Lydia Dews, an attorney in Fort Worth, Texas, is the mother of fugitive Ali Alexander and has played a role in his right-wing ventures that led to Capitol siege

 

The news for the past two days has been dominated by the second impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump, focusing on his alleged incitement of the U.S. Capitol riots. (See video above.) But the guy who organized the pro-Trump rally that turned into a siege on the Capitol remains a fugitive from justice. But that's not to say authorities don't have leads on tracking him down.

Lydia Dews

 We're talking about Ali (Akbar) Alexander, the right-wing extremist and convicted felon who led a "victory or death" chant the night before the riots broke out. Alexander has connections to Alabama's GOP swamp, but the leads on his whereabouts revolve around Fort Worth, TX. We know Alexander has established a P.O. Box at a Fort Worth UPS store to accept donations from supporters. But that is not the only Forth Worth tie that FBI agents should be following.

Alexander's mother, Lydia Dews, is an attorney in Fort Worth, and she has a history of being involved in  his political affairs. From a December 2020 post at medium.com:

Alexander’s LinkedIn profile page lists himself as the current CEO of Vice and Victory Ventures, Inc., and the former vice president of digital strategy at Vice and Victory Agency LLC. Texas’s business entity registry shows that Lydia Dews, a Texas attorney who Alexander identified in a 2015 Facebook post as his mother, registered Vice and Victory Agency LLC in 2011. (The company’s registration in Texas is no longer active.)

Using DomainTools, the DFRLab found that Alexander’s own Vice and Victory email address (ali@viceandvictory.com) and another company email address (v@viceandvictory.com) appeared in the domain registration data in a combined 190 websites at the time of publication, many of which are no longer active. The company’s Instagram profile is followed by just eight accounts, three of which appear to belong to Alexander and one of which is that of wealthy businessman and Republican Party donor Sean McCutcheon, who is from Alabama.

Vice and Victory’s domain history can be understood as a proxy for Alexander, providing a timeline of his political and media endeavors, dating back nearly a decade. Although many of the company’s websites are no longer active, the site URLs show a career that began in Southern state politics and proceeded to cycle through several short-lived organizing efforts. Several websites paid homage to late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart and others heralded Tea Party-era Republican politicians. Many focused on Black identity, including “blacksfortrump.com” and “blacklivesmatterwatch.org,” and some appear to be financial blogs.

Some of Alexander’s prior endeavors have been alleged to be connected to shady data collection operations. Alexander was a lead operator of an organization called National Blogger’s Club — Vice and Victory hosted “bloggersclub.org” — and the organization quickly came under fire for its lack of transparency and its ties to Republican super PACs. Crooks and Liars reported that National Blogger’s Club had required “an unusual amount of personal information from donors” and had not properly registered as a nonprofit, despite its claims to operate as one.

It does not appear much of Alexander’s operational behavior has changed; as recently as 2019, he participated in a “philanthropic” effort that other conservative figures accused of being a sleazy digital marketing scheme. Given that history, the fact that the Stop the Steal site encourages visitors to input their contact information and to sign up for SMS text message updates could be cause for concern.

When Alexander first discussed launching the Stop the Steal effort in September, he stated his intentions to create a digital database of contact information that could be used to dispatch conservatives to polling places, vote-counting locations, and court hearings. Alexander was involved in a similar effort in Broward County, Florida, in 2018 and made clear at the time that he was willing to recruit extremists to the cause.

The phrase “Stop the Steal” can be sourced to a 2016 campaign led by Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone to dispute vote counts in urban areas with multiracial communities, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in November. Alexander is a close associate of Stone.

Lydia Dews appears to be an attorney of some stature. From a report at foiaresearch.com:

In April 2011, while Alexander was still on probation, his mother Lydia Dews, a Texas lawyer, registered a company called Vice and Victory Agency LLC, according to research by Medium.30 According to her LinkedIn profile, Dews was a member of the Rules Committee at the Texas Supreme Court from 2009 to 2015 before embarking on a career as a "legal and creative writer" in 2013.

Alexander states on his LinkedIn page that he was "Vice President of Digital Strategy" at Vice and Victory (V&V) from January 2011 onward. He immediately embarked on building up V&V, set out as a digital communications and political advocacy group, as the superstructure for his emerging blog empire that he ran from his mother's house.

Is Lydia Dews wise enough to separate herself from her son's current endeavors? The FBI should be checking into that question.