Dustin Stockton, a Breitbart alum and March for Trump organizer who called his efforts to overturn the election a “mission from God,” is pledging to organize primary challenges to congressional Republicans who he says “betrayed” former President Donald Trump. Stockton calls his project the “Tyrant’s Curse” and is selling merchandise with the logo of a snake crawling through the orifices of a human skull.
Stockton helped organize a series of pro-Trump rallies in Washington, D.C., in November and December and on Jan. 5, the eve of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. At that rally, both Stockton and his fiancée Jennifer Lawrence (not to be confused with he actress) declared that Joe Biden would “never” be president.
On the March for Trump bus tour in December, Stockton’s talking points included a sort of mission statement for his project to promote the “Tyrant’s Curse”: “A well-armed and self-reliant populace, who take personal responsibility, can never be oppressed and will never be ruled. It is the tyrant’s curse. We are the tyrant’s curse.”
In Lansing, Michigan, at a Dec. 8 rally at the state capitol, he expounded on the “well-armed” portion of the message, saying, “It’s about more than just ownership. It’s about putting your range time in. It’s about learning tactics. It’s about training others. It’s about being a mentor. Right? So we gotta do that. Right? Cuz that’s what allows us to be independent. It’s the one that defends all the rest of our rights.”
After hanging out with Trump-promoting pastors like Greg Locke and Brian Gibson, Stockton modified his statement to bring God into the mix. In a December post, Stockton said he had never “been big on organized religion” but that Locke and Gibson’s “message of being warriors for Jesus Christ has touched me in a way I could never have anticipated.”
Stockton announced the new version of his statement, which includes the additional phrase “and put their faith in God,” at the Jan. 5 rally in D.C.:
A well-armed and self-reliant populace who take personal responsibility and put their faith in God can never be oppressed and will never be ruled. It is the tyrant’s curse. We are the tyrant’s curse. Every single one of us who won't be controlled by these globalists, every single one of us who aren’t about to give in to the commies in China, we know what's happening. We're not nearly as dumb as they think we are. They believe that we are ignorant. They believe that they can steal it right in front of our faces because it's about demoralization. They want to demoralize us by stealing it so blatantly, which is why they picked such an idiot in Joe Biden, right?
Stockton reminded people to show up the next morning at the Ellipse near the White House, saying,
That’s where the president’s gonna be speaking. That’s who we’re taking our marching orders from, right? Because President Trump is the one who has stood against the communists. He's the one who's fought the globalists. He's the one who took on the military industrial complex. He's the one who ended the wars instead of starting them. He is America first, and we are America first.
Joining Stockton was Lawrence, his fiancée, former Breitbart writer, and fellow Stop the Steal activist, who like Stockton was drawn into the investigation of the private build-the-wall fundraising project for which Trump gave Steve Bannon a preemptive pardon. At Freedom Plaza, Lawrence was on message with the theme that Trump was God’s man in the White House:
You know what makes America great? Our belief in God. And you know why God Donald Trump made America great again is because he got brought God back to that Oval Office. He brought prayer back to the Oval Office. And he moved that embassy back to Jerusalem, its rightful home.
Lawrence told rallygoers that she graduated from the same military academy that Trump attended in high school, adding that she was proud to be standing with people who “are here to take back our country from the people we elected who forgot why they were here.” She said Trump fights for what is “righteous”:
He stands on what's righteous and just and the more righteous your fight, the more just your fight, the more terror and people are gonna come against you. And that's how you know you're doing the right thing and you're on the right side of history. All of you are standing here today on the right side of history. We are the Founding Fathers of our time, we are standing up against the evil globalists such as George Soros, who thinks he owns our politicians, who thinks he owns Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court. We don't need George Soros in our lives. We don't need globalists in our lives. We don't need the great reset. All we need is Jesus Christ and the truth.
