But this was not a calmer spring. A week had passed since a Black man named George Floyd died while a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. People who had been trapped at home during a tense pandemic spilled into the streets, first in Minneapolis and then in other cities and even tiny towns. They marched and carried signs and chanted that Black Lives Matter. A much smaller number looted liquor stores and burned police precincts. The president tweeted threats—“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”—and smeared all protesters, including millions of peaceful Americans, as the Radical Left, “thugs,” or, most menacingly, antifa, an ideology ascribed to a diffuse group of antifascists who sometimes stoke chaos and aren't opposed to fighting the far right with violence. Twitter, Facebook, and Nextdoor crackled with claims that antifa was coming to suburbs and rural towns. They were coming on buses, on planes, wearing black, coming, always, from somewhere else.
On the night of May 31, a Sunday, a new Twitter account styled @Antifa_Us issued a call to arms: “Tonight's the night, Comrades. Tonight we say ‘Fuck The City’ and we move into the residential areas... the white hoods.... and we take what's ours …#BlacklivesMaters #FuckAmerica.” A brown hand emoji raised a middle finger. Donald Trump Jr. posted it to his Instagram. “Absolutely insane,” he remarked.
If the tweet sounded just a little on the nose, like shark chum tossed to a certain kind of white person, it was. The next day, Twitter deleted @Antifa_Us; it was not, as advertised, an antifa account, but rather one secretly run by a US-based white-supremacist group called Identity Evropa, one of the organizers of the infamous 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
On the day of the march, June 3, just hours before Big Bertha would roll into Forks in need of a battery, Larson cued up his Facebook Live. He walked by shops downtown, narrating the scene of people striding down the sidewalk carrying Black Lives Matter signs. “Sequim just got a busload of people ... They're not breaking windows yet.” He also claimed to see out-of-towner antifa, 25 to 30 of them, pointing to people with skateboards and training his phone's camera on an occasional bicyclist whizzing by. “Head to Sequim, boys!” he told his followers. “All patriots, call to arms right now!” Over the next 50 minutes, he kept ringing the alarm. “The fuckery is here!” “It looks like Clallam County is going to get hit tonight.” “There's the antifa group. You can totally smell the wanting-to-break-shit-up off of their body. They look sketchy as shit.”
He told his viewers to buy bear mace and “less lethals” at Freds Guns. He said to fetch their gear, their long guns, and meet him at City Hall. A dozen followers showed up at the Sequim protest with pistols, some asking protesters for ID. At least one was carrying an assault rifle. Rumors about buses spread across the county—a guy called 911 about seeing a yellow bus at a gas station between Sequim and Forks, “all of them in black,” cutting off the call frantically with “I gotta meet people!”
Dan Larson (no relation to Seth), a retired logger who lives in Forks, heard the rumor from a text. A friend had seen on social media that antifa was near; the citizenry needed to be warned. It was like the ride of Paul Revere, except on Facebook, and Larson thought he better light a lantern. He posted about busloads of rioters in Sequim and said that “Forks could be next.” A former prison guard in town joined the cry. “Forks, let's get ready to rumble. Lock and load.”
Facebook shares spiked. A City Hall staffer relayed that her husband had heard from truckers on CB radio that busloads of rioters were speeding their way. People called the True Value, urging the owner to batten down its inventory. Some doubted the chatter. The town of 3,500 people was known for two things: logging and as the moody backdrop for the Twilight vampire-romance novels and films. What would antifa want in Forks? To loot sultry Edward and Jacob posters from the souvenir shop?
But then Big Bertha lumbered into the Thriftway parking lot, proof, it seemed, that the rumor was true. Pickups, SUVs, and an ATV circled the 36-foot Trojan horse. A few men approached to talk with the driver, a young brown-skinned man who introduced himself as Tyrone Chevall. He was wearing a black T-shirt and red pants and told them that he and his family had come to camp. A white woman wearing a dark sweatshirt and capri pants stepped off the bus and walked into the grocery store. People loitered in groups, leaned on their car hoods, pistols on hips, watching.
When the woman returned to the bus, it pulled out onto the town's main street. Trucks in the lot followed. A police officer studied the rare sight of a bona fide bottleneck in Forks: 20 vehicles, heading north to the city line.
The officer had heard the antifa rumors and stopped to talk to one of the men who had peeled off from the caravan following the bus. The officer told the man that no antifa were coming, that the rumor was false, but the man sniped, “Bullshit, I've got Three Percenters that posted video of buses dropping off antifa in Sequim for the exact bus that was here.” He insisted that 50 people were on board, but the dark windows made it hard to know for sure. (Three Percenters are a national far-right militia that arose after Barack Obama was elected; the organization says it is pro-government, “so long as the government abides by the Constitution.”) The man couldn't find the video for the officer, but he did show him the Facebook profile of Tyrone Chevall, the driver who'd introduced himself earlier in the parking lot. Another man told the officer that the bus had headed out to the A Road, an old logging byway north of town that leads into a federal forest. He said that the locals were “watching it.”
by Lauren Smiley, Wired | Read more:
Image: Ian Allen
