A sign at today’s ReOpen PA rally
A smaller, yet still passionate, crowd gathered on Friday in front of the PA Capitol building, as ReOpen PA held a second rally in a month protesting the state’s coronavirus-related restrictions.
Like during the first rally, many protestors carried homemade signs or scrawled messages on their vehicles that said things like “Stop Virulent Government” and “Jesus Is My Vaccine”—and there was no shortage of “Trump 2020” signs or people selling them.
But, despite a full, professionally organized publicity blitz, the crowd was about half the size of the first rally in April, which attracted upwards of 1,000 people. The parade of honking vehicles circling the Capitol Complex also seemed to have lost much of its punch.
The smaller gathering didn’t stop Jeff Sternly from declaring the protest a “major success in sending a message to the governor.” Sternly ventured down from Lackawanna County and said he also had attended the April rally.
“See all this people here?” he said, gesturing to the crowd. “They want their freedom back.”
ReOpen PA alleges that Gov. Tom Wolf, through his response to the COVID-19 pandemic, “has unconstitutionally denied citizens their basic rights” and “threatened the livelihood of all Pennsylvanians.”
In March, Wolf issued a “stay-at-home” order and required that all “non life sustaining businesses” close their physical locations to fight spread of the virus. Since then, his administration developed a three-color system for gradually reopening.
Today, 13 counties in the southwest portion of the state switched from “red” to “yellow,” thereby loosening some of those restrictions. Last week, 24 counties also changed to the yellow category.
The Harrisburg area remains in the most restrictive “red” zone, though Wolf has said that he would announce today that more counties soon will enter the yellow phase.
Today’s rally lacked the hours-long cavalcade of honking vehicles through downtown and Midtown residential neighborhoods, which marked the first event. On Friday morning, the city placed barricades cordoning off most of the Capitol district’s residential areas and limiting access between downtown and Midtown.
Many vendors sold pro-Trump merchandise at the rally.
It did feature a number of speakers who oppose Wolf’s measures, including Republican state legislators Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-33) and Rep. Russ Diamond (R-102).
Diamond, for one, led the crowd in a chant decrying Wolf’s actions, repeatedly saying they were a “complete and utter failure.”
“Putting 2 million people out of work and not making the unemployment system [work], so they can handle it, that’s a complete and utter failure,” he said.
Like Sternly, Diana Jackson of Berks County said that this was her second “ReOpen PA” rally and that she was prepared to return to Harrisburg if necessary.
“We need to go back to work,” she said. “That’s the bottom line.”
