Author: Atlanta Antifa

Summary: Christopher Mark Head of Locust Grove, Georgia, promotes and helps organize for local versions of the July 24 anti-vaxxer “Worldwide Rally for Freedom”. He also disseminates anti-vax propaganda under the “White Rose” name in Metro Atlanta. Online, Head networks with Nazis and helps radicalize anti-vaxxers into extreme forms of antisemitism and racism. Head travels around Metro Atlanta as a Turf Masters employee, leaving far-Right propaganda in the communities he visits. We assess the threat level of Head’s network to marginalized communities and conclude with a call for additional monitoring of the intersection between anti-vaccination, antisemitism, and white supremacy.

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Introduction

When far-Right movements lack a strong figurehead and common target, they infight. The electoral defeat of Trump and the slow-motion implosion of the QAnon conspiracy theory have brought a period of infighting, but also of recomposition. New figures step into the disarray, attempting to bring order and to “unite the right”. One of these figures is Christopher Mark Head from Locust Grove, Georgia. Through his work with the “White Rose North GA” anti-mask/anti-vaccination group, Head builds alliances with everyone from explicit neo-Nazis to more mainstream anti-vaxxers.

Head’s political agenda goes far beyond anti-vaccination campaigns and COVID-19 conspiracies. His aim is to politically impose his version of Christian Fundamentalism, and to purge society of alleged “anti-Christ” influence—he is, in other words, a Christofascist. Although Chris Head occasionally criticizes Nazism, he also considers neo-Nazis as allies against his greater enemies.

This year, Head has been increasingly involved in on-the-ground activism and placing propaganda stickers across Metro Atlanta. In recent weeks, Head has also been planning and promoting anti-mask/anti-vaccination rallies in our state. These rallies are scheduled for Saturday, July 24. Head is one of the most active participants in the “Worldwide Georgia” channel on Telegram for the anti-vaxxer rallies. Through his efforts for the July 24 mobilization, Head hopes to meet allies and draw them closer to his far-Right politics. With the publication of this article, “Sir Christopher”/Chris Head will at least no longer have the cover of anonymity.

July 24 Rallies

A loosely organized coalition of anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, the “Worldwide Rally for Freedom”/“Worldwide Freedom Rally”, will hold coordinated rallies on Saturday, July 24. In Georgia, there are at least three rallies advertised: one in Dalton, one in Roswell, and one in Atlanta. The Atlanta rally, scheduled for Piedmont Park and primarily organized by Karen Denise Cortes Hernandez of Marietta, will likely be the largest. Among other speakers, the Atlanta rally will feature fringe Republican candidate for governor Kandiss Taylor, also known for spreading election misinformation and demanding an Arizona-style “forensic audit” of Georgia results.

The July 24 rallies in Georgia are organized both on Facebook and especially on the Telegram messaging application. As “Sir Christopher”, Chris Head is one of the most active participants in the “Worldwide Georgia” Telegram channel. Although Head has written that he was planning to attend the Roswell event with a “rally bro”, he has placed flyers in Atlanta for the Piedmont Park rally. Head has also expressed interest in holding a post-rally after party in McDonough, an effort to further network with anti-vaxxers and move them toward his politics.

In “Worldwide Georgia”, Head promotes the “White Rose”, another anti-vax propaganda group, as well as his personal “Defying Tyranny” Telegram channel. Head has also suggested that July 24 rallygoers “post White Rose stickers as we go” that day. Since Head is the dominant personality of the local “White Rose North GA” Telegram channel, his aim is to funnel “Worldwide” rally participants to the White Rose, to the North Georgia local channel, and to his far-Right personal channel where they will be exposed to much further-Right propaganda.

Historical Background of the “White Rose” Name

To explain the activities of anti-vax “White Rose North GA” group, some historical context is necessary. The original White Rose was an underground student group in Nazi Germany. Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, both leaders of the group, were arrested for anti-Nazi pamphlets and executed by guillotine on the same day in 1943, along with a third member of the group Christoph Probst. More trials and executions of White Rose members followed. Sophie Scholl has long been remembered as an antifascist martyr and the name “White Rose” has been associated with antifascism.

Many modern-day anti-vaxxers push a brand of historical revisionism that claims public health guidelines are the equivalent of Nazism. This analogy is a form of Holocaust-trivialization and denial, but it allows anti-vaxxers to claim the mantle of resistance to Nazism, even when they organize alongside neo-Nazis. This attempt at cooptation has also received intense popular pushback. For example, in November 2020 at a German anti-vaxxer rally, when a young anti-vaxxer compared herself to Sophie Scholl on stage, a security guard stripped off his vest, saying “I’m not going to be a security guard for bullshit like this,” and walked away. Such pushback has not deterred anti-vaxxers, who also formed an international propaganda network called “The White Rose” to distribute anti-vax stickers last year. The cooptation of the White Rose name is especially grotesque considering that antivaxxer movement is a breeding ground for antisemitism, as our documentation makes clear.

“White Rose” on Telegram

The international White Rose group is active on Telegram and encourages supporters to form local groups to coordinate stickering campaigns and for grassroots networking. Despite its name, the local “North Georgia” Telegram chat contains many Metro Atlanta participants. The group soon became characterized by extreme conspiracism, as well as the presence of open white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Except for spam accounts, Chris Head is the most active poster in the North Georgia channel. He also formed his own Telegram group, originally called the “White Rose North GA Extension”, to “talk deeper” beyond COVID-19 conspiracy theories. At approximately the same time, he was banned from the main international White Rose chat for his off-topic posting and promoting his personal “extension group”. Head renamed his own Telegram channel “Defying Tyranny” after that episode and began to complain that the White Rose anti-vax movement was too moderate for his taste, although he remains active in the “North GA” chat and continues to place White Rose stickers.

Antisemitism and Nazism

Chris Head states that he is not a neo-Nazi and has even expressed dismay at some of their propaganda which he considers counter-productive. At his most critical, Head refers to neo-Nazis and the Alt-Right as “critical race theory for white people”. However, Head agrees with Nazis on many points—especially their hatred of Black Lives Matter and anti-racists—and hopes to eventually recruit them to his brand of far-Right conspiracism and Christofascism. Head’s main sticking point is the Nazi belief that Jewish people are ultimately responsible for everything wrong in the world. Head will agree that Jewish people are contributing to societal collapse, but only because Satan in the guise of “Mystery Babylon” is making them do it—therefore, they are not directly to blame. His co-administrator “Ryan” is a virulent antisemite who argues that Hitler was a Jewish plant who orchestrated the Holocaust to somehow make Jewish people look better.

Another of Chris Head’s “Defying Tyranny” administrators, “Tzunami”, is also an antisemite. In the below screenshot, they take the side of Holocaust-denier, Hutton Gibson.

Yet another co-administrator of the “Defying Tyranny” group is an antisemite. “TheColonelRetired” uses his real name and profile photo: former US Army commissioned officer Brett Hale (Brett Miot Hale) of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Earlier this month, Hale wrote in “Defying Tyranny” about receiving a visit from the FBI—possibly related to some of his inflammatory online posts, for example about targeting businesses with mask requirements.

The North Georgia group effectively functions as a safe space for neo-Nazis to argue their positions and attempt to recruit, even as they themselves are supposedly being recruited into anti-vax stickering. Once members join the “Defying Tyranny” group, antisemitism becomes the default position promoted by the owner and all group administrators.

It is worth reflecting on why anti-vax and COVID-19 conspiracy groups are so attractive to Jew-haters. First, Jewish people have long been portrayed as vectors of disease in the antisemitic imagination, reaching back to Medieval Europe when Jewish communities were scapegoated for the spread of the Black Plague. Second, alleged COVID-19 plots would involve massive worldwide conspiracies of the sort that have featured in antisemitic propaganda since at least the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The conspiratorial imagination quickly tends toward antisemitism, and vice versa. Much has been written about this connection, but to put it in simple form: when conspiracy theories are constructed, they need some form of scaffolding. Otherwise, the slightest skepticism could dismantle the theory. Inconvenient questions such as, “So what’s the point of faking COVID-19?” or “Who would even benefit from such an evil plot?” need to be deflected. Relying on the preexisting scaffolding of antisemitism, at first tentatively then later with true commitment, allows conspiracists to build ever more convoluted and counterfactual theories. And once these edifices are constructed, they attract the already committed antisemites, who are always looking for new problems to blame on Jewish people.

