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Thursday, March 28, 2024

The True Story of the Antifa Invasion of Forks, Washington

In a calmer spring—when facts weren't so slippery, social media so noxious, the country so ready to combust—what happened in Forks, Washington, on June 3 might have been a perfect plot for a farce. A giant white school bus known as Big Bertha puttered into a two-stoplight town far north on the Olympic Peninsula, in desperate need of a new battery, on the very day the town was on alert for a different bus, one full of violent antifa activists ready to riot.

But this was not a calmer spring. A week had passed since a Black man named George Floyd died while a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. People who had been trapped at home during a tense pandemic spilled into the streets, first in Minneapolis and then in other cities and even tiny towns. They marched and carried signs and chanted that Black Lives Matter. A much smaller number looted liquor stores and burned police precincts. The president tweeted threats—“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”—and smeared all protesters, including millions of peaceful Americans, as the Radical Left, “thugs,” or, most menacingly, antifa, an ideology ascribed to a diffuse group of antifascists who sometimes stoke chaos and aren't opposed to fighting the far right with violence. Twitter, Facebook, and Nextdoor crackled with claims that antifa was coming to suburbs and rural towns. They were coming on buses, on planes, wearing black, coming, always, from somewhere else.

On the night of May 31, a Sunday, a new Twitter account styled @Antifa_Us issued a call to arms: “Tonight's the night, Comrades. Tonight we say ‘Fuck The City’ and we move into the residential areas… the white hoods…. and we take what's ours …#BlacklivesMaters #FuckAmerica.” A brown hand emoji raised a middle finger. Donald Trump Jr. posted it to his Instagram. “Absolutely insane,” he remarked.

If the tweet sounded just a little on the nose, like shark chum tossed to a certain kind of white person, it was. The next day, Twitter deleted @Antifa_Us; it was not, as advertised, an antifa account, but rather one secretly run by a US-based white-supremacist group called Identity Evropa, one of the organizers of the infamous 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Seth Larson didn't notice Twitter's fact check. The 45-year-old manager of Freds Guns, a firearms store 70 miles east of Forks in the town of Sequim, had already reposted the tweet on his Facebook. A few days later, when he saw a notice for a Black Lives Matter demonstration planned in his hometown, he worried that antifa rioters would come. Someone had to be on the alert.

On the day of the march, June 3, just hours before Big Bertha would roll into Forks in need of a battery, Larson cued up his Facebook Live. He walked by shops downtown, narrating the scene of people striding down the sidewalk carrying Black Lives Matter signs. “Sequim just got a busload of people … They're not breaking windows yet.” He also claimed to see out-of-towner antifa, 25 to 30 of them, pointing to people with skateboards and training his phone's camera on an occasional bicyclist whizzing by. “Head to Sequim, boys!” he told his followers. “All patriots, call to arms right now!” Over the next 50 minutes, he kept ringing the alarm. “The fuckery is here!” “It looks like Clallam County is going to get hit tonight.” “There's the antifa group. You can totally smell the wanting-to-break-shit-up off of their body. They look sketchy as shit.”

He told his viewers to buy bear mace and “less lethals” at Freds Guns. He said to fetch their gear, their long guns, and meet him at City Hall. A dozen followers showed up at the Sequim protest with pistols, some asking protesters for ID. At least one was carrying an assault rifle. Rumors about buses spread across the county—a guy called 911 about seeing a yellow bus at a gas station between Sequim and Forks, “all of them in black,” cutting off the call frantically with “I gotta meet people!”

Dan Larson (no relation to Seth), a retired logger who lives in Forks, heard the rumor from a text. A friend had seen on social media that antifa was near; the citizenry needed to be warned. It was like the ride of Paul Revere, except on Facebook, and Larson thought he better light a lantern. He posted about busloads of rioters in Sequim and said that “Forks could be next.” A former prison guard in town joined the cry. “Forks, let's get ready to rumble. Lock and load.”

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Facebook shares spiked. A City Hall staffer relayed that her husband had heard from truckers on CB radio that busloads of rioters were speeding their way. People called the True Value, urging the owner to batten down its inventory. Some doubted the chatter. The town of 3,500 people was known for two things: logging and as the moody backdrop for the Twilight vampire-romance novels and films. What would antifa want in Forks? To loot sultry Edward and Jacob posters from the souvenir shop?

But then Big Bertha lumbered into the Thriftway parking lot, proof, it seemed, that the rumor was true. Pickups, SUVs, and an ATV circled the 36-foot Trojan horse. A few men approached to talk with the driver, a young brown-skinned man who introduced himself as Tyrone Chevall. He was wearing a black T-shirt and red pants and told them that he and his family had come to camp. A white woman wearing a dark sweatshirt and capri pants stepped off the bus and walked into the grocery store. People loitered in groups, leaned on their car hoods, pistols on hips, watching.

When the woman returned to the bus, it pulled out onto the town's main street. Trucks in the lot followed. A police officer studied the rare sight of a bona fide bottleneck in Forks: 20 vehicles, heading north to the city line.

The officer had heard the antifa rumors and stopped to talk to one of the men who had peeled off from the caravan following the bus. The officer told the man that no antifa were coming, that the rumor was false, but the man sniped, “Bullshit, I've got Three Percenters that posted video of buses dropping off antifa in Sequim for the exact bus that was here.” He insisted that 50 people were on board, but the dark windows made it hard to know for sure. (Three Percenters are a national far-right militia that arose after Barack Obama was elected; the organization says it is pro-government, “so long as the government abides by the Constitution.”) The man couldn't find the video for the officer, but he did show him the Facebook profile of Tyrone Chevall, the driver who'd introduced himself earlier in the parking lot. Another man told the officer that the bus had headed out to the A Road, an old logging byway north of town that leads into a federal forest. He said that the locals were “watching it.”

