Charlottesville unite rt
bit belated
see kessler league of the south neo-confed
mike benz ~ USAID
biggs gohmert
FUENTES
colligan
organized on facebook?
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new book 2 26 huffpo guy
anti-social network doku? habbo hotel --> scientology --> charlotteville --> jan 6? --> musk zuck digital authoritariaNISM
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OMFG RWW FALSE FLAG BS
'Charlottesville Was Not A Hoax': The Trump Administration's Indictment Of The SPLC Is Causing A Rift In The Right-Wing Movement
04/23/2026
by
Earlier this week, the Trump administration unveiled a politically motivated indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long drawn the ireof conservatives for its decades of work tracking and exposing right-wing extremism.
In the wake of the indictment alleging that the SPLC had committed financial crimes by making payments to informants working in various extremist groups, right-wing members of Congress, organizations, and activists have wasted no time in attacking the SPLC and its allies.
But the indictment has also created a rift within the right-wing movement, as activists have started accusing other activists of being paid by the SPLC to make the right look bad.
For instance, Hitler-loving racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic,Christian nationalist, fascist, white nationalist Nick Fuentes has long been dogged by allegations that he is a "fed" or some other sort of infiltrator being paid to undermine the right-wing movement. In the wake of the SPLC indictment, Fuentes was forced to respond to claims that he is an SPLC informant.
In a desperate attempt to deny that their movement is filled with racist, sexist, and antisemitic extremists, many on the right are seizing on the SPLC indictment to claim that just about anything that makes the movement look bad is really an SPLC false flag operation. They are focusing, in particular, on the deadly "Unite The Right" rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017 during which a neo-Nazi named James Fields drove his car into a group of anti-racism protesters and killed Heather Heyer.
The DOJ's indictment alleges that one SPLC informant was part of an "online leadership chat group" that helped plan the Charlottesville rally, which is all the right needed to convince itself, or try to convince others, that "Charlottesville was staged by the SPLC."
But the right-wing effort to paint the Charlottesville rally as a SPLC op is generating outrage from the white nationalists who actually organized the rally, such as Augustus Sol Invictus.
Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who was among the speakers at the rally and was part of a group of plaintiffs who were ultimately ordered to pay millions in damages for the violence that occurred that day, appeared on "The Backlash" program on Wednesday to blast all the "dumb" conservatives who are using the SPLC indictment to dismiss the Charlottesville rally as a leftist operation.
"Conservatives are dumb and they come to the wrong conclusion and they come to a very self-serving conclusion, which is that anyone who isn't the Daily Wire or Matt Walsh or what have you, anyone who isn't in a movement conservative is somehow a puppet," Spencer told program host David Reilly, who is himself a right-wing antisemite who lost his job after attending the rally. "The fact is this indictment does not even suggest that and it's just a very self-serving thing for conservatives to now say, 'Oh, I knew it was a hoax or something.'"
"Charlottesville was not a hoax," Spencer insisted. "Conservatives get off, they've been getting off for years on just declaring that, 'They're feds, the liberals fund them so that they make us look bad,' and blah, blah, blah. They just will do this endlessly. What happens with these things is we learn new information—and I hope that we'll learn important information with this case—and you wake up a year later and somehow we're dumber, like, we have a worse conception of the event. We're not able to criticize it productively, precisely because conservatives are retards."
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AN 9 26
An exclusive Talking Points Memo investigation by Christopher Mathias reports that a Republican candidate for House District 10 in Florida was photographed marching with white supremacists at the infamous Charlottesville, Virginia, rally that left one woman dead and 35 injured.
Marshall Rawson attended the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally alongside members of the League of the South, which is a white nationalist, neo-Confederate organization.
TPM spotted Rawson and his wife arriving at the rally in archived video footage. They're greeted by fellow members of the League. Footage and photographs reviewed by the outlet reportedly place him carrying a League of the South flag and marching with neo-Nazis, including James Alex Fields Jr. He was the man who later killed counterprotester Heather Heyer by driving his car into a crowd of people.
Rawson has never denounced the League of the South, apologized for his participation in the violent rally or spoken out against many of the people he marched with.
The League has a documented history of white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, homophobic and secessionist advocacy, and its leaders have openly promoted the idea of a white ethnostate in the South, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center's database of hate groups.
TPM cited a 2025 Facebook post in which Rowson claimed, “I am happy to talk about my past advocacy and activism on any issue. I am also proud of the advocacy work that I have been involved with for the past 13 years.”
Rawson's ideology is a close match to the League's values, particularly when it comes to LGBTQ people. A 2023 statement from him, cited by TPM, expressed his support for the death penalty for gay people in Uganda.
“This is how you would run the pervs and miscreants out of Florida," he said.
“A one-way ticket to no more sexualizing of children and the LGBTQ+ agenda in Florida!” he added.
The investigation by TPM alleged that "there are indications Rawson may have still felt the need to operate a pseudonymous social media account where he could express even more extreme sentiments. There are several data points linking an X account that posted from 2017 to 2020 under the handle 'RockOfDixie' to Rawson. Some of the posts from this account compiled by researcher ShermanMarching seem to have since been deleted, and the account’s most recent post is from 2020."
The account "features a bodybuilder flexing on stage," which is the same image in an online gallery of photos from the 2016 National Physique Committee’s Galaxy Championships. The researcher found that the bodybuilder in the image was identified at that time as Marshall Rawson. He finished fourth out of six.
One of the policies he advocated for is to bring back lynchings.
“Multiculturalism kills and public lynchings worked," said the "RockOfDixie" account.
Fellow League of the South members have opened their checkbooks in support, TPM found. So far, he's received more than $15,000 from dozens of people the report said are tied to the League of the South, neo-Nazi circles, white nationalist groups or other extremist activism.
One of the donors is a former Klan lawyer, and others also attended the Charlottesville riot. When asked about it, Rawson said he doesn't "screen" his donors or their views before he takes their money.
Rawson won the August Republican primary by just over 2,000 votes and is widely expected to win the November general election in the heavily conservative district. TPM argues that his candidacy illustrates how ideas once associated with fringe white-nationalist groups have gained a greater foothold within Republican politics.
Neither the Florida GOP nor the national Republican Party responded to TPM’s requests for comment.
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an 7 25
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters reportedly employed and promptly dismissed Peter Cvjetanovic (also spelled Cytanovic), the 28‑year‑old former white nationalist whose fiery image at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, made him a flashpoint of far‑right extremism.
Hired into an administrative role at the union’s D.C. headquarters earlier this year, he was fired during his probationary period once the union became aware of his past, HuffPost reported Thursday.
Teamsters executive board member John Palmer, who is challenging President Sean O’Brien in the union’s upcoming 2026 election, has publicly questioned how the hire bypassed the usual vetting process. He said senior-level hires are customarily subject to sign-off by “three or four people,” but said he was unaware of how Cytanovic was vetted, per the report.
READ MORE: 'Who in the world would be stupid enough to believe that?' Morning Joe torches Trump
A source familiar with the situation told HuffPost that Teamsters did not know of his involvement in the rally at the time of hiring. As a college student from Reno, Nevada, Cytanovic marched alongside neo‑Nazis on UVA grounds in 2017.
A widely circulated Getty photo captured him screaming with his face illuminated by tiki torches — a striking symbol of the white supremacist demonstration.
According to the report, his brief tenure was outed by an anonymous Reddit post from a Teamsters HQ employee, who wrote that they discovered Cytanovic’s name linked to Charlottesville after googling him, reported it to management, and saw him terminated soon after.
The report further noted that Cytanovic has consistently argued since immediately after the Charlottesville rally that he is “not the angry racist [people] see in that photo.”
READ MORE: 'Sad Sunday': Christian power couple smacks down evangelical conservatives in rare public statement
He claims that his primary motivation for attending the demonstration was to protect the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which he viewed as representative of white European heritage.
At the time, anti-racist groups were calling on Charlottesville officials to remove the Lee monument from a local park, per the report.
He told Nevada’s Channel 2 News, “I hope people acknowledge that being a party to the alternative right does not make me an evil Nazi, and that being pro‑white right now is dangerous, and being pro‑white doesn’t mean I’m anti‑anyone else”.
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AN 1 25
NO LNX
alternet-logo
US extremists are rattled by new sanctions against global terrorism group
How scammers use psychology to create some of the most convincing internet cons
Jordan Green January 15, 2025
The State Department has applied the “specially designated global terrorist” designation to the Terrorgram Collective in a groundbreaking move that for the first time sanctions a transnational white supremacist terrorist group with a significant presence in the United States.
The announcement on Monday — one week before President Biden leaves office — justified the designation based on the group “posing a significant risk of committing, or having participated in training to commit acts of terrorism, that threaten the security of United States nationals or national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” Terrorgram is an amalgam of the words “terror” and “Telegram,” the latter of which is a social media platform used by members to distribute propaganda.
“This is the first time you’ve seen a white supremacist group that had members or supporters in the U.S. receive the designation,” Seamus Hughes, a researcher at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center at the University of Nebraska, told Raw Story.
Two of the group’s leaders, Dallas Erin Humber of California and Matthew Robert Allison of Idaho, were indicted last year on charges that included conspiracy, solicitation of hate crimes, solicitation of the murder of federal officials, and conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists. Two other individuals, Brandon Russell — founder of the neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division — and Andrew Takhistov, who each face federal charges related to plots to attack the power grid, are also linked to Terrorgram.
The indictment against Humber and Allison describes Terrorgram as “a network of channels, group chats, and users on Telegram that promote white supremacists accelerationism: an ideology centered on the belief that the white race is superior; that society is irreparably corrupt and cannot be saved by political action; and that violence and terrorism is necessary to ignite a race war and ‘accelerate’ the collapse of the government and the rise of a white ethnostate.”
Terrorgram is not the first transnational white supremacist terrorist group to be sanctioned by the State Department. In 2020, under the first Trump administration, the State Department applied the “specially designated global terrorist” identification to the Russian Imperial Movement, which was implicated in a series of bombings in 2016 and 2017 that targeted refugee shelters in Sweden. Nordic Resistance Movement, a group founded in Sweden, was added to the list last June.
The specific bans designated groups and individuals from holding property and financial interests in the United States, while also prohibiting U.S. citizens from engaging in financial transactions with them.
Following the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., the Russian Imperial Movement invited the organizers to visit its paramilitary training camps in St. Petersburg, according to Nathan Sales, a former Trump administration State Department counterterrorism official who testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Sales said there is no evidence that the Charlottesville organizers accepted the invitation, but the following month, Russian Imperial Movement leaders traveled to the United States to network with white supremacists, and one posed for a photo with the group’s flag in front of the White House.
“What is most interesting for me is this represents the first time when a designation would have ramifications for U.S. prosecutors,” Hughes said. “There’s not a cadre of Russian Imperial Movement adherents in the U.S., whereas there is a good number of individuals that were drawn to Terrorgram in the U.S.”
Hughes said the designation will give prosecutors the ability to request terrorism enhancements during sentencing.
“It helps for them to tell the story to a jury that this is not just a bunch of angry people online, but an actual terrorist group,” he added.
The designation is also likely to make social media companies more reluctant to allow members and associates to organize on their platforms.
“Because tech companies can face legal risks if they provide services to designated groups or individuals, sanctions can prompt them to sever ties with those listed as terrorists,” Sales testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee back in 2022.
The announcement about the State Department sanction against Terrorgram is already causing ripples of unease across Telegram.
Reacting to the announcement on Monday, a neo-Nazi channel that advertises itself as a source of “tradecraft to evade authorities online,” posted: “We all know we are operating on borrowed time here on Telegram. It is unfortunate, as it is a hell of an app.”
The post went on to say that users should not trust Pavel Durov, the Russian founder and CEO of Telegram, to protect their data.
“We don’t want any of our admins or subscribers to wind up in federal prison over ironically being part of a ‘terror group,’” the post continued. “With no publicly available criteria to determine guilt or association, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It doesn’t make sense to maintain a presence where the enemy has the advantage.”
Prior to the arrests of two American leaders last September, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced charges against two unnamed Ontario men “alleged to have participated in the creation of Terrorgram Collective manifestos and Atomwaffen Division recruiting videos.”
The Canadian arrests in December 2023 followed an 18-month investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. That timeframe puts the launch of the investigation roughly in June 2021, the time of the first Terrorgram publication Militant Accelerationism, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center investigation.
Federal prosecutors allege that Humber and Allison joined Terrorgram in 2019, and became leaders of the group in the summer of 2022, “after one previous leader was arrested and charged with terrorism offenses and another became aware that he was the subject of a terrorism related investigation.”
Following Humber and Allison’s arrests, three foreign nationals appear to have taken over leadership of Terrorgram. The State Department designation identifies Ciro Daniel Amorim Ferreira of Brazil, Noah Licul of Croatia and Hendrik Walh-Muller of South Africa as “leaders of the Terrorgram Collective” and “specially designated global terrorists.”
Terrorgram is linked to two other federal prosecutions in the United States beyond Humber and Allison. Russell, the Atomwaffen founder, was arrested in February 2023 and charged alongside codefendant Sarah Beth Clendaniel in an alleged plot to carry out a coordinated attack on electrical substations designed to create a widespread power outage in Baltimore.
While Terrorgram is not directly mentioned in charging documents for the case, a review of Russell’s Telegram chats by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that he forwarded a Terrorgram document called Make It Count to another Telegram user.
Court filings by the government also allege that Russell told an FBI confidential human source that they should use Mylar balloons to short out a power transformer. That tactic is recommended in another Terrorgram publication The Hard Reset, which is described by the government as including “detailed information on how to attack a substation, including the use of Mylar balloons.”
The State Department announcement references a planned energy facility attack by Andrew Takhistov in New Jersey last summer without directly naming him.
Takhistov’s charging documents allege that he “claimed to have taken a role in the publication of” The Hard Reset and that he sent a PDF of the document to an FBI undercover employee. Takhistov allegedly praised The Hard Reset as “the only thing you need” to plan a white supremacist terror attack.
Takhistov was active in the Terrorgram group chats, and Humber posted an Audiobook promoting white supremacist murder in January 2024 in response to a request from Takhistov, according to government court filings. Later, according to the government, Takhistov thanked a Terrorgram chat administrator for posting a video “with instructions for using Mylar balloons to commit an attack on an energy facility.”
Lawyers for Takhistov and Russell could not be reached for comment for this story prior to publication.
The State Department announcement listing Terrorgram as a terrorist entity cited the Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, released in June 2021. The framework highlighted the government’s efforts to assess whether foreign entities could meet the criteria for the “specially designated global terrorist” designation.
“These designations are part of a broader U.S. government effort to address the transnational dimensions of the threat posed by [racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist] actors and reflect the Biden-Harris administration’s continued commitment to countering domestic terrorism, which includes REMVE and white identity terrorism,” the State Department said.
The emphasis on tackling white supremacist terrorism under the Biden administration has been embraced by an array of agencies in addition to State, including Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI.
The commitment across the federal government to combating white supremacist terrorism under Biden’s leadership built on a growing consensus within the agencies that took hold during the first Trump administration. It remains unclear whether the second Trump administration will maintain the same course.
“In fact, we viewed it as such a critical threat that back in June of 2019, under my leadership, we elevated racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism to our highest threat priority, on the same level with ISIS and homegrown violent extremists, where it remains to this day,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2021.
Wray was appointed to lead the FBI by Trump in 2017.
Kash Patel, who has been named by Trump to replace Wray in the incoming administration, has expressed skepticism towards the government’s focus on “domestic terrorism.”
“Whistleblowers have revealed in multiple ways how the Deep State is continuing to weaponize the power of the state against internal dissidents,” he wrote in his book Government Gangsters. “To pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data on domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”
Asked for clarification on Patel’s views, a Trump transition spokesperson previously pledged to Raw Story that Patel will “protect Americans from terrorism as the agency’s director.”
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https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/08/11/unite-right-5-years-later-where-are-they-now
no lnx many pix
'Unite the Right' 5 Years Later: Where Are They Now?
August 11, 2022
Michael Edison Hayden, Hannah Gais, Cassie Miller, Megan Squire and Jason Wilson]
Five years after white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, the statue they came to protect is gone, and the “alt-right” coalition they embodied has imploded. At the same time, the existential threat that far-right extremism poses to the U.S. has arguably never been more severe.
Such is the complex fallout of “Unite the Right,” where hundreds of extremists immersed a college town in violent conflict, generating shocking images that news organizations continue to broadcast as symbols of the nation’s struggle with hate and authoritarianism. They also helped bring the “great replacement” conspiracy theory into mainstream right-wing discourse by chanting, “Jews will not replace us” in viral videos staged on the eve of Unite the Right.
Hatewatch has continued to monitor the personalities and groups who staged Unite the Right, even after street-level activism, investigative reporting and legal battles blocked the rise of those figures, forcing the radical right movement to shuffle beyond them. The following capsules provide a summary of where Unite the Right’s key players find themselves as of August 2022.
Jason Kessler
Jason Kessler
MollyConger, an antifascist researcher and activist, shared documents and screenshots to Twitter on July 21, 2022, identifying Jason Kessler (pictured) as the sole proprietor behind an Alexandria, Virginia-based moving company, Super Precision Movers LLC. (Photo from Twitter)
Former Proud Boys recruit and Charlottesville resident Jason Kessler obtained the original permit for Unite the Right and briefly became a nationally recognized figure in its fallout. Kessler’s stature in the movement and in the broader culture collapsed in the years that followed, as other movement leaders blamed him for Unite the Right’s failures.
After initially withdrawing a lawsuit against the city of Charlottesville for rejecting his bid for another permit, Kessler traveled to Washington, D.C., in August 2018 for an event marking Unite the Right’s one-year anniversary. Many of the white nationalists who attended the first Unite the Right publicly distanced themselves Kessler in its runup. Some white nationalists even collaborated to sabotage Kessler by suggesting on social media that terroristic neo-Nazis would attend the rally. Kessler’s sequel utterly flopped, attracting only a handful of extremists beyond its host.
Integrity First for America, who brought the Sines v. Kessler lawsuit on behalf of nine plaintiffs alleging they were harmed by the rally, recalled to Hatewatch that Kessler lashed out at victims and co-defendants on social media during the trial for it. The court ordered Kessler to stop posting about Sines v. Kessler on social media, raising concerns about his actions. A jury finally ruled in favor of the plaintiffs on multiple claims in November 2021.
Kessler continues to brand himself as a “white civil rights” activist. He also sometimes blogs for the white nationalist website VDARE.He has written with palpable bitterness about journalists and activists who cover the far right, paying particular interest to those who reported on the fallout of the doomed rally that made him infamous.
“At some point they’re going to take something from someone with nothing left to lose … everyone has their breaking point, and a decapitated head is going to be all that’s left of the person who casually destroyed someone’s life online because they could,” Kessler posted to the messaging app Telegram on July 24, 2022, referring to what he described as “the Antifa people.”
Molly Conger, an antifascist researcher and activist, shared documents and screenshots to Twitter on July 21, 2022, identifying Kessler as the sole proprietor behind an Alexandria, Virginia-based moving company, Super Precision Movers LLC. Hatewatch reached out to Kessler by text message for his thoughts on the anniversary. He said he could not respond due to a lawsuit he filed against the city of Charlottesville.
Richard Spencer
Richard Spencer
Richard Spencer exits the Charlottesville Federal Courthouse in Virginia on Nov. 22, 2021. (Photo by Zack Wajsgras for The Washington Post)]
Once the face of rising white supremacist activism during the Trump era, the telegenic extremist’s celebrity peaked at Unite the Right. Richard Spencer attended the event as a headline speaker, and he infamously helped lead a torchlit march through the University of Virginia campus on Friday, Aug. 11, 2017. Following Heyer’s murder, Spencer threatened to “come back here every f----- weekend if I have to” in a slur-laden rant. Websites across the world published a photo of him at the event, wearing sunglasses and shouting behind him as a crowd of armored state police surrounded him.
Spencer did return to Charlottesville in October 2017 for a small pop-up event involving a handful of extremists. He also took on a speaking tour across college campuses after Unite the Right. Wherever Spencer went, his name stirred protests, cancellations and clashes between antiracist demonstrators and white supremacists. Colton Fears and Tyler Tenbrink, two of Spencer’s supporters, are serving prison terms after separate juries convicted them for their roles in a shooting that targeted protesters of his October 2017 event at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Although Tenbrink’s bullets missed their targets, the men brought the “alt-right” movement and the country extremely close to a replay of Heyer’s murder just two months after she died.
Spencer’s efforts to stage events, and the alt-right movement around him, crumbled in March 2018, when police arrested over two dozen people, including Gregory Conte, the director of operations for Spencer’s groupNational Policy Institute (NPI), following violent skirmishes outside his speech at Michigan State University. Images of Spencer’s supporters trading blows with protesters went viral and led to a debate within the radical right about how activists should carry themselves in public.
“I absolutely regret that I will always be connected with an event that led to the death of an innocent person, among other things,” Spencer told Hatewatch for this story, referring to Heather Heyer’s murder.
Answering a request for comment, Spencer confirmed to Hatewatch what researchers already sensed about him. He said that he pulled back from the movement in 2018, after the Michigan State event. He said that he experienced no single “a-ha moment” in choosing to do so. His group NPI lost its active-status corporate designation in Virginia in August 2018, according to Hatewatch’s review of Virginia corporate records. The SPLC last listed NPI in its annual “Year in Hate” report in 2020.
“I just abandoned it,” Spencer said of NPI.
