How did I miss the existence of entire organizations’ worth of hard-right fellow Californians? Because they’re still organizing their anti-Left protests on Facebook… oh. Get a clue, Twitter Trumpists! That is not a safe space!
Online activism is spilling into the streets of Southern California, sparking a post-Trump movement
h ttps://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Online-activism-is-spilling-into-the-streets-of-16281500.php
By Elizabeth Dwoskin for the Washington Post, 29 June 2021
SANTA ANA, Calif. — A week before California reopened its economy…
…to off-duty, fully vaccinated people only… wait, wait… Los Angeles is threatening to lockdown again…
…a group of 100 or so demonstrators gathered in front of the Orange County Board of Supervisors here to decry lingering mask mandates and other health restrictions.
Whipped up by a misleading campaign of social media promotion, doorstep fliers and TV ads, they carried signs that read, “RIP COVID VAX VICTIMS” and “My Body, My Choice, No Vax.” The previous month, more than 600 people had gathered in the same spot to protest a voluntary digital vaccine passport – by falsely claiming it would be mandatory, comparing it to Nazis forcing Jews to wear yellow stars.
Falsely? Local governments and Globocorps are already mandating it.
“A year from now, I don’t want to be back at this board demanding they repeal a requirement to donate a kidney,” local activist Peggy Hall said into a microphone at the passport protest in May. “What’s next? You’re going to be sterilized for the common good?”
Four of five county supervisors voted to put pause on any efforts to create vaccine passports in the county that day, effectively killing the plan. The lone holdout – a Democrat – says the others caved to the pressure.
Another day, another victory. California was emerging from the pandemic, but for these activists, the battle – both online and off – was far from over.
I admit, I don’t understand why protests work. How is a bunch of people making noise more convincing than a well-reasoned argument? But they DO work, thus proving that most people are idiots.
For years, social media companies have sought and failed to limit the reach of misinformation and other harmful material spread on their sites. That failure culminated in January when – after months of allowing falsehoods about a stolen election to proliferate – the companies kicked former president Donald Trump as, along with tens of thousands of rank and-file followers and some prominent ones off their platforms for inciting violence during the Capitol insurrection.
But six months later, a right-wing movement is reconstituting itself across the United States, and once again, it is fueled by social media.
This WaPo article, repeated by the Sacramento Bee, is intended to inform Facebook employees that they aren’t doing their job of controlling dissidents on the Internet. As I just said, protests works. “If you people don’t get your act together then we might have another Trump on our hands!”
Researchers say that’s because the combination of the pandemic and the election radicalized people and enabled right-leaning groups that were not previously aligned to find one another – creating a mega-network that was fueled by outrage and misinformation. Armed groups, Trump supporters, anti-vaccine moms, government skeptics and conspiracy theorists were suddenly protesting the same things.
You hysterical tyrants banned fun and oxygen. What did you expect, FEWER malcontents?
The mainstream tech companies’ crackdown on Trump and his followers helped splinter that vast network, researchers have found, without fundamentally weakening it. Influencers kicked off Facebook or Instagram ported followers to the lightly-policed app Telegram or right-wing YouTube rival Rumble…
That SHOULD have been the final clue needed for Normie Republican to accept that Big Tech is not your friend.
…but they’ve also found ways to get back on the mainstream platforms by creating new accounts or using alternate language to avoid detection.
Sigh. Well, if needs must then this is the traditional and inevitable outcome of “government made the rule, now let’s watch them enforce it”.
One of the epicenters of this movement is in Southern California, where activists have successfully protested the national vaccine rollout, even at one point prompting the temporary shutdown of a mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium. But more than a dozen Southern California activists interviewed by The Washington Post…
One part of me would love to make contact with like-minded people. Another part of me thinks self-doxxing on social media platforms who brag about sharing private information with activist Feds is a stupidly bad idea.
As much as I’d like to help… I’m not suicidal.
…say their movement is bigger than opposition to public health measures or any other single issue – even Trump. They see their fight against government overreach and the establishment as a patriotic struggle to counter authoritarianism, and even a battle for the civil rights of those who refuse vaccination.
