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By the time former President Donald Trump takes the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas on Sunday afternoon, attendees will have no doubt who he believes won last November’s election.

With a speaker list packed with Trump acolytes and panels with titles such as “Detecting Threats to Election Integrity: How to Collect Evidence of Fraud” and “Spare the Fraud, Spoil the Child: The Future of American Elections” there will be no shortage of people willing to boost the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

As he’s returned to staging campaign-style rallies in recent weeks, Trump has shown that even eight months after President Joe Biden won the election, he is still clinging to the claim that there was widespread fraud during the election and that he should still be in the Oval Office.

But at CPAC, Trump will be among friends and he won’t have to work that hard to convince anyone that he’s the legitimate president.

The latest polls suggest that 53% of Republicans believe that Trump is the true president. While most on the left are scratching their heads that the figure is so high, those on the right are looking at the 47% who don’t ascribe to this theory and are trying to do something about it.

Over the last six months, as the fallout from the Capitol insurrection subsided and Trump continued to push the conspiracy about a stolen election, a shadow network of acolytes, grifters and sycophants lined up to bring his message to the masses, organizing grassroots and fundraising events across the country.

But as well as spreading lies about the election being stolen, this strange mix of national lawmakers and internet-famous conspiracy theorist helped spread anti-vaxx disinformation, COVID-19 denialism, antisemitism, and, of course, QAnon conspiracy theories.

Here’s a look at some of those efforts:

This is a 110-day tour with 89 stops in all 50 states organized by Robert David Steele, a former CIA spy, a well-known conspiracy theorist and one of the earlier promoters of QAnon.

“I really feel good about the country,” Steele told the audience at a stop in Menoken Grove, North Dakota this week, before casually promoting the conspiracy that Trump will return to office in August and adding: “I’m a Trumper, plain and true.”

These events are not slickly produced shows, but are designed to be low-key in order to connect with the people attending. Steele, oftentimes speaking in what look like hay sheds, portrays himself as just a regular guy fighting for his fellow citizens. As an example of the lo-fi nature of the events, rather than using flashy digital presentations, Steele uses cardboard flash cards during his speeches to show how the government is “screwing over” its citizens.

Clips of the events posted to the alternative video-sharing platform Rumble by the tour’s organizer show that audiences are typically in the dozens. Sometimes, like at the July 4 event at Mount Rushmore, the figure may have passed 100, but at other events, like the one in Pembla County Fairgrounds in Hamilton, North Dakota, the attendance looked to be as low as 10 people.

Steele’s website describes the tour as a “non-profit civics education campaign” designed to “restore integrity to the U.S. Government via an Election Reform Act.” What the tour website doesn’t mention, however, is the depths of Steele’s antisemitic beliefs.

As documented in this recent report from the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, Steele has has long history of antisemitism, including the times he called for all Jews who are not sufficiently “loyal to the Republic” to be jailed, and said that we must “eradicate every Zionist who refuses to be loyal to their country of citizenship and the rule of law.”

As well as hating Jewish people, Steele has a deep-seated hatred for the political class (but believes that Trump should not be included in this category as he is a businessman first and foremost).

Steele and the other speakers on the tour, who include a variety of fringe mini-celebrities from MAGA world as well as local pro-Trump figures, are using the tour to reinforce the idea that the government is not to be trusted and that regular citizens (the 99%, as Steele calls them) need to stand up and take action in order to regain control.

Central to this is the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), a group led by longtime militia figure Richard Mack, who wants to reintroduce Posse Comitatus, a violent far-right movement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s and whose ideas underpinned the militia and common law courts movements of the 1990s.

The overall message to the people who are coming to these rallies is that you can’t trust anyone in government or on Capitol Hill—but you can trust Trump.

On the other end of the scale is the Reawaken America Tour, formerly known as the Health and Freedom Conference, and, briefly, the Reopen America Tour.

This is a series of slickly produced and well-attended conferences across the country, which brings together prominent QAnon influencers (Lin Wood, Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell), high profile pro-Trump religious leaders (such as Pastor Greg Locke), anti-vaxxers, and some of the biggest election fraud conspiracy boosters, including Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne.

The events have been organized by Clay Clark, a Tulsa businessman. Each event is held in a church, and so far Clark has held sold-out events in his home town and in Florida.  Next up is an event in California later in July, before moving on to Michigan in August, Colorado in September and Texas in November, where 6,500 tickets will be up for grabs.

The tie that binds all of the various viewpoints at these conferences together? Trump, and the baseless belief that he is still very much the legitimate president. 

Arguably, the bogus recount taking place in Maricopa County has done the most to perpetuate the myth that the election was stolen from Trump.

By indulging QAnon-inspired conspiracies about bamboo ballots flown in from Asia and secret watermarks, Republicans in the Arizona Senate gave Trump supporters something to focus on, a tangible event that they could point to whenever someone said they were spreading lies.

