Protests, Arrests and Doxxing at American Renaissance 2019

AmRen 2019 has come and gone, and another hate conference comes next month, but given the police presence that never really existed before, seems they are getting a little afraid of the opposition.

BURNS, TN – This year’s American Renaissance (AmRen) Conference saw heightened security and the arrests of several protesters, but it also was held as the group that had the biggest influence on the conference was dealing with yet another embarrassing information leak from what was supposed to be a secured outlet. The conference also served as a precursor to a second neo-Fascist conference to be held at the same park next month, drawing concern among local residents that officials are allowing their parks to be used as safe havens for such groups when they have not been afforded the same allowances anywhere else.

Dozens of protesters from Tennessee, St. Louis and other parts of the country converged on Montgomery Bell State Park Saturday where the AmRen Conference was being held for the 8^th year. As was the case for the first time last year, only those attending the conference could go into the Inn and Conference Center where the conference was being held and any protesters that came out were kept away from the venue via a “protest area” set up by park officials. There were no such restrictions imposed on protesters until after the 2017 event when conference attendee William Markley attacked an antifascist protester, resulting in him being airlifted to the hospital and charged with assault, embarrassing AmRen’s Jared Taylor who expressed his anger to his conference attendees saying, “We’re supposed to be a high I.Q. race!” The following year, the restrictions were imposed and this year, protesters refused to even enter the protest area, save for a few. Some altercations between them and conference attendees reportedly took place as they drove to the conference center, resulting in four arrests.

This video shows a small sample of the large police presence protecting the white supremacists attending the American Renaissance conference. Protesters just left after lots of cops flooded the area in what appeared to be a show of force to encourage ppl to leave the state park. pic.twitter.com/Vo6zic68Mh

— Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) May 18, 2019

Before going near the protest area, antifa stood at one of the park’s entrances where a number of speakers spoke about the history of the conference in the park, the opposition and how important it has become to in fact oppose the event.

Anti-racist activist @DLamontJenkins of @OnePeoplesProj spoke at the state park's entrance about the history and context of people coming out to protest American Renaissance.

Shortly after this video was taken, a man drove by and yelled "white power". pic.twitter.com/Abn0obMCrC

— Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) May 18, 2019

Conference attendees, which included members of the National Socialist Movement were also subject to search as they entered the inn.

The biggest embarrassment to many of the conference attendees however came when news outlet Unicorn Riot, who has spent much of the past several months releasing sensitive information about the American Identity Movement (AmIM), which is seen as a rebrand for Identity Evropa (IE), released even more chats from Discord servers as well as from a chat software called MatterMost, including audio from Wednesday from AmIM leader Patrick Casey that he believed to be secure. In those chats he spoke of upcoming actions to be held, one on July 4 in Washington, DC, and others in August n South Dakota and Texas. He also talked about the then-upcoming AmRen Conference, noting how he and member James Allsup will be speaking and that they were to have “close to 25 people” attending. “Henry Wolff who’s in the organization, is basically planning most of the conference himself from what I’ve gathered, and yes, it’s going to be pretty top notch,” Casey said, referring to AmRen Conference organizer Devin Saucier by his pseudonym when writing for AmRen. Saucier, who attended nearby Vanderbilt University in the late 2000s, founded a campus chapter of the now-defunct White Supremacist group Youth for Western Civilization while there, and even invited neo-Fascist Richard Spencer to come speak there at a time when he was not known to many people. In the chat Casey said that Kevin DeAnna, the co-founder of YWC, spoke at an event held by AmIM, along with Taylor. DeAnna has made few if any public appearances since YWC fell apart seven years ago, the only indication that he was still active being pictures of him associating with the White Supremacist Wolves of Vinland.

The racist, anti-Semitic alt-right group is also planning a demonstration for July 4 in DC as part of their strategy of trying to get Trump supporters to support overt white nationalism. https://t.co/bIqnleh2Uq pic.twitter.com/msr0wbyMxs

— Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) May 20, 2019

The second conference, to be held on June 28-30 at the park, is sponsored by the American Freedom Party and the Council of Conservative Citizens and called the Nationalist Solutions Conference It will be the second year this conference has been held there, and will include former Klansman and Louisiana State Legislator David Duke among its speakers. Protests are planned for that event as well. It is unclear if park officials have spoken about the neo-Fascists repeatedly using their parks.