Women for America First Is a Domestic Extremist Group with Domestic Terrorists in Its Ranks

Damning new evidence raises substantial questions about how and why the January 6 insurrection unfolded the way it did—and what role a little-discussed group played.

Introduction

Misogyny has long been implicit in federal law enforcement’s January 6 investigation. Sadly, the same can be said of much of the work done on the subject by major-media journalists and some independent journalists. Despite a growing mountain of evidence that at least 20 key figures in the events of January 6 were women—including Trump advisers Kimberly Guilfoyle, Katrina Pierson, and Hannah Salem; Trump family members Lara Trump and Ivanka Trump; Trump campaign staffers Caroline Wren and Maggie Mulvaney; Trump administration official Arina Grossu; Trump agents Amy Kremer, Kylie Jane Kremer, and Cindy Chafian; Trump donors Julie Jenkins Fancelli and Linda McMahon; pro-Trump activists Bianca Gracia and Rose Tennet; pro-Trump congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado; and Trumpist foot-soldiers Jessica Watkins, Connie Meggs, and Ashli Babbitt, the last of whom was shot and killed as she and a group tried to violently gain access to the Speaker’s Lobby of the U.S. Capitol to apprehend congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts—the FBI has thus far appeared to focus exclusively on the insurrectionists’ “boots on the ground,” with the effect that (Jessica Watkins and Connie Meggs excepted) women tied to the events of January 6 have been ignored.

Instead, the exclusive focus has been on militantly male-dominated entities deemed rife with domestic terrorists: the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, militarized adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory, and the organizers of the Stop the Steal “movement.” A secondary domestic-terrorist threat is seen in the Boogaloo Bois, a group that is also—as its name implies—male-dominated. While all of these groups are rightfully now the target of federal investigations across the country, the focus on malevolent toxic masculinity cannot occlude the full investigation of an ongoing domestic insurgency.

It is unclear whether the FBI’s seeming unwillingness to investigate the many women behind the events of January 6 is born of an antiquated and preposterous notion—common among law enforcement officers, as I saw in my nearly a decade working in the criminal justice system—that women are incapable of plotting complex criminal acts, or rather that arrests of women would simply be more politically unpopular than arrests (righteous as nearly all of them have been and will be) of hulking angry men. In either case, the worrying result of a 1950s-inspired policing philosophy could be that some of the most dangerous U.S. insurrectionists not only remain at large but have no contact at all with federal agents over their actions during an ongoing armed rebellion.

While many of the individuals mentioned in this article may not have criminal liability for their actions, some do. And some may even have liability at the level of conspiring with—and/or aiding and abetting—domestic terrorists under existing federal statutes.

The Domestic Terrorists Among Us

In addition to labeling the attack on the Capitol “domestic terrorism”, FBI director Christopher Wray has opined, as to the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, that both of these groups “have individuals who associate themselves with [the] group[s] who are domestic terrorists.” So far, more than two dozen of the “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys have been arrested over their roles in the insurrection, while more than 60 have been found to have posted notes to an encrypted pre-insurrection planning channel. Meanwhile, more than a dozen Oath Keepers stand charged with crimes related to January 6. Of the nearly 40 defendants in these two groups, just two are women—a figure in keeping with the demographics of those who violently breached the Capitol, but out of step with the cadre of individuals who planned the events of January 6.

The problem, of course, is that in ignoring the class of insurrectionists who helped plan the insurrection—with the FBI conducting no known interrogations, executing no known search warrants, and seizing no known electronic devices from anyone in this group, giving members of a key group of prospective federal defendants ample time to destroy evidence, synchronize narratives, strategize cover stories, and credibly develop “faulty” memories—the FBI has not only turned its January 6 investigation into an oddly gendered exploration of admittedly toxic paramilitary masculinity, but also let entire women-led organizations off the hook. Indeed, in the interest of taking no action against plotters rather than soldiers, even the trio of men atop the Stop the Steal movement (convicted felon Ali Alexander, convicted felon Roger Stone, and alleged attempted murderer Alex Jones) have received no more than a letter requesting that they preserve evidence (Jones) and time and space to flee into hiding (Alexander).

