On the day that Andy Ngo made himself the most famous milkshake recipient in Portland, antifa in Tennessee was getting damned creative pissing off the attendees of the latest conference being held at Montgomery Bell Park Inn. Wait until they see that we have pics and vids though!

BURNS, TN – Even before any opposition made it to Montgomery Bell State Park, Rick Tyler, one of the organizers of the Nationalist Solutions Conference was concerned.

“Tomorrow the leftist contingency will be making their presence known in some way, shape or form, he told the attendees that had arrived. Law enforcement has gotten this system down pat to where they don’t let them get anywhere near us here. In 2017, I believe it was at the AmRen event, they weren’t doing that yet. They weren’t keeping Antifa away from the building. They were able to come into the lobby. They were able to press their ugly faces up against the glass. They succeeded in getting into an altercation with a guy and they rolled down the hill into the water. Created some bad optics. So the law enforcement figured out, ‘OK. We’ve got to keep these people away from the hotel.’ And that of course has facilitated the charges against the law enforcement personnel that they are protecting us, protecting the white supremacists, etc. etc.”

Tyler went on to urge the assembled to not engage with that “leftist contingency” thereby making the job of the law enforcement to protect them that much harder. And Tyler also saw something else in their protectors. “The law enforcement guys out there, they’re doing a good job,” he said. “You know, we’ll never know exactly what’s in their hearts and minds but I have a sneaking suspicion that probably a bunch of those guys secretly might approve of us!” As Tyler spoke these words, there were giggles from the audience, the kind of giggles of a shared secret between the group.

Somewhere, antifa were giggling too. Because they had plans for that crowd.

On June 29, just over a month since the white supremacist publication American Renaissance held its eighth conference at Montgomery Bell State Park, and on the same day as a rally in Portland that made conservative propagandist Andy Ngo infamous for being pelted with milkshakes and silly string there, the American Freedom Party and Council of Conservative held its second one in as many years in the same venue, and as a number of speakers and organizations promoted neo-Nazi ideology and hinted at the possibility of a second civil war in the country, many were outside expressing their opposition to the conference and anger at park officials for marginalizing their rights to the public park.

Approximately 75 persons were outside the park that afternoon shouting anti-racist chants and playing music such as “La Bamba” by Richie Valens to annoy the approximately 65 that came out to attend the Nationalist Solutions Conference. They represented several organizations such as the Tennessee Anti-Racist Network, Democratic Socialists of America, Dangerous Ideas Collective, American Indian Coalition Nashville, Nashville Peace & Justice Center, Nashville Direct Action, Mercy Junction Justice & Peace Center, No Exceptions Prison Collective, Harriet Tubman House, Murfressboro Antifa and Jam City Antifa. Some also came from out of state, such as the Kansas City-based Ida B. Wells Coalition, of which One People’s Project is a member organization.  

Many of those there also protested the American Renaissance Conference in May when police shut down any effective protest or disruption with a line so far up the road that they were unable to even see the inn, and there was also a fight with police mounted on horseback that resulted in injuries and arrests. At the end of the protest of this conference, they felt this was by far one of the most successful protests against white supremacy at Montgomery Bell State Park, and by far the most successful since militarized police forces began stifling First Amendment expression by antifascist and anti-racist protesters more than a year ago there.

During this protest, an activist named “Crash” who lives in Dickson County where the park is located, , and was one of those who fought with police and arrested in May, spoke about his experiences at the park during the AmRen Conference over the past several years.  “Since they started coming here, I’ve been here every year,” he said. “A lot of it’s been really, really civil I’ve never ever been arrested or caused any kind of mischief up here. I’m disabled, but I’ve always been out here fighting with you guys, but I want to show you something.”

At this point, Crash lifted his shirt to show those attending the protest a month-old bruise, more than six inches wide and six inches long, that covered parts of his stomach and the side of his body.

 “It’s healing now, but it’s kind of grotesque to look at. This is from a month ago. They took a bunch of grown law officers, TDOC (Tennessee Department of Corrections) to throw me to the ground. I’m 135 pounds. I’m a little dude. They beat the hell out of me.”

Mina Shedd of Middle Tennessee Democratic Socialists of America also spoke at the rally: “As a trans woman, I’m facing down a lot of things,” she said. “The people at this conference are really at the tip of the spear for increasing the amount of fascism in the U.S .They would rather see people like me locked up. They’d probably rather see people like me in gas chambers. What’s important is that we get out every single time they do this and chase them away — chase them away from private places and from every single public land, wherever they find quarter and scare them out of it. “

Shedd also noted how many, of the attendees are not even from Tennessee let alone Dickson County, while many of those opposing them were.

