Crime and Punishment: Insurrection Day's Most Wanted, Pt. 33

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33. Doctor, Lawyer, Insurrectionist: The Radicalization of Simone Gold

“Those who have spent more time educating themselves tend to think they know better than other people.”

When rioters broke into the US Capitol on January 6, chants of “Fuck the police!” “USA!” or “Treason!” echoed in the marble halls. When Dr. Simone Gold got inside the rotunda, she stepped over a velvet rope and announced to anyone who would listen, “I am a Stanford-educated attorney!”

Thus she distinguished herself among the motley crew of Proud Boys, MAGA types, and the QAnon shaman who paraded through the Capitol to overturn the 2020 presidential election, an event that left five people dead. Not only is Gold a Stanford-educated lawyer, she’s also a board-certified emergency room physician. Neither qualification prevented the FBI from coming to her Beverly Hills house on January 18 and arresting her. Nor did it make a federal grand jury think twice in early February before indicting her on five criminal counts, including entering a restricted building and obstructing an official proceeding.

Within days of her first media hit, she had teamed up with tea party groups working with the Trump reelection campaign to demand that governors reopen the economy. Fox News put her on national TV to publicly denounce lockdowns and mask mandates as overblown responses to a disease she insisted wasn’t fatal to most people. In July, her new right-wing friends ushered her to meetings with members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence. The sudden fame seems to have propelled her right up the steps and into the Capitol on January 6.

Her arrest highlights the role of conservative media in fomenting an insurrection, but Gold’s personal experience also illustrates what experts on extremism have long known: Education is no defense against radicalization. “If you think of who is susceptible of extremist ideology, people tend to think it’s people who don’t have much education,” says Don Haider-Markel, a University of Kansas political science professor who has studied extremism and radicalization. “That’s not the case at all. It tends to be more middle class and upper class. Those who have spent more time educating themselves tend to think they know better than other people.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/05/doctor-lawyer-insurrectionist-the-radicalization-of-simone-gold/

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