“This is a humanitarian issue,” said Jason Lefkowitz, a Los Angeles-based organizer behind the Dodger Stadium anti-vaccine protest and others. Like others here interviewed by The Post, he said he was motivated to became an activist during the pandemic, after losing his job and other freedoms. “It is about our civil liberties being taken away over a made-up pandemic. It is a global war over everything.”
((Lefkowitz)). Who organized his event on the home cyber-turf of the FaceBorg SJW Collective. Hmm.
More than 600,000 people in the United States have died of the coronavirus since January 2020.
Which made 2020’s overall death count the second highest in the last five years. 2017 had more death.
In a post-Trump era, these activists use social media to organize, share information and sometimes to make a living as influencers in a right-wing universe, though the companies say they ban most misinformation about the coronavirus as well as groups that encourage breaking public health rules.
“Influencer”. That’s a term coming up with increasing regularity. The Powers That Be are obsessed with people who are able to control… or “influence”… the behavior of other people. They don’t want to convince people of anything. They want to find the people that are trusted and do a skinjob on them.
I do not think that there are many such people left in this fatherless world so this tactic probably says more about the Leftoid’s collectivist mindset than it does about our trusting natures. But then, ((Lefkowitz)) is one of the protests’ leaders so maybe they’re right.
The Facebook group promoting the Dodger Stadium anti-vaccine rally, Shop Mask Free Los Angeles, was incorrectly listed on the social network as a “local business” for months and was only banned by the company this past month. Lever had no comment.
Alan Hostetter, a former local police chief and yoga teacher as well as a speaker at the June rally attended by The Post, was indicted on a charge of his alleged role in the insurrection June 10. Shortly after, he went back on Facebook Live, YouTube, Spotify, Rumble and several other services, filming himself walking on the beach in San Clemente in a “Free Man” baseball cap. He decried the Jan. 6 riot as a “false flag staged event” and a “fakesurrection” because he believed infiltrators were in the crowd.
His being re-doxxed and pilloried on the East Coast by WaPo and the West Coast by SacBee proves he was right.
(More than 400 people have been charged in connection to the Capitol riots, many of whom had come to Washington at Trump’s behest to protest the election results.)
Off-topic, but Trump not even offering legal assistance to those fans is as bad an act of treachery as “Judas” Pence accepting the election results.
Southern California, and particularly Orange County, is a longtime bastion of reactionary conservatism and far-right politics in a largely liberal state. The region was a breeding ground for the John Birch Society, a conspiratorial anti-communist group in the ’60s. A “White Lives Matter” Ku Klux Klan rally that took place in Huntington Beach in April was organized on Telegram.
Be ashamed, Normie dissidents, when even a Klansman has better survival instincts than you.
From January 2020 through April of this year, the most “Stop the Steal” rallies and U.S. demonstrations opposing coronavirus restrictions combined took place in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange County, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit organization that studies misinformation.
A spinoff of George Orwell College for Political Science.
Over the last year, Hostetter, Hall and other leaders – some with long-standing ties to the state’s influential anti-vaccine movement – have helped mentor and motivate a new crop of activists, who have organized online to host “mask-free shopping” events throughout the region, where they purposefully enter stores without masks to provoke a viral confrontation.
They proceeded to learn that in-your-face tactics work for Antifa only because the government owns Antifa.
Now that California has reopened, the protesters are continuing to push local rulemaking bodies to loosen remaining restrictions for the unvaccinated and are planning for a fight over school immunizations for covid. Some are also focused on Gov. Gavin Newsom, D, himself, including supporting a Republican-led recall campaign that has garnered enough signatures for a statewide vote this year. Some also post about a 2024 run for Trump.
Fun fact about that “D”: it’s not a typo. Newsom’s chosen Secretary Of State Shirley Webber deleted his affiliation with the Democrat Party on the governor-recall paperwork as an intentional snub. In addition to facing the recall, Newsom is now suing his own SecState for permission to be identified as a Democrat.
h ttps://www.foxnews.com/politics/newsom-sues-elections-chief-party-designation
Nobody is going to miss you, Gruesome Newsom.
