This wasn’t the Boston Tea Party, but still …

My friend Emily Rainey is one of many females who have led the Freedom Movement.

A hero for our times - Emily Rainey, the daughter of one of my best buddies, West Point grad Scott Rainey.

In the Reader Comments at Alex Berenson’s Substack today, I tried to make the point that females have often taken the lead in the protests against our New Abnormal.

That is, if a stereotype exists of woke and meek “Karens,” it should also be noted that many women are fearless lionesses and are leading the good fight or pushing back against unnecessary “reforms” or non-sensical virus-mitigating measures.

One such lady, Emily Rainey, is a daughter of one of my best friends from high school.

During the height of the lockdown craze, Emily - who was then a captain in the U.S. army - organized at least two protests that got her into major hot water with the military brass, which eventually forced her to resign from the military.

In her first protest, she simply took her toddler son to the local playground, which had been deemed “off limits” and was now covered with yellow police tape.

Tired of being home-bound with a toddler and recognizing no virus was going to kill she or her son, Emily took her son to the park, cut up the police tape and let her little boy slide down the sliding board, climb on the monkey bars and pushed him a few times on the toddler swings.

Not only did she commit this shocking “crime,” she video-taped herself doing this and then put the video on her social media accounts!

While, perhaps, not the equivalent of dumping barrels of tea into the Boston Harbor, this small form of protest did make Emily a local celebrity/villain and generated a fair amount of local coverage.

This 2-minute clip from a local North Carolina TV station shows Emily explaining why she engaged in such shocking activity. The clip also provided the counter-point from local law enforcement officials who cited Emily for “damaging public property.”

(I later learned from Emily that the charges were dropped, but she did have to pay for a lawyer and was banned from using any local public park for a year.)

Emily was in D.C. on January 6, 2021 …

Skip forward a few months and Emily doubled down on free speech by being one of the local organizers of a group that chartered a couple of busses and went to the J-6 rally in D.C.

Emily told me she did this as a private citizen on a day off from her military job. She attended the event wearing her civilian clothes, not her battle fatigues and captain’s bars.

Emily did not enter the Capitol, but the fact she helped organize the event and attended it clearly agitated her military bosses, and her participation generated a fair amount of national coverage.

Emily was later interviewed by Tucker Carlson for a segment on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and was featured in a documentary on J-6 produced by Tucker’s documentary team.

While the military didn’t court-martial her, Emily said she could read the writing on the wall and “voluntarily” left the military.

I interviewed Emily for a story for our local newspaper because everyone beyond a certain age remembers Emily’s father - who grew up in Troy and later attended West Point, where he was a punter on the football team. Emily’s grandparents - great friends of mine and also well known in our community  - also still lived in Troy.

The main purpose of the story was to let local residents know that Scott Rainey’s daughter was going to be a guest on Tucker Carlson’s highly-rated TV show as well as being one of the main characters profiled in a controversial documentary.

Capt. Rainey was not gung-ho about

the Army’s woke initiatives …

One thing I didn’t mention in the story was that Emily told me she wasn’t too upset about leaving the Army, which she told me had become far too woke for her taste.

For example, as a company commander, Emily said she was spending a surprising amount of time dealing with troops under her command who’d undergone gender-changing operations.

Other woman freedom fighters step up …

I can think of many other women who took the lead and pushed back against the lockdowns and the “vaccine” mandates.

For example, Lucia Sinatra, an attorney from California, is the co-founder of No Vaccine Mandates. This organization played a prominent role in ending vaccine mandates at almost all U.S. colleges.

When the pandemic allegedly started in March 2020, I didn’t have my own Substack newsletter yet. I was just a “freelance author” who quickly became accustomed to my stories being rejected by news organizations.

However, I still enjoyed writing and, by then, was doing a great deal of research into Covid topics. The one place I could share my research and contrarian opinions and reach a decent-sized audience was two Facebook groups. These groups, started by women, were created to lobby for a return to a normal college experience for the children of these mothers.

Two important Facebook Groups were started

by women … and were then torpedoed

One “Keep-Our-Colleges-Open” group was created for citizens in Alabama and another, almost identical site, was for parents with students who attended Mississippi colleges.

If I remember correctly, the Alabama Facebook Group had grown to more than 6,000 members when the “content moderators” and algorithms of Facebook went into hyper-drive.

Soon, the groups’ founders were making posts they had to self-censor because their content was constantly being flagged as dangerous misinformation or violating Facebook’s “community standards.”

About the same time, my Facebook posts started to be flagged and earn those ubiquitous “Danger, Will Robinson!” messages. 

I lost count of the number of times my Facebook account was suspended or put on “double secret probation” by Mark Zuckerbeg’s army of content moderators and AI surveillance warriors.

Finally, I said, “screw it” and started my own Substack newsletter, where I could write whatever I wanted to write.

Since I’m still pretty much banned on Facebook, to this day I don’t know what happened to my 10,000+ fellow contrarians who - for one brief, shining moment -  were allowed to engage in free speech at these two Facebook sites.

I do know that our collective posts and emails to college deans and presidents probably did make some difference in forcing colleges to abandon their Orwellian virus-mitigation protocols.

If nothing else, we stirred things up a bit and, perhaps, made a few leaders a little uncomfortable - something I’m still trying to do on Substack.

I never got to say goodbye …

However, I never got a chance to make a “farewell post” to all my allies at these two sites. 

In fact, if I had been able to do this, I might have started my Substack newsletter with a couple thousand subscribers who followed me from those Facebook Groups.

What Facebook effectively did was deny me access to my optimal target market, which no doubt costs me thousands of dollars in paid subscription revenue. (I still wonder if I might have a legitimate lawsuit for economic damages, although I doubt I could find a lawyer who would file this suit for me).

My main reason for sharing these anecdotes is to point out that many of the country’s greatest “freedom fighters” have been females. (It would have been encouraging if more college students had become fully-engaged in these grassroots “democratic” protests, but that never happened.)

Also, it would have been nice if more military members had followed the lead of Capt. Emily Rainey.

All Emily Rainey did was let her son slide down a sliding board at a public park and chartered a bus to Washington D.C.;  but this was enough to label her a grave threat to “democracy.”

Still, she did more than 99 percent of the population and, FWIW, happened to be on the right side of history. 

As an officer in the U.S. Army, she was fighting for freedom and exhibited genuine courage … and never once had to fire her M-16.

As long as our country continues to have citizens like Emily Rainey who are willing to risk their jobs by protesting policies that make a mockery of our founding principles, our nation might still have a fighting chance.

I appreciate my male and female subscribers … and, if someone isn’t sure about their gender, you are also welcome to my Substack.

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