Nativist Rally Canceled Over White Nationalist Speaker

A major nativist rally scheduled for this Saturday in Shenandoah, Pa., the coal town where an all-white jury recently acquitted two high school football players in the July 2008 beating death of a Mexican immigrant, has been canceled. The move came after some of the groups involved learned that rally organizer Joe Miller had invited a well-known Pennsylvania white nationalist to speak.

The scheduled speaker, John DeNugent, is a frequent contributor to virulently anti-Semitic and racist online forums and writes regularly for The Barnes Review, a Holocaust denial journal.

“I guess they were concerned about his political views, and him being — I’m not really sure of what group he’s even affiliated with — and being a white supremacist, or whatever they called him,” Miller told The Republican & Herald.

Miller’s fellow activists had good cause for concern. DeNugent has posted more than 1,000 messages to the racist online forum Stormfront in recent years. However, he was banned from that forum earlier this year after he apparently threatened Stormfront moderator Don Black following Black’s request that DeNugent tone down the implied threats of violence in his posts.

DeNugent was enraged by the arrest of Henrik Hollapa, a young, Finnish neo-Nazi who fled to the U.S. last year after he was charged with inciting violence against Finnish citizens of Somali descent. Hollapa was living with DeNugent in a rural Pennsylvania home when he was taken into custody by federal agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

“I thank the Jews for making me more determined that ever to bring them all to conclusive world justice that all psychopaths merit,” DeNugent posted to Stormfront after Hollapa’s arrest. “I will transmute this rage I felt at my very core into a newer and icier resolve.”

“John, you’ve really lost it,” Black wrote in a post announcing that DeNugent was banned. “Back in the early 90s when you were just ‘John Nugent’ and came to our house to visit when you were selling a trust package for [leading anti-Semite] Willis Carto to the lady across the street, you told me you’d found a psychiatrist who was politically supportive who’d helped you. You need to leave here and find him.”

Miller said he plans to reschedule the planned May 30 Shenandoah rally for a date in the near future that will give him enough time to carefully examine the backgrounds of invited speakers, who include representatives of United Patriots of America, a nativist extremist group, and You Don’t Speak For Me!, a “Latino” front group for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.