In 2017, an anti-Muslim nonprofit crowd-sourced the organization of a nationwide series of rallies. Many of the people who stepped up to help turned out to be well known white supremacists. Sources:https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/05/portland_suspect_in_2_slayings.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/27/portland-double-murder-white-supremacist-muslim-hate-speechhttps://islamophobia.org/special-reports/the-hate-that-act-for-america-wrought/https://islamophobia.org/islamophobic-organizations/act-for-america/ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidnoriega/meet-the-charming-terrifying-face-of-the-anti-islam-lobby https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/americas-most-anti-muslim-activist-is-welcome-at-the-white-house/520323/https://politicalresearch.org/2018/03/01/profile-on-the-right-act-for-americahttps://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08gabriel.html?pagewanted=allhttps://www.huffpost.com/entry/maher-season-premiere-inc_b_168972https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iobsessioni-stars-have-le_b_126693 https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/movie-to-marshal-support-for-college-israel-advocacy/https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/ed-gillespie-declines-to-denounce-endorsement-from-anti-muslim-activist/2017/06/09/8a16a45c-4d28-11e7-bc1b-fddbd8359dee_story.html https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/03/gay-trumper-almost-got-hired-by-the-gop-but-it-got-called-off-what-happened/https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-trimet-stabbing-trial-micah-fletcher-survivor-testifies/https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-prosecutors-max-stabbing-trial-call-eyewitnesses-killings/https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/2017/taliesin-namkai-meche-2016.htmlhttps://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-target-of-a-hate-crime-she-was-labeled-as-a-witness/ Isabelle Canaan, In Bad Faith: Anti-Sharia Laws, the Constitution, and the Limits of Religious Freedom, 21 U. Md. L.J. Race Relig. Gender & Class 248 (2021). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/rrgc/vol21/iss2/3https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/is-act-for-america-really-a-grassroots-organization/https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_mrpetehegseth.pdf https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-capitol-brawl-white-nationalist-sentenced-20190703-story.htmlhttps://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/05/nathan-damigo-punching-woman-berkeley-white-nationalism/https://unicornriot.ninja/2017/neo-nazi-william-planer-arrested-vandalizing-synagogue/https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2017/06/10/emotions-run-high-march-against-sharia/386607001/https://accollective.noblogs.org/post/2021/11/10/allison-richard-jack-peirce-iv/https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/family-research-councils-anti-splc-campaign-promoting-anti-semitic-publication/https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/neo-nazi-billy-roper-organizing-act-americas-march-against-sharia-arkansas/ https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/following-trump-appointments-anti-muslim-act-america-may-see-growing-influence/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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The summer of 2017 was a hot one.
The weather was hot, I'm sure.
I can barely remember now.
In May, the editor of the Nazi website The Daily Stormer declared that it would be the summer of hate.
A month later, another article on the site ended with a triumphant prediction.
Expect a hot summer, and I'm not talking about the thermometer.
The political temperature was rising rapidly.
It was the first summer of Donald Trump's first term as president.
And all over the country, right-wing extremists of all stripes were feeling bold.
The summer of hate culminated in the murder of Heather Heyer here in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017. Perhaps because that day ended in a hate crime murder, the Unite the Right rally is often the only one of the dozens of violent, hate-filled rallies that summer that most people still remember.
But they were happening all over the country in the months leading up to Unite the Right.
In Portland and Seattle, Patriot Prayer rallied for Trump, for free speech, and against communism.
In Berkeley, repeated rallies ostensibly for Trump or the concept of free speech We're just a thin excuse for fascists spoiling for a fight.
Almost any given weekend that summer, somewhere in the country, there was a contingent of armed militiamen ambling around a public park, acting as self-appointed protest security.
Some of these rallies drew crowds of thousands and made the national news.
Some were just a few dozen bigots standing on a street corner, drawing only the momentary notice of passing motorists.
And on one morning early that summer, the same protests took place simultaneously in over two dozen cities across the country.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This episode isn't actually about a guy.
Not just one guy, anyway.
If you're a regular listener, you've probably already figured out that it is rarely actually even about one guy at all.
But typically an episode revolves loosely around one weird little guy, using him as an entry point to explore the world he existed in.
But last week's episode left me with some thoughts I was having trouble putting to bed.
The ordinary men who cross paths with our weird little guys.
Men who may be on their own path toward extremism or just their own self-destruction.
And it also got me thinking about the nature of a crowd.
The way we can lose ourselves within them.
The way they can give us permission to act in ways we otherwise would not.
The crowd grants the individual plausible deniability.
More power than it would have had without them.
And I've been thinking too about the current state of affairs.
The ways in which our political discourse has changed over the last decade.
How these once fringe ideas have been mainstreamed.
Things that were once unthinkable are happening every day now.
How did we get to the place we are now?
Where people who seem so normal...
