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Coronavirus is airborne. Here’s how to know if you’re breathing other people’s breath.
InternationalFeb 11. 2021Bri Yeager, a server at Railroad Pub and Pizza in Burlington, Wash., prepares a table for diners. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Jovelle Tamayo
By The Washington Post · Chris Mooney
With its five wall-length windows, Nick Crandall’s restaurant, Railroad Pub & Pizza, can bring in a lot of outside air. In late December, though, Washington state regulators said the restaurant could not qualify as “outdoor” dining, and would have to close because of heightened coronavirus restrictions.
So Crandall went to Facebook to protest, giving a video tour of the Burlington, Wash., pub and its vast, garage-door-style windows. “I’m just kind of curious on what the science is for outdoor dining, how much airflow you need to do,” he said. He took aim at the state’s Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, suggesting he use “common sense.” The video was viewed over 73,000 times.
It may sound like yet another politicized, Trump-era battle over coronavirus restrictions – yet this one ended in something that looks less like polarization and more like compromise.After Crandall and others complained and took to the media, state regulators introduced a new policy, which appears to be one of the first of its kind, allowing certain restaurants to count as “open air” dining even if they have four walls. In a new pandemic trend, these establishments can open up large windows or doors and actively measure levels of carbon dioxide, the gas we all exhale when breathing, as a key indicator of how much fresh air is circulating.
Now Crandall’s restaurant is open again – with a CO2 monitor whose reading he tries to keep under 450 parts per million, only slightly higher than levels in the outside air, per state policy. Thanks to the human burning of fossil fuels, outdoor levels currently average around 415 parts per million, and are steadily rising.
It’s part of a new wave as scientists, citizens and businesses including gyms, restaurants and bars try to quantify the airborne coronavirus risk in hopes of staying open. Sales of handheld carbon dioxide monitors have boomed, so much that one popular model, the $250 Aranet4, sold out rapidly, requiring its Latvia-based manufacturer, SAF Tehnika, to dramatically ramp up production.
“We did not expect to, you know, have this increase so exponential,” said Toms Rekšņa, marketing director for the Aranet, speaking from the country’s capital, Riga.
The trend is also catching on fast with a number of coronavirus activists – or citizen scientists – who tweet out their readings in different locations and use the hashtag #covidco2. In Australia, a group of “CO2Guerillas” have been documenting measurements in grocery stores, doctor’s offices, and businesses, often displaying very high levels of carbon dioxide. In Japan, the use of monitors is also catching on, including on a massive screen recently at a concert venue.
The impetus for measuring carbon dioxide is simple: An increasingly powerful body of evidence suggests the coronavirus is airborne, capable of traveling distances well beyond six feet in tiny aerosols released when infected people talk, shout, sing or just breathe. But there’s currently no sensor that can monitor, in real time, whether these infectious aerosols are floating around us when we’re indoors.
But carbon dioxide can, in some ways, act as a proxy. People exhale it when they breathe, and the gas builds up in indoor spaces that aren’t well ventilated, reaching concentrations far above the baseline level of outside air.
“It gives you some insight into ventilation, which is really hard to figure out otherwise,” explains Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. “Even building owners and managers often don’t know much about the ventilation. The person who knows is the person who installed it, and they are usually long gone.”
Marr is a medical adviser to the network of CrossFit gyms – installing indoor monitors is now part of their coronavirus guidelines, at her urging.
Longtime experts on indoor air say the heightened attention to ventilation is very valuable, and that carbon dioxide measurements can definitely be useful. Yet amid the grass-roots frenzy to find the next gadget that can confer a safety edge during the pandemic, some worry about misunderstandings.
“It is a piece of information, not a smoking gun,” said indoor air expert Jeffrey Siegel of the University of Toronto. “If you have a long period of measurement in a space with a sensor that you know how to interpret, then it means something different than if you bring a sensor inside, read a few minutes of data, and say, ‘Oh, my God, the ventilation doesn’t work.'”
In Washington state, the new regulation calls for restaurants to bring in so much outside air that concentrations stay below 450 parts of carbon dioxide per million. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Jovelle Tamayo
When scientists want to measure carbon dioxide to a very high level of accuracy, they use sophisticated lab equipment. It can cost thousands of dollars. That is not what citizen activists are generally using during the pandemic.