Social media started pinging with live action. A Snap photo of the bus read “Get outta our town.” Another Snap said “Later idiot,” with a picture of the bus glowing white as a lamb against the dusk-darkened woods, stalked by a line of tightly packed pickups. Another showed a picture of a gun laid across someone's lap.

As the bus turned off the highway onto the A Road, the truck caravan split off. Having lost its pursuers, the bus entered the forest and crossed a river on a graffiti-scrawled bridge. It parked in a shallow pullout, and its occupants spilled out to set up camp. A group of ATVs sped by and skidded sideways near the bus, sending gravel skittering. Meanwhile, a small group of vehicles had appeared on the town side of the bridge's span. Someone started up a chain saw. Someone, maybe more than one, cut five moss-covered alder trees at their stumps, felling the white trunks and branches across the asphalt like a medieval barricade. Someone, maybe more than one, shot bursts of gunfire into the air, final exclamation points of menace. By the time the bus drove back to the bridge, scared off by the ATVs, it was trapped.

A new post popped onto the Facebook of Josh Fletcher, the thirtysomething son of Forks' mayor. Fletcher is one of Forks' old names, going back to the pioneer homesteading days. There's a Fletcher Street, a Hillcar & Fletcher rock crushing company, and, back in the day, a logging company too. The photo showed the alder blockade, the bus on the other side on the narrow mountain logging road, no other way out. Commenters chimed in:

“Wonder if they feel like they just drove into a horror movie?”

“It's like the purge.”

“Let 'em starve!”

“It's just a strong message of get the fuck out.”

Say what you will about Forks—and people in Clallam County always have—but don't think for a second that the entire town was on board with this. Even before officials confirmed that Chevall had been telling the truth—that there were no antifa in the bus, just Chevall, his partner, her daughter, and Chevall's mother—many in Forks saw social media and suspected the real crime wasn't some fantasy of black-clad rioters but the spectacle of their neighbors harassing and stranding travelers in the forest. The skeptics feared those actions would soon be deleted, not just from social media but from the realm of consequences too. They realized that what happened in Forks couldn't stay in Forks; it needed to be hurled into the summer's strife over power in America, a churning, white-hot debate over who gets coddled and who punished, who is a thug and who a hero. Suddenly, this episode in a patch of Washington woods seemed to have something to say about it all. So people in Forks did what you do in 2020 when you want evidence. They started to screenshot.

Forks is circled by foothills covered in patches of pines logged in different years, uneven, like an awkward home haircut. Trucks stacked high with logs still rumble down the main street, but not as in the old days. Much of the forest can no longer be logged. In the '90s, the Clinton administration protected old-growth trees in the name of the threatened spotted owl, and changing global markets further depleted the industry. Today, Twilight-themed gift shops, java drive-thrus, and Tesla charging ports signal a newer tourist economy. The influx of visitors, however, hasn't replaced the jobs lost from logging, and disdain for government meddling is as common as American flags. Trump won 60 percent of the Forks vote in 2016. One of the bigger local logging companies made branded Trump baseball caps, a symbol of both national triumph and Left Coast dissent.

People call this part of the Olympic Peninsula the West End. A half-hour drive from the Pacific Ocean, Forks is one of the rainiest towns in the continental United States and one of the more isolated. This separateness breeds a sense of mutual reliance within the community. When the day comes that the Cascadia fault running the length of the Pacific Northwest coast ruptures, help might not arrive in Forks for a month, so a network of residents keep ham radios at the ready to coordinate survival logistics. This is not an area of great wealth; the median annual household income hovers around $36,000. Yet every year the town raises scholarship money—this year it was $113,000—for the graduating high school class. The town's seclusion also warded off Covid-19. There were only two cases before late July, one assumed to be related to tourism, and many resented the outsiders potentially harboring the virus who continued to trek to the peninsula. Someone put up “Go Home!” and “Locals Only” posters below the town's welcome sign.

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The A Road falls into the Clallam County sheriff's turf, and in the days after the townspeople followed the bus into the woods, detectives fanned out to conduct interviews. The crime they were investigating was cutting trees on federal land, a misdemeanor. But they also wanted to learn more about the pursuers' intent, which could push the charges into disorderly conduct, malicious mischief, harassment, or, if race were involved, a hate crime.

Once the identity of Big Bertha's inhabitants and their innocent intentions were made public, many of the get-out-of-town posts were deleted from social media, but now residents, troubled by their neighbors' actions, had screenshots in hand. They wanted to share the information and for the perpetrators to be caught, but they also wanted to be able to eat at Pacific Pizza without being hassled or shunned. So some fed images to Matthew Randazzo, a journalist and former Democratic Party county chair. Randazzo, in turn, set about lassoing Twitter outrage toward #ForksGoons with a thread of screenshots and commentary to ensure that authorities couldn't even think about letting it go.

The social media whirlwind got City Hall's attention: City attorney Rod Fleck texted Forks' mayor, Tim Fletcher, a screenshot of Twitter's national trending stories, one of which was “Forks.” Emails poured in from campers and parents in mixed-race families who threatened to never stop in Forks again. The Chamber of Commerce denounced the incident. At a city council meeting the following week, Mayor Fletcher read an apology to the family. “I think it's absolutely crucial there are consequences,” one council member said, adding that she might go for “the stocks and throwing tomatoes.”