Racism and “Critical Race Theory” Panic

Although he engages in casual anti-Asian racism with “China virus” remarks, Head’s resentment is more centered on anti-Black racism.

Chris Head claims that he is a civic nationalist and not a white nationalist, but the level of vitriol directed at people of color and Jewish people renders the difference more academic than functional.

Throughout July, Chris Head has been sharing more and more content from white nationalist and racist channels. 

Head’s obsessive hatred of Black and Native people is very clear in this July voice message: he begins by talking about missing his nearly-all-white home state of Alaska and segues into a call for white nationalism while weaseling out of calling it “white nationalism”.

These racist musings were inspired by Christian Foshee’s recommendation of a book outlining the future Balkanization of the US into separate ethnostates. The book in question is authored by Billy Roper, notorious neo-Nazi and former membership director of the National Alliance.

Chris Head has recently been propagandizing around the “critical race theory” (CRT) scare, for example leaving anti-CRT stickers alongside White Rose materials on a July 11 propaganda mission in Atlanta. (See below for more information on Head’s stickering activity.) Head has also shared far-Right anti-“critical race theory” materials in the “Georgia Worldwide” rally Telegram channel. This is not simply Head jumping on the far-Right anti-CRT bandwagon, which pretends that white people are victimized when racism is analyzed or the history of racism is taught. It also shows Head’s preference for rhetorically framing his racism as opposition to anti-racism. Chris Head’s anti-CRT stickers placed in Atlanta claimed that CRT is “anti-white” but that it also “undermines Blacks”. Head’s statements in “Defying Tyranny” show that beyond the tangled rhetoric, he is simply a garden-variety racist.

Misogyny

Anyone who follows the far-Right attentively, notices that misogyny and domestic abuse are rampant. Far-Right and fascist ideology focuses on controlling and dominating those who they perceive as weaker, and the closest group at hand perceived as weak is generally women. Chris Head is an adherent of misogynist theology, blaming cultural evils on “Mystery Babylon” and promoting YouTube preacher Spencer Smith. Smith argues that Satanic feminism has infected evangelical Christianity. Chris Head is also an anti-choice activist who believes that “pro-life” does not go far enough and that anyone who has an abortion should be executed.

In his personal life, Chris Head is a domestic abuser. He has an extensive list of charges and court records from his old residence in Homer, Alaska, before his move to Georgia. Here is information from a protective order.

Non-White-Rose Networking, Connections and Employment

While it is unclear how much he networks with their other Georgia members, Chris Head also sympathizes with the far-Right street brawlers of the Proud Boys. In April, Head, in an audio message, quizzed one member of the “White Rose North GA” telegram group about whether that member “refuses to apologize for the West”—a paraphrase of the first-degree Proud Boy pledge. On Teespring, Chris Head sells t-shirts for Valiant Images, his photography side business. The shirts feature laurels and a yellow and black color scheme, which is a clear reference to the Proud Boys’ dress code.

Chris Head’s wife, Chantelle Adkins-Head, is a critical care nurse at the Neuro ICU unit at Emory Midtown according to LinkedIn. If Adkins-Head shares her husband’s racist and antivaxx beliefs, this could endanger patients. Chris Head has mentioned Emory hospital and its mask policy in the “White Rose North GA” Telegram channel.

Chris Head is employed at a landscaping business called “Turf Masters” which has multiple locations in the Metro Atlanta area. The Turf Masters location in Jackson, Georgia confirmed his employment as of July 22, 2021 as a Lawn Care Consultant. Head has promoted Turf Masters using his own name on social media such as Nextdoor.

Head has jokingly referred to “the Black ethnostate where I work.” Given his obsessive resentment of Black people, his relationship with his coworkers, managers or customers may be uncomfortable or worse. Head also appears to place propaganda stickers in the same communities he visits for work.

Propaganda Activity

Chris Head regularly places propaganda for White Rose. Head has discussed placing anti-vax stickers in Peachtree City and other locations south of Atlanta, which he also appears to visit for work. Head has also made several trips to Atlanta to place propaganda. He is almost certainly responsible for targeting the Little Five Points area of Atlanta with White Rose stickers in April, since the April stickering followed a route used by Head in subsequent visits. In June, Head claimed responsibility in an audio message on “White Rose North Georgia” for stickering around the nearby Historic Fourth Ward Skate Park. Earlier this month, Head again stickered in Little Five Points and the Skate Park, following a post to the channel stating that he was in “Little F[*]g Points”—a reference to the area having a reputation as LGBTQ+ friendly. During that visit, Head also placed stickers promoting his “Defying Tyranny” telegram channel and attacking “critical race theory”, alongside his normal anti-vax White Rose materials. Head returned to Little Five Points the next weekend, placing a smaller number of only White Rose stickers.

Other Notable members of “White Rose North GA” and “Defying Tyranny”

In “Defying Tyranny”, there are three co-administrators chosen by Chris Head: “Ryan”, “Tzunami” and “TheColonelRetired” (Brett Hale of Tennessee). All of them are non-Nazi antisemites. Ideologically committed Nazis who frequently defend Hitler have been active in the chat. Still present in the channel are Christian Foshee (Telegram alias “Christian Fo Sho”) of Georgia and “Drooper Doo” (real name unknown). Other Nazis have left for various reasons: “The Resistance” left because Chris Head mentioned having a friend in Homeland Security, and “Colin Ries” and “Charlie Hartmann” left after finding the channel insufficiently pro-Hitler. (“Charlie Hartmann” remains in the “White Rose North GA” Telegram channel.)

Conclusion and Calls to Action

Chris Head has a history of violence against women, which is a strong predictor of future violence. He has not made any specific physical threats of violence himself, but he fantasizes about violence carried out against his enemies and creates spaces online where others can also engage in these violent fantasies.

The worst-case scenario is that one of the group members will become radicalized and angry enough to turn dream into reality. Potential targets could include local abortion clinics, Black civil rights organizations, LGBTQ+ spaces/centers, and synagogues. Chris Head therefore represents a clear danger to the community and should be monitored closely, as should his associates.

Our study of Chris Head provides one example of COVID-19 conspiracy mobilizations serving as a channel for far-Right, antisemitic and racist organizing. By promoting White Rose and the July 24 “Worldwide” rallies, Head builds a reputation as a committed activist and draws others towards his politics. Those who proceed down the rabbit hole far enough end up in Telegram channels with neo-Nazis. A similar trend has been highlighted by antifascists in Oregon, who documented antisemitic and fascist organizers recruiting through COVID-19 denial groups. Since anti-vax/COVID-19 conspiracy mobilizations frequently provide space to far-Right organizers, antifascists must research and document this problem, then engage in concrete opposition. In our instance, this begins with exposing Chris Head.

CALL TO ACTION: Turf Masters should immediately terminate Chris Head’s employment. He is a danger to local communities and to his coworkers. Turf Masters headquarters can be reached at 888-924-8873 and the Jackson, GA office is 770-775-0081. They can be reached by email through a contact form on their website and at [email protected]. 

We also encourage antifascists to continue pushing back against the cooptation of the White Rose name, by honoring the real history of anti-Nazi resistance. 

If you have further information on any of the far-Right groups or regional organizers mentioned in this article, please get in touch.

Update: Martin Rojas’ steady stream of racist propaganda ended in June 2022, with Rojas’ sudden death in Atlanta.

“I have a vested interest in keeping blacks (and any other hostile people unlike myself) out of power, for myself and my posterity.”

Martin Rojas (as “Nathan Doyle”) explains his campaigning for Brian Kemp in Georgia, 2018

Introduction

The pseudointellectual white nationalists involved with the American Renaissance (AmRen) website often carefully hide their true identities. Even among this set, Martin Christopher Rojas stands out both for his wariness about being identified and his wordiness in support of the cause. Using seven different pen names over eight years, Rojas spread racist propaganda far and wide. Hiding under the pen name of “Chris Roberts”, Rojas has been employed by the influential “race realist” American Renaissance (AmRen) website from July 2016 to October 2017, and again from November 2019 to present. Of the four employees currently listed on the white nationalist site, “Roberts”/Rojas is the only one who has not yet been publicly identified, a situation which this report now remedies. 

