Kyle Bristow

The pugnacious college student also spearheaded anti-immigrant and anti-gay campaigns organized by YAF, prompting the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to take the unusual step of listing the campus club as a hate group. Bristow soon branched out to violent, hate-driven fiction. While attending law school in 2010, he published White Apocalypse, a novel seething with lethal white supremacist revenge fantasies against Jewish professors, Latino and American Indian activists and staffers of a group clearly modeled on the SPLC. Since then, Bristow has continued to air his extremist views in white nationalist, anti-gay media. Now a lawyer in suburban Detroit, he’s recently championed the cause of female victims, said by Bristow to be mostly white blondes, whose nude photos have been posted online as “revenge pornography” by ex-lovers.

In His Own Words:
“The early and relatively sophisticated Egyptians understood that their civilization would be threatened if they bred with the Negroes to their south, so pharaohs went so far as ‘to prevent the mongrelization of the Egyptian race’ by making it a death penalty-eligible offense to bring blacks into Egypt … [although] blacks still came to Egypt as soldiers, slaves, and captives from other nations. By 1,500 B.C., half of the population of southern Egypt was of mixed blood, and by 688 B.C., societal progress had ended in Egypt.”
—The Conscience of a Right-Winger, collection of essays, 2012

“[One character’s ancestors] for 40,000 years were all white and he hated who he was so very much that he put an end to that tradition by becoming romantically involved with a nonwhite individual — as many white liberals are predisposed to doing these days.
—White Apocalypse, a novel, 2010

“Liberalism promotes sexual perversion —especially homosexuality and miscegenation — which debases the White race. Neither homosexuals nor interracial couples, after all, produce White children.”
—“Does white guilt run in the family?” article in The Citizens Informer of the Council of Conservative Citizens hate group, Feb. 10, 2011

“Homosexuality kills people almost to a degree worse than cigarettes. … [T]hese [pro-gay rights] groups are complicit with murder.”
—Quoted in The Spartan Edge, an alternative newspaper at Michigan State University, Sept. 24, 2006

Background
Kyle Bristow grew up in Clinton Township, Mich., near Detroit. He was president of the Young Republicans’ Club at Chippewa Valley High School and has voiced anger about a perceived leftist bias in the local schools. In high school, he read the 2003 book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism by far-right attack dog Ann Coulter, which he says inspired a turning point in his political views, evidently to the extreme right.

During his freshman year at Michigan State University, he was elected president of the campus conservative group, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF).  Bristow also won an unopposed seat on the student government council. He quickly posted his 13-point agenda as a student representative, a sophomoric document saturated in hate that included capturing undocumented immigrants in the area, cutting school funding for non-heterosexual groups, and giving more representation to men and whites on the student council than others. The council recalled Bristow in a landslide vote after he refused to recant his agenda or resign.

But the young firebrand succeeded in sparking plenty of national publicity during his two years as president of YAF. Ugly public spectacles were his specialty.  He planned a ”Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,” which drew national attention but was later cancelled. He led a “straight power” rally in front of the Lansing City Hall to protest a proposed 2006 law to protect gays, lesbians and bisexuals against bias based on sexual orientation. Protesters held up signs saying “End Faggotry” and “Go Back in the Closet.” In a news release to publicize the event, Bristow wrote: “YAF members find homosexuality and other forms of sexual deviancy to be disgusting. The Boy Scouts, military, and the American public need to be protected from these degenerates.” Under Bristow’s leadership, the campus YAF group also held a “Koran desecration contest.” Based on these and other bigoted acts and statements, the SPLC began listing Michigan State’s YAF club as a hate group in 2007.

One of Bristow’s most inflammatory tactics was inviting virulently racist and anti-Semitic leaders to speak on the MSU campus — acts that triggered disciplinary threats from the national YAF group. Among those speakers was British National Party chairman Nick Griffin, a Holocaust-denier and white supremacist. Another invitee was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist New Century Foundation and editor of its American Renaissance, a journal that publishes racist articles and hosts periodic national conferences attended by a variety of hardline nationalists that have included neo-Nazis, former Klan leaders and other open white supremacists.  Inviting Taylor was a step too far for the national YAF group. In a February 2008 post on the website of American Renaissance, Bristow disclosed that national YAF had threatened to revoke the campus’ charter if the local group hosted Taylor. In a bitter post, he complained that “YAF does not officially recognize multi-culturalism as a threat to the United States” and railed against “cowards at the university and in ‘conservative’ organizations.” Nevertheless, under heavy pressure from YAF, Bristow resigned from the MSU chapter and Taylor’s lecture was cancelled.

