The founder of a group that has been organizing harassment of school boards is a close follower of a QAnon cult leader whose group is awaiting the return of the late President John F. Kennedy. The founder has also promoted the harassment on multiple QAnon shows — with the hosts lauding the effort — and her approach has drawn support from some prominent promoters of false voter fraud claims.

As reported by NBC News, since its founding in December, a group called Bonds for the Win has been “bombarding school administrators with meritless claims over Covid policies and diversity initiatives. These claims allege that districts have broken the law and therefore owe parents money through what are called surety bonds, which government agencies often carry as liability insurance.” 

NBC News noted that the group’s approach “has been used in the past by sovereign citizens, loosely affiliated right-wing anarchists who believe federal and local governments are operating illegitimately.” The FBI has labeled the “sovereign citizen” movement as a domestic terrorism threat. 

Even though the group’s claims are false, the efforts have intimidated officials around the country, including in at least 14 states where “Bonds for the Win activists attempted to serve sham paperwork to school districts, in several cases causing commotions that required police intervention.”

The founder of Bonds of the Win, Miki Klann -- who has said she “didn’t wake up until early 2020 when the COVID hoax came out” -- has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, mapping posts from “Q,” QAnon’s central figure, with the stars. In particular, she is also a close follower of Michael Brian Protzman, a QAnon influencer known online as “Negative48,” who since late 2021 has led a group based near the place where Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. 

Protzman has claimed that neither Kennedy nor his son, John F. Kennedy Jr., is really dead and that they will reappear with former President Donald Trump, who will then be somehow reinstated into office. Members of his group have drunk harmful substances and discussed having to “experience … physical death” in order to understand reality.

A follower of the QAnon JFK Dallas cult leader

During an online appearance in August 2021 with QAnon show host Scott McKay -- who has since targeted school boards with his own harassment campaign -- Protzman said that Klann joined his channel when it was “like day one or two old” and connected him with QAnon influencer Tom Sidney Bushnell (who is known online as “Tom Numbers”).

McKay also said that Klann is the one who introduced him to Protzman’s content, saying she “kept telling me about what’s going on in this channel and some things that seemed incredibly far-reaching,” adding that “then I jumped in” and spoke with him.

During an appearance posted online that same month with Protzman and Bushnell, Klann said, “I started to take [Protzman’s] theories and I started to look and do my own research and dug deeper” and that she was the one who connected Bushnell with Protzman. She also said Protzman’s online channel got her further into gematria, which Vice describes as “a Jewish system of assigning a numerical value to a name, word, or phrase based on the letters used and inferring some sort of spiritual or mystical meaning behind the phrase.”

Additionally, Klann has said that she has texted Protzman and has spoken with him on his online chat. And, in an appearance on McKay’s show posted online in September, Klann and Protzman had what McKay called a “dialogue” of “these two pulling together their fields of understanding in laying out how what is happening now is truly biblical.” During the conversation the two cited gematria, the stars and planets, Bible verses, and Q posts.

Klann went on a tour of QAnon shows to promote Bonds for the Win

Klann has said that Bonds for the Win was inspired by a guest on QAnon show SGT Report pushing surety bonds. And she has also gone on multiple QAnon shows to promote the organization's efforts, with hosts in turn lauding the project and encouraging its use to target people even outside of school boards (as has Klann).

In an appearance on QAnon show RedPill78 in February, host Zak Paine -- who has admitted to participating in the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol -- said that he was “so excited” by the effort, adding that “there’s unlimited opportunities for this to be used” in order “to have a very real and nearly immediate impact on everything that we have seen.” 

Klann also floated using surety bonds to target Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Paine later in the interview said he would email the interview to a Canadian he knew so “hopefully this is something that [he] can implement there as well.”

During an online stream that same month with another QAnon influencer, John Sabal, known online as “QAnon John,” Klann said, “We’re just scratching the surface, guys. Every elected and appointed official is bonded.” Sabal later added that “what you guys are doing is probably one of the most important things you can be doing today.” 

Another QAnon influencer Klann spoke with, David “Nino” Rodriguez, praised Bonds for the Win for “giving people the tools to fight back” after Klann told him that “everyone is bonded, everyone. Every judge, every prosecutor, every single — we're talking mayor, city council.” 

Klann also went back on McKay’s show in January to promote her effort, and McKay said it was a “lawful and legal strategy to basically take the power from these criminals,” including “school boards, city councils, sheriffs, [and] legislators.”

Protzman’s network has also promoted Bonds for the Win, and a member of the group has spoken on one of his online chats. And Klann in January teamed up with Ron Watkins, the former administrator of 8kun, where Q has been based, and who some have alleged ran the Q account for at least a period of time. They targeted an Arizona school board with the bonds effort.

Some election fraud promoters have embraced Klann’s surety bond strategy

Klann’s dubious strategy has also caught the eye of some prominent figures promoting false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, including Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who has heavy ties to QAnon and has become a major funder and organizer of election-denying efforts. In an online stream in February, he advocated using the surety bond strategy to target election officials, saying that “it may be possible to get some civil suits going on the insurance side that triggers the insurance companies to do something” and to “file a lawsuit” on the bond. 

And in a stream the following month, Byrne again promoted surety bonds, urging people to “create lawsuits against the insurance companies that are going to make them lean on the county people.”

And in March, David Clements, another prominent figure involved in promoting supposed election fraud, suggested in an online stream with Sabal that surety bonds could be used regarding election fraud claims as well, saying: “The surety bond strategy I like because you’re basically talking about the vulnerability of the machines themselves. And so almost every politician out there has an insurance bond.”

Klann’s success with her Bonds of the Win effort — and the success of Protzman’s group — signals the increasing influence of a wing of QAnon influencers who are perhaps even more extreme than the conspiracy theory’s original adherents. And the surety bonds strategy expands upon the QAnon community’s ongoing targeting of school boards and furthers the community’s association with the sovereign citizen movement. The strategy is also yet another way that the QAnon community has helped drive attempts to overturn the 2020 election.