In the weeks since Adam Newbold, a former member of the Navy SEALs, was identified as part of the enraged crowd that came down to the Capitol on January 6, he was interviewed by the FBI and resigned under pressure from jobs as a mentor and as a fighting coach. voluntary free. He expects his company to lose important customers because of his actions.
But none of this has shaken his belief, against all evidence, that the presidential election was stolen and that people like him were right to stand up.
It is surprising because Newbold’s background seems to protect him better than most against the temptation of unfounded conspiracy theories. In the Navy, he was trained as an expert in separating information from disinformation, a clandestine command that spent years working in intelligence together with the CIA, and he once scoffed at the idea of shadowy anti-democratic plots like “aluminum foil hat” thinking.
Yet, like thousands of others who came to Washington this month to support President Donald J. Trump, Newbold believed in the fabricated theory that the election was rigged by an obscure cabal of liberal power brokers who pushed the nation into the precipice of civil war. No one could persuade him otherwise.
Capitol photos show Mr. Newbold wearing a black “We the People” T-shirt and riding a Capitol Police motorcycle, just steps from where the police were fighting with the protesters.
Newbold says he did not enter the Capitol and was not charged with any crime. But his presence there reflects the volatile mix of party politics and viral disinformation that helped lead to the attack.
Newbold’s worldview is clear on his Facebook account. In a combative video full of profanity he posted a week before the riot, he repeated the debunked but widely publicized statements about the election, saying that “it is absolutely unbelievable, the mountains of evidence of electoral fraud and electoral fraud and machines and people who they voted, dead they voted. ”When commentators challenged him, he replied with expletives and replies such as” Yes, keep laughing, you will laugh when you are trampled. “
An impressive aspect of the furious Capitol crowd was how many of its members appeared not to be from the outskirts of American society, but from the origins of some white stakes on Main Street – firefighters and realtors, a marketing executive and a member of the city council , all captivated by fragile conspiracy theories. Newbold’s presence showed how convincing the history of the fraudulent election had become.
Your experience should make it difficult to deceive. A few years earlier, he had received the same unfounded and potentially dangerous fervor about an alleged sinister government conspiracy that became known as Jade Helm.
Even after the Capitol revolt, however, he expressed certainty that he had not been deceived.
“I have been to countries around the world that are indoctrinated by propaganda,” Newbold said in a lengthy telephone interview last week, adding that he knew how disinformation could be used to manipulate the masses. “I have no doubts; I am convinced that the election was not free and fair.”
He said he believed the unidentified elites had quietly won a coup by manipulating election software, and warned that the country was still on the brink of war.
Mr. Newbold, 45, lives in the rural hills of eastern Ohio and is one of three brothers who have become SEAL commanders in the Navy. He spent 23 years in the elite force, Navy records show, including seven in the Naval Reserves, before retiring as a senior noncommissioned officer in 2017. He received two Navy Commendation medals for bravery in combat deployments, and several more for good conduct.
A former SEAL who served with him at the Little Creek Joint Expeditionary Base in Virginia said that Newbold was smart and had a good reputation on SEAL teams, and had worked with the CIA on intelligence gathering.
After the Navy, Mr. Newbold moved to the small town of Lisbon, Ohio, opened a coffee shop and founded a company called the Advanced Training Group that taught SEAL-style tactics to members of the army and police and maintained a gym and shooting club for residents.
Through his company, he was involved in helping to design and conduct an eight-week military exercise in Texas and other border states in the summer of 2015, called Jade Helm 15.
When a PowerPoint slide summarizing the exercise was leaked, it was taken advantage of by marginal Facebook groups and professional conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, who began to claim that Jade Helm was a secret conspiracy to get federal troops to invade Texas, seize citizens’ weapons and enforce martial law. Unfounded rumors circulated about “black helicopters” and Walmart stores that had allegedly been turned into detention camps.
The storm of political paranoia that hit a direct military exercise became so violent that some members of Congress, who later questioned the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr., began to demand answers, and Governor Greg Abbott ordered that the Texas National Guard kept watching.
In the end, the exercise went smoothly. Mr. Newbold said in the interview that he and the other former special operators who planned the training exercise laughed at paranoia and even made T-shirts saying “I went to Jade Helm and all I got was this aluminum foil hat”.
Last week, he acknowledged that the disinformation frenzy surrounding Jade Helm may have been lethal. Local residents in Texas were afraid of the violence. Three men were arrested after planning to attack the exercise with tubular bombs.
“In fact, there were some farmers and landowners who made threats that if someone was on their land, they would shoot him, so there were real concerns,” said Newbold. “It’s funny, but it’s something we should take seriously.”
At the time, Mr. Newbold dismissed what he witnessed as marginal delusions, unaware that he was a precursor to the fantasies that came to suck far more Americans, including military troops, police, members of Congress and an incumbent president – not to mention the Mr. Newbold.
Newbold is a longtime registered Republican who said he voted for Trump. In the past four years, as mainstream media coverage of the president became tougher and Newbold’s sometimes raucous support on Facebook drew more criticism, he switched to news sources and chat rooms that shared his views .
In the late fall of 2020, he was spending time on private Facebook pages, where far-right talk proliferated. He posted long, often furious video soliloquies about how the country was being robbed. He seemed to be increasingly convinced that people were conspiring not only against Trump, but also against the Constitution and, as a veteran, it was his duty to defend it.
Newbold began holding private meetings at his shooting club with other like-minded members, according to a former member who said he resigned because he was alarmed by growing extremism.
“He has become a supercult,” said the former member, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “I tried to reason with him, to show him the facts, and he just went crazy.”
After the November election, Newbold’s Facebook posts predicting an approaching war worried some people in Lisbon to the point that at least one said he alerted the FBI
Last week, in discussing his beliefs, Newbold rejected the dozens of court rulings rejecting challenges to election results and ignored logistical obstacles to manipulating an election conducted by independent officials in more than 3,000 counties. Without citing evidence, he suggested that it was naive to assume that the results were not rigged.
In a long video posted in late December, the former member of the SEALs predicted a communist takeover if people didn’t get up to stop it. “As soon as things start to get violent, I’m in my element,” he said in the video. “And I will defend this country. And there are many other people who also go. “
A week later, Mr. Newbold organized a group of his company’s employees, club members and supporters to travel in a caravan to Washington and join the flag-waving crowd that headed for the Capitol on January 6.
In a video posted that night, he is seen saying that his group members were on the “front line” of the riots. “Guys, you’d be proud,” Newbold told viewers. “I don’t know when you last broke into the Capitol. But it happened. It was historic, it was necessary ”. He adds that members of Congress were “shaking”.
In last week’s interview, Newbold sought to minimize his involvement in events at the Capitol. He said he sat on the police motorcycle just to keep the vandals away from her, and that he traveled to Washington not to incite violence, but to protect the Capitol from angry liberals in case the Senate agreed to prevent certification of the election.
After the attack on the Capitol, he deleted some of his most incendiary online posts. But what happened in Washington apparently did not prompt him to question his beliefs. He said he is still sure that the election was stolen and that the country is on the path to global autocracy.
And in a video posted six days after the uproar, when it was learned that people had died, Newbold said that on Capitol Hill he felt “a sense of pride that the Americans finally got up”. He did not rule out the possibility of resorting to violence himself.
“I do not apologize for being a rude man ready to do difficult things in difficult situations,” he said. “Sometimes it is absolutely necessary, and it has been throughout our history.”