Have the same kinds of ideas that just a few years ago were relegated to the pages of Stormfront and 4chan.
And as I was ruminating on all of this, I thought of a picture.
One in particular, saved years ago in one of my hundreds of folders of half-finished ideas about a guy.
It's a picture that was taken on the morning of June 10th, 2017, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
The photo shows a handful of members of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America on their way to the steps of the Pennsylvania Capitol building for an event billed as the March Against Sharia, a protest against the imaginary threat of a Muslim theocracy in America.
These members of Vanguard America all have their faces covered, either with black bandanas or the half-faced skull mask that was favored by a certain flavor of neo-Nazi.
But the man at the head of their tiny march is barefaced, proudly leading this little band of Nazis down the street.
Vanguard America would later evolve into Patriot Front, a white supremacist organization led by Thomas Rousseau.
And today, when Patriot Front takes to the streets, its members, too, all cover their faces.
Except the leader.
As their public face, Rousseau marches unmasked.
So looking at this photo of these Vanguard America members, perhaps this barefaced man is their leader.
But I know he isn't.
Maybe he's so proud of being a Nazi that he made the choice to show his face.
But the truth is the exact opposite.
By today's standards, that man, Benjamin Hornberger, is just a pretty typical MAGA Republican.
He wasn't, and...
Isn't, as far as I can tell, a Nazi at all?
Later that same evening, one of the men who had marched behind him posted in a Discord server where the Unite the Right rally was being planned, writing, We got a normie to lead our march away from the Sharia event.
I don't think he fully knows what he got himself into.
I told him after, You know you just led a march of a bunch of Nazis.
And the poster notes that the man they'd talked into joining them hadn't showed up with any group, and he didn't even seem to hate Jewish people.
Another user chimed in, saying, When the Jews call him a Nazi anyway, it'll red-pill him a little.
To which the original poster agreed, writing, That's exactly what we were saying.
You're on our side now, Goy, whether you like it or not.
There in the Nazi discord, they were all in agreement.
These more mainstream conservative rallies were a great place to network and recruit, of course, but also a valuable opportunity to shape the discourse and push people they call normies further to the right.
They believed that the average white Republican man would be radicalized by the experience of being called a bigot, and instead of engaging in any self-reflection on why they were shoulder-to-shoulder with Nazis at a rally for bigots, They would instead double down and come to love being a bigot.
This is, unfortunately, not an uncommon path to radicalization.
But let's back up for a second.
What on earth was the march against Sharia?
The rallies were organized by a non-profit organization called Act for America.
Its founder, Brigitte Gabriel, started a group called American Congress for Truth.
In the months after 9-11.
And in 2007, Act for America was spun off as the organization's lobbying and activist arm.
The policy statement on their website today boasts that they are, quote, the nation's premier grassroots movement dedicated to preserving America's culture, sovereignty, and security.
Groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Southern Poverty Law Center Consider Act for America one of the nation's largest anti-Muslim hate groups.
In February of 2016, Brigitte Gabriel had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Act for America's Facebook page posted a photo of the meeting.
In a room with entirely too much gold-painted woodwork, there's Trump, wearing a pale pink tie, and he has one arm around Gabriel, and he's giving a thumbs-up with his other hand.
According to the caption, Gabriel was there to give him a national security briefing.
Not long after their meeting, Trump announced that he'd chosen Michael Flynn, an Act for America board member, to be his campaign's national security advisor.
At Act's annual conference that year, Flynn gave a speech in which he called Islam a malignant cancer.
Over the years, Brigitte Gabriel has said that Muslims are infiltrating the government to destroy America, that people should call the FBI to report the construction of mosques, that Islam is a cancer infecting the world, and that Islam is a radical ideology, not a religion at all, and thus should not be afforded the protection of the First Amendment.
In the wave of Islamophobia that followed 9-11, she somehow managed to situate herself as some kind of expert.
On Islamic extremism.
In 2006, she published her first book, Because They Hate.
The book is a propagandistic memoir of sorts about her childhood as a Christian in Lebanon.
The book has been described by Georgetown University history professor Ivan Haddad as not historically accurate as an account of the Lebanese Civil War.
In his book, The Islamophobia Industry, Nathan Lean describes Gabriel's origin story as, quote, tendentious, if not outright deceitful.
But somehow, in 2007, she was invited to give a talk about the book at the U.S. military's Joint Forces Staff College.
During the Q&A portion, a man in an Air Force uniform stood and read several passages from the book in which Gabriel describes Islam as an inherently violent and fanatical religion.
And then he asked a question.
Should we resist Muslims who want to seek political office in this nation?
What a great question.
Absolutely.
If a Muslim who is a practicing Muslim, who believes the word of the Quran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day, this practicing Muslim who believes in the teachings of the Quran cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.
Her answer went on for nearly five minutes.
