An Infowars #StopTheSteal Caravan Was ‘Attacked’ With A Milkshake
November 12, 2020A caravan of self-described MAGA patriots, chaperoned by the Infowars “Battle Tank” truck, briefly found itself under siege somewhere between Georgia and South Carolina on Wednesday evening.
“We’re under attack,” #StopTheSteal Caravan, the pro-Trump group that organized the convoy, posted on Parler, an alternative social media platform that’s provided refuge to right-wingers exiled from Twitter for sharing conspiracies or advocating violence. One of their participants’ vehicles had been hit with a milkshake, thrown by an ornery truck driver.
“I actually just had a trucker throw something at me and it exploded all over my truck,” Casey Holmes said on a video shared by the main StopTheSteal Caravan account on Wednesday. “Some sort of nasty milkshake or something.”
Nevertheless, the caravan persisted.
Its goal is to galvanize the #StopTheSteal movement by rallying President Donald Trump’s base around the false conspiracy that the Democrats rigged the election on behalf of Joe Biden. It left Austin, Texas, on Monday, snaking its way through the South and rallying supporters in Houston, Baton Rouge, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Columbia, Raleigh, and Richmond. Caravan organizers plan to arrive in Washington D.C. on Friday, to protest the results of the presidential election.
On Thursday, the caravan was about 25 cars strong. One had “CARAVAN TO DC: JOIN OR DIE,” written on the window.
And not all the drivers are necessarily being very careful, as Holmes described about the moments leading up to the milkshake incident.
“There was a young girl driving in a Pontiac and she cut the trucker off, and he started flashing her and threw something at her,” Holmes said. “And it hit me. So I’m getting attacked because other people in the caravan aren’t driving well. But yeah, I’ve got a million miles at least traveling back and forth this country, and I’ve never had a trucker throw a milkshake at me, so that’s a new one.”
Traveling across the country to boost the spirits of Trump supporters and promote the Infowars brand is no easy feat, Holmes added.
“Driving in this caravan stuff is pretty crazy because people are slowing down and speeding up, trying to cut us off, doing all sorts of crazy stuff,” Holmes said. “It’s wild driving in the caravan guys. Hope you’re all staying safer than me.”
The main StopTheSteal Caravan account put out a PSA Wednesday on Parler with regards to participants’ driving.
The other downside of riding caravan-style is that it’s been hard to stick to a schedule—especially one so jam-packed.
For example, the caravan was due to arrive in Columbia at 8 p.m. on Wednesday. But at around 9 p.m., they announced on Parler that they’d stopped at a Chick-Fil-A for dinner in Augusta, Georgia, and hoped to get back on the road in about 20 minutes. They eventually got to Columbia at around 11 p.m.
At their various stops, Infowars’ top correspondent Owen Shroyer has led crowds who come out to see them in singing the national anthem or chanting “Infowars.” He does on-camera reports, which are run on Infowars. In one report from Atlanta, he held up a placard of an enlarged New York Times graph that showed how the vote in key battleground states changed over time from favoring Trump to favoring Biden — which he touts as evidence of potential foul play.
Organizers of the caravan are also using the event as an opportunity to boost their presence on Parler and draw social media users away from mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which they accuse of "censoring" them by flagging false information about the outcome of the election. They've been doing a running tally of follower counts on Parler throughout the week.
When they reach their destination cities, caravan participants wave Trump flags. They chant “Four more years!” They try to sell Infowars merch: bumper stickers saying “FLUORIDE: THERE IS POISON IN THE WATER” or “INDICT THE DEEP STATE”; fridge magnets showing Obama with clown makeup and the word “SOCIALISM”; and Infowars’ special “Super Male Vitality,” something the organization describes as a “natural stamina, endurance and strength booster.”
Participants take photos together—typically a handful of people flash the “OK” sign, which was designated as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League this year because it had been appropriated by right-wing internet trolls. They do video dispatches from the rallies. They post to Parler.
Crowd sizes have varied among StopTheCaravan rally locations, and appear smaller at some of the later stops. The largest crowd was in Atlanta, where an election recount will take place. There, the caravan drew some 400 people, many holding TRUMP2020 flags. One person had a sign saying ‘ARREST BILL GATES.” Another wore a T-shirt saying “Masks Don’t Work.”
The caravan will meet an array of right-wing groups who are organizing a rally in D.C. Saturday against what they see as a vast conspiracy to snatch the presidency from their MAGA hero and install Biden in his place. Biden was called as the winner last Saturday, and currently has a 5 million-vote lead in the popular vote over Trump.
It’s unclear how many people will arrive for the event, which has been promoted by the Oath Keepers, one of the largest militia groups in the U.S., and the Proud Boys, a pro-Trump street-fighting gang. The rally has been advertised under an array of names, including “Million MAGA March,” “Stop the Steal” or “March for Trump” — but nobody with any of those groups has applied for a permit to host a rally at Freedom Park, the designated location, the National Park Service told the Washingtonian.
There’s at least one counterprotest planned, led by a local antifascist group called the “They/ Them Collective.”