While some of Forks' old-timers didn't appreciate outsiders complaining on the town's Facebook groups, they too were outraged by the actions on the A Road. Teri Bagby Gaydeski, 57, and her sister, Tami Bagby Shaner, 60, are fourth-generation Forks. They both drive school buses and are partial to Day-Glo manicures and rhinestone-dusted baseball caps and caroling down the school halls at Christmas. “We're kind of liked,” Teri told me. She says she's more Republican than not; Tami isn't political. Both were appalled by local men questioning visitors as if they had a right to. They thought about how frightened the family must have felt, with men pursuing them while carrying guns. “Can you imagine?” Teri exclaims. “I would have been terrified. Nothing about that is OK.”

The sisters got in a spat with one of the guys who'd been in the Thriftway lot, first on Facebook, then on the phone. “They said to me, ‘We're patriots!’” Tami says. “Gimme a break.” The sisters saw on Facebook that some locals were raising money to buy ad space in Washington newspapers to run an open letter to the family. The letter said, “The greater Forks community stands against violence.” Tami signed, along with more than 300 others. The sisters hope for justice. “We're pretty protective of our little town,” Teri said, “but, in this case, these people need to be in trouble.”

By midsummer, the sheriff's investigators had talked to around 40 people, homing in on 10 they believed were at or near the tree-felling. But they couldn't get closer: Who cut the trees? Who fired a gun? Among the people on the road, a logging country omertà had settled like the morning fog. Investigators' phone calls went unreturned. National media had picked up on the story, and witnesses who did cooperate told investigators they were intimidated by the attention. Friends told friends they didn't want to know names, so they wouldn't have anything to snitch.

Clallam County chief criminal deputy Brian King lives in the county seat of Port Angeles, but he graduated from Forks High School, where his wife now works. He's been in law enforcement for 25 years, and in a county with so few people, he says, that means “I've arrested a lot of my friends or acquaintances.” But he had rarely been so stymied by silence. His team resorted to plan B. People had used social media to broadcast the bus stalking. Maybe they'd used it to coordinate too. If they wouldn't speak, maybe their digital trail would.

Investigators served search warrants to Verizon for cell phone records and to Facebook for the activity of those people at or near the tree-felling. As July turned to August and Facebook searched its servers for clues, I drove over Puget Sound into the Olympic Peninsula. Internet disinformation often seems disembodied, its actors faceless, its path through hearts and minds hard to see. In Clallam County, the consequences were tangible, the players visible, and I knew where to start.

Freds Guns, on Highway 101, sits on the outskirts of Sequim. While Forks is a logging town that still touts the slogan “Logging Capital of the World,” Sequim is a growing retirement community surrounded by meadows of lavender. The mayor is a hair stylist and avid motorcyclist who attended the notoriously un-distanced Sturgis biker rally in South Dakota. He espouses the QAnon conspiracy theory on his personal Facebook page and in mayoral interviews. But he presides over a politically purple town where “you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a retired Californian,” as one cop put it to me, and where Hillary Clinton eked out a win in 2016. When I visited Sequim, an older white man in suspenders sat on a corner downtown displaying a Black Lives Matter poster, gently waving to drivers. Many whooped in support. One white woman riding shotgun chided, “Did y'all forgot you're white?”

Courtney Thomas grew up in Sequim, her family having farmed and logged in the area for more than a century. Thomas, 33, is a massage therapist and the white mother of three adopted kids, one of them Latino. When Black Lives Matter protests sprouted across the country after George Floyd's death, and then two Black students in Atlanta were tased and pulled from their car, she posted a call for the June 3 march on Facebook and was thrilled when hundreds showed up. Then marchers showed her Seth Larson's Facebook video calling on his buddies with guns. Families at the protest—hers included—whisked their kids away. Some armed men started arriving. Thomas talked to a man wearing a bulletproof vest who'd come with two German shepherds. He told her he was there to protect the protest, to which she replied, “We need to be protected from you. You're here to look scary.”

Outside Freds Guns, an LED screen shuffles images of hunting rifles and a “Don't Tread on Me” flag. Larson had ignored the message I'd sent, but once I showed up at the store he agreed to talk, somewhat warily. I stood next to him behind the cash register, below a surveillance camera that he called “a fact-checking thing.” Larson is a lot to take in: He's built like a block, 6 feet tall, with the flip-flops, polo shirt, and shorts of a suburban dad. He wears a belt sporting tools to handle all manner of potential emergencies: a tourniquet in case someone gets shot, handcuffs to make a citizen's arrest, a Glock pistol, and an extra magazine. He didn't wear a face mask. A flyer sitting on a display case this summer described how “Bill Gates and the Global Health Mafia” were funding Covid-19 contact tracing to surveil the public.

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Taking my station in front of the camera, I asked Larson why he had raised the alarm. He repeated that he'd seen the “white hoods” tweet about antifa bringing their fight to residential areas. “Everything that happened that day was totally twisted,” he said. “All of my good intentions. I love this county. I love this town. Honestly, the Black Lives Matter group is really good at making you look like a racist. Hey, just because you're Black, it doesn't mean you're more special than me. We're all created equal, 'kay?” he said sharply. I thought of a meme that had been posted on the Freds Guns Facebook page that week: a vintage 1950s illustration of a blond-haired nuclear family and the tagline “What extremism in 2020 looks like.”

