Introduction
While 2018 was not the banner year that 2017 was for the Alt Right and others on the Far Right, it was still a period of intense activity.
The Alt Right’s winning streak, which started in 2016, ended ingloriously in March 2018 with the collapse of one of its largest groups after a sex scandal, coupled with the cancellation of Richard Spencer’s failing college lecture tour. The movement has been in the doldrums since. Some Alt Lite groups—including Joey Gibson’s Patriot Prayer, but especially the Proud Boys—had an unexpected comeback earlier in the year between the spring and fall. (The Alt Right has two wings: one is openly White nationalist; the other, the Alt Lite, is similar in look and feel—but it allows in Jews, gay men, and people of color, and does not call for a White ethnostate.)
In addition a large number of Far Right candidates, ranging from neonazis to veterans of armed Patriot movement occupations, entered the Republican primaries. Some advanced to the November general election. The one-year anniversary of the deadly Charlottesville rally appeared to be a peak month of action for the Far Right, with many groups feeling the taboo against public demonstrations had expired. But the action that attained the most visibility, the Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington, DC, was a dismal failure.
The Alt Lite’s spring success and the wave of activity from across the Far Right in August was followed by a major downswing in the fall. In October, a gang-style attack by Proud Boys in the New York City, coupled with reports that the FBI had designated them an “extremist” group, led to a backlash against them and a leadership shakeup.
In November, an analysis of elections of the elections showed that almost all documented state- or national-level Far Right candidates failed to win office; only three incumbents with Far Right ties were re-elected. The Democrats also re-took the House in November, ending the GOP’s two-year reign of power over the executive office and both legislative bodies.
The most telling change in 2018 has been the firm repudiation of the Far Right by a mainstream that had been largely willing to embrace, consider, glamorize, or tolerate it during the previous two years. Gone were the magazine profiles of “dapper white nationalists.” While in the spring it seemed that the Proud Boys had gained full entry into mainstream GOP circles, their increasing violence soon backfired against them.
Digital platforms have also been increasingly assertive in removing White nationalist and other Far Right accounts. Alex Jones, for example, lost almost all of his mainstream digital accounts. Patreon, a site which manages recurring donations, also became more aggressive in removing Far Right activists, striking an important financial blow against them. Alt Right attempts to form their own platforms have also largely failed. The most successful, Gab (the Nazi-friendly alternative to Twitter), was briefly taken offline after Robert Bowers allegedly massacred eleven Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue; he had announced his intentions beforehand on Gab.
Lawsuits against the Alt Right—including organizers of the thwarted 2017 Charlottesville rally and against Andrew Anglin, editor of the neonazi website Daily Stormer—have also taken their toll. Lawsuits initiated by them, however, have not met with success.
While Donald Trump continued to demonize “antifa” (antifascist) activists this past year, their movement has not abated. Clashes have become less common. Antifa groups helped organize large counter-protests in Portland, Oregon in August and another large one in Philadelphia in November, although in both cases no fighting erupted between the groups. Perhaps because of this decline in violence, doxxings became more prominent in 2018, and arrests and firings of Far Right activists followed these. A number of White nationalists—including an active-duty Marine, two deputy sheriffs, a corrections officer, an employee at a Department of Defense contractor—apparently lost their jobs after being outed. One of Trump’s speechwriters was fired after became public that he had spoken at a White nationalist conference. And at least two law enforcement officers lost their jobs due to affiliations with the Proud Boys.
In terms of the White nationalist wing of the Alt Right, many of 2017’s main players have collapsed or taken on a low profile. The Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), the group most able to mobilize activists who were willing to engage in fisticuffs, imploded after a sex scandal involving their leader Matthew Heimbach; he lasted less than two months in the next group he joined, the National Socialist Movement. Richard Spencer’s AltRight.com website hasn’t been updated since the spring. The Rise Above Movement, one of the most violent and well-organized fascist groups, had numerous core members—including its leader—arrested. Identity Evropa survived by encouraging its members to infiltrate the Republican Party, and holding occasional unannounced “pop-up” demonstrations. Vanguard America has gone silent, although a splinter group, Patriot Front, remains very active. The Nationalist Front umbrella group, which provided a solid core of hardline activists at Charlottesville and two other rallies last year, was devastated by the folding of the TWP, the deflation of Vanguard America, and the withdrawal of the League of the South. Last, in December James Fields, Jr. was convicted of murder for his car attack after the foiled 2017 Charlottesville rally, and a jury recommended life in prison; if convicted of forthcoming federal charges, he could receive a death sentence.
The Alt Lite is doing a lot better, but the Proud Boys suffered a major blow after the arrests in New York City and the resignation of their leader, Gavin McInnes. Joey Gibson had successes through the summer but received less than 3 percent of the vote in his Senate bid and has been unable to repeat the energy of his previous rallies. The militia and Patriot movement, who have similar politics, have also lost steam as they are largely refusing to do security for rallies where Nazis are present—their most popular project in 2017.
The major group which gained popularity this year was Turning Point USA, which recruits college students and has avoided collapsing in scandal or being embroiled in violence. Canadian professor Jordan Peterson also emerged as a major Alt Lite figure this year, and Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) continue to be popular. This year, MRAs committed two multiple murders: an April van attack which killed ten in Toronto, Canada, and a November shooting in a Florida yoga studio which killed two.
There is no reason to expect the Alt Right, Alt Lite, and associated Far Right groups to disappear in 2019. It was Trump that energized the movement, and it will remained tied to his presidency. After all, White nationalists merely elucidate the logical conclusion of many of Trump’s tweets and comments, and the Alt Lite and Patriot movement act as a paramilitary and independent activist base for him, functioning primarily outside of the Republican Party apparatus. These groups, however, need a new cart to hitch their horse to, and right now Trump’s promise to “Build the Wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border is the most likely issue. Last, we should be wary of dismissing the Alt Right; with so many newly minted White nationalists—many of them angry young men—new groups will likely emerge to replace those leaders and organizations that have folded or stepped back into the shadows.
January
January 2: Blaze Bernstein, a gay, Jewish college student, is stabbed to death in a park in Orange County, California, likely on this day. His body is found on January 9 and Samuel Woodward, a member of the neonazi group Atomwaffen Division, is arrested soon after. This is the fifth murder alleged to be committed by those associated with the group since May 2017. That month, Devon Arthurs killed two of his roommates, who were group members, in Tampa, Florida. The police arrested a fourth roommate, Brandon Russell, the founder of Atomwaffen. On January 9, 2018, Russell was sentenced to five years for possessing materials for a dirty bomb. On February 1, 2018, Arthurs was sent to a psychiatric institution until he is deemed mentally competent to stand trial.
In December 2017, Atomwaffen supporter Nicholas Giampa, 17, was arrested for killing Buckley and Scott Kuhn-Fricker, the parents of Giampa’s 16-year-old ex-girlfriend. The Kuhn-Frickers had urged their daughter to break up with Giampa after finding out he was a neonazi.
January 9: Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon stepped down as Breitbart executive chairman after he is quoted making disparaging remarks about Donald Trump, Jr.
