The big news for two days has been the “protests” of state governors’ stay-at-home orders and mandatory business closings to try to contain the novel coronavirus which, as of today, has taken more than 40,000 American lives. The protests started last week in Lansing, Michigan,

2/Wednesday, April 15, when demonstrators descended on the state Capitol to protest the “statists” they said were destroying the economy and taking away their liberties. On Friday morning, Trump tweeted that people needed to “LIBERATE” Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia,all states

5/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

3/with Democratic governors. Then, Saturday, the Fox News Channel advertised “emerging rallies/protests to reopen economy” and, lo and behold, there they were on television tonight: protests in Colorado, Illinois, Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Washington.
These protests are

4/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

6/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

7/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.”
The Fox News Channel personalities cheered

8/on the events, with Jeanine Pirro saying of the Michigan protesters: “God bless them, it’s going to happen all over the country;” Laura Ingraham tweeting a video of it, saying: “Time to get your freedom back;” and Tucker Carlson interviewing a representative of the Michigan .

9/Conservative Council on his show before the person did another interview on “Fox & Friends” the next day. On Saturday, FNC ran graphics showing where protests were planned across the country from April 18 to May 2.

These are not spontaneous, grassroots protests. They are

10/political operations designed to divert attention from the Trump administration’s poor response to thepandemic. Even more, though, they are designed tokeep the American public dividedso that we donot protest the extraordinary economic inequality the pandemic has highlighted.

11/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: twothirds of Americans are worried that lockdowns will