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The groups other administrators were even more prominent conservative activists with close ties to Steve Bannon, the former manager of Trumps 2016 campaign and the ex-chair of the conservative news organization Breitbart, according to data collected by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism and misinformation.

The pages rapid surge in membership was also helped by promotion from conservative activists and pro-Trump Facebook groups online. And for a group that existed for just over a day, it had an outsized, real-world impact.

As incoming results from multiple battleground states put Biden on the verge of winning the presidency, the baseless allegations of election-rigging are only getting louder, and some groups are working to organize countrywide rallies this weekend.

At the White House Thursday night, Trump boasted about the spirit he was seeing from people angered over voter fraud, although he did not cite any specific movement.

I've never seen such such love and such affection and such spirit as I've seen for this, he said during remarks in the press briefing room. People know what's happening, and they see what's happening, and it's before their eyes.

Yet the affiliation between the #StopTheSteal groups and Trumps camp show that this spirit is supported, encouraged and occasionally manufactured by Trumps own allies. Its part of Trumpworlds broader attempt to gin up outrage about misleading and false claims of voter fraud, thus giving Trump a way to claim the public is behind him.

This is definitely not just organic, up-from-the-grassroots disinformation, said Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and Facebooks former security chief. There are professionals here who are pushing some of this stuff based upon exactly what is going on in the polls and in the real-world arguments over the election.

Along with Kremer, administrators for the invite-only Facebook group included Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, two political operatives and former Breitbart writers affiliated with other high-profile MAGA projects, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Stockton and Lawrence had recently been working on We Build The Wall, a Bannon-linked operation where Stockton served as a strategist and Lawrence as communications director. The group, a crowdfunding operation to raise money to build a border wall, counted major Trump allies on its board, such as former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Sheriff David Clarke, Academi CEO Erik Prince, and Bannon himself.

Neither Stockton or Lawrence returned requests for comment.

#StopTheSteal quickly grew beyond Facebook and into on-the-ground action. It was spurred on by MAGA influencers like Mike Cernovich, who helped the group organize a Wednesday night demonstration in Arizona, where more than 100 people flooded the Maricopa County tabulation center where volunteers were processing mail-in ballots. The demonstrators, several of whom had guns, got into a heated confrontation with journalists on-site, prompting security to escort them from the building.

The incident was then amplified and reinforced online. Social media posts tagged #StopTheSteal, including those showing protestors chanting MAGA slogans, quickly went viral after Wednesdays protest helped by far-right influencers promoting the videos. The posts garnered thousands of retweets on Twitter and shares across Facebook, based on data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics firm.

Some of the prominent conservative groups involved with #StopTheSteal have also organized rallies to get attention for the cause. Tea Party Patriots, one of the most influential political organizations in the original Tea Party movement, served as one clearinghouse, posting scheduling details for rallies in Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada on its pages.

It is important that election officials see the public pressure to ensure that we have a valid and legitimate count of the vote, the group said in a notice on its site. If the public is deemed to not care, it will be immensely easier for nefarious things to happen.

The presence of organizations like Tea Party Patriots has raised the profile of armed demonstrations held by far-right fringe groups, said Alex Newhouse, a researcher at Middlebury Colleges Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism.

They don't usually get into these really far-right campaigns, Newhouse said. So seeing FreedomWorks do it, seeing a verified Tea Party group pushing it, and seeing them push actual events with dates and times saying, Get out there, get on the ground and protect the vote that was surprising to me as well, and also a big reason why this took off as fast as it did.

Several protests are planned in key swing states this week, and were initially promoted on the #StopTheSteal Facebook page before it was removed from the platform.

The content they oversaw and cultivated was heated, and sometimes stoked violence.

In the #StopTheSteal Facebook group, users voiced their anger over what they said, without clear evidence, were efforts to steal the election from Trump. Others called for violence against what they perceived as widespread voter fraud across the country, even though such allegations have been widely debunked.

In one post, reviewed by POLITICO, a Facebook user posted an image with the text: I dont know why we are surprised about the vote, we all saw it coming and we know how it will end. Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.

Facebook users also responded to peoples posts with similar call-to-arms. Civil war! We are sick of this. Its about time, wrote one in the private group. There will be a war and the folks with guns will win, said another.

Several other Facebook messages in the invite-only group also promoted false allegations that the Democratic Party was stealing the election. God help our country!!! Im literally sick at my stomach. This election is very much rigged!!! said one Facebook user whose post was shared 185 times and received almost 2,000 comments.

Facebook deleted the group because of its rules against using the platform to promote violence or undermine the electoral process. We saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group, Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, said in a statement.

But even with the disappearance of #StopTheSteals official Facebook page, other groups have continued to promote similar rallies through their own social media channels, and through conservative influencers advertising events on their own pages, according to an analysis from Media Matters, a progressive group monitoring far-right media. The bulk of these events are focused in swing states that are still counting ballots including Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania and are planned for locations where votes are being tabulated.

Within hours of the first #StopTheSteal Facebook groups being removed, at least 20 other groups with the same name with a combined membership of over 320,000 people had sprouted up on the social network, though Facebook removed some of these groups.

