ali alexander
===
bad code format see bak
primary 1/21 on insurrection
see ali akbar for older
good sum
6 22
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ali-alexander-and-stop-the-steal-were-central-to-jan-6-heres-what-you-need-to-know/
no lnx twt pix
"I was the person that came up with the Jan. 6 idea with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks, and then Congressman Andy Biggs,” GOP operative Ali Alexander said in a Dec. 28, 2020, Periscope video. “We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting, so that who we couldn’t lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”
The video, which was captured by investigative reporter Jason Paladino before it was deleted, highlights the role played by Alexander, his so-called “Stop the Steal” campaign, and far-right members of Congress in the failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack launches its first public hearings June 9, and Alexander and “Stop the Steal” are likely to figure prominently in its findings. Alexander sat for eight hours of testimony in front of the committee on Dec. 9, and in April, a lawyer for Alexander said he would cooperate with the Department of Justice’s Jan. 6 investigation—a claim on which Alexander promptly threw cold water.
Right Wing Watch extensively covered Ali Alexander and the so-called Stop the Steal movement ahead of Jan. 6. Here’s what you need to know.
Who is Ali Alexander? What is “Stop the Steal”?
On Nov. 4, 2020, as mail-in ballots began to be counted and shifted the election in favor of Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump falsely declared that the ongoing efforts to count millions of outstanding ballots were an indication of fraud and that he had in fact won.
Hours later, Alexander publicly launched “Stop the Steal,” a campaign to get right-wing activists to discredit mail-in voting, disrupt vote-counting, and falsely accuse Democrats of stealing the presidential election. The campaign held its first rally outside Arizona’s state capitol building in Phoenix that evening, featuring Rep. Paul Gosar, who with a bullhorn in hand, addressed the crowd before introducing “Pizzagate” booster Mike Cernovich, who threatened imaginary anti-fascist activists.
And so began months of “Stop the Steal” rallies featuring far-right members of Congress, QAnon and election conspiracy theorists, Christian nationalists, and far-right anti-government groups, all under the MAGA banner.
Ali Alexander and Roger Stone (Image Source: Twitter)]
Alexander, née Ali Akbar, has long worked in Republican politics, coming up under the tutelage of “dirty trickster” Roger Stone. He has connections to deep pockets, too: a PAC advised byAlexander received a $60,000 donation in 2016 from pro-Trump billionaire Robert Mercer. These Republican connections have persisted despite his habit of noting when members of the media he criticizes are Jewish and despite associating with far-right figures like Unite the Right white supremacist attendee Matt Colligan and members of the neo-fascist Proud Boys.
Alexander’s “Stop the Steal” campaign wasn’t the first to go by that name. Longtime GOP operative and Trump confidant Roger Stone first popularized the phrase “Stop the Steal” during the 2016 presidential election. In 2018, Alexander, Stone, and far-right commentator Jack Posobiec launched a “Stop the Steal” campaign during a ballot recount for Florida’s Senate race between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Bill Nelson. Pro-Trump activists from around the country descended on Florida to protest and spread misinformation, insisting that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election from Scott. It served as a dry run for the 2020 presidential election. Sure enough, in September 2020, Posobiec and Alexander discussed rebooting the campaign.
What was their role in the lead up to Jan. 6?
Alexander served as the lead organizer for “Stop the Steal.” The campaign targeted Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia—battleground states won by Joe Biden and whose cities are home to predominantly Black and brown voters—holding rallies and spreading election disinformation on social media.
He called on figures he knew from his time as a member of the highly secretive Council for National Policy and through his years in Republican politics to join the effort, including activistsAmy and Kylie Kremer, Jack Posobiec, Brandon Straka, Scott Presler, Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, Ed Martin of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. He brought into the fold Trump’s short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn and Trump team attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood—who have since been disciplined for bringing false lawsuits alleging election fraud. Most joined the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement in a public capacity; others promoted the same messaging through their own organizations and organized behind the scenes.
Ali Alexander and other “Stop the Steal” activists at Dec. 15, 2020 press conference (Image from NTD livestream posted on Epoch Times YouTube channel.)]
Alexander welcomed extremists into the campaign’s ranks. Male supremacist Mike Cernovich, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones were among the first to answer Alexander’s call. Alongside white nationalist Patrick Casey, Vincent James, and Baked Alaska, Fuentes galvanized crowds of white men to attend “Stop the Steal” rallies across the county, while Jones spread disinformation through his Infowars network, raised funds for the Jan. 6 rally, and brought a caravan of supporters to rallies.
On Nov. 14, “Stop the Steal” came to the nation’s capital. Thousands of Trump loyalists, conspiracy theorists, and members of far-right groups took to the streets. Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn—all recently elected to Congress—addressed the crowd alongside organizers. Radical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones yelled unintelligibly into a bullhorn. Members of the Proud Boys hate group roamed the streets looking for fights and found them late in the evening.Fuentes’ America First group, a youth-focused white-nationalist outfit, commanded the crowd’s attention with chants of “America First.”
A second Dec. 12 rally was deeply steeped in Christian nationalist and violent rhetoric. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law, threatening a “much more bloody war”should he fail to do so.
While rallies brought the whole of the MAGA movement together, Alexander held regular Periscopes to spread disinformation and provide action items to Trump supporters.
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Alexander called on “Stop the Steal” activists to lobby the state legislatures of battleground states won by Joe Biden to ignore the election results andsend Republican electors to the electoral collegeto give Trump enough electoral votes.He called on state Republican legislators to declare the election fraudulent and threatened them with a primary challenger should they not.
By mid-December, right-wing activists and lawyers were focused on Jan. 6, the day Congress would certify the electoral votes. More than 100 House members and a dozen Senators committed to voting against certifying the election. Trump and the apparatus around him began to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to use his ceremonial duty to block or delay Biden’s certification. “Stop the Steal” fed into that pressure, with “Stop the Steal” friend Lin Wood going as far as to call for the vice president’s execution.
On Dec. 19, Trump declared it “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election.” [~ his own # guy 1/6 hearing] He encouraged his followers to come to D.C.: “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Alexander had already planned a Jan. 6 D.C. protest, but he began fighting his one-time fellow activists Kylie and Amy Kremer for control of the big Jan. 6 rally. The Kremers had used the “Stop the Steal” banner for their cross country bus tour and a competing December rally, much to Alexander’s chagrin. ProPublica reported that Katrina Pierson, whom the White House put in charge of the rally planning, “helped arrange a deal where those organizers deemed too extreme to speak at the Ellipse could do so on the night of Jan. 5.” That meant Alexander and his cohort were relegated to speaking on the evening of Jan. 5, while the Kremers took the lead on the Jan. 6 event held at the Ellipse.Alexander held that Jan. 5 rally and planned his own separate “wild” Jan. 6 protest on the east side of the Capitolbuilding to follow the main “Save America” rally.
Alexander spent weeks in the lead up to the Capitol insurrection calling for “rebellion,” starting chants of “victory or death,” and using rhetoric of the American Revolution and spiritual warfare to call for action should Congress certify the election of President Joe Biden. He engaged in violent rhetoric, appearing to even advocate for physical attacks against members of Congress who he said stole the election.
The Jan. 5 rally served as the penultimate event of those calls. Speakers delivered Christian nationalist messages and veiled threats of violenceif Congress failed to reject Biden electors. Bikers for Trump founder Chris Cox told rally-goers that the United States was on the brink of a revolution and that he would “take the first bullet.” Right Wing Watch reported at the time:
Standing in front of a sign declaring “MARTIAL LAW NOW,” so-called Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander led the crowd in chants of “Victory or death!” Alexander told activists, “Our government is only our government if it is legitimate” and declared, “1776 is always an option.” [new boogaloo? less racist?] He said Stop the Steal activists were starting “a rebellion against the Deep State.”
What was Ali Alexander and the campaign’s role on Jan. 6?
On the day of the insurrection, Alexander took to Twitter early in the morning to declare it the “First official day of the rebellion.” Alexander was supposed to hold his “wild” protest by the Capitol, but it would never materialize.
Trump loyalists packed into the Ellipse, eager to stop what they saw as a fraudulent election. Speaking from the stage and wearing a bulletproof vest, Rep. Mo Brooks, whom Alexander had recently called a friend, told attendees that Jan. 6 is “the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass. … Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder! Will you fight for America?”
“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump told the crowd. He urged activists to march to the Capitol to make their voices heard. They did as they were told.
Leaving the rally at the Ellipse after Trump’s speech, where he was a VIP guest with far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Alexander followed Jones through the Capitol grounds, past barricades, and up the Capitol steps. At that point—around 2 p.m.—the Capitol had already been breached.
“Democrats and Media ended the Republic and the people responded. Welcome to ‘duhhh’,” he tweeted an hour later.
Alexander emerged on One America News Network’s terrace overlooking the Capitol to record a video, posted on the “Stop the Steal” Twitter account by his associate Michael Coudrey at 4:26 p.m.—well after the violence had begun.
“I don’t disavow this. I do not denounce this,” Alexander said, gesturing to the scene behind him. Trump loyalists were descending on the Capitol and up the Capitol steps. “This is completely peaceful, looks like, so far. And there are a couple of agitators that I obviously don’t endorse,” he claimed despite having seen what took place on the steps not long before. By the end of the video, Alexander was back to encouraging rebellion. “StoptheSteal.us is going to be the home of the rebellion against an illegitimate government.”
Right Wing Watch captured the video, which was later deleted.
Where is Ali Alexander now?
Ali Alexander went into hiding following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.In February, he briefly reappeared and said he had been plotting to restart rallies in March,abolish the media, and build a separate society for Trump supporters. He declared that “civil war” was the only outcome available to those who opposed Biden’s presidency.
But Alexander was kicked off Twitter and most mainstream social media platforms. He lost access to his Venmo, Cashapp, and Paypal. He turned to alternative social media platforms and briefly became a Bitcoin influencer.
In October 2021, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack issued three subpoenas to Alexander, the Stop the Steal organization, and Nathan Martin, who worked with Alexander and reserved the Jan. 6 rally space. Alexander accused the government of “gaslighting” and blamed the violence on “agitators dressed in militant outfits.” Jan. 6, he said, was a government “psyop.”
In December 2021, Alexander testified for eight hours in a closed-door hearing andasked the House select committee to suspend reality. In a draft of his opening statement, which was leaked to the New York Times, he denied wrongdoing and passed the buck, placing blame for the violence on Katrina Pierson, Kylie Kremer, and Amy Kremer.
In a lawsuit seeking to prevent the select committee from obtaining his phone records, Alexander confirmed to congressional investigators that ahead of Jan. 6, he had communicated with several GOP congressmen—Reps. Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks, and Andy Biggs—as well as with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend and member of Trump’s inner circle.
In April, a lawyer for Alexander said he would cooperate with the Department of Justice’s Jan. 6 investigation. The following day, Alexander joined Alex Jones’ show to suggest he wouldn’t cooperate.He went on to call the effort to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol a conspiracy to “stop Trump from running in 2024” and “usher in a New World Order.”
A few days later, Alexander joined Alex Jones’ show again. He mused that “there is a time for legitimate violence when there is legitimate tyranny.”
Tags: Alex Jones Ali Alexander Jack Posobiec
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/i-love-nazis-kanye-west-repeatedly-praises-nazis-and-especially-hitler-in-wild-interview-with-alex-jones/
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‘I Love Nazis’: Kanye West Repeatedly Praises Nazis and ‘Especially Hitler’ in Wild Interview With Alex Jones
Kyle MantylaBy Kyle Mantyla | December 1, 2022
Kanye West, the rap mogul who now goes by the name Ye, recently teamed up with Nick Fuentes, the racist, misogynistic, America-hating, Christian fascist leader of the white nationalist America First movement. Brought together by their mutual virulent antisemitism, the two recently had dinner with former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort, andFuentes is reportedly playing a key role in planning West’s presidential campaign.
Today, West and Fuentes joined far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones live in studio, where West, shielded behind a face mask, spent hours delivering bizarre rants, attacking Jews, and repeatedly praising Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Jones, West, and Fuentes were joined later in the program by far-right activists Laura Loomer and Ali Alexander.
West kicked things off by boldly declaring that he sees good things in every person, “especially Hitler.”
Jones, who grew increasingly uncomfortable with West’s praise for Hitler and the Nazis as the show went on, repeatedly tried to downplay West’s comments. But at every turn, West doubled down, openly insisting that people need to stop criticizing the Nazis all the time.
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“I love Nazis,” West stated at one point,prompting Jones to respond, “well, I disagree with that.”
In a final, desperate effort to help West extricate himself from the potentially career-ending debacle the interview had become, Jones tried to get West to admit that he did not, in fact, love Hitler. But West was having none of it: “There a lot of things that I loooooooove about Hitler. A lahhhhhhhht of things.”
Beclowning Themselves: The Far-Right Reacts to the Jan. 6 Committee Hearings | Right Wing Watch
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beclowning themselves...
the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has been holding public hearings for two weeks now, but take a look at right-wing media and its personalities and you’d hardly know it.
Right-wing and far-right activists have largely ignored the hearings or, when they have addressed it, painted the hearings as “propaganda” or a “partisan witch hunt.” Others, still, haven’t been able to resist criticizing those Republicans they feel betrayed by.
Here’s how a few right-wing activists, many of whom have been subpoenaed for their role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, have responded.
Mike Cernovich—a far-right activist and conspiracy theorist with the so-called Stop the Steal campaign—had this to say about the Jan. 6 hearings: “Nobody cares, dude!”
Cernovich had joined former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon a day before the opening hearing on the June 8:{episode:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: of Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. Asked how right-wing media, including the “War Room,” should respond to the Jan. 6 hearings—whether or not they should mention it or launch counterprogramming—Cernovich offered some counterintuitive advice.
“Whatever we can do to get Democrats to talk more about Jan. 6 we should do, so whatever gets them hyperventilating, crying—oh, seven people died that day? Yeah, they were Trump supporters,” Cernovich said.
In fact, five police officers:{died:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: and about 150 were injured as a result of Trump loyalists’ attack on the Capitol. Another four in the crowd died.
“But what we don’t want to lose sight of is that they are beclowning themselves, so the key for us is to stay on message. Yeah, a woman was shot in the neck and bled out,” he said. “The key to keep in mind is the Democrats look like unserious people, unfit to govern because they’re hyperventilating over an event they compare to 9/11.”
Cernovich has since called the hearings “propaganda.”
Bannon—who was indicted for refusing to respond to a Jan. 6 committee subpoena—referred to the Jan. 6 hearings as a “show trial” and lambasted Fox News for its coverage.
While major news networks carried the first primetime hearing live on June 9, Fox aired:{counterprogramming by Tucker Carlson:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, who took no commercial breaks less his viewers be tempted to tune into the hearing.
But since then, the network has:{covered the Jan. 6 hearings:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: held in non primetime hours, and network analysts were so moved by Republican testimonies during Tuesday’s hearing that one said it suggests:{Trump “may be guilty of a crime”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: and that it “shows his unfitness” for office. And that Bannon finds to be sinful.
“Fox News shows their hand—all in on taking down President Trump—now it’s out in the open—IF YOU WATCH FOX U ARE ONLY AIDING AND ABETTING THEIR ANTI-TRUMP HATE,” Bannon wrote in a June 21:{post:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: on GETTR.
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“If this was a real committee, they would have another panel of witnesses like me!” said Trump lawyerCleta Mitchell—who was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee for her role in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Last Tuesday, Bannon had Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell on:{his show:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:. Mitchell—who was on the infamous call on which Trump asked Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find votes for him—lashed out at Raffensperger. Raffensperger had testified to the Jan. 6 committee that same day about:{Trump’s efforts to pressure him:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: to overturn the election results.
“All Raffensperger cared about was getting good press from the liberal media and having all of the left-wing reporters fawning over him, and that’s why they were there today, because that’s his number one priority,” Mitchell claimed.
“If this was a real committee, they would have another panel of witnesses like me!” said Mitchell—who was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee for her role in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. She went on to call the Jan. 6 committee a “kangaroo committee.”
Other political operatives involved in the so-called Stop the Steal disinformation campaign to keep Trump in power were clearly watching.
Ed Martin—a mentor to Ali Alexanderwho was subpoenaed for his role in the so-called Stop the Steal campaign—portrayed the hearings as “pure propaganda,” held “just to destroy Donald Trump.”
Ali Alexander—theleader of the so-called Stop the Steal campaign with a penchant for violent rhetoric—doubled down on his criticism of former Vice President Mike Pence. “Pence betrayed us,” he declared on June 16, the day after the committee detailed Trump and his allies’ pressure campaign on Pence to illegally overturn the election. The committee also illustrated how this pressure campaign led rioters to call for Pence’s hanging on Jan. 6 when he refused to do Trump’s bidding.
“Mike Pence is WRONG,” Alexander:{wrote:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: in the June 16 Telegram post. “No one asked him to overturn the election.”
“Pence was the presiding officer,” Alexander continued. “He could do nearly anything he could justify. The body could overrule him with a 2/3rds vote but that’s it. Pence betrayed us and is lying about the law and the rule.”
[twt]the second hearing featured prominent Republican voices, like former Attorney General Bill Barr, who said that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were false, as was Dinesh D’Souza’s:{“2000 Mules”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: video, whose claims of voter fraud were so preposterous it elicited laughter from Barr during his testimony.
D’Souza fumed. “Bill Barr is the stereotypical small-town sheriff, overweight and largely immobile, whose rank incompetence results in the whole town being robbed from under his nose,” he wrote on:{Twitter:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, adding, “Fatso.”
Trump confidant Roger Stone, meanwhile,:{slammed:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:fellow Trump ally Jason Miller, calling him a “lying scumbag” for his testimony. Miller testified that Trump lawyer RudyGiuliani encouraged Trump to falsely declare victory on election night and that he was intoxicated while doing so.
“What a backstabbing asshole,” Stone wrote in a June 13 Telegram:{post:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:. Stone has been:{subpoenaed:(style="box-sizing:border-box;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: by the select committee.
Some, like Alexander, made it clear they stood by their actions on Jan. 6, 2021.
As Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol behind him, Ali Alexander pointed to the unfolding scene and said, “I do not denounce this.” While he once tried to claim the video published on his campaign’s page (and captured by Right Wing Watch) was a “deep fake,” he reversed his stance this week and said he stood by his comments on the roof that day.
“If I had stood on this rooftop and denounced our movement instead of doubling down on it, I would’ve saved myself a lifetime of grief and $100,000 in legal bills,” Alexander wrote in a June 20 post. “And I would’ve lost my soul. I have no regrets. … a government for and by the people.”
That didn’t stop him from claiming persecution. After the June 23 hearing, which revealed the lengths to which Trump and Republican members of Congress went to corrupt the DOJ, Alexander took to Telegram. “We’re being persecuted by the Security State (SS) and our ‘team’ doesn’t even have a response,” Alexander wrote.
When on Monday, reporters briefly speculated that Alexander might be the select committee’s “surprise witness” for Tuesday’s hearing, Alexander released a statement that he would not be testifying publicly but that he would like to do so. Alexander—who spread disinformation about the 2020 election and Jan. 6—then had the gall to declare that “Misinformation is polluting the January 6th narratives.”
:{
[twt]
during Tuesday’s hearing, Cassidy Hutchinson, the top aide of White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, presented damning testimony about Trump’s knowledge of the potential for violence on Jan. 6 and painted an unhinged portrait of the president who went so far as to lunge at his own Secret Service detail.Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene urged Trump to sue her, while white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who has been subpoenaed by the select committee, applauded Trump’s alleged violence, declaring “choking a guard and throwing food at the wall” an “EPIC REACTION.”
Tags: Ali Alexander Cleta Mitchell Dinesh D'Souza Ed Martin Jason Miller Marjorie Taylor Greene Mike Cernovich Mike Pence Nick Fuentes Roger Stone Stephen K. Bannon William Barr Capitol Insurrection conspiracy theories House select committee on Jan. 6 Jan. 6
}:
foia permit
...SPEAKERS LINEUP
TUESDAY, JANUARY 5TH
TIMING SPEAKER/PROGRAMING LEAD SPEAKERS EMCEE
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM March to Save America
Katrina Pierson, Dr. Gina Loudon, Chris Cox, TBD,
TBD. TBD, TBD (5-7) Katrina Pierson
(b)(6)• (b)(7)(E)
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM Stop the Steal TBD (15-20) All Alexander
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Peaceably Gather Prayer Virgil. TBD (2-3) TBD
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM Eighty Percent Coalition Alex Jones, Roger Stone, TBD (8-10) TBD
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM Eighty Percent Coalition TBD (10-15) TBD
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6TH
TIMING SPEAKER/PROGRAMING POC SPEAKERS EMCEE
8:30 AM - 9:00 AM N/A
Pastor Mark Burns, Julio Gonzalez, Sherriff, Alex
Jones. TBD (5-7) TBD
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Stop the Steal
Ali Alexander. TBD, TBD, TBD, TBD, TBD, TBD (8-
10) Ali Alexander
10:00 AM - 10:45 AM March to Save America Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani. TBD, TBD (4-5) TBD
10:45 AM - 11:00 AM Videos Rule of Law Defense Fund, Turning Point Action N/A
10:55 AM - 11:00 AM Women for America First Amy Kremer Amy Kremer
11:00 AM - 11:08 AM Rule of Law Defense Fund
(b)(6) (b)(7)(C)
Attorney General Ken PaxtonAmy Kremer
11:08 AM - 11:15 AM Congressman XCongressman TBD Amy Kremer
11:15 AM - 11:30 AM Senator X Senator TBD Amy Kremer
11:30 AM - 11:40 AM Videos Women for America First, Stop the Steal, TBD N/A
11:40 AM - 12:00 PM Hold Music N/A N/A
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM POTUS N/A N/A
...
Organizers
Stop The Steal (NRID), Million MAGA March (NRID), Women for America First (NRID), March for Trump
(NRID), Proud Boys (RID), and other pro-Trump groups, along with private citizens, have promoted event
pages for the event.
Stop The Stealis a loosely organized group which emerged on November 7, 2020, with the belief the
election is being stolen from President Trump due to election fraud. The group began organizing
demonstrations nationwide called "Stop The Steal." According to the website,invited speakersand
featured guests for the January 6, 2021 event include Rep. Paul Gosar, Ali Alexander, Roger Stone, Rep-Elect Marjorie Greene,
Rep. Lance Gooden, Rep-Elect Lauren Boebert, State Rep. Vernon Jones, State Rep.
Mark Finchem,State Sen. Doug Mastriano, State Rep. Anthony Kern, and several others.
One
spokesperson from Stop The Steal, Ali Alexander (NRID), has encouraged followers to bring tents, sleeping
bags, food, and water. Alexander claimed,"if DC escalates...so do we. Do not wear a mask. Stand with
others bullied by staff." Twitter removed this tweet as it violated the spread of COVID-19 harmful
information.
The Million MAGA March has been involved in organizing both large protests in November and December.
The website was created early November prior to the first Million MAGA March, which spurred several
social media groups and pages supporting this movement.
Women for America First is a pro-Trump, female led group. The group was the center of organization for
both the November and December protests. The group plans to host a "March for Trump" bus tour from
California to Washington, DC, arriving on the January 6, 2021.
Although March for Trump is listed as a group, several different smaller factions are listed under this
name. The group name is considered more of a movement than an organization.
Proud Boys is a right-wing group founded in 2016 by Gavin McInnes as a "pro-Western fraternal
organization." They are of record with USSS for demonstration activity since 2017; no civil disobedience
or arrests have been recorded. For more information on the Proud Boys, please see the Protective
Intelligence Brief Proud Boys Talking Points.
Hotel Harrington, an alleged hangout/hotel for the Proud Boys, made a statement on December 28, 2020,
announcing their closure from January 4-6, 2021, for "safety of visitors and employees." According to
news media, four individuals were stabbed outside the hotel during the protests on December 12, 2020,
when Proud Boys members clashed with counter protesters. Proud Boys' self-proclaimed chairman,
Enrique Tarrio (NRID), made a statement on Parler regarding the closing of Hotel Harrington, claiming the
Proud Boys outgrew the hotel and are planning on protesting during the January 4-6, 2021, time frame
and will be staying at various other locations
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/January-6-Clearinghouse-US-Secret-Service-FOIA-CREW-June-29-2021-2.pdf
no lnx twt
as ballot counting to determine the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election continues in swing states, right-wing operatives with ties to the influential Christian Right group Council for National Policy (CNP) are organizing daily #StoptheSteal protests. #StoptheSteal, a “coalition/team effort” that The Washington Post reported yesterday was shut down on Facebook, and FreedomWorks are promoting and hosting rallies across the country based on the false claim that Joe Biden’s growing lead is based on election fraud.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone announced in a statement that its banning of the #StoptheSteal group page with 360,000 members was due to it being “organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group.”
The new #StoptheSteal site was registered on November 4 by viceandvictory.com in Fort Worth, Texas. Vice and Victory is nothing but a landing page for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts. An examination of the three, leads to one individual: Ali Akbar AKA Ali Alexander.
Akbar, who has a book written on him titled “Vice and Victory,” has taken on the name Ali Alexander to distance himself from his past legal troubles. In 2007, he pled guilty to felony property theft in Fort Worth, and in 2008 he pled guilty to a felony charge of credit card abuse, reported the daily dot.
Alexander’s homepage, which links to his blog for subscribers and offers a “Persuasion Masterclass” for $199, links to StoptheSteal.us, as does his Twitter profile.
Alexander calls himself an “interpreter of energy for this period,” and is Pro-Trump influencer on Twitter with over 140,000 followers. It is unclear who funds Alexander’s activities, but Politico noted in 2018 that Robert Mercer, one of the “blow-it-all-up billionaires” behind the rise of Trump, gave a PAC Alexander advises $60,000.
Alexander, a former member of CNP, announced the StoptheSteal.us site with a video and a tweet, “Proud to be working with these patriots to Save the Election,” and listed 15 Twitter handles.
Proud to be working with these patriots to Save the Election@ScottPresler @alexbruesewitz @Cernovich @EagleEdMartin @KylieJaneKremer @AmyKremer @thecjpearson @JackPosobiec @debostic @MichaelCoudrey @hollandcourtney @stclairashley @BrandonStraka @DrPaulGosar @ReaganBabe pic.twitter.com/9otKQA7tWv
— Ali stopthesteal.us (@ali) November 5, 2020
Many of the individuals listed are organizers of individual states protests. Jack Posobiec, a correspondent for the far-Right One America News Network, and pro-Trump activistScott Preslerare leading a protest at the capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Georgia protests held yesterday at in Atlanta and Savannah were led by Kylie Kremer, executive director of the Women for Trump PAC; right-wing activist CJ Pearson; former congressional staffer Daniel Bostic; and Amy Kremer, chair of Women for America First and co-founder of Women for Trump. Women for Trump’s co-founder Caroline Wetherington is a member of the CNP.
