Caroline Orr reports on the evidence linking the ‘Three Percenters’ militia with right-wing mega-donors including the billionaire Mercer family
An alleged insurrectionist affiliated with the far-right ‘Three Percenters’ militia group who was indicted Thursday in connection with the 6 January riot at the Capitol in Washington DC is also actively involved in organising anti-lockdown protests as the founder of a group boosted by the billionaire Mercer family.
Alan Hostetter, an ex-police chief who in November called for the execution of top Government officials, was one of six men charged Thursday with conspiring to obstruct the certification of the 2020 election. Four of the men cited in the indictment identify as members of the Three Percenters, while two are considered associates.
This is the first set of conspiracy charges against rioters affiliated with the Three Percenters, an often violent anti-government militia group that formed in 2008 when Barack Obama won the presidency.
It’s also the first indictment that brings charges against people involved in planning organised political protests ahead of the Capitol riot. According to the charges, Hostetter’s anti-lockdown group, called the American Phoenix Project, co-sponsored a rally on 5 January on the steps of the Supreme Court with Virginia Women for Trump. Also present at that rally were long-time Trump ally Roger Stone and conspiracy theorist ‘Stop The Steal’ organiser Ali Alexander.
Hostetter founded the American Phoenix Project in Spring 2020 to oppose lockdowns and other restrictions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. This came amid a surge of anti-lockdown protests across the country organised by a network of seemingly grassroots conservative groups.
But there’s big money and even bigger influence behind the push to re-open states, which is really an orchestrated movement styled after the Tea Party.
Radical Right Donors
As detailed by the New York Times and The Washington Post, the nationwide anti-lockdown movement is actually bankrolled by some of the country’s richest conservative donors including the Mercer family, the DeVos family, and the dark money conduit DonorsTrust.
Michigan was the pilot for the national movement. Over several weeks in April and May 2020, anti-government extremists and other far-right agitators gathered at the state Capitol to protest against COVID-19 restrictions.
The Michigan protest was organized through a Facebook group called ‘Operation Gridlock’, which itself was a creation of the Michigan Freedom Fund and the Michigan Conservative Coalition. The Michigan Freedom Fund is bankrolled by the billionaire family of Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the Michigan Conservative Coalition is a far-right group that “doubles as a front for Michigan Trump Republicans,” according to Mother Jones. One of the prominent figures in Women for Trump also played a major role in planning Operation Gridlock.
Other groups like Michigan United For Liberty also took part in organising protests throughout the several week period in April 2020 during which armed demonstrators, some wearing camouflage and bulletproof vests, crowded into the state Capitol where lawmakers were trying to debate an emergency bill. The Three Percenters were allegedly involved in these demonstrations and two members were charged in connection with a kidnapping plot against Michigan’s governor.
While this was going on, other right-wing groups were organising their own protests elsewhere in the country. A spokesman for the Michigan Conservative Coalition encouraged groups in other states to hold their own protests and even told them to use the Coalition’s wording and templates. He said at least a dozen other states had organised protests based on the “Operation Gridlock” model.
Around the same time, FreedomWorks, a right-wing advocacy group associated with the Tea Party movement, published a ‘#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide’ to help right-wing groups around the country organise their own anti-lockdown protests.
Social Manipulation, Bankrolled By the Mercers
Behind the scenes, the radical right-wing Convention of States — another group that grew out of the Tea Party movement and is currently led by Mark Meckler, the co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots Group — propped up smaller, local organisations and provided materials (like signs) for anti-lockdown protests.
The conservative group, which has received funding from the Mercer family and the dark money conduit DonorsTrust, bought dozens of URLs for sites that were later used for protests in key states, including opencalifornianow.com, openfloridanow.com, and openarizonanow.com.
The Convention of States also launched a ‘sock-puppet’ organisation and website called Open The States, seemingly in an effort to conceal its role in the anti-lockdown campaign. The website linked to Facebook groups around the country that were involved in organising protests targeting states with Democratic governors, some of which had hundreds of thousands of members. The group also reportedly purchased Facebook adverts and quietly helped boost the profiles of smaller protests, but did so through sock-puppets.
Using social media and access to friendly media platforms, the Convention of States, along with other deep-pocketed conservative groups, spread inflammatory content aimed at evoking anger towards scientists and public health officials, as well as stoking fear of an imminent loss of freedom and liberty.
“We are witnessing a large-scale exercise in social manipulation, led by Convention of States, a Republican operation funded by the billionaire Robert Mercer, with support from the far-right groups FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, and others,” says Boston University professor Jeremy Menchik, a comparative studies scholar who researches anti-democratic movements.
Menchik says the protests don’t reflect actual grassroots opinion, but rather “manufactured outrage, ginned up by right-wing interest groups.”
“The evidence of the top-down nature of the protests is their coordination, timing, messaging, and overt links. Their group names are similar. The content is similar. Their history is similar. Their calls to action are similar,” he said. “It’s once you see the coordination at a macro level that you recognise this is not a grassroots movement. This is being orchestrated by political operatives…”
Sure enough, the American Phoenix Project resembles countless other anti-lockdown groups, with a strong emphasis on liberty and small government, and common propaganda themes such as calling masks on children “child abuse,” fear-mongering about antifa and Black Lives Matter, warning that masks and lockdowns are the first step towards tyranny, and attacking local and national Democratic politicians.
Beyond those similarities, there’s a pretty big clue right on the website of the American Phoenix Project, which directly links to the Mercer-funded Convention of States. The website also includes verbatim snippets of text from the Convention of States’ website.
American Phoenix Project
There’s very little publicly available information on the American Phoenix Project. Hostetter registered the organisation in California in May 2020 as a non-profit focused on “human and civil rights advocacy, and public health education.” The group’s secretary is listed as Robert Ramsey, a former police chief in Fontana, CA.
In social media posts and