As part of the Million MAGA March, several hundred Donald Trump supporters rallied at the State Capitol in Carson City, Nevada on Saturday. For them, the election for US President has yet to be decided.
Somehow, that the Associated Press, the New York Times, Reuters, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox News have called the race for Joe Biden doesn’t seem to matter. That Trump campaign legal challenges to vote counts in several states have been dismissed has little seeming relevance.
As recently as today, the President and his representatives sent fundraising emails that ask recipients to help support an Election Defense Fund and to take action to prevent a rigged usurpation of power, a stolen national election.
“We are simply past using the three branches of government to accomplish liberty for our nation,” an unidentified man said into a microphone. He wore a MAGA hat and stood on a low riser in the middle of a crowd of some 300 people on the Capitol lawn.
“We are in the spring of 1776, right now. We are in the spring of 1861, right now. Know that. Live that. It is far worse conditions here with the evil Marxist left and tyranny over us, than any form of tyranny from British rule from 1600 to 1776. It is far worse in this country now,” the man yelled to the cheering crowd.
On the outskirts of the crowd, on the sidewalk in front of the State Legislature, a man wearing military fatigues and a flack jacket spoke through a bullhorn.
“Creepy Joe … pedophile Joe … the pedophile Joe Biden,” the man said.
Since the killing of George Floyd, a near-daily culture of protest and counter protest has developed at the Nevada State Capitol. A central figure in these ongoing interactions is Corey Lequieu. Lequieu is noted as one of the people who, in an antigovernmental statement, overtook the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.
At first, Lequieu was hesitant to speak with me. He said reporters get his story wrong and characterize him as a lunatic seeking violence, which he says he’s out to prevent. I asked if he genuinely believes that the election is rigged and the results are yet to be determined.
“Put it this way, my vote hasn’t been counted, or my wife’s vote hasn’t been counted at the Secretary of State’s Office,” Lequieu said. “It’s like it’s been thrown away or whatever. You go on the Secretary of State’s (website) and there’s no voting history, so something stinks.”
The Ally will verify if Lequieu’s vote was officially counted with the Carson City Registrar of Voters when that office reopens on Monday.
During our interview, Lequieu repeatedly returned to the tit-for-tat interactions with “Antifa” and “BLM” on the Capitol campus. The Ally will publish a separate report regarding the ongoing tensions at the Capitol. I asked Lequieu why he was out on Saturday.
For Lequieu, Barack Obama is a Muslim, Joe Biden is a pedophile, the novel coronavirus is no more dangerous than the common cold, and the 2020 presidential election is a sham.
Recently, President Trump tweeted that Dominion Voting Systems “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.”
“That whole Dominion Software that flipped votes for Biden and took them away from Trump in so many swing-states, we know what’s going on,” Lequieu said.
A Politifact analysis of this claim traced the kernel of misinformation back to a website, TheDonald.win, and ultimately found the assertion to be untrue.
Size Matters
Trump has long used crowd size as a reflection of his popularity. From his inauguration to campaign 2020 whistle stops, Trump compared his crowd sizes to those of his competitors, and so do Trump supporters. On the 2020 campaign trail, Trump mocked the size of Joe Biden rallies by contrast to his gatherings that ostentatiously flaunted social distancing guidelines and the wearing of masks.
Only a handful of attendees wore masks on Saturday.
“Look at all the massive rallies Trump’s had,” Lequieu said. “I went to the one at the Carson Airport, and there was like 15,000 of us. The last one in Georgia was 35,000. You couldn’t get in. Biden is lucky to get six people in a circle. Really? And you’re going to tell me he won … bullshit.”
Demonizing the Democrats
With the zeal of Senator Joe McCarthy, Lequieu and his friend Vance Rushing said today’s Democratic Party has direct connections with Soviet-style Communism, socialism, and Nazisim.
Rushing and Lequieu both said they have been informed by the writings and filmmaking of Dinesh D’Souza. DeSouza’s latest book is titled United States of Socialism – who is behind it, why is it evil, and how can we stop it?