Spencer’s name trended on Twitter in June 2022 after the feminist website Jezebel ran a post about him. Someone found Spencer on the dating app Bumble, and Jezebel highlighted that he listed himself as a political moderate there. Twitter users derided him and debated his sincerity.
“I feel like sometimes I can’t escape my own shadow in the sense of when people still think of the alt-right, I think they almost imagine that I’m still doing what I used to be doing,” Spencer said. “I have to take responsibility on some level, I mean, I get it. But I hope that there’s something to me beyond those things.”
Spencer continues to operate the web-based publication Radix Journal, which SPLC listed as white nationalist in 2021. Spencer and his former collaborators have lambasted each other on social media. Spencer periodically also makes comments criticizing former President Trump and the Republican Party.
Timothy ‘Baked Alaska’ Gionet
Timothy "Baked Alaska" Gionet appeared in a viral livestream in which he filmed himself making calls from Nancy Pelosi’s office inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Screenshot from DLive)
Gionet, known by his stage name “Baked Alaska,” seized the role of court jester for the white nationalist movement during the Trump era by unleashing a barrage of clownish, sometimes utterly inexplicable stunts on social media for an audience of young racists. Unlikely a figure as he might be to embody this role, the 35-year-old Anchorage native arguably symbolizes the bridge between the violence at Unite the Right and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, better than any other single person.
Formerly an employee of BuzzFeed, Gionet started collaborating with such far-right social media influencers as male supremacist Mike Cernovich and disinformation hustler Jack Posobiec in 2016 and 2017. He also connected with Richard Spencer. Gionet developed a style of livestreaming seemingly non-stop from the selfie position, sometimes while talking to strangers about his racist and antisemitic views. He also produced surreal pop songs like 2016’s “We Love Our Cops.” Its opening lyrics, “We love our cops/our law enforcement/we love our military/they’re important,” perfectly encapsulates Gionet’s superficial-to-the-point-of-being-empty, irony-laden performance style.
Gionet brought something critical to Unite the Right: a substantial social media following. He had 182,000 followers on Twitter heading into Charlottesville, as well as a reliable livestreaming audience. While pro-Trump influencers like Cernovich and Posobiec sat out the event, Gionet charged into it headlong, surrounded by a pack of racist street brawlers. On the eve of Unite the Right, he even retweeted a post from a self-described fascist depicting “alt-right” personalities clashing violently with symbols of antiracism and Marxism.
“I got pepper sprayed! … I need milk! … I need milk! … What the fuck? ...What the fuck? … I need milk! … I need milk right now!” Gionet yelped on a livestream that went viral on Aug. 12, 2017, referring to the practice of pouring milk over someone’s eyes to alleviate the pain caused by pepper spray.
Less than five years later, Gionet appeared in another viral livestream when he filmed himself making calls from Nancy Pelosi’s office inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. He appeared at the Capitol loosely aligned with Nicholas J. Fuentes’ America First movement (see his section below) and with a fanbase diminished by his suspensions from Twitter and, perhaps more crucially, YouTube.
“Occupy the Capitol, let’s go! We ain’t leaving this bitch … Patriots are in control!” he yelled from inside the building, before leading people in a chant of “America First.” “Thank you to all new followers. … Hit that follow button.”
DLive, which Gionet used to livestream as a replacement for YouTube, suspended his account after Jan. 6. Gionet appeared at a Fuentes-led event in November 2021, but the livestreamer’s typically boisterous, class-clown energy appeared to be somewhat diminished. On July 25, Gionet agreed to plead guilty to unlawfully protesting at the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection.
He has suffered other legal and social troubles: An Arizona court sentenced him to 30 days in prison in January 2022 for pepper-spraying a bouncer. He received misdemeanor charges in Phoenix in December 2020 for tearing down a Hanukkah display. A Mesa, Arizona, Starbucks also recently banned Gionet for life for playing racist music inside. He currently hosts an obscure livestream called “Wake and Baked,” featuring freestyle rapping, which he promotes through his Telegram account.
James Alex Fields Jr.
James Alex Fields Jr.
James Alex Fields Jr. is led out of General District Court courthouse after his sentencing on state charges in Charlottesville, Virginia, on July 15, 2019. (Photo via AP Images/Steve Helber)
James Alex Fields Jr. drove his 2010 Dodge Challenger over 500 miles from Ohio to march with hundreds of other white supremacists at the Unite the Right rally. On Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017, he rammed that car into a crowd of antiracist demonstrators, murdering 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring several other people involved in the counterprotest. Footage from Fields’ attack played on newscasts across the world. According to police, Fields wept when they arrested him around a mile from the crime scene.
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Fields, who wore clothing associated with the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America in Charlottesville that weekend,has spent every day since he murdered Heyer incarcerated. Absent a pardon, he will die in prison. Across June and July of 2019, he pleaded guilty to 29 hate crimes and received a life sentence in federal court, and then a second life sentence plus 419 years in a Virginia court after being found guilty of Heyer’s murder, hit and run, and eight counts of malicious wounding. A federal court also ordered Fields to pay $12 million in damages to plaintiffs in the civil suit, Sines v. Kessler, in November 2021.
Contributors to white supremacist-friendly forums shared memes fantasizing about running over antiracists for months before Fields carried out his attack. In his adolescence, Fields expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and aired white supremacist sentiments, according to teachers and acquaintances. He had also allegedly assaulted and threatened his own mother. He took medication for anger management. Despite this history, during his trial, far-right propagandists concocted elaborate conspiracy theories to exculpate Fields for a crime occurring in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses, which bystanders captured in video recordings.
Fields’ fate has not prevented others from carrying out car attacks targeting protesters: Drivers targeted protesters multiple times during the racial justice protests of 2020. Some state-level Republicans have made laws that shield motorists who drive into protesting crowds from civil liability. And to this day, many on the far right minimize or relativize Fields’ crime. In a December 2021 podcast, John Derbyshire, a columnist at the white nationalist website VDARE, attributed Fields’ sentence to an “anti-white justice system.”
Vanguard America
Thomas Rousseau
Thomas Rousseau, founder and leader of white nationalist group Patriot Front, poses for a jail booking photograph released by the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on June 12, 2022. (Photo via Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office)
The white nationalist group Vanguard America brought a large, visible contingent to Charlottesville in 2017. Members wore uniform khakis and white polo shirts, and carried banners displaying the group’s insignia, which combined two fascist symbols. The group arrived at Unite the Right after having staged other events, including a rally on June 17, when several dozen Vanguard America members assembled in formation outside the Texas Capitol.
The killer James Fields marched alongside Vanguard America in Charlottesville, sported a shield with their logo and was photographed alongside their “Vice Commander,” Thomas Rousseau. He was still wearing the group’s uniform dress when police arrested him for Heather Heyer’s murder. Vanguard America leaders and members have repeatedly denied any affiliation with Fields, despite these facts.
Even as Vanguard America marched in Charlottesville, group members jostled for control of their operations. Self-styled “commander” Dillon Ulysses Hopper and Texas-born white nationalist Thomas Ryan Rousseau, just a teenager at that time, split the leadership structure of the group. Rousseau took control of Vanguard America’s private chats before Unite the Right and ultimately led the group’s march there. The public primarily blamed Hopper in the fallout of the event, even though he never appeared at it. Vanguard America fell apart following intense media scrutiny, the identification of members by antifascist activists, and growing divisions between Rousseau and Hopper.
Rousseau’s Patriot Front, which has involved itself in marches across the country and whose members have notoriously defaced public tributes to civil rights leaders, victims of police violence and LGBTQ+ pride, has emerged as the one of the most active white supremacist groups in the U.S. Replacing Vanguard America’s aesthetic with one that borrows from conservatism and Americana, they pivoted away from Fields and Unite the Right and have managed to exist for five years, despite a series of arrests and leaks and the exposure of members’ identities. Hopper, on the other hand, has all but disappeared, going the way of so many other failed white nationalist leaders.
The Daily Stormer
Robert "Azzmador" Ray
Robert “Azzmador” Ray at Unite the Right on Aug. 11, 2017. (Photo from Twitter)]
SPLC warned in January 2017 that a pro-Trump, neo-Nazi blog called The Daily Stormer had emerged as “the top hate site in America,” surpassing its older rival Stormfront. Daily Stormer editor and owner Andrew Anglin appeared to revel in the negative attention. He declared in May 2017 that his readers and everyone else should prepare for “The Summer of Hate.”
“This summer, a Black Sun will pass over America,” he wrote, referring to the esoteric Nazi sonnenrad (or “black sun”) symbol, comparing it to a total solar eclipse.
Daily Stormer writers including Anglin and Robert “Azzmador” Ray, head of the membership groups known as “Stormer book clubs,” promoted Unite the Right throughout that summer. On Aug. 9, 2017, Anglin appeared to call for war.
“We are angry. There is an atavistic rage in us, deep in us, that is ready to boil over,” he wrote. “There is a craving to return to an age of violence.”
Three days later, Anglin stayed away from Charlottesville, continuing to blog. His readers took to the streets, unleashing violence. Fields, whom Anglin later glorified through his site, murdered Heyer. On the night he killed her, his collaborator Ray read a speech authored by Anglin to a crowd of white supremacist supporters. Ray quoted Anglin as calling for them to dig graves and claimed to keep a list of Jewish people.
“This is our war! This has always been our war. And I wouldn’t want it any other way. Death to traitors! Death to the enemies of the white race! Hail victory!” Ray said, quoting Anglin.
Public outrage grew rapidly over The Daily Stormer's role in building an atmosphere of violence during Unite the Right. Multiple web infrastructure companies canceled their contracts with The Daily Stormer on Aug. 13, 2017. The move sent Daily Stormer charging around the web for months at time, drifting between the so-called dark web and what Anglin called the “normie web.” Stormer has since moved through at least 15 different domain names in five years.
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Ray disappeared sometime in 2019, requiring lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Sines v. Kessler lawsuit to request a warrant for his arrest. Anglin, facing financial judgments from multiple lawsuits, including one backed by SPLC, is also on the run, financing what is left of The Daily Stormer with dwindling cryptocurrency donations. Although Anglin loaned his blogging support to trends like the “Stop the Steal” rallies that preceded the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, years of deplatforming have decimated Anglin’s traffic and his influence on the far right, particularly compared to where it stood in moments before Fields murdered Heyer.
The Right Stuff
“White Sharia”: Mike Peinovich, “Eric Striker” and Sacco Vandal at an Alt-Right Book Burning Event in 2017]
Mike “Enoch” Peinovich launched The Right Stuff (TRS) in 2012 as a racist libertarian blog, and in 2014 started a white nationalist, antisemitic podcast called “The Daily Shoah,” playing on a synonym for Holocaust. The podcast overcame rampant infighting, scandals and security issues to become the staple audio broadcast of the alt-right era. After agreeing to participate as a featured speaker at Unite the Right, Peinovich prepared his fans for potential conflict in its runup.
“Bring whatever you need [to Charlottesville], that you feel you need for your self-defense,” Peinovich told his listeners. “Do what you need to do for security of your own person, at this point. … We don’t want [counterprotesters] to have the impression – that we are going to be showing up there, unarmed. … That is not the case.”
Peinovich’s The Right Stuff involved itself in Unite the Right in several ways. Jason Kessler and rally co-planner Elliott Kline (“Eli Mosley”) appeared on TRS-branded podcasts at least 16 times in the runup to Unite the Right. Identity Dixie, a neo-confederate offshoot of The Right Stuff, planned and attended Unite the Right as a group. Some collaborators of the group served as rally organizer Kessler’s personal security detail during the rally. Later, after Fields murdered Heyer, Peinovich emerged as one of the killer’s staunchest defenders, repeatedly spinning the car-ramming attack as unintentional and suggesting to listeners that Fields would be found innocent.
Integrity First for America named Peinovich in the Sines v. Kessler lawsuit, but in 2018, with help from a neo-Nazi “shadow lawyer,” Peinovich convinced the judge to drop him from the case. Despite dodging legal fallout from Unite the Right, The Right Stuff has lost cultural clout and credibility in the radical right since the days of 2017 when they hosted book-burning parties, due to defections, identity exposures and deplatforming on social media.
Hatewatch identified several previously pseudonymous collaborators of The Right Stuff following Unite the Right, including racist podcaster and Twitter troll Trey Garrison, an embattled Dallas-based columnist whose byline started to disappear around 2013, suspended State Department official Matthew Q. Gebert and a man named James Kreider, who allegedly handled security measures for the alt-right movement. Hatewatch also confirmed the identity of Joseph Jordan, who attended Unite the Right while using the pseudonym “Eric Striker,” and started to collaborate on podcasts more with Peinovich during the event’s aftermath. Peinovich produced podcasts with other Unite the Right attendees after the event, including James Allsup, a former white nationalist influencer whose celebrity has faded into near-obscurity in the years following Heyer’s murder.
The Right Stuff’s website popularity rankings have essentially collapsed.They dropped a remarkable 87.5% in the three years after 2018, as Hatewatch previously reported. The Right Stuff attempted a sort of rebrand into a political party in August 2020, called “National Justice Party.” Despite calling the group a political party, National Justice Party has not fielded any discernible candidates for office or filed for party status with the Federal Election Commission. Instead, Peinovich’s crew have held small events designed to stoke racial tensions, including some hosted by a man who disappeared to Moscow after appearing in the Capitol on Jan. 6. White supremacist groups sometimes attempt rebrands like this to reinvigorate their influence in the movement, but such moves often reveal a decline in stature that they never overcome.
Matthew Q. Gebert
Matthew Gebert
Hatewatch unmasked “Coach Finstock” as State Department official Matthew Gebert on Aug. 7, 2019, almost exactly two years after his participation in Unite the Right. (Photo contributed anonymously)
Unknown as an activist in the white supremacist movement to anyone outside the radical right in August 2017, Matthew Q. Gebert stands out among the men who protested at the event because of his double life as a State Department official with security clearance. Gebert went by the pseudonym “Coach Finstock” at that time and organized with Mike Peinovich and The Right Stuff, hosting extremists at his home in Leesburg, Virginia. He covered his face with sunglasses and a hat at Unite the Right, according to comments he later made on a podcast.
“Dude, we smacked the hornet’s nest with a big f------ stick. And the only question is whether this is valuable accelerationism or whether we just provoked the red guards, like, a year before we had enough time to spare,” Gebert said on that podcast, referring to the atmosphere of violence unleashed by white supremacists at Unite the Right.
Hatewatch unmasked Coach Finstock as Gebert on Aug. 7, 2019, almost exactly two years after his participation in Unite the Right. Within an hour of the story going live, the State Department suspended Gebert, and he never returned to work again. His neighbors in Leesburg put up antiracist lawn signs, protesting his presence in the neighborhood, and less than a year after the story went live, Gebert sold his home and moved out. Gebert’s once promising career, which included his receipt of a prestigious Presidential Management Fellowship, crashed.
Two years ago, Gebert relocated his family to Purgitsville, West Virginia, a 98% white town with under 1,000 people in it. (His wife, Anna, also participates in radical right activism.) Gebert continues to produce a podcast, and although the State Department removed his name from its directory, they have refused to confirm whether or not they still pay him any salary. Gebert has never responded to emails from Hatewatch seeking comment about his activism.
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David Duke
David Duke arrives Aug. 12, 2017, to give remarks after the “Unite The Right” rally was declared an unlawful assembly in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Photo by Shaban Athuman/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP Images)]
Despite being an infamous white supremacist, the former klansman David Duke arrived in Charlottesville in August 2017 as a figure with diminished influence in the radical right, especially compared to some of the younger players mentioned here. Duke did however provide a throughline between an older generation of extremists and the alt-right movement by attending Unite the Right. He also built collaborative relationships with younger extremists who attended around the same time, including Joseph Jordan, a neo-Nazi who goes by the stage name “Eric Striker.”
Still, Duke’s notoriety outside of the movement made him a target for media interviews in Charlottesville, and he delivered to the press on Aug. 12 what arguably became the day’s most memorable quote, linking the conglomeration of extremists to Trump’s rise.
“This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back,” Duke told the press from the grounds of the doomed event.
Twitter once gave Duke a highly trafficked perch from which to spew hate, most notably about Jewish people, for the better part of a decade. The controversy-plagued social media giant ultimately took action against Duke on July 31, 2020, eight long years after he joined. The move dramatically reduced Duke’s visibility as a public figure. He still updates his website sporadically. Hatewatch reached out to Duke through his website but did not receive a reply.
Identity Evropa
Elliott "Eli Mosley" Kline
Feb 2018 Elliott Kline aka Eli Mosley (left) and Richard Spencer set up their own film shoot to promote an alt-right effort. (Photo by Andrew Michael Ellis for The New York Times)
Identity Evropa and its leader Nathan Damigo helped plan Unite the Right. In a press conference after the rally, Richard Spencer blamed violence on the city of Charlottesville’s lack of preparation, while Damigo stood by his side. Elliott Kline, an Identity Evropa personality who at the time went by the pseudonym “Eli Mosley,” arrived at the event as one of the faces of the alt-right movement. As with other groups who traveled to Charlottesville that day, the violence of Unite the Right triggered Identity Evropa’s decline.
Identity Evropa had been working to rebrand white supremacy into a tweedy, youthful political movement anchored in America’s college campuses in the runup to Unite the Right and had gained some legitimate traction before Fields murdered Heyer. Members of Identity Evropa identified not as white nationalists, but as “identitarians” invested in preserving white, European culture. They claimed not to support segregation, but “ethnopluralism.” Former members of the group who have since renounced white supremacy claim to have been attracted to Identity Evropa’s veneer of intellectualism and seriousness. They pinned their flyers on college campuses across the country to build young recruits.
Following Unite the Right, as pressure mounted on the groups involved, Damigo stepped down from control of Identity Evropa, citing “personal issues.” He disappeared from the public eye for years, but appears to have returned in 2022 to operate a small, white nationalism-themed Twitter account, which the company quickly suspended. Kline then led the group for only three months, before handing it to longtime member Patrick Casey. Kline’s stature in the radical right collapsed seemingly overnight in February 2018, when The New York Times reported that he had fabricated a backstory he frequently recited, wherein he depicted himself as a veteran of the Iraq War. He has made few public appearances since then, save for his trips to court.
As antiracist activists identified by name numerous members of Identity Evropa in March 2019, Casey chose to rebrand the group as the American Identity Movement. American Identity Movement continued to focus on the same tactics as Identity Evropa, including “flash” demonstrations, banner drops and flyer distribution, but did so while achieving less success.
Casey also teamed up with white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes in 2019, whose popularity on the racist right had begun to rise, particularly in comparison to other extremists who attended Unite the Right. Fuentes and Casey launched what they and their followers called the “groyper” movement, which focused on injecting questions about race, immigration and support for Israel into college speaking events.
Outshined by Fuentes’ growing America First movement, Casey disbanded American Identity Movement in 2020. He and Fuentes began working on a new venture, helping to lead a series of “Stop the Steal” events around the country that promoted the lie that elites stole the 2020 election from Trump. The Jan. 6 congressional committee ultimately subpoenaed both Casey and Fuentes to ask them questions about their role in hyping "Stop the Steal." Casey appears to have stopped working with Fuentes and now produces a podcast with a limited fanbase.
Nicholas J. Fuentes
Nick Fuentes
Nick Fuentes appears at a Nov. 2021 anti-vaccine rally in New York City. (Photo by Michael Edison Hayden)
Comparatively overlooked at the time he attended Unite the Right, Fuentes traveled to Charlottesville as just a teenager. The 19-year-old Boston University student and podcaster on the hard-right conservative Right Side Network harnessed the infamy of the moment to build his fame, ultimately eclipsing in name recognition most of the other extremists on this list. He has successfully courted relationships with such far-right congresspeople as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who have participated in his annual America First Political Action Committee (AFPAC) events and appeared inside the VIP section at Trump’s infamous speech at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Fuentes told the media from the grounds at Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017, that he attended Unite the Right as a “Trump supporter” concerned about “cultural genocide.” Right Side then dropped Fuentes’ podcast, and he dropped out of school, eager to pursue a career as an influencer. Within weeks of Unite the Right, he appeared on a white nationalist podcast, urging listeners to present themselves as “normies,” referring to people who do not appear to belong to some of the hate groups that attended Unite the Right. He soon began livestreaming his YouTube show "America First," while wearing a suit and tie and sitting in front of a green screen. He couched his ideas in doublespeak and irony, and rapidly built up an audience that supplanted in influence embattled figures like Peinovich and The Right Stuff network.
YouTube kicked Fuentes off their platform in February 2020, at which point he relocated to DLive, a small video livestreaming service designed for gamers.Hatewatch reported that Fuentes earned over $100,000 on DLive promoting anti-vaccine conspiracies and antisemitic great replacement narratives. He also issued veiled threats to lawmakers with whom he disagreed. Following the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, DLive removed him too, forcing him to build his own livestreaming infrastructure, which he still uses today.
Fuentes built some of his fanbase through his verified Twitter handle. Twitter suspended his account in July 2021, following the publication of Hatewatch analysis showing that site’s considerable role in stoking an atmosphere of disinformation and rage, which preceded the Capitol insurrection. He continues to attempt to climb back onto that website, and has relaunched Twitter accounts over a dozen times, only to have the company remove them within a day or two. He returned to Twitter on July 26, 2022, through the handle @PunishedIcon to tweet that he felt “tired.”
Fuentes’ troubles coincided with his rapid growth as a public figure, but they appear to have accelerated beyond his control following his involvement in the so-called "Stop the Steal" campaign, which preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Faced with legal battles, deplatforming, the exposed identities of his previously pseudonymous collaborators, and desertions from key lieutenants, Fuentes is now enduring what many other key Unite the Right participants faced five years prior. Hatewatch reached out to him for comment by email, but he did not reply.
