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Meet Stew Peters: Massively Popular Crazy-Assed New Kid on the Block In Crowded Conspiracy World [1]
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Date: 2023-09-27
Every show needs a headliner, someone whose hot takes have the potential to shock, stun, enliven and/or thrill an audience. At the recent ReAwaken America Tour stop in North Las Vegas, Stew Peters was that guy. His special power? Out conspiracying almost every one else on the platform; no easy task at these conspiracy-laden, MAGA –supporting gatherings.
Peters had on his executioner’s hat, calling for the deaths of Hunter Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom Peters said should “hang from a length of thick rope until he is dead.”
As recently as February of this year, Peters tweeted “This war is FAKE!” referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson reported, ”Fauci deserves the gallows because the federal physician-scientist supposedly backed a Wuhan ‘bioweapons lab’ — and that this ‘illegal research’ cost ‘millions of lives,’ [according to Peters] The younger Biden should get the ‘Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’ treatment, Peters insisted, for the ‘treason’ of ‘selling this country off to rich oligarchs.’ Peters also demanded that Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security, be executed as ‘a treasonous traitor’ because he has permitted legions of ‘rapists and murderers and killers and goons’ to breach the border” (
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/conspiracy-theory-stew-peters-hunter-biden-execution-1234816880/).
Peters unhesitatingly declared: “In the world that we are going to build, traitors will hang.”
Despite being one of the relatively new kids on the conspiracy beat, Peters has more than 1.2 million combined followers across Rumble, Telegram, Twitter and Truth Social, and his shows average between 40,000 and 70,000 views on Rumble.
So, no surprise that Peters was treated as a rock star by emcee Clay Clark, the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based radio personality and founder of the ReAwaken America Tour. According to Dickinson, “As Peters ramped up this violent diatribe, including with a call to drown doctors who care for transgender patients, no one cut his microphone.” The crowd was apparently enraptured by Peters’ rhetoric; they “didn’t recoil; rather, they filled the giant air-conditioned tent hall with hoots and hollers of approval.”
Stew Peters knows how to play to an audience of conspiracy devotees. Dickinson noted that Peters is a natural at these events. “He is a media maven for a country hooked on conspiracy theories, catering to a religious, red-pilled audience that chooses to live in a dark irreality, full of horrific plots, satanic forces, and illicit knowledge.”
According to the Anti-Defamation League, Peters “launched his right-wing media career in August 2020, when he began co-hosting an online radio show called ‘Patriotically Correct Radio’ (PC Radio) that aired on MoJo 5.0 Radio and Red Voice Media, two conservative digital media networks.” Going solo in 2021, the program is now “The Stew Peters Show.”
“In 2022,” the ADL notes, (
https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/stew-peters-five-things-know) “Peters launched his own digital media company, the Stew Peters Network. The network features shows hosted by a range of right-wing conspiracy theorists, including former California congressional candidate and QAnon conspiracist DeAnne Lorraine and former TruNews co-hosts Lauren Witzke and Edward Szall. Anti-vaccine conspiracist Dr. Jane Ruby also hosted a show on the network, but parted ways with Peters in March 2023. While much of the site’s content is free, viewers can access premium, ad-free content for $10 a month.
“No longer just a sideshow on the right’s lunatic fringe, Peters, through his dark films and on his nightly streaming broadcast, is reaching an audience of millions. And he’s interacting with elected officials,” Tim Dickinson reported in Rolling Stone.
Over the past two years, Peters has been creating all sorts of conspiracy-based content, including churning out a pair of feature-length films — “Watch the Water” and “Died Suddenly” — “each falsely purporting to reveal demonic plots behind the novel coronavirus and the ‘bioweapon’ vaccines allegedly foisted on an unsuspecting public by a nefarious cabal,” Dickinson noted.
The ADL pointed out in its “Five Things to Know” about Stew Peters feature that he “is a rabid anti-LGBTQ+ bigot and has repeatedly promoted the false, malicious narrative that LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles who are ‘grooming’ children. ‘Homosexuality is the gas on the burning fire of pedophilia. Gays are the ones raping little boys. Period,’ Peters wrote in a July 12, 2022, Telegram post.”
Not leaving any disgusting stone unturned, Peters also has associated with white supremacists and anti-Semites, hosting them on his program and appearing at white supremacist conferences.
The conspiracy movement is driven by messaging on its vast infrastructure, and its stars, Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Michael Flynn, the Trump brothers, Tucker Carlson, Roger Stone. In May, BBC News profiled Peters under the headline “Is this anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist the next Alex Jones?”
BBC’s Rachel Schraer and Mike Wendling met up with Peters in a warehouse on an industrial estate in Vero Beach, Florida. In response to questions about the lack of accuracy in Peters’ anti-Covid vaccine film, “Died Suddenly,” Peters did what media savvy people do, deflect, change the subject and attack the media. "This is an attempt to try to discredit me or the film rather than talking about the millions of people that are dying," he said, claiming that Covid vaccines was a "bio-weapon…[that's] killed unprecedented, record-smashing numbers of people." (Read more about the “Died Suddenly” phenomena at
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-65412798.)
In a political landscape filled with conspiracy theorists and platforms, Stew Peters is carving out his own niche; a niche that is growing daily.
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