Rojas is responsible for over three hundred pieces on AmRen, mostly as “Chris Roberts” but also under other pseudonyms. His original writing has been featured on other far-Right, anti-immigrant, and white nationalist websites: Counter-Currents, Occidental Observer, VDare, and over a half dozen others. In total, he has published over five hundred pieces with his seven known pseudonyms. As “Linda Preston” writing for AmRen, Rojas advocated compartmentalizing personal information across different pen names to avoid being identified. Evidently, this strategy has failed. In a companion piece, “Martin Rojas’ Pen Names”, we discuss Rojas’ seven known pen names and how they trace back to him. 

At the heart of Rojas’ writing is a commitment to “Identitarian” white nationalism. While Rojas may pose as a sort of intellectual while writing under his pseudonyms, his propaganda serves as a mission statement for violent action. The same narratives promoted by Rojas in his writing for AmRen and other sites have been linked to massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas. The white nationalist movement requires ethnic cleansing to achieve its goals. The career propagandists who spread the movement’s lies are at least as dangerous as its organizers and foot soldiers. 

Here, we discuss Rojas’ background in Minneapolis; the start of his writing; his time in Beltway conservative politics; his travels to Chile and networking with the far-Right there; and his activities in Georgia. 

Background

Martin Rojas was born in 1992 to a US-born mother and a Chilean immigrant father, and grew up in a bilingual household in Minnesota. Rojas would later use his “Benjamin Villaroel” pen name to discuss “white Hispanic” topics as well as race in Chile. Rojas was unhappy in high school, and under his pen name “Chris Roberts” he later claimed that “public schools” helped turn him to racism. A profile of an “extra-institutional learning” book club founded by Rojas in the Twin Cities notes that he “once dropped out of high school for a period”. The article noted that Rojas had assigned his book club the white supremacist race war fantasy The Turner Diaries. However, at that time Rojas may not have been completely immersed in the white nationalist movement. Rojas graduated from Avalon School, a charter school in Saint Paul, in 2011.

Appearing on a podcast under his own name in 2019, Rojas stated that he “studied history at the University of Minnesota”. It is unclear when Rojas was at UMN. Rojas also studied at Shimer College, a “Great Books” college in Chicago—likely earlier, since one of Rojas’ articles suggests his “freshman year” was at Shimer. In April and August 2013, “Gilbert Cavanaugh” wrote bitterly about Shimer, although he did not provide the college’s name at the time. Another Rojas alias, “Albert Emory”, claimed to live in Chicago circa August 2013. The following month, yet another Rojas pen name—“Hubert Collins”—wrote that he was living in Minneapolis. From March to June 2014, Rojas as “Albert Emory” blogged for the paleoconservative Chronicles, with some blog posts discussing the inside-the-Beltway (metro Washington DC) political scene. A fourth Rojas alias, “Nathan Doyle”, announced in September 2014 that he had dropped out with “no intention of finishing my bachelor’s degree”. 

The first article by Rojas we have found is from December 2012, at the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine. During 2013, Rojas contributed to white nationalist, anti-immigrant, and Alt-Right sites such as AlternativeRight.com, American Renaissance, Amerika, Occidental Observer and VDare. He was by then a committed member of the white nationalist movement, gravitating toward its pseudo-intellectual side. Some racist websites paid Rojas token amounts for his writing. Others received content for free.

Rojas’ travel to the 2013 H.L. Mencken Club conference, held at a hotel near the Baltimore-Washington International Airport over the first weekend of November, deepened his far-Right involvement and grew his contacts. Speakers at the 2013 gathering included Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer; paleoconservative and Spencer mentor Paul Gottfried; and John Derbyshire, a former National Review writer and anti-Black racist whose writing Rojas admires. Rojas later wrote about talking with some attendees about their memories of the late Sam Francis, a paleoconservative turned open white nationalist and a hero to Rojas. In a different article, Rojas mentioned chatting with racist and misogynist gender theorist F. Roger Devlin at the H.L. Mencken Club gathering. In October 2014, AmRen published a lengthy interview with Devlin by Rojas.

Rojas’ networking throughout 2013 meant that by the time he moved to metro DC, he likely already had Alt-Right contacts in the area.

Beltway Politics and the Leadership Institute

In 2014, Rojas wrote a dozen blog posts on the paleoconservative Chronicles website under the name “Albert Emory”. His author’s bio stated: “Albert Emory is a twenty-something hiding out in the Beltway.” We do not know what Rojas’ first job or internship was in metro DC, but his blog posts offer some clues. In the last of the Chronicles posts, published in June 2014, Rojas/“Emory” stated that he was part of the “overlapping circles of Conservatism Inc and Libertarianism Inc—or the ‘Kochtopus,’ if you will.” This refers to the network of right-wing and libertarian organizations funded by the Koch brothers. While seemingly doing an internship or working for pay in the Beltway libertarian world, Rojas continued to write for other far-Right sites. The first articles from Rojas’ widely-used “Hubert Collins” pseudonym date from this time. Rojas also knew the local Alt-Right scene: a March blog post mentioned that “a friend of mine who has been published on a few Dissident Right [another way of expressing ‘Alt-Right’] websites” invited him to a DC demonstration against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The protest was organized by the left-wing CodePink, and the white nationalists were discussing tagging along.

In July 2014, Rojas attended the Leadership Institute’s two-day “Youth Leadership School” in Arlington, Virginia on the recommendation of “a fellow Minnesotan and former Leadership Institute intern”. After finishing the two-day event, Rojas was invited to intern with the Leadership Institute (LI) starting Spring 2015. The Leadership Institute works to train conservative activists and its alumni include politicians such as Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell, plus other right-wing figures such as selectively edited video specialist James O’Keefe of Project Veritas. The Leadership Institute has a history of training and employing white nationalists. For example, Kevin DeAnna (“Gregory Hood”) who currently is employed at AmRen with Rojas, had earlier worked for Leadership Institute. Longtime AmRen employee Devin Saucier (“Henry Wolff”) passed through LI training as well.   

Before returning to metro DC for his Spring 2015 internship at LI, Rojas appears to have spent time in Chile during the second half of 2014. His international travel did not put a halt to his racist propaganda output for far-Right and white nationalist sites. One of Rojas’ announcements for the 2014 H.L. Mencken Club gathering referenced him being over four thousand miles away from the venue, and Rojas was fined for breaking Chilean residency laws at the end of December, perhaps for overstaying his permitted time in the country. When Rojas returned to metro DC for his Spring 2015 internship, he appears to have first stayed at LI’s Sacher Intern House in Arlington, Virginia. 

As “Hubert Collins”, Rojas wrote for AmRen about attending the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February. He suggested that the real reason for attending the annual event was to attend CPAC social events where he would subtly change perceptions of “dissidents”—meaning white nationalists in this context—and to “establish a good reputation for yourself among people whose opinions matter.” Rojas mentioned LI’s happy hours among his recommended CPAC events. He mulled the possibilities of “a job in Conservatism Inc. […] You could learn a lot about fund-raising, activism, lobbying, and how power is exercised in Washington”. “Collins”/Rojas also noted having “dissident” friends who were holding down jobs in the DC political world.

Rojas’ LI internship led to a job, with Rojas hired as a Donor Communications Coordinator for LI. In a 2015 “Special Movement Issue” of the Leadership Institute’s Building Leadership newsletter, Rojas contributed a brief article about his internship and his new position at LI. An accompanying photo caption states: “Using the skills he learned at LI’s Communications Workshop, Martin recorded a segment with the Institute for Humane Studies […] to promote their summer seminars.” The Institute of Humane Studies is a major Koch-funded libertarian organization that holds educational events and offers scholarships. The IHS video featuring Rojas has since been removed from their YouTube channel.

Rojas later described his Donor Communications Coordinator position at Leadership Institute as “a tepid job with Conservatism Inc.”. The job provided income as Rojas continued writing for the white power movement, and it kept him in the DC area at a time when the Alt-Right was starting to gain visibility and numbers. Through his work at LI, Rojas may have picked up some skills and cultivated some goodwill in broader rightwing circles. However, as a new employee at LI, he had limited impact at his workplace.