“Year over year over year, we can chase them down so that there’s none of them who feel safe meeting,” she continued. “We should make sure that they have no quarter in this state because hardly any of them actually live here. All of them are being flown in and bussed in because this is the last place, out in the middle of Dickson County in Montgomery Bell, where they can have this conference where they can plan for people like me to be killed, where they plan for women to be immiserated, they plan for the further immiseration of this country.”

A police barricade on the road into the park directed conference-goers toward the inn, and everyone else — park goers and protesters, alike — toward the swimming/boating area of Lake Acorn. The protesters marched over the hill toward Lake Acorn where only a wooden bridge guarded by two park rangers, and a narrow stretch of Lake Acorn separated them from the white supremacist conference goers inside the inn.

Antifa remained on the banks of the lake for approximately three hours and blasted “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens and other tunes and chanted “KKK come out and play” and “David Duke you make me puke,” across the waters. Occasionally, a window or door would open at the back of the inn and conference attendees would come outside to check out what was happening. The protest ended the day with a couple of paddle boats filled with members of what they dubbed the “Antifa Navy”. They took the boats up to the shore of the lake directly behind the inn, chanting “No Nazis, No KKK, no racist USA.” The antifa flag was flown from one boat while the other unfurled a banner that said “WHITE SUPREMACY KILLS.”

The conference inside saw representatives of the Klan, the National Alliance and the website Stormfront attending and distributing literature at the various booths. White Supremacist Richard Spencer was scheduled to speak, but had bowed out prior to the event, and was replaced by Simon Roche, the spokesperson for the South African White Supremacist group Suidlanders, who anticipates and is preparing for a civil war that they believe will be spurred on by what they see is White genocide in the country. Other speakers who were not announced prior to the conference, such as attorney Augustus Invictus, who spoke on his efforts to create a nation wide support program for who he considers political prisoners, and Don Black, the founder and owner of Stormfront. The tone of many of the speeches were about dealing with the opposition they routinely face from antifa to the mainstream, to in many cases the paranoia surrounding the notion that Jews were trying to overrun them, and many of the solutions to dealing with that opposition that some of the speakers provided repeatedly implied a violent one.  Rick Tyler himself began the conference by drawing positive comparisons to the tragic “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA that resulted in the death of counter protester Heather Heyer to that of Frazier Glenn Miller’s rallies and marches in the eighties as the founder and leader of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which was a paramilitary organization with ties to White Supremacist terrorist organizations such as the Order. “Glenn Miller was holding marches through the Carolina towns, sometime four, five hundred men in camo, all carrying Confederate flags, and hundreds of people from the towns would join the processional, the parade,” he said, describing Miller’s example. “Charlottesville, the torchlit parade, Charlottesville (at) the University of Virginia campus, was the first time I had ever seen anything that remotely approached what Glenn Miller was doing in the Carolinas back in the early eighties. Tyler avoided mentioning that Miller is now on Death Row after he killed three people in a 2014 shooting spree at both a Jewish-run community center and retirement community in Overland Park, Kansas, saying only that his was a story that had “a really bad ending.”

Later, Tyler poses a hypothetical “plan” that recalls what led people to hold the “Unite the Right” rally to begin with – armed men protecting a monument. “Imagine the day in the future when the enemies of our race are getting ready to take down another monument…another domino is getting ready to fall, and amongst our ranks…we decide that this is where in an Alamo type fashion we have got to draw the line. It just has to be done. And so, let’s just say hypothetically 200 men…go to Santa Monica armed and announce to the world, ‘We are not going to allow this monument to be taken down. This is it, this is the redline, this is the Alamo, it ain’t happening!’” He then continues with how they should all be willing to die for what they believe in as those in the past have.

According to news reports, taxpayers in Tennessee are paying tens of thousands of dollars in security costs to play host to the Nationalist Solutions and American Renaissance Conferences.

During the weekend of June 28-30, the American Freedom Party and League of the South held something called the Nationalist Solutions Conference at Montgomery Bell Park in Burns, TN. This is a thread of video from inside that conference. Part 1 pic.twitter.com/oB6rLXTmqk

— Idavox (@IdavoxOPP) July 15, 2019