Some of the groups which are organizing protests in battleground states subsequently changed their names to pro-Biden topics to avoid detection, leading to pushback from their members, based on a review of their Facebook posts by POLITICO.

We have to avoid being in the open as much as possible. Our goal should be to fly under the radar, said the administrator of one of those groups with roughly 93,000 members. Facebook eventually removed that group.

High-profile conservatives are also now using other avenues to reach out. Women for America Firsts private Facebook page is advertising nationwide demonstrations for Saturday, according to data pulled by Media Matters for America, a progressive group monitoring right-wing media.

We will be sharing the locations where the vote counts will be happening in the contested states, wrote the groups coalitions director, Cindy Chalian. If you cant make it to any of those locations, we encourage you to organize a local rally to demand transparency and to count the LEGAL votes. We support President Trump and we demand our elections be honest and fair. End the fraud now!!!

Other MAGA personalities with large social media followings are hosting additional events, according to a new website, StopTheSteal.us, operated by Ali Alexander, an ex-Tea Party political strategist, current MAGA internet personality. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Cernovich will be holding rallies in Arizona. Jack Posobiec, a correspondent for the Trump-friendly OAN outlet, and conservative activist Scott Presler will be in Pennsylvania. Kremer the #StopTheSteal group founder will be in Wisconsin. Many of these events were marketed online as grassroot uprisings to defend democracy.

Newhouse, the researcher from Middlebury, said the combination of social media, shared conservative messaging and the far-reaching influence of these MAGA forces, has created the perfect storm for a quickly spreading campaign.

He called SharpieGate a debunked but prominent conspiracy theory circulating on far-right forums claiming that Arizona used Sharpie markers to disenfranchise voters a prime example of a small local quirk that Trump allies quickly made into a nationalized MAGA flashpoint.

It took a few hours for SharpieGate to appear, and then to appear on protest signs that people are holding up in Arizona, he said. There's definitely a direct throughline there, and the amplification of online material and online campaigns in this area I'm pretty confident in saying that it's had an effect on actual on the ground activism.

Steven Overly contributed to this report.

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Trump-linked figures have boosted #StopTheSteal movement - POLITICO

With Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan now squarely in Joe Bidens corner, the former vice president has secured the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win the presidential election. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, President Donald Trump held leads in all three states, but as votes from Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other urban areas were counted, Biden climbed ahead. On Friday morning, after Biden overtook Trump in the Pennsylvania vote count, Decision Desk HQ called the race for Biden.

At the same moment that those votes from heavily progressive cities beset by protestswere putting Biden over the top, House Democrats were locked in a tortured, three-hour conference call on Thursday. Centrist after centrist lambasted the partys left for costing it seats in the lower chamber and threatening its ability to win the Senate. It created a surreal juxtaposition: Had progressive organizing on the ground around left-leaning issues driven registration and turnout for Biden where he needed it, or had it hurt the party more broadly? Or was it both?

The fiercest criticism was leveled by Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA official who won an upset victory in rural and suburban Virginia in 2018. Her victory was symbolic, in that she toppled Dave Brat, the tea party upstart who had himself toppled Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014, presaging Trumps rise a year later. In 2018, Brat accused Spanberger of endorsing and being in league with, by dint of her party identification, Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and would-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi even though she theatrically distanced herself from all three, as well as former President Barack Obama. Her rousing defense Abigail Spanberger is my name! earned her a viral clip at a debate with Brat:

Spanberger won a narrow victory and spent 2019 and 2020 further distancing herself from the partys progressive wing. She is once again locked in a close count, but appears to again have the upper hand, poised for reelection.

It has not diminished her rage toward the left. On the call Thursday, Spanberger vented not at abolish ICE but at defund the police, the slogan that gained mainstream currency following the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

Rep. Conor Lamb, whose special election victory in 2018 was a bellwether of the coming blue wave, backed Spanberger up. Spanberger was talking about something many of us are feeling today: We pay the price for these unprofessional and unrealistic comments about a number of issues, whether it is about the police or shale gas, Lamb said. These issues are too serious for the people we represent to tolerate them being talked about so casually.

But Lambs criticism of his party colleagues goes to the heart of the flaw in the argument. Lamb wasnt forced to defenddefunding the policebecause of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other members of the Squad. Rather, it was Lamb who went to a Black Lives Matter protest and took a maskless photo with a (white) woman holding a defund the police sign. His GOP opponent hammered Lamb for it. Most centrist politicians think of politics as top-down a strategy thats decided upon and then implemented. But defund the police whatever one thinks of the slogan came from the protest movement that grew out of Minneapolis, not from the messaging department of the Squad Central Committee.

Democrats actually benefited from a surge in voter registrations amid the protests, as noted by Tom Bonier, head of the major Democratic data firm TargetSmart.