If the FBI now confirms that the Capitol attack was an act of “domestic terrorism,” it follows—not as a matter of opinion, but federal law—that those who coordinated the attack, not merely those who participated in it, are domestic terrorists. And if the FBI must therefore (as it must) investigate all entities that coordinated the events of that terrible day as possible domestic terrorists, it will not do for the FBI to stop at the Stop the Steal group, especially as the actions of that group before and during the January 6 insurrection were inextricably entwined with, and would indeed have been impossible without, the Women for America First and Eighty Percent Coalition organizations.

The head of Women for America First, Amy Kremer, is a highly experienced political operative who was not only a founder of the Tea Party Express group, but is credited with being one of the founders of the Tea Party movement itself. As importantly, she tried in 2018 to gain election to Congress in Georgia, a failed bid now best known for infamously featuring an “AR-15 giveaway” fundraiser; the campaign underscored that Kremer’s designs centered not merely on political advocacy, but political authority and capital. Indeed, had Kremer won in 2018, we’d be discussing her in the same breath as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert—though Kremer’s 2018 electoral defeat arguably freed her to take actions between 2018 and Insurrection Day that would have been impossible had she been under the public scrutiny members of Congress face.

Kremer’s actions include planning the January 6 rally at the White House Ellipse that launched an armed rebellion immediately upon its conclusion. In fact, Kremer even spoke at the event that incited the Capitol attack, and did so using inciting language. Despite this, a non-consecutive search string for four words on YouTube—“Amy,” “Kremer,” “January,” and “6”—returns zero results related to Kremer’s remarks to an armed mob on January 6. Just so, the only livestream of the Ellipse event that is readily available online, the one at C-SPAN, has a time-stamped video for every January 6 speaker except Kremer. Kremer and her group—along with a related group, the Eighty Percent Coalition—have simply been forgotten, it seems, by both the FBI and DOJ.

This willful act of forgetting needs to stop right now, as Women for America First in particular is, by the evidence rather than pejorative assignation, a domestic extremist group, with individuals within it ir associated with it who appear—based on evidence now available—to fall under any classification of domestic terrorism. If federal agents won’t go after these individuals using the awesome authority delegated to them, then it is left to independent journalists to at least expose the information that establishes Women for America First, and notably so, as a clear and present danger to the nation.

{Note: While the FBI doesn’t designate domestic groups as “domestic terrorist organizations,” it does label some groups as “domestic extremist” groups, which can mean, and certainly does with respect to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, that the group’s membership includes some would-be “domestic terrorists.” This Proof article suggests that Women for America First does also include such individuals, and therefore should be designated a domestic extremist group that shelters domestic terrorists—not violent domestic terrorists, but nevertheless those who act as aiders and abettors of violent domestic terrorism through the planning and coordination of activities legally punishable, via “conspiracy” and “aiding and abetting” statutes, with the same federal prison sentences as given to those who enact violent domestic terrorism directly.}

Kim Guilfoyle, Katrina Pierson, Caroline Wren, and the Kremers Orchestrated a Rally That Incited a Rebellion

One can’t understand the events of January 6 without understanding that the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers—and even the Stop the Steal group—come into the story of what happened on that day well after the framework for the insurrection had been authored, it would appear, by five women associated with Women for America First and one who was in that group until founding a sister group days before January 6.

As has previously been reported at Proof, top Donald Trump presidential adviser and Donald Trump Jr. girlfriend Kim Guilfoyle—critically, also a top official at the joint Trump campaign-RNC fundraising vehicle, Trump Victory—delegated supervision of the January 6 White House Ellipse speech to a deputy, Caroline Wren, who thereafter, as ProPublica reports, so thoroughly took over the January 6 Ellipse rally that journalists have evidence of her issuing orders to the grassroots activists originally tasked with planning the event, such as Cindy Chafian of the nascent Eighty Percent Coalition.

According to ProPublica, Wren “played an extensive role in managing operations for the event. The records show that Wren oversaw logistics, budgeting, funding and messaging for the January 6 rally that featured President Donald Trump. Chafian told ProPublica that Wren and others had pushed her aside as plans intensified, including as a late effort was made to get Trump to speak at the event.” Lest anyone be confused by the relationship between the two groups at issue here, at the time that Chafian was taking direct orders from Trump Victory, she was working for Kremer’s Women for America First. That Chafian was, by January 6—just days after she’d been a key part of Kremer’s group—identified as the leader of the Eighty Percent Coalition underscores that the Trump campaign caused chaos and infighting when, in the final ten days of December 2020, it took over the January 6 Women for America First event.

