Scott Presler

Scott Ryan Presler (born 1987 or 1988) is an American conservative activist. Briefly an organizer for the Republican Party of Virginia before the 2016 U.S. elections, Presler came to prominence as coordinator of the "March Against Sharia" events organized by anti-Muslim advocacy group ACT for America.

Presler was a participant, and sometimes a speaker or organizer, in the "Stop the Steal" protests promoting the false claim that widespread electoral fraud allowed former vice president Joe Biden to win the 2020 presidential election against incumbent Donald Trump. He attended the rally in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, when the United States Capitol was attacked by a mob of Trump supporters, although he did not participate in the attack.

Biography
Scott Ryan Presler was born in 1987 or 1988. The son of a United States Navy captain, Presler was raised in Florida and Fairfax County, Virginia, and had lived in Virginia Beach for around a year by 2016. Presler earned a degree in criminal justice from George Mason University. When interviewed by The Virginian-Pilot in 2016, Presler said that he had come out as gay in June that year following the shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people were killed.

2016 U.S. elections
Presler was employed as a regional field director for the Republican Party of Virginia for around a year in 2015 and 2016. In 2016, Presler knocked on doors and registered voters in support of the Donald Trump presidential campaign. With other Trump supporters, Presler constructed a small "Trump Train" political display in Virginia Beach that was featured in The Virginian-Pilot. He also attended Norfolk's PrideFest, an LGBT festival, later that year with Republican Party officials.

Presler co-founded the LGBTQ coalition Gays for Trump, and was reported to be its chairman in 2017. In a Bloomberg News interview, Presler stated he partly used Twitter as an extension of his political organizing work; during the race, he frequently tweeted messages supportive of Trump, using the hashtag "#gaysfortrump", and tweeted messages attacking Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Presler was present at the Gays for Trump DeploraBall held in Maryland after the inauguration of Trump as president on January 20, 2017. In March 2017, Presler led the Virginia branch of the nationwide March 4 Trump.

ACT for America (2017–2018)
In a 2017 Washington Post interview, Presler said he was motivated to become a volunteer for anti-Muslim advocacy group ACT for America that year after hearing its founder, Brigitte Gabriel, speak. After volunteering for ACT for America for three months, Presler was employed by the group until the following year, according to his Facebook page. In June 2017, Presler was reported to be coordinator of the "March Against Sharia" events organized by ACT for America in various states, as part of the counter-jihad movement. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, the marches "attracted various factions of the radical right, including white nationalists, neo-Nazis and antigovernment extremists" that were all "united by anti-Muslim animus."

Presler organized a local offshoot of the March Against Sharia in Portland, Oregon, on June 10, 2017. Presler announced the event's cancellation a week earlier, citing Portland mayor Ted Wheeler's request for the General Services Administration (GSA) to not issue a permit for Presler's event to occur at a park across from the Portland City Hall, and Wheeler's call for the GSA to revoke its permit for a Trump rally organized by Joey Gibson, founder of the far-right group Patriot Prayer. A march on the same date in Seattle, Washington, was organized by Presler soon after.

Prior to the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial election, Republican Party candidate Ed Gillespie requested an endorsement from Presler, as Presler was at that time the vice chairman of the Virginia Beach Young Republicans and a volunteer for Gillespie's campaign. A spokesperson of Gillespie told The Washington Post that he was not aware of Presler's involvement with ACT for America; Gillespie's campaign did not denounce Presler's endorsement.

Before the elections (2019–2020)
According to a 2021 report by Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog, Presler promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and political movement by using hashtags in dozens of posts on Instagram in 2018 and 2019. Media Matters for America found Instagram posts by Presler which used the QAnon-related hashtags "QAnon" and "wwg1wga".

In April 2019, Presler held an activism workshop in the town of Kent, Connecticut, for the Connecticut Republican Party in preparation for the 2020 elections. A protest of Presler's event was organized by the Kent Democratic Town Committee after it failed to have his event canceled. After state house representative Cara Pavalock-D'Amato praised Presler on a social media webpage for the event, the Southern Poverty Law Center invoked the state's Freedom of Information Act to request some of Pavalock-D'Amato's email correspondences.

Presler organized a "neighborhood cleanup" in Baltimore, Maryland, through social media the month after President Trump's tweets in July 2019 which described the congressional district represented by Democratic Party congressman Elijah Cummings as a "rodent infested mess". The event was attended by more than 100 volunteers and resulted in 29 tons of trash cleaned from streets. According to the Los Angeles Daily News, another event in Los Angeles, California, organized by Presler involved dozens of volunteers. In December, Presler was advertised as appearing alongside activist Dylan Wheeler at an "immigration forum" in Bettendorf, Iowa, hosted by the Scott County Teenage Republicans which concluded with a speech by white supremacist political commentator Nick Fuentes.