Trumpist Courtney Holland and right-wing social media operative Mike Coudrey are listed as organizers of a protest scheduled for 6 p.m. tonight at the Nevada Clark County Elections Department in Las Vegas.
Right-wing social media influencer Brandon Straka and Amy Kremer led a Detroit, Michigan protest this morning at the TCF Center, where ballots were being counted. Protesters blocked a bridge, and at least one arrest was reported.
Protests at the capitol in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday, today, and tomorrow are being led by Alex Bruesewitz, co-founder and CEO of the PR firm X Strategies.
Although not listed in Alexander’s tweet, Turning Point USA‘s founder and president Charlie Kirk is listed as leading an Arizona protest at the Maricopa Tabulation Center in Phoenix at 6 p.m. this evening. Kirk is also a CNP member.
Ed Martin, president of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, listed by Alexander as a partner in the tweet above, is also a member of the CNP.
Early today, Alexander announced protests for every state capital tomorrow at noon.
We want everyone at their state capitols on Saturday at noon. #StopTheSteal @BrandonStraka @ScottPresler @AmyKremer @tracybeanz @alexbruesewitz @stclairashley @EagleEdMartin @JackPosobiec @Cernovich @hollandcourtney @RyanAFournier @thecjpearson
Peaceful Protest
— Ali stopthesteal.us (@ali) November 6, 2020
FreedomWorks, led by president Adam Brandon, who also serves on the advisory council for Turning Point USA and the CNP Action Board of Directors, is also organizing “Protect the Vote” protests in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Oklahoma today. The times of the events do not match the #StoptheSteal events.
FreedomWorks, a group that grew out of a Charles Koch-founded organization and that helped launch the Tea Party in 2009, was also behind many of the protests to reopen the economy amidst the pandemic this year, as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported.
A number of CNP members are major donors to FreedomWorks.Lawson Bader, president of DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund is a CNP member. DonorsTrust has given $3.4 million (2006-2018) and Donors Capital Fund another $667,000 (2008-2016) to FreedomWorks.
Bradley Foundation president and CEO Richard Graber is a CNP member.Bradley has given FreedomWorks $1.2 million (2007-2017) and disclosed another $100,000 this year to fund FreedomWorks “Save Our Country initiative,” as CMD first reported.
Heather Higgins is a CNP Gold Circle member, and her Randolph Foundation gave FreedomWorks $10,000 in 2017.
The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation gave FreedomWorks $600,000 (2009-2011). Richard DeVos is a former CNP member.
Tea Party Patriots Action (TPPA) announced this morning that it is “working with FreedomWorks, Turning Points, Heritage, and countless social media influencers” to promote and hold “Protect the Vote” rallies in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. TPPA’s honorary chairman Jenny Beth Martin serves on the CNP Executive Committee and a number of those working at the Heritage Foundation are also members.
CNP is deeply tied to the Trump administration. In August, Trump himself spoke to CNP on the last day of the meeting, where he repeatedly thanked the Christian Right group for its leadership.
Trump’s vice president Mike Pence went further in thanking CNP in November 2019, for “standing by him” and for giving him counsel “every single day.” Pence later followed up in March of this year in a letter made public by investigative researcher Brent Allpress, in which he “thanked the Council for National Policy for your support and for consistently amplifying the agenda of President Trump and our Administration.”
Brent Allpress contributed research on #StoptheSteal and Vice and Victory for this report.
About David Armiak
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rww 4 22
Ali Alexander, an organizer with the so-called Stop the Steal campaign, told radical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Wednesday that “there is a time for legitimate violence when there is legitimate tyranny.” The two agreed that now is not the time but began to discuss what would constitute “legitimate tyranny.”
Alexander and Jones are people of interest to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Alexander organized the rallies and strategy of the Stop the Steal campaign, which perpetuated the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and worked desperately to keep him in power, while Jones and his InfoWars’ crew spoke at the rallies and advertised the campaign on their networks.
In December, Alexander sat for eight hours of testimony in front of the House select committee and **threw fellow rally organizers**, Amy and Kylie Kremer and Katrina Pierson, under the bus;Jones says he pled the Fifth when he met with the committee. Last Friday, Alexander told the New York Times through a lawyer that he would cooperate with the Department of Justice in its investigation of the attack. But by Tuesday, Alexander joined Jones on “InfoWars” to suggest he would never do so.
On the Wednesday edition of “InfoWars,” Alexander repeated part of his conspiracy theory that he shared with Jones the day prior: that the Jan. 6 investigations were part of a “deep state” plot to get rid of elections, the Republican Party, and Christians, with the goal to usher in a “stateless New World Order.” A civil war orchestrated by the deep state would be central to this effort, according to Alexander. In response to Jones asking how to avoid such a civil war, Alexander suggested viewers pray, before discussing “legitimate violence.”
“The second byproduct of prayer is that it makes us sane,” Alexander said. “So when we’re getting this deluge of persecution, we’re not saying, in our gut primal level, ‘We need to go bomb something, we need to go shoot something’; it’s ‘I will not give them an inch or become the monster they want us to become.’”
“Now, folks, I’m going to say something really crazy,” Alexander continued. “I’m not going to deny that the people have the right of revolution. I’m not going to deny 1776. I’m not going to deny there is a time for legitimate violence when there is legitimate tyranny. And by the way, the Declaration of Independence even outlines—”
“Says it’s your right and duty,” Jones interrupted. “But they are just losing right now, we’re winning politically. We don’t want to do it yet, but you’re not denying we have the right.”
“Right,” Alexander replied. “I’m not denying the—I’m saying it’s not the time now, that’s for sure.”
“But it’s definitely a card we have in our hand we’re allowed to play,” Jones said.
“Right! Right,” Alexander said.
“When all else is lost you gotta do it,” Jones said.
“If they start ripping your children from your home and doing reassignment surgeries—” Alexander began.
“Everyone knows when the time is,” Jones interrupted. “The point is,anybody trying to lure you into plots to kidnap governors, anybody who wants you tooffensively attack, that’s not what we do.”
“Frankly, a discerning mind and a mind in prayer, frankly, would not punch cops at the Capitol, would not kidnap governors,” Alexander said.
“You know it makes us look bad!” Jones said
“And it won’t be successful,” Alexander said.
“Not only do I not want to randomly punch cops, it’s dumb!” Jones exclaimed.
“It’s very dumb,” Alexander agreed. “It’s dumb, and it displeases God I think. But you know, these cops need to stop complying with COVID orders and lockdowns and stealing.”
“Yeah, no, they’re putting themselves in that position,” Jones said.
Alexander regularlyuses violent rhetoric and has called for civil war and rebellion. On the eve of the insurrection, Alexander led a Stop the Steal crowd in chants of “Victory or death!” and declared “1776 is always an option.”
As Luke O’Brien reported in HuffPost, Alexander considers violence a “natural right”:
On Twitter, Alexander had called violence a “natural right.” He was a prominent influencer on the platform, with almost 200,000 followers. “I am a sincere advocate for violence and war, when justified,” he tweeted in 2019. “I recognize no law above what is natural and good.” A militant Christianity has permeated his extremism; he has spoken often about being an agent of God.
Tags: Alex Jones Ali Alexander Capitol Insurrection conspiracy theories Jan. 6 violent rhetoric InfoWars
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/proof-congressional-republicans-subvert-election/
a recording made by a disgruntled election conspiracist is the strongest evidence yet that operatives in Donald Trump’s orbit summoned supporters to Washington on January 6 for the express purpose of coercing lawmakers into overturning the 2020 election.
News broke late Tuesday afternoon, whereupon this bombshell of a story was promptly buried under an avalanche of other news.
The main characters aren’t household names, but this story is every bit as important as the earlier revelation that Donald Trump, Jr, was pushing a detailed plan for a coup to his father’s chief of staff before the election had even been decided. And it’s even more important than the late-breaking news that Sen. Mike Lee talked up Trump lawyer John Eastman’s plan for a procedural coup in late November.
The star of the secret recording is Jason Sullivan, one-time aide to dirty trickster and longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone.
Sullivan told the Times he was invited to speak by a group of anti-vaccine activists, who were planning a permitted event in the capital on J6. (By amazing coincidence, Stone was scheduled to speak at an anti-vax event on the afternoon of J6, an engagement he missed, for reasons that are surely of great interest to the J6 committee.)
The call was made a week before the insurrection.
Sullivan repeatedly urged the other callers to intimidate the lawmakers who were meeting to certify the election. He told them they needed to make them feel like the people were “breathing down their neck.”
“If we make the people inside that building sweat and they understand that they may not be able to walk in the streets any longer if they do the wrong thing, then maybe they’ll do the right thing,” Sullivan said.
“We have to put that pressure there.”
This recording was made by a woman named Staci Burk, a former school board official turned election conspiracist. Burk filed an anonymous affidavit supporting one of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s many election conspiracy theories. Whereupon heavily armed paramilitary operatives calling themselves the 1st Amendment Praetorian (1AP) moved into her home for several weeks, ostensibly to guard her. Burk told the Times a 1AP member joined the call, and she made the recording because the armed men were making her feel unsafe. Members of 1AP were in the capital during the insurrection and members of the group have been subpoenaed by the J6 committee.
This recording partially corroborates previous claims by Ali Alexander, another one of Roger Stone’s associates. He said he schemed with members of the Congress to gather a crowd to pressure lawmakers into overturning the election during the certification ceremony.
In a video made before the insurrection, Ali Alexander claimed that he and US Reps. Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar “schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting.”
The video circulated on social media but was later deleted. The plan was to “change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside,” Ali Alexander said.
The Sullivan call proves there was an inside-outside game on J6.
The inside game was the procedural coup devised by John Eastman that was unfolding inside the Capitol on J6 as GOP legislators raised spurious claims of election fraud to overturn a free and fair election.
The outside game was the mob deliberately assembled in order to pressure legislators to go along with Trump’s illegal scheme.
luke obrien
no lnx pix
high above Constitution Avenue, on a rooftop terrace, “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander gazed down at the U.S. Capitol and the chaos he’d helped unleash.
A mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters had just stormed the U.S. Capitol, forcing members of Congress to scramble for safety. White nationalists, QAnon cultists and Make America Great Again extremists roamed the halls hunting for politicians. Some carried zip-tie handcuffs. One wore a sweatshirt that read “Camp Auschwitz.”
“I don’t disavow this,” Alexander said, pointing to the scene below.
The longtime Republican political operative had spent months working with Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and far-right activists, such as Mike Cernovich, to organize nationwide protests aimed at invalidating Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential win. Alexander knew plenty of influential Republicans, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who led an effort in the Senate to dispute the election results. He had connections to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which was also involved in promoting the rally-turned-riot.
Alexander had plenty of friends in low places, too: far-right Twitter influencers and grifters; members of the violent neo-fascist Proud Boys gang who showed up at his protests; Nick Fuentes, a prominent far-right extremist who participated in 2017’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fuentes said in 2019 that he could accurately be described as a white nationalist, being both “white” and a “nationalist,” and just two days before the riot he seemingly encouraged his followers to kill legislators.
Unsurprisingly, several of Alexander’s previous Stop the Steal events had inspired bloodshed. But none of them ― and nothing in American history ― compared to what happened Jan. 6.
The warning signs were ominous. Before the rally, white nationalists and militia members talked about smuggling guns into D.C. Pro-Trump internet forums crackled with homicidal chatter and plans to lay siege to the Capitol. And the Proud Boys were back in town. They’d turned out by the hundreds for Alexander’s two other Stop the Steal events in Washington. Brawls and stabbings occurred after those demonstrations. The Proud Boys attacked residents. In December, they ripped a Black Lives Matter banner off a Black church and burned it in the street. Their leader, Enrique “Henry” Tarrio, was arrested on Jan. 4 with high-capacity firearms magazines as he entered the city.
At the rally, the president whipped up demonstrators with a speech on the White House Ellipse, where Alexander had a front-row seat. “We will not take it anymore,” Trump said. “We will stop the steal.” The demagogue then pointed his supporters toward the heart of American democracy.
The mob arrived at the Capitol just before 1 p.m. Insurrectionists smashed through barricades and police lines. Once inside, they looted and vandalized. They urinated and defecated on floors. One of them scrawled “Murder the media” on a set of doors. Many were far-right extremists, including a Proud Boy allegedly looking to kill then-Vice President Mike Pence. Men carrying a flag from Fuentes’ “America First” group prowled through the building. Another Alexander associate, Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, a veteran of the Charlottesville rally, livestreamed himself inside the Capitol and was later arrested.
But it was the fate of Ashli Babbitt, a military veteran and QAnon conspiracy theory devotee, that crystallized to what lengths some would go on behalf of Trump. On Twitter, Babbitt was in thrall to MAGA propagandists and Stop the Steal organizers such as Jack Posobiec— one of Alexander’s close friends and a prolific spreader of disinformation, including the Pizzagate sex trafficking conspiracy theory that in 2016 resulted in a pro-Trump gunman storming a restaurant in Washington, D.C. On Jan. 5, Posobiec tweeted a photo of a plane loaded with Trump supporters traveling to Washington and described them, seemingly in jest, as “domestic terrorists.” Babbitt retweeted the message. It was her penultimate act on a platform that helped radicalize her.
The next day, she stormed the Capitol and tried to force her way through a broken window into the House chamber. A Capitol Police officer shot her in the neck. Babbitt died.
Police would later find pipe bombs outside the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee offices. They’d find Molotov cocktails in a nearby truck. National security experts declared the attack domestic terrorism. Seven people died in the mayhem or by suicide in the immediate aftermath, including three Capitol Police officers.
“I do not denounce this,” Alexander reiterated from his rooftop perch, impassively surveying the Capitol grounds in a video posted to Twitter by one of his associates and preserved by Kristen Doerer at Right Wing Watch.
On Twitter, Alexander had called violence a “natural right.” He was a prominent influencer on the platform, with almost 200,000 followers. “I am a sincere advocate for violence and war, when justified,” he tweeted in 2019. “I recognize no law above what is natural and good.” A militant Christianity has permeated his extremism; he has spoken often about being an agent of God.
Insomuch as he was a zealot, however, he was also out to make a buck. His Jan. 6 protest, which he’d dubbed the Wild Protest after Trump promoted his “March to Save America” event on Twitter ― “Be there, will be wild!” the president tweeted ― had brought in almost $200,000 in donations in just over two weeks. On his Stop the Steal site, Alexander hawked $45 T-shirts, $40 baseball caps and $75 yard signs. A bumper sticker cost $17.76. On merchandise site Gumroad, he sold self-designed “New Crusades” T-shirts for $55. Alexander hadn’t bothered to set up a business or a nonprofit, he admitted on his personal site, where he peddled a “persuasion” class for $198. Stop the Steal donations flowed initially into his personal accounts. In mid-November, his lawyer, Baron Coleman, who has also served as local counsel in Alabama for Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, registered a limited-liability company, or LLC. One of Alexander’s partners set up a political action committee.
To radical Republicans, he was worth it. Alexander, 36, represented the possibility of a multiracial far-right coalition and put a diverse sheen on a movement founded on white supremacy. And he did it from within. A lifelong product of Republican politics and activism who’d radicalized in step with his party, Alexander embodied a turn toward outright fascism. His Stop the Steal movement was simply a Trumpified extension of decades of Republican efforts to invalidate Democratic votes, especially Black ones, with false accusations of “fraud.”
The day before the riot, Alexander bounded onto a stage in Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington to prepare protesters for “rebellion.” “Victory or death!” he cried, leading Trump supporters in a chant. Proud Boys and militia members were in the crowd. Some carried knives and clubs. “These degenerates in the deep state are going to give us what we want or we are going to shut this country down!” Alexander shouted as a cold rain fell. “Our government should be afraid.”
Petty Crime, Conservative Politics
Ali Alexander was once Ali Abdul-Razaq Akbar. Alexander, who was born in Texas, claims his father was an exchange student from a “prominent family” in the United Arab Emirates who abandoned him and his Black mother when Alexander was a toddler. He says his mother raised him by herself in Fort Worth, where he went to Fossil Ridge High School. Even then, he was a conservative political junkie who liked to talk about the big sponsors he’d land who would take him to the “hieghts of the Hill” one day, as he wrote in 2005.
“Very early as a child, I sought power. I sought power and influence,” Alexander would later say.
After high school, however, he got into legal trouble. He briefly attended the University of North Texas but dropped out in 2006 and was arrested that year for stealing property. A month later, he was arrested again for debit card abuse. In 2007 and 2008, the charges resulted in felony convictions.
But the Republican Party took him in. Alexander recognized Twitter’s potential for political activism early on, creating his account less than a year after the platform launched. “I was like the first [of] four political operatives that joined Twitter, and we made sure there was mass adoption on the Republican side,” he later told Cernovich in a podcast. Alexander also had a knack for graphic design and web development. He started setting up right-wing blogs, including one that attacked then-presidential candidate Barack Obama as an elitist trying to “marginalize traditional Americans.” On his personal blog, Alexander embraced a right-wing “birther” conspiracy that disputed Obama’s birthplace and racial identity.He wrote that Obama was an “African man (he is not Black!).”
In 2008, Alexander was a “member of the Republican National Convention Floor Operations team” and a contributor to a blog called “Hip-Hop Republican.” He had quickly reinvented himself as a Republican “operative.”
By 2009, at the latest, he was attending the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, an important gathering of right-wing activists and elected officials, where he would become a fixture. That year, former New York State Assembly Republican Leader Jim Tedisco brought on Alexander to run his online campaign in a special congressional election. The “tea party” movement had also roared to life, fueled by the same vengeful nativism and conspiratorial thinking as Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Alexander worked on tea party news sites and helped tea party candidates boost their online presence.
Ali Alexander with Republican megadonor David Koch]
In 2010, a tide of dark money from the conservative billionaire Koch brothers swept numerous tea party candidates into Congress, locking the GOP into culture warfare and vaulting Alexander into a higher echelon of Republican politics. For a small-time hustler, it was like being called up to the majors. In Texas, his mother, Lydia Dews, who did not respond to a request for comment, registered a company — presumably a political consultancy — called Vice and Victory Agency. It received more than $40,000 from a tea party PAC that Politico later dubbed a “scam PAC.” The PAC’s designated agent, Dan Backer, went on to run several major Trump super PACs.
“The majority of my work and my money comes from electoral politics,” Alexander later explained. “So super PACs, billionaires and millionaires approach me to make sure that their money is going to causes that they believe in.”
Early in his career, Alexander appears to have come to the attention of Mike Roman, the head of Charles and David Koch’s “competitive intelligence” team, a surveillance and intelligence-gathering unit that the Koch Industries brothers used to monitor and counteract liberal groups and activists. Roman, one of Alexander’s first Twitter followers, took to occasionally boosting the young operative’s account. Roman would go on to work for Trump, first in 2016 to oversee “election protection,” and, later, in the White House, where his duties were shrouded in secrecy, according to Politico. (On Election Day in 2020, Roman tweeted viral disinformation about Democratic voter fraud and was among the first people to amplify a “Stop the Steal” hashtag tweeted early that morning by Posobiec.)
In 2011, Alexander found his way to the heart of the GOP’s minority rule project when the Leadership Institute, a conservative grassroots training organization in Washington, invited Alexander, who was still on probation for debit card abuse, to give a presentation about online fundraising. The organization’s notable alumni include former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and violent pro-Trump neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach, who told HuffPost in 2016 that the Leadership Institute had trained “this entire next generation of white nationalists.”
Alexander forged other connections with prominent conservatives throughBlog Bash, an afterparty for bloggers that he helped organize at CPAC. It was sponsored at times by organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, Facebook and the Koch’s libertarian FreedomWorks organization. In 2012, Blog Bash honored James O’Keefe, a Robert Mercer-financed Republican operative who has been labeled a “dirty trickster,” for a film he made that purported to show voter fraud in New Hampshire. (Republicans have used O’Keefe’s “stings” to support restrictive voter ID laws in state legislatures across the country.)
With right-wing publisher Andrew Breitbart in attendance, O’Keefe gave a three-word acceptance speech: “Fuck the media!” In 2013, Ted Cruz shared the Blog Bash stage with Alexander. The freshman tea party senator delivered a softer, long-winded version of O’Keefe’s speech, but his anti-media sentiment was palpable and foreshadowed not only Trump’s authoritarian assault on the press but also the online propaganda machine that activists like Breitbart were building for the GOP.
“You scare the hell out of Washington,” Cruz told the right-wing bloggers. “Y’all are on the front lines, taking this country back.”
[Ali Alexander, Blog Bash co-organizer Melissa Clouthier and Ted Cruz at Blog Bash in 2013.
YOUTUBE]
Money was rolling in for Alexander. When he and his partners used Blog Bash to launch the National Bloggers Club, a collective they claimed would “fund private reporting projects,” Republican megadonor Foster Friess, a co-owner of the right-wing Daily Caller, put up seed money. The group didn’t seem to do much beyond solicit donations for CJ Pearson, a 12-year-old Black conservative who’d become a darling of Fox News after denigrating Obama. Alexander somehow became Pearson’s “manager.” (Pearson, now 18, was one of Alexander’s Stop the Steal accomplices and was slated to be a speaker at the Wild Protest.)
By 2014, Alexander had landed a gig as communications director for the Republican Leadership Conference — a smaller, Southern version of CPAC that is now called the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. The event was in New Orleans that year. Cruz was headlining. But another speaker captured Alexander’s attention: Donald Trump. The crooked Manhattan oligarch’s popularity had soared among conservative voters after his racist “birther” attacks on Obama.
In New Orleans, Alexander and the future president met for the first time. Alexander at first claimed they hung out for 45 minutes ― later, he upped it to four hours ― and that his resemblance to Sammy Davis Jr. left an impression on Trump. Alexander has often used the meeting to impress followers and potential donors, circulating a photo of himself with Trump from that day.
But a senior conference official said the encounter happened in a busy holding room for VIPs where several others also interacted with Trump. “I wouldn’t doubt that the president called him Sammy Davis Jr., but nobody cleared the room for him to visit,” the conference official said.
Dirty Tricks Down South
A few months after his Trump encounter, Alexander resurfaced in Baton Rouge as a senior adviser to the Black Conservatives Fund, which received more than $150,000 that year from Mercer. As detailed by progressive journalist Lamar White Jr., the mysterious PAC had begun meddling in Louisiana politics in 2014. The group’s stated aim was to support Black Republican candidates, but it devoted considerable energy to tactics that could disenfranchise Black voters, including making baseless allegations of voter fraud.
Anita MonCrief, a driving force behind the Black Conservatives Fund, was a veteran of one of the GOP’s most notorious “voter fraud” disinformation campaigns: the fake ACORN scandal of 2008, when prominent media figures, including Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs, made the community organization for lower-income families the centerpiece of a massive propaganda attack on Obama.
The campaign was supercharged by O’Keefe and Breitbart, who released “severely edited” undercover videos that created the appearance that a handful of ACORN employeeswere willing to aid seemingly criminal activity. Breitbart’s legion of bloggers amplified the “sting” online. Even though multiple investigations found no evidence of wrongdoing at ACORN, more than 50% of Republicans came to believe the group had stolen the election for Obama.
MonCrief, who had been fired by ACORN for using a business credit card for personal expenses, tried to feed the press smears about the group’s ties to Obama. The barrage crescendoed at the final presidential debate, when Republican candidate McCain falsely accused Obama of “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
The ACORN campaign marked the GOP’s open embrace of white grievance politics and a venomous brand of dirty tricks tailored for a post-truth digital age. It also brought MonCrief, who did not respond to a request for comment sent to her personal email, together with O’Keefe, whose voter fraud disinformation she has promoted on Twitter. And she’d soon join forces with Alexander. In 2012, she attended his Blog Bash with O’Keefe. In Louisiana two years later, they all zeroed in on Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a three-term incumbent entering a runoff with a strong Republican challenger in Bill Cassidy.
O’Keefe had gone after Landrieu before, in 2010, when he illegally entered her office with two associates, both of whom were disguised as telephone repairmen and one of whom asked to access the “central box” of the phone system as part of an attempt to “orchestrate a conversation” about phone calls to Landrieu’s staff that O’Keefe would capture on video. He was arrested and pleaded guilty to a reduced misdemeanor charge of entering federal property under false pretenses. In late 2014, O’Keefe returned to Louisiana. He was, he said, “working on a big story.” He wasn’t alone. Gavin McInnes,who two years later would found the Proud Boys, was also there, doing “undercover work” for O’Keefe. McInnes claimed to have infiltrated Landrieu campaign headquarters.
The Black Conservatives Fund soon released an undercover “sting” video that the group claimed showed the father of Landrieu’s chief of staff, a Black mayor of a small city in Louisiana, encouraging voter fraud. The speaker, who did not appear on camera, was making an obvious joke at a Landrieu event about voting twice, a harmless crack on the campaign trail. But Alexander and the Black Conservatives Fund spun it into a voter fraud conspiracy focused on the mayor. Alexander, who went by Ali Akbar at the time, and the Black Conservatives Fund emailed a press release to local journalists and political bloggers, accusing the mayor of undermining the “integrity of our voting process.”
“Immediately after” the release went out, according to a local political blogger, the Republican Party of Louisiana emailed its own statement condemning the mayor, an original copy of which HuffPost obtained. The party and Alexander appeared to be coordinating.
“The Democrat machine has once again been exposed for its efforts to mislead, cheat and steal when it comes to elections,” wrote Jeff Landry, who at the time was the head of the Republican Party of Louisiana’s “Voter Integrity Program.”
Landry, a former tea party congressman running for state attorney general, was a notable participant in the effort to smear Landrieu and a fitting person to apply the GOP’s imprimatur to voter fraud disinformation. The climate change denialist was financed by the fossil fuel industry and the Koch brothers.
Roger Villere, the chairman of Republican Party of Louisiana at the time, issued a similar condemnation a few hours later. Alexander, who had also targeted Black voters with a misleading robocall about Landrieu, posted a picture on Facebook around this time of himself with Villere in the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge. Villere and the Republican Party of Louisiana did not return requests for comment.