As ProPublica reports, Wren’s extremely problematic event planning was disassociated from Trump Victory and, as importantly, Trump adviser Guilfoyle by way of being paid in full by Publix heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli—a $300,000 post-election donation to Trump’s cause that came at a time when Publix desperately wanted a major political chit from Trump’s top ally in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis: namely a then-exclusive right to distribute vaccines in Florida (at least among non-government-run vax sites). Meanwhile, Fancelli’s role was obscured, ProPublica adds, by an otherwise inexplicable confidentiality agreement, as well as the fact that all of the permitting documents for Trump’s January 6 rally listed Women for America First as the sponsor of the event.

As Proof has reported, Wren was falsely listed as merely a “VIP adviser” on the federal permit, while Maggie Mulvaney—niece of former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney—was listed, a bit ambiguously, as “VIP lead.” Meanwhile, First Lady Melania Trump donated (knowingly or unknowingly is unclear, and will need additional investigation) a former top aide to act as “Project Manager for the March to Save America”, and former Special Assistant to the President and Director of Press Advance Hannah Salem was listed on the permits as “Operations Manager for the March to Save America.” Amy Kremer’s daughter, Kyle Jane Kremer, was listed as the “Person in Charge” on the Women for America First permit. Former Trump administration Small Business Administration Head Linda McMahon, wife of WWE Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon, aided the effort by using her policy advocacy dark money group, America First Policies, to contribute $25,000 to Women for America First in 2020.

Added to this predominantly female network of Trump operatives was the president’s longtime adviser, Katrina Pierson, who was dispatched by Donald Trump himself to be the liaison between his team and Women for America First. If Caroline Wren’s job was to handle event logistics, Pierson’s was to handle political messaging—including who would speak at the Women for America First event and what they would or would not say. Pierson was a good fit for this task, as a friend of Kremer (see more on this below).

Guilfoyle, Pierson, Wren, Chafian, the two Kremers, Mulvaney, and Salem had just one task at the start of their mission in mid- to late December: to orchestrate a rally on January 6 at which Trump could deliver a fiery speech urging supporters to “stop the steal.” It was not within their remit to transport the mob they planned to gather at the Ellipse to the Capitol; that task was assigned to a small group of men close to Trump.

The Attack on the Capitol Was a Three-Stage Operation

The multistage attack on the Capitol used this (oddly gendered) distribution of labor:

(1) STAGE ONE: Assemble a mob at the Ellipse. Nearly all of the work for this stage was conducted by women, including all of the women listed above. Virtually no men—with the exception of Justin Caporale, Melania Trump’s former top aide, and a few others slotted on the Women for America First permit for lesser roles—were involved in the planning for the event, though some of the execution of the gathering’s logistics was delegated to Tim Unes of Event Strategies (a company Paul Manafort also works for). While some men were enlisted to help gin up interest in Trump’s speech at select DC events slated for January 5—for instance, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Pastor Mark Burns, Georgia state representative Vernon Jones, and Flynn’s brother Joe Flynn were set to join Rose Tennet of Women for Trump, Bianca Gracia of Latinos for Trump, and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado at the Rally for Revival at Freedom Plaza—none of these individuals were assigned any event planning duties. Stage coordinator: Kimberly Guilfoyle (with and through Caroline Wren).

(2) STAGE TWO: Transport the mob from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Eventually, three men were tasked with this operation, specifically the three organizers of the Stop the Steal group: Alexander, Jones, and Stone. For unexplained reasons—though foreknowledge of STAGE THREE remains the most likely candidate—the last of these three, Stone, dropped out of all his January 6 duties at the last moment, failing to appear at even one public event on January 6 (including the “Wild Protest” that was supposed to draw the Ellipse mob to the Capitol under the pretext of a pre-permitted, peaceful 1PM rally). Stage coordinator: Ali Alexander (with Alex Jones).

