The mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, which saw a 22-year-old man charged with hate crimes and murder on Monday, came after years of intensifying anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, acts of violence and intimidation, and discriminatory legislation from far-right individuals and groups, including powerful Republican politicians.
Tuesday’s midterm elections saw candidates who held extremist anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, election-denying and anti-abortion positions widely rebuffed by voters around the country.
Conspiracy theories about the home invasion and hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, continue to spread across conservative media, social media and “alt-tech” sites, even as a federal criminal complaint appears to debunk false narratives extremists and right-wing influencers have spread.
Patriot Front members have replaced their former first-choice lawyer Brent Gleason with Jason Lee Van Dyke in recent months, according to court documents, leaked chats, sources with knowledge of the group’s internal workings, and online materials reviewed by Hatewatch.
Five years after white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, the statue they came to protect is gone, and the “alt-right” coalition they embodied has imploded. At the same time, the existential threat that far-right extremism poses to the U.S. has arguably never been more severe.
Steven Derrick Tucker, a member of white nationalist group Patriot Front, was jailed in Texas after a judge ruled that his bond on an existing felony charge would be withdrawn following his June arrest at a flash mob protest in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho. Tucker is awaiting trial on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Hatewatch has identified three previously anonymous principals in the publishing company Antelope Hill Publishing, which specializes in translating historical works by Nazis, fascists and ultranationalists, and original works by contemporary white nationalists, neo-fascists and others on the far right. Hatewatch identified these individuals using a combination of public records, podcast recordings, commercial data services and a range of other documents and online materials.
The man who allegedly shot dead at least 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket on Saturday may have been preoccupied by the so-called “great replacement” conspiracy theory. A sprawling propaganda document released online under his name in advance of the attack obsessively references that theory. Authorities have yet to confirm the authenticity of the document, but if it was indeed written by the killer, it further exposes the deadly consequences of white supremacy.
Not long after a man shot to death at least 10 people on Saturday, May 14, in what local officials called a “pure evil,” “racially motivated hate crime,” influencers hustled to spread false narratives online that ignored the overwhelming evidence showing this attack was an act of white supremacist violence.