Telegram channels with tens of thousands of followers were set up to monitor every moment of the ballot, while lawmakers from over a dozen other states visited the Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix and indicated they would try to conduct similar recounts. A Pennsylvania state senator this week said his state needs to conduct a “forensic audit” similar to the one taking place in Arizona.

The event has also been a fundraising boon for Republicans and other grifters, with millions of dollars being donated to fund the sham recount.

Women for America First is a nonprofit spearheaded by former Tea Party activist Amy Kremer, whose PAC previously ran the Women for Trump group. Women for America First was the group who organized the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the Capitol riots.

The group was founded, its website says, to counter “liberal feminists and their cohorts” who they say have spent billions to undermine conservative female voices.

Since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the group has gone on to hold a number of events promoting the Big Lie, including a Save America summit at Trump’s own Doral National resort, with speakers including Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is under investigation into whether he paid underage girls for sex, and other Trump acolytes like Sen. Rand Paul, Rep. Louie Gohmert, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Women For America First has also begun an “election integrity town hall” tour in Georgia where they are pushing for an Arizona-style audit. “If they actually won, then they should be happy to prove they actually won,” Kremer told the audience at the inaugural town hall last month.

On Wednesday, Kremer posted an updated schedule of events, which includes half a dozen town halls in Georgia in the coming weeks. The first of these will be held in Rome next week, where Kremer will be joined on stage by Greene.

Kremer added that when the Georgia tour is complete the group will be heading to what she calls the “Pennsylvania audit,” even though such an audit has not been officially sanctioned.

Greene, who appeared as a speaker at Trump’s Ohio rally last month, has been one of the loudest proponents of the election fraud conspiracy and in May teamed up with her colleague Gaetz to hold a trio of events claiming that Trump should still be president.

The America First tour kicked off in Gaetz’ home state of Florida, before moving to Arizona and finally to Greene’s home state of Georgia. At each of the events hundreds of supporters packed venues and paid hundreds of dollars for tickets, with many paying for VIP access to the speakers.

As well as proving to be a good fundraising vehicle for the pair, the events helped spread the message that there was widespread election fraud happening across the country, and that RINOS (Republicans in name only) were as much to blame for Trump’s loss as Democrats.

While this was a QAnon conference in all but name, the “For God and Country” event in Dallas on Labor Day weekend was a major opportunity for some of Trump’s biggest boosters to promote the claim that he was still president. 

Sidney Powell, the “Kraken” lawyer who filed dozens of failed election lawsuits on behalf of the former president, told the 1,500 attendees that Trump could be reinstalled as president, saying that "it should be that he can simply be reinstated, that a new Inauguration Day is set."

Not willing to be outdone by his own lawyer, disgraced national security adviser Michael Flynn went on to suggest that there was no reason a military coup should not happen in the U.S. to take back control—a suggestion he quickly walked back following intense media coverage. 

The first Patriot Roundup event was so successful that its organizer, known as ”QAnon John,” has announced a second one will be taking place in Las Vegas in October.

Billing itself as “CPAC of the South,” the event in Greenville, South Carolina, featured keynote speakers Flynn and Lin Wood, the pro-Trump lawyer who has become one of the biggest QAnon influencers.

The event included the typical mix of pro-Trump rhetoric and election fraud conspiracies, but also featured some violence, after one of the speakers decided to bodyslam a protestor who called Flynn a traitor, to the ground.

Organized by talk show host and QAnon influencer Doug Billings, the Determined Patriotism Conference in Branson, Missouri last weekend also featured Wood, again spreading false information about election fraud.

Also speaking was Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com and one of the biggest boosters of election fraud. He even wrote a book about it, called “The Deep Rig,” and in Branson he presented a “documentary” version of the book, which is filled with lies and conspiracies about the election. 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to chase down Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wednesday and called her a “coward” for not agreeing to a debate on the Green New Deal, causing the New York congresswoman to raise security concerns. And apparently, it’s not the first time Greene has pulled a stunt like this.

In early 2019, Greene visited Ocasio-Cortez’s office and threw a tantrum because the New York Democrat’s staff refused to allow her in. Naturally, Greene streamed the entire incident on Facebook Live.

The February 2019 video, which has since been deleted but was obtained and uploaded by CNN, is nearly 40 minutes long and shows Greene visiting various congressional offices. About eight minutes in, she arrives at Ocasio-Cortez’s office, which she calls a “daycare” and compares to a “sorority” because of the Post-It notes on the door. 

Greene and the group she’s with, which includes former congressional candidate and Capitol rioter Anthony Aguero, attempt to walk into Ocasio-Cortez’s office, but find the door is locked. 

“Excuse me, I’m an American citizen, I pay taxes, I’d like to speak to someone in Congress,” Greene said, calling the fact that Ocasio-Cortez’s staff locked the door “immoral.” 

