How a tea party-linked group plans to turbocharge lockdown protests

The Convention of States, an activist network with tea party origins, did not originate the coronavirus lockdown protests across the country. But it’s got a plan to take them to the next level.

Publicly, the group claims no affiliation with the organizers agitating for state governments to lift social-distancing measures. Yet behind the scenes and on their social media channels, the group’s leaders have made no secret of their desire to boost the protests, if not elevate them to a bigger, more professionalized and media-friendly network with a more broadly appealing message.

Over the past several weeks, the group has scooped up dozens of URLs for sites aimed at organizing future protests in key states — OpenWINow.com, opencalifornianow.com, openfloridanow.com, openarizonanow.com. On private forums, activists affiliated with the Convention of States are coordinating their own protests. And in Facebook livestreams, the organization's leader has been advising protesters to avoid divisive features that marked some early lockdown protests: stand apart from each other, bring hand sanitizer, and, most importantly, do not openly carry guns, even if you’re protesting in an open-carry state.

“You want to create a narrative that says, ‘Those people look like they're using common sense. I want to be one of them,’” said Mark Meckler, president of the Convention of States, in a Tuesday livestream.

The group is also directing protesters to channel their energy into political activity, launching a website, “Open the States,” which allows users to send automated petitions to the White House, Congress, governors and state legislators. The site also links to Facebook groups across the country that are organizing protests, with the largest ones — boasting membership rates into the hundreds of thousands — targeting states run by Democrat governors.

The protest organizers appear to be taking the cues. Many of these Facebook groups include rules that reflect Convention of States recommendations, like not posting coronavirus memes or conspiracy theories.

Taken together, it’s a slate of tactics that indicates protests in the coming weeks may only grow in size, sophistication and coordination. And it reveals an effort among conservative leaders to tap in to growing anger as lockdowns across the country have forced over 26 million Americans to file for unemployment. As the debate intensifies over when and how states should gradually reopen their economies, groups in more than a dozen states are planning rallies for the coming days.

The tactics are reminiscent of the early tea party movement, an inchoate collection of populist anger following the 2008 recession that quickly coalesced into a professionally organized, if loosely built movement fueled by money from conservative donors. Meckler himself was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and pioneered many of these tactics.

“It kind of feels like deja vu to me,” Meckler told POLITICO in an interview. “There's all these groups independently doing their own thing, but at the same time doing the same things and taking cues from each other, clearly”; such as giving themselves the same names, like “Reopen” and “Liberate” these states. “That’s the very definition of a movement—that people start to pick up the same ideas, same terminology.”

All he was doing, he said, was giving them tools and advice.

“When people are engaged in politics, the question is: Do they want to accomplish their goals, or they just want to go out there and do crazy stuff? And so you can have the right end goal, but you can still act crazy in pursuing that goal. I'm not in favor of that.”

But while this push is similar — leveraging an American suspicion of big government and elites dictating individual behavior — it’s a radical departure for the Convention of States. Since its founding in 2014, the group’s goal has been to get Republicans in power in at least 34 state legislatures, persuade them to call a “convention of states” — as outlined in Article V of the Constitution — and rewrite the country’s founding document to reduce the federal government’s power.

“It does strike me as very strange that a group that claims to be devoted to turning power back to the states is protesting in an area where the states are leading rather than the federal government,” said David Super, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University who has written about the Convention of States’ efforts.

Meckler pushed back against the idea that the group was acting differently. “We've always believed in taking power away from centralized government and returning it to the citizens. And one method for doing that is to take power away from the federal government and return it to the states. But we've also always promoted that people could be involved in their state politics and reclaim their power at the state and local level as well.”

This time, he added, the states were playing the role that he always worried the federal government would. “Unfortunately, the state legislatures and mostly the governors and the municipalities have overstepped their bounds and are doing things that a lot of the people really don't like. “

The Convention of States’ efforts are among several national conservative groups, such as FreedomWorks, that have helped organize anti-lockdown protests across the country. Others, such as the Koch family juggernaut Americans for Prosperity, have declined to participate. “The question is — what is the best way to get people back to work? We don’t see protests as the best way to do that,” Emily Seidel, CEO of Americans for Prosperity, recently said in a statement.

Meckler said he and the groups he supported were not working with the Kochs, and understood why they would publicly decline to be involved, citing his early, underfunded experience in the Tea Party Patriots.

