As measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 have stretched into their second month, thousands of protesters have converged on state capitols in recent weeks to demand an end to stay-at-home orders. The emerging anti-lockdown movement, egged on by President Trump and quietly propped up by influential right-wing groups, has so far steered clear New York City.
But as hospitalization rates decline across the five boroughs, a small subset of newly-galvanized New Yorkers — ranging from elected officials to fringe conspiracists — are now calling to ease restrictions inside the epicenter of the country's coronavirus pandemic.
Much of that advocacy is happening through an online Facebook group known as REOPEN NY, a petri dish of misinformation and distortions that has garnered more than 11,000 followers in just two weeks. Following last Wednesday's "Operation Gridlock" protest in Albany, the group is now promoting a statewide day of action on May 1st, including a rally outside City Hall.
"Of course upstate people are more on board, but there are people in the city starting to get involved," said Bradford Solomon, a Sunnyside, Queens resident who hosts a YouTube channel devoted to "debunking" the pandemic, and is helping to organize the Manhattan protest. "New York has gotten most of the propaganda about how bad it is, so you’ve got people scared to speak up."
Like several of REOPEN NY's administrators, Solomon believes the virus is a government ploy to push harmful vaccines on Americans — a conspiracy theory with no basis in reality. Claims that the media is exaggerating the death toll of the virus, or that hospitals are wrongly diagnosing patients to turn a profit, are frequently shared on the page, whose members must agree to support a statewide lifting of lockdown restrictions by May 1st.
A Siena College poll released on Monday found eighty-seven percent of New Yorkers support keeping schools and nonessential businesses closed through at least May 15th, the expiration date of Governor Andrew Cuomo's current PAUSE order. Emphasizing that New York City and its suburbs will require more time, the governor has laid out a plan to regionally "un-pause" parts of the state in mid-May, depending on the rate of cases. Still, the push to reopen the city sooner has taken hold among some establishment conservatives as well.
"We flattened the curve a week ago, so why are businesses still closed? Put your big boy pants on and go back to work," Nachman Mostofsky, a district leader in South Brooklyn and an executive committee member of the Kings County Conservative Party, told Gothamist on Monday. "We’re freaking New Yorkers. We can figure this out."
Mostofsky, who previously served as director of government relations for the National Council of Young Israel, said he's had conversations with people "very high up in [the Trump] administration," all of whom support reopening. "New York is run by progressive, nanny state lunatics who don’t understand how the economy works," he said.
Defying guidance from health officials, President Trump has openly encouraged his base to protest stay-at-home orders imposed in certain states. Behind the scenes, influential conservative groups, some of them connected to the White House, have worked to cultivate those demonstrations.
An analysis by the Washington Post found that a family of far-right pro-gun activists were behind many of the largest anti-lockdown Facebook groups, including the now-deleted "New Yorkers Against Excessive Quarantine.” Powerful, dark money advocacy groups such as FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have also worked to increase turn out to rallies in parts of the country.
Marc Ambinder, a fellow at the University of California who studies disinformation, stressed that it was important to understand that the backlash to stay-at-home orders reflected real frustrations of citizens worried about their next paycheck — while still acknowledging that protests were not spreading organically.
"It’s growing, it exists, and it’s real," he said. "And there are ideological opportunists using it for specific political ends."
Such opportunists may have been hesitant to target New York City, where the virus has killed at least 17,000 people, more than anywhere else in the United States. Some right-wing activists said they've noticed that reluctance has started to fade.
"There’s a growing sentiment in New York City. Most people are really done with the lockdown," said Evan Freeman, the leader of the Empire State Conservative Network, a media platform and podcast (the group also sells merchandise, including a face mask emblazoned with Cuomo as Star Wars villain Emperor Palpatine.) "Let's get everything going. Let's open it back up."
While Freeman stressed that those calling for a continued lockdown were "out of touch" with the typical worker, polls do not back that up. According to the Siena College survey, nearly 70 percent of New York voters, including half of Republicans, said the state should not open before widespread testing was available. Some conservative officials said they empathized with the desire to lift restrictions — but said the city was not there yet.
"People are hurting financially and they're angry. You can’t give business owners the idea that this is never going to end," said New York City Councilman Joe Borelli, a Republican and rare Trump supporter in the legislative body. But, he added, he'd just spoken to a hospital in Staten Island with more than 100 people on ventilators. "On a normal day they’d have maybe 10. So yeah, it's still too rushed to talk about a full reopening."
