They came up with a plan. Murphy snapped up domains for every still available iteration of reopenAL.com, reopenAK.com, reopenAR.com, and so forth, that hadn’t already been purchased, along with every domain he could for variations like liberateWV.com, liberateWY.com, and liberateWI.com. The idea was to preempt any further such purchases by people genuinely seeking to organize protests.

“I realized all these fringe guys are gonna get a hold of these websites, So I went out and bought ‘em up that night,” he told me. The financial burden of thwarting fringe-right groups? “It cost me about four grand,” Murphy said. “I don’t have the money quite frankly. I was just trying to do something good. I’m in massive credit debt to do this.”

Murphy said that he recognized that his plan isn’t foolproof. While similar domains have already been obtained and still remain up for purchase, he thinks keeping fringe-right wingers from the one’s he purchased has made a difference. He said he believes such short concise domain names are important in search rankings. “Names are really powerful. That’s why people pay millions for certain domains,” he said.

After buying the URLs, things were initially quiet. But on Saturday night a Reddit post detailing information about the domain registrations went viral. While the message didn’t directly identify Murphy, it gave instructions on how to find his name alongside speculation that he must be running an anti-lockdown astroturf campaign—even though Murphy’s intentions were the exact opposite. On Twitter, people doxxed him, posting his address and home number.