FASCIST YOUTH MOVEMENT GAINS FOOTHOLD ON CAMPUSES ACROSS COUNTRY AS COLLEGE REPUBLICAN GROUPS CALL TO BAN ALL IMMIGRATION

By ABNER HAUGE|LEFT COAST RIGHT WATCH

Young fascists from the University of Maine to San Diego State signed a resolution at the end of March calling for President Trump to “pass an indefinite moratorium on all immigration to the United States.” Seven college Republican groups from Maine, Arizona, and California initially signed on.

The statement, viewable in full at the bottom of the story, was originally drafted by the University of Maine Real College Republicans. It cites the “Wuhan Virus,” known by non-racists as the disease COVID-19  or the novel Coronavirus, as their latest excuse for wanting draconian immigration policy. Specific groups they want expelled are foreign students, tech industry workers with H1-B visas and DACA recipients who by definition have lived in the United States for most of their lives. They also call for a punitive tax on money that “alien workers” send abroad. And, of course, they want the border wall finished.

The demands aren’t really about practical containment of the virus. They’re the same demands fascists in the United States have made for decades. For example, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement’s “25 points” included a demand that “[a]ll non-White immigration must be prevented” and that all non-Whites must be expelled.

But college Republicans are more likely influenced by the side of white nationalism that wears a suit and tie and pretends at academic and political legitimacy. The San Diego State College Republicans and the Berkeley College Republicans (BCR) follow VDARE on Twitter, as does BCR president Matt Ronnau,

Peter Brimelow, the founder of the white nationalist VDARE magazine hob-knobs with conservative outlets like The Daily Caller, publishes Ann Coulter, and had a close rapport with White House advisor Steven Miller. Brimelow and VDARE writers often advocate for an immigration moratorium. The SPLC writes that VDARE “has produced a deluge of propaganda related to the pandemic,” most of it urging Trump to further restrict immigration. The racism in the articles is blatant. One article from February is titled “Do You Know All Coronavirus Victims Appear To Be Chinese? Thought Not!”

But VDARE isn’t the main engine of this insurgent college fascist movement–Nick Fuentes and his “America First”/”Groyper” movement is. Fuentes, a Unite the Right attendee and Holocaust denier, is the main figure behind the coalition that’s succeeded the alt-right.

To understand the Groypers, LCRW spoke to Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR,) which released a report in February called From Alt-Right to Groyper: White Nationalists Rebrand for 2020 and Beyond.

"[W]e looked at the ‘Groypers’ as a political force, and as a marketing and organizing strategy,” Burghart told LCRW. “Like the ‘alt-right’ before it, the Groyper mobilization is not a new social movement, but rather a flashpoint in the latest mainstreaming strategy deployed by white nationalists.”

The “America First”/ “Groyper” crowd’s ideological leaders are indeed mostly white nationalists. They include Patrick Casey, head of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa (now rebranded as American Identity Movement,) Vincent James of the white nationalist propaganda outlet “The Red Elephants,” and Scott Greer, a former Daily Caller editor who pseudonymously wrote for Richard Spencer’s white nationalist journal Radix.

But their most famous supporter is Michelle Malkin, a one-time darling of the more mainstream and corporate-friendly conservative movement who authored a book-length defense of interning Japanese-Americans. [Jesus Christ lol] Malkin lost her gig as a Young Americans For Freedom speaker after publicly backing Fuentes and his “Groyper Army.” She’s since doubled down. Incidentally, Malkin was supposed to speak at the University of Maine College Republicans’ invitation in January but the venue cancelled.

Malkin was thrilled with the resolution.

AMEN AMEN AMEN: New alliance of nationalist College Republicans calls for immediate immigration moratorium to protect safety, security & economic well-being of #AmericaFirst! Do @yaf & @TPUSA (and their donors) support or oppose this common-sense resolution? https://t.co/JdVaG9Bawq

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) March 25, 2020

“AMEN AMEN AMEN: New alliance of nationalist College Republicans calls for immediate immigration moratorium to protect safety, security & economic well-being of #AmericaFirst! Do @yaf & @TPUSA (and their donors) support or oppose this common-sense resolution?” she said in a post sharing the resolution on Twitter.