In 2020, Presler continued to be involved in events in support of President Trump's re-election campaign in cities such as San Francisco, California, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Election protests (2020–2021)
During the nationwide protests surrounding the 2020 election, Presler was involved with demonstrations in the capital cities of Pennsylvania and Georgia, both battleground states, and Washington, D.C.  On November 5, 2020, two days after polls had closed but before the election's winner had been decided, Presler led a "Stop the Steal" demonstration at the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg attended by around 100 supporters of Trump. On the first day of the demonstration, Presler told Reuters that the demonstration was in support of "truth and justice" instead of supporting a specific presidential candidate. Presler also told the news agency about his intentions to fundraise for "an audit of the state's vote count". Presler and more than 75 protestors continued demonstrations at the state capitol for a second consecutive day. A week after the victory of the Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden in the election, Presler was involved in a pro-Trump demonstration in downtown Washington, D.C. Presler was a speaker at a "Stop the Steal" rally at the Georgia State Capitol, in Atlanta, later that month held to rally support for Trump and protest the results of the election.

Presler attended the rally in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, that ended with an attack on the United States Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, although he was not one of the people who entered the Capitol in the attack, according to New York newspapers Times Union and The Post-Star. According to Mother Jones magazine, Presler was able to obtain VIP seats for his parents at Trump's speech at The Ellipse that day. Presler published at least two tweets about the rally in the previous week, as well as a video of himself near the Capitol on January 6 in which he described the events that day as the "largest civil rights protest in American history."

Voter registration efforts (2021–present)
Presler was a speaker at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference held in Orlando, Florida, in February 2021. According to 2023 reporting by Newsday, in May 2021, Presler became the brand ambassador for Rise NY PAC, a political action committee operated by the sister of New York congressional candidate George Santos following his unsuccessful run for Congress in 2020.

Presler was scheduled to appear at a Republican Party voter registration event in the town of Wilton, in Upstate New York, on August 25, 2021. The event was sponsored by the Saratoga County Republican Committee and House Representative and House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik. Stefanik promoted Presler's appearance on Twitter, describing Presler as an "American Patriot" in a tweet a week earlier, although she was not expected to attend the event. Stefanik and the county Republican Party were criticized by Democratic Party officials from her congressional district, who urged them to renounce Presler, but in response the Republican Party county chairman claimed the Democrats wanted to divert attention from "their own failed policies." Stefanik later deleted her tweet, and Presler ultimately canceled his appearance due to a Rise NY staff member contracting COVID-19, but a counter-protest organized by Democratic Party operatives was still held. Presler announced the event would be held again on two later occasions but ultimately canceled both events.

In December 2022, Presler was involved in get-out-the-vote efforts during the runoff election in the U.S. Senate election in Georgia. Later in December, Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer and Republican National Committee (RNC) committee member, announced her candidacy in the 2023 RNC chairman election, challenging current chair Ronna McDaniel. The day of her announcement, Dhillon said on Twitter that "one of my first job offers" would be to Presler if she was elected. During the race, Presler published the email addresses and Twitter account names of RNC committee members on a website called "hireharmeet.com", which Dhillon shared on Twitter.

Prior to the Wisconsin Supreme Court election on April 4, 2023, Presler traveled through Wisconsin and appeared on conservative talk radio shows to promote candidate Daniel Kelly, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice. In late March, Kelly posted a video on Twitter of himself standing alongside Presler. When asked at a press event about Presler's presence at the United States Capitol on the day of the Capitol attack, Kelly said he was "not really familiar with his background", and he thanked Presler for his recent activities in Wisconsin.

Presler runs a non-profit organization, Early Vote Action, intended to "organize & mobilize Republicans to vote early." Shortly after her installation as Republican National Committee co-chair, Lara Trump, Donald Trump's daughter-in-law, expressed her interest to hire Presler to lead the Republican Party's "legal ballot harvesting" efforts. The RNC later clarified it would not be hiring Presler, but that he would be a "valuable voice" while he led his own organization.

LGBT rights
In a 2016 interview by The Virginian-Pilot, Presler said he was not put off by the Republican Party's positions on gay rights despite being a gay man. Presler further explained that he was supporting Trump's 2016 presidential campaign over Hillary Clinton partly because of the Second Amendment: "I 100 percent believe in the notion that armed gays don't get bashed. It is our right to feel safe."

Presler said on Twitter that he supported President Trump's 2017 Presidential Memorandum on Military Service by Transgender Individuals, which prohibited open military service and enlistment of transgender Americans, although he did not agree with it.

Presler voiced his support for the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, commonly referred to as the "Don't Say Gay" law, signed into law by state governor Ron DeSantis in 2022.

Islam
In 2017, while employed by anti-Muslim advocacy group ACT for America, Presler said in an NPR interview that he felt inspired to "fight Muslim extremism" after the 2016 shooting at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando. Because the shooter allegedly swore allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Presler said he felt the shooting "highlighted a problem of anti-gay bigotry in orthodox Islam". Presler also told The Washington Post that he disagreed with the Southern Poverty Law Center's claims that ACT for America is an extremist group and the "largest grass-roots anti-Muslim group in America", insisting that ACT for America intends to help girls and women affected by Sharia.