And she's gish-galloping through unrelated points and misinterpretations of the Quran.
She says Muslims are all liars, they're all killers, that they can't be trusted to tell the truth, let alone uphold an oath of office.
And she rounds out the answer by reiterating that no Muslim can be trusted to be loyal to the United States.
And then she calls on the next audience member with a question.
A man stands.
He's a United States Army officer with 19 years of service, and he's also a practicing Muslim.
He's calm.
His face is neutral, as if he had not just sat through a torrent of lies attacking his very existence.
But he probably knew that he had to be, lest he be seen as the untrustworthy, volatile, violent extremist she already believes all Muslims are.
And he asks, Gabriel interrupts him, asking what Hasbara Fellowship is, as if she's never heard of it, and then denies having any connection to the organization.
The Hasbara Fellowship is an organization co-founded by Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and they train American college students to be pro-Israel activists.
And contrary to her sharp denial, she had in fact been listed on the organization's website as a member of their Speakers Bureau.
All that to say, Brigitte Gabriel is a bigot and a liar.
But she is one who has successfully talked her way into a lot of rooms with a lot of powerful people and managed for the most part to maintain a veneer of legitimacy and respectability while earning a comfortable living peddling hate.
And by 2017, Act for America was a decade old.
She had the ear of the sitting president, Securing a meeting with Trump at the White House in March of 2017. Act for America's March Against Sharia rallies don't show up on their website anymore, unsurprisingly.
The earliest reference to the rallies I could find was around mid-April, when Facebook event pages started popping up for events in nearly 30 cities.
In her thesis for a master's at Oxford, Isabel Kanin studied the way Act for America organizes.
Regrettably, that thesis appears to be unpublished, so I couldn't read it.
But in a 2018 interview about her research, Kanan says those March Against Sharia events were part of an attempt to maintain the facade of being a true grassroots organization, rather than what they truly are, which is a lobbying group.
The rallies were an effort to, quote, create the perception that the majority shares its warped opinion, Kanan wrote.
Both Canaan and the Southern Poverty Law Center have speculated that Act for America is not being honest about the size of the organization, providing artificially inflated numbers of active chapters and the grassroots organizers in them.
In 2017, Act for America was claiming to have over a thousand chapters nationwide, and the website displayed a map showing pins with locations for 500 chapters.
In 2018, the SPLC was only able to confirm the existence of 47 chapters.
In her research, Kanan attempted to contact 25 chapters and was only able to confirm the existence of six.
An Ohio-based member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told Kanan that at least one of the alleged ACT chapters in Ohio was just two very active individuals.
And it's not just progressive watchdogs and academics calling ACT's numbers into question.
Anti-Islam activist Dave Gaubats had worked for Brigitte Gabriel for three years when the two had a falling out in 2017. He wrote in a blog post that March that there had only been 50 participants in that month's chapter leader's call.
And that might explain why the rallies went the way that they did.
You see...
It's very hard to organize grassroots rallies without actual grassroots activists.
They wanted to put on a big show, but the average ACT member is, according to Canaan, a white evangelical retiree whose activism is mainly confined to signing up for the emails and occasionally making a donation.
That demographic is not actually very likely to attend a protest, let alone organize one.
ACT members donate money, which is used for lobbying efforts.
But most members aren't engaged in any way with the organization.
In order to maintain their brand and keep those donations coming and capitalize on the momentum of those early months of the Trump presidency, they needed to project the image of being a true grassroots organization, one with active and engaged members.
So they faked it.
In late spring 2017, Act for America hired Scott Pressler to coordinate the events.
Pressler was a rising star in conservative activism, having founded Gays for Trump in 2016. And now he had less than two months to figure out how to put on 28 simultaneous rallies all over the country.
He couldn't exactly just reach out to local Act chapter leaders because those didn't really exist in most cases.
The organization had never bothered to cultivate a group of motivated, engaged local organizers.
So it appears that what he did was just tweet out that they needed interested volunteers to put on rallies in their own towns.
And you'll never guess who stepped up.
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I suspect you all guessed correctly during the break.
It was white supremacists.
When Act for America needed volunteers to handle the work of putting on their local march against Sharia, a lot of the active, engaged bigots who knew how to handle that work were not members of Act for America.
But they were members of other groups.
Groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and Identity Europa.
Nazis didn't just attend these events.
They didn't happen upon them.
They organized them.
And they served as the headline speakers.
But there is another story to tell.
Because no one was really talking about these events at all until something terrible happened.
Scott Pressler had dutifully created Facebook event pages for the rallies in at least 26 cities, with the earliest posts I can find on pages that still exist showing that he probably started working on that at the end of April.
But there wasn't a lot of traction.
In April and most of May, there's hardly any news coverage in any of those cities about these upcoming events.
It's possible people were posting about it on social media, but those posts or accounts just don't exist anymore.
