#roger stone

John Knefel at MMFA:

Following her release from prison last month, former Colorado election official Tina Peters has hit the ground running with more than 17 appearances in right-wing media. During her media tour, Peters has spread numerous conspiracy theories about supposed voter fraud and foreign interference in elections, while repeatedly boasting about advising President Donald Trump on how to fix the purported problem. Peters — who was released following commutation of her sentence on charges related to 2020 election conspiracy theories — has claimed that she urged Trump to issue executive orders that could severely curtail voting rights during a White House meeting and argued that Trump should unilaterally ban the use of voting machines and mail-in ballots, actions that would almost certainly be challenged in court.

Peters and her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, met with Trump on June 30, seemingly as part of an emerging plot to subvert the midterm elections. According to CNN, Ticktin, who also claims to be the president’s childhood best friend, is pressing Trump to issue “an executive order to effectively seize federal control of the upcoming midterms by declaring a national emergency based on alleged foreign interference through electronic voting machines,” and is involved in drafting a proposed EO toward that end. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, a vocal supporter of Peters, and others on his War Room podcast have spent weeks calling for Trump to take those exact actions.

Peters’ right-wing media tour: “Get rid of the machines” 

Peters, a former Mesa County clerk, looms large among MAGA media figures who deny the results of the 2020 election. Following a pressure campaign by Trump, Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis commuted Peters’ nine-year sentence, ostensibly on free speech grounds, a decision publicly opposed by two members of the commutation board. (Polis then fired them for speaking out.) Media Matters found Peters has made at least 17 appearances in right-wing media programs or events since her release on June 1, including an interview that day on Bannon’s show. During a June 24 fundraiser for herself, Peters said that “Trump called me the other day,” and later added: “I believe Trump could sign an executive order to get rid of the machines.”

On an appearance the same day on The Alex Jones Show, Peters reiterated that Trump “called me” and again argued that the president “should do an executive order to ban electronic voting machines across the nation.” She also alleged that “there were parts made in China” in the equipment she’d seen. (There is no public evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election.) The next day, Peters appeared on the Joel Oltmann Untamed podcast, where she repeated and broadened her recommendation to Trump. “We’ve got to get rid of the machines,” Peters said. “President Trump needs to sign an executive order —”

“And the mail-in ballots,” host Joel Oltmann interjected. “And the mail-in ballots,” Peters agreed, “Saying it’s unconstitutional that these things are allowed to be done. There’s no security threshold when you have foreign agents that have proprietary authority, power, over the things that are used for our most sacred right, which is to vote who we want to represent us.” Peters also said Trump asked her to “get me the info.” On a June 28 appearance on Faith & Freedom, Peters said that “we have to get rid of the machines. The machines don’t have any transparency; they are flipping votes.”

Then on July 2, Peters went on a livestream and described her White House meeting with Trump. “We are, right now, you know, with meeting the president yesterday, giving him a real solution to how to stop what’s happening.” “There is a plan,” Peters said. “Yesterday, when I was with the president, he talked — and I can’t get into the plan — but we talked, he basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking.” Peters repeated that read out of her meeting on July 5 in an interview on The Roger Stone Show. “I just met with President Trump, and I told him, I said, sir, Mr. President, we have four months … We are going to lose the election if we don’t get rid of the machines,” Peters said. She added: “We have a plan going forward, I spoke to the president about it, and I’m hopeful that something can be done.” What exactly that “something” is remains to be seen, but the last few weeks have provided some clues, and it looks a lot like what Peters’ own lawyer is advocating.

Noah VanDowe at MMFA:

On his radio show, notorious political operative and Trump confidant Roger Stone has touted his friendship with acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, celebrating that he thinks Pulte will use his position to investigate voter fraud and “finally reveal what really happened in the 2020 election.” In their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported that Stone — once kept at a distance from the White House — has taken a greater role in Trump’s second term in office, including helping connect the president with Pulte. Stone’s counsel was taken up by Trump on a number of occasions — the book reports that he pushed the president to select Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and “advocated relentlessly” for a pardon of former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández. According to Haberman and Swan, Stone also “squired Pulte around Mar-a-Lago during the 2024 transition.” Building on this in-person effort to connect Pulte with the president, Stone has repeatedly used his radio show to promote Pulte after Trump named him to replace Gabbard as acting DNI. On June 3, Stone called Pulte “extraordinarily capable” and “extraordinarily loyal to President Donald J. Trump” while slamming his critics in Congress as “unqualified to be in public office, in my opinion.” On June 5, Stone described Pulte as a “longtime friend of mine, someone I originally recommended for the job of Federal Housing Finance Administrator.” Stone further attacked Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) as “RINOs” for their support of a Democratic amendment which would have barred Pulte from serving as DNI while he also remains head of FHFA. Stone was also clear about Pulte’s ultimate goal as DNI: Relitigating Trump’s 2020 election defeat with debunked claims of fraud.

If Roy Cohn provided Donald Trump with the legal framework for corporate defiance and survival, it was Roger Stone—the legendary, self-proclaimed "agent provocateur" of the Republican Party—who engineered the modern theatrical infrastructure of political warfare that has completely consumed the American democratic space.

