It Could Happen Here - Infiltrating Local Nazi Groups
Episode Date: October 22, 2024Garrison is joined by Corvallis Antifa and Left Coast Right Watch to discuss the Oregon chapter of White Lives Matter and one particular nazi who is receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in go...vernment contracts via his company Whit Industries. Sources:https://cvantifa.noblogs.org/post/2024/09/16/wlm/ https://leftcoastrightwatch.org/articles/your-tax-dollars-at-work-the-nazi-leader-behind-coos-bays-whit-industries/ https://info4publicuse.org/2024/09/tax-dollars-funding-a-nazi-linked-business-at-the-port-of-coos-bay/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.
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CallZone Media.
Welcome to It Could Happen Here.
I'm Garrison.
This is a little special episode today.
I'm joined by Alex from Corvallis Antifa and Hank, who's using a pseudonym for personal safety,
from the Left Coast Right Watch team.
Hello to you both, and thank you so much for joining me.
Hey, what's happening?
Thank you so much for having us.
Thanks for having us.
Good to be here.
So today we're going to be talking about this group called White Lives Matter.
I guess originally, White Lives Matter was like a slogan and like a very, very loose group from like 2015, or at least it kind of started in 2015, as a reaction to the growing Black Lives Matter movement.
I know I definitely saw this phrase propagated via like memes, flyers, billboards, and other forms of propaganda as a way to like seed white nationalist rhetoric to the then like growing and burgeoning alt-right.
Yeah. So there was a formation that was kind of like an NSM splinter formation
that happened in reaction to the initial Black Lives Matter protests in 2015.
The White Lives Matter that we're talking about today is a different formation entirely
that utilizes sort of the same slogan.
They are a group that started in like 2021 and have been organizing primarily on Telegram and have grown really rapidly across the country in the years since.
Yeah, we can see the early use of this phrase spread by, you mentioned, the National Socialist Movement, along with a few other kind of collections of neo-Nazis, the Aryan Resistance Society and the Aryan Nationalist Alliance. But then things
kind of like died down. It was just, it was like a slogan you could see at rallies, but it wasn't,
it wasn't anything like too prominent, honestly. But then we had this big second wave in 2021
with Telegram channels promoting a White Lives Matter march uh or a series of marches to be held
across the country on like april 11th this batch of rallies were mostly a failure in part due to
the efforts of anti-fascists who worked to sabotage the planning of these rallies ahead of time of the
rallies that did eventually take place really only a handful of white supremacists showed up
and most were outnumbered by anti-fascist counter demonstrators. So then after this initial event with this big
batch of channels on Telegram, which is this encrypted messaging platform based out of Russia,
it's not very good. Don't use it unless you're trying to infiltrate a Nazi group.
But after these like failed rallies,
White Lives Matter kind of turned into yet another
one of these like networks for white supremacists
and neo-Nazis that advocate quote unquote
pro-white activism.
Typically this includes like putting up
white nationalist like stickers around neighborhoods,
hanging large banners with fascist rhetoric
or Nazi imagery,
flyering and just spreading propaganda online
with the occasional like in-person rally.
I think you can see kind of the peak
of like the White Lives Matter slogan at least
was when it was propagated to the degree
that Kanye West wore it on a t-shirt
during his little Nazi era back in 2022.
And I think now you see White Lives Matter
as like a network. like it overlaps and crosses
over a lot with like similar groups, like the GDL, that's the Goyim Defense League, as well as
the National Socialist Club and Patriot Front to some degree. I guess one thing that I wanted to
talk about is that, and this is mentioned in the Corvallis and Tifa article on the Oregon chapter
of White Lives Matter, is like this idea
of hiding your power level, which we used to talk about it a little bit more. I think in some ways,
a whole bunch of Nazis kind of blew their cover back around 2020. But now you see kind of more
attempts to try to seed a white nationalist rhetoric into other kind of right-wing spaces
to push them farther along that radicalization pathway. And I would like to
have a discussion at least a little bit about how White Lives Matter specifically tries to hide
their power level, like kind of disguise the level of like overt fascism that they're really
proposing by employing this like, quote unquote, like pro white rhetoric.
