in the longest occupation of a federal building in US history in San Francisco -- and it is a historical moment that deserves more recognition, especially as America marks the 30th anniversary of the ADA.

Brad Lomax, a Black Panther who was also a pivotal figure in the movement for disability rights and helped lead the (ultimately successful) sit-in, was one of many activists who worked to make disability rights a presence and priority in the broader civil rights movement. Donald Galloway, who headed blind services and the Black Caucus at Berkeley's Center for Independent Living, recalled: "Brad was our linkage to the Black Panthers." Lomax brought together the growing disability rights movement, which Galloway remembered as "predominantly white," and the Black community in the Bay Area.

This kind of connection, sadly, is too often lost or forgotten when the stories of both movements are told: members within these movements are rarely aware that worlds and identities collided in the name of freedom and justice in ways that reshaped history.

David Shribman at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

“Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down,” President George H.W. Bush said when he signed the law in 1990. It was the disabled version of the Book of Exodus sentiment — Let my people go! — that Harriet Tubman used as a code for enslaved people escaping to the North and that Al Jolson and Paul Robeson made famous.

That phrase is enshrined in the American Songbook, in the hearts of the marginalized and the striving, in the soaring words of a patrician president who claimed the ADA was the achievement of which he was most proud, in the American spirit and, 30 years ago, in the American legal code.

“President Bush truly was passionate about disability rights and felt the ADA was the greatest civil rights act in the country after the civil rights movement of the 1960s,” Andrew H. Card, deputy White House chief of staff at the time and interim chair of the George and Barbara Bush Foundation, said in an interview. “He used to say that disability knew no barrier between ethnic groups and religious affiliation. People with disabilities were pushed aside, and he was proud to make them part of the fabric of America.”

Public Health Under Siege

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Alan Greenblatt at Governing:

Across the country, health officials have been met with armed protesters at their homes and been subjected to anti-Semitic or transphobic slurs. On social media, they encounter posts that include phrases such as “let’s start shooting” and “bodies swinging from trees.” As the nation faces its gravest health challenge in more than a century, many leaders in public health are reluctantly leaving the field.
...
It’s true that there have been protests over health policy questions before, from abortion to the Affordable Care Act. Death threats have also become a fact of life for prominent physicians promoting vaccine use, given the virulence of the anti-vaccine movement.

But anger has never been so deep in so many places as during the coronavirus pandemic. Health officials, who have possessed shutdown authority in many jurisdictions for more than a century, haven’t had to use it for decades. People aren’t used to having their freedoms impinged upon so widely or for so long.

“People are enormously frustrated and angry and worn down, and so they lash out,” says Paul Offit, an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. “You shoot the messenger. What you really want to shoot is the virus, but instead you shoot the people who tell you about the virus.”
...

[Georges] Benjamin, the APHA director, notes that public health decisions are often controversial enough to meet with protests. Big, burly men might show up at a hearing to express their displeasure about having to wear motorcycle helmets. Abortion opponents have bombed clinics and murdered physicians. Anti-vaccine protesters have targeted lawmakers with death threats and other intimidation tactics.

But protests targeting individual health officials have reached a new level. “It’s true we’ve had protests,” Benjamin says. “We’ve had offices taken over by AIDS activists, but I don’t think anyone felt threatened. They told us they were coming.”

More on the Antivax/Antilockdown Connection

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.   And among those diseases could be COVID-19.

Jonathan Oosting, Ted Roelofs at Bridge:

Anti-vaccination activists — already warring against government mandates — have emerged as key players in the battle against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order designed to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Several organizers with Michigan United for Liberty, the group that hosted an April 30 protest at the Michigan Capitol and is planning another Thursday, have deep ties to the “anti-vaxx” and “medical freedom” movement, according to a review of online activity and public records by Bridge Magazine.

Some have used social media to promote conspiracy theories about the pandemic and to discourage the kind of widespread testing, contact tracing and vaccine development that medical experts say is critical to defeating the virus and reopening the economy.

Robert Mackey at The Intercept:

THE PRESIDENT OF the United States voiced his support on Saturday for a protest against New York state’s public health orders that was backed by an anti-government militia and anti-vaccine activists who called for the execution of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s senior immunologist.

The “Re-Open NY” rally on Thursday in Commack, New York was organized by a group of Trump supporters who call themselves the Setauket Patriots, but also endorsed by anti-vaccination activists and the Long Island branch of the Oath Keepers, a national organization of current and former law enforcement officers and military veterans who think they are defending the nation from a range of imaginary threats posed by the federal government.

Amid a sea of American flags and Trump banners, several of the signs waved by the protesters referenced conspiracy theories promoted by radical anti-vaccine activists that demonize Fauci and the philanthropist Bill Gates.