After the Sequim police confirmed that no antifa were at the march, the police chief, Sheri Crain, who has known Larson since high school, asked him to delete his video. He did. He also admitted that he had been wrong and had “knee-jerked” about antifa. So I was surprised to hear him revert to his earlier position. His evidence was that he recognized only 30 to 40 protesters. The rest, he asserted, arrived from bigger cities in buses, and 10 percent “were bad.” What about the police statement that there had been no antifa, that zero buses had arrived? “They're just falling with the same liberal quid pro quo of ‘Let's cover this up,’” Larson told me. He then suggested that small-town cops wouldn't know how to identify antifa anyway. (In his Facebook Live video of the protest, Larson walks up to a parked black van in which a middle-aged white man is holding a camera. The man, Larson says to his followers, is “antifa or something.” Police identified the man as one of their detectives; he was monitoring the protest.)

Larson told me that the only reason the antifa activists lurking at the march didn't act out was because the presence of his friends deterred them. He told me that on the day of Sequim's protest, 85 Three Percenters—a label he used interchangeably with “Patriots”—answered his call. (Sequim police counted roughly a dozen of Larson's followers, several with pistols holstered on their hips.) As Larson recalled this scene to me, an elderly white customer in a US Army cap rolled up in an electric wheelchair, listening with interest. He asked whether this Three Percenter group had regular meetings and if there was some information he could read about it.

“It's not really a group,” Larson said, hesitantly, sandwiched between an eager recruit and a reporter, pen poised. “We don't have paperwork on it. It's just people that are Americans and they're for the Constitution and they're veterans and retired law enforcement people.”

“How can I get the call?”

“Well,” Larson replied, “you just leave your phone number here, and we tell you to show up.”

After more than an hour, I brought up the fact that Twitter had tracked the antifa “white hoods” tweet to a white-supremacist group. Larson said he hadn't heard that, but, in any case, he couldn't trust Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and therefore couldn't trust what Twitter said. He added that even if the tweet was false at the time, it had become true, because now protesters were invading small towns. He gestured to his latest Facebook post on his monitor, a news story about Black Lives Matter protesters at the Seattle police chief's house in rural Washington.

Though he still seemed feisty about antifa, Larson told me that the dustup had worn on him. He said he received online threats after posting his video of the march, and he had moved his family out of their home shortly after. A parade of pranks had arrived in the mail: a 6-foot-tall cardboard penis, an “Eat a Dick” ceramic, and, more concerning, a glitter bomb that exploded with a note saying, “Next time it will be real.”

He knew about the debacle on the A Road but rejected the notion that his posts had set it in motion. “That means I have more power than you would ever know,” he said. “And that would be scary, would it not?”

Larson then turned to the matter of the bus itself. “Just an FYI,” he said, seeming to relish insider intel. “It wasn't just a family on a camping trip. There were seven grown men on the bus.”

Where'd he hear that?

“It's local knowledge. Let's just put it that way.”

Leaving Sequim, I drove west on Highway 101, the same direction misinformation had traveled on June 3, when rumors spread from a white-supremacist tweet to Seth Larson's Facebook page and out through the social media accounts of Forks residents. One of those belonged to Terry Breedlove, the former prison guard who'd written, “Forks, let's get ready to rumble. Lock and load.” He clarified in a comment that “Peaceful protestors are good. Rioters will be shot.”

I'd arranged to meet Breedlove in a gravel lot just past the Forks welcome sign. He was waiting in a Toyota truck, and I hopped aboard for a tour of the nearby mountains. A necklace hanging from his rearview mirror swung side to side like a metronome as he sped over back roads.

Breedlove is 56, and for some 25 of those years he logged these ridges. An explosion in a logging shop when he was a teen blasted off the ends of his right fingers, and a machinery accident took off three on his left. In his mid-forties, Breedlove turned to the security and pension of a job at Clallam Bay Corrections Center, one of two nearby state prisons. In 2016 an inmate beat him on the head with a metal stool. He's been on disability ever since. The assault caused traumatic brain injury, and at first Breedlove had trouble speaking. He would stumble while walking. For years, people or noise could overwhelm him: He might start crying for no reason or have to lie down at a moment's notice, feeling like “my brain was shutting me down.” He'd retreat home to stay in bed for days at a time. Going out was difficult, but he could connect online. “Social media saved my life,” he says. “I could always type just fine by myself in the dark, easy. That was the only place I felt comfortable.”

Breedlove became one of the most prolific commenters on Forks' Facebook forums, typing complaints about “lily white social justice warriors.” Acquaintances wondered if he had become more opinionated or had just found an outlet.

Breedlove told me that when he received a group direct message on Facebook—he won't say from whom—that a white bus full of antifa was coming to Forks, he “didn't have any reason to doubt that someone was coming down.” He watched the news. “That was right in the middle of all the riots and the burning.”

After bucking down an old mud logging path to show me a swimming hole, Breedlove turned his Toyota toward the scene of the A Road bridge standoff. We hopped out and walked over to inspect the freshly shorn alder stumps. The cut branches were still piled nearby. Breedlove never saw the bus, and when I talked to him on the phone a few weeks before coming to Forks, he downplayed the A Road incident, given that no one had been hurt. But now he was of the mind that things had gone too far. “I'd like to talk to them”—the people who followed the family. “Just, ‘Why? Why? What were you doing?’”

