Yep, and some other wealthy funders intent on diverting, dividing, and grabbing control of the political narrative. Given how much energy people on the left are expending by ridiculing these relatively small and unpopular protests, I’d say it’s working.
These protests are a classic example of trying to control politics by controlling the national narrative.
The protests are backed by the same conservative groups that are working for Trump’s reelection. The Michigan Conservative Council, one of the organizers of the Michigan protest, was founded by a pro-Trump couple active in state Republican politics. Another organizer was the Michigan Freedom Fund, whose leader, Greg McNeilly is a Republican political operative who worked for Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s family.
Protests in Wisconsin were organized by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, founded by Republican pro-Trump economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, and by FreedomWorks, a training group for conservative activists that grew out of a political organization founded by David and Charles Koch. FreedomWorks is most famous for its organization of the Tea Party movement in 2009. Its president, Adam Brandon, told Vox reporter Jane Coaston that “this has the same DNA [as] the Tea Party movement.” It “just so happened a lot of our activists were organizers.”
These are not spontaneous, grassroots protests. They are political operations designed to divert attention from the Trump administration’s poor response to the pandemic. Even more, though, they are designed to keep the American public divided so that we do not protest the extraordinary economic inequality the pandemic has highlighted…
These protests have diverted the national conversation by turning a national crisis into partisan division along the lines the Republican Party has developed since the 1980s. But in reality there are few actual protesters: two-thirds of Americans are worried that lockdowns will end too early, not too late. People began to separate physically even before governors required it, and say they will not stop distancing until they are certain they are safe, no matter the official government stance.
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