A county commissioner in Idaho on Wednesday blamed Republican leaders after people opposing COVID-19 safety measures frightened her children.
Ada County Commissioner Diana Lachiondo was forced to abruptly leave a Board of Health meeting on Tuesday because her home had been surrounded.
“My 12-year-old son is home by himself right now, and there are protesters banging outside the door,” she told health officials at the time.
Lachiondo suggested in a series of tweets on Wednesday that Republicans had incited the event.
“And as our federal and state officials have consistently failed to provide the kind of leadership needed in this moment of crisis, those responsibilities have fallen on local leaders, health board members, and public health employees,” she wrote. “As they’ve accepted that responsibility, stepping up to make tough calls in the interest of public health, they have paid a heavy price. The scrutiny, intimidation, harassment, and threats have taken a toll on us all, myself included.”
According to Lachiondo, “armed protestors once again assembled outside my home: yelling, banging, firing air horns, amplifying sound clips from Scarface, accusing me of tyranny and cowering inside.”
Even though she was not inside of her home at the time, Lachiondo said that her two young sons and mother were at the residence.
“There is an ugliness and cruelty in our national rhetoric that is reaching a fevered pitch here at home, and that should worry us all. And, above all, I am terrified about the virus’s current trajectory,” she lamented.
Lachiondo said that she is “calling on Republican leaders who have politicized public health, who have amplified rhetoric, capitalized on it, tacitly endorsed it while holding hands with the most extreme factions in their party: take a hard look at what you’ve become.”
“It’s far past time to do better,” she insisted.
Read Lachiondo’s tweets below.
