White Supremacists, Sexists, and Neo-Nazis Lead Protests at the Ohio Statehouse

This is the headline that local media should have run with today, after yet another protest of stay-at-home measures at the Ohio Statehouse.

But they won’t. Because that’s the kind of benefit-of-a-doubt treatment that far-right, majority-white rallies get in the mainstream media.

While photos and reporting by journalists doing their job does help us piece together the politics of the protestors, they are getting a legitimacy and audience that they don’t deserve. The media is not consistently providing the investigative edge that would actually tell readers who the leading protestors are and the horrific world they want to bring into being.

For instance, The Columbus Dispatch today interviewed health experts who explained that it’s common to hear doubt about the seriousness of a virus when counter-measures start to work. That conspiracy theories thrive at this time.

That’s useful to learn.

But the Dispatch needs to emphasize that these are far-right, white supremacist groups organizing these protests, attempting to draw people in and build their base.

The Republican Governor DeWine, the main target of the protests, is toeing the line at times because these are, in fact, his constituents.

But the press shouldn’t give them so much coverage — and soft-pedal it when they do.

(Update: There are exceptions, like this April 18 piece by The Guardian called “Thousands of Americans backed by right wing donors gear up for protests.” A great example of what the press can do.)

This rhetoric of liberty and individual freedom is driven by groups like the Proud Boys, by anti-abortionists, and by people who couldn’t care less that black and brown people — those who are dying at higher rates than anyone else — will be the first to feel the brunt of a new wave of cases caused by negligence.

To ask when things will become safer again, to ask what processes we should follow to ease restrictions — that is legitimate.

To demand that the government and institutions take care of people losing jobs and businesses because of the coronavirus crisis — that makes sense.

But as is evident from the reporting and the photographs (see photos below), the politics projected at the anti-stay-at-home Ohio protests — and the ones in Michigan, Texas, Kentucky, Utah, North Carolina, and elsewhere —are those of the far-right.

Placards, slogans and speeches reveal who is actually leading these protests:

• the “small government” warriors who see DeWine as breaking from Republican norms by issuing state-wide orders for closing schools and businesses,
• the anti-abortionists angry that abortion care remains classified as an essential medial procedure
• the far-right gun fanatics seeing this as a recruitment opportunity
• the Confederate-flag-waving racists
• the anti-vaxxers who have repeatedly put faith in conspiracy theories over the science of public health
• the right-wing politicians like Melissa Ackison, pandering for votes

and on and on.

And all of this with the White Supremacist in the White House egging them on, interested only in his short-term political gains and the profits of his ruling-class pals.

On top of the fears of a premature opening of a country that is not nearly ready in terms of testing and contact tracing capacity, in other words, we have the danger that these far-right groups will expand their base by preying on the worries of people — unemployed and anxious about their futures.

At the very least, the press has a responsibility to be clear about who the forces behind these protests really are.

There are, in fact, actual struggles against power that we can support.

Let’s get behind the protest actions of frontline healthcare workers, the strikes of warehouse workers, and the struggles of millions of women — particularly women of color — whose jobs have been overwhelmingly marked as essential:

One in three jobs held by women has been designated as essential, according to a New York Times analysis of census data crossed with the federal government’s essential worker guidelines. Nonwhite women are more likely to be doing essential jobs than anyone else.

Let’s champion the work of groups like FreeThemAll614 in Columbus, Ohio, which is fighting for the release and safety of those incarcerated in Franklin County jails and the Juvenile Detention Center. The coronavirus is raging through Ohio prisons: there is no time to waste.

These strikes, protests, and actions — centering on the most vulnerable — emerge from a vision of the world that I can relate to. A world I would want to live in.

Whereas the anti-stay-at-home protesters stand for a society in which I and mine have no place.

Photos of the Ohio Statehouse protest on April 18 from The Columbus Dispatch: