It’s all a conspiracy! A left-wing soshalisst Mooslim atheist health-mongering conspiracy to close our parks and make us drink bleach no wait to tell us not to drink bleach yes that’s it. Ice cream, Mandrake?

A video of a mother arrested in Idaho at a playground that was closed under stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic has quickly gone viral, with far-right social media accounts rallying around her.

But the mother, 40-year-old Sara Walton Brady, wasn’t on the playground simply so her kids could play. Brady is an anti-vaccine activist with connections to several far-right groups in Idaho, and she was participating in an organized protest on Tuesday against the governor’s stay-at-home order. A group of people removed police caution tape to enter the closed playground, the Idaho Statesman reported, and Brady refused police requests to leave before she was arrested.

Because freedom freedom freedom freedom. People should be free to stay home to avoid the virus if they want to and people should be free to cluster in parks to spread the virus around if they want to. That’s freedom!

They expostulate and exclaim as if they were Freedom Riders being dragged off buses in 1964 as opposed to being selfishness-glorifying right-wingers determined to spread a lethal virus.

“I didn’t wake up today thinking, I’m taking my kids to the park to get arrested — but when tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty!” Brady said to supporters following her release. “We have a duty to stand up to tyranny, or we’re gonna lose our republic.”

Except that closing playgrounds during a pandemic isn’t tyranny. They’re closed in my nabe too. There are signs explaining: the playground is a high-touch area (because of the equipment, the swings and slides and the like) so they are wrapped in yellow tape while the rest of the park remains open, with signs warning that they can be closed if they get crowded so don’t crowd them, and people are not crowding them. Efforts to protect public health are not tyranny.

Brady was involved in a protracted and public battle with her local school district concerning her son’s vaccinations in 2017, and her Facebook page is filled with anti-vaccine posts.

In other words she wanted to endanger the other children in her son’s school, while taking advantage of the fact that most or all the other children are vaccinated. The core principle of this “movement” is utter selfishness.

This protest, which was livestreamed on Facebook, was a follow-up to a large rally against stay-at-home restrictions organized by a coalition of radical groups. They include the anti-vaccine group Health Freedom Alliance, the gun rights group Idaho Second Amendment Alliance, and the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a far-right group that wields significant power in the state.

In Idaho, the Second Amendment Alliance organized a rally against her arrest at city hall on Tuesday evening, and then her supporters continued their protests outside the home of the officer who arrested her, which was guarded by four police officers. Video shows Ammon Bundy, who led the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, joining that demonstration.

Same principle – the occupation of Malheur was about cattle ranchers wanting to use public land to feed their cattle, in other words freedom to steal public goods for private enrichment and to hell with everyone else.