While listening to the world’s greatest podcast, Frank and Beanz’ Dark to Light, I heard Beanz wonder aloud while discussing the vaccine lunacy in New York State, specifically the vaccine passport, where her New Yorkers were in acting as resistance to Cuomo?
“I’m waiting for the first lawsuit in New York. Where are you guys, New Yorkers? With this vaccine passport? Where are you with this, with what Cuomo’s doing?”
Had I been able to answer her, considering I call the western part of New York State home, I would have instantly directed her to one name above all others as an anti-lockdown/anti-vax information clearinghouse on our edge of the state.
Our September issue focuses on education, on our cover is Shannon Joy, host of Talking Back with Shannon Joy on WYSL Radio.
My introduction to Shannon Joy took place early in the Trump era, on days I drove to work at midday to work the evening shift, listening to WYSL 1040 AM on the way in. WYSL is the red-headed stepchild of our two local conservative talk stations, wherein 2016 to 2018 Joy seemed, relative to the day’s topics on WYSL’s other programs, often seemed to be locked onto her own tangents. She talked about the subtleties of local and state politics and was the type of conservative to hold Trump’s feet to the fire for what some saw as his ideological impurity. She offered in a recent interview I conducted with her that, “My criticism of President Trump was not necessarily personality-driven, more than it was the fact that he never claimed to be a conservative was not a conservative, and when he governed, did not govern in a conservative way.”
Joy’s criticisms of Trump, honestly, could frustrate me, and it’s been reported, in fact, that her reluctance to be more supportive of Trump was the reason she was let go by WYSL in 2018. Joy later resurfaced on the larger of our two conservative talk stations, WHAM 1180 AM, where her critical stance on Trump repeated itself, but where I finally and at long last became a fan. So, what had changed for me?
I became enamored of Joy’s curmudgeon-ness, a quality which I see as essential to the conservative personality, an unwillingness to give up even small points of contention, and a resistance to move with the times. I could count on days when every other conservative commentator seemed to have the same talking points, that Joy was a woman for all seasons and would reliably be out of step. Women, like Joy, who stubbornly “hold a line” in any way, aren’t often described as being curmudgeonly, however, more often described as fanatical, as in “anti-vaxxer,” which brings us to the next point of discussion: Despite Joy’s opinions on Trump perhaps being her most contested, Joy’s locked-jaw grip showed more on one subject than any other, and that is the dangerous nature of vaccines.
I knew that Joy’s children had suffered adverse reactions to inoculations they’d been given, and I assumed that it was those incidents that sparked her vaccine wariness. Not so, there was a different initial spark, which she outlined for me in our interview,
“My interest in the vaccine issue came from a post that I made on Facebook many years ago where being completely ignorant -- at that point I was pro-vax. I had been vaccinated, all my kids were vaccinated. I had never even thought twice about vaccines -- and I saw a post from someone mentioning that they didn't want to get an HPV vaccine, and they didn't want it to be mandated. They didn't want to be forced, and so I posted very innocently that I thought it was wrong to force anyone to get a vaccine against their will, and it was on that post that the gates of hell opened.”
Joy was overwhelmed by ferocious responses with that post, some claiming to be from experts, but which she now thinks may have been trolls. Inspired then to research the topic of vaccines and those side-effects and adverse reactions common to inoculations, she recalled health issues her children developed overnight in years past. Joy said,
“I looked back at two of the incidents my two children had, neurological episodes. It was very strange. My son, all of a sudden, developed epilepsy and was having 30 to 40 petit mal seizures a day. We had to put him on medication for two years. My daughter -- I believe she was two or three years old -- had a febrile seizure and had to be hospitalized overnight. The ambulance had to come, and it was unlike anything that had ever happened to her. So, once I began to educate myself on vaccines, I went back and looked at the dates of the onset of both of those episodes. I was able to link them within a week of the DTaP polio vaccine that they both received.”
I then asked Joy about New York’s vaccine passport, interested in Tracy Beanz’s query whether or not we could expect a slew of lawsuits against the State of New York in the near future. Joy explained,
“I find it very unlikely that you're going to see a piece of legislation that any legislator would put their name on, or vote yes for. And I highly doubt you'll see any kind of executive order from Andrew Cuomo on this because it is so draconian a measure. I think what you're going to see is that the vaccine companies, and in large part the Federal Government, the CDC, and the New York State Department of Health, your state governments are going to place extreme pressure on businesses, and they're going to make it seem like people have to get this vaccine passport, or get the vaccine, in order to travel, in order to be employed. It's largely a mirage; it's all smoke and mirrors. To my knowledge, at this point, there is absolutely no binding piece of legislation, or even a policy that requires vaccination.”
Joy made it clear that binding legislation or not, it’s necessary that people speak up immediately in resistance,
“Right now, what needs to happen is every single person who does not want to get the vaccine needs to begin to get loud, because if you do not -- right now they're at 20% -- Once they get to 30, 40, 50 -- every threshold that they reach in coercing and manipulating people into getting this vaccine is going to make it more and more difficult for those of us who don't want to get it to get out of it.”
In my prior UncoverDC article, Grocery Riot, Vaccine Trials, Suspicion, I touched on a situation in my home of Monroe County, New York that was discussed on a local podcast by two notable local resisters to New York State lockdowns and vaccine pushes. Chad Hummel, podcast co-host, and Christina Higley, organizer of the Facebook group “ROC for Educational Freedom” described what the mainstream press might tar as another example of conspiratorial thinking from the right (as the most interesting thinking seems to be in the modern age).
Higley and Hummel presented personal testimony that they had seen locally what looked to be a deliberate time-wasting game between the various entities you would think able to make the call to reopen Monroe County Schools. The game, it was suggested, was designed to keep local schools from fully opening for as long as possible. I asked Joy if she’d noticed the same thing. She had, and she detailed the situation in Monroe County,
“Absolutely, it is a strategy. It is a way to frustrate and confound parents and advocates by simply telling them, 'It's not my fault, it's their fault,’ and then we go to the next person, and we’ve been bounced back and forth from the superintendents to the school board to the County Health Department to the State Health Department, back to the County Health Department, back to the school board, back to the superintendents, and over and over and over. They're doing it on purpose and it's because there is, for some reason, in Rochester, New York, and Monroe county, it is everything to them to keep these schools closed. We have to get to the bottom of that. We have hunted for that. They are not disclosing to us why it's so important to keep the schools closed.”
I suggested to Joy that the reason for the continued lockdowns might be the longer the schools are kept closed, the better a case can be made to mass vaccinate, as mass vaccination is promoted as the one strategy that can return life to normal. She agreed,
“I have probably said 100 times since March every road leads to mass and coerced vaccination. Every road. That is the brass ring.”
POSTSCRIPT:
Shannon Joy’s recommended organizations and websites for vaccine research:
www.icandecide.org – “They have petitions you can sign, they have resources, they can call out to people. In fact, when employers began to talk about potentially mandating vaccination as a condition upon returning to work, they put a call out and I believe right now they're asking for anyone who is being pressured by their employer or their school district or their college or their institution to get vaccinated as a condition of entering society. They have a phone number that you can call to potentially get on some of their class action lawsuits.”
www.openvaers.com – “Where you can see updated every day every single case of a COVID-19 vaccine injury or death. You can read the actual reports, you can search by location, age, demographic, male, female, and they are categorizing and chronicling all of the reports. To this date there are about 50,000 reports to this federal agency of serious vaccine injuries, and about two thousand two hundred deaths reported.”