But for a big nationwide event, there just isn't a lot of evidence that people were talking about it.
No, no one was talking about the March against Sharia.
Until the last few days of May 2017, when Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler made a public plea for the March Against Syria in Portland to be cancelled.
On May 26, 2017, two black teenagers were riding the Max Light Rail train in Portland, Oregon.
It was a Friday afternoon, and the pair were headed to the mall after school.
They were normal, happy teenagers, having a normal, fun afternoon.
One of the girls, a Muslim immigrant from Somalia, was wearing her hijab.
She would later say, it was like our faces were a trigger.
Because when they got on the train and Jeremy Christian saw those two girls, he immediately locked on to them, shouting things like, fuck Muslims and go back to Saudi Arabia.
People were staring.
He was making a scene.
And when he stood up and started to move toward the girls, Taliesin Namkai Meche was the first to intervene, moving towards Christian and getting out his phone to record what was happening.
When Christian turned his attention toward this first Good Samaritan, another man on the train could see that things were about to get violent.
Micah Fletcher would later testify that he could tell Taliesin had never been in a fight before.
And while Fletcher is far smaller in stature than either of those men, I'm not sure if Micah Fletcher recognized Jeremy Christian in that moment, or if he didn't realize until later that this wasn't the first time he had tried to de-escalate a situation caused by this particular man shouting racial slurs in public.
Just a month earlier at a rally put on by the far-right group Patriot Prayer, Jeremy Christian arrived wrapped in a Revolutionary War-era flag, carrying a baseball bat.
In a Wendy's parking lot, a crowd had formed around Christian as he attempted to provoke counter-protesters into a physical fight.
Micah Fletcher was there, dressed as a jester, trying to diffuse the tense situation by distracting the crowd with a pretty competent juggling routine.
He would later testify about that day, saying, It's just less scary for other people.
If I'm able to show up in a way people would laugh at, instead of looking intimidating, I would prefer it.
But on May 26th, on the train, there was no chance that Whimsy would win the day.
Micah Fletcher moved towards this brewing confrontation, and he shouted at Jeremy Christian that you can't talk to kids like that, and you need to get off this train.
Christian already had his knife in his hand, but...
No one saw it.
Suddenly, both Micah and Taliesian had been stabbed in the neck.
A third man, Ricky Best, a retired Army veteran and father of four who was on his way home from work, moved to intervene, and he too was stabbed in the neck.
The girls fled the train, terrified that he would kill them now that the men who tried to protect them were bleeding out before their eyes.
Ricky John Best and Taliesin Namkai Meche were murdered.
Micah Fletcher survived.
As Taliesin collapsed on the floor of the train, a woman knelt next to him.
She took off her own shirt, depressed to his wound, telling him, you're not alone.
We're here.
What you did was total kindness.
You're such a beautiful man.
I'm sorry the world is so cruel.
She held her shirt to his neck, there on the floor of the train, praying over him and trying to keep him calm.
He said his last words to that gentle stranger.
Tell everyone on this train, I love them.
Micah Fletcher stumbled out of the train at the next stop.
collapsing on the platform in front of a man waiting for the train with his family.
That man, an army veteran, used what he had at his disposal to try to stop the bleeding.
A child's jacket and the pink baby blanket from his daughter's stroller.
On a Friday afternoon, just before Ramadan, an entire train full of people watched a self-proclaimed Nazi stab three men who were brave enough to defend two children.
From a racist, Islamophobic tirade.
And, in just two weeks, the March Against Sharia promised to bring anti-Muslim activists to Portland.
On Monday, May 29th, it was national news that Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler did not want the March Against Sharia in Portland.
Permits for events in the area where the rally was set to be held are not actually issued by the city of Portland.
But by the federal government, through the General Services Administration.
And they declined to pull the permit.
But Act for America voluntarily cancelled the Portland event anyway, moving it to Seattle instead.
And then, all of a sudden, people were talking about the march against Sharia.
The very next day, on May 30th, in a Discord server for members of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America, Thomas Rousseau posted a link, to Act for America's website for the rallies, writing, We keep saying we need to stand up against Islam.
Well, here's your chance to get started.
Barely a minute later, another user had copied and pasted that exact message into a Discord server for the neo-Nazi group, the Traditionalist Worker Party.
That same day, May 30th, Act for America's rally coordinator, Scott Pressler, heard from an excited pair of new volunteers.
Billy and Tina Roper, On June 1st, Pressler created a Facebook event for a march against Sharia in Batesville, Arkansas, which would be organized and hosted by Billy Roper.
Billy Roper is a Nazi.
I don't mean that in like a colloquial, casual, careless sort of sense.
He is a Nazi, an out-and-out, dyed-in-the-wool hater.
His name might sound familiar if you listen to every episode of the show.
He gave a speech at Arian Fest 2004 in Phoenix, a few weeks before Dennis Mahon built that bomb and sent it to the Diversity Office in Scottsdale.
