In researching my new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, I discovered something unexpected: an alarming confirmation of my September 2022 article in which I argued that Educated Liberal Females (ELFs) are the single greatest threat to our enduring liberties.
My new book deals specifically with the ELF’s natural foes, the women of January 6. Among the ten women I profile is Dr. Simone Gold. Even before getting caught up in the events of that memorable day, Dr. Gold had set the ELFs on edge through her work with America’s Frontline Doctors, a group she founded.
An M.D. as well as a lawyer, Dr. Gold, 55 at the time, went to Washington not to protest the election but to address the issue of medical freedom. She had secured a permit to speak at a venue on the east side of the Capitol, but when organizers cancelled the event, Gold decided to give the speech on the Capitol steps. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she did not readily surrender her right to speak freely.
Standing at the top of the steps on the Capitol’s east side, Gold got swept into the building when the doors opened from the inside, and the crowd surged forward. Finding her way to the rotunda, Dr. Gold stood on the base of a statue to speak. Someone passed her a bullhorn, and several people came over to listen. Following her five-minute speech, she took questions. After twenty or so uneventful minutes in the Capitol, Gold exited the building, having seen no violence or vandalism.
Along with 1200 or so other citizens, Dr. Gold was hunted down by the FBI in the most sweeping series of arrests on American soil since the notorious Palmer raids of a century ago. Twelve days after January 6, roughly 20 agents came knocking at her Los Angeles door with a battering ram.
“They arrested me,” she told Tucker Carlson. “They [yell], ‘put your hands up, put your hands up, face the wall, face the wall,’ they’re screaming, ‘face the wall’ — handcuffed, shackled, take me downtown, orange suit, strip search, holding cell, fluorescent lights, — it was terrible — no phone call, no Miranda rights.”
Threatened with a 20-year sentence if she took her case to trial before a rubber-stamp D.C. jury, Gold reluctantly accepted a plea deal. For a single misdemeanor charge, she was sentenced to 60 days at the Miami Federal Detention Center, a maximum-security prison. This was an unusually severe punishment for a single misdemeanor, even by January 6 standards.
On March 9, 2022 the New York Times celebrated Gold’s impending imprisonment in an article headlined, “A doctor prominent in fomenting opposition to Covid vaccines Facebook page, America’s frontline Karens queued up to take a whack at the Gold piñata. For the researcher, Facebook is a useful and easily mined resource. All those who comment have a Facebook page in their own name, and on that page is enough personal information to assess, in general terms, the person’s background. The article elicited more than a thousand comments.
The first 19 people to post an original comment were female, all of them hostile. A supportive male broke the streak. Of the first 50 people, 42 were female. Of that 42, two more or less defended Gold, but the other 40 met the general definition of an ELF. These are New York Times readers after all. The comments of the 40 were uniformly negative. Of note, some expressed as much anger at Dr. Gold’s Covid skepticism as they did her designation as insurrectionist. Some samples:
Take her medical license… she should be held to a higher standard…. throw the book at her… she is a danger to others and the public health.
Apparently that “first do no harm” thing didn’t take. #quack
Glad to see she is no longer practicing, can’t imagine her taking care of people when she doesn’t trust science.
Honestly she should lose her medical license for intentionally spreading so much misinformation. In this kind of scenario she very likely could have caused lives to be lost.
Suspend her license — She is a threat to her patients.
Given the number of people who have died from her COVID lies, she should be facing more serious charges.
She should be charged for the deaths of anyone who believed her. And she should lose her license for spreading lies about medical information. She totally violated her oath to do NO harm.
NYTIMES Stop referring to her as a doctor. She is not one of us.
Too bad she doesn’t live in Russia where she could get 15 years in jail for misinformation.
Thinking the Russia comment might have been made in jest, I reviewed the commenter’s home page. She wasn’t joking. Her past comments showed symptoms of an irony deficiency epidemic in the ELF community. Other ELFs saw Dr. Gold not only as a quack, but also as a traitor. They proved equally as ignorant about January 6 as they did about Covid and just as vengeful.
She should serve at lest 25 years for this insurrection and trying to destroy democracy! Why are we so lenient with this terrorists!!??
Go get them all !!!!!! Enough is enough and this has gone on too long. Just like the horrendous amount of time it is taking to make #45 pay for his crimes. #45, his family and his cult MUST be brought to justice for the damage they did to American democracy, citizens and place in the world.
Hope she sees time behind bars.
Sick & tired of misdemeanor charges for these people who tried to overthrow our government.
She should lose her medical license, not only for the misinformation she was spreading but especially for not attending to the fallen & injured officers of that despicable riot!
I hope in future someone researching our odd and precarious times will be able to assess the harm that has been done to American citizens and others by conspiracy theory promoters.
The ELFs, it should be noted, left these unforgiving comments two years after the onset of the pandemic. By this time, they should have known they had been deceived about Covid’s origins, the efficacy of masks, the value of the vaccines, the effectiveness of lockdowns, the lasting harm to schoolchildren, and the dangers of the disease itself.
If proof were needed of this deception, a survey done by Franklin Templeton-Gallup in late 2020 provided it. In the survey of 35,000 Americans, the most revealing indicator came in response to the question: “What percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?” The responding Democrats proved scarily clueless. Some 41 percent believed that 50 percent or more of those who contracted Covid would end up in the hospital. Another 28 percent said that 20-50 percent of Covid sufferers would be hospitalized.
The correct answer was 1-5 percent, an answer Republicans were nearly three times as likely to get right. In sum, 69 percent of Democrats were deeply misinformed and 41 percent were grossly misinformed. The ignorance infected even the most powerful ELFs. At a January 2022 hearing on vaccine mandates, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators.” As the CNN fact checker had to admit, the self-described “wise Latina” overstated the numbers by a factor of at least twenty.
“It was as if these communities were in the grip of a collective hallucination,” erstwhile feminist icon Naomi Wolf writes of her former allies in her book The Bodies of Others, “like the witch crazes of the sixteen and seventeenth century. Whole understandings and belief systems were abandoned overnight. Intelligent, informed people suddenly saw things that were not there and unable to see things that were incontrovertibly before their faces.”
Dr. Gold was punished for being right. To this day, she defies her critics to find anything that she said about COVID that has proved to be untrue. “The anger against me is so aggressive,” she believes, “because they think I betrayed my social class.” Like other religious zealots, ELFs have no tolerance for apostates.
Jack Cashill’s newest book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is now available for purchase. Ebook and audiobook versions to follow shortly.
Image: Bombardier Books
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