After months of hosting rallies peddling the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and calling for “rebellion” and “revolution” against the government, Ali Alexander is now claiming that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a government “psyop.”
Alexander, the far-right Republican operative leading the so-called Stop the Steal campaign, joined “The Pete Santilli” show last Thursday to peddle the conspiracy theory concocted by right-wing activists that the Capitol insurrection was the product of “agent provocateurs,” who in Alexander’s telling, were conducting a psychological operation.
Pete Santilli, whose show has become a stomping ground for conspiracy theorists and the hard right of the Republican Party, began the interview by introducing Alexander as “a skilled internet operative … in the crosshairs of the Deep State.”
“Do you think they reverse engineered this conspiracy charge that [they] are now going to bring down upon a whole bunch of people?” Santilli asked.
“They reverse engineered this as soon as we decided that we were going to, in fact, go to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6,” Alexander said.
Lanyards, Alexander said, were the key clue to discovering this Deep State conspiracy. (Yes, lanyards.) Here’s how Alexander explained this alleged conspiracy:
And what it turns out is that there are photographs of people who have lanyards of unauthorized graphics that were in the early stages of the December announcement of Jan. 6. So what I knew basically, at the end of January, beginning of February, was that what you just said, that some agent provocateurs were funded, that there is a D.C. printer that has a work order for these lanyards, and that this had to be in the plot the day that we announced that we were going … to go to D.C. Jan. 6. Three days later, the president endorsed the idea of Jan. 6, this is when whether it's the Deep State, or it's the private security state, somebody chose to start interfering immediately with our plans. …
As we reverse engineer this, a lot of people are coming to find out that there weren't just agent provocateurs there, there was an actual psyop that intended to, um, to agitate and cite and incentivize a large crowd to then turn into a mob that would not have been possible had Speaker Pelosi done her job and FBI done their job. So the question becomes is: Is this a coincidence? Or is this a conspiracy of both state actors and nonstate actors?
The two then discussed the case of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right paramilitary group the Oath Keepers who was arrested last Thursday and charged with seditious conspiracy, along with 10 others. Santilli suggested that the government had targeted Rhodes before the attack on the Capitol even occurred.
Seeming to acknowledge the right-wing conspiracy theory that Rhodes was a government informant, Alexander said, “There’s been a lot of questions surrounding Stewart Rhodes, you know, and I think that those questions should be answered.” But, he said, the Oath Keepers were cosplaying, not committing sedition.
“I do not believe that Stewart Rhodes or the Oath Keepers committed sedition,” Alexander said. “I think that they had some larpy conversations, I believe that they are playing cosplay. I believe they had some inappropriate conversations, but nothing that rises up to what the government's alleging.”
Eventually, Santilli got around to asking Alexander why he testified in front of Congress when so many others who received subpoenas from the Jan. 6 select committee refused to cooperate.
“I'm really smart,” Alexander replied. “And I've been on the stand before. So I'm not just somebody who has an academic understanding or structural understanding of this.”
Fighting a subpoena, he added, is a “$250,000 litigation bill.”
“Alex [Jones] can afford that, Trump can afford that. I can't, I just can't, OK,” Alexander complained. “I'm also in a multimillion dollar civil suit, where eight police officers who failed us are actually suing me and Trump and Roger. So I have like five legal cases going on. I can't afford to spend a quarter million dollars on one.”
Alexander, who has complained of being in exile since Jan. 6 and of “losing everything” thanks to a video of his own words during the insurrection, explained that he was in fact the victim. “This was an operation from the jump, and we are victims of it.”
Of course, such claims segued nicely into his plea for money at the end of the interview, pointing listeners to Give Send Go, a Christian fundraising platform that has hosted the campaigns of right-wing extremists, including his own.