People can’t get enough of this. Great people! https://t.co/b4HM0C298h

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2020

More on Antivaxxers and Shutdown Protests

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing disease to spread.  Trump has helped spread misinformation.

The antivaxxers are joining up with protests against the coronavirus shutdown.

For instance, antivaxxers were prominent in a Friday anti-shutdown rally in Sacramento.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs at NYT:

The people behind the rally are founders of a group, the Freedom Angels Foundation, which is best known in California for its opposition to state efforts to mandate vaccinations. And the protest was the latest example of the overlapping interests that have connected a range of groups — including Tea Party activists and armed militia groups — to oppose the measures that governors have taken to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Activists known for their opposition to vaccines have also been involved in protests in New York, Colorado and Texas, where they have found a welcome audience for their arguments for personal freedom and their suspicion of government. But their growing presence at the protests worries public health experts who fear that their messaging could harm the United States’ ability to turn a corner following the pandemic if Americans do not accept a future vaccine.

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Heidi Muñoz Gleisner, one of the three women who hosted the rally in Sacramento on Friday and were arrested by the police, said the stay-at-home orders that are now expiring in many states had mobilized people who span a variety of groups focused on individual liberty.
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In recent years, Ms. Muñoz Gleisner and the two other founding members of the Freedom Angels, Denise Aguilar and Tara Thornton, have organized people in California and New Jersey against bills that crack down on non-medical exemptions for vaccinations and the process by which they’re granted.

Many were galvanized by a 2015 fight over a state bill introduced in response to a measles outbreak at Disneyland.
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In New York, Rita Palma, who runs a blog and seeks to halt mandatory vaccinations, voiced support for the California protest and joined one herself in Albany, where she interviewed protesters and streamed the rally on her Facebook page. And Jonathan Lockwood, a consultant who has worked with conservatives in several states on matters including opposition to the California vaccination bill last year, founded the ReopenAmerica Project, which urges lawmakers to get the country “back up and running.”

All of this activity takes place as yet another study finds that vaccines do not cause autism. 

Shutdown Protests and Antivaxxers

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing disease to spread.  Trump has helped spread misinformation.

The antivaxxers are joining up with protests against the coronavirus shutdown.

Craig Timberg,  Elizabeth Dwoskin and Moriah Balingit at WP:

Protests against coronavirus-related government restrictions continued to spread on Friday as a coalition of gun activists, vaccine opponents and anxious business owners used the organizing power of social media to build increasingly visible and vocal opposition movements in several states.
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In many cases the protests, which have been supported by conservative megadonors, have ties to a host of darker Internet subcultures — people who oppose vaccination, the self-identified Western-chauvinist Proud Boys group, anti-government conspiracy theorists known as QAnon, and people touting a coming civil war.
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Erica Pettinaro, 28, who works part-time as a medical assistant and doula near Flint, Mich., said she is suspicious of the death toll reported from covid-19 and does not believe the government should be counting people who contract the virus and die of pneumonia, even though the term describes any infection that invades the lungs

Pettinaro, a mother of five, co-founded Michigan United for Liberty with a woman she met through her work as an anti-vaccination activist. The group has sued Whitmer over the restrictions imposed during the pandemic and urged businesses to open Friday in defiance of the state order. It organized Thursday’s protest at the state capitol.
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Earlier this month, a video of an Idaho mother who was arrested after letting her kids play on a playground that was surrounded by police tape went viral in far-right circles, pushed out by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

The mother, Sara Walton Brady, is an anti-vaccine activist with connections to a number of conservative groups, said [researcher Joan] Donovan. The video was live-streamed on Facebook by supporters, and the incident followed an earlier anti-quarantine

demonstration in Idaho organized by anti-vaccine activists, the gun rights group Second Amendment Alliance, and the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a politically prominent conservative group in the state.

Sam Stanton and colleagues at The Sacramento Bee:

In the most intense protest yet against California’s stay-at-home order, demonstrators crowded the Capitol on Friday and scuffled with California Highway Patrol officers who had ordered them to disperse.

Authorities said late Friday 32 people were arrested, most of being cited and released, during the middle of the four-hour rally when tensions boiled over on the west steps of downtown Sacramento landmark.

The protest by roughly 1,000 people – some holding American flags and signs calling for the economy to reopen – started peacefully but quickly escalated when CHP officers ordered them to leave the steps of the landmark downtown Sacramento building or face arrest.

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At least three people who tried to cross police lines were pulled away and detained. Several other people were pulled from the crowd as well. Among them was Heidi Munoz Gleisner of the group Freedom Angels; Gleisner is a familiar figure at the Capitol for participating in anti-vaccination protests.

