Behind The American Guard: Hardcore White Supremacists | Anti-Defamation League

17.9.17

Behind The American Guard: Hardcore White Supremacists | Anti-Defamation