(3) STAGE THREE: Incite the mob—once it reached the Capitol—to trespass on Capitol grounds and breach the Capitol. This task was entrusted to the paramilitary enthusiasts whose calling card (toxic masculinity) would send them immediately to the forefront of the Capitol barricades just as the early departures from Trump’s Ellipse speech were showing up to the Capitol as directed. While two women were included among the scores of men tasked with this final, most dangerous stage—namely, Jessica Watkins and Connie Meggs, each romantically linked to a STAGE THREE paramilitary man, Donovan Crowl and Kelly Meggs respectively—it was otherwise a male-dominated op. Stage coordinators: Ethan Nordean (of the Proud Boys), Joe Biggs (of the Proud Boys), Stewart Rhodes (of the Oath Keepers), and “Whip” (an as-yet unidentified contractor with Erik Prince’s former private paramilitary outfit, Blackwater; see here for more).

ProPublica confirms that as late as December 29, nearly everything about STAGE ONE remained in flux, including the speaker list for the Ellipse (which Katrina Pierson was still working on on January 4) and even the basic messaging of the event. It wasn’t until the 72-hour period between January 3 and January 5—a span of time culminating in a meeting of Trump’s inner circle at Trump’s private residence at Trump International Hotel—that a seemingly irresolvable problem with the January 6 plan was detected.

The problem resided at a very particular point in the three-stage plan: STAGE TWO.

Team Trump Games Out Guiding An Insurrectionist Mob

Trump’s inner circle had become concerned that it would not be possible for the mob to reach critical mass at STAGE THREE unless substantially more was done to focus on STAGE TWO. That is, the Trump administration and the Trump campaign had to get significantly more involved in getting people from the Ellipse to the Capitol, or else the crowd would dissipate throughout downtown DC and never arrive at the Capitol as the discrete, coherent, contained army it needed to be for Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to set off the breach of the Capitol and be followed inside by the mob. How do we know all this? Because Alexander and Jones confessed it on video (scroll way down at link).

Women for America First—along with its various Team Trump handlers and agents—thereafter took these steps in response to its new “STAGE TWO” January 6 dilemma:

(1) It ignored its permit. The Women for America First permit, which had Kylie Jane Kremer as its lead signatory, had a clear restriction on crowd size—with 5,000 guests anticipated, “including press and staff”—yet by the time Kylie Jane’s mother Amy took the stage, she was crowing (albeit falsely) about how her group had brought “1.5 million” people to DC in mid-December, underscoring that the plan of her group was to not just outstrip the 5,000-guest mark, but obliterate it. The 2020 Trump campaign’s Director of Operations, Megan Powers—who was still, as of January 2021, working for the Trump campaign—was listed as one of two “Operations Managers” on the permit.

(2) It cancelled competing events. According to Alexander and Jones (see link above), in order to better corral Trump voters from the Ellipse to the Capitol, Women for America First cancelled a Stop the Steal event scheduled for the morning of January 6. It ensured that Trump’s rally would be the only Stop the Steal event in DC January 6.

(3) It altered its stage presentation. According to both Alexander and Jones, a map showing Ellipse audience members where to meet at the Capitol—in a permitted lot far from the building itself—was not displayed on Jumbotron screens as planned, on the orders of Trump’s top adviser on the coordination of January 6, Katrina Pierson. Speakers who were going to discuss the lot in question (Alexander being one) had their speaking slots cancelled. Video screens that were set to display a map of the permitted lot near the Capitol where the so-called “Wild Protest” was to take place instead just showed the words “Save America March”—easily read as, “Save America! March!”—despite the event being one that was not only not called the “Save America March” (though it was sometimes called the “March to Save America rally”) but whose federal permit explicitly said it had nothing at all to do with any march to the Capitol, only that “Some attendees may leave to attend rallies at the United States Capitol to hear the results of Congressional certification of the Electoral College count.” This was, of course, a deliberate lie; as Amy Kremer would make clear in her speech (see below), she knew about the Stop the Steal rally being planned for the “Capitol steps” because she had been working with the coordinator of that event, Ali Alexander, and she further knew that that event was intended to influence the “Electoral College count” rather than just create a space in which Trump voters could hear news after the fact.