Traditionalist Worker Party
Matthew Heimbach
White nationalist Matthew Heimbach is led away in handcuffs in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 2018 after a judge ruled that he violated the probation he was serving for physically harassing a protester at a 2016 Donald Trump campaign rally. (Photo by AP Images/Dylan Lovan)
Headed by its loquacious leaders Matthew Heimbach and Matthew Parrott, Traditionalist Worker Party brought their black clothes, black helmets and history of violent conflict to Charlottesville at Unite the Right at the peak of their influence. Court documents and testimony unearthed in the Sines v. Kessler trial indicate that Jason Kessler sought Heimbach’s assistance in bringing two violent racist skinhead groups, the Hammerskins and Blood & Honour Social Club, to Unite the Right, effectively layering muscle onto a group that was already poised to clash with antiracists.
Heimbach and his crew trudged on following the failures of Unite the Right, despite their organizational shortcomings, until March 2018, when they clashed with antiracists outside a Richard Spencer event on the campus of Michigan State University. They collapsed later that month, immediately following a violent domestic confrontation in which Heimbach reportedly attacked Parrott and Heimbach’s then-wife. At the time, Parrott told Hatewatch in a statement that he was “done” and “out of the game.” A court sentenced Heimbach to 38 days in jail on May 15, 2018, on a parole violation. The attack undercut Heimbach’s claims of “empowering women” and standing up for family values.
Upon his release from prison, Heimbach did a brief stint as the director of community outreach for the National Socialist Movement.Heimbach announced that he no longer involved himself in the white power movement in early 2020, but extremism researchers have greeted his claims of departure with a skeptical response. Parrott has continued to be involved with the movement through a group that funds white power activists in prison, known as the Global Minority Initiative (formerly the National Socialist Charitable Coalition). In a CNN documentary aired after the Sines v. Kessler trial concluded, he claimed to evade a long-standing Twitter ban by pretending to be a Black businesswoman. Hatewatch reached out to Heimbach and Parrott for comment by email but did not receive a response.
League of the South
Brad Griffin
Brad Griffin appears in the crowd outside Foy Hall on the Auburn University campus in Auburn, Alabama, where Richard Spencer spoke on April 18, 2017. (Photo by William Flowers)
Arguably no group suffered more from the Sines v. Kessler lawsuit than the neoconfederates of League of the South. The group came into Charlottesville with the ability to summon scores of people at protest events throughout the South, dressed in recognizable black-and-white uniforms. They pulled in donations and embraced a leadership structure that included the former Green Beret Michael Tubbs, secessionist academic Michael Hill and blogger Brad Griffin, who spoke energetically to the press on their behalf.
Members of League of the South carried out brutal acts of violence at Unite the Right. Tubbs, known for his flowing mane of white hair and large, physically imposing frame, appeared to lead packs of white nationalists into clashes with counterprotesters on Aug. 12, 2017. Police arrested League of the South member Tyler Watkins Davis for his alleged involvement in the beating of Deandre Harris, a Black man.
Today, League of the South struggles to exist.The group has not made public-facing appearances in years, and SPLC believes the number of active members to be a mere fraction of what it was heading into Unite the Right. On the eve of the Sines v. Kessler decision in November 2021, the blogger Griffin relayed his regrets about attending Unite the Right.
“If our people want to meet up and socialize, there are far more effective and enjoyable ways to do so than being attacked by bricks, bear mace, acid, sticks and bombs of shit and urine in a place like Charlottesville. Sure, it is bold to go into a place like that, but it is not worth the cost. None of this is news. I’ve been saying all of this for years. If we ever decide to reboot our activism, it needs to be done on this basis,” he concluded, evoking familiar criticisms of the event’s counterprotesters.
Griffin responded to Hatewatch’s request for comment by posting a lengthy statement to his blog, suggesting that he regrets going, and noting that the mainstream Republican Party had adopted many views that Unite the Right protesters held. You can read an archived version of it by clicking here.
National Socialist Movement
Jeff Schoep
National Socialist Movement leader Jeff Schoep speaks during a white nationalist rally in Newnan, Georgia, on April 21, 2018. (Photo by Bita Honarvar/AFP via Getty Images)
Now synonymous for being on the losing side of a debate over “optics,” referring to how white supremacist groups choose to present themselves to the public, National Socialist Movement came into “Unite the Right” as a veteran neo-Nazi group struggling find their stature in an evolving movement. National Socialist Movement leader Jeff Schoep and his crew proved instrumental in shaping the racist violence that shocked people on Aug. 12, according to court documents produced during the Sines v. Kessler trial. They allegedly physically attacked multiple counterprotesters and cast a menacing appearance in their moody black clothing.
National Socialist Movement faced a precipitous decline in recruitment following Unite the Right, ending in something quite like complete and total dissolution. Schoep claimed to publicly renounce his views in 2019, but documents produced during Sines v. Kessler suggested that he continued to involve himself in the group in the following year. Arizona police have charged Burt Colucci, National Socialist Movement’s current leader, with a number of violent crimes since the start of 2021. A Virginia court found National Socialist Movement and Schoep liable on charges of civil conspiracy theory in the Sines v. Kessler case in November 2021, but by the time they reached that verdict, not much was left of the group but memories of their black uniforms and the violence they inflicted while wearing them.
Rise Above Movement
Daley and Miselis
Benjamin Daley (in long-sleeve white shirt) and Michael Miselis (in the backward baseball cap) were arrested in connection with the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. (Photo by Edu Bayer)
Members of the Rise Above Movement brought long criminal histories with them to Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally. It therefore came as little surprise to researchers of extremism to watch members of what essentially constituted a white supremacist street gang, who trained in martial arts and frequently posted videos of their members attacking their political opposition at public demonstrations, engaging in violence that weekend in August.
Video footage of Rise Above Movement members brutally attacking a group of counterprotesters at the Unite the Right circulated heavily online in the aftermath of the event, prompting investigations from such outlets as ProPublica, Frontline, SPLC and CNN. One year later, federal prosecutors charged four members of the group with rioting charges, to which they pleaded guilty. Four other members, including Rise Above Movement leader Robert Rundo, remain wrapped up in the criminal legal system. All were indicted for planning and engaging in riots, but a judge dismissed the charges in 2019, ruling that the law upon which their prosecution was based was unconstitutional. In March 2021, a federal appeals court reinstated those charges.
Rundo spends most of his time in Europe these days and was last seen in Serbia. He has attempted to build a “nationalist” lifestyle brand to sustain himself financially. His primary outlets are Will2Rise, a media and clothing company that sells a sleek neofascist aesthetic to an audience of racists, and a series of so-called Active Clubs. Rundo described the latter, which have sprung up around the country since 2021, as “small-styled local clubs [that] combine fitness, Nationalism, activism, camaraderie, and skill-building.” More than anything else lately, Rundo appears to enjoy filling his channel on the messaging app Telegram with shirtless photos and issuing repetitive personal essays that romanticize his history of carrying out violence. Hatewatch reached out to Rundo via email and did not receive a response.
Christopher Cantwell
Christopher Cantwell
Christopher Cantwell (center) and other white nationalists participate in a torchlit march on the grounds of the University of Virginia ahead of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Reuters)
Christopher James Cantwell, an outspoken admirer of Adolf Hitler, became one of the faces of Unite the Right on the basis of two video recordings. First, Cantwell projected a tough-talking persona in a Vice Media documentary filmed before and during the rally, calling Heyer’s murder “more than justified.” Then on Aug. 16, four days after Heyer’s murder, Cantwell collapsed into tears in a self-made video, earning himself the viral sobriquet, “the Crying Nazi.”
Cantwell cried that day because authorities charged him with crimes related to his actions at Charlottesville, and the tears may have been justified, because troubles with the law have truly come to overshadow his life story. Even before Unite the Right, Cantwell had an intimate familiarity with the criminal justice system. Juries convicted him in 2000 and 2009 of offenses including driving while intoxicated, criminal possession of a weapon and criminal possession of stolen property.
Authorities then hit Cantwell with three felony assault charges for his role on the Aug. 11, 2017, torch rally, which preceded Heyer’s murder. Cantwell plea-bargained down to misdemeanor convictions in July 2018. In October 2017, plaintiffs named him as a defendant in Sines v. Kessler for his role in promoting Unite the Right. After attorneys dumped him for sending a threatening message to a plaintiff's attorney, Cantwell represented himself and lost in November 2021. He now must pay $500,000 in punitive damages. During these legal challenges, Cantwell continued to host a podcast, which he sometimes used to complain about antiracists and reporters. He forced himself to take a hiatus in April 2019, citing exhaustion and “serious personal problems.”
“I need to stop, avoid recording devices, and pull myself together,” he wrote to his fans. “I’ll be back as soon as I can be.”
FBI agents arrested Cantwell in 2020 and charged him with extortion and interstate threats over his actions during a feud with members of the so-called "Bowl Patrol,” a group of neo-Nazi podcasters who praise mass murderers as “saints.” The FBI alleged that Cantwell had threatened, among other things, to rape one of the podcasters’ wives in front of his children. On Sep. 28, 2021, a judge sentenced Cantwell to 41 months in prison on one count of transmitting extortionate communications and one count of threatening to injure property or reputation. Hatewatch could not reach Cantwell for a comment on the Unite the Right anniversary because he is in prison.
Proud Boys, militiamen and the persistence of ‘great replacement’ propaganda
Tarrio and Biggs
Enrique Tarrio (left), leader of the Proud Boys, and Joe Biggs (right) gather outside of Harry’s Bar during a protest on Dec. 12, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)]
When Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the event embodied a still-evolving cultural shift in far-right extremism, one that left behind many of the men who participated in Unite the Right on Aug. 12, 2017. Still, it’s almost impossible to imagine Trump’s mob enacting that kind of violence in a world where Unite the Right never took place.
“You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” then-President Trump told the press about the men who appeared in Charlottesville on Aug. 12. “You had people in that group. Excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name."
Hints of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection can be found within the Unite the Right crowd, if you squint. While Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes ultimately disavowed the Unite the Right rally, his online show provided a major mouthpiece for its organizers. Former Proud Boy Jason Kessler appeared on McInnes’ show multiple times and, during a June 2017 interview, promoted the rally. Augustus Sol Invictus, a scheduled speaker at Unite the Right, served as the second-in-command for the Proud Boys’ “tactical defense arm” called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights. He also appeared as a guest on McInnes’ show in June 2017. Although the Proud Boys did not attend the rally in their signature black-and-yellow uniforms after McInnes warned them against doing so, members of the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights chose to wear that group’s patches on tactical vests.
One member of the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights who attended Unite the Right, Enrique Tarrio, became the chairman of the Proud Boys a year later, and proved instrumental in shaping the version of that group that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. As mentioned above, Unite the Right attendees such as Timothy “Baked Alaska” Gionet, Nicholas J. Fuentes and Patrick Casey also played roles in shaping the atmosphere on Jan. 6, 2021, albeit in different ways. Militiamen, a group of people harboring a range of different political motivations, did in fact appear at Unite the Right, even if white supremacist activists overshadowed them there. Militiamen obviously played a much more critical role in instigating the violence on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Now that basic concepts like the Great Replacement, Christian nationalism and secession are no longer marginal and taboo, I think we are going to have to make the leap from being a fringe political culture into boring political activists who sell out and reform conservatism like the Religious Right,” Brad Griffin of League of the South wrote in response to Hatewatch’s request for comment. “There will soon be Great Replacement activists like pro-life activists or gun rights activists.”
Griffin knows a thing or two about the so-called great replacement conspiracy theory, which posits that Jewish people, or elites, have colluded deliberately to make white people into a minority in America. Following Unite the Right, Griffin interacted online with a man accused of murdering 11 Jewish people at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018. The terror attack constitutes just one of several other similar mass murders perpetrated by men who claim to be motivated by that very conspiracy theory.
Tucker Carlson
Fox News host Tucker Carlson speaks at AmericaFest, a Turning Point USA event, in 2021. (Photo by ZUMA Press/Alamy Live News)]
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, and the influence of anti-immigrant extremists of the Trump-era Republican Party such as Stephen Miller, helped catapult the thinking behind the racist great replacement-themed chants shouted by Unite the Right protesters into mainstream discourse. That conspiracy theory’s influence on terrorism and politically motivated violence may be the ultimate legacy of a rally that shattered the lives of so many people, including its instigators.
25 million $
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/charlottesville-verdict/
25 million $
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/charlottesville-verdict/
Returning a verdict against dozens of white supremacist leaders and organizations who organized Unite the Right, a Virginia jury has awarded millions in damages to nine plaintiffs who were injured in the violence during the chaotic rally that ended with a car attack by James Fields.
The defendants were found liable in four of six counts, including a Virginia state conspiracy claim that they subjected the plaintiffs to racial, religious or ethnic harassment or violence. But the mixed-race jury deadlocked on a major claim in the civil case against the organizers, whether they engaged in a conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence.
The plaintiffs presented evidence over the course of the four-week trial showing that the defendants meticulously planned the Unite the Right rally on the digital chat platform Discord. While the ostensible reason for the rally was to support two Confederate monuments slated for removal in Charlottesville, the organizers' private communications revealed that their true inspiration was a violent rally four months earlierin Berkeley, Calif. and that they hoped to bait left-wing opponents into the streets, and as primary organizer Jason Kessler put it, "fight this shit out."
The evidence showed that Kessler quickly reached out to Matthew Heimbach, an avowed fascist and antisemite who led the Traditionalist Worker Party and had already organized a coalition of "hard right" white supremacist groups that included League of the South, the National Socialist Movement and Vanguard America. All the organizations sent members to Charlottesville, and the leader of Vanguard America wound up providing a shield to Fields before he drove his car into counter-protesters.
After securing a commitment from Spencer — then the most famous figure in the alt-right movement that emerged on the coattails of Donald Trump's 2016 election — for the headlining speaker slot, Kessler wrote in a phone text: "We are raising an army, my liege, for free speech but the cracking of skulls, if it comes to it."
The plaintiffs also presented evidence that Elliot Kline, both a lieutenant to Spencer and a leader of Identity Evropa, organized Unite the Right alongside Kessler. Kline's former girlfriend, Samantha Froelich, testified that he was obsessed with exterminating Jews, saying he would "gas the kikes forever." Robert "Azzmador" Ray, a contributing writer for the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, mentioned in a Discord chat in the month prior to Unite the Right that had "just got done with an hourlong chat with some of the organizers and I feel better about the thing. The plan is the same: Gas the kikes." After macing counter-protesters at the Aug. 11 torch march, Ray reported to his fellow neo-Nazis: "I personally literally gassed half a dozen kikes."
Counsel for the defendants argued that Fields car attack was not reasonably foreseeable or intended by the defendants, who anticipated only pushing and shoving, or, at most, fist fights, but the jury evidently didn't buy it. The defendants all testified that they did not know Fields and had not seen him prior to his appearance at the Aug. 12, 2017 rally.
Plaintiff Natalie Romero was injured in Fields' car attack, which left her with a fractured skull, a cleft lip, persistent headaches and trouble maintaining balance. Romero and co-plaintiff Devin Willis were among a small group of University of Virginia students who linked arms around a statue of Thomas Jefferson during a torch march in which white nationalists made monkey noises at them and threw lit torches at their feet while macing, punching and kicking others. All the plaintiffs, who include a pastor, a landscaper, a paralegal who recently passed the bar exam, testified that they have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of physical injuries or emotional distress.
As she and a dozen or so counter-protesters linked arms around statue, Romero described the sound of the approaching torch marchers as "almost like thunder, like the earth was growling." She recalled that they chanted "Blood and soil" and "White power."
"There's another that I hate repeating," Romero testified. "I like, hear it in my nightmares. If my phone buzzes, I hear the same cadence, the 'You will not replace us.' That one is just so terrifying to hear the whole time."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/lawsuit-over-charlottesville-unite-rally-080025307.html
no lnx pix
lawsuit over Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally has crippled white supremacist groups, leaders
White nationalist Richard Spencer (center) and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Emancipation Park after the "Unite the Right" rally was declared an unlawful gathering Aug. 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the "alt-right" clashed with anti-fascist protesters and police as they attempted to hold a rally in Emancipation Park, where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was slated to be removed.
A white supremacist with a Nazi tattoo leaves Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 12, 2017.
Flowers and notes are left in memory of Heather Heyer, who died after she was struck when a car plowed into a crowd protesting the 'Unite the Right' rally on Aug. 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Va.]
Firefighters from northern Idaho and eastern Washington participate in fire training on July 11, 2001, climaxing with the destruction of the church structure at the former Aryan Nations compound in Hayden, Idaho. The only other structure then remaining at the compound was the former residence of Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, which also was to be used for firefighter training.
Supporters of US President Donald Trump protest inside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. - Demonstrators breeched security and entered the Capitol as Congress debated the a 2020 presidential election Electoral Vote Certification. ]
Civil trial over deadly 'Unite the Right' extremist rally to begin in Charlottesville
White nationalist Richard Spencer (center) and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Emancipation Park after the "Unite the Right" rally was declared an unlawful gathering Aug. 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the "alt-right" clashed with anti-fascist protesters and police as they attempted to hold a rally in Emancipation Park, where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was slated to be removed.
Will Carless
October 17, 2021
In this article:
Richard B. Spencer
American white supremacist, conspiracy theorist, and neo-Nazi
Donald Trump
45th President of the United States
A federal lawsuit against the organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which has rattled hate groups and white supremacist leaders, goes to trial this month.
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The suit already has helped to dismantle some of America's most well-known white supremacist groups, and it has financially crippled one leader of the so-called "alt-right," the white supremacist and nationalist movement that came to prominence under President Donald Trump.
"It's very stressful, and very costly," said Richard Spencer, one of the defendants in the lawsuit and the former de facto leader of the "alt-right," in an interview. "This level of pressure is definitely scary."
Oath Keepers: Hack exposes law enforcement officers who signed up to join anti-government Oath Keepers
White supremacist recruiting: How podcasts have become the backbone for white supremacist recruiting
Video: 'White supremacy is terrorism': Biden condemns terrorism in address]
Lawsuits have long been used to dismantle or bankrupt the engines of hate in the U.S., including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.
"We know that civil lawsuits work in holding accountable extremists by going after their finances and their operations," said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of the nonprofit civil rights group Integrity First for America, which is backing the lawsuit. "That has been true for decades."
But even when those groups have been crippled, white supremacists have adapted, going underground and surfacing with new organizations and leaders.
An alleged conspiracy to Unite the Right
The Unite the Right rally, held on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, was a watershed moment for the white supremacist movement in the United States.
Coming the summer after the election of a president who kickstarted his political career by pushing a racist conspiracy theory, the event put American hatred on full display.
Clean-cut white men marched across the University of Virginia campus carrying tiki torches and chanting, "Jews will not replace us." Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, brandishing shields emblazoned with Nazi symbols, chanted racist and antisemitic slogans as they fought the removal of a Confederate monument.
Fights between white supremacists and counter-protesters broke out. Neo-Nazi James Fields drove his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer. Fields was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.[19 hurt some badly?]
Heather Heyer attack: Neo-Nazi James Fields gets life plus 419 years for murder in Charlottesville
Integrity First's wide-ranging lawsuit alleges that the leaders of the white supremacist movement engaged in a conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence against nonwhite and Jewish people during the Unite The Right rally.
"The violence in Charlottesville was no accident," the lawsuit states. "Defendants spent months carefully coordinating their efforts, on the internet and in person. They exhorted each other: 'If you want to defend the South and Western Civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August' and 'Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz.'"
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The lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages for the plaintiffs, with the amount to be decided by a jury.
The defendants are a "who's who" of the extremist right: Jason Kessler, a key organizer of the event; neo-Nazi podcaster Christopher Cantwell; Nathan Damigo, a white supremacist who founded the group Identity Evropa; Spencer; and a host of other extremist leaders and groups.
Richard Spencer: Suit has been 'crippling'
Despite briefly rising to prominence at the outset of the Trump presidency, the last four years have proven brutal for the "alt-right," a political movement that mixes racism, white nationalism, antisemitism and populism. That's thanks in part to the pressure of the case, filed in October 2017.
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Spencer has no illusions about the state of the movement he helped create. "The 'alt-right' is dead,"he said in an interview last month.
Last week, Spencer acknowledged that the Integrity First lawsuit has taken a toll.
Along with the constant stress, the lawsuit has cost thousands of dollars to defend, Spencer said. In June 2020, he told the court that the case has been "financially crippling." Now he's representing himself in court.
White nationalist Richard Spencer (center) and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Emancipation Park after the
The plaintiffs – a minister, students and other Charlottesville residents – have won default judgments against seven[1 did not show b/c dropped phone in toilet] of the 24 defendants, with the penalties to be decided by the jury. The court has issued five-figure fines against three other defendants for failing to produce evidence or show up for court hearings or depositions, court files show.
Meanwhile, several of the groups named in the suit have fallen apart.
Vanguard America, the neo-Nazi group that Fields marched with, fragmented after the rally. So did the Traditionalist Workers Party, a white supremacist group. Cantwell is in prison after being convicted of extortion. Identity Evropa rebranded, and in May 2020 defendants Matthew Heimbach and Elliott Kline each were ordered to pay fines of more than $12,000.
At least two defendants are in hiding: Andrew Anglin, who founded the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer and has another multi-million dollar judgment against him from another lawsuit, and his webmaster Robert Ray, who goes by "Azzmador" and disappeared from view last year after the suit was filed.