“We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” the Arizona State University College Republicans said on Twitter, referencing the anti-Semitic dogwhistle.

“The immigration moratorium resolution is the clearest manifestation of the Groypers’ strategy to date,” Burghart wrote to LCRW, continuing, “Nativism and xenophobia are central to the Groyper’s white nationalist rebranding efforts.”

Burghart and IREHR found that Fuentes’s crowd is employing two main strategies. The first is “driving a wedge between the Trump camp” and billionaire-funded conservative campus groups like Turning Point USA and Young Americans for Freedom.

“If the ‘alt-right’ strategy most associated with Richard Spencer sought to pull disaffected reactionaries and misogynists outside the Republican Party into the white nationalist fold,” Burghart said, “the ‘Groyper War’ is aimed at pressing Donald Trump and Trump-backing conservatives to adopt the core issues and political framings of white nationalists in the lead-up to the 2020 election and beyond.”

Fuentes first sent his Groypers out to billionaire and foundation-backed conservative speaking events last Fall Semester. Fuentes’ goal was to challenge “Conservative Inc” talking heads like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro on the issues that really matter: Anti-semitic dogwhistle gotcha questions about the Israeli military’s sinking of the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967 and calls for endorsing bigoted policy like exclusionary immigration laws.

The Groypers managed to disrupt events with Donald Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk and Fox News commentator Kimberly Guilfoyle and, as LCRW covered in detail, Shapiro spent virtually all of a speech at Stanford trying to differentiate his own bigotry from the alt-right’s/the Groypers’ and thereby disavow them.

The IREHR identified the Groypers’ second strategy as entryism, which, Burghart explains, is “gaining a place in more mainstream organizations by moderating one’s appearance and expressed values in order to further movement goals.” While college Republican clubs are nothing new, Fuentes and the Groypers latched on to a population of ambitious young right-wingers across the country and his movement is trying to establish itself on campuses.

Four of the college Republican clubs who sponsored the resolution and whose names appear on its masthead, UCLA, Arizona State, San Diego State and University of Maine explicitly brand themselves as “America First.” An apparently separate “America First Bruins” club signed on to the resolution alongside UCLA’s college Republicans. Kansas State University also has an America First student group.

“This marks the emergence of a network of groups willing to push Groyper themes on campus, attacking both ‘SJWs’ and other college Republicans who disagree about nativism,” Burghart told LCRW.

One of the most influential groups to join the Groypers are the Berkeley College Republicans (BCR.) BCR don’t explicitly brand themselves as “America First” but have a long history of aligning with Fuentes’s peers and predecessors. BCR has well-documented connections with fascists. Current president Matt Ronnau and former Vice-President Naweed Tahmas were interviewed by Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo for the white nationalist outlet Red Ice TV on inauguration day 2017. Then-president Troy Worden invited Milo Yiannopoulos, the Gamergate harassment king-turned Breitbart editor who wrote admiringly about the alt-right to present on campus a month later. Antifascists staged a violent shutdown of Yiannopoulos’s event, breaking windows at UC Berkeley’s Amazon store, punching and pepper-spraying people who wanted to attend Yiannopoulos’s speech. I remember watching them set a police generator on fire.

In response, the far-right began a year of staging rallies in Berkeley, one of which was used by Damigo and other white nationalists as a testing-ground for what would become the deadly Unite the Right rally that August. During Fall semester that year, Tahmas and other BCR members coordinated with local far-right activists including the Proud Boys for Yiannopoulos’s fizzled return to Berkeley. BCR members even passed out t-shirts that said “Nuke Mecca” and “Lesbians aren’t real.” Worden, Tahmas and other BCR members posed with Martin Sellner, founder of the neo-Nazi group Génération Identitaire, which received money from the Christchurch shooter. They also palled around with Kyle Chapman, founder of the now-defunct militia arm of the Proud Boys, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights. Worden also gushed about Génération Identitaire at The Liberty Conservative, a far-right website he was a contributor at. Coincidentally, neo-Nazi James Allsup, who used to host a podcast with Nick Fuentes, was also a contributor at The Liberty Conservative.

