blazek patriot party

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/one-loud-voice-capitol-riot/

raw story

one of the most crucial questions for both the FBI investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol and the House Select Committee inquiry is the connection between President Trump and the militant groups that carried out the attack.

The next hearing of the January 6th Committee, scheduled for July 12 and led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), reportedly “plans to detail known links and conversations between political actors close to Trump and extremists,” according to the New York Times.

While it is not clear what evidence the committee will present, a network of operatives surrounding retired Lt. General Michael Flynn — an inspirational figure for rank-and-file Trump supporters protesting the outcome of the election — helped build an infrastructure for months in advance that stoked anger, called on the president to invoke the Insurrection Act, and amplified his call to supporters to be in Washington for a “wild rally” on Jan. 6.

One of the initiatives that sprung up around Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor who was seeking a pardon after the US Department of Justice dismissed charges for lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, was called Operation Voter Integrity.

Felisa Blazek, a New Hampshire-based event planner with ties to the QAnon community, outlined plans for the initiative in an interview with Tamara Leigh, a podcaster active in the campaign to vindicate Flynn, and Brent Hamachek, the executive editor of the right-wing publicationHuman Events. As Blazek described it, the project would deploy GOP activists to monitor polling places for voter fraud, with pro-Trump groups standing by to escalate complaints up through a network that she said would ultimately reach the White House.

Two of the groups mentioned by Blazek, Veterans for Trump and Bikers for Trump, would later show up at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Blazek a phone tree in which one activist “would just call the head of your state for Bikers for Trump.” She continued: “One phone call. They dispatch 20 to 30 people to that precinct. Second phone call, you call in Veterans for Trump. They dispatch 20 to 30 people. They just show there and they just stand up, and they just let you know you’re not alone. The police will come. If the police don’t come, they’re all trained. We’re just standing by and letting you know that we know.”

Blazek could not be reached for comment for this story.

Two days after the election, Veterans for Trump co-founder Joshua Macias and an associate, Antonio LaMotta, were arrested on weapons charges outside the Philadelphia Convention Center, where election officials were tabulating votes. Local police made the arrests after receiving an FBI alert about a possible attempt to interfere with the vote count, according to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office. The police reportedly recovered a semi-automatic AR-15-syle assault rifle, samurai sword and hundreds of firearms cartridges from the Hummer that the two men drove from Virginia.

Macias and LaMotta could not be reached for comment for this story.

At the time, some Democratic officials and voting rights groups condemned President Trump’s instruction to supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully,” saying it amounted to voter intimidation, and the Department of Homeland Security warned that polling places could be “flash points for potential violence.”

Both Macias and Blazek were avid supporters of Flynn.

Two years earlier, Macias had organized a rally to support Flynn outside the DC federal courthouse at the former general’s sentencing hearing, where he stood alongside Tamara Leigh, according to a report in Mother Jones. Chris Cox, the founder of Bikers for Trump, also attended the protest to support Flynn.

Blazek had recently organized a two-day QAnon-friendly gathering called the Patriot Party in Scottsdale, Ariz. that featured Barbara Redgate, Flynn’s sister.

During an interview to promote the event, Blazek had said, “We’re hoping to host General Flynn and his family as our honored guests. If they would choose to speak, that would be great. But really, we just want them to come there, and support them.” Blazek added that the Flynn family was like “the tip of the spear in our movement.”

David Sumrall, a Dallas-based organizer who founded the right-wing group Stop Hate, similarly extolled the Flynn family in an interview with Redgate to promote the Patriot Party.

“We want to make sure that General Flynn’s getting a message of support and love and encouragement because we have his back,” Sumrall said. “We understand what happened to him, and the whole fact that he’s willing to take one for the team.”

Soon after Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, Blazek and Sumrall, alongside Ali Alexander and Tomi Collins, began organizing rallies across the country to protest the electoral outcome.

Pasquali “Pat” Scopelliti, a business coach based in Charlottesville, Va. and frequent contributor on the PardonFlynnNow.com website, praised Blazek and Macias together in a post-election thread on Twitter. Referring to the two by their Twitter handles and using hashtags associated with Blazek’s election mobilization effort and a parallel campaign led by Alexander, Scopelliti tweeted: “Both @PatriotAssembly and @JoshuaMacias are on the Field of Fight, right now. I choose to support them, as should you./ #1LoudVoice/ #StopTheSteal.”