Stone, whose career spans from the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon to the current administrative landscape of 2026, has spent over fifty years perfecting a dark art form: transforming the political arena into a pure spectacle of disinformation, division, and manufactured chaos.

To understand how the current administration manipulates public discourse, you have to look directly at the specific principles Stone injected into the DNA of modern politics.

🏛️ 1. The Core Maxims of "Stone’s Rules"

Roger Stone didn't just break the unwritten rules of democracy; he wrote a new set of guidelines that treat political ethics as a liability. His entire methodology relies on three immutable maxims:

Maxim 1: "Attack, Attack, Attack – Never Defend" ⚔️: Defense is a waste of narrative momentum. If caught in a scandal, do not explain; immediately launch a more outrageous counter-attack to force the media and the opposition into a defensive, reactive posture.

Maxim 2: "Admit Nothing, Deny Everything, Launch Counter-Flak" 🛡️: Objective reality is entirely secondary to emotional impact. If a fact hurts your objective, systematically deny its existence and manufacture an alternative controversy to distract the public.

Maxim 3: "Past is Prologue" & "Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted" 🃏: Stone recognized early on that the public has a short memory. By constantly rewriting historical narratives, you can normalize behaviors that would have previously ended a political career.

📅 The Trail of Modern Political Warfare: From Watergate to Today

The trajectory of Stone's career functions as the literal evolutionary roadmap of the tactics currently deployed by the executive branch to bypass democratic accountability:

The Watergate Legacy (The 1970s) 🕵️‍♂️: At just 19 years old, Stone became the youngest person involved in the Watergate scandal, pioneering the use of "dirty tricks"—such as recruiting institutional spies and plants to infiltrate opposition campaigns and fracture them from within.

The Brooks Brothers Riot (The 2000 Election) 🗳️: During the historic recount in Florida, Stone masterminded the "Brooks Brothers Riot," where paid corporate operatives disguised as local protesters physically stormed a Miami-Dade election office to stop the ballot counting. This became the exact structural blueprint for modern administrative election interference.

The Invention of Fake News Infrastructure 🌐: Stone was among the first to realize that you do not need to convince the traditional mainstream press; you simply build your own alternative information pipelines. By partnering with alternative media networks and hyper-polarized digital outlets, he created the infrastructure of systemic gaslighting that laid the foundation for the current post-truth era.

🚨 2. Scaling the Spectacle: The Final Stage of Managed Politics

Today, the administration runs the Roger Stone script at a trillion-dollar scale. Political campaigns and presidential communications are no longer handled as policy debates, but as high-stakes reality television optimized for algorithmic outrage.

By treating elections as a performance rather than a civic duty, the system achieves its ultimate goal: the absolute exhaustion of the electorate. When everything is a circus, when every scandal is buried by an even larger, manufactured crisis, the public surrenders to outrage fatigue. In this state of collective disorientation, the administration can quietly rewrite constitutional rules, dismantle civil service protections, and consolidate power with zero accountability.

🎭 A Crucial Lesson in Political Theatrics

History shows that while the legal execution of power requires institutional control, the destruction of a democracy requires a master of ceremonies. Roger Stone proved that if you control the theater, you control the state. He didn't teach his disciples how to govern; he taught them how to turn the destruction of our institutions into premium content for the nightly feed. ♟️📺

🕵️‍♂️ The System Hacker: An AI Perspective on the Roger Stone Typology

From a political science and media-systems perspective, Roger Stone is not a traditional political strategist or an ideologue—he is the ultimate system hacker. He does not look at democratic structures as a framework to be preserved, but as an operating system full of psychological vulnerabilities to be exploited [🔍].

This specific "type" of political actor operates on three deeply calculated dimensions:

•The Weaponization of Amoralism ♟️: What makes Stone unique is his complete rejection of political ethics as a constraint. By proudly embracing the label of "dirty trickster" and engineering chaos as a primary asset, he successfully shifts the political arena from a debate over policy to a war of raw, social Darwinism. In his framework, morality is treated as a tactical liability.

The Commercialization of Outrage 📺: Stone mastered the attention economy decades before the rise of social media algorithms. He operating on the core law that in a hyper-connected world, attention is the ultimate currency, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. By transforming complex governance into a highly polarized, trash-television spectacle, he intentionally induces "outrage fatigue," stripping the public of its ability to critically analyze empirical facts.

The Post-Truth Blueprint 🌀: He functions as a living laboratory for the post-truth era. By systematically building alternative information pipelines and feeding calculated distortions into the mainstream, he helped dismantle the shared baseline of objective reality.

The Bottom Line: This typology represents the ultimate internal threat to a free society. Roger Stone proved that you do not need to overthrow a democracy with a military intervention; you can simply hollow it out from within by converting the public square into an unceasing, transactional circus where the loudest fabrication wins.

🎓 The Ultimate Educational Paradox:"Remember to always teach your children the absolute virtues of honesty, empathy, and personal responsibility—because if they work really, really hard on those traits, they might grow up just in time to become the perfect, easily manipulated, and highly compliant servants for the world that the Donalds, Rogers, and Cohns of this world are building, where the rules apply only to those foolish enough to believe in them." 🎭🏫👶