Rather, a variety of handheld or mountable sensors, costing around $100 and up, have become popular. Experts recommend devices that use a technology called non-dispersive infrared sensing (NDIR), a well-known technique based on the same basic physical principles that drive the so-called greenhouse effect. Whether in the atmosphere or a small chamber within your sensor, carbon dioxide absorbs a type of radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light, often dubbed infrared or heat radiation.
At the scale of the Earth, greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide not only absorb this type of radiation but also re-emit it, keeping some of the heat within the planet’s system, rather than letting it escape to space. Within the far smaller sensor, infrared gets beamed from one side of a chamber to the other, and carbon dioxide concentrations are calculated based on how much radiation arrives at the other end without being absorbed by the gas.
In theory, at least, such measurements can give a good sense of how many humans have been exhaling into a space, and how much their breath is lingering.
“The reason CO2 measurements are important is that they can give an indication of how much air you are breathing that is coming out of other people’s respiratory systems,” says Richard Corsi, an indoor air quality expert at Portland State University who has been taking carbon dioxide measurements for years with many different instruments.
A critical figure, Corsi says, is the “rebreathe fraction,” which refers to the percentage of the air you breathe in that others in the same indoor space recently breathed out. For instance, he has calculated that when the indoor concentration of carbon dioxide reaches 800 parts per million, then each time you breathe in, one percent of the air you inhale has come from the exhalations of others. During a pandemic, that’s an alarming thought.
But carbon dioxide concentrations of 1,000, 2,000, or even 4,000 can be found in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, where people simply aren’t aware how much of the gas has built up.
“Many teachers are reporting, they say they have 2,000, 5,000, and then curves of it going up in classes,” said Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol science expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has promoted the use of the sensors and has been involved in testing a number of them for accuracy.
It is very good news that the pandemic has raised our consciousness about the quality of air within buildings, a subject that has been neglected for decades, say longtime experts such as Corsi and the University of Toronto’s Siegel. And in their field, carbon dioxide has long been used as a proxy for how well ventilated a space is by outside air.
But at the same time, these scientists worry that carbon dioxide measurements can be misinterpreted or even, in some cases, give a false sense of security.
Siegel warns, for instance, that handheld devices can require calibration, can sometimes be confounded by other greenhouse gases (such as water vapor), and can drift in their measurements as time passes. That doesn’t make measurements useless, he said – but it does mean that you have to have some experience with your instrument, and should be measuring consistently over time.
“The more engagement with indoor air, the better everything is,” he said. “But the problem is, good indoor air or bad indoor air is not defined by a spot measurement of CO2 with a low-cost sensor, without appropriate interpretation.”
Corsi, meanwhile, cautions that even if very low or very high carbon dioxide concentrations may appear easy to interpret, many readings will fall into more of a gray area, somewhere between around 700 to 1000 parts per million.
Are you safe in such a space? The answer is, it depends. For instance, Corsi notes, a space with 25 people in it and a CO2 measurement of 700 parts per million is far better ventilated than one with three people in it and the same measurement.
Moreover, he adds, if a room has a portable HEPA air filter, or a good HVAC system with similarly strong filters (properly installed), then your risk will be lower even though carbon dioxide levels may seem a tad high. Carbon dioxide, a tiny molecule, passes right through these filters, even though the larger aerosols containing viruses can be caught by them.
“I think a single point measurement of CO2 can tell you something in the extremes, but when you get into this middle, typical area, there’s a lot of nuance,” Corsi said. Ideally, he thinks, there should be an app that would help people interpret CO2 levels by inputting other information, such as the number of people in a space and how much time they plan on spending there.
Rekšņa, marketing director for the Aranet, says the device’s start-up guide tells users how to calibrate it, and after that it is accurate to within about 50 parts per million (which would certainly be enough to distinguish low concentrations from high ones).
“We have dedicated technical support for the whole business ecosystem where we try to explain these things,” he said. “We have recently launched an Aranet forum as well. So we do try to inform the consumers as much as possible.”
One more thing to keep in mind: Just as has happened with outdoor air all across the Earth, humans can fill the air indoors with carbon dioxide by burning wood or fossil fuels, such as in fireplaces and gas stoves. In these cases, concentrations can spike for reasons that have nothing to do with our breathing.
In other words, CO2 measurements can be useful and informative, but have to be understood in context.
