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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Kelly Walker, a local coffee shop owner in Tucson, Arizona, never imagined how his world would be turned upside down when he started speaking out publicly against COVID-19 mandates and the harm to children.

He and Sam Sorbo are cofounders of the Parents Demanding Justice Alliance. They have put together a report detailing alleged actions taken by local authorities to censor, surveil, and pressure parents who protested policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Editor’s Note: Kelly Walker previously has done work for The Epoch Times as a freelance marketing writer. Sam Sorbo previously hosted a show on EpochTV called School’s Out with Sam Sorbo.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Sam Sorbo, Kelly Walker, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thanks for having us.

Great to see you, Jan.

Quite an astonishing story, Kelly. I think we should just start there. Tell me what happened to you over the last few years.

Sure, I’d be happy to. And we’re sort of using my story as a case study for what a lot of parents endured. I moved my family from Bend, Oregon, to Tucson, Arizona. In 2017, we had experienced a certain type of radicalism there, particularly within the schools, persecution for our views and beliefs. So part of the reason we moved to Tucson, I had been to Tucson many times, was to start a new life, really have a quiet life. And boy, did we fail miserably in having a quiet life.

We ended up opening a family coffee shop. We put a lot of what we had into it, you know, cleaned out our savings and things were going great. We opened it in October of 2018. I have a part of my background in marketing, and our branding was excellent. It was called Viva Coffee, and it very quickly became a community hub. We had a children’s area. We had events. We would do superhero events. I was Captain America, and it was just a lovely place.

Then came this moment. I remember I was getting ready to go into the shop, and somebody said, we’re going to be locked down. You’re not going to be able to go anywhere, and I thought, what? What is this?  At the time, I had been working as editor-in-chief for a medical publication for a national medical education company. And so I was actually, part of my job was to work with some of the nation’s top doctors.

One of them was actually a colleague of Fauci. I would watch these lengthy webinars, and part of my job was to then write continuing education questions for doctors, dentists, and other health care practitioners across the country. So I was in this interesting position of being somewhat of a subject matter expert and also running a local business. And I was astonished at the approach.

And I’ll say this, everyone who was in this conversation early on said the same thing. This is going to be a relatively minor virus that’s mainly going to affect people with pre-existing conditions, advanced age, and so on. It’s not going to be dangerous to children. And then I watched in horror as it became political. And I remember one of the webinars, the doctor did a whole webinar on hydroxychloroquine and how effective it was, case studies. And I understood the science. I said, this is great. This is a therapeutic.

Of course, I’m following one of the nation’s top doctors. And then two weeks later, after Donald Trump endorsed hydroxychloroquine, I watched it change. And the very next webinar, the same doctor came in and ridiculed hydroxychloroquine. And my wife came into the room after the webinar, and she said I was like a shade of gray or white and just flushed. And I said, I think I’ve witnessed a crime against humanity because I watched a cover-up.

At that point, I had no political motive. I just knew what the truth was about it. I had a good idea of, you know, they had the genome map of the virus. They knew so much about it. And then I saw that political fight bleed over into the business world. And I remember going into the coffee shop one day and I pulled up our social media and I just noticed this flood of negative comments, fake reviews. Your coffee tastes like expletive, and you’re a white supremacist, and all these things.

Because you decided to stay open? I’m trying to see why all of a sudden would there be this?

Good question. Part of it was because I was going on social media trying to share the science that I was getting at work. And I got this response that just floored me because I wasn’t partisan, I wasn’t political, and I got people just being abusive. But also our coffee shop, we held a Back the Blue event. We had the American flag in our window. We obviously were not far left. I’d say we were neutral, but conservative. We embrace those values.

Then people started sending me screenshots showing that we were on the Pima County wall of shame. What is that? Pima County set up a system where anybody could go out to any business. And if they felt they weren’t keeping the mandates following the resolution, they could report you. And we, for the record, we never failed a health inspection. We did everything by the letter, but we also gave people the freedom.

We said, because the county resolutions, right on the title, said, if 10-foot spacing can’t be maintained, or six-foot spacing can’t be maintained, the 10 comes in, they said, parties of 10 or less, you can sit together without masks. The way we ran our business was, you’re an adult, we respect your decisions. If you choose to wear a mask, great. If you choose not to, respect these other people where they’re at.