Rojas’ writing appeared in a few issues of LI’s eight-page Building Leadership newsletter while he worked there. For the Winter 2016 issue, Rojas co-authored a piece about the Leadership Institute’s field representative program, which was portrayed as “fight[ing] back against the leftist campus onslaught.” Rojas wrote half of the Spring 2016 newsletter, contributing two articles praising the work of LI’s CampusReform site, which publishes stories about alleged liberal or leftist excesses at universities. In one article, Rojas characterized the accusation of racism as “a common leftist attack”: a line that would fit in just as well on American Renaissance where he was also contributing. For the most part, though, Rojas’ newsletter contributions were the generic conservative content his employers expected. Rojas’ final newsletter appearance was a lightweight interview in the Summer 2016 issue with US Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who was leading the Freedom Caucus at the time.

Rojas’ employment at the Leadership Institute briefly coincided with that of Alex Witoslawski, a LI regional field coordinator who later provided private media trainings to the white nationalists of Identity Evropa. Witoslawski has also contributed to American Renaissance, publishing an article on the site in October 2017, shortly after Rojas ended his first period of employment there. Both Rojas and Witoslawski were listed on the Leadership Institute staff page in early 2016. 

American Renaissance

In July 2016, Rojas made the leap to full-time professional racism by leaving his job at LI and beginning work at American Renaissance as “Director of Special Projects”. Rojas first published on AmRen almost three years earlier as “Gilbert Cavanaugh” and had also appeared there using other pen names. Now he began his new job with a new persona: “Chris Roberts.” Rojas’ AmRen job required being the “point of contact for supporters and readers”, utilizing the skills Rojas had developed as a Donor Communications Coordinator for LI.

Apart from AmRen founder Jared Taylor, the Oakton, Virginia-based site had only one other employee at the time: Devin Saucier, who writes for AmRen under the pseudonym “Henry Wolff”. Before landing at AmRen, Saucier had founded the Vanderbilt chapter of “Youth for Western Civilization”—an organization that skirted white nationalism—and eventually became the Vice President of that national organization. Later, while working for Jared Taylor and AmRen, Saucier helped then-Breitbart correspondent and rightwing celebrity Milo Yiannopoulos to sanitize and promote the Alt-Right for a mainstream audience. Though it is unclear when the affiliation started, Saucier was also a member of the white nationalist Identity Evropa/American Identity Movement organization, which disbanded last year. 

Despite AmRen’s small size, it is one of the most influential and long-running white nationalist projects in North America, with its “race realist” website providing a pseudointellectual veneer to racism. AmRen’s annual conference is the year’s main event for the “suit-and-tie” portion of the racist movement. The conference often hosts representatives from overseas neofascist movements, facilitating deeper collaboration with their US counterparts.  

Rojas’ first piece for AmRen as “Chris Roberts” was “The Irreplaceable Gregory Hood”: reviewing collected essays by white nationalist Kevin DeAnna, who writes as “Gregory Hood” on white nationalist sites. Kevin DeAnna as “Hood” joined the AmRen staff in February 2018, between Rojas’ two stretches at AmRen. Writings by “Gregory Hood” on AmRen, however, go back to 2011. Now, as of 2021, Rojas, Saucier and DeAnna are all coworkers at AmRen. 

DeAnna is a former Leadership Institute field representative and founded Youth for Western Civilization while working for LI. He went on to write for the conservative WorldNetDaily and, as “James Kirkpatrick”, for the anti-immigrant VDare and the now-defunct Social Contract. One of Rojas’ jobs while away from AmRen was editing an anthology of “James Kirkpatrick” from the home of VDare boss Peter Brimelow.

Much of Rojas’ writing for AmRen as “Chris Roberts” is typical for the site: for example, articles on white “replacement” and portrayals of Black people as violent and criminal. Rojas’ writing sets itself apart, however, with its greater attention to leftist movements. For example, “Chris Roberts” contributed a piece on the “Anti-Anti-White Left” to AmRen in late 2016, arguing that class reductionist leftists who react against “identity politics” could ultimately help the white nationalist cause. The piece demonstrated a greater knowledge of leftist discourse and movements than is usual in white nationalist publications. Rojas even interviewed Benjamin Studebaker, an academic leftist with articles published in The Huffington Post and Current Affairs, in AmRen last year. For more detail on Martin Rojas’ writing, see our companion article about his pen names.

Trump

While employed by AmRen, Rojas took off time to canvass for Trump’s presidential campaign. A bio for Rojas at The American Conservative, where he published an article under his own name, noted: “Martin Rojas was a turf coordinator in Virginia during the 2016 election.” 

Rojas threw himself into the Trump campaign. In one of two articles he wrote for Counter-Currents about his time as a Trump “foot soldier”, “Hubert Collins”/Rojas quoted a letter he composed on the Friday before the election, addressed to his imaginary future white child. Fearing that he had not done enough to help Trump, Rojas explained the attraction of the Trump campaign, then apologized:

Mr. Trump promised me something I had thought out of reach. A President who might keep the rising tide of color at bay […]

I tried my hardest. I donated over and over again. I argued over and over again. Your mother and I lost friends because we supported him. She worried she might lose her job, or be denied a future job. She got terribly anxious and wanted me to make it all better, but all I could do was knock on more doors and donate more money.

The imagined mother appears to be a Beltway libertarian figure who lived with Rojas in Arlington, Virginia during this time. They are not presently in a relationship.

As well as door-to-door canvassing, Rojas encouraged his white supremacist associates to promote Jill Stein in liberal neighborhoods and to leftists online in the hope of splitting votes from Clinton, although this is unlikely to have made much difference. Rojas was elated when Trump won the election despite expectations. His enthusiasm was soon tempered as 2017 “went from hope to rage” for the white nationalist movement. However, even at his most critical, Rojas agreed with fellow AmRen writer “Robert Hampton” (current pen name for Scott Greer) that the alternatives to a second Trump term were “horrifying”.

Rojas’ interest in the Left and his campaigning for Trump may seem contradictory, but racism resolves this apparent contradiction. Rojas’ worldview centers an idealized white “Middle American” society portrayed as threatened from above by elites and from below by an underclass, which Rojas understands in racial terms. Despite Trump’s wealth, Trump’s performance of anti-elitism through his attacks on liberal norms was convincing enough for Rojas and many others. Meanwhile, Rojas views the Left as an adversary so long as it is anti-racist, but a potential ally if it breaks from or deemphasizes those commitments. This position not only misunderstands capitalism and class society, but by allowing racism to divide the multiracial working class, it is poisonous to any real working class movement.

Rojas’ Travels

Rojas began to burn out not long after August 2017’s disastrous “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville, Virginia. Looking back on 2017, “Roberts”/Rojas stated that he was “overwhelmed with disappointment” toward the end of the year and “needed a break.” He worked at AmRen through the end of September, then paused his writing while he returned to Minneapolis.

Before long, Rojas was writing for racist websites again. In a Counter-Currents essay in mid-October, “Hubert Collins” wrote about his hometown friends, who he portrayed as floundering or falling into self-destruction. While the piece expressed skepticism that “writing for White Nationalist websites” could “actually transform the world”, Rojas suggested that something like a white racist revolution was what his friends needed. Rojas recommitted himself to his movement, even making a fundraising appeal for AmRen as “Chris Roberts” by the end of the year.

In a November 2019 interview, “Chris Roberts” summarized how he spent his time before returning to AmRen:

What did I do while I was away? Many things. I traveled a great deal, both nationally and internationally, taught English abroad for a bit, and worked in real estate here in the US for nearly a year. Probably of most interest to American Renaissance readers was that I lived with the Brimelows [the family of Peter Brimelow, VDare publisher] for a short while, during which I put together the James Kirkpatrick [Kevin DeAnna] anthology Conservatism Inc., recently released by [far-Right publisher] Arktos — a project of which I am quite proud.

Rojas/“Roberts” wrote on VDare in May 2018 about being “currently hard at work” on a book project, presumably the Kevin DeAnna/“James Kirkpatrick” title. Martin Rojas’ name appears in internet records of residents at a Litchfield, Connecticut address for Peter Brimelow.

Earlier, Rojas spent some time in Georgia. A “Gilbert Cavanaugh” photo essay on AmRen included photos of the small community of Lakeland in southern Georgia, which he mentioned visiting in April. At some point after work on the DeAnna/“Kirkpatrick” anthology, Rojas may have made a return trip to Minneapolis, since a June 2018 post as “Gilbert Cavanaugh” on VDare discussed public libraries “in the Minneapolis ghetto” (the piece could also have been based on earlier materials).

Atlanta

Rojas was in Atlanta for at least part of 2018. When Rojas stated that he “worked in real estate [..] for nearly a year”, much of this was likely in Atlanta, where racist leader Sam Dickson and a network of his associates are active on the property market. 

