What appears to be several hundred if not 1,000 or more protesters have gathered outside the State House in Sacramento as part of a series of "Reopen California" protests happening today. Other groups under the "We Have Rights" moniker with their "Don't Tread On Me" flags and the like have gathered in Huntington Beach and Los Angeles, and a parallel protest was trying to come together in San Francisco though we're not seeing much evidence of it so far.

The Sacramento protest may be the largest of the bunch, and video footage from KCRA and ABC 7 show protesters largely not wearing protective masks, and not observing any social distancing.

"We are not okay with being imprisoned in our homes and with government officials acting like SS agents in Hitler's Germany!" shouted one speaker at the Sacramento demonstration. And a banner was flying over the state capital, behind a plane, showing a picture of Governor Gavin Newsom with the phrase "End His Tyranny!"

The Sacramento crowd is also, inexplicably, chanting "USA!"

One protester walked up to a cameraman for KCRA and asked "How are you going to edit this to make it look like it's just 100 people?"

A lively protest, sans masks, is also going on in Huntington Beach, in Orange County — where on Thursday Newsom declared all beaches needed to be closed following crowds of tens of thousands of people showing up on Newport Beach last weekend.

Governor Gavin Newsom addressed the protests and said he applauded the protesters' "freedom of expression." As KRON4 reports, he said "We’re getting really close to making augmentations to that stay at home order," and those changes are coming next week.

These protests, with a mostly libertarian and far-right bent, have been going on across the country and have flared up in particular in Michigan, where today armed protesters stormed the state house and got inside to scream about the ongoing shelter-in-place order there. That protest, called the "American Patriot Rally," was organized by a group called Michigan United for Liberty.

It took a couple weeks for California to join in these loud demonstrations that reject the science behind the current public health measures, and deny that the coronavirus is any more lethal than the regular flu — which was something that President Trump essentially espoused a little over six weeks ago, before he came around to agreeing with some experts. But he has played both sides of this on Twitter, of course, tweeting about "liberating" various states in order to play to this asinine group of potential voters who still like and listen to him.

Good luck denouncing this media/Democrat hoax everybody! Go reopen your business and assume no one will get sick!

Also, please note the example of 60-year-old Ohio resident John W. McDaniel. He spent March denouncing the shelter orders as "bullshit" and a "political ploy," and by late March, he was diagnosed with COVID-19 and he is now dead.

Previously: Anti-Shelter-in-Place Protest Planned Around City Hall in SF on Friday

Photo: Mrs. Jones/Twitter