Powell was one of the rioters at the White house, the so-called bullhorn lady, and is a divorced 40 year old mother of eight living about 1 ½ hours southwest of here in Sandy Lake, PA. She had her first child at age 16 and their present ages range from four to the mid twenties. Besides an apparent disregard for birth control and overpopulation, a search of her car turned up a "go bag" that contained a tarp, zip ties and two loaded magazines for an AK-47. During an earlier search of Ms. Powell's house, FBI agents found two other "go bags," one containing ammunition, rope and duct tape and a second one with Ninja throwing stars, knives and lighters. The FBI also found paper shooting targets with written slogans on them, including "Guns don't kill people, I do," and "Prayer is a good way to meet the lord, but trespassing is faster."
On February 2nd she gave a New Yorker interview in which she said that “I garden” and “raise chickens” and that she had been working part time jobs and sold cheese and yogurt at a farmers market. In short, she is an adamant ‘anti-mask’ protester who over the last year has been sucked down the rabbit hole of lies and conspiracy theories by people like Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones and Donald Trump.
Anyone unfamiliar with western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio should know that this is a darkly conservative area with an enduring provincial attitude. When Trump made his campaign sign “GOD, GUNS and COUNTRY”, this is the people to whom he was trying to appeal. It the only area that I passed through during my cross country walk in 2006 where I encountered negative comments from people and where a driver deliberately swerved to harass me. 40 years ago when a friend and I rode bicycles across PA, we were resting in a town park in Sandy Lake when people noticed us and harshly yelled for us to leave.
In January, when I drove to
southern Georgia through West Virginia, Virginia,
North and South Carolina, I noticed that western PA was the only location where people still had dozens of Trump
signs in their yards. Most of them will remain there for the next four years as
people refuse to believe he lost in a fair election. Some of his supporters in Warren County
live in dilapidated houses, but Mr. Trump remains their hero as he flies in a
private jet to his Florida
mansion. Some claim they fear socialism and the welfare state while cashing their
stimulus checks; yet despite the hypocrisy they prefer the greed in the abuses of capitalism over a more equitable, humanitarian distribution of wealth. Some defend their right to own AK 47s because the men who wrote
the 2nd amendment said so, forgetting that in 1776 muskets required
20 seconds to reload. Some believe they must ‘make America great again’ while changing
the oil on their boats and trucks and ATV’s and drinking beer and eating
pizza and not quite noticing that they have it pretty damn good. Others condemn
the rioters but not Trump, and never acknowledge his role in
encouraging the behavior. Trump once claimed “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” That is True for some of his supporters. The gulf between opinion, fact and reality, between
moral conscience and political expediency has become so skewed that I do not
know if some people will ever crawl out of the rabbit hole. Postscript: Trumps attorney general Bill Barr said to Trump during Trumps final weeks: "..your people keep shoveling this shit out" ..."my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit." "...part of Trumps "..clown show." ...and yet there are millions who still believe it.
As Neil DeGrasse Tyson wrote:
“One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.”
1 comment:
Great post Wes.
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