Rojas’ address history provides several locations in Atlanta: 

• the residence of antisemitic lawyer and Dickson ally Michael Dominy in the Lullwater Parc Townhomes off Ponce de Leon; 
• Dickson’s white power hub on Ridgeland Way in Buckhead; and
• a northwest Atlanta address which is now co-owned by racist militant Jared Huggins. This final address was not purchased until 2020 and therefore must have been a later stay.

Rojas registered to vote in Georgia in August 2018, although curiously he does not appear to have voted. He is listed on the rolls as “Martiin [sic] Rojas” at Michael Dominy’s address, although that location may have been provided when Rojas’ records were updated in July 2019. 

In articles as “Nathan Doyle” on VDare, Rojas wrote about canvassing in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. He explained his motivation for campaigning for white Republican Brian Kemp against Black Democratic candidate Stacy Abrams: “I know everything I need to know about what happens when blacks are in charge from Detroit, Haiti, South Africa, etc.” Rojas’ articles got noticed, and his pen name eventually received a mention in the New York Times. In turn, Kevin DeAnna/“Gregory Hood” responded to the NY Times on AmRen, using the incident for more racist propaganda. DeAnna did not mention his relationship with “Doyle”, who had been editing the “James Kirkpatrick”/DeAnna anthology earlier in the year.

Chile

Rojas arrived in Chile in January 2019 and began teaching at Dynamic English in Santiago the following month. Appearing on a July 2019 podcast for Dynamic English under his own name, Rojas stated that he had recently got his Chilean citizenship and was “now experimenting with being Chilean”. While Rojas announced his intention was to “stay [in Chile] for two or three years and sort of decide if I want to stay here permanently”, Rojas was back in the US by late 2019.

Although Rojas had written before about Chile using the name “Benjamin Villaroel”, his writing on this topic increased while he was living in the country. Rojas networked with Chilean Identitarians, his political counterparts in that country, and published an interview with two leaders of the National Identitarian Force/Fuerza Nacional-Identitaria on AmRen in August 2019. As “Benjamin Villaroel”, Rojas also appeared in the white nationalist Occidental Quarterly, a pseudo-academic print journal published by the Charles Martel Society, in its Winter 2019 issue, with an article about Chile. That article had earlier appeared in two segments on Occidental Observer. 

Due to Rojas’ new Chilean citizenship, he is well positioned to further build coalitions with the Chilean far-Right. However, Rojas now claims that teaching English long-term is not for him. After returning to the United States, he rejoined AmRen as an employee rather than a freelance contributor.

Back in the US

The end of 2019 saw Rojas back in Atlanta. The return of “Chris Roberts” to the AmRen staff was announced with an interview that November. The same month, “Roberts” tweeted a photo from Sam Dickson’s house and, as “Gilbert Cavanaugh”, included photos from the Buckhead area in a photo essay on “The Demographic Transformation of the South”. 

In February 2020, “Gilbert Cavanaugh” built an entire article around harassing a group of day laborers in Atlanta. Ironically enough, his lead-in—“Most Americans can drive by a Home Depot and spot Hispanic men loitering nearby”—could equally apply to himself. Only one of Rojas’ pen names, Villaroel, reflects his Spanish-language heritage, while the rest of his pen names, like Cavanaugh, are extremely not-Spanish sounding. In Rojas’ worldview, his white racial identity trumps his “Hispanic” identity, but his racist audience in the United States is not necessarily so discerning or charitable, a fact which no doubt contributed to Rojas’ fondness for Anglo-Irish pen names. Rojas represented himself as a journalist to these laborers, spoke to them in Spanish to gain their trust, received confidential information about their backgrounds, and then wrote an article begging ICE to “Detain and Deport These Men”.

Though the “Roberts” return interview on AmRen discussed real estate work as though it was a thing of the past, in February 2020 Martin Rojas appeared in Georgia business filings for Hamilton Avenue Holdings, LLC, a Sam Dickson company.

As mentioned earlier, Rojas’ address history includes a Northwest Atlanta home co-owned by Jared Alexander Huggins, a white nationalist and part of Dickson’s real estate network. The McCallie Boulevard house was purchased by Good Earth Properties—part of Sam Dickson’s property network—in February 2020, then sold on to Huggins and a relative a few months later. Any stay from Rojas would therefore have occurred over the last year.

Since his return to the US, Rojas steadily contributed to AmRen. When rebellion broke out in Minneapolis following the police murder of George Floyd, Rojas as “Cavanaugh” used his knowledge of the East Lake area to comment on events, predictably painting the uprising as the result of multiculturalism and Black stereotypes. However, Rojas relied on old photographs and his memory of the area and does not appear to have witnessed events firsthand. 

Interestingly, Rojas did not cover the Rayshard Brooks uprising in Atlanta that summer for AmRen, except in passing comments.

A recent Twitter comment from Rojas mentions speaking with Jared Taylor, suggesting that Rojas is now living closer to Taylor’s home and AmRen’s headquarters in Oakton, Virginia while he works for the site.

Conclusion

Martin Rojas has, through his various pseudonyms, been a constant presence on Alt-Right, white nationalist and anti-immigrant websites over the past eight years. On American Renaissance he has authored over 300 posts, with almost 250 under his “Chris Roberts” employee name. Rojas was already heavily active in white power circles while working for the conservative Leadership Institute in Washington, DC. 

Rojas has intermittently lived in Georgia and, according to articles under the name “Nathan Doyle”, even helped canvass for Brian Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial race. A Georgia business filing links Rojas to attorney and white power leader Sam Dickson’s network, which is active on the Atlanta property market. Rojas’ address history in Atlanta also shows him to be deeply connected to Dickson’s circles. Rojas may now be living closer to AmRen’s headquarters in Virginia.

Rojas also spends time in Chile, has secured Chilean citizenship, and writes about that country for white nationalist websites such as Occidental Observer and AmRen. Rojas has built ties to and actively promotes the “Identitarian” movement in Chile.

For more detail on the web of pseudonyms used by Rojas when writing for racist and far-Right websites, see our companion article here.

We are exposing Rojas because his propaganda has a body count. He has helped fuel white nationalist and “Identitarian” movements whose conspiracy theories of white replacement predictably lead to attacks and murder. While Rojas may claim that he is merely discussing ideas, these ideas get put into practice with massacres such as in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas. These are all the fruits of his movement’s narratives. Rojas will probably continue to spread his pompous racist propaganda, but at least he will no longer have the cover of anonymity. 

If you have further information on Rojas or his associates, please get in contact.

This is a companion piece to “Martin Christopher Rojas: Professional Racist”.

We have identified seven pen names used by Martin Christopher Rojas while writing for various far-Right and racist websites since late 2012: “Gilbert Cavanaugh,” “Chris Roberts,” “Hubert Collins,” “Nathan Doyle”, “Albert Emory”, “Benjamin Villaroel” and “Linda Preston”. 

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Under these names, Rojas published over five hundred pieces, spread across a dozen white nationalist, anti-immigrant, and far-Right websites. Over 300 of these articles are on American Renaissance, which currently employs Rojas as “Chris Roberts”.

Each of Rojas’ seven pen names can be independently linked to Rojas through biographical information, or they can be traced back to him through one pen name connecting to another. Each pen name is unmistakably part of a broader web of pseudonyms, all operated by the same person.

Rojas has even written about “How Not to Get Doxxed”, or identified by anti-racist researchers, and advocated using different pen names to avoid detection. However, Rojas made arrogant mistakes which ensured that he would be identified.

Our main article gives an overview of Martin Rojas’ activities. Here, we discuss Rojas’ seven pen names in greater detail, and explain how we tied each of the names to him.

Gilbert Cavanaugh

“Gilbert Cavanaugh” was Martin Rojas’ first pen name and is still occasionally used by him. “Cavanaugh” is Rojas’ mother’s maiden name.

Apart from the name itself, there are three main ways we know “Cavanaugh” to be Rojas:

1. “Gilbert Cavanaugh” wrote about Shimer College at the same time Martin Rojas attended that college.
2. Writings by “Cavanaugh” closely match Martin Rojas’ location history.
3. An article published under another pen name, “Hubert Collins”, gives the story of his beginnings as a writer. When “Collins” discusses the first pen name he used, this matches exactly with “Cavanaugh’s” history. See the “Hubert Collins” section for details.

