From It’s Going Down
[This post only contains information relevant to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, to read the entire articles follow the above links.]
Twitter researcher Thirteen Roses documented the presence of Philadelphia Proud Boys and Three Percenters in several Pennsylvania Facebook groups associated with the [anti-quarantine] protests, including a Philadelphia Police Department Officer related to Zach Rehl, a leader in the Philadelphia Proud Boys.
The Facebook pages for the Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine, Minnesotans Against Excessive Quarantine, and Ohioans Against Excessive Quarantine also appear to be run by the Dorr brothers, who have a history of direct mail fundraising for conservative causes – gun rights, the pro-life movement, etc. – and then funneling the money back to direct mail services owned by the brothers. The brothers also appear to own a series of domain names for “ReOpen” protests in seven different states.
Call to Action
Deplatform Quarantine Protest Groups
In the past week, the far-Right has taken to a new tactic – public demonstrations against public health guidelines. As detailed above, the protests have often taken the form of blocking hospitals, which the far-Right believes is either responsible for new restrictions on gatherings, or else engaged in a massive conspiracy to restrict Constitutional freedoms.
While the classic Points of Unity long held by antifascist groups such as Anti-Racist Action demand that we confront the far-Right wherever they organize, we can’t ethically demand that our comrades gather to confront these rallies in-person. Any mass antifascist gathering would mean infection.
In the United States, the death rate of known cases hovers around 4.3%, but those numbers may be higher or lower, depending on access to medical care. Statistically, any mass gathering in sufficient numbers would mean that someone would die. Fascism has always been a death cult, and the public gatherings make that evident. The organizers of these protests – some true believers, some grifters – are more than happy to throw their followers on the corpse-fire of their quest for power.
But we can still disrupt their organizing. The protests center around social media pages, usually on Facebook. This week, we can disrupt far-Right organizing by mass reporting the Facebook pages spreading COVID-19 misinformation and putting our communities at risk by organizing live events.
Below is a list of the most active COVID-19 protest groups on Facebook, listed in alphabetical order by name of state. Find your state and report the groups active there, then share this list with friends and ask them to do the same. Though Facebook has yet to offer an official tool to report COVID-19 misinformation, the company’s VP of Integrity issued a blog post on Thursday, claiming that the company is tracking the potentially dangerous posts.