Yeah, so White Lives Matter as a national organization is extremely like conscious of what
they would describe as like their optics they are very intent on like radicalizing who they
perceive to be everyday white people into sort of fascist politics and in their national level
manuals and the uh the materials that they provide to the leaders of statewide organizations.
They specifically talk about stuff like not displaying Nazi flags or using neo-Nazi rhetoric,
despite that being what they believe.
But their goal is to use more innocuous styles of sloganeering,
like the phrase white lives matter and protect white babies, stuff like that,
like white lives matter and protect white babies stuff like that as ways to kind of open the door to get people to uh become interested in a more like overtly national socialist politic they can
radicalize people to who like join their group and you see a lot of groups uh like active clubs
patriot front uh other sort of white nationalist formations using the national WLM org as sort of
a way to recruit to their own organizations with this sort of more innocuous, subtle style of
propaganda. Yeah, and like one other thing that's pointed out in the Corvallis and Tifa article
is like, they don't just do agitprop. Like, they're not just a group that is composed of only doing stickering.
There's been multiple instances when their online propaganda as well as their in-person
stickering escalates to real violence. Last year, a 28-year-old from New Jersey attacked
an anti-racism concert at a church. He yelled, white lives matter at attendees,
threw smoke bombs at the church, and then tried to bear spray the crowd. I think inadvertently bear spraying himself, which he then recorded a video talking about and posted online.
Later that year, a 20-year-old male associated with White Lives Matter firebombed a church in Ohio, and the church was picked as a target because it planned to host two drag events.
After being arrested, police found six firearms and dozens of loaded magazines alongside Nazi paraphernalia.
This guy also wrote a manifesto defending his actions and specifically stating that he was happy about it because people online were proud of him. And like, you can even go back to the White Lives
Matter rallies back in 2021, especially the one in Huntington Beach, which saw a degree of physical
violence. It's important not just not to just write these groups off as being like, oh, they
only do banner drops. Oh, they only do stickers, because not only is like propaganda really
important part of growing the number of them out there, but they also do real world violence.
It's also important to talk about like the ways that WLM is organizationally connected to like
more like scary elements of the neo-Nazi right. Recently, Left Coast Right Watch published proof
that Matthew Allison, who was one of the leaders of the Terror Ground Collective, who was one of the leaders of the terror ground collective who was recently arrested, was responsible for some of the national WLM propaganda that they published, which is quite concerning.
So, you know, even these groups that are more movementarian in nature and are trying to appeal to, you know,
you know, more quote unquote normie white people are like directly in bed with people who are like associated with mass shooters and like terrorists.
Yep.
Specifically try to like groom people into becoming mass shooters.
Yes.
I mean,
and like,
that's why I think specifically with both these guys who,
who did physical violence,
you can see violence as like a,
as like an escalatory thing for the person who's like doing it right.
You start off with throwing a Molotov cocktail and then later you might do a mass shooting it's like a testing ground you can see the same thing
with you know bear macing an anti-racism concert the fact that both these guys specifically the
one in ohio had like a lot a lot of guns and like we're in america there's there's a lot of guns
around but but having that many guns and and and in Ohio as a 20-year-old with all that
Nazi paraphernalia, that is what a Nazi mass shooter's bedroom looks like. And these are not
isolated incidents. I guess let's take a bit of a break and we will come back to talk about
specifically the Oregon chapter of White Lives Matter and what they've been getting up to the
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All right.
So after Corvallis Antifa leaked like chat logs from the Oregon White Lives Matter group back in 2021,
the chapter went dormant
and then it restarted earlier this year.
I guess, Alex, can you walk us through
kind of the rebirth of White Lives Matter
Oregon? Yeah, so the way that WLM works as a national organization is there's like a series
of groups that all kind of are extant, like there are groups, and then people would like apply to be
with the national order to be like a leader of a state group so back when uh wlm initially began as a thing in 2021
our group uh was running the oregon chapter and exposed several people who tried to join that
group and then after that like interest in uh that organization became uh it stopped existing
for several years yeah then uh earlier this year we noticed that somebody had taken over the chapter and had started engaging in some stickering and some propaganda.