The following day, Scopelliti issued another Twitter thread, declaring that America was at “war,” with “voter fraud” being the “ultimate weapon,” while speculating that “$1,000 bottles of rice wine” were “being uncorked in Beijing.”

“There are three people I must mention,” Scopelliti continued, recognizing Sumrall, alongside Blazek and Macias. “They are: @HelpStopHate, @PatriotAssembly, @JoshuaMacias.These three patriots have known in their bones, the nature of this war. And they have joined forces to lead the ground game of its fight.”

Scopelliti attached a digital flier to the tweet with the heading “All 50 State Capitol Buildings, #1LoudVoice, Truth Rally, 12:00 PM across the nation.” The flier included URLs for nearly a dozen pro-Trump groups, including Sumrall’s Stop Hate; Blazek’s Patriot Party; PardonFlynnNow.com; and Cowboys for Trump, led by Couy Griffin, who had attended the Patriot Party event in Scottsdale. Griffin would later be arrested for his role in the attack on the Capitol, and found guilty of entering and remaining in a restricted building.

Veterans for America First, the successor organization to Veterans for Trump, currently lists Scopelliti as its community engagement advisor on the organization’s website.

Despite being out on a $750,000 bail with pending firearms charges in Philadelphia, Macias and LaMotta traveled to Washington, DC in early January for a cluster of rallies culminating with President Trump’s speech at the Ellipse. Macias was present during a brief meeting between Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes in an underground parking garage on Jan. 5, the eve of the attack on the Capitol. Tarrio and Rhodes both face seditious conspiracy charges in separate cases related to the attack on the Capitol.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner noted the meeting during a press conference last month to announce a motion to have Macias held for contempt of court due to his actions at the Capitol.

“When people are planning a bank robbery, when they are planning a mob hit, they do not let uninvolved people come to that small private meeting,” Krasner said. “When people are planning serious crimes, the only people that are going to be there, especially when they’re trying to be secretive, are people that are seriously involved.”

Also present at the parking garage meeting were Kelly SoRelle, who now serves as general counsel for the Oath Keepers, and Latinos for Trump President Bianca Gracia.

On Jan. 6, Blazek, Macias, LaMotta, Rhodes, SoRelle, Gracia and members of aBikers for Trump faction known as Boots on the Ground gathered at the MAGA Freedom Rally in front of the Russell Senate Office Building, a block away from the Capitol.

In an interview with Sumrall last fall, SoRelle said she went back to a hotel room to eat and get warm, while Rhodes went to the Capitol. Rhodes took up a position outside the Capitol, while more than a dozen Oath Keepers members outfitted in tactical gear pushed through the crowd in a stack and followed a mob into the building. SoRelle said in that interview in September that there was no plan to attack the Capitol. In January, Rhodes and 10 other members of the Oath Keepers were charged with seditious conspiracy — a charge that amounts to attempting to overthrow the government by force. Two of those charged have pleaded guilty.

“Stewart had guys that were protecting different speakers at different events, namely Ali Alexander, who was supposed to have been literally on the Capitol grounds,” SoRelle told Sumrall last September. “Then everybody’s like, ‘Well, we don’t know where everybody’s at. This is chaos. Like, what the heck?’ So, that’s why we ended up at the Capitol. We went down there just to see if we could locate his people. You know? And then next thing you take it straight to crazy la-la land, as in everybody’s the mastermind, and whatever.”

Sumrall, who used social media to raise money to take a “team” to Washington, DC, concurred with SoRelle’s account.

Sumrall said he told FBI agents: “Guys, listen: The plan was to get to DC. That’s where it stopped. That’s where it stopped. You’re never going to find anything where anybody says, ‘We’re going in the Capitol.’”

Sumrall’s voice can be heard in a video posted on Stop Hate’s Instagram account that was taken from the west side of the Capitol. The post is accompanied by a text comment from the account owner: “We’ve broken down the gates and made it onto the Capitol grounds.”

Another video on the Stop Hate Instagram account shows police in riot gear lined up on the inauguration review stand and the terrace facing rioters, with the caption, “#StormTheCapitol.”

Macias and LaMotta also went to the Capitol. Footage recently obtained by NBC News shows LaMotta inside the Capitol. He has not been arrested to date.

With LaMotta standing nearby, Macias addressed the crowd on the east side of the Capitol, according to video archived by the @capitolhunters Twitteraccount.

“Mike Pence is a Benedict Arnold,” Macias roared. “We believed in you, Vice President. We had hope that you would do what’s right for our Constitution. I stood with you onstage, sir. We believed in you.

