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“As the Covid-19 outbreak sweeps the nation, governors and local authorities take advantage of the crisis to impose strict and draconian restrictions on our civil liberties,” says the Open States website, which it promotes and calls “inspiring.” . “Protests against the containment measures taking place in the United States. The organization defines itself as” a spontaneous civil movement. “But is it really?
The domain was created by the States Convention, a nonprofit organization that advocates for limiting federal power, launched in 2015 thanks to a generous donation from the family foundation of billionaire Robert Mercer, Cambridge Analytica’s chief financier and the ultra-conservative website Breitbart News, which played a key role in the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump’s in 2016. The leader of the Open States is Mark Meckler, another longtime acquaintance. Meckler co-founded Tea Party Patriots, the far-right movement formed in 2009, after the United States elected its first black president.
History repeats itself. In fact, it never completely ended. The Tea Party began with marginal proposals against the extension of public health, which sparked latent, senseless Republican fury over an alleged socialist conspiracy against the United States. Meckler and company now use the same tactics to promote and amplify protests against governors who intend to stop the spread of a pandemic by restricting the freedoms the United States has become, with more than a million confirmed cases and 60,000 dead. in the epicenter
They are not, in most cases, mass protests. In Annapolis, the capital of Maryland, at the national call for rallies in front of state legislatures, literally two people showed up at noon on Friday. Steve Estes was one of those, a 62-year-old computer programmer, a Silver Springs resident, who defines himself as “an American responsible for the Constitution.” “Our Constitution is being left out. We have the right to work and freedom. They are divine rights, the Government does not give them to us. There was an overreaction, in fact, this is like the flu. It is time to return to normal life ”, he defends behind the protective mask.
The other participant asks to be identified only as “farmer Frank”. “I don’t think the virus is as dangerous as it was said to be,” he says. “But there are many people with a hidden agenda. People who believe in socialism, environmentalists who want to close the country because they mistakenly think that carbon emissions are a problem. Are you religious? Do you believe in Satan? I studied the Bible and discovered that it is always correct. Satan is behind all this because he wants a world government. Crazy Bill Gates wants to put chips on all of us, and that’s exactly what the Beast wants to do. ”
Research shows that 70% to 90% of Americans support measures to stem the spread of the virus, even if they limit their freedoms and harm the economy. Discontent exists today and yesterday, but it is a minority. Journalistic information over time dismantled the legend of the spontaneous nature of the Tea Party, linking the ties that led to fortunes like that of the Koch brothers. Part of the money that financed the attacks on Obama’s health care reform and contributed five years later to mobilize the discontent that brought Trump to the White House, is now behind those protests.
Organizations like Open States, FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots. Activism is promoted and amplified by a robust network of ultra-conservative groups, fearful that the economic deterioration caused by the confinement measures could harm Donald Trump’s reelection options. Catalysing this discontent also enables them to obtain valuable data from people. There are countless ways on the sites to subscribe to newsletters that will build grassroots cohesion and keep the flame alive.
The diffuse dynamics of the calls, and the fact that the States, not the White House, are in charge of dictating and lifting the confinement measures, allows the President not to be bound by the protests to the limit of legality and, at the same time, encourage them. On Thursday, a group of angry and furious protesters stormed the Michigan Capitol in Lansing City to call for the lifting of the restrictions that Governor Gretchen Whitmer, an emerging figure in the Democratic Party, extended until May 15 in a state with almost 4,000 deaths and 41,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. “The governor should give in a little and put out the fire,” Trump said on Twitter. “These are good people, but they are angry. They want to get their lives back safely! Meet with them, talk, come to terms. ”
Crouching in front of the camera, Josh Ellis, a construction business owner in Naperville, Illinois, an Army veteran and the father of a Marine, defines himself as “an average American.” “I am not a politician, I am not a millionaire, I am not a very special person,” he says in a video in which he asked to participate in the protests called on Friday, under the slogan of American Revolution 2.0. “I am here to defend what the United States was founded for,” he says.
In the comments on the Facebook page of American Revolution 2.0, there were countless conspiracy theories and lies against scientific evidence. The profile was censored in April by the social network. “It is a technological tyranny,” says Steve Estes, in Annapolis, justifying the small participation in a protest that only one person attended, besides himself. But other similar pages continue and the call for applications has been made public on many websites. Including the organization of Mark Meckler Open the States, which clarifies that it does not “organize and sponsor” the events it announces, and that it is only “an information office where these people can meet”.
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