David Corn: How Did an Alleged 1/6 Conspirator Hook Up With a Prominent GOP Leader?

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David Corn
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The 2nd issue of my new newsletter "This Land" is out. Read how an alleged 1/6 conspirator (who called for executing Trump's foes) hooked up with a top GOP official & Fox News regular. Plus...Los Lobos' new album.
https://link.motherjones.com/public/24251523

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This Land
A newsletter from David Corn
secure.motherjones.com
6:42 AM · Jun 24, 2021

https://link.motherjones.com/public/24251523

The Republican Party has a long, rich, and ignoble tradition of playing footsie with the extremist right. Barry Goldwater welcomed members of the ultra-conservative, commie-hunting, anti-civil-rights John Birch Society into his presidential campaign. Ronald Reagan pandered to racists with his attacks on “welfare queens.” John Boehner, when he was the GOP leader of the House, sponsored a rally at the US Capitol where hate-driven tea partiers called Democrats “Nazis” and shouted the n-word at the late Rep. John Lewis. And the January 6 seditious assault on Congress was a high—or low—point in this tawdry but never-ending relationship between the Grand Old Party and fascistic elements, with Donald Trump and his crew encouraging a crowd of white supremacists, Christian nationalists, QAnoners, militia wannabes, and others to rampage and overturn the results of a democratic election.

In following up on a recent story I did about one of those extremists, I came across an example of how a mainline Republican made common cause with a future 1/6 conspirator.

In January, I uncovered a video of a Stop the Steal organizer named Alan Hostetter, who at a pro-Trump rally in December in Huntington Beach, California, called for the “execution” of Trump’s foes. A few weeks after that event, Hostetter, a police chief turned yoga instructor, was a key figure at the attempted January 6 uprising. Through a nonprofit organization he runs, the American Phoenix Project, he had helped organize a pre-march rally on January 5 in front of the Supreme Court, where many of the sedition-pushing stars of the Stop the Steal movement spoke. The lineup included Ali Alexander, who has proclaimed himself the movement’s leader; Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theory monger; Joe Flynn, the brother of retired General Michael Flynn; and Roger Stone, the dirty trickster and long-time Trump adviser whom Trump later pardoned. Hostetter and the others fired up the assembled with hyperbolic and false rhetoric about the election being stolen. The next day, Hostetter was in the crowd that besieged the Capitol.

In an indictment filed earlier this month, the Justice Department charged Hostetter with conspiring to “corruptly obstruct, influence, and impede an official proceeding, to wit: the Certification of the Electoral College vote.” The indictment alleges that he plotted with several men associated with the Three Percenters militia and that this group planned to come to Washington to disrupt the certification. One of Hostetter’s confederates, according to the indictment, on January 5 posted a photo on an encrypted messaging service showing gear arranged on a bed, including two hatchets, a stun baton, and a knife, with the caption, “Now getting ready for tomorrow.”

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[MagickMuffin]

1. Why any of these traitors were released makes my blood boil

No now should have been released after their arrest. They tried to overthrow our government.