Billy Roper was raised by a second-generation Klansman, and he turned to neo-Nazi organizing as a young man, joining the Council of Conservative Citizens in his 20s and quickly rising through the ranks as a regional leader in National Alliance.
Shortly before the death of National Alliance founder William Luther Pierce, Robert had moved to the Nazi group's compound in West Virginia to serve as deputy membership coordinator.
He was pushed out of National Alliance after Pierce died, and he's been trying to lead his own wing of the movement for the last 20 years.
He led a group called White Revolution for a while, he had the Shield Wall Network, and these days he's trying to start his own ethnostate called Ozarkia.
Billy will get his own episodes, eventually.
But the point is, Scott Pressler obviously did not Google Billy Roper.
This wasn't some obscure figure or a man who did his Nazi organizing under a pseudonym.
This was page one Google results territory.
I'm pretty sure that one of the first things he would have found, had he looked, were news stories about the time Billy Roper emailed the entire membership list at National Alliance.
About how much he was enjoying 9-11.
On 9-11, like before noon.
He wrote, The enemy of our enemy is, for now at least, our friends.
We may not want them marrying our daughters, just as they would not want us marrying theirs.
We may not want them in our society, just as they would not want us in theirs.
But anyone who is willing to drive a plane into a building to kill Jews is alright with me.
I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude.
And that was widely reported.
That would have come up.
There's no indication that any vetting of any kind was done here.
Scott Pressler was just taking all comers, setting up Facebook event pages with Act for America's official endorsement on them in any city where someone offered to put on an event.
On June 4th, Billy Roper posted on the Stormfront that he was organizing the event and would be giving a speech.
It wasn't until June 6th, though, when he published an episode of his podcast advertising the event, that it was made perfectly clear that he wasn't just attaching his name to this event for attention.
He wasn't riding ACT's coattails.
He was working with and had the approval of ACT for America.
And on the podcast, Roper described participating in a conference call with other event organizers, a call that was hosted by Act for America.
And Roper doesn't name names, but he does hint that he wasn't the only extremist on the call.
Within hours of that episode appearing online, the Southern Poverty Law Center was reporting that Act for America had given Billy Roper their blessing.
Email exchanges later published by Roper show that Pressler must have seen this news pretty quickly.
Because by late afternoon that very day, he wrote the Ropers an email with the subject line, Act for America marches, urgent.
And the body reads only, Billy, please give me a call.
Act for America quietly removed the listing for the Batesville rally from their website that night.
Now, it kind of sounds like this is a point in their favor, right?
Sure, they dropped the ball when it came to vetting, but when they found out they were working with a Nazi, they dropped him.
That's got to count for something, right?
But far from being exonerative, I think it only underscores what's going on here.
They don't mind working with extremists.
They just don't want to be publicly humiliated.
Earlier in 2017, Act for America joined forces with a few dozen other SPLC-designated hate groups to launch a site called SPLC Exposed, dedicated to attacking the credibility of the people who were drawing attention to their hateful organizations.
So they couldn't give the SPLC an easy win here by refusing to back down from working with a man whose literal occupation And the timeline of that day makes it very clear that someone at Act for America was just sitting at a computer refreshing the SPLC's website all day to see if they were talking about them.
Because they saw that article about Billy Roper instantly.
But the SPLC was only able to report that there was a Nazi organizing one of these Act for America events.
Because Billy Roper ran his mouth.
It's impossible to say which of the slew of white supremacist speakers and organizers that ACT might have been willing to cut ties with if it had been reported ahead of time.
But I can tell you that they never disavowed any of them afterwards.
Some of the white supremacists who spoke at those events were lesser-known figures, ones who may have been able to slip through a vetting process, had there been one.
But some of these people, some of these guys they could have Googled.
Fucking fantastic, man.
Yeah, so there was these Sharia law protests.
I'm surprised.
I don't know what happened that I didn't catch on to these things earlier.
I read about this on Saturday, and I was like, oh, I should have gone to one of these things.
What's the story here?
Yeah, Act for America.
It's Bridget Gabriel's thing.
They put on a nationwide anti-Sharia protest called March Against Sharia.
So it happened in 23 different cities all over the country.
I was one of the organizers for the Orlando event because Orlando is my hometown.
All right, fantastic.
So we did it on Saturday, and everybody did it across the country.
Yeah, you got together with what?
I think you said you were with Identity Europa?
Yeah, a lot of groups came out.
Identity Europa was one of them.
They unfurled their banner for my speech, specifically.
Now there's a chance you might recognize those voices.
They are two of the more uniquely annoying accents of the 2017-era white nationalist figures.
And that is crying Nazi Chris Cantwell with the Long Island accent.
And the one faking a Southern accent is white nationalist attorney Augustus Sol Invictus.