“What happens is when people see something is becoming successful, that's when the wealthier people invest in it. They're smart and they don't invest in something nascent because they're worried it's going to go off the rails,” he recalled, adding that he wouldn’t be surprised if they changed their mind: “At some point, they're going to take advantage of the momentum.”

At the White House, President Donald Trump has mostly backed the protesters, declining to express any concerns about the large rallies, which have not always adhered to the government’s social-distancing guidelines. He has even tweeted out calls to “liberate” certain states, like Virginia and Minnesota, that have had protests targeting Democratic governors.

“They seem to be protesters that like me and respect this opinion, and my opinion is the same as just about all of the governors,” Trump said during a recent briefing.

The medical community, including Trump’s own scientific advisers, have been less sanguine. Public health experts worry that lifting social-distancing guidelines now would result in another spike in coronavirus cases, and, ultimately, an even longer economic recovery period.

“So what you do if you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you’re going to set yourself back," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease specialist and a main medical voice on the White House coronavirus task force, during a recent appearance on “Good Morning America.”

The Convention of States officially encompasses several tax-exempt, 501c(3) nonprofit groups that Meckler runs. It was founded with a $500,000 assist from the conservative megadonor Mercer family. Since then, the organization has received significant funding from Donors Trust, a conservative fundraising network primarily affiliated with the Koch family. And it has gathered a slate of endorsements from high-profile conservative politicians like Sens. Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, popular conservative pundits like Glenn Beck and Ben Shapiro and former Republican Govs. Bobby Jindal and Mike Huckabee, according to a recent copy of their activist handbook.

The group aims to build vast political networks in at least 40 states, across at least 3,000 state legislative districts, each captained by a district coordinator responsible for recruiting at least 100 people to their cause.

Though their regularly stated goal is to relentlessly petition their state legislatures to call for an Article V convention, the coronavirus crisis presents a unique opportunity for their movement, said Jay Riestenberg of Common Cause, who has monitored the group and its involvement with other right-wing groups focused on state legislatures.

“The Convention of States is interested in showing any type of image or anything that shows that people don’t like their government. I mean, that is their end goal, to overthrow the federal government and rewrite the Constitution,” Riestenberg said. “So this is a perfect opportunity for them to show that.”

And Convention of States repeatedly hammers home to its activists that a message goes across better with a degree of professionalism. In recent days, Meckler and his deputies have been dispersing tips on how to protest effectively and present a good image.

During a recent livestream on the Convention of States’ Facebook page, Mark Ruthenberg, executive vice president for the affiliated Center for Self-Governance, told viewers that it was crucial that they maintain a 5-foot distance from each other.

“It looks so much bigger when people are so far spread out,” he said. “So it just makes sense that we maintain our distance, that we show common sense because then the government will most likely say,‘Oh yeah, I guess these guys know what they’re doing.’”

The group has also used the protests to help fundraising.

In recent weeks, Meckler and his affiliated groups have amped up their outreach, launching a campaign in memory of the late senator Tom Coburn to fund their efforts to flip legislatures.

According to one fundraising email, an unnamed donor has offered to match every donation, in addition to an initial $50,000 donation. Meckler himself has started a podcast, where he rails against governors and health officials for being too overcautious. And he launched a private, subscription-only social network for his fans to “keep in touch with other humans” in a place “without the censorship, data mining or trolls.”

In the event that Facebook bans groups for promoting rallies that directly go against public health laws, Rutherberg said that the Open the States project is the organization’s backup plan.

“Should Facebook continue what they're doing — and they're literally working with the governors to find out what the policy is and they're trying to shut [us] down,” he said during a Convention of States Facebook livestream on Tuesday. “So what we're trying to do is we're trying to create other ways to communicate with people about what we're doing.”

As for the URLs, Meckler said that he’d purchased them just in case. “I don't know if we'll ever get around to using those. I don't have an actual purpose for them right now.”

The Open the States project launched its activist forums on Thursday. Already, the Convention of States coordinators have started advertising their own protests.

Joanne Laufenberg, the Wisconsin director of Convention of States, posted that she was organizing a protest in Madison this weekend, as well as several requests to keep things looking orderly.

“Please social distance,” she wrote. “Staying in our cars is even better. We don't need to give the ‘opposers’ any extra ammunition to criticize us. Trust me, I know all the reasons — they are full of it. But let's consider the optics.”