Ritually Essential Walking: Seeing, Reading, and Listening in an Anti-Lockdown Protest
The year 2020 can be defined as the year of the protest. Whether it be racial injustices, the violation of individual rights on account of draconian COVID lockdown policies, or the most recent siege on the US Capitol, these acts of (un)civil unrest by no shortage ripped the bandage from the flesh of our society to reveal its gaping wounds. However, the portrayal of the persons involved in these protests and riots were not presided over by a logical assessment of grievance validity, but rather read and constructed through hyper-partisan, moralizing lenses thus resulting in the (mis)characterization of BLM and Antifa demonstrations as peaceful, just, and pure, and anti-lockdown demonstrators as selfish and threats to public safety…the irony is not lost. This by no means is unfounded in the contemporary rhetorical convention from which has stemmed an eclipsing of usually conservative, usually white, and usually Trump-supporting individuals with broad strokes of contrarian animus from the now-banal charges of isms to murderers-by-COVID. In the act of these brazen reductions and sophistic aspersions, I posit that the root of such behaviors is credit to a disregard—willful or otherwise—for these individuals’ standpoint and results in testimonial injustices (by credibility deficit) onset by prejudices contending that those on the right are uneducated, conspiratorial, religious zealots. However, this prescription does not demonstrate the complexity of the conservative mindset that tends to see more threat in disease than their liberal counterparts which perhaps renders their anti-lockdown behaviors curious —of which is hopefully clarified here within.
Regardless of which side of the aisle one finds himself, the grievances that founded these protests, demonstrations, and riots are real, complex, and human and therefore should be examined as such. Contrary to this point, the information that the public has been fed by the media has been less than accurate, objective, or forthright and arguably only led to increased political tensions and misunderstanding. Thus, an anthropological approach to these matters is of crucial beneficence as the praxis of virtuous listening and experiential “traveling” are inherent to the field. As but only a snapshot of the overarching civil-unrest apparatus, this essay examines a California anti-lockdown protest with generous eyes so as to fully understand the subjects setting forth their grievance, how it is articulated and rationalized, and most importantly, the sociocultural implications that can be gleaned by engaging with these interlocutors.
The content put forth in this essay is compiled from field notes taken as a part of my doctoral methods sequence in December 2020. Names of interlocutors have been anonymized. It is of significant note that many of the interpretations woven from my original field notes had been authored before the Capitol incident on 6 January 2021 and therefore such a lens is not applied here within. Rather than dramatically updating the content of the original analysis, I invoke a Husserlian phenomenological orientation and contend that the experiential value of the observations at the time has a valuable spatiotemporal purity that stands to be lost if it were to be revised through the prejudicial lens of hindsight.
Organizing
This ethnographic experience was rather interesting from a planning perspective. In the wake of the omnipresent pandemic and protests, I was curious to investigate the politics of such. Namely, there have been the BLM demonstration, Trump rallies, and a slew of COVID-related demonstrations with regards to curfew, lockdowns, and restaurant closures. On 28 November, there was the “curfew breaker” protest in Huntington Beach which, judging by the recordings from social media, was a well-attended event and largely underscored by political expression either for Trump or against Gov. Gavin Newsom. Then on 5 December, restaurant/bar owner Angela Marsden organized a demonstration in front of the home of Sheila Kuehl, the city board member who voted to support stricter lockdown restrictions on restaurants, subsequent to which the supervisor was observed dining-out at a neighborhood eatery. But it is important to note that these events are not typically well-advertised, and thus several questions arise: How are these circles of information constructed? Who does one need to follow to be “in the know”? and Which events are legitimate and will yield fruitful data? As I began to dig into the troves of potential brokers of such information, the politics of organizing on the right (as I will generalize) seems nebulous and ad hoc. Fortuitously, I came across a posting for a “Lockdown Protest” (LDP) which took place on Sunday, 6 December 2020 in front of Mayor Garcetti’s home in Los Angeles. The budding organization primarily seemed to be spurring in the US, particularly LA and NY, but had been positioned as a global, non-partisan movement. However, the account from which this event was sponsored did not seem entirely convincing (few followers, little cross-platform posting, few retweets/shares of the event). Naturally, I was skeptical—pursuant to the aforementioned questions—about attempting to use this event as a potential field site. If in fact this nature of organizing is true, then this seeming lack of typical organization is understandable; however, it was also indicated by one of the event “promoters” that previous shares of related content had been banned by Facebook (of which I could not verify).
