TOTALLY NOT A CULT:

In mid-April 2020, it appeared, a new movement was rising to express frustration with the restrictions and uncertain endpoint to the pandemic, and the economic toll the lockdown has caused.

In the space of several days, there were protests in a dozen states, ranging from a crowd of more than 2,000 who gathered in Olympia, Washington, to several dozen in Annapolis, Maryland.

The available evidence suggests that the demonstrations were organized by paid political operatives using Facebook and new websites to encourage conservatives to protest in specific places against specific governors who had imposed strong public health restrictions on economic activity. This context indicates that one real intention of the protests was to create the illusion of an organic movement that had arisen to object to the restrictions. Evidence is to the contrary: Polling shows that just 12% of Americans think their local restrictions have gone too far - and 26% think they don't go far enough.

Sparked by citizen inquiries first posted on Reddit, independent investigative reporter Brian Krebs has confirmed that most of the web domains that had been registered around the idea of "reopening" the economy belonged to a very small number of people. He used a cybersecurity search tool to search for "any and all domains registered in the past month that begin with "reopen" and end in ".com." He found that many of them were created on the same day.

He found that many of these websites, whose registration records you can see yourself at Whois.com, were owned by anti-gun-control groups that are run by the same family of brothers that organized the demonstrations through Facebook groups they run.

Several others of the "reopen" websites were registered with addresses or phone numbers used by longstanding conservative enterprises like Freedom Works. A surprising number belonged to an activist who told Mother Jones that he registered the domains to keep conservatives from using them to counter the recommendation of public health officials.

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