Three days after the sting, Alexander posted another picture ― a celebratory one on Instagram of himself with O’Keefe in Baton Rouge’s Crowne Plaza Hotel, where Cassidy would soon have his election night party after beating Landrieu.
“Provocateurs at large,” Alexander wrote.
In 2015, Landry won his race for Louisiana attorney general, and Alexander found work as the digital director for Louisiana Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne’s gubernatorial campaign. Dardenne lost his primary, but that hardly slowed Alexander’s ascent. With his network, experience and aptitude for dirty tricks, he was well-positioned for the calamitous next phase of Republican politics.
Twitter-Enabled Authoritarianism
In 2016, Trump ushered the GOP into a new era of social media-fueled extremism. Alexander, who had already started to shed his Muslim last name, adapted quickly. He joined a ring of propagandists and white nationalists orbiting Steve Bannon, chief executive of Trump’s campaign. The Mercer-funded Milo Yiannopoulos became a friend. So did Breitbart writer Mike Mahoney, the founder of an eco-fascist organization now deemed a potential domestic terrorism threat. At some point, Alexander also fell in with Marcus Epstein, an ethno-nationalist reactionarywith a violent past who collaborates closely with prominent white nationalists and has high-level Republican contacts, and Jeff Giesea, an understudy to billionaire Peter Thiel who has funded white nationalists in the past.
But his closest colleague at the time was Lucian Wintrich, who would soon become the White House correspondent for The Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump disinformation outlet that has pushed voter fraud lies, promoted Stop the Steal and published propaganda from the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia group whose members were involved in the storming of the Capitol. (In January, an Oath Keeper and two people associated with the militia were charged with criminal conspiracy for participating in the attack.)
With Wintrich, Alexander launched a dead-end media startup and staged a pro-Trump anti-immigrant art show in New York where the British Yiannopoulos gave a speech about “American values” and bathed in a tub of pig’s blood. McInnes arrived in his gang’s black-and-yellow uniform and recruited attendees into his organization.
In 2017, Wintrich and Alexander again caught the eye of extremism researchers when they hosted a podcast with Matt Colligan, who had marched with a tiki torch at the Charlottesville rally. During the podcast, Alexander jokingly threw up a “sieg heil.” Colligan hoisted a Nazi flag behind him on screen, which prompted laughter from Alexander. When a woman who claimed to be Jewish called into the podcast to complain, Alexander mocked her.
A month later, Alexander and Cernovich attended the wedding of neo-Nazi collaborator Posobiec, a protégé of convicted felon and Trump consigliere Roger Stone. As HuffPost first reported in December, Posobiec was also a confidant of Donald Trump Jr. Amplified heavily on Twitter by an infamous Kremlin-directed account, Posobiec has repeatedly promoted a book by Russian neo-fascist Aleksandr Dugin that lays out a plan to topple American democracy through racial tension and disinformation. In October, HuffPost emailed, called and texted Posobiec to ask about his promotion of Dugin’s book and whether he had ever “taken any money from Russia, any foreign government or a cut-out.” Posobiec did not respond.
In the summer of 2017, Alexander teamed up with the far-right propagandist to speak at a “Rally for Peace” in front of the White House that kicked off with a Trump supporter shouting, “It’s time to put George Soros in the gas chamber!”The rally, which also featured Wintrich and Cernovich, attracted a contingent of Proud Boys, one of whom gave a spit-flying speech about the media that had an audience member screaming about “communist scum!” Handling security were the 211 Bootboys, an ultranationalist skinhead crew that has engaged in gang assaults, sometimes with the Proud Boys. Stone called in over Posobiec’s phone to address the crowd.
By the end of that year, Alexander and Stone were hanging out together.The two posed for a photo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where Alexander turned up for a quarterly meeting of theYoung Republican National Federation, acting as the chairman of the organization’s Louisiana chapter. A few days later, as part of a secret retreat with top donors, the Republican Attorneys General Association booked Mar-a-Lago’s Teahouse dining room for an event that Louisiana’s Jeff Landry reportedly attended.
Alexander’s social media star was on the rise. In 2018, Kanye West promoted him on Twitter, where Alexander had taken to singling out Jewish members of the media in a way that he insisted couldn’t be anti-Semitic, given his own claims of Semitic heritage. He also tweeted what appeared to be a lynching threat at former CIA Director John Brennan, an outspoken Trump critic. Like Trump, Alexander abused Twitter blatantly. But Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey nevertheless sought out the views of the extremist influencer.
In February 2018, Alexander revealed on Instagram that he and Dorsey had been “talking for the past several months” about how people with “different beliefs” could coexist on Twitter. Alexander meant conservatives. Specifically, he meant far-right influencers like himself and Stone, who’d been booted from Twitter in 2017 for abusive and menacing tweets about CNN news anchors and contributors. Bad actors on the political right often use false claims of “conservative censorship” to pressure social media companies to take a hands-off approach to disinformation and extremism, and Alexander indicated that he brought up Stone’s suspension with Dorsey. In a Breitbart interview, Alexander claimed that he and Dorsey discussed problems “disproportionately affecting conservatives” on the platform and that the Twitter CEO “stressed that mistakes had been made and Twitter needs to serve everyone going forward.” In August 2018, Dorsey quietly sought Alexander’s advice about whether to ban bigoted far-right conspiracist Alex Jones from the site.
“I was introduced to him by a friend, and you know, he’s got interesting points,” Dorsey would later say of Alexander. “I don’t obviously agree with most. But I think the perspective is interesting.”
It’s unclear how Alexander met Dorsey, and Twitter declined to answer any of HuffPost’s questions. A year before his photo with Dorsey, however, Alexander claimed in a private meeting with White Jr., the journalist from Louisiana, that he knew influential higher-ups at the social media company. “He told me he had friends in Twitter corporate,” White told HuffPost. “He didn’t give me any specific names.”
Alexander’s next piece of subversion drew on Stone for inspiration. In 2016, Stone, who would carve out a role for himself that year as a backchannel for WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, a Twitter account that American intelligence investigators and cybersecurity experts had already accurately assessed was run by Russian military intelligence, had created a “Stop the Steal” slogan, fundraising website and 527 advocacy group. The apparent objective: erode voter trust in a Republican primary in which Trump looked like a long shot.
Later, in a general election Trump also seemed fated to lose, Stop the Steal played up fabricated claims of a rigged election and morphed into a project to send Republicans to “monitor” polling places in communities that Democratic leaders in battleground states who sued over “voter intimidation” tactics pointed out had large populations of marginalized group.
But Stone’s effort paled in comparison to what Alexander would eventually pull off. First, though, the young Republican had to field test the idea for himself. In 2018, at Posobiec’s urging, according to Alexander, he decided to marry the Stop the Steal slogan to his own on-the-ground activism.
Alexander saw an opportunity in Florida, where a tight U.S. Senate race between Democrat incumbent Bill Nelson and the state’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, had gone to a mandatory recount after absentee and provisional ballots narrowed Scott’s lead. Republicans were apoplectic. Scott talked about “unethical liberals” trying to “steal this election.” Trump alleged “election fraud.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) circulated a conspiracy theory about unmarked vehicles moving fake ballots in the dead of night.
Alexander took to the street. He gathered angry Trump supporters outside the Broward County Supervisor of Elections to protest the recount. The Proud Boys turned out. So did Stone, who’d participated in and claimed to have orchestrated a similar spectacle in 2000 ― the “Brooks Brothers riot,” during which a mob of white Republican operatives tried to force their way into Miami-Dade County polling headquarters and put a halt to the recount in that year’s presidential election.
Alexander’s far-right network also showed up. Pearson, the young conservative activist from Alexander’s past, tweeted to promote the protest and commended Posobiec, Proud Boys influencer Joe Biggs, and Republican operative Scott Presler, formerly the lead activism strategist for anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America, for “descending onto Florida.” With hislogistical know-how, Presler was an important ally for Alexander. A year earlier, Presler — who, according to his Facebook, later became a regional field director for the Republican Party of Virginia — had organized a nationwide “March Against Sharia” that attracted neo-Nazis, other racist extremists and anti-government groups such as the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and Proud Boys.
Alexander’s Broward County Stop the Steal event also proved irresistible to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who appeared outside the election center to cause a ruckus and spread disinformation on Twitter about “fraudulent ballots.” Even the Republican National Committee got involved, tweeting, “We cannot let lawyers and special interests from Washington steal this election.” When Scott emerged victorious, Alexander took credit.
In early 2019, Alexander launched a MAGA influencer site, Culttture, with Trump’s favorite meme-smith, Logan “Carpe Donktum” Cook, who has glorified violence against the media. Alexander said the idea came to him after LSD “rewired” his brain. The site made an initial splash by sending Alexander, Islamophobic Republican congressional candidateLaura Loomer and far-right subversive Jacob Wohl, who was arrested last October for running a robocall scheme targeting Black voters with false election information, to Minneapolis to generate fodder for an Alexander-directed propaganda reel about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). In Periscope videos, they falsely depicted parts of the city as being under sharia law and claimed to need a “massive” security team in order to travel safely. The best way to support them, Alexander told followers, was through “money, money, money, money, money and then prayer.”
Alexander caused another stir that year during a birther smear campaign against Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. “She’s not an American Black. Period,” he tweeted, echoing his description of Obama a decade earlier. The racist message got a boost on Twitter from Trump Jr., who later deleted his retweet.
A month later, Alexander scored an invite to the White House for Trump’s “social media summit.” The gathering of digital extremists was a murderers’ row of pro-Trump trolls and propagandists. Alexander had finally arrived.
Alexander was also building his own coalition. In October, he traveled to the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort for the American Priority Conference, which brought together figures ranging from GOP heavyweights like Trump Jr. and Gaetz to the usual crew of henchmen: Posobiec, O’Keefe, Cook, Presler and others. In the Trump resort, Alexander gathered some of his fellow travelers for a photo-op.
These were Trump’s digital soldiers. But next to Alexander in his trademark sunglasses was a real one: Tarrio. A bullet-headed felon who’d attended the Unite the Right rally, the Cuban-American Tarrio was a street fighter who’d gone on to succeed McInnes as national chairman of the Proud Boys. Under Tarrio’s command, the neo-fascist gang has acted as a personal security force for Stone. The Proud Boys were seemingly at Alexander’s disposal as well. And the Republican operative had big plans.
“Goebbels and Lenin, smart men, evil men,” Alexander said that year. “But they have nothing on me in terms of social engineering.”
Ali Alexander with Scott Presler, Enrique Tarrio, Mike Cernovich, Logan Cook and several Stop the Steal accomplices at the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort for the American Priority Conference in 2019.]
Stop The Steal 2020
On Sept. 7, 2020, Alexander and Posobiec primed their social media followers for a new Stop the Steal campaign. In a Periscope broadcast, Alexander declared his intention to build the digital “infrastructure” for the anti-democratic movement and talked about sending Trump supporters to election centers in case a “physical presence is needed,” according to Right Wing Watch. That same afternoon, Posobiec, who has over 1 million followers on Twitter, posted that “#StopTheSteal 2020 is coming” in a since-deleted tweet uncovered in an investigation by the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab.
As soon as it became clear on Nov. 4 that Trump would likely lose the election, Alexander swung into action on social media, claiming that his young political mentees had convinced him: “They said, ‘Ali, if you could change the world ― or save the world ― and you had that opportunity to do it, why wouldn’t you?’ And I felt this rush of conviction, you know, because I’m a Christian.”
The daughter of Amy Kremer, a tea party organizer, launched a Stop the Steal Facebook page. Posobiec and other far-right friends of Alexander promoted it. The page quickly gained over 360,000 members, some of whom talked about murdering Democrats and starting a civil war. Within days, Facebook had shut it down.
Twitter, however, permitted Alexander’s extremism, which he didn’t camouflage.He called the platform his “public diary” and his “call to action.” On Nov. 9, he tweeted, “Republicans choose who wins the Electoral College. We don’t have to lie down.” Alexander urged GOP state legislatures to “only send Republican Electors to the College,” seemingly advocating that they defy the popular vote and overturn the most secure election in American history. Mocking Alexander with the Proud Boys slogan, another Twitter user pointed out that, “Such a fascist coup would provoke a civil war. Why don’t you fuck around and find out?” Alexander retweeted the ominous prediction with his own message: “Thanks for the invite, bitch.”
Several other Twitter users, presumably followers of Alexander, replied to the message with what appeared to be endorsements of insurrection and civil war. One promoted a logo of Anticom, a far-right group whose members espouse fascism and guerrilla warfare against the political left and have shared detailed bomb-making instructions online.
For the next two months, Dorsey and Twitter executives did next to nothing to prevent Alexander from growing his movement on their platform, aside from temporarily blocking the link to his Stop the Steal website. But that didn’t last long, according to Alexander.
“I used my relationships with Twitter to get that reversed,”he told the Epoch Times, a far-right conspiracy and propaganda outlet that promoted Stop the Steal and false claims of voter fraud. (Twitter declined to respond.)
Stop the Steal was scary from the start. The first rally took place on Nov. 4 in Phoenix outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office. Alexander organized the event on Twitter with Gosar, who has been photographed with Proud Boys and reportedly attended Oath Keepers meetings, and Cernovich, who has for many years used Twitter to sow disinformation that has inspired threats and violence.Gosar would later acknowledge Cernovich’s seminal role in launching Stop the Steal, comparing the far-right propagandist to Rosa Parks.
In November, Gosar ― “the spirit animal of Stop the Steal,” according to Alexander ― did not respond to a request from HuffPost seeking information about his involvement in the protest movement and his connections to extremists. Later that month, the leader of an Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers claimed in a video that Gosar had met with his group “a couple of years ago” and told them he believed the United States had already entered another civil war. “We just haven’t started shooting yet,” Gosar reportedly said.
In March, HuffPost reached out again to Gosar’s digital director, Jessica Lycos, who appears to double as a press secretary, to inquire one more time about the radical congressman’s troubling associations. (Gosar also met privately in 2018 with Steve Bannon and foreign ultranationalist leaders, including racists and Islamophobes with ties to violent extremists.) Lycos replied with an email that she tried to put off-the-record.
“Sounds like your story is already completely written. What do you need me for?” Lycos wrote. “Rep. Gosar is of course none of those things but you’re not interested in hearing that. Good luck!”
HuffPost requested a third time to speak to Gosar and asked Lycos to clarify what she meant by “none of those things.” She did not respond.
At the Phoenix rally, Cernovich and Gosar gave speeches to a large, angry crowd similar to the mob that rioted in Washington in early January. It was a mix of MAGA extremists, armed militia members and QAnon believers. They chanted “stop the steal.” They threatened reporters. The protesters grew so hostile that election workers needed a police escort to their cars at the end of the night. At one point, militia members barged into the elections center. No arrests were made.
Alexander recruited hundreds of protesters on Twitter within minutes of launching Stop the Steal, but the Phoenix rally also showed signs of more advanced planning and financial backing.
“This wasn’t just a grassroots swelling of citizens,” local attorney Tom Ryan, who specializes in election law, told HuffPost. “These people had pre-manufactured signs.”
A second night of protest in Phoenix summoned Jones, who Alexander tweeted was “getting a jet.” Jones, known for spreading lies that led to death threats against the parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, showed up to bellow to the mob about the coming war against Trump’s opponents. “They will be in their goddamn bunkers when we come for them!” he shouted. “They will be hiding. They will pay. They will be destroyed.”
Jacob Chansley, known as the “Q Shaman” for his horned fur hat and Norse tattoos, was at that rally. Though reportedly jobless, Chansley nevertheless found the means to travel to Washington in January. He stormed the Capitol with a spear, tracing a throughline of violence back to Stop the Steal’s genesis.
A third night of protest in Phoenix featured Trump family insider and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. On Nov. 4, he was one of the first people to promote the rally, using slick material branded with his affiliate’s name, Turning Point Action. The affiliate reportedly paid a sprawling network of teenagers, including some minors, to pump out disinformation, much of it about voter fraud.
At a Nov. 18 Stop the Steal event in Atlanta, Alexander appeared with Fuentes, Jones and Tarrio outside the Georgia State Capitol,along with a mob of Trump supporters.
“Who is going to be ready to storm the Capitol with us in a couple minutes?!” Alexander shouted through a megaphone.
“Peacefully,” Jones reminded Alexander.
“Peacefully,” Alexander snickered. “Do not let antifa infiltrate.”
Once inside the building, some Trump supporters didn’t want to leave, figuring they could shut down the certification of the Georgia vote. Biden had won the state by a slim enough margin to trigger a hand audit of the results, which was underway at the time of the rally. The certification deadline was two days away. One Trumpist, who understandably viewed Jones as the leader of the group, approached wide-eyed with an idea.
“They certify the vote here, right?” said the man, who wore a stars-and-stripes cowboy hat.
“Yeah,” Jones grunted.
“We’re inside,” the man told Jones. “Let’s not leave!”
Oddly deferential, Jones turned to Alexander.
“We’re not the left, we’re not going to democratize ideas,” Alexander snapped at the man. “Listen to me, we’re going to stop the steal. But first we’re going to stop the certification.”
It was too soon. Too small. Too few people.
A Growing Insurrection
Alexander kept organizing at a feverish pace. He put together numerous events in other states, many of which attracted extremists and militia members. He tapped into his network for help, including Kremer, who now runs Women for America First, an organization created to oppose Trump’s impeachment. Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, an influential dark money conduit for the GOP that Alexander’s Blog Bash site listed as a sponsor, co-host and supporter of the event over the course of several years, had signed on early and was speaking at Stop the Steal rallies. Prominent conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, who’d been on the board of Alexander’s National Bloggers Club, got involved, enthusiastically spreading Stop the Steal propaganda and speaking at at least one rally.
Malkin already had well-documented connections to the white supremacist movement.In early 2020, American Renaissance, a prominent white supremacist publication, began syndicating Malkin’s columns. She endorsed Patrick Casey, the leader of American Identity Movement, a now-defunct neo-Nazi and white nationalist organization, and Fuentes, as well as other far-right extremists who have routinely expressed anti-Semitic and white nationalist views. She spoke at Fuentes’ 2020 America First Political Action Conference.
Afterward, she went on “Red Ice,” a white power radio show, to warn of changing demographics and “multicultural rot.” She didn’t stop there. She created a reading list with Yiannopoulos for “America First” activists that included towering anti-Semitic texts such as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and “Culture of Critique” by Kevin MacDonald, who has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the “neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic.”
By the time Alexander’s Stop the Steal movement surged to life, Malkin, who refers to herself as the “mommy” to Fuentes’ “groyper” followers and regularly socializes with fascists, had, by any definition, embraced far-right extremism. She was a big name, with a big platform.
But it was the junior influencers who helped Alexander with local Stop the Steal promotion and organizing. One of them, Michael “Mike Tokes” Coudrey, emerged as a key lieutenant.
“There would be no #StopTheSteal movement without @MichaelCoudrey,” Alexander tweeted the day before the Capitol attack.
Like Alexander, Coudrey had had legal problems, beginning when he was a minor. As an adult, he was arrested in 2017 on a felony charge of obtaining property under false pretenses after allegedly lying on a credit application at a used car dealership in Las Vegas so he could purchase a 2008 Dodge Caravan with a small down payment. Coudrey entered a nolo contendere plea to a reduced charge of petit larceny in 2019. By then, he was reinventing himself as a pro-Trump social media performer. Trump retweeted Coudrey last year after he pushed hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 cure.
White nationalist Bryden Proctor, Stop the Steal organizer Mike Coudrey and white nationalist Tim Gionet.]
Last year, Andy Stepanian, an activist and communications consultant for nonprofits, revealed that Coudrey, who did not respond to requests for comment, was apparently running a private Twitter group in 2019 and beyond that appeared to include multiple far-right activists who would go on to be Stop the Steal co-organizers. Several Trump insiders also appeared to be part of the group, including Richard Grenell, Trump’s then-acting director of national intelligence who spread baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
“Does the Huffington Post still exist?” Grenell asked when HuffPost reached him for comment.
Yet another important colleague of Alexander’s was Ed Martin, the former chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, who appears friendly with Mike Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. Martin, who has expressed support for QAnon, handled Stop the Steal organizing in Washington. The day before the attack, he tweeted a photo of himself with Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas). They were smiling and holding a “Stop the Steal” sign.
Martin and Alexander had joined forces before, in 2014, on behalf of Chris McDaniel, a tea party candidate for Senate in Mississippi with a history of making inflammatory remarks about women and minorities and whose talk-radio show website promoted the League of the South, a violent neo-Confederate organization. A strategist for McDaniel told CNN in 2018 that the politician “has never endorsed the League of the South and has nothing to do with them.” But McDaniel, who reportedly delivered the keynote address at a 2013 event staged by a chapter of another neo-Confederate group, had accepted donations from a League of the South member, the attorney for an imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who died in prison after murdering a civil rights activist. When McDaniel lost in the Republican primary, he falsely claimed the election was stolen. So did Ted Cruz.
Alexander had two Stop the Steal trial runs in Washington before the Capitol attack. On Nov. 14, he staged the “Million MAGA March,” promotional material for which had spread widely among violent extremist groups. During the election, Trump had refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and instead issued a “stand back and stand by” directive to the Proud Boys. “Somebody’s gotta do something about antifa and the left,” the president said, using language that thrummed the blood of far-right extremists.
“Trump basically said to go fuck them up! [T]his makes me so happy,” wrote Joe Biggs, a high-ranking Proud Boy who was connected to Alexander on Venmo, a money-sharing app that creates public friends lists of users who have communicated via phone.
“[T]here are not enough jail cells to house everybody that is coming,” Alexander said in a Periscope broadcast, Right Wing Watch first reported.
On the appointed day, thousands of Trump supporters poured into D.C., including several battalions of Proud Boys, some of whom wore bulletproof vests. Before the rally, Biggs, who was arrested last month for storming the Capitol, told his followers to “buy ammo [and] clean your guns.”
Other groups such as Oath Keepers, Patriot Prayer and American Guard also showed up, and when night fell, the far-right extremists mixed it up with counterprotesters. People were stabbed. Police recovered guns. But it was the number of Trump blackshirts in the streets that was so shocking. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. CJ Halliburton, an independent journalist who livestreams protests, filmed Alexander that night in their midst, smoking a celebratory cigar and sharing a toast with Tarrio.
Ali Alexander and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio toast in November 2020, after a Stop the Steal rally in Washington.]
Alexander spoke of “political revenge” and only grew more bellicose as insurrection approached. “I am willing to give my life for this fight,” he tweeted on Dec. 7, a message the Arizona Republican Party amplified on Twitter a few hours later. “He is. Are you?” the party asked.
Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, went on to speak at one of Alexander’s Stop the Steal rallies. Ward, who has a history of associating with other extremists and has also beenfunded by the Mercers, wanted to “cross the Rubicon.” She later refused to condemn the attack on the Capitol.
Alexander’s next Stop the Steal event in Washington took place on Dec. 12. Far-right extremists such as Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin — who urged his neo-Nazi followers to “Get out in the street. No Surrender.” — promoted it. Flynn spoke at a portion of the rally called the “Jericho March,” which had a website stating “globalists, socialists, and communists” were trying to “destroy” America through “fraudulent and illegal activities in this election.”
The Jericho March, as Flynn made clear in his speech, referenced a biblical battle during which Israelite soldiers marched around the Canaanite city of Jericho and blew trumpets until the city walls collapsed. The Israelites then stormed inside and massacred every living creature except a treasonous prostitute and her family. In the MAGA rendition of the tale, Congress was Jericho.
“We’re in a spiritual battle for the heart and soul of the country,” Flynn said, a flag of the anti-government Three Percenter militia flapping in front of him as, overhead, Trump buzzed the crowd in Marine One. “We’re going to knock those walls down.”
The rally attracted thousands more Trump supporters and resulted in more Proud Boys-led violence. Gang members marched in formation through downtown D.C. The Proud Boys reportedly assaulted passersby. They targeted Black churches and vandalized their property. Alexander began tweeting about 1776, a reference to the American Revolution.
On Dec. 29, Alexander appeared on Sean Hannity’s podcast to promote the upcoming Wild Protest. Conservative commentator Rose Tennent, who is affiliated with Moms for America, another organization involved in the Jan. 6 rally, was the guest host. “We can’t let it be said of us that we stood by and did nothing,” she said. “This is a hill we are willing to die on.”
The Wild Protest had come together, Alexander told her, with the “collaboration” of his Republican allies in Congress: Gosar, Mo Brooks and Andy Biggs, all of whom would object to certifying the Electoral College vote affirming Biden’s win. Brooks later denied that he had helped Alexander organize a rally, and he issued a statement saying he had “no recollection of ever communicating in any way with whoever Ali Alexander is.” But Brooks was featured on the Wild Protest website and, as a speaker at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, urged angry protesters to sacrifice their lives if necessary.
“Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?!” he shouted.
Biggs, too, tried to distance himself from Alexander after the deadly attack.“Congressman Biggs is not aware of hearing of or meeting Mr. Alexander at any point — let alone working with him to organize some part of a planned protest,” Biggs’ spokesman told The Washington Post. On Dec. 13, however, Biggs and Alexander had appeared together as speakers at a small Moms for America rally in Washington. On Dec. 19, Alexander played a video message from Biggs during a Stop the Steal rally in Phoenix, at which Alexander and Biggs’ wife hugged.
During his appearance on Hannity’s podcast, Alexander was adamant that the three congressmen helped him conceive of his protest, an assertion he echoed on social media.
“They were like, ‘Ali, bring your people, we’ve had these rallies all across the country, two times in DC,’” he told Tennent. “They were like, ‘Bring those patriots here. Let our colleagues hear them outside before they vote.’”
Alexander tweeted a translation for his “people” the next day: “1776 is *always* an option,” he wrote, warning that if lawmakers certified the Electoral College vote, “everyone can guess what me and 500,000 others will do to that building.”
A Powerful Republican Ally
On Jan. 5, Proud Boys and other extremists, including white supremacists on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist, flooded into Washington. Stone was spotted with an Oath Keepers security detail. That morning, Alexander tweeted that he was considering issuing an order to supporters to “occupy DC” until a “negotiated settlement” could be reached. “Stand back & stand by!” he tweeted.
A robocall went out that day encouraging “patriots” to march to the Capitol at 1 p.m. the following afternoon to “stop the steal.” The recording, unearthed by the watchdog group Documented, was paid for by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, a fundraising arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association.
