Pennsylvania Senate Candidate Lou Barletta has a decision to make. Does he want to be the Senator of Pennsylvania or does he want to be the Senator of the Alt-Right?
This past week it was revealed that Lou Barletta sat down with holocaust denying publications on multiple occasions and sat on a 2011 CPAC anti-immigration panel with Kevin DeAnna, a white supremacist who founded a white nationalist student group, the Youth for Western Civilization. Other panelist included Tom Tancredo, an honorary president of the defunct student group, Bay Buchanan, an anti-immigrant activist and brother to Pat Buchanan and former Charlottesville Congressman Virgil Goode. In 2009, Kevin DeAnna and Pat Buchanan were given keynote speaking spots at the annual HL Mencken Club conference, which was co-founded by Richard Spencer and Elizabethtown College professor Paul Gottfried.
So naturally, Lou Barletta was having a campaign kickoff event hosted by the Lehigh Valley Tea Party and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist, Jack Posobiec, made it into the event. The hall that the event was hosted in was filled with campaign signs that read “Build the Wall” and “Repeal Obamacare.” Posobiec live-streamed the event through his twitter account, via the Periscope app. After the election, Posobiec traveled to the Comet Ping Pong pizza shop and began live streaming a children’s birthday party. An excerpt a Washinton Post article on Posobiec’s trip read as the following:
On Nov. 16, Jack Posobiec, a former Navy Reserve intelligence officer who had spent much of the previous year as a leader of a pro-Trump grass-roots organization, decided he’d had enough of just reading tweets and blog posts about the pizza place in his city.
Posobiec, 31, had never eaten at Comet; he had never even heard of the place until he started reading about it on conservative, antigovernment media sites. “I didn’t pay much attention to it before Election Day because I was focused on the campaign,” he said. “With that going on, who wants to talk about pizza?”
Now, with Trump elected, he read the posts more closely. Any story that accused Clinton, John Podesta and Brock of nefarious deeds deserved some investigation, he thought. He believed the Clinton campaign was “full of secrecy and deception.”
It seemed reasonable to Posobiec that Podesta might have organized a sex ring in cahoots with Brock. But the only part of the scenario that was real was that Podesta had been known to eat pizza at Comet. This part is false: pictures purporting to show that symbols, such as butterflies and spirals, in signs at Comet and other shops were statements about pedophilia.
Posobiec said he was curious and confused. He and a friend decided to go have some pizza. They walked into Comet eight days after the election, sat down and ordered. Posobiec got the garlic knots. His friend got a beer. But they were not just hanging out. Posobiec was using his phone to broadcast his evening at Comet on Periscope, an app that allows users to stream video live.
“Part of the experience of living in 2016 is live, on-the-scene broadcasts,” he said. “People have lost faith with government and the mainstream media being any real authority. After the Iraq War, after Benghazi, people are searching for other sources of information. If I can do something with Periscope and show what I’m seeing with my own two eyes, that’s helpful.”
Posobiec said he never made any disturbance inside Comet, but the restaurant’s managers saw him take his camera into a back room where a child’s birthday party was underway. It did not seem appropriate for a child’s party to be broadcast on a stranger’s Periscope feed. The manager asked two D.C. police officers who happened to be across the street to assist.
If you watch the video of Lou Barletta sitting at the CPAC panel almost 7 years ago and the campaign kickoff event that he had in Allentown over the weekend, you’ll notice how little has changed in his messaging. The speech he gave on Wednesday was extremely similar to the speech he gave while sitting next to Kevin DeAnna. He hit the main talking points about his first encounter with INS, which then became ICE, the story of Hector Luna and how he tried implementing immigration reform in the city as mayor.
Lou Barletta PA Senate Announcement at Lehigh Tea Party https://t.co/0guRTSpLVZ
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 26, 2018