The first “Gilbert Cavanaugh” article we have found was published in December 2012 on Taki’s Magazine, a paleoconservative website with a racist history. For example, Taki’s published a notorious anti-Black rant by John Derbyshire in 2012 and continued to publish Derbyshire afterward. The first “Cavanaugh” article is not explicitly racist, but it cites both the anti-immigrant website VDare and one of Derbyshire’s articles approvingly.

Early the next year, “Cavanaugh” published on AlternativeRight.com, a website founded in 2010 by Richard Spencer to coalesce the “Alt-Right”. By the time of “Cavanaugh”/Rojas’ article, other editors ran the site’s daily operations. “Cavanaugh” published more articles on AlternativeRight.com during 2013, and later contributed to an Alternative Right successor blog once Richard Spencer redirected the .com domain name to his new Radix Journal. Despite friction between Radix and the successor Alternative Right blog, “Cavanaugh” published to Radix as well as Alternative Right in 2014. Several articles by another Rojas pseudonym, “Hubert Collins”, also appear on Radix.

Rojas first appeared as “Gilbert Cavanaugh” on VDare in May 2013, several months after he started contributing to AlternativeRight.com. By then, “Cavanaugh” had also appeared on another Alt-Right website, Amerika, complaining about his liberal college. 

An August 2013 article by “Cavanaugh” for VDare bemoaned the “Cultural Marxism” of the student body at his Great Books college. The “Gilbert Cavanaugh” name was later removed from this article on VDare, with the piece republished as an anonymous letter: the author feared that this piece included too much personal information. A follow-up letter published by VDare years later named Shimer College in Chicago as the Great Books college in question. Martin Rojas studied at Shimer but did not graduate. When Rojas registered for a 2013 Foundation for Economic Freedom summer seminar, the seminar materials listed “Shimer” by his name.

During 2013, “Gilbert Cavanaugh” published five articles to the Occidental Observer, the first appearing in June. The Occidental Observer is an antisemitic “white identity” website edited by Kevin MacDonald, a professor who believes that Jewish people have evolved to undermine the societies they live within. Rojas also publishes to Occidental Observer under several other pen names.

As well as Taki’s, Alternative Right, Radix, Occidental Observer, Amerika and VDare, Rojas wrote as “Gilbert Cavanaugh” for the white nationalist website American Renaissance. The first article under that name appears in AmRen’s archives August 2013. Some “Gilbert Cavanaugh” articles on AmRen overlap with Martin Rojas’ employment there as “Chris Roberts”. 

Writings by “Gilbert Cavanaugh” match with Rojas’ location history. For example, a 2018 AmRen article about “city murals” features images from Washington DC, Minneapolis, and Georgia. (Some of the photographs are taken from “Chris Roberts” articles about DC.) The article calls Minneapolis “my usual surroundings” but also features photographs from the small southern Georgia community of Lakeland. According to an online address record, Rojas briefly stayed in Ray City, Georgia, just eight miles away from Lakeland. An AmRen article in late 2019 and another in 2020 indicated that “Cavanaugh” was spending time in Atlanta, which again corresponds to Martin Rojas’ location history. When “Cavanaugh” began submitting articles to VDare again in 2018, these submissions discussed Minnesota, where Rojas grew up and where he spent some of that year. A mid-2018 article calls the East Lake area “my ghetto in Minneapolis”. Rojas’ address history includes an apartment in East Lake, Minneapolis. 

Chris Roberts

As “Chris Roberts”, Martin Rojas worked for the white-nationalist website, American Renaissance, from July 2016 to October 2017, and again from November 2019 to present. At the time of writing, “Roberts” has contributed 250 pieces under this name to the site. Martin Rojas also contributed a smaller number of articles to VDare under the “Chris Roberts” pseudonym.

Several of Rojas’ other pen names published writing to white power sites before “Roberts” appeared. However, we are presenting “Roberts” earlier in our summary of pen names because of what the name clarifies:

1. “Chris Roberts” exactly matches Martin Rojas’ employment and location history, showing them to be the same person; and
2. “Chris Roberts” tells the same story, set at the same time down to the month, as another pen name, “Hubert Collins”. This ties the two pen names together. After “Roberts”, we discuss “Collins”.

Much of Rojas’ writing as “Chris Roberts” is typical AmRen fare: for example, article after article portraying Black people as naturally violent and criminal. However, “Chris Roberts” has set himself apart by sympathetically covering the “anti-woke Left” in the United States: class-reductionist leftists who fume about feminists and anti-racist movements. In one essay that received particular attention, “Chris Roberts” asked whether “The Anti-Anti-White Left” could end up as strategic allies for his racist movement or eventually become “white advocates”. This piece demonstrated a much greater familiarity with Left-wing movements and discourse than most white nationalists.

With so many articles containing references to his life, “Roberts” inevitably left clues to his real identity. When “Chris Roberts” was announced as a new “Director of Special Projects” for AmRen in July 2016, the website stated:

Mr. Roberts came to care deeply about the fate of whites after experiencing diversity in Chicago and Washington, DC, and is glad to have left a tepid job with Conservatism Inc. 

Rojas unhappily attended Shimer College in Chicago, and later lived near Washington, DC. The so-called “Conservatism Inc.” job was with the Leadership Institute, where Rojas worked for over a year.

“Chris Roberts” left his job at AmRen at the start of October 2017, less than two months after the calamitous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “Roberts” occasionally submitted articles to AmRen after the resignation, which he explained in December 2017 as “stepping back from the movement to see if I can make a healthier income in the private sector.”

When “Roberts” returned as an AmRen employee in November 2019, he offered a different explanation for his earlier departure: “the short answer would be ‘depression.’” Roberts summarized his activities while away from AmRen:

I traveled a great deal, both nationally and internationally, taught English abroad for a bit, and worked in real estate here in the US for nearly a year. Probably of most interest to American Renaissance readers was that I lived with the Brimelows for a short while, during which I put together the James Kirkpatrick [alias of Kevin DeAnna] anthology Conservatism Inc., recently released by [far-Right publisher] Arktos — a project of which I am quite proud.

For much of 2019, Martin Rojas lived in Chile teaching for Dynamic English, and even appeared on the company’s “Coffee with Gringos” podcast. On that podcast, Rojas admitted, “I’ve done a lot of ghost writing in the United States related to history and politics”.

In Atlanta, a network of white nationalists centered around attorney and longtime racist leader, Sam Dickson, are active in real estate, a topic we have covered in detail. Martin Rojas was listed as an agent for “Hamilton Avenue Holdings, LLC” – a Sam Dickson company – in a February 2020 business filing in Georgia. Another white nationalist, Jared Huggins, appears as the authorizer on the document.   

The stay “with the Brimelows” is a reference to the family of Peter Brimelow who publishes VDare. An online record shows that Martin Rojas stayed at Peter Brimelow’s home in Litchfield, Connecticut.

In the “Chris Roberts” interview marking his return to AmRen, he told a story about why he chose to return to the project. “Roberts” explained:

So many of the talented, artsy white folks I spent my teens and early twenties with are just sitting around getting high, working dead-end jobs, and drowning […] Getting them out of their rut will take a racial and spiritual renaissance […] Going home after having been away for so long […] made me wonder why I’d left American Renaissance in the first place.

Rojas went home to Minneapolis in October 2017 after his first stretch at AmRen. The month of his return, Rojas told the same story about his floundering peers on a different website and under a different pen name. “Hubert Collins” contributed “Going Home Again” to Counter-Currents, another influential white-power publisher.

Hubert Collins

“Hubert Collins” is Rojas’ second most prolific pen name. Whereas “Chris Roberts” has 250 pieces on AmRen alone, “Hubert Collins” has written over 150 original pieces but spread these across ten different websites. 

The first article we have found as “Hubert Collins” is an April 2014 piece at Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal site, where “Collins” contributed several more posts. VDare, AmRen, Amerika, the Occidental Observer, Counter-Currents, and the now-defunct Social Matter have also published multiple “Collins” pieces. “Collins” made guest appearances at Taki’s Magazine with “What Kind of Pornography Should Be Banned?”; the far-Right and Islamophobic Gates of Vienna, with an article praising ICE; and The American Thinker rightwing blog, with another piece cheering for ICE.

