How Ammon Bundy Helped Foment an Anti-Masker Rebellion in Idaho | The New Yorker

By the time of the August spectacle at the state capitol, Bundy and the health-freedom activists had spent four months staging increasingly bold protests. Inside the chamber that week, several legislators embraced the activists’ world view. “This emergency declaration created the situation that we’re in, not the virus,” Representative Vito Barbieri said. Barbieri represents a district just outside Coeur d’Alene, which, with a population of fifty-two thousand, is the largest city in the anti-government stronghold of the Idaho Panhandle. Two months before President Trump took the myth mainstream, Barbieri accused hospitals of “making up statistics” about covid-19 for profit. “N95 masks are of no value,” he added. The former representative Tim Remington, a pastor who represented the same district, suggested that the virus was not as contagious as reported. “I’ve actually laid hands on people that have covid and prayed for them. I never got covid,” he said.