This Week in Fascism #12: Burning Books & Banned Accounts

Welcome, fellow antifascists! This week, we’ve got an explainer on #OperationTittyTwister, more doxxes, antifascist actions from Kentucky to Delhi, and Brittany Pettibone getting kicked out an IHOP!

Without further ado, let’s begin!

Explainer: #OperationTittyTwister

The past couple of months have brought a number of suspensions of antifascist twitter accounts, as well as those of journalists who cover the far-Right.

On April 3rd, Senior Investigative Reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) Michael E. Hayden’s account became locked over the above tweet, (Twitter demanded that Hayden remove it in order to again use the platform). The tweet explained that an obscure symbol used by white nationalists (but which originated from the Romanian fascist group, the Iron Guard) was found after the arson of Tennessee’s Highlander Center. Members of an offshoot of the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) the Legion of St. Ambrose, which are active in holding protests and literal book burnings in the same area of the arson have also been documented to have the symbol tattooed on them.

Neo-Nazi Craig Spaulding sports an “Iron Guard” symbol on his head, which was popularized by an obscure Romanian fascist group.

Hayden had pointed out that the symbol was also used by a select group of white nationalists formerly associated with Matthew Heimbach, and also appeared painted onto the gun of the New Zealand Christchurch shooter. The next day, Hayden’s account was restored, largely after a backlash online when it became clear it had been the result of a mass Alt-Right reporting campaign.

The next week, the twitter account of photographer Sandi Bachom, who was injured while documenting Unite the Right in Charlottesville and who filmed the Manhattan beatdown in which ten Proud Boys and neo-Nazis caught charges last October, was suspended but was again restored.

Next, @Kherman112 (screen name Official Alt-Left) was permanently suspended after being flagged for bogus DMCA violations.

Freelance journalist Elizabeth King’s account was permanently suspended after twitter decided that her tweet above violated the site’s policy against hateful conduct a day after calling far-right social media troll Eoin Lenihan aka ProgDad a C-U-N-T, after Lenihan had just attempted to paint several important journalists covering the US far right as secret antifa activists. King’s appeal was denied.

It was soon uncovered that these suspensions were being coordinated in a group chat on Telegram (made famous by being used heavily by ISIS) called “Mass Report and Retweet Thread” which Kelly Weill had reported on previously.

As it turns out, this mass reporting of leftist accounts traces its lineage to October of 2017, with notorious far-right troll MicroChip’s introduction of “Operation Titty Twister.”  Although it didn’t gain as much traction as intended the first time around, this refreshed version seems to be working better with whatever Twitter’s current TOS policy is.

We have some recommendations for how to keep your twitter account safe from mass-reporting trolls:

• Don’t swear at anybody. We can still swear, just don’t call anyone a c*nt or a b*tch or a f*cking f*ckstick, for example. It is unknown at this time whether calling a Nazi a Nazi can be grounds for suspension, but we’ll probably find out soon enough.
• Don’t feed the trolls; instead, consider blocking them. We’ve seen 100% of the time that their arguments are in bad faith, so instead of going ALL CAPS on their ass consider using that time productively. Do some pushups, get ready to fight them in the street.
• Delete old tweets periodically. Most likely, the only people looking back to your 2013 tweets is some troll trying to find a TOS violation to flag you for. Keep your receipts always, but let those old tweets go.  www.tweetdelete.net is one option to automate that process.

Twitter’s Terms of Service allows the posting of a fascist’s work address, but not their home address. According to Twitter’s Terms of Service, the following are considered private information:

• credit card information
• social security or other national identity numbers
• private residences, personal home addresses, or other locations that are considered private
• non-public, personal phone numbers
• non-public, personal email addresses

But these are fair game:

• name
• birthdate or age
• business addresses
• places of education or employment

Please stay safe both IRL and online, and keep up the fight!

Doxxes

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Chicago Antifa exposed Christopher B. Crooks, of Orland Park, Illinois, documenting his connections to members of the neo-Nazi Patriot Front and the white nationalist American Identity Movement. They’ve promised a full article next week, which we’ll link to here.

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Chicago Antifa exposed Jonathan Alexander Argumedo, the leader of Anti-Antifa Chicago. The 28-year-old was first doxxed in 2012 by South Side Anti-Racist Action, when he was associated with neo-Nazi group Blood and Honour (named for the “Blut und Ehre” slogan of the Hitler Youth). Argumedo lives in the Kilbourn Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.

Friday, May 31, 2019

Antifa Sacramento exposed neo-Nazi Tessa Hamilton, an affiliate of the Golden State Skinheads on Friday. Hamilton is currently fundraising for GSS member William Plainer, who is currently imprisoned after assaulting an anti-racist protester with a stick in 2016.

Saturday, June 1, 2019

The Hoosier Anti-Racist Movement exposed Sarah Dye, of Indiana, as “Volkmom,” a member of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa. Dye is a personal friend of Nolan Brewer, who was sentenced earlier this week for spraypainting swastikas on an Indiana synagogue.

(Brewer’s attorneys, in a document asking the court to mitigate his sentencing, argued that he’d been radicalized by his wife: “According to Nolan, she began with right-wing yet mainstream views such as those presented on Fox News. She then moved on to writings by Ben Shapiro and articles on Breitbart News which bridged the gap to the notorious white supremacist and anti-Semitic propaganda site Stormfront.”)

Chicago Antifa identified Matthew Missimer, of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, as far-Right Twitter troll @Mathaeus-M. He frequently retweeted neo-Nazi and white nationalist accounts, including former Traditionalist Worker Party co-founder Matthew Parrott, white nationalist website VDARE, and Identity Evropa, and made frequent misogynistic and transphobic statements. After being publicly identified, Missimer promptly deleted his Twitter account.