So I thought, well, why are we on this county wall of shame? We just passed our inspection, and the inspector gave us a few items, you know, to do this, put these stickers up here. We did that, great. And so I emailed the county board of supervisors, and I said, I understand you’ve put us up as noncompliant, but we are compliant. And I got a message back from some administrator saying, well, we can take it down within a couple of weeks.

I said, are you kidding me? We’re getting death threats, threats to kill my children. We’re getting doxxed. The phone rings, an 18-year-old barista picks up the phone. She’s called an effing C. You can fill in the blank. Our employees were terrified. We had people say, we’re coming in with masks and we’re watching you. My wife was afraid to let the children go out and play in the yard.

I ended up getting invited to the Board of Supervisors meeting. There were two Republicans, and three Democrats, and one of the Republicans invited me. And it was interesting because all the meetings before that one were virtual. All the meetings after that one were virtual. This particular one, we were going in the elevator up to the supervisor’s office and they said, oh, they said it’s going to be live.

So we went back down the elevator. I go in. I did not want to wear a mask because I promised myself, look, I know the science. This is ridiculous. I’m not going to do this. Ask me to wear a pink tutu, and I’m not going to wear a pink tutu. I tried everything I could to get in that room without a mask and they wouldn’t let me.

Then I said, what will you do if I walk in without a mask? They not only had six-foot spacing between chairs, it was probably 20 feet. I kid you not. And they said, we’ll arrest you. I said, all right, I’ll wear a mask. And I wore it down here. I did everything I could because I had promised myself this to me is a sign of oppression because it means you’re using pseudoscience and you’re forcing me to play the game.

So I went in and sat down and a couple of people got up and spoke. You had three minutes to speak publicly. It was my turn, and I got up to the speaking stand. I had sent my notes of what I was going to say beforehand, and I just started reading these comments that my wife and children and the public had to see. I didn’t delete the expletives.

I thought, you know, if we have to see this, you’re going to experience it. Within 30 seconds, and you can see the video, you can go to<a href="http://realfreedomtalk.com"> realfreedomtalk.com</a>, you can watch the video. Within 30 seconds, they had three sheriff’s officers surrounding me, handcuffed me, I’d never been handcuffed. I hadn’t even had a speeding ticket since probably my early 20s. A model citizen kind of thing. And I was just shocked.

My approach was, you all work for me. We pay your salaries. And I said, I have a right to speak. And I stood there, and I was just holding onto the speaking stand because it was, you know, I’m having anxiety here. I don’t know what’s going on. And the officer who was arresting me said, you are resisting. I said, you’re violating my civil rights. He said, you’re resisting. I said, I’m not resisting. I’m just strong.

I didn’t want to always say that people picked up on that afterwards. I said, oh, that’s awesome. What I was really saying was, you’re not going to move me until I want to be moved because I’m holding on for dear life because I thought I’m just going to stand here and exercise my free speech. So I was handcuffed, taken out of the room, booked for disorderly conduct.

Can I ask what their reason was for arresting you? Did they give you a reason? We are arresting you because…

This is where it gets interesting.The chair of the board of supervisors, he just waved his hand like off with him and they accused me of disorderly conduct. Obviously, I wasn’t directing these comments at them. Everybody knew that. And by the way, the arrest was released, I mean dismissed, just days later. But I went back into the booking room with the officer who put me in handcuffs. And this is where it gets interesting into your question of why they did it.

I actually said, why did you arrest me? He said, well, why did you do what you did? And I said, I had a right to speak. And he said it was very interesting. He said, I’m in so much trouble with my wife. Like, we’re patriots. And why did you do that? And I said, why did you arrest me? He said, I don’t want to lose my job. I turned to him and I said, your job is to protect people like me from people like that. You swore an oath. This is wrong, what happened.

At the time, I was worried about my wife, and she was going to be freaking out. She was sitting there. I didn’t know all this was televised. I had no idea this was going to happen. She was at home saying, oh man, they poked a lion now. So, yes, it was scary. It was stressful, but I know what this country is built upon.

And respectfully, every one of those officers, as they were booking me and everything, I gave them a lecture. I said, you signed an oath to defend the Constitution, to defend the people. You don’t work for these guys. And it was very interesting because after I was released, I went out, and there was a woman who managed the parking lot. She was a parking lot attendant.