"This case is about ensuring that these folks are effectively bankrupted and dismantled," Spitalnick said. "The fact that so many of these defendants have already been marginalized in the movement is a testament to how accountability can work."
In that respect, the Charlottesville case follows a long history of using lawsuits to disrupt hate groups.
A compound razed and movements flattened
An extraordinary series of photographs from 2001 shows the demolition of the Aryan Nations compound outside Boise, Idaho. In one, a yellow digger chews into a massive swastika painted on a roof. In another, a guard tower is flattened by the same machine.
The compound was razed after the Aryan Nations was bankrupted in 2000 by a lawsuit brought by an Idaho attorney and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
That case was one of almost a dozen such lawsuits filed by the SPLC against various groups over the last 20 years.
Firefighters from northern Idaho and eastern Washington participate in fire training on July 11, 2001, climaxing with the destruction of the church structure at the former Aryan Nations compound in Hayden, Idaho. The only other structure then remaining at the compound was the former residence of Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, which also was to be used for firefighter training.
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"Every one of our cases led to the dissolution of a group," said Heidi Beirich, who once led the SPLC's Intelligence Project. Now she's co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. "It's a very effective tactic."
The land that once housed the group is now a public park.
In the 1980s and 90s, the SPLC filed lawsuits against several chapters of the KKK on behalf of plaintiffs who had been intimidated or threatened. The lawsuits caused those chapters to file for bankruptcy or shut down.
Beirich said she applauds Integrity First for bringing such a broad lawsuit against so many defendants. The SPLC cases typically tackled one organization or chapter at a time, she said.
Like the SPLC lawsuits, the Charlottesville case is based on more than the mere speech of hate groups, which is protected, Beirich said. It alleges the defendants engaged in illegal actions, including harassment and assault.
Ku Klux Klan Act invoked in lawsuit over insurrection
The suit against the Unite the Right organizers appears to have opened new legal fronts in the fight against extremism.
In late August, seven officers from the U.S. Capitol Police sued Trump, his longtime adviser Roger Stone and members of far-right extremist groups, alleging they conspired to use violence on Jan. 6 to attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election
That lawsuit relies on the same statute used in the Charlottesville case – the federal Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a Reconstruction-era statute that allows individuals to sue when they are injured by conspiracies.
"Unfortunately, the KKK Act is experiencing something of a renaissance," said Karen Dunn, co-lead counsel on the Charlottesville lawsuitwith Roberta Kaplan. "But we are glad it exists because this is exactly the kind of conduct it is meant to address."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lawsuit over Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally goes to trial
blk female student thugswarmed when elected to student gov't? at ivy league now in boden admin? civil KKK suit ~ charlottesville indiv and groups 10 21 trms
https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-show-10-25-21-n1282354
...Heres the other thing though thats going on in Virginia that is worth paying attention to both in its own right, but also because this is going to be a blockbuster thing, thats going to be unfolding at a very high profile way in Virginia, this week and into next, and beyond, just as Virginia voters are going to the polls in this super important tight election. It is now, just over four years, since a rotten assortment -- if youll forgive me -- of neo-Nazis and white supremacist, and anti-Semites, convened in Charlottesville, Virginia, to basically terrorize that town, in the University of Virginia campus.
This was the "Jews will not replace us" torched lit march. The guys with rifles and pistols and clubs, and chemical spray, and swastikas flags, marching through Charlottesville, surrounding the only synagogue in Charlottesville, assaulting counter protesters ultimately one of their number, and devout neo-Nazi, rammed his car at high speed into a group of counter protesters, killing one of them, a young woman named Heather Heyer, injuring at least 19 other people, some of them quite severely.
The guy who deliberately drove that car into that crowd is now facing not one but two life sentences, without the possibility of parole, plus another 419 years on top of that for good measure.
But, just days after the debacle in Charlottesville, a very interesting legal strategy started to come together, to try to pursue some kind of accountability, not just for that murderer, now convicted murderer, but for the neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, that did not just plan to come to Charlottesville to speak their, minds they planned the violence there.
And we know that in part, because it leaked screenshots, of these guys planning and promoting the Charlottesville event online, interactions online which showed them promising and hyping and celebrating that it would be violent in Charlottesville, that the violence would specifically target Jewish, people and people of color.
Quote, there is a atavistic rage in us, deep in us, that is ready to boil over. There is a craving to return to an age of violence. We won a war. That`s in advance of the Charlottesville event.
And quote, if you want to defend the South and Western civilization from the Jew, and his dark skinned allies, be at Charlottesville, on the 12th of August.
Also this one. Next up Charlottesville, Virginia. Final stop, Auschwitz.
They exchanged these fantasies and plans about fighting with violence in doing violence to Jewish people and black people and black people of color. They exchanged fantasies in plans about driving vehicles into protesters, which is, of course, exactly what happened.
As one extremism expert at Cal State-San Bernardino just told NBC News about this case, quote: We have to tolerate bigotry in the marketplace of ideas, because of the First Amendment. But when that bigotry turns into conspiratorial violence, there is redress.
Well, the redress that is being sought here is by nine plaintiffs who were harmed by what happened in Charlottesville, including a minister who was assaulted by the neo-Nazis, four people who were injured in the car attack that killed Heather Meyer. A Jewish woman who was hounded and stopped by these anti-Semitic thugs.
Their case is spearheaded by a group called Integrity First for America, and they brought this issue on behalf of these nine plaintiffs against a big broad swath of defendants, 14 individuals and ten groups, all far white right nationalist, white supremacists, neo-Nazi extremist groups and individuals, all involved in the planning in executing of the Charlottesville event. This is the trial that is just starting right now in Charlottesville, just a week ahead of Virginia choosing its next governor.
The case in Charlottesville went to jury selection starting today, the trial is expected to run for the next four weeks or so, but it`s already proving to be sort of a nightmare for the planners of what happened in Charlottesville.
[21:15:09]
Here, for example, is the headline on this case today, and this case recently, on "USA Today", lawsuit over Charlottesville Unite the Right rally has crippled white supremacist groups and leaders. Quote, a federal lawsuit against the organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, has rattled hate groups and white supremacist leaders. The suit already has helped to dismantle some of America`s most well-known white supremacist, and it has financially crippled one leader of the so-called Alt-Right, the white supremacist and nationalist movement that came to prominence under President Donald Trump.
Richard Spencer, one of the defendants in the lawsuit, said, quote, it`s very stressful, and very costly. Spencer acknowledged that the Integrity First lawsuit has taken a toll. Along with the constant stress, the lawsuit, he says, has cost thousands of dollars to defend.
In June 2020, Richard Spencer told the court that the case has been financially crippling. Now hes been representing himself in court. Hes representing himself? Serving as his own lawyer? You don`t say.
Whatever else has happened in your life today, I bequeath you this. Little warm fussiness to hold in your heart. The Nazis are representing themselves in court. Acting as their own lawyers.
That always works out great. Good for them. Couldn`t happen to a nicer bunch.
That one Richard Spencer is representing himself in court, because other lawyers started -- stopped wrapping him when he stopped paying him. Another defendant lost his lawyer when he quit, because he started spewing anti- Semitic threats against one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs.
Three of the defendants have managed to hold on to their lawyer, but their lawyer is a gentleman from Ohio who said he is representing these three clients out of the goodness of his heart because he agrees with them. He himself wants to, quote, oppose Jewish influence in society. And so, he has taken their case. Thats why Im sure he is going to be a great lawyer. Sounds like he`s got mad skills, emphasis on that.
At least two of the defendants in this case have gone into hiding. Seven of the defendants have already had a default judgment levied against them by the court. It`s basically the civil suit equivalent of a guilty plea, arranged on their behalf by the court after they ignored court orders refused to comply with them. They had default levied against them already.
One of them, the leader of the National Socialist Movement -- where have I heard that name before? He tried to say he didn`t need to comply with court orders because he dropped his phone in the toilet. It was an accident. There it was, plop in the toilet.
So, to his mind, that mean he didnt need to respond to the court anymore produce any documents by court order. You would be surprised to learn that the court disagreed. "Oops I dropped it in the toilet" isnt a legal defense to compulsory proceedings.
So, some of these guys have already lost the case already by default judgment. Three of them are facing fines over $10,000 already as sanctions from the court. And did I mention they are only at the point of jury selection? That thing hasn`t even gotten started yet.
The point of this litigation, overtly, is to bankrupt the neo-Nazis and white supremacist, the individual leaders in the organization who made Charlottesville happen, who promised that it would be used as an occasion to bring violence in the name of white supremacy and to terrorize black and Jewish people. Thats what they did Charlottesville four, thats how they planned, it that`s how they carried it out.
Holding them accountable for it by a civil lawsuit is an unusual thing in this day and age. It is already succeeded partially and taking them apart.
And I say this tactic is rarely used, but it`s never used. If it sounds familiar to you as a viewer of this show, it may be that you are remembering a story we covered here in 2019. The story of a brave, brave, accomplished young woman. Her name is Taylor Dumpson.
In 2017, Taylor Dumpson was elected student body president by her peers at American University in Washington, D.C., just the first ever African American elected to be student body president there.
In response, somebody hung nooses and bunches of bananas for the extra racist kick, all over the campus of American University. After there was some publicity about that, a prominent neo-Nazi website, run by one of the defendants in the Charlottesville cases, that prominent neo-Nazi website took up the case, so to speak, and they doxed her.
[21:20:00]
They posted her personal information online, and they encouraged the monsters who frequent that neo-Nazi website, that they should step up the attacks on her. Keep it going, and worse.
What would you do in that circumstance? Having every avowed neo-Nazi in the internet coming for you? After those physical threats already?
Well, she responded by going on offense. She brought a case led by the national lawyers committee for several lawyers under law. Her hate case was held by very, very, able lawyer named Kristen Clarke, who we had her on the show to talk about at the time. Kristen Clarke, you remember, you may recognize, she is now the head of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, appointed by President Biden. She now serves there under Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The young woman who brought that case, the civil case in which she sued the living daylights out of the neo-Nazis who organized these attacks on her, her case was successful. She won a large monetary judgment against the Nazi who won that website who orchestrated those attacks.
She herself has since graduated from American University. She then went on to graduate from Cardozo School of Law. She now joined theNational Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law,same organization that represented her and won her a case against the neo-Nazi website in 2019.
Taylor Dumpson now works as a civil rights attorney. Earlier today, she spoke about her case at the Justice Department Civil Rights DivisionVirtual Conference on Confronting Hate.
And Taylor Dumpson joins us now live. She`s the presidential fellow at the National Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Ms. Dumpson, it`s a real honor to have you here. Thank you.
TAYLOR DUMPSON, CIVIL RIGHTS ATTORNEY: Thank you so much for having me, Rachel.
MADDOW: So let me start first of all by asking if I got any of that wrong, and also by asking how youre doing. I imagine this has been just an incredible flexion point, turning point in your life. It seems to have set you off on the path youre on now.
DUMPSON: Absolutely. The hate crime, to say the least, definitely changed my life, and the cyber harassment that ensued afterwards continued to do so. Im definitely one of the lucky ones. Im one of the people who have survived. I take it as an obligation and a responsibility to share my story because unlike Heather Heyer, you know, I`m able to share my story as my own person and on my own behalf.
Luckily, Heather has her mother, Susan Bro, and other folks around there to advocate on her behalf. But as a survivors and one of the lucky ones, I`m here to share my story.
MADDOW: What should we understand, obviously you`re now a practicing civil rights lawyer yourself. You have been through this process through a very unusual circumstance given what you went through. What should we understand? What should the country understand about this strategy, about using civil litigation, in which the victim, as the plaintiff goes after the perpetrators through civil litigation basically to try to bankrupt them, make them literally pay for what they have done?
How should we understand that in terms of its overall effectiveness against these kinds of crimes or at least this kind of behavior, but also what kind of difference it makes to victims?
DUMPSON: Absolutely. So civil litigation is just one of the many tools available to survivors of hate incidents and hate crimes, to be able to bring their perpetrators to accountability. In my suit, we were able to sue three of the individuals who cyber harassed me online as well as the Daily Stormers parent company, and they were using a novel kind of idea using public accommodations as that avenue, and so basically you`re not allowed to discriminate against people because of places of public like schools and hospitals and other places like that that are accessible to the public.
And so, being able to use, you know, litigation and civil remedies as an avenue for people to be able to hold their perpetrators accountable is one of the ways. So, being able to see what the lawyers are doing and the Charlottesville litigation is really amazing.
MADDOW: Are you encouraged by whats happening in Charlottesville? I mean, one of the things thats unique about the case is there is a broad swath of defendants. Theyre not going after, you know, a single entity, a single defendant who had a key role in organizing those things. It is a murderers row of neo-Nazi leaders, white supremacist organizers, and the organizations that they have been able to cobble together over the years.
Obviously, if this litigation is successful, its going to be a death blow to a lot of those groups because theyll never be able to have a dollar to their names. What do you make of that as that sort of broad strategy they`re taking, taking on the whole movement all at once?
DUMPSON: I think its send ago very strong signal to folks in that movement that survivors will speak out, survivors will use their voices and use every avenue available to them, including litigation to hold people accountable. And so, luckily, defendants like Andrew England have been forced into the shadows because of litigation like the case I was able to bring, like the case thats being brought right now, and like some of the other cases that have been levied against them.
[21:25:11]
And so, I hope this is a fatal blow to their movement, and people know that survivors will continue to use their voices.
MADDOW: Taylor Dumpson, attorney and presidential fellow with the National Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law with a remarkable story of her own to how she ended up there. Ms. Dumpson, thank you. Good luck to you, and thanks for being with us tonight. I appreciate it....
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/unite-the-right-organizer-says-hes-rekindling-ties-to-vdare/
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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neo-nazis-virginia-gun-rally_n_5e221a24c5b63211761391ad
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6 Suspected Neo-Nazis Have Now Been Arrested In Lead-Up To Virginia Gun Rally
The men are all alleged members of The Base, a white supremacist group that hopes to start a race war.
By Sebastian Murdock
George Bush Praises ImmigrationGeorge Bush Praises Immigration
Six neo-Nazis have been arrested just days before a gun rally in Virginia is expected to draw thousands, including far-right extremists.
Three Georgia men were arrested Friday on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and participating in a criminal street gang as members of The Base, a white supremacist group that seeks to start a race war.The suspects are Luke Austin, Michael Helterbrand and Jacob Kaderli, The Associated Press reported.
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The men are accused of seeking out antifascists to kill, and were planning to “overthrow the government and murder a Bartow County couple,” the Floyd County Police Department said in a statement.
Left to right: Luke Austin Lane, Jacob Kaderli and Michael Helterbrand are all suspected neo-Nazis who allegedly planned to t
FLOYD COUNTY POLICE DEPARTMENT]
Left to right: Luke Austin Lane, Jacob Kaderli and Michael Helterbrand are all suspected neo-Nazis who allegedly planned to target and kill antifascists.
Atlanta Antifascists, a group that works to confront and expose fascists throughout Georgia, told HuffPost the news of the arrests “underscores that organized white supremacists remain a threat to our communities.”
“Targeting people as members of our group has become a favorite pastime of violent white supremacists,” Atlanta Antifascists said. “Many of these people are not even connected to organized antifascism at all — they simply have become caught in the crosshairs. This is part of a concerted attempt by fascists to create a general attitude of terror and paranoia. We extend our solidarity to all members of the community targeted by white supremacy and fascism and encourage everyone to watch out for each other and keep each other safe.”
The arrests came a day after three other suspected neo-Nazis affiliated with The Base were arrested in Maryland. One of the men, Patrik Mathews, fled Canada earlier last year after his white supremacy ties were discovered. A former reservist in the Canadian Army, Mathews trained as a combat engineer and is an explosives expert.
Patrik Mathews fled Canada after his white supremacy ties were discovered.
RCMP
Patrik Mathews fled Canada after his white supremacy ties were discovered.]
Authorities said Mathews is a top recruiter for the terrorist group and was allegedly planning to start violence at Monday’s gun rally in Virginia along with accomplices Brian Lemley and William Bilbrough IV. Police found guns and more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition during the arrests.
Monday’s rally in Richmond is expected to draw thousands of people who oppose recent gun control bills introduced in the state legislature, including one that would require universal background checks for firearm purchase and another that would limit people from buying more than one handgun per month.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) declared a temporary state of emergency on Wednesday banning all guns from the state Capitol grounds amid threats of violence from far-right extremists.
“We have received credible intelligence from our law enforcement agencies of threats of violence surrounding the demonstration planned for Monday, January 20,” Northam said in a tweet. “This includes extremist rhetoric similar to what has been seen before major incidents, such as Charlottesville in 2017.”
Organizers of the rally, anti-gun control group Virginia Citizens Defense League, falsely accused Democratic leaders of inviting violent groups to the rally following the temporary ban on guns.
“[Democrats] would love for it to degenerate to ‘violence, rioting, and insurrection’ in order to smear gun owners,” the group said in a statement. “Has the Democrat leadership actually invited violent groups to attend for the purpose of disrupting our peaceful assembly?”
Hours after the statement, three of the suspected neo-Nazis were arrested. The VCDL did not respond to a request for comment.
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neo-Nazi Richard Spencer went into a racist rage after the death of Heather Heyer: Leaked audio
In January 2017, Richard Spencer gained fame as a result of a number of articles highlighting him as the new, “dapper” face of white nationalism.
Jen Hayden / Daily Kos November 4, 2019
In January 2017, Richard Spencer gained fame as a result of a number of articles highlighting him as the new, “dapper” face of white nationalism. Then, there was the infamous incident at a Trump inauguration protest in which he was punched in the face during a live television interview.
In August 2017, Richard Spencer was one of the leaders of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville where Heather Heyer was killed, and many others seriously injured, after one of Spencer’s buddies drove into a crowd of anti-Nazi protesters. Spencer was apparently furious about the negative coverage of their violent Nazi rally and now his fellow alt-right pal (or former pal) Milo Yiannopoulos has leaked audio on YouTube, which Yiannopoulos says is Spencer in a racist rage, recorded after the rally. For what it’s worth, YouTube is one of the only social media platforms that hasn’t banned Yiannopoulous. He was permanently banned from Twitter after a racist attack on comedian Leslie Jones..
This is definitely NSFW as it contains explicit and racist language.
BAILEY, THE LIBTARDTARIAN ??
@atheist_cvnt
Milo just uploaded leaked audio of Richard Spencer reacting to the death of Heather Heyer and the negative press it did to his movement.
Just in case there was any question of the so-called "dapper white nationalist" being a raged fuelled hateful monster.
Explicit warning.
Embedded video
When you hear that audio, recall Donald Trump, President of the United States, defending these people, calling them “very fine people.” Sickening.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212658769
[link:https://www.salon.com/2019/11/04/leaked-audio-purportedly-captures-richard-spencers-racist-violent-threats-after-charlottesville/|
Leaked audio purportedly captures Richard Spencer's racist, violent threats after Charlottesville
“We are going to destroy this f**king town,” he is heard saying in the audio. "I rule the f**king world." [i win]
Former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos published a leaked audio recording that he claims shows white nationalist leader Richard Spencer shouting racist slurs and threats after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
“My ancestors f**king enslaved those little pieces of f**king sh*t,” the man identified as Spencer shouts in the audio recording. “They don’t do this to f**king me. We’re going to f**king ritualistically humiliate them.”
“Little f**king kikes,” the audio continues. “They get ruled by people like me. Little f**king octaroons.”
The audio includes a threat to return to Charlottesville repeatedly.
“We are coming back here like a f**king hundred times,” the voice in the recording says. “I am so mad. I am so f**king mad at these people. I am coming back here every f**king weekend if I have to. Like this is never over. I win. They f**king lose. That’s how the world f**king works. I rule the f**king world. Those pieces of sh*t get ruled by people like me.”
“We are going to destroy this f**king town,” he added.
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2nd anniv stories
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/this-19th-century-law-used-to-fight-the-kkk-is-now-targeting-extremists-in-charlottesville/
no lnx
This 19th century law used to fight the KKK is now targeting extremists in Charlottesville
Written by Alex Henderson August 12, 2019
Two years have passed since the Unite the Right rally of August 2017, when hundreds of white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia and one of them murdered counterdemonstrator Heather Heyer by driving his vehicle into a crowd of counterdemonstrators. Many other acts of white nationalist terrorism have occurred since then — mostly recently, an anti-Latino attack in El Paso, Texas that left 22 people dead. But activist Amy Spitalnick, in an August 12 article for NBC News, explains how a law used to fight the KKK in the 19th century can be used to fight extremists in Charlottesville in 2019.
Spitalnick, who heads the organization Integrity First for America, notes that her organization is “working with a coalition of Charlottesville community members injured in the Unite the Right rally to sue the two dozen individuals and organizations responsible.” And the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, Spitalnick stresses, is “central to our case” and is “one of the few legal remedies intended to deal with private — rather than government — conduct that violates civil rights.”
The KKK was founded in 1865 and quickly became a major source of domestic terrorism in the United States. Six year later, the Ku Klux Klan Act was passed by a post-Civil War Congress and signed into law by Republican President Ulysses S. Grant — and it offered a “civil remedy,” Spitalnick explains.
“Following its passage,” Spitalnick recalls, “the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan organization was effectively dismantled and did not resurface until decades later.” And 148 years later, that law is still on the books and can be used to address the harm caused by events like “what happened in Charlottesville.”
The organizers of the Unite the Right Rally, Spitalnick emphasizes, engaged in activity that violated the civil rights of Charlottesville residents.
