It started with a Zoom call.

Five members of the Michigan Conservative Coalition – a rightwing non-profit with ties to the Trump administration – decided they needed to do something to protest against Michigan’s stay-at-home order, designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Over a video chat in mid-April, they conceived a “gridlock” protest outside Michigan’s state capitol. It led to thousands of people blocking streets with their cars and hundreds assembling, in contravention of social distancing guidelines.

The rally had a bigger impact than they could have imagined. Promoted by wealthy rightwing groups, pushed by Fox News, and tacitly endorsed by Donald Trump, the Michigan protest has sparked copycat rallies across the US with further protests planned, and is spiraling into a movement which one conservative activist said could “dwarf the Tea Party”.

“We were blown away,” said Meshawn Maddock, a co-founder of the Michigan Conservative Coalition and a member of the advisory board for Women for Trump – an official arm of Trump’s re-election campaign.

“We’ve organized some pretty big things, but I don’t think Michigan … I don’t know that the nation has seen anything like what just happened.”

The rally was also supported by the Michigan Freedom Fund – which has received more than half a million dollars from the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos – but soon even bigger groups were jumping on board, each with their own rightwing agendas to promote.

FreedomWorks, a conservative special interest group which pushed the Tea Party movement, opposed Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms, and has downplayed climate change, has directed resources to the movement. The group now hopes to turn the anti-lockdown protests into a movement which could help re-elect Trump in November.

The Tea Party Patriots, another group forged amid the Tea Party movement of 2009, has also weighed in, promoting the rallies to its 3 million members nationwide, while a group of gun-enthusiast activist brothers bought up webpages in an effort to further the movement’s aims.

The Tea Party supported lower taxes, but was also accused of representing a racist reaction to the election of the first black president. It is also a prime example of “astroturfing” – where corporations jumped on to an activist group presented as a grassroots movement. It had some undoubted success, particularly in electing a number of extremely rightwing Republicans to office during the midterm elections, but some of those behind the current protests say this movement could eclipse it.

“This movement that’s starting right now has the potential to even dwarf the size of Tea Party,” said Noah Wall, the vice-president of advocacy at FreedomWorks.

“The Tea Party was started in response to excessive government spending and bailouts in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. This is affecting Americans across the board. You don’t have to have an opinion on government spending to not want to be forced to stay at home and not be able to work.”

Wall stressed that activists are organizing the protests, but FreedomWorks is pulling out all the stops to help them do so. The organization has set up an online “planning guide” for people to hold anti-stay-at-home rallies, complete with printable rally signs and tips on promoting the events online.

Meanwhile, it has promoted the events to its 5 million members through emails and social media posts.

The influence of rightwing groups has rarely been made clear to the aggrieved Americans heading out to the protests.

The Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer. Photograph: AP

Maddock and her Michigan Conservative Coalition co-founder Marian Sheridan claimed the Michigan rally was bipartisan, despite scores of protesters waving Trump 2020 campaign signs and sporting Maga hats. Others paraded Confederate flags.

Sheridan is the grassroots vice-chair of the Michigan Republican party, and said although this wasn’t an official Republican protest, “I’m sure that the party supports this”.

“There were lots of our legislators at the rally,” Sheridan pointed out.

Tony Daunt, the executive director of the DeVos-backed Michigan Freedom Fund, downplayed the group’s involvement in the rally – saying it was limited to spending $250 to advertise the event – but he did attend the protest.

“The rally was, I think, a huge success,” Daunt said.

Daunt and the Michigan Conservative Coalition said they had supported Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s initial stay-at-home order until she introduced stricter measures on 10 April, including limiting the number of people allowed in stores.

Polls show a majority of Michiganders support Whitmer’s handling of the crisis. More than 2,800 people have died from coronavirus in the state – the third highest tally in the US – with African Americans accounting for 40% of the deaths.

Despite minorities having been most affected by coronavirus in the state, the Michigan crowd appeared to be majority white.

Fox News covered the Michigan event throughout the day, with hosts including Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro – neither of whom have risked abandoning social distancing to attend a protest – championing the effort.

Fox News’s bombardment of anti-lockdown messaging soon reached a particularly influential audience member. “Liberate Michigan!” Trump tweeted two days after the Michigan protest, minutes after another favorable report by Fox News. On Sunday, he denied the protesters had put people at risk.

“They’ve got cabin fever,” Trump told reporters at a White House briefing. “They want their lives back. These people love our country. They want to get back to work.”

As Trump and Fox News, plus other rightwing outlets, cheered the Michiganders, plans for rallies in other states began to emerge. Since the Michigan effort, protests have taken place in Maryland, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia – a rally organized, in part, by a Virginia gun rights group.

Other protests, promoted by FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots, are planned in Alaska, Delaware and Kansas.

Jenny Beth Martin, honorary chairman of Tea Party Patriots, stressed that the protests had not been organized by the top of the organization, but by Tea Party Patriots activists in different states.

“They let us know about reopen events that are happening in their own state,” Martin said. “As long as the event is listing that the social distancing guidelines must be followed then we are sharing the event with our supporters in the geographic area by email.”

That possibly underplays the Tea Party Patriots’ influence, given it has 3 million supporters and hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Wall, at FreedomWorks, was also keen to stress it did not organize events, but the organization’s ability to reach its 5 million members is hardly a small matter in promoting the events.

In any case, the protests and the fawning news coverage by the rightwing media serve as a handy shot in the arm for less-publicized work both organizations are doing behind the scenes.

FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots have joined with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a controversial rightwing network that pushes policies by creating model legislation, to create a “Save Our Country” coalition, which is quietly lobbying Trump to reopen the economy. The protests are likely to help them make their case – potentially having consequences that far outweigh the few thousand who have turned out to defy stay-at-home orders.

In the meantime, FreedomWorks is hoping to turn the rallies into a force in electoral politics, another avenue the original organizers did not conceive.

“We train activists on how to influence elections. Any new members who are interested we will absolutely be providing training and resources for them to get involved and be able to affect the elections,” Wall said.

“What’s happening in the coming weeks will absolutely affect the November elections.”