So we were like, well, you know, we may as well join this group and see what's up. infiltrated the organization gathered information about the membership and published that information
online in order to warn the communities that these guys inhabit about their activities the group you
know was doing stuff that was not like extremely intense like they were doing stickers they did
two banner drops or three banner drops successfully rather. But in their chat, we also found that they were talking a lot about like, you know, military training and escalating.
And, you know, even though this group kind of like seemed very low key and was like not doing anything, you know, super scary, like the stuff they're talking about is concerning and they're getting organized and they're getting to know each other so we put a kibosh on that so it looks like according to
your research the new leader is this guy named cruz dean walters yeah yeah so cruz is a marine
kind of washout who lives in mcminnville oregon until very recently was living a double life. He was living with his mom
and his fiance, neither of whom knew about his racist beliefs and now knew. He was a highly
incompetent leader who, you know, really had a tremendous number of security flaws in his
organization, you know, as is evidenced by the fact that we were able to, you know, infiltrate
and destroy it in a matter of just a few months. But, you know, it is evidenced by the fact that we were able to, you know, infiltrate and destroy it in a
matter of just a few months. But, you know, it is worth noting that, like, the group grew from just
a handful of people to, you know, doing banner drops with, like, you know, six or seven folks
in just a couple, you know, a couple of short months. So, like, even though these groups can
kind of be benign, if there winds up being somebody who
is like, particularly passionate behind the channel, like, they can transform into something
less benign very, very quickly. And that's something we want to impart to other anti-fascists
across the country is there are all these channels, and they might be seeming kind of like,
benign now, but they can turn to something very malignant very quickly.
I wanted to ask specifically about Cruz's radicalization.
It's written in your piece that he was radicalized in part by the GDL,
the Going Defense League,
and participated in the city council death squads,
as reported by our own Molly Conger.
And then just seemingly like just getting bored
of just calling into city council
meetings to yell slurs he then like cooed the organization so i i i'm curious uh if he ever
wrote about or talked about his background with the gdl and his like apparent boredom
at their particular style of like a white supremacist activism yeah so um he i think
was just kind of like sitting on the internet as, like, a fucking, you know, dorky, lonely, sad little man.
And, you know, got into the GDL.
For those who have the fortune of not knowing, the GDL is sort of this network of, like, really grotesque, highly cringy, racist Twitch streamers.
Or, like, not on Twitch anymore, but, like, you know, there's streamers nonetheless not on twitch anymore but like you know there's
streamers nonetheless they've been banned from twitch but yeah um but yeah so they uh have this
program called the city council death squad where they will like call into like your local city
council meeting and just like yell slurs at the bleeder municipal employees that have to sit and
watch uh they did one in corvallis
and like watching the footage was just like watching like these like grown men acting like
children like you know hollering at like random like city counselor 23 or whatever it's it's
really like pathetic so and i think you know crews kind of saw that, and many do, you know, the GDL is just a tremendously fucking pathetic organization.
And he was, like, kind of decided that he wanted to get more involved, and he chose to get involved with WLM as opposed to, like, another neo-Nazi formation, because WLM is, like, a really, really easy entry point and has a very, like know kind of base politic it's not like you know hatred front
or an active club where there are you know membership requirements and you have to engage
in certain amounts of organizing activity or whatever it's just very easy for you know you're
lazy nazi to engage with yeah absolutely it definitely feels like the lazy person's option
who doesn't want to go through the work of being vetted by like actual like larger organizations yeah and he he took over the chapter from an even lazier nazi uh named christian coats
who lives in portland oregon who is like this old school bonehead from the 2000s who like has some
hate crime charges from like i think like attempting to and failing to assault some Black teens in 2007.
So Christian had, in the interceding years between us destroying the initial iteration of WLM,
taken it over and basically done zilch with it.
He posted one photo on the channel ever.
But then he got taken over by this dude, Cruz,
who grew the organization from just a few people to being a reasonable street
presence in a short number of months, obviously at the expense of including an anti-fascist
infiltrator and also just a true coterie of scumbags and idiots in the group.
Yeah, one of the other guys that you've identified is um i don't know
how to say his last name but casey i want to say nuts him oh yeah casey nelson who after being
kicked out of both the proud boys and patriot front made his own group in 2022 uh the rose
city nationalists which is kind of the laughingstock of all white supremacist groups in the pnw and the
group has the group has largely fallen apart after being just extensively investigated
and exposed by local anti-fascists,
almost to a comical extent.