“Over August 11 and 12, 2017, they marched military-style on the University of Virginia and downtown Charlottesville,” Spitalnick asserts. “They carried semiautomatic weapons, swastikas and other hate symbols — as well as torches to evoke the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. They chanted ‘Jews will not replace us,’ ‘blood and soil’ and ‘white lives matter.’ They violently attacked students, clergy and other community members.”
Spitalnick goes on to discuss her lawsuit against the Unite the Right organizers, writing, “If everything they own now and in the future can be jeopardized, it makes it much more difficult to recruit followers for these horrific causes. Some defendants cited the lawsuit in deciding against returning to Charlottesville last August.”
Spitalnick wraps up her article by noting that the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 can be used not only against extremists in Charlottesville, but in other places as well.
“The last two years have proven that Charlottesville was not an isolated incident, but a flashpoint in the rise of extremist violence that’s connected to the attacks that followed,” Spitalnick writes. “Before killing 11 Jews in a synagogue last October, the Pittsburgh shooter communicated with some of the Charlottesville leaders…. With this trial — and the judgments we expect to win against these extremists — we can help reverse that deadly and hate-filled cycle.”
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/all-4-white-supremacists-charged-in-charlottesville-violence-plead-guilty/
story was co-published with Frontline PBS.
Last year, when federal authorities arrested and charged four members or associates of a white supremacist gang for their roles in the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the men and their supporters struck a defiant tone.
The men proclaimed their innocence, and their backers described them in social media posts as “patriots” and “political prisoners.” The gang, known as the Rise Above Movement and based in Southern California, set up an anonymous tip line for people to share evidence that might exonerate the imprisoned members, and it established a legal defense fund, with donations taken via PayPal and bitcoin.
But in the following months, the men, one after the other, have pleaded guilty.Last Friday saw the final two guilty pleas, including one from Ben Daley, 26, one of the group’s leaders. He was joined by Michael Miselis, 30, a former Northrop Grumman aerospace engineer. The men pleaded guilty to conspiracy to riot.
“These avowed white supremacists traveled to Charlottesville to incite and commit acts of violence, not to engage in peaceful First Amendment expression,” U.S. Attorney Thomas T. Cullen said in announcing the guilty pleas. “Although the First Amendment protects an organization’s right to express abhorrent political views, it does not authorize senseless violence in furtherance of a political agenda.”
The Rise Above Movement and its role in the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and at rallies in other cities was the subject of reporting by ProPublica and Frontline, work the authorities have credited in taking action against the men. Federal prosecutors in California are pursuing charges against four other RAM members, including its founder, Robert Rundo.
The plea documents filed during Friday’s court proceedings in Charlottesville lay out a detailed narrative of what the authorities say were RAM’s repeated acts of violence two years ago.
The narrative chronicles RAM’s combat training and the visual evidence capturing its members attacking protesters, including in Charlottesville, where, the authorities spell out, they “collectively pushed, punched, kicked, choked, head-butted, and otherwise assaulted several individuals, resulting in a riot.”
In pleading guilty, the authorities said, Daley and Miselis admitted their actions were not in self-defense.
In the contemporary white supremacist scene, RAM had positioned itself as the violent vanguard of the movement, a successor to the volatile and hyper-aggressive skinhead gangs that were prevalent during the 1980s and 1990s. Since its formation in 2016, the group has recruited several members of the Hammerskin Nation, the largest skinhead gang in the country, which has been tied to numerous killings, including the massacre of six Sikh worshippers at a temple outside Milwaukee.
Though RAM has eschewed the skinhead style — combat boots and bomber jackets — in favor of a more mainstream look, its members have embraced the bloody tactics of the Nazi skinhead gangs.
Miselis, a onetime engineering student at UCLA, was fired from his job at Northrop Grumman after ProPublica and Frontline exposed his membership in RAM. In a companywide email, then-CEO Wesley Bush said he was “deeply saddened yesterday to see news reports alleging that one of our employees engaged in violence as part of the Charlottesville protests.” Miselis held a government-issued security clearance while at Northrop, a major defense contractor, though the company has so far declined to say what projects Miselis was assigned to.
Rundo, who was living in Orange County at the time of his arrest, has also portrayed the federal prosecutions as a miscarriage of justice. “The rioting charges brought against us have not been used in 70 years,” Rundo said in a jailhouse interview posted on YouTube in February. “This has little to do with rioting and all to do with censorship and silencing anyone that they deem too radical by today’s standards.”
In the interview, Rundo blamed the media for demonizing RAM and described the group as a self-improvement club for white men.
Rundo has pleaded not guilty, and he could be headed to trial.
The RAM prosecutions have become something of a cause celebre for the racist right. Augustus Invictus, a fringe political figure and attorney, has set up a legal defense fund to solicit donations for the RAM members facing charges. “The federal government has taken an absolute political hard line against the right wing,” Invictus said in a 53-minute YouTube video discussing the case. The video has generated more than 22,000 views and nearly 700 comments, most of them sympathetic to RAM and many of them racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic.
One of RAM’s most infamous supporters is Robert Bowers, the Pennsylvania man accused of murdering 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburghlast October. Shortly before the massacre, Bowers posted a message decrying the RAM prosecutions on Gab, a far-right social media platform. Bowers has pleaded not guilty in the unfolding case.
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wapo no lnx
Neo-Nazi sympathizer pleads guilty to federal hate crimes for plowing car into protesters at Charlottesville rally [BUT NOT TERROR
On Aug. 12, 2017, James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into protesters demonstrating against the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. (Ryan M. Kelly/Daily Progress/AP)
By Paul Duggan and
Justin Jouvenal March 27 at 6:38 PM
CHARLOTTESVILLE — An avowed neo-Nazi who killed one woman and injured 35 other people when he plowed his car into a group of counterprotesters at an infamous white-supremacist rally here pleaded guilty to hate crimes in federal court Wednesday.
James Alex Fields Jr., 21, of Ohio admitted guilt to 29 of 30 counts in a federal indictment as part of a deal with prosecutors, who agreed they would not seek the death penalty in a case that has come to symbolize the violent resurgence of white supremacism in the United States. Fields is set to be sentenced July 3.
Late last year, Fields was convicted in state court of first-degree murder and other charges for killing Heather D. Heyer, 32, and injuring dozens at the chaotic Unite the Right rally on Aug. 12, 2017. The jury in that case recommended a life sentence, and a state judge is scheduled to formally impose it in mid-July.
Admitting guilt to hate crimes marks a dramatic shift for Fields, whose attorneys argued during his trial in state court that he sped toward the crowd out of fear for his safety and confusion. They said he immediately regretted his actions.
On Wednesday, Fields, who has grown a bushy beard in the months since his state trial, entered a federal courtroom here in a gray-and-white-striped prisoner’s jumpsuit and handcuffs. He spoke only to answer a judge’s questions and displayed no emotion during the hour-long hearing.
Susan Bro, Heyer’s mother, said after the hearing she was satisfied with the result.
'He needs to be kept away from society': Charlottesville car attacker sentenced to life in prison
A jury sentenced James Alex Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi who rammed his car into a group of counterprotesters at a white-supremacist rally, to life in prison. (Reuters)
“There’s no point in killing him. It would not bring back Heather,” Bro said.
“It’s a relief to think we don’t have to go through another trial. It was exhausting the first time. I can get on with my life, and the other victims can, too.”
Thomas T. Cullen, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said he was gratified that Fields finally admitted he was motivated by hate, calling the crime “an indelible mark on the city of Charlottesville, our state and our country.”
Fields pleaded guilty to one count of a hate crime that resulted in the death of Heyer and 28 counts of hate crimes that caused injuries and involved attempts to kill other people in the crowd. Each of the 29 counts carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Attorney General William P. Barr approved the deal.
[Fields sentenced to life in prison in fatal Charlottesville car attack]
U.S. Attorney Thomas Cullen speaks to the media Wednesday after a plea agreement with Fields, who was charged with 30 counts stemming from the car attack in Charlottesville. (Steve Helber/AP)
The violence in 2017 and President Trump’s assertion afterward that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the Charlottesville rally sparked intense criticism and a fresh focus on the renewed forces of ethno-nationalism.
The events began on Aug. 11 when far-right groups mounted a torchlight march through the University of Virginia campus shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans, including, “Jews will not replace us!”
Fields was already on his way to Charlottesville, arriving the next day for a white-supremacist rally that was nominally held to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The event, involving hundreds of marchers, generated national media attention after rallygoers carrying Nazi flags and shouting racial epithets clashed violently with throngs of counterprotesters. Police eventually dispersed the groups.
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A short time later, Fields was seen driving his gray Dodge Charger up to a group of counterprotesters on a narrow street. He slowly backed up and then accelerated down a hill directly into the group.
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Harrowing video, which was played at Fields’s state trial, shows protesters tumbling and screaming as the car slams into them. Fields then reversed at a high speed, hitting and dragging others. Someone repeatedly yelled: “Oh, God! Oh, God!”
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Heyer was killed, while others were seriously wounded. One woman who limped to the witness stand at Fields’s state trial testified she had five surgeries and was about to undergo a sixth. Another described a broken pelvis and a third how he pushed his fiancee out of the way before he was hit by the Dodge.
At the state trial, a mental health expert detailed Fields’s psychiatric disorders dating to early childhood.
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He did not deny running into the crowd, but his attorneys argued that he acted to protect himself. Prosecutors forcefully countered that argument, and the jury at the six-day trial rejected the defense.
Jurors were shown a deleted Instagram post by Fields shared three months before that crash that featured a car running into a group of people. A caption read: “You Have the Right to Protest, But I’m Late for Work.”
A state prosecutor also showed a blown-up image of Fields in his car to counter the idea that he was frightened when he acted.
“This is not the face of someone who is scared,” a state prosecutor said at the time. “This is the face of anger, of hatred. It’s the face of malice.”
As part of the plea agreement in federal court, prosecutors said Fields admitted that before the rally, he had used social media to “express and promote white supremacist views” including admiration for the racial-purity doctrine of Adolf Hitler. They said he used those accounts to “espouse violence against African Americans, Jewish people, and members of other racial, ethnic and religious groups he perceived to be non-white.”
[From wary observer to justice warrior: How Heather Heyer’s death gave her mom a voice]
After Wednesday’s federal court hearing, Browas asked whether Heyer’s killing had raised the community’s consciousness about racial disparities.
“Sadly, it took a white girl dying before anyone paid attention to civil rights around here,” she told reporters. “I wish we had woken up sooner.’
But Bro did describe one moment of healing. When asked whether she had ever come in contact with Fields’s mother, Bro said she had seen her just once, at the state trial.
“She looked at me, and I looked at her,” Bro said. “I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ She said, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
Read more:
Man arrested in fatal stabbing at U-Md. will not face federal hate-crime charges
Hateful acts may be rising, but will court cases follow?
Former Portsmouth police chief says she was forced out for confronting racism
==
Patrick Casey’s comments appear intended to distance himself from previous Identity Evropa leaders Nathan Damigo and Eliott Kline (aka Eli Mosley), both of whom are named as defendants in civil suits filed after Unite The Right. However, Casey, who took over IE in late 2017, is also implicated in the same series of violent and racist alt-right rallies that he now seeks to dissociate from. Casey appeared alongside racist figures such as Richard Spencer and ‘Baked Alaska’ at rallies, and for years he produced and hosted neo-Nazi propaganda videos for the alt-right YouTube channel ‘Red Ice TV’. In fact, on August 12, 2017, the morning of Unite The Right in Charlottesville, Casey can be seen in a white motorcycle helmet leading a column of Identity Evropa members marching into the park.
Identity Evropa’s founder and former leader, Nathan Damigo, recently failed in his attempt to avoid financial liability in the Charlottesville lawsuit by declaring bankruptcy. It’s a safe assumption that Patrick Casey is angling to avoid a similar outcome for himself.
==
rww
Two neo-Nazis who filmed One America News Network personality Jack Posobiec while he roamed the streets of a Washington, D.C., to create propaganda for the Seth Rich conspiracy theory on behalf of Rebel Media are suspected to have schemed violence in relation to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 murdered, court documents show.
Jeffrey Clark, who police arrested on November 9, was active on Gab, where he used his profile honoring white supremacist mass murderer Dylann Roof to connect with the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. Prior to his arrest, he had attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he was photographed alongside the young man who killed counter-protester Heather Heyer. Clark’s relatives told the FBI that he sought to “expedite” a race war.
Clark’s brother, a fellow neo-Nazi named Edward, committed suicide after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting when it was revealed that Gab, a Twitter spin-off overrun with violent extremists, had provided the shooter’s profile information to law enforcement. Apparently concerned that he’d soon be receiving a visit from the FBI, he shot himself in a park.
The tie-ins don’t stop at Gab. The neo-Nazi Clark brothers were connected to a web of white nationalists who ushered in the “alt-right,” including Posobiec.
The brothers were photographed filming Posobiec while he worked on footage about the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, which served as rich fodder for pro-Trump conspiracy theorists online in 2016. Posobiec also notably traveled to Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizza restaurant and bar that was at the center of wild internet conspiracy theories about satanic pedophile rings, to “infiltrate” the scene. When a believer in the conspiracy theory took matters into his own hands and entered the restaurant with a firearm, Posobiec deleted evidence of his visit and began lying about his role in spreading the hoax.
In the images and reporting published by HuffPost, the Clark brothers are seen filming Posobiec. Jeffrey Clark reportedly told Laura Sennett of One People’s Project that “Posobiec absolutely was” aware of their neo-Nazi beliefs and had told his brother “that he was sympathetic to those beliefs.” HuffPost reports:
In May 2017, the Clark brothers teamed up with far-right “Pizzagate” propagandist Jack Posobiec, who was then the D.C. bureau chief for the far-right website Rebel Media, to shoot footage for a film Posobiec was working on about Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer whose murder near the Clarks’ home in Bloomingdale has spawned numerous far-right conspiracy theories.
Laura Sennett, an anti-fascist researcher who works with One People’s Project, spoke with Jeffrey Clark a few weeks after he and his brother were spotted in Bloomingdale with Posobiec, who by then had been fired from Rebel under mysterious circumstances after plagiarizing Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who organized the Unite the Right rally.
“[Clark] told me that Jack Posobiec hired him and his brother to follow him with a camera to take video of his investigation of Seth Rich,” Sennett told HuffPost. “Not sure if it was a documentary or a news story, but [Posobiec] was doing some kind of reporting for Rebel Media. I asked him if Posobiec was aware of his Nazi beliefs. He told me that Posobiec absolutely was and had told Jeff that he was sympathetic to those beliefs.”
TheClark brothers would stand
Posobiec again at a rally he led alongside white nationalist Richard Spencer,of whom the brothers and Posobiec were both seeming fans. Alexander Reid Ross, the author of the book “Against the Fascist Creep,” tweeted that the Clark brothers had infiltrated a book talk he gave last year. According to Ross, a Daily Caller reporter was filming the incident. Later that night, Posobiec published the PDF of Ross’ book.
...
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proud boy crybully
Even McInnes’ mockery of the suburbs—a common punk trope—takes on a right-wing bent. In the September Infowars broadcast, McInnes pushed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, claiming his neighborhood spats were the effects of a campaign by George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist and prolific Democratic donor who is Jewish.
“I’m laying on the couch here bitching about the sort of pariah status that has been imbued upon me,” he told viewers. “The reason it’s relevant to your life, is I believe it can be traced back to Soros.”
Right-wingers have blamed Soros for everything from immigration to Black Lives Matter to efforts to count every vote in the 2018 midterm elections. The blame game echoes previous efforts to portray wealthy Jews as mass manipulators, efforts that have led to pogroms and genocides against Jews. Most recently, Soros was sent a bomb allegedly by a rabid Trump supporter.
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In McInnes’ case, he accused Soros of funding a network of “lesbian” lawyers who harass the far right. (He also falsely accused Soros’ staff of organizing Unite the Right “to discredit us all.”)
“I think I’m part of this sort of computer virus the Soros machine sends out in the system to mess with your life,” he said.
==
https://www.propublica.org/article/four-men-arrested-over-unrest-during-2017-unite-the-right-rally
no lnx few, pix
Four Men Arrested Over Unrest During 2017 “Unite the Right” Rally
The four are members or associates of the Rise Above Movement, a white supremacist group based in Southern California, prosecutors say.
by Rahima Nasa Oct. 2, 7:30 p.m. EDT
Benjamin Daley, in the long-sleeve white shirt, center; Michael Miselis, in the backward baseball cap; Thomas Gillen, with goggles around his neck; and Cole White, in a white shirt and sunglasses, right; were arrested in connection with the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. (Edu Bayer, special to ProPublica)
DOCUMENTING HATE
Tracking Hate Crimes and Bias Incidents
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday announced they had arrestedfour members or associates of the Rise Above Movement, a white supremacist group, over their alleged role in the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The four men were charged with having traveled to Charlottesville with the aim of inciting a riot and conspiracy to incite a riot, and prosecutors submitted an array of photographs and videos capturing the men pummeling and choking protesters over two days.
If convicted, the men — Benjamin Drake Daley, 25, of Redondo Beach, California; Thomas Walter Gillen, 34, of Redondo Beach; Michael Paul Miselis, 29, of Lawndale, California; and Cole Evan White, 24, of Clayton, California — could face five years in prison for each of two federal riot charges. White has been described as an associate of the group, not a member.
Most of the men charged on Tuesday have been the subject of reporting by ProPublica and Frontline over the last year. RAM, based in Southern California, claimed more than 50 members in 2017 and an overriding purpose: physically attacking its ideological foes. Its members spend weekends training in boxing and other martial arts, and they have boasted publicly of their violence during rallies — not just in Charlottesville, but in the California cities of Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley, as well. Many of the altercations have been captured on video.
About This Partnership
This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between ProPublica and FRONTLINE that includes documentaries beginning with “Documenting Hate: Charlottesville,” which aired on PBS in August 2018, and the upcoming film “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis,” which will air Tuesday, Nov. 20.
The charges announced Tuesday are among a number of prosecutions to stem from the notorious Charlottesville gathering that resulted in two days of mayhem and the death of a young anti-racism activist. The charges brought today are unrelated to the death.
Local prosecutors have also brought charges against a handful of other participants in the Charlottesville rally, successfully convicting several men, including activists on both sides of the clashes. And federal authorities have indicted neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, the man accused of killing counterprotester Heather Heyer and injuring more than two dozen others, on some 30 charges, including 28 counts of hate crime.
“This case should serve as another example of the Department of Justice’s commitment to protecting the life, liberty and civil rights of all our citizens,” U.S. Attorney Thomas T. Cullen said Tuesday. “Any individual who has or plans to travel to this district with the intent to engage in acts of violence will be prosecuted and held accountable for those actions.”
Cullen cited ProPublica and Frontline’s reporting during a news conference Tuesday.
“The news organization ProPublica did in my view a fantastic job in piecing together some of the organized activities that occurred on Aug. 11 and Aug. 12, and the work that they did was certainly reviewed by our office as a starting point to understand a little bit about this particular group,” he said.
One of those arrested, Miselis, was a doctoral student at UCLA with a U.S. government security clearance to work on sensitive research for a prominent defense contractor. He was let go by the contractor, Northrop Grumman, after ProPublica and Frontline identified him as a RAM member who had attacked people in Charlottesville. At the time, Miselis denied involvement in the violent weekend two summers ago.
RAM was founded in early 2017 by Robert Rundo, a Queens, New York, native who served an 18-month prison sentence for stabbing a rival gang member six times during a 2009 street fight. The group’s core membership is small — 15 to 20 young men, according to interviews and a review of court records. Before joining RAM, several members spent time in jail or state prison on serious felony charges including assault, robbery, and gun and knife offenses. Daley served seven days in jail for carrying a concealed snub-nosed revolver. Another RAM member served a prison term for stabbing a Latino man five times in a 2009 gang assault.
Read Our Reporting
A Day After Report, Violent White Supremacist Loses Job With Defense Contractor
The CEO of Northrop Grumman told employees he was saddened by ProPublica and Frontline’s report concerning Michael Miselis, an aerospace engineer who took part in the violence in Charlottesville last year.
He Is a Member of a Violent White Supremacist Group. So Why Is He Working for a Defense Contractor With a Security Clearance?
Michael Miselis took part in the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. So far, it hasn’t damaged his standing at Northrop Grumman.
A RAM recruiting video posted to YouTube and Vimeo highlights the organization’s heavy emphasis on violence, cutting between choppy footage of RAM members brawling at public events and carefully shot scenes of them sharpening their boxing skills and doing push-ups during group workout sessions.
RAM members are frequently praised as heroes on some white supremacist media outlets
The group portrays itself as a defense force for a white Western civilization under assault by Jews, Muslims and brown-skinned immigrants from south of the Rio Grande. At rallies, members have waved red-and-white crusader flags and carried signs saying “Rapefugees Not Welcome” and “Da Goyim Know,” an anti-Semitic slogan meant to highlight a supposed conspiracy by Jews to control the globe and subjugate non-Jews. One RAM banner, which depicts knights on horseback chasing after Muslims, reads “Islamists Out!”
ProPublica interviewed one RAM leader last year on the condition of anonymity. He said the gang came together organically. It started when he encountered a few other guys with similar political beliefs, including two active-duty U.S. Marines, while exercising at different gyms in Southern California. They all liked President Donald Trump but didn’t think his agenda went far enough.
On social media channels, RAM members regularly espouse blatantly anti-Semitic and racist views. They have repeatedly been booted from Instagram and Twitter for offensive postings.
Identifying Members of RAM
This year, four RAM members attended a massive neo-Nazi rally in Germany, which was held on Hitler’s birthday, uploading photos and videos from the trip to social media.