I speak Spanish. She spoke very little English, so we had this bilingual conversation. She said, I saw what you did. I like you. And all the security people, the contract security people, they were applauding this. And it felt very much to me almost like being in a king’s court, and all the servants were oppressed. They were under the thumb.

Again, I wanted a quiet life. I went back to our coffee shop. In walks Christa Reynolds. She wrote a book. You can find it on Amazon. It’s called “Born to War.” It’s her memoirs of growing up as a child in Nazi Germany and then experiencing the Berlin Airlift and being in Berlin during that time. She came in, and she said, she stood up above me—I was sitting—she said, Kelly, I am so afraid. This is just what it was like when I was a kid.

I stood up and I put my arms around her, a little 84-year-old woman. I said, Christa, as long as there are men like me in the world, you are never going to experience that again. She had had her daughter take the American flag off her house because she was afraid that men with jackboots were going to come by. She was 84-years-old, and she was going back to that place emotionally where she was as a child.

And the next day, because this was televised, I came to the shop, and there were lines out the door. There were people who had traveled from other states. And it was overwhelming. I sat there at this round table inside the entrance, and it was just a steady stream of people for days. And people were throwing cash on the table for legal defense. People were praying over me.

They were saying things like, God raised you up. And I’m just like, what? One night, this is very personal, but after a day or two of this, I just went into the bathroom and I fell on my knees, and I said, God, I know I could hide from this. If I keep going, it’s going to put a target on my chest. I said, I’ll give up my life for these people, for my country. I spoke out, I opened up our shop, and I did become a target.

He opened up the shop as a bit of a refuge. He kept the shop open, and people flocked to it because they saw opportunity, they saw solace, consolation, they saw like-minded people who were also being oppressed by the system and not understanding why. And so then that created an even bigger target because then he was offering this to other people and offering them some sanity in a world that was going insane.

Our coffee bean supplier canceled us, said horrible things about us online. And we had trained our barista; my wife trained with them. And it was all because—and it wasn’t like rah-rah Trump or any particular party. It was just because we didn’t fit the narrative. The county tried to shut us down.

We got a lawyer who we later realized was just trying to make a quick buck, get a settlement. He said, I have a settlement for you. I’m starting with a $2 million offer, but it comes with a gag order. And I looked at my wife, and we just both shook our heads. We said, that’s not why we’re doing that. And so at a time when we very much needed it, because by this time…

I’m sure the gag order would include shutting down the shop.

It could be. And I had already been politically canceled out of a very good job. We lost half our customer base just like that because suddenly we were the grandma killers. And we turned down the $2 million because we said, that’s not why we’re doing this. We fired the lawyer. And I spent like three days taking in all these people’s emotions or comments.

There was an elderly lady. I remember we were outside talking, and she had a black mask on, and she took it off. And she said, I don’t care if this kills me. I’ve lived a good life. I’m not doing this anymore. And I thought, what an act of dignity. And I knew it’s not going to kill her. Actually getting fresh air is a good idea.

We had two women, black, Hispanic, who I’d been—they’d been following me on Instagram. They showed up in my shop. It turned out they were black lesbians. They had come down from Seattle. They’d been in the BLM thing, beating the drums, and they suddenly had an awakening. They said, this isn’t about love. This is about hate. And I think seeing my message and what I went through, they showed up in my shop, and I just had this lovely conversation with them.

And I would have people from the left come in the shop and say, we see what’s happening. And they changed their view. So after that time, we had people who didn’t want to be forced to take a vaccine—military, medical, law enforcement—come in and meet in our shop. We opened it up to people. I had the wife of a police officer sit down with me in tears and say, my kids are afraid dad’s not going to come home. And by this point, you know, the anti-cop rhetoric was at a fever pitch. And at this point, we had so much community support.

I was in this odd position of saying, if your husband, if things get really bad and he’s threatened, bring him here, and we’ll protect him. What a humbling thing. I mean, coffee shop owners saying this will be a refuge for you. And that’s how crazy it was. People think that Arizona is red, maybe purple. Tucson, not so much. I’ll just say there’s a lot of radical people there, lovely people, but also a lot of radical ideology.

So one of the issues that came to the fore, and I’m a father of five kids, I had three kids in the district, was the effect of the lockdowns, of the forced masking on children. The school shut down, my wife says, for about two years. They canceled all the school; it went online. At that time, we started homeschooling. And I know this gets into something you’re very interested in, Sam. It looks like you’d like to say something about that.

