High above Constitution Avenue, on a rooftop terrace, Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander gazed down at the U.S. Capitol and the chaos hed helped unleash.

A mob of President Donald Trump s supporters had just stormed the U.S. Capitol , forcing members of Congress to scramble for safety. White nationalists, QAnon cultists and Make America Great Again extremists roamed the halls hunting for politicians. Some carried zip-tie handcuffs . One wore a sweatshirt that read Camp Auschwitz.

I dont disavow this, Alexander said, pointing to the scene below.

The longtime Republican political operative had spent months working with Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and far-right activists , such as Mike Cernovich , to organize nationwide protests aimed at invalidating Democrat Joe Biden s presidential win. Alexander knew plenty of influential Republicans, like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who led an effort in the Senate to dispute the election results. He had connections to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which was also involved in promoting the rally-turned-riot.

Alexander had plenty of friends in low places, too: far-right Twitter influencers and grifters; members of the violent neo-fascist Proud Boys gang who showed up at his protests; Nick Fuentes, a prominent far-right extremist who participated in 2017s deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fuentes said in 2019 that he could accurately be described as a white nationalist, being both white and a nationalist, and just two days before the riot he seemingly encouraged his followers to kill legislators .

Unsurprisingly, several of Alexanders previous Stop the Steal events had inspired bloodshed. But none of them and nothing in American history compared to what happened Jan. 6.

The warning signs were ominous. Before the rally, white nationalists and militia members talked about smuggling guns into D.C. Pro-Trump internet forums crackled with homicidal chatter and plans to lay siege to the Capitol. And the Proud Boys were back in town. Theyd turned out by the hundreds for Alexanders two other Stop the Steal events in Washington. Brawls and stabbings occurred after those demonstrations. The Proud Boys attacked residents. In December, they ripped a Black Lives Matter banner off a Black church and burned it in the street. Their leader, Enrique Henry Tarrio, was arrested on Jan. 4 with high-capacity firearms magazines as he entered the city.

At the rally, the president whipped up demonstrators with a speech on the White House Ellipse, where Alexander had a front-row seat . We will not take it anymore, Trump said. We will stop the steal. The demagogue then pointed his supporters toward the heart of American democracy.

The mob arrived at the Capitol just before 1 p.m. Insurrectionists smashed through barricades and police lines. Once inside, they looted and vandalized. They urinated and defecated on floors. One of them scrawled Murder the media on a set of doors. Many were far-right extremists , including a Proud Boy allegedly looking to kill then-Vice President Mike Pence. Men carrying a flag from Fuentes America First group prowled through the building. Another Alexander associate , Tim Baked Alaska Gionet, a veteran of the Charlottesville rally, livestreamed himself inside the Capitol and was later arrested.

But it was the fate of Ashli Babbitt, a military veteran and QAnon conspiracy theory devotee, that crystallized to what lengths some would go on behalf of Trump. On Twitter, Babbitt was in thrall to MAGA propagandists and Stop the Steal organizers such as Jack Posobiec one of Alexanders close friends and a prolific spreader of disinformation, including the Pizzagate sex trafficking conspiracy theory that in 2016 resulted in a pro-Trump gunman storming a restaurant in Washington, D.C. On Jan. 5, Posobiec tweeted a photo of a plane loaded with Trump supporters traveling to Washington and described them, seemingly in jest, as domestic terrorists. Babbitt retweeted the message. It was her penultimate act on a platform that helped radicalize her.

The next day, she stormed the Capitol and tried to force her way through a broken window into the House chamber. A Capitol Police officer shot her in the neck . Babbitt died.

Police would later find pipe bombs outside the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee offices. Theyd find Molotov cocktails in a nearby truck. National security experts declared the attack domestic terrorism. Seven people died in the mayhem or by suicide in the immediate aftermath, including three Capitol Police officers.

I do not denounce this, Alexander reiterated from his rooftop perch, impassively surveying the Capitol grounds in a video posted to Twitter by one of his associates and preserved by Kristen Doerer at Right Wing Watch .