Ocasio-Cortez received so many death threats during her first three months in Congress that Capitol Police trained her staff on how to do “risk assessments” of visitors to her office, TIME reported in March 2019. 

Because the door is locked, Greene, Aguero, and others open up the mail slot and start talking through it to Ocasio-Cortez’s staff.

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I'm an American citizen. I pay your salary through the taxes that you collect for me through the IRS because I'm a taxpaying citizen of the United States,” Greene says through the slot, showing off her trademark sterling understanding of representative government. 

Greene goes on to blame Ocasio-Cortez for “New York’s abortion law.” 

“You’re bringing God’s judgment on our country and I’m against it as well as my friends,” Greene says through the slot.

“So you need to stop being a baby and stop locking your door and come out and face the American citizens that you serve. If you want to be a big girl, you need to get rid of your diaper and come out and be able to talk to the American citizens. Instead of having to use a flap, a little flap. Sad.” 

Before leaving to visit the offices of other members, Greene and the group she’s with sign Ocasio-Cortez’s guestbook by drawing a picture of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. 

The video was taken on February 22, 2019, according to CNN. That same day, Greene delivered a WhiteHouse.gov petition signed by nearly 200,000 people calling for Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment for “treason” to Pelosi’s office, CNN reported in January. 

Greene was kicked off her House committee assignments earlier this year after CNN uncovered social media posts where Greene endorsed the killing of prominent Democrats, including Pelosi, as well as a video where Greene confronted Parkland survivor David Hogg, calling him a “coward.” 

On Thursday, Pelosi said Greene’s latest “verbal assault” and “abuse” of Ocasio-Cortez is “probably a matter for the [House] Ethics Committee.” 

"This is beneath the dignity of a person serving in the Congress of the United States,” Pelosi told reporters. “[The GOP] caucus should exercise some respectable behavior, standard for them.” 

Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday dismissed Greene’s latest attempt to goad her into a debate. “I used to be a bartender. These are the kinds of people I threw out of bars all the time,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters Thursday, referring to Greene as “a person who supports white supremacists in our nation's Capitol.” 

Greene, who apparently has a lot of free time, responded to all of this on Twitter, tweeting at Pelosi that actually, the Ethics committee should investigate Ocasio-Cortez for “putting Trump admin staff and supporters on lists to destroy their lives and prevent future employment.”

“.@AOC you’ve never thrown anyone out of a bar, you’re too scared to talk to anyone,” Greene tweeted separately at Ocasio-Cortez. 

A former White House doctor-turned-Republican-congressman who once said he had “absolutely no concerns” about former President Donald Trump’s cognitive ability is leading a group of House Republicans calling for President Joe Biden to take a cognitive test. 

Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas, who was also the White House physician for former President Barack Obama and a member of the White House Medical Unit under former President George W. Bush, led more than a dozen of his fellow Republicans in a letter to the President demanding he take a cognitive test. Aside from Jackson, the only other doctor listed on the letter is Rep. Brian Babin, a dentist by trade. 

“We believe that, regardless of gender, age, or political party, all Presidents should follow the precedent set by former President Trump to document and demonstrate sound mental abilities,” the Republicans wrote, adding that when Trump subjected himself to that test performed by a White House doctor, he “excelled.”

Jackson was the White House physician who administered that test in 2018, and said at the time that he “found no reason whatsoever to think that the President has any issues whatsoever with his thought process.” He also added that Trump had “incredible genes.” 

Just a few months later, Trump nominated Jackson to become his Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs. But in April 2018, Jackson withdrew from consideration after a flood of allegations from current and former colleagues, which Jackson denied, claiming that—among other things—Jackson improperly prescribed drugs to staff and was intoxicated on the job. The following year, Trump appointed Jackson as his chief medical advisor. 

Jackson went on Fox News Thursday night and cited Biden’s recent trip to Europe, during which Biden was bashed by conservative media for—among other things—mixing up Syria and Libya, as the reason he was sending the letter now. 

“Unfortunately, your forgetfulness and cognitive difficulties have been prominently on display over the past year. Unfortunately, your mental decline and forgetfulness have become more apparent over the past eighteen months,” the letter says.

“After this most recent embarrassing enforcement performance overseas, I thought it was time to come out. We can't sit on this any longer," Jackson told Sean Hannity. "I know what the rigors of this job are, both physically and cognitively demanding... he's not physically or cognitively fit to be our president right now."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from VICE News but said last month that Biden would be receiving a physical later this year and would release the full results. The last time Biden released his medical information was in 2019, when his doctor declared him to be “healthy” and “vigorous.” 

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of and senior White House adviser to former President Donald Trump, is writing a book about his time in the White House, his publisher announced Wednesday.