In February last year, most college Republican organizations in California broke off from the statewide California College Republicans (CCR) organization and formed the California Federation of College Republicans (CFCR.) The CFCR was recognized by the College Republican National Committee and with 32 chapters is now the dominant organization in the state. Ronnau told USA Today that the split was initially ideological–the old CCR represented the “traditional Conservative” wing of the movement while the new CFCR organization represents the more pro-Trump wing. Many college Republicans I spoke to in 2017 who went with the pro-Trump CFCR themselves as “Nationalists.” They associated  themselves more with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon than Trump himself. The “Nationalists” viewed their enemies within the Republican Party as the “NeoCons” wing associated with the Bush administration. These “NeoCons” apparently went with the old CCR.

“There is good reason to believe that the Groypers are attempting to take advantage of the space afforded by Donald Trump’s framing of his own presidency and administration, dating back to his 2016 electoral campaign,” Burghart said. Trump ran an explicitly nativist campaign, famously calling for a massive border wall between the U.S. and Mexico and repeatedly claimed Mexico was sending rapists and murderers across the border. He also called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States.

“Nativism and xenophobia are issues that have a) already reached the mainstream, particularly thanks to Trump and b) where their white nationalist positions find the most support,” Burghart said. “They don't have to go through all sorts of ideological contortions to make their message fit the moment.”

Burghart said that “The Groyper message of ‘Non-white immigrants bad. Expel them. Keep them all out. Protect the core white identity of the nation’ is in lock-step with” the broader pro-Trump crowd.

Groypers have gone well beyond being just “pro-Trump.” Matt Ronnau of the Berkeley College Republicans is the CFCR’s president presumably until he graduates at the end of this semester. Ronnau himself followed VDARE on Twitter until some time after an antifascist group called Berkeley Collective Safety called him out for it in January. Ronnau retweets Groyper thought leaders like Malkin and Scott Greer regularly and invited VDARE columnist Ann Coulter to speak on campus last November. If Ronnau is not personally a white nationalist, he is at least someone who spent years as part of a group of BCR members that fraternized with right-wing extremists and white nationalists and openly sympathizes with their goals. And he’s ending his last semester at Berkeley as the head of the premiere college Republican organization in the most populous state in the country.

But Ronnau is far from the only college right-winger with direct links to white nationalism. Christian Secor, president of UCLA’s America First Bruins attended AFPAC, Nick Fuentes’s counter-conference to the annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) gathering. He apparently interned for Michelle Malkin. Secor’s Twitter bio also says he’s a “/k/ brand ambassador.” /k/ is the weapons board on 4chan.

Jaden McNeil is not only the president of Kansas State University’s America First Students but is a minor thought leader in the Groyper movement.

From Alt-Right to Groyper notes that “Though McNeil lacks the same lengthy paper-trail of explicit white nationalism as that of Fuentes or Casey, he has already signaled his affinity with such ideas.” The report also notes that McNeil involved himself with four Unite the Right attendees: Fuentes, Tim Gionet aka Baked Alaska, white nationalist propagandist Faith Goldy and Patrick Casey of Identity Evropa. Identity Evropa’s telegram channel even listed McNeil’s telegram channel as a resource for a time.

But the point of being a college Republican is to network and move on to a career in right wing politics. On this end, the “America First” crowd have already produced a Senate candidate: Lauren Witzke in Delaware.

#AmericaFirst College Students are fighting for a chance at a better future. Great work, guys. #ImmigrationMoratorium https://t.co/Qeu4dXsbZJ

— Lauren Witzke for US Senate (@WitzkeforDE) March 26, 2020

“#AmericaFirst College Students are fighting for a chance at a better future. Great work, guys.” Witzke tweeted in response to the resolution.

