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Richard Spencer. Robert Rotellas foundation gave Spencers National Policy Institute $12,500 over three years. Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

At first glance, Robert Rotella appears to be a typical libertarian donor. Through the foundation named in his honor, the Bellevue, Washingtonbased founder of Rotella Capital Management has donated millions to libertarian and conservative organizations like the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, and Turning Point USA. One of his particular favorites is the Institute for Justice. Since 2010, he has donated nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the group, and through it, he has helped set up a Supreme Court battle with dramatic implications for public schools. Justices heard Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue on Wednesday: the Institute for Justice had brought the case against the state of Montana in order to force it to include religious schools in its tax-credit scholarship program. The case has implications not just for the First Amendment but for teachers unions, who view it as yet another attempt to take precious resources away from public schools.

Rotellas financial support for libertarian causes is enough to make him a consequential figure, but theres another reason to know his name: A closer look at the financial records of the Robert P. Rotella Foundation, which he manages alongside his sister, Rosemarie, reveals that he isnt just interested in right-to-work laws or free enterprise. Hes also a significant funder of white nationalism.

Of the $5.8 million the foundation has donated to various causes since 2002, roughly $105,000 has gone to organizations like the National Policy Institute, or NPI, which is led by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. A comprehensive review of the foundations available 990 reports indicates that its financial support for white nationalism began in 2014 and continued through 2018. Though $105,000 is not an exceptionally large sum of money, white nationalist organizations are small, and it doesnt take much money to keep them afloat. Annual recurring donations are kind of where its at for these guys because they all have financial limits, imposed by federal law, on how large the donations can be, explained David Neiwert, the author of Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump.

A guy like Spencer, for instance, doesnt need a single sugar daddy to give him money, Neiwert added. Basically, the National Policy Institute is Spencer, and he just needs an annual salary. Five thousand dollars is basically 5 percent of that annual income for him. He just needs another 20 of those donations and hes done for the year. Thats actually not that hard to get, because there are a lot of people out there who are willing to keep that chunk rolling in for him every year.

Rotella was one of those people. His foundation gave $2,500 to NPI in 2014, then doubled the sum in 2015. It handed off another $5,000 chunk to the group in 2016. Donations to other white nationalist groups follow a similar pattern. Between 2013 and 2017, his foundation donated $10,000 every year, or $40,000 total, to the Charles Martel Society, a white nationalist organization that publishes The Occidental Quarterly, a pseudo-academic journal that focuses on race science. Members of the journals advisory board include Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt University professor emerita who describes herself as an ethnic separatist, and Tom Suni, a writer whom the Southern Poverty Law Center calls an intellectual voice for white nationalists and who once complained that the media pathologized White Western peoples into endless atonement. Until 2018, the RPRFs donations composed roughly 13 to 18 percent of the Charles Martel Societys donation income, depending on the year.

Rotellas foundation also funded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. That group, founded by the late anti-immigration eugenicist John Tanton, has received $17,500 from Rotella since 2015. FAIR calls for sweeping restrictions on legal immigration based on stereotypes about the criminal tendencies of nonwhites; the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated it a hate group. During the same period, Rotella gave another $35,000 to the New Century Foundation, publisher of the digital outlet American Renaissance. The website advocates for white separatism, eugenics, and strict immigration restrictions.

Rick McNeely, a spokesperson for the Rotella family, told New York in December that the Charles Martel Society and the National Policy Institute had misrepresented their work to the foundation. In retrospect, the original goals of why someone would give a donation, in the spirit of diversity and giving other people voices, that certainly wouldnt have been something [the Rotellas] would do if there had been better disclosure. Or if they had a crystal ball, McNeely said.

Unfortunately, none of us can tell the future or hidden agendas or what might happen, he added. However, the goals and characteristics of the Charles Martel Society are not hidden knowledge. The Southern Poverty Law Center helped publicize the societys role as a leading purveyor of academic racism in 2010, years before the Rotella Foundation started funding the group. The society has been around since 2001, meaning it had 13 years to establish its white nationalist raison dtre before it received any Rotella money. FAIR has existed since 1979; NPI, since 2005. Richard Spencer, no stranger to the limelight, had already begun leading NPI by the time it started receiving Rotella money. The intentions of these organizations were clear enough to many.

