Health Department Intimidation Squad at Broadcaster’s Home
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?
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