Back in the pickup, we bounced up Hunger Mountain, and I asked Breedlove if he regretted putting up the antifa posts. “What I put up there, I don't think was very confrontational. It fed into it a little bit,” he replied, “but I wasn't there”—meaning at the tree-cutting itself. As for the “lock and load” post, it was “just having fun on social media.” He added, “If I did something wrong, I'm the first one that will apologize and say, ‘Oh, I fucked up.’”

A couple of days after the A Road fiasco, Breedlove heard about a Black Lives Matter protest happening in Forks, organized by four young white and Native American locals. Breedlove had only seen the protests filtered through the news and social media, and now that one was happening in his town he decided to see it with his own eyes, maybe talk to some people. Two hundred protesters showed up along the town's main street, at one point lying down on the sidewalk to mark the time the Minneapolis officer's knee was on George Floyd's neck. Members of several coastal tribes played in a drum circle, and Tim Fletcher, the mayor, came with a poster reading, “This Native American has never been for racism.” Passing drivers replied with honks of support.

Returning home, Breedlove posted his report on Facebook. Overall, he concluded, it “was a really good walk with a lot of really good people.” Among his posts of MAGA dictums and right-wing punditry, he posted artful black-and-white portraits of protesters with their signs.

Dan Larson was away from Forks on June 3, but when a buddy texted saying that their Facebook friend needed help, he posted this warning on his Facebook page:

Three busloads of rioters dressed in black just showed up in Sequim! … Local boys are gathering with their ‘gear’ and are going to protect their town! Forks could be next, they want guys from the peninsula to join together to protect our communities! We help them, they help us!

The post took off, getting more than 60 comments and 120 shares within two hours. Some of the commenters accused him of spreading a hoax and pointed him toward Seth Larson's Facebook Live video. Dan cued the video, expecting to see a black-clad bicycle mob burning up Sequim. “I was like, ‘Shit, I don't see the guys carrying bricks or dressed in black. I mean, I don't see any of that. I got drawn into some ridiculous bullshit.’” Dan deleted his post. “It was really embarrassing and humiliating,” he told me. A day later, he deleted his Facebook account. “If I can't control myself on there, I don't deserve to be on there.”

Dan lives in a forest-green ranch house close to downtown Forks. He's in his sixties, with a full head of hair and an arsenal of old-timey expressions like “gee whiz” and “gosh darn.” We talked in his driveway, and he told me how he'd moved to Forks as a long-haired teenager from the suburbs of the state capital. It was the mid-'70s, and the Forks High School football team tried to whoop him. “I wasn't used to this kind of attitude about strangers—the new guy. Once they got to know you, and you kind of earned your way, everything was fine. Just a whole little-town-type deal.” After sprinting away that day, he dropped out of school and, at 19, started logging. He worked alongside the now-mayor, Tim Fletcher, for Fletcher & Fletcher.

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In the '90s, logging companies introduced cheaper and more efficient machines, so the human loggers moved to steeper, more perilous slopes, where the machinery couldn't operate. Larson was working on one such mountainside when a 4-foot-wide log tumbled downhill at him. Larson hurled himself down the slope to escape, sprinting and somersaulting. He dislocated a shoulder and rib and shattered his clavicle; it ended his logging days. Logging “makes you feel like Superman,” he said, but it's also, statistically, the most dangerous job in the US. “I got friends in wheelchairs,” Larson says. “I have friends in the ground.” Mayor Fletcher left the work to run IT at the school district and town hospital and now rents out his logging-themed house on Airbnb.

Dan said he wasn't missing Facebook. Mostly, he says, he would check his feed for a couple of minutes in the morning, sharing updates about fishing or checking posts about his far-flung grandkids. Some of those grandkids are Black and Native American, and he told me that he doesn't put up with “foul language about color or anything like that. I got African American people I happen to love, you know? So don't be talking shit about 'em in front of me. And my friends don't. They're not that way.” He would occasionally get drawn into spats on Facebook. He remembered one particularly galling exchange with a white lady who wrote something about poverty. He responded that he knew what it felt like to grow up poor. His father had left the family, and his mom did what she could, like pulling bottles from the trash to buy food. Dan made money for school clothes by picking berries. The woman had responded dismissively, saying, “You weren't Black poor, you were white poor.”

Recalling the exchange, Larson's face wrenched in annoyance. He typed back something about “going to bed hungry is going to bed hungry.” But this dismissal of his experience by some disembodied stranger still irritates him so much that, while he sat out the 2016 election—“a goofy billionaire and Hillary, come on”—this year he's going to pick a side, and it's going to be Trump. “Now I do like him because of you stupid fuckers,” he said.

Hearing about Dan's change of heart, I thought of a story Terry Breedlove told me. At the state prison, a young offender would arrive, scared of the more veteran inmates, and would hover around the officer's podium to chat. Yet over time, the old-timers would groom the new guy into the fold, and the kid would end up a “little punk,” radicalized into a race-based prison gang. Dan had just described a similar effect with Facebook: He'd come in conservative but flexible and ended up defensively hunkered with a tribe.

I asked Larson what I'd asked Breedlove—whether he felt culpable in ginning up the A Road fervor. “If I did, that really sucks,” he said. The idea seemed to eat at him, and he returned to it a couple of times. “I guess that could have sparked a ridiculous emotional reaction over that, and done that to those poor people … But I got sucked in. I got sucked in too.”

