Billed as an opportunity to honor World War II veterans, the event featuring Greene is scheduled to take place at a church in Vero Beach, Fla. The event is co-hosted by the Indian River County GOP, which has posted notice of the event on its Facebook page, and the Vero Beach chapter of Conservative Watch USA.
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As advertised, the Jan. 6 event promises that attendees who buy a $45 ticket will receive a signed copy of Greene’s book. “Super VIPs” who shell out $500 to $2,500 “will be invited to a special briefing on J6 and DC.”
“It’s going to be a tremendous rally, a J6 rally, because we know that we have prisoners of war right here in our own country,” Conservative Watch USA President Annie Marie Delgado said during an appearance on Vandersteel’s podcast last week. She added that the event would honor “our World War II veterans,” appearing to accord the Jan. 6 offenders a similar level of respect.
“We all know that we’re in a war,” Delgado said. “But it’s a spiritual war.”
Greene has not publicized the event to date, and she could not be reached by Raw Story to confirm that she plans to be there.
But Greene’s shared billing with Vandersteel and Evans, who is running for the open seat in West Virginia’s 1st Congressional District, is consistent with the Georgia lawmaker’s history.
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As a congresswoman-elect, Greene met with Trump at the White House in December 2020 to coordinate a strategy for objecting to the certification of the electoral vote on Jan. 6, and since then has consistently expressed support for the hundreds of people charged in connection with the attack, while characterizing them as noble victims.
Foreshadowing her meeting with Evans next month, Greene on Monday posted a photo of herself on X posing with admitted Jan. 6 offender Jacob Chansley, writing that she was “honored” to meet him. Greene described Chansley as the “face of the Jan 6th ‘Insurrection,’” while claiming that “the media plastered his image and slandered him all over the world, the Biden regime’s DOJ wrongfully prosecuted him for innocently and nonviolently walking through the Capitol, and he was treated horrifically in prisons even being held in solitary confinement for over 10 months just like many other J6’ers.”
Greene has encouraged speculation that she might be named as Trump’s vice presidential running-mate, and her X feed curates the kind of content that is likely to find favor with the former president, who is facing 91 felony charges across four separate criminal cases. A civil case jury earlier this year found Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation in connection with columnist E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump.
On Tuesday, Greene posted on X a warning about the 2024 election, writing “they are going to try to steal it again.”
A J6er running for Congress
Consistent with the MAGA effort to downplay the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol and the coordinated effort among Trump and his allies to forcibly stop an official proceeding of Congress, the announcement for Greene’s Jan. 6 event describes Evans as a “Jan 6th Survivor.”
Police arrested Evans on Jan. 8, 2021, and he eventually pleaded guilty to impeding, obstructing or interfering with law enforcement during a civil disorder. As part of his plea agreement, Evans admitted that he attempted to obstruct the Capitol police during a civil disorder, which in turn obstructed “the performance of a federally protected function.”
The government agreed to a two-level reduction under the sentencing guidelines based on Evans taking responsibility for his actions at the Capitol, and he received a three-month prison sentence for a crime that otherwise carried a maximum penalty of five-years imprisonment.
Evans announced his campaign for Congress on Jan. 6, 2023, the two-year-anniversary of the attack. Speaking on an X Space in February that was hosted by Dustin Stockton, an organizer with the Women for Trump bus tour that helped mobilize Trump supporters to go to D.C. on Jan. 6, Evans said he chose the date of his campaign announcement “just to kind of thumb the nose a little bit.”
He gave a sanitized account of his experience at the Capitol as part of his campaign pitch.
“I walked in an open set of doors,” Evans said. “I thanked a police officer for his service. He gave me a fist bump. I spent 10 minutes on the public rotunda area. I walked out. I ended up being arrested January 8th. I had an 18-month legal battle. Went to prison. I’ve got four young kids.”
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The pinned post on Evans’ X account includes a selectively edited version of the video he livestreamed on Facebook from the Capitol, accompanied by text claiming he “peacefully protested on J6.”
The “Statement of Offense,” to which Evans agreed as a condition of his plea deal, paints a different picture. Evans’ video, as described in the government document, captures Evans in the midst of a screaming crowd outside the East Doors and saying, “It’s time to go; they’re on the other side!” The video shows another rioter spraying chemical irritant in the direction of law enforcement officers, and Evans shouting as the crowd surge forward and squeezes through the doors: “Move! Move! Move!”
