A pair of heavily armed men from Virginia who subscribed to QAnon conspiracy theories and had driven to Pennsylvania to participate in a pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” protest were arrested Thursday outside the Philadelphia Convention Center—where mail-in ballots from Tuesday’s presidential election were being counted—for apparently planning an attack on the operations inside.
Philadelphia police made the arrests after receiving a tip from the FBI in Virginia that the men inside a Hummer later found parked outside the convention center had a large cache of weapons and ammunition and were planning an attack in hopes of stopping the counting of ballots, just as fresh returns showed Joe Biden overtaking Donald Trump in the race for Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes. Shortly after finding the Hummer, police on bicycles found the two men outside the center, both carrying guns and ammo.
The men, ages 42 and 61, were found to be carrying a 40-caliber pistol and a 9mm handgun, respectively. Neither of the men had a valid permit for carrying weapons in Pennsylvania, and were promptly arrested. An additional gun was found inside the Hummer, police said.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that police had been warned by FBI agents in Norfolk to be “on the lookout for a mother, son and another man from Virginia Beach traveling to the Philadelphia region to ‘straighten things out’ as vote counting continued.” They were believed to have an AR-15 rifle in the car and were believed to have recently purchased large amounts of ammunition and gun parts.
The men’s Hummer bore a large “Q” sticker with the hashtag #WWG1WGA, which stands for the QAnon motto “Where We Go One, We Go All.” One of the two men arrested, as WHYY reported, is a Chesapeake man named Antonio Paredes LaMotta, whose social media accounts are filled with QAnon and other conspiracy theories. The vehicle is linked to a group calling itself the “Virginia Armed Patriots.”
In a blog post, LaMotta had described COVID-19 as a “psyop,” and justified killing the people he considers responsible for the pandemic.
“The entire plot is equivalent to crimes against humanity for causing premeditated deaths, suffering, and economic hardship, in combination with the suppression of preventive medications and natural treatments,” read the post. “Killing these people is a legitimate act of self-defense and not a crime.”
LaMotta had also predicted that Trump would win the election. “Election or Not, Trump will win by a landslide, if you can't see that, you're in denial,” he wrote in late August.
In other posts, he appears to have embraced sovereign citizen ideology, which claims that ordinary people can simply declare themselves no longer subject to federal, state, and local laws by filing papers filled with legal gobbledygook. “Folks, don't let the democrats brainwash you about taxes,” he wrote in September. “We have two kinds of citizens (Sovereign citizens and First Class citizens). Ones you've relied on public schools, borrowed money that you can't pay, Social Welfare, the democrats will be able to slowly shackle you into slavery. Matter-fact, you can't become First-Class citizens if your kids go to public schools.”
He added: “The teachers don't even know about First-Class and Sovereign Citizens ... They've been programmed to preach that we're a democracy ... but it's beyond that ... they are preaching Socialism now.”
LaMotta, who claims to be a veteran with mastery in multiple forms of martial arts, maintains a website for his private security business offering services as an “international guard, security escort, personal bodyguard, instructor.”
Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase—one of the leading figures in the Virginia far-right’s ongoing campaign against gun control and COVID-19 pandemic measures, and a candidate for the Republican nomination to run against incumbent Gov. Ralph Northam in 2022—has multiple associations with LaMotta, including hiring him to provide security at her announcement event in February.
Chase also has posed with LaMotta and his “Virginia Patriots” group alongside the Hummer that was impounded after the men were arrested Thursday, in photos that were on the group’s Facebook page before it was removed. She can be seen posing with a semiautomatic rifle in front of a QAnon banner raised alongside the Hummer.
When someone on Facebook pointed out to Chase that QAnon is considered a domestic extremist group, she responded, “Guess I just triggered a liberal.”
But on Friday, Chase denied any connection to the men charged in the plot in a Facebook post. “Give me a break,” she wrote. “There is no connection. The individual has never worked for my campaign as paid staff or asked by my campaign to help out as a volunteer. He is simply a supporter that shows up on occasion at events.”
from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/32lq8wt
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