In May of 2018, President Trump pardoned D’Souza after he plead guilty to effectively funneling campaign contributions to a Republican candidate through fake people.
D’Souza is a New York Times Best-Selling author. In his 2010 book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, D’Souza advances the notion that Barack Obama, as president, was enacting the anti-colonial agenda of his Kenyan father. Rush Limbaugh picked up on and added to the conspiracy theory. On Fox News, reality TV actor Donald Trump expanded and reverberated the unsubstantiated claim that Obama was born outside the United States and was enacting a radical Muslim agenda on America.
Despite the release of Obama’s long-form birth certificate, by 2012, several polls showed that roughly half of Republicans believed Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
“He (D’Souza) basically came out with how much Obama hates America. He got it from his father. His father was in prison in Kenya because he tried to do a communist revolution in Kenya against the British, so Obama learned early-on how to hate America and western Europe,” Lequieu said.
Vance Rushing said that he’s been long studying Democrats. He said D’Souza’s writing confirmed what he already knew: Democrats are essentially criminals.
“The Democrat mindset, like I said, they’re no different than the prison population. And so what are we dealing with? We are dealing with criminal minds,” Rushing said.
Rushing is convinced that not only are Democrats criminals fully capable of cheating to steal the election but worse in his estimation, communists.
In the 1970s, while in the Navy and stationed in New Orleans, a man on the street handed him a pamphlet written by American Communist Party senior official and presidential candidate Gus Hall titled A Lame Duck in Turbulent Waters. Rushing said the pamphlet referred specifically to then President Richard Nixon, but that it’s message still resonated with him today and is a component in his reason for protesting the election results.
“Over on page 37, paragraphs four, five, and six, the chairman of the Communist Party USA, which is still active. Their website is still up and going strong. Gus Hall laid claim to the Democrat Party on behalf of the Communist Party via the liberal wing.”
For Rushing, Democrats are not only criminals and communists but Nazis, directly linked to Adolph Hitler and the German Nazi Party. The writings of Hilmar von Campe inform Rushing’s thinking. von Campe said he was forced to join the Hitler Youth movement as a boy living in Germany. von Campe and subsequently Rushing see a direct link between the Democratic Party of today and the Nazi Party of 1930s Germany.
“In the 2008 campaign, a guy pops up on Newsmax, and he talks about Obama and the behavior traits he sees in Obama being the same as the behavior traits of somebody he knew semi-personally, a man by the name of Adolph Hitler,” Vance said.
Rushing explained that in 2011, von Campe wrote an essay titled a Warning to America.
“He tied, by name, Obama and the Democrat Party as a whole to his former associates, Hitler’s Nazis.”
Vance is aware that many view his theories with skepticism, but that does not tarnish his 50-year-old belief structure.
“I’ve passed this on to people, and some of them have outright said that I’m a fruit cake. Fine and dandy, I’m a fruit cake … OK … USDA grade triple-A, but I’ve done my homework.”
Dirty Politics
In late October, the New York Post ran an exclusive article about secret emails between Hunter Biden and his father and Ukrainian officials. Since then, what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop has grown and morphed in the milieu of tabloid journalism and social media, fertile ground for exotic conspiracy theories.
Earlier this summer the Ally recorded a group of QAnon Trump supporters at the Nevada State Capitol who said that “elites” like Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey and others were having children kidnapped and taken to Jeffrey Epstein’s Island. There, the children were frightened just before they were killed to increase the amount of adrenaline in the child’s blood. The blood was then taken to Wuhan, China where it was made into an elixir that Hillary, Tom Hanks and Oprah drink.
At first I thought Lequieu’s accusations of Biden being a pedophile were related to the Epstein’s Island conspiracy theory. Lequieu said he and his wife have sold a few QAnon t-shirts, but his reason for saying Joe Biden abuses children did not hearken to the Epstein’s Island theory but focused on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“Hunter was banging his niece. It came off his laptop,” Lequieu said. “Hunter Biden has a PornHub channel with 3,000 some videos with his niece in one of them. Joe covered that shit up.”
Brian Bahouth is the editor of the Sierra Nevada Ally and a career public media producer. Support his work.
