Soccer Mom Highlights Injustices Wealthy
Texas White Women Face with Mask Stunt

Capitol Inside
April 18, 2021

Lake Travis school board hopeful Kara Bell was still a baby when Peter Finch won an Oscar for Best Actor in 1977 for his performance in the movie Network as a slumping anchorman who goes on a deranged rant on the air live when he tells the world that he's mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

But Bell knows exactly how he felt after a racially-charged soliloquy outside a store in the Texas Capital City where she refused to wear a mask, made a scene with the police and was charged with assault after reading the riot act on individual liberty to a pair of officers with a bodycam in her audience.

Bell is taking aim at incumbent Lauren White in the race for the board in one of the wealthiest public school districts in the state. Bell, who lists her occupation as children's advocate, says on her campaign web site that she moved with her husband and her family to Texas last year from southern California in search of more conservative values.

The Bells apparently didn't realize they would be settling in one of the nation's most liberal metropolitan areas in the nation. But that gave the soccer mom who's running for school trustee an ideal backdrop and stage for the show that she put on here this month with the grandstanding on masks.

"It's my God-given right to be here on this planet," Bell declared in the parking lot of a Nordstrom Rack in suburban southwest Austin where the two officers from the Sunset Valley police force were attempting to question her about an altercation inside the store.

"This is my land as much as it is yours," Bell told the cops - interrupting the speech at times to narrate the events to someone on a cell phone that she also appeared to be using to film the confrontation. "I did not sign up for this. I'm a Christian woman of God - and you are not going to put your disgusting rules on me - that are false and not true. I will not have it. You understand that? I will not have it."

Bell sought to portray herself as a victim of reverse racism - suggesting that she'd been targeted for harassment by a female store employee when there had been another woman in the store without a mask at the time.

"Isn't that interesting how she only picked me. She would pick me - the white person - not the Black person without any mask," Bell said. "Do you think that's a racist thing? I don't know."

Witnesses told the officers that Bell had shoved her way past employees who'd asked her to put on a mask in line with local emergency standards. She went into a dressing room and found an officer waiting to question her outside it when she emerged while reporting the events on the cell phone.

Bell launched into the declamation when the police asked to see her identification, which she refused to produce initially. The candidate for school trustee was starting to say something about the CDC when the officers suddenly pulled her wrists behind her and handcuffed them.

The encounter plays out on YouTube like it was staged and scripted. It's conceivable that the erratic behavior and belligerence could have been improvised without having been planned in advance. But it spawned a sequel a few days later when a group of Bell supporters estimated somewhere between 10 and 12 showed up at the Nordstrom branch outlet with their faces uncovered to show their disdain for the policy on masks.

Bell and her friends appear to be trying to spotlight the injustices that white women from wealthy neighborhoods are facing with the inconvenience of masks and other coronavirus pandemic restrictions.

The Bells relocated to the heavily Democratic Austin area after living for several years in an affluent southern California community in Orange County near San Juan Capistrano and Laguna Beach. While Lakeway is a long way from Hollywood, Bell is a star now in her new home base.

 

 

Copyright 2003-2021 Capitol Inside