Responding to a Facebook message from Raw Story on Tuesday, Evans cited a discredited claim by Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) that the FBI sent “ghost buses” full of informants to the Capitol as vindication for his actions.
Evans said in a message that since Higgins “has clearly shown that January 6th was a Reichstag Fire-style operation carried out by the Deep State desperate to keep Donald Trump out of the White House — along with dozens if not hundreds of federal agents — my only regret remains the situation I put my family through, and not my protest against what was obviously an election stolen by the Democrats and Republicans on behalf of Joe Biden.”
The notion that the 2020 election was “stolen” has been repudiated by multiple election officials and court decisions.
‘War, baby!’
So who is Ann Vandersteel?
For at least five years, Vandersteel has pushed conspiracy theories through nightly interview shows and livestreams that mimic cable-news production values. Vandersteel grabbed the spotlight in January 2019 during a livestream in which she pushed QAnon, sex trafficking and pedophilia conspiracy theories before describing herself as “a surrogate for the Trump campaign,” but the campaign eventually disavowed her.
Vandersteel has also falsely claimed that the Christchurch massacre, in which a white supremacist slaughtered dozens of Muslim worshipers in New Zealand, was a left-wing “false flag.”
Immediately following Jan. 6, Vandersteel was a leading promoter of a baseless claim that “white hats” in the Special Forces were embedded with “antifa” during the storming of the Capitol and smuggled out then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop. The revelation of secrets on the laptop, the conspiracy theory went, would in time reveal crimes by Democrats and moderate Republicans, leading to a political purge. The claim, which was widely shared on Facebook, was summarily debunked.
During an hourlong program following Jan. 6 and after visiting the White House, Vandersteel declared, “War, baby! We got it. They want it. And we are going to bring it…. MAGA is in charge.”
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While Vandersteel contributed to the false claim that “antifa” was responsible for the storming of the Capitol, publicly available video indicates that Vandersteel herself went inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. She has not been charged with any crime to date. An archived video file labeled “Capital Hill Occupy” shows a woman with long, blond hair, wearing a coat with a fur-lined hood and a billed cap who resembles Vandersteel standing in a hallway next to a set of double doors leading to the Rotunda. The source of the video is unknown, but the woman’s appearance matches video obtained by a lawyer for one of the Oath Keepers that shows Vandersteel being interviewed outside the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Vandersteel could not be reached for comment for this story.
Since the reality of Biden’s inauguration disrupted the QAnon fantasy that Trump remained in control, Vandersteel has gravitated to sovereign citizen ideology, a worldview that suits the MAGA refusal to recognize Biden’s legitimacy.
Adherents to the sovereign citizen movement, which emerged in the early 1970s, believe that following the Civil War a nebulous cabal of conspirators usurped the United States and transformed it into a tyrannical corporation that enslaved Americans. Sovereign citizen leaders often entertain schemes that rely on pseudo-legal language to encourage followers to divorce themselves from the system. Adherents often use the term “state national” to signal their belief that the U.S. government lacks legitimacy.
“When you become an American state national, you’re now giving, saying, I don’t want the privileges of being a citizen of the United States,” Vandersteel reportedly told an audience during an appearance on Clay Clark’s Reawaken America tour in Texas in November 2021. “I want to be a resident alien in this country, part of the constitutional republic from which this country was founded. I’m taking back my rights as a free people not to be privileged to live under the United States federal bureaucracy.”
Vandersteel’s embrace of sovereign citizen ideology is significant in that she will be sharing a stage with Greene, a rising star in the MAGA movement who has continuously tilted towards insurrectionary politics.
Following the 2022 midterm elections, in which Republican candidate Kari Lake lost her race for Arizona governor, Vandersteel told her followers to “form a new government.” in a message on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram.
She claimed that the Republican candidate’s loss proved that there was no longer a two-party system in the United States.
“There are only public/private partnerships of a corrupt global cabal operating a worldwide RICO crime syndicate,” she said. “WE FIGHT ON! The torch of liberty will be used to start a fire of freedom again. #WeThePeople must CORRECT our STATUS. Reclaim our God Given Rights. We must RESTORE AMERICA. We must live outside the corporation. Are. You. With. Me?”
Greene has explored similar ideas about breaking up the United States by calling for a “national divorce” as a guest on former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s podcast and on the social media platform Twitter (now X).