“Immigration has been and will continue to be, a defining issue for the ‘Zoomer’ generation. The issue is less about the particulars of policy, but more about defining who we are as a nation in the 21st century,” Burghart told LCRW.

“Groypers are definitely gaining ground in the college Republican scene. They’ve made those gains by relentlessly attacking ‘establishment’ conservatives (what they call ‘Conservative Inc.’), and recruiting amongst the disenchanted ranks of establishment conservative groups like Turning Point USA,” he said.

“In 2020, the Groypers also reached a significant milestone when they moved from online army to building a real-life network,” Burghart said, concluding, “The Groypers represent a growing threat, and it will require creative new approaches to defeat them.”

 

KLAN LEADER ANNOUNCES MULTNOMAH COURTHOUSE RALLY ON FEBRUARY 8TH

Steven Howard, former Imperial Wizard in the Northern Mississippi White Knights of the KKK, announces a rally in front of Multnomah County Courthouse on February 8th.

By ABNER HAUGE|LEFT COAST RIGHT WATCH


1/13, 10:40am: This article has been updated to include information on a planned antifascist counter-protest.

There’s a Klansman looking to rally in Portland on February 8th. Afterwards, he’ll burns a cross up the way in Vancouver, Washington.

Steven Howard announced on Facebook January 9^th he plans to rally in front of the Multnomah County Courthouse. Howard told Sergio Olmos of Underscore.news that the Klan rally will be followed by a “cross-burning ceremony” in Vancouver, Washington.The rally is scheduled for February 8^th from 11 in the morning until Noon. 

LCRW spoke on Thursday to antifascists in the area who say they are now organizing a response. The Direct Action Alliance (DAA) set up a Facebook event to announce a counter-protest some time Thursday night.

"We shut this chump down in Lake Oswego and ran him out of town, this wont be any different, join us!" DAA wrote on the event page.

People ask” is the klan really coming? If they do I’ll bet it’s only a hand full” I say if even one shows up he should face hundreds - that even one should be run off- even one is viewed as the threat they are. Not one is welcomed here

— leftist (@luistheleftist) January 30, 2020

"People ask” is the klan really coming? If they do I’ll bet it’s only a hand full” I say if even one shows up he should face hundreds - that even one should be run off- even one is viewed as the threat they are. Not one is welcomed here," Luis Marquez, a prominent Portland-area antifascist activist, wrote on Twitter.

Howard is a hardcore, old-school white nationalist. He belonged to the National Socialist Movement and was an Imperial Wizard in the Northern Mississippi White Knights of the KKK. In addition, Howard is a believer in Christian Identity, the white supremacist religious movement that holds that Jewish people are the spawn of Eve and Satan and only white people have souls. Christian Identity is a deadly movement. Among the murderous groups tied to them is The Order, a white supremacist gang that committed armed robberies and an assassination of a Jewish radio host in the 80s.

Steven Howard has a long history of media appearances, often paid. He admitted to “stealing valor” or lying about his military record in order to raise his public profile. Howard claimed he was instructed to lie about his record by many of the outlets who interviewed him, which outlets like Vice and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation have denied.

By 2016, Howard had dissolved the Northern Mississippi White Knights. But that year, the A&E network paid Howard at least $21,150 to start the Klan group up again and manufacture rallies and demonstrations for their series Generation Hate.

Howard relocated around 2016 to the Portland metropolitan area. He attended a pro-Trump rally in Lake Oswego, OR on March 4^th, 2017.

“On March 4, Howard was in Lake Oswego, where he harassed several counter-protesters, and then stood guarded by the III%ers “security team,” who seemed more than happy to let this KKK member do as he liked in their midst,” Rose City Antifa reported. The march that day was organized by the III% of Oregon militia.

The announcement for Howard’s rally in Portland was met with little notice until the Colombian published a longform piece by Sergio Olmos on the fascist street gang Patriot Prayer Thursday. Joey Gibson, Patriot Prayer’s leader, often claims he and his group are not racist despite the racist themes in their rallies, Patriot Prayer’s constant Islamophobia and numerous well-documented ties between his group and other racist organizations.

