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What happened when Black Lives Matter protests came to small town Ohio

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Protesters had only begun assembling peacefully in Idaho when a Facebook page for retired police officers advised its followers to stay on high alert.

“We will protect our neighborhoods,” it vowed.

So when early reports about potential violence surfaced a day later — claiming “ANTIFA agitators” were storming the state this week — scores of residents took to the streets. Armed with ­military-style assault rifles, they stood guard in places such as Coeur d’Alene, a resort town of 50,000 on a lake in northwest Idaho.

“Enough of us swung into action, and put the word out on social media and elsewhere, that we were able to deploy and meet any violent elements that might come here from out of state,” said Trevor Treller, a sommelier and one of the armed locals. Treller, 48, said he mobilized after hearing from trusted voices that ­“antifa types” were on the move.

It would not prove to be true.

As vigils and protest actions unfolded in Idaho this week, local officials across the state confirmed that not a single participant was known to have defiled a home or storefront in the name of “antifa,” a loose label attributed to far-left activists. Many of the rumors about violent protests originated from dubious Facebook posts, often shared widely and rarely debunked, residents there said.

The raft of myths and misstatements that triggered visceral reactions throughout Idaho illustrates how long-standing grievances have fused with the vast reach of social media during protests that have swept through the country — in big cities and rural towns — after the killing of a black man in the custody of Minneapolis police last week. Though many of the protests have been peaceful pleas to redress racial injustice, scenes of burning buildings and trashed businesses — often not at the hands of the demonstrators — have fueled the perception of a country under siege.

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But discussion about antifa has reverberated especially widely across Facebook, including on a page that bills itself as “North Idaho News.” The page acknowledges in fine print that it is “not affiliated with any real news company.” On Monday, though, it claimed to have “credible information that violent rioters, not just peaceful protesters, have plans to come to Coeur d’Alene.” Reached Wednesday via Facebook message, the unidentified operator of North Idaho News declined to comment.

The post quickly gained widespread attention, troubling the likes of Chris Dawson, a retired police officer from Santa Clarita, Calif., and the president of the ex-law-enforcement group on ­Facebook that put its members on high alert. His Facebook page shared the notice, and Dawson said he had been “given information that antifa would be coming in from Portland or Seattle.” Amplifying their fears was the destruction that marked some demonstrations in neighboring states.

Soon, armed residents began patrolling the streets of cities including Coeur d’Alene, where Native American tribes once battled the Army and federal troops crushed mining strikes. An infamous neo-Nazi compound was bulldozed nearby in 2001 after a legal battle.

David Hagar, a captain in the city’s police department, described the gatherings this week as peaceful. Asked whether antifa-affiliated individuals had targeted the city, Hagar said, “Not that we’ve identified.”

“I think a lot of it was fueled by social media,” Hagar said.

Dawson acknowledged in an interview that there was “no concrete evidence that was going to occur.” His intention, he said, was to tell his network to “be prepared in case something goes wrong.”

Similar rumors gripped Payette County, a rural expanse on Idaho’s western edge. One post shared widely on Facebook said antifa had dispatched a “plane load of people” arriving from Seattle, targeting Idaho’s rural regions. “The sheriff in Payette has already spotted some of them,” the notice continued.

Phone calls soon flooded the sheriff’s office, leaving local law enforcement perplexed.

“It indicated maybe we had given some warning to our citizens, which we hadn’t done,” said Lt. Andy Creech. The original Facebook post had been shared more than 200 times before local authorities put out an alert of their own, clarifying: “The information in this social media post is not accurate.”

Facebook declined to comment on the proliferation of falsehoods in Idaho. But a spokesman, Andy Stone, said in a statement that the company generally has been “working to find and remove violating activity since the protests started.”

The false notion continues to have traction with local paramilitary groups, including the far-right Three Percenters, who draw their name from the disputed claim that just 3 percent of American colonists were fighting at any one time during the revolt against the British crown. An Idaho branch said in a Facebook post Sunday that it had “credible intel” about plans for an antifa-induced riot in Boise. No such riot took place.

Treller, who left California five years ago for Coeur d’Alene, said reports of extremist activity were “quadruple verified,” including by “those who monitor some of the communications going on between these groups.” He could not produce the communications.

“Several of them were going to be coming in from out of state, particularly from Washington and Oregon, in hopes of causing trouble of some indeterminate kind,” he said. “Possibly rioting, possibly looting, certainly demonstrating, which can lead to those sort of things if it’s the wrong kind of people demonstrating, like the more radical elements of Black Lives Matter or left-wing extremists.”

The apparent intention, Treller said, was to “strike a symbolic blow against a state that doesn’t cultivate these sorts of unpleasant and not-very-patriotic movements.”

“The fact that we appeared in such great numbers, and with much more efficient weapons than they have, could be the reason it did not happen,” he said.

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Originally posted by AdagioM:
Oh, Coeur d’Alene. One of 3 towns in which I’ve been racially harassed.