Episode 134: Ali Alexander & Stop The Steal feat Luke O'Brien
"Stop The Steal" organizer Ali Alexander is the topic of this week's episode. We are joined by investigative journalist Luke O'Brien, who wrote a lengthy piece on Alexander.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 134 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Ali Alexander episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
It's the quintessential story of the American dream, how a young man from Texas changed his name to sound less foreign and undertook a self-styled career as a far-right-wing operative, discovering in himself the talent to raise money from aging Republican moneymen.
He eventually became one of the figureheads of the so-called Stop the Steal movement, a series of rallies and protests across the country designed to undermine election results, culminating in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
His collaborators along the way included a cross-generational coterie of right-wing grifters like Alex Jones, Roger Stone, Jacob Wohl, Laura Loomer, and Mike Cernovich.
Alexander also sent a tweet to AOC once, saying, quote, Later, Alexander would come to draw up plans for a city in South America named after him.
Our guest this week is Luke O'Brien, a journalist who recently wrote an extensive piece on Alexander for the Huffington Post.
But before we get into all that, QAnon News!
First up, General Flynn speaks at a QAnon event in Fort Myers, Florida.
So after everything that has happened, I kind of assumed that people would scatter from QAnon, at least the big names.
It's toxic now, I thought, but that appears to be not the case because General Flynn teamed up with the people over at Red Pill Roadshow Yeah, and they worked with this guy called Florida Conservative, who's also a kind of operative and PAC guy in that area.
And to be clear, it appears that the Red Pill Roadshow was an issue because of the QAnon connotations, and they lost a venue and had to go to another venue.
In the process, one of their sponsors, the Matrix Groove Show, was sidelined because there were higher GOP people at the function.
So they were basically not very happy.
They're pissed off with the Red Pill Roadshow people now because they weren't put up front and center.
They weren't allowed a moment to speak with the other sponsors.
So it's kind of like this weird dance that's happening right now with Flynn and organizations like the Red Pill Roadshow, slightly more legit operations like the Florida Conservative, and then like actual GOP moneymen.
Yeah, you know, I think we really are kind of seeing how all those factors are trying to figure out what the relationship is now.
Because, like we talked about before, the money men, they still want the QAnon caucus supporting them with bodies and money and whatever, but they know that the brand is troublesome because it gets them booted out of venues and stuff.
Exactly.
It's like how do we retain the fans but lose sort of the influencers that kind of make us look, you know, not as official?
And the way that the Red Pill Roadshow dealt with this is that on their website, they just had a line that said, this is not a QAnon event.
Duh.
Well, not duh, because you organized a bunch of them in the past.
Sorry if I don't duh on that one.
Yeah, we've attended two events organized by Red Pill Roadshow because they were clearly QAnon events attended by QAnon followers, hosted by QAnon followers.
And I would imagine that these events, despite being not QAnon, duh, are still attended by QAnon believers and supporters.
Yeah.
That's right, because a big, beautiful In the Matrix flag was signed by our General Flynn, and he signed it with where we go when we go all.
He's also appeared on their fucking show, so where's the doubt here?
Actually, I have a funny story.
A friend of mine who's a reporter tried to get into this event.
He called up the organizers, and he tried to persuade them, and they said there was no media, but this reporter insisted.
And the organizers said, okay, you can come to the event, but you have to wear a clown suit so you can be easily identified.
Nice.
And he did not agree to this condition, so that's why he was not covered.
Yeah.
I mean, I was listening to the In the Matrix groove show and they were speaking directly to Donnie and saying, like, we will accept to be interviewed by you if you take back all of your lies about, like, the vote and all this stuff.
So Donnie has been given the choice to basically share misinformation on the air or never get an interview with In the Matrix.
And so I think we know what he's going to choose.
He's about to burn his whole career down to the ground.
Of course.
As many do chasing QAnon.
This is what you do.
For my next story, QAnon groups turn their attention to vaccine skepticism.
I've been getting asked a lot like what QAnon is talking about now that the March 4th fiasco is over and if there's gonna be like a new date that they're predicting and I haven't really seen like a new date of Trump's glorious return that they've set so far.
But I have seen a lot of QAnon groups on Telegram and Gab be very intensely focused on spreading disinformation about the safety and efficacy of the many vaccines that people are currently getting to hopefully end this pandemic sometime later this year.
For example, numerous QAnon groups are pushing March 20th as a worldwide rally for freedom, which again isn't specifically a QAnon event, but it is probably going to be heavily attended by QAnon followers all over the world.
It kind of reminds me of the Save the Children movement.
Sure.
Yeah.
And the way that is sort of like it masks the conspiracism that's motivated a little bit.
And so, yeah.
I mean, these are all kind of like nodes of entry into a conspiracy matrix.
So they can always shift to like a more functional node that's still able to take people in, like anti-vax, like save the children from pedophiles or whatever.
These are all, again, kind of like I think this is going to be, I guess, part of the function of QAnon from here on out, is that they're going to work to juice up these kinds of protest movements.
it as QAnon, but those have been largely shut down.
So, of course, it's mutating and it's out of sight now.
And it'll be the winky word.
freedom, as they call it.