– – –
Still, the baseline principle is hard to dispute: If carbon dioxide levels are very low in a business, or office, or grocery store, or wherever – then your coronavirus transmission risk is probably also low, at least from people who aren’t very close to you. (The risk will be lower still if people are also masked and wearing their masks properly.)
What’s unfolding in Washington state right now may be a case study of how well – or how poorly – the technique can be employed through a concerted policy effort involving state regulators and individual businesses.
“There’s been a number of studies that have used CO2 levels as kind of a risk proxy for covid,” said Sheri Sawyer, a policy adviser to the state’s governor, Inslee, who was centrally involved in issuing the new guidance on “open air” dining. The document is a joint product of the state’s health department and its Department of Labor and Industries.
“And we thought that made great sense for businesses to use that as a tool for what their risk is for covid transmission.”
“It’s kind of uncharted territory,” Sawyer continued. “But certainly, given what businesses are going through, we think it’s a worthy endeavor to try to figure these answers out.”
The new Washington state policy is one factor that is driving “a tremendous spike in demand for these products,” said Travis Lenander, the CEO of CO2Meter.com, which manufactures the devices used in Crandall’s restaurant.
Indeed, Sawyer says the state is now receiving a large number of questions from businesses about how to use carbon dioxide monitors, and suggests that this is probably the beginning of a lengthy dialogue between the state and its restaurants and other venues. The state has just added an FAQ document to further help restaurants learn to use their monitors, adjust them when needed and set up spaces with good airflow.
The large response so far is “a sign businesses are seeing this as a way they can open up,” she said.
That’s certainly how Crandall, in Burlington, feels. “Everybody is trying to figure out how to open their doors, and spending all this money on heaters, and trying to figure out these CO2 detectors,” said Crandall, who has also installed one at his other business, the Train Wreck Bar & Grill.
“You’ve got all these employees that you want to get hired back, and get your system up rolling again, and hopefully you can start paying your bills and get ahead again.”
Democratic House impeachment managers on Wednesday began formally laying out their case that President Donald Trump incited the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. They are allowed 16 hours, spread over two days, to make their arguments.
Below are some early takeaways from Day 2 of the Senate impeachment trial.
1. Raskin’s extended fire-in-a-theater metaphor
While Tuesday’s presentation was mostly about emotion – Democratic impeachment managers sought to emphasize the importance of the trial to pass a procedural hurdle – Wednesday was more about actually connecting things to Trump.
It’s one thing to remind viewers that bad stuff happened, after all. But to prove incitement, you need to argue that Trump actually caused it to happen.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the lead impeachment manager, sought to do that early in his presentation. Trump’s team has broadly referred to Trump’s claims of free speech while ignoring the established limits on such speech, which include incitement and defamation. The generic example is shouting fire in a crowded theater. Yes, you have free speech, but no, you can’t just say whatever you want, because your words have consequences for other people.
Raskin rode that metaphor:
“This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater. It’s more like a case where the town fire chief who’s paid to put out fires sends a mob not to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater but to actually set the theater on fire, and who then when the fire alarms go off and the calls start flooding into the fire department asking for help, does nothing but sit back, encourage the mob to continue its rampage and watch the fire spread on TV with glee and delight.
“So then we say this fire chief should never be allowed to hold this public job again, and you’re fired and you’re permanently disqualified.”
There are limits to the metaphor. Trump’s response was delayed, even by the accounts of GOP senators and some former White House aides. He also offered words of praise for the rioters, expressing “love” for them even as it was occurring and later saying it would be a day for them to remember. But he did, in the same “love” video, tell them to go home peacefully.
Trump often mixes his messages like this, giving himself plausible deniability while seeming to send a message. His team will focus on the “go home” stuff rather than the “We love you” stuff. It’s up to Democrats to argue that his encouragement and negligence outweighed these messages.
Expect that argument to rely heavily upon the statements of rioters who say they were encouraged by Trump to act – along with accounts that Trump was happy about the scenes he was seeing on TV.
2. Connecting the dots on subversion
Democrats’ impeachment article focused mostly on one event: Trump’s Jan. 6 speech on the Ellipse. It also mentioned Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, in which he asked the official to “find” enough votes to flip the state, as well as a broad reference to Trump’s “prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of” election results.
Given that, there was a real question about how far back in history they would go and what they would use to prove incitement – including whether and how much they would lump in Trump’s past references to violence by his supporters.