The Optics
The LDP was scheduled to commence at 6pm. On Twitter and the limited website, from which I consulted to acquire information, the event was positioned as a “flashlight mob” for which attendees were requested to bring a flashlight as a way to purportedly “send a signal”. Upon arriving approximately 15-minutes before the official start of the event, a moderately sizable gaggle of individuals had already begun to congregate on the sidewalk of the dimly lit street as a news van lay in wait in front of the extremely well-manicured Tudor-style home of the LA mayor. Police and security officers (approximately 4-6 in the immediate area) observed from a distance only to occasionally request from a cruiser PA that demonstrators not stand in the streets—a request that would be made from time-to-time throughout the evening. As the time drew nearer, a diverse crowd of at least 70 people had drawn, a number that slowly increased to approximately 100 as the night went on. Throughout the night, an equal proportion of men and women were present. This represented a range of racial and ethnic groups that seamlessly melded into the congregation. Age-wise, a spectrum from young adults to octogenarians (a few attendees arrived with their children later) although the majority of persons appeared to be middle-aged and middle class. Unsurprisingly, masks were the exception, not the rule. Although the presumed middle-classedness of the protesting group compartmentalizes the attendance of this event on one axis, the overall optics (as also evidenced by footage from the Huntington Beach curfew protest) were out of joint with the mainstay narrative of lockdown opponents being portrayed as a mostly homogenous group of unempathetic, privileged, white, Karens. Rather, the group embodied—though controversial—a particular anti-lockdown and anti-COVID sentiment predicated on narrative, technocratic skepticism, constitutional rights, accountable governments, and life.
American flags and Gadsden flags were buttressed by DIY signs made from poster board and marker. One woman brought a surplus of signs to share. Messages included: “Garcetti hates Angelinos”, “Newsom is a tyrant”, “Your obedience is prolonging this nightmare”, and a group favorite, “Make Orwell fiction again” donned by an older woman decked out in all manners of kitsch. While there were a couple of Tweets that requested that attendees refrain from bringing political paraphernalia, there nonetheless were several MAGA hats and other Trump adjacent merchandise in addition to one man distributing “Democrats are EVIL” stickers towards the end of the event. If there were Democrat or more liberal attendees, they did not make themselves visible, nor—with the exception of the stickers—was there evident generalized admonishment of democrat voters, only of officials, namely Newsom and Garcetti (or “Gar-shitty” as one participant had taken to calling him). Needless to say, it can be safely assumed that the majority of persons in attendance found themselves somewhere on the political spectrum from libertarian to staunchly republican. Despite the recurring narrativization of the Trump or republican base, the LDP dispels—in conjunction with the 2020 election data—the notion of a homogeneous, white-male machine and reconstitutes it as a variegated group bound by similar ideological stances.
The Convocation
As we waited for the strike of 6, various chatter of hot-button political topics such as defunding the police could be heard. Initially, there was no apparent direction, until one man, John, rallied everyone into a rather tight-knit circle. John, a rather tall and lean fellow wearing a cognac leather jacket and skinny jeans, opened by explaining that the purpose of LDP was to “send a global signal” to political leaders in addition to outlining the social media campaign strategy whilst making a quip about censorship. Moments later he was joined by Dr. Simone Gold (the person from whose account I discovered the LDP event), who led the group in prayer. The act of prayer in a setting of assembled strangers—while not an uncommon ritual—ostensibly serves to simultaneously act as an invocation of unity, community, and solidarity while also setting the scene in a particular Judeo-Christian framework that perhaps does not undermine the likely existence of differing religious or non-religious observations among a mass of diverse individuals. But perhaps it is not the denomination of religion that enforces the unity onset by the prayer but the act in and of itself that appeals to a collectively held value of tradition, orthodoxy, or accountability that signals and codifies that one is amongst friends. In her prayer Gold spoke precisely. It was by no means rehearsed, but it was evident that she was aiming to find the right vernacular stating of the group: “we are warriors…we are not afraid”. Following the benediction, a short administrative brief was given in which John and Gold underscored the expectation to keep the protest peaceful and lawful. Particularly, throughout the night John was consistent in conducting the procession of the circle of attendees so as not to violate what I presume to be loitering statutes. Such a ground rule is not unique to this LDP event. Similar statements can be heard in clips from Marsden’s protest event. In the wake of the contentious riots associated with BLM and Antifa activists in Seattle, Chicago, New York, and Kenosha, lockdown and other anti-COVID protesters seemingly employ this subscription to lawfulness as an implicit castigation of the narrativization imparted by mainstream media outlets and certain (usually Democrat) political leaders with regard to the BLM and Antifa demonstrators compared to that of the lockdown/anti-COVID demonstrators.
