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.
Conservatives who love to bash educated, liberal elites as out of touch quickly embraced Gold and gleefully touted her impressive credentials to support their attacks on public health measures designed to combat the pandemic.
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.
“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.
Researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago have dug into the demographic profiles of hundreds of people charged with crimes related to the Capitol incursion.
Even so, Gold still stands out from that well-heeled crowd, and not just because she’s a woman.
Reuben Tizes, her father, was a doctor, a medical school professor, and even served as the Orange County, New York, health commissioner in the early 1970s.
After graduating from the City College of New York at 19, she claims she was the youngest person in her graduating class at the Chicago Medical School in 1989.
That same year, according to her LinkedIn profile, she served as a congressional fellow in DC and wrote speeches for the late Vermont senator James Jeffords, who famously left the Republican Party to become an Independent in 2001.
According to her LinkedIn page, in 2009, she worked in DC as an assistant to Michael Oren, then Israel’s ambassador to the US, who credited her in print for stories she helped him research for the Wall Street Journal and New Republic.
She and her husband donated thousands of dollars to their children’s private, conservative Jewish day school in Beverly Hills, where Gold volunteered on the PTA, managing the shabbat swap one year.
Los Angeles County court records suggest that her relationship with her ex-husband was somewhat contentious.
In her October 2020 book I Do Not Consent: My Fight Against Medical Cancel Culture Gold writes, “I have always worked with the poor and underserved,” treating ER patients in places like Inglewood, California, which she describes as a “low-income, gang-ridden majority-minority city that provided the setting for the tough 1991 drama Boyz N the Hood.” She does not, however, include any mention of her services as a pricey “concierge physician,” which she advertised on her now-defunct personal website: “As a C-Suite Physician, Dr.
The concierge medical practice is just one of several business enterprises she attempted to launch over the years—including MedicaLife, a short-lived lifestyle magazine for doctors that launched in 2006 and folded in 2008. In 2017, Gold started a company called Gold Healthcare Solutions that advertises assistance to hospitals facing government audits.
I was not able to achieve the kind of interest she wanted so we stopped talking about the project.” His name and photo were subsequently removed from the company website.
“They develop some grievance around that and connect that to a broader social movement.” If Gold was looking for a mid-life reboot, the heady mix of the pandemic, President Trump, and right-wing media provided the perfect catalyst.
She had been treating COVID patients in Los Angeles emergency rooms with President Donald Trump’s favorite unproven COVID cure, hydroxychloroquine, just a few weeks after the president had announced that the FDA would be fast-tracking emergency use authorization for the drug for COVID treatment.
“Instead I was met with hostility.” The hospital medical director challenged her independence and dressed her down for prescribing a drug that wasn’t indicated for outpatients.
Susan Collins in 2019, but before that, the only other federal candidate to whom she gave money was a Democrat—California Rep.
Prager has been broadcasting in LA since 1982, but he has become an important though underappreciated part of the modern right-wing infrastructure thanks to his online Prager University.
Identifying herself as an ER doctor, Gold described her success at treating patients with hydroxychloroquine and voiced dismay that medicine was becoming so politicized that a perfectly safe drug could not be dispensed by doctors without controversy.
A week later, Gold made a series of Twitter videos, a platform that she had rarely before used, to share her experience “practicing emergency medicine in this era of the COVID-19 crisis.” Standing in her white lab coat in front of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center—a hospital she didn’t work at—Gold panned the camera over the quiet grounds.
She doesn’t say how much this may have hurt her bottom line, but in June, her medical practice received more than $150,000 in federal bailout loans, suggesting the lockdowns caused a personal budget deficit large enough to turn many a doctor into an activist.
“There’s been a lot of fear mongering going on.” With help from a QAnon enthusiast, the video spawned the hashtag #filmyourhospital and prompted a host of right-wing figures like failed California congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero to rush to their nearest hospitals to make their own “empty hospital” videos weeks before Gold did.
One of the largest of the original tea party groups that arose to oppose President Barack Obama, Tea Party Patriots encompasses a trio of nonprofit groups funded by wealthy conservatives and conservative foundations like Donors Trust.
Early in the pandemic, she was working with a newly formed Save Our Country Coalition to help oppose lockdowns and defend Trump’s handling of the pandemic, along with powerful conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council.
“I reached out to her and said, ‘Hey, I’m working on this effort and I’d like to talk to doctors,’ and we started emailing and talking, and as things have developed and she watched the virus, things have evolved,” Martin later explained to Yahoo News.
On May 19, Tea Party Patriots hosted a conference call with conservative media luminaries, including Fox News’ Ed Henry and Breitbart News, featuring Gold and a handful of other doctors who had signed Gold’s letter to Trump.
The call sent Gold on a grand round of media hits with all of the biggest names in the MAGA firmament—former Trump White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, Glenn Beck, Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk—and ultimately with some of the major stars of Fox News.
In his research on extremist networks across the globe, he identified three crucial factors in political radicalization: a need to feel significant, a narrative to follow, and a network that supports and validates that narrative.
The two-day summit garnered almost no media attention until the very end, when Gold and about a dozen white-coated physicians appeared on the steps of the Supreme Court to talk about “medical cancel culture” and spent nearly 45 minutes making misleading claims suggesting that COVID can be prevented and cured with, no surprise here, hydroxychloroquine.
retweeted a video of the event and it went viral, receiving more than 16 million views in a matter of hours before Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter took it down for spreading misinformation.