Early on, they did go through some of that history, while focusing more on Trump’s subversion of the election.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas,) laid out a timeline of events dating to the summer, noting Trump laid a predicate for claiming the election was stolen as far back as June. Trump made these claims long before even mail ballots were sent out. The argument: He was whipping up his supporters for a moment like Jan. 6 for a very long time.
“This attack did not come from one speech, and it didn’t happen by accident,” Castro said. “The evidence shows clearly that this mob was provoked over many months by Donald J. Trump. And if you look at the evidence, his purposeful conduct, you’ll see that the attack was foreseeable and preventable.”
Castro pointed to Trump’s tweets and comments as early as May saying that the only way he would lose the election was if it was rigged – despite polls at the time repeatedly showing his loss was the likeliest outcome. He played clips of Trump supporters who internalized this message and took it at face value. He also played clips of people, even as the votes were being counted, rising up in protest – scenes that bore a less violent resemblance to what transpired Jan. 6.
Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., said Trump sought to “prime” his supporters for Jan. 6 for months.
“That took time,” Swalwell said, revisiting the fire metaphor. “Just like to build a fire, it doesn’t just start with the flames. Donald Trump for months and months assembled the tinder, the kindling, threw on logs for fuel to have his supporters believe that the only way their victory would be lost was if it was stolen – so that way President Trump was ready, if he lost the election, to light the match.”
There is no question that Trump’s claims about the election have been routinely wrong; the courts have ruled as such. Claiming an election will be stolen months before it’s held also speaks to the idea that he was planning for a specific eventuality.
The challenge for Democrats, from there, is to argue that this wasn’t just an effort to save face – to pretend he never lost. Playing with fire is different from deliberately lighting it. On that front, you would think they’ll soon talk about the many ways in which he seemed to offer a specific course of action in the situation he spent so many months preparing his supporters for.
3. References to Trump and violence
Democrats did get around to highlighting Trump’s past rhetoric encouraging and suggesting violence by his supporters, while keeping it focused on events surrounding the election.
Del. Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands was given an unusually large platform for a non-voting member of Congress. She used it to lay out Trump’s past comments about such violence.
She noted that Trump endorsed his supporters surrounding a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway just before the election and, according to some accounts, attempting to drive it off the road. Trump tweeted a video with fight music behind it and said at the time, “These patriots did nothing wrong.” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also approved of the scene.
An organizer of that event was later involved in encouraging people to storm the Capitol, having cited flimsy fencing around the Capitol and using a bullhorn to urge people to enter the building.
The second major event she spotlighted was Trump being asked at a September presidential debate to repudiate more extreme elements of the conservative movement, during which he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” The comment, like many of Trump’s which will be at issue in the trial, was criticized for promoting potential violence which eventually became a reality. The Proud Boys also used it as a mantra, suggesting they viewed it as encouragement. And they figured prominently in the storming of the Capitol.
“This was not just one reference or a message to supporters by a politician to fight for a cause,” Plaskett said. “He’d assembled thousands of violent people, people he knew were capable of violence, people he had seen be violent. They were standing now in front of him. And then he pointed to us (in Congress), lit the fuse and sent an angry mob.”
Thus far, Democrats haven’t delved more deeply into Trump’s past suggestions or endorsements of violence, outside the context of the election. Plaskett’s presentation was focused upon those specific ones, which could be more directly attached to those who literally stormed the Capitol.
But there is plenty of grist for that mill beyond what she referenced, which could come later in the Democrats’ presentation.
4. The deliberate-negligence argument
One way to drive home the above point is to note that Trump didn’t just light the fire – he declined to snuff it once it started burning. That shows that, at the very least, this was an outcome he was OK with, even if he didn’t outright desire it.
Democrats set about making such an argument – call it deliberate negligence – on Tuesday.
Beyond Raskin’s allusion to Trump deciding to “sit back” and let it happen, Castro and Swalwell noted that some officials had warned about the possibility of such scenes weeks beforehand, but Trump did little. Swalwell contrasted this with Trump’s other calls to action.
“‘Stop the count.’ ‘Stop the steal,'” Swalwell said, referring to Trump’s post-election tweets alleging fraud. “President Trump was never shy about using his platforms to try and stop something. He could have very easily told his supporters: Stop threatening officials. Stop going to their homes. Stop it with the threats. But each time he didn’t. Instead, in the face of escalating violence, he incited them further.”