Party leader James Clyburn, the Democrat from South Carolina whose endorsement of Biden launched him to the nomination, warned on the call that if Democrats ran on Medicare for All and other progressive issues, they would lose the upcoming Georgia Senate special elections that will determine control of the upper chamber and dictate whether Biden and the Democrats have the possibility of implementing a legislative agenda. (Alaskas Senate seat, a contest between Republican Sen. Al Sullivan and independent challenger Al Gross, is still up for grabs. While Sullivan is currently ahead, the count of the remaining 44 percent of votes absentee ballots wont begin until Monday.)

Even so, progressives defended a number of Republican-leaning seats. Democratic Rep. Katie Porter won reelection by 8 points in Californias 45th District, covering Orange County and Irvine, which she flipped in 2018. Further south, Rep. Mike Levin, who flipped the 49th District two years ago, won reelection, beating his Republican opponent by 12 points. Both are co-sponsors of the Medicare for All bill in the House, as are Jared Golden in Maine, Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona, Josh Harder in California, and Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania, who all won reelection in swing districts. And Rep. Tom Malinowski also defended his northern New Jersey district with an 8-point win, again holding onto a district he flipped in 2018. Cook Political Report had rated both Porter and Malinowskis districts as R+3, and Levins as R+1.

Democrats insisting that progressive issues are losing policies have yet to articulate what their winning agenda would be, now that getting Trump out of the White House is no longer the mission. As attention will shift to the Georgia special elections, can Democrats rally the troops simply to help Biden confirm slightly more progressive cabinet nominees? What is the Democratic agenda that the party can pledge to voters to inspire them to vote in that January special election?

From the progressive perspective, its an easy question to answer, and Ocasio-Cortez has made the argument herself repeatedly: Its better to have Democrats in control so that the left can push them to be better, whereas Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown himself immune to protest from the left. But thats not a message from the party itself.

And if Democrats dont find a message or insist on spending the next few weeks attacking its left flank then they have little chance of winning the Senate. Mike Siegel, a Democrat who ran and lost as a populist progressive in suburban Texas, said on this weeks Deconstructed podcast that without a persuasive message coming from the top of the ticket, he was unable to convince disaffected voters that he was serious about fundamental change. Without the Senate, Biden will be a badly hobbled president, the kind that is routinely dealt a blow in the first midterm. While Spanberger and Lamb may be angry, it appears that both will still win, as will dozens of their colleagues who first won in 2018. In 2022, they may look back on this election fondly if they dont deliver something for the people who elected them.

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib encourages a resident to vote in the upcoming presidential elections in Detroit, on Oct. 18, 2020.

Photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters

The fears put forward by centrist Democrats are the flip side of the same political vision that Trump used to fuel his base. In nearly every one of his rallies this fall, he singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar for attack, arguing that she was so toxic in Minnesota that she would deliver the states suburbs to him. He made the same claim about Rep. Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and about the rising strength of the left in Philadelphia, which he singled out during the first presidential debate, claiming that bad things happen in Philadelphia.

Yet Trumps hopes were dashed. He effed around and found out, said Omaron Deconstructed when asked about Trumps strategy of demonizing her to win suburban votes. Indeed, not only did margins for Democrats expand in the suburbs in Minnesota, but Omars strength in Minneapolis also helped power Biden to the win.

The same is true of the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia, where strong left organizing catapulted Biden past Trump in two of the three states that were crucial to the incumbents 2016 victory, and a third (Minnesota) that the Trump campaign hoped desperately to flip.

In the late summer, as the GOP was knocking on a million doors per week in August, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee resisted a return to in-person canvassing even though it had become apparent that there was a safe way to do so and advised their surrogates to do the same.

In Minneapolis and Detroit, Omar and Tlaib both rejected the advice of the Biden campaign and instead sent volunteers to persuade people not just to come out to vote for their member of Congress after all, they had effectively no GOP competition in their general elections but to do their part in ousting Trump by voting for Biden. In Philadelphia, where leftist candidates have romped over the past four years, thanks in part to a robust organizing community that saw two of their leaders elected to the state House on Tuesday, unions and organizers spent the final stretch of the campaign knocking doors in areas where voters felt ignored by the Democratic Party.

Its too early to know precisely what effect the progressive canvassing operations and organizing had on the vote, as that will require a deeper dive into the data to determine how many irregular or first-time voters were pushed to the polls. Turnout surged everywhere Biden garnered more votes than any presidential candidate in history but its clear, at minimum, that Trumps high-profile attacks against Omar and Tlaib did not deliver him those states, and there is preliminary evidence that their operations were disproportionately beneficial to Biden.

In Detroit, voter turnout reached its highest point in decades, election officials reported, even as the citys population has declined by 10,000 since 2016, and 3,000 people in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, died from Covid-19. Overall in the county, Bidenwon 587,000 to 264,000, a net of 323,000 votes, though more are still left to be counted. Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in the city of Detroit by about 1,000 votes, but outperformedherby 67,630 votes throughout the entire county; that bump helped put him over the top in a state that Clinton lost by some 10,700 votes.

With about 90 percent of the votes in her district counted, Tlaib already has more than 220,000 votes, having beaten her Republican opponent by some 170,000 votes and counting. Thats a significant jump from 2016, when John Conyers Jr., who previously held the seat, won it with fewer than 200,000 votes.

