🧵Watching the footage from Ottawa reminded me that a few hundred trucks convoyed into Salem, OR and snarled traffic for about 10 hours on June 27, 2019. It was part of a mostly-astroturfed movement that scuttled a carbon bill that, by all accounts, was about to pass.
https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1144307856553861121
The group that organized the rally was called "Timber Unity" & it had 1st come into existence on June 6, 2019 (3 weeks before the protest) as a Facebook group. From what I can tell, the 37K members (as of late June 2019) were real live Oregonians who didn't like the Carbon Bill. 
That said, the seed money for the group was provided on 6/21 by Andrew Miller, a longtime conservative donor in Oregon who is the heir to a multi-generational timber fortune. He owns Stimson Lumber Company. Screenshot from Oregon Sec of State website.
Here's a profile of Miller from 2012. According to that article, Miller had donated $2.2 million "in recent years" to conservative candidates and groups. By Oregon standards, that's a lot of money. wweek.com/portland/artic…
One week before Timber Unity came into existence on FB and 3 weeks before Miller gave them $5000, he laid off a good number of workers, blaming it on the climate legislation in the works. wweek.com/news/2019/05/3…
One of the things that really angered Miller (who has given untold millions to influence Oregon politics) is the way "special-interest donors" were supposedly distorting the legislative process. I mean, come on now. This isn't even trying to pass the smell test.
To some extent the successful killing of the carbon bill was "normal" American politics. Citizens formed a pressure group, special-interests donated funds to support politics favorable to them, coordinated protests happened at the Capitol. Standard stuff.
https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1144396926596501504?s=20&t=LFtJWd9eayaB9LSON7q6xQ
But as I observed on in June 2019 and as is documented in this piece by Leah Sottile, Timber Unity has many ties to far right groups. It brings together timber CEOs with cash, far right groups with muscle, and a good number of other "conservative" folks. hcn.org/issues/53.7/no…
The group still exists. There have been many changes in leaderships, squabbles, etc. that I don't fully understand. One thing I do know is that the current leader of the group, who is on the city council in Sweet Home, was in DC on Jan 6.
This story talks about the Oregon GOP officials and candidates who went to DC for Jan 6. statesmanjournal.com/story/news/202…
Here's the point. Protests are messy events that are hard to reduce to one thing. There were far right domestic terror groups and white supremacists at the Timber Unity rally. There were ordinary people. There were aspiring MAGA politicians. It was funded in part by a rich CEO.
Just because some participants in a rally authentically believe in the cause, doesn't mean it's not also in service of some rich guy's political project. And just because many "normies" are there, that doesn't mean there aren't far right radicals providing muscle and recruiting.
To me, what made the Timber Unity protests appear anti-democratic (rather than part of the normal process) was that they used this mysteriously funded truck convoy to kill a bill on the verge of passing that had been worked a long time, with all stakeholders at the table.
The bill was also killed by a GOP Senate walkout to deny a quorum. When the senators went to Idaho, one of them implied the OR State Police better be ready for a shootout if they came to retrieve them. statesmanjournal.com/story/news/pol…
The Oregon GOP has not been competitive in statewide races for over a decade. Rather than move to the center, they have instead lurched rightward, making themselves even LESS electorally viable. So the only power they now have is the power to disrupt, to ratf*ck the process.
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