McNeely said he was unaware that the RPRF had also funded American Renaissance, nor could he explain how the Charles Martel Society and NPI became familiar with a relatively minor foundation in the first place. Public information offers scant additional insight into Rotella or the substance of his views. He has no social-media presence. His official biography on the Rotella Capital Management website says he earned degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Temple University before founding his company in 1995. He eventually relocated from Chicago to Bellevue, where the company is now based. An amateur photographer, he opened the Rotella Gallery in Bellevue, and his biography on its website says he is originally from Niagara Falls, New York.

Despite Rotellas relatively low profile, his donation history offers a rare glimpse into the way the alt-rightis funded. Information about its major donors tends to be scarce. The RPRF is only the second funder of Spencers organization whose identity has become known; the other is multimillionaire William Regnery II, who founded the Charles Martel Society and also helped found NPI.

Rotellas other charitable causes are not so obviously linked to partisan issues. In addition to funding environmental groups like Conservation International and the Pollinator Partnership, the RPRF donated thousands to obscure groups that tout research efforts into UFOs, anti-vaccination, and the apparently fictitious Morgellons disease. The foundation has donated $5,000 to the Exopolitics Institute, which offers a certification program in extraterrestrial affairs, and $25,000 to the Farsight Institute, which claims its team of psychic remote viewers has confirmed that aliens built the Pyramids. But Neiwert says this grouping of interests, while strange, isnt completely unusual. White nationalism runs on conspiracies, he explained.

The psychics of the Farsight Institute probably have little impact on daily affairs, but other Rotella beneficiaries achieve more tangible results. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in November that before Stephen Miller joined President Trumps speechwriting team, he regularly shared links to American Renaissance stories with Breitbart staffers to influence their coverage. Julie Kirchner, who resigned as the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ombudsman in October, had previously led FAIR for nearly a decade. She wasnt the only FAIR employee in the Trump administration, either. John Zadrozny and Ian Smith both worked for FAIR in different capacities before joining the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; both have since left the administration.

The Rotella Foundations giving will soon cease: McNeely said it will dissolve this year. The family lacked the manpower to do it correctly, he explained. But the foundation has already accomplished a great deal during its 18 years in existence including funding a legal case that could lead to a radical reinterpretation of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court will rule on Espinoza later this year, and, given the conservative makeup of the court, the Rotella-funded Institute for Justice is likely to win. That worries unions like the American Federation of Teachers, which opposes the use of public funds for religious schools. Robert Rotella and his support for far-right causes is exhibit A in the disturbing story of how money has infiltrated and corrupted our political system, Randi Weingarten, the president of AFT, told New York.

As a backer of Richard Spencer, Rotella represents a clear and present danger to the tolerance and diversity underpinning American democracy and its well past time his influence is exposed and interrogated,Weingarten added.

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This Obscure Foundation Helped Fund The Alt-Right - New York Magazine

EAST WINDSOR TOWNSHIP, NJ A relatively new white supremacist group has been distributing propaganda in East Windsor and Hightstown, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League.

On April 7, the alt-right New Jersey European Heritage Association distributed fliers in Hightstown that read: "White Pride World Wide," "Reclaim Your Heritage," and "It's okay to be white."

On Dec. 7, the group distributed fliers with the QR code for New Jersey European Heritage Association and propaganda that read: "Take back your country" in East Windsor.

On Dec. 24, the group returned to Hightstown to distribute propaganda that read: "The New Jersey European Heritage Association wishes you a Merry white Christmas."

The New Jersey European Heritage Association was founded in 2018 to "save white European people from purported extinction," according to the Anti-Defamation League's profile of the group. They focus their efforts in central New Jersey.

Statewide, the number of incidents involving potential hate, extremism and anti-Semitism dropped from 2018 to 2019, according to the report.

In 2019, there were 216 incidents of hate, extremism and anti-Semitism in 112 towns in New Jersey, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The figure for 2019 decreased from the 452 incidents reported in New Jersey during 2018. But the incidents were no less concerning, the report says.