Democrats signaled this will be a focal point of the case against Trump, including Trump’s tweet attacking Vice President Mike Pence, even shortly after Pence had been removed from the chamber for his safety.
“You will see his relentless attack on Vice President Pence, who was, at that very moment, hiding with his family as armed extremists were chanting, ‘Hang Mike Pence!,’ calling him a traitor,” said Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., another impeachment manager. He added: “If as soon as this had started, President Trump had simply gone on to TV, just logged on to Twitter and said, ‘Stop the attack,’ if he had done so with even half as much force as he said, ‘Stop the steal,’ how many lives would we have saved? Sadly, he didn’t do that.”
A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble
InternationalFeb 11. 2021Thousands of Trump supporters violently storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to support President Trump’s baseless claims that he won the election. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez
By The Washington Post · Todd C. Frankel
WASHINGTON – Jenna Ryan seemed like an unlikely participant in the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. She was a real estate agent from Texas. She flew into Washington on a private jet. And she was dressed that day in clothes better suited for a winter tailgate than a war.
Yet Ryan, 50, is accused of rushing into the Capitol past broken glass and blaring security alarms and, according to federal prosecutors, shouting: “Fight for freedom! Fight for freedom!”
But in a different way, she fit right in.
Despite her outward signs of success, Ryan had struggled financially for years. She was still paying off a $37,000 lien for unpaid federal taxes when she was arrested. She’d nearly lost her home to foreclosure before that. She filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and faced another IRS tax lien in 2010.
Nearly 60% of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.
The group’s bankruptcy rate – 18% – was nearly twice as high as that of the American public, The Post found. A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.
The financial problems are revealing because they offer potential clues for understanding why so many Trump supporters – many with professional careers and few with violent criminal histories – were willing to participate in an attack egged on by the president’s rhetoric painting him and his supporters as undeserving victims.
While no single factor explains why someone decided to join in, experts say, Donald Trump and his brand of grievance politics tapped into something that resonated with the hundreds of people who descended on the Capitol in a historic burst of violence.
“I think what you’re finding is more than just economic insecurity but a deep-seated feeling of precarity about their personal situation,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a political science professor who helps run the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University, reacting to The Post’s findings. “And that precarity – combined with a sense of betrayal or anger that someone is taking something way – mobilized a lot of people that day.”
The financial missteps by defendants in the attempted insurrection ranged from small debts of a few thousand dollars more than a decade ago to unpaid tax bills of $400,000 and homes facing foreclosure in recent years. Some of these people seemed to have regained their financial footing. But many of them once stood close to the edge.
Ryan had nearly lost everything. And the stakes seemed similarly high to her when she came to Washington in early January. She fully believed Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen and that he was going to save the country, she said in an interview with The Post.
But now – facing federal charges and abandoned by people she considered “fellow patriots” – she said she feels betrayed.
“I bought into a lie, and the lie is the lie, and it’s embarrassing,” she said. “I regret everything.”
The FBI has said it found evidence of organized plots by extremist groups. But many of the people who came to the Capitol on Jan. 6 – including Ryan – appeared to have adopted their radical outlooks more informally, consuming conspiracy theories about the election on television, social media and right-wing websites.
The poor and uneducated are not more likely to join extremist movements, according to experts. Two professors a couple of years ago found the opposite in one example: an unexpectedly high number of engineers who became Islamist radicals.
In the Capitol attack, business owners and white-collar workers made up 40% of the people accused of taking part, according to a study by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. Only 9 percent appeared to be unemployed.
The participation of people with middle- and upper-middle-class positions fits with research suggesting that the rise of right-wing extremist groups in the 1950s was fueled by people in the middle of society who felt they were losing status and power, said Pippa Norris, a political science professor at Harvard University who has studied radical political movements.
Miller-Idriss said she was struck by a 2011 study that found household income was not a factor in whether a young person supported the extreme far right in Germany. But a highly significant predictor was whether they had lived through a parent’s unemployment.
“These are people who feel like they’ve lost something,” Miller-Idriss said.
Going through a bankruptcy or falling behind on taxes, even years earlier, could provoke a similar response.
“They know it can be lost. They have that history – and then someone comes along and tells you this election has been stolen,” Miller-Idriss said. “It taps into the same thing.”