RAGA, a national organization for Republican state attorneys general, is financed by big corporations and Republican megadonors, none more significant than Koch Industries, which in 2020 gave the group $375,000, according to IRS 527 filings reviewed by Documented. As a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization, RLDF can hide its donors. But it, too, is funded by Koch-backed organizations and other right-wing dark money groups. One of these donors demanded that the “March to Save America” robocall go out and made a contribution “contingent” upon its release, according to The New York Times.
In the months leading up to the Capitol attack,RAGA had also put out a series of propaganda videos that demonized racial justice protesters and liberals. One video used Soviet-style imagery to portray Democratic leaders in Congress as communist subversives. In official statements, RAGA said the political left was on a “mission to burn America down” and that a Biden-Harris administration would “destroy” the country. “JOIN THE FIGHT!” urged the Republican attorneys general.
It was, perhaps, no coincidence that the RAGA chairman in 2020 was Landry, the tea partier whose connection to Alexander went back at least to 2014, and the Black Conservative Fund’s “sting” on Mary Landrieu.
The two appeared to have stayed in touch. When Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, sued on Dec. 8 to block battleground states won by Biden from submitting their Electoral College votes, Alexander tweeted that “Some of us are hard at work behind the scenes too.” He mentioned only one name.
“I just thanked my friend @jefflandry,” he tweeted, using Landry’s personal Twitter handle.
Alexander seemed to have inside knowledge of RAGA’s plans. He noted that no “procedural vehicle” existed yet for other states to join Paxton’s suit but that an amicus brief was on its way. Sure enough, Landry and 16 other Republican attorneys general filed the brief on Dec. 9 in support of Paxton’s sham lawsuit. A day later, Landry signed on to the lawsuit in a motion to intervene that misspelled his own state’s name.
Landry shared some of Alexander’s extreme views. In RAGA statements and op-eds, the Louisiana attorney general warned of a “radical takeover” by Biden and Harris ― RAGA’s race-baiting propaganda focused heavily on America’s first Black, Asian and female vice president ― that would leave the nation “lawless, socialist, and jobless.” Landry wrote about “charging to the frontlines in order to save and defend America.”
Landry declined to answer any questions about his connection to Alexander. His spokesman, Cory Dennis, emailed HuffPost a one-line response: “The [Louisiana] Attorney General had no prior knowledge of, nor participated in, the robo call’s planning or execution.”
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry at a Jan. 22, 2020, news conference where it was announced that Republican attorneys general from 21 states submitted a letter to the Senate to reject the two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. ]
But RLDF’s involvement in the violent Jan. 6 protest was undeniable. The robocall mentioned a “March to Save America” website that Alexander highlighted in his Twitter profile and that listed 11 participating organizations. Three tied directly to Alexander: Stop the Steal, Wild Protest and the Black Conservatives Fund. The rest belonged to his partners. RAGA was the most troubling participant ― originally listed on the site before the more obscure RLDF was swapped in.
RAGA’s executive director at the time, Adam Piper, appears to have been acquainted with Alexander for more than a decade. Piper’s Twitter timeline, which is filled with years of anti-Obama rhetoric, shows him replying casually to Alexander and promoting the Republican operative’s account from 2009 to 2020. They both attended CPAC in 2009, when Alexander was making a name for himself as a tea party activist, and perhaps met there. Starting in early 2009, Piper also tweeted rabidly using #tcot, a tea party hashtag that allowed the nativist movement to organize and propagandize on Twitter, a precursor to the authoritarian MAGA network that coalesced around Trump on the platform in 2016.
At RAGA, Piper issued his own incendiary statements.On Election Day, he promised that a failure to thwart Biden and Harris would result in “complete annihilation.” In a press release two weeks later, he relied on selectively edited video of a street fight during Alexander’s November rally in Washington to suggest that “antifa” would run the United States if Harris and New York Democrat Chuck Schumer were allowed to take control of the Senate.
Piper, who did not respond to requests for comment, also “spearheaded” RLDF. After the revelation of the robocall, he insisted that RLDF and RAGA had “no involvement in the planning, sponsoring, or the organization” of the Jan. 6 rally. Five days later, he resigned without explanation.
Prior to the rally, Alexander had been in direct contact with Trump insider Caroline Wren, a top Republican fundraiser and former deputy to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump Jr.’s girlfriend and the former national chair of Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee for Trump’s reelection campaign. Wren had previously served as the national finance director of Trump Victory and the finance director for Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.). She had access to a deep pool of Republican dark money, bushels of which had flowed to hard-right candidates and organizations. To cite one example, Citizens for a Working America, a mysterious PAC, had paid Wren’s fundraising business handsomely in the past and, in 2012, spent almost $165,000 on behalf of Landry’s unsuccessful House reelection effort. In fiscal year 2018, the same PAC gave $930,000 to RAGA.
Wren “played a central role in bringing together the disparate group of activists planning events on Jan. 6,” according to The Wall Street Journal. She reportedly even suggested to Alexander that he reschedule his Wild Protest at the Capitol for 1 p.m. When contacted by HuffPost on Feb. 27, Wren requested that questions be emailed to her. She never responded to them.
In an appearance on Alex Jones’ show, however, Alexander offered a narrative about how the Jan. 6 megarally came together that supported The Wall Street Journal’s account.
“We were going to start at 9 or 10 a.m., and we were going to have 30 members of Congress with us. When the Trump campaign called and said, ‘Let’s combine all the events,’” Alexander said on the show. “They were like, ‘The president doesn’t want to stomp on your grassroots effort. What can we do for you?’”
On the morning of the insurrection, Alexander went on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily show to promote his Wild Protest one last time. The guest host that day was his Stop the Steal partner, Ed Martin. Alexander told Martin about another, more recent, call he said he’d received from the Trump inner circle.
“[Trump]’s in fighter mode, and today will determine which Republicans are going to suffer his wrath going forward,” Alexander explained. “I got a call last night from Kimberly Guilfoyle, and none of us are stopping. I know you’re not stopping, Ed. I’m not stopping. StoptheSteal.us is not stopping. The family is not stopping.”
Guilfoyle did not respond to a request for comment left via a cellphone linked to her name, or to questions HuffPost emailed to her through Alexandra Preate, a public relations executive and longtime friend who has also served as Steve Bannon’s spokeswoman.
The Aftermath
After the Capitol riot, the Stop the Steal team came undone. Martin, Posobiec and Gaetz spread disinformation about antifa causing the violence. Arizona Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar reportedly solicited preemptive presidential pardons. Charlie Kirk, who’d talked about “building up the infantry” and bringing in 80 busloads of protesters to “fight for this president,” held an excuse-laden press conference, his voice cracking. Numerous members of the Proud Boys were arrested, and the neo-fascist gang landed on Canada’s list of designated terrorist entities.
Alexander’s movement had helped upend the peaceful transfer of power for the first time since the Civil War. He reportedly went into hiding, claiming antifa was after him. Tech companies had finally started to deplatform him, which he likened to dying. “They got this close to having Ali Alexander commit suicide,” he said. But he managed to keep squeezing out livestreams. Four days after the insurrection, he broadcast from inside a vehicle rolling through the dark toward an undisclosed location. The next day, wearing the same clothes, he streamed from inside a building.He was the true victim here, he insisted. He compared himself to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. He compared himself to Jesus Christ.
“I had to be crucified from social media in order for social media to end,” he said. “And I will fucking end social media.”
Alexander barely acknowledged the Trump supporters who died in the Capitol attack. His soliloquies focused on him, his plight, his need for money. He claimed his life was in danger and that he required funds to pay his security team ― the same apparent ruse he’d used with Loomer and Wohl in Minneapolis. Over and over, he promoted his page on GiveSendGo.com, a Christian crowdfunding platform used by many far-right extremists. At first, Alexander wanted $40,000. The next day, he demanded $100,000, so he could “open Pandora’s box.” If he didn’t get the money, he said, “we’ll all die.” (He raised over $30,000 on GiveSendGo.)
When HuffPost contacted Alexander on Jan. 19 with an interview request, he refused to talk and accused this reporter of stalking, harassing and bullying him. “Find God,” he said. “God bless.”
A few hours later, he posted a new video on his Stop the Steal site asking for money. “Stop the Steal will not stop!” he vowed on Gab, a social media network favored by neo-Nazis.
Alexander had more rallies planned for March. He was targeting indoor venues in Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Texas. He talked about creating a new society exclusively for Trump supporters, about building MAGA megacities in the U.S. and South America, places where liberals would not be welcome.He wanted to “make lists” of his enemies. The only outcome left, he said, was “Civil War.”
“I’ve been licking my wounds but I’ve been plotting. I’ve been planning. I’ve been scheming,” Alexander told his followers. “Because we have to do away with this whole system.”
He craved revenge.
“The government outta be deathly afraid of us,” he said. “When I am ready … I will unleash a legion of angels to bring hell to our enemies. So rest assured in this, you know, the Lord says vengeance is his. And I pray that I am the tool to stab these motherfuckers.”
Fifteen years of activism ― of radicalization ― had honed him into a weapon. He was still a party man. It just happened to be Trump’s party now.
This piece has been updated to provide further clarity about O’Keefe’s illegal entry into Sen. Landrieu’s office in 2010.
started as kns on TP IRS BS?
roskam bill endorse: CAP? "memo":
H.R. 5053 will assist the IRS in doing its job: If the IRS doesn't have information
about donors to 501(c) organizations, it can't release it, by mistake, or by direction of a
successor to Lois Lerner . one of whom might, soon, be a Republican.
The IRS would continue to be able to obtain specific financial information, including
donor identity and contribution histories and information, as part of any audit or
enforcement action involving specific taxpayers; but that would be within a different IRS
procedure and would be unaffected by the passage of H. R. 5053.
The Conservative Action Project urges all conservatives and conservative
organizations . and all other Americans as well . to urge their representative in
Washington to support H.R. 5053. Ronald Reagan was right in 1981. And thirty]five years
later, government is still the problem.
The Honorable Edwin Meese III
Former Attorney General
President Ronald Reagan
The Honorable Becky Norton Dunlop
Chairman, Conservative Action Project
Former White House Advisor
President Ronald Reagan
L. Brent Bozell, III
Founder & President
Media Research Center
The Honorable Bob McEwen
U.S. House of Representatives
Former Member, Ohio
Cleta Mitchell...
Mario H. Lopez
President
Hispanic Leadership Fund
Ali Akbar
Senior Advisor
Black Conservatives Fund
==
https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/jan-6-christian-nationalism/
In the midst of the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Jacob Chansley, the bare-chested man in Viking horns who's come to be known as the QAnon Shaman, stopped his fellow marauders in the Senate chamber to pray. "Thank you Heavenly Father for gracing us with this opportunity … to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs," he said. "Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ. Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn."
The prayer, caught on _{video}_ by New Yorker reporter Luke Mogelson, was just one moment among hundreds that day illustrating how deeply the insurrection was intertwined with Christian nationalism. Across the sea of protesters in and outside the building, t-shirt and ball-cap slogans proclaimed it: "Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president"; "God, Guns, Trump"; or, on the sweatshirt of a man helping construct the rough _{gallows}_ erected on the Capitol lawn, "Faith, Family, Freedom." (The gallows itself was quickly covered in handwritten notes — "as if it were a yearbook," _{observed}_ lawyer and author Andrew Seidel — reading "Hang them high" and "In God We Trust.")
Elsewhere, protesters carried gigantic portraits of Jesus and replica statues of the Infant of Prague, or chanted about the blood of Jesus washing Congress clean. A long-haired blond man _{sang}_ praise songs into a microphone plugged into a stack of amplifiers he was wheeling on a hand-truck. A Nebraska priest performed an exorcism on the Capitol building to banish the demon Baphomet, who he
was "dissolving the country" in order to "bring it back as something different." One rioter later indicted for breaking into the Capitol was actually a cast member in a touring production of "Jesus Christ Superstar." Another,_{Leo Brent Bozell IV}_, came from a long line of Christian right activists: His father, L. Brent Bozell III, founded the right-wing Media Research Center and his grandfather, L. Brent Bozell Jr., wrote speeches for Joseph McCarthy and a manifesto for Barry Goldwater.
"It was evident to anyone watching that there was this religious character to what was going on, both in the Trump movement writ large but particularly in the leadership of the 'Stop the Steal' movement," said religious studies scholar Jerome Copulsky, co-director of a new website,_{**Uncivil Religion**}_, dedicated to collecting "digital artifacts" of Jan. 6 religiosityand exploring what it means for, say, violent protesters to dress up like Captain Moroni — a legendary warrior from the Book of Mormon — or sing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" alongside fellow protesters carrying Confederate flags. "It wasn't just the Stop the Steal rally, then the assault," Copulsky continued. "People really wanted to display their religious commitments, literally wearing them on their sleeves."
The Uncivil Religionproject developed from a Twitter hashtag, #CapitolSiegeReligion, created by author and religious historian Peter Manseau and based on his sense that the _{religious subtext}_ (and text, and blaring headline) were "_{*the* story}_ of what happened" on Jan. 6. In Manseau's view, religion wasn't an incidental element, but had been the driving motivation that had brought many people to the Capitol. Much of that had begun much earlier, with Christian right leaders — both official and self-declared — framing the 2020 election, and the rest of America's polarized conflicts, as an all-or-nothing showdown between good and evil.
Some were national names, like Samaritan's Purse president Franklin Graham, who in August 2020 _{warned}_ in a Christian Broadcasting Network interview that if Trump lost, churches would close down and Christians would be attacked. But that message was echoed so widely, in both religious and secular conservative media and across numerous niche religious right communities, that allegations about the "stolen" election became nearly inseparable from messages of apocalyptic faith.
Much of that was on display on Dec. 12, 2020, in Washington, when a large-scale interfaith prayer protest, the _{Jericho March}_ — widely seen as a forerunner to Jan. 6 — brought together a number of religious right factions to pantomime the biblical Battle of Jericho in praying to "bring down the walls of the Deep State." The carnivalesque full-day rally — organized, as journalist Sarah Posner _{reported}_, by two then-current employees of the federal government — featured anodd fusion of charismatic evangelicalism,Christian Zionism and right-wing Catholicism. There was contemporary Christian praise music and Virgin of Guadalupe iconography; a rendition of "Ave Maria" that concluded with the singer _{whooping "Giddy up"}_; and the female pastor of a New England pro-cannabis church wearing Catholic vestments while blowing on a Jewish shofar.
Emceeing the event was evangelical radio host Eric Metaxas, author of a bestselling biography of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a key figure in building an alliance between conservative evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Metaxas had become increasingly extreme throughout the Trump era. The week of the Jericho March rally, he _{told}_ TurningPoint USA founder Charlie Kirk that the 2020 election was like "somebody is being raped or murdered … times a thousand," and that conservatives would need "to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood" to keep Trump in office.
That December rally featured several notable names on the Catholic right, including a bishop from Texas who _{refused}_ to acknowledge Biden as president-elect, a nun who had
a fiery pro-Trump address at the 2020 Republican National Convention and, most prominently, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a dissident Catholic figure who had once been the Vatican ambassador to the U.S. but fell into disgrace after calling for Pope Francis' resignation in 2018.Since then, Viganò has turned into a sort of alternative pope for disaffected _{Catholic traditionalists at odds with their more moderate pope}_, and in 2020, he published an _{open letter}_ to Trump warning that a "deep church" was working with the "deep state" to use the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests to undermine his presidency. After Trump tweeted a link to the letter, Viganò attracted so much support on the broader right that when he appeared, via video, at the Jericho March — _{praying}_ "for the conversion of public officials who have become accomplices in public fraud" — an audience largely composed of evangelical Protestants cheered alongside his Catholic fans.
Evangelical speaker Lance Wallnau, who in 2016 famously _{compared}_ Trump to the biblical figure of Cyrus — a "heathen" king who nonetheless served as the instrument of God — also sounded the theme of intra-religious conflict. "This is the beginning of a Christian populist uprising. There is a backlash coming," he said. "And you're going to see this wrecking ball of a reformation hit the church as well … because it's going to divide between those who are awake and those that are asleep. … There is a great awakening coming, and this is the spark that is starting it right now."
Not all speakers at the Jericho March were religious leaders in the traditional sense. Stewart Rhodes, the devoutly Christian founder of the militia group the Oath Keepers, was on hand to urge police and military members to prepare to fight Chinese "proxies" in the U.S., who he claimed were working to install Joe Biden as their "puppet."
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, freshly pardoned by Trump for lying to federal investigators, appeared in a flag bandana to talk about spiritual war and lead the crowd in an "Our Father." And conspiracy-theory talk-show host Alex Jones delivered a barn-burning near-sermon, proclaiming, "This is the beginning of the great revival before the Antichrist comes. World government, implantable microchips, Satanism — it's out in the open. The Bible is fulfilled, Revelation is fulfilled."...And there was Ali Alexander, the bombastic founder of the Stop the Steal movement, who appeared frequently on stage alongside Metaxas, vowing that if Biden was installed as president, Alexander and his supporters would return to "occupy D.C. full of patriots," adding, "We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us."
In the following weeks, Alexander repeatedly underscored the religious dimensions of his mission. In late December, he...https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/stop-steal-organizer-ali-alexanders-pre-january-6-calls-violence-weve-got...told the Epoch Times-affiliated NTD television network, "We are in a fight of good versus evil, of light versus the darkness, and a global order over sovereign citizens. … I believe that this is ametaphysical fight and we are channeling all energy in heaven and on earth towards a favorable outcome."
On New Year's Eve in 2020, Alexander _{announced}_ on Twitter that he was converting to Catholicism, in part, he explained, because he'd become convinced that the Catholic Church had been "infiltrated" by an "earthy [sic] order that works in concert with Satan himself against the Church," and that he had been personally called to join the battle. And when the Jericho March returned to Washington on Jan. 5, for a slate of protest events leading up to the following day's MAGA march, Alexander spoke again, whipping the crowd into a ...
**...But no matter how explicit — and violent — the religious rhetoric swirling around Stop the Steal was, it was little recognized before the Jan. 6 attack.** "We have gotten so used to religious language used by evangelicals and other religiously-affiliated officials that the danger that was there — whether at the Jericho March or the Jan. 6 rally that led up to the attack on the Capitol — was really just noise to some people," said :{Anthea Butler,:(style="opacity:1;transition:color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s"):}::{ chair:(style="transition:color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s"):}: of the religious studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. ":{And then it happened, and everyone pretended to be shocked. But that's willful ignorance about the role religion has played in the last 40 or 50 years in the Republican Party. It hasn't just been this alliance of how to get people elected, but has had this element of things that have fed upon each other to create a monster that threatens democracy."...https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1351180665904111619...of" victory="Victory" or="or" death="death">**That has remained central to the legacy of Jan. 6, as religious leaders have used the rhetoric of faith to minimize and redirect responsibility for the violence of that day: whether it's people like... Wallnau**:(style="background-color:#ffff33;"):}::{ :(style="transition:color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s"):}:or South Carolina televangelis...Mark Burns blaming "antifa soldiers" for perpetrating a false-flag operation to smear Trump supportershuckabee ...suggesting, in email newsletters over the last six months, that Nancy Pelosi may have orchestrated the attack, and casting indicted Jan. 6 protesters as political prisoners; or former Vice President Mike Pence, in a December interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, _{downplaying}_ the very attack in which an angry mob called for his execution.
The rest of its legacy is more diffuse, but no less troubling:Metaxas
that the creation of COVID-19 vaccines is akin to experimenting "with the bodies of Jews we murdered in the concentration camps," or Viganò _{writing}_ that COVID exists merely as a "psycho-pandemic"; Wallnau _{calling}_ "wokeness" the religion of the Antichrist and, on the eve of the Jan. 6 anniversary...that if America is to be one nation under God, it must have only one religion. More systematically, there's the fact that much of the religious organizing energy that went into Stop the Steal has now transferred itself, as Posner... , into:{ mobilizing the Christian right on behalf of voter suppression initiatives:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:.
A year later, none of the religious fervor that helped drive Jan. 6 has vanished, says Copulsky. "It's built into the fabric of American life. There's a radicality to it, but this didn't come out of thin air. And it's not going to go away. It's incumbent on religious leaders and organizations to think about what that means....
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/confrontational-christian-nationalists-are-pushing-anti-vaxxer-extremism-report
rww 12 21
the former president’s chief of staff Mark Meadows may have reneged on his promise to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee, but Ali Alexander, the leader of the so-called Stop the Steal movement, has followed through, spending eight hours in a closed-door hearing Thursday. ... which was leaked to the...https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/us/politics/ali-alexander-jan-6-house-testimony.html... he denied having anything to “do with any violence or lawbreaking that happened on January 6”—a statement that flies in the face of his own comments and declarations ahead of the insurrection calling for rebellion, including leading chants of...https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/christian-nationalism-and-threats-of-violence-at-pro-trump-rally-on-eve-of-electoral-college-certification/...The findings of the closed-door hearing have not been made public, but based on his planned opening and public statements, it appears the far-right organizer is attempting to simply deny wrongdoing and pass the buck. Alexander claims he did not foment violence and that on the day of the rally, he attempted to deescalate the violence with calls of “peace,” while other organizers were nowhere to be found. Such claims ask the House select committee to suspend reality and ignore Alexander’s real-time... approval of Trump loyalists descending on and breaching the Capitol as well as the role of...https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/christian-nationalism-and-threats-of-violence-at-pro-trump-rally-on-eve-of-electoral-college-certification/...Even Alexander’sprayers for “peace” on Jan. 6 suggested that violence is what the government brought upon itself for not declaring Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election. He may have not explicitly told rallygoers to violently attack the Capitol and members of Congress, but his violent rhetoric, leading role in perpetuating the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump, and verbal attacks on officials in charge of U.S. elections smack ofstochastic terrorism.
Alexander emerged from the hearing Thursday evening, tellingreporters that the meeting was “adversarial” and that he was “truthful.” (The Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzoreported that Alexander was also served with a civil lawsuit related to Jan. 6 as he left the building.)
“Yesterday was one of the toughest days of MY LIFE,” Alexander wrote on Telegram Friday morning. “8 hours of accusations, lies, and conspiracy theories digging into my First Amendment rights.”
Alexander posted a video to Telegram of an interview he conducted before he went in, claiming he would “cooperate” where he could and lashing out against his critics.
“There’s this left-wing Blue Anon conspiracy theory that me and members of Congress worked to jeopardize the safety of their colleagues. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Alexander declared. “This evidence actually exonerates those members, this evidence exonerates me, and this evidence is actually going to exonerate President Donald J. Trump.”...;Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, and Mo Brooks “to put maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting” to certify the election on Jan. 6....The draft of his opening statement echoes his denial of wrongdoing and suggests he has been made into a “bogeyman” and treated differently because he is a Black and Arab man.... I had nothing to do with any violence or lawbreaking that happened on January 6,” Alexander said. “I had nothing to do with the planning. I had nothing to do with the preparation. And I had nothing to do with the execution.”... alerted the New York Times, Alexander spent weeks in the lead up to the Capitol insurrection calling for “rebellion,” starting chants of “victory or death,” and using rhetoric of the American Revolution and spiritual warfare to call for action should Congress certify the election of President Joe Biden.... “Victory or death!” Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander tells Trump rally the day before the Capitol insurrection that “1776 is always an option” and “our government should be afraid.... https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1351180665904111619?...On the day of the insurrection, Alexander took to Twitter early in the morning to declare it the “First official day of the rebellion.” Leaving the Stop the Steal rally at the Ellipse after Trump’s speech, where he was a VIP guest, Alexanderfar-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones through the Capitol grounds and up the Capitol steps. At that point—around 2 p.m.—the Capitol hadalready been breached.
“Democrats and Media ended the Republic and the people responded. Welcome to ‘duhhh’,” hetweeted an hour later.
Alexander emerged on a terrace overlooking the Capitol to record a video, posted on the Stop the Steal Twitter account by his associate Michael Coudrey at 4:26 p.m.—well after the violence had begun. “I don’t disavow this. I do not denounce this,” he said as Trump loyalists continued to descend on the Capitol behind him. He added later in the video, “This is completely peaceful, looks like, so far. And there are a couple of agitators that I obviously don’t endorse.”
This is Ali Alexander, leader of the so-called Stop the Steal campaign, saying: “I don’t disavow this. I do not denounce this.” pic.twitter.com/0mP0xThAYP
— Kristen Doerer (@k2doe) January 6, 2021
In the prepared draft of his opening statement, Alexander also threw under the bus three other organizers of the Stop the Steal event that preceded the insurrection: Amy Kremer and Kyle Kremer, the mother-daughter duo of Women for America First, and Katrina Pierson, a former Trump campaign adviser whom the White House assigned to take charge of the rally planning.
“While I was actively trying to de-escalate events at the Capitol and end the violence and lawlessness, it’s important to note that certain people were nowhere to be found, including Amy Kremer, Kylie Kremer, and Katrina Pierson,” Alexander’s draft statement reads. “Press reports suggest they may have had their feet up drinking donor funded champagne in a War Room in the Willard.”
Infighting between the two camps had already begun months before. When Alexander relaunched the Stop the Steal campaign in early November as Biden’s victory was becoming more apparent, he had called on the Kremers (who started a popular Stop the Steal Facebook page) to join him. Soon after, the mother-daughter duo began a bus tour with the Stop the Steal branding, which angered Alexander. The two camps publicly sparred on Twitter ahead of two competing December events. The Kremers made it known that they found Alexander to be incendiary, and ProPublicareported that with Pierson’s help, they kept him and the radical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from taking the stage at the Jan. 6 Ellipse rally. Alexander blamed the Women for America First leadership for taking instructions out of the program “ to provide clarity on exactly where to go following the Ellipse event,” which he said would have prevented the chaos that followed.
In his statement on Telegram Friday morning, Alexander suggested that he would not turn on anyone else, offering his support to those who are refusing to cooperate with the House select committee.
“Many others are using their constitutional rights to stop the Democrat Select Committee from violating those rights. I support those people using their right to not testify too,” Alexander said. “I chose to testify after the advice of counsel and with the thought: I fear nothing but God. I told the truth.”
Tags: Ali AkbarAli AlexanderCapitol InsurrectionHouse select committee on Jan. 6Jan. 6Stop the StealStop the Steal
badash n c r m
an 10 21
stuart Stevens is calling out News Corp founder and chief Rupert Murdoch as a "domestic threat" in response to a stunning preview clip from Fox News' top personality, Tucker Carlson, that falsely paints Donald Trump's January 6 insurrection as a false flag operation by Democrats.
