His conspiracy theories were so wild that co-conspirators sought separate trials
On Dec. 7 — a month before the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Alan Hostetter, an Orange County police chief turned yoga instructor — who self-radicalized in opposition to pandemic restrictions and called for the execution of Donald Trump’s enemies before joining in the insurrection — was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison on four counts, including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
While evidence-free conspiracy theories propelled his Jan. 6 involvement, they’ve grown even wilder since. In the sentencing hearing, he repeatedly described Jan. 6 as an “obvious set up” and claimed the crowd was filled with “crisis actors.”
But Hostetter “has not presented any evidence that could make out an entrapment defense on the theory that the Jan. 6 riot was a staged event,” presiding judge Royce Lamberth said during sentencing.
Hostetter even claimed that Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt was not actually killed. “As you are aware, I don’t believe Ashli Babbitt was actually killed that day,” he said. “I believe that was a psy op. That was staged.”
Babbitt’s mother, Michelle Witthoeft, who attends many Jan. 6 hearings in support of defendants, was in the public gallery and confronted him afterwards, but he shrugged her off, saying, “This feels like it’s staged,” as if he’d done nothing to cause it — a perfect miniature of his whole fantastical defense.
Hostetter was ecstatic over what happened on Jan. 6. “The people have taken back their house. Hundreds of thousands of patriots showed up today to take back their government!” he enthused from a restricted area on the Capitol’s upper West Terrace that afternoon. “This was the shot heard round the world! … the 2021 version of 1776,” he later wrote in an Instagram post. “That war lasted 8 years. We are just getting started.” But, as had happened at least twice before in his life — when he went from police chief to yoga instructor and from yoga instructor to pro-COVID activist — his perspective has shifted radically since. He now claims he was purely nonviolent and believes everyone close to him was conspiring against him, Trump and America.
While utterly unique in some ways, his story resonates with broader themes and trends in GOP politics, such as the ongoing expansion of evidence-free denialist conspiracy theory beliefs, reflected in a recent Washington Post poll. It found that 62% of Republicans said there was solid evidence of voter fraud — even though none has ever been produced in court, or in GOP-sponsored audits or reviews. Even more— 67% — said that Biden wasn’t legitimately elected. Among Trump voters, 44% agreed with Hostetter “that FBI operatives organized and encouraged the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021” and 26% said there was “solid evidence,” none of which either Trump or Hostetter could produce in court.
Hostetter’s sentencing came one month after four co-conspirators were found guilty in a separate trial, which they sought, in part because of his unhinged conspiracy theories, which claimed that all his co-conspirators were government agents in a vast, intricate, long-running plot. “What if everything we were ever taught about our history, our government and the world in which we live is a lie?” he wrote in a court filing last May. Just as the sequence of COVID-19 lockdowns, mask mandates, and election denialism brought disparate forces together, the paranoia generated in the process has produced fractures in the aftermath, with Hostetter as ‘Exhibit A,’ projecting his own erratic political trajectory onto everyone else.
The night before his sentencing, in the GOP primary debate, candidate Vivek Ramaswamy claimed, without a scintilla of evidence, that Jan. 6 “now does look like it was an inside job,” and Hostetter picked up on it.
“These conspiracy theories are no longer fringe,” Hostetter said at his sentencing hearing, specifically noting Ramaswamy’s comments. “The election was stolen. You have presidential candidates saying that openly during the debate,” he said. “At some point, the truth is going to be coming out.”
But co-conspirator Derek Kinnison saw Hostetter’s claims quite differently — as a reason to seek a separate trial, in light of his filings filled with speculations involving secret societies, the founding of the FBI, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the 9/11 attacks and a well-known San Clemente street artist named “Bandit” who mocked him with satiric artworks, portraying him as a sheep leading other sheep. He even speculated that the FBI “created” Bandit. “Mr. Hostetter’s arguments do not even manage to be false because for that, they would have to have a misleading resemblance to truth,” Kinnison argued through his attorney. “They are so incoherent and untethered from reality that they fall short of even that modest goal and remain nothing but empty words.”
A fifth co-conspirator, Russell Taylor, pleaded guilty in April and testified against Hostetter at his trial, which ended on July 13. In addition to the conspiracy charge, Hostetter was found guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding, entering or remaining on restricted grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon and disorderly or disruptive conduct on restricted grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon.
Hostetter’s journey to prison arguably began on April 12, 2020, when, by his own admission, he led the first protest against California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders. He claims that the conspiracy against him began in response to that protest. “Hostetter’s social media accounts promoted weekly rallies and street marches against ‘tyrants’ issuing health orders for a pandemic he claimed was not real,” the LA Times summarized in March 2021. By the end of the month, as subsequent protests drew larger crowds, he had created the American Phoenix Project, an organization grandiosity created to “protect the constitutional rights of all Americans.” He met Taylor at a subsequent COVID-19 protest and Taylor became a board member of the organization, later giving him the weapon (a hatchet) he was found guilty of carrying. They met the other four co-conspirators — members of the SoCal Three Percenters militia group who had trained together — in a Telegram chat group formed to plan for Jan. 6.
In a December 2021 82-page conspiracy-infused motion to dismiss, Hostetter accused the government of engaging in “a classic FBI Counter Intelligence Program or COINTELPRO operation targeting him from the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdowns,” with Taylor as suspected informant, either working directly for the FBI or through secret societies working with the FBI, “such as Freemasonry and Mormonism as he belongs to both organizations.” Why, exactly, the FBI would target him for leading lockdown protests he never explained. Other close associates were FBI or secret society agents as well — not just Taylor, but another American Phoenix Project board member, Morton Irvine Smith, and anti-vax lawyer/activist Leigh Dundas, both of whom spoke at various events alongside Hostetter, most notably a Jan. 5 rally on the steps of the Supreme Court that APP co-sponsored along with Virginia Women for Trump.
At that rally, Dundas called for the execution of “any alleged American who acted in a turncoat fashion and sold us out and committed treason!” Smith, speaking last, cast Trump as a spiritual savior. “Whether through prophecy or divine intervention,” he said, “a single man has taken the torch of freedom from the smoldering ashes of a nation damned, and raised it to a beacon of clarity.”
But now Hostetter claims, that was all just an act to set him up — even though both have continued their Trump-supporting activism. And what did he say that day?
“We are at war,” Hostetter declared, vowing to “put the fear of God in the cowards, the traitors, the RINOs, the communists of the Democrat Party.”
“I will see you all tomorrow at the front lines,” he said. “We are taking our country back.”
Back to where, exactly? That is the question in 2024.