January 17: An Anti-Defamation League report found that in 2017 “right-wing extremists” committed the majority (59 percent) of “extremist” murders in the United States. “white supremacists” committed eighteen of these twenty murders. In December, the Global Terrorism Index (a project of the Institute for Economics & Peace) found that in 2017 “far-right” terrorism had increased in North American and Western Europe.
January 19: Donald Blakney is arrested for felony assault relating to an incident involving in his participation in the 2017 Charlottesville rally. Although only eight arrests were made during and immediately after the rally, three of them were black men, including Blakney. On November 6, he made a plea agreement and received a twelve-month suspended sentence.
January 23: Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is released and becomes a best-seller. Peterson is a Canadian evolutionary psychology professor who has been embraced by the Alt Lite for his misogynistic and other reactionary views.
January 27: The neoconfederate group League of the South held a demonstration in Tallahassee, Florida. About thirty attend, while a counterprotest draws 150.
February
February 2: The Traditionalist Worker Party attacked a demonstration against Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA—a Far Right group that focuses on college students—at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.
February 7: It is reported that Gab, a Twitter-like social media platform which is favored by the Alt Right and neonazis, says they will expand operations after raising almost $5 million.
February 10: Joey Gibson’s Patriot Prayer group held a rally at the University of Washington in Seattle. Hundreds come to the counter-demonstration, and five are arrested after a clash. The rally is held in the same location where— during protests against a Milo Yiannopoulos appearance on January 20, 2017—an Alt Right activist shot and critically injured a left-wing activist who was trying to deescalate a fight.
February 14: Nikolas Cruz is arrested after a school shooting at a Parkland, Florida high school which left 17 dead and 17 wounded. Cruz had carved a swastika in his gun magazine. Prior to the shooting he is said to have made numerous bigoted remarks about people of color, Jews, and LGBTQ people.
February 14: A lawsuit is filed by father and son Jerome and Joel Vangheluwe against almost two dozen websites and individuals, including GotNews, FreedomDaily, Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft, Gavin McInnes, and Paul Nehlen. The Vangheluwes were falsely claimed to be the owners or drivers of the car in Charlottesville which plowed into an anti-racist march. Both received death threats after the misidentification, and the suit seeks damages for defamation, invasion of privacy, and emotional distress. One defendant, Got News editor Chuck Johnson, settled by paying almost $5,000 to each man personally, while Got News paid almost $20,000 to Jerome and closed down in September. FreedomDaily, which was shuttered in March, was affiliated with Right Wing News. This site was run by Brian Kolfage, who in December 2018 started the online fundraiser, “We The People Will Fund The Wall,” which has raised almost $19 million to date.
February 20: Jared Taylor and American Renaissance sued Twitter in California state court for “viewpoint discrimination” after both were suspended. In August, a state appellate court halted the suit and sent it back to a judge, who was directed to either dismiss the case or defend why it should continue.
February 20: Milo Yiannopoulos dropped his lawsuit against Simon & Schuster, his former publisher. In 2017, after a scandal where Yiannopoulos endorsed sex between adult and underage males, the publishing house declined to release his memoir Dangerous. It was eventually self-published.
February 21: It is reported that three high-profile Alt Lite figures—Laura Loomer, Mike Cernovich, and Jack Posobiec—were suspended from the online platform Medium, which hosts blog-style content.
February 21–24: Trump spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). A number of White nationalists attended as audience members, including Patrick Casey (Identity Evropa), Peter Brimelow (VDARE), and Nicholas Fuentes. Alt Lite figures who attended include Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Cassandra Fairbanks, Lucian Wintrich, and members of the Proud Boys.
February 28: Polygon reported that Discord, a chat platform originally set up for online gamers, was cracking down on White nationalists, who have made the platform their favored communications method. However, in October Slate showed that the server is still heavily used by open White nationalists.
March
March 3: Kyle Bristow announced he was abandoning politics. He had founded the
Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, which was the Alt Right’s in-house law firm for a period of time. He was the lawyer for Richard Spencer and Matthew Heimbach, and litigated in support of the 2017 Charlottesville rally.
March 5: Richard Spencer spoke at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing. On March 4 one of Spencer’s followers, Jonathon Kolanowski, was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. At MSU, almost 500 counter-demonstrators clashed with fascists from the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) outside the event, resulting in twenty-five arrests. Only about three dozen people attended the talk.
The next day, TWP’s Matthew Parrott wrote: “The antifa have actually pretty much succeeded in achieving what the progressive left cannot, which is fully and finally deplatforming the hard right” and that “They demoralized and disabled the majority of the altright, driving most of them off the streets and public square.” Soon after, Spencer cancelled his college speaking tour.
March 5: Cartoonist Matt Furie, creator of Pepe the Frog—the cartoon figure which become the mascot of the Alt Right—continued his lawsuits against the use his work without permission by suing two companies run by Alex Jones. A trial date was eventually set for July 2019. In July 2018, Furie was able to force the neonazi website Daily Stormer to remove many Pepe images.
March 7: A research study by Erin Kearns, Allison Betus, and Anthony Lemieux found that terrorist attacks by Muslim perpetrators receive 357 percent more press coverage than those committed by other political actors.
March 9: Brittany Pettibone and her boyfriend Martin Sellner, a Austrian Identitarian leader, were detained while entering London, and expelled from the country two days later. On March 12, Lauren Southern was also denied entry; she had planned on meeting British Islamophobe Tommy Robinson.
Soon after, on June 6, Southern tweeted an image of her and Pettibone meeting with Russian intellectual Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin promotes a form of Far Right Eurasianism which is influenced by fascist thinkers like Julius Evola.
March 8–11: Identity Evropa, the largest and best organized White nationalist Alt Right group, held its membership conference in Tennessee, drawing between 50 and 70 people. On March 11, members dropped a banner in Nashville, Tennessee.
March 13: Brennan Gilmore, a State Department employee who attended the Charlottesville counter-demonstration as a private citizen and filmed the car attack, sued eleven companies and people—including Alex Jones, Infowars, and the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft—for making “false and defamatory” statements about him. Infowars had claimed, “One guy is paid 320 thousand a year on the payroll of Soros. He doesn’t just get money from Soros, he personally is paid 320 a year, and then he is there—CIA, State Department—and he is on the news.”
March 13: In a sex scandal worthy of daytime TV, Traditionalist Worker Party leader Matthew Heimbach was caught having an affair with the wife of Matthew Parrott, his father-in-law and the party’s spokesperson. Heimbach was arrested for assaulting both Parrott and his own wife. Parrott then quit the party, which melted down altogether soon afterward. Heimbach was already on probation for attacking a Black woman at Trump rally in 2016, and after his arrest was sent back to jail for violating it. He was released on June 20.
March 16: DeAndre Harris was found “not guilty” of assault and battery, which stemmed from a fight after the aborted 2017 Charlottesville rally. Harris, who is Black, was arrested despite being brutally beaten in a parking garage by a group of White nationalists.