(4) It coordinated the launch of STAGE TWO. All three of Alexander, Jones, and Stone were explicitly and directly requested to gather at the Women for America First “VIP area” prior to Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, so that (per Jones) with “thirty minutes” left in Trump’s speech—a time deliberately chosen to avoid audience melt toward the end of Trump’s address—Stop the Steal’s three co-organizers could be led to “the place where they [the White House] want you to start the march” by members of the Secret Service. Women for America First thus helped coordinate a march on the U.S. Capitol they had expressly told the government they would have absolutely nothing to do with.

(5) It changed Trump’s speech. According to a man working with radical documentary filmmaker Jason Rink on January 6, Paul Escandon, as of the morning of January 6 there was no plan for Trump to speak at the “Wild Protest,” though one of the men who was the subject of Rink’s documentary, Alex Jones, says (see link above) he was told on January 3 that Trump would speak. We can easily reconcile these competing narratives by noting that Trump may well have had—and subsequently abandoned—a plan to speak on the Capitol steps, as this would be consistent with what we now know about Trump’s arguments with the Secret Service (see link above) on this very subject, thereafter falsely resurrecting his plan to speak at the “Wild Protest” as a way of aiding Ali Alexander and Jones (with or without their prior knowledge that the means to be used was fraudulent) in drawing the mob to the Capitol. All three men would have had reason to fear some audience members at the Ellipse might go to lunch in downtown DC instead of to the Capitol if they didn’t think Trump would show up at the latter.

In consequence, Trump repeatedly lied to the crowd at the Ellipse by telling them he would be going to the Capitol, which lie gave both Jones and Alexander significant rhetorical ammunition—which, according to the ProPublica video archive of January 6, they used to their advantage—in drawing Trump voters to the Capitol. After Jones and Alexander arrived at the Capitol, Alexander was told by the Trump campaign (by text) that Trump wouldn’t be going to the Capitol, thereby completing a gross misdirection.

(6) It reached out to the STAGE TWO coordinators. It’s not just that all three of the STAGE TWO coordinators were told to come to the Women for America First VIP area to coordinate with the Secret Service and the event organizers, it’s that on January 5 the STAGE ONE coordinator, Kimberly Guilfoyle, spoke directly with Ali Alexander, the STAGE TWO coordinator. The result of this conversation was that both Alexander and Jones were present in the VIP area rather than at the Capitol steps managing the logistics of their “Wild Protest,” which they otherwise would have been expected to do. This also enabled them to be absent from the Capitol as the attack began, which in an interview on InfoWars (see link above) Alexander attributed to divine intervention, but in fact appears now to have been the work of Kremer and Pierson, not the Almighty.

(7) It admitted STAGE THREE parties to its VIP area. Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins, presumably seen—in the gendered visage of the Trump campaign and its agents—as a less threatening STAGE THREE figure, was admitted to the Women for America First VIP area. Meanwhile, a presumptively less threatening member of another major STAGE THREE entity, the Proud Boys—Eddie Block, a person with a disability who would not present as a likely foot soldier at the Capitol, due to his use of a motorized scooter—was inexplicably given a press pass by the Trump campaign so that he could be admitted to the Women for America First VIP area also. After a dispute between Secret Service agents (possibly representing the different camps within that agency on January 6, one aligned with Trump’s political team and one neutral, see links above), Block was denied entry to the Women for America First VIP area, to his great anger.

(8) It incited insurrection from the Ellipse stage. Both Pierson and Kremer delivered speeches (see below) that sought to move people to the U.S. Capitol and significantly upscale their collective willingness to engage in aggressive confrontations once there.

(9) Its agents incited an insurrection on January 5 in Freedom Plaza. The speech by Women for America First agent Cindy Chafian, delivered near the White House and Trump International Hotel while Trump’s inner circle was meeting at both locations, has to be heard to be believed. Note that many invitees to these two secret meetings, such as Michael Flynn and Rogan O’Handley, ultimately showed up at the plaza to speak at the so-called Rally to Save America alongside Chafian (and Ali Alexander, who led a “Victory or death!” chant wearing the blaze-orange garb of the Proud Boys).