Lawrence said that the private effort to raise money to build a wall on the border with Mexico proved that if Congress can’t get things done, the American people can do it themselves. She added:
And that’s why we are going to stand strong with Donald J. Trump until this election’s overturned and the truth comes out that Joe Biden did not win. He will never be president of the United States. And we will stand with Donald J. Trump for four more years. We will stand on the truth. And we as Christians in a Christian nation will stand on the principles of the Ten Commandments. And we will stand on the Founding Fathers and what they believed. When they couldn't get it done, they turned to God. They got on their knees and started praying. And that's what we all need to do here. We need to pray, and we just stand ,and no matter what they say about you, no matter what they say about any of us, we need to stand on what is right and what is just.
On Jan. 12, Stockton said that he was still “praying for a miracle because that’s the only way that Joe Biden isn’t going to be sworn in as president on January 20th.” He urged his readers to “prepare for the dystopian future that has arrived,” adding, “Censorship, oppression, and tyranny are here. In America. God help us.” He urged people to check their emergency food supplies and stock up on ammunition.
Stockton was mournful on Inauguration Day, calling it an “atrocity” that Trump was “replaced by the [Chinese Communist Party] puppet President Joe Biden.”
“Biden is already promising to further weaponize the government against those of us who supported President Trump making the dystopian military inauguration almost seem fitting,” Stockton claimed. “These evil globalists intend to turn our own government against us, make no mistake.”
Stockton asked people to subscribe to Tyrant’s Curse to support his efforts to organize against the “sellouts” and figure out “how we can best slow, stall, and delay the globalist agenda.”
Stockton has been urging people to follow his channels on Gab and Telegram, but he’s also still active on Twitter, where he announced this week that Tyrant’s Curse will be visiting the districts of Republican members of Congress who “betrayed President Trump” to “begin the process of recruiting/vetting candidates to primary these sellouts.” He said he had “secured the domain MAGASELLOUT dot com to organize” and is “working with many incredible groups and influencers.”
“We’re gonna make the Tea Party look tiny in comparison,” he said on a Facebook video this week.” The starting point, he said, are the 10 Republican House members who voted in favor of the most recent impeachment of former President Donald Trump. He added Reps. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Dan Crenshaw of Texas and pledged that the list would grow to include House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and others. And he said he hasn’t ruled out supporting third-party candidates. On that same video, Stockton called Biden “senile” and claimed that Biden doesn’t answer to “we the people” but instead to “we the Chinese people.”
It’s somewhat terrifying to imagine the kind of candidates Stockton is hoping to recruit, given that in 2017 he and Lawrence abandoned the Senate campaign of Kelli Ward saying she was not sufficiently committed to “America First” values. Ward is a hard-right activist who recently urged Trump to “Cross the Rubicon” in order to stay in power. In 2016, she spoke at the establishment-challenging rally organized by radical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and fraudster Roger Stone at the start of the Republican National Convention. Ward was just reelected as chair of the Arizona GOP. In 2017, Stockton and Lawrence quit the campaign, complaining publicly that Ward was “bringing in people from the political consultant class” and was not “up to the task of standing up to the pressure that causes so many candidates to betray voters when they get to Washington.”
Stockton is an admirer of Matt Couch, who is infamous for his promotion of conspiracy theories and who also emceed part of the Jan. 5 rally. In December, Stockton described Couch as “a relentless truth seeker and teller,” adding, “For years I have been inspired by his tenacity on tough stories like the Las Vegas Shooting and the Seth Rich murder in Washington D.C.” Earlier this month, Couch retracted and disavowed his claims about Seth Rich’s brother Aaron and apologized to Rich’s family as part of the settlement of a lawsuit.
Stockton introduced Couch at a Dec. 12 rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., saying Couch had paid “a real hefty price” for “telling the truth in a big way in this country.” Couch told attendees, “Patriots and tyrants, this is our 1776 right now, right here, in Washington, D.C.”
Stockton has been complaining about media coverage, denouncing a recent BuzzFeed story that drew from hours of video from the March for Trump bus tour, and said he is expecting upcoming “hit pieces” from major media outlets. In his Facebook video this week, he said reporters were distorting his message to wrongly portray him as an advocate for violence. What is radicalizing people, he said, are efforts to silence them and silence Trump’s messages about the election being stolen. “You don’t censor things because they’re not true,” he said. “You censor things because they counter the narrative that you’re trying to push.”