April
April 21: The National Socialist Movement held a rally in Newnan, Georgia. The neonazi gathering drew twenty-five people, while hundreds of counter-protestors came. A heavy police presence prevented any clashes.
April 23: Alek Minassian is arrested for a van attack which kills ten in Toronto, Canada. He is alleged to have posted on social media beforehand, “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” Rodgers, an “incel” (involuntary celibate), killed six people in 2014 after making a misogynist video and manifesto explaining his views.
May
May 3: GoDaddy, a domain name registrar and web hosting service which is favored by the Far Right, pulled Richard Spencer’s AltRight.com website. A GoDaddy spokesperson said it “crossed the line and encouraged and promoted violence in a direct and threatening manner.” The site is now back online but has not been updated since the spring.
May 4: Adam W. Purinton is sentenced to life in prison. On February 22, 2017, he shot three men in an Olathe, Kansas bar after yelling at “Get out of my country!” Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian immigrant, died in the shooting.
May 4: Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) asked Defense Secretary Jim Mattis for “information on reports of and investigations into white supremacist activities within the military.” This occurred after ProPublica reported that Vasillios Pistolis, an active-duty Marine, took part in the Charlottesville demonstration.
May 24: A court hearing was held involving a lawsuit which accuses twenty-five defendants of conspiring to commit violence at the August 2017 Charlottesville demonstration. Nineteen of the defendants asked the judge to dismiss the case, but on July 9 it was ruled that the suit can proceed.
June
June 3: Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys hold what was billed as a goodbye event for member Tiny Toese, although at the day itself he said he would return to Portland shortly. Hundreds of counter-protestors meet them in Portland, Oregon, and four arrests were made.
June 5: California primary election day. Many candidates with Far Right ties ran in various local, state, and federal elections in 2018. An analysis of the results shows that eleven of these candidates ran in the primaries and lost, while another twenty-four ran in the general election. Of the latter, only three—all incumbents—won.
The three highest-profile primary candidates who lost were Patrick Little, Paul Nehlen, and Joey Gibson. Little is a vicious antisemite with White nationalist ties; he received 1.3 percent (just under 90,000 votes) in his bid to be a U.S. Senator representing California. Nehlen sought the GOP nomination for House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin district. During the race Ryan announced his retirement, but not before Nehlen veered far to the right and took on open antisemitic and White nationalist positions. He still received 11.1 percent (over 6,600 votes). Gibson ran for Senate in Washinton state; he leads Patriot Prayer, an Alt Lite group with strong militia ties, who have been involved in numerous clashes in the West coast liberal cities. He received 2.3 percent (over 38,600 votes).
For a detailed analysis of candidates and election results, see the Spencer Sunshine’s “The U.S. Far Right’s 2018 Election Results: A Blind-Alley for the Alt Right”
June 8: Corey Long is found guilty of disorderly conduct and is given a 360-day jail sentence, although 340 days were suspended. The charges involved an incident at the 2017 Charlottesville counter-protest where he used an aerosol can as a makeshift flamethrower. Long, who is Black, used it to fend off White nationalists who were leaving the cancelled rally. A photo of the incident became one of the day’s most famous images.
June 8: Rep. Dan Donovan (R-NY) introduces the “Unmasking Antifa” bill (H.R.6054). It seeks to establish a fifteen-year maximum sentence if someone in a mask “injures, oppresses, threatens, or intimidates any person” engaged “in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” The bill is currently in the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations.
June 14: The host of This Hour Has 88 Minutes, the largest Canadian neonazi podcast, is outed as Clayton Sanford.
June 15–17: The Council of Conservative Citizens and the American Freedom Party hold a joint conference, “Nationalist Solutions,” in Montgomery Bell State Park in Burns, Tennessee. About seventy attend. Speakers include League of the South’s Michael Hill, antisemite Kevin MacDonald, and White national doyen David Duke. Protestors booed participants; a few anti-racists rented a canoe, sailed it on a lake on the conference ground, and held up a banner denouncing White nationalism.
June 19: Vasillios Pistolis, a Marine who was revealed by ProPublica to be a former Atomwaffen Division member who participated in the 2017 Charlottesville rally, was court martialed. He was sentenced to twenty-eight days confinement and on July 11 was discharged from the Marines.
June 26: Supreme Court upheld the legality of the third revision of Trump’s Muslim Ban.
June 27: James Alex Fields, Jr. is indicted on thirty counts relating to a murder and numerous injuries at the 2017 Charlottesville rally. These are “one count of a hate crime act resulting in the death of Heather Heyer”; “28 counts of hate crime acts causing bodily injury and involving an attempt to kill”; and “one count of racially motivated violent interference with a federally protected activity…resulting in the death of Heather Heyer, for driving his car into a crowd of protestors on a downtown street in Charlottesville, Virginia.”
June 29: It is reported that Andrew Veprek, a Trump-appointed deputy assistant secretary for refugees and migration—who is close to xenophobe Stephen Miller—objected to language in United Nations documents which denounce racism, intolerance, and xenophobia. Soon after Veprek’s comments, the United States declared it was leaving the UN Human Rights Council.
June 30: Police halt a Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys march in Portland, Oregon after the authorities decided it has become too violent. Patriot Prayer had promoted the rally by saying “stench-covered and liberal-occupied streets of Portland will be CLEANSED,” and bussed in supporters from out of state. One rally speaker said, “For all the illegals trying to jump over our border, we should be smashing their heads into the concrete—handling business, separating them from their kids.”
July
July 3: Daily Stormer editor and neonazi Andrew Anglin, who is in hiding from a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lawsuit, was a no-show to different, libel lawsuit by Muslim comedian Dean Obeidallah. Anglin had falsely accused Obeidallah of masterminding a terrorist attack. The judge ruled against Anglin. In November, Obeidallah’s lawyer attempted to get hold of Anglin’s bank records in order to help calculate damages.
July 3: Alt Right figure Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman is arrested again, this time for an assault in a Texas bar.
July 5: HOPE Not Hate reported that Richard Spencer was deported from Poland during a stop-over on the way to Sweden, where he was to attend the Almedalen forum. In November 2017 Spencer was banned from Europe’s Schengen zone for five years.
July 6: The last charges were dropped in the J20 case. On January 20, 2017, more than 230 members of a protest against Trump‘s inauguration were kettled and arrested; all were charged with felonies. In the end, none of those arrested who went to trial were convicted—although some had already taken plea deals. In May 2018, the prosecution was found to have withheld evidence from the defense after they presented an edited video which originated with Project Veritas, a Far Right group infamous for creating deceptive and misleading videos about political opponents. Litigation over that is ongoing; on October 12, a judge ordered the prosecution to reveal if they had made a deal with Project Veritas to conceal the group’s identity.
July 6: The Action Center on Race & the Economy, in conjunction with the Partnership for Working Families, released the report, “Delivering Hate: How Amazon’s Platforms Are Used to Spread White Supremacy, Anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia and How Amazon Can Stop It.” After pressure from Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), on August 2, Amazon said it would remove some items with visible swastikas. However, many books advocating fascism and White nationalism can still be ordered from the company.