“President Trump, you have the ability to pass — if you have the strength, sir — the Insurrection Act is now,” Macias continued. “You have the power, sir, and we support you 110 percent. Do what’s right, sir…. Defend the Constitution against foreign and domestic enemies. Those domestic enemies are here. If you’re not awake, America, be awoke. The enemy is not at the gates; the enemy is already here.”

Another person could be heard answering Macias with theQAnon slogan: “Where we go one, we go all!”

“That’s right!” Macias said. “One loud voice! We are one. We are united. I am Josh Macias, Vets for Trump.We will never quit.”

ref jordan green raw no lnx

https://www.rawstory.com/america-restored/

:{six months before the 2020 election, Tomi Collins, a Christian right organizer from North Dakota, issued a demand on Twitter for the execution of political enemies in the federal government bureaucracy — citing an array of imagined offenses, including the QAnon hoax that progressive elites are harvesting children’s blood.

“#WeThe people demand incitements [sic] for #SpyGate #PizzaGate #UraniumOne #Adrenochrome,” she wrote. “#DeepState will be exposed and hung for treason. Even if we have to do it ourselves! #CoordinationMatters.”}:

Collins closed her digital call to arms with two more hashtags: #PatriotsMobilize and #1LoudVoice.

Collins serves as executive director of a little-known Christian right outfit called America Restored. Collins has described America Restored, which is organized as a private corporation, as a vehicle for providing strategic consulting and funding to grassroots organizers.

As early as January 2018, less than a year into the Trump administration, Collins was warning followers on Facebook Live about “voter machine fraud,” and foreign election interference, while specifically referencing Dominion Voting Systems. Her description of a plan “to cheat” in the upcoming 2018 midterm elections uncannily anticipated public claims by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell that have prompted a defamation lawsuit against the two attorneys who litigated President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Collins’ role as a key, if overlooked, organizer in the sprawling network of operatives and influencers highlights the role ofChristian nationalism in a movement that remains committed to overturning the 2020 election and vanquishing political opposition. Many of the tenets of a hyper-partisan version of Christianity — entwined with syncretic strains of the QAnon cult — were voiced by the far-right organizers who galvanized defiance of the 2020 election results, including some who attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The mission statement for America Restored, prominently displayed on its website’s landing page, clearly describes the work of the organization led by Collins: “America Restored is ‘We The People’ building a powerful, action-driven infrastructure by organizing and mobilizing existing, effective patriot groups and freedom-loving Americansin all major areas of influence: Education, Family, Faith, Business, Government, Entertainment and Media.”

The mission statement ends with a pledge that inaccurately conflates the organization’s vision of aChristian theocracy with an originalist view of the country: “We The People will see America restored to our founders’ original intent.”

[READ: Legal expert: Pat Cipollone could deal a massive blow to Trump if he confirms Hutchinson's explosive testimony

America Restored’s mission statement explicitly references Seven Mountains dominionism, a far-right Christian ideology that emerged in the mid-1970s. It holds that Christians are called on by God to dominate all realms of civil society, including government.

Katherine Stewart, author of the 2020 book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, described Seven Mountains dominionism in an email to Raw Story as “the conviction that Christians of a certain hyper-conservative variety are called by God to dominate the main peaks of modern civilization in the United States and, ultimately, the world.”

C. Peter Wagner, one of the ideology’s key proponents, preached that Christians’ responsibility for taking over “whatever molder of culture or subdivision God has placed them in” is a matter of “taking dominion back from Satan,” according to Stewart.

America Restored’s grafting of Seven Mountains dominionism ideology onto a claim of restoring the original republic represents a fundamental misreading of the founders’ intent, Stewart told Raw Story. Stewart cited appeals to reason and deistic or atheistic philosophy as underpinning the thinking of founders such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin. But even more important than what the founders thought, she said, is the question of what kind of government they established.

“Was it a government that derives its legitimacy from its appeal to Christian revelation, or from its endorsement by Christian ecclesiastical authorities?” Stewart wrote. “The answer to that is no. America’s founders established the world’s first large-scale modern secular republic.”

[READ: Trump fake elector was visited by FBI — but still may be ousted for not election denying enough: report

Four days after the 2020 election, Collins spoke at a “Stand With Trump Rally” at the North Dakota state capitol in Bismarck. Collins told the crowd she had been contacted by the Trump campaign’s legal team and had attended “meetings with intelligence folks.” Raw Story has not been able to verify these claims independently.