“We are the account killers,” quipped Chicago Antifa. “3rd one this week.”

According to his LinkedIn profile, Missimer is an Invoice Processor at Aerotek, a staffing services company in Downington, Pennsylvania. You can let them know about their employee by tweeting @Aerotek.

Sunday, June 2, 2019

Haleyville Anti-Rapist/Anti-Fascist Action exposed Caitlin Phillips, of Orlando, Florida, as a member of the 4th Reich, a neo-Nazi server on Discord.

Actions and News

Anonymous activists in Kentucky removed Confederate flags from monuments and burned them. Various statues, including a statue of Confederate soldier John B. Castleman and the Confederate Monument in Bardstown, Kentucky, were also defaced. The Castleman statue was covered in lavender paint, and the Monument was drenched in red paint.

The website of the Dehli Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu ultranationalist party, was hacked last week. A hacker going by “SHADOW_V1P3R,” replaced “BJP” with “beef” and replaced several pages on the site with lists of beef recipes as BJP leader Narenda Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister.

In 2002, Modi was chief minister of Gujarat, when were large-scale riots targeting the minority Muslim community, particularly Muslim women, in the state. It is estimated that more than 1,000 people were killed during the violence. During the riots, many people reported that police were indifferent to violence against Muslims, or, in several cases, actively participated in it. Human Rights Watch issued a report on the riots, revealing that the attackers carried voter lists of Muslims’ home addresses, as well as lists of Muslim-owned businesses. As a result of his role in the violence, the State Department banned Modi from entering the United States.

Modi assumed the office of Prime Minister for the first time in 2014, and in recent months, critics of Modi and activists advocating for the rights of religious minorities and lower-caste Indians have been arrested under anti-terrorism statutes.

Lastly, in Southern California, a 28-year-old man Nicholas Rose has been arrested after it was discovered he was building a list of churches and synagogues to attack in a murder spree.

Deplatforms

“I’m banned from social media, so my ability to fight a fair campaign is gone,” proclaimed Tommy Robinson after losing a European parliament election. Robinson is an anti-Islamic activist, current member of UKIP, and former member of the fascist British National Party. Keep up the reporting on Facebook and Twitter, folks!

On Friday, Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage revoked Steve Bannon’s lease for a rural medieval monastery, which he had intended to turn into a training school for the dystopian future’s far-Right political elite under his own tutelage.

Racist rappers Adam Calhoun and Demun Jones, who have ties to the misogynist and anti-immigrant group the Proud Boys, had a appearance on their “Crazy White Boy” tour cancelled last week. Congratulations to all the activists who made that possible.

For more information on future appearances on the tour, Left Coast Right Watch has compiled a list of tour dates here.

White nationalist Brittany Pettibone was barred from speaking at a north Idaho IHOP on Friday, when local protesters surrounded the location prior to her arrival. As an Alt-Right commentator and former author at AltRight.com (formerly run by Richard Spencer), Pettibone is known for her support of both the Pizzagate and white genocide conspiracy theories.

In 2016, the Pizzagate theory, which claims that high-level Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of a Washington, DC pizza parlor, inspired a North Carolina man to enter the restaurant with an AR-15 and fire several shots into the wall. In 2019, the white genocide conspiracy theory, which claims that white people are being systematically replaced in formerly white-majority countries, was the ideology cited by the perpetrator of Christchurch massacre, who murdered more than 50 Muslims in March, livestreaming the attacks on Facebook.

Pettibone’s fiance, Martin Sellner, (who along with Pettibone and Laura Southern, targeted migrants at Sea as part of the ‘Defend Europa’ campaign), leader of the Austrian chapter of the white nationalist Generation Identity, was recently denied a US Visa after his ties to the perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre were revealed. In April, the Kootenai County GOP unanimously passed a resolution encouraging the federal government to allow Sellner into the country.

In response to pressure campaigns from activists, Fracture Me, a photo printing service has dropped Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, after host Laura Ingraham promoted white supremacist Paul Nehlen as one of the “prominent voices censored on social media.”

Nehlen first came to national attention as a GOP Congressional Primary candidate in Wisconsin where he was backed by Steve Bannon and promoted on Twitter by Trump. Despite espousing openly antisemitic and white supremacist views, in 2016, he received 16% of the primary vote, and 11.1% in 2018.

Nehlen was banned from Twitter in February 2018 for racism and antisemitism. In April 2018, he was banned from Alt-Right social media network Gab for doxxing another member of the Alt-Right. And in May 2019, he was also banned from Facebook.

Nehlen’s primary mode of communication with the public is now his Telegram channel, where, as noted by journalist Hilary Sargent, he recently posted a picture of himself wearing a t-shirt depicting Robert Bowers, who murdered eleven Jewish people at the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in October 2018, along with the slogan “Screw your optics, I’m going in,” the infamous Gab post left by Bowers directly before committing the shooting.

Nehlen also routinely calls for more mass shootings, telling the members of his Telegram channel, “We must Saint every shooter, every willing participant who balls up their fist and unleashes a torrent of punishment upon the n*****s, k***s, and h****s who fuck with the White race.”

Call to Action

Though one advertiser has abandoned The Ingraham Angle since her public support of white supremacist Paul Nehlen, there’s still more advertisers to pressure. @CruiseNorwegian, @BauschLomb, and @bookingcom are still advertising on her show.

Let them know that you don’t support hate or the stochastic terrorism of Paul Nehlen.

Sample tweet:

Hey, @CruiseNorwegian, @BauschLomb, and @bookingcom:

Laura Ingraham defended a neo-Nazi, Paul Nehlen, who is openly trying to inspire more mass shootings at mosques and synagogues.

Why are you still advertising on her show?

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