Yeah, ourselves, Rose City Antifa,
and the Stumptown Research Collective
have been kind of going through
and just, you know, ripping apart RCN.
And RCN is, at this point more or less just casey and this
fella named jaron huber who is an absolute like freak he's got a bunch of tattoos all over his
face he uh was arrested for kicking a puppy nearly to death and beating up his grandfather um just
real scumbags jesus christ yeah they all they all have domestic violence charges and are just real nightmare folks.
The funniest thing about Rose City Nationalists is they got in this conflict with the Proud Boys.
I believe it was in Oregon City where they got just absolutely washed by some drunken Proud Boys on the street.
Proud Boys on the street,
not because of ideological issues,
but just because they have interpersonal issues
between Casey and the
Portland chapter of the Proud Boys.
They are truly just
a laughingstock and are just like,
I hate to use the term, but kind of like
wall cows at this point.
One thing that you do document
is just how many of
these guys are like domestic
abusers and like this is not uncommon for like these types of fellows but also crews uh like
both admitted to stealing a gun and also abusing his wife and threatening other family with
firearms and this is like a trend across so many of of the people exposed in these articles is the
extent to which they're all imbued in like spousal abuse child abuse it's it just it's one of the people exposed in these articles is the extent to which they're all envuved in
like spousal abuse child abuse it's it just it's one of the very consistent factors yeah misogyny
is you know one of the very very core parts of neo-nazism and white nationalism and uh yeah
there's a really really horrible like section of text in our article that where Cruz discusses like physically
hitting his fiance and then threatening his brother with a firearm and yeah it's really
really common that these people have domestic abuse charges multiple people in WLM Oregon have
histories of domestic abuse including Jaron Huber and Casey Knudsen who are the two other members
and yeah it's just anytime you look at a Nazi group there's a dude who beats his wife in it like kind of bar none as long as we've been
doing this work we've been seeing it i'd like to talk now about the second in command of white
lives matter oregon this small business owner in coos bay named michael witt gatenbein who usually
just goes by wit now wit has been a part of the White
Lives Matter Oregon banner drops, and is also responsible for a lot of the stickering that
gets done as he leaves stickers across the truck stop bathrooms up and down the coast.
Now, Witt's kind of a fascinating fellow to me. He has shockingly bad OPSECsec kind of one of the worst examples i've ever seen his very easily
recognized custom flatbed truck can be seen at banner drops in august and it even appears in
their own like propaganda videos for for another banner drop in september he like talked about his
just like utter disregard for opsec in uh in one of the audio archives that you have hosted on Left Goes Right Watch.
What else can you tell us about kind of Witt's background here?
Yeah, so Witt is a Nazi. And I believe his mother is actually, you know, he said at one point his
mother was like, quote, awakened to the truth about the Jews or something like that. So he
seems to come from, at the very least, an-semitic family but he himself is certainly a nazi and and i think he has believed he can operate with
impunity in kuzbe so i think it's less that he has bad opsec and more believes he seems to think of
himself as living in a world where it's okay to be a nazi sure we can talk a little bit more about
that but yeah he he runs a company called Industries, which he's claimed does business from Mexico to Russia. He works in the marine and maritime industry. Within the port of Coos Bay and Coos County, we know that he's gotten about a quarter million dollars in public contracts, primarily from the port of Coos Bay, but also the Port of Umpqua, the City of North Bend,
Coos County, South Coast Education Service District. That's just what we've found so far.
It can be pretty difficult to find, you know, even though this is public money, it can still
be sort of a pretty difficult process to get public records and things like that. But, you know,
we know that the Port of Coos Bay alone has awarded him like $219,000 in contracts for work ranging from hydraulics repairs and replacements on vessels and the bridge.
He's also painted the state dredge and the trailer, things like that.
You mentioned him using his work vehicle.
So he has stated, and this is from information we have from the Port Dallas Antifa infiltration, he stated that part of his goal is to build a white supremacist hub in Coos Bay.
He wants to get guys elected to mayor and city council and things like that.