But Bristow clearly was determined to gain more attention for his extremist political views even as he seemed to be preparing for a mainstream career as a lawyer. After graduating from MSU, he started law school at the University of Toledo in 2010. He didn’t just write exams and school papers, though, using his spare time to contribute racist articles articles to The Citizens Informer, the quarterly newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens.

In 2010, Bristow moved into new territory, writing a novel that reads like the prolonged, violent revenge fantasy of a racist and anti-Semitic fanatic. White Apocalypse, self-published through the Amazon subsidiary CreateSpace, is still available on Amazon. The book takes as its touchstone the “Solutrean Hypothesis,” a widely discredited theory that whites from Europe appeared in North America 15,000 to 17,000 years ago, making them the true “Native Americans.” In Bristow’s version, these whites were massacred by darker-skinned late arrivals. He dedicates the book to “the real Native Americans.” Its publication was hailed by the white power movement as a bracing inspiration for future recruits to their cause.

The hero/narrator of the book wants the Solutrean theory to come to public light. But first he has to squash the evil “Center for Diversity and Multiculturalism,” based in Atlanta. The group, which maintains an active legal staff and “hate group list,” just like the SPLC, is unquestionably modeled on SPLC. But Bristow gets even more personal than that. Two of the fictional group’s staff members are obviously modeled on SPLC Intelligence Report editor and Senior Fellow Mark Potok and Heidi Beirich, director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project. (Beirich’s name is rendered as “Beirman” in the book, and Potok’s stand-in is David Greenberg, who is described as an “oily, curly haired troll.” The Potok character is assassinated in a grisly and meticulously described scene.) When asked about the apparent targeting of Potok and Beirich, Bristow dismissed it entirely, saying in an E-mail to the SPLC beginning “Dear Guttersnipe” that he meant nothing of the kind.

While still a law student in 2012, Bristow published another book, The Conscience of a Right-Winger, a collection of essays with a far-right spin on favorite topics such as the scourge of gun control, immigration and white racial pride. Like White Apocalypse, which was lauded across the extreme right, Bristow’s second book boasts enthusiastic endorsements from racist leaders such as Jared Taylor. A new edition on Amazon combines this nonfiction work with the earlier novel.

After finishing law school in 2012, Bristow appeared to be dropping under the radar as he took up work at a regular day job with the France Law Group in Toledo, Ohio. But not for long. He began to actively seek female clients whose nude photos were posted on online “revenge porn sites” by vindictive ex-partners. He got two of the sites shut down on behalf of clients, and then was interviewed about his efforts by The Wall Street Journal and television’s Katie Couric. Although many observers were surprised by Bristow’s activity actually helping people, he may have shown his real interest when he characterized revenge porn as a manifestation of liberalism and claimed that the majority of its victims are white, blonde women.

A year after joining the Toledo law firm, Bristow left to open his own law practice in Clarkston, Mich., a Detroit suburb. He now bills himself online as an expert in Internet law and also as “able to assist law school graduates who are going through the character and fitness” test required before sitting for the Michigan and Ohio bar exam. (Apparently, he knows something of such problems.)

In December 2013, Bristow publicly teamed with Dan Poole, a recent college-graduate and activist with the white supremacist American Freedom Party, to found The Center for the Advancement of Occidental Culture. The new group’s mission is   “to advance and defend Western civilization,” opposing alleged discrimination and harassment of European Americans. Its opening online salvo, on Dec. 31, asked for original articles for its website and financial contributions. Mysteriously, just a month later, the two founders dissolved the new group as a limited liability corporation (Bristow was its chief legal officer, according to a blog post by the Anti-Defamation League) and its website went dead.