San Francisco is not immune from racist nutjob conspiracy-loving covidiots, and a new one has offered us a fine performance, sans face mask, while railing against a Rec & Parks outreach worker in Dolores Park about the closure of the playground. To wit, she did not appear to have a child in tow.
The incident happened on Sunday, as told by worker Andres Patino, who said he was out in the park doing outreach for the "LoveDolores" campaign — which encourages people to remove their own trash. And this unmasked, "unknown Karen" can be seen in cellphone video he shot, stomping around the entrance to the playground with a pair of scissors in her hand, crowing in true Alex Jones style about the public health-related playground closure being "an unconstitutional, unlawful taking of public property." As Mission Local notes, the woman was using the scissors to cut the tape that had been strung across the playground entrance.
Interestingly, she was wearing a pair of yellow kitchen gloves.
When Patino begins filming her and she then approaches with the scissors, he tells her to stop approaching him, and she screams, "I'm not chasing you, ya dumb sheep!" But her attacks quickly become racist when she calls Patino "you little nigres," and adds, "Go back to wherever you came from."
The woman seems inspired by the likes of conspiracist Alex Jones, who recently got himself back into some social media attention by morphing into John Goodman's character from The Big Lebowski and screaming through a megaphone at a bunch of teenagers assigned to guard the entrance to a greenbelt in Austin, which had instituted a reservation system to control summer crowds. And I'm sure if I wanted to I could find a rabbit-hole's worth of YouTube videos and podcasts about how federal, state, and local governments have conspired to steal public property through this pandemic and drug us all into zombies with a fake vaccine. (The woman can also be heard screaming about how the government is putting people on ventilators in order to kill them.)
But, many of us have probably been comforted by the idea that incidents like this — in which "Karens" and "Kens" are becoming irrationally unhinged by having to comply with public-health orders about a virus they've been convinced is fake — do not happen here in San Francisco.
As Patino says in a Facebook post:
For a large portion of my life, I have felt like I didn’t belong.... Feeling that I was not Colombian or American enough, I found myself feeling like I didn’t have a place to easily exist as myself. That is, until I came to SF. I was greeted into the Quirky life here, where I’ve learned to love myself, get out of my comfort zone, and honestly just be myself. This is why this incident caught me off guard. I didn’t expect to have someone pull at my insecurities and feelings of not belonging in a place that prides itself as progressive and has felt like a safe space. To be personally attacked in my own backyard (I literally live a block away), one of my favorite places in the city, and also my work place came as a big surprise.
It should be shocking to all of us! Where did this woman come from?
Patino added in an email to Mission Local, "Since I was working at the time, I had to [restrain] myself and was unable to stand up to her comments. But [I] have decided I really want to find a way to hold her accountable for her actions."
It shouldn't take long for her to be publicly shamed, so, grab some popcorn.
See the full video below.