We noted how the “Hubert Collins” article “Going Home Again” from October 2017 on Counter-Currents exactly matches comments by “Chris Roberts” on AmRen about his experiences returning home. The “Hubert Collins” persona also ties directly to the “Gilbert Cavanaugh” pen name: a “Collins” article in Occidental Observer about his start as a far-Right commentator matches the early writing history of “Gilbert Cavanaugh”. “Hubert Collins” also matches information about Martin Rojas’ life such as his educational and travel history, as well as his campaign work for Donald Trump in 2016. 

“Hubert Collins” told the story of how he started using different pen names in an October 2014 article for Occidental Observer. Earlier, we mentioned that Rojas began writing as “Gilbert Cavanaugh” during his unhappy time at Shimer. The Occidental Observer piece as “Hubert Collins” claimed that the young author panicked when he believed that his identity was about to be exposed. He begged an editor to change the name on a couple of incriminating pieces. We have found one of those articles, in which the “Gilbert Cavanaugh” name was removed from an article on VDare about his school. According to the “Hubert Collins” Occidental Observer piece, the writer then decided to spread his writing across multiple pen names to better obscure his identity. Although “Collins” dated the motivating scare to the summer, Rojas’ “Albert Emory” and “Hubert Collins” pen names began in Spring 2014, one season earlier. 

“Hubert Collins” is only half-disguised. A 2016 Occidental Observer article states that “Collins” has “spent plenty of time on more than one leftist college campus”. Martin Rojas not only attended Shimer College in Chicago, but according to a 2019 podcast appearance under his real name, “studied history at the University of Minnesota”.

In an article for the neoreactionary site Social Matter (now offline), “Collins” promoted the 2014 gathering of the H.L. Mencken Club, held at a hotel near Baltimore-Washington International Airport in Maryland. The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights describes this event as a “significant annual gathering of academic racists, white nationalists, and paleo-conservatives.” In his Social Matter article, “Collins” stated “I have gone [to the gathering] before” but in 2014 he could not attend since he was “about 4,750 miles away”. While the actual distance is closer to 4,800 miles, “Collins”/Rojas was likely writing from Elqui Province in Chile, where his father owns property. At the end of 2014, Martin Rojas was fined for breaking Chilean immigration rules, likely by overstaying his permitted time in the country. (Rojas told a podcast in 2019 that he recently got Chilean citizenship.)

Rojas’ “Gilbert Cavanaugh” pen name mentioned in an AmRen article that he attended the HL Mencken Club’s 2013 gathering. As an inside joke, “Hubert Collins” claimed on the 2014 Social Matter announcement that he “had the pleasure of getting to talk with Gilbert Cavanaugh [i.e. himself]” at a previous H.L. Mencken Club gathering. 

Keeping with Rojas’ practice of writing about the same events for different audiences with different pen names, “Hubert Collins” not only promoted the 2014 H.L. Mencken Club gathering to the neoreactionaries of Social Matter, but with another pen name, “Benjamin Villaroel”, publicized the event to the white nationalists at AmRen. We discuss “Villaroel” later.

As well as his educational history and travels, “Hubert Collins” matches Rojas’ documented political activity. In 2016, Martin Rojas canvassed for Trump. An article under Rojas’ real name for the paleoconservative American Conservative states in the author biography: “Martin Rojas was a turf coordinator in Virginia during the 2016 election.” Under his “Hubert Collins” pseudonym, Rojas published two articles looking back on his experiences canvassing for Trump during that campaign. In one, “Collins” noted that “the swing state I went door-knocking in did not go to Mr. Trump.” Virginia was, until recently, considered a swing state and did not go to Trump in 2016. 

The “Hubert Collins” name is useful on American Renaissance, where “Chris Roberts” worked and currently works as an employee. For example, by crediting “Hubert Collins” instead of “Chris Roberts” for a 2018 interview with just-hired AmRen staffer “Gregory Hood” (Kevin DeAnna), it looks like a website supporter is doing the interview, rather than someone else with an AmRen work history. In one AmRen piece on recommended books, “Gilbert Cavanaugh”, “Hubert Collins” and “Chris Roberts” all provided separate recommendations. “Hubert Collins” and “Chris Roberts” have even coauthored articles – another inside joke.

Nathan Doyle

The pen name “Nathan Doyle” is linked to another Rojas alias, “Albert Emory” which we discuss later. When “Nathan Doyle” began publishing, he supplied an email address starting “nameless.young.writer” for correspondence about his VDare articles. A web result reveals that this email address was used to create a Gravatar account under a different name: “AlbertEmory”. 

“Nathan Doyle” first appeared on VDare in September 2014, when “Doyle” submitted an article about “Dropping Out […] of America’s Cultural Marxist-Controlled Colleges”. “Doyle” stated that he had attended two colleges, which matches Rojas’ educational history. The article mentions in passing “having been published by American Renaissance”. Search results show that “Nathan Doyle” has only been published once on AmRen – that occurred several years later, when AmRen reprinted a “Doyle” article from Counter-Currents. If “Doyle” was already published by AmRen in 2014, it was under a different pen name. By the time of the article, AmRen had already published “Gilbert Cavanaugh”.

“Doyle”, when explaining his reasons for not returning to college, stated that his academic interests were “history, political science, philosophy, and sociology”. He discussed a hypothetical scenario in which a “history student” with his far-Right and racist politics made his way to a PhD. Martin Rojas told a podcast in 2019 that he had “studied history at the University of Minnesota”. The 2014 VDare article by “Doyle” made an ironic reference to Timothy Leary’s advice: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Rojas/“Hubert Collins” also referred to the slogan in a 2016 Occidental Observer piece.

The similarities to Rojas’ other personas do not end there. The VDare author’s bio for “Doyle” begins: “Nathan Doyle is a Middle American Radical”. The AmRen bio for “Gilbert Cavanaugh” reads: “Gilbert Cavanaugh is a proud Middle American Radical.” The term “Middle American Radical” comes from sociologist Donald Warren but was popularized by paleoconservative turned explicit white nationalist leader Sam Francis, who died in 2005. As “Chris Roberts”, Rojas has written reverentially about Francis. 

“Nathan Doyle” published not only on VDare but to another Rojas favorite, Counter-Currents. As with several of Rojas’ pseudonyms, “Nathan Doyle” shows that he is familiar with left-wing discourse. “Doyle” supplied a list of left-wing articles to Counter-Currents which he believed his white nationalist audience should read. The leftist magazine Jacobin, which “Chris Roberts” highlighted in his article about “The Anti-Anti-White Left”, is particularly well represented in the Counter-Currents list.

During the 2018 gubernatorial campaign in Georgia, “Nathan Doyle” canvassed for Kemp and wrote racist articles for VDare about his efforts against Stacey Abrams. The story of a VDare author allegedly campaigning for Kemp eventually made its way to the New York Times. Rojas was in Atlanta at the time.

In 2018, Martin Rojas traveled a great deal. We already noted that he spent some time in Minneapolis, lived in Connecticut helping with a book project, and was briefly in south Georgia. When “Chris Roberts” told AmRen in his November 2019 return interview that he had “worked in real estate here in the US for nearly a year” this was likely during 2018. (Rojas was in Chile for much of 2019, starting January.) Later business filings from 2020 connected Martin Rojas to white power leader Sam Dickson and his dealings on the Atlanta property market. Rojas is linked to several addresses in Atlanta, and in August 2018, he registered to vote in Fulton County (his name is misspelled “Martiin Rojas” on the registration). The “Nathan Doyle” efforts for Kemp parallel those by Rojas/“Hubert Collins” for Trump two years earlier.

Since an online registration shows that “Nathan Doyle” is “Albert Emory”, and a unique identifier we discuss in the next section also ties “Albert Emory” to “Chris Roberts”/Rojas, we know that Rojas was the white nationalist who wrote about canvassing for Kemp in 2018. 

Albert Emory

Between March and June 2014, “Albert Emory” provided a dozen blog posts to the paleoconservative Chronicles site. Rojas’ hero, Sam Francis, contributed a regular column to Chronicles magazine until his death in 2005—blogging there would be, in some small sense, following in Francis’ footsteps. “Albert Emory” matches Rojas’ location history, writing style, politics, and concerns. Through a unique profile image, “Albert Emory” also directly ties back to Rojas’ “Chris Roberts” identity.