A criminal complaint filed in federal court Tuesday cited the group’s racist and anti-Semitic postings online in support of the arrests.
Prosecutors said the four men will be brought to Virginia next week to be arraigned on the charges.
It was not clear on Tuesday whether the men had yet retained lawyers.
“This wasn’t in our view the lawful exercise of First Amendment rights,” Cullen said. “These guys came to Charlottesville to commit violent acts, and this wasn’t the first time they’ve done it.”
Cullen said that charging the men with inciting a riot and conspiracy to incite a riot was more appropriate and likely effective than arresting them on hate crime charges.
Cullen said there are other ongoing investigations, but he would not say more about them.
There’s a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office who has done nothing else but look into these investigations since Aug. 12, according to Cullen.
“We’re not finished,” Cullen said. “We’re going to continue these investigations until we reach a point where we’re satisfied that our federal interests have been vindicated.”
Read More
48 Hours in Charlottesville: Fear, Nausea, and a Sad Lack of Surprise
The violence didn’t shock me; the inaction in the face of it did.
charlottesville 180
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/biggest-fcking-mistake-ive-made-trump-reportedly-raged-against-his-decision
https://www.alternet.org/timeline-racism-charlottesville-1607-through-2017s-unite-right-rally
Universities are complex networks of buildings and organizations that provide education and jobs and health care and cultural enrichment. They take form in classrooms, dorms, dining halls, and hospitals. They field sports teams and community volunteers. They possess histories that include shameful compromises with the inequalities and oppression of their times. And they nurture opposition to those moral and ethical errors. Most fundamentally, universities are students, professors, staff, and alumni who think together about what is needed—from food and computers and trust to books and ideas and evidence—for us to continue in this essential act of collective thought.
The book "Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity" brings together University of Virginia professors thinking about and feeling their way through the events of August 11 and 12, 2017. When white nationalists and neo-Nazis marched through the University of Virginia, students staged a counterprotest in front of the Rotunda by standing in a small, brave circle around the statue of Jefferson. When white supremacists of all kinds rallied in Emancipation Park and fought in the streets of downtown Charlottesville, students, staff members, alumni, and professors stood among the counterprotesters and said no to hate in our town and our nation. Here, professors write about these events as scholars—as students of history, law, photography, literature, and music, yes—but also as humans, as parents and spouses and siblings, as colleagues and congregation members and citizens of a historical moment in which choices must be made and false equivalencies abolished.
I began my career as a professor of history researching how white Southerners created a culture that legitimated segregation: the system of violence, oppression, and discrimination they created to replace slavery. The question that animated my work was how white Southerners learned to live with what they had done, how they convinced themselves that their world was moral and good and true. Building Confederate statues in parks and in front of courthouses formed an essential part of that work. After twenty years of teaching at the University of Virginia and living in Charlottesville, I have become the rare academic who wishes her research was not quite so relevant.
Here, on a campus where slaves once labored and African American students were not welcomed until almost a century after emancipation, the right to speak freely is not an abstract concept. It is a material, grounded, and embodied act that has been defeated in the past by slavery, war, lynching, rape and other forms of assault, eugenics, and segregation. It has also at times been defended by brave students, faculty, and staff members. It is palpable. In this collection, UVA professors suggest answers to what this history means the next time the white supremacists come to this or another university campus. They turn the university’s collective thinking to the prospect of creating a truly antiracist future. — Grace Elizabeth Hale, Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia
CHRONOLOGY
1607: The Virginia colony is founded.
1625: The census enumerates twenty-three blacks living in the Virginia colony.
1737: William Taylor receives a patent for the land that would become Charlottesville.
1743: Thomas Jefferson is born on April 13 in Shadwell, Virginia.
1774: The Virginia General Assembly establishes Albemarle County.
1784: Thomas Jefferson publishes Notes on the State of Virginia.In the text Jefferson argues that African Americans were inferior to whites in both body and mind. His racial theories elicited outrage and critical responses from a variety of African American intellectuals and leaders, including Benjamin Banneker and David Walker.
1800: This transformative year witnesses numerous events that reveal the tension between freedom and liberty in the American republic. Thomas Jefferson defeats the incumbent president, John Adams, in a highly contested election. Gabriel Prosser, a blacksmith owned by Thomas Prosser of Henrico County, Virginia, devises a plan to liberate his people and put an end to the brutal institution of slavery. Gabriel reads the Bible closely and sees himself as divinely chosen to deliver his people from bondage.
1807: Robert E. Lee is born at Stratford, Westmoreland County, Virginia.
1814: Thomas Jefferson proposes a bill for the establishment of Central College in Virginia.
1817: On October 6 Jefferson begins construction on what would become the University of Virginia, located on a rocky ridge one mile west of the City of Charlottesville. The laying of the cornerstone for the first building draws many dignitaries, including James Monroe and James Madison. Building the university relies on the labor of enslaved African Americans, as well as free blacks.
1818: Jefferson convenes a group in Rockfish Gap, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains and thirty miles west of Monticello, and presents a report on his vision for Central College and explains why Charlottesville is the ideal location. This report is known as the Rockfish Gap Report.
1825: On March 7 the University of Virginia officially opens its doors to students.
READ MORE: Are white people ready to bail on democracy? These researchers say the danger is real
1826: Thomas Jefferson dies on July 4. He is buried at Monticello the next day.
1859: James Lawrence Cabel, an 1833 graduate of the University of Virginia who joined the faculty in 1837, publishes The Testimony of Modern Science in the Unity of Mankind.In this book he posits the inherent intellectual, physical, and emotional inferiority of African Americans. Though insisting that blacks could never be equal to whites, Cabel asserts that the “civilizing” influence of slavery has improved African Americans’ condition.
1861: The start of the Civil War transforms both the City of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia.Ninety percent of the six hundred students enrolled at the university in 1860 would eventually fight on the side of the Confederacy.
1864: The Charlottesville African Church, now known as First Baptist Church, is organized. It remains an institutional cornerstone of the African American community in Charlottesville and surrounding counties to the present day.
1865: Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9. A day later he issues his farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude. The Senate passes the amendment on April 8, 1864, the House on January 31, 1865. It is ratified on December 6, 1865.
1869: The Jefferson Lodge of Charlottesville successfully petitions for membership in the Union Grand Lodge of Virginia.
1881: Virginia-born educator Booker T. Washington is named principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The most powerful African American in the nation until his death in 1915, Washington would have a profound impact on the development of black education.
1892: A graduate of Hampton Institute and a friend of Booker T. Washington, J. F. Bell opens the J. F. Bell Funeral Home.
1901: The University of Virginia hospital opens. Under the leadership of Paul Barringer, who served as the chair of the faculty from 1897 to 1903, the hospital develops into an important intellectual hub of the eugenics movement.
1902: On July 10 the new Virginia Constitution becomes law. To reduce the black electorate and undermine African Americans’ political power, the constitution implements requirements like the “understanding clause” and the payment of poll taxes in order to vote. The number of eligible black voters in the state declines from 147,000 in 1901 to 10,000 by 1905.
1907: Harvey Ernest Jordan joins the faculty of the medical school. A longtime member of the UVA community, he serves as the dean of the medical school from 1939 to 1949. A firm and unapologetic believer in the principles of white supremacy, Jordan promotes sterilization laws that prevent procreation among those he deems “unfit” for reproduction. To avoid weakening the gene pool among whites, he also advocates laws restricting intermarriage among whites and blacks.
1914: In the first of a series of attacks on African Americans’ property rights, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors removes African Americans from the McKee Row section of Charlottesville by confiscating their land and deeding it to the city. McKee Row, a predominantly African American neighborhood near downtown, becomes the site of Jackson Park, where the equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson is unveiled in 1921.
1915: D. W. Griffith releases The Birth of a Nation.Ivey Foreman Lewis joins the faculty at the University of Virginia. As chair of the biology department, he integrates eugenicsinto the curriculum and gains a reputation as an outspoken eugenicist.
1917: Philanthropist Paul Goodloe McIntire commissions artist Henry Shrady to create a statue in honor of Robert E. Lee.
1920: On October 5 three African American women in Charlottesville, Mrs. Maggie P. Burley, Mamie J. Farwell, and Mrs. Alice Grady, successfully register to vote.
1921: In June the Ku Klux Klan organizes a local chapter in Charlottesville. The City of Charlottesville unveils the Stonewall Jackson monument.
1922: To expedite the process of “Negro removal,” Lily White Republicans in Virginia bar blacks from participating at the Republican state convention. Claiming to be pragmatic rather than racist, white strategists within the party defend these moves as necessary steps in improving the GOP’s standing in the South. John Powell, a graduate of the University of Virginia, forms the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, a white supremacist organization that promotes separation of the races and the colonization of black Americans to West Africa, preferably Liberia.
1924: On May 21 the City of Charlottesville unveils the statue of Robert E. Lee as part of a two-day event in which the Sons of the Confederacy participate. The Virginia Assembly passes the Racial Integrity Act of 1924.
1926: Black Charlottesville celebrates the opening of the city’s first high school for African Americans, Jefferson High School.
1935: Alice Jackson, an alumnus of the historically black Virginia Union University in Richmond, applies to the University of Virginia to conduct graduate work in English. The university rejects her application and does not admit an African American until 1950.
1945: Under the leadership of Rev. Benjamin F. Bunn, local activists form the Charlottesville branch of the NAACP. By 1954 the NAACP chapter has 867 members.
1954: The U.S. Supreme Court issues its Brown v. Board of Educationdecision, which declares the separate but equal doctrine unconstitutional. Randolph Louis White founds the local black newspaper, the Charlottesville Albemarle Tribune.
1956: On February 25 U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. (D-VA) calls for massive resistance against the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Educationdecision.
1956: Judge John Paul of the U.S. District Court for the Fourth Circuit issues an order for Venable Elementary School and Lane High School to integrate at the beginning of the school year. To delay the process the local school board appeals the decision for two years.
1958: After a federal court order to integrate several schools in Virginia immediately, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond Jr. orders the closing of public schools in Charlottesville, Alexandria, and Norfolk. In Charlottesville, Lane and Venable are closed until February 1959.
1960: The Charlottesville Redevelopment Housing Authority submits an application to the Charlottesville City Council calling for the redevelopment of Vinegar Hill, a central residential, business, intellectual, and cultural district for African Americans.
1964: Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, and national origin. This law plays a critical role in the desegregation of the City of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia. In addition, the Westhaven housing project is completed. It will house many of the city’s black residents displaced by the razing and destruction of Vinegar Hill.
1967: Virginia Anne Scott, Nancy Jaffe, Nancy L. Anderson, and Jo Anne Kirstein file a lawsuit against the University of Virginia charging that the school discriminates against women in its admissions policies. The court mandates coeducation within three years. In the fall of 1970, 450 women undergraduates enter the university.
1968: African American student leaders organize the Black Students for Freedom, a precursor to the Black Student Alliance.
1969: On February 18 hundreds of progressive students march on the University of Virginia’s historic Lawn, demanding an end to all vestiges of Jim Crow segregation, a living wage for workers, the creation of a Black Studies program, the integration of UVA’s athletic department, and the appointment of an African American as assistant dean of admissions.
1970: In early May, following the murder of four students at Kent State University, student activists at UVA engage in a series of protests over the war in Vietnam, the slow pace of integration at the college, the status and working conditions of low-wage employees on grounds, and law enforcement officials’ “invasion” of the Academical Village.
1972: Charles Lee Barbour becomes the first African American mayor of Charlottesville.
1974: UVA’s student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily,publishes several articles on the large number of UVA administrators, including President Frank Hereford, who belong to the all-white Farmington Country Club, which at the time excluded Jews, African Americans, and other people of color. In addition to President Hereford, this list includes seventeen department chairs, seven deans, and eight Board of Visitors members.
1976: After protests over the Farmington Country Club membership issues, as well as other related incidents, the Office of Afro-American Affairs is created in 1976.
1977: The number of African American undergraduates enrolled at the University of Virginia reaches five hundred for the first time.
1978: In response to constant demand for affordable housing in Charlottesville, Friendship Courts is constructed on Garrett Street.
1979: The poverty rate among African Americans living in Albemarle County is 22.7 percent.
1980: The eleven-million-dollar Primary Care Center at UVA opens in January. The site displaces the former neighborhood Gospel Hill, which was predominantly black.
1982: The Office for Civil Rights finally approves the state’s desegregation plan for higher education. This comes eighteen years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
1987: UVA releases the Audacious Faithreport,a detailed account of race relations on Grounds, documenting the experiences of students, faculty, and workers. It began in 1986 when the university commenced its preparations for its decennial reaccreditation evaluation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. University president Robert O’Neil appointed a steering committee for the self-study report. The committee had as one of its tasks the evaluation of the university’s recruitment of black students and faculty. The committee suggested the formation of a separate task force that would focus solely on investigating the state of race relations on Grounds and recommending policies to achieve full integration at the university. President O’Neil impaneled a committee of sixteen faculty members, students, and administrators, who compile the Audacious Faithreport.
1989: Virginians elect Lawrence Douglas Wilder as the sixty-sixth governor of Virginia.
1996: With strong support from the local chapter of the NAACP, the Office of Equal Opportunity releases An Examination of the University’s Minority Classified Staff (The Muddy Floor Report).The report reveals “glaring disparities” in employment opportunities, performance evaluations, and disciplinary sanctions between white and black employees.
2001: Richard Spencer graduates from UVA with a bachelor of arts in music. About twelve hundred African American undergraduates attend the university in the 2000–01 academic year.
2003: A series of racial incidents on Grounds leads university president John Casteen to create the Commission on Diversity and Equity, which conducts a year-long study on race relations on Grounds. This leads to the creation of the position of vice president and chief officer of diversity and equity.
2006: On February 21 the Living Wage Campaign releases Keeping Our Promises: Toward A Living Wage at the University,a detailed report that encourages the administration to adopt a living wage ($10.72 per hour) for classified staff and contract employees. A month and a half later, on April 12, seventeen students affiliated with the campaign stage a sit-in at Madison Hall. For the next three days, the Living Wage Campaign captures the attention of students, administrators, faculty members, community leaders, and perhaps most importantly, the media.
2008: During a retreat the Charlottesville City Council identifies two issues deserving serious and immediate attention: the need to ease strained race relations between whites and African Americans and the necessity of promoting greater diversity within city government. A series of conversations leads to the creation of the Dialogue on Race project.
2010: In June Dialogue on Race creates working groups to tackle a variety of issues, including housing, employment, and education.
2010: Richard Spencer founds the publication alternativeright.com. In June 2011 Spencer becomes president and director of the National Policy Institute.
2013: UVA president Teresa A. Sullivan establishes the Commission on Slavery and the University.
2015: On March 18 Martese Johnson, then a third-year student at UVA, is brutally arrested by officers from Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) on “The Corner,” a popular hangout near academic Grounds. His bloodied face circulates across the media and elicits a great deal of conversation about the politics of race and the treatment of African Americans on and beyond the Grounds of UVA. The following month the Black Student Alliance issues its report, Toward a Better University.In November, Wes Bellamy is elected to the Charlottesville City Council.
2016:In March Councilman Bellamy calls for the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park. On May 28 the Charlottesville City Council approves a resolution to create the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces. The Blue Ribbon Commission submits its report to the council in late December.
2017
February: The Charlottesville City Council votes to remove the Robert E. Lee statue and rename Lee Park.
March 20: Several groups, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans, file a lawsuit against the city council, noting that its decision to remove the Lee statue violates state law.
May 2: Judge Richard Moore rules that the statues cannot be moved for six months.
May 13: UVA alum and white nationalist activist Richard Spencer leads a nighttime rally in Lee Park to protest the city council’s decision to remove the statue.
June 5: The city council votes unanimously to rename Lee and Jackson Parks. The former becomes Emancipation Park and the latter Justice Park.
July 8: President Teresa Sullivan issues statement to the UVA community encouraging its members to avoid conflict with white supremacists. That same day dozens of KKK members rally in protest of the city’s plan to remove the Lee statue.
Aug. 10: Jason Kessler—lead organizer of the Unite the Right rally, graduate of UVA, and resident of Charlottesville—files a federal suit against the City of Charlottesville with the support of the Virginia ACLU.
Aug. 11: Federal Judge Glen Conrad rules that the Unite the Right Rally can be held in Emancipation Park. At approximately 8:45 p.m., a group of 250 white supremacists and nationalists assembles on Nameless Field, located in the back of Memorial Gymnasium at UVA. The group, led by Richard Spencer, then marches to the Thomas Jefferson statue near the Rotunda, where a small group of students have assembled to protest the white supremacists.
Aug. 12: Early in the morning Unite the Right rally participants and counterprotesters assemble in various points in downtown Charlottesville, including the pedestrian mall and Emancipation Park. At approximately 11:32 a.m., law enforcement officials rule it an unlawful assembly as violence breaks out. At approximately 11:52 a.m., Gov. Terry McAuliffe declares a state of emergency. At 1:42 p.m., a car later identified as belonging to James Alex Fields plows into the downtown mall, killing counterprotester and Charlottesville resident Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen others.
Aug. 20: The city council votes to shroud both the Jackson and Lee statues.
Oct. 7: Three UVA students are arrested for trespassing at the Bicentennial Launch celebration. At the event the students held up the banner “200 years of white supremacy” in front of a screen showing coverage of the event. That same night white supremacists hold a tiki-torch rally in Emancipation Park. Chants of “you will not replace us” pierce the air as the participants gather around the covered Robert E. Lee statue.
Sept. 24: Thousands pack Scott Stadium for A Concert for Charlottesville, which features the Dave Matthews Band, the Roots, Brittany Howard (of Alabama Shakes), Stevie Wonder, and Pharrell Williams, among others.
November: Charlottesville native and local activist Nikuyah Walker is elected to the city council. She is later appointed mayor. Walker is the first African American woman to hold the position of mayor.
Reprinted from “Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity” by permission of the University of Virginia Press. Chronology courtesy of Claudrena N. Harold, Professor of History and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South.”
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anniversary, post-mortem
cornell west says straight up that antifa saved their lives (clerics) this lil light of mine
https://www.propublica.org/article/for-charlottesville-authorities-a-painful-post-mortem-on-preparedness
USMC
https://www.propublica.org/article/atomwaffen-division-hate-group-active-duty-military
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https://www.propublica.org/article/michael-miselis-rise-above-movement-white-supremacist-group-northrop-grumman
There likely isn’t such a thing as a “typical” violent white extremist in America in 2018. Still,Michael Miselis — a University of California, Los Angeles doctoral student with aU.S. government security clearanceto work on sensitive research for a prominent defense contractor — makes for a pretty unusual case.
For months, ProPublica and Frontline have been working to identify the white supremacists at the center of violent demonstrations across the country, including the infamous Unite the Right rally last August in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Rise Above Movement, a Southern California group that expresses contempt for Muslims, Jews, and immigrants, became a focus of that effort. ProPublica and Frontline were able to quickly identify a number of the group’s leaders, and find evidence that put them in the middle of violence in Charlottesville and Berkeley, California, among other places.
About This Partnership
This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between ProPublica and Frontline that includes documentaries scheduled to begin on PBS in August 2018.
But one seeming member of RAM was harder to nail down. In video shot in Charlottesville, a bearded, husky man is seen in a red Make America Great Again hat with his hands wrapped in tape that came in handy for the brawling that occurred that day. During one encounter, the unidentified man in the red hat pushed an African-American protester to the ground and began pounding on him, video of the episode shows; moments later, a known RAM member choked and bloodied a pair of female counterprotesters. The possible RAM member also had turned up in video shot during hours of combat at a Trump rally in Berkeley, as well. Wearing protective goggles to ward off pepper spray, the man fought alongside RAM members, wrestling one protester to the ground and punching others.
Ultimately, ProPublica and Frontline determined the man in the violent footage was Miselis, a 29-year-old pursuing a Ph.D. in UCLA’s aerospace engineering program. Miselis was identified using video footage and social media posts, and reporters confirmed his identity in an encounter with him outside his home. In interviews, a number of California law enforcement officials said Miselis was a member of RAM.
In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Miselis works as a systems engineer for Northrop Grumman, the giant defense contractor with a plant in Redondo Beach, California.
When approached by ProPublica and Frontline in front of his home in Lawndale, a small city south of Los Angeles, Miselis said he “didn’t know anything” about what happened in Charlottesville.
Miselis did not respond to questions about his involvement with RAM. He did not answer additional questions sent by email.“I think you got the wrong guy,” he said before driving off in his car.
Several current and former employees at Northrop Grumman told ProPublica and Frontline that Miselis has received a security clearance to work in a computer modeling and simulation group within Northrop’s aerospace division. Such security clearances are typically issued in a two-step process. The federal Office of Personnel Management conducts an investigation into the individual. The agency’s findings are then forwarded to a special unit within the Department of Defense, which makes the final determination on whether the person should receive a clearance, a status that often allows the person access to classified or otherwise sensitive information concerning national security.
Public affairs officers at the Defense Department declined to comment about Miselis and his security clearance. The federal personnel management office referred questions regarding Miselis to Northrop Grumman.
Northrop Grumman did not respond to several requests for comment. However, interviews with current and former Northrop employees, as well as an internal email, make clear the company knows of Miselis’ actions in Charlottesville and involvement with RAM. Miselis informed his superiors about his contact with reporters from ProPublica and Frontline, as is required by any individual who holds a higher-level security clearance, the people said.
With hands taped like a boxer, Michael Miselis pushes an unidentified African-American man to the ground in in Charlottesville last August. (Edu Bayer, special to ProPublica)
So far, it seems, the company has taken no action against Miselis, who remains employed.