Ritually Essential Walking
Shortly after the inaugural procession began John, in true picket-line fashion, began to teach the “Demand Chant”, an echo-form tercet that went: We do not consent/ We will unite and rise against/We the people make this end and the “Response Chant”, a couplet in which John would shout “Save lives” and the mass would respond “Stop the lockdown” although the ‘the’ was removed out of simplicity sake. This notwithstanding, the response chant would frequently result in uncoordinated structure and was eventually altered in cadence by one male attendee to a more rhythmic and repetitive form of “Save lives; Stop lockdown”.Though considerably more vehement, the chanting accompanied by the circumambulation under the orange glows cast by the dim streetlamps and Garcetti’s sconces bore mild resemblance to Buddhists’ processions about the stupa, yet the enrapturing contrast of bright, strobing LED flashlights distinguish this procession as an animated process rather than a meditative one. This act of “essential walking” as one middle-aged, white male participant jokingly called it, was expressive rather than contemplative. It was an act of defiance rather than reconciliation. It was an act that was posited as a repudiation of this perceived pandemic samsara rather than a means to surrender to it. However, it was not the circumambulation that generated and maintained as Durkheim terms in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the social “effervescence”, rather this was interestingly imparted by the numerous instances of motorists passing by and blaring their car horns as a semblance of support. On one occasion, a gentleman in a black pick-up truck gave an impromptu rallying speech from a bull horn out of the driver’s window while he waited for the traffic light to change.
The protest seemed to act as a social occasion. Conversations and introductions were being spontaneously made, signs and textual apparel became a catalyst for conversations and off-the-cuff photo-ops. The elderly woman donning US-flag novelty sunglasses and the “Make Orwell Fiction Again” sign was especially popular. In a similar vein to Gold’s description of the participants as “warriors”, conversation and the speech act (in this instance I am considering the car honk as a form of non-verbal speech act) was the life-force of the group. Namely, the speech acts employed harkened to principles of consent of the governed, freedom (often framed as technocratic skepticism), and history (with references to both Pearl Harbor and the Alamo being made, although in my estimations these were inappropriately leveraged in the contexts/instances in which they were invoked). These elements of the speech act and the invocation of such elements by many of the protesters invites the consideration of the state of contemporary conservative and liberal philosophy. While reverence for history is surely the traditional conservative MO, the immense skepticism of the government as it stands slightly confounds this categorization wholesale as such perspectival roots are perhaps the consequence of the elision of liberal and conservative ideologies or it is the glimpses of what Jerry Muller, in What is Conservative Social and Political Thought, outlines as “radical conservatism” at play.
Their Protests and Ours
As previously mentioned, the organization of this event seemed incongruous when compared to demonstrations staged by established organizations/movements such as BLM. However, this may be due to the newness of the LDP format. In order to orchestrate media coverage and yield such turnout is indicative of some functional form of organizing. Unlike the police-brutality protests and demonstrations that generally unify under the banner of #BLM and to some extent “defund the police”, the anti-lockdown demonstration as a genre seems to be loose conglomerates of simply ideologically similar demonstrations. For example the Huntington Beach event was framed as the “curfew breakers” and was accompanied by vast swathes of rowdy attendees decked-out in Trump gear versus the protests specifically for restaurant owners under the banner “open LA”. Similar to the latter, the LDP was rather tame. With some political paraphernalia against the request of the organizers, the most aggressive acts were participants shining their flashlights at Garcetti’s windows every so often or attempting to yell through his gate intercom. The “Open LA” and the “Recall Newsom” elements seem to be consistent across these events in small portions. At the LDP, leaflets advertising for the next Open LA protest at Supervisor Kuehl’s home were distributed in addition to several women working diligently to gain signatories for a “Recall Newsom" petition. Interestingly, the women operating the petition clipboard were very in-tuned to process, aptly explaining that online signatures were unofficial and meticulously ensured that the in-person signatories fill out the information precisely to code. The messy amalgamation of grassroots tactics on one hand and a hyper-orderly structure on the other, place these anti-lockdown protests in a precarious situation inasmuch as this lack of cohesion —in theory—safeguards against movement cooption by fringe behavior, a downfall incurred by the largely unified positioning of the BLM demonstrations.