“I know Joey Gibson,” Howard told Olmos in the piece. “I’ve seen white supremacists at his events.”

Gibson asked Howard not to attend his events, Howard claims, not because Gibson disagrees with him, but because it looks bad.

“[Gibson]told me, ‘It’s better for me if you don’t come to my events,’” Howard told Olmos. “The only reason he doesn’t want guys like me coming around is because it hurts his image.”

Indeed, the “themes” of Howard’s rally are virtually the same as Patriot Prayer's: “illegal immigration, sex offenders and putting prayers back in schools.”

More coverage to come. 

TACOMA REPUBLICAN CLUB HOSTS ANTI-TRANS SPEAKER, PUSHED OUT OF TWO VENUES

🚨 ALERTA 🚨 pic.twitter.com/ANSzFJGj1s

— UPSantifa (@UPSantifa) November 25, 2019

By ABNER HAUGE|LEFT COAST RIGHT WATCH

On Monday this week, The 27^th District Virginia Taylor Club, a Tacoma-area Republican Party org, hosted an anti-trans speaker who previously harassed a children’s event along with armed militia members.

The talk, titled “Transgenderism and Our Children,” was part of their regular monthly social hour at Knapp’s Restaurant. The speaker, Lynn Meagher, is a member of Mass Resistance, an SPLC-designated anti-LGBT hate group. She calls being trans a “cult” and helped found an anti-trans-youth group called A.S.K. Moms.

“We don’t think it’s hateful to have a discussion about whether life altering medical treatments should be offered to children,” Martin Merterns, president of the Republican club, told the Tacoma News Tribune.

Meagher previously showed up to a trans youth event in Renton on June 23rd. At that event, she and another Mass Resistance member were escorted out of the event by police after refusing to leave. They took pictures of the sign-up sheets and refused to give the officers’ their names. Other Mass Resistance members who were not escorted out filmed inside a bathroom.

A week later, Meagher joined the ranks of armed III% militia members and Proud Boys in protesting a Drag Queen Story Hour event in a Des Moines, WA library. The Proud Boys and III% members were apparently recruited by Mass Resistance as security. Counter-protestors who showed up to oppose Mass Resistance and their affiliates later told me they received death threats from militia members during the event. One of the Proud Boys in attendance, Sean-Michael David Scott, openly endorses James Mason’s Seige, the neo-Nazi book advocating for lone wolf acts of terrorism.

Antifascist and local LGBTQ+ activists acted with a day’s notice to have the event shut down.

“We felt that this speaker was an active threat to our community and believe it was necessary to try to get them de-platformed,” the University of Puget Sound (UPS) Antifa collective said in a report-back published on It’s Going Down.

UPS Antifa started a call-in campaign and flyered the area around Knapp’s the night before.

“This is an excuse to promote hatred and normalize violence against trans people. This is a mockery of real activism and I hope you will do the right thing and cancel this event,” part of the suggested script for the UPS Antifa’s call-in campaign read. “If this event is not canceled we will be forced to boycott your restaurant and show up in protest of this event.”

Knapp’s management told the News Tribune it doesn’t monitor what the Republican club does with the event space, as they had regularly rented it from the restaurant for several years.

“The fallout online led to people making threats against the restaurant, which is kind of terrifying,” Stephanie Anderson, the restaurant coordinator for Knapp’s parent company told the News Tribune. She claimed there were arson threats.

Meagher went to Knapp’s to make her case for continuing the event on Monday. Local LGBTQ+ activist Leah Smillie, planning to meet with the restaurant’s staff herself, happened to walk in during the meeting (archived).

“The actual staff seemed devastated and distraught that this was even potentially in their place of employment to begin with,” Smillie said in her Facebook post about the event. “Corporate would not let any employees be recorded due to fears for their safety and retribution from those who might be angry at the cancellation.”

Knapp’s asked the Republican club to cancel the event. They did. The restaurant then made a public apology. UPS Antifa thought that was the end of it and cancelled their protest.

