Fake recruitment flier circulated online targets Thurston County Democrats

A flier posted on social media saying “Get Paid to be a Professional Anarchist,” and which included contact information for the Thurston County Democrats, began circulating on Facebook and Twitter last week as protests in Minneapolis prompted by the death of George Floyd began to spread throughout the country.

The flier promises to pay $200 to those who join, and features the Banksy artwork “Love is in the air,” along with several anarchist and Antifa symbols.

Victor Minjares, chairman of the Thurston County Democrats, took to Twitter to inform people of the post. “Over the last 24 hours, we were one of the victims of a nationwide ‘fake news’ trolling operation,” he wrote.

He said the post was determined to be fake by the fact-checking website Snopes.com, writing on Twitter, “It was a fascist-style disinformation campaign to discredit protesters nationwide; we were the incidental victims.”

While the email address on the flier was fake, the phone number listed was the Thurston County Democrats’ real number. Over the last few days their phone was “swamped with calls from gullible conspiracy theorists, accusing us of being backed by George Soros [a billionaire political donor],” Minjares wrote on Twitter.

Minjares was first made aware of the flier when the Thurston County Democrats received a phone call from a man asking, “Is George Soros there?” “I just chuckled and said, ‘don’t call back here,’” he said.

That was just the start, however, and by Tuesday, the Thurston County Democrats had received “innumerable” calls.

“When I turned the phone on Sunday morning, which is when I became aware something serious was going on, the phone’s voicemail box was full, and the phone just kept ringing and ringing and ringing with calls from all over the country,” Minjares said, “You couldn’t say ‘Hello’ without the phone ringing and another call coming in.”

Even after posting about the flier as a hoax, accusatory calls still came in. So, the Thurston County Democrats were forced to change their number.

While the flier appears obviously fake to many people, there was still a vocal minority that believed it was real, Minjares said. “It was a legitimate threat to our organization.”

The flier’s origin is unknown but has been posted and seen by people across the country via Facebook.

Glen Morgan of the “We The Governed” website saw the flier and quickly dispelled it as fake. “You could tell immediately it was fake,” he said. “Number one, the email address was wrong… but secondly there is no way they would ever put out a public flier of any kind that says they’re funded by Soros. That’s just openly and obviously stupid.”

George Soros, billionaire investor and Democratic donor, is the subject of many online internet conspiracies among right-wing and alt-right groups. His name and his organization – the Open Society Foundation – were both listed as sponsors on the flier.

“I think that it’s just so amateurish that it was just somebody screwing around somewhere. What’s weird is I’m not sure why they picked the Thurston County Democrats because it looks like it didn’t even come from this state.” Morgan said.

Morgan, who posted his own article calling the flier fake, said analytics showed that a majority of the articles’ readers were out-of-state. Accounts that post the flier on Facebook are from all over the country as well.

“There’s always going to be misinformation spread whenever there are times of chaos and we’ve got plenty of legitimate things to cover that are bad enough and plenty of bad news scandals that we don’t need to go and get hyped up about something that’s obviously fake,” he said.

This story was originally published June 3, 2020 at 5:45 AM.