July 8: Six members of Keystone United are arrested for “ethnic intimidation, criminal conspiracy and simple assault.” The charges stem from an attack on a Black man at an Avalon, Pennsylvania bar. Keystone United is a longstanding White nationalist group, originating with the Keystone State Skinheads, and includes two elected GOP committee members in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.
July 10: Dwight and Steven Hammond, members of a politically connected right-wing Oregon ranching family, were pardoned by Trump. They had had been sentenced for arson under an anti-terrorism law, and had been forced to return to prison to complete their mandatory-minimum sentences, despite having been previously released. Their case was the initial catalyst for the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, which was led by members of the Bundy family and lasted from January 2 to February 11, 2016.
July 11: National Socialist Underground (NSU) former member Beate Zschäpe was sentenced to life for her role in ten murders in Germany between 2000 to 2007. The neonazi group targeted and murdered many people of Turkish background. The arrests prompted a public outcry for several reasons. First, police had investigated members of the Turkish community as suspects, refusing to treat the murders as racist crimes; second, law enforcement failed to stop the group despite having at least one informant inside of it; and, third, details of the scandal have led some to conclude that parts of the German intelligence services are colluding with the country’s banned neonazi underground.
July 11: Jason Kessler was the last defendant to sign a consent decree saying he will not organize an armed presence in Charlottesville, Virginia in the future. This settled a lawsuit which named twenty-two groups and individuals who were present on August 12, 2017. These included White nationalists; militias who had claimed to be neutral peacekeepers; and two anti-racist groups that were part of the counter-protest.
July 14: Harold Covington died at age 64. He had been active in White nationalist circles since joining the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP) in the early 1970s. In 1980, he received nearly 43 percent of the vote for attorney general in the North Carolina Republican primary. At the time of his death, Covington was running the Northwest Front, which promotes Pacific Northwest secession in hopes of making it into a white ethnostate.
A number of other older White nationalist and related leaders also died in 2018. James Wickstrom, 75, a 1970s and ‘80s midwest Posse Comitatus leader, died, apparently on March 24. Mark Downey, 63, a Christian Identity preacher, died of cancer on March 26. Gary Lee Yarbrough, 62, a member of the 1980s armed underground group the Order, died in prison on April 2. Ralph Forbes, 78, a member of the original American Nazi Party who later ran for Arkansas governor and received 46 percent of the vote, died on June 10. Barry “The Baron” Mills, 70, a leader of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang, died in a supermax prison on July 8. Last, Robert Faurisson, 89, a former professor who created the intellectual foundations of Holocaust Denial, died in Vichy, France on October 22.
July 16: Sam Brownback, the Trump-appointed Ambassador for International Religious Freedom, spoke with the British envoy and told him that Breitbart wanted to raise the issue of the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson. The latter has became a cause célèbre for the Far Right; “Free Tommy” demonstrations were held in Britain and the United States.
July 17: Erin Willey, a Clark County, Washington deputy sheriff, was fired after photos surfaced of her wearing Proud Boys clothing. The story later took several turns. First, it was reported that the pictures had been provided by a vindictive ex-boyfriend, himself deeply involved in the group, who wanted to ruin Willey’s career. Second, a FOIA request about this meeting contained a passage that said that an FBI agent had characterized the Proud Boys as “extremists” to local law enforcement; a November article about this contributed to a major shakeup in the group.
July 18: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social media network will not ban Holocaust Denial.
July 20: Christopher Cantwell, the “Crying Nazi,” admitted guilt in a plea for assault and battery charges stemming from the Charlottesville rally. He had previously said he was cooperating with the FBI. He received two one-year sentences to run concurrently, with seven months suspended. This freed him from detention, but he was required to leave the state within eight hours and not to return for five years.
July 20: The Daily Beast reported that Steve Bannon and Mischaël Modrikamen, leader of the People’s Party in Belgium, are setting up a new foundation in Europe called “The Movement.” The group has received support from Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini and others. However, major right-wing populist parties such as National Rally (formerly the National Front) in France and the AfD in Germany are skeptical of the group.
July 20: Over a hundred people protest outside Alt Right figure Lauren Southern’s talk in Melbourne, Australia. Australia has been a popular spot for Northern American Alt Right figures to tour; Milo Yiannopoulos made a successful tour in late 2017 and Stefan Molyneux came in 2018.
July 23: It is reported that PayPal had removed accounts belonging to White nationalist media platform Red Ice and Canadian Alt Right figure Faith Goldy.
July 28: At least a dozen members of Patriot Front, a fascist group that splintered out of Vanguard America, attacked an anti-ICE camp in San Antonio, Texas and destroyed some property.
August
August 1: Spokane County, Washington GOP Chair Cecily Wright resigned after hosting White nationalist James Allsup, a member of Identity Evropa, at a conservative event. Wright had previously defended her actions, but now said it was a “serious mistake.”
August 4: This weekend was the largest wave of Far Right rallies across the United States since August 2017.
Following the violence from the last rally in Portland, Oregon in June, Patriot Prayer bussed in supporters from out of state and gathered about 500 people, many in military gear. Counter-protestors draw about 1,000 people, mostly local. The police attacked the counter-protest with flash bang grenades, seriously injuring two. In October, it was made public that, during the demonstration, police had found four Far Right activists with rifles and ammunition on top of a nearby parking garage.
Earlier the same day, Resist Marxism—a group which combines both Patriot movement and Alt Lite elements—held a Providence, Rhode Island rally. It ended after one speaker because their tents were pushed over, exposing sound equipment to the rain. A small “Refuse Alt-Left Fascism” rally was also held in Tucson, Arizona.
August 5: A rally in Berkeley organized by Amber Cummings, one of a tiny number of transgender Alt Lite activists, drew about thirty people and 1,000 counter-protestors.
August 5–6: Leading conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is banned from Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify after he calls for drag queens to be “burned alive.” He is later banned from Vimeo, and in September from Twitter and PayPal.
On December 13, a video circulated online showing Gavin McInnes initiating Alex Jones into the Proud Boys. However, it is unclear if it was an official induction, since Jones could only name four breakfast cereals as McInnes punched him (initiates must recite five). Jones was not the first high-profile figure to join the group; in February, Roger Stone was also recorded doing the pledge.
August 6: Atlanta Antifascists provide evidence that two Spalding County, Georgia deputy sheriffs—Howard Reece Costner and Jesse A. Jones—were promoting neonazism. They were fired the same day.
August 7: Alt Lite media figure Lucien Wintrich, who worked at Gateway Pundit, appeared on a White nationalist podcast hosted by Nicholas Fuentes. The Gateway Pundit later said Wintrich no longer worked there.
August 8: Eric Clanton took a plea deal and received three-years probation for a misdemeanor battery charge related to his part in a fight in Berkeley. There, in April 2017, antifascists clashed with a coalition of White nationalist and Far Right groups; Clanton was caught on camera using a bike lock as a weapon. He had originally faced multiple felony charges.