"If Rupert Murdoch were applying for American citizenship today, there would be ample evidence to classify him as a domestic threat and deny citizenship," Stevens says of Murdoch, an Australian-born naturalized U.S. citizen. "He's a dangerous man who should be treated as the anti-democratic propagandist he is."
Stevens is known as one of the top Republican strategists who became a never-Trumper and co-founded The Lincoln Project. Murdoch owns News Corp, the parent company of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, and numerous other outlets across the globe. He became a U.S. citizen in 1985 to meet the requirements to purchase and own TV stations.
The clip of Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the January 6 insurrection (below) is being called "fucking insane" by fellow never-Trumper Tim Miller, a former GOP strategist.
"I'd like to focus in on the fact that Fox is hosting one of the main architects of the Stop The Steal insurrection Ali Akbar Alexander for this 1/6 special," Miller adds. "Going full Newsmax."
In a scathing strike against Carlson, former Obama HUD deputy assistant secretary Brandon Friedman compared the Fox News personality to a radio station**known for helping to incite the Rwandan genocide**in which more than one million people died and up to half a million women were raped.
Here's the clip, which is loaded with falsehoods and anti-American, anti-democracy propaganda:
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/stop-the-steal-organizer-ali-alexander-is-selling-merchandise-with-his-mugshot-on-gumroad/
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/bitclout-the-dystopian-crypto-based-social-app-popularized-by-stop-the-steal-leader-ali-alexander/
bitClout: The Dystopian Crypto-Based Social App Popularized by ‘Stop The Steal’ Leader Ali Alexander
ByKarim Zidan | April 21, 2021 12:49 pm
Website of the BitClout social media network with sing up button on the smartphone screen. (Viktollio / Shutterstock.com)]
“The future of social media just got a lifeline.”
These were the words spoken by Ali Alexander, the far-right organizer behind the so-called Stop the Steal movement, during a recent interview on
” YouTube show. Dressed in his signature plain orange sweater and seated against a beige backdrop that gave no hints as to his whereabouts, Alexander spoke about BitClout, a decentralized social media platform developed on blockchain technology that allows users to buy and sell tokens based on people’s reputations or “clout.” Creators and celebrities can monetize their internet presence by allowing their fans to invest in their “creator coins,” while general users can speculate and invest in people and posts to drive up their value as they would on the stock market.
In a nutshell, BitClout is a combination of Twitter, Patreon, and Robinhood—a one-stop shop that provides a social media platform and crypto-exchange for influencers and content creators.
Alexander’s fascination with BitClout is unsurprising. The application serves as an alternative to mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, both of which have banned his accounts after the events of Jan. 6. And while sites such as Parler and Gab have fashioned themselves as censorship-free alternatives to Twitter, BitClout stands out because of its decentralized nature. According to BitClout’s official website, the application has “no company behind it—just coins and code.”
“It is the most exciting thing I have seen on the internet—ever,” Alexander, who refers to himself as “The BitClout Oracle,” explained during the interview. “This is going places.”
While BitClout has excited users clamoring for a censorship-resistant social media platform, the application has already courted plenty of controversy since its launch in March 2021. The start-up has been criticized for prepopulating its network with some 15,000 accounts created around popular Twitter profiles without their account-holder’s permission, allowing users to invest in coins for people like Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, YouTube sensation Mr. Beast, and Ariana Grande.
BitClout’s commodification of individuals is eerily dystopian. It also raises questions about the future of decentralized social media and the people who profit off it.
A Decentralized, Dystopian Social Space
When a Twitter user informed William Shatner, the renowned Canadian actor best known icon for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in the original “Star Trek” series, that he had an account on BitClout, the actor was not impressed.
“It’s a scam and I’ve not authorized my name or likeness to be used,” Shatner wrote on Twitter in March. “So if you see my name or photo there it’s not been authorized.”
Shatner, whose coin price is currently valued at $553 despite never signing up for an account, is not the only public figure to complain about BitClout’s controversial tactics. Other celebrities have complained about having their likeness monetized without their permission, while prominent crypto law firm Anderson Kill P.C. sent a cease-and-desist letter to the BitClout’s alleged founder on behalf of their client Brandon Curtis, the chief research officer at decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Radar Relay, for using his private information without his consent.
“Adopting Bitcoin’s aesthetic to raise VC funding to carry out unethical and blatantly illegal schemes like BitClout: not cool,” Curtis tweeted.
Curtis and Shatner were among the 15,000 profiles (the figure is taken from the project’s whitepaper) that BitClout uploaded to its system ahead of the official launch in March 2021. Users who sign up for the site are then able to purchase BitClout’s native cryptocurrency, BTCLT, which can then be used to invest in tokenized accounts belonging to celebrities and creators, thereby increasing their commercial value. Beyond the ethical implications, BitClout has also been criticized for having no internal mechanism to withdraw funds from the site. While users use Bitcoin to purchase BTCLT to use on BitClout, the platform does not offer users a mechanismto trade that BTCLT back to Bitcoin, meaning there is no official way to cash out—a red flag for experienced crypto users. (At present, the only way to exchange BTCLT is to use Peer-to-Peer transfers, or a new website called BitSwap, which allows you to exchange the coins for Ethereum at 60% of its official listed price on bitclout.com).
Bitcoin gold coins with wallet, close-up.
Diamondhands, BitClout’s anonymous founder who is believed to be crypto entrepreneur and Princeton alumni Nader Al-Naji, dismissed critics who called BitClout a scam, stating that such fears were misplaced but failing to offer a clear answer to justify the platform’s tactics. It is worth noting that Al-Naji’s previous venture, Basis—a cryptocurrency designed to serve anyone around the world with unreliable central banks—was forced to shutter after failing to meet regulatory requirements.
Despite the controversy surrounding BitClout, the platform is rumored to have attracted some major venture capitalist firms, including Sequoia, Social Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian. By March 2021, the social media network had accumulated more than 3,200 Bitcoins (worth approximately $176.364 million at the time of writing) from its big-name investors.
Outside of marquee investors, BitClout has also attracted celebrities such as YouTube sensation Jake Paul (whose coin is currently valued at $15,764) and former “Baywatch” star Pamela Anderson, who quit social media in January 2021 before joining BitClout in March, adding that it is “important to be free.” Since then, she has become an active participant in the site and regularly engages with her investors by auctioning off signed copies of her final Playboy cover to the top three accounts that hold her coin. Anderson has since accumulated 2,596 followers while her coin is currently valued at $6,428.66.
For many prospective celebrities and content creators, BitClout is an application that allows users to monetize their social media presence in a way that is not possible on mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter. Others are attracted to the platform’s potential, especially since anyone can build applications onto BitClout once the platform releases its open source code. This could lead to increased innovation and user input within the social network, thus allowing the application to evolve according to user demand rather than relying on a centralized organization. “Thus, in some sense, BitClout is decentralizing social media in much the same way as Bitcoin is decentralizing the financial system,” read BitClout’s whitepaper.
Once BitClout is fully decentralized, it will become independent of its developers, making it next to impossible to litigate against or shut down.
Ali Alexander’s Crypto Grift
Since discovering BitClout, Ali Alexander claims he has not slept more than four hours a night. No longer prioritizing politics, the Texas native now spends upwards of 12 hours a day on Clubhouse, the exclusive audio-chat iPhone app that is accessible only by invitation, where he promotes BitClout to anyone who will listen.
“I have never been so well-behaved as I have been on Clubhouse talking about BitClout,” Alexander told the hosts of.”
While Alexander’s Clubhouse chats attract people from across the political spectrum, he is best known as the organizer behind the so-called Stop the Steal movement, which promoted the baseless conspiracy theory that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. Alexander pushed unfounded election fraud conspiracy theories and embraced adherents of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory as well as the neo-fascist Proud Boys hate group during his rallies.
Among those rallies were several in Washington, D.C., organized by Alexander in the ramp-up to the Jan. 6 Capito insurrection, including one held a short distance away from the White House the day before the insurrection, at which he led those gathered in a chant of “Victory or death!”
Ali Alexander dressed in his trademark orange sweater.]
In the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, Alexander went into hiding while the FBI and Justice Department began investigating his connection to the Jan. 6 rioters. He was also banned from major social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which forced him to turn to alternatives such as Telegram, Clubhouse, and now BitClout. Though Alexander primarily discusses cryptocurrency on Clubhouse, he has participated in chats with other notable far-right figures, including dirty trickster Jacob Wohl. He argued during a chat on March 7 that a dictatorship was preferable to a democracy and that white nationalists were mostly “peaceful.” However, the vast majority of his interactions monitored by Right Wing Watch on these alternative platforms since Jan. 6 have been specific to cryptocurrency, and more recently, BitClout.
“It is slower than politics, but the same amount of adrenaline is pumping through your veins,” Alexander explained during his” appearance. “It is just so fascinating.”
Alexander’s interest in cryptocurrency makes sense given his limited avenues to raise funds in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection. The far-right activist has been booted from major payment apps and processors, including PayPal, Venmo, and Patreon. He was previously using GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding site used to raise money for the Proud Boys among others, before his page was deactivated because the site’s payment processor wouldn’t support Alexander. Cryptocurrency remains one of the few potential avenues for raising funds, which Alexander confirmed during the chatroom when he reportedly told listeners that he was able to make “passive income” from “small donations.”
After discovering BitClout, Alexander was able to expand his income opportunities. Not only was he able to monetize his own brand by promoting his creator coin, he then founded BitClout Analysis, a subscription-based analytics website dedicated to disseminating BitClout data for users. While the official website is still under development, several posts can be accessed by members who hold at least 0.5 of the BitClout Analysis coin (one coin is valued at $1,295.47 at the time of writing).
Alexander also funded a second BitClout project called CloutMembers, which allows creators to publish “exclusive content for their top coin holders.” The aim is for creators to monetize their content while incentivizing BitClout users to invest in their coin. The website is also subscription-based, though the pricing will not be released until the platform is fully functional. Alexander also holds exclusive conference calls where he discusses “high-level topics” with CloutMembers subscribers who hold at least one-seventh of one of his creator coins (currently valued at $3,429.17).
“Can’t wait for this conference call with @alialexander and his coin holders tomorrow. So happy I own his coin #CloutMembers #BitCloutOracle,” one BitClout user wrote on the platform on April 18.
[img twt?]
With more than 3,000 followers on BitClout, Alexander is one of the most followed users on the website. Despite amassing an impressive following in a matter of months, Alexander has not used his newfound platform to spread the far-right politics for which he is best known. Instead, he acts as an ombudsman for the BitClout community while occasionally sprinkling in Hallmark-esque inspirational quotes.
While Alexander has seen fit to tailor his BitClout persona, his politics are on display in his Telegram channel. On April 13, he forwarded a message (Telegram’s equivalent to retweeting) from Jacob Wohl which read: “We’ve still never been told the name of the black Capitol Police Officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt,” as well as another from white supremacist Nick Fuentes which called on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to “strengthen the Florida tech censorship bill with the amendments proposed by the America First Coalition,” a reference to a far-right group founded by Fuentes He also expressed his distaste for former Vice President Mike Pence, and voiced support for fellow far-right organizer Roger Stone after reports emerged that the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit alleging that Stone owes more than $2 million in unpaid taxes. “The government is always trying to kill Roger Stone,” Alexander told his 21,000 Telegram subscribers on April 17. “I rebuke their efforts in the name of Jesus Christ and summon His Angels.”
Though Alexander still uses his Telegram sporadically, his primary focus over the past couple of months has been BitClout, where he has created several potential revenue streams while monetizing his brand. BitClout, and its promise of a decentralized social media space, is Alexander’s latest, if not desperate, attempt to prosper in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“I just think I’m done,” Alexander told.” “The next level of worse for me is assassination or jail time. It can’t actually get worse for me … then you transcend, and now I’m on BitClout.”
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/paul-gosar/
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Meet Rep. Paul Gosar: The GOP's leading ambassador to white supremacy
Igor Derysh and Salon March 03, 2021
Former Republican lawmakers slammed the GOP for its silence after Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., spoke at a conference organized by a white nationalist who praised the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, weeks after being linked to the rally that sparked the deadly attack
Gosar skipped Friday's vote on a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package approved by the House to attend the America First Political Action Conference, which was organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who mused about killing members of Congress days before the riot.Gosar later condemned "white racism" during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference ahead of former President Donald Trump's speech over the weekend — and then met with Fuentes again after the event.
Former Rep. Joe Walsh, an Illinois Republican who was elected alongside Gosar during the 2010 Tea Party wave before rejecting far-right extremism after Trump's rise to power, said he was "stunned" by Gosar's extremist turn and expressed frustration that Republican leaders have stayed silent on his appearance at AFPAC.
"It's beyond disappointing," Walsh said in an interview with Salon. "This is where the party is now. The fact that this party— and we all contributed to it — but here we are in 2021, and one of their members keynotes a white nationalist event and the party can't condemn it. The party is telling the country that they're OK with white supremacy."
Former Rep. Denver Riggleman, R-Va., also slammed the party for failing to condemn Gosar for getting cozy with white nationalists, noting that Fuentes is a Holocaust denier who has pushed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. (Fuentes has denied this.)
"This is what @RepGosar supports: Unambiguous anti-Semitism," Riggleman tweeted. "He should be condemned by the full House for speaking at AFPAC."
The Anti-Defamation League's Arizona chapter said in a statement that Gosar's appearance at AFPAC was "deeply disturbing."
"A member of Congress should never share a stage with Fuentes," the group said.
The Southern Poverty Law Center said it was "unimaginable" that Gosar would not be held accountable by his colleagues.
"Less than two months after the violent attack on the Capitol, Rep. Paul Gosar participated in a gathering of white nationalists at the beckoning of one of the movement's most notorious and hateful leaders who glorified the events of that day," Susan Corke, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, said in a statement to Salon. "While his colleagues were holding hearings to ensure that another violent insurrection will never again disgrace the halls of Congress, Gosar provided these extremists a mainstream platform and further stoked the hate that drives their movement."
Gosar, who was described by "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander as a key ally in organizing the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the riot, and who has extensive ties to extremist groups, skipped Friday's House vote, citing the coronavirus pandemic — although he previously joining a lawsuit arguing that voting by proxy in Congress is unconstitutional. "I continue to be unable to physically attend proceedings in the House Chamber due to the ongoing public health emergency," he said in a letter justifying his absence.
Gosar, who led Republican objections to the counting of Arizona's electoral votes, and later reportedly asked Donald Trump for a pardon related to his involvement with the rally, spoke at AFPAC after former Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who was denounced by the GOP in 2019 for comments defending white nationalism and white supremacy.
The event was organized by Fuentes, a 22-year-old white nationalist agitator who promoted the Jan. 6 rally and originally gained prominence after the deadly 2017 "Unite the Right" march in Charlottesville. Fuentes, who has been banned by some social networks for making racist and anti-Semitic comments, called on the AFPAC audience to help America protect its "white demographic core" and accused Black Lives Matter activists of trying to create "a new racial caste system in this country, with whites at the bottom," The Washington Post first reported.
"If America ceases to retain that English cultural framework and the influence of European civilization, if it loses its White demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ, then this is not America anymore," Fuentes said.
Fuentes, who attended the Jan. 6 rally but says he did not enter the Capitol, later praised the rioters as "patriots."
"I saw the police retreating and we heard that the politicians voting on the fraudulent election had scurried to their underground tunnels away from the Capitol," Fuentes said. "I said to myself: 'This is awesome!'"
Fuentes went on to mock Gosar's Republican colleagues and made fun of Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., for using a wheelchair.
Gosar did not mention AFPAC or Fuentes on Saturday during an appearance at the Trump-headlined CPAC but abruptly interrupted a panel discussion to note that he disavows racism, with no apparent context. "I want to tell you, I denounce . . . white racism," he said. "That's not appropriate."
Gosar acknowledged to the Washington Post after the panel that he was referring to Fuentes' comments. He told the outlet that he accepted the invitation because "you don't accomplish anything by isolating" certain audiences.
"We thought about it, and we thought: There is a group of young people that are becoming part of the election process, and becoming a bigger force," Gosar said. "So why not take that energy and listen to what they've got to say?"
CPAC organizers did not comment on Gosar's appearance but blocked Fuentes from entering the conference with a group of maskless supporters.
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Despite Gosar's comments, Fuentes posted a photo of the two sharing drinks on Saturday.
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"Great meeting today with Congressman Gosar!" he wrote. "America is truly uncancelled."
Walsh, who like many Tea Party-backed Republicans pushed racist conspiracy theories to win elections, said the appearance made clear how far Gosar had drifted to the extremist fringe from their time in Congress together in 2011 and 2012.
"Gosar was sort of nuts back then," Walsh said, "but we were all sort of part of the same Tea Party wave. Even though some of us were kind of nuts, it was all about the issues. I don't recognize these guys now. I mean, this crazy shit was fringe — now it's like the base of the party."
Walsh noted that just two years ago the Republican Party stripped King of his committee assignments after he questioned why the term "white supremacy "was deemed offensive.
"Maybe I'm naive, but back in 2010, if Gosar pulled something like this I got to believe [former House Speaker John] Boehner and leadership would have come down on him like a ton of bricks," he said. "It's amazing. He blew off a COVID relief vote to fire up a bunch of white supremacists, and the fucking party, they're not going to do a damn thing to him."
Republicans were recently forced to reckon with freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who has made comments pushing conspiracy theories and calling for Democrats to be executed. The party ultimately decided not to punish Greene, but Walsh predicted it won't even have the same conversation about Gosar.
In the pre-Trump era, Walsh said, the situation was quite different: Republican leaders would "bounce his ass off of committees, immediately the party censures him, and the party goes out of their way to condemn this Nick Fuentes and this white nationalist group." Now, he added, "I didn't see one Republican in the conference who condemned what Gosar did. … I don't think they'll even bring it up."
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., has been one of the most vocal Republicans in opposing the racism and conspiracy theories pushed by his party's fringe, but like the rest of his colleagues has stayed silent on Gosar's speech. Kinzinger's office did not respond to Salon's request for comment.
Fuentes is understood as the leader of the "groypers," a fringe far-right group fueled by supposedly ironic memes, including specific Pepe the Frog poses. The ADL describes them as a "white supremacist group" who believe they are defending the country against "demographic and cultural changes that are destroying the 'true America' — a white, Christian nation."The FBI is currently investigating a $250,000 bitcoin payment Fuentes received ahead of the Jan. 6 riot, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Alexander, the "Stop the Steal" organizer, praised Fuentes' "hugely successful" AFPAC event over the weekend. Last week, Alexander hosted Gosar's chief of staff, Tom Van Flein, a former top aide to ex-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in a Clubhouse chatroom that also included indicted right-wing fraudster Jacob Wohl.
Alexander said after the Capitol riot, in a now-deleted video, that he had "schemed up" the Jan. 6 rally to put "maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting" to certify the election, in collaboration with Gosar and Reps. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., and Mo Brooks, R-Ala. Biggs and Brooks have both denied involvement with Alexander. Gosar, notably, has not.
Gosar previously appeared at a rally organized by Alexander in December, where he told supporters they planned to "conquer the Hill" to return Trump to the White House.
Gosar's office did not respond to questions from Salon.
Gosar has also come under scrutiny for his ties to extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, some of whose members now face conspiracy charges after they were seen in videos leading the invasion of the Capitol.
The New York Times reported after the riot that Jim Arroyo, who leads an Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers, promoted a "coming civil war," citing Gosar's appearance at an event held by the group several years earlier.
"We had Congressman Paul Gosar come to a meeting, he is the elected representative here in Northern Arizona," Arroyo said. "And we asked him, flat out — Do you think we are headed towards a Civil War? And he said, 'We are in a Civil War, we just haven't started shooting yet' ... So that is about to change."
The group has used that kind of civil war rhetoric as a recruiting tool, according to KNXV.
Gosar came under criticism last summer after posing for a photo with a member of the Proud Boys. In 2018, he met with the jailed leader of a far-right anti-immigrant extremist group and made comments about Muslim immigrants that were widely seen as Islamophobic. In 2014, he traveled with Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward to support the Bundy militia in its Nevada standoff with federal law enforcement, after rancher Cliven Bundy refused to pay grazing fees and stop trespassing on federal land.
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"He's been involved with anti-Muslim groups and hate groups," his brother, Dave Gosar, told the Times. "He's made anti-Semitic diatribes. He's twisted up so tight with the Oath Keepers it's not even funny."
Dave Gosar and other siblings of the congressman bought ads to campaign against their brother in 2018 after he falsely suggested that the deadly Charlottesvile neo-Nazi rally was "created by the left" and carried out by an "Obama sympathizer." He also falsely claimed that billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, the target of countless anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, had bankrolled the event.
"We warned everybody how dangerous he was," Dave Gosar said after the riot.
Gosar condemned the rioters on Twitter, urging them to "not get carried away" while posting a photo of the mob scaling a Capitol wall. But he posted the same photo to the far-right social network Parler, which was used by some rioters to coordinate the attack, without any such criticism. "Americans are upset," he wrote in response to the image.
In the days following the riot, Arizona Democrats called for the FBI and Justice Department to investigate Gosar and other state lawmakers "directly involved, as well as those who, through words and conduct, aided and abetted sedition, treason or any other federal crimes."
"The events of January 6 were not spontaneous, nor were they the random acts of a diffuse handful of unconnected individuals," the state Democratic party said in a letter to federal law enforcement officials. "For weeks prior to the breach, a group of Republican Arizona legislators and legislators-elect publicly advocated for the overthrow of the election results which encouraged precisely the kind of violent conduct that we witnessed."
CNN has reported that Gosar and Biggs asked Trump for a pardon related to their involvement with the rally that preceded the riot in January, but were denied.
Gosar's siblings have launched a new campaign to remove their brother from Congress in the wake of the riot.
"We feel it's our moral obligation," Dave Gosar told the Los Angeles Times, adding that his brother is "in my opinion, about as despicable a politician as I have ever seen."
"He started at an extreme place, he started at a bigoted place ... and he's gone even further into that," added sister Jennifer Gosar.
"Paul has no character, no integrity, no honor," agreed brother Tim Gosar, "and is absolutely as close as you get to a pathological liar."
Walsh predicted that despite calls for Gosar to be punished, the Republican Party will stay silent because of the effect Trump has had on the party over the last five years.
"This is one of Trump's impacts on the party," he said. "The party follows a lot of Trump's signals. Trump makes signals to a lot of these white supremacists and white nationalists. I mean, Donald Trump didn't go out of his way to condemn them. They're more welcomed now in the coalition, and I think the party gets that. So the party is much, much more loath to condemn people like this."
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/stop-the-steal/
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Ali Alexander, the lead organizer of the so-called Stop the Steal campaign, has resurfaced after going into hiding following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Streaming on Trovo Wednesday night, Alexander claimed that while he has been licking his wounds, he has been plotting to restart rallies in March, abolish the media, and build a separate society for Trump supporters.
As former President Donald Trump faces an impeachment trial this week for inciting an insurrection with his speech at the Stop the Steal rally the morning of Jan. 6, it appears Alexander has yet to face charges for his role. Alexander rebooted the so-called Stop the Steal campaign the day after Election Day, when Trump's lead began to slip as mail-in ballots began to be counted. He pushed voter fraud conspiracy theories, embraced QAnon conspiracy theorists and far-right activists in his campaign, claimed to be doing God's work, and organized three massive rallies in Washington, D.C., that featured the Proud Boys hate group, paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers, and other extremists.
Following Jan. 6, Alexander was booted off most major social media platforms and, as a result, is now streaming on Trovo, a gaming platform that appears to be growing in popularity among far-right actors kicked off other platforms. On Wednesday night, Alexander lamented the “racist, bigoted, anti-Christian, anti-Southern, anti-Republican, anti-conservative, anti-human smear machine" that he says targeted him, and he promised to create chaos. “We've got to get back in the driver's seat," he added.
“They've done a great number on my life, they've cost me tens of thousands of dollars, they've really destroyed parts of my life, but in a lot of ways, I have no other choice but to announce that I'm building the future, so I'm making strategic investments in tools that fight deplatforming and tocreate chaos on existing platforms," Alexander claimed.
“America is going to have a choice, and I promise you that, between going onto this dystopian future or fighting in what I'm calling the American sovereignty movement," he said. “And I'm gonna get back, and I'm going to do rallies again starting in March, I'm gonna have indoor gatherings in March, in Michigan, in Arizona, in Georgia, in Texas. I'm going to do a media tour."
Alexander said he had been plotting how to do away with the free press and other “systems that control us": “So I want you guys to know that I've been licking my wounds, but I've been plotting, I've been planning, I've been scheming because we have to do away with this whole system. The free press is not free, and they're not the press, they need to be abolished. The systems that control us have to be abolished."
“I'm going to create a society, and a community, and a culture, and a language for [Trump supporters], and there are tens of millions of us. … Winning can just be 10 million people creating a new megacity," he mused. “Let's build our own city, let's seriously build our own city, let's build a back-up city in South America."
Alexander also didn't miss the opportunity to push the claim that the insurrection was a “premeditated psyop."
“Like everyone is saying the impeachment trial is proving that there was a premeditated psyop against both Trump and Stop the Steal, so how could we incite an insurrection that was premeditated by people we don't know?" he said. “And yet, are there big platforms welcoming me back saying we treated a Black man wrong because we wanted to pretend he was leading a white supremacy movement? No. These people are evil. And we will make lists of them, and they will not be welcome in this new society, they won't be welcomed on new platforms, those people who have tried to force Marxism and thought control on us."
Alexander said that if the “deep state" charges him with a fake crime, he'd be prepared to fight: “If they want to charge me with a fake crime, if they want to martyr me, then I will meet them on that battlefield. I'm not somebody, I'm not somebody that talks a talk or tweets a tweet."
“I've licked my wounds, I'm pissed off. I'm more pissed off than I was the night of the election I created Stop the Steal. We win. They lose. To God be the glory," he said in closing.
Ahead of the Capitol insurrection, Alexander embraced increasingly violent rhetoric, calling for revolution and rebellion. A short distance away from the White House the day before the insurrection, Alexander started a “Victory or death!" chant at a Stop the Steal rally. “Our government is only our government if it is legitimate," he declared at that rally. “1776 is always an option."
After the violence at the Capitol, Alexander posted a since-deleted video of himself saying “I don't disavow this. I do not denounce this." He encouraged viewers to tune into his Stop the Steal website, which he called “the home of the rebellion against an illegitimate government."