(10) It deliberately hid the involvement of the president and its team in its activities. It is remarkable, as noted above, that so many people on Trump’s payroll ended up playing critical roles in an event nominally being run by an outside organization. The deception—comically blatant—couldn’t possibly have been anything but intentional.

Katrina Pierson on Insurrection Day

Pierson, the White House liaison to Women for America First on Insurrection Day, may have taken on that role not merely because Trump directed her to but because she was well suited to the task as a longtime (self-described) “friend and sister in liberty” of Amy Kremer. Just as Kremer self-credits (and is sometimes credited by others) as a founder of the Tea Party movement, Pierson identifies herself, in her speech at the White House Ellipse, as “one of the original founders of the Tea Party movement”, adding that Kremer—who she eventually formally introduces—is “a woman I have known for a very long time, who has fought for our country, been a voice for liberty.”

Pierson further plugs Kremer’s coming speech by adding that Kremer is “fierce” and a “fighter”, someone who “after this election took to the streets because that’s what we do as patriots. We fight. We don’t sit around and wait for politicians to act, or judges to act, we the people [Trump voters] are in control of the United States, and we are going to remind everyone that we are still a constitutional republic. And we will take our rights back!” Pierson calls Women for America First “an amazing organization.”

Pierson begins her speech by lying for the president, telling the gathered mob that the president is only speaking to them because he was overwhelmed to discover that they would be coming to Washington, DC. The aim of this shameless and transparent lie is self-evidently to inoculate Trump from culpability for anything that might happen after his speech. Indeed, Pierson seems most interested in building the narrative that neither Trump nor any of his team (herself included) coordinated the massing of the huge crowd through social media posts, robocalls, direct emails to Trump supporters, or other inducements we now know were plotted in various closed-door meetings at the White House and Trump International Hotel (including the appearance of Adam Piper at the January 5 meeting at the latter location; Piper ultimately resigned from the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, when it was discovered that he had orchestrated robocalls pushing the January 6 Women for America First event).

Lest it seem as though Pierson only briefly tossed out Trump’s “Big Lie” to the crowd—“You put him in the White House, not once but twice!”—the Trump adviser in fact went on to focus on the Big Lie at length:

[Joe Biden] couldn’t even get 1,000 views online [on YouTube], but we’re supposed to believe he got more votes than Barack Obama? I mean c’mon, nobody really believes this crap. But hey! There’s something going on at the Capitol today! And I don’t think they can hear you [from the Ellipse]!…{crowd chants, “Stop the Steal! Stop the Steal! Stop the Steal!”} And even if they [Congress] think—for a second—that they’re going to get away with it today, they got another thing coming…I think the politicians down there [at the Capitol]—the Republican politicians down there—have forgotten what the Tea Party did back then [in 1773]. See they [Congress] forgot that Americans know their rights, Americans will stand up for themselves and protect their rights, and they will demand that the politicians that we elect uphold those rights or we will go after them!

While at certain points Pierson underscores that some of the resistance she wants to see will take place over the ensuing “two years”, and involves nonviolent action like voting in future elections and advocating for changes in election laws, her emphasis on the January 6 joint session of Congress (“I don’t think they can hear you [from here]”) is unmistakable. And her frenzied pro-Trump audience doesn’t miss it. She continues:

At the end of the day, these politicians are not in charge. They govern at the consent of the people. We are revoking that consent moving forward, and we are going to fight for our president! And we are going to fight for our country!….The [political] left, they go out there and they scream and cry and they whine, but—this is something they [the politicians up at the Capitol] don’t get, either—they [Congress] haven’t seen a resistance until they’ve seen a patriot fight for their country! Because we know how to fight for our country.

This is a threat of an imminent and extraordinary confrontation at the Capitol. Then:

We know, and they [points to the Capitol] all know, that this election was severely compromised—and we’re going to make sure it never happens again!

Toward the end of her Ellipse speech, Pierson drops all pretense of not inciting a mob:

There are more of us [members of the mob] then there are of them [members of Congress]! And they’re about to see us coming!

She ends by saying to the mob gathered before her, “Today, we are all in this together, in this fight to restore America. We will save America!”