Then, a couple of hours later, they found out the event was moved to a Round Table Pizza. “With an hour to spare,” UPS Antifa said, they had activists call in and show up in person to protest.

“When several members of our collective and around 5 other non-affiliated activists got to the restaurant at 6:15, there was no sign of the 27th District Republicans. We thought that we had lost them, until one activist went into the pizza place to ask around,” UPS Antifa wrote in their report-back. One of the Republican club members, not knowing who the activist was, tipped him off that the was meeting at a restaurant called Joseppi’s.

The Republican club member also told the activist to be careful because there’s “leftists afoot.”

“We didn’t know this was what was going on until they were eating and protesters showed up,” Mary Bertrand, Joesippi’s general manager told a commenter who complained about the anti-trans meeting in a review on the restaurant’s Facebook.

“But they let them stay and have their meeting even after they knew what was going on. They stated they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone; once they found out what was happening, why didn't they ask them to leave?” the commenter said.

Bertrand replied that the Republican club was asked to leave “when they were done eating.”

UPS Antifa and other activists said they talked to one of the owners, not specifying who, but couldn’t convince him to kick the Republican club out. So they protested outside.

“The 27th District Republicans and anti-trans “activists” could see us through the window, waving trans flags and signs, and singing copyrighted music so that any recordings of their event would be taken down if they were posted online,” UPS Antifa wrote. 

UPS Antifa said “one of the owners” called the cops on them initially, but later came out to apologize to them. They said after he’d heard “what Lynn Meagher was saying, the owner came around to some degree.”

The owner also told them that one of the Republican club attendees offered to call in “private armed security.” UPS Antifa suspects this was an “alt-right militia.” As previously stated, Meagher’s group Mass Resistance has used Proud Boys and III% members as armed security.

Mertens told the News Tribune his group felt intimidated by the protesters.

Stortini later told the News Tribune the protesters were peaceful and “stayed outside the whole time.”

“There was no conflicts between the groups,” Stortini recalled.

But there were.

“We continued to play copyrighted music and wave trans pride flags and signs around until they finished. Then we moved to the entrance and proceeded to shame the people for attending the talk,” UPS Antifa’s report-back said.

“Two walked out looking like they wanted a fight,” they continued, “and when one of them was questioned about the event, he proceeded to shout and push two activists out of his way,”

UPS Antifa members and other activists continued to argue outside the restaurant with the Republican club attendees.

“Sometime in the middle of the debates, a woman got into her car and backed up very fast in an attempt to intimidate us,” UPS Antifa wrote. “Getting no reaction, she drove swiftly away.”

UPS Antifa claims 20 activists in total showed up to protest over the course of the night.

The next day, Joesippi’s issued an apology for the event. It’s since been deleted from their Facebook page for unknown reasons, but it was copied in part on UPS Antifa’s twitter.

“We believe that LGBTQ community should live openly without discrimination and enjoy equal rights, personal autonomy, and freedom of expression and association. Joeseppi’s reserves the right to refuse service to any organizations or groups who demonstrate hate,” the statement read in part. 

According to Smillie, Knapp’s, the Round Table Pizza and Joesippi’s are all receiving backlash for, in Smillie’s words, “choosing their WHOLE community over those who use their platform to hurt parts of it.” 

According to Anderson, Knapp’s will no longer be hosting the Republican club.

INTERVIEW WITH ‘SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT DENNY’S’ DIRECTOR XAVIER ROTNOFSKY

Sunday Afternoon at Denny's from Xavier Rotnofsky on Vimeo.

By ABNER HAUGE|LEFT COAST RIGHT WATCH

On September 22^nd, Harim Uzziel, a minor figure in the Trump/far-right protest scene in Southern California, held a meetup at a Culver City Denny’s. It seemed like it’d be a boring event where a dozen or so Trump supporters ordered chicken tenders, heard speeches and learned how to register voters.

But it wasn’t.