Of course, you're going to welcome QAnon followers in order to, like, have a good turnout.
And it'll be the winky word.
It'll be the little, like, friend of Q. Ali Alexander and Stop the Steal.
There are a lot of factors that led to the Capitol riot of January 6th, but a major one was the Stop the Steal campaign.
This was a disinformation campaign that spread false rumors of election fraud that really had been years in the making.
The campaign was first the brainchild of Roger Stone, who started pushing it during the 2016 Republican primaries.
Stone first claimed that the Republican establishment was going to steal the nomination from Trump.
Then, when that didn't happen, at least not successfully, he updated Stop the Steal for the general election, claiming that Hillary would win fraudulently.
But it wasn't until 2020 that Stop the Steal really caught fire.
On November 4th, the day after the election, a Stop the Steal Facebook group amassed hundreds of thousands of followers before it was shut down the day after.
In the following months, Stop the Steal would be the main rallying cry of those who didn't want to recognize Biden's win.
A major organizer of Stop the Steal was a younger Republican operative, Ali Alexander.
In a video, Alexander claimed that he conceived of the gathering on January 6th that led to the insurrection.
He further claimed that he got help from his connections in Congress.
I was the person who came up with the January 6th idea with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks, and then Congressman Andy Biggs.
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 war from outside.
On the day of January 6th, Alexander assumed a high vantage point in Washington D.C.
and watched the results of his campaign.
A massive crowd of angry Trump supporters swarming the Capitol building.
There he clearly stated that he did not disavow what was going on.
This is We The People.
The growing frustrations of the government and what's happening now is exactly what I've warned about.
I've said that we need to make fair elections and transparent counting so that the people do not feel like the last resort is public demonstrations like this.
Now, I want to say something.
I don't disavow this.
I do not denounce this.
This is completely peaceful, looks like so far, and there are a couple of agitators that I obviously don't endorse, but this is completely peaceful.
This is we the people, and this will only grow.
Recently, journalist Luke O'Brien published an extensive investigation about Alexander's career and activities for the Huffington Post, and I want to cover some of the highlights of that great report.
Ali Alexander was born in the mid-80s in Texas as Ali Abdul Razak Akbar.
According to him, 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 as a teenager, he was a conservative political junkie who liked to talk about the big sponsors he'd land as a Washington, D.C.
power player.
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 later that year for stealing property.
A month afterwards, he was arrested again for debit card abuse.
In 2007 and 2008, the charges resulted in felony convictions.
But that didn't stop him from establishing himself as a GOP operative.
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 pushed birtherism.
Even at the beginning of his career, he was a dedicated party man.
In 2008, he was a member of the Republican National Convention floor operations team and a contributor to a blog called Hip Hop Republican.
Come on!
Yeah, I know.
By 2009, at the latest, he was attending the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.
That year, former New York State Assembly Republican leader Jim Tedisco brought on Alexander to run his online campaign in a special congressional election.
Alexander worked on Tea Party news sites and helped Tea Party candidates boost their online presence.
In 2010, Alexander got an upgrade in his career when he started getting that sweet dark money from the billionaire Koch brothers.
The majority of my work and my money comes from electoral politics.
a company called Vice and Victory Agency.
It received more than $40,000 from a Tea Party PAC that Politico later dubbed a scam PAC.
Alexander later explained how this worked.
The majority of my work and my money comes from electoral politics.
So super PACs, billionaires, and millionaires approach me to make sure that their money is going to causes that they believe in.
He's so candid.
I represent the interests of billionaires.
Billionaires want the world to look a certain way and I help them.
In 2011, Alexander got even closer to the heart of Republican Party power when he gave a presentation to the conservative training organization, The Leadership Institute.
That organization's notable alumni include neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach, who once said in 2016 that the Leadership Institute had trained, quote, this entire next generation of white nationalists.
Alexander forged other connections with prominent conservatives through an afterparty for bloggers that he helped organize at CPAC, Cool.
which he dubbed Blog Bash.
Blog Bash was sponsored at times by organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, Facebook, and the Koch Brothers Libertarian Freedom Works organization.
The money was rolling in for Alexander, and his dreams of being a Republican power player were coming to fruition.
By 2014, Alexander had landed a gig as a communications director for the Republican Leadership Conference.
This was a smaller, southern version of CPAC.
That year, future president Donald Trump was a featured speaker.
He and Alexander met for the very first time.
That meeting was probably just a brief meet-and-greet that a lot of people did, but Alexander claimed that he and Trump spoke for 45 minutes.
He later extended the meeting, in his story, to four hours.
Trump couldn't get enough.
Yeah, couldn't get enough of the Alexander.
He kept just saying, another Diet Coke so I can listen to this kid!
As Trump ascended to the presidency in 2016, Alexander joined a ring of propagandists and white nationalists orbiting Steve Bannon.
But his closest colleague at the time was Lucian Wintrich, who would soon become the White House correspondent for The Gateway Pundit.
In 2017, Wintrich and Alexander caught the eye of extremism researchers when they hosted a podcast with a white nationalist named Matt Culligan, who had marched with a tiki torch at the Charlottesville rally.
During the podcast, Alexander jokingly threw up a Sieg Heil.
