bayoubrief | After amassing more than 350,000 followers, Facebook banned the group “Stop the Steal” once members began posting calls to incite violence at planned protests across the country.
The protests were the brainchild of Ali Alexander, a controversial far-right operative who boasts more than 140,000 followers on Twitter, where he’s simply @ali.
“Alexander appears to be involved with Stop The Steal both through his tweets promoting it and through his links to one of the websites boosting it,” Mother Jones reported Friday. “Stopthesteal.us’s domain is registered to Vice and Victory, a possibly defunct political consultancy he’s affiliated with. After clicking the site’s donate button, visitors are prompted with the option to donate money to one of several cryptocurrency addresses associated with Alexander, or given links to his Paypal, CashApp, and Amazon wishlist.”
Here in Louisiana, Alexander is better known by his legal name, Ali Akbar. Although he now lives in Texas, for the past four years, Alexander resided in Baton Rouge, a fact that has gone virtually unnoticed in the torrent of coverage he’s recently generated.
In June 2019, Alexander made national headlines for a racist tweet that asserted Kamala Harris was not “an American Black” because her father was Jamaican. His comment was retweeted and then later deleted by the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr. The next month, Alexander was one of several controversial figures invited to the White House’s “social media summit.”
There’s more.
“According to a 2018 Politico report, the night before the 2016 election, a PAC advised by Alexander received a $60,000 donation from hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, the pro-Trump billionaire,” Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt reported in September. “Alexander has associated with far-right figures including Unite the Right white supremacist attendee Matt Colligan, and made a habit of noting when members of the media he criticizes are Jewish, according to The Observer.”
In an August profile of Alexander, the Daily Dot reported that he had “found a niche among the likes of anti-Muslim activist and Republican Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer and blundering political fraudster Jacob Wohl….The trio went to Minneapolis in June 2019 to film a documentary called Importing Ilhan, which was severely mocked online for lacking credibility. The video they produced was aimed at proving Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) had married her brother. While filming, they also wore bulletproof jackets only to turn out to report fake death threats against themselves to authorities.”
Weeks before the election, Alexander promoted a website that floated the bogus claim that Joe Biden secretly suffered from Parkinson’s disease.
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