A group including John Turano, a.k.a Based/Cucked Spartan and Charles Brandon Recor, both far-right figures who regularly go to protests to brawl with people, and Antonio Foreman, a Unite the Right attendee with ties to the white nationalist media outlet The Red Elephants, stood outside the Denny’s to confront Uzziel.

Uzziel isn’t just some local Republican booster. He attended the April 15^th, 2017 rally in Berkeley that turned into a massive brawl between militiamen, open white nationalists, Proud Boys and antifascists. He’s mingled for years with the extended West Coast right-wing protest scene that includes Proud Boys, conspiracy vloggers, militias and open white nationalists. He’s gone on conspiratorial rants against the Illuminati and was kicked off a flight after an unhinged rant. He later expressed in a since-deleted livestream that he was trying to distance himself from the openly white nationalist strain in the pro-Trump activist scene.

The conflict between Uzziel and his former colleagues is the subject of Sunday Afternoon at Denny’s, a short documentary by Xavier Rotnofsky. The film’s been well-received. Patton Oswalt called it ‘Amazing’ and it became a Vimeo Staff Pick. LCRW reached out to Rotnofsky this week to talk about the film and the art of documentary.

LCRW: Give us some background on you and your career as a filmmaker.

ROTNOFSKY: I wouldn’t say I have a career in filmmaking yet, but I write and produce as much as I can with friends. I’ve always been interested in documentary, and I hope to do more of it.

LCRW: What about documentaries appeals to you?

ROTNOFSKY: There’s so much drama in real life, so I love documentaries that explore that. I love weird, unscripted moments people post online like on Worldstar and Twitter.

LCRW: Any directors you’d cite as influences?

ROTNOFSKY: I’m a big fan of Adam Curtis but he’s not really a slice-of-life director.

LCRW: How did you find Harim Uzziel and this story?

ROTNOFSKY: My friend sent me a screenshot of Harim’s Facebook event. My roommate and I decided to go to Denny’s for lunch and just see what would happen. We didn’t expect what went down.

LCRW: What initially drew you to it?

ROTNOFSKY: The venue. It’s such a strange and surreal setting for a MAGA meeting. The infighting between the MAGA groups made it even more surreal.

LCRW: What were your impressions of the MAGA crowd going in to filming?

ROTNOFSKY: Everyone just seemed so sad, desperate, and empty. Even the people outside.

LCRW: What kind of story did you initially think you’d be doing when you went to film Harim’s meeting that day? What did you expect would happen?

ROTNOFSKY: There weren’t really any expectations. We figured it would just be a MAGA meeting held in a Denny’s. We didn't know there would be so much conflict.

LCRW: Did you expect the people who showed up outside to be there?

ROTNOFSKY: Lol no.

LCRW: What was shooting that conflict like for you?

ROTNOFSKY: It felt a bit risky, but ultimately both groups were so concentrated on bothering each other, we were the least of their worries.

LCRW: The crowd that confronted Harim included Antonio Foreman who was at Unite the Right in Charlottesville and others who have incited violence and brawled with people at protests. Did you know anything about those people beforehand? What’s your reaction to learning more about who they are and what they’ve done now?

ROTNOFSKY: I knew about Antonio beforehand. He once came out in one of my videos from a few years ago. So I’ve had experience with him.

LCRW: What’s the reception to the film been like? Do you find people like antifascist activists who were familiar with the characters in your film beforehand reacted differently than the people who didn’t know who they are?

ROTNOFSKY: The reception has been wild. I did not expect such a positive reaction. I don’t think the reaction has been different between people who are familiar and people who aren’t. Though, antifascist activists understand more of the backstories.

LCRW: What’s next for you? Do you plan to explore right wing extremists further in your work?

ROTNOFSKY: I’m not sure what’s next. I have to figure that out. Yes, I would like to explore them further in my work.

LCRW: Are there any major lessons or messages or broader awareness you hope the audience takes away from your film?

ROTNOFSKY: I hope you get the vibe of what it felt like to be at Denny’s that day.

Rotnofsky’s work can be found here on his Vimeo page. Check out his film Wipe here. You can follow him on Twitter at @xrotnofsky.