COVID Narratives
Officially, the event only lasted about an hour; however, people stayed longer simply to chat, take photos, or wrap-up their social media live-streams with informal “interviews”. From time-to-time there were attempts to rejuvenate the hype with “U-S-A” chants to little avail. I used this time to try to capture more insights from the participants since during the event I had been in a state of observation thinking through the present happenings. It is in these ad hoc conversations that narratives and the invocation of the Narrative —that is, the MSM/ ‘official’ story of the pandemic— becomes a recurrent instrument by which these anti-lockdown attendees rationalized their stances even the ones that hinge on conspiratorial side. First, I overheard a group of people chatting about COVID and hydroxychloroquine. It was a man (Mark, unmasked, mid-to-late-40s) and a woman (Jill, wearing a mask, early-to-mid-30s). The woman began to bemoan her work at a warehouse and had mentioned her skepticism on the efficacy of COVID testing. I used this as a way-in by regaling my university’s COVID testing policy for on-campus students to join their conversation. This interaction sediments the form of what I will term the COVID narrative typically structured as a personal anecdote that evolves into commentary about skepticism of the Narrative and frames all of it in some overarching notion of Americanism and freedom. The woman had regaled that she had essentially gone about her normal life and had not contracted COVID. The man agreed and divulged that he had been taking hydroxychloroquine and was a living example—so to speak—that the Narrative was blown out of proportion. By this time, we had been joined by another woman (Sarah, mid-to-late 30s) who wore a face-shield and had a medical mask resting on her chin who interjected that hydroxychloroquine was indeed safe and that COVID was “engineered” and “unleashed” and cited her suspicion about the Gates Foundation having allegedly run pandemic simulations prior to COVID hitting and thus making a vaccine questionable. Mark agreed positing that COVID was a last-ditch effort to oust Trump to which Sarah rallied saying “they won’t win”. This conversation shifted then to a discussion on rights and freedom intrinsically and metonymically. Jill noted how the lockdowns were draconian, that it was unreasonable to lock up healthy people and opined that those who are ill or more susceptible should be the ones abiding by stay-at-home precautions. Mark added that Americans fail to see these lockdowns as tyrannical because they take freedom for granted and don’t see the signs of encroaching tyranny while immigrants tend to have a better litmus. Jill buttressed this statement outlining how her grandparents fled from Germany to the US for these liberties and that the present lockdowns were an affront to their refuge. Mark resolved that we can’t “lose America'' because it is the figurehead for freedom. Finally, Sarah flirts with the idea of whether or not these lockdowns will result in a civil war.
Sean & Christi
In the midst of scrawling notes down after departing from Mark, Jill, and Sarah, on two separate occasions I was approached with interest in what I was jotting down. (I cannot say for sure whether it was a general sentiment of anti-surveillance—after all, several people had asked if drones streaming the event on social media were police drones—or if it was the optics of someone frantically note-taking in the dark on analog media akin to Albena Yaneva’s breakroom note-sessions; however, it did culminate in me haphazardly explaining what anthropology was…but I digress). On the second occasion I was fortunate to engage in an about 30-minute chat with Sean and Christi, friends, both in their 40s, not-wearing masks. After explaining anthropology to them (the SparkNotes version) I proceed to ask how they heard about the LDP and what their opinions of the lockdowns were. I ensured to place my notebook and pen away in my bag so as to prevent them from feeling surveilled given the spur of our interaction.
Christi began by commenting that the lockdowns were deadly, thus beginning her COVID narrative. She cited an anecdote of an acquaintance whose son had committed suicide on account of being out of work due to the pandemic. Over the course of the chat Christi also talked about how she was shocked by the fact that her Bible study group was so complacent with giving-up attending in-person services. For Christi, this was as much about rights as it was a need to maintain some form of charismatic spiritual communal connectivity. Later she revealed that she didn’t own a business that she could keep open in opposition but used demonstrations like this to show her support. On this issue of complacency, Sean recalls the Civil War and historic crossing of the Delaware by George Washington as a means to demand that people “take action” amidst these lockdowns. He explained that “we have to protest because it’s our right” but we still need to take greater action clarifying that he didn’t mean violently to which I jokingly mentioned the “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests” chyron that CNN had used, to which we all shared a laugh.