And that's from an episode of Christopher Cantwell's podcast two days after those rallies.
Invictus organized and headlined the Orlando March Against Sharia, and he posed for photos with an Identity Europa banner held by members of that now-defunct white nationalist organization.
Augustus Invictus had a very busy summer in 2017. He spoke at alt-right rallies all over the country for months.
In May, he told a crowd in Boston that a new civil war was upon them.
Two weeks later, at a pro-Confederate statue rally he organized in Orlando, he blamed Islam for mass shootings and ranted about white genocide.
He gave speeches in Chapel Hill, Washington, D.C., Austin, and Huntington Beach.
He crisscrossed the country that summer.
But wherever he went, the message was the same.
Now is the time for violence.
No one's going to fix this for you.
That's why it doesn't matter if we are armed or even if our security details are armed.
What matters is that you are armed and you are prepared for war and you are prepared to carry on the heritage of your forefathers.
And by June, he was on board as an organizer for the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August.
After his speech at the March Against Sharia, he led a dozen members of Identity Europa.
In chants of, one people, one nation, end immigration.
And that's a chant they would use again in August, as they march through the grounds of the University of Virginia with their torches.
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And around the same time that morning that Augustus Invictus was straining to be heard over the passing cars in Orlando, the march against Sharia in New York was in full swing, too.
The hosts of Fox and Friends scoffed at the way the mainstream media had characterized the event as anti-Muslim, something they thought was very unfair.
So they'd send a correspondent out into the streets to get the real story.
It's not about being against Muslims.
It's just being against the ideology of, I guess, murdering homosexuals and treating women as a second class, maybe under a second class citizen, just dehumanizing.
Over in Britain, they were just frogs boiling in water, and now they're dead.
Critics will say that you're anti-Muslim.
Are you anti-Muslim?
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
This one really messed me up.
I had to take a break after I found this video.
I see a lot of really upsetting stuff in my research.
You know, sometimes you have to take a break to cry, take a walk, close the computer.
But this one was just surreal.
It's hard to wrap your head around who's in this video.
Fox and Friends didn't ask any of those rally attendees their names.
At least not that they showed on air.
So as presented, this clip just shows...
Random man-on-the-street candid interviews with average people.
And you probably don't recognize their voices.
But I think you'd know their faces.
Because that's former Fox& Friends co-host and current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asking Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and neo-Nazi troll Joe Vival what they think about Islam.
I didn't watch the confirmation hearings, so I don't know if they ever got to the bottom of this allegation from a former employee that Pete Hegseth once got blackout drunk and started yelling, kill all Muslims, at some bar in Ohio.
But either way, I'm not sure we're getting a straight answer about Islam from any of these guys.
The New York City March Against Sharia was organized by a man named Pax Hart, a staff writer at the Proud Boys magazine.
Speeches were given by Hart, as well as Proud Boys founder Gavin McGinnis and Proud Boys magazine creative director Paul Basil.
Frank Morgenthaler, the vice president of the New York chapter of the Oath Keepers, had only barely finished his speech when he collapsed, apparently having a massive heart attack.
The Oath Keepers New York chapter would later tell reporters that Morgenthaler was in the hospital in stable condition.
I tried to cut a clip of Laura Loomer's speech, but it's just not worth it.
She has no charisma, and she never has.
It's just kind of sad.
And just to position you in the timeline of embarrassing Laura Loomer stunts, this was after she tried to do voter fraud as a prank, showing up at a polling location in a burqa and pretending to be Huma Abedin.
But before she handcuffed herself to the front door at Twitter, Oddly, I think it was Gavin McGinnis who gave the most honest speech that day.
Because a lot of speakers at these rallies in various cities pretended that their concern was for women's rights, for gay rights, for freedom and liberty.
Despite the fact that these people absolutely Do not believe in women's rights or gay rights.
And when Gavin McGinnis took the mic after being introduced by Pax Hart, an openly gay brown boy, he started with what I assume were supposed to be jokes.
Um, I like that guy.
I like Paxton.
But, uh, let's cut the shit.
He's a homo.
And I was talking to this guy, I don't know if you went to Colombia, but this guy, Ahmadinejad, he was saying that in Iran, there's no homos.
And that sounds like my kind of place, you know?
So, I'm not going to be your average speaker up here today because I've been kind of looking into Sharia and I kind of like a lot of it.
Of all the speeches I was able to dig up from that day, from rallies all over the country, these jokes are the closest anyone came to telling the truth.
They don't care about women.
They hate gay people.
They just don't like Muslims, and they don't think that any immigrant can ever really be American.
Over in Denver at the March Against Sharia, Neo-Nazi Will Plainer was briefly detained by police after brandishing a knife.
He had not yet, at that time, been convicted for beating a woman unconscious with a flagpole at a Nazi rally in California a year earlier.