But the episode provided her with instant celebrity as a victim of Big Tech censorship, a credential even more beloved by conservative media than her white coat and fancy law degree.
Gold agreed and then seized the opportunity to make her case for hydroxychloroquine to Carlson’s millions of viewers.
In a sign of how far down the far-right rabbit hole she’d already gone by then, Gold told Carlson that because of “some negative things” people had said since the video aired, she had retained attorney and conspiracy theorist L.
As her prospects in medicine dimmed, Gold seems to have become too toxic even for Fox News, which hasn’t had her on the air since July.
She even went on the Patriot Radio show hosted by Matt Shea, a former Washington State legislator who has been involved in a number of armed federal standoffs, including the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 led by Ammon Bundy.
The Jewish doctor chatted happily with him about vitamins and the value of exercise in preventing COVID.
But Gold found her most loyal audience among evangelical Christian prosperity preachers, many of whom had refused to close their church doors during the lockdowns and were vaccine skeptics.
“It’s going to take money to do that.” In October, Gold returned to chat with the ladies of “Joni Table Talk,” Daystar’s televangelical version of “The View.” Over coffee with the hosts, Gold thanked “the whole Daystar family for being so generous,” and talked about the small donations from viewers she’d received.
Gold took the stage before a room full of people without masks and gave an hour-long speech, where she decried the evils of the “experimental biological agent,” better known as the COVID vaccine.
But whether Gold realized it or not, the battle over the drug was less about health care policy and more of a proxy war over Trump and the future of democracy.
Gold’s Stanford law degree suggests she is smart enough to know a big lie when she sees one, but “stop the steal” was where the action was, not to mention the speaking gigs and fundraising ops she now relied on for her livelihood since her medical career cratered.
When Trump supporters first converged in DC on November 14 at the “Million MAGA march” to contest the election results, Gold was right there with them, along with other Trump die-hards like Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy who helped bankroll the march; Sebastian Gorka, and Rep.
The event was advertised on the neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer, and drew hordes of militia outfits and white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys and Nick Fuentes’ Groypers.
Standing under an umbrella held by a man in a “Baby Lives Matter” shirt, Gold said to the crowd, “I’m here to ask you a personal question: Why are you here?…I believe the reason you are here is the same reason I am choosing to be here.
Kruglanski isn’t surprised that Gold would move from promoting a bogus COVID cure to joining with people who thought the election had been stolen.
The next day Gold was scheduled to speak again at the “Wild Protest” organized by Alexander near the White House, along with Tea Party Patriots’ Jenny Beth Martin and Brandon Straka, founder of the Walkaway Campaign that urges Democrats to quit the party.
She was accompanied by John Strand—an international underwear model who serves as the communications director for America’s Frontline Doctors.
“I can certainly speak to the place that I was, and it most emphatically was not a riot,” she said, explaining dubiously that she thought it was legal to go inside.
One of the officers, who had been pinned near the doors to the Capitol, appears to be pulled down by someone in the crowd and lands near where Strand and Gold were standing.” Videos and still photos also show the pair pressed up against the door to the House chamber where law enforcement was trying to block them.
For days, an image of her standing in the Capitol Rotunda with a bullhorn appeared on an FBI wanted poster seeking help identifying people who participated in the insurrection.
Let’s start with her own reflections on what happened, which were surprisingly uncomplicated: “When you’re crossing the street and the light turns green, you go,” she said in an interview with KGET.
In Judaism we often ask ourselves, ‘What does God expect of me in this situation?’ It’s this emphasis on action that is essential to the Jewish faith.
Many people who’ve spent a long time investing in their own education and status tend to socialize with others—like, say, in the PTA of an exclusive Beverly Hills private school—who have the same or similar credentials.
Simone Gold poses as a hostage for a video she made framing her as victim of government persecution.
Conservatives claiming to represent “we the people” love to dump on professional expertise and fancy pedigrees in latte liberals—just listen to Fox’s Tucker Carlson repeatedly mock MSNBC host Joy Reid for having gone to Harvard.
Ted Cruz , both of whom worked to overturn the election of President Joe Biden.
Experts say that far-right radicalism of the sort on display on January 6 and elsewhere over the past year has strong parallels not in Cruz’s “defund the IRS” agenda but in Islamic radicalism, which studies have shown is full of doctors, engineers, and other professionals, even in the United States.
Rhodes is the founder of the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group of which about a dozen members have been charged with crimes related to the Capitol riot.
Gold’s initial regret about her actions at the Capitol has given way to defiance as she returned to the lecture circuit, where she has reframed herself as a victim, and her prosecution as an assault on free speech.
Evangelical groups have continued to shower her with Biblical hospitality.
There, she took the stage along with many others who’d been involved in the “stop the steal” efforts after the election, including Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and L.
After getting tear gassed outside, she went back to a nearby stage where she implored people to “stand the hell up! Because you are far better off fighting on your feet and being prepared to die on your feet than living a life on your damned knees.
Clearly this political persecution of a law-abiding emergency physician is designed to threaten and intimidate any American who dares to exercise their 1st Amendment rights.
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