In my home of Rochester, New York, there have been fairly regular attempts to de-platform non-liberal broadcasters. It’s remarkable really how many personalities I’ve come to know, appreciate, and anticipate as part of the local media landscape who have disappeared overnight for a shock-jock take of theirs on race relations, or even in one case a mispronunciation that could be misconstrued as having been about race. Possibly the only regional anti-establishment personality currently remaining on terrestrial radio in Rochester is the anti-vax pit bull, Shannon Joy. I did an interview with Shannon Joy for UncoverDC a few months ago. A unique thing about Shannon Joy among local broadcasters who have been a target of harassment, as Joy has recently, is that she wasn’t made a mark due to a comment of hers about race. Unique too was that an attack didn’t come with a demand that her employment be terminated.
When Joy had a press conference last week on the steps of the Monroe County Government Building to announce a lawsuit, I contacted her to see about a second interview to ask about the new development. She explained to me that the issue the lawsuit is meant to address began with phone calls to her from contact tracers. She had avoided their calls as a matter of principle, as many people probably have, if not on principle, then likely some who like me are lousy about checking the answering machine or picking up the phone. Joy’s case, anyway, was escalated because she’d avoided the calls. Eventually, Joy, after receiving seven phone calls in two days, informed the county in what turned out to be the final call in the dispute that she didn’t think her family would need to quarantine. Joy began to record the conversation when she was vaguely threatened by the upper-level contact tracer on the phone. Joy recalled for me in our interview the situation as it stood at that point,
“The county was harassing me the week before, with phone calls and questions, and so I informed them at the very last phone call I had with a senior-level contract tracer who reported directly to Mike Mendoza (Commissioner of Public Health for Monroe County) and basically told her my daughter wasn't at the practice, at the place that you have identified as my daughter being, she wasn't there, and we have witnesses. We have proof.”
Joy had been contacted about her daughter having been at a volleyball practice where someone unnamed had the virus, but Joy’s daughter had not attended that practice. The final phone call could have been the end of the matter, but this is where we enter the logic of western novels. In a western novel, if you’re new in town and get on the wrong side of the dude running things, he sends some men out to your ranch to have a talk with you and yours.
The conversation on the phone between Joy and the contact tracer had its provocative moments, and Joy played full audio of the call on an episode of her radio show. Lawyer and fellow anti-vaxxer Chad Hummel was a guest on that episode and chimed in during a replay of the call with opinions on various things said by the contact tracer. To give you a taste for the call, here’s a pertinent section:
Joy: … because you said just a few minutes ago, you said that you could send the sheriff to my house –
Contact tracer: I could.
Joy: -- so what did you mean by that? So, what does the sheriff do when he comes to my house?
Contact tracer: They could fine you or your daughter. You could be fined.
Joy: Why would the sheriff need to come to my house to fine me?
Contact tracer: You know, honestly, I don't know the details of how that happens.
Joy: So, I'm just concerned that if Mike Mendoza—You're telling people that if they don’t comply with quarantine—because you just told me if I didn't comply, you would send a sheriff to my house --
Contact tracer: I did not say that.
Joy: That’s exactly what you said.
Contact tracer: I said we could.
During playback of the call, Hummel weighed in with his opinion on the contact tracer’s contention that Joy’s daughter would have to be quarantined but while offering no proof Joy’s daughter had been in contact with anyone positive for Covid:
“You can’t claim to be doing something legally that is essentially illegal by just simply moving it under a different umbrella. So, if the state has to follow due process laws when it’s a police officer with a gun and a badge, you can’t simply say, ‘OK, in order to get around affording somebody due process, we’re going to turn this matter over to the health department and let them do it because the health department doesn’t have to follow due process.’”
So we have a health department circumventing due process?
A consistent problem with any conspiracy involving “the elite” manipulating reality for their own nefarious purposes is that there’s rarely a villain’s face to attach to the devilish scheme. There’s never any mad doctor at the center of things de-winging horseflies for his own twisted enjoyment. This story is a little different in that there actually is a mad doctor. Dr. Mendoza, our Commissioner of Public Health, like Fauci, like Cuomo, was made a star by Covid. That elevated status came with a certain amount of reluctance on Mendoza’s part to behave. As covered in two previous articles of mine for UncoverDC, various advocates against Covid restrictions in Monroe County, such as Shannon Joy, noticed a deliberate time-wasting game played among the entities capable of lifting the restrictions. Joy explained in our interview the delayed re-opening of local schools,
“It is a circular finger-pointing squad. So, Mike Mendoza says it's up to the state. He says his hands are tied because of the state guidelines. The state throws it back on the (school) superintendents saying they're free to open if they want to open, take the masks off. The superintendents fling it back to Mike Mendoza and say, our hands are tied, the county wants us to do this, and then we go back to Mendoza, and it's around and around and around. It's purposeful. That's the strategy.”
So that’s part of what our local mad doctor has been up to. A wide-reaching game meant to stall for time.