No, I want you to tell the story of standing up for the parents whose children became suicidal.

Yes, we were this community hub, and we had people come to us. By this time, people knew who I am; they like I’m the guy who stood up, right? And I accepted this role, and there was one man—his wife was legally deaf. He said, this is so hard for her because she reads lips. And now her world is completely silent because she can’t see people’s lips.

Somebody came and said, my teenage son is autistic. He cannot stand a mask on his face. Somebody threatened to kill him because he wasn’t wearing a mask. People would come and say, my nephew committed suicide because of the isolation. There was a young man in our neighborhood, and we heard he had gone out into the desert and shot himself in the head. We got more of the story as time went on.

Police came out to retrieve him. And we just actually found out months ago that he was living in an abusive home. And when the police came out, he said, I’m never going back again. I was writing peer-reviewed articles about how kids no longer had access to the people who would recognize abuse—the schools, the doctor, the dentist. And the stats bore it out that these COVID policies were driving kids to suicide.

So we were in the position—I was communicating with the Vail School District, other school districts, writing about it, pleading for them to listen to these people. We had a teenage boy who had been put on suicide watch from the isolation come and speak. And I had started Freedom Talk at this time. We did a Freedom Talk event. He was there. Christa Reynolds was there. She has a piece of the Berlin Wall. And we allowed him a chance to speak.

His family was there. I have the video. It was very touching at the end. Christa Reynolds is hugging him, this 84-year-old woman encouraging him. He had been put on suicide watch because he was ostracized, because he had nowhere to go. And it was amazing just being able to speak his piece. That young man started going to the school board meetings in the Vail School District, but also other school boards. He became this champion.

And so I was getting ignored, rebuffed by the school districts. And on April 26th, 2001, we had a big meeting in our coffee shop—parents, parental advocates—and we all said, we’ve got to get their attention on this. And so we all decided we’re going to go to this school board meeting the next day, April 27th. We went; there were over 200 parents there in the parking lot.

Everybody was peaceful. We had signs. I got there. I was dressed in a suit. And there’s a particular reason why. The media immediately came over to me. And the reason I dressed in the suit was I didn’t want other people experiencing the harassment I had. Look, I’ve been in marketing and advertising. I don’t need a camera on me, but I wanted to protect them. So I took the interviews.

And one of the first questions I was asked was, we understand you’re in charge or you’re leading this. And I said, no, I’m not in charge. And they said, well, who is? And I pointed back to the crowd and I said, they are. And I went in with some guys. By this time, there were some retired military, active and retired law enforcement who just watched over our family because of the death threats. I went in, I was the first in the door.

They tried to deny us access because we weren’t wearing masks. We stood our ground. I said, that’s the whole reason we’re here. So they designated a room with monitors where we could go in because that’s dirty non-maskers. They tried to cancel the meeting. We respectfully said, no, you can’t cancel it. They have to be heard.

Finally, they started letting the parents in. And when all the parents came in, I looked at the guys that came with me and I said, now’s our time to go outside. This is their moment. And what happened, because I was outside in the parking lot hearing about this, was the board was nowhere to be seen. So somebody said, there’s no quorum for the meeting. We’re going to swear in a new board. And this went viral, the Bongino show and everywhere. Everybody saw it.

And I know some of these things were going on in other school districts around the country, but people saw that and they were inspired by it. And it was kind of known as the shot heard around the world. They tried so hard to shut down the meeting. Finally, they ended up letting a few people in. And there was a young man, 15, 16 years old. He had sent me his speech, and he wanted to explain why his friend had committed suicide. He was denied the opportunity to speak. And it wasn’t until they tried to shut down the parents and silence them that people outside got angry.

So you would think that John Carruth, the superintendent of Vail Schools, would say, okay, this is a concern. There’s a significant number of people here, parents, who are concerned. Let’s sit down and work this out. No, he didn’t. The school district took an adversarial approach. They went on a speaking tour in the local media claiming that parents had brought guns, that they were hostile and violent.

And later on, I got emails through FOIA. I did the research on this. And it was right at that time that the targeting of parents started because the National School Board Association wrote a letter to Joe Biden’s office and Merrick Garland accusing parents of being hostile. They put them in this position of being so-called domestic terrorists. We’d had an incident where a young man was told to wear a mask, and he made a stand at the school, and he wouldn’t leave. People came and protested. That was probably July or August.

