The Dorr Brothers
The Dorr Brothers
Early last year, many state and municipal governments frantically began issuing stay-at-home orders and restrictions on gatherings and business activities as part of a last-ditch bid to slow down the spread of the pandemic. They were opposed by conservative activists who organized protests demanding health authorities rescind those orders. Some of the rallies were massive. Many of them had a heavy presence of gunmen and armed anti-government militias. And virtually all of them were composed largely of anti-maskers who refused to cover their faces, spouting ill-advised pseudoscience and promoting a conspiracy theory the lockdowns were designed to hurt Trump’s political standing.
As it turns out, many of those protests can be traced to just four people with a total of five separate words in their names. Investigations showed that brothers and pro-gun activists Aaron, Ben, Chris, and Matthew Dorr, who had a long history of staging far-right political stunts, had quickly assembled a network of five Facebook groups with total membership in the hundreds of thousands, which became key launching points for the rallies. Those included Minnesotans Against Excessive Quarantine, New Yorkers Against Excessive Quarantine, Ohioans Against Excessive Quarantine, Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine and Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine (noticing a trend here).
The Dorr brothers sat on the board of the American Firearms Coalition, as well as served as directors, authors, advisers, or in other roles on groups including Wyoming Gun Owners, Iowa Gun Owners, Ohio Gun Owners, Minnesota Gun Rights, and the Missouri Firearms Coalition. Many of their Facebook pages posted links leading to their other pro-gun projects, and at least one other major anti-lockdown group, American Revolution 2.0, reportedly communicated with them. Given the overlap, it’s hardly a mystery that so many gun-toting weirdos showed up to anti-lockdown protests organized via the pages, and that in turn may have played a role in Trump’s rhetoric asserting the anti-coronavirus measures were somehow a prelude to mass gun seizures.
However, the Dorr brothers had more than spreading anti-lockdown, pro-gun rhetoric in mind. They’re also well known for cashing in on their political projects. According to the Washington Post, the brothers have in some cases tried to skirt lobbyist registration rules by instead describing themselves as involved in “pro-gun grassroots mobilization,” and they’re notorious for trying to direct conservative followers into signing up for pricey memberships in dubious pro-gun groups. (The price tag for the Wisconsin Firearms Coalition? $35 to $1,000.) NBC News, it reported that the brothers’ pro-gun and anti-abortion rights Facebook groups have raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
NBC wrote that the Dorrs have gathered such a negative reputation that Republicans in the Minnesota Senate set up a website warning off prospective donors:
A 2019 investigation by Fox affiliate KMSP-TV of Minneapolis-St. Paul found that Minnesota Gun Rights continued to raise money through memberships, boasting hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual donations, although the IRS had revoked the group’s tax-exempt status in 2016 for failing to file Form 990s. The IRS reinstated its tax-exempt status in 2019. According to tax documents, the group raised $273,000 in 2018, the most recent year for which it filed.
In February, Minnesota’s Senate Republican Caucus launched a website warning voters against the Dorr-backed “scams.”
A Minnesota anti-abortion group has also called the brothers scammers, while another website titled DorrBrothersScams.com has numerous accountsof the Dorrs raising money for various conservative causes, only for the money to seemingly evaporate.