About a week after the A Road incident, Shannon Lowe—the woman in capris on Big Bertha—gave an interview to the Peninsula Daily News. The issue of race came up. Lowe is white, but Chevall, her partner and the driver of the bus, is Black and Native American. Lowe told the newspaper that she didn't believe Forks people had targeted her family because of Chevall's race. Nearly every person I talked to in Forks repeated that quote. The point carried not just reputational but also legal heft: Racial targeting could tip any allegation of harassment into a hate crime, a felony that carries prison time. (Targeting a political group does not fall into the definition of a hate crime.)

In late June I connected with Lowe by phone. She and Chevall had driven to the farthest northeastern reaches of Washington, where they'd found work managing a campground. She could only make calls when she visited the nearest town. Lowe told me that she grew up in a speck of a place in Iowa. “I understand having that love for your hometown and not wanting anything bad to happen to your neck of the woods,” she said. She worked as a news director in rural Iowa and later in casinos, where she met Chevall, 15 years her junior.

Three years ago, they bought a white Blue Bird school bus from a farmer, named it Big Bertha, and trekked west to Spokane, where Chevall had family. The couple sometimes stayed with his relatives and sometimes on the bus, which they outfitted with a bed, kitchen, and bathroom. They got jobs in casinos outside Spokane, but when Covid-19 shut down business in the spring, they embraced their unemployment. “We felt like we'd been set free,” Lowe said. They hit the road in Bertha, their own social-distancing mobile. Shannon's 21-year-old daughter, who is white, joined them, along with Tyrone's mom, Sondra Rickard, who is Native, and their two dogs and three cats.

Sondra had been rereading the Twilight books and wanted to see Forks. On the 400-mile trek, Bertha's battery started flagging and its alternator busted. The family decided to push into town, order the parts, and camp until they arrived. Lowe noticed people taking photos of the bus while they drove across the Olympic Peninsula on June 3, but she's used to people waving and honking at Big Bertha.

As they drove into town for supplies, the driver of an ATV flipped Chevall off, and Chevall returned the gesture. Almost immediately after the bus parked in the outer reaches of the Thriftway parking lot, a surveillance camera recorded pickup trucks and an ATV arriving and parking around the bus. An older man wearing a bulletproof vest tried to push open the bus door. More men strolled up and asked Chevall if they were there to protest. The family's German shepherd mix barked madly. Lowe nervously walked past the men to go shop for dinner ingredients while the rest of the family stayed on the bus. In the store, Lowe overheard clerks talking to each other in the produce section, voices tinged with fear. “Have you heard they're sending antifa?” Lowe worried about getting caught in the middle of some incoming riot.

While shopping, Lowe realized she didn't have enough cash and headed back to the bus for Chevall's credit card. Some 10 trucks were now circling Bertha. People stood in small groups staring at the bus. Sondra remarked that it looked like a militia was out in force. Chevall said he'd been waging diplomacy: He'd apologized to the guy with whom he'd exchanged middle fingers and told the men they just wanted to camp. Someone mentioned Rambo was filmed in the surrounding woods. “Everything was very veiled in the parking lot,” Lowe says. Some of the people held cell phones high, trying to take pictures inside the bus.

Lowe wanted to leave Forks, but Chevall thought that now that he'd said they were camping, it would look suspicious if they didn't. He navigated Bertha around the trucks in the lot and turned north on Highway 101. The line of vehicles followed them out. As Chevall drove through town, people in trucks poised at street corners flipped the bus off, and, Lowe says, one driver held a rifle out his window. She quipped that she felt bad for anyone trying to mess with this town. Chevall remained silent, guiding Bertha tensely. Neither wanted to worry his mom in the back.

Once the bus turned onto the A Road, the caravan disappeared. Chevall turned onto a smaller logging road, crossed a bridge, and slowed into a pullout littered with tent poles and old workout equipment. The family tumbled out to clean up the site and pitch their tent.

Lowe heard guns firing in five-round bursts but dismissed it as someone shooting at a range. Then, a bunch of ATVs sped by and skidded sideways near Bertha, sending gravel shooting toward the bus and pelting Chevall's pant leg. They decided to leave. As they dismantled the tent, they heard a chain saw, close, echoing around them. Chevall drove back to the bridge they had crossed to see if they could get cell service and to scout new camping locations. On the far side, a thicket of cut tree trunks and branches blocked the road, and behind the barricade there was a gathering of cars and trucks. The innocent explanations they had held onto withered: This was about them, and maybe something more.

“That was the first time that Tyrone started to feel like maybe it was about race,” Lowe told me. “At that point, I still wasn't. I'm a white girl from the Midwest, and I feel like out here in Washington people are a lot more open-minded. I guess I wasn't ready to let go of my fairy tale.”

With no clear plan on how to get out, Chevall turned Bertha around on the skinny road and headed up the mountain, hoping to get cell service at a break in the trees. Shannon's daughter penned a journal entry that began, “If I'm dead and you just found this …” Sondra kept dialing 911, trying to get a signal. Finally, she got through. Chevall told the dispatcher that their bus was barricaded in the woods and lost, and the dispatcher told them to meet deputies at the downed trees.

Careening back to the bridge, Chevall parked at the span's edge and told his mom to lock the bus and not to come after them, no matter what. Hands trembling, Lowe grabbed her Canon camera. She and Chevall tentatively treaded across the bridge as Lowe snapped photos of the people and cars still hanging around, for evidence. She pleaded with Chevall to stay behind her. “I'm 43 and I've lived a pretty good life, and if this is what I go down over, I felt like that's fine,” she said, beginning to cry. “But I didn't want it to be the end for Tyrone.”