This article was originally published at Right Wing Watch and is republished here by permission.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/stop-the-steal/
In January 2013, a 26-year-old right-wing blogger named Ali Akbar joined the campaign of Curtis Bostic, a former Charleston, South Carolina, city councilman and Tea Party conservative who was running against disgraced former governor Mark Sanford in a Republican congressional primary. Bostic narrowly lost to Sanford (who served two more terms in the House before getting primaried out in 2018), and the campaign disassociated itself from Akbar, whose history as a convicted felon and hack political operative had caught up with him once again.
But over those first three months of 2013, Akbar — now known to the world as Ali Alexander, architect of the 2020 Stop the Steal movement — befriended the candidate's son, Daniel Bostic, then a 20-year-old aspiring model and actor who over the next eight years would partner with Ali in a number of failed ventures, including a cryptocurrency project, a listless consulting agency, a defunct MAGA gossip blog, and a scam donation project created with right-wing trolls Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer. The partnership's lasting contribution to the world, however, came earlier this month, when the massive pro-Trump rally they organized on the National Mall on Jan. 6 turned into a violent siege of the U.S. Capitol, defiling the seat of American democracy and leaving half a dozen people dead, including two police officers.
Back in 2013, Akbar (as he was then known), a fast-talking aspiring strategist from the Dallas-Fort Worth region, had been casting about for a new gig after Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential bid failed, taking with it his own efforts to make inroads with mainstream Republicans. Conservatives had grown increasingly wary of Akbar's felony fraud convictions and other allegations of improper conduct, such as asking donors for personal information. Akbar's political journalism project, known as National Bloggers Club, was struggling, too, after its founder's history and conduct created complications for top advisers to the Romney campaign. (Akbar was first anti-Romney and then pro-Romney.) He claimed the site was a nonprofit but apparently never registered it as such with the IRS. Its current status is "revoked," according to federal tax records.
"Akbar was a Libertarian, a Reagan conservative, and a Tea Party journo all at the same time," said freelance reporter Ron Brynaert, whose complicated history with Akbar/Alexander stretches back more than a decade. "He's always been a delusional liar with a messiah complex, who talks out of both sides of his mouth and contradicts himself."
Akbar's work with the Bostic campaign focused on boosting name recognition through social media, including creating a hashtag that got a shout-out from former Republican senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who had co-sponsored Akbar's CPAC "Blog Bash" parties two years in a row and flew in to campaign with Bostic for a day. Bostic did see a surge, but it was too little too late — Slate awarded the campaign its "social media fail of the week" during the primary, specifically citing one of Akbar's sites, ViralRead.com, as having become "a one-stop shop for #SC01 news, with a jaundiced view of Sanford."
Notably, Akbar also created a since-deleted donations landing page "paid for by the committee to elect Curtis Bostic," which was quite likely illegal, since the campaign denied ever officially hiring the convicted felon. After Bostic's primary defeat, the campaign dismissed Akbar in the press as an overzealous volunteer.
But Akbar had grown close with Daniel Bostic, who had a certificate in theology from Appalachian Bible College and a few months experience as staff assistant to then-Rep. Tim Scott, R-S.C., now the state's junior senator. Bostic yearned to be a professional actor, but had landed only done a few regional ads for American Eagle and Nokia and some local short films, along with an extra role in an episode of "Army Wives," which he described as something of a formative experience.
Akbar's online footprint dries up a bit after Curtis Bostic's defeat, but he re-entered the political sphere in 2014, with a hybrid PAC called the Black Conservatives Fund, which took in $150,000 from right-wing financier Robert Mercer. But for much of that spring and summer, it seems that Akbar devoted much of his time to helping Daniel Bostic convince people that he was a celebrity with a rabid, obsessive fan base.
Operation Bostic involved a coordinated lineup of fake Twitter fan accounts promoting a number of blog sites, interviews and press releases with Bostic fan content, which Bostic and Akbar most likely either commissioned or created themselves. The profile of one Twitter account, "Daniel's Lover," links out to a Wordpress site called Daniel Bostic Daily, which the account would regularly promote in hundreds of tweets at a time, drawing hardly any response from the larger world. One tweet from May 29, 2013 ("Fans are CRAZY about Daniel's Twitter!") tags Akbar's Twitter account and links to a Daniel Bostic Daily entry that itself quotes a since-deleted tweet from Akbar:
Few folks have the honest joy that @debostic has. It's fun to watch happy positive people online.
— Ali A. Akbar (@ali) May 28, 2013
Three days later, the same blog published another entry titled, "Euphoria for Ladies — Daniel Bostic posted a shirtless picture and became an Instagram sensation," which features said shirtless selfie and a quote about it from a website called Viral Read.
The news site VIRAL READ had this to say:
Walking the fine line between #hotmess and #hotness, Bostic wins the day and lands gracefully in the hotness column. Who knew this skinny kid had this hiding under his bro-tanks? He's the eventual celebrity you'll love to hate and we intend on watching him closely. All of him.
The now-defunct Viral Read was one of Akbar's blog sites, which named controversial right-wing blogger Robert Stacy McCain as editor-in-chief on March 13, 2013, while Akbar was working in South Carolina. The Viral Read article on Bostic from May is similarly titled "Daniel Bostic, Hotness or Hotmess?" and begins like this:
ViralRead was first introduced to the young actor, Daniel Bostic, during a special election run-off in April where his father, Curtis Bostic was up against now-Congressman Mark Sanford. Our Publisher and Editor even traveled down to the lowcountry district. Sadly, they came back with zero pictures of him. Epic fail.
Other Bostic fan sites include "Bostiholics," which migrated from the "allwewantisdaniel" blogspot site. "We are here for one reason and one reason alone," reads the Bostiholics tag line. "We are OBSESSED with Daniel Bostic." Other Twitter accounts include Dan Bostic Is Life and Dan Bostic Daily. It also seems that Akbar helped place Daniel-centric content in other outlets around that same time. In March 2013 alone, as Curtis Bostic was waging a vigorous campaign, posts about his fake celebrity son appeared on sites called Jakes Take, Daily Entertainment News and Entertainment Worlds, as well as in a Newswire press release titled, "Born To Be Distinguished, Daniel Bostic Has Made A Huge Difference In The World Of Acting."
"Being young has not deterred this young actor from climbing heights in this intricate acting career," the release says, then lists "exciting films" in which he has "made headlines": "From Darkness into Light," "Gone for the Day," "Crash" (no, not that "Crash"), "Secrets in the Fall." The release also says Bostic "is much into politics" and "a proud certified black belt Tae-Kwon-Do." His LinkedIn and IMDb pages boast of the 2008 black belt, but for the art of karate.
Two months later, Bostic featured in another Newswire press release, titled, "Bostic Calls on His Fans to Support Oklahoma Tornado Victims." The release is attributed to Marti Youngue, and gives a phone number and address. The address is Curtis Bostic's law firm, but the phone number belongs to Marti Young, former owner of a Nashville agency called Illuminating Talent, which at one point represented Daniel Bostic. Presented with the press release, Young told Salon in a text message, "Wow that's the first time I ever saw this."
While the extent of Akbar's involvement in Bostic content creation is unclear, his prints appear to be on some of the self-promoting replies, including those aimed Dana Loesch and Michelle Malkin, who were relatively obscure at the time but would go on to become big names in right-wing political circles.
By 2014, however, Akbar had moved on from South Carolina's low country, landing himself a consulting gig in Louisiana with his new Mercer-backed PAC, the Black Conservatives Fund. According to investigative journalist Lamar White Jr., this PAC was mostly a proxy for former Louisiana State Sen. Elbert Guillory, who at the time was putting together an ultimately unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor. CNBC reported the PAC distributed money that year to a handful of successful Black conservative candidates, including Rep. Mia Love of Utah, as well as Bostic's former boss Tim Scott, who won South Carolina's special election to the Senate in 2014.
Bostic in the meantime attended Anderson University, a private Christian school with both online and in-person degrees, eventually earning a BS in international business, according to his LinkedIn page. He appears to have done some political blogging, identifying as a never-Trumper in 2016 and becoming one of the few donors to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina's ill-fated presidential campaign.
Politico reported in 2018 that a PAC advised by Akbar had accepted $60,000 from Mercer just before the 2016 presidential election. After Trump's victory, Akbar popped up again amid the Unite the Right controversy, and in 2018 tried to help kickstart a Trump-centric alternative to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) called the American Priority Conference, which collapsed in short order.
After that defeat, Alexander (having dumped his original surname at some point) teamed up with longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone, who first conceived of the Stop the Steal movement — which, believe it or not, did not originate with the 2020 election. The name and the "movement" began with the 2018 midterms, and specifically with the Florida U.S. Senate campaign in which then-Gov. Rick Scott narrowly defeated incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson. That was whenRoger Stone launched the group as a kind of tribute or coda to his infamous "Brooks Brothers riot" during the Florida recount of 2000.
Alexander signed on to work for the "Stop the Steal" campaign, which was aimed at locking down Scott's victory over Nelson. In a Periscope
, as reported in Right Wing Watch, Alexander said he hoped to motivate not just Republicans, but QAnon followers, Democrats and "homeless people in all the adjacent counties" to keep an eye on the vote count in Broward County.
"Ali Alexander is a noxious political activist who often animates extremist groups and individuals to fulfill his activism goals," Jared Holt, journalist and expert in domestic extremism, told Salon. "Political groups and organizations that have turned to him for his work should be embarrassed and ashamed. The fact that he has a molecule of influence in GOP organizing is a damning indictment of the priorities of pro-Trump politics."
Alexander has associated with a number of young pro-Trump flunkies who would also seem to fit Holt's description, as with his aforementioned ill-fated 2019 joint venture in Minneapolis with right-wing personality Laura Loomer and the recently-indicted Jacob Wohl.
That scam also involved Daniel Bostic. Alexander, Loomer and Wohl directed donations to a company called Cystra Ventures Ltd., which had been created in Bostic's name just three weeks before the group met up in Minnesota. Cystra Ventures is apparently held under Cystra LLC, Bostic's "consulting company," whose website doesn't work (this archived version does) but which received $14,477 in federal coronavirus small business loans this spring — after much apparent consternation on Bostic's part.
Cystra appears to have been designed to get Bostic and Alexander in the cryptocurrency game. In late June 2017, less than two months before Unite the Right in Charlottesville, Alexander and Bostic teamed up to pitch a new cryptocurrency "focused heavily on free speech." According to thepitch, the coin would be "a medium of exchange for individuals who value free speech above all else," and would be exchanged on the Crown platform, based on the Dash network. "Our project will feature no pre-mine and a decentralized governance with the sole goal of promoting free speech," they claimed.
Nothing came of this venture, shockingly, but the duo were back at it in 2018, cranking out a series of
pitching the Crown crypto platform, whose "overarching goal is to build a community ofdedicated users who maintain a free, legally compliant, open-access and decentralized sandbox economy." Nothing came of that, either.
Then in 2019, Alexander launched a tabloid called Culttture, a right-wing organ that employed a handful of writers to write breathless gossip about MAGA-world's second-string celebs, often plugging Alexander's tweets and videos in the course of the day. The site's homepage took a hiatus the next spring, however, citing the coronavirus pandemic ("China's virus") for the need to "simplify." Although the homepage still promises a steady stream of content, that promise appears not to have materialized. Twitter suspended Culttture's account when it suspended Alexander, on Jan. 10. Bostic had claimed on his Twitter profile to be a "lead at Culttture," but deleted that sometime after Jan. 9.
Alexander also still retains control over the Black Conservatives Fund, and the group regularly promoted Stop the Steal rallies to its more than 80,000 Facebook followers. One post ahead of the Jan. 6 riots read: "D.C. becomes FORT TRUMP starting today. Fight to #StopTheSteal with President Trump." It then listed rally locations, including at the Capitol building. That post disappeared from the Facebook page after an inquiry from CNBC.
That PAC's treasurer, Patrick Krason, also happens to be treasurer for Stop the Steal PAC— the group that initially registered in November with Bostic as designated agent. During the two months prior to the riot, Bostic, who also listed himself as the media contact for Stop the Steal, helped organize rallies and sometimes addressed crowds briefly himself.
On Jan. 6, Bostic was in Washington with Alexander. The two can be clearly identified in video clips climbing the Capitol steps with Alex Jones.After the violence, Bostic tweeted, "This could've all been avoided if we were shown signatures and allowed to audit our elections. You cannot expect elections to be conducted in secret without repercussions. I do not in any way endorse violence, but path has been traversed time and time again throughout history."
Two days after the attack, Bostic's name was removed from the Stop the Steal PAC's statement of organization. Bostic told Salon that "some answers are too long for Twitter," adding that "you have slandered me, my friends, all to meet your monthly ad revenue quota."
Salon then asked Krason, the PAC's treasurer who manages compliance for a number of political committees, why Bostic was no longer a listed agent. Krason outlined a complex but somewhat plausible scenario in which he had to change bank accounts. Krason would not say what role, if any, Bostic had played in that well-timed change, and would not say whether Bostic had asked to remove his name, or why he had been listed as an agent to begin with.
After Alexander went into hiding, apparently concerned about the authorities, Bostic at first made his Twitter account private. He reopened it again this past Friday, having deleted all tweets prior to Jan. 5 (except for a New Year's Eve post), as well as a number of tweets from Jan. 6, the day of the riot, including one that called Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer "evil" for posting an image of a Stacey Abrams votive candle. Bostic has also removed two tweets that appeared to show live-streamed video which he had captioned "Storming the Capitol." Those tweets are archived here and here, but the media files appear inaccessible. He did, however post that the chants of "Stop the Steal" that day were "indescribable."
That refrain, believe it or not, can be traced all the way back to the apparent ears beginning of Bostic and Alexander's relationship. One of the first tweets from the "Daniel's Lover" fan account is a retweet of an uncannily prescient post from Curtis Bostic, Daniel's dad, whose underdog campaign had just hired Akbar, perhaps unofficially.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." - Benjamin Franklin
10:47 AM · Jan 22, 2013·Twitter for iPhone
Alexander could not immediately be reached for comment.
https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/stop-steal-organizer-ali-alexander-still-making-money-using-online
mma
:{Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander’s pre-January 6 calls for violence: “We've got to punch the left in the nose.” “You must fight. … They will kill us.”:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/how-ginni-thomas-and-the-shadowy-council-of-national-policy-advanced-a-disinformation-campaign/
before Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas took to Facebook in the early morning hours that Wednesday; there she urged people to tune into the so-called Stop the Steal rally held on the grounds of the White House. “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” sheposted, adding minutes later, “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING.”
Though her affinity for caps-lock commentary may suggest otherwise, Ginni Thomas is an influential right-wing activist respected in conservative politics. The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, she has made her own mark on the Republican Party with lofty positions at Turning Point USA, the Heritage Foundation, The Daily Caller, and the Council for National Policy,a highly secretive organization whose members include some of the most powerful conservatives and right-wing players in the country.
Respected though she may be in conservative circles, Ginni Thomas’ connection to extremists is nothing new. In 2010, she led Liberty Central, a think tank she founded to appeal to Tea Party supporters andto serve as the connective tissue between “Tea Party groups and the new citizen activists,” as she claimed in a2010 interview. That group’s sponsors included the Gun Owners of America—a radical alternative to the NRA—and its gun-rights extremist leader**Larry Pratt**, who addressed white supremacists at a 1992 gathering in Colorado and appeared to call for war against the U.S. government in 2010. The far-right Catholic groupTradition, Family and Property, known for being virulently anti-LGBTQ, anti-woman, and anti-democratic, was also linked to Ginni Thomas’ think tank from its inception.
Ginni Thomas’ zeal for the Stop the Steal campaign and its followers, a mob of whom would later storm the Capitol in an act of domestic terrorism, is notable in and of itself—her husband sits on the highest court, after all—but it’s also disconcerting for another reason: She is the latest in a string of Council for National Policy members—and an authoritative voice at that—who has supported the Stop the Steal movement.'[twt]
since the inception of this latest incarnation of the Stop the Steal campaign on Nov. 4 by lead organizer Ali Alexander, who himself was a member as recently as 2017, according to membership rollsobtained by the watchdog group Documented, it has received support from CNP members. In fact, the tacit support of key CNP members for challenging the 2020 presidential election results may have been theimpetus for Alexander’s decision to begin the campaign to overturn the results of the presidential election by peddling disinformation.
Formed during the Reagan administration, CNP holds closed-door meetings and instructs members to not discuss the council’s work or its membership, though, over the years, membership rolls have been leaked to the press. Those rolls have shown the organization to be home to a couple hundredmarquee names in the conservative movement, Christian right, and right-wing fringe: Current members include Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch and Tony Perkins of the religious-right Family Research Council; former members include Trump’s former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.
The CNP has a close relationship with the Trump White House—so much so, that at the superspreader Rose Garden event to celebrate the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, “there were more Council for National Policy members present there than there were members of the White House staff and members of Congress combined,” said Anne Nelson, author of the “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” a book about the CNP. And on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Trump gave a big speech to the Council for National Policy, calling it as his “flagship address,” a rare public event for the council, Nelson said.
Nelson describes the CNP’s main role as providing “coordination, rather than direction” to its members, which include executives of such right-wing outlets the Salem Media Group and The Daily Caller.Ginni Thomas, Nelson points out, is on the board of governors of CNP Action, the lobbying arm of the secretive organization. In May 2019, Thomas and Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell provided an update on the Conservative Action Project,CNP’s 501(c)(4) arm that holds weekly meetings, and laid out their strategy for the coming year with aslide presentation to CNP members, which included messaging about building a robust infrastructure on the right and protecting Trump.
In the days leading up to the Jan. 6 mayhem, and on the day itself, the connection between CNP and Stop the Steal—and the campaign’s influence on the White House—became more apparent.
On Dec. 30, Right Wing Watch posted areportabout alettersent by the Conservative Action Project to Senate Republicans urging them to “contest the electoral votes” from “Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona”—the battleground states Biden won. That letter may have not mentioned Stop the Steal by name, but it asked senators to do exactly what Stop the Steal was demanding of Republican members of Congress: to reject electoral votes in favor of Biden.
Those signees included Cleta Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer (who was on theinfamous phone call when Trump asked that Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes”); Tom Fitton, an CNP executive committee member whose Judicial Watch group constantly spouts voter fraud conspiracy theories; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots and columnist for The Washington Times; Tony Perkins, former CNP president and leader of the Family Research Council; Kenneth Blackwell,former Ohio secretary of state and member of CNP Action’s board of directors; and William L. Walton, current CNP president. All were revealed as CNP members in a leak of CNP’s September2020 membership directory.
ADec. 10 letter posted on the Conservative Action Project website,reported by Alex Kotch at Exposed by CMD, asked state legislatures in battleground states to “exercise their plenary power under the Constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump,” and that the House and Senate only recognize the electors of those states that do so. Again, this was the same demand state legislators and Congress members were hearing from Stop the Steal activists. Kotch reports that the letter links to a document that, according to metadata embedded in the file, was created by none other than Cleta Mitchell, calling for a “constitutional remedy” to reject votes for Biden. The signatories included some of the same names that appeared on the Dec. 30 letter, in addition to Ed Martin, a leading Stop the Steal organizer and CNP member whom Alexander has thanked for his“mentorship” in organizing the Stop the Steal campaign.
Two days before the Jan. 6 rally, CNP member Charlie Kirk, who leads the youth-oriented group Turning Point USA, shared a video from Women for America First’s Kylie Jane Kremeradvertising the rally and told his followers that his organizations, TPUSA and Students for Trump, had funded more than 80 buses to attend the rally. “The historic event will likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history,” Kirk wrote. “The team at @TrumpStudents & Turning Point Action are honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president,” he said in the since deleted tweet,uncovered by Daily Dot. Kirk’s Students for Trump co-chair is Ryan Fournier, a Stop the Steal organizer who spoke at the Jan. 5 rally on the same stage where speakers advocatedrebellion.
While a viral claim that Ginni Thomas funded the buses herself appearsto be false, Ginni Thomas has been linked to the group in the recent past, serving on Turning Point USA’s advisory council in 2019, along with fellowCNP members Foster Friess, Adam Brandon, and former Ohio congressman Bob McEwen.
On Jan. 5, speakers took to Freedom Plaza for a Stop the Steal rally designed to prime attendees for the big day. Among the speakers wasPeter Navarro, a fringe right-wing economist whospoke at the May 2019 CNP meeting. and who serves as an assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. On the stage at Freedom Plaza, Navarro peddled voter fraud conspiracy theories and urged activists to stay angry,declaring to the assembled crowd, “We will take this back.”
On Jan. 6, Ginni Thomas told her Facebook followers to watch the event convened by groups working in concert with the Stop the Steal campaign, dubbed the “Save America Rally,” on the right-wing Right Side Broadcasting, one of the few networks to cover the gathering. The massive rally, at which Trump would incite his supporters to bring their wrath to the Capitol, was led by the groups March for Trump and the Kremers’ Women for America First.
Amy Kremer, who was listed as a member in a2014 CNP membership directoryobtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was among the first speakers. Jenny Beth Martin, the CNP executive committee secretary whom Trump thanked in his speech to CNP this summer, was another. She brought with her Simone Gold, who is nowsought by the FBI after she appeared to be part of the crowd thatstormed the Capitol following her speech on the main stage, as seen on social media.
After the Capitol insurrection, Ginni Thomas either deactivated or deleted her Facebook account, likely unhappy thatreporters noted her enthusiasmfor a movement what would launch a riot. Josh Hawley, one of the senators who led the charge to contest electors’ votes in the Senate,charged ahead even as other lawmakers backed off in light of the violent consequences wrought by the disinformation campaign designed to delegitimize the outcome of the presidential election. “Shadow Network” author Nelsonnoted that, throughout his career, Hawley was groomed by CNP affiliates.
[pix
Ali Alexander and other “Stop the Steal” activists at Dec. 15, 2020 press conference (Image from NTD livestream posted on Epoch Times YouTube channel.)
The Stop the Steal disinformation campaign wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without CNP support. When on Nov. 4, Ali Alexander floated the idea of rebooting the Stop the Steal campaign, which in its prior iteration was focused on the outcome of the 2018 mid-term elections, baselessly claiming that the election had been stolen from Trump, he called on key CNP members including Tom Fitton, Amy Kremer, Ed Martin, and Charlie Kirk.
“Because Ali Alexander is a fairly veteran operative, he managed to get a lot of people on board very quickly,” said Stephanie Lamy, a French information warfare researcher with the advocacy groupDanaides. “Although he was a fairly marginal actor, he managed to have a big reach because he knew which people to rely on. And that was a lot of the CNP.”
Once he began to be successful, Lamy said, the White House seemed to have taken note.
Right Wing Watch reported about CNP members’ connection to Stop the Steal on Nov. 13—the same day Vice President Mike Pence was set to address CNP attendees in Virginia. CNP convened that meeting, Nov. 12-14, “to strategize on how to challenge the election results,”according to Exposed by CMD reporter David Armiak. At the meeting, a panel dedicated to the election results and the ensuing legal battles featured Cleta Mitchell, J. Christian Adams, a knownvoter suppressor who leads the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, a leading proponent ofthe voter fraud myth.
The following day, Stop the Steal organizers held the first of three major rallies in Washington, D.C., with speakers peddling disinformation and violent rhetoric on the main stage—a day that ended in violent skirmishes between Proud Boys and counterprotesters, foreshadowing the violence to come.
“Most people don’t realize that disinformation has an aim, and that aim is to have real life impact. So what we saw with Stop the Steal, it had a real-life impact as of the 6th of November [the date of one of the first Stop the Steal rallies], and it kind of culminated with these terrorist threats and a breach of the Capitol,” said Lamy, the French disinformation researcher. “And it’s still ongoing,” she continued. “The CNP hasn’t finished manipulating anger and personal grievances.”
Tags: Ali Akbar Ali Alexander Amy Kremer Charlie Kirk Clarence Thomas Cleta Mitchell Ed Martin Ginni Thomas Hans von Spakovsky J Christian Adams Jenny Beth Martin Kellyanne Conway Ken Blackwell Kylie Jane Kremer Peter Navarro Ryan Fournier Steve Bannon Tom Fitton Tony Perkins William Walton Capitol Insurrection Disinformation Stop the Steal Council for National Policy Gun Owners of America tea party Women for America First
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/capitol-riot-2649927261/
no lnx twt
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/capitol-riot-2649927261/
These Republican representatives are accused of helping to plan January 6 insurrection
U.S. Congressman Paul Gosar speaking with supporters at the 2018 election eve rally hosted by the Arizona Republican Party at the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott, Arizona, photo via Gage Skidmore.
Mark Sumner and Daily Kos January 13, 2021
It's obvious that many Republicans—including Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz in the Senate, and dozens in the House, including minority leader Kevin McCarthy—actively inflamed Donald Trump's white supremacist mob and encouraged their deadly assault on the Capitol. However, it now seems that some Republicans in Congress may have done more than knowingly fan the flames. In the days since the rotunda was cleared of debris and the halls were cleaned of the literal human excrement smeared there by Trump's biggest fans, information has appeared that indicates some Republicans may have actively been involved in planning or carrying out the assault.
On Tuesday evening, Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill conducted a Facebook live session for her constituents during which explained her support resulting in calling on Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment. During that webcast, Sherrill made an astounding accusation. She claimed to have witnessed Republican members of Congress leading Trump supporters on, not a tour, but a "reconnaissance" of the Capitol. "We can't have a democracy," said Sherrill, "if members of Congress are actively helping the president overturn the elections results."
As reported by USA Today's northerjersey.com, Sherrill's accusation was as astounding as it was direct.
“Not only do I intend to see that the president is removed and never runs for office again and doesn't have access to classified material, I also intend to see that those members of Congress who abetted him; those members of Congress who had groups coming through the Capitol that I saw on Jan. 5—a reconnaissance for the next day; those members of Congress that incited this violent crowd; those members of Congress that attempted to help our president undermine our democracy; I'm going to see they are held accountable, and if necessary, ensure that they don't serve in Congress."
Sherrill has not so far detailed what she means by this reconnaissance, or given names of Republicans who were involved. However, it's become increasingly clear in the days since the insurrection that the situation at the Capitol was much more dire than was originally reported.
The accusations of involvement by Republican members of Congress aren't just coming from Democrats, they're coming from those who were involved in the assault.
