A pro-Trump group called Women For America First and two agents for Steve Bannon’s Build The Wall money laundering scheme launch a Facebook group to organize protests around the country. Their goal is the same as the Trump Campaign’s: to delegitimize the election results.
Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence are both administrators of the group, called Stop The Steal. Stockton and Lawrence were public relations contacts for the Build The Wall campaign.
The Facebook group becomes a hub for Trump supporters to call for violence and civil war in their own communities and around the country.
Stop The Steal goes viral on Thursday despite Facebook’s attempts to slow its spread. The group amasses over 300,000 members. Eventually, the social network takes down the group completely.
Facebook initially barred the group from appearing in searches involving the election and even direct searches for “stop the steal,” but members of pro-Trump Facebook groups, as well as other social media networks and email lists, drove users directly to the Facebook group’s URL.
Citing repeated “worrying calls for violence,” Facebook pulled the group down by 2 p.m. ET.
“In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the group ‘Stop the Steal,’ which was creating real-world events. The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
NBC News
When NBC News reached out to Stockton for a comment, he accused the media of gaslighting the American people and “doing the devil’s work.”
Women for America First is a group co-founded and operated by Caroline Wetherington and Amy Kremer (pictured). Not surprisingly, both women are current or former members of the Council for National Policy (CNP). The CNP is a secretive group praised by Mike Pence. The group helped direct Trump’s COVID-19 response and organized anti-lockdown protests earlier this year.
This is not the only Stop The Steal group on Facebook; it’s just the most popular. Others are still active at the time of this writing.
Another former Council member, Ali Alexander, is behind the Stop The Steal movement in 2020 and announced his efforts in September. It’s unclear if Alexander is directly involved with this Facebook group, specifically. However, the group did link to Alexander’s Stop The Steal website. (Ali Alexander’s former name was Ali Akbar, but he changed it to distance himself from past legal issues.)
“Stop the Steal” is the brainchild of Ali Alexander, a former Tea Party activist turned Trump superfan with nearly 140,000 Twitter followers. In September, Alexander announced plans to dispatch protesters to disputed ballot counting sites after Election Day. Alexander and other MAGA personalities had pulled a similar stunt in Florida in the 2018 midterms…
Alexander has coordinated rally appearances around the country by MAGA figures like Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk, One America News personality and former Pizzagate promoter Jack Posoboiec, and outspoken pro-Trump youth C.J. Pearson…
That’s not to say that there’s no big-donor money involved in any of the ballot protests. Other rallies have been bolstered by FreedomWorks, a super PAC tied to the Koch brothers’ network. In 2016, a PAC advised by Alexander received $60,000 from the right-wing Mercer family, according to a Politico report.
The Daily Beast
Besides Kremer and Wetherington, at least four right-wing operatives behind Stop The Steal and similar events like Protect The Vote are also members of the Council for National Policy. The list includes Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA), Adam Brandon (FreedomWorks), Jenny Beth Martin (Tea Party Patriots Action), and Ed Martin.
Countless other CNP members have donated thousands to the groups mentioned above.
External Sources
NBC News (Archived)
Mother Jones (Archived)
The Daily Beast, Archived
Exposed by CMD (Archived)
Photo: Gage Skidmore