And he actually was using White Lives Matter to recruit guys to come and work for him.
in White Lives Matter to recruit guys to come and work for him. He was recruiting a guy named Landon Calhoun, who is also an alleged pedophile, and we go into that in the Left Coast Right Watch
article. But if he got this alleged pedophile, Landon, to come and work for him, they met in
White Lives Matter, and he said, hey, come work for an all-white organization where we can come
and build the movement together. And as far as we know, it does appear that Landon has moved there.
He was planning to move there in this fall, and
we believe he's currently there.
Yeah, I'd like to kind of go by some of these points
one by one, because he's
certainly a worrying figure.
The fact that he's using his income, which is
largely derived of government contracts
to specifically
fund white supremacist activity
in the PNW and like use his own company
resources to grow the number of far-right extremists in coos bay specifically his plans
of like having them eventually like occupy positions of of local government it's a degree
of like long-term planning that isn't always present in some of these types of guys you know
plans are one thing but when you actually have
a business that you are like hiring people to move to this town to like actually build this
plan up like it shows the degree of uh chutzpah i guess on his part that he's actually like doing
this i mean it kind of reminds me of the the rise above movements tree trimming business
but that was just to pay bills they had no plans to like slowly actually
just like take over a small town there's a lot of these businesses that are run by nazis that
primarily hire other nazis but the degree to which that michael witt is is able to operate
without much oversight and just get get all of this money from local government is certainly
worrying i know he's stated that one of his employees like prints out all of this money from local government is certainly worrying. I know he's stated that one
of his employees prints out all of his White Lives Matter stickers and has gotten help from employees
to do one banner drop outside of Roseburg and has a history of hiring far-right people,
conspiracy theorists, and monetarily supporting them to help them continue their own far-right
activism. Yeah, and you mentioned his employees
that were printing the stickers for him that was before he hired landon so yeah he already has guys
that are that are doing this and the port i think it's important to point out that the port of coos
bay it's public body the the commissioners are elected by the governor and they're confirmed
by the oregon senate you know or yeah the yeah, the Oregon Senate, I believe it is.
So this is a state body that is giving state funding to this Nazi.
And I think that's really important to name.
It's also, like, just to give people a little bit of the geography.
Coos Bay is a small town, but actually geographically it takes quite a while to, like, drive from North Bend to Coos Bay.
And Witt lives right over by the Charleston Marina, and we know he's pretty in bed with the marina folks there.
There was a big Oregon Department of Transportation grant at a state level that the port had written that Witt would have been one of the people making money.
He was written officially into this grant.
It was a $3.5 million grant that Witt was written into this grant for it was a 3.5 million dollar
grant that was written into right so they're like his friends you know like they're like yeah
they're writing him into these grants wit's office is over there on ocean view boulevard which is
right next to the confederated tribes of kuz lower um indians tribal housing office and right next to
one of their casinos and just to give folks the terrain of where he's living and kind of operating too.
Yeah.
Hello, Garrison from the future.
Just cutting in to say something that Hank said, but it got a little bit garbled in the
voice modulation.
So I just want to state it a little bit more clearly here.
There's some other events that can help contextualize what Witt is doing in Coos Bay. Because currently in Coos County, there's this sort of intense far
right power grab that is slowly happening. Some people might know of this radio host named Rob
Taylor. He's said to be one of the guys who coordinated the breaching of the Oregon Capitol
in late December, which was basically a test run for January 6th. And he's hosted people
with the far-right group Patriot Prayer. He has an old Gab account, which was essentially like
Nazi Twitter before Twitter just became Nazi Twitter under Elon Musk. So this guy is like
very comfortable and associates with extremely far-right people, as well as engaged in a level
of activism in Oregon, at least. So that's Rob Taylor, the radio guy.
There's this other person named Rod Taylor, who's a Coos County commissioner,
who actually was a January 6th insurrectionist.
He was arrested at the Capitol on J6.
Now, Michael Witt Gatenbein has also previously employed this guy named Matt Wilbanks,
who's a buddy of Rob Taylor.
He runs this blog called Matt Wilbanks, who's a buddy of Rob Taylor. He runs this blog called
The Daily Resister, and also one of the Coos County Neighborhood Watch Groups in the Empire
District of Coos Bay, which is mostly just focused on like doxing and harassing homeless people.
