A friend of mine lives in Huntington Beach with her husband on a smallish plot of land that was an “Encyclopedia Lot.” It’s an interesting story.

In the early part of the last century, from 1910 to 1914, the publisher of the Encyclopedia Americana bought up a lot of what was thought to be worthless land in Huntington Beach, and, as a marketing ploy, they threw in a plot of Huntington Beach land to anyone who purchased a leather-bound 18-volume set of Encyclopedia Americana. Hundreds of plots were doled out by the company, and later, the city feverishly sought to buy back the plots, but my friend, though not a recipient of the original free deed, still lives on an “Encyclopedia Lot,” and, for the most part, she and her husband enjoy life in Surf City.

But, sometimes a city will turn ugly on you, as she discovered on a walk down to the pier on Friday afternoon, when Downtown HB was packed with a couple thousand “liberators.”

In an email, she wrote, “As I write this I have tears in my eyes and I’m having a hard time to keep from crying. Since I live in Downtown Huntington Beach and I’m a lover of history, I decided I needed to go and see what was happening at the pier.

“So many crazies; no masks, no social distancing, mothers bringing their kids with no masks or social distancing. Trump banners, ‘Free America’ signs, ‘Recall Newsom.’

“The negative energy was so great I just had to leave. All I know is these people are going to be spreading the virus back to where they came from…”

The Huntington Beach protest, like one held in that city in mid-April, was our own nearby version of those taking place in lockdown states including Michigan, Ohio, Idaho and Kentucky, and they’re not so much protests by locals wanting to go to the beach or get in a round of golf, or even mom-and-pop business owners trying not to lose their lives’ investments. In fact, they’re little more than pop-up Trump rallies, funded and organized by groups such as the Michigan Conservative Coalition, which Michigan state which has also operated under the name of Michigan Trump Republicans. It was, according to the Guardian news site, also heavily promoted by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a group linked to Trump’s  Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

In fact, alt-right groups abound in these nationwide protests, as witness Friday’s protest in Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s open-carry state of Michigan that was attended by protesters with guns at the state’s capitol. President Trump called them (once again) “very good people.”

I suppose I should be appreciative of their efforts to free me from my stay-at-home exile, but I’m not. I’m staying home because of science, as are millions of other people in this country and in the world.

There’s an over-arching tone among these groups that echoes climate-change denial, and it’s a loud, raucous and dangerous series of demonstrations of bull-headed bellicosity, science phobia and other aspects of right-wing extremism that threatens to turn very ugly soon.

The protesters are demonstrating most vociferously in states run by Democratic governors as the divisiveness that has cleaved this country for the last dozen years now leaks into a binary battle over public health and safety.

It is perhaps ironic, though certainly perverse, that these groups are protesting in blue states, when it was their own beloved bright-red president whose inaction and misplaced hubris worsened the viral mess that we’re facing today and in many ways necessitated the lockdown.

It’s also ironic that these groups often present themselves as free-wheeling militiamen and women, yet they’re hesitant to do what’s necessary to battle COVID, but rather push for surrender and demand to spring open the country today. Many will die, but, people die in car accidents every day, amiright? And, anyway, acceptable losses and whatnot, that’s the cost of freedom.

The best hope right now is for a vaccine against COVID, and it’s not something that will happen this week, though even if it were, how many of these denialists will avail themselves of it? A few, no doubt, but most will see it as another government conspiracy (to what end is unclear), and the battles will continue. It’s something to look forward to.