Scenes from the Capitol now. There are thousands here to protest. So many Trump and anti-vax signs, American flags and very few masks. pic.twitter.com/LlCi424MPL

— Hannah Wiley (@hannahcwiley) May 1, 2020

Antivaxxers and Anti-Shutdown Protests

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing disease to spread. 

There are signs of considerable overlap between the antivax movement and the anti-shutdown movement.

Carl Marinucci and Jeremy White at Politico:

They didn’t have masks, they weren’t into social distancing and they brought lots of signs, and some anger — some of it fueled, critics say, by the president of the United States.

But the arrival of a crowd of a couple of hundred protesters at the state Capitol underscored the growing efforts by conservative groups to push back at ordered shutdowns aimed at controlling the Covid-19 epidemic.

The organizers of Monday’s Sacramento event called themselves “Freedom Angels“ — but as CALMatters’ Laurel Rosenhall tweeted, many were regulars in the recent CA anti-vaxx movement. Already, they’re promising weekly rallies on Facebook with more “Operation Gridlock” efforts planned for April 24 and May 1.

Will Sommer and Jackie Kucinich at The Daily Beast:

Del Bigtree, a notorious anti-vaccination activist before the emergence of COVID-19, attended a reopening rally in Austin last weekend to find out why the protesters were showing up. Bigtree told The Daily Beast that he saw a lot of overlap between anti-vaccine activists who distrust vaccines and the rally-goers, who were complaining that the public health policies put in place by state governments are unconstitutional and draconian relative to the health crisis at hand.

“I think the science is falling apart,” Bigtree said, citing models he called “a disaster.”

On April 17, Bigtree featured Wendy Darling, founder of anti-stay-at-home-order group “Michigan United for Liberty” and an attendee of one of the Michigan protests, on his online show The High Wire, which usually dedicates programming to questioning health professionals and settled science. Asked by Bigtree whether the demonstrations showed that at least some Michiganders “are not afraid of dying from the coronavirus,” Darling said: “In our group, in particular, we've got thousands of people in Michigan United for Liberty and the consensus there is, you know, we are not. We're more afraid of the government than we are of the virus at this point.”

Bigtree isn’t the only drawing connections between the anti-vaccine movement—which advocates for the fallacious notion that vaccines cause autism or other ailments—and the movements against the stay-at-home orders. Anti-vaccine activists have pushed a hashtag calling for President Donald Trump to fire the government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci—a message that evolved into a “Fire Fauci” chant at the Texas rally Bigtree attended. Some participants in the reopening rallies have also adopted “I Do Not Consent” as their go-to sign formulation, which is the same language that’s become a popular phrase for anti-vaccination activists.

Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins at NBC:

Protests against state stay-at-home orders have attracted a wide range of fringe activists and ardent Trump supporters. They have also attracted a family of political activists whom some Republican lawmakers have called "scam artists."

A family-run network of pro-gun groups is behind five of the largest Facebook groups dedicated to protesting the shelter-in-place restrictions, according to an NBC News analysis of Facebook groups and website registration information.

The groups were set up by four brothers — Chris, Ben, Aaron and Matthew Dorr — and have amassed more than 200,000 members collectively, including in states where they don't reside, according to an NBC News analysis based on public records searches and Facebook group registrations.
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The Facebook groups started by the Dorrs each promote state-specific websites, which were registered with the same private registrar, and use similar language in their descriptions.
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The websites, such as ReOpenPA.com and ReOpenMN.com, were initially shared by the same network of pro-gun and anti-vaccination sites, regardless of region, according to an analysis using the Facebook analytics tool CrowdTangle, which lets people track the spread of content on the platform.

For example, ReOpenPA.com and ReOpenMN.com were initially shared by the Dorr-affiliated Facebook groups Ohio Gun Owners, Pennsylvania Firearms Association, New York Firearms Association, a pro-Trump group called Ohio First and an anti-vaccine group called VaXism.

Antivaxxers Get Worse

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms have helped spread this dangerous myth.   Measles can kill.

At NBC, Brandy Zadrozny and Erika Edwards report that antivaxxers are getting nastier and more aggressive.

Opposition to immunizations was once largely limited to online bullying, but now opponents are increasingly taking their harassment tactics into the real world: aggressively following legislators and doctors and, in some cases, using physical violence.
...
Online conspiracy theorist Austin Bennett livestreamed himself physically shoving the author of California's law, state Sen. Dr. Richard Pan. Bennett was later charged with a misdemeanor. The next month, Rebecca Dalelio, a participant at a protest at the California state Capitol, was charged with assault and vandalism when police say she threw a menstrual cup full of blood on lawmakers in the gallery.