As The Washington Post reports, Ali Alexander, the right-wing activist who formed the "Stop the Steal" movement, did so with the help of three Republican members of Congress: Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, and Paul Gosar. "We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting," said Alexander. Biggs' staff has denied any contact with Alexander—but the involvement of all three Republicans is certainly worthy of investigation.
Completely disowning Alexander's claims could be difficult. He and Gosar appeared together at a "Stop the Steal" rally in Phoenix on December 19. At that same rally, Alexander played a recorded message from Biggs, who he described as a "friend." In both the live and recorded messages, Gosar and Biggs singled out January 6 for action.
Gosar would go on to promote other "Stop the Steal" events more than a dozen times, as well as pumping out tweets and emails promoting the January 6 gathering in D.C. Typical of Gosar's statements was an op-ed on the site Revolver, Gosar called simply counting the legal electoral vote a "Third World coup d'etat." According to Gosar, Biden's win involved "statistically impossible" spikes in the voting and "We will not tolerate this." Far from distancing himself from Alexander's group, Gosar claimed ownership. "As many of you know, I helped organize the very first 'Stop the Steal' rally," he wrote. "… Patriotic warriors joined together to gather evidence and tell the Left we will not accept a coup and a usurper in the White House."
All three Republicans continued to be involved in "Stop the Steal." As The New York Times reports, In the hours immediately before the assault on the Capitol, Brooks addressed the "Stop the Steal" rally in D.C. "Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass," said Brooks. "Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder! Will you fight for America?"
Gosar, Biggs, and Brooks are far from the only Republicans connected to Alexander's group, or the only ones who both inflamed Trump supporters through lies about the election and demands to attend the January 6 event.
On December 30, Alexander tweeted what would happen if Congress voted to approve the count of the Electoral College vote. "If they do this, everyone can guess what me and 500,000 others will do to that building. 1776 is always an option." The use of "1776" appeared in a number of statements from hard-line Trump representatives right up to the insurrection. Both Q-supporting Reps Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert directly called the insurrection an "1776 moment."
On Tuesday evening, The Washington Post reports that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she feared some of her Republican colleagues would not only open the doors to rioters, but direct them straight to her. "I can tell you that I had a very close encounter where I thought I was going to die," she said. "I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive." According to Ocasio-Cortez, she can't go into specifics because of security concerns. But it's clear there were very good reasons to be concerned. And it's clear that multiple Republicans in both the House and Senate did more than enough to justify removing them from the halls of Congress. In fact, several of them may well deserve a new office—in very small room surrounded by bars.
Wednesday, Jan 13, 2021 · 9:27:10 AM Eastern Standard Time · Mark Sumner
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called himself one of 12 orig organiz of insurrection, after in hiding w/ 2k$/day bodyguard saying god told him to wear orange; witches and wicca hunt him
// bannon and freedom cocks going ~ gop est'b?
livestream so basically a TV station?
[ali Alexander and other "Stop the Steal" activists at Dec. 15, 2020 press conference (Image from NTD livestream posted on Epoch Times YouTube channel.)
:{
}:
Right-wing activists who falsely insist that President Donald Trump won reelection held a press conference Tuesday to talk about their path forward after Electoral College votes cast in every state Monday formally affirmed Joe Biden’s presidential win. The activists threatened to unseat congressional Republicans who do not go along with their demands to object to certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
“Stop the Steal” organizers Ali Alexander and Ed Martinwere joined by Arizona state Sen. Anthony Kern, political strategist Alexander Bruesewitz (who is also working with the Stop the Steal campaign), and two Republican electors from Michigan who unsuccessfully attempted to crash the official count at their state capitol on Monday.
“Trump did win this election,” said Kern, claiming that it is being “stolen from the American people.” He said that if Republican members of Congress do their jobs, Trump will serve for another four years.
“We are being gaslit,” Alexander said. “This is apsychological operation on the American people, and patriots are standing up to say, ‘Enough of this.’”
“The constitutional process has not been exhausted,”said Alexander, who had previously announced that Rep. Mo Brooks, R-AL, would object to House certification of the Electoral College vote in January. On Tuesday, he said six other members of the House had agreed to join Brooks and that Stop the Steal activists are pressuring the 126 House Republicans who supported the Texas attorney general’s failed lawsuit to join the effort to disrupt the certification.
Alexander has previously threatened that pro-Trump activists would “burn it all down” if the Republican Party fails to stand with Trump in his effort to stay in power. That threat was a major theme of Tuesday’s press conference. Speakers slammed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for referring to Joe Biden as the president-elect and for reportedly urging Republican senators not to support the effort to challenge the election outcome.
Brusewitz, identified as CEO of X Strategies,called McConnell’s remarks a “disgrace” and was blunt about plans to go after Senate Republicans who fail to stand with Trump until the bitter end. He claimed to have spoken with “many billionaires” who he said are willing to fund primary challenges in 2022. He warned McConnell—who Republican incumbents will be relying on for campaign cash—that the 2022 primary season would be “very expensive.”
“We are going to primary everyone who has said anything awful about exercising our constitutional options,”Alexander said. And he said grassroots pro-Trump activists will “take on” the Republican National Committee by seeking to replace party officials, beginning with upcoming state conventions.
Martin, who also heads the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, warned that the GOP would ignore the grassroots at its own peril, a remark seconded by one of the Michigan activists, who declared, “This is Trump’s party.”
In response to a reporter’s question about whether Trump had been undermined by members of his own team, Alexander said that one day a book will be written about the betrayals of Trump from within the White House and the RNC.
Alexander, who combined forces with right-wing religious leaders and activists to host last Saturday’s pro-Trump “prayer rally” on the National Mall, declared that Stop the Steal is “a spiritual movement.”
“Our hope is in Christ. Our hope is in God. And our hope is in the founding documents, the Constitution that we must continue to exhaust,” he said.
Tags: Alex Bruesewitz Ali Alexander Anthony Kern Ed Martin Christian Nation Disinformation Election 2020 Republican Party Stop the Steal Phyllis Schlafly Eagles
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/stop-the-steal-activists-demand-congressional-republicans-give-election-to-trump-threaten-retaliation-if-they-dont/
rww
...That’s the environment in which the Proud Boys took the streets of Washington Saturday. By night’s end, the founder of Stop the Steal, Ali Alexander, was applauding the hate group,claiming, “Brave patriots defended the helpless last night. Thank you. Dinner’s on me. Proud of my dudes.”
Tags: Alex Jones Ali Alexander
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/million-maga-march-draws-thousands-in-gathering-of-%e2%80%8bpro-trump-conspiracy-theorists/
someone had determined that the man wearing all black with a red bandana around his mouth was “antifa.” Pro-Trump supporters swarmed the man, who put his hands in the air and refused to budge, even as a large man wearing a camo hat but no mask began yelling for him to leave, his finger pointing in the bandana-wearer’s face. A man in the crowd shouted repeatedly, “You’re destroying America!” while a Trump supporter chased off a member of the press who tried to tape the incident.
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The confrontation outside of the Supreme Court Saturday erupted out of thin air; just minutes before, the crowd seemed slightly tired, ready for lunch and a nap. This scene ended with the alleged anti-fascist demonstrator leaving the scene with the help of police, followed down the street by Trump supporters carrying flags emblazoned with the name of their hero, chanting “U-S-A!” But later that evening, real brawls would break out between counterprotesters and the Proud Boys hate group—whose members President Donald Trump famouslytold to “stand by” during his Sept. 30 debate with now President-elect Joe Biden.Police reported 21 people werearrested, and one man who was stabbed in the back was taken to the hospital. [3x/ gay? kpfa interview]
Going by “Million MAGA March,” “Stop the Steal,” and “March for Trump,” the Nov. 14 rally-march event was portrayed by GOP political operative Ali Alexander as an organic uprising of Americans who believe the presidential election was “stolen” from President Donald Trump. In reality, it was an astroturfed campaign pulled together by Alexander, who has ties to Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, to push a false narrative of voter fraud and cast doubt on integrity of the election.
On display Saturday was how much the right—and Republican Party under Trump—has embraced what in the past would have been considered its most fringe elements. In addition to the far-right street fighting Proud Boys, gathered in the nation’s capital were members of the QAnon conspiracy-theory movement, white nationalists, and militia groups, brought together by their common reverence of Trump.
Trump repaid them in the morning by driving past the rally in his motorcade on his way to play golf, waving from his limousine window at the throngs of MAGA-hat wearing supporters. By noon, the official start time of the rally, Freedom Plaza, which sits just east of the White House, was packed with thousands of supporters, their flags waving high in the sky. The banners featured such slogans as “All aboard the Trump train,” “Trump 2020,” “Blue Lives Matter;” and images of Trump as an action hero, his head superimposed on the body of the then-buff Sylvester Stallone in Rambo mode.
As he walked into the plaza, a man wearing an InfoWars T-shirt unfurled his Trump-Pence flag. (Alex Jones, the leader of the conspiracy-theory outlet, had led a caravan from Austin, Texas, to the nation’s capital, picking up followers along the way.) Another man attached his “I See Dead People Voting,” sign to his backpack; the sign was in reference to a conspiracy theory pushed by Alexander’s “Stop the Steal” campaign positing that the identities of dead people were used to vote in the election. Epoch News, a leading purveyor of right-wing disinformation that has peddled the QAnon conspiracy theory, handed out free newspapers that explained why they wouldn’t call the race for Biden even though every major news outlet has.
With one visible loudspeaker and a stage that wasn’t high enough off the ground, most speakers couldn’t be heard or seen, unless one wanted to shove their way past maskless rallygoers to make it close to the stage. As a result, the main event took a backseat at times to the general commotion, of which there was plenty.
Competing for attention was Nick Fuentes’ America First group, a youth-focused white-nationalist outfit whose members refer to themselves as “groypers.” Fuentes stood on an elevated area of the plaza with his followers, waving America First flags leading rally-goers in a chant of “Fox News sucks!” Contempt for Fox News has become a primary fixture of the Stop the Steal campaign, having fallen out of favor among right-wing audiences for being the first major news outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden.
When they tired of the Fox News chant, the group then began chanting, “Nick, Nick, Nick,” prompting Fuentes to take the bullhorn. But by the time Fuentes stepped up to address his acolytes, the next speaker on the main stage drowned him out. His speech still garnered cheers from the crowd before his followers launched into an “America First” chant. Fuentes took part in the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist gathering, where a counterdemonstrator was murdered, and he hassaid that he had similar political complaints as those of the El Paso shooter, who published a white nationalist manifesto before he killed 22 people in a massacre at a Walmart[twt vid]
nick Fuentes’ white nationalist“groypers”commanded the crowds attention at Freedom Plaza with chants of “America First.” pic.twitter.com/KPXjENFHz3
— Kristen Doerer (@k2doe) November 14, 2020
Fuentes and his America First group were welcomed with open arms by Alexander,who tends to point out whenever someone is Jewish and has joined Fuentes on his podcast. Alexander eventually took the main stage and offered rally-goers a way Trump could stay in power.
“Next week, start lobbying the state legislatures of Pennsylvania, of Wisconsin, of Michigan, of Arizona, and of Georgia. We’re going to tell them to ignore the rigged elections and send Republican electors to the electoral college, or we’re going to deprive both candidates of 270,”Fuentes said, referring to the number of electoral votes a candidate needs to accumulate in order to win the presidency. ”Then we’ll send it to the House of Representatives where Donald J. Trump will win,” he continued, adding, “Let’s terrify this town.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-supporting Republican from Georgia who will be walking the halls of Congress come January, closed out the rally at Freedom Plaza with a torrent of falsehoods, offering a sense of what kind of colleague she’ll be on Capitol Hill.
“This is only the beginning,” she said. “The Democrat Party is the party of socialism, the party of riots, the party that wants to murder babies up until birth and make taxpayers pay for it, they’re the party that wants to take away your guns.”
With that, the rally blasted the song “YMCA” unironically, and the march to the Supreme Court began.
***
[clothes code interesting blk yel polo] Dozens of members of the Proud Boys hate group march by the Capitol building on Nov. 14, 2020. The far-right fight club gathered in the nation’s capital for the “Million MAGA March.” (Photo: Kristen Doerer)]
Running down Pennsylvania Avenue in an apparent effort to get to the front of the procession, Jack Posobiec, the far-right activist and One America News Network figure, slipped and fell in front of the Justice Department before getting up and continuing his quest. The night before, Posobiec had called for rally-goers to “Police the crowd,” claiming that “Anarchists wait to strike” and “know how to blend in.” Passing him by was a man wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt; its bright print featured both flowers and machine guns. The Hawaiian shirt has become the uniform of the Boogaloo movement, a militia-style movement whose members believe that a race war or civil war is inevitable, and see it as their charge to accelerate its commencement.
Near the Dirksen Senate office building on Constitution Ave, dozens of Proud Boys in their signature black-and-yellow polos walked in the opposite direction of the crowd, making the “OK” hand gesture, which has become a symbol of white power, high in the air.
The Proud Boys are known to instigate fightsand then claim self-defense, as they did in the melee that took place after a talk by the group’s founder Gavin McInnes at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City in 2018. That incident led to two Proud Boys members being sentenced to four years in prison for kicking and punching protesters.
The Oath Keepers militia group, whose leader Stewart Rhodes promised to place his armed men outside of the District borders should Trump call on them, were also in attendance, as were members of the Three Percenters militia group. (Across the border between D.C. and Virginia, the law allows for the open carrying of firearms, which is prohibited in the nation’s capital.)
By the Capitol building, Trump supporters closed in around a counterprotester shouting at the Trump fans from his bike. A man employing a bullhorn tried to keep the peace: “Let him leave. Stop! We are not those types of people.”
A woman looked on. “Shit’s getting real. It’s about time!” she yelled.
In this strange gathering were also families and strollers, which may be one reason why—despite the confrontations and handful of scuffles—things did not turn more violent until the evening. The other may be that counterprotesters appeared to mostly give up any plans to gather at the rally site for a demonstration, so those looking for a fight had no one to turn on.
[A man wears a QAnon pin on his hat at the “Million MAGA March” by the Supreme Court on Nov. 14, 2020. (Photo: Kristen Doerer)
The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory also made a showing, with the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all,” abbreviated to “WWG1WGA,” on T-shirts, “Q” pins on hats, and posters about child-sex-trafficking. One man wore a sweatshirt that read, “Investigate Pizzagate,” referring to the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory that preceded QAnon and ended with a gunman showing up to a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. Meanwhile, Alex Jones, who pushed that theory, was given the microphone on the same stage at which recent electeds Lauren Boebert and Madison Cawthorn, who both have dabbled in QAnon, would later speak.
After claiming that “globalists are making their move against us,” Jones led the crowd in a prayer. “We absolutely commit to you on your holy altar to never submit to Satan and these globalist pedophiles, and we will defeat their new world order. Amen!” he yelled before starting the crowd on a “U-S-A!” chant.
Matt Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union, took the stage outside the Supreme Court. His organization hosts the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest gathering of conservatives in the world. “I want you to know your president loves you,” he said, flaunting his access to the commander-in-chief. He then led the crowd in a chant of “We love Trump.” And by all appearances, indeed they do.
Tags: Alex Jones Ali Akbar Ali AlexanderDonald Trump Jack Posobiec Lauren Boebert Madison Cawthorn Marjorie Taylor Greene Matt Schlapp Nick Fuentes Roger Stone Steve Bannon Stewart Rhodes Disinformation groypers Million MAGA March QAnon Stop the Steal American Conservative Union InfoWars Oath Keepers Proud Boys Three Percenters
https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/stop-the-steal/
The right-wing trolls behind the baseless "Stop the Steal" election fraud movement have launched a political action committee (PAC) to cash in on the false claim that the election was rigged against President Donald Trump, according to a filing posted this weekend on the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) website.
The organization, called Stop the Steal PAC, shows signs of being what campaign finance watchdogs know as a "scam PAC" — a for-profit fundraising vehicle that professes to support a cause but in reality ends up pocketing most of the money for its members, or shuffles it off to contracted firms.
Stop the Steal PAC's treasurer, Patrick Krason, and his wife Crystal are affiliated with a number of these small-time PACs. For instance, Krason also launched the Draft Sarah Huckabee Sanders for Arkansas PAC, but lives in West Virginia, had never visited Arkansas and had no connection to the former White House press secretary or her family.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sanders' father, warned prospective donors away from Krason in 2019.
"[Neither] Sarah nor anyone connected to her has ANYTHING to do with it," Huckabee told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "The person who launched it is unknown to everyone in Sarah's family, her political orbit, or her circle of friends."
Earlier this year a conservative watchdog group filed an FEC complaint against a Krason-led "social welfare" charity called the Stronger America Fund, alleging that he had unlawfully coordinated with a congressional campaign he was working on at the time.
Several of Krason's other PACs say they aim to legalize marijuana, and others — such as Make Virginia Great Again and MAGA Coalition — draw on familiar-sounding Trump-world phraseology. He also appears to have chiefly paid his own firms through campaigns, FEC filings show.
While Stop the Steal's FEC filing lists an address in Washington, D.C., it's only a drop box — Krason's actual office is in Charleston, West Virginia. The group's phone number is different from the one listed on Krason's own website, and directs calls to a Google subscriber mailbox after one ring.
Krason told Salon in a phone interview that while he had handled federal compliance for Stop the Steal, it was not his PAC, but would not disclose the client.
In addition to Krason, the PAC's registration with the FEC lists a man named Daniel Bostic as a designated agent.
Bostic's 54,000-follower verified Twitter profile says he is a former model and congressional staffer, a reference to his "full-time" work as a homeschooled South Carolina 17-year-old in the Washington office of then-Rep. Tim Scott, R-S.C. (Scott is now a U.S. senator.) The 20-something activist also claims a producer credit on a recent documentary about the widely-mocked efforts of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., to discredit the Russia investigation. Bostic is an active member of the Stop the Steal movement, which he heavily promotes on social media.
But Bostic is just one of a number of MAGA-world second-stringers who appear to see Stop the Steal as a way to ride the fantasy of a stolen election into a future of relevance, influence and income after Trump departs the White House.
While the movement's name may suggest a reaction to the 2020 election, its roots trace to the 2018 midterms — and specifically Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott's 2018 narrow victory over then-incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson. That was when Roger Stone launched the group as a coda to the "Brooks Brothers riot" of 2000.
At the time, Stone had the help of a far-right operative and conspiracy theorist named Ali Alexander,an itinerant provocateur who signed on to recruit for the "Stop the Steal" campaign and appears to be the organizing force behind this year's post-Trump iteration.
Alexander's current approach echoes the eclectic appeal he envisioned in a Periscope in 2018, as reported in Right Wing Watch, where he hoped to motivate not just Republicans, but QAnon followers, Democrats and "homeless people in all the adjacent counties" to keep an eye on the vote count.
But Alexander, formerly known as Ali Akbar, has a checkered history even by the loose standards of the alt-right movement, and today he does not have the full confidence of MAGA-world, some of whom suspect him of being a disingenuous grifter.
As Ali Akbar, he was convicted of theft and credit card fraud in 2007 and 2008. He entered national politics as a John McCain campaign staffer in 2007, when he was apparently reprimanded — ironically enough — for discussing opportunities to committing voter fraud during the Republican primary campaign. (Former McCain campaign officials contacted by Salon did not recall him, or the alleged incident.)
More recently, in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, a PAC affiliated with Alexander got a $60,000 injection from billionaire far-right financier Robert Mercer. The next year he popped up amid the Unite the Right controversy, and in 2018 tried to help kickstart a short-lived Trump-centric alternative to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), called the American Priority Conference. He followed that up with an ill-fated joint troll operation in Minneapolis with right-wing personality Laura Loomer and indicted felon Jacob Wohl.
Today, Alexander is the organizing force behind Stop the Steal, which last weekend organized demonstrations in several U.S. cities to protest President Trump's defeat.The demonstrations served a dual role as promotional platforms for a hodgepodge of conservative and alt-right media personalities — e.g., Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Scott Presler and Amy Kremer — described in a Mother Jonesprofile of the event as "a collection of disgraced right-wing internet figures."
Their rhetoric and messaging has been amplified by Trump himself and his high-profile allies, who have repeatedly peddled baseless claims that Democrats have "stolen" the election, making unfounded allegations about "missing" military ballots, "illegal ballots" and chicanery in vote-counting sites in multiple key battleground states.
The Stop the Steal PAC was born on Saturday, the day of the scheduled protests. That also coincided with a change to the group's website, which appears to have removed its "donate" button after it was revealed that contributions went straight to Alexander's personal accounts, including his PayPal, CashApp and Amazon Wishlist.
Given the warring factions within TrumpWorld, Stop the Steal's future as a cohesive movement appears tenuous, especially without the bonding agent of Trump at the top of U.S. politics. Alexander's apparent cash grab has already begun to draw fire from inside the tent. While the movement may now have the imprimatur of an officially FEC-registered PAC, the name defines the mission,and there are two full years ahead with no steal to stop.
Bostic and Alexander did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-operative-ali-alexander-leads-stop-the-steal-campaign/
right-wing political operative Ali Alexander has brought back “Stop the Steal,” a campaign to get right-wing activists to discredit mail-in voting, disrupt vote-counting, and falsely accuse Democrats of stealing the presidential election—presumably because legally cast ballots are being counted in states that have yet to declare the winner of the 2020 presidential contest. (Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden appears to be prevailing among votes cast by mail-in ballots.)
The move comes after President Donald Trump declared a premature victory in the early morning hours Wednesday and accused Democrats of mass voter fraud, a false narrative he’s been pushing for months about mail-in voting. At a Wednesday afternoon press conference in Philadelphia, Trump’s legal team, including conspiracy theorist and Trump sycophant Rudy Giuliani, doubled down on those claims, as have right-wing activists. The race is still too close to call, but as more mail-in ballots have begun to be counted, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has taken the lead.
In a panicked Periscope broadcast Wednesday evening, Alexander said he was “busy organizing thousands and thousands and thousands of people” to join “voter integrity” rallies in Phoenix, Arizona, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Detroit, Michigan, Madison, Wisconsin, and Atlanta, Georgia, (and perhaps Nevada) to protest. Alexander said the first rally would feature “Pizzagate” booster Mike Cernovichat the capitol in Arizona at 7 p.m. Wednesday evening, claiming that they’d have hundreds there and 10,000 attendees there by Friday. Asecond rally took place Wednesday night in Las Vegas. Alexander encouraged viewers to go to a website where they could register with the campaign and explained how he hoped to draw attention to these rallies.
“We’re matching influencers with operatives, so every influencer will have an operative there also working with local media, capturing all the vehicles going in and out ‘dropping of ballots,’” Alexander said. “We’re gonna capture everything.”
“If you need a plane ticket, I’ll PayPal you money, because people have sent me money,” Alexander said, before clarifying, “We’re flying giant influencers. We’re flying those people who are offering to share their audiences.”
Earlier in the day, Ali had put out a call for right-wing political operatives to lead the campaign in a number of states where Trump and Biden are in tight races or where Biden has won by a slim margin.
He called on Scott Presler and far-right activist Jack Posobiec to join the effort in Pennsylvania; Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk and Cernovich in Arizona; Alex Bruesewitz in Wisconsin; and CJ Pearson and Daniel Bostic, a producer of “The Plot Against the President” in Georgia. He also called on Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, a right-wing legal outfit that doubles as a communications shop, to work the legal network and Amy Kremer of Women for Trump and Ed Martin of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles to work the campaign nationally. He also said that Ed Martin, Amy Kremer and Kyle Jane Kremer would be “running point” for aWashington, D.C.event 1 p.m. Thursday.
At Wednesday’s rally in Phoenix, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who has his own ties to far-right nationalists, introduced Cernovich to the assembled crowd waving Trump flags. Taking the megaphone, Cernovich claimed that 200 anti-fascist activists had planned to disrupt his rally, but he said they’d never show up because, “I’ll get sent to prison after kissing their asses—legally and lawfully under self-defense laws.”
Cernovich went on to attack Fox News. “Do you think Fox News is suppressing pro-Trump vote?” He asked the crowd. “Yes!” The crowd shouted back.
Alexander also lashed out at Fox News in his Periscope, saying the conservative, pro-Trump network’s coverage of the presidential election was why he launched the campaign. He asked his viewers to spend 15 to 20 minutes after his Periscope harassing Fox News reporters and producers.
“Fox News is about to call the election for Joe Biden. How does this happen? They called Arizona too early. … I think it’s going for Trump,” he said. “If they call Nevada for Biden, then they will accidentally be forced. You need to tweet the hell out of everyone at Fox News.”
In September, Alexander took to Periscope to float the idea of revamping “Stop the Steal” for the 2020 presidential election, Jared Holtreported for Right Wing Watch then. At that time, Alexander had said that the 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign would bypass social media by collecting phone numbers from supporters.
Theoriginal “Stop the Steal” campaign was led by Alexander in 2018, along with convicted felon and self-described “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who Alexander said came up with the phrase, and his associates, including Posobiec. The campaign featured protests and misinformation against a ballot recount in Florida’s 2018 Senate race between Republican Rick Scott and Democrat Bill Nelson. In that campaign, pro-Trump activists from around the country descended on Florida to protest and spread misinformation, a seeming reboot of the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot,” which broke out following Florida’s contested presidential election results in 2000. Stone was behind that riot, which shut down recount efforts in Miami-Dade.
For the 2018 “Stop the Steal” campaign, Alexander said that he had recruited QAnon followers as well as people experiencing homelessness to fill spots at the protest. Politico reported in 2016 that Alexander’s PAC had received a large donation from billionaire**Robert Mercer**; Ali claims to not be taking money from him for this campaign.
It appears the 2018 “Stop the Steal” campaign was an attempted dry run for the 2020 presidential election. On Twitter, Alexanderclaimed to have approached Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel about running the campaign and that she had mocked it. On Wednesday, Alexander lashed out at those around Trump andMcDaniel, who he called “the dumbest woman in history.” He said that the RNC, McDaniel, and the Trump campaign were not doing the campaign. [twt forced errors in messaging and non-legal and non-protest actions coming out of the GOP right now is simply stunning. Trump may ruin his own efforts before they start. Why is no one around him doing this right?]
alexander claimed that his campaign of right-wing and far-right activists just want “a fair, predictive, determinative result” and that “This election is going to be conducted fairly where it produces a legitimate result that both sides can come together on.”
“I’m going to be here in Texas, just providing my friends with support,” Alexander said. “What I want to do is bring this country as much together as we can and have a certain outcome and ride off into the sunset.”