We shifted the discussion to mask-wearing. Christi continues the sequence of her COVID-narrative detailing how she and Sean had been heckled earlier in the day for not wearing masks expressing that it was ludicrous because the heckler was wearing a mask herself and well over 6-feet away. Ultimately, Christi resolved that she didn’t want anyone to get sick or die but if the mask is in fact effective, people who want or need to wear masks should and those who don’t should have the choice. To this Sean began to impart his COVID-narrative explaining that he was a nurse and actually had COVID himself earlier in the year. Like Christi’s narrative, Sean’s narrative also works through a phenomenological synthesis of lockdown-life as deadly. He explained that he had seen people die of COVID but had also seen a large number of people die of the flu or common cold and even had some patients in their 90s recover from COVID purportedly without any issue. However, Sean noted what was particularly devastating was to see patients being kept in isolation from seeing their families describing it as “worse than getting COVID”.
Similar to my conversation with Jill, Mark, and Sarah, Christi and Sean touched on communism and also exhibited skepticism of the Narrative primarily via social media. Sean in particular presented a rather thorough elucidation of his skepticism. At the start of our conversation, we had been discussing the ineffectiveness of online classes. While Christi expressed concern for her nephew in the 3rd grade who had been falling behind, Sean framed the contemporary overreach of the government as a gradual process that started with the “indoctrination” employed through educational institutions. He alluded to the Vietnam era draft-dodgers, caveating that he wasn’t castigating those opposed to the war, that spurred a rise of radicalism in universities in addition to how parents have increasingly become less involved in their children’s learning process. Sean’s engagement (or counter engagement) with the Narrative vis-à-vis the wealth of untruth on social media detailing how he had been labeled a conspiracy theorist and yet his “conspiracy” (that being in this case government reaction to COVID) actually has come to pass.
Notes on Methods
Despite having only been at this site for roughly two hours, it generated an extensive amount of data that I don’t believe has been fully parsed in this essay. I question how I can capture this idea of the COVID-narrative and distrust of the Narrative as integral analytics by which anti-lockdowners negotiate their understanding and navigation of this moment? I find that there is much more to be rendered in the linkages of lockdown-life as social and literal death, American freedom ideals, and history as bounding elements of both the aforementioned analytics. How the constitutional rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (to work), in this instance, are seen as fundamentally in conflict with one another by one camp, while from the perspective of the anti-lockdowners, these rights are seen as co-constitutive to an even greater degree in the wake of the pandemic? In listening to the attendees, it has further led to the complexity of deeming certain viewpoints as conspiratorial. That is, what constitutes the limits between conspiracy, fiction, or “otherwise”-standpoint? Moreover, I wonder how the researcher must reorient his/her positionality qua researcher, as in my case, this served as—albeit oddly—a means of access to conversations but also hindered them insofar as the process of simply talking seemed performative and invisibly tethered to methodological ethics. Given that members of the right or Trump-base tend to exhibit clear sentiments of skepticism towards research institutions such as universities or think-tanks, my presentation (or perhaps actual) that I wanted to listen to their perspectives remediated these interactional walls. Lastly, I must underscore how vital yet complex an Ingoldian ethnographic approach is in capturing the essence of a site but also how spontaneity disrupts the accuracy of representation that formulated interview schedules and simultaneous recording/notetaking can offer rather than relying on memory and the candor of attended conversation even if I wrote notes less than 10 mins following the interactions.
Conclusion
It is my hope that, while incomplete, this essay acts as a starting point for cross-partisan understanding and generous seeing, reading, and listening. While this could be of grave benefit as a practice for everyone, I importune that it be more for institutions—if, in fact, they are still salvageable— or even aspiring scholars to begin to suss out and exercise narrativization from their curricular platforms in exchange for recognizing how theory and canon are still beneficial (with some necessary revision) in truly connecting across lines of difference such that we may (dis)agree on merit and sentiment separately.