The book will be published by Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins that has published books by conservative politicians and media figures like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Ben Shapiro, and Charlie Kirk. The book is expected to be released next year, and Broadside did not disclose how much Kushner is being paid to write it, according to the Guardian. 

Kushner’s book promises to be the “definitive, thorough recounting” of the Trump presidency. In the spirit of definitiveness and thoroughness, let’s take a look back at Jared Kushner’s track record during his time as one of the most powerful people in the White House—and, by extension, the world.

In November 2016, weeks after Trump won the presidency, he said that his son-in-law could help end conflict in the Middle East. “I would love to be the one who made peace with Israel and the Palestinians, that would be such a great achievement,” Trump said at the time.

Over the next four years, that did not happen. Instead, the Trump administration further inflamed tensions between the Israeli government and Palestinians by embracing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; as Kushner spoke at a ceremony celebrating its opening in May 2018, Israeli security forces were slaughtering dozens of people in Gaza. 

In March 2021, Kushner wrote an op-ed claiming that “we are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Two months later, Israeli airstrikes killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians and rocket attacks by Hamas killed a dozen Israeli civilians.

As one of Trump’s top advisers, Kushner was in the room from the earliest stages of the crisis that would become the COVID-19 pandemic. And along with the president himself, Kushner continuously downplayed the pandemic that tore through the country and represented possibly the biggest crisis and interruption in American life since the end of World War II. 

In April 2020, as the virus was ravaging Kushner’s hometown of New York City, Kushner predicted that things would be “rocking” by July and mocked “the eternal lockdown crowd.” 

“The federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story and I think that that's really what needs to be told,” Kushner said at the time. In August, after more than 170,000 people were dead, Kushner was asked if he still thought that constituted a “success story.”

“Yes,” Kushner told CNN, without a hint of irony.

To date, approximately 600,000 Americans have died due to complications from the virus.

It wasn’t just Kushner’s words about the pandemic, either: He also actively mismanaged the effort to obtain personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies for healthcare workers at a time when they were needed most. 

During a March 2020 meeting at the White House, Kushner told attendees that securing PPE would be up to the “free market” and that the “states” were on their own, according to a report by Vanity Fair. “[New York Governor] Andrew Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state,” Kushner reportedly told attendees. “His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.” (The White House called the story “another inaccurate and partisan hit job.”) 

Kushner’s approach to securing supplies was driven almost entirely by politics, with an inexperienced volunteer team prioritizing leads on equipment that were offered up by Trump allies, according to the New York Times. As states pleaded for equipment to help protect frontline workers, Kushner went on TV during a coronavirus task force briefing early last April and referred to the nation’s PPE stockpile as “our stockpile.” 

"The notion of the federal stockpile is that it's supposed to be our stockpile,” Kushner said. “It's not supposed to be states' stockpiles that they then use."

In an interview with Bob Woodward last April that was published later in the year, Kushner bragged that Trump was “back in charge. It’s not the doctors.” 

In February 2018, Kushner—described in reports as a regular reader of the Presidential Daily Briefing—was stripped of his top-secret security clearance after delays in completing a background check. Three months later, it was restored. 

Kushner appears to have gotten it back the old-fashioned way: Nepotism. Trump reportedly demanded that then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly approve a security clearance for Kushner despite concerns by the Central Intelligence Agency and White House counsel Don McGahn, according to the New York Times. One whistleblower told Congress that Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump were two of dozens of people who were granted security clearances over the objections of career officials. 

A spokesman for Kushner’s personal lawyer told the Times that he “went through the standard process with no pressure from anyone,” and the former president has denied intervening on behalf of Kushner in a January 2019 interview with the New York Times. “I know that there was issues back and forth about security for numerous people, actually,” Trump said. “But I don’t want to get involved in that stuff.”

Prior to joining the White House, Kushner was the CEO of Kushner Companies: The real estate company was founded by his father, and Jared still holds a share estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. While the younger Kushner ran the company and its assets, it aggressively litigated against poor and working-class tenants in order to collect relatively meager fees, according to ProPublica.

In one particularly egregious case, JK2 (one of Kushner’s companies in which he and his brother each owned a 50 percent stake) sued a woman who was dying of cancer for nearly $4,000 in rent and legal fees, including repair costs and $10 for “failure to return a laundry room card,” according to ProPublica. In a statement at the time, Kushner Companies’ chief financial officer told ProPublica: “As property manager, it’s our job to collect rent payments.”

In 2018, the company was fined more than $210,000 by New York City housing regulators after the Associated Press reported that Kushner Companies had filed false paperwork claiming it had no rent-controlled tenants in order to evade anti-tenant harassment regulations— in fact, it had hundreds of rent-controlled tenants. And in April 2021, a Maryland judge found that the company committee “widespread and numerous” violations of consumer protection laws.

Chances are he’s probably not going to want to talk about any of this in his memoir.