Amy Kremer on Insurrection Day

Kremer is not merely an activist—despite her status as one of the founders of the Tea Party—as her 2018 run for Congress in Georgia cements her ambitions as a would-be political leader. As Pierson explains in her January 6 speech introducing Kremer, Kremer spent late 2020 driving “fourteen thousand miles” in a “big red bus called ‘March for Trump’” (despite her January event allegedly having no march component).

Kremer begins her speech by trying to undo the damage Pierson had done at the start of her own speech, reconfiguring the Ellipse event as having occurred at the president’s direction rather than (as would be the only other readily available alternative) her own:

This president hasn’t asked for much from us. He’s asked for our vote and he asked us to show up today. And I don’t think he’s going to be disappointed!

What’s odd about this framing is that, as Kremer would have known, the president was already aware of the size and scope of the event at the Ellipse. Kremer was more likely speaking, therefore, of what was going to follow Trump’s Ellipse speech when she said that Trump would “not…be disappointed” by the crowd. Indeed, Kremer makes clear her focus is on the event about to happen at the Capitol—a joint session of Congress—more so than the event then taking place at the Ellipse, with her very next words:

There’s so much at stake today. And we have been in the streets the last two months. There’s a movement [Stop the Steal] that has been born [in the last two months]. I come from the Tea Party movement, and I’m asked all the time, “What happened to the Tea Party?” Well [I tell them], “We’re still here. We just grew and morphed into something bigger and better: the MAGA movement.” And I am convinced that, were it not for the Tea Party movement, we would not have President Donald J. Trump today. He has fought for us, and he, unlike any other president in our lifetime, has put America First. And how refreshing is that? We love him—I know you do, I just heard you chanting it—and he loves us. He is putting our country and the American people first. And Washington [Congress] doesn’t like it. Why? Because they’re in the back pockets of China and Russia and Ukraine. We’ve got their number, we know what they’re doing, and I don’t care what they [Congress] say [up at the Capitol in joint session]: “Sleepy Joe” Biden did not win this election!….You can’t convince me that a man who can’t fill six [social distancing] circles won this election! There’s no way!

There’s a lot to unpack here. Kremer at once takes credit for Trump’s presidency, takes credit for the Stop the Steal “movement,” takes credit for the MAGA movement, and spreads discredited Russian disinformation—all in an effort to (1) paint members of Congress as traitors to the United States, and (2) advance the Big Lie that Trump won the election. As a gratis soupçon, she adds that the joint session about to meet up at the Capitol is going to anoint Biden because it’s being paid to do so by hostile foreign powers. And she repeatedly references “the people” (a term MAGA agitators like Amy Kremer use to refer, incredibly, only to Trump voters) to add an ambiance of revolution:

As I look out here today, this is probably the biggest party that the people have ever held for a president in the history of this country!…You are amazing, patriots! Amazing! It doesn’t matter what the media says. They can call [Biden] “president-elect,” that doesn’t make it so. We know that there was voter fraud. We absolutely know it. And that’s why we’re here [Washington] to stop the steal [of the election about to happen at the Capitol]. {Crowd chants, “Stop the Steal! Stop the Steal! Stop the Steal!”}….They can say that there’s no voter fraud, but we know that there is….Just because the media doesn’t tell you what’s going on, doesn’t make it not true! One of President Trump’s legacies is his exposure of the “fake news” media. But that doesn’t just mean wrong and inaccurate information, it’s also the omission of information. Right? But we’re smarter than them. We’ve connected in other ways. We’ve connected over social media. And now Big Tech is trying to silence us. Facebook has shut us down. We [Women for America First] are the group that started the Stop the Steal Facebook group the day after the election….then MailChimp shuts us down so we couldn’t communicate with our supporters. And then EventBrite shut us down.

Why do I include all this Big Tech minutiae? Because Amy Kremer here confesses to working with Trump’s top post-election presidential adviser, Steve Bannon—who’s been publicly credited with “start[ing] the Stop the Steal Facebook group the day after the election”—as well as Ali Alexander, who bragged pre-election that he was (as summarized by Right Wing Watch) “creat[ing] a digital text-messaging database ​that would dispatch supporters of President Donald Trump to places where their physical presence is needed” in response to ongoing “de-platforming” efforts by Big Tech.This latter boast may explain the odd presence of Txtwire CEO Daniel Beck at the January 5 Trump International Hotel meeting—a meeting STAGE ONE coordinator Kimberly Guilfoyle attended, and during which she spoke by phone to STAGE TWO coordinator Ali Alexander. Whether Beck also spoke to Alexander on January 5 is unknown, as are any connections between the Becks (meaning Daniel Beck and his GOP-official and January 5 “war council”-attendee father, Doyle Beck) and Amy and Kylie Jane Kremer.