Colgan hoisted a Nazi flag behind him, which prompted laughter from Alexander.
I love to just have one of those laying around.
Yeah, this is my joke Nazi flag.
And he's also he's joking about doing Sieg Heil.
Everything's so funny.
A month later, Alexander and Mike Cernovich attended the wedding of Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec.
In the summer of 2017, Alexander teamed up with Posobiec to speak at a rally for peace in front of the White House.
That rally 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 speech about the media that had an audience member screaming about communist scum.
Sounds like a good time.
Yeah.
By the end of 2017, Alexander and Roger Stone himself were hanging out together.
In 2018, Alexander's social media star was on the rise.
He even got a boost from Kanye West.
This is the year after he threatened to murder AOC on the platform.
That's right.
Yeah.
Great.
Yeah.
And also this was also during the period that West seemed to be going full MAGA, wearing a Make America Great Again hat.
Interesting era.
So West retweeted a video of Alexander defending Yeezy from Republicans.
The video was viewed over a million times.
It's not called free thinking or free speech because it gets policed.
It's actually the lack of policing it that makes free thinking free thinking.
And this is my warning to conservatives and Republicans, my fellow conservatives and Republicans.
Kanye West is a Republican.
And Kanye West is going to say stuff that we disagree with.
And Kanye West is going to, you know, do all kinds of things.
Maybe even some disgusting things, you know, but that doesn't matter.
I don't care that this benefits the Republican Party.
I think it might.
But I'm not really worried about that.
I'm really not worried about that.
In fact, I'm thinking about leaving the Republican Party.
Again.
You think Kanye is a libertarian?
He's not!
Stop it!
He's not!
When you have a political label, it makes you an ideologue.
Alexander then began talking with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
It's a bit of a mystery how this relationship happened.
In February 2018, Alexander revealed on Instagram that he and Dorsey had been, quote, talking for the past several months about how people with different beliefs could coexist on Twitter.
Alexander claimed that he and Dorsey discussed problems disproportionately affecting conservatives, so he claimed, on the platform and that the Twitter CEO stressed that mistakes had been made and Twitter needs to serve everyone going forward.
According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, in August of 2018, Dorsey quietly sought Alexander's advice about whether to ban far-right conspiracist Alex Jones from the site.
Dorsey later said this of his relationship with Alexander.
I was introduced to him by a friend, and you know, he's got interesting points.
I don't obviously agree with most, but I think the perspective is interesting.
You know, there are lots of people with interesting perspectives that aren't, you know, far-right extremist operatives, you know?
Though Roger Stone kicked off Stop the Steal, his efforts paled in comparison to what Alexander would eventually pull off.
First, Alexander would field test the campaign for the midterm elections in Florida.
In that state, a tight 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 furious and baselessly cried foul.
Scott talked about unethical liberals trying to steal this election.
Trump alleged election fraud.
Senator Marco Rubio 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.
Even the Republican National Committee got involved, tweeting this.
We cannot let lawyers and special interests from Washington steal this election.
When Scott emerged victorious, Alexander took credit.
In 2019, Alexander scored an invite to the White House for Trump's social media summit.
He had finally arrived at the top.
That same year, he also boasted of his political prowess by comparing himself to communist and Nazi leaders.
Goebbels and Lenin, smart men, evil men, but they have nothing on me in terms of social engineering.
Steve Bannon compared himself to Lenin, too.
Of course, Steve Bannon also compared himself to Darth Vader.
These people are weird.
They like villains.
I'd love to say that I'm like Lenin, but I'm not an ideologue.
Okay, bro.
As soon as it became clear on November 4th that Trump would likely lose the election, Alexander and his allies swung into action on social media.
The daughter of Amy Kremer, who is 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 did not hide.
On November 9th, he tweeted this.
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 vote.
For the next two months, Twitter 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 even last long, according to Alexander.
He later told the Epoch Times that he used his relationships with Twitter to get that block reversed.
Stop the Steal 2020 kicked off in earnest on November 4th in Phoenix, outside of the Maricopa County Recorder's Office.
Alexander organized the event on Twitter with Representative Gosar, whom Alexander called the spirit animal of Stop the Steal.
Now, Julia and I actually, we attended that days-long protest.
Yeah.
It was a good time.
You know, it featured militia members, had Boogaloo boys.
They're proud boys.
Alex Jones dropped by to yell at everybody.
Yeah.
Alex Jones.
That was that was incredible.
See, Charlie Kirk was there.
The Q Shaman.
The Q Shaman showed up.
Cernovich.
It seemed like the whole party was there.
Yeah.
Alexander had two stop-the-steal trial runs in Washington before the Capitol attack.
On November 14th, he staged the Million MAGA March, promotional material for which had spread widely among violent extremist groups.
Groups such as the Oath Keepers, Patriot Prayer, and American Guards showed up.
In an interview on that day, Alexander characterized Biden's electoral victory as a coup.
This is truly systematic and systemic cheating.
And it is unique.
It is evil.
It is corrupt.
It is in league with some of our worst enemies that are painted as people that we need to appease, like Beijing, China, the Communist Party.
And we don't need to appease them.
And so we really, really, really have to fight this now.