Pan, who is also a pediatrician, suspects he was Dalelio's target.

"Everyone around me was hit" when the blood splattered on the legislative floor, he said.
Pan said anti-vaccine groups have stalked him at conferences, speaking engagements, even the March for Science in Washington.

As legislators, "we deal with all sorts of contentious issues — guns, abortions, lots of issues people are very passionate about," Pan said. "But the degree to which the anti-vaccine extremists takes this is in excess of any other group."
...

During an infectious diseases conference in New York in November, Dr. Peter Hotez was followed throughout a hotel by several aggressive anti-vaccination protesters who filmed while pelting him with questions predicated on vaccine hoaxes. Hotez is a vaccine scientist, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, and author of the recent book, "Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism."

Hotez tweeted from the event, thanking hotel security for “getting me out safe.”

“I've been targeted by them for 20 years,” Hotez said. But the real-life harassment is part of “an awful new normal.”

Antivax Activists Throws Liquid on CA Senators

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing disease to spread.  Unfortunately, Republican legislators in some states are opposed to vaccine mandates.

Hannah Wiley at the Sacramento Bee:

An anti-vaccine activist who traveled to the Capitol to protest on the final day of the legislative year threw a menstrual cup at state senators on Friday afternoon, prompting a quick recess and an immediate evacuation of the chambers.

The protesters were watching from the upstairs balcony in the Senate at about 5:15 p.m., when a woman hurled what the California Highway Patrol called “a feminine hygiene device containing what appeared to be blood” at several lawmakers. “That’s for the dead babies,” she yelled.

Rebecca Dalelio, 43, was charged with felony vandalism, misdemeanor battery, and multiple other misdemeanor counts related to disrupting official state business. Her bail is set at $10,000, according to Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department records.

2/2 These anti-vaxxers are engaging in criminal behavior. They’ve now repeatedly assaulted Senators & are engaging in harassing & intimidating behavior every single day, as we try to do the people’s work. They’re a cancer on the body politic & are attacking democracy.

— Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) September 14, 2019

Protesting Senate Trumpcare

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss health care issues and state Medicaid services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

For many Americans, Medicaid means welfare, which means handouts to lazy bums.  Opponents of Medicaid cuts have to show who actually benefits.

From The New York Times:




Disabled people protested outside Mitch McConnell's office:

Medicaid Day of Action: June 6

In The Politics of Autism, I discuss health care issues and state Medicaid services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

From the Autistic Self Advocacy Network:

Medicaid Day of Action on June 6th

Many groups around the country have been organizing events to defend health care in America. Now, we’ve all joined forces to declare June 6th a national Day of Action to #SaveMedicaid – and we need YOU to get in on the action. Here’s how you can get involved:
Join a rally.
If you’re in the DC area, there’s a rally planned for 11:30am. Find out more details here.
Not in DC? Click here to find out about rallies planned in other parts of the country.
If you can’t attend a rally, don’t worry – there are many other ways you can take action that are just as important. We need to get our message across to Congress in as many ways as possible. Here’s what else you can do:

Call your Senators.
You can find your Senators’ contact information by entering your ZIP code at contactingcongress.org. If you find it easier to leave an answering machine message than to talk to a staffer on the phone, you can call after work hours, and your message will still be counted. If you don’t speak, you can call using your AAC device, or get a friend to call in and read your message. No matter how you do it, your call is criticalright now. Here’s a script you can use:

Script for calling your Senators

My name is [your full name]. I’m a constituent of Senator [Name], and I live in [your town]. I’m calling to ask the Senator to protect Medicaid. Specifically, I want the Senator to promise to vote against any bill that converts Medicaid into a per capita cap, including the potential ACA repeal bill. Per capita caps mean huge cuts to Medicaid that would cause many of your constituents to lose health care, and eliminate vital services that people with disabilities rely on to live in the community. Capping Medicaid will have a devastating impact on the lives of people with disabilities like [me/ my family member/ my friends]. We’re counting on you to do the right thing. Please tell the Senator to stand up for people with disabilities and save Medicaid!

Use the power of social media.

On June 6th, we want to see the #SaveMedicaid hashtag on every social media platform. After you’ve called your Senator, print out a “#SaveMedicaid because…” sign, fill it out & take a selfie with it, and share! Make sure to use the #SaveMedicaid hashtag so we can see it and share it as well. You can also tweet it at your Senators to remind them of your story and encourage others to take action.

No matter how you participate, we need everyone to take action on June 6th. Congress represents us, the people — and this affects all of us. On June 6th, we’re going to take to the streets, phone lines, social media, and Senators’ offices to tell them to #SaveMedicaid – and we hope you’ll be there with us. United, our message cannot be ignored: Nothing about us without us!