And what else could explain the extremely odd rant below by Kremer—at a Stop the Steal-sponsored event—besides ongoing confusion and consternation within Trump’s camp about whether the Trumpist mob gathered at the Ellipse on January 6 would transport itself to the Capitol if Trump decided against saying he’d go with them (as Paul Escandon contends was the state of affairs as of a strategy call early on January 6)?

They [Big Tech] thought they were going to stop us [Women for America First]. But then we came back again, on December 12, and another approximately one and a half million people showed up in Washington, DC. Not because they thought they were going to hear from President Trump or see President Trump. Not because they thought they were going to hear from somebody with a Trump last name. But because they love this country and they love this president and they are committed to standing for election integrity and saving our republic. {Note: The sign on Kremer’s lectern reads, “Women for America First: Save America.”} So Women for America First decided to get on a bus—the “March for Trump” bus—and go across America, and take a little piece of everybody we came across and bring it to Washington, DC. Like I said, the president has not asked for much, but he asked us to show up today and we showed up. And we’re not going to back down! We’re not going away!

Kremer urges the mob to put away its fear and “go on offense and win—and fight back, punch back, for Donald Trump” (emphasis supplied). Kremer adds, speaking of Trump (who immediately after his Ellipse speech would flee to the White House rather than go to the Capitol as he’d repeatedly promised the crowd), “He doesn’t back down. He’s not afraid of Republicans. He’s not afraid of Democrats. He doesn’t need anybody else’s money. He is fighting for me and you and Americans across this country. And he needs us now [today] just like we need him.”

Kremer’s oblique reference to supposed foreign bribes to anti-Trump politicians aside, lest it be unclear what she “needs” the mob to do, her next words erase any doubt:

So for years, as the Republicans over at the Capitol have been telling us that they’ve been fighting for us, what have they been doing? They’ve been crafting the terms [to the] signing away [of] our rights. That’s what they’ve been doing. And they keep attacking our president. And every time they attack our president, it’s an attack on you and I [sic]. And I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of it. So we are here [in DC]—we’re not going anywhere—we’re not going to let them steal an election [during the joint session at the Capitol]. Because this isn’t about stealing an election from Donald J. Trump, this is about stealing an election from “we the people”—and we are here to save the republic. You guys, we cannot back down. {Crowd chants, “USA! USA! USA!”, the chant Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama had minutes earlier told them to chant as they marched on the Capitol.} We’re not gonna back down, are we? Keep up the fight! Keep fighting for America! It’s worth saving! I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to learn to speak Chinese, and I don’t want that White House {she points behind her, toward the White House] to turn red! It is up to you and I to save this republic!

Like Pierson, Kremer intersperses references to future nonviolent political campaigns with references to the joint session of Congress, so that when she says she wants to “let Republicans know we’re coming for you—and Democrats, too!” it simultaneously refers to the march on the Capitol and to future unspecified acts of political advocacy.

Conclusion

Federal criminal statutes—18 U.S.C. § 371 (Conspiracy) and 18 U.S.C § 2 (Aiding and Abetting)—not only equalize the punishments for those who coordinate domestic terrorism and those who commit acts of terrorism directly, but also establish that when we speak of “domestic terrorists” we are speaking of both the vile criminal masterminds behind acts of terrorism (Osama bin Laden being a key recent example) as well as the foot soldiers who dumbly carry out operations whose contours have been set by those above their pay grade. By any definition of the relevant federal statutes, the evidence we currently have strongly suggests that the FBI hasn’t cast nearly a wide enough net in its January 6 probe. As it rounds up almost exclusively toxic-masculine byproducts of long-dangerous paramilitary outfits, it misses a cadre of very dangerous insurrectionists that (a) primarily comprises women and (b) is ensconced within groups that at present are rarely discussed by either law enforcement or American journalists.