This man traveled all over the country for ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies. Now he says it’s a ‘cult’
“I felt like a patriot that was standing beside our Founding Fathers speaking up against King George,” Scott told CNN in an interview on the one-year anniversary of the insurrection.
A year on, Scott is blunt about the movement he was a part of, calling it a cult. His story is complicated — he still believes much of the “Stop the Steal” propaganda, for example — but his journey is illustrative of how Americans like him, who said he had never attended a Donald Trump rally, get caught up in a movement based on misinformation and how it takes over their lives.
That was just the beginning. He spent the next few months living mostly in his car, driving through the night and across the country to almost every “Stop the Steal” rally.
“I felt like we were doing something,” Scott said. “If nothing else, we were showing patriotism, because we were standing up for — whether we were right or not — we felt like we were standing up, making our voices be heard.”
There were several times Scott said he thought he was done protesting, only to be reeled back in. He missed Thanksgiving with his family, in part, he said, because they objected to his hanging around so many people without masks as Covid-19 surged through the country. After a protest in Lansing, Michigan, he was ready to drive back to Atlanta, when someone told him the “Stop the Steal” website had been updated: in 36 hours, they were to have an event in Phoenix, where Rudy Giuliani — Trump’s one-time lawyer — would supposedly present evidence of election fraud.
A buddy of Scott’s at the protest said to him, “These Q people are nuts.” Scott played along. “So I go, ‘Yeah, the Q people are crazy.’ … I just wanted to seem like I was in the know. I didn’t know what Q was.”
Before long, he was driving 30 hours to another rally in Alpharetta, Georgia. At this point, Scott said, “I was not in control of my actions.” He was addicted, he now says. “I felt like I needed to be there. I felt like my voice mattered.”
And he kept thinking he’d soon hear the evidence he was looking for — from Giuliani, or Trump-connected lawyer Sidney Powell or Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. “The people that were giving evidence of election fraud, so to speak, it was the same message that we had heard a day before or weeks before. It was, ‘It’s coming. It’s coming. It’s going to be revealed,'” Scott said. “Just keeping us holding on for the next breath.”
Scott says he saw “bad” things that day “regardless of which side you’re on.” But he added that “the people that actually, you know, had physical confrontations with police officers, they should be held accountable for that.” And he said he did wonder at the time, “How far is this gonna go? How does this end? This doesn’t end well.”
When it was all over, he visited a friend in Texas, where he said he kept muttering to himself that he felt like he just got out of a cult. His friend suggested maybe he had. A couple days later, Scott decided to write a book called “Election Fraud Cult,” which he’s hoping will help warn people about joining similar movements.
“My point is to look out for people,” Scott said, noting he’d met people who lost their jobs or were estranged from their families because they spent all their time on “Stop the Steal.”
“Whether it’s politics or something else, don’t get so caught up that you’re not making your own decisions anymore.”