August 9: Laura Ingraham gives a baldly White nationalist rant on Fox News, saying “Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people” that “most of us don’t like.” Her statement was praised by David Duke. In September, Ingraham tweeted a link to VDARE, a White nationalist anti-immigration website.
August 9: A study by George Hawley found that almost 5.64 percent of non-Hispanic Whites—about 11 million people—have views that align with basic Alt Right beliefs.
August 10: A number of Proud Boy accounts are banned from Twitter, including leader Gavin McInnes. Other Twitter bans in 2018 include the pro-White nationalist media platform Red Elephants in April; and, in September, both Alt Right figure Millennial Woes and Far Right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
August 10: It is reported that the National Policy Institute—Richard Spencer’s think tank—has closed its offices in Alexandria, Virginia.
August 11: On the anniversary of the torchlit march in Charlottesville, anti-racist protests draw hundreds to the small Virginia town.
August 12: Jason Kessler, the organizer of the original Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, attracts about thirty people to a second one. It is held in Washington, DC after he is unable to secure a permit in Charlottesville. Thousands of counter-protestors attend different events in the city.
August 14: Greg Conte, who was close to Richard Spencer, resigns from the Altright Corporation and Washington Summit Publishers. In July he had resigned from the National Policy Institute. Earlier in April, Evan McLaren had also resigned as head of the National Policy Institute.
August 14: The Marine Corps issued an updated order which, among other things, specifies that members are barred from participating in “supremacist” activity.
August 16: Brian Green is fired from his job as deputy at the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana, after saying he was a member of the Proud Boys on social media.
August 17: Darren Beattie, a Trump speechwriter, was fired after it came to light that he spoke at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club Conference, a White nationalist event. The next day Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic advisor, held a birthday party at his residence which was attended by VDARE’s Peter Brimelow.
August 18: A second wave of Far Right rallies happen after the Charlottesville anniversary. Resist Marxism held events under the name “March Against Far-Left Violence” in Tucson, Arizona; Austin, Texas; San Jose, California; and Boston, Massachusetts. Rep. Dan Flynn (R-TX) sponsored the Austin rally. On the same day is a Seattle is a “Liberty or Death” open carry march by Patriot Prayer. Some counter-demonstrators were also armed.
August 19: Joden C. Rocco, a White Alt Right follower, is arrested for murdering Dulane Cameron, Jr., who is Black, at a North Shore, Pennsylvania bar.
August 20: Patriot movement group the Oath Keepers announces it will launch “Spartan Training Groups” to fight “antifa and the far left.”
August 21: Richard Wilson Preston, Jr., received an eight-year sentence (four of which are suspended) for discharging a firearm near a school. This stemmed from an incident at the 2017 Charlottesville demonstration when Preston fired a shot into a crowd of counter-protestors which hit the ground. Preston said he attended the demonstration as a Three Percenter, but he is the leader of a small Klan group, the Confederate White Knights of the KKK.
August 21: After years of protests Jakiw Palij, a 95-year-old Nazi war criminal, is deported from Queens, New York to Germany.
August 22: The League of the South announced that is leaving the Nationalist Front, an umbrella group of White nationalists. Several Nationalist Front groups attended the 2017 Charlottesville rally, including the League of the South, the Traditionalist Worker Party, the National Socialist Movement, and Vanguard America. James Fields, Jr., who drove a car into an anti-racist march after the aborted Charlottesville rally, had marched in uniform with Vanguard America earlier in the day.
August 22: Trump tweeted a false story which claimed there is a “large scale killing” of White South African farmers, and he ordered Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate. The South African government denounced Trump’s statement the next day. Trump’s tweet reflects longstanding White nationalist propaganda that claims there is an ongoing “White genocide,” and white South African farmers are typically trotted out as an example of this. Whites are 8 percent of the South African population but own 72 percent of the farmland.
August 23: Two of DeAndre Harris’s attackers are sentenced. Jacob Scott Goodwin is sentenced to ten years (with two suspended) and Alex Ramos received six years. Two others involved in the attack have ongoing legal proceedings. Daniel Patrick Borden had previously entered an Alford Plea, but his sentencing is delayed until January 2019. Tyler Watkins Davis entered a not guilty plea; his trial is set for February 2019.
August 23: It is reported that an unnamed Georgia Department of Corrections member resigned the prior week, after having been outed by Unicorn Riot as a member of the neonazi group Vanguard America.
August 25: Associated Press reported that University of Arizona professor Aurelio Jose Figueredo had received $458,000 from the Pioneer Fund between 2003 to 2016. Additionally, between 2014 and 2016 Figueredo was the sole recipient of the foundation, receiving $90,000. The fund promotes race-based eugenics.
August 26–27: After a murder at a street festival, two days of anti-immigrant demonstrations breakout in Chemnitz, Germany. The first day draws around 800 and the second over 6,000. Police are overwhelmed as xenophobic mobs attack those who look like immigrants on the streets, chant racist slogans, and sieg heil. Fifteen people are arrested for some of the attacks a couple weeks later.
August 27: At a private meeting, Trump told evangelical leaders that if Republicans lose the midterm elections, their opponents “will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently. And violently. There’s violence. When you look at antifa, and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people.” No such violence occurs after Republicans lose the House in November.
August 27: A Chapel Hill, North Carolina police officer, Cole R. Daniels, was put on paid leave after he was photographed policing a demonstration against a controversial confederate memorial, Silent Sam. The photo showed a tattoo on his arm that is the logo of Three Percenters, a decentralized Patriot movement paramilitary group.
September
September 1: The national convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) in Houston attracted an Islamophobic protest by the Texas Patriot Network and the Soldiers of Odin. The twenty-five person protest drew eighty counter-protestors, a number of whom were open carrying rifles.
September 3: Steve Bannon’s appearance at The New Yorker Festival is cancelled after numerous speakers threaten to withdraw.
September 4: GOP operative Zina Bash made the “OK” symbol behind Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh during confirmation hearings. The use of the hand symbol started as a 4chan prank, and both White nationalists and Alt Lite members use the hand sign as an indicator of their politics.
September 5: Laura Loomer and Alex Jones are disruptive at congressional hearings about the supposed censorship of right-wing media, which are attended by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. Loomer is removed from the audience for her conduct. Jones interferes in a media interview by Senator Marco Rubio in the hallway; the senator tells Jones that he will “take care you myself.” The next day Jones is banned from Twitter.
September 5: Scott Greer, a former columnist and editor at the Daily Caller, is revealed to have written for Richard Spencer’s old website Radix under a pen name. The Daily Caller says they will no longer publish Greer.
September 6: East Ellijay, Georgia police officer Tommy Long is put on paid leave after Atlanta Antifascists made public that he liked social media posts promoting the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (UNSKKKK). He is reinstated after the police department claim they have found no wrongdoing on his part.
September 6: An advance excerpt from Bob Woodward’s then-forthcoming book, Fear: Trump in the White House, includes a passage quoting Trump as saying that denouncing racists after Charlottesville “was the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made.” The next day, former President Barack Obama gave a speech at the University of Illinois, criticizing Trump; he said, “How hard can that be, saying Nazis are bad?”
