At the Huntington Beach pier about 50 protesters gathered to pick up where they had left off on Friday. The turnout was light, but the rhetoric was just as passionate.
On the seventh Saturday of the state’s stay-at-home order, the division over mandatory closures widened, and the flashpoint in Southern California was once again the beaches of Orange County.
“The orders of Newsom are not constitutional, and they are not effective in any way,” said Kyle Richardson, who had designed a poster the night before.Waving to passing cars on Pacific Coast Highway, Richardson portrayed Gov. Gavin Newsom in a Nazi uniform beneath a red flag and a swastika. “Obey the Fuhrer,” it read the script. Opposite were a hand-drawn star, surfboard and the words, “Come and Get it,” a reference to the first battle of the Texas Revolution in 1835.
Eventually the crowd dispersed, but a half dozen stood their ground and debated their case with police officers not far from the water. Bill Beukers was among them. He and his wife had driven down from Lancaster, and uncertain how the conversation would go, she filmed the exchange while the couple’s children bodysurfed.
The day before, Huntington Beach resident Pete Hamborg stood on the sand with a garden hoe, carving out the letters to a vaguely obscene insult directed to the governor.While not participating in the Huntington Beach demonstration, Hamborg sympathizes with the protesters. He believes that the beach closure creates a dangerous precedent in the event there are additional outbreaks or a new pandemic.
“I have an addiction,” he says. “I need to go to a 12-step program, and it’s called 12-steps in the sand.”
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