We can't wait for next year or reforms or anything like that.
This isn't basic corruption.
There's a coup going on.
And worst, Our mainstream media has partnered with authoritarian forces and violent thugs in the streets.
This is a perfect situation of good versus evil.
Alexander's next Stop the Steal event in Washington took place on December 12th.
Far-right extremists such as Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin promoted it.
General Flynn spoke at a portion of the rally called the Jericho March, which had a website stating that, quote, globalists, socialists, and communists were trying to destroy America through fraudulent and illegal activities in this election.
On January 5th, Proud Boys and other extremists, including white supremacists on the FBI's terrorist watch list, flooded into Washington.
Roger Stone was spotted with an Oath Keeper security detail.
That morning, Alexander tweeted that he was considering issuing an order to supporters to occupy D.C.
until a negotiated settlement could be reached.
So, he's literally just advocating for an overthrow of the United States government.
After the Capitol riot, the Stop the Steal team, they started backpedaling, they scattered, they did damage control.
Posobiec and Gates spread disinformation about Antifa causing the violence.
Arizona representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar reportedly solicited preemptive presidential pardons from Trump.
Charlie Kirk, who talked about building up the infantry and bringing in 80 busloads of protesters to fight for the president, held an excuse-laden press conference.
Alexander himself reportedly went to hiding, claiming that Antifa was after him.
This is when tech companies finally decided that they couldn't have him on their platforms anymore, and they de-platformed him, which he likened to dying.
Despite this, he kept producing livestreams.
Four days after the insurrection, he broadcast from inside a vehicle rolling through the dark through an undisclosed location.
The next day, while wearing the same clothes, he streamed from inside a building.
So he always claimed that he was the victim, he was being targeted.
He compared himself to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X even compared himself to Jesus Christ Saying this I had to be crucified from social media in order for social media to end and I will fucking end social media That's famously something that Jesus said as well.
I'll Alexander claimed that his life was in danger and they required funds to pay for a security team.
Over and over again, he promoted his page on this website called GiveSendGo, which is a Christian crowdfunding platform that's used by many far-right extremists.
At first, Alexander said that he needed $40,000, but the next day he demanded $100,000.
He said that if he didn't get the money, we'd all die, which is, I don't know, a good sales pitch, I'd say, if you want money.
He did manage to raise over $30,000 on Give Cengo.
He talked about creating a new society exclusively for Trump supporters and about building MAGA megacities in the U.S.
and in South America.
Including, yeah, in South America was going to be called the City of Alexander.
Yeah.
So just create his own utopia.
Is Trump supporting?
He's a far cry villain.
He also wanted to make lists of his enemies.
The only outcome left, he said, was civil war.
Alexander craved revenge.
In a livestream video that he filmed while sitting in his car in the dark, Alexander expressed his religiously infused rage.
So, rest assure in this.
You know, the Lord says vengeance is his, and I pray that I am the tool To stab these motherfuckers.
This begins the rebellion.
And I will not bow before an illegitimate government.
Not now.
Not tomorrow.
Not if they imprison me.
Not if they question me.
Not if they poison me.
Not if they behead me.
They can go to hell.
I'm going to heaven.
The people who want to be in my crowd, they can be in my crowd.
But you are not, you are not going to rule over us with your Alinsky type rules.
You and Lucifer and Alinsky and all the fat people Who refuse to sign up for Jenny Craig can go fuck yourselves.
Okay?
Go fuck yourselves.
To all of you people who called patriots domestic terrorists, y'all can go fuck yourselves.
To all of you people who say that Christians can't cuss, y'all can go fuck yourselves.
The nation is in peril.
They are trying to rape your children.
They are closing our churches and keeping us from the sacrament so that they can open a gateway to hell.
Go fuck yourself.
OK.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's wow.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
What was he was he just doing like like completely randomly among all of the rest.
Just just saying fat people are bad.
Yes.
Yes.
What was also he's just like yeah.
Satanist Democrats and fat people.
He hates them all equally.
He's like Saul Alinsky of, you know, the Manifesto for Communists.
Fat people!
I hate them too!
I'm gonna stab everybody!
Very dumb.
I hate fat people and I also hate people that are opening a portal to hell.
Yeah, all these things are the same.
And he says all this in like a nice, you know, like North Face fleece or whatever.
Like, you know, sitting comfortably with all of his freedoms, you know, fully intact.
Yeah, the freedom to live in your car like the rest of America, baby.
This is Ali Alexander's America.
Interview with Luke O'Brien.
I am joined now by investigative journalist Luke O'Brien.
He has covered disinformation and extremism for the Huffington Post, Politico Magazine, Deadspin, Wired News, and other publications.
Today we're talking about his recent investigation headlined, How Republican Politics and Twitter Created Ali Alexander, the Man Behind Stop the Steal.
Luke, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Yeah, happy to be here.
So your article was a really fascinating character study into Alexander.
But the main question I had while reading it was like, what's wrong with this guy?
Because he seems like someone who has like a chip on the shoulder, not someone who's just merely motivated by money and power.
So what do you think really drives him?
Yeah, well, that is actually a question that I always have with these guys because they do tend to hue to kind of a similar psychological profile, if you will.
