TikTok Gives Ex-Texas GOP Chair Boot
after Inciting Claims on Trump FBI Raid

Capitol Inside
August 13, 2022

Former Texas Republican Party leader Allen West contended on Saturday that he'd been banished from TikTok after an impassioned call to arms for patriots in a video that claims that America has been at war with itself since the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant at Donald Trump's home in south Florida early this week.

"Remember that this is the day that the progressive socialist left, the Marxists, the statists, the communists in the United States of America fully declared war against the American people by going after a former President in his private residence," West proclaims in the video that he shot in his role as executive director of the American Constitutional Rights Union - or ACRU.

A former U.S. Army officer who led a battalion in Kuwait during Operation Desert Shield, West acknowledges that the raid at Mar-a-Lago has compelled him to reexamine allegiances and loyalties to which he'd sworn at the start of his first and only term in Congress as the representative for the district that contains the former president's winter residence.

"I did not take an oath to see this happen in my country," West says in the video, which he posted on the social media site Rumble after the ostensible boot from Tactic. "I will stand up and push back against this. I will use my voice. I will not surrender. I will not retreat."

West emerged in Texas where he lived several years before claiming the job as the state GOP chairman in the summer of 2020 in a state party convention meltdown on Zoom after having an in-person event cancelled by the city of Houston as a threat to the public health during a major COVID-19 surge. West, who's Black, proved to be the most unconventional state party leader in modern history in the Lone Star State.

Unlike party bosses before him who viewed unity as the paramount priority, West spent considerable time during one year as state chair lobbing rhetorical grenades at Governor Greg Abbott as a consequence of restrictions he imposed on businesses and individuals in the first few months of the pandemic. West built his national brand in the meantime with hints of support for the secession of Texas from the Union. He transcended the bounds of esoteric with a tale on conversations that he'd claimed to have with the Davy Crockett figure in a statue in front of the Alamo.

West portrayed Abbott as a tyrant and he even led a protest outside a window at the Governor's Mansion to express his disdain with the state's top leader. But West proved no match for Abbott at the polls after resigning the state chair post so he could challenge the governor in the primary election in 2022. Abbott and West received 66 percent and 12 percent of the vote respectively in the primary in March when the ex-state party boss finished second in a field of eight.

While West failed to get the traction that he needed as a longshot in the governor's competition, he claimed a personal victory at the courthouse last year when charges against his wife in a driving while intoxicated case were dismissed after blood tests determined that she'd been clean when Dallas police pulled her over for swerving. West insisted from the start that he wife wasn't drunk and needed a week to clear her name.

West declined to acknowledge the defeat at the ballot box this year when he depicted politics as the new battleground where Americans are under attack. "The only thing that I know is victory, and the victory starts in these midterm elections," West told the faithful. "We have got to win the House, and we have got to win the Senate. My message to Republicans in office: find your big boy pants. Now is not the time to back down."

West said the U.S. was torn by an "ideological Civil War" and that the U.S. either had "rogue agents in the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation" or the "willful targeting" of a former President and potential presidential candidate for 2024" by government agencies.

"That’s not how we roll in the United States of America!" West said. "That’s the essence of tyranny. That’s the essence of fascism. That’s the essence of Marxism. That’s the East German Stasi police state."