By September, this was happening again with another child, and the father called me up. He was very disturbed, kind of very anxious, and he said, Kelly, I want you to come here and witness this. I need you to keep me calm. I need advice. They forced my son to wear a mask. He’s healthy. They’re going to quarantine him for the second or third time, missing out on his education.

I’m going to call the police and report abuse because they forced him to wear a mask. He threw it in the nurse’s trash. They made him retrieve the mask out of the dirty trash and put it back on his face. And I said, that’s awful. I contacted another father. So the two of us went to the school by invitation.

Fortunately, we have a video of every second of it. We had an office meeting. I called State Senator Kelly Townsend. I called the sheriff’s department. I said, what do I do? How do I help this father? And their advice was have him get documentation as to why they’re quarantining his child. They are obligated to give him information on how to appeal this to the superior court.

And so I turned to the father, and you can see all this on video. I turned to the father and I said, this is the advice. They said, you do this and then you should leave. He had called the police, by the way, early on. And he said, I want to report child abuse. I want you to come out here. And you can see this on the recording. The police said, you’re probably right, but it’s too controversial. We’re not coming out. So a parent, they didn’t know the circumstances reporting child abuse. They refused to come out.

They didn’t know the circumstances and they refused to come out on a call for child abuse.

So we ended up leaving after we got the information. The school district, the principal, immediately went out to the media, which you’ve got to think there’s going to be pending litigation or you’re going to have to work this out. They claimed that three large fathers had stormed the school, tried to arrest the principal.They made us out to be the worst kind of terrorists. They took selective clips because we were streaming it onto social media.

And three days later, the police hunted down each one of those fathers, including me. I’m sitting on a Sunday night, three days after having a movie night with my kids. There’s a knock on the door. There are five Tucson police officers—five. And they delivered a paper ticket for misdemeanor trespassing, which is literally in severity between a parking ticket and loitering. Five police officers.

And I asked the police officer, what’s your probable cause? Why are you here? He didn’t know. He had no idea. He was just following orders. So skipping some steps, we did end up going to court. And there was a hearing with Judge Antonio Riojas for the father who had called me because the school tried to put protective orders against him. You can’t come on school property. And I have that recording on our website of Judge Riojas’ comments because he watched the whole video.

And he said in that hearing, I watched the whole video. You never got up. You never raised your voice. All you did was disagree. And that’s an issue because like this father’s bigger than I am and I’m six four. And he said, you disagreed. And he turned to the school district people who were there and he said, they get to disagree and you don’t get to tell them how. And he dismissed the protective order at no time.

And when I called the sheriff’s department, I talked to this lieutenant. He said, at no time did I feel like we needed to send someone out. There was no shutdown of the school. He said, I know Kelly. I come into his shop. At no time did I feel like he was a danger. But it went out to the media that we were somehow these violent extremists.

And I started getting calls from MSNBC, CNN, UK Daily Mail, all these places wanting to interview me. And I knew by then, because I had been in interviews after the first arrest, I’m not going to get a fair shake here. So I just refused to talk to them. So they basically made up stories. I ended up in court.

The other two dads, by the way, who didn’t have a platform, weren’t public figures. They got plea deals and they were let off with $250 fines and unsupervised probation. After three days in court for class 3 misdemeanor trespassing, they added on other misdemeanors on to me. I got sentenced to 100 days in jail and $10,000 in fines. I was told I had to scrub my social media and be quiet. They tried to gag me and that didn’t work well.

But his crime rose to the exact same level of the other two fathers, except that he had a coffee shop.

And if I had done what they accused me of doing, I would have been charged with felonies. I would be in prison. They knew they couldn’t. I mean, it was a stretch to get what they got. My lawyer before the trial said, hey, this is open and shut, Kelly. You’ve got the video.

And the other judge threw the whole thing out against the other guy, but his judge, not so much.

One of the charges that was added on was disrupting a school environment. We had a memo that John Carruth sent to all the staff the day after this incident saying the schools were not disturbed and the situation was resolved peacefully. The judge refused to admit that exculpatory evidence.

So I do want to point out that the other father had to go to court to defend his right to school property to see his son. That’s not acceptable in the United States of America.

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Surveilled, Silenced, and Smeared: How Parents Became ‘Domestic Terrorists’ | Kelly Walker and Sam Sorbo