Trump’s false claims about election fraud – refuted by elections officials and rejected by judges – seemed tailored to exploit feelings about this precarious status, said Don Haider-Markel, a political science professor at the University of Kansas who studies political extremism.
“It’s hard to ignore with a Trump presidency that message that ‘the America you knew and loved is going away, and I’m going to protect it,'” Haider-Markel said. “They feel, at a minimum, that they’re under threat.”
While some of the financial problems were old, the pandemic’s economic toll appeared to inflict fresh pain for some of the people accused of participating in the attempted insurrection.
A California man filed for bankruptcy one week before allegedly joining the attack, according to public records. A Texas man was charged with entering the Capitol one month after his company was slapped with a nearly $2,000 state tax lien.
Several young people charged in the attack came from families with histories of financial duress.
The parents of Riley June Williams – a 22-year-old who allegedly helped to steal a laptop from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol office – filed for bankruptcy when she was a child, according to public records. A house owned by her mother faced foreclosure when she was a teenager, records show. Recently, a federal judge placed Williams on home confinement with her mother in Harrisburg, Pa. Her federal public defender did not respond to a request for comment.
People with professional careers such as respiratory therapist, nurse and lawyer were also accused of joining in.
One of them was William McCall Calhoun, 57, a well-known lawyer in Americus, Ga., 130 miles south of Atlanta, who was hit with a $26,000 federal tax lien in 2019, according to public records. A woman who knows Calhoun, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly, said he started to show strong support for Trump only in the past year. An attorney for Calhoun declined to comment.
Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by police when she tried to leap through a door’s broken window inside the Capitol, had struggled to run a pool-service company outside San Diego and was saddled with a $23,000 judgment from a lender in 2017, according to court records.
Financial problems were also apparent among people federal authorities said were connected to far-right nationalist groups, such as the Proud Boys.
Dominic Pezzola, who federal authorities said is a member of the Proud Boys, is accused of being among the first to lead the surge inside the Capitol and helping to overwhelm police. Up to 140 officers were injured in the storming of the Capitol and one officer, Brian Sicknick, was killed.
Pezzola, of Rochester, N.Y., also has been named in state tax warrants totaling more than $40,000 over the past five years, according to public records. His attorney declined to comment.
The roots of extremism are complex, said Haider-Markel.
“Somehow they’ve been wronged, they’ve developed a grievance, and they tend to connect that to some broader ideology,” he said.
Ryan, who lives in Frisco, Texas, a Dallas suburb, said she was slow to become a big Trump supporter.
She’s been described as a conservative radio talk show host. But she wasn’t a budding Rush Limbaugh. Her AM radio show each Sunday focused on real estate, and she paid for the airtime. She stopped doing the show in March, when the pandemic hit.
But she continued to run a service that offers advice for people struggling with childhood trauma and bad relationships. Ryan said the work was based on the steps she took to overcome her own rough upbringing.
Twice divorced and struggling with financial problems, Ryan developed an outlook that she described as politically conservative, leaning toward libertarian.
But politics was not her focal point until recently. She recalled being upset when President Barack Obama won reelection in 2012. And she preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton four years later. But she said she wasn’t strident in her support for Trump.
That changed as the 2020 election approached.
She said she started reading far-right websites such as Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit. She began streaming shows such as Alex Jones’s “Infowars” and former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic.” She began following conspiracy theories related to QAnon, a sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology. She said she didn’t know if the posts were true, but she was enthralled.
“It was all like a football game. I was sucked into it. Consumed by it,” Ryan said.
She attended the first protest in her life in April, going to Austin to vent about the state’s pandemic lockdown orders. That was followed by a rally for Shelley Luther, who gained national attention for reopening her beauty salon in Dallas in defiance of the lockdown.
Ryan said she traveled to Trump’s “Save America” rally on a whim. A Facebook friend offered to fly her and three others on a private plane.
They arrived in Washington a day early and got rooms at a Westin hotel downtown, Ryan said.
It was her first trip to the nation’s capital.
The next morning, Jan. 6, the group of friends left the hotel at 6 a.m., Ryan said. She was cold, so she bought a $35 knit snow hat with a “45” emblem from a souvenir shop. They then followed the crowd streaming toward the National Mall.