Oakland County, the suburbs outside Detroit, also went strongly to Biden. Clinton netted roughly 54,000 votes there in 2016, but Biden won it by 110,000 votes.

In Minnesota, Omars district saw explosive growth in turnout, with more than 400,000 people casting votes. The district netted Biden more than 250,000 votes in a state he won by just 232,000. And despite Trumps hopes, the suburbs did not recoil at Omar, giving Biden a bigger margin than Clinton won there.

In Pennsylvania, where ballots are still being counted, Biden outperformed Clinton in Philadelphias suburbs, including Montgomery, Chester, Bucks, and Delaware counties giving him a crucial boost even as voter turnout in the city of Philadelphia dropped. In other parts of the state, he flipped back to blue the counties of Eerie and Northampton, which both voted twice for Obama before flipping for Trump.

Congressional candidate Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., left, joined by Democratic Senate candidate Tina Smith, D-Minn., speaks during a get-out-the-vote event on the University of Minnesota campus on Nov. 3, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Both Omar and Tlaib faced competitive primaries, which they won comfortably, and they never really stopped campaigning into the general election. Their teams worked together, swapping notes on how to safely canvas in a pandemic, and also worked closely with Rep. Mark Pocan, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who represents Madison, Wisconsin. Omars team made 1.4 million attempts to reach out to voters through phone, text, or in person. They knocked on more than 150,000 doors, hitting everyone in the district more than twice on average, according to Jeremy Slevin, Omars communications director. A record 400,000 people voted in the district, netting Biden 253,000 votes. Biden visited St. Paul, but not Minneapolis, where his wife Jill Biden visited early last month.

Omars campaign hired dozens of organizers to turn out voters when Minnesota started early voting in September, the Washington Post reported. They knocked throughoutOctober and up to Election Day, especially targeting voters who sat out in 2016. Omar was also one of the only Democratic Farmer-Labor Party candidates to continue canvassing, the Star Tribune reported.

Tlaibs campaign focused on voters whoturned out in 2012 and stayed home in 2016, and knocked 16,000 doors in the six weeks leading up to Election Day. They made close to 150,000 calls and sent 100,000 text messages and 100,000 pieces of mail. Our message was more about Democrats up and down the ballot, said Tlaibs Communications Director Denzel McCampbell.

In Philadelphia, Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive group focused on working-class issues founded in 2016 by local organizers, has helped grow a squad of their own in state and local office. Two Reclaim Philadelphia alums, Nikil Saval, who helped found the group, and Rick Krajewski, previously a staff organizer, won their elections to the state House on Tuesday. A coalition of local and national groups in the city including Saval and Krajewskis campaigns, other local elected officials, and unions knocked 370,000 doors in the weeks leading up to Election Day. That included West/Southwest Philly Votes, the unions Unite Here and Service Employees International Union, campaigns for State Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, and City Council Members Kendra Brooks, a WFP council member, and Jamie Gauthier. The 215 Peoples Alliance, another local grassroots group, made a total of 35,000 calls and texts to Philadelphia voters, and provided 5,650 meals to voters and poll workers with help from the Peoples Kitchen, a local food security project. National groups like For Our Future and Changing the Conversation knocked doors in Philly as well.

Renee Wilson, a member of service industry union Unite Here, canvases for Joe Biden in Philadelphia on Nov. 2, 2020.

Photo: Rachel Wisniewski/Reuters

There were a number of virtual organizing operations as well. The Working Families Partys $1.5 million Vote Today Program netted 93,400 conversations about early voting, 76,900 commitments, and more than 2,000 newly registered voters in Philadelphia. They recruited just under 500 volunteers for the effort, which extended to protests and dance parties at count every vote protests on Wednesday and Thursday. Nuestro PAC, a group that worked to turn out the Latino vote, run by former Bernie Sanders adviser Chuck Rocha, spent $2.1 million on bilingual outreach over the last four months.

Organizers with West/Southwest Philly Votes, a partnership between Krajewski and Gauthiers campaigns, knocked 20,000 doors between October 3 and Election Day, an effort that took about 345 three-hour volunteer shifts. Members from SEIUs Local 32BJ joined that effort, said Rachie Weisberg, field director for West/Southwest Philly Votes.

Reclaim partnered with the campaigns for Krajewski and Fiedler to knock doors, said Amanda McIllmurray, Reclaim Philadelphia political director and Savals campaign manager. Together with PA Stands Up, a coalition of grassroots organizing groups that grew out of a response to the 2016 election, 8,000 volunteers across local groups made just under 7 million calls, sent just under 2 million texts, and reached 400,000 voters statewide.

SEIU members also held their own canvass, knocking 70,000 doors statewide, 30,000 in Philadelphia, and 20,000 in surrounding suburbs. They also knocked doors in Allegheny, in the Western part of the state, and other areas and made 2 million calls statewide.