Two blog posts by “Emory” at Chronicles targeted pornography, a topic that Rojas’ “Hubert Collins” pseudonym later wrote about for Counter-Currents and Taki’s. One early blog tried to reconcile the “split between Catholics and racialists” on the “Dissident” Right, all the while making clear white nationalist talking points. Another blog post promoted the racist Stuff Black People Don’t Like website by “Paul Kersey” (Michael J Thompson), calling the site “indispensable”. 

The first post by “Albert Emory” for Chronicles stated that “I was living in Chicago” when news “broke that Jesse Jackson Jr. was going to prison.” Jackson, Jr. was sentenced in August 2013. As already documented, Rojas attended but did not graduate Shimer College in Chicago and wrote disparagingly about the college for VDare in August 2013. Writings by “Gilbert Cavanaugh” suggest that Rojas moved back to Minneapolis for the last few months of 2013, though he attended the 2013 H.L. Mencken Club gathering in Maryland from November 1-3. The following year, a March 2014 Chronicles post from “Emory” stated that he had “left the Heartland for Washington DC” recently enough that he was still getting accustomed to the inside-the-Beltway political scene. 

In the same 2014 post about getting to know the DC scene, “Emory” stated that he was invited to an anti-AIPAC protest there by another member of the “Dissident Right” (another way of saying “Alt-Right”). The article indicated that he was surrounded by “Libertarianism Inc.” – a dismissive term for thinktank/nonprofit right-wing libertarianism. 

The last blog post for Chronicles by “Emory” described himself as being part of “the overlapping circles of Conservatism Inc and Libertarianism Inc – or the ‘Kochtopus,’ if you will.” Martin Rojas went on to work for the Leadership Institute in Washington, DC the following year. The “Emory” post suggests that before Rojas joined that conservative institute, he had been moving in a part of the DC nonprofit/thinktank world closer to right-wing libertarianism. We do not know Rojas’ work in DC during the first part of 2014, but he likely attended a seminar by the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) that summer, since Rojas appeared in a March 2015 IHS video speaking of his experience.

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Through an email address and Gravatar registration, the “Nathan Doyle” pseudonym pointed to “Albert Emory.” “Emory” in turn points back to “Chris Roberts”, Martin Rojas’ main pen name while working for AmRen. The profile image used by “Emory” while blogging for Chronicles is the same image used by “Roberts” on AmRen, just trimmed slightly differently. Reverse image searches for these two profile pictures show that neither version is used by anyone else.

Benjamin Villaroel

The first “Benjamin Villaroel” article we have found is from July 2014 on VDare, where the author wrote about his identity as a “white Hispanic”. In this article, “Villaroel” wrote: “I was born to a Chilean father and a German-Irish mother just after the Cold War ended”. These details largely match Rojas, who was born in 1992, one year after the Cold War ended. “Villaroel” is a variant of “Villarroel”: the maternal surname of Martin Rojas’ grandmother on the Chilean side of his family.

“Villaroel” writes about Hispanic immigration, “white Hispanic” identity, and Latin American issues with a focus on Chile. One exception is the “Villaroel” article for AmRen in September 2014 promoting the upcoming gathering of the H.L. Mencken Club in Maryland. We have already noted that Rojas/“Hubert Collins” promoted the 2014 gathering for Social Matter, mentioning that he was over four thousand miles away from the venue and could not attend, which suggests that Rojas was in Chile at the time of writing. “Villaroel” and “Collins” promoting the same 2014 gathering is another example of Rojas using different pen names to discuss the same topics, but to different audiences.

In addition to articles on VDare and AmRen, “Villaroel” contributed to white nationalist websites Counter-Currents and Occidental Observer in 2019 while Rojas was again in Chile. The Winter 2019-2020 issue of The Occidental Quarterly, a print journal from the white nationalist Charles Martel Society, also included “Villaroel” on “Chile’s Immigration Crossroads” which had originally appeared on Occidental Observer in two parts.

While living in Chile during 2019, Rojas built links with that country’s “Identitarian” movement. In August 2019, AmRen published an interview by “Villaroel” with two leaders of that country’s National Identitarian Force/Fuerza Nacional-Identitaria (FNI). In a 2020 AmRen article, published after Rojas was back in the US and working for AmRen again, “Villaroel” wrote that “I started using Instagram when I was living in Chile” and recommended several “positive” Instagram pages for his readers. In the article, “Villaroel” upheld FNI as “Chile’s foremost identitarian group”. Martin Rojas followed the Instagram page for FNI with an account as “MartinCristobalRojas”. Rojas also followed most other pages mentioned in the 2020 article. (The “MartinCristobalRojas” account was set to private and was deleted in the second half of February 2021.)

Ironically, “Villaroel”/Rojas may not be “white” enough for some US white nationalists. In one piece, “Villaroel” wrote “My brother [presumably Rojas’ sister in reality] recently had his [DNA] tested” and published the DNA results of his family member on AmRen, since the percentages would be more-or-less the same for him. While “Villaroel” grew up believing that his mother was German-Irish, the amount of German ancestry was minute according to test results. The DNA tests also showed 19% Middle Eastern ancestry and 7% Indigenous American ancestry. While “Villaroel” insisted that “Psychologically, politically, and emotionally, I am entirely white,” when he asked readers “Would you call me white?”, he got a mixed response in the comments.

Linda Preston

“Linda Preston” has published three articles, all on AmRen, including one about avoiding being identified by anti-racists.

The first “Preston” article, published in May 2016, derisively covered a panel discussion on “Growing Far-Right Sentiments in Europe and the U.S.” held at the Goethe-Institut in DC. Since the author was writing about the event for a white nationalist site and did not want to be identified, the writer registered for the event with a newly created email address and started a new pen name (“Preston”) to discuss it. Martin Rojas was based in metro DC at the time.

The second “Preston” article discussed the paleoconservative American Conservative, claiming that the publication had moved from being “implicitly pro-white” to now having “lost its way”. This article claimed however that “In foreign policy, there is still much to admire.” The next year, Martin Rojas published at The American Conservative in his own name, with a call for Trump to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

The final “Linda Preston” article appeared in December 2019 and was titled “How to Avoid Getting Doxxed”. In this piece, Rojas/“Linda Preston”, advises using multiple pen names to compartmentalize personal information:

If you are fluent in Finnish, taught English in Mexico, and knocked on doors for Scott Brown’s 2012 senatorial campaign, you don’t want one name associated with all those things. […]  Use one name to address Finnish topics, another name to talk about your time in Latin America, and another to share insider scoops about the campaign. 

This is a thinly disguised Martin Rojas: Rojas is fluent in Spanish, taught English in Chile, and knocked on doors in Virginia for Trump. According to “Nathan Doyle”, he also canvassed for Kemp’s gubernatorial campaign in Georgia. 

To make things even more obvious, “Linda Preston” cites two other pen names in the AmRen piece: “Gilbert Cavanaugh” and “Chris Roberts”, giving them as examples of a bad and a good pen name, respectively. Like “Hubert Collins” mentioning his conversation with “Gilbert Cavanaugh” at the H.L. Mencken Club, the author is making a joke for those in the know.

Conclusion

For over eight years, Martin Rojas has steadily contributed to far-Right, Alt-Right, and white nationalist websites under a variety of pen names. By our count, Rojas has published original work on a dozen far-Right websites, with over five hundred pieces spread across his seven pen names. His political home is the white nationalist American Renaissance, where he has been employed from July 2016 to October 2017, and again from November 2019 to present. 

For several years of his racist agitation, Rojas lived inside the Beltway and participated in the Libertarian and Conservative nonprofit/thinktank worlds, including a stretch working at the Leadership Institute. For an overview of Rojas’ activities, see our main article: “Martin Christopher Rojas: Professional Racist”.   

Rojas views himself as part of the Identitarian movement. He is an effective propagandist for his cause and is recognized within his racist niche. Rojas used his time in Chile to network with that country’s Identitarian movement and publicize it to English-speaking white nationalists. While Rojas will doubtless claim that he is concerned with ideas rather than stoking violence, the Identitarian movement to which he belongs has been tied to massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas. While cultivating intellectual airs, Rojas works to build a movement whose goal is ethnic cleansing – a political project that requires wholesale violence. Exposing Rojas may not stop his propaganda, but we hope that denying Rojas anonymity limits his options and allows others to resist his movement more effectively.

If you have more information on Rojas or his white nationalist associates, please get in touch.