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gop-operative-says-hes-building-system-to-dispatch-protesters-where-ballots-are-counted/
republican political operative Ali Alexander, who previously went by the name Ali Akbar, is floating the possibility of revamping a 2018 effort to discredit mail-in and absentee voting ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
2012
https://crooksandliars.com/matt-osborne/national-bloggers-club-and-their-supe
Ali Akbar, now President of the National Bloggers Club, is one of the conservative blogosphere's most infamous characters. He began his campaign of notoriety with a crime spree in 2006, blazing a six-year trail of fraud. That's him up there, in the mug shots. Akbar's story is as improbable as the Tea Party movement itself, and a lesson on the privileges of power in the age of Citizens United. How did a petty crook rise to these heights in such a short time? Why does he enjoy such influential connections today?
We ask these questions because we see an emerging bipartisan consensus that Akbar's National Bloggers Club (NBC) is entirely notional. Akbar has never applied to the IRS for 501(c)3 status -- despite having claimed as much on the NBC Facebook page. While the NBC requires an unusual amount of personal information from donors, they do not offer those donors an EIN (Employer ID Number) to make their contributions tax deductible.
An EIN is provided upon application for nonprofit status, and should be available if the National Bloggers Club has applied. It is an easy online process. Yet we have been unable to locate an EIN in any database, and inquiries by both liberal and conservative bloggers have been met with silence. When journalist Bill Schmalfeldt contacted the Internal Revenue Service, he was informed that no EIN existed in their database for a National Bloggers Club.
This would be less distressing if Akbar didn't have a long history of covering up his tracks and minimizing his criminal past. In 2006, he stole items from a woman's home; he later broke into a vehicle, stole a debit card, and withdrew money from the victim's account, earning a felony conviction. Yet this record did not keep Akbar out of Republican politics.
Barely a year later, Akbar was accused of discussing election fraud tactics. The accuser, Joey A. Dauben, was a former colleague. In coverage of the controversy, Akbar was frequently and mistakenly identified as a John McCain campaign staffer due to his involvement in Bloggers for McCain, a "cooperating" website independent from the campaign itself. Akbar also caught flak for “scrubbing the web” to cover the tracks of
who was charged with posing as a woman and soliciting photos of underaged boys.
In April 2008, Akbar pleaded guilty to the debit card fraud and was sentenced to four years probation and restitution of the stolen money. His probation ended in May of this year. In the meantime, Akbar has built quite a blog empire for himself -- and runs it from his mother's house.
By 2008 Akbar had linked up with Eric Odom's Don't Go movement. They likely met up when Akbar’s firm, Republic Modern, designed the old website of Sam Adams Alliance, for which Odom was the new media director. When Odom started American Liberty Alliance (ALA), a tea party website that was mainly in the business of monetizing other Tea Party sites with ads, he brought Akbar along with him. Starting off as ALA’s Technology Consultant, Akbar would eventually became Chairman of ALA's Board, spending much of his time collecting non-deductible donations.
Yes, despite claiming to be in the application process for 501(c) 4 status in August 2009, ALA eventually was embarrassed into posting the following caveat on their website (though not their donation page): “The American Liberty Alliance is not a 501c3, 501c4 or a PAC. We are not registered as a non-profit and we do not raise funds as such.” Yet they incorporated under the name “American Liberty Alliance - A Non-Profit Corporation.”
The most excoriating examination of the ALA came from Erick Erickson, who reported that ALA had eventually been rolled up into an Eric Odom PAC:
For a number of months I have had more than my share of phone calls from conservative donors, bloggers, activists, campaigns, and others wishing someone would speak out. Several tried pushing this story into the mainstream media, but we all know what would happen there ? we’d turn people into martyrs who shouldn’t be.
At best this conduct looks like ignorance of the complex bureaucracy and regulations surrounding the FEC. At its worst, it looks like . . . well, you decide. I’m sure even more will come out now that I’m willing to speak up and it does not look like a case of simple ignorance. If it were an isolated incident it’d be one thing, but it is a pattern.
Indeed, the pattern begins with a profitable deception. Although ALA was registered as a non-profit in Nevada, as far as we can determine they never actually applied for non-profit status with the IRS, despite always claiming they were "in the process" of doing so. The pattern repeats with NBC, which incorporated in Texas as a non-profit, and has collected donations as a non-profit, without ever applying for legal non-profit designation. (The NBC has scrubbed 501(c)3 language from its donations page at Rally.org.) Our attempts to reach the law firm listed as the NBC's registered agent have been rebuffed. (Update: the address appears to be a "virtual" office.)
These dubious credentials in the new Tea Party movement propelled Akbar into the upper echelons of conservative organizing, where he has apparently met Karl Rove. Yet Akbar seems to have done remarkably little real work during his ascension. Take the NBC's website, for example, which contains no content -- just a redirect to the group's Facebook page. There, you will find grassroots conservatives wondering how to join, and why the donation practices are so intrusive:
Like many of Akbar's websites, content doesn't seem to be key. For example, despite supposedly representing a robust movement, Akbar's Tea Party Brew.com has surprisingly few posts. Bill Murphy, now the Social Media Director for the Romney campaign, wrote the final post at that site in February. By then, he had been Akbar's venture partner since 2009.
Murphy (right) was Director of Strategic Initiatives for American Liberty Alliance, though the position does not appear on his LinkedIn resume. Murphy was also Akbar's partner in an organization called Vice & Victory, which put on the BlogBash party at CPAC in February. Akbar was listed as the Host Organizer and Murphy as the Event Coordinator. BlogBash’s director is usually identified as Devon Wills, but many of NBC’s announcements and press releases offer contact information for "Bill Murphy at director@blogbash.com." Yet the BlogBash website doesn't even mention the NBC, which supposedly organized the event.
When he appeared on the radio program of conservative Larry Sinclair in March, Murphy also identified himself as the Director of the NBC -- though that position also does not appear on his resume. Whenever he has been asked about such omissions, Murphy has responded by further scrubbing his LinkedIn profile. Sinclair now calls foul on Akbar and Murphy's notional blogging club for using Andrew Breitbart's name to raise money for a scholarship fund -- again, while claiming 501(3)c status was "pending:"
In March 2012 we received an email which came from Bill Murphy and Ali Akbar from BlogBash.org and Vice and Victory email addresses announcing the creation of an Andrew Breitbart Scholarship Fund. After receiving the email and because of our own personal encounters with Andrew Sinclair News decided we would do a feature story on the Scholarship fund. In preparing the story we sent an email to Joel Pollak who was the primary Breitbart.com principle since the untimely death of Andrew early the morning of March 1, 2012. In the email to Mr. Pollak we asked if Pollak would be interested in going on Through the Mirror w/Larry Sinclair to talk about the recently established Breitbart Scholarship Fund. Pollak responded almost immediately by telling us he knew nothing of any such fund; that anyone using Andrews name along with any such fund was doing so without authorization and Pollak even went to the point of saying that any such organization was in his opinion a scam.(Emphasis added)
Aside from Michelle Malkin, nobody knows who is on the board of the NBC, or how they were selected. NBC won't even say whether they have any bylaws, and has never applied for non-profit status. If the NBC was an ACORN office, Malkin would denounce it as a criminal organization. Instead, she is Akbar's public ally and defender.
These inconsistencies had already drawn criticism from conservatives when we began reporting on them. First was Paul Lemmen, a convicted con artist working out his redemption in his blog, "An Ex Con's View." As the details of Akbar's criminal record appeared on the website Breitbart Unmasked in May and June, Lemmen expressed disdain for the fact that "the other side" had been the one to reveal Akbar's criminal past. Citing the NBC's disturbing lack of transparency and its behavior with donors, Lemmen called for transparency and accountability.
As a result of his outspoken blogging, Lemmen received the close attention of**NBC "enforcer"**and Andrew Breitbart protege Lee Stranahanamid a series of attack posts by other bloggers. Lemmen fell silent for a while, reemerging later to write on more general topics. Today, he is a member of North American Conservative Bloggers United (NACBU), a new association of conservative indie bloggers opposed to the NBC and its opaque operations. In supporting Lemmen, David West called out Akbar for elitism:
See, Ali Akbar was the ‘technical guru’ for a while behind the Don’t Go Movement which I was a part of as Northwest Regional Coordinator. I, however, was ignored back then by Mr Ackbar. When he formed the NBC, I was ignored as well.
The NBC billed itself in part as an organization that could give bloggers desperately-needed press credentials. Those who have received credentials are unable to activate them as instructed. The NBC does not explain how to receive a credential, or even describe any standards for applicants. NACBU organizer "Impolite Canadian" just wanted to webcast an event; after being rebuffed in all attempts to learn more about how to obtain the privileges of membership, the pseudonymous blogger concluded that NBC was simply a club of Akbar's friends:
It's like they all of a sudden became part of the ''elites'', encouraging and defending the ''mastermind'', but when asked how does one join this ''elite'' club, you get the ''I dunno man, it just happened, u know?''.
There are only 340 "likes" on the NBC Facebook page at the time of this writing -- far fewer than one would expect for a popular netroots organization. Ladd Ehlinger, Jr., aka FilmLadd, questioned whether the NBC was even a real organization:
Screw Ali's political connections. You love him? Want to blacklist me? Be my guest. Won't be the first time that's happened. Been happening for two years now anyway. It's the sort of thing I think Ali likes to do to people who get crosswise with him - trash them, prevent them from getting work, and so on. I could regale you with first-hand stories I've heard, but this post is already too goddamn long.
Akbar did not prevent Ladd from getting work. In fact, Ehlinger received a plum new gig from Washington lobbyist Dan Backer of DB Capitol Strategies. He serves as Treasurer for many well-known PACs, including the Conservative Action Fund, which has already given Akbar's "Vice & Victory Fund" over $44,000 in 2012. Backer is also Treasurer for Stop This Insanity Inc PAC, which recently signed Ehlinger to a complex $10,000 contract. Ehlinger hasn't spoken out on the subject of Ali Akbar ever since. (CORRECTION: see below)
Backer (right) is the attorney who created "hybrid Super PACs" through his Carey v. FEC lawsuit in 2011. As part of his contract, Ehlinger agreed to be classified as an employee and then kick back $1,500 to Stop This Insanity Inc PAC, creating an opportunity to challenge federal limits on employee PAC contributions. Backer also wants to lift limits on contributions to federal candidates. True freedom, Backer argues, is American billionaires donating more hard political money every year than an average American family makes.
Dan Backer's other PAC products include Todd Cefaratti, who became infamous for fleecing PAC donors and using his for-profit JoinTheTeaParty.us website as a lead generator for spam. Cefaratti was found out by activists at Free Republic, who quickly discovered that his real estate sales lead business was named Glengary Inc. Despite grassroots revulsion at this character from a David Mamet play, Cefaratti
. He and his Glengary LLC are also party to Dan Backer's FEC suit with Ehlinger. Stop This Insanity Inc. runs another one of Cefaratti's websites, TheTeaParty.net.
The "made men" of the Inner Party are never held accountable. Their revolution has been monetized: shirts, buttons, email addresses, and page views turn dedicated activists into revenue streams for "producers." Meanwhile, these same "producers" also get paid by billionaires and PAC lawyers who benefit from stoking the grassroots fires on behalf of their corporate agenda. It's a great job if you can get it. No wonder Akbar likes to throw big, exclusive parties at CPAC and the Republican National Convention.
In order to make the BlogBash party an instant institution this year, Akbar and Murphy took money from a host of the usual suspects in astroturf politics, including Americans For Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and the vote-suppressing True The Vote organization. Billionaire and megadonor Foster Friess also helped throw Akbar's party at CPAC, then cracked a terrible joke about aspirin as a form of birth control: "You know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.” Friess has vowed to spend a large chunk of his fortune through Karl Rove's American Crossroads this year.
We believe the National Bloggers Club encapsulates a problem common to Tea Party organizing since February 2009. As with Mark Meckler, the multilevel marketing billionaire who organized Tea Party Patriots, we see a disturbing pattern of grift in the National Bloggers Club. Sincere Americans have been organized to prevent corporate regulation and billionaire tax hikes; the organizers fleece them while also accepting money from representatives of these same corporations and billionaires.
This charade may be close to an end, however. Larry Sinclair has presented the National Bloggers Club with a demand they publish the following:
The names of every National Bloggers Club Board member including the date each became associated with the NBC
A complete financial report showing the amounts of all monies paid to in contributions; services; or sponsorships made to NBC or BlogBash.
A Complete financial reporting of all funds paid out by NBC or BlogBash including the names of those receiving said payments and the reasons for each.
A complete financial accounting of all funds paid out by NBC/Blogbash including an accounting of what the payments were for and if they were made for the personal benefit of Ali Akbar or any other member of the NBC Board.
A complete accounting of all contributions made to the Breitbart Scholarship Fund as well as an accounting of all disbursements of said funds as well as the name of the financial institution(s) where contributions are on deposit.
A statement as to Bill Murphy’s position with NBC and BlogBash; whether Murphy has been involved in any NBC/BlogBash activities and or promotions since becoming Mitt Romney for President Social Media Director?
The IRS 501(c)(3) documents confirming the below stated claim by NBC:
"National Bloggers Club is a new 501(c)(3) founded by top new media operatives, bloggers and journalists as a loose association of bloggers who are for free enterprise and limited government and to advocate on bloggers behalf."
In the spirit of nonpartisan opposition to criminal misbehavior and opaque political activity, we join these conservative voices in calling for accountability. Akbar has been dishonest about his criminal record. His organization has been dishonest about its non-profit status. The NBC did not ask Breitbart's family before asking for donations in his name. Their associations with powerful figures in the world of campaign finance have not been able to fully silence grassroots opposition to their questionable practices:
These aren’t unfair questions. They are very simple, basic questions spoken without malice or any agenda save that of telling the truth. And has already been noted, the truth has no agenda. It’s just the truth.
Conservative bloggers are asking for simple transparency -- and being refused. Liberal bloggers meet only scorn and harassment for asking the same legitimate questions. We believe it is time for "real" journalists to consider this information, as no mere blogger of any political persuasion will ever glean answers from the National Bloggers Club or their Super PAC friends. They are apparently a law unto themselves.
CORRECTION: Advised via Twitter that Ladd Ehlinger had recently denounced Ali Akbar on Twitter, we include the following items for your consideration:
@xcitizen10 @brooksbayne When I came out against Ali, it was after extended 1st hand evidence. Not hearsay, not Twitter snark. 1st hand.
— Film Ladd (@FilmLadd) September 6, 2012
@xcitizen10 @brooksbayne Let's do a reality check on that. Ever got a link from either's blog? (er, Ali doesn't actually blog, but...)
— Film Ladd (@FilmLadd) September 7, 2012
@brooksbayne @xcitizen10 1st, I can agree to disagree w/others in regards to Lee or Ali w/out lining 'em up in front of Twitter firing squad
— Film Ladd (@FilmLadd) September 6, 2012
@thecypressgang @aaronworthing @brooksbayne 2nd, reasonable people can disagree over Ali being a p.o.s. Con-men are good at confusing folks.
— Film Ladd (@FilmLadd) September 6, 2012
Tags:
Ali Akbar, American Liberty Alliance, Andrew Breitbart Scholarship Fund, astroturfing, Bill Schmalfeldt, BlogBash, Dan Backer, Glengary Inc., Karl Rove, Ladd Ehlinger, Lee Stranahan, Michelle Malkin, National Bloggers Club, Paul Lemmen, Tea Party movement, Todd Cefaratti, Vice & Victory Fund
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https://observer.com/2018/10/robert-mercer-bankrolled-pac-ali-alexander/
Billionaire Robert Mercer gave money to a PAC advised by a self-proclaimed “interpreter of energy.”
The spiritualist in question is Ali Alexander, formerly known as Ali Akbar, a GOP political operative with a notorious reputation that allegedly includes fraud.
“On the eve of the 2016 election, Robert Mercer donated $60,000 to a PAC Alexander advises,” reported Politicoon Monday. “Alexander, who identifies himself as black and Arab, brings a more new-age approach to the culture wars, calling himself an ‘interpreter of energy for this period.’”
Alexander is one of the many New Right media celebrities orbiting Trumpland who built a brand through livestreaming musings on political warfare. Like many New Right figures, he also has a history of dog whistling to the nationalist wing of the MAGA movement.
After the first “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Alexander interviewed the white nationalist Matt Colligan alongside former Gateway Pundit reporter Lucian Wintrich. Colligan was identified as a tiki-torch holding participant at the gathering of white nationalists which resulted in the murder of protester Heather Heyer.
“Nazi flags, ‘Hitler did nothing wrong’ memes, and attacks on mainstream media were displayed by Colligan during the livestream,” noted Right Wing Watch in its coverage of the since-deleted Periscope. “Akbar insisted that the conversation was ‘not a debate’ and that ‘there’s no winner, there’s no loser’ in the duo’s friendly discussion with Colligan.”
Alexander also claimed that white men have been caricatured as evil by “white fat bitches” in the media, a sentiment which resonated with Wintrich and Colligan.
Wintrich was fired from the Gateway Pundit this August after appearing on a podcast hosted by the white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes. Alexander also appeared on Fuentes’ program over the summer to discuss the far-right identitarianism movement, where he speculated that “a number of Jewish people do hate crimes against their own communities to get press.”
This year, Alexander has made it a habit to note members of the media who are Jewish.
Jake Tapper, who is a Jewish left-leaning journalist who works at CNN, was obsessed with packages that could not detonate and the tragic Synagogue shooting but dismissed the FL GOP shooting today. Called it simple “vandalism.”
Our Media are Bloodthirsty to “get even” with Trump
— Ali Alexander (@ali) October 29, 2018
Anti-white comments from Jewish anti-Trump commentator, Bill Kristol.
This kind of bigoted thinking painted as altruism is in fact still bigotry.
We are all God’s children and no race or sex is destined to save the other. You sound like Hitler.
Ironic, you ethnic supremacist. https://t.co/mxug3as9f8
— Ali Alexander (@ali) August 5, 2018
The conservative jewish publication, The Daily Wire, has millions of dollars in funding from good Christian Texans. I wish they covered these topics like the arrest of Posobiec’s attacker. I’ve asked to no avail. Don’t know why.
— Ali Alexander (@ali) June 3, 2018
“Jake Tapper, who is a Jewish left-leaning journalist who works at CNN, was obsessed with packages that could not detonate and the tragic Synagogue shooting but dismissed the FL GOP shooting today. Called it simple ‘vandalism,'” tweeted the operative on Monday, referring to an incident earlier in the day in which the windows of Volusia County’s GOP headquarters were shot with bullets.
Alexander isn’t the only fringe figure Mercer has bankrolled. After Milo Yiannopoulos was fired from Breitbart, the Republican megadonor bankrolled his independent media venture (Milo Inc.) before a Buzzfeed report exposed the provocateur’s ties to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Mercer resigned from his hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, after the story’s publication.
Over the summer, PayPal suspended Yiannopoulos’ account over trolling a Jewish journalist with Nazi rhetoric through the company’s platform.
Alexander could not be reached for comment.
Filed Under: Politics, National Politics, Heather Heyer, Robert Mercer, Unite The Right, Lucian Wintrich, New Right, Ali Akbar, Matt Colligan
Ali Alexander, a longtime right-wing activist with ties to far-right figures in the pro-Trump movement, offered a $2,500 reward for anyone who could disprove his claim that a man who appeared at Saturday’s “Demand Free Speech” rally in Washington, D.C., carrying an anti-Semitic sign was planted there by antifascist activists. Although Alexander was offered proof he was wrong, he hasn’t paid.
In a video uploaded to Periscope yesterday, Alexander—who previously went by Ali Akbar—claimed that the man who appeared at Saturday’s rally with a sign that said “Jews Own USA” was an antifascist activist posing as a right-wing rally-goer in order to smear other rally attendees as anti-Semites. Later in the video, Alexander floated the possibility that the man had been placed in the rally as part of a plot to murder anti-Muslim speaker Laura Loomer, who is Jewish.
[jews own usa]
(Photo: Adele Stan, Right Wing Watch)
Alexander gave two pieces of information to support his claim: that the sign carried by the alleged provocateur was mounted on a wood stick, and that the man had a physical appearance that led Alexander to believe he was not right-wing. Placing a sign on a wooden stick is “actually a technique of the left that was given to them by the Russians,” Alexander claimed. Alexander also claimed the anti-Semitic man was friendly with antifascists after he was ejected from the rally—a claim that runs contrary to multiple eyewitness accounts, including that of reporter Rachel Kurzius, who tweeted she saw the man engaged in “a verbal altercation with antifa.”
“Anyone who can prove me wrong on this story—the first person who can prove that I’m telling a lie—I will give $2,500 to,” Alexander said.
Freelance journalist Molly Conger and a leftist who goes as “Goad Gatsby” online responded to Alexander on Twitter with the information they gathered that identified the man who showed up to the rally as a little-known person named Shawn Jones. Conger located Ohio court records showing Jones had been convicted for domestic violence twice and discovered Jones had been posting his anti-Semitic views online for at least the last five years. Right Wing Watch was unable to find details online that suggested Jones had ever been involved in antifascist organizing.
Rather, a review of his social media profiles, some of which have been archived, indicates that Jones expresses particularly alt-right viewpoints, and is vehemently anti-Semitic. In a video he uploaded to YouTube after the right-wing rally, he claimed he was kicked out of the rally in Washington after he began accusing organizers of being led by Jews and of not being “the real alt-right.” On Facebook, Jones wrote that he should have “been more agressive and tried to fight all the large groups” of both pro-Trump and antifascist activists who confronted him about his anti-Semitic signage. In other posts, he alleged that antifa and liberal groups were created by the government, and derided them for rejecting his anti-Semitic message.
While doubling down on his theory in a tweet, Alexander nonetheless recycled the information sent by Conger and Gatsby to counter his claim. Alexander did not pay them the promised reward, Conger and Gatsby told Right Wing Watch.
Right Wing Watch reached Alexander and asked whether he had more information to support his claim that Jones was planted in the rally by antifascists.
“That’s my educated guess since he was caught on and off camera paling around with violent left-wing Antifa. I’m glad I was the one who kicked out the anti-Semite who put us all at risk and rushed the stage to harm me, as the video shows,” Alexander said via Twitter direct message. He declined to comment further.
Alexander did not respond to Right Wing Watch’s request for the footage he claimed to have allegedly showing Jones interacting in a friendly manner with antifascists, and he did not answer whether he planned to pay those who debunked his claim.
Alexander is reportedly attending the White House’s Social Media Summit on Thursday. Recently, Alexander was implicated in a smear campaign against Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris.
Tags: Ali Akbaranti-fascismsocial media
https://www.newsweek.com/kamala-harris-bots-ali-alexander-twitter-donald-trump-jr-conspiracy-race-1446523
A tweet claiming Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is "not an American black" went viral yesterday—and some believe it was given a boost by bots.
A mass of duplicate messages was pushed by accounts on Twitter after the senator commented on her race during the Democratic debate yesterday. The tweet, penned by a political commentator, said Harris is "half Indian and half Jamaican" and alluded that she was "robbing American Blacks... of our history."
The same evening, the surge of tweets was highlighted by Twitter user Caroline Orr—a behavioral scientist who regularly discusses the topic of online disinformation. Orr shared a series of images which appeared to be sharing Ali Alexander's viral tweet verbatim or pushing a similar narrative.
"What a weird coincidence that a group of accounts, starting with Ali, decided to tweet the exact same thing about Kamala Harris within minutes of each other tonight," Orr noted. "It's everywhere and it has all the signs of being a coordinated/artificial operation."
Alongside images of the tweets, which also went viral, she added: "Efforts to attack Kamala Harris' race have been around for a while but a huge volume of tweets pushing this manufactured narrative appeared tonight right after Kamala pointed out that she was the only black woman on stage."
[tweet]
...en. Harris appeared on stage beside some of the biggest rival candidates from her own party yesterday, including Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Kirsten Gillibrand.
On stage, in comments that sparked the viral tweet, she referenced herself as "the only black person on this stage" and attacked Biden's political record on race and segregation.
"I would like to speak on the issue of race," she said. "This is an issue that is still not being talked about truthfully and honestly. There is not a black man I know, be he a relative, a friend, or a co-worker who has not been the subject of some form of profiling or discrimination."
In a tweet yesterday, Harris wrote: "There was a little girl in California who was bussed to school. That little girl was me." Alexander responded: "Stop appropriating our history."
As reported by *The Washington Post*, Harris was previously forced to address her race after memes started to spread online about her heritage earlier this year.
They all largely focused on how the senator spent some high school years being educated in Canada while noting her father is a Jamaican immigrant and her mother is a Tamil Indian.
In March, during an interview on popular "The Breakfast Club" podcast, Harris directly took on the issue when talking about a meme which claimed she was "not African-American."
"I'm proud of being black," Harris told the hosts, as reported by CNN at the time. "I was born black. I will die black, and I'm not going to make excuses for anybody because they don't understand." She said similar tactics had previously been used by opponents against President Barack Obama.
At its core, it was the argument made by Alexander's viral tweet yesterday, which he said had spiked in popularity—and bot-like activity—after being noticed by Donald Trump Jr.
"Her conspiracy makes no sense," he wrote, referencing Orr.
"I tweet something. Don Jr retweets it. Bots following his account steal my content. Somehow... Russia! Now, I'm getting death threats. I'll be sharing these with the Twitter team." Alexander later published a video response in which he elaborated on his arguments about Harris.
The issue of bots—which are typically designed to amplify a message—dominated the political discourse in 2016 in the run-up to the presidential election as analysis increasingly suggested that Russia had been attempting to meddle in U.S. politics using social media platforms and co-ordinated leaking.
A January 2017 report published by the Director of National Intelligence suggested Russia not only used cyberattacks and espionage, but also "paid social media users or 'trolls.'" In January this year, Cnet reported that Twitter confirmed bots with links to Russian retweeted Donald Trump upwards of 470,000 times between September 1 and November 15, 2016.
Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to request for comment. An email for comment sent to Sen. Harris was not immediately answered
Harris, 54, was born in Oakland, California to a father from Jamaica and a mother from India. She spoke of her experience growing up black in the debate, recalling a story about neighbors who wouldn’t let their children play with Harris and her sister because of the color of their skin.
The attacks on Harris’s background started Thursday when Ali Alexander tweeted she is not an “American black.”
“She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” Alexander wrote. “I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It's disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people. Freaking disgusting.”