The list follows a similar report published last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which said 18 hate organizations are based in towns throughout the Garden State, and the number is rising. Read more: Hate Groups In NJ: Map Shows Rising Total Of Racist Organizations

The occurrences in New Jersey identified in the ADL report were among the 4,015 examples of extremist and anti-Semitic incidents that happened nationwide in 2019. The figure reported for 2019 is up almost 32 percent from the 3,052 incidents reported in 2018, according to the ADL.See related: Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism In 112 NJ Towns In 2019: Report

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Alt-Right Group Handed Out Fliers In East Windsor In 2019: Report - East Windsor, NJ Patch

Wearing a blond wig and walking through the streets of central Vienna in October 2017, Julia Ebner reminded herself of her new identity: Jennifer Mayer, an Austrian philosophy student currently studying abroad in London. It was one of five different identities that Ebner, an Austrian researcher specialized in online radicalization and cumulative extremism, adopted in order to infiltrate far-right/Islamist extremist networks. That day in October, she met a local recruiter for Generation Identity (GI), the European equivalent of the American alt right, which is mostly an online political group that rejects mainstream politics and espouses ideas of white nationalism. GI is the main proponent of the Great Replacement Theory, the baseless idea that white populations are being deliberately replaced through migration and the growth of minority communities. The theory has inspired several recent extremist attacks, including the murder of 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand last March, and the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas last August, which left 22 people dead.

The meeting with GIs local leader proved to be significant. Ebner learned about how important the group considered social media for their strategy to expand and recruit members in schools, public baths and other public venues that young people visit. She found out that GI were planning to launch an App, Patriotic Peer, that would connect a silent majority (in the words of the leader), which was funded by donations from around the world.

Securing the meeting wasnt easy. It took several months of setting up credible accounts within the various GI networks online and a couple of weeks of messaging with GI members. But it was necessary for Ebners research: the 28-year-old is a resident research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think-tank that develops responses to all forms of hate and extremism. She has advised the U.N., parliamentary working groups, frontline workers and tech firms on issues around radicalization, and her first book, The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism, was published in 2017.

Two years ago, Ebner started to feel like she had reached the limits of her insights into the world of extremism. She wanted to find out how extremists recruit members, how they mobilize them to commit violence, and why people join and stay in the movements. Ebner believed she could only get her answers by being a part of these groups. Over the past two years, she has spent much of her spare time talking to people on online forums. They include the Discord group, used by the alt-right to coordinate the violent Charlottesville rally in August 2017, the Tradwives (short for Traditional Wives), which is a network of some 30,000 far-right women, who perceive gender roles in terms of a market place where women are sellers and men buyers of sex, and an online trolling army, Reconquista Germanica, which were active in the 2017 German federal election.

Ebner, whose new book Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists is published Feb. 20, spoke with TIME about what she discovered. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Ebner: My first attempt of creating and maintaining a credible profile didnt work. I was kicked out of a group and had to start all over again.

I found switching between different identities stressful and confusing. Remembering exactly what I had said in my online profiles, previous chats and real-life conversations in these various roles could get challenging. Sometimes staying in my role and not being able to talk back as my real self was also difficult. There were many moments when I wanted to debunk a crazy conspiracy theory, or say youre not funny! instead of laughing at a racist joke, or convince younger members to cease their involvement with a group.

As youd imagine, I made made plenty of stupid mistakes. Dropping my real credit card was only one of them. Once I even signed an email with Julia instead of Jenni. Im not a professional MI5 agent, I did acting in high school but going undercover didnt come naturally to me.

I received some tips from a friend who has done undercover investigations himself and also trained people to infiltrate dangerous groups. I probably did appear nervous but I imagine most people who go to a first recruitment meeting with a white nationalist group leader probably would be, so I didnt think that it would be too suspicious.

In many cases, they offer an escape from loneliness and a solution to grievances or fears. A lot of the time it was a fear of a relative loss of status, which the networks blamed on migration and changing demographics. They offered easy explanations oversimplified rationalizations to complex social and political issues.

The networks also offered support, consolation and counselling. They can turn into a kind of family. Some people spend so much time online that I doubt they socialize in the real world.

On the surface, there was no clear profile. Users were from different age groups, social classes, educational backgrounds and depending on the group different ethnic backgrounds. The lowest common denominator was people who were in a moment of crisis. The recruiters did a good job of tailoring their propaganda to pick up vulnerable individuals. The Tradwives reached women who had relationship grievances, Islamist extremists recruited alienated Muslims whod experienced discrimination, and white supremacists exploited people who had security concerns.

It was a major part of the recruiters strategy. White supremacist networks, like the European far right, have a clear step-by-step radicalization manual, which they call recruiting strategies. The Tradwives, for example, made themselves seem like a self help group and I think thats what attracted even women from different ideological backgrounds, and even those who dont subscribe to traditional gender roles.

Some groups, the European Trolling Army for instance, had tightly-organized hierarchical structures. Neo-Nazi groups often have military-like structures, positions in the groups are even named after military ranks, and a person could rise to the top by running hate campaigns against political opponents.

