Jaw-Dropping Report on Utah Anti-Mask Protest Explodes on Twitter Weeks Later
A weeks-old report on an anti-mask protest in Utah has prompted a flood of social media reaction due to the jaw-dropping statements of the participants, including a straight-faced comparison of mask compliance to the murder of George Floyd.
The report, from Utah ABC affiliate KTVX, features reporter Katie Karalis interviewing participants at an August 21 anti-mask protest at the Washington County administration building in St. George, Utah.
The protesters chant “No more masks!”, a small child is filmed telling Karalis “The flu kills more than coronavirus” [it does not], a man walks by in a t-shirt that says “I identify as a fresh air breather,” and an elderly woman named Betty Jake snarls “I’ll tell you another reason I hate masks: most child molesters love ’em!”
But the capper is a woman named Shauna Kinville, who says “When George Floyd was saying ‘I can’t breathe, and then he died,’ and now we’re wearing a mask and we say ‘I can’t breathe,’ but we’re being forced to wear it anyway.”
On Twitter user flagged a clip of Kinburg on Friday, and on Sunday, I posted full video of the report on Twitter. In less than two days, the clip racked up about 20 million views, and a flood of stunned reactions.
introducing… the world’s dumbest person! (at :51) https://t.co/awdvwcFtbv
— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) September 14, 2020
White people are literally the wildest… imagine thinking being murdered and wearing a mask are the same. Imagine being so fragile you think a piece of cloth is oppressing you. Truly most of these people’s faces would be improved by what a mask obstructs https://t.co/ymltV2Zdpt
— nicole byer (@nicolebyer) September 14, 2020
We will be inside forever.
When I see dystopian movies with everyone living inside & socializing virtually I often wonder, how did they get there? How did it happen?
Idiots like this. Idiots like this are how it happened. #FixItBlackJesus https://t.co/jDvmwUcSla
— yvette nicole brown (@YNB) September 15, 2020
Things are going great https://t.co/Qv91XBQnVa
— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) September 14, 2020
Literally cannot even https://t.co/u2phjlVsCz
— Brendan McGuirk (@BrendanMcGuirk) September 13, 2020
Feels like an ‘SNL’ skit but sadly, we know it’s not. https://t.co/GaZFEtrgrb
— Clay Jenkins (@JudgeClayJ) September 15, 2020
Someone actually had to make a choice to use that footage of a child reading a talking point he doesn’t understand. I hope they feel proud of themselves. https://t.co/KMHWQJTL59
— Jonathan Gitlin (@drgitlin) September 13, 2020
Ask this protestor whether she’d rather have a boot on her neck for eight minutes and 15 seconds, or wear a surgical mask, which medical professionals do every day for hours, for the same length of time. https://t.co/G2Yhc7gmw8
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) September 14, 2020
The report likely gained additional resonance from the fact the President Donald Trump was holding a packed, largely maskless indoor rally at the time this clip was blowing up, and from a similar bit of reporting from last week in which CNN’s Jim Acosta interviewed attendees at a Trump rally over their shirking of coronavirus masks. Their responses were equally gobsmacking.
The coronavirus model used by the White House task force currently predicts that if 95 percent of Americans wore masks in public, 122,000 fewer people would die by the end of the year.
Watch the clip above via KTVX.