And these guys are also part of various mega groups like Citizens Restoring Liberty. And
Witt himself is a part of this network. He has
attended Citizens Restoring Liberty events. He's also an admin on a Telegram channel called the
Oregon Patriot Alliance, which is like this mega patriots organizing channel on Telegram.
Nominally, these mega types typically say that they are, you know, not for Nazis. They are
against Nazis. They are against pedophiles.
And yet they are associating with wit here who employs a pedophile and is a Nazi. But one other thing that Hank said that I want to reiterate is that Coos Bay is also a contested space.
Although there is this intense far-right power grab happening, there's also a whole bunch of
other much more positive
activism. Hank pointed to the tribal communities fighting for indigenous sovereignty, as well as
environmentalist groups calling BS on the port's greenwashing of all their projects. So it's not
just that like everyone's Nazis now in Coos Bay. Yes, WIT is a Nazi and people should be concerned
about that, but it is a contested space home to
a diverse group of people who are also fighting for good things we're now going to have an ad
break and then return to talk more about white lives matter oregon
hey i'm jack these thomas the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.
I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories.
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of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers
and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,
and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
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Check out betteroffline.com. and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture,
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On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.
He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.
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Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,
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Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti.
And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden.
We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline,
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One of the most exciting things
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okay we are back and uh alex you said you wanted to add something on this point about projects of like moving a bunch of people to certain usually rural
areas to, you know, try to take them over, you know, most notably like Leaf, North Dakota,
where Craig Cobb tried to take over. But what I think has been shown really repeatedly is that
these projects have failed because the communities that live there, you know, even if they're rural
communities, even if they're small towns,
don't have it and are willing to fight back.
And that's what we're really hoping to see
from folks on the Oregon South Coast
being willing to push back against this sort of thing
like was done in Leith
and, you know, forcing these people
out of the institutions they're trying to inhabit.
Yeah, and especially with someone like Michael here
because he's
hiring people who advocate
going much farther than White Lives Matter
to actually engage in paramilitary training,
hiring someone who is
not just accused of being a pedophile,
but has admitted to Michael that his family
hates him because of an allegation that he's
touched someone, and that Michael
himself witnessed this guy,
Calhoun, being quote-unquote hands-on with an eight an eight year old girl while they were meeting together in Coos Bay.
There's like that side of it.
And then you have him like posting on Telegram about like wanting the day of the rope to come faster.
Kind of like an old like Nazi slogan about like racial lynchings and like furthering racial conflict, as well as like sharing instructions from the meme Waffen telegram channel
about how to make them all tough cocktails.
I believe we've talked about meme Waffen on the show before.
So he's like doing all of this type of stuff.
That's like so much more obviously objectionable.
We're also trying to like make like space for himself within like the mega
community,
right.
Being the admin of this Oregonregon patriots alliance telegram
channel which is like also an attempt just to like further the radicalization of these like
mega centric members by like inundating them with more explicit kind of fascistic propaganda but on
like a slower level and then there are multi-million and multi-billion dollar government projects to
improve the port that wit is expected to receive funds from and i feel like
this is something that's pretty pretty objectionable and it should be easy to stop but it requires like
attention and it requires a degree of public pressure to make sure that the government both
state and federal are not giving funds to like an explicit neo-nazi who hires alleged pedophiles
to fund like right-wing activism across the Pacific Northwest.
Yeah, totally. And I think it's important to point out too, like, you know, Coos Bay is in this process. They have the intermodal port of Coos Bay, which is like a $2.3 billion project where
they want to become like, you know, they want to be as big of a port as Oakland, California or
whatever. And, you know, one of the things i mean my understanding from
talking to folks in coos bay is that it's just greenwashed capitalism that will be destructive
to the environment it won't actually bring the community the kind of like people are like what
about bike lanes you know like there's like community infrastructure people want in coos bay
and dredging the port is not that you know and I think there's
also like a couple examples of that is it'll destroy eelgrass which is a really important
marine habitat and also source of storage carbon it'll destroy indigenous cultural resources or
impact those spaces and you know we haven't seen the exact financials yet for what this project
will be but it's a 2.3 billion dollar project that involves dredging, you know, which is sort of deepening and widening the port and the channels.