September 7: On the America First podcast, Nicholas Fuentes and James Allsup encouraged White nationalists to become involved in their local Republican Party. Allsup, a member of Identity Evropa as well as a Whitman County, Washington GOP committee person, says teenagers as young as seventeen “can have a position of leadership in your county party, which doesn’t sound like much, but of course that then translates into positions of power in your state party, and then you become part of the national political stock.”
September 8: The second Mother of All Rallies (MOAR) is held in Washington, DC; it is a crossover point between the Patriot movement and the Alt Lite. Speakers include former sheriff Joe Arpaio and Roger Stone. About 200 people attend, including the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, the Light Foot Militia, the American Guard, and the Proud Boys.
September 9: The Sweden Democrats, a Far Right party that originates in the neonazi milieu, received 17.6 percent of the vote for Swedish parliament. It is not the huge victory predicted, but is up from the 12.9 percent they received in the last election. It was also enough to cause a deadlock for the main parties in the parliament. Two weeks before, on August 25, the neonazi group Nordic Resistance Movement drew 300 to a rally in Stockholm.
September 10: Nine books of Daryush Valizadeh, aka “Roosh V,” are removed from Amazon, although others remain. A leading figure among Men’s Rights Activists and is connected to the Alt Right, Roosh V has been accused of promoting rape. On October 1, he announced that he will not longer update his flagship website, Return of Kings.
September 10: American Front leader Jake Laskey is sentenced to two years for assaulting a fellow gang member. Released in 2015 after serving eleven years for attacking a synagogue and then threatening to kill a witness, Laskey was attempting to revive the moribund group. The American Front was the first U.S. national neonazi skinhead gang.
September 14: Jason Lee Van Dyke, a lawyer who works with the Proud Boys and frequently threatens to sue critics, was arrested for filing a false police report.
September 14–16: The Gateway Pundit and Eagles (a splinter group of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum) co-host the 47th Eagle Council conference in St. Louis, Missouri. It is attended by a wide range of Far Right figures, including retired general Michael Flynn, Islamophobe Pamela Geller, Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Joe Arpaio, and Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe. Alt Lite figures include Mike Cernovich, Stefan Molyneux, Cassandra Fairbanks, and Laura Loomer. Members of European right-wing populist parties in attendance include Petr Bystron (an MP in Germany’s AfD) and Dominik Tarczynski (in Poland’s Law and Justice party).
The American Priority Conference, held in Washington, D.C., on December 6-8, had a similar mainstream conservative/Alt Lite crossover lineup. Cernovich, Loomer, Posobiec, Molyneux, Stone, and Wintrich spoke, but attendance was exceedingly sparse.
September 20: It is revealed that Facebook has a policy to allow “white nationalist”—but not “white supremacist”—content. Experts point out that the former is a euphemism for the latter.
September 22: Joey Gibson held a “Free Alex Jones” rally in Austin, Texas. It draws a small turnout, including Jones himself.
September 23: Matthew Heimbach, the disgraced former leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, is named Director of Community Outreach for the National Socialist Movement, the largest U.S. neonazi party. Five days before, he had entered a guilty plea for assaulting his father-in-law and received a 287-day suspended sentence.
September 27: Three Percenters harassed a gathering of the Democratic Socialists of America in Louisville, Kentucky, allegedly macing both participants and staff of the restaurant where the meeting was held. In July local Three Percenters had also harassed the local anti-ICE occupation in Louisville.
September 27: Reddit created a “quarantine” around several Far Right subreddits. Visitors must read a disclaimer, and the subreddits no longer show up in searches or appear in summaries of popular material.
September 27: Hyatt Hotels CEO Mark Hoplamazian said the hotel chain will not rent space to hate groups after a controversy over the Islamophobic group ACT for America using a Hyatt for a conference.
September 29: The League of the South held a surprise demonstration in Newport, Tennessee after cancelling a rally originally scheduled for the same day at Sycamore Shoals State Park. The police disperse the unpermitted rally by 9AM, which claims to have drawn forty participants. Later that day the group is lampooned on Saturday Night Live.
September 29: Kaitlin Bennett held an armed carry walk at Kent State University in Ohio, which was attended by Patriot movement and Alt Right activists. They were met by a much larger crowd of counter-protestors. Kent State is a particularly sensitive site because in 1970 four unarmed students protesting the invasion of Cambodia were shot and killed by the National Guard on the campus.
October
October 2: Federal prosecutors announced the arrests of four members of the fascist Rise Above Movement. They are charged with travelling across state lines from California to Virginia for the 2017 Charlottesville rally. These four—Benjamin Drake Daley, Thomas Walter Gillen, Michael Paul Miselis, and Cole Evan White—had been previously identified by ProPublica, which broadcast video of them attacking counter-protestors. Miselis had worked with defense contractor Northrop Grumman until he was outed in July.
Four more RAM members are later arrested, including Aaron Eason, Tyler Laube, and Robert Boman. RAM leader Robert Paul Rundo had fled to Mexico, first, and then into Central America. He was arrested and extradited in October. In November, White and Laube entered guilty pleas.
October 4: Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute regained its 501(c)3 non-profit status. It had been stripped last year after failing to file the necessary paperwork.
October 5: In a tweet, Trump claimed protestors against Supreme Court nominee Brett (Michael) Kavanaugh are “Paid for by Soros.” Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani retweets a tweet that says “I think Soros is the anti-Christ! He must go! Freeze his assets & I bet the protests stop.” These are a type of antisemitic conspiracy theory which uses a traditional antisemitic narrative—but names a specific Jewish person or group, as opposed to blaming “the Jews” as a whole.
October 5: Taylor Michael Wilson, a member of the National Socialist Movement who attended the 2017 Charlottesville rally, is sentenced to fourteen years for attempting to hijack an Amtrak train in October 2017. At the time he was tripping on LSD and during his arrest told police, he was “trying to save the train from black people.” Wilson also participated in Traditionalist Worker Party online chats, where said he hoped to make himself a martyr for the movement.
October 6: Another Resist Marxism rally is held in Providence, Rhode Island. It is attended by Patriot Prayer members Joey Gibson and Tiny Toese, as well as the Alt Right group American Guard. Fighting breaks out with counterprotestors, and video appears to show the police standing passively by when the Far Right activists to attack counterprotestors, but actively intervening when the right-wingers start to lose the fight.
October 10: The National Socialist Movement’s “Stop South African White Genocide” rally in Little Rock, Arkansas drew about twenty, many of whom open carry firearms. Heimbach attended and a new logo for the group—a fasces inside of a cog—made its debut. They are met with a slightly larger counterprotest. After the rally, the neonazis burn a wooden Odal rune, instead of the more traditional lighting of a cross or swastika.