Other networks, like the ones used by the perpetrator of Christchurch and the attack in Halle, Germany last October, had looser structures. They would get together on an opportunistic basis when they saw that something could be gained by cross-border cooperation. They use their own vocabulary and insider references when they decide to collaborate on a campaign or a media stunt. The Matrix is one of many internet culture references from Japanese anime to Taylor Swift. And they would be very effective at advancing these operations.

Far right groups have undergone a rebranding and have reframed the ideas held by traditional neo-Nazis. Generation Identity use euphemisms like ethno pluralism instead of racial segregation or apartheid, and combine video game language with racial slurs, creating their own satirical language.

Not only are extremist groups better at spreading their real ideologies behind satirical memes, theyre also being given a platform by politicians. Language which mirrors that used by proponents of conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement are retweeted by politicians and repeated in their campaigns. This is likely to become more prevalent in the next few months in the run up to the U.S. presidential election. The 2016 U.S. election proved to be one of the key turning points in uniting far right groups globally.

Trans-Atlantic cooperation between the far right in Europe and the alt right in the U.S. has been growing. Some of the ideologies that inspired the GI and other far right groups have been propagated by leading far right figures in the U.S. And the European far right have adopted some of the strategies of gamification and propaganda used by the Americans alt right. They both see themselves as fighters in a war against white genocide or the Great Replacement and there is loyalty between them that makes the idea of ultra nationalism obsolete.

One of the biggest problems is in the infrastructure of social media and tech companies. Algorithms give priority to content that maximises our attention and to content that causes anger and indignation. Its like handing a megaphone to extremists. Its allowed fringe views to get a much bigger audience. Developments in deepfakes, cyber warfare and hacking campaigns are likely to help extremists to refine their strategies.

Firstly, we need a global legal framework that forces all the tech companies not just the big ones but also the fringe networks, like 8chan and 4chan to remove content that could inspire terrorism. After the shootings in Christchurch and Halle, the documents the manifestos left behind by perpetrators were translated into several languages and shared on the fringe corners of the internet. We need a global approach because people can always find a way to circumvent national laws.

But content removal alone wont work. In my book I suggest 10 solutions for 2020; this includes more digital literacy programs in education settings, which can enhance critical thinking skills, help Internet users to spot manipulation and ultimately weaken extremists. We also need more deradicalization projects that use social media analyses to identify and engage with radicalized individuals. Counter-disinformation initiatives with the help of fact checkers and social media campaigners could be formed, as they have done in the Baltics, to debunk online manipulation.

Technology and society are intertwined. So, our response has to be integrated. We need an alliance across not only politicians and tech firms, but civil society and social workers.

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This Researcher Juggled Five Different Identities to Go Undercover With Far-Right and Islamist Extremists. Here's What She Found - TIME

A counterprotester confronts members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing demonstrators during an End Domestic Terrorism rally in Portland, Oregon. (Noah Berger / AP Photo)

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Several hundred anti-fascist activists gathered in Lownsdale Square, a small park in downtown Portland, Oregon, on February 8 to oppose a Ku Klux Klan rally organized by Steven Shane Howard, a former imperial wizard of the North Mississippi White Knights. But after local anti-fascist groups mobilized to counterprotest, Howard contacted the Portland Police Bureau to cancel his event. When the KKK didnt show up, we held a victory party instead.Ad Policy

Unfortunately, while we anti-fascists in Portland danced to a brass band dressed in banana costumes (the beloved Banana Bloc), more than a hundred members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front marched through the National Mall in Washington, DC, wearing white masks and chanting Reclaim America! and Life, liberty, victory!

In the aftermath, #AntifaTerrorists trended on Twitter. The hashtag tends to emerge when the right has an optics problem and needs to spin the narrative. An optics problem like, for example, white nationalists marching through the nations capital.

For all of the right-wing hand-wringing over people dressed in black wielding silly string and oranges, nearly all the domestic terrorists in the United States emerge from the extreme right. A 2019 report from the Anti-Defamation Leagues Center on Extremism showed that all 50 of the extremist killings in the United States in 2018 had links to right-wing extremists. Since 2001, the extreme right has killed 109 people. Over that same time period, anti-fascists are responsible for zero deaths.