“It’s an amazing day when you get to stand and go from a conspiracy theorist to getting called up by the campaign and attorneys all over the country saying, ‘What about those voting machines? What’s going on in them?’” Collins said. “Hey, let’s go. We’ve got some lawsuits to do.”

Collins went on to describe a plan to “mobilize all 50 states” for rallies that would augment the lawsuits with continuous public pressure to overturn the election results.

“We worked in conjunction with Stop the Steal to get folks at capitols in every single state in the union so we the people could be heard,” Collins later recalled in an interview for a far-right podcast, referencing the coalition led by Ali Alexander.

:{

Felisa Blazek, a New Hampshire-based event planner, described a markedly similar effort.}:

“I had started the 50-state rallies with — actually ahead of Ali,” Blazek told an interviewer the following summer. “And Ali, having all of his width and breadth of followers — although he’s gone into hiding — God used him in that way, right? God used Cain and God used Abel. He sends out someone who has a much bigger presence on social media than myself. God’s calling for me was to be a base cheerleader, not a main player. So, we’re doing these 50-state rallies at all the capitols every Saturday after the steal of the November election.”

It is unclear whether Collins and Blazek worked together on the effort to mobilize Trump supporters for the rallies, and neither woman responded to repeated requests for interviews. But language used by the two women in interviews to promote their projects and on websites for their respective organizations — including the #1LoudVoice hashtag and Seven Mountains dominionism ideology — bear striking similarities.

The #1LoudVoice hashtagwas used in Collins’ social media beginning in May 2020 and has also been prominently displayed on the America Restored website. Meanwhile, a tab on the website ThePatriotParty.rocks, which promotes events organized byBlazek, includes the heading “Our Mission: #1LoudVoice.” The mission statement includes a “call to action,” declaring it is “time to rise up in unity, go into the harvest and take our country back.” The statement continues: “We are assembling to organizing and mobilizing [sic] existing Patriots groups [sic] in all major areas of influence by a national digital communication platform and network influencing all seven (7) spheres of influence:Education, Family, Faith, Business, Government, Entertainment, Media.”

:{

The page includes a link to a separate site listing “coalition members,” including Virginia Freedom Keepers and Latinos for Trump, two of the groups that hosted a MAGA Freedom Rally one block from the US Capitol on Jan. 6; and 1st Amendment Praetorian}::{:{,}: a security group associated with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn that provided personal security details for speakers at several rallies and assisted attorney Sidney Powell with research on purported election fraud.

}:

And although it is unclear what role, if any, Blazek had in organizing theDec. 12, 2020 Jericho March that helped build momentum for Jan. 6, a photo gallery is displayed under the “Events” tab on the ThePatriotParty.rocks website, with images of Flynn, InfoWars host Alex Jones, and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.

Using Seven Mountains dominionism language in an interview to promote a two-day Patriot Party event at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort in Arizona two weeks before the 2020 election, Blazek avoided any mention of Christianity while highlighting defiance of mask mandates during the COVID pandemic.

“The seven spheres of influence to me and what I am trying to rally around are organizing people in education, family, faith, business, government, entertainment and media,” she said. “Underneath all of those are health and medical because health and medical touch each one of those. It doesn’t get its own sphere; it’s that magical bridge.”

Blazek had hoped to secure a special appearance by Flynn and his family, whom she described as “the tip of the spear in our movement,” for the gathering, but had to settle for his sister, Barbara Redgate. Other guests included Cowboys for Trump, led by Otero County, NM County Commissioner Couy Griffin.

:{Folded into the Patriot Party, the Q Con Live! gathering organized by Chris Jacobson commandeered a conference room at the Arizona resort.

Blazek described her radicalization during a joint appearance with Jacobson on a QAnon podcast in June 2020. She said the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon provided an initial jolt, but in early 2020 she said a friend prodded her to look into a conspiracy theory associated with the Sovereign Citizen movement that posits that the British crown holds the originals of American birth certificates. That led her to research the Federal Reserve,she said, prompting a weekslong quest to sources that predate Christ, until, Blazek said, she “worked my way back up to the heart of the issue, and landed with the corruption of the Deep State and how everything’s really been a lie.”}:

While promoting QAnon, Jacobson expressed a more conventional view of religious nationalism in response to a question about the role of religious leaders in the United States’ civic life.

