Kelly Neidert was painfully familiar with the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club well before it was linked to a terrorist attack.

The University of North Texas graduate, now head of Texas Coalition for Kids, built a reputation around the college town of Denton as an activist leading protests against LGBT events for children. The Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club’s members spent years trying to crash her events with rowdy protesters and confronting her in their masks, black uniforms, and rifles, she recalled to the Washington Examiner. She first encountered them in October 2021 after the gun club encouraged people online to disrupt her “christo-fascist” vigil against abortion, showed up with a mob that yelled obscenities, and prompted university police to escort her away, she said.