In Richardson, Texas, just outside of Dallas, Oath Keepers leader Stuart Rhodes was in attendance.
Jason Lee Van Dyke, who now works as an attorney for Patriot Front, was there hanging out with the Proud Boys, a group he claims he was never a member of, But did work for and hang out with all the time.
And unlike rallies in state capitol plazas or near random intersections, that rally in Richardson, Texas was held right outside of a mosque.
So as children were arriving for their weekend classes in Arabic, Muslim heritage, and Quran recitation, there were armed men standing across the street, shouting at them to go back to their own country.
In Indianapolis, the Indiana director for Identity Europa gave a speech.
I can't find any video of his speech, but a reporter for the Indy Star quoted him saying, We're here to support the march against Sharia, but we're here to take it a bit further.
Apparently, this man gave his name to the reporter as John Richardson, and I suppose the reporter from the Indy Star had no way of knowing that was a lie.
Because there's a picture in that article.
And I recognize that man who said his name was John Richardson.
That's Alison Richard Pierce IV. Jack to his friends.
Ajax to his fellow Nazis.
He was Richard Spencer's head of security for the weekend of the Unite the Right rally.
And he served as the point of contact for the rally's organizers with the Charlottesville Police Department.
Like Augustus Invictus, He, too, had spent most of that summer in the car, driving halfway across the country multiple times just to stand behind Richard Spencer at Nazi rallies on the East Coast.
At the March Against Sharia in Roseville, California, Identity Europa founder Nathan D'Amigo gave a speech.
I really wish I could have dug up video of this speech in particular.
I would have liked to know how Nathan D'Amigo presented himself to that crowd.
In a live stream the day after the event, he admitted to his own followers that he knows there's no actual threat of Sharia law in America.
But he felt it had been worthwhile to dispatch members of Identity Europa to those events across the country.
We had IE as a nationwide network, Identity Europa.
We had members go to this thing across the country just to kind of support a little bit, but also to get a chance to talk to people who were there.
And normalize ourselves in their eyes.
D'Amigo's Nazis didn't wear swastika armbands.
They wore khaki pants and white polos.
They were clean-cut, with fresh haircuts and professionally printed banners and signs.
And he recognized the value in showing up to things like this, to shift the conversation in their direction.
Which is why I'm curious how he chose to address that crowd.
I'm sure they didn't know that he'd been discharged from the Marine Corps in 2007 after he drunkenly pulled a gun on an Arab-American taxi driver because he, quote, looked Iraqi.
D'Amico has claimed that he had his political awakening after reading David Duke's autobiography in prison.
I wonder if he knows that David Duke paid a pedophile to ghostwrite that.
Probably not, but that's neither here nor there.
Photos of the march against Sharia in San Bernardino, California, show physical confrontations between the rally's attendees and anti-fascist counter-protesters.
And again, I don't even need to look at the captions.
I recognize the men at the center of the violence.
One of them, captured by the photographer in the moment where his fist is drawn back, readying himself to punch a woman.
He's a man I've spent hours picking out of crowd shots at Nazi rallies.
That's Benjamin Daly from the Nazi fight club The Rise Above Movement.
In Atlanta, Georgia's 3% security force militia claimed that they had been asked by Act for America to provide security for the event.
A year earlier, that march had held armed demonstrations at a construction site for a mosque outside of Atlanta.
Georgia State Senator and gubernatorial candidate Michael Williams gave a speech at the March Against Sharia and then posed for photos with the militia.
One photo of Williams with that militia shows yet another man that I can't help but recognize.
Militia member Alex Ramos attended the Unite the Right rally later that summer.
And after that rally, he proudly posted a video on Facebook of his participation in a brutal beating.
of a young black man.
And he wrote, We stomped ass.
I didn't really want CNN showing this, but getting some was fucking fun.
I've spent a lot of time in a courtroom listening to that judge in particular, the one who sentenced Alex Ramos to six years in prison for that assault.
And I don't even have to check my notes to pull this quote from that hearing.
It was six and a half years ago.
But it was such a jarring thing to hear him say that I'll never forget it.
As he pronounced Ramos' sentence for that beating, Judge Moore told him, You could spend the rest of your life thinking about this.
It's just evil.
It's beyond me.
So that's who benefited from the march against Sharia.
Identity Europa.
The Proud Boys.
The Oath Keepers, Vanguard America, the Traditionalist Worker Party, the Georgia 3% Security Force.
Those events provided ideological cover for these groups to seek violent confrontations with counter-protesters and to spread their ideas to conservatives who hated Muslims enough to show up but weren't quite red-pilled.
Act for America did not disavow these organizers, speakers, attendees, or security teams.
In a column from Breitbart shortly after the rallies, ACT founder Brigitte Gabriel wrote, America is a divided nation.
Countless political issues fragment our nation while race, gender, and religious identification enhance division even further.