There may be debate as to what the endgame would be to delay schools' fully re-opening. The general sense I have is that the delayed re-opening was most likely meant to encourage vaccination. After Joy described the circular finger-pointing squad during our interview, I chimed in, “Because they want everyone to get the vaccine, correct?” She surprised me when she said, “Eventually, yes. They just do what they're told. They don't know what they want.” I asked who then was the man behind the curtain in the grand scheme to have everyone vaccinated? Joy answered:
“It's the pharmaceutical companies who pay Mendoza. So, the pharmaceutical companies. Big pharma. They are just shoving an enormous amount of money at media. They own media outlets. If you watch any media, every other commercial is for a pharmaceutical product, and they're also giving them money as well. They own social media. They spread billions of dollars into politicians’ pockets. Mike Mendoza's job is to get as many people vaccinated as possible. That's his job. Because the pharmaceutical companies own the politicians, and the politicians hire people who do the bidding of the pharmaceutical companies. It's trillions of dollars on the line.”
To compress the subject a bit and get back to my strengths—which involve keeping a story manageable—let’s get back to what was going on with Joy and the contract tracer. I’ll leave it to some other writer to land a solid blow to big pharma.
As I understand it, having listened to the audio of the phone call, the basic argument was that the contract tracer was not satisfied that Joy’s daughter hadn’t been exposed to Covid even though Joy contended that her daughter had not been present at the Saturday event in question. The contact tracer, as best I could make out in a conversation with overlapping voices, said that “What you told me is that she wasn't at practice on Saturday but that she was either at a practice or game earlier in that week on Thursday or Friday.” Joy countered with, “Yes, however, she was not within six feet of anyone who had Covid, and unless you can prove to me that she was, then this order of quarantine is not enforceable.” However, the contact tracer’s mind could not be changed about the necessity for Joy’s daughter to quarantine. This leads us to another opinion offered by Hummel:
“What we’re talking about here is a judge and police officer—Dr. Mike Mendoza’s acting as if he’s the judge signing warrants, and then they’re using people like her to make the phone calls. If you commit a crime and the police are investigating it, they may call your phone. And somebody may be on the other end of your phone and identify themselves as deputy so-and-so from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department, and you would take that call seriously because they’re the police and that police officer would never issue you an order or never come in your home unless they had due process. If the police officer can’t do it, how in the hell can nurse practitioner whatever—Linda Mack-Fogg (contact tracer), Dr. Mike Mendoza’s minion— how can she do it?”
Joy likely imagined she was in good standing at the time of the radio broadcast in which she replayed the call and received reassurances from Hummel. The next day, however, things would change mightily.
Joy wasn’t home when visitors came to her door, which again seems appropriate to western novels. The protagonist is rarely at home with their family when the welcoming committee shows up. Joy recalled for me the incident involving her 12-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old son,
“On April 3rd, the day before Easter, my daughter was downstairs watching cartoons when she saw a strange man came up on the porch aggressively banging on the door. She didn’t know who he was. She looked out the window and saw two police officers on the sidewalk, armed, and another stranger, so when she didn't answer the door, they went around to our side door. So, around our porch to our side door, and started banging on the side door. My son Teddy was there playing video games. It scared him too. So, she ran upstairs and got my husband. I was driving my son to volleyball practice at the time, so I wasn't even there, and she ran upstairs, got her dad, said, there's a stranger, I’m scared. My husband gets dressed, comes downstairs, and is met with two health inspectors—two contact tracers from the county and two police officers. They were there to deliver my daughter, my 12-year-old daughter, a quarantine order.”
I wondered how usual this sort of thing was, on how regular a basis, Mendoza pulls this sort of thing. After Joy told me that Mendoza and the County Health Department never send contact tracers to a home to deliver a quarantine order, I asked if she was the only person this had ever happened to. Her answer:
“I'm the only one. And they’ve never sent police. Ever. And Mendoza justified they did it because they thought that the contact tracer would be in danger from me. From a 12-year-old girl to deliver an order to a 12-year-old girl. They thought that the police presence was justified because it was me, indicating they knew it was me. They knew who I was. I never had a record of violence. I don't even have a parking ticket.”
About par for the course in a lawless town.
Joy said of the forthcoming lawsuits:
“We are suing the County of Monroe, we’re suing the Monroe County Health Department, Mike Mendoza personally, and also the Fairport Police Department, and it's on two matters. First, we are challenging—it’s a civil rights lawsuit that we hope to take all the way up if we can. So through federal court and even to supreme court to challenge the constitutionality of quarantine orders on due process. So essentially, you cannot willy-nilly declare permanent emergency and just order people into home confinement which is equivalent of prison without some kind of due process, without proving that this is necessary, that there is a health emergency, that this person is sick and a threat to other people in society.”
“We're also filing a suit for damages against the County Health Department and Mike Mendoza for harassment, for harassing my family, for trying to intimidate us, me a member of the press, which also loops in first amendment rights as well. And so that's the nature of the lawsuit, and we filed a notice of claim to all of those entities: Fairport Police Department, Monroe County, Monroe County Department of Health, Mike Mendoza.”
