‘I WOULD HAVE KNOCKED HIM OUT!’ Former Leader of Identity Evropa Joins Other Neo-Fascists in Defending MAGA Teens who Harassed Native American Veteran

Angelo John Gage was running Identity Evropa when it was called National Youth Front. When he left he faded from view – but he and his fellow fascist dirtbags decide they wanted to clapback on this dumb crap – with more dumb crap.

While much of the nation was repulsed by video of students of Covington High School of Park Hills, KY harassing and mocking Nathan Philips, a Native American Vietnam War veteran at the Lincoln Memorial Friday while they were participating in this year’s March for Life in Washington, DC and while he was attending the Indigenous Peoples March, many on the right have taken to defend the students, but most notably a former leader of the White supremacist group that would eventually be called Identity Evropa and closely identified with the tragic events of 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlotteville, VA, posted a video where he concurred with the conspiracy theories right wingers have created around the incident and attempted to defame Philips.

“Let me tell you something,” Angelo John Gage began in the video he posted on his Twitter feed, “If that was my kid, and I was there and this man went up to his face, I would have knocked him out! Get away from my son, you creep! I don’t care if he’s Native American, I don’t care if you’re a war veteran. Just because you were born a certain way or did something doesn’t mean you deserve respect!” Gage, like Philips, is also a former Marine.

@CassandraRules, I feel you so I made this…

this is how we parents need to be…enraged and protective….!#phillips #blackisraelites #CovingtonCatholic pic.twitter.com/NmYgMU27px

— Angelo John Gage (@AngeloJohnGage) January 20, 2019

According to reports, the Indigenous Peoples March was just wrapping up and the group of students, many of them wearing MAGA hats, were on the Lincoln Memorial steps and were mocking the attendees of that march and eventually ended up surrounding Philips as seen in the video.

Gage was the second person to lead what was then called National Youth Front (NYF), founded in 2014 by Nathan Damingo, then it’s Vice-Chairman, and Caleb Shumaker as the youth wing of the neo-Nazi American Freedom Party. Gage took over the leadership from Shumaker in January 2015 after Shumacker was forced out of that position due to his interracial marriage. The hallmark of his tenure was his YouTube channel which at the time featured videos  of him proclaiming the mantras of “diversity = white genocide” and “make whites great again”, as well as anti-Semitic rants denying the Holocaust, and criticizing what he calls “international-jewry”. Gage passed on the NYF leadership to Damingo ten months later in October 2015, which was also the same month an organization called Youthfront, Inc. threatened them with legal action if they continued to use the National Youth Front name, which they eventually changed to Identity Evropa. The group would go on to be one of the leaders of the rally in Charlottesville that took the life of a woman protesting them. Gage shut down his YouTube page in April 2016 and today is most prominent on Twitter, where despite defending the Covington students for being “just children” referred in a tweet to the student victims of last year’s Parkland High School shooting and their supporters as “Tide-pod eating, non-voters, who can’t even accept that the human species has only two genders” for advocating for gun control in last year’s National Walkout Day.

Let’s see… Tide-pod eating, non-voters, who can’t even accept that the human species has only two genders, want to convince us that we need more gun control because people who don’t follow the law will try to kill them.#NationalWalkoutDay

— Angelo John Gage (@AngeloJohnGage) March 14, 2018

Gage was inspired to support the Covington students by another neo-fascist, writer Cassandra Fairbanks who had been tweeting her defense of them over the weekend. Meanwhile, Robert Barnes, an attorney who represented neo-Fascist Chuck C. Johnson in his failed lawsuit against Twitter for banning him, said he was willing to represent any of the teens in court pro bono.

According to the mother of one of the students, they originally were attempting to avoid the racial barbs from a group of “Black Muslims” that were also there. While this does not explain their own bad behavior, according to mainstream reports, the Black Hebrew Israelites indeed were on the Lincoln Memorial steps, shouting racist invectives against not just the students but the indigenous peoples as well and engaging in heated conversations with a number of people at the Memorial. The Hebrew Israelites are a cultish group that follows almost identical tenets of Christian Identity, the religion followed by Aryan Nations and modern-day Klan groups, although they reverse the roles White and Black races play. The most well-known former member is Maurice Woodside, a conspiracy theorist who is often behind Donald Trump during his rallies with a sign reading “Blacks for Trump”. His website once proclaimed,  “YAHWEH BEN YAHWEH Taught Us To Vote Republican & is Now VINDICATED,” Yahweh Ben Yahweh being the late founder and leader of the Hebrew Israelites that was arrested and convicted on charges of racketeering and conspiracy in 14 murders and a firebombing. Woodside was charged as well, but acquitted.

In the wake of the incident, the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School condemned the actions of students towards Nathan Phillips, apologizing to him, are investigating the matter and “will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.”