“My main concern was there were no bathrooms. I kept asking, ‘Where are the bathrooms?'” she said. “I was just having fun.”
They listened to some of the speakers. But mostly they walked around and took photos. She felt like a tourist. They grabbed sandwiches at a Wawa convenience store for lunch. They hired a pedicab to take them back to the hotel.
She drank white wine while the group watched on television as Congress prepared to certify the electoral college votes. They listened to clips of Trump telling rallygoers to walk to the Capitol and saying, “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
They decided to leave the hotel and go to the Capitol.
Ryan said she was reluctant.
But she also posted a video to her Facebook account that showed her looking into a bathroom mirror and saying, according to an FBI account of her charges: “We’re gonna go down and storm the capitol. They’re down there right now and that’s why we came and so that’s what we are going to do. So wish me luck.”
She live-streamed on Facebook. She posted photos to Twitter. She got closer to the Capitol with each post. She stood on the Capitol’s steps. She flashed a peace symbol next to a smashed Capitol window. The FBI also found video of her walking through doors on the west side of the Capitol in the middle of a packed crowd, where she said into a camera, according to the bureau: “Y’all know who to hire for your realtor. Jenna Ryan for your realtor.”
The FBI document does not state how long Ryan spent inside the building. She said it was just a few minutes. She and her new friends eventually walked back to the hotel, she said.
“We just stormed the Capital,” Ryan tweeted that afternoon. “It was one of the best days of my life.”
She said she realized she was in trouble only after returning to Texas. Her phone was blowing up with messages. Her social media posts briefly made her the infamous face of the riots: the smiling real estate agent who flew in a private jet to an insurrection.
Nine days later, she turned herself in to the FBI. She was charged with two federal misdemeanors related to entering the Capitol building and disorderly conduct. Last week, federal authorities filed similar charges against two others on her flight: Jason L. Hyland, 37, of Frisco, who federal authorities said organized the trip, and Katherine S. Schwab, 32, of Colleyville, Texas.
Ryan remained defiant at first. She clashed with people who criticized her online. She told a Dallas TV station she deserved a presidential pardon.
Then Trump left for Florida. President Joe Biden took office. And Ryan, at home in Texas, was left to wonder what to do with her two mini-goldendoodle dogs if she goes to prison.
“Not one patriot is standing up for me,” Ryan said recently. “I’m a complete villain. I was down there based on what my president said. ‘Stop the steal.’ Now I see that it was all over nothing. He was just having us down there for an ego boost. I was there for him.”
At a routine civil forfeiture case hearing in Texas’ 394th Judicial District Court, Rod Ponton, Presidio County attorney, accidentally signed on with the cat filter, making the flummoxed attorney look like an adorable kitten. The 34-second clip of Ponton’s brief appearance as a cat immediately amusing many and becoming a viral hit among the likes of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sander’s mittens and runaway llamas at a time when court events are frequently held virtually.
The prevalence of video chat platforms for court appearances has led to other unusual moments: A defendant in Sacramento appeared from a barber’s chair, a Florida burglary suspect tried to shoot his shot with a judge and a lawyer in Peru was caught on camera naked after he stripped to have sex. But Tuesday’s video was the cat’s pajamas to many.
Even Ponton, once he recovered from cat face and mortification, found humor in his proverbial 15 minutes of fame.
“At first I was worried about it,” Ponton, 69, told The Washington Post on Tuesday, “but then I realized as it was going viral if the country could take a moment to laugh at my cat moment at my expense, I’ll take it. We’ve had a stressful year.”
Judge Roy Ferguson, who was presiding over the hearing, was the first to mention the cat filter.
For the first few seconds, it seemed a cat had Ponton’s tongue as he silently tried to revert the effect, giving an illusion that the virtual kitten’s delightfully wide eyes were darting back and forth.
“Mr. Ponton I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings,” Ferguson said.
Ponton interrupted the judge with an exacerbated guttural noise.
“Auughh,” he exclaimed. “we’re trying to – can you hear me judge?”
The video’s sound was fine.
“I can hear you,” Ferguson told the cat lawyer. “I think it’s a filter.”
“It is,” Ponton said, the kitten’s head bobbing up and down to signal Ponton was nodding.
“I don’t know how to remove it. I got my assistant here trying to…” Ponton added, trailing off.
“I’m prepared to go forward with it,” Ponton said, not wanting to pussyfoot around. “I’m here live.”
