As mass protests against police brutality and racial injustice continue across the country, 4chan, a notorious alt-right troll hub online, is trying to meddle in protesters’ online operations.

On Sunday night, users of 4chan made several highly trafficked posts with links to dozens of Black Lives Matter channels on Telegram, a privacy-oriented, encrypted messaging app that has been used for organizing protests across the country. Users on 4chan encouraged others to post disinformation in the groups, find “incriminating” information that they can pass to law enforcement, and trawl the channels for as much personal, identifying, and organizational information as they can about people in the groups.

Some have already posted the phone numbers of volunteers organizing food and water for protesters, and phone numbers for jail support for arrested protesters. The 4chan posts didn’t include instructions for what to do with the numbers, but based on 4channer’s normal behavior, it’s possible that the implication is to harass the person on the other end of the line. In some cases, users in the threads are also doxxing what they believe to be “Antifa safehouses” by posting addresses of these homes.

The leisure and hospitality industry accounts for one of every four jobs in Nevada. Or it did, anyway...

For all the hand-wringing over Nevada’s failure to diversify its economy because uh-oh now look where we are, well, here we are. Nevada’s economy hasn’t diversified in a statistically meaningful way, it isn’t going to anytime soon, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Despite the earnest efforts of the state’s growing economic development industrial complex over the last few years, battery factories and data centers and all the other ventures Nevada has attracted by doling out publicly subsidized handouts — even the holy sacred football field amen — have created a workforce that is still dwarfed by the number of people directly and indirectly employed in what is — or was — the state’s primary industry.

And now, in Nevada’s greatest economic crisis ever, the economic development crowd is saying what we need is more financial enticements to lure new firms to come to Nevada.As one economic development official explained to business allies last week, “The strategy is to push and push hard for new job creation.”

With incentives.

In other words, more of the same.

First, economic development groups and their “partners” should marshal their formidable collective resources to reform systemic policies and practices that make life harder for working people than it needs to be. Unaffordable child care, poverty-level wages, erratic working conditions, skimpy or non-existent health, sick leave, vacation and retirement benefits, ruthless banking options, a dearth of public transit, a profit-driven court system, one of the nation’s most thread-bare safety nets — all those create broad workforce instability and erode the purchasing power of the consumer core of working Nevadans, which in turn hinders, to borrow a term, economic development.

Those barriers to prosperity and well-being also block performance in one area that every economic development organization in Nevada and the nation unanimously agrees is a tip top priority, education.

Second, if Nevada’s politically juiced-up and much-admired economic development movers and shakers want to do something that would make a difference but quick, they shouldn’t be dreamily promising to attract new jobs (however few) with tax cuts and giveaways. They should be identifying the most expeditious way possible for the state to reverse the tax cuts and giveaways that have already been bestowed to companies that never needed them in the first place, and then lobby like hell to replace those race-to-the-bottom “incentives” with responsible policy.

Amazon, Tesla, Google, Apple, Switch — and yes, even the football team — don’t need the goodies Nevada has given them. But the state does.

The chambers of commerce, higher education institutions, and politicians have all been staunch allies of the economic development set. And they all know prosperity isn’t shared in Nevada. They shouldn’t be whining for tax breaks and pining for deals, begging for grants, and smiling at ribbon-cuttings.

They should be pushing economic development policy that helps people who work in the jobs Nevada has (or had, but will someday have again), not cheering on economic development agencies as they muse about how wonderful it will be when every Nevada child learns to code or whatever.

They came up with a plan. Murphy snapped up domains for every still available iteration of reopenAL.com, reopenAK.com, reopenAR.com, and so forth, that hadn’t already been purchased, along with every domain he could for variations like liberateWV.com, liberateWY.com, and liberateWI.com. The idea was to preempt any further such purchases by people genuinely seeking to organize protests.

“I realized all these fringe guys are gonna get a hold of these websites, So I went out and bought ‘em up that night,” he told me. The financial burden of thwarting fringe-right groups? “It cost me about four grand,” Murphy said. “I don’t have the money quite frankly. I was just trying to do something good. I’m in massive credit debt to do this.”

Murphy said that he recognized that his plan isn’t foolproof. While similar domains have already been obtained and still remain up for purchase, he thinks keeping fringe-right wingers from the one’s he purchased has made a difference. He said he believes such short concise domain names are important in search rankings. “Names are really powerful. That’s why people pay millions for certain domains,” he said.

After buying the URLs, things were initially quiet. But on Saturday night a Reddit post detailing information about the domain registrations went viral. While the message didn’t directly identify Murphy, it gave instructions on how to find his name alongside speculation that he must be running an anti-lockdown astroturf campaign—even though Murphy’s intentions were the exact opposite. On Twitter, people doxxed him, posting his address and home number.

In 2009, the right-wing network helped build the tea party movement. It’s happening again.

In recent days, thousands of people have protested against coronavirus lockdowns in states across the country. The demonstrators—often wearing MAGA gear and directing their ire at Democratic governors—still represent a small minority; polls show that most Americans are actually worried the shutdowns will be ended too soon. But according to Matt Gertz, that could change quickly. Gertz, a senior fellow at the liberal group Media Matters for America, points out that Fox News has thrown its full weight behind the protests and that Donald Trump has followed the right-wing network’s lead. “Once you have Fox News and President Trump championing these protests for a while,” Gertz predicts, “you’ll see polarization kick in, I think, and Republicans begin to support them in larger numbers.”

Between April 13 and April 19, Fox devoted a whopping 4 hours and 23 minutes—across 69 separate segments—to covering the protests, a Media Matters report found. All this is eerily reminiscent of 2009, when Fox helped turn the nascent tea party movement into a powerful anti-Obama political force by relentlessly promoting its rallies. (Disclosure: I worked with Gertz at Media Matters back then.) On Monday, I spoke with Gertz about Fox’s coverage of the anti-social distancing demonstrations, its impact on Trump, and the striking similarities to what happened a decade ago. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.