Before the January 6 Capitol “Insurrection” Hoax, and the last week’s atrocious sentencing of Proud Boy leaders on the absurd charge of “seditious conspiracy,” there was Charlottesville—the court-approved August 12, 2017 Unite The Right patriot protest against the Great Replacement of the historic Robert E. Lee statue that was similarly mugged by Democrat authorities, with complicit lying spin from the Regime Media (see my Charlottesville Untold: Inside Unite The Right).
I reported recently on the belated felony arrest, six years after the retroactively invented crime, of nine participants in the Charlottesville Tiki Torch Light parade, which took place the evening before UTR. Some of them have already been forced through lack of funds to accept plea bargains.
Significantly—and as is certainly the case with J6—a small private army of communist vigilantes is engaged in ongoing efforts to identify and punish attendees of UTR.
One group, Ignite the Right (ITR), identify themselves as a
[c]oalition of anti-fascists ensure that participants of the deadly Unite the Right rally are still being identified … Ignite the Right works to organize the existing documentation from numerous anti-fascists into a cohesive catalog, and continues to research information on new identities.
The ITR account on X (formerly known as Twitter) regularly posts photos of nicknamed attendees from several angles with comments like:
#RedFringeUTR thought it was a good idea to join the murderous thugs of Unite The Right in the violent racist riots in Charlottesville IDENTIFY her and let’s remind everyone we don’t tolerate racism.
The use of inflammatory terms like “murderous thugs” and “violent racist riots” is obviously ridiculous for people accused of no wrongdoing other than attending a legal rally.
But it’s not surprising, given the self-righteous and vengeful nature of the self-appointed “Nazi hunters.” Ignite the Right declares on its website: We do not forgive. We do not forget.
On the six-year anniversary of the event, Ignite the Right boasted that there had been “607 faces listed, 320 identified.”
Numerous dox victims, though not engaged in or even accused of illegal activity, have lost their jobs or suffered other personal consequences.
An analysis of ITR’s database reveals that seven of the men identified are now deceased—most from apparent suicide. Helpful sources cited by ITR include activists Molly Conger and Emily Gorcenski [See Doxing the Doxers: Antifa’s War Against Regular Americans is run by Spoiled Rich Kids], and Elon University astrophysics professor Anthony Crider.
The phenomenon of political Dissidents being doxed for their views with the connivance of major social media companies, and subjected to harassment or job loss, is well known to readers of VDARE.com.
Now, in the era of Joe Biden’s war on the boogeyman of “White Supremacist terrorism” [ Biden calls white supremacy ‘most dangerous terrorist threat’ in speech at Howard, Politico, May 13, 2023], the massive, largely covert and decentralized machinery of communist investigators produces information that is used to aid in the prosecution of American patriots. And American taxpayers are being forced to subsidize their own dispossession.
Earlier this year, it was reported that the Department of Homeland Security gave a $352,109 grant to the University of Dayton’s PREVENTS-OH counter-extremism project [How Biden’s DHS is Weaponizing an Anti-Terror Program Against Christians, Conservatives & The GOP—EXPOSED, by Luis Cornelio & Tim Kilcullen, Media Research Center, May 25th, 2023].
One speaker at the University’s 2021 White Nationalism Workshop (December 3rd, 2021), Michael Loadenthal, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Cincinnati and the Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association. By his own admission, he is also a Leftist political advocate with an extensive history of activism and arrests. (He was one of the people arrested during the Trump Inauguration riots, though charges against him and many others were dropped.)
Loadenthal is also the executive director of The Prosecution Project, for which the aforementioned Gorcenski is an advisor.
In the workshop, Loadenthal instructs the audience how to use burner phones and false online identities to join “white supremacist” groups for the purpose of documenting and archiving their social media activity.
He boasts that, through these efforts, activists have accumulated “absurd archives… including complete chat records that go back years. He asserts that “if you are a white supremacist and you’ve said awful sh*t online, we have a screenshot of it.”
How is this data, acquired with the apparent approval of our government, used? Loadenthal explains that when a supposed white supremacist is identified
…we contact employers, landlords, commanding officers, school officials, family, clergy ... and we pressure service providers [like GoFundMe and PayPal]. We let them know what’s being done, and typically … [they] will kick people off.
Communist militants generally do not consider governmental authorities to be their allies and claim not to work directly with them.
However, Loadenthal concedes that this research is used for law enforcement purposes.
Speaking generally we [antifa] believe ourselves to be working outside, and to a degree against, the interests of law enforcement. However, it is becoming unavoidably obvious that law enforcement is actively using the intelligence we’re generating for the purpose of incarcerating people. [Emphasis added]
Evidence suggests that such efforts were used by the Federal Government to build a case against Tyler Bradley Dykes of Bluffton, SC. Dykes was one of the nine men prosecuted as a felon by the Commonwealth of Virginia for his participation in the Charlottesville torch march. He pled guilty to that charge and received a five-year sentence, with four and a half suspended.
When that sentence concluded, Dykes was immediately picked up by the federal government to face charges for his role in the January 6 “Capitol insurgency.” The DOJ’s statement of facts in the arrest warrant reads:
In December 2021, the FBI received information from an anonymous tipster that an individual by the name of TYLER BRADLEY DYKES had entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and assaulted law enforcement officers … As the investigation was on-going, in September 2022, the FBI received information from a confidential human source who provided photographic and video of evidence of a subject who the CHS confirmed to be DYKES based on open-source evidence … The information provided included certain images that identified unique facial features of the subject.
The “tipster” was not named in the federal arrest warrant. The federal warrant also stated in a footnote that
publicly available information also indicates that [Dykes] may still have ties to extremist groups such as “the Southern Sons Active Club”
—citing a report on the Atlanta Antifa website.
So what?
In other words, the federal government is cooperating with communists.
Perhaps by happenstance, on October 16, 2022, a few weeks after the tip was received, a group called Sunlight Anti-Fascist Action took credit for unmasking Dykes. They taunted Dykes in a social media post, “Have you heard of a ’moleprint,’ Tyler?” along with a link to a scholarly article entitled “Facial Mole Detection: An Approach towards Face Identification.”
In the thread, they explained that they had verified his identity by comparing photos taken at Unite the Right to others he had posted online for professional purposes.
The Sunlight AFA site proclaims that “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” But they identify themselves only as “a collection of anti-fascist researchers.” All of the other “anti-fascist researchers” to whom they link are likewise anonymous.
Who are these professional stalkers and self-appointed judges of virtue, who proudly work to stifle even completely lawful political expression?
Who funds their remarkably expansive activities? And how can they champion the value of “sunlight” while lurking in the shadows themselves?
The Tiki Torch march pogrom provides yet another example of the blurred lines between communist activism and law enforcement.
Lawton Tufts , a youngish white graduate of UVA, is the Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney who prosecuted the felony charges against Dykes and other Tiki Torch carriers. He was described in the post–Unite the Right analysis commissioned by the city of Charlottesville, the Heaphy Report, as one of the “anti-racist activists” they interviewed, along with Gorcenski, Seth Wispelwey, Willis Jenkins and Tanesha Hudson.
The Heaphy Report revealed that
Lawton Tufts and Anne Coughlin played a role in facilitating communication between members of BLM [Black Lives Matter] and SURJ [Showing Up for Racial Justice] and City officials. [Heaphy Report, p. 86]
But apparently the fact that prosecuting attorney Tufts was actively working with assailants of Unite the Right is not considered to be a conflict of interest.
Anne Wilson Smith (email her) is the author of Charlottesville Untold: Inside Unite the Right and Robert E. Lee: A History Book for Kids. She is also the creator and editor of Reckonin.com.