But there is one issue that has brought Americans of all backgrounds together in opposition to it.
The barbarism of Sharia law.
Issues such as gay marriage, affirmative action, medicinal marijuana, And others may bring out our differences.
But Sharia law is an enemy that all rational citizens unify against.
And in the column she lists off some of these speakers at the rallies.
Some of them were gay.
Some of them were Jewish.
Some of them used to be Muslim.
So many kinds of people and they all agree with her about Islam.
Isn't that beautiful?
She fails to mention the involvement of any neo-Nazi groups.
And she says groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Antifa thugs staged repulsive counter-protests.
And she repeats the claim that someone had been splashed with urine at the rally in New York.
She does mention that the rally attendee in question who was maybe splashed with piss was Lauren Southern.
But she doesn't mention that Lauren Southern had very recently been detained by the Italian Coast Guard.
Just a month before she arrived in New York for the March Against Sharia, Lauren Southern was with the French neo-fascist organization Generation Identity as they attempted to block a search and rescue mission for shipwrecked refugees in the Mediterranean Sea.
I don't know if Lauren Southern really did get piss thrown on her in New York City.
That's one of those things that...
I think is probably an urban legend.
Fascists are constantly talking about this ongoing threat of Antifa throwing piss on them.
But I've never actually heard anybody talking about preparing for a protest by storing their urine in Gatorade bottles.
I'm just not convinced that happens.
But if this was the one time it really did happen?
I can't say the woman who tried to drown refugees didn't deserve to get splashed.
Gabriel ends her column about the march against Sharia by addressing the lies that the events had been anti-Muslim or even white supremacist.
Common sense Americans see these allegations for how fantastically stupid they are, she wrote.
The people at her rallies weren't white supremacists.
They were just, quote, Later that summer, Act for America announced they'd be putting on another nationwide series of rallies in September.
But after the events of the Unite the Right rally, they called them off.
In a press release, Gabriel wrote, And this is just a staggering lack of self-awareness.
The picture...
Accompanying the press release is of anti-fascist counter-protesters, implying that she means that the people who have overrun peaceful events causing violence have been the anti-fascists.
But this announcement came in the aftermath of Unite the Right, where Nazis caused violence.
The Nazis that had attended her rallies two months earlier.
And I don't just mean the same kinds of people.
I mean literally the same exact people.
As I was going through photos of these March Against Sharia rallies all over the country, I was shocked to see so many familiar faces.
Scott Pressler, the conservative influencer who failed so spectacularly at organizing those anti-Muslim rallies in 2017, Went on to be an early promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and was a major figure in the Stop the Steal movement leading up to the January 6th riot.
In the hours after the riot at the Capitol, Pressler posted a video of himself outside the Capitol, calling it, quote, the largest civil rights protest in American history.
And to really bring things full circle, in 2023, Scott Pressler started a political action committee called Early Vote Action.
In 2024, Laura Trump praised his efforts, calling him, quote, In the final months of the 2024 presidential campaign, backed by a million-dollar donation from Elon Musk, Scott Pressler and his early vote action PAC hired a team of field organizers to register Republican voters in Pennsylvania.
There are those who credit Pressler for securing a Trump win in that swing state.
And that brings us all the way back around to the photo we started with.
That regular MAGA Republican.
A guy who just hated Muslims the normal Republican amount.
Who accidentally led a Nazi march to the Pennsylvania State Capitol in 2017. One of the field organizers on the payroll at Pressler's Political Action Committee in 2024 was the very same man, Benjamin Hornberger.
And as for the rest of this cast of characters, oh, I don't know.
The Nazi who stabbed three men on the train is serving two life sentences.
For his conduct at the Nazi torch march in 2017, Augustus Invictus was recently convicted of a felony, which at the time of this recording, he does not appear to have reported to the Florida State Bar Association.
Nathan D'Amigo declared bankruptcy to try to get out of a lawsuit filed by the victims harmed at the Unite the Right rally.
And it remains to be seen whether a bankruptcy judge will discharge the millions of dollars he may be on the hook for.
And a lot of far-right extremists are celebrating the successful mainstreaming of their beliefs into the Republican Party platform.
I don't have a tidy ending for this story, but I think there's something to mull over here.
Act for America used crowds of neo-Nazis to bulk up the numbers at those rallies.
Rallies they staged to fake mass support for hateful lies.
The way they talked about our Muslim neighbors wasn't grounded in reality, and their ideas were not actually popular.
A small, loud minority backed by money from a handful of right-wing donors doesn't change reality.
Muslims were never destroying America.
And neither are your immigrant neighbors.
Neither are transgender people.
Diversity doesn't cause plane crashes.
Asylum seekers aren't to blame for violent crime.
Don't fall for it.
Don't fall in line.
Don't fall in line.
I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.
It's nothing personal.
I don't answer any of my emails.
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Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
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