Stew Peters

After high school, Peters moved from Minnesota to Los Angeles, Florida and New York while pursuing a career as a rapper named Fokiss. As a rapper, he performed at several night clubs and bars around Minneapolis and Duluth including 7th St. Entry at the landmark 1st Avenue.[18] He briefly interned at 101.3 KDWB-FM in 1998.[9]

In 2000, he auditioned for a film directed by Tyrel Ventura, the son of then-Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura. After obtaining a lead role in the film, Peters lied to Ventura that his brother was a teen heartthrob who starred in a popular 1990s sitcom. Tyrel invited Peters to stay at the governor's residence in St. Paul during filming. Peters went home to Apple Valley, a suburb 16 miles away, and later moved into the residence's guest room of the residence for several weeks, until he was evicted by the state troopers providing security for the governor.[9]

Peters was a bounty hunter before producing internet content.[10] He started moonlighting as a bounty hunter after he met someone in the business.[9]

For a period of more than 10 years ending around 2021, Peters headed a bounty hunting agency named Twin Cities Apprehension Team.

In 2015, Minnesota Law was changed to limit what bounty hunters can wear and drive, a change apparently aimed specifically at Peters, who dressed to resemble law enforcement officers.[19]

On May 30, 2017, Peters' agency was involved in a fatal shootout. The shooting left two agents and the fugitive dead. T.C.A.T. had tracked Ramon Hutchinson from Hennepin County, Minnesota to Greenville, Texas. Hutchinson was wanted after missing a court date for driving under the influence (DUI) arrest, assaulting a police officer, and cocaine possession. In Greenville, T.C.A.T. used a tracking device on Hutchinson's girlfriend's car to find him at a car dealership during a trade in. Cell phone video shows two T.C.A.T. agents, Gabriel Bernal and Fidel Garcia Jr, approaching Hutchinson. When the two agents told Hutchinson the charges against him, Hutchinson pulled out a gun and opened fire. When it was all over, all three men were dead. When asked about the shootout, Peters said: "It's just a horrible loss. Fidel was just a great friend".[20]

Peters' bounty hunting agency closed in 2021 after Peters was found guilty of disorderly conduct related to a domestic disturbance situation and was sentenced to probation.[10][7]

Peters launched The Stew Peters Show as a podcast in 2020, commenting on criminality and related topics, also giving air time to figures of the American far-right and the anti-vaccination movement (such as Del Bigtree).[7] Peters uses his show to initiate or amplify a large number of rumors and fabrications that have been identified as disinformation. He has used violent rhetoric against several marginalized groups, notably Jews and the LGBT community. He promotes concepts linked to QAnon, white nationalism and the sovereign citizen movement.[21][22] Because of his ability to incite his numerous followers to harass those he targets, extremism researcher Katie McCarthy has compared him to Alex Jones.[7]

In 2021, he, along with L. Lin Wood, became involved in a feud with Michael Flynn and Marjorie Taylor Greene regarding Flynn's endorsement of Vernon Jones and the future of Kyle Rittenhouse's bail fund.[17]

Peters was a speaker at the 2022 America First Political Action Conference, where he called for the murders of Anthony Fauci (lynched by hanging), and Vernon Jones (executed by electric chair).[23]

In February 2023, following the Ohio train derailment, a tweet by Peters claiming that "journalists covering the story have been arrested" and dead fish and cattle were being found "as far as 100 miles away from the site" went viral, attracting about half a million likes. Only one journalist had been arrested.[24]

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Peters has joined other conspiracy theorists in peddling disinformation about COVID vaccines and public health measures taken to limit the spread of the pandemic.

Peters misrepresented scientific communications and presented baseless theories as fact to promote the narrative that COVID vaccination is part of an attempted genocide,[25] that military personnel got HIV from the vaccine,[26] and that vaccinated people are frequently victims of strokes[27] and penile rot.[28]

In January 2022, Peters became involved in the Scott Quiner legal case. On the Stew Peters Show, Quiner's wife claimed that Mercy Hospital was refusing to give Quiner proper treatment because of his refusal to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Mercy Hospital refused to provide a reason for taking Quiner off of a ventilator, citing patient privacy. Peters encouraged his listeners to "blow the hospitals phone lines up", and he also shared the hospital's address and named the doctors involved.[29][30] Peters received criticism after his audience began making anonymous threats. After four days, Quiner was allowed to be transferred to a hospital in Texas which would provide the care that his family wanted. Quiner was described as the "most malnourished patient" a doctor at the Texas hospital had ever seen. He died on January 19, 2022.[31]

In 2022, Peters started to produce long videos: These Little Ones, promoting the QAnon conspiracy about elites kidnapping children to drink their blood;[7] Watch the Water, which claims that COVID-19 vaccines are derived from snake venom in order to transform people into "a hybrid of Satan",[1][2][32] and Died Suddenly, which promotes misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and Great Reset conspiracy theories.[4][33][32] Peters publishes the videos on Rumble, using Twitter and Facebook to amplify their distribution. His Twitter account was suspended for a few months for breaching the platform's content policies, but was reactivated in mid-December 2022. Spotify and iHeartRadio have removed his content from their platform.[7][11]

Starting in 2022, Peters has been speaking at political events, favoring the more extreme varieties of American conservatism. He endorsed the unsuccessful candidate Kandiss Taylor in the Republican primary for the 2022 Georgia gubernatorial election, and also supported Janice McGeachin and Wendy Rogers.[7]