And, you know, I'm talking about far-right influencers, activists, extremists.
So with Ali in particular, Ali Alexander, I would just say first that I went really deep on his ties to a network of bad actors and Republican operatives and the harm that was being caused by that network.
And I needed to, and the story was long, but that also often protects some of these guys from a different kind of investigative reporting, which is Getting more into their personal backgrounds, like, you know, examining their childhoods and sort of their psychological journey to radicalization.
So I touched on that in this Ali Alexander piece, but I feel like I only kind of scratched the surface, really.
So I can't answer too definitively, but what I can tell you from what I saw is that it lines up with things that I've seen in other extremists and that is that there is some kind of like something in their past it's like a deep ego wound that none of them were really equipped to handle and they never really healed from and it changed them and set them on this path toward becoming more radical.
So these guys are often Frankly, just like wounded boys who never really either got the love that they wanted or the support that they wanted or the recognition that they wanted.
And that usually is what drives them.
It does manifest in kind of this lust for power and significance and often a desire to to get money while doing whatever they do.
And usually it's it's any.
Anything goes with these guys, you know to to satisfy these psychological needs but really underneath it all I think it's kind of this need for revenge and and so you're getting into some You're getting into some stuff that that is hard to Without being like a psychologist.
It's hard to speak to definitively but with Ali Alexander I would I you know if I were doing the the full kind of Background profile of this guy for for like an investigative profile about him rather than so much his network I would drill down on his childhood.
I would drill down on things that he said about his father leaving his family And abandoning him when he was two years old that seems to have have affected him deeply as as it would anybody I'm sure but his father very interestingly was an immigrant and He was from the UAE, I believe.
And Ali Alexander used to be known as Ali Akbar.
And so his father's name was Akbar.
And he abandoned the family, according to Alexander, when Alexander was two years old.
How I would interpret that in terms of what he ended up becoming as an adult is in this way.
He threw in his lot Early on as a young adult with this movement that is very anti-immigrant, often racist, and after 9-11, totally Islamophobic.
And so, you know, if I were doing the armchair analysis, it's kind of, Bitterness toward the father that sort of propels him in a certain direction.
He's become a Christian extremist, which is interesting.
He seems to have been looking for a family, for some sense of belonging for his whole life and who took him in, but the GOP and this network gave him a sense of self-worth and, you know, he doesn't see or doesn't care that he's being used in the process.
But this was also a guy who fantasized about being a political operator from a very young age.
Even as a teenager in high school, he was thinking about what he would do once he got to Washington.
For sure.
Yeah.
So, you know, if you go back to his high school years, you can find blog posts and things that he set up online where he is talking in those terms, you know, one day I'll make it to the heights of Capitol Hill and oh boy, did he ever on January 6th.
But, you know, there wasn't this kind of radical tone or edge to it.
It was just here's this really Christian kid in Texas who is very into conservative politics.
He came off in high school kind of like, I'm sure, A lot of your listeners know the type from high school who was active in high school politics and was just really like a political nerd in high school.
But then it keeps going and it gets darker and scarier over time.
As Alexander matured in his career, it seems like he was pretty ahead of the curve, particularly in terms of how he used social media.
Like you mentioned in your article, he was an early adopter of Twitter, He even got his first name, Ali, as a handle.
So what do you think he saw in Twitter so early on, and how did this platform change the game for political operatives like him?
Yeah, that's that's a great question.
So yeah, I think he set up his Twitter account just a few months after Twitter launched even has claimed to be one of the first quote-unquote Republican operatives on the platform.
It was him and a few other guys, you know, they clearly recognized early on the power that Social media platforms had not only to organize, but also to spread a message outside kind of the, I guess, the parameters of the mainstream media, which are there for a reason.
You know, if you're a bad actor and you're trying to spread disinformation, and when he first adopted Twitter, I don't want to You know, it's like he's evolved quite a bit over the years.
So when he first adopted Twitter, it really was more about leaning into this.
Oh, there's this liberal media bias and we have to find a way to get our message out.
And then over time that that kind of evolved into just just pure disinformation.
But I don't know.
I think about this a lot when it comes to these influencers and social media and disinformation, because I think The way that these political operatives behave, they've changed in a way that like, you know, tracks with how society has changed with social media, because whether you like it or not, the stuff is inescapable now.
At most jobs, you can't avoid it.
You're even required in some fashion to engage with it.
And there are people who have really grown up with this stuff.
I think sometimes, you know, They almost have like a different approach to information and the world and like a brand first approach where they feel like they can warp the world to service their brand.
Influencer culture, you know, and I think that it's happened a lot with these political operatives too.
So, I don't know, like Alexander, for example, it's just made social media has made it so much easier for people like him to engage in Kind of not only the sabotage online, disseminate the information instantaneously around the world now to millions, sometimes even billions of people, if you have the right megaphone and the right network.
And nothing like that has ever existed before.
You know, we've had political operatives for as long as there have been politics, really.
But they used to kind of operate more in the shadows, you know, and they're sort of like these hatchet men who just get things done.
And then we had, you know, the rise of attack ads when television became a big medium.
But now with social media, you know, it's somebody who knows how to like weaponize this and has a motive to kind of sabotage our politics can just overnight become a very powerful force in a way that could never happen before.
