The South Carolina man arrested after barreling his car through the FBI‘s front gate in Atlanta on Monday has a long history of far-right posts on social media — and he even wrote “I love you” to Donald Trump, according to new research.
Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that researches online extremism, said the suspect in the attack espoused conspiracies about the 2020 election and other QAnon-adjacent beliefs. Wired was the first to report the findings. Rolling Stone has reached out to Advance Democracy for details.
The man, identified by federal authorities as 48-year-old Ervin Lee Bolling, was arrested on suspicion of destroying public property after driving an orange SUV through the final barrier of the FBI’s field office in Atlanta on Monday. Bolling spent 23 years in the U.S. armed forces, most recently working as a submarine sonar technician with the U.S. Navy until 2017.
The research claims Bolling posted far-right views as early as 2020, including anti-vaccine posts. On his public Facebook profile, Bolling reportedly posted memes about the COVID-19 pandemic, including reasons to “get yourself an unvaccinated girl” and “a virus with a 99% recovery rate” which would “strip me of my freedoms, my job, my constitutional rights and put me under house arrest.”
The research alleged that Bolling posted to X, formerly Twitter, under the handle “alohatiger11” which features the same man in the profile photo as Bolling’s Facebook page. Though the profile is now private, the Internet Archive has more than 50 posts captured, all of which were grabbed between Dec. 20 and 24, 2020.
One post shared a YouTube video titled “Release The Kraken,” referencing disgraced Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s plan to overturn the 2020 election results, per the report. Another post shared an article about an “unexplained explosion and fire destroy world’s second largest pharmaceutical factory producing precursors for hydroxychloroquine,” according to the report.
Bolling’s activity in the days after the 2020 election showed his skepticism for the results, per the findings. In one exchange with someone over alleged election interference, he wrote “Show that it’s been disproven. You can’t combat imperial data with…oh yeah, well that’s been disproven….”
In a reply to someone who wrote “wonder what it will take for people to wake up,” Bolling replied: “I’m awake. Just looking for a good militia to join.”
Though his post is no longer publicly visible, another reply to Bolling’s post remains visible, and it reads: “A good militia is meeting January 6th in DC.”