“And we need to get back to being one nation under God, so that He will continue to bless us,” Jacobson said. “Our founding fathers all, whether they were Christian or not, they understood and said that if we don’t have a higher power — in other words, God — that this whole experiment, this United States of America, would fail.”

Blazek, in turn, affirmed a “spiritual, but not religious” outlook, and expressed a QAnon slogan as a central tenet of her faith.

“I really feel like our statement, ‘Where we go one, we go all,’ represents the true God,” she said. “The true and one God — our God.”

:{

During the Q Con Live! conference, Alan Hostetter, an anti-lockdown activist from southern California, told attendees: “We are at war right now…. Nobody wants violence. We are conditioned from the time we are children to always think violence is a horrible, horrible thing, until we go back and reflect on the Revolutionary War. They picked up guns at some point, and said, ‘Enough!’”}:

Hostetter would later recall in a court filing that when he sat down after his speech, he noticed a man dressed in headgear and horns carrying a sign that read “Q sent me” enter the back of the conference room and stand in the back. It was Jacob Chansley, who would later gain infamy as the “QAnon Shaman” when he stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Hostetter faces charges of his own, including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, due to his role in the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Griffin was found guilty of entering restricted grounds and sentenced to time served.

Griffin told Raw Story that he met Chansley “at the event in Scottsdale,” and that after their arrests the two men were housed in adjacent jail cells.

Reflecting on the awkward commingling of Christianity and QAnon, Griffin told an interviewer last fall: “I spent all my time witnessing to [Chansley] about Christ and about how he needs to put his faith in Jesus because he’s, in my opinion, and by scripture, he’s lost in that account.”

Griffin told Raw Story that he first met Blazek at the Patriot Party event in Scottsdale, and that since then he has come to know her “as a great patriot.”

:{

“Felisa’s a good person; she’s an organizer,” Griffin said. “To make it look like she’s organizing a violent uprising — that’s what the American people are sick of. People are getting tired of the fake news.}:”

Many of Trump’s supporters involved in the effort to overturn the election — both before and after Nov. 3, 2020 — used language of “good” and “evil,” and even “war,” as a call to action.

“It’s not left and right, it’s not red and blue,” said David Sumrall, an organizer with the pro-Trump group Stop Hate during an interview with Redgate to promote her appearance at the October 2020 event in Scottsdale. “It’s good and evil…. It’s just real deal. And I’ve told people this a hundred times if I’ve said it once: Until we put the cross next to the flag again, this is a holy war we can’t win.”

:{

A week before the election, Stop Hate posted a video of Daniel Goodwyn speaking at a rally in San Francisco on the group’s Instagram page.

“They’re Satanists and pedophiles,” said Goodwyn. “They’re disgusting. }:And we have God on our side. And Trump’s gonna win. The only thing standing in our way is the corruption, because they’re gonna try to steal the election via fraud.”Goodwyn, who shared a social media post promoting the Proud Boysand President Trump’s instruction to “stand back, stand by,” live-streamed his participation in the storming of the Capitol, and faces charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct, among other offenses.

A month after the election, white supremacist Nick Fuentesaddressed Trump supporters at a “Stop the Steal” rally outside the Hyatt Regency hotel in Phoenix.

“This is not simply a political struggle, as I’m sure all of you know,” Fuentes said. “The real struggle is not between Republicans and Democrats. The real struggle is between good and evil. This is a spiritual war. It is a spiritual war between the devil and the children of Jesus Christ.” Video of Fuentes’ speech was amplified on social media by Goodwyn and Stop Hate.

Stewart, the author of the Power Worshipers, said extremism that rejects the idea that people can disagree without dehumanizing their opponents isn’t compatible with democracy.

“A large-scale political movement that believes that any deviation is illegitimate, and that political opponents are literally controlled by demons puts democracy in peril,” she said.

As Jan. 6, 2021 approached, #1LoudVoice became a mobilizing call for Trump supporters to pressure Congress to block the certification of Joe Biden as the next president.

Felisa Blazek hosted a conference call on Dec. 30, 2020. The guest, a social media strategist named Jason Sullivan who had worked with Trump confidant Roger Stone during the 2016 election, urged listeners to “descend on the Capitol.”

During the call, one of the listeners asked Sullivan what group he was with.

“I am not with a group,” Sullivan said. Blazek interjected and Sullivan amended his statement.

“Well, yes,” he said. “Thank you for correcting me. I just joined with #1LoudVoice. Yes, Felisa’s fantastic and I greatly admire her.”