The goals of anti-fascism are simple: oppose hate and prevent its spread. The goal of white nationalism, as established in core texts such as Siege: The Collected Writings of James Mason and the white nationalist utopian novel The Turner Diaries, is to destabilize American society and initiate a civil war. Amid the chaos of a fragmenting country, the white nationalists plan to seize control and establish a white homeland. (That nationalist doesnt refer to the United States. It refers to the white nation theyll form from Americas ashes.) Its far-fetched, but the improbability doesnt keep us safe from domestic terrorists working toward it.Related Article

Domestic terrorists are like mushrooms. Mushrooms are the surface expression of a complex network that lives beneath the soil and can span thousands of acres. Above the surface: A hate-filled personalmost always a white mancommits an act of terror, like the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting or the El Paso massacre. The popular narrative may describe him as a lone wolf, lashing out at society because of a personal grievance. We want to believe that; it renders each horrific attack an isolated event. But white nationalists are deliberately encouraging vulnerable individuals to carry out terrorist acts. In addition to message boards like IronMarch, 4chan, and StormFront, white nationalists rely on rallieslike the one planned by Howard in Portland and the one carried out in Washington, DCfor recruitment and radicalization. Rallies give them an opportunity to identify and connect with individuals who they deem open to indoctrination, as well as generating a trove of often sensationalized media coverage that they can mine for online propaganda.

In the spring of 2017, a Vancouver, Washingtonbased group called Patriot Prayer began crossing the Columbia River into Portland to hold right-wing extremist rallies. Emboldened by the Trump administration, they came to challenge Portlands reputation for progressive politics and values. Their intention was not to protest but to instigate conflict. Theyre frequently accompanied by members of the Proud Boys and known white supremacist groups, including the American Guard, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers. They come dressed for battle, with helmets and body armor, sticks and bear spray, knives and guns. Oregon is an open-carry state, and the alt-right takes full advantage.Current Issue

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Theyve been confronted by anti-fascist protesters marching in black bloc as well as those rallying in solidarity. But theyve also been helped by the Portland Police Bureauan organization that includes among its ranks an officer who built a shrine to Nazi soldiers in a public park. In a series of hundreds of friendly text messages between Portland Police Lieutenant Jeff Niiya and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson from 2017 to 2018, the lieutenant shared information about anti-fascist activist movements, including the locations of unrelated leftist events.

On the morning of a Patriot Prayer rally on August 4, 2018, police found members of Patriot Prayer with a cache of loaded weapons on a rooftop overlooking the location where the rally and anti-fascist counterprotest would take place. The weapons were taken and the Patriot Prayer members redirected. There were no arrests, and police returned the weapons after the event. The Portland Police Bureau informed neither the public nor the mayors office of this potential sniper threat until months later.

When the police form a line to separate one side from the other at these events, they always stand with their backs to the alt-right and their weapons facing the anti-fascist counterprotesters. Dispersal orders and crowd-control weapons like tear gas and stun grenades (flashbangs) go only one way, often deployed against the anti-fascists to allow Patriot Prayer to leave the area. Nonviolent protesters have been struck and seriously injured by flashbangs fired directly into the crowd by the police.

So why do we keep showing up to protest Patriot Prayer and their white supremacist friends? Why did we come together last Saturday to protest the KKK? Critics often tell us, Stop giving them the attention theyre looking for!

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We keep showing up, because ignoring hate doesnt make it go away; it only allows it to spread further. If we permit white supremacists to march through our city, theyll grow bolder. If we dont show up each time and prove that we outnumber them, their numbers will swell. Imagine the recruiting power of an artfully edited video of white supremacists marching unchallenged through the streets of a major US city like Washington.

On August 17, 2019, Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, and other extremists came back to Portland. Anti-fascist protesters recognized that videos of clashes have been used as right-wing propaganda, and so the anti-fascist group PopMob organized the Spectacle, an event designed to shut that down. PopMob encouraged Portlanders to wear whimsical costumes to an anti-fascist outdoor dance party adjacent to the far-right rally. That resulted in the confrontation of about 300 far-right demonstrators with roughly 1,500 unicorns, cats, witches, and bananas (the Banana Bloc, of course), joined by a contingent of protesters in a black bloc forming a front line to protect us. It was a very Portland protest, and it was also very effective. The far right called it quits after 30 minutes, retreated to their rental buses, and went home.

This past Saturday, the KKK wanted to test Portland, and once again we organized and claimed victory. Portland leftist organizations including PopMob, Rose City Antifa, Portland DSA, Jobs with Justice, Banana Bloc, the Direct Action Alliance, and others have formed a community to face down right-wing extremists.