October 11–12: The Metropolitan Republican Club on the Upper East Side in Manhattan is vandalized the night before Gavin McInnes is scheduled to speak. At his appearance, McInnes reenacted the murder of a Japanese socialist politician by a fascist. After the event, three counter-protestors are beaten in a gang attack by thirty Proud Boys; they shout homophobic slurs while kicking their victims on the ground. It is caught on film. That night the police only arrest three people, all of whom are counter-protestors. After calls from the governor, mayor, and numerous state and city officials, the NYPD charges ten Proud Boys and affiliates, and issue warrants for three more counter-protestors. After this, national media coverage turns against the Proud Boys.
October 23: Buzzfeed reported that Nina Koupriianova’s divorce papers against Richard Spencer detail her “being hit, being grabbed, being dragged around by her hair, being held down in a manner causing bruising, and being prevented from calling for help.” Koupriianova also claims that Spencer was fond of saying, “The only language women understand is violence.” He denies the allegations.
October 22: Canadian Alt Right figure Faith Goldy, who was fired from Rebel Media after appearing on a Daily Stormer podcast, lost her bid to be Toronto’s mayor with 3.4 percent (over 25,600 votes). She had previously posed with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and a current attorney to Trump, and was endorsed by Rep. Steve King (R-IA).
October 24: Gregory Bush allegedly murders two Black shoppers, Maurice Stallard and Vickie Lee Jones, in a Louisville, Kentucky, grocery store and parking lot. Confronted by an armed white man, Bush reportedly said, “Don’t shoot me and I won’t shoot you” because “whites don’t kill whites.” Just before the attack, Bush had tried to break into a Black church.
October 26: Cesar Sayoc is arrested for sending mail bombs to thirteen prominent targets villainized by the right-wing. They start with one at the upstate New York house of financier George Soros on October 22. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, several Democratic legislators, and CNN were also mailed bombs. Sayoc’s van was covered with pro-Trump stickers, including pictures of left-leaning political figures with rifle-sights on their faces.
October 27: Robert Bowers allegedly entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and murdered eleven worshippers. He was a prolific antisemite on Gab, where his account’s banner featured the neonazi alpha-numeric code “1488.” The massacre is the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history. The victims, aged 54 to 97, were: Joyce Feinberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger.
October 27: Following the Pittsburgh massacre, Gab is banned from various services, including Paypal, Joyent, Stripe, GoDaddy, Medium, and Shopify. On October 28 it is offline; it returns on November 4, and is now hosted by the domain registrar Epik.
October 28: Far Right Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro wins the run-off election for Brazilian president. Bolsonaro had made numerous homophobic, misogynistic, racist, and pro-violence statements in the run-up to the election. In August it has been announced that Steve Bannon was advising him. He takes office on January 1, 2019 and immediately enacts anti-LGBTQ and anti-Indigenous policies.
October 30: An arrest warrant is issued in Montreal, Canada for neonazi Gabriel Sohier Chaput, aka “Zeiger,” for “willful promotion of hatred.” He is an important figure on the Daily Stormer website and edited the 2017 edition of James Mason’s Siege, which is the bible of the Atomwaffen Division.
November
November 2: Gregory Ramos, 15, is alleged to have murdered his mother, Gail Cleavenger, in Debary, Florida after an argument about a school grade. He is arrested the next day. Ramos’s Facebook is reported to have included an Alt Right image that was a Nazi reference.
November 2: Scott Beierle kills two women, Nancy Van Vessem and Maura Binkley, in a Florida yoga studio before killing himself. Beierle was involved in Far Right manosphere circles.
November 6: The federal general election is held. Twenty-four candidates on the Far Right or with ties to the movement ran in state and federal races, although only three—all incumbents—won their races.
Representative Steve King barely won with 50.4 percent (almost 157,700 votes) in Iowa. He had appeared on and promoted White nationalist and antisemitic websites and podcasts, and retweeted White nationalists. Matt Gaetz won a House seat in Florida (with 67.1 percent—almost 216,200 votes) despite inviting a Alt Right Holocaust Denier to the State of the Union address. Matt Shea, a Washington state senator, also won re-election to the Washington state house, despite his well-documented militia and theocratic ties, including justifying murdering political opponents.
Those who lost included longtime neonazi Art Jones, who received a disturbingly high 26.2 percent (almost 57,900 votes) in his race to be an Illinois U.S. Representative. Ryan Bundy, who was took party in armed Patriot movement actions in 2014 and 2016, received 1.4 percent (almost 13,900 votes) as an independent candidate for Nevada governor. Corey Stewart, who supported antisemites and White nationalists, took 41 percent (over 1.3 million votes) his race to be a Senator from Virginia. Kris Kobach, seeking to be the Kansas governor, was shadowed by Far Right associations, but still received 43.3 percent (443,300 votes). And Russell took 37 percent (almost 8,600 votes) in his North Carolina state representative race, despite saying that God is a “white supremacist” and Jews are “satanic.”
For a detailed analysis of candidates and election results, see the Spencer Sunshine’s “The U.S. Far Right’s 2018 Election Results: A Blind-Alley for the Alt Right”
November 7: Smash Racism DC held a protest outside of FOX News host Tucker Carlson’s suburban home. Carlson has repeatedly promoted White nationalist views and talking points. A storm of media outrage follows the event, briefly reviving “anti-antifa” hysteria.
November 9: PayPal terminated the accounts of the Proud Boys and Gavin McInnes, as well as three antifascist groups. The service says all the accounts either promoted “hate” or “violence.” Tommy Robinson had been banned from the service earlier in the week.
November 9: Lawyers representing Eugene Antifa appeared in court to quash a SLAPP suit. A libel lawsuit was brought by Bethany Sherman, who had owned a Eugene, Oregon marijuana testing company until the antifa group revealed she was active in White nationalist circles, after which her business melted down. If the lawsuit had been allowed to proceed ahead, it would have set a precedent by making it easier to identify doxxers. On November 30 the judge tossed the suit.
November 11: The Polish independence day march, which this year marked the country’s hundredth anniversary, drew over 200,000 people. It featured President Andrzej Duda, and saw the country’s army marching along fascist groups like the National Radical Camp and representatives from Forza Nuova, an Italian party.
November 14: A judge ruled that promoting online harassment against religious minorities is not a protected First Amendment activity, and so the SPLC’s lawsuit against neonazi Andrew Anglin can proceed ahead.
November 14: Trump threatened antifa activists in a Daily Caller interview. He says, “These people, like the antifa—they better hope that the opposition to antifa decides not to mobilize. Because if they do, they’re much tougher. Much stronger. Potentially much more violent… and antifa’s going to be in big trouble. … But so far they haven’t done that and that’s a good thing.”
On September 21 he had made similar comments at a Missouri rally, saying “The Democrat [sic] party is held hostage by far-left activists, by angry mobs—antifa—by deep-state radicals. …. You ever seen what happens when they take the masks off antifa? You have guys that look like they live with mom and dad in the basement. They live in the basement of mom and dads’ home. … I would never suggest this, but I’ll tell you—they’re so lucky that we’re peaceful.”
November 15: Alt Right figure Hank Yoo, who called himself the “Asian Nazi,” is convicted of firearms charges related to illegal possession of weapons and making false statements. Yoo, a South Korean citizen, frequently used Nazi and Confederate symbols in his YouTube videos.