So I think Alexander is a really great example of kind of the dark side of social media and how something like Twitter can be used in deeply malicious ways.
Speaking of using Twitter in malicious ways, Alexander and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey seem to have a kind of relationship.
They spoke frequently and they're quite open about this.
Which is kind of unsettling.
So how exactly did that relationship happen, and what does it say about how seriously it takes the problem of disinformation and extremism on the platform?
Yeah, well, some of that is a mystery, but I'll do my best to explain.
Let me answer the second part of that question first about Twitter taking disinformation seriously on their platform.
My experience in covering this stuff for several years is that Twitter is so negligent as to be complicit at this point.
The company appears to be run by people who either don't understand what's going on, which is hard for me to believe because it's a data company that employs data scientists, or are okay kind of looking the other way while bad actors use the platform to damage democracy around the world.
There's a lot of money in this, you know, and Jack Dorsey's terrified of being called a censor.
It's clear that he's kind of caved to that bad faith messaging that he's been hit with over the years, you know, like a don't censor conservative speech when we've seen studies that show that conservative speech actually isn't being censored on social media.
But he's so scared of being branded that way, it would seem.
The Twitter has really kind of allowed a lot of this stuff to happen, and the problem's kind of baked into the business model, I think.
I mean, I could point you to large networks of far-right extremists and neo-Nazis that are on the platform right now.
After years of us talking about this as a problem, and like, you know, watchdog groups and journalists, and I would imagine behind-the-scenes law enforcement even going to the company and being like, You've got a serious problem here.
I'm pointing out specific accounts, specific networks, and yet it just continues to happen.
You know, Twitter's kind of all out.
They've looked the other way oftentimes when there's this violence inciting disinformation and extremism flourishing on its platform, which, you know...
I don't know what we do about that because I think Twitter is making money off of their user base and some of these problems are baked into the business model and no amount of reputational harm matters really as long as that money keeps rolling in.
So it's going to take We're going to have to find other solutions to this problem other than just applying pressure through the media or like, you know, trying to shame Twitter because they don't seem to feel a lot of shame now about your the first part of your question about Alexander's connections to Dorsey.
So that's kind of a mystery, how he got to know Dorsey.
We have a photograph of them together.
We have Dorsey admitting that he sought out Alexander's advice on whether to ban Alex Jones or not, from the platform, we have Alexander talking about how he and Dorsey had been in touch for many months discussing various issues about conservatives on the platform.
Dorsey said that a mutual friend introduced them.
Now, I don't know who that friend was.
I really would love to know, but here's another piece of information that's interesting, and I couldn't get all this in my story, but Alexander has bragged in private conversations about having high-level ties at Twitter for years, and there is a way to kind of date some of this stuff, at least.
So a source for me on my story was this journalist in Louisiana, his name is Lamar White Jr., and Alexander was based down in Louisiana for a couple years doing, you know, political stuff and dirty tricks, And he kind of crossed paths with Lamar White Jr.
and they sparred a little bit.
And at one point, Lamar White Jr.
met him for drinks at a bar.
And he asked Alexander, you know, hey, there's this Twitter account that I know you control.
It's at Louisiana.
That's the handle.
And Alexander admitted to controlling it at Louisiana, like, you know, just the state name, right?
Which is pretty crazy that Ali Alexander, who, by the way, still has several active Twitter accounts, has that one in, you know, his.
In his stable.
And so I think this journalist in Louisiana was like, hey, shouldn't you turn that over to like the Louisiana government or something?
Why do you get to control that?
And that account was set up in 2015 on Twitter.
And that was when Alexander was the digital director for the campaign of this guy, Jay Dardenne, who was the lieutenant governor of Louisiana at the time and was running for governor.
So Alexander was his digital director.
Now, apparently the Department of Tourism and Recreation, I can't remember the official name, but that is under the lieutenant governor's control.
So this account is set up around the time that Alexander is doing work for the guy who controls the Department of Tourism.
And Lamar White Jr.
said, how did you get this account?
And this conversation happened in 2017.
And the account was set up in 2015.
And Alexander at that time indicated that he had these high-level ties at Twitter.
And I think it was one of these discarded accounts.
Somebody had set it up.
I don't know who set it up first, but it wasn't being used.
And then Alexander claimed it, I think, by using his connections at Twitter.
At least that's according to this guy, my source.
You know, we're talking like at least half a decade possibly of him interfacing with high level people at Twitter.
And by 2015, he was starting to radicalize.
I mean, he was hanging out around that time or soon thereafter with like Milo Yiannopoulos and other far right extremists.
And it's really, really concerning that this guy who helped organize January 6th would be in close contact with Twitter executives.
It almost seems to me that Twitter actually welcomed the ways in which political operatives use their platform.
They saw it as a great use case as they were building up their business.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to necessarily go that far.
I think it's more just this hyper-libertarian attitude towards speech on a platform.
You know, anything goes.
And by the way, anything goes is also good for business, right?
That's sort of the unspoken part of that because the more conversation, the more outrage, the more users, the more money.
And, you know, so it's very easy for – you know, like Alexander, as I said in my story, he radicalized in step with his party.