The most significant push came from Unite Here, a hospitality workers union that deployed hundreds of members to knock on 300,000 doors in Philadelphia between October 1 and Election Day, the largest such operation targeting Black and Latino workers in the city. Statewide, the union knocked 575,000 doors. They got 60,000 people in Philadelphia to pledge to vote for Biden, 30,000 of whom did not vote in 2016. (Trump won the state by 44,000 votes that cycle.)

We saw the effects of everything thats happened since 2016, with police brutality, right with Covid-19 and with the pandemic in general, said Brahim Douglas, vice president of Unite Here Philadelphias Local 274. We wanted to engage our neighbors in places where typically, folks dont go to, he said, like his neighborhood in North Philadelphia and where hopelessness as a result of the pandemic is prevalent.

This stuff affects our communities, said Douglas, referring to Covid-19. Last month, he lost his 21-year-old niece to the coronavirus;her 1-year-old daughter had also contracted the disease. In the Black and brown communities, Covid has affected here in Pennsylvania a lot of us. And we have a president that took that stuff for granted, and I think thats the hurtful part.

Update: November 7, 2020The article and headlinehavebeen updated to reflect Bidens official Electoral College win.

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Biden Wins, but Now the Hard Part Begins - The Intercept

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Right-wing Stop The Count protests that have sprung up in the last 72 hours to attempt to manipulate the vote-counting process in favor of Donald Trump appear to be at least partially artificially bolstered by paid Republican operatives. But unlike previous coordinated protests that have been revealed to be supported well-funded and organized conservative interests, the demonstrations have been organized largely by a collection of disgraced right-wing internet figures. Some have been all but discarded from mainstream Republican circles for being too extreme, too inept, or some combination of the two. Despite this, theyve been good at one thing: figuring out how to spin never-ending mishaps into continued careers.

The protests have grown since Election Day, with FreedomWorks and Trumps 2020 digital director getting involved in the events, according to The Guardian and Washington Post. Heres a smattering of some of the more compelling characters involved:

After one of the first 2020 primary debates, Alexander went viral claiming that Kamala Harris wasnt an American Black, because she was of Jamaican and Indian heritage, instead of descending from African-Americans who had been forced into Antebellum-era slavery.Alexander was convicted of two felonies in 2007 and 2008, and has a track record of publicly noting people for are Jewish. He made a sensationalist video with right-wing snafu generator Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer, the Islamaphobic failed Congressional candidate, wherein Wohl seemingly fakes the group receiving death threats during filming.

Alexander appears to be involved with Stop The Steal both through his tweets promoting it and through his links to one of the websites boosting it. Stopthesteal.uss domain is registered to Vice and Victory, a possibly defunct political consultancy hes affiliated with. After clicking the sites donate button, visitors are prompted with the option to donate money to one of several cryptocurrency addresses associated with Alexander, or given links to his Paypal, CashApp, and Amazon wishlist.

Its brazen, but thats typical for Alexander. On his website, he sells various tiers of access to himself, ranging from $25 a month, which gets you a spot on conference calls, all the way up to $250 a month which not only comes with the raw analysis of his private notes, but gave subscribers the ability to spend an extra $50 for an election night cheat sheeta product unavailable to most lower tier users.

Despite building a large internet profile (he has over 700,000 followers on Twitter), Mike Cernovich is avoided by mainstream conservatives, potentially because of his history of advocating for various criminal acts of sexual harassment. In one now-deleted 2012 post on his blog, he encouraged his readers to When in Doubt, Whip it Out, in a Louis C.K. manner. Cernovich has also posted tweets that make proclamations like date rape doesnt exist. In 2017 when he seemingly worked with alt-right figure Charles Johnson to boost a forged document falsely accusing Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) of sexual assault.

Cernovich also boosted Pizzagate, the thoroughly debunked prequel to QAnon, a conspiracy which claimed that children were being kept in the basement of a local pizza restaurant in D.C. as part a pedophile ring being run by liberal elites.

Cernovich took the chance to use the post-election period to raise his flagging profile by doing a seven-hour road trip to Arizona, where he claimed to lead a protest to monitor the election, from which he proceeded to film the unrest he helped aggravate. Alexander also on Twitter praised Cernovichs trolling work in Stop The Steal protests.

Kremer, a former Tea Party organizer, has more substantial links to the Republican power apparatus, and a history of showing up toright-wing protests with heels on. The former Delta flight attendant came on the scene in 2009, and has flitted from one political action committee to another, trying to replicate the grassroots conservative heyday of the Tea partyand its money-minting fundraising appeal.

Kremer was an early Trump supporter in 2016, starting a political action committee called TrumPAC to support his insurgent campaign. The PAC ran afoul of campaign finance rules for using the name of a candidate without their permission. It was rebranded the Great America PAC, which she left after a falling out, after which she went on to join with the ex-wife of Trump adviser Roger Stone to launch yet another pro-Trump super PAC, Women Vote Trump, that pledged to raise $30 million to support Trumps 2016 ampaign for president. The group came up $29,973,187 short of that goal, went into debt, and also got in trouble with the FEC for the unauthorized use of a candidates name.

Kremers own political career hasnt fared much better. In 2017, she jumped into a Georgia Republican congressional primary; two months before the special election, her staff quit en masse, claiming that she couldnt pay them.

