OAKLAND — The Bay Area lawmaker who found herself the subject of a protest Friday in the city’s Rockridge neighborhood was at home when a large group of trucks and vans arrived to her street, representatives said.
East Bay Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks called law enforcement to her house for protection as about 20 drivers blasted their horns and crowded the roadway, demanding that Wicks come out to face them.
The demonstration was apparently inspired by the People’s Convoy movement in Canada, which has been led mostly by truckers who oppose COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
According to video footage available online, many in the Oakland convoy had driven to the Bay Area from elsewhere to protest two state bills that Wicks recently proposed. One of the bills, placed on hold last month, would require employers to have their workers vaccinated against COVID-19; the other would prevent coroners from investigating stillbirths and other lost pregnancies.
“People have come from all over the United States to fight for your freedom,” a man filming the event on the streaming platform Twitch is heard telling a neighbor of Wicks who had pointed out that one of the trucks on the street carried a Minnesota license plate.
The convoy hung around Wicks’ street for about an hour and none of the participants were arrested or cited, according to California Highway Patrol and Oakland police representatives.
A similar trucking convoy rolled through Sacramento earlier in the week in protest of vaccination mandates, which have been relaxed in recent weeks as COVID-19 deaths decline.
A representative for Wicks said on Saturday the assemblywoman would be “off the grid as far as communication goes” for the rest of the weekend.
“Bullhorns and loud trucks lend no legitimacy to baseless conspiracy theories from out of state protestors, and Asm. Wicks will not indulge any attempts to influence her legislative work through harassment and intimidation tactics — especially when it’s directed at her home and her family,” Erin Ivie, a spokeswoman for Wicks’ office, said in an email.
Drivers in the Oakland convoy blared their horns ceaselessly Friday afternoon as they made their way past the Safeway on College Avenue toward Wicks’ home.
They were greeted by an angry response from onlookers standing on the sidewalks, some of whom threw eggs at the trucks and yelled “Get out of our town!” at drivers who exited their vehicles to confront them.
Later, in front of Wicks’ home, neighbors stood in front of the trucks and gestured at them as their horns roiled the sunny suburban neighborhood.
“This is not freedom — you are a disturber,” said a woman confronting a livestreamer recording to Twitch. The streamer’s channel, wysiwygtv, provides “unedited conversations with real people for you to make up your own mind,” according to its description.
In various videos, the protesters and those supporting them are heard referring to Wicks’ stillbirth bill as promoting “infanticide,” or the killing of a child within a year of birth.
In fact, the bill, which is making its way through the state legislature, protects women from being charged by authorities when they abort their pregnancies; experience a miscarriage or stillbirth; or when they give birth to a child who shortly afterward dies from a pregnancy-related cause.
In a fact sheet for the legislation, Wicks asserts that women are often charged with homicide for losing their pregnancies, even in California, which already has laws protecting mothers who deliver stillbirths due to drug use.
Meanwhile, a bill establishing a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for workers in the private sector isn’t moving forward any time soon after Wicks paused the legislation last month.
But participants in the Oakland convoy on Friday decorated their trucks with the phrase “We the People” and chanted “Freedom!” as they circled around Wicks’ home, blocking traffic.
“We are U.S. citizens, we believe in the Constitution and your legislations are a direct assault on the freedoms of this country!” one protester on the livestreamed video shouted at residents on the sidewalk, using a megaphone to project his voice over a chorus of boos.
Source: www.mercurynews.com