And we know that Witt has gotten money, for example, to work on the state dredge and do work on it.
think it's very possible that wit would be until the port takes a stand and says hey we're not funding this nazi who uses his work truck to do nazi stuff i think people should be really concerned
about this port money going back to help build a nazi community that he's trying to build there
yeah and like to your previous point like the fact that he's able to be so flagrant about his
white supremacist beliefs the way that he doesn't feel like he needs to care about OPSEC because he has a job that's irreplaceable.
He provides a service to this community that he feels like no one else can do.
Therefore, he is secure in that.
You can't allow them that level of comfortability.
And that's something that has to be opposed due to both public pressure and research that you have done, as well as the crucial work from Corvallis Antifa.
Yeah, I think just to add to groups like the Oregon's Bay Area,
which is a popular Facebook group, has been doing a really great job
just talking about what's going on.
I think largely we really haven't seen much response from the Port of Coos Bay or the governor who's confirming these commissioners.
Like largely the sort of institutions of power are not yet responding.
And so I think that's something that both local folks in Coos Bay could be pressuring and also at a statewide level.
Right. Like this is state funding and the Port of Coos Bay Development has federal funding too.
But I think those are places
where there could really be
a lot more pressure being applied.
And I think a lot more people
should be talking about all of this
as well as we mentioned earlier,
you know, WIT claims to have
a reputation and work and contracts
all up and down the entire West Coast.
So certainly if there are listeners in here in Oakland or Alaska or Washington
or wherever you might be who know the name Witt Gate and Vine or Witt Industries
and you want to send in a tip to Corvallis Antifa or whatever, Left Coast Right Watch,
we would be really happy to hear what you know about this guy
because we know he's working in other communities,
but we would love details or any tips folks may have.
Yeah, would either of you like to kind of add anything else before we close out and
point people towards both your work and where to send information to?
Yeah, I guess the thing that I would just close out with is WLM is not just an Oregon
problem.
It's a national problem.
I know this podcast reaches folks all across the country. Because WLM is not just an Oregon problem, it's a national problem.
I know this podcast reaches folks all across the country.
If you are somebody who is Antifa curious or is interested in making a difference in your community,
it's a group with really terrible security culture, and it might be worth taking a gander at.
God, it feels so silly to do a podcast plug, but please check out our work at cvantifa.noblogs.org we're also on twitter at cv against fash and instagram at cvantifa
and you know we have lots of articles exposing neo-nazis in oregon and across the country
and uh you might just find somebody in your community who sucks hank yeah
i'll just add you know if you want to see the the of course the left coast right watch article gives
a really deep dive on whip and also information for public use has posted like the financials so
if you really want to like get into the numbers it's worth looking there and yeah just to reiterate
i mean i think coos bay and so many other places are really contested spaces and i think these nazis want us to believe that they're in charge
and that they're powerful and they have this idea that they can operate with impunity and it's really
not true like we've seen small and rural towns take down nazis all over this country and i think
that will continue and i think that yeah like what tactics and ways people might do that in from place
to place can look different.
But I just, you know, encourage folks to dig into your local Nazis and get together and
figure out how to how to mess them up, you know, and it's a good way to have fun with
your friends and and we can do it, you know, and we need to be doing it.
I mean, there just shouldn't be state money going to help a Nazi build a white supremacist utopia.
I mean, that's the history of this country, right?
Like, that's the history of colonization.
That's the history of Oregon specifically.
So, yeah, it's time to do something else.
Yeah.
And Antifa isn't just for you big city folk.
You know, those of us that live in rural communities
can and should be involved in these struggles.
And it is something that like,
is not just something that happens in Portland.
People in rural Oregon are doing anti-fascism
and we'll continue to do it and we'll continue to win.
Thank you both so much.
I will leave links to your orgs and your articles in the description below.
Thank you for listening.
And yeah, if you are Antifa curious, give it a shot.
It is indeed fun.
If What Happened Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
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Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German,
where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral.
We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and
all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment
world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians,
actors, and influencers. Each week we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that
matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only
nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast,
and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon
Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better
Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by
an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.
Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.
And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba?
Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.
Or stay with his relatives in Miami?
Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.
Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.