Money problems have been a consistent theme with her efforts. In October 2018, Kremer started a new nonprofit, Women for America Firstthe organization formally behind http://www.stolenelection.us, the website emblazoned on posters at Stop the Steal protests. Donations through that website are directed to Kremers nonprofit. The group also appears to have been involved in the Stop the Steal Facebook page. Last year, the same group organized a Stop the Coup anti-impeachment rally in DC that might have been a much bigger affairif the buses scheduled to bring hundreds of activists from other states had actually departed. Instead, two hours before the busses were slated to leave, the tour company cancelled the trips because Kremers groups credit card had been declined.

Posobiec, who Alexander has said has a role in the protests, has also been tweeting in support of them, and personally showed up at the groups Harrisburg, Pennsylvania demonstration.

Posbiecs biggest claim to fame is being one of the highest-profile pushers of the Pizzagate conspiracy:

[Posobiec] once conducted a livestream investigation of the restaurant where the [Pizzagate] hoax pedophile ring was said to be occurring, during which he waltzed into a childs birthday party being held in a back room. Since then, he acts as though hes been locked in a John Wooden-esque competition with himself to outdo his greatest disinformation achievement.

Since Pizzagate, instead of amplifying other already existing conspiracies, Posobiec has usually been focused on his own, artisanally crafted solo concoctions. He once stopped a performance of Shakespeares Julius Caesar mid-production in New York because he was offended the centuries-old work had been staged with elements that seemed to reference Trump. I once witnessed him dash around the lawn of the Capitol telling Democratic Senators that supporting net neutrality would mean that they were supporting Satanic porn.

Some of his most repugnant hits include trying to plant Rape Melania signs at an anti-Trump rally, falsely tweeting that Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch had called for blood in the streets, a made-up claim that Star Wars Rogue One was being rewritten to include scenes calling Trump racist, and, after Republican congressman Steve Scalise was shot at baseball practice, that Bernie Sanders had told his followers to take down Trump.

None of rose to Pizzagate levels of fame, but not for lack effort on Posobiecs part. He has also tweeted in support of a white nationalist conspiracy which holds that immigration and other trends are part of a secret plot to commit white genocide.

As a member of Alexanders Twitter crew, Coudrey promoted and seemingly helped organize a Stop The Steal rally in in Las Vegas,

Coudrey used to go by Mike Tokes on Twitter, but has rebranded as a more serious, GOP insider. That has not stopped him from putting out a steady stream of falsehoods. Lately his disinformation has focused on the election, but he has a broader history.During the 2019 California wildfires, he pushed the claim that the damage showed something more nefarious than a simple forest fire, feeding into a larger theory about direct energy beams. Earlier that year, he spread disinformation falesly claiming that Twitter had censored news of a coronavirus treatment to make Trump look bad, and made up fantastically untrue stories about Antifa disguising themselves in MAGA hats and NRA shirts to incite violence.

Since Tuesday, amid his roll in the protests hes been busy spreading wholly unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in Wisconsin.

Presler helped arrange the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Stop The Steal event, but hes best known for his 2017 March Against Sharia, which ended up being about Islmaphobic as the name suggested. Presler worked with Joey Gibson, leader of the violent, far-right group Patriot Prayer, on the eventually cancelled Portland edition of the event.

Since then, he hasnt managed to make much of a splash, aside from an elaborate concern trolling campaigns in which he travels to various cities staging trash clean up events or asking homeless people whether the government should prioritize their needs over immigrants, as the local San Francisco publication Mission Local put it.

Stephanie Mencimer contributed to this story.

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Four years ago, Steve Bannon watched Donald Trump declare victory in the small hours of election night in 2016, a victory for which Bannon assigned himself much of the credit and which he thought would make him historically powerful.

I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors, Bannon notoriously told the journalist Michael Wolff in an interview after Trumps win.

Cromwell, Henry VIIIs adviser who played a key role in the English state in the 1500s, eventually fell out of favor with the king and was beheaded, the 16th-century version of Bannons banishment from the White House and Trumps good graces in the summer of 2017. Four years later, as Trump loses the presidency while clinging desperately to false claims of a stolen election, it is Bannon who wants to do the beheading. Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci, Bannon said on his livestream web show Thursday of the current FBI director and top infectious diseases official. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I'd put the heads on pikes, right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. Bannons cohost mused about how traitors used to be hung, and Bannon remarked, That's how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn't some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. (Twitter swiftly imposed a permanent ban on Bannons shows account, and YouTube removed the video.)

Bannons call for the execution of federal officials deemed insufficiently supportive of Trump was certainly an escalation for him though not much of one, coming the day after he urged the attorney general to send federal agents to arrest Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. But hes far from alone among certain segments of the MAGA hardcore who have been crossing new rhetorical lines in their desperation to keep Trump in office.

An important divide has arrived on the right in the immediate aftermath of the election over how far to go in following Donald Trump, and how far people are willing to go to destroy others who dont follow along. At the heart of the divide is a gap between those triangulating for a future without Trump and those who are refusing to imagine one.