November 15: Thirty-nine members of two White Supremacist drug gangs, the Unforgiven and the Aryan Brotherhood, were arrested on drug-trafficking charges. A rocket launcher is also seized in the raids. On November 19, forty-three members of the Ghost Face Gangsters, a similar gang, are also arrested on drug and weapons charges. All three were established as prison gangs but now have members on the outside.
November 16: Steve Bannon spoke at the prestigious Oxford Union in Britain amid protests. At the talk he said, “Nazis and the KKK have no place in our society, they should’ve never been allowed to march in Charlottesville. The same can be said about Antifa and BLM—they shouldn’t be allowed to do what they are doing.” The same day Reuters reported that Bannon told private broadcaster RTL that next year he will advise Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán.
November 17: The Facebook page “Sports Beer & Politics II,” which is alleged to be run by members of the Proud Boys, held a “We the People” rally in Philadelphia. Joined by Three Percenters, it drew approximately thirty people. Across the street 1,000 counterprotesters took part in the #PushBack counter-protest. The Far Right rally’s organizer later said he is not planning to hold rallies in the near future.
November 17: Patriot Prayer, joined by members of the Patriot movement and the Proud Boys, held a #HimToo rally in Portland. They drew forty people who said they were protesting the excesses of the #MeToo movement and “false rape accusations.” A “Survivors are Everywhere” counter-protest drew 350 people.
November 17: Les gilets jaunes (“The Yellow Vests”) protest movement starts in France. Originally over fuel prices, its demands expand, and demonstrations continue through the end of the year. One list of demands includes anti-refugee planks, and Far Right groups become involved as one element in the large and amorphous movement.
November 18: Five fascists, wearing masks bearing the symbols of two neonazi groups (Patriot Front and Vanguard America), entered the Boston Anarchist Book Fair but were quickly expelled. In 2017, members of Patriot Front had attempted to enter the Houston Anarchist Book Fair.
November 19: The Guardian reported that the FBI considers the Proud Boys an extremist group. On November 21, founder Gavin McInnes declares that he is “officially disassociating myself” from the group, as does Milo Yiannopoulos. Initially, two lawyers, Augustus Invictus and Jason Lee Van Dyke, both claim to be the new leader. Van Dyke emerges the victor on November 24, but by accident reveals the names of the “Elders” of the Proud Boys, and on November 29 the group announces he has left the organization. (On December 21 an arrest warrant is issued for him after he fails to show up in court in relation to an alleged death threat.) Enrique Tarrio succeeds him as the Proud Boys leader. On December 4, a FBI agent said the agency did not designate the Proud Boys as an extremist group—but the damage is done.
November 21: Alt Lite figure Laura Loomer is suspended from Twitter on November 21 for tweeting Islamophobic abuse at Ilhan Omar, who had been elected a U.S. Representative in Minnesota. On November 29, Loomer handcuffed herself to the Twitter’s New York City headquarters to protest her suspension.
November 25: U.S. federal agents fire tear gas canisters over the border into Tijuana, Mexico. Their targets are Central American refugees who had walked through Mexico to the U.S. border to apply for asylum.
November 29: The murder trial for James Alex Fields, Jr. starts. Fields drove his car into an anti-racist march in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 after the aborted Unite the Right rally. Heather Heyer died and dozens were injured. Fields claims he is not guilty and acted in self-defense. On December 7, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and nine other charges, and on December 11 recommended a life sentence; a judge will decide a final sentence in March 2019. Fields still faces federal hate crime charges; if convicted of these, he could be sentenced to death.
November 29: Australia’s ABC News reports that Gavin McInnes is denied a visa to Australia after “he was judged to be of bad character” by authorities. On December 3 it was reported that he had joined Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media, but on December 8 the company said he was no longer with them. McInnes had planned to do his Australian speaking tour with Tommy Robinson. It was reported on November 12 that he, in turn, was not allowed to enter the United States to meet Republicans in Congress.
Another planned Australian tour, by Milo Yiannopoulos in December 2018, was also cancelled. After news broke that Yiannopoulos was reportedly $2 million in debt, he said the number was twice as much. He attempted to raise funds on Patreon, but on December 5 was removed from the platform. In 2018 the site had also removed the accounts of Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin), James Allsup (of Identity Evropa), and BitChute (a Far Right version of YouTube). On December 17, Jordan Peterson announced he is leaving Patreon in protest, and is helping start an alternative platform.
December
December 1: The “Liberty or Death 2: Rally Against Left-wing Media Bias” rally is held in Seattle, Washington; Patriot Prayer and Three Percenters attend. Speakers include Shawna Cox, who was present at armed conflicts between law enforcement and Patriot movement activists at both the Bundy Ranch in 2014 and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016.
December 2: It is reported that Matthew Heimbach is expelled from the National Socialist Movement for “Strausserism [sic] and Communism.” Strasserism is an anti-capitalist form of Nazism.
December 5: The Washington Post reported that after the 2017 Charlottesville clash, the chief diversity officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Georgia Coffey, was directed by her superiors not to condemn White nationalism.
December 8: Nine members of the Hammerskins are arrested for a racial attack at a bar in Lynnwood, Washington. The Hammerskins are the most violent and longstanding U.S. neonazi skinhead gang. The nine were in town for a “Martyr’s Day” memorial for The Order on Whidbey Island. There, in 1984, The Order’s Robert Mathews had a shootout with the police, after which the house he was in burned down; his charred body was found in the rubble.
December 9: YouTube’s most popular star, Felix Kjellberg a.k.a. PewDiePie—who has 75 million subscribers—promoted an antisemitic and racist video channel. He had previously been criticized for promoting similar views; for example, he called an opponent a “fucking n****r” while livestreaming a video game.
December 10: Authorities announce that Elizabeth Lecron, one of only four people who have corresponded with imprisoned racist mass murderer Dylann Roof, was arrested for plotting an “upscale mass murder” at a Toledo, Ohio bar. Her boyfriend, Vincent Armstrong, was arrested two days later for lying to the FBI. Separately, on December 7 neonazi Dakota Reed was also arrested in Lake Forest Park, Washington for saying he planned on “pulling a Dylan Roof” by attacking a school or synagogue.
December 13: Novelist Alice Walker endorsed antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke in the New York Times Book Review.
December 17: Infamous Eugene, Oregon neonazi Jimmy “Genocide” Marr is hospitalized after an alleged fight in Corvallis, Oregon. Marr was apparently there to see another White nationalist, Andrew Oswalt, who was serving a jail sentence for intimidation. The graduate student had placed racist stickers on the cars of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) members.
December 17: Roger Stone settled a defamation suit for slandering businessman Guo Wengui, who Stone had said he was a “turncoat criminal who is convicted of crimes here and in China” on Infowars. Stone agreed to takes ads out in national newspapers apologizing to Guo.
December 18: The last two sentences for six members of the British neonazi group National Action are passed. National Action, which was tied U.S. neonazi groups, was the first fascist group banned in the UK since World War II. The sentences ranged from five to six years.