A report claims that accounts associated with the suspect suggested that he was also ready to join a militia.
A former Navy submarine technician was arrested after law enforcement says he drove an SUV into the FBI headquarters near Atlanta on Monday afternoon. It is still unclear why the suspect, Ervin Lee Bolling, attempted to force entry to the headquarters, but research by Advance Democracy, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that conducts public-interest research, and shared exclusively with WIRED, has found that accounts believed to be associated with Bolling shared numerous conspiracy theories on social media platforms, including on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
Advance Democracy researchers identified an account on X with the handle @alohatiger11, a reference to the Clemson University mascot which Bolling has expressed support for on his public Facebook page. The handle name is also similar to usernames on other platforms like Telegram and Cash App, which bear similarities to a Facebook page with Bolling’s name. The profile picture used in the X account also resembles a picture of the same man shown in Bolling’s public Facebook profile. The X account is currently set to private, but dozens of the account’s old posts are still publicly viewable through the Internet Archive.
Around the same time, social media accounts seemingly associated with Bolling repeatedly boosted QAnon content and interacted with QAnon promoters, including posting a link to a now-deleted QAnon-associated channel on YouTube alongside the comment: “Release the Kraken’—in direct reference to Sidney Powell’s failed legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
On what’s believed to be Bolling’s Facebook account, there were various posts related to anti-vaccine memes as well