White Nationalist Shieldwall Network Member Arrested in Alleged Anti-LGBTQ Attack Invokes Domestic Terror Ideology on Facebook
Three members of the Shieldwall Network (SWN), an Arkansas-based white nationalist group founded by longtime movement leader Billy Roper, were arrested last week in connection with second-degree battery.
Police arrested Julian Austin Calfy, Nicholas Randal Holloway and John Andrew Carollo after they allegedly lured a gay man to their Atkins, Arkansas, home. There, police say, the three beat the man before calling law enforcement, claiming the man was a “child predator.”
The Pope County Sheriff’s Office booked the three and photographed them before a bond hearing the following day.
A tattoo beneath the collar line of Calfy’s orange jailhouse jumpsuit appears to represent a white supremacist ideology.
The tattoo is a thin outline that resembles the letter “P” with a horizontal line across it. It is the symbol of the “Phineas Priesthood,” a domestic terror ideology laid out in the 1990s that encourages Christians to perform a “Phineas action,” which refers to murdering “race mixers” and those deemed in violation of God’s law, including Jews, non-whites, multiculturalists and others seen as enemies.
The ideology has previously inspired violent attacks, including a series of bank robberies and bombings, and an attack on a Jewish community center. A man who considered himself a “high priest” fired more than 100 rounds and attempted to detonate propane tanks during the failed attack on the Austin, Texas, police department in 2014. That man, Larry Steven McQuilliams, was shot and killed during the attack.
Calfy has had run-ins with the law in the past. At 16 he was arrested for plotting a “Columbine-style attack” at his local high school. Calfy pleaded guilty to terroristic threatening and criminal possession of explosive material.
Social media posts under the name Julian Calfy are littered with incitements to violence and references to the Phineas Priesthood and other white supremacist terror groups.
On April 11, 2019, the man identified as Calfy posted an image to his Facebook featuring the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division’s logo incorporated into the Imperial German Flag with a Phineas Priesthood symbol in the upper left canton. The post is captioned: “Purge the Noctulian scourge. Christ gang rise up. A spear for every Satanist.”
The spear reference refers to the biblical origins of the Phineas mythos, Numbers 25:7-13, wherein the titular priest murders a mixed-race couple with a spear.
The combination of Nazi, neo-Nazi imagery and Phineas Priesthood imagery is emblematic of contemporary radicalization trends within the white power movement, wherein individuals blend different historical references with overt calls to violence. Atomwaffen Division exemplifies such trends, for example.
Calfy’s profile on the Russian social media site VK lists him as “Shieldwall Network Regional coordinator – Western Arkansas.” A post from Feb. 10, 2019, which begins, “Let me explain something about me personally,” lays out Calfy’s belief in political violence as a solution to white racial grievances:
I want people to be in constant fear, on the verge of homelessness and starvation. I want people to be so far out of the realm of comfort that they have no choice but to pick up their balls and load their rifles. I want the situation to escalate so quickly that all that is left is the choice between Revolution or Death.
Photo illustration by SPLC