Those that were important before Trump like Fox News and certain elected Republicans have walked a fine line, softly entertaining Trumps wild lies about rigging while focusing more on the need for further transparency or proof and making loaded remarks about the elections processes in Democratic cities like Philadelphia.

Those that owe their influence to Trump the network of far-right Internet personalities, websites, and independent TV channels that gained popularity by riding his coattails, or figures who remodeled themselves in Trumps image have hewed to or exceeded Trumps claims.

As the days dragged on and it became increasingly clear that Trumps path had closed, influential figures such as the members of the Fox News primetime lineup began to shift their emphasis, testing out attacks on the incoming Biden administration and offering glowing praise of Trumps tenure in office. Trumps attempt to contest the results continued, but true hope that it would be successful had waned on all but the fringe.

Steve Bannon exits the Manhattan Federal Court on August 20 in New York City.

The MAGA diehards efforts to throw out the election will be futile. But their influence on the Trump-supporting base is important, and affects both the future of the conservative media and the way the Republican Party will handle Trumps most adoring fans going forward. Trumps supporters have spent the last four years being told that the president is the victim of a huge conspiracy to undermine him, and many will never believe that this election was legitimate a fact that hasnt been lost on Republicans deciding how to react to this crisis. The closest parallel could be to the Tea Party a decade ago, a movement fueled by hard-right conservative media that demanded ideological purity from establishment Republicans and threatened their seats in Congress.

The fragmentation of conservative media has empowered the loudest voices calling to stop the steal and weakened any possibility that reality will intrude on those who are consuming their news through the hodgepodge of fringe sources popular on the Trump right these days.

On the final weekend of the campaign, I asked voters at Trump rallies where they got their news. Some did mention Fox News, but I was surprised that nearly everyone I talked to emphasized other sources just as much or more. The Parrishes, a retired couple who went to Trumps rally in Hickory, North Carolina, told me they didnt like Fox News apart from Tucker Carlson, finding the hosts too egotistical and arrogant, said Mary Ellen Parrish, and that theres a lot of deception, her husband Chuck said. The couple mostly get their information online: Mary Ellen from Twitter and Chuck from YouTube, where he has discovered the "flat Earth" conspiracy theory, to which he ascribes.

Jerry Senn, 82, at Trumps rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, mentioned One America News Network and Newsmax as his favorites, though he likes Fox too. He goes online to read Bill OReilly and Dennis Pragers websites. Jennifer Justice, 34, at the same rally, said, I don't watch mainstream news. I follow a lot of people on YouTube and on alternative media, but I don't watch Fox. I don't watch MSNBC. I dont watch CNN. Some of her favorites include Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, and Candace Owens. Multiple voters mentioned how much news they get from Facebook.

Already, Trump family members and some of the new wave of Trump-like politicians are using Trumps popularity with the base to threaten any Republican who doesnt publicly agree with the fraud allegations. The total lack of action from virtually all of the 2024 GOP hopefuls is pretty amazing. They have a perfect platform to show that theyre willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead. Dont worry @realDonaldTrump will fight & they can watch as usual! Donald Trump Jr. tweeted on Thursday. The implicit threat of Trumps wrath worked, kind of: Shortly after Trump Jrs tweet, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton weighed in, tweeting, All votes that are *legally* cast should be counted. There is NO excuse not to allow poll watchers to observe counting, and including a link to donate to Trumps campaign to support its legal challenges in various states.

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who served as Trumps ambassador to the United Nations, struck a more cautious note on Twitter, emphasizing Republican wins in the House and Senate. We all owe @realDonaldTrump for his leadership of conservative victories for Senate, House, & state legislatures. He and the American people deserve transparency & fairness as the votes are counted. The law must be followed. We have to keep the faith that the truth will prevail. This was not enough for Trump purists. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, an archetypal member of the MAGA wave, sniped at Haley, accusing her of eulogizing Trump.

Bannons maximalist position is shared by other former Trump officials, including those of the populist intellectual variety who had been part of the effort to reframe Trumpism as a movement with a clear ideological basis. Former White House speechwriter Darren Beattie who lost his job after it was revealed that he had spoken at a white nationalist conference tweeted on Thursday, Screw Biden... if they take this from Trump it's war on the GOP that has sabotaged Trump from the beginning even as they rode his coat tails and kissed his ass. While lacking the eloquence that perhaps was exhibited in Beatties speechwriting work, the language and the message is the same: This is a war, which must be won at any cost.

Michael Anton, Trumps former National Security Council spokesperson who had gained notoriety as the author of the incendiary Flight 93 Election essay in 2016, wrote for the pro-Trump website American Greatness casting the situation as a coup.

Anton appeared on Tucker Carlsons Fox News show on Thursday to discuss the situation. Carlson like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, the other two hosts who command huge audiences during Fox News primetime has devoted his show to openly sowing doubt in the legitimacy of the election, giving valuable airtime to the misinformation spreading through the right about the validity of the counting process. While none of the three have matched Trumps stolen language, they have heavily implied it.

