Brandon Fellows reacts to Anthony Fauci testimony June 3.
"What's somebody like that doing at a hearing about COVID?" Anthony Fauci asked a CNN host. As shall be seen, there is more to this question than meets the eye.
Fauci was referring to the mischievous January 6 veteran Brandon Fellows. Fellows was thrown out of the subcommittee hearing Monday for making faces behind Fauci while he talked.
I had the pleasure of meeting Fellows in D.C. during the Ashli Babbitt Freedom March on Memorial Day. We walked and talked together for a few blocks. He is a character.
As the marchers headed down Massachusetts Avenue toward the D.C. jail, with American flags and Trump flags flying, the neighbors, all white, felt free to shout the most vile epithets their limited imaginations could conjure.
Laughing, Fellows joked back that he had just been paroled to the district a week earlier and was pleased to be their new neighbor. His good nature only enraged his critics more. As I said to Fellows at the time, "This is your jury pool."
A dozen members of that pool saw to it that Fellows went to prison. His crime was to enter the Capitol through an open door and put his feet up on the desk of U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., while smoking marijuana.
He hurt no one, broke nothing. Now just 30, Fellows had been incarcerated since July 2021 and remains on probation.
As to what "somebody like that" was doing at the Fauci hearings, the government's abuse of individual freedom during the COVID reign of terror helped radicalize Fellows.
"COVID lockdowns in N.Y. told me I wasn't supposed to work," said Fellows in his pre-sentencing memo. "All the while not giving me any money, they instead threatened fines on people who worked."
Fellows was not alone in his outrage. In researching my new book, "Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6," I was surprised to find just how direct a role COVID oppression played in inspiring people to go to Washington.
Of the 10 women I profile in the book, nine were outspoken COVID dissidents. Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot and killed on January 6, had a perfectly apt name for COVID, the "controla virus."
"We are being hoodwinked. The sheep need to wake up," Ashli posted on social media. A sign on the door of her and her husband Aaron's pool supply business captured the take of most J6 protesters.
The Babbitts declared the business a "mask free autonomous zone, better known as America." Another sign read simply, "If you need to wear a mask outside, I'm not sure we can help you."
Living in San Diego, Ashli was the only woman of the 10 to fly to Washington. Rather than deal with oppressive airline regulations, the other nine drove or went by bus.
Rebecca Lavrenz, a great-grandmother from Colorado, refused to wear a mask under any circumstance. As a nurse, she knew the masks were "ridiculous," but more to the point, she did not like the idea of people "taking away her liberties."
In 2020, she sought out people like herself willing to go maskless in a grocery store even at the risk of being kicked out. Through these new affiliations, she got involved actively in politics and worked her precinct on behalf of Donald Trump. "I knew I had to do something," said Rebecca. "Politics are local."
On Dec. 8, 2020, Idaho's Yvonne St Cyr was arrested at an anti-mask rally in Boise at the Central District Health Department. She refused to cover her nose and mouth, she said, because "I have a right to breathe oxygen."
Yvonne's defiance of Idaho's lawless COVID restrictions did not sit well with the local apparatchiks. As CNN matter-of-factly reported, Yvonne "was placed under citizen's arrest by a staff member."
Rachel Powell found herself banned from local farmers' markets in western Pennsylvania where she sold her cheese and yogurt. In an article on Powell, Ronan Farrow traced her resistance to the "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories" about COVID that were being spread by Trump and others.
In a foreshadowing of what would happen after January 6, the heavily indoctrinated Americans felt empowered to monitor and report on their fellow citizens.
"Random people became citizen cops preventing you from living your life doing ordinary things," said Dr. Simone Gold, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. "I was watching Nazism unfold."
In May 2020, Dr. Gold recruited some six hundred physicians to sign an open letter to Trump protesting the lockdowns. She showed up at the Capitol on January 6 as a respected physician/attorney and founder of America's Frontline Doctors, but she, too, left as a "domestic terrorist."
"One important lesson I've learned over the last few years," said the undaunted Dr. Gold in January 2024: "When they try to discredit you by labeling you a conspiracy theorist, it's probably because they're hiding a conspiracy."
At the House committee hearings this week, Dr. Fauci listened contemptuously as one Congress member after another rattled off the disastrous consequences of the COVID policies he set and the desperate efforts he has made to cover his sins.
Yet for the major media, the takeaway message was that a J6er made faces while Fauci spoke.
Jack Cashill's, new book, "Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6," is now available in print and ebook. Audio to follow.
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