In the near term, public health experts say groups like those in Southern California may sow just enough doubt in vaccination to prevent the broader population from reaching herd immunity. Orange County and Los Angeles County have vaccination rates slightly higher than California’s average of 49%, but the regional average is well below it.
Only 49% vaxxed in Commiefornia? I *know* there are dissidents here, right-thinking people, but I don’t know how to meet them… having ruled out both an account on FedTweet and trusting a Jew.
And in the years ahead, every successive fight – waged in person and over social media – is an opportunity build a bigger political movement, said Richard Carpiano, professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California at Riverside, who has researched local organizing against public health measures.
As said already, this article is a warning to Social Media Warriors that they need to silence dissidents harder. Because that always worked in the past!
“Covid was a spark for a fire that was just waiting to happen here in Southern California,” he said. “There’s already this belief that we’re in a high-tax state with too much government overreach and this politically organized anti-vaccine movement. Add in Trumpism . . . and you have a perfect storm.”
No, seriously? Commiefornia is overregulated? But but but we have negative population growth AND rising home prices at the same time! You can’t say that’s not progress!
Before the pandemic hit, L.A.-based organizer Lefkowitz was working three nights a week as a waiter at a Beverly Hills restaurant to support his career as a stand-up comedian. For much of his adult life, he was barely interested in politics, he said. He voted twice for Barack Obama.
But after California closed restaurants except for takeout and banned large gatherings, he lost his day job and his comedy gigs were canceled.
Infiltrator. His ethnic background alone proves he had significant political involvement whether he wanted it or not. “I voted twice for Obama but now I’m one of you”, seriously? That’s leadership material?
He began spending hours a day online, finding articles and documentaries purporting to chronicle how powerful figures were involved in sex trafficking…. “People call this going down the rabbit hole,” he said. “But it’s all part of the big truth. This whole new world order – Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Bill Gates, Hunter Biden – unfortunately, it all is tied together and happens to be coordinated by one group of people.”
If he wasn’t honest about his people’s involvement in that New World Order then he’s a worst-case scenario for the L.A. Normies. Even assuming he originally meant well, how long until he makes the connection between Pedowood, the banksters and his tribe? Only a white man can be trusted to act against his own blood… and I’m not sure that’s a compliment.
Alison, a Los Angeles makeup artist, found herself in a similar predicament under the lockdowns, she said. Her makeup clients disappeared overnight, and the salon where she worked was temporarily shuttered.
“I’ve poured my whole life into this makeup business,” said the 29-year-old, who would not allow The Post to use her last name for privacy reasons.
The ditsy hair stylist has above-average survival skills for this crowd.
The more she read, she said, the angrier she became. People in California were being shuttered in their homes without knowing the facts, she said, adding she believed masks were ineffective and the vaccine was actually “poison.”
“The fear that this virus is instilling in people is crazy,” she said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended mask use to stop the spread of the virus among the unvaccinated…
Not recommended. Mandated. Mandated to this very moment in California with no end in sight.
…and has said that coronavirus vaccines have met rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality.
The manufacturers were also given total legal immunity because the vaxxes are so safe, they didn’t need it.
Alison said she started to become more vocal online, posting on Instagram against health restrictions. In the summer, she showed up at her first protest for the recall of Gov. Newsom, which she had also heard about on Instagram.
“I kind of went undercover,” she said, “I wasn’t even out as a Trump supporter then.”
As the election approached, Lefkowitz, Alison and Bryna Makowka, a self-described independent journalist who believes QAnon “awakened people,” began attending weekly pro-Trump “freedom rallies” at a Beverly Hills park with those they met at the anti-Newsom events.
By the election, Beverly Hills police had declared the ongoing rallies unlawful after clashes with Black Lives Matter protesters took place there.
To keep the momentum going, the group started attending events by Shop Mask Free Los Angeles. The Facebook page helped organize “maskless shopping events.” The effort would inevitably lead to a clash with customers or shopkeepers – and an opportunity to create a viral meme claiming discrimination.