But something else began happening on Fox News. During the daytime, the news division hasnt indulged Trumps election claims as much as might have been expected; another News Corp property, the New York Post, has run articles mocking the Trump familys reaction to the election.

And in the evenings, the primetime opinion hosts have also provided potential rhetorical pathways for Trump to back off.

On Wednesday night, Ingraham made a point of praising Trumps accomplishments and casting him as a martyr whose influence would only increase if the Democrats win. If they manage to succeed, how powerful is Donald Trump in the next two- and four-year period? she said. People arent going to take it. Trump and his movement, she said, would be made much more powerful, and Democrats were making a huge mistake. He will be bigger, agreed her guest Newt Gingrich. By Friday, Ingraham was all but admitting that Trump had lost. During an opening monologue that seemed designed to cheer up Trump himself, Ingraham warmly listed his first-term accomplishments and assured viewers that If there is no path for Donald Trump's second term, it doesn't mean the end of the America First movement."

Fox News host Tucker Carlson

The same night, Carlson also acknowledged that Trump might lose and focused his show on an attack on Biden as a lackey of Big Tech and a hologram who is merely a cutout for corporate interests. Carlson also previewed the kind of intra-Republican infighting that could be on the agenda, attacking Sen. Lindsey Graham despite Graham groveling to Trump for years, and pledging to give $500,000 in support of his postelection litigation for saying he is open to compromising with Democrats on immigration.

These lines signal a path forward for the right, and for Trump supporters, that is absent in the rhetoric of the dead-enders like Bannon. If you insist that Trump has won, period, and will be inaugurated on Jan. 20, period, theres nowhere to go from there.

But where is there to go for people like Bannon without Trump?

On election night, Bannons War Room show hosted a livestream atop a building across from the Capitol.

Four broadcasts were taking place from a large white tent on the rooftop: his show, Americas Voice News, The John Fredericks Show, and GTV, a Chinese-language media company owned by the Chinese dissident billionaire Guo Wengui, for whom Bannon has worked since shortly after leaving the White House. The big, brightly lit tent contained a few rows of tables, technical equipment for the livestreams, catered food and drinks, and couches arranged in front of TVs showing Bannons broadcast. Bannon and his cohosts, Jack Maxey and former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam, sat side by side at a table with the Capitol dome in the back of the shot. GTV was in a separate area, broadcasting in Chinese.

Two years ago, Bannon had hosted a similar event as midterm results came in; that time, his gathering had attracted bigger names in MAGA world and a clutch of reporters. This year, I hardly recognized anyone in the large white tent housing the event; the real VIPs were at the White Houses election night party, and the tier below at least got an invite to a gathering hosted by the campaign at the Trump International Hotel.

That these were not the MAGA A-list didnt reduce their enthusiasm. With my friend and former colleague who was also there to write about the event, the Atlantic writer McKay Coppins, I spoke with Harlan Hill, a right-wing personality who had carved out a niche for himself as a Bernie Sanders supporter who had switched to Trump. Hill, like nearly all of the guests, wore no mask, and when we introduced ourselves he shook our hands jovially. He was fully confident in Trumps reelection and eager to discuss it. Oh, he's gonna win, Hill declared. A hundred percent. He added, If it goes the other way, Ill eat my shoe."

Outside the tent, we encountered Kassam on a break from the livestream. Kassam had left Breitbart News in 2018 and had gone on to work for Bannon during Bannons failed effort to influence European politics. Upon seeing us, he demanded that Coppins leave, insisting that he wouldnt be fair, without being able to provide a single example of why that would be when pressed. Kassam unleashed a string of insults on the dark rooftop. We were psychopaths, he said, who actually make shit up. Though his ire was initially directed towards Coppins, he turned on me as soon as I argued with him, demanding that I leave too. I told him I found his behavior unnerving, to which he remarked cryptically that there were cameras around thus, I supposed, no reason to be unnerved. (I still dont know what he was implying might have happened in the absence of cameras.)

We explained to Kassam that Bannon and his spokesperson Alexandra Preate had both said it was fine for us to come, and he promptly turned heel and fetched Preate, who told us she was sorry but she had no choice but to back his insistence that we leave, since it was his party. Before leaving, we reminded the two of them that wed attended the event in a journalistic capacity and had never agreed to any off-the-record ground rules, which prompted Kassam to turn on his phones camera (with flash) and follow us out as we left while filming us and shouting that we were not there as reporters!

Kassams behavior was more surprising than scary. Id never seen him blow up like that in person, and, because of my work covering the right, I have known him for several years. It seemed as though a pressure valve had been released by the bitter election and the prospect of Trumps power slipping away, destroying the normal boundaries between Twitter and real life.

Later this week, both Hill and Kassam were in Philadelphia, agitating against the vote-counting there as Trumps chances of winning the election grew more and more remote. Im going to Philly tomorrow with a team, Hill tweeted on Thursday. This is war.

By Saturday, the war was lost. Along with the other networks, Fox News called the election for Biden.

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The MAGA Movement Is Splintering Between Those Preparing For A Future Without Trump And Those Refusing To Imagine One - BuzzFeed News