On Twitter, Alexander had called violence a natural right. He was a prominent influencer on the platform, with almost 200,000 followers. I am a sincere advocate for violence and war, when justified, he tweeted in 2019. I recognize no law above what is natural and good. A militant Christianity has permeated his extremism; he has spoken often about being an agent of God.

Insomuch as he was a zealot, however, he was also out to make a buck. His Jan. 6 protest, which hed dubbed the Wild Protest after Trump promoted his March to Save America event on Twitter Be there, will be wild! the president tweeted had brought in almost $200,000 in donations in just over two weeks. On his Stop the Steal site, Alexander hawked $45 T-shirts, $40 baseball caps and $75 yard signs. A bumper sticker cost $17.76. On merchandise site Gumroad, he sold self-designed New Crusades T-shirts for $55. Alexander hadnt bothered to set up a business or a nonprofit, he admitted on his personal site, where he peddled a persuasion class for $198. Stop the Steal donations flowed initially into his personal accounts . In mid-November, his lawyer, Baron Coleman, who has also served as local counsel in Alabama for Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, registered a limited-liability company, or LLC. One of Alexanders partners set up a political action committee.

To radical Republicans, he was worth it. Alexander, 36, represented the possibility of a multiracial far-right coalition and put a diverse sheen on a movement founded on white supremacy. And he did it from within. A lifelong product of Republican politics and activism whod radicalized in step with his party, Alexander embodied a turn toward outright fascism. His Stop the Steal movement was simply a Trumpified extension of decades of Republican efforts to invalidate Democratic votes, especially Black ones, with false accusations of fraud.

The day before the riot, Alexander bounded onto a stage in Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington to prepare protesters for rebellion. Victory or death! he cried, leading Trump supporters in a chant. Proud Boys and militia members were in the crowd. Some carried knives and clubs . These degenerates in the deep state are going to give us what we want or we are going to shut this country down! Alexander shouted as a cold rain fell. Our government should be afraid.

Petty Crime, Conservative Politics

Ali Alexander was once Ali Abdul-Razaq Akbar. Alexander, who was born in Texas, claims his father was an exchange student from a prominent family in the United Arab Emirates who abandoned him and his Black mother when Alexander was a toddler. He says his mother raised him by herself in Fort Worth, where he went to Fossil Ridge High School. Even then, he was a conservative political junkie who liked to talk about the big sponsors hed land who would take him to the hieghts of the Hill one day, as he wrote in 2005.

Very early as a child, I sought power. I sought power and influence, Alexander would later say.

After high school, however, he got into legal trouble. He briefly attended the University of North Texas but dropped out in 2006 and was arrested that year for stealing property. A month later, he was arrested again for debit card abuse . In 2007 and 2008, the charges resulted in felony convictions.

But the Republican Party took him in. Alexander recognized Twitters potential for political activism early on, creating his account less than a year after the platform launched. I was like the first [of] four political operatives that joined Twitter, and we made sure there was mass adoption on the Republican side, he later told Cernovich in a podcast. Alexander also had a knack for graphic design and web development. He started setting up right-wing blogs, including one that attacked then-presidential candidate Barack Obama as an elitist trying to marginalize traditional Americans. On his personal blog, Alexander embraced a right-wing birther conspiracy that disputed Obamas birthplace and racial identity. He wrote that Obama was an African man (he is not Black!) .

In 2008, Alexander was a member of the Republican National Convention Floor Operations team and a contributor to a blog called Hip-Hop Republican. He had quickly reinvented himself as a Republican operative.

By 2009, at the latest, he was attending the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, an important gathering of right-wing activists and elected officials, where he would become a fixture. That year, former New York State Assembly Republican Leader Jim Tedisco brought on Alexander to run his online campaign in a special congressional election. The tea party movement had also roared to life, fueled by the same vengeful nativism and conspiratorial thinking as Trumps Make America Great Again movement. Alexander worked on tea party news sites and helped tea party candidates boost their online presence.