She heard someone call out, “They have a camera.” Engines roared, and cars peeled out. “I think at that point they had lost their nerve,” she says. Heading back to their bus to await law enforcement's arrival, they heard another round of gunfire. Chevall said, “Well, I can see how this feels like Rambo.”

Finally, an officer and sheriff's deputy arrived and asked four gawking teens who had driven up as the others were leaving to clear the alders with their chain saws. (It's standard in Forks to carry a chain saw in your truck.) After they made a report at the sheriff's station, the deputies guided them to a place to camp and told them that, for their own safety, they should leave at first light. The family left at dawn and bought a new battery at a Walmart 150 miles away, and Bertha rumbled off the peninsula.

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A week later, Lowe made the comment to the Peninsula Daily News reporter that she didn't think race had been a factor. She did so for a few reasons, she told me. For one, she wasn't absolutely certain, but more important, she didn't want to start something. What if her assumptions riled up real antifa militants and they targeted Forks? “If we make Forks look like a racist town, then Forks will burn, and that's not what we want. We want it to all die down.” But since then, she had reconsidered. “If our voices can make the hate stop, then I want to try to make it stop.”

If race was at play, it wasn't broadcast on social media. Brian King, the chief criminal deputy, told me his investigation had found no indication of a hate crime. But the rumor had primed people in Forks to expect a bus of antifa rioters, and maybe the group of four adults inside, spanning three races and four decades, confirmed those expectations, looking just as much like a group of protesters as a family unit. People in Forks dismissed that idea: Interracial relationships are common; Native Americans and Latinos make up 7 and 26 percent of the town's population, respectively. Austin Pegram, a white man who left Forks after high school and only felt safe to come out as gay once he left town, suggested a subtler dynamic: Maybe the family wasn't harassed because of race, but that “the color of their skin didn't help.” In the eyes of people in town, “it made them not believe them and dismiss what they said.” As Lowe put it, “They looked us right in the eye and didn't believe we were camping.”

Lowe says they're willing to cooperate with prosecutors, even if she thinks the law misses who she sees as the greater culprits: “people spreading fear and anger and hatred online in joke form, and people getting swept up in it.” She mentioned, in particular, the guy who had started the rumor in Sequim. Law enforcement did examine Seth Larson's video but ultimately concluded that his call to arms didn't cross into criminal territory. Spreading disinformation may be a scourge, “a cancer,” as Forks' police chief put it to me, but it isn't a crime.

Lowe told me she still jumps at the sound of an ATV or a car backfiring. Chevall was done talking about it. “It's just really hard to try to continue to be ourselves without letting it change us.” Forks is changed too; until someone faces consequences for the A Road incident, the entire town would be seen as culpable, reduced to the redneck epithet lobbed at it for years.

“We have tons of guns in our house, and we never talk about shooting antifa,” Kris Hull said, dryly. It was a wry diss, a tone that she excels at. It translates well to Facebook, where she used the eye-rolling emoji when people on a Forks Facebook page were initially doubling down on the antifa rumor. She typed: “A few paranoid residents did a great job of making us look like an intolerant, fearful, hick town. Great job, we are now safe from hippie campers.”

Hull is in her forties, with long hair pulled into a ponytail. She's spent her whole life in and around Forks—“If you haven't been here since you were an embryo, you're an outsider,” she jokes—and her humor about the place reflects her deep affection for it. Hull's son was one of the teens who helped remove the alders at the crime scene so that Chevall and Lowe could pass. He'd been mortified by the praise and gift certificates he'd received as a result.

Hull told me that her son got his first chain saw at age 9 and had cut firewood for pocket money all through high school. He can be a bit of a clown, she said. Like other teen boys, he grew his hair into a semi-ironic mullet that is salon-permed in the back and which he calls “majestic.” He posed with his rifle for his senior pictures. He sometimes wore a MAGA hat to school. “Stupid hat,” Hull says (she voted Libertarian in the last presidential election). “I think he did it for attention.” Hull says she thanked another one of the teens who helped the family, and he answered with a mock manly, “That's what us redneck kids do.” She laughed. “But they've never had bad experiences with rednecks.”

Investigators have interviewed her son three times, trying to elicit names, but he told his mom that people had left by the time he pulled up to the site to see what all the excitement was about. Hull doesn't know who was there, either, but she speculates on the mentality: People in Forks like to be left alone, especially by the government or tree huggers. To some, the Covid shutdown seemed an overreaction imposed by a Democratic governor. People in Forks questioned why their businesses had to close, why they had to wear masks in public and stay home—especially as tourists disobeyed the stay-at-home orders, flocking to the coast and its closed beaches, lining up at Thriftway for toilet paper and supplies. Some people weren't working. They were restless and uneasy and then saw the violent disorder of Seattle—“and people here have very strong opinions on Seattle,” Hull says. Once the antifa rumor began, “They had a target where they could focus their armchair rage. It was a perfect storm of stupidity.”

In the days right after the A Road event, some saw darkly comedic threads mixed into the Forks stew of outrage and shame. City attorney Rod Fleck received a wry text: “How is the anti-Antifa war?” Fleck responded with face-palm emojis and mused that he should write a Coen brothers film. The contact suggested some mix of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil— a B-list redneck send-up—and the iconic hillbilly thriller Deliverance.

