Neo-Nazi ‘Fixer’ of the Alt-Right Identified
Forty-year-old James Kreider allegedly provided security assistance to the white nationalist movement for years, helping extremists mask their identities and plan clandestine meetups, according to three different sources who spoke to Hatewatch.
Kreider inhabits the online pseudonym of “Jayoh De La Rey,” or simply “Jayoh,” the sources told Hatewatch. He first emerged as an internet personality alongside members of The Right Stuff (TRS), a white nationalist podcasting network and extreme far-right organization. Headed by a man named Michael Peinovich, TRS built up a network of private meetups across the country during Donald Trump’s rise as a political figure. The group relies heavily on internet pseudonyms to keep its members’ identities secret. As Jayoh, Kreider served as a crucial organizer, helping from behind the scenes to advise white nationalists on how to stay pseudonymous, and recommending how to protect themselves if antiracist activists ascertained their real-life identities, the sources told Hatewatch. (Hatewatch has chosen to grant anonymity to the sources named in this story to protect them from retaliation.)
Anonymous Comrades Collective, a group of antifascist activists, also submitted social media profiles of a “Jim Kreider,” and apparent family members, to Hatewatch for review. Hatewatch then connected images from those social media profiles to private photos obtained through the sources who knew Jayoh through the white nationalist movement. The photos also appeared to match images of a man who appeared alongside white nationalists at such events as the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
Hatewatch could not find Kreider or his contact information to seek comment from him. Kreider, operating as Jayoh, sometimes co-hosts podcasts with suspended State Department official Matthew Q. Gebert, a TRS affiliate Hatewatch identified in 2019. Hatewatch reached out to Gebert for a comment on Kreider, but he did not respond. Kreider is the seventh pseudonymous personality associated with Peinovich and his group TRS that Hatewatch has identified since the start of that year. Hatewatch contacted Peinovich’s lawyer for a comment, but he did not reply. In 2019, Peinovich sent Hatewatch a cease-and-desist letter after receiving a request for comment about a leaked video of TRS members burning books around a fire while shouting “white sharia” and performing Hitler salutes. Hatewatch also attempted to reach Kreider through his family members on Facebook.
The ‘fixer’ who reads ‘SIEGE’
One source told Hatewatch that in 2017, Kreider said Peinovich paid him a salary of $40,000 per year to run security for his operation. Security, the source said, meant helping organize so-called “pool parties,” a term TRS used for privately held gatherings of white nationalists in different regions across the country. Kreider, as Jayoh, also bragged about bringing the so-called “alt-right” movement together, the source claimed.
“He was the fixer. He would always handle situations,” the source told Hatewatch, using the word “fixer” to refer to Kreider’s alleged skill at organizing white nationalists and keeping their identities secret. “Jayoh bragged that he pulled the alt-right together after Mike [Peinovich] got doxed. He bragged about all the people brought back in the fold after that.”
A photograph taken at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, appears to show Kreider marching alongside Peinovich and James Fields, the neo-Nazi who later that day murdered activist Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others in a car ramming attack. Less than a week after Fields killed Heyer at Unite the Right, a Twitter account going by the username Jayoh De La Rey posted the words “read siege,” a phrase that is often used as a neo-Nazi call-to-arms. So-called “SIEGE” culture, which consists of an esoteric internet fanbase surrounding a collection of racist writings by that name, has helped inspire far-right terror attacks. It is unclear if the “read siege” tweet referred to Fields’ attack or the violence perpetrated by white nationalists in Charlottesville at Unite the Right.
A mysterious figure
The neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer provided additional corroborating evidence about Kreider’s role in the movement with titled “Head of [TRS] Security was a Heroin Dealer on the Run from the Feds in 2012.” The post, which highlighted material that antiracist activists had also obtained, described Jayoh as being “an absolute liability” to their movement. Citing a 2012 appearance on a libertarian-themed podcast called “Anarchy Gumbo,” wherein Kreider appeared under an earlier pseudonym, “Jim Object,” Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin described him as a potential federal informant. Hatewatch found no evidence to back up Anglin’s claim that Kreider is a federal informant.
“If you cannot grasp what an absolute liability it is to have someone who was a wanted drug dealer – someone with extensive interaction with the feds as a criminal, including attempts to be recruited as an informant, someone who told the feds he was going to turn people in to them – running your neo-Nazi group, then you are such an absolute r****d that you deserve to have done to you whatever Mike Peinovich does to you,” Anglin wrote of Kreider, referring to him as Jayoh.
On the podcast appearance cited by Anglin, Kreider, speaking under the Jim Object pseudonym, claimed to have attended University of Chicago and Harvard University. University of Chicago told Hatewatch the school found no record of Kreider attending. Harvard did not return a request for comment. Hatewatch also searched a catalog of Harvard alumni and found no record to substantiate that Kreider attended their school.
Anglin also mentions in the post that Kreider, as Jayoh, told people in the white nationalist movement that he worked as “a secret agent mercenary fighting blacks in South Africa.” One of the sources that spoke to Hatewatch said that Kreider bragged about working as a mercenary in South Africa and wore red shoelaces to represent the idea that he had killed Black people there. Racist skinheads sometimes don red shoelaces as a badge, claiming that they have shed blood for the movement. Hatewatch failed to verify any details of Kreider’s story about living in South Africa, but he made on one of Peinovich’s shows in which he told parts of it. He did not mention killing people on that podcast.
Hatewatch also identified Kreider through his teeth. For at least three years before identifying him, Hatewatch tracked conversations among extremists wherein the person behind the Jayoh De La Rey pseudonym was described by other extremists as a man who removed false teeth at private events to eat. In addition to identifying him in photos, the three sources who spoke to Hatewatch about Kreider also described him as a man who wore false teeth.
Kreider lived for a time in Leesburg, Virginia, according to a source who obtained his address for the purpose of sending him a package. In 2019, Hatewatch knocked on the door of that Leesburg home, but no one answered. Four left-wing activists living in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, area also told Hatewatch they saw a person resembling a photo of Kreider lingering around a protest there in September 2020, alongside other members of TRS. National Justice Party, a spinoff group from TRS, hosted events in Pennsylvania in recent months, they claim on their website.
Hatewatch was unable to determine if Kreider currently lives in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. Very little information about Kreider can be found online, save for some high school yearbook photos found by Anonymous Comrades Collective and a few photos family members posted to Facebook.
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