So when he first started using Twitter in 2007, 2008, He's not really an extremist, you know?
He's like a very conservative, right-wing-y type guy.
He's getting into Republican politics, becoming an operative.
Over time, you know, he's getting more and more extreme.
Maybe he doesn't even recognize that he's radicalizing gradually.
By the time Trump hits, it's like full bore.
But I have a feeling that, you know, that's sort of symptomatic of a lot of things that happen on these social media platforms where People had these accounts and then they just kind of went, they went crazy, you know, and Twitter's like, okay, they're on, like, he had a blue check, you know, maybe he didn't have a blue check, but a lot of these people do have blue checks on Twitter.
And what do they do once these people have, like Jack Posobiec is a perfect example of this, actually.
Jack Vosobik, a far-right propagandist, got himself a blue check years ago, and nobody really knew too much about who he was.
He started spreading around Pizzagate type stuff, and he got more and more extreme, started spreading more and more disinformation, and then Twitter's kind of like in a bind.
It's sort of, we've approved this guy, and he's got a huge following now.
He's got over a million followers at this point.
I mean, that's good business for Twitter, so what, like... I'd just love to know, I'd love to be a fly on the wall in those meetings, those high up meetings at Twitter where it's like, okay, so we got a guy who just...
You know, allegedly spread around a fake bomb threat during a BLM protest that resulted in a police response.
Should we ban him or not?
Oh, he's got over a million followers and people would start sending us death threats.
Maybe we don't ban him.
You know?
It's crazy.
I feel the same way about Cernovich, who's had a blue check forever and is just an absolute menace on Twitter.
Absolutely.
Yeah, he's one of the worst ones.
And he's been doing it for years and years and years in plain view and with Twitter fully aware of this.
And I've actually seen Twitter do strange things with Cernovich where So Cernovich has been beefing for a long time with certain people and there's this guy Vic Berger who does some very funny videos.
I'm sure you've seen him.
And Cernovich claims that Berger's harassed him.
There's no evidence of that at all.
In fact, the evidence is all going the other way.
And I think Berger sent me some stuff at one point where he had gotten responses from Twitter saying that they had suspended Cernovich for, you know, violating their terms of service.
And that was a total lie.
Like this was happening.
I was watching it happen in real time.
You know, Berger's getting these responses saying, yeah, we're taking action.
We're suspending Cernovich.
And Cernovich was not suspended.
So Twitter appears to have just been straight up lying.
To this person who was targeted by Cernovich.
Yeah, it's just a mystery.
It's like, it's how do they do these things?
And how, I mean, why do they make these decisions in such a terrible way?
You mentioned how Alexander seemed to radicalize along with the Republican Party.
I think this is partly illustrated by the fact that he developed a close working relationship with Representative Paul Gosar, who was very involved in the Stop the Steal campaign.
So what do you think it means that we now have elected representatives who work so feverishly to delegitimize elections?
Well, I think it does not bode well for our country.
Alexander launched this movement, Stop the Steal, which was kind of a slogan that was coined by Roger Stone in 2016.
But Alexander repurposed it for 2020 as a way to invalidate the election results and claim that Biden and the Democrats had stolen the election.
And he organized that very quickly on Twitter, primarily.
And, you know, within, I think it was November 4th, was the very first protest.
So this is an example of kind of what happens online becoming real very quickly and the power of social media to allow propagandists and influencers and extremists to organize and actually get people into the streets.
And Alexander has some experience doing that.
So that first protest that happened, Stop the Steal protest, was in Phoenix.
And Paul Gosar showed up with Cernovich, which I wrote a story about that after that happened, because it was so shocking to see an elected official, a Republican congressman is down there like riling up An angry mob.
There were extremists there.
Some of them had guns.
A few extremists, I think they were militia members, went into the election center to kind of like based all this is all disinformation driven.
Right.
So you've got this this this congressman down there whipping them up.
Crazy.
Yeah, you know, I was actually there in Phoenix, outside the Maricopa County Tabulation Center, watching all that go down.
We saw Charlie Kirk, and we saw the Q Shaman, and we saw Alex Jones.
It seems like there was a call that went out, and every single right-wing provocateur just descended upon this particular area.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, that was the beginning of it.
And it was and it was, you know, as I wrote my story, it was scary right from the start, because you had you had a mob down there and they were threatening journalists.
They were trying to get into the election center.
Imagine, you know, it was like it was kind of like a mini version of January 6th without the without the violence.
But they're trying to force their way into where the votes are being tabulated and put a stop to it because they just don't like the results.
And so to see A congressman down there whipping up that mob, a guy who has used democracy to get himself into a position where he can undermine democracy.
By the way, that is a tactic of the far right.
That is absolutely an articulated goal and tactic of an anti-democratic, some people call it neo-fascist movement that Has been percolating in this country for some time, often with some serious funding behind it.
And so Gosar, he basically put a stamp of approval from Republicans in Congress, in a way, on Alexander's movement from the very beginning.
And that, if you know a little bit about Gosar, that's actually not surprising.
I mean, this is a guy who's Own brothers and sisters have basically disavowed him and said that he's dangerous.
He has open connections to far-right extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers, members of which stormed the Capitol on January 6th.
