Jordan Green

A network of Florida Republicans with links to hate groups and the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally is mobilizing to seat members on local government boards and run for elected office in the Sunshine State and beyond.

Members of American Restoration Coalition, or ARC, who count among their ranks a city council member and two planning and zoning board members, openly promote Patriot Front on their social media pages. Some of the Republican activists also belong to a secretive “white Christian fitness crew” with a paramilitary aspect that has shared a gym with white supremacist Active Clubs.

Members of the group, described by its executive director as “a strategic level organizing apparatus for Heritage Americans,” knocked on doors for Marshall Rawson in July and August, helping him win an upset victory in the Republican primary for a north-central Florida state House seat. Rawson attended the violent Unite the Right rally in 2017 and has a long history of involvement in the white nationalist movement, as previously reported by Talking Points Memo....

GREENSBORO, N.C. — In July 1979, a North Carolina Ku Klux Klan leader named Joe Grady summoned two FBI agents to a Waffle House to warn them “about possible violence in the future.”

Earlier that month, members of the Workers Viewpoint Organization and local Black residents had forced armed Klansmen to retreat inside a community center where they were screening the hugely controversial movie Birth of a Nation. The euphoric anti-Klan protesters celebrated by stealing their Confederate flag and burning it.

That confrontation in the town of China Grove was only the most recent in a string of incidents of leftist harassment that Grady complained had violated the Klan’s constitutional rights....

As Republican Zach Lahn launched his campaign for Iowa governor, the private school he founded in Kansas quietly scrubbed the names of controversial right-wing figures from its website.

The effort to paint over the influence of Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson, two men widely credited with mainstreaming white supremacist and anti-feminist ideas, took place as Lahn launched a campaign that has centered repeated attacks on what he calls a “sinister” agenda by the left to shape public education, while he vows to revoke the licenses of teachers seen as indoctrinating students.

“And education is one that they have targeted so deeply because they know that if they can get their hands on your children — on our children — that they can work to change their beliefs to alter society in the future,” Lahn said during a candidate forum hosted by the conservative group Moms for Liberty in January. ...

Days after the State Department designated an Italian tech group as a terrorist entity, thousands of antifascist sites on its web hosting service wound up on a searchable online research tool described as an “anonymous blog network that quietly powers antifa.”

Jennica Pounds, a Pentagon special government employee better known as Data Republican and the creator of the search tool, described the antifascist sites that she purported to expose as “a whole elaborate doxxing scheme that’s set to ruin people’s lives.”

Unveiling the search tool last month, Pounds boasted: “DataRepublican.com strikes again.” Pounds wrote on X that “the militant far-left has spent years hiding in plain sight on Noblogs.org,” the web hosting platform of Autistici/Inventati, which was sanctioned by the State Department. “So on my own time, for free, I scraped the whole thing,” she said. “Because I kick commie *** and need no government funding or sanction for it.” ...

When MAGA supporters fueled by conspiracy theories angrily protested Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Arizona, it fell to Recorder Adrian Fontes to certify the results in Maricopa, the state’s largest county surrounding Phoenix.

“I’ve been through the fire in Arizona at the very basic gestation of election denialism,” Fontes, a Democrat, told Raw Story, recalling how election conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Jacob Chansley, better known as the QAnon Shaman, screamed his name outside his office.

“I’m not going to let the b-----ds intimidate me,” he said....