White Nationalist Group Exploits Amazon To Fund Their Cause

Hatewatch reported in June that extremists Vincent Cucchiara, 24, Sarah Elizabeth Cucchiara (née Nahrgang), 25, and Dmitri Anatolievich Loutsik, 25, run the publishing company Antelope Hill from properties they own in eastern Pennsylvania. The company collaborates frequently with National Justice Party, a pro-Hitler white supremacist group that traffics heavily in antisemitic conspiracies, and they sometimes sell books authored by its associates. Members of National Justice Party host book-burning parties, where they set fire to books authored by Jewish people and others they revile.

Antelope Hill established their publishing business as an LLC, and Hatewatch has been unable to determine how much profit they make from selling their books. What money the extremists do bring in through Antelope Hill appears to be made through their website and with the help of online retailers like Amazon, who may set limits around selling some hateful material, but does not adequately assess whether the sellers themselves are part of the organized white supremacist movement.

Hatewatch reached to Antelope Hill via email for a comment on this analysis but did not receive a response.

Charting on obscure Amazon subcategories

Like Twitter, which extremists exploit to grow their ranks and instigate chaos, Amazon consistently ranks as one of the most highly trafficked websites in the world. Antelope Hill promotes their relationship to Amazon publicly. For example, the group published a tweet on July 17 boasting that their reprint of a 1924 text, authored by a Jewish man and purporting to show differences in behavior between Jewish and white, non-Jewish people, was trending #1 in Amazon new releases under the subcategory of “Jewish social studies.”

Neo-Nazis and other antisemites selectively uplift commentary made by Jewish people to justify their view that people of that faith want to harm them or should be made to live separately. Antelope Hill described this book, which as of this writing charts in Amazon’s “Jewish social studies” category, to their readers as evidence of “millennia of conflict” between Jewish and non-Jewish people that rejects “any possible reconciliation” between the two groups.

“There has been no shortage of writings detailing an incompatibility between Jewish and Gentile peoples from a variety of sources and perspectives,” they wrote on the chat app Telegram in reference to the charting book.

Antelope Hill posted a screenshot in a Dec. 21, 2021, tweet showing that white supremacist Trey Garrison’s brief, loosely edited book, Opioids of the Masses, trended as a new release in the category of “Pharmaceutical & Biotechnical Industry.” Garrison, who relocated from Dallas, Texas, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 2020, once worked as a newspaper columnist before his byline started to disappear in 2013. He is best known for harassing women and journalists on Twitter and producing a racist and antisemitic podcast.

Hatewatch found close to two dozen Antelope Hill titles sold through Amazon and reached out to them for comment about the phenomenon. Amazon removed some of the titles and chose to leave more than a dozen other titles standing. In a comment, the company said they based the removal of the content on the literature itself, rather than the publisher. In other words, Amazon has declined to take into account the fact that they are financially abetting a white supremacist group.

“We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale and promptly investigate any book when a concern is raised. We remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines,” an Amazon spokesperson told Hatewatch.

Amazon did not respond to Hatewatch’s observation that an antisemitic hate group is promoting their site ranking in “Jewish social studies.” The tech giant lists on its website a policy that suggests it does not “promote organizations” like Antelope Hill.

“Amazon does not allow products that promote, incite or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views,” the disclaimer says.

Using industry databases to improve visibility

Although Amazon dominates book sales, leading some to compare it to a monopoly, Antelope Hill has managed to get their books sold on retailers across the country due to apparent low standards of entry.

Barnes and Noble hosted a page labeled Antelope Hill until June 23. After Hatewatch reached out for a comment, the company pulled down the page outright and explained that the titles came to them from a book industry feed that supplies retailers. They also explained that they never sold physical copies of Antelope Hill’s book in their stores.

“Titles feed automatically onto our website from standard industry databases. As third-party submissions are continually being added to the site, we do our utmost to diligently monitor such submissions for violations of our content policy,” a spokesperson for Barnes and Noble said. “As soon as we are made aware of any such offending titles, we take prompt action to remove [them] in accordance with our policy, as we are doing with these titles.”

Powell’s Books, one of the most famous independent booksellers in the world, sells Antelope Hill titles online. They do not sell them at their sprawling headquarters in Portland, Oregon, they told Hatewatch. In January 2021, after facing protests, the company chose not to sell copies of Andy Ngo’s antifa-centered book, Unmasked, at their headquarters. Ngo traffics in politically charged disinformation, has embedded with neofascist activists and has traveled to Poland to speak to hard-right sympathizers. Unmasked, which the Los Angeles Times singled out for its “distortions and untruths,”  spins wild conspiracies about leftists and indulges Ngo’s ego.

A spokesperson for Powell’s noted to Hatewatch that “books are being banned at schools and libraries across the country” and expressed a commitment to free speech, which did not directly address the critique that Antelope Hill’s business funds white supremacist activism. Powell’s also cited an industry-created feed, which it said put the Antelope Hill titles onto the Powell’s site without Powell’s knowledge.

“Books published by Antelope Hill came to Powells.com through an automatic data feed via one of our long-term distribution partners. While Powell’s won’t be promoting Antelope Hill Publishing titles or this subject matter, these books will remain in the online catalog,” a spokesperson said. The spokesperson declined to name its long-term distribution partner.