When we counterprotest white supremacists in Portland, were working to cut off white nationalists recruitment and radicalization tools as early as possible. If you are opposed to fascism, you are an anti-fascist, and our fight is your fight. As a favorite chant at these anti-fascist rallies goes, We are many! They are few! We need to prove that nationwide.

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The Importance of Being Anti-Fascist - The Nation

Conservative commentator Candace Owens told Fox News hostLaura Ingraham on her Monday broadcastthat Bernie Sanders is the best racist on the left as she compared the Democratic candidate to Lyndon Johnson, a president who signed landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

The good racist the best racist on the left, by the way is Bernie Sanders, because he pretends to be their friend. He lies to black Americas face, Owens said of the frontrunnerin national polls among the candidates vying for the Democratic nomination. He knows he is going to be the one like Lyndon Baines Johnson. Hes Lyndon Baines Johnson 2.0, who is going to enact policies that are going to harm black America for the next 100 years when he smiles in their faces.

Sanders famously marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. In contrast, President Donald Trump was sued by Richard Nixons administration in 1973 for violating the Fair Housing Act. Trump has a long history of making racist comments, includingpromotingthe racist birther conspiracy theory in 2011, defending alt-right protesters in Charlottesville in 2017 by claiming that there were good people on both sides and referringto several African countries as s**tholes.

Leo Terrell, a civil rights attorney who appeared on Ingrahams program with Owens, responded by asking:Did she talk about Lyndon Baines Johnson . . . and the Civil Rights Act? The Voting Rights Act?

He added, OK, she lost me.

Owens later defended herself on Twitter, writing that Johnson only signed the Civil Rights Act because he was forced to, as President. She also quoted the former president as saying, Ill have those n***ers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.

As historian Robert Caro explains in his four-volume, prize-winning biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the future president took a lead role in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and Civil Rights Act of 1960 while he was still Senate majority leader. After former President John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Johnson took the reins on passing civil rights legislation and used his parliamentary skills to successfully push through both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Near the end of his presidency, Johnson also successfully pushed for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

This is not to suggest that Johnson had a spotless record on race. Like nearly all southern legislators in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, Johnson opposed most of the major civil rights bills which came before the House of Representatives (where he served from 1937 to 1949) and the Senate (where he served from 1949 to 1961). He also frequently made racist comments to colleagues andfriends, as well as toblack Americans.

At the same time, there is no evidence that Johnson ever claimed that he was only passing civil rights using the slur cited by Owens. That quote originated from a former Air Force One steward named Robert MacMillan, who told journalist Robert Kessler about it in the 1990s. Though MacMillan supposedly heard Johnson say those words to two Democratic governors, it has not been corroborated. MacMillan made it clear in interviews that he intensely disliked Johnson on a personal level.

Despite his racist comments, Johnson was one of the most successful American presidents in terms of pushing for and achieving civil rights for black Americans themselves. There was a difference between Lyndon Johnson and all the other Americans who held racial stereotypes and between Lyndon Johnson and all the presidents, save only Abraham Lincoln, who came before him and who came after him, Caro wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. Though Lincoln abolished slavery, Johnson gave black Americans the right to vote and made great strides toward ending discrimination in public accommodations, in education, in employment, even in private housing.

Ironically, Johnsons achievements in civil rights contributed to the Republican Party becoming a the staunchly conservative organization it is today. Johnsons Republican opponent in the 1964 election, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, rose to prominence in large part due to his opposition to those civil rights measures. His candidacy played a significant role in turning the overwhelming majority of black voters away from the Republican Party. Goldwaters candidacy also helped bring Ronald Reagan into national prominence as a political figure, paving the way for his election to the presidency in 1980 and the so-called Reagan Revolution, which transformed the GOP into a vehicle for modern conservatism.

Owens has aroused considerable controversy since she first began posting conservative videos in 2017 on her YouTube channel, Red Pill Black. The former Turning Points USA employee incorrectly claimed that the so-called Southern strategy of Republicans pandering to racism was a myth, and she had never seen evidence of racism in conservative circles. However, the former field director of Turning Points USA had to resign after saying, I hate black people. Like f*ck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.

She also falsely accused Democrats of sending explosive devices to prominent liberals, including George Soros, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2018, appeared to defend Adolf Hitler last year in comments meant to explain why she is a nationalist and was accused of politicizing the death of a college student allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant.

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Right-wing Candace Owens claims on Fox News that Bernie Sanders is the best racist on the left - Raw Story