Keegan Hankes, an analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center who follows RAM closely, said he was surprised that nothing has been done about Miselis’ employment and security clearance.
“It’s ridiculous,” Hankes said.
“They’re openly motivated by racism,” he added of RAM.
As ProPublica has previously reported, RAM first surfaced publicly last spring and has quickly established itself as one of the violent groups in the resurgent white supremacist scene; members, who regularly train in boxing and martial arts, have been documented engaging in a string of melees. Founded in early 2017 by Robert Rundo, a Queens, New York, native who served an 18-month prison sentence for stabbing a rival gang member six times during a 2009 street fight, the group’s core membership is small — 15 to 20 young men — but capable of real menace, ProPublica’s reporting has shown.
Rundo has recruited followers from the Orange County and San Diego chapters of the Hammerskin Nation, the country’s largest Nazi skinhead gang, and one the authorities say has been behind at least nine murders. One of the Hammerskins who joined up with RAM, Matthew Branstetter, went to prison in California in 2011 on hate crime charges for robbing and assaulting a Jewish man in an Orange County park. The attack left the victim with “a concussion, broken jaw, eye socket fracture, broken nose, cracked ribs, severe facial bruising, and cuts and bruises to his body and face,” according to a news release issued by county prosecutors at the time. Other RAM members have spent time in prison and Los Angeles County Jail on charges for robbery, firearms possession and other offenses.
Identifying Members of RAM.
The FBI has taken notice. Several law enforcement officials familiar with the bureau’s work said agents have opened a formal investigation into RAM. In a statement, the FBI said, “While the FBI neither confirms nor denies the existence of an investigation, our agents investigate activity which may constitute a federal crime or pose a threat to national security. Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on criminal activity. The FBI cannot initiate an investigation based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or the exercise of their First Amendment rights, and we remain committed to protecting those rights for all Americans.”
Since last August, local prosecutors have brought charges against a handful of participants in the Charlottesville rally, successfully convicting several men so far, including activists on both sides of the clashes. Now federal authorities are targeting neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, the man accused of killing counterprotester Heather Heyer and injuring more than two dozen others. Federal prosecutors recently filed 30 charges against Fields, including 28 hate crime charges.
A native of Stockton, California, Miselis earned a bachelor’s of science degree in mechanical engineering from UCLA in 2011. UCLA’s website today lists Miselis as a Ph.D. candidate in the engineering department’s hypersonics and computational aero-dynamics group. After Frontline and ProPublica began making inquiries about Miselis, the school issued a brief statement saying only that he is technically on leave from the doctoral program.
Read More
Racist, Violent, Unpunished: A White Hate Group’s Campaign of Menace
They train to fight. They post their beatings online. And so far, they have little reason to fear the authorities.
American Hate Group Looks to Make Allies in Europe
Trips to Ukraine. Mixed martial arts events with a white supremacy flavor. California’s Rise Above Movement goes on the road.
Miselis was clearly prepared for the unrest in Berkeley in the spring of 2017. At the Trump rally he wore protective goggles to ward off pepper spray or tear gas, taped his hands up like a boxer, and wore a gray active-wear uniform, as did several other RAM members that day. In video footage reviewed by ProPublica and Frontline, Miselis can be seen fighting alongside other RAM members.
[Miselis prepares to hurl what appears to be a soda can at counterprotesters during the weekend of mayhem around the Unite the Right rally. (Edu Bayer, special to ProPublica)
Daley attacked two female counterprotesters, kicking and punching them, a scene captured in video obtained by ProPublica and Frontline. He wrapped both hands around the throat of one woman, throttling her until she fell to the ground, blood seeping from a gash on her temple. The other woman emerged from the incident with a laceration across her forehead. On video, she screams as blood drips across her face.
Miselis jumped into the fracas. In addition to Frontline and ProPublica, National Geographic produced video documenting the brawl.
A sequence of pictures shot by photojournalist Edu Bayer, who was on assignment for the New York Times, show Miselis hurling what appears to be a can of soda at a counterprotesters. In one photo he flexes his biceps muscles in celebration.
It’s this sort of street combat that worries the SPLC’s Hankes. In his view, such brazen criminal activity should be a red flag for both Northrop Grumman and the Pentagon.
“I can’t believe that participation in an organized white supremacist group focused on street-level violence wouldn’t jeopardize your security clearance,” Hankes said.
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ref
no lnx
It was about 10 a.m. on Aug. 12 when the melee erupted just north of Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia.
About two dozen white supremacists — many equipped with helmets and wooden shields — were battling with a handful of counter-protesters, most of them African American. One white man dove into the violence with particular zeal. Using his fists and feet, the man attacked one person after another.
The street fighter was in Virginia on that August morning for the “Unite the Right” rally, the largest public gathering of white supremacists in a generation, a chaotic and bloody event that would culminate, a few hours later, in the killing of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was there to protest the racist rally.
The violence in Charlottesville became national news. President Donald Trump’s response to it — he asserted there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the events that day — set off a wave of condemnations, from his allies as well as his critics.
But for many Americans, conservatives as well as liberals, there was shock and confusion at the sight of bands of white men bearing torches, chanting racist slogans and embracing the heroes of the Confederacy: Who were they? What are their numbers and aims?
There is, of course, no single answer. Some who were there that weekend in Charlottesville are hardened racists involved with long-running organizations like the League of the South. Many are fresh converts to white supremacist organizing, young people attracted to nativist and anti-Muslim ideas circulated on social media by leaders of the so-called alt-right, the newest branch of the white power movement. Some are paranoid characters thrilled to traffic in the symbols and coded language of vast global conspiracy theories. Others are sophisticated provocateurs who see the current political moment as a chance to push a “white agenda,” with angry positions on immigration, diversity and economic isolationism.
ProPublica spent weeks examining one distinctive group at the center of the violence in Charlottesville: an organization called the Rise Above Movement, one of whose members was the white man dispensing beatings near Emancipation Park Aug. 12.
The group, based in Southern California, claims more than 50 members and a singular purpose: physically attacking its ideological foes. RAM’s members spend weekends training in boxing and other martial arts, and they have boasted publicly of their violence during protests in Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley. Many of the altercations have been captured on video, and its members are not hard to spot.
Indeed, ProPublica has identified the group’s core members and interviewed one of its leaders at length. The man in the Charlottesville attacks — filmed by a documentary crew working with ProPublica — is 24-year-old Ben Daley, who runs a Southern California tree-trimming business.
Many of the organization’s core members, including Daley, have serious criminal histories, according to interviews and a review of court records. Before joining RAM, several members spent time in jail or state prison on serious felony charges including assault, robbery, and gun and knife offenses. Daley did seven days in jail for carrying a concealed snub-nosed revolver. Another RAM member served a prison term for stabbing a Latino man five times in a 2009 gang assault.
“Fundamentally, RAM operates like an alt-right street-fighting club,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
RAM members Ben Daley (front, center) and Tom Gillen (front, right) in Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally (Jason Andrew for Splinter)
Despite their prior records, and open boasting of current violence, RAM has seemingly drawn little notice from law enforcement. Four episodes of violence documented by ProPublica resulted in only a single arrest — and in that case prosecutors declined to go forward. Law enforcement officials in the four cities — Charlottesville, Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley — either would not comment about RAM or said they had too little evidence or too few resources to seriously investigate the group’s members.
In Virginia, two months after the deadly events in Charlottesville, Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the Virginia State Police, would not say if the police had identified RAM as a dangerous group.
“We’re not going to be releasing the names of the groups that we believe were present that day in Charlottesville,” she said. Investigators, she added, are still “reviewing footage” from the event.
Law enforcement has a mixed record when it comes to anticipating and confronting the challenge of white supremacist violence.
Often working undercover at great personal risk, federal investigators have successfully disrupted dozens of racist terror attacks. In the last year, agents have captured three Kansas men planning to bomb a mosque and an apartment complex inhabited largely by Somali immigrants, arrested a white supremacist in South Carolina as he plotted a “big scale” attack, and investigated a neo-Nazi cell that allegedly intended to blow up a nuclear power plant.
But there have also been failures. During the past five years, white supremacists, some of them members of gangs or organized political groups, have murdered at least 22 people,according to the Global Terrorism Database and news reports. And some government insiders say the intelligence services and federal law enforcement agencies have largely shifted their attention away from far-right threats in the years since 9/11, choosing instead to focus heavily on Islamic radicals, who are seen by some to pose a more immediate danger.
State and local police have struggled to respond effectively to the recent resurgence in racist political organizing. Police in Sacramento were caught unprepared in June 2016 when neo-Nazis and anti-fascist counter-protesters, or “antifa,” armed with knives and improvised weapons, clashed outside the California State Capitol during a rally. Ten people were sent to the hospital with stab wounds.
Taking a different tack, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida took the aggressive step of declaring a state of emergency in the run-up to this week’s appearance by Richard Spencer, a white supremacist scheduled to speak in Gainesville.
Michael German is a former FBI agent who during his career infiltrated a Nazi skinhead gang and militia organizations. German, now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said he is worried that law enforcement doesn’t comprehend the threat posed by this latest iteration of the white supremacist movement.
Police and federal agents, in his view, are “looking at this whole thing so narrowly, as two groups clashing at a protest.”
In reality, German said, “it is organized criminal activity.”
One of the first people known to have been targeted by RAM was a journalist working for OC Weekly, an irreverent liberal publication based in Orange County, California.
The date was March 25, and writer Frank John Tristan was covering a Make America Great Again rally in Huntington Beach. The event, which had drawn more than 2,000 Trump supporters, marked what seems to have been RAM’s public debut. About a dozen RAM fighters showed up, with members carrying an anti-Semitic sign and a massive banner emblazoned with the words “Defend America.”
The march also drew a small contingent of anti-Trump protesters, including some militant antifa activists, and some people intent on physically blocking the procession as it moved along the Pacific Coast Highway. Before long, the scene turned violent and brawls between the political foes swept across the beach.
RAM members Daley, nearest at right, Tyler Laube, holding an American flag, and Robert Rundo, far left, display a “Defend America” banner at a pro-Trump rally on March 25, 2017, in Huntington Beach, California. (Brian Feinzimer for OC Weekly)
Tristan and two OC Weekly colleagues, photographers Julie Leopo and Brian Feinzimer, wound up in the conflict.
“The Trump supporters felt empowered to ridicule and intimidate me,” Leopo recalled in an OC Weekly article. “I kept shooting despite the insults and just as I was about to click the shutter on my camera, I looked up and locked eyes with a white woman carrying a flag.”
The woman struck Leopo and Feinzimer with the flagpole. A man shoved Feinzimer, sending him reeling. Tristan intervened, trying to calm the situation.
That’s when two men attacked him. One was a RAM member who charged at Tristan and began punching him in the face. The other assailant, who wasn’t a RAM fighter, grabbed Tristan’s sweatshirt and hit him with a series of punches.
Tristan was staggered. Someone standing nearby fired off a thick stream of pepper spray, and Tristan’s beating ended. Then RAM members fanned out and began fighting with other people.
Another RAM member confronted a masked counter-protester, grabbed the man, and threw him into the sand. From there he pummeled the counter-protester with his fist and elbow. Captured on video and shared through social media, the spectacle became a meme of the so-called alt-right.
In the days after the mayhem, Tristan spent hours studying shaky smartphone videos and scrolling through social media posts trying to identify the men who attacked him. He concluded that a 21-year-old man named Tyler Laube was the RAM memberwho struck him. Laube appears with his face uncovered in several group photographs of RAM from their training sessions in an Orange County park and at the Huntington Beach rally.
ProPublica was unable to contact Laube, but court records show he has had many entanglements with the law in recent years.
Identifying the Members of RAM
He has been convicted of fighting with a paramedic at a supermarket, illegally possessing a switchblade, disturbing the peace, and DUI, according to Los Angeles County court files. In 2015, Laube pleaded no contest to felony robbery charges — prosecutors said he partnered with another man to rob a 7-Eleven and another convenience store at gunpoint. While in jail before trial, Laube told a detective that he’d gone to a Hollywood strip club and gotten high on Xanax — the potent, often-abused prescription benzodiazepine — before acting as the wheelman in the robberies, which occurred early in the morning in Redondo Beach, according to court transcripts.
Laube, court records indicate, was on probation on the day he allegedly assaulted Tristan.
In the six months since the violent rally, state parks police have opened no criminal case in connection with the assault on Tristan and made no arrests. It is unclear how much of the abundant photographic evidence and video footage the authorities have reviewed, if any.
Capt. Kevin Pearsall, a regional superintendent with the parks police, says his officers can’t act because they’ve received no complaint from Tristan. However, former OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano says he’s repeatedly contacted parks police via phone and email in hopes of getting them to investigate. Parks police documents and internal emails obtained by ProPublica show that Arellano has reached out to police brass and that detectives are aware of the assault on Tristan.
Arellano said since the assault not a single law enforcement agency or official had contacted him about the alleged perpetrators.
“We know their identities,” said Arellano, who supervised Tristan and the other journalists until recently, when he left the paper amid staff cuts. “But what good is the truth when the law doesn’t give a shit?”
No charges have been brought against the people who attacked Leopo and Feinzimer, either, though Pearsall says those incidents have been examined by police. According to Pearsall, his agency, which is tasked with maintaining order in California’s vast network of parks and recreational areas, doesn’t have the resources to carry out extensive investigations and must turn to outside police forces for assistance in such cases.
In an undated photo posted to their since-deleted Instagram account, RAM members pose in skull masks.
Most of the time, the young men of the Rise Above Movement, nearly all of them in their 20s, look perfectly innocuous: close-cropped hair, clean-shaven faces, T-shirts and jeans.
But for public events, RAM has developed its own menacing signature look, with members often wearing skull masks and goggles to ward off pepper spray. At times, RAM fighters have tied American flag bandannas around their faces to conceal their identities.
A RAM recruiting video posted to YouTube and Vimeo highlights the organization’s violent raison d’être, cutting between choppy footage of RAM members brawling at public events and carefully shot scenes of them sharpening their boxing skills and doing push-ups during group workout sessions.
There is an entire ecosystem of low-budget white supremacist media outlets — websites, blogs, forums, podcasts, YouTube channels and the like — and RAM members have been hailed as heroes on some of these platforms.
“They kicked the shit out of people in Berkeley. It was great,” said a host on a racist podcast called Locker Room Talk. “They like to go to rallies and beat up Communists.” YouTube talker James Allsup saluted RAM members as the embodiment of the ideal American man.
The group portrays itself as a defense force for a Western civilization under assault by Jews, Muslims and brown-skinned immigrants from south of the Rio Grande. The RAM logo features a medieval sword with a cross on the pommel — a symbol of the crusades — and an evergreen tree. On T-shirts they wear while training, the logo appears above three words, “courage, identity, virtue.” At rallies, members have waved red-and-white crusader flags and carried signs saying “Rapefugees Not Welcome” and “Da Goyim Know,” an anti-Semitic slogan meant to highlight a supposed conspiracy by Jews to control the globe and subjugate non-Jews. One RAM banner, which depicts knights on horseback chasing after Muslims, reads “Islamists Out!”
A ProPublica reporter recently met at a restaurant in Orange County with a man who says he’s a leader of the organization. This man, who appears frequently in the videos of RAM members fighting, would only agree to talk openly about the group’s origins and intentions if we didn’t reveal his name. No other RAM members or associates would speak to us.
RAM, the leader said, came together organically. It started when he encountered a few other guys with similar political beliefs, including two active duty U.S. Marines, while exercising at different gyms in Southern California. They all liked Trump but didn’t think his agenda went far enough.
The men began hanging out. Their numbers grew. Many came from rough backgrounds — they’d been strung out on drugs or spent time behind bars — and currently labored at tough blue-collar jobs. Soon they had a name and a mission: They would physically take on the foes of the far-right.
An undated photo posted to the RAM Twitter account shows a group training session in an unidentified Southern California park.
The RAM leader claims his organization isn’t racist and complains he doesn’t even know what the word “racism” means.
“We’re proud of our identity,” he said before launching into a long list of grievances. Whites, he said, are ignored by politicians, taught to be ashamed by leftist academics, and marginalized and driven from the workforce by economic globalization. Young white men, he said, are drawn to the extreme right “because there is no other option for them. They’re disenfranchised.”
This intense sense of victimization is widespread among figures involved in the so-called alt-right.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a fascist,” the RAM leader continued, though he acknowledged that his worldview is close. He said he’s trying to create a “conservative counter-culture” as an antidote to the “complete degeneracy” of contemporary American life and “the left-wing ideology that’s poisoning the youth.”
In the leader’s eyes, “your life should be dedicated to God and country and your people.”
While the RAM leader insists the group isn’t racist, on social media channels, its members regularly espouse blatantly anti-Semitic and racist views.
Ben Daley has used his Facebook page to bash “Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook Jew police” for taking down his “anti Muslim posts”; to suggest that African Americans are “shit” and that former President Obama is a leech; and to cheer the fatal shooting of a black man. “Good riddance,” he wrote. The Facebook page of another member, Robert Boman, is laden with anti-Semitic graphics, including an illustration glorifying the Nazi SS and a cartoon depicting African Americans and Muslims as rabid dogs controlled by Jews. (Court and prison records show Boman served 18 months in prison for a 2013 robbery in Torrance.)
The group has drawn recruits from the ranks of the Hammerskin Nation, the country’s largest Nazi skinhead gang, which has been tied to at least nine murders in four states, including a 2012 massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.
At the ADL, Segal said law enforcement agencies are struggling to keep up with RAM and the scores of other extremist outfits that have emerged in recent years. Skillful use of social media and the broader internet has allowed some of these organizations to metastasize quickly into formidable operations. And whatever connection, if any, Trump has to their rise, the groups don’t hesitate to invoke his presidency as validation for their belief systems.
“There are so many new faces,” Segal said. “It creates a challenge for law enforcement.”
Two veteran Southern California detectives who spoke to ProPublica were not familiar with RAM before our reporters brought the organization to their attention. After reviewing photos and videos of RAM in action, as well the social media pages of its members, the investigators said they were concerned by what they saw. The group, they said, seems to have ties to white supremacist gangsters known to law enforcement, a propensity for violence, and a desire to grow their numbers.
The detectives spoke to ProPublica anonymously in order to freely discuss intelligence on white extremists and street gangs.
Earlier this year, on April 15, about a dozen RAM members traveled from Southern California to Berkeley. The group was met there by a fan: Vincent James Foxx, a 31-year-old video blogger and livestreamer with a fondness for white supremacists and radical right-wing politics.
Foxx, a father of three who runs a growing media operation called The Red Elephants, had become RAM’s unofficial propagandist. After the Huntington Beach brawls, which he attended and filmed, Foxx put together a nearly 10-minute video glorifying the group’s fighting abilities and uploaded it to YouTube, where it has garnered 174,000 views to date.
Foxx and RAM were sure another Trump rally in one of the most liberal cities in America would provide an opportunity for violence.
Two earlier political events in Berkeley had turned ugly, with crowds of left- and right-wing activists engaging in running street battles. Police seized knives, baseball bats, axe handles, nail-studded boards and other weapons during the previous clashes. Few were predicting that the April event, scheduled for Berkeley’s Civic Center Park, would be peaceful. This is what RAM had been training for.
For Foxx’s part, he would be shadowing the group. He knew where the action would be.
RAM members (left to right) Daley, Robert Boman, and Spencer Currie and Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo in a blue collared shirt wrestle a banner away from anti-fascist protesters on April 15, 2017, in Berkeley, California. (Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
When leftist counter-protesters showed up to express their contempt for the president and his supporters, RAM, fighting as a pack, chased them down and attacked them — stomping, punching, kicking. Video shows Ben Daley pounding on a man who is trapped on the ground and kicking other opponents. In one incident, Daley and RAM member Robert Rundo manhandled a journalist, Shane Bauer of Mother Jones, shoving him and yelling at him “Get the fuck out of here! ... Fake news!”
At times RAM fought alongside an ally, Nathan Damigo, a former Marine and founder of Identity Evropa, a prominent white supremacist organization; Damigo wound up punching a female antifa member in the face, an act that would become one of the enduring images of the day’s havoc.
Foxx wasn’t just documenting the violence at the rally — he was inciting it. On video Foxx posted to YouTube, he can be heard repeatedly encouraging RAM members and others to assault people. “Get that fucking cuck!” he screamed when a RAM member and four or five other men grabbed a counter-protester and began beating him. “Charge!” Foxx yelled as a mob of right-wingers went on the offensive.
Reached via email, Foxx declined to be interviewed for this story.
At 11:45 a.m. that morning in Berkeley, police arrested Rundo, a 27-year-old boxer who lives in the beach town of San Clemente, for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest. “Oh shit … that’s one of our guys,” Foxx said as officers handcuffed Rundo, who was wearing a tight gray-and-black athletic shirt and a skull mask. Prosecutors would later decide not to bring charges.
“We reviewed it over the summer in July and declined to file charges,” said Teresa Drenick, an Alameda County deputy district attorney. “We determined we didn’t have enough evidence to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Another violent incident in Rundo’s past was far more clear-cut. In 2009, in Queens, New York, where Rundo had grown up, he confronted two Latino men in a store. Flanked by several other men, Rundo chased his victims into the street where one of them tripped and fell to the pavement. Prosecutors charged Rundo with pouncing on the man and stabbing him in the right hand, right elbow, left arm, chest and neck, according to court records. In a sworn statement the investigating New York Police Department detective noted that the entire episode was documented by surveillance video and that Rundo’s comrades used “some sort of club” to bludgeon the stabbing victim and his friend.
