The Far Right Is Roiled by an Underage-Sex Scandal

[brooklynite]

New York Magazine

Over the past month or so, the far right has been embroiled in a scandal involving the alleged grooming practices that its loudest voices have claimed are rampant among liberals. According to two accusers who have come forward, Stop the Steal founder Ali Alexander allegedly came on to them when they were teenage boys, asking for nudes from a 17-year-old and pressuring a 15-year-old to have sex with him.

For those of us who don’t have a mental Rolodex of the movers and shakers of the far right, Alexander is the founder of the campaign to push the conspiracy that Donald Trump was the actual winner of the 2020 election, and he hosted a rally outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021, that fed the subsequent riot. Alexander’s problems first emerged in March, when fellow far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos aired interviews on his podcast detailing Alexander’s alleged practice of propositioning minors for sex. Yiannopoulos, whose own career was derailed years ago because of old videos purportedly condoning pedophilia, was frustrated that Alexander and white nationalist Nick Fuentes had booted him from Kanye West’s camp.

In one of the interviews, a young man named Aidan Duncan described how Alexander had allegedly solicited nude pictures from him when Duncan was 15 and Alexander was 32. He claimed Alexander had promised to share his “entire network” with Duncan if he kept their situation secret. “Boundaries are cool,” Alexander wrote, according to a screenshot of a text conversation obtained by The Daily Beast. “Allowed to say no. However, the less you deprive me of, the less I deprive you of.” But by May 2019, Alexander was annoyed that Duncan would never send him “good jack off material,” according to another screenshot.

“When I was 15 I was naive and desperate,” Duncan tweeted last week. “I thought I had no choice but to cooperate with inappropriate and humiliating requests if I wanted to make it in politics. I figured that was just the nature of the game.”

Months after Alexander appears to have grown tired of Duncan, he began texting Lance Johnston, then a 17-year-old conservative influencer on TikTok. Johnston told The Daily Beast that Alexander had moved “oddly quickly” toward discussions about sex. In July 2019, the 34-year-old Alexander texted Johnston for nude pictures, according to screenshots: