Luxury cars, MAGA flags and Facebook invites: How an unknown Idaho family organized the Portland ral
Source: Washington Post
Luxury cars, MAGA flags and Facebook invites: How an unknown Idaho family organized the Portland rally that turned deadly
By Isaac Stanley-Becker, Joshua Partlow and Carissa Wolf
9/21/2020, 6:34:00 p.m.
MERIDIAN, Idaho — The first time Alek Kyzik tweeted, two months ago, he invited Donald Trump Jr. to a pro-Trump rally he was hosting in Boise.
“I would love to chat,” he wrote in a public post on July 9 addressed to the president’s eldest son, who did not respond. “Thanks!”
The invitation was to a “cruise,” the type of provocative show of force that would become Kyzik’s signature: a motor-rumbling, flag-waving caravan of cars and trucks endorsing Trump on the streets of liberal cities. The most recent cruise he hosted involved thousands of vehicles advancing on Portland, Ore. It ended with one participant shot dead.
Kyzik was not well known in Republican activist circles. In fact, Kyzik was not even his real name, according to a review of business and academic records, as well as interviews with family members.
He is Alex Kuzmenko, a 33-year-old architect who lives in a second-story apartment in Meridian, a bedroom community outside the majority-Democratic city of Boise. His YouTube channel featured luxury car reviews before shifting to pro-Trump memes and videos several months ago. He and members of his family — immigrants from Belarus and Ukraine — had almost no political profile before organizing one of the most consequential pro-Trump demonstrations of the summer.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/idaho-family-portland-trump-rally/2020/09/21/246ef878-f2e5-11ea-b796-2dd09962649c_story.html
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