Neo-Nazi Child Porn Enthusiast Reappears Under New Name
Kevin Alfred Strom, founder of the now-defunct neo-Nazi hate group National Vanguard, apparently is trying to shuck off his former identity following release from federal prison three years ago on a child pornography conviction.
Hatewatch spotted Strom, born again as “Julian Dene,” a squeaky-clean gentleman clad in buttoned-to-the-neck white shirt, in a phony Facebook (FB) page that violates FB rules barring the use of fake names.
Could Dene be for real? There is an apparently real Julian Dene on the Internet, a blogger from Northwest England who identifies himself as a “retired semi professional photographer with a love of Victorian architecture.”
Not likely. The Facebook Dene’s photos show that that he has the very same face as Strom—and the same rogue’s gallery of friends, along with two of Strom’s children. Dene boasts 176 of them, including a number of luminaries of the radical right, the very people Strom hung out with before his child porn debacle.
Many of Strom’s old friends repudiated him after the conviction, viewing the veteran activist as a severe liability to their cause. Strom had founded National Vanguard in 2005 after being expelled from the National Alliance, the most important neo-Nazi group in the U.S. until the death of its long-time leader, William Pierce, in 2002. Strom failed in his bid to become Pierce’s successor and took hundreds of disgruntled Alliance members with him when he departed to form National Vanguard.
Strom pledged “to lay the groundwork for a healthy White nation to emerge from the chaos ahead,” lamenting on the group’s website that “no civilization has ever survived racial mixing let alone on the scale which has engulfed the U.S. since the 1960s.” Another key insight from National Vanguard: “Jewish interest groups have been at the forefront of nearly all the negative changes which have taken place in the White world during the last 100 years.”
Strom’s group never amounted to much, in part because many neo-Nazis saw him as a weak and effeminate leader. But it was utterly destroyed with Strom’s embarrassing arrest and imprisonment. Since then, Strom has stayed under the radar—until surfacing as the faux Julian Dene on Facebook.
Among the Facebook Dene’s friends, according to his page:
April Gaede: A Kalispell, Mont., neo-Nazi activist, she’s posted countless racist and anti-Semitic screeds on websites of the movement. Gaede left the National Alliance with Strom and became active in National Vanguard. She’s best known as the mother of teenaged twin daughters, Lynx and Lamb, who performed for a time as a neo-Nazi duet called Prussian Blue. The sisters, now 19, recently renounced their mother’s views, saying they preferred tolerance and medical marijuana.
Jared Taylor: Founder of the New Century Foundation, a pseudo-intellectual think tank, he edits its American Renaissance magazine. The publication, under a false scientific veneer, features blatantly racist articles. Taylor, a Yale graduate, argues that white superiority is just common sense. “When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization—any kind of civilization—disappears,” he has written in the magazine. New Century also hosts periodic conferences that draw Holocaust deniers and eugenicists.
Kevin MacDonald: An anti-Semitic psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach, MacDonald published a trilogy that purports to “prove” that Jews are driven by their genes to try to destroy Christian societies. He’s a board member of the white supremacist Charles Martel Society and a director of the American Third Position, a racist political party whose founder once sought to deport every American with an “ascertainable trace of Negro blood.”
Troy Southgate: A British "national anarchist," Southgate broke away from the neofascist International Third Position group to create a website for the National Revolutionary Faction that pushes a “monoracial Europe” and shattering of the “economic imperialism of Zionism.”
Craig Bodeker: Identifying himself on his Facebook page as connected to the University of Hawaii, Bodeker is known for a “documentary” he made suggesting that modern-day racism is a myth. Though he has presented himself as a non-racist thinker, Bodeker has referred in YouTube postings to black people as “EVIL monkeys,” “NAZIS,” people with “limited intelligence,” and more. (Despite that, black Vanderbilt Professor Carol Swain has endorsed his film enthusiastically.)
Peter Brimelow: A former Forbes magazine editor and National Review columnist, Brimelow is a British immigrant who started a racist anti-immigrant website called VDARE. Although Brimelow has described the role of race as “elemental, absolute, fundamental,” he has not, up to now, been known for befriending neo-Nazis.
Larry Darby: Once a lonely atheist in hyper-religious Alabama and an advocate of marijuana legalization, Darby several years ago morphed into a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier who called, despite his two biracial daughters, for the return of racially segregated schools. He attended a 2006 National Vanguard rally, where he may have first become friendly with Strom and Gaede, among others.
The Facebook Julian Dene says he attended Northeastern University, a step up from Strom, who didn’t go to college. Sounding a little lonely, he lists among his favorite quotations: “Achieving love is much more than finding the right person, it is a matter of being the right person,” and, “Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.”
But the big mystery is how Strom turned into “Julian Dene.” Is there some special significance to the name? Or is the bogus moniker explained all too clearly by the outfit Dene lists as his “employer” on the Facebook page: “Society for the Propagation of False Doctrine.”