One reason why retailers had not previously wrestled with the ethics of financially enabling a hate group like Antelope Hill before is that the books may not be selling well. The spokesperson for Powell’s Books wrote in a follow-up email that Antelope Hill Publishing has sold only one book through its store in the years since its titles/the publishing company appeared online.

“I would also like to share that in a review of our records, these books have virtually no sales through Powells.com. We have sold one title in the Antelope collection,” Powell’s wrote to Hatewatch.

Short, loosely edited books and Jan. 6 poetry

Hatewatch reviewed the majority of Antelope Hill’s books for sale as of August 2022 and found them to be, like Garrison’s book about the opioid crisis, mostly short and loosely edited, with the exceptions of translated works. Its contemporary authors repeatedly spread conspiracy theories blaming perceived problems on Jewish people, as well as dehumanizing Black and LGBTQ people.

Amazon removed from their catalog an Antelope Hill book called The Transgender-Industrial Complex. Like most Antelope Hill original works, it embraces an over-the-top conspiratorial tone, blaming Jewish people for anyone coming out as transgender, which the author perceives to be a social problem. At times, the book bears striking similarities in tone to a June 2022 campaign on the hard right to link Pride festivities to pedophilia.

“The grooming factor is very real,” the author writes, suggesting that LGBTQ people groom children for sex and “recruit” children to be gay or trans, before citing misleading statistics.

The author of the book ignores critical details about how many child abusers are in heterosexual relationships when they hurt children, and how many are also older relatives of their victims. The book also labels people as being “Jewish” or “homosexual” before introducing their views. For example, someone who introduced legislation to end discrimination against LGBTQ youth is described as a “Jewish homosexual State Senator.” Another supporter of the same bill is labeled a “lesbian Assemblywoman.” The choice to highlight these identities aligns with the author’s stated effort to portray the push for LGBTQ rights as “the product of a few wealthy and powerful people, mostly of one ethno-religious group and/or sexual proclivity or proclivities forcing the issue.”

Amazon also decided to remove a book called The Tyranny of Human Rights, which promotes the notion that white people are victims of a profound, global conspiracy of social injustice. Amazon chose not to remove the book The Open Society Playbook, which lays out predictable grievances about demographic replacement and, in repetitious detail, names individual Jewish people as being at fault for it and other perceived problems. Hatewatch pointed out the similarities between the two texts in a request for comment to Amazon but did not receive a response regarding the company’s decision to remove one book but not the other.

Antelope Hill also publishes amateur poetry authored by pseudonymous extremists, including one that romanticizes the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and describes deceased insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt as a martyr:

Cowering Congress called a recess; legislating did digress,

Running in fear from the awesome sight of freedom undistilled;

Boldly they did flee like rats, plainly scared of red hats,

Through tunnels and caves filled of bats, screaming until they were shrill

“Attack on our democracy!” a hypocrisy that makes me sick and ill.

Many Advils are needed still.

– From “The Patriot,” published in Antelope Hill’s 2021 anthology Why We Fight.

Translations

Hatewatch also reviewed Antelope Hill’s translated works and found that the company has sold a variety of translated works from 20^th-century Nazis, fascists and ultra-nationalists. Many of Antelope Hill’s early translations focused on Nazi Germany and its sympathizers, including the works of Adolf Hitler and others.

Recently, Antelope Hill has sought to expand its library to include works in Russian, Spanish and French. In April 2022, for instance, Antelope Hill released a translation of Chechen Blues (Chechenskiy Blyuz), a literary account of Russia’s assault on Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s. Its author, Aleksandr Prokhanov, currently heads a Russian ultra-nationalist think tank. Known as the Izborsky Club, the group’s members include figures with ties to the Kremlin. These include Sergei Glazyev, a former adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin on economic matters from 2012 to 2019, and Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov), whom Russian media has referred to as Putin’s spiritual adviser.

Hatewatch found that Antelope Hill has struggled in its efforts to expand its library of translations, particularly when it comes to more mainstream right-wing figures. In one podcast from Oct. 4, 2020, a pseudonymous representative for the publisher claimed the estate of prominent Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn denied them the right to translate 200 Years Together (Dvesti let vmeste). The book purports to be a systematic study of Russian-Jewish relations, though some critics have contended it is fueled by antisemitism. Hatewatch reached out to the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center through a contact form on their website. A representative of the center told Hatewatch that they are planning to release an English translation of 200 Years Together in a few years through a major publishing house, not “whoever these folks are.”

Hatewatch also discovered that a German publishing house requested Antelope Hill withdraw its collection of works from Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist and jurist, due to apparent copyright violations. (Schmitt supported the German Nazi regime early on in its formation.) German law grants protection for 70 years after an author’s death. Schmitt died just 37 years ago, in 1985. A representative from Duncker & Humblot, the company that owns the rights to Schmitt’s work in German, verified to Hatewatch in an email that Antelope Hill removed the four texts from circulation in October 2021 after the German publishing house informed them that Schmitt’s work is not yet in the public domain.

These withdrawn works included three original translations of Schmitt, as well as a fourth book which collected those translated works into one volume. One reviewer on Amazon described Antelope Hill’s translation of Schmitt’s 1932 work The Concept of the Political as “screamingly poor” in a November 2020 post, prior to the text’s removal from circulation.

Photo illustration by SPLC