Rundo, who was 19 at the time, struck a plea deal, admitting his guilt in exchange for a sentence of two years in state prison on gang assault charges. He served about 20 months of his term, prison data shows.
As a detective in the 109th Precinct, Francis Johnston helped to build the case against Rundo in 2009. Johnston, who is now retired, remembers Rundo as a hard character — “a bit of an asshole” — with a strong dislike for law enforcement. While police were eager to question Rundo’s accomplices, they were never able to identify them — and Rundo never gave up their names.
At the Berkeley rally, RAM certainly wasn’t the only violent element on the scene — antifa cadres hurled bottles and other projectiles and instigated a number of melees. But throughout the day, interviews and video show, RAM was perhaps the most effective and disciplined group as the fighting dragged on for hours. At least 11 people were injured in the violence, with seven going to local hospitals for treatment, including a stabbing victim, according to local officials.
“From the second we got there it was just chaos,” said the RAM leader. “People like to say we’re Nazis and stuff, but all the people we’ve beaten up are white college kids.”
German, the former FBI agent now with the Brennan Center in New York, says he was shocked by the news reports he was seeing online about Berkeley. He thought: This isn’t a riot. It’s basically low-level political warfare in the streets of an American city. German, who studies national security and civil liberties at the Brennan Center, said he couldn’t believe law enforcement was allowing the two sides to battle it out with each other for hours with minimal intervention.
“The protests in Berkeley really caught my attention,” he said. “This should not be happening.”
Daley, wearing a skull mask, exults after chasing anti-fascist demonstrators down Center Street in Berkeley, California, on April 15, 2017. (Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
In his view, police and federal agents should be focusing on RAM and similar organizations.
“This is black and white,” German said. “There are certainly people exercising First Amendment rights at these demonstrations. However, these people are in the middle of brawls and open about it — they’re posting images of violence and communicating their intent to commit violence. It’s very different than someone exercising their right to stand on a stage and preach their ideology.”
In June, RAM made its way to San Bernardino for a protest by Act for America, a controversial group that urges legislators to pass bills banning Islamic sharia law in the U.S. Act for America, which says its goal is to “protect and preserve American culture and to keep this nation safe,” has been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has highlighted its ties to Billy Roper, a veteran white supremacist organizer.
In San Bernardino, the RAM forces included at least two members of the Hammerskin Nation, a loosely structured but highly aggressive Nazi skinhead gang with chapters across the U.S. and in Europe.
ProPublica identified the men as Hammerskin members by reviewing video footage, photos, social media channels and court files.
“California has the largest racist skinhead population in the U.S., predominantly based in Southern California,” Joanna Mendelson, a researcher at the ADL, testified at a recent California state Senate hearing. “Adherents have their own unique subculture and are dedicated to furthering Hitlerian ideology.”
The gangs, she noted, range from a few members to a few hundred members, and have been responsible for some of the country’s “most violent hate crimes.”
One of the Hammerskins who has trained with RAM and appeared with them at rallies is Matthew Branstetter, a 25-year-old Huntington Beach resident. In April 2011, Branstetter and an accomplice beat a Jewish man unconscious and robbed him in an Orange County park. Branstetter was convicted of aggravated assault with a hate crime enhancement, and sent to prison for 20 months.
While the San Bernardino march, which attracted about 300 people, was nominally a protest against sharia law, it quickly devolved into an opportunity for protesters to mock Muslims and deride their faith. One man carried a sign that said “Islam is not an American religion.” Another wore a shirt that said “Muhammed was a Homo.”
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A smaller crowd of counter-protesters also turned out to condemn what they saw as racism and Islamophobia. Police tried to keep the two groups separated, corralling them on opposite sides of a street. But that didn’t stop RAM, which brought about 15 members to the event. The group’s members crossed the street and began beating counter-protesters, eventually running many of them off.
In a video from the scene, RAM members boast about their actions. “We physically removed ‘em,” said Daley. “We chased ‘em down the block, smashed up their car,” added Rundo, describing an incident in which RAM forces shattered the rear window of a car driven by counter-protesters.
San Bernardino police did not respond to requests seeking comment.
Rundo also said, on video, that RAM members are “fans” of a white supremacist slogan called the “14 Words.” The slogan was authored by David Lane while he was serving a 190-year sentence in federal prison for his role in the murder of Jewish talk show host Alan Berg and a series of armored car robberies that netted more than $4 million, money that Lane and his co-conspirators planned to use to fund a race war.
Lane wrote: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Lane’s message has been enthusiastically adopted as a call-to-arms by the current generation of right-wing radicals, many of whom believe that America’s ongoing demographic transformation is rapidly pushing whites towards extinction. The only answer, they believe, is an uprising.
What happened in Charlottesville last August looked a lot like an uprising, and RAM was right in the middle of it.
“You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” yelled Daley and another RAM member, Tom Gillen, as they stood before a statue of Thomas Jefferson on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. It was the night of Aug. 11. The men held torches. They were surrounded by hundreds of young white men, all of them shouting the same words.
Both of the Californians were known to law enforcement in Los Angeles County. Gillen, a surfer and 23-year-old native of Torrance, had been jailed in 2014 for possessing an illegal handgun — someone had grinded off the serial number on the gun, making it untraceable. Police seized the weapon, destroyed it and barred Gillen from owning any other guns.
Gillen, like other RAM members, would not speak to ProPublica.
Daley had been arrested on a gun charge that same year. He was convicted of illegally carrying a concealed snub-nose .357 Magnum revolver and sentenced to seven days in jail. Police also discovered an array of bullets in his pickup truck, including .38-caliber ammunition and .223 rifle rounds, the latter used in bolt-action hunting rifles and military-style assault weapons.
An unidentified woman attacked by Daley and other white supremacists lies wounded on the ground in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, 2017. (Jason Andrew for Splinter)
In a brief text message, Daley declined to comment on his arrest or his activities with RAM. He did, however, say that he had signed up for the U.S. military and would be going through basic training shortly.
That night in Charlottesville, Daley and Gillen clashed violently with a handful of college students who’d gathered at the Jefferson statue holding a banner denouncing racism. RAM and the white supremacists quickly prevailed, and drove the students off the campus and into the night. Charlottesville police did little to intervene as the conflict unfolded.
Whooping and giving straight-arm Nazi salutes, white supremacists began to celebrate their victory. Some chanted the words “blood and soil,” an old Third Reich slogan.
The violence would continue — and escalate dramatically — the next morning as racists from around the country gathered around a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee for the “Unite the Right” rally. And once again RAM members were at the heart of the fighting.
Charlottesville police declined to comment about RAM.
Today, according to the anonymous RAM leader interviewed by ProPublica, his organization is “trying to stay away from rallies.” RAM’s next moves, he explained, are confidential.
Oren Segal of the ADL said RAM could prove durable or fizzle out in a matter of months. It’s too soon to tell. But in both their short-term menace and their uncertain long-term future, Segal said RAM is quite representative of what he called the “new alt-right youth brigades.”
The self-described alt-right “really wants to strike while the iron is hot,” he said. “They believe that now is the time to go from online to the real world. And frankly, the street fighting element very much fits this narrative.”
Ali Winston is a reporting fellow with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and covers criminal justice and surveillance. Follow him on Twitter at @awinston.
Darwin BondGraham is an investigative reporter for the East Bay Express in Oakland, California.
https://www.alternet.org/accused-annapolis-mass-shooter-left-trail-evidence-ties-him-alt-right
When the identity of the apparent gunman in the massacre of five journalists in Annapolis, Maryland, was revealed, area resident John Hutson, a retired Navy admiral who is now a prominent consultant and writer, had a shock of recognition. The suspect,Jarrod Ramos, had contacted Hutson in March 2015, taunting him about his role in alerting law enforcement and thwarting a potential mass killer who threatened schoolchildren and Jews in far-away Montana.
That first individual in Montana, David Lenio, overflowed with hyperbolic threats, and Hutson’s efforts to stop him succeeded, as I reported at Salon, just after it happened. Ramos was more cryptic less overtly demonstrative—but in the end, far more deadlier.Both were somewhat enigmatic, angry loners, with an unmistakable affinity for the racist alt-right.
This article originally appeared in Salon.
“Jarrod Ramos was a lone nut who was not politically motivated, but he was politically influenced by the alt-right,” Hutson told Salon. Researcher Fred Clarkson agrees. “Ramos and David Lenio seem to have been drawn into the orbit of far-right visions of anti-democratic violence, even as they seem to have ultimately acted on their own,” said Clarkson, a senior research analyst with Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank in Somerville, Massachusetts.
The only two politicians Ramos had tweeted about, according to Hutson, were Donald Trump and Michael Peroutka, a wealthy neo-Confederate funder turned Maryland county councilman. Hutson has written about Peroutka, as have I. Peroutka had major funding ties to former Alabama judge and U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, as well to theLeague of the South, whose leader, Michael Hill, had written approvingly about plans to form paramilitary groups to fight a militarized “fourth generation” culture war, one of whose targets would be the media.
“To oversimplify, the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers;” Hill wrote, “instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.”
Ramos first contacted Hutson through Twitter, the latter recalls, after "the Capital Gazette published a piece about how I had alerted the FBI about mass shooting threat suspect David Lenio,” Hutson said.
After Hutson tweeted about the story, Ramos tweeted a couple of disturbing responses, first asking “Were any school children intimidated?” then claiming that Lenio “had won”:
...
no lnx
The piece highlighted the fact that I was also researching and writing about Michael Peroutka, for example, in the pages of Huffington Post,” Hutson noted. “I documented Michael Peroutka’s support for the League of the South [here], a right-wing group that advocated death squads, assassinating journalists, elected officials, and other members of the elite,” he explained. He questioned and challenged Peroutka "about his support for the League of the South, and that led to a lot of public attention,” which he also wrote about for Huffington Post.
Although Ramos didn’t contact Hutson at the time, he was clearly not pleased with the critical coverage of Peroutka, fusing his own lawsuit-fueled enmity toward the Capital Gazette with his enthusiasm for the pro-Confederate candidate:
Ramos was also given to self-inflation, putting on both literary and moralistic airs.In court documents, Hutson noted, he referred to himself as a crusader. Like his hero, Peroutka, this would effectively place himself above ordinary human law.
“His defense of Michael Peroutka is particularly interesting, since his views seem to echo Peroutka, a local politician and think tank leader, and other elements of the theocratic far right,” Clarkson added.
When Peroutka did manage a narrow victory that November — with signs that illegal robocalls helped put him over the top, Ramos’s tweet seemed over the top as well:
In fairness, none of Ramos' tweets overtly screams “potential mass murderer.” They’re indicative of someone stewing in resentment, but that’s hardly unusual in this day and age. Except for his Twitter avatar — that’s a whole different story.
“The image used in Ramos' Twitter profile is an image not of himself," Hutson observes, but of former Capital Gazette columnist Eric Hartley, against whom Ramos held a grudge against. “He placed a symbol on Hartley’s forehead and the symbol is a brand of sacrifice, marking a target for ritual murder,” Hutson explained. “It may have Celtic origins, but it is used in a Japanese manga series, called ‘Berserk,’ and it’s called ‘the brand of sacrifice.’
“For years Ramos stewed in his embitterment, over the newspaper's coverage of his unsuccessful defamation case and the newspaper's coverage of his stalking by Facebook of a woman with whom he had gone to high school. But he didn't act,” Huston summed up. “So the question is, what triggered him?”
Several things are worth considering, Hutson suggested. “Ramos tweeted about only two political figures, Trump and Michael Peroutka -- but he also tweeted to me after the Capital Gazette had written about me.”
The content of that story was significant. That was when Hutson wrote about Peroutka's ties to the League of the South, and its support of "death squads to assassinate journalists."These were all pieces of a puzzle Ramos had been playing around with for years, Hutson believes.
“So what happened this past week?” Hutson asked. “On June 25, Trump – at his South Carolina rally – pointed to members of the media, and called them the enemy of the people. This is a phrase that throughout history has been used by autocrats to incite violence,” from ancient Rome to the French Revolution to Nazi Germany.
That's not all that occurred last week, Hutson noted. On Tuesday, Peroutka, an Anne Arundel County councilman, was defeated for re-election, losing in the Republican primary to a female challenger. That may not be coincidental, Hutson suspects.
There are also darker long-simmering elements that may have helped prepare the way. Hutson sees an “overall pattern" of "homicidal ideation," starting with Ramous replacing the bloody severed head in a famous Charlie Hebdo cartoon with the face of Garrett Hartley, the Capital Gazette columnist:
Ramos was actually recycling an even earlier image, which was even less coherent:
Ramos also tweeted at Capital Gazette editor Rick Hutzell, criticizing him for relegating coverage of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris to page 2. Then he wrote, “je suis CapGazNews.” a direct reference to the hashtag that followed the Charlie Hebdo massacre. As Hutson reads this, Ramos was already thinking of a mass shooting at Capital Gazette in the context of his reflections on Charlie Hebdo:
These aren’t the only such messages, either. As early as September 2014, there’s this one, citing the Capital Gazette's Annapolis address:
But after the Charlie Hebdo attack, Ramos' obsession appeared to become more intense, combining political and religious overtones. “Ramos had a website in which he published court documents from his unsuccessful defamation suit,” Hutson said, and the material reads more like psychodrama than legal briefs:
In the court documents Ramos referred to himself as an agent of the Inquisition, and a crusader who cannot be killed. The Inquisition was a holy inquiry, where church authority superseded that of the civil authority. A crusader is the hand of God, waging a holy war, in the same way that the Charlie Hebdo massacres were. [In the documents] Ramos appeals to "higher authority," and he capitalizes "Higher Authority." This is similar to the way that the violent wing of the anti-abortion movement has appealed to "Higher Law," which they capitalize, to justify homicide against providers of safe, legal abortion, as well as judges and political figures who support the right.
Clarkson sees this tying back to Peroutka’s old allies at the League of the South. “Ramos came to see himself as some kind of vigilante for righteousness, casting himself for example as a 'crusader' and gunning down innocent people in a newsroom," Clarkson said, which "is not unlike the militaristic, millennial vision of Michael Hill, president of the League of the South.” Clarkson said. “Last year [Hill] rallied what he calls the Southern Defense Force, which he envisions as not just a modern Confederate army but the ‘Army of the True Living God.’ This is the group that played a prominent role in theUnite the Right march on Charlottesville.”
Hutson links these violent longings to Ramos' aristocratic pretensions. “His writing style is very arch. He appears to be writing what he conceives of as literature. His speech is highly stylized and idiosyncratic, and uses the metaphors of a holy war. A sense of embitterment and homicidal ideation comes through clearly. He writes about literal carnage, making clear that ... he means this in a literal sense. So it's not for nothing that you think about people like the Army of God.”
Ramos wasn’t acting on anyone’s orders, and despite his apparent linkages to white supremacy never expressed any clear political ideology. But there's little doubt he was influenced and shaped by some of the darkest forces in our society.
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/charlottesville-car-attack-suspect-james-fields-indicted-federal-hate-crimes
James Fields, suspected in the death of the woman who was fatally struck by a vehicle last year outside the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, was indicted on Wednesday in Virginia for federal hate crime charges.
The 32-year-old victim was Heather Heyer. Her killing resulted in a first-degree murder charge for Fields, who also faces a slew of other hate crimes charges.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, long viewed as an opponent to civil rights, said in a statement, “Today’s indictment should send a clear message to every would-be criminal in America that we aggressively prosecute violent crimes of hate that threaten the core principles of our nation.”
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Beyond the notable Media Matters work below, here are some other things I've been reading: Alex Pareene on the "alt-right" white nationalists being the future of conservative politics, Angela Nagle on the "alt-right" after Charlottesville, Diana Tourjee and Lindsay Schrupp on trans care in the military being stopped, and Paul Blumenthal on how the federal government has ignored far-right extremism.
John Whitehouse
CEO of Fox News parent company condemns white nationalism, but Trump's Charlottesville talking points were ripped straight from FoxIn front of a bank of elevators in the lobby of Trump Tower, Donald Trump fervently defended the white nationalists who had gathered in Charlottesville, blaming violence on "many sides." Trump's disgusting remarks were pulled directly from Fox News. Just watch the video for yourself. And yet the chief executive officer of Fox News parent company is in complete denial. James Murdoch sent a letter decrying white nationalism and Trump's remarks. But not only did Murdoch not mention that Trump's talking points were pulled from Fox News, Murdoch didn't even mention the "news" network. Murdoch's choice is simple: He can remain an enabler of the hate and bigotry and misogyny and share in the responsibility. Alternatively, he can directly take action to clean the network from the bottom up. There is no middle ground, there is no third option. |
There will never be a pivot. There will never be a reset. No one was more pleased from Trump's statements than the white supremacists themselves, and for good reason. They know what you know: Donald Trump was a bigot before he ran for president, he ran for president as a bigot, and now he's governing as a bigot. None of this should surprise anyone. And yet the elite pundits in D.C. never seem to get it. They pick random tea leaves as evidence that Trump someday soon may possibly pivot to being presidential. The latest example was when Trump hired John Kelly as his chief of staff. Days later, Trump retweeted a far right conspiracy theorist, floated pardoning Joe Arpaio (something neo-Nazis had asked for), pushed a racist lie about General Pershing, and marched to the lobby of Trump Tower and defended white nationalists. Undeterred, some started speculating that Stephen Bannon leaving the White House will be Trump's real pivot. The truth is that these people are wildly out of touch with reality when it comes to Donald Trump. There will be no pivot. Trump acts how he does because this is who he is. And that's why things are just going to get worse. |
:{How pro-Trump media reacted to terrorism in Virginia }: The act of terrorism in Charlottesville prompted pro-Trump media to go off the deep end (not surprising since right-wing media was a welcoming home to the organizer of the rally beforehand). Here's just a list of things they said in response: <ul id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1503340453802_2226" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 2px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial;"><li id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1503340453802_2228" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Fox guest said that the confederate flag and the LGBT rainbow flag "<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fvideo%2F2017%2F08%2F15%2Ffox-guest-confederate-flag-and-lgbtq-pride-flag-represent-exact-same-thing%2F217628&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=18" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1503340453802_2292" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">represent the exact same thing</a>."</font></li><li style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alex Jones said that many KKK protesters are "<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fvideo%2F2017%2F08%2F14%2Falex-jones-lot-kkk-protesters-are-jewish-actors-who-look-cast-seinfeld-their-hoods%2F217615&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=19" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">Jewish actors</a>."</font></li><li id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1503340453802_2225" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Newt Gingrich said that mayors who take down confederate statues are just <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fvideo%2F2017%2F08%2F14%2Fnewt-gingrich-mayors-who-take-down-confederate-statues-are-pandering-black-audience%2F217625&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=20" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">pandering to a black audience</a>.</font></li><li style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pro-Trump outlets said that the organizer of the white supremacist neo-Nazi rally was <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fblog%2F2017%2F08%2F18%2Fpro-trump-media-conspiracy-theory-white-supremacist-who-organized-charlottesville-rally-really%2F217683&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=21" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">secretly a liberal spy</a> (he wasn't).</font></li><li id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1503340453802_2297" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fox News invited Ted Nugent on <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fblog%2F2017%2F08%2F16%2Fnation-reels-trump-s-embrace-nazis-fox-news-invites-racist-anti-semite-ted-nugent-full-hour%2F217667&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=22" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">for a full hour</a>, mostly to discuss Charlottesville. Nugent has made numerous racist and anti-Semite statements in the very recent past.</font></li><li id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1503340453802_2227" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CNN's law enforcement contributor <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fblog%2F2017%2F08%2F16%2Fcnn-law-enforcement-analyst-claims-left-shares-blame-heather-heyer-s-death%2F217659&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=23" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">blamed</a> "the left" for Heather Heyer's death.</font></li><li style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nigel Farage called for Americans to <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fvideo%2F2017%2F08%2F18%2Ffoxs-nigel-farage-says-americans-should-ignore-white-nationalism-because-islamic-terror-exists%2F217690&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=24" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">ignore white nationalism</a> and focus on being scared of Muslims.</font></li><li style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Fox News contributor said that "it starts with statues, it moves to books, <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fvideo%2F2017%2F08%2F16%2Ffederalists-mollie-hemingway-removing-confederate-statues-it-starts-statues-it-moves-books-it-ends%2F217669&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=25" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background: transparent; outline: none;">it ends with people</a>."</font></li><li style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Sinclair's Boris Ephstyn said that Trump <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fblog%2F2017%2F08%2F17%2Fdefense-trump-s-unforgivable-statements-charlottesville-may-be-airing-your-local-news%2F217675&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=26" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; outline: none;">shouldn't have to state</a> obvious things like Nazis are bad.</font></li><li id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1503340453802_2298" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A Sean Hannity radio guest calmly explained that the neo-Nazis were just "<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fvideo%2F2017%2F08%2F16%2FHannity-radio-guest-defends-white-nationalists-They-were-merely-making-a-case-for-white-ri%2F217668&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=27" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; outline: none;">making a case for white rights</a>."</font></li><li id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1503340453802_2307" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Hannity himself <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediamatters.org%2Fblog%2F2017%2F08%2F17%2Fsean-hannity-has-been-dumpster-diving-conspiracy-theorists-again%2F217686&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=820wa&n=28" style="-webkit-padding-start: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; outline: none;">dabbled in a fringe conspiracy theory</a> that all anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville were paid actors.</font></li></ul> Hannity's Charlottesville propaganda was a thing unto itself: repeatedly attacking the media while also defending Trump. |