But the joking dismissals didn't last long: Seth Larson had been completely serious when he called on armed people to monitor the protest. He too was carrying a concealed weapon. And, in Forks, as Fleck noted in a text, the men at the Thriftway parking lot had “pumped their chests and walked around like fake cops.” Chevall and Lowe weren't hurt, but they were terrified.

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Paired with the president's drumbeat of antifa allegations, the fake tweet planted by Identity Evropa, the white-supremacist group, had its intended effect: a rippling radius of fear, distrust, and vigilantism. As the summer continued, men with guns took the law into their own hands. Boogaloo Boys organized on Facebook groups and are now charged with murder in Oakland and Santa Cruz, California. A 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse, who told a reporter he came to Kenosha, Wisconsin, with his AR-15-style rifle to protect local businesses from rioters, was arrested for allegedly killing two people. The day after Rittenhouse was arrested, the Kenosha sheriff said at a press event, “I had a person call me and say, ‘Why don't you deputize citizens?’ And I'm like, ‘Oh, hell no.’ What happened last night is probably the perfect reason why I wouldn't.” As of mid-September, a professor at Portland State University had tracked 610 incidents of far-right militants showing up at protests since George Floyd's death, instigating assaults and scuffles, firing shots, and driving cars into demonstrators; in more than 20 cases, disinformation led to their appearance at the events. FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that a “majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we've investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white-supremacist violence.”

Yet antifa fearmongering has accelerated. In a Fox News interview with conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, President Trump spoke darkly of a plane full of black-clad “thugs” wanting to do “big damage,” a nebulous description echoing the false rumors that had been making the rounds on social media. The mayhem of the “radical left” became the president's central message at the Republican National Convention. And then, in August, a man who claimed allegiance to antifa ideology did apparently kill a supporter of a right-wing group called Patriot Prayer in Portland, Oregon. Facebook rumors accused antifa and right-wing extremists of lighting the wildfires consuming the West, as law enforcement pleaded with people not to listen. Nationally, the question of who was creating the mayhem—police who shot Black men, people who burned buildings in response, vigilante militias, a president turning all of the above into a reelection strategy—grew increasingly muddled by the ideology of who was answering. One person's terrorist was another person's hero; one's lie was another's truth.

After Rittenhouse was arrested, the Freds Guns Facebook page posted a picture of him with his rifle strapped around his chest overlaid with the words “We Salute American Heroes.” Facebook alerted Larson that the post violated its standards against violence and incitement. Larson wrote a new post putting into words what he claims “everyone is thinking” but is too “chickenshit” to say:

I am going to say it now. You all have purchased masses of fire power from me and are getting ready for the WAR. If on the election night Biden magically wins the next morning will be at best a scene from the movie “Escape from New York With Kurt Russell.” Most likely Trump will win and the BLM movement will burn down Silicon Valley… Win Win.

Toggling between Larson's posts and those of his critics, I was overwhelmed by the chasmal challenge of ensuring a factual center holds. There was evidence for the truth in Forks that June day. If people had slowed down and taken some time to look, most could have seen that there was no sign of rioting antifa on Seth Larson's Facebook Live video, despite his efforts to conjure them. They could have listened to the Sequim police or believed Chevall when he said he was camping. The Bagby sisters saw through the hoax. So did Kris Hull. Dan Larson looked at the evidence and admitted his error. Politics didn't factor into their assessment. It still seems possible to find factual agreement, but momentum is pushing the other way.

By September, Facebook had sent the Clallam County sheriff the evidence investigators had hoped would break the lace of loyalties in Forks. It didn't. The hundreds of pages provided little beyond what investigators already knew from screenshots and interviews. There's hardly any cell service on that part of the A Road, so the data returned from Verizon didn't get them any closer either.

Chief criminal deputy Brian King said he wasn't losing hope. “We're close, we're really close,” he says, a tinge of ardor breaking through his even-keeled tone. “It just takes something small to really break this.” It could turn on just one person speaking. “But,” he added, “we've been close for a while.”

The ongoing silence has infuriated the Bagby sisters. “If they're not talking,” Tami told me, “throw them in jail! Maybe they'll talk then! I guess you can't do that. It's called kidnapping or something.” Kris Hull said her friends no longer wanted to discuss the case unless there's a new development. Still, no one in Forks forgets, she says. “It's never going to quite go away.”

Shannon Lowe told me about a person on the A Road who gave her hope, who listened in a way few people in 2020 seem able to. As she walked across the bridge with Chevall, snapping photos, a group of teens scurried away, but two of them turned and came back. One was white and had an “excellent mullet,” she recalls, and the other, she thought, was Native American. (He is Latino and is the Forks police chief's nephew.) He explained that they weren't trying to mess with campers, but they'd heard there were “terrorists” in the woods.

At that point, Lowe's nerves were beyond frayed, and she told them to think for themselves. “They're talking about us!” Shannon recalls yelling at the teens, the bite of the word “terrorist” overflowing into anger. “But we're not terrorists! You guys are terrorists! You are terrorizing my family!”

She saw the Latino teen's face change. “You've blocked us in here,” she continued. “We don't want to stay anymore, because we don't feel safe.” When the deputies arrived, the teens dutifully cut and dragged the alder branches off the road, then loaded their chain saws back into a truck.

Before jumping in to drive off, the young man looked straight at Shannon and Tyrone with one final message: “I'm sorry.”


LAUREN SMILEY (@laurensmiley) is a regular contributor to WIRED. She wrote about the Covid-19 lockdown on the Diamond Princess in issue 28.06.

This article appears in the November issue. Subscribe now.

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