Nonono DON’T DO THAT! DO NOT ORGANIZE DISSENT ON ENEMY SYSTEMS, IN ENEMY STRONGHOLDS!
After the first coronavirus vaccine was authorized for emergency use by the FDA in December, Lefkowitz began organizing a protest at Dodger Stadium. He pushed the idea out on a 400-member group on Telegram…
Okay, I guess. I presume Telegram isn’t a front for the fascists.
…and broadcast it on Facebook.
WHERE THE FASCISTS COULDN”T MISS IT!!!!
Alison said she promoted the Dodger rally on Instagram…
And I had just credited her with a speck of wisdom.
…as did the Shop Mask Free Los Angeles Facebook group which at one point had more than 3,000 followers and another Telegram group called California Curfew Breakers. The latter group – before it was banned from Facebook and moved to Telegram – had previously organized protests with Hostetter, the former police chief. One flier for the event said: “Please refrain from wearing Trump/MAGA attire as we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple.”
Lefkowitz says the group planned to show up at 11 a.m. As the group trekked toward the vaccine site, passing out fliers about “toxic chemicals, aborted fetal cells, and nano aluminum inside the vaccines,” the Los Angeles Fire Department closed the site.
As the day devolved into a shouting match between the anti-vaxxers and a handful of counterprotesters, Makowka said she believed – without citing evidence – that her side would prevail because “we have passion and they are paid.”
Yes, they were paid counterprotesters who knew when & where to show up. How did they know? Because fools like Makowka were trending on COINTELPRO’s Twitter feed.
One of the inspirations for the mask-free shopping confrontations is a former administrator at University of California-Irvine named Peggy Hall.
Hall, now a YouTube personality who is a regular speaker at the Orange County board protests, has tailored legal tactics pioneered by the state’s anti-vaccine activists to the conditions of the pandemic.
On social media, an organizer of the Shop Mask Free group – who was arrested this year for confronting a shopkeeper at a Family Dollar – calls her a “forever mentor and fearless leader.”
UC-Riverside professor Carpiano says some of the new influencers like Hall are also profiting off their activism. Alongside selling health serums and survival gear on her website, the Healthy American, Hall offers online legal education seminars at a cost of $39 to $175 for business owners and parents who want to use civil rights and anti-discrimination laws to avoid mask-wearing, testing and vaccination requirements. (Hall disputes Carpiano’s characterization and says he is a Twitter troll who has mischaracterized her work).
We can still date, Peggy, but I’ll sneak out before dawn.
Claiming that vaccination requirements equate to civil rights violations is part of a long-standing playbook for California’s anti-vaccine groups, said Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law who has researched the issue. Now those tactics are being repurposed online with greater effect.
“It’s okay when we do it.”
In an interview, Hall said she was previously involved in animal rescue causes, but really became an activist during the pandemic. The movement, she said, would continue long after it ends.
Oh sh*t, I will NOT be dating Peggy. Thanks for the warning, WaPo.
In hindsight, the scariest thing about the Plandemic is that the economy did NOT collapse when most of the workforce was locked down. That’s how uselessly makework most jobs are these days. I really am doing the work of 10 people, or at least, I’m feeding 10 fat sucking welfare faces.
“It is going to flourish, and it will take the shape and form that makes sense for each individual advocate,” she said. “Some will take it on vaccines. Some will take it on freedom. People will find their own lanes because there is no single rallying cry as there was for Trump.”
She said she does not endorse the tactic of confronting people maskless in stores and did not attend the Capitol rally.
Smarter than an Alison.
Other prominent figures here have also been swept up in the sprawling investigation resulting from the events of Jan. 6, including a model who organized the Beverly Hills rallies.
Hostetter, the former police chief, was part of a Telegram group for Capitol rallygoers called “The California Patriots-DC Brigade,” the indictment said. He allegedly joined rioters that pushed through a line of law enforcement officers guarding the Capitol until he reached the building’s upper West Terrace and shouted, “The people have taken back their house!” The indictment does not accuse Hostetter of entering the Capitol building itself.