Also, and I always like to point this out because not a lot of people know about it with Gosar, but he was caught on video a couple years ago in London.
He'd gone over there to support Tommy Robinson, who is a far-right Like you know activist over there in England who's a violent criminal who works with sort of neo-fascists in England and Gosar was over there to support him and he had a dinner where he appeared to be kind of like under the thumb of Steve Bannon who was there at the dinner with him and Gosar was dining with a group
Some of the most notorious far-right extremist leaders in Europe people who work with neo-nazi organizations and he's sitting there and and and just a member of Congress and one of the one of the European nationalist leaders.
Looking at Gosar said, you know, we really we're not sure we can't quite predict what Trump's gonna do We don't know if he really has our back But we need more people in Congress and he's looking right at Gosar who then looks over to Bannon kind of defers to Bannon and Bannon says something like oh, yeah, don't worry like we got you covered when you see stuff like this And you're writing about networks of bad actors.
You realize that this anti-democratic network goes all the way to the top in our government.
And that was made clear after January 6.
It was made clear when so many Republicans voted to or refused to certify the Electoral College votes based off of disinformation.
Disinformation that Alexander was pushing.
So my story about him is really about his connections to this bigger network and into mainstream Republican power.
And that's what's so scary about all this because You know, it's not just some fringe group that just happened along here.
I mean, this is something that's been in the works for a long time.
Alexander is a very useful tool for a bigger machine that is still spinning its wheels here, you know, and still trying to do what it was doing prior to January 6, which is You know, work against our democracy.
So what comes next for these people now that the political environment has changed a bit?
We are, you know, Trump is out of office.
We are in a post-January 6th kind of world.
So do they still just have their eye on 2022 and the midterms and the next election in 2024?
Of course.
Yeah.
And beyond.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, Trump may be out of office, but I would argue that it actually is still the Trump era when it comes to Republican politics.
And, you know, it's Trump's party.
And this machine was built for somebody like Trump, but probably somebody who's a little more effective than Trump, like a true Somebody who could hide his power level a little better than Trump could work you know the system a little better play the game a little better deflect criticism a little better you drop somebody like that who's who's who's more restrained and controlled but possibly even has more toxic ideology into this machine and we got major major problems and so
You know, people like Alexander, they're not going to stop.
I mean, I'm watching him on Telegram and on other platforms.
He's, you know, he's been de-platformed from his main account on Twitter and like a lot of these other leaders of the far right.
They've been deplatformed from their main accounts, but they're still going.
I mean, they have no intention of stopping here.
They don't have another choice, really.
I mean, they've committed fully to this and they still have access to the same resources.
They still have access to literally millions of susceptible minds that are out there.
Um, that, you know, believed that the election was stolen.
Uh, so I think what we're going to see here, what we already seeing a little bit, uh, just, just by default almost because of the deplatforming, they've gone a little more underground in terms of organization and communication.
Um, but they are, they remain undaunted.
And in fact, I think they're even more energized by, by January 6th and that's been a massive Recruitment and radicalization moment for far right extremists.
Even the FBI director was saying so in Congress the other day.
And you take a look at like the Proud Boys, for example, that group, it's neo-fascist gang that was instrumental in the January 6th attack.
I mean, they're tipping more and more into, you know, even harder extremism, more open white nationalism, even neo-Nazism, if you're tracking their channels now, which, you know, it's not happening on Twitter, it's not happening on Facebook, but it's definitely happening out there on Telegram and in other places.
So there are thousands of members of the Proud Boys in this country.
Thousands.
And that's just one group.
So I think we're very likely to see these people continue to organize, continue to grift.
And unfortunately, I think we're also very likely to see some of the more hardcore, violence-inclined extremists continue to plan and carry out kind of irregular warfare activities in our country.
But to 2022, yeah, they're certainly pushing.
They're trying to primary any Republican who didn't go along with the Trump program and any Republican who resisted the anti-democratic attempt to invalidate the election.
2024, they're hoping to drop You know, I mean, Trump's making noise.
Maybe people think he's going to run again.
I don't know.
I bet he's had enough, to be honest with you.
And he's probably going to get tripped up by a lot of the lawsuits that are out there now.
But you could drop somebody else into that machine.
And I think they're trying to figure out who that might be.
Somebody more dangerous than Trump.
That's the scary part.
Thank you, Luke.
Always love to end these interviews on an optimistic note.
I'm speaking with reporter Luke O'Brien.
You can find him on Twitter at Luke O'Brien.
That's O'Brien spelled B-R-I-E-N.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
Mitch McConnell did more to hurt the GOP turnout in Georgia than us.
So what I would say on the political front is that we've got a lot of gas.
And we've got all the leverage in the world.
And the Republican Party can choose to commit suicide or it can choose to put us in leadership.
But that is the only path forward for the American right in this country.
And what I would say is this.
It's not just our civil rights that are up for grabs right now.
It's our natural rights.
And if brave men We'll lean on God and revisit the great minds.
Across millennia, we will tell people what their rights are.
And so I always think there's a backstop that even if we lose politically, that the government ought to be very fearful about Continuing to cross those lines of our natural rights because we are the majority.
