Patrick Casey, Identity Evropa’s new leader, wants to ditch the "alt-right" for "identitarianism"— another euphemism for white nationalism
After only three months at the helm, Identity Evropa leader Elliot Kline, aka Eli Mosley, is out. Patrick Casey, aka Reinhard Wolff, who wants to distance the group from the Charlottesville-damaged “alt-right” brand, will replace him.
Identity Evropa is known for posting flyers with Greco-Roman motifs around college campuses and for footage of their founder Nathan Damigo, a disgraced ex-Marine, . Kline took over from Damigo after the Charlottesville “Unite The Right” rally descended into chaos.
While Damigo had a penchant for public assault, Kline also had a temper, exemplified by of him in Charlottesville informing a police contact of his intention to march to Emancipation Park with “200 people with guns.” Casey, however, clearly wants a different approach to delivering their white nationalist message.
In a December 2 interview on the far-right “Red Ice Radio,” host Henrik Palmgren revealed that his correspondent “Reinhard Wolff” was in fact Casey and asked him about his new role, which Casey was happy to explain:
This was a decision that was made before I even was nominated as the CEO… what we essentially determined is that doing these big public rallies where anyone and anyone can show up and they're announced beforehand and so forth isn't exactly what we want to do going forward…
The interview focused on the question of “optics,” a topic that has consumed the far right since Charlottesville, with camps fighting over a “normie”-friendly aesthetic of civic nationalism versus a raw, more honest expression of white supremacy.
Casey’s interview with Palmgren continued:
There was actually a really great event before ‘Unite the Right’ that we call ‘Charlottesville 1.0.’ In that event we pretty much planned everything privately behind the scenes and it wasn't announced, so that means that we had hundreds of people that still showed up but we were able to control the branding, we were able make sure that everyone that attended was on the same page and wasn't going to be, you know, waving around swastika flags and so forth and that essentially is kind of what we're looking to emulate more of in the future. Private, invite-only events for mostly IE members, but, you know, select others as well who are kind of on board with the identitarian message that we're going for, so that in terms of policy change that might be what people are getting at. But again that's not anything new that's something that we conclusion that we reached pretty soon after Charlottesville 2.0
As for the question of public rallies versus closed-door conferences and guerrilla tactics — such as banner drops and flyering — nearly all parties involved seem to be in agreement that “liberal strongholds” like Charlottesville should be avoided during daylight hours. The lone dissenter seems to be Jason Kessler, who made headlines last week after for a rally on the one-year anniversary of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer’s death.
Casey then described his interest in distancing Identity Evropa from the “alt-right” branding, which the group played an essential role in popularizing.
I've had people ask me if Identity Evropa is going to officially break away from the ‘alt-right’ now. I don't exactly know what that would entail given that the ‘alt-right’ isn't you know an official membership organization and so forth. We do like the term ‘identitarian,’ we feel like that is the most specific and defining term for our organization and what we're doing so we'll probably continue to identify as ‘identitarian.’
Other far-right groups who embrace more overt expressions of white racial animus, like the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) and its Nationalist Front brethren — including League of the South (LOS) and the National Socialist Movement (NSM) — are unlikely to follow as tension between the factions mounts. These groups have long decried “c------” on the question of overt expressions of white racial animus as an approach doomed to failure. This might create further tension between the factions.
Richard Spencer — who has long been rumored to hold the puppet strings attached to any Identity Evropa leader — ., on Sunday as part of a series of nationwide protests sparked by the acquittal of the man charged with Kate Steinle’s death, an incident which the far-right has attempted to leverage as emblematic of their arguments for an all-white ethnostate. Spencer and company decked themselves out with American flags, a clear embrace of the optics of “civic” nationalism.
Casey also referenced the incident of Steinle’s death in his “Red Ice Radio” interview, stating “anyone who is concerned about the issue of sanctuary cities and the issue of illegal immigration really sees Kate Steinle’s murder as an example of just how bad things really are in this regard.”
Spencer and Casey’s efforts to back away from explicit white nationalist appeals and instead focus on a sympathetic victim like Steinle and innocuous-sounding “identitarianism” come straight from the playbook of a larger attempt by the international far right to obscure the genocidal implications of white separatism, which remains at the core of these movements.
While Casey attempts to delineate his strategy from those of his predecessors, Kline and Damigo both attempted to walk the same line separating their true beliefs from those they present to the public.
Planning calls for the event on the Discord gaming platform contained the following statement attributed to Kline:
The purpose of this is to gain sympathy for pro-white advocacy as well as a general uniting of the right wing against these communists who are gonna come shut this down, okay… Going up to, like, MSNBC and them interviewing you and you saying like, “yeah, I actually think we should kill every non-white on the planet”…like again, I don’t necessarily like have an issue with listening to that on a podcast or whatever, but if you are gonna do something like that, even if it’s your true belief, that’s not the objective of this rally, so we should try to keep it with the objective of trying to gain sympathy for a pro-white rally.
On the morning of Tuesday, December 5, Identity Evropa’s Twitter and @IEAtlanta shared images of its members unfurling a large banner across a bridge on Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus. True to his mission, Patrick Casey, who lists his location on his twitter profile as “East Coast,” was among those photographed.