So, he was extradited across the entire continent and is now being held in solitary confinement… for misdemeanor unarmed trespass. It’s July and the trials still haven’t started.
At the Board of Supervisors rally in June before his indictment, he told The Post that the mainstream media “had squelched any debate from the other side of this argument.”
“We’re not crazy. We’re not conspiracy theorists. We are not kooks. We are people that love our country,” he said.
And others are there to continue the fight.
Since the initial Dodger Stadium protest on Jan. 31, Lefkowitz has raised his profile. He now plans to start a community market for people who are opposed to government oppression, want to eat non-GMO food and aren’t “poisoned” by the vaccine.
That’s the sort of thing we’re going to need, and I cannot imagine that a black market will not grow up around the unvaxxed as the screws continue to tighten, but Lefkowitz would probably use Facebook to keep track of his vendors.
“You should keep that list offline where the SJWs can’t find it and shut us down.”
“Nah, it’ll be fine. Zuckerberg knows what he’s doing.”
Alison, the makeup artist, suffered a setback when she was temporarily kicked off Instagram after someone reported her content. But she regained thousands of followers after a viral incident in which she filmed herself appearing to be denied coffee by a Starbucks drive-through barista for not wearing a mask.
Alison is not an intentional infiltrator but Karens gonna Karen.
While a formal vote on Orange County’s voluntary vaccination passport was paused until July, Hall and others are now pushing for a county resolution prohibiting any vaccine verification system. They also want an end to California’s state of emergency, which gives Newsom special powers to issue executive orders.
And which Newsom has publicly announced he will never give up. Which means that if these protesters don’t act quickly, Governor ‘No-Ball’ Bruce Jenner will soon have a kill switch for the California economy.
Yes, he’s running against Newsom. And he’s going to win. Because he’s going to get the trannie vote and nobody else gets to vote. We iz Dumbocracy!
In interviews, protesters said they understand the digital passport was billed as voluntary but said they were skeptical it would stay that way and that the county had poorly managed the program.
Katrina Foley was the only one of five Orange County supervisors who voted against pausing the plan.
Since her opposing vote, she has been barraged with hate mail and targeted with social media posts calling her a “worshipper” of Adolf Hitler. Protesters also showed up at her home.
The latter might have been Antifa. Funny thing about destroying peoples’ lives: some people–even on the Left–want their lives back.
“There’s just too many vocal people who have managed to change the narrative from, ‘We’re providing a convenient, voluntary option,’ to ‘This is a mandate and big government is trying to control you,’ ” she said. “This is not about vaccines. This is about a political movement they are trying to build.”
Actually, it’s about a religion. The worship of Government as God, worshiped by the sacrifice of fathers and innocents because Christ didn’t make Himself available a second time.
Please, ye brave malcontents, be also smart enough to not use Facebook and Instagram to organize your cunning strategies against the Deep State. It’s nice that you exist and not nice that I’m still better off without you.
Notice they voted to “pause” the plan, not to censure the plan, reject the plan or declare that it would never be: just to “pause” it – presumably until this blows over and they can force it on us.
Even assuming he originally meant well, how long until he makes the connection between Pedowood, the banksters and his tribe? Only a white man can be trusted to act against his own blood.
I trust the ones who make a sincere conversion to Christianity and condemn their own tribe. Brother Nathaniel, for instance. Not many like him, I know.
As for the right-wingers in SoCal, I know a bit about the local libertarian scene. It’s largely middle-aged and older white single men (both divorced and never married). Some women, some married men, some younger folk, but mostly older, white single men.
How dare the peasants react.
I feel sorry for the landowning farmers I left behind there. They can sell out for tons of money, but it.s not like you can just up and move to a different state and buy a ton of rural land and start farming something else there.
The agrarian lifestyle is dying, and the land is being bought out by urban elites.
“The lone holdout . a Democrat . says the others caved to the pressure.”
Caved to pressure? We used to call that “Representative Democracy”, where the elected officials represented the will of the people.