“I’m not a cat,” Ponton promised as the cat mouthed what he was saying.
“I can see that,” Ferguson said after a pause.
Eventually, Ponton figured out how to remove the filter and the rest of the hearing proceeded as normal. He said he was using his legal assistant’s computer in his office and believes her daughter may have swapped in the filter before he logged on.
Seeing the moment as an educational opportunity, Ferguson posted the video and it was shared by Texas attorney Kendyl Hanks and Reuters U.S. Supreme Court reporter Lawrence Hurley. By Tuesday evening, one version on Twitter had been viewed more than 18 million times.
“It’s something that’s given the world a smile – and it’s an innocent smile at no one’s expense,” Ferguson told The Post.
Reaction to the video was immediate: People jokingly compared the cat lawyer’s hearing to the ongoing Impeachment hearing, photoshopping a cat head over the face of Trump lawyer Bruce Castor Jr. Many joked the viral moment could end badly, alluding to Milkshake Duck, a meme that describes people who initially are perceived as good but later revealed to be flawed.
Ponton, a well-regarded lawyer, is a former city attorney for Alpine, the small Texas city where he currently practices law, the Dallas Morning News reported. In 2019, Ponton appeared in a Netflix documentary series, The Confession Killer, about one of his former clients, convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, according to the newspaper.
Now, Ponton has joined the ranks of others who gained fame during the pandemic for Zoom antics, including a boss who accidentally showed up to a Monday virtual meeting as a potato.
Since the start of the pandemic, Texas courts have held more than 1 million virtual hearings, leaving Ferguson often in charge of guiding others through technical difficulties, he said.
“That’s part of my job now in the pandemic – to fix everything that can go wrong,” he said.
The 394th Judicial District has no IT department, Ferguson said, and covers a roughly 25,000-mile rural area of western Texas nestled between Mexico and New Mexico. Ferguson, who has presided over cases via Zoom since last March, said he’s seen “everything possible that could go wrong” with a virtual hearing.
His best tip for those appearing virtually before a judge: You’re still in the courtroom – and audible to the judge – after he adjourns the virtual hearing. “There are some very colorful things from lawyers being heard,” Ferguson said. “Watch what you say, because YouTube hears all and never forgets.”
Ferguson also said that while he was genuinely happy to see people enjoy a laugh – one he hopes is with the lawyers and not at them – he views the video as a testament to the professionalism of Texas lawyers, as the other attorney present was notably straight-faced in the video.
“Every one of those people in that room kept their composure,” Ferguson said. “The lawyer who was, I guess you would say the butt of the joke, has handled it with absolute grace.”
Ponton, who says he prefers dogs to cats if you ask (and we did), has another tip to take from the tale: “It happened to me today, it can happen to you tomorrow.”
ทางการจีนปฏิเสธข่าวลือแอบส่งเจ้าหน้าที่เทคนิคและอุปกรณ์ไอทีมาช่วยกองทัพเมียนมา
พิพิธภัณฑ์สหรัฐยอมคืนทับหลังโบราณ 2 ชิ้นที่ถูกขโมยจากไทยเมื่อเกือบร้อยปีก่อน
มาเลเซียตั้งเป้าฉีดวัคซีนให้ประชาชน 80% ภายในหนึ่งปี รวมชาวต่างชาติ ผู้ลี้ภัย และผู้อพยพที่ไม่มีเอกสาร
สีจิ้นผิงแนะจีน-สหรัฐกำหนดแนวทางใหม่เลี่ยงเผชิญหน้า ย้ำไบเดนดำเนินการระวังกระทบอำนาจอธิปไตยจีน
ไบเดนประกาศดำเนินมาตรการคว่ำบาตรผู้มีส่วนเกี่ยวข้องรัฐประหาร พร้อมตัดขาดการเข้าถึงเงินทุนพันล้านในสหรัฐ
ไม่ว่าธารน้ำแข็งหิมาลัยจะละลายมากไปหรือละลายจนไม่เหลือแล้วประเทศไทยก็เดือดร้อนทั้งนั้น
Bri Yeager, a server at Railroad Pub and Pizza in Burlington, Wash., prepares a table for diners. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Jovelle Tamayo
Thousands of Trump supporters violently storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to support President Trump’s baseless claims that he won the election. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez
