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Seth Larson didn't notice Twitter's fact check. The 45-year-old manager of Freds Guns, a firearms store 70 miles east of Forks in the town of Sequim, had already reposted the tweet on his Facebook. A few days later, when he saw a notice for a Black Lives Matter demonstration planned in his hometown, he worried that antifa rioters would come. Someone had to be on the alert.On the day of the march, June 3, just hours before Big Bertha would roll into Forks in need of a battery, Larson cued up his Facebook Live. He walked by shops downtown, narrating the scene of people striding down the sidewalk carrying Black Lives Matter signs. “Sequim just got a busload of people ... They're not breaking windows yet.” He also claimed to see out-of-towner antifa, 25 to 30 of them, pointing to people with skateboards and training his phone's camera on an occasional bicyclist whizzing by. “Head to Sequim, boys!” he told his followers. “All patriots, call to arms right now!” Over the next 50 minutes, he kept ringing the alarm. “The fuckery is here!” “It looks like Clallam County is going to get hit tonight.” “There's the antifa group. You can totally smell the wanting-to-break-shit-up off of their body. They look sketchy as shit.”
He told his viewers to buy bear mace and “less lethals” at Freds Guns. He said to fetch their gear, their long guns, and meet him at City Hall. A dozen followers showed up at the Sequim protest with pistols, some asking protesters for ID. At least one was carrying an assault rifle. Rumors about buses spread across the county—a guy called 911 about seeing a yellow bus at a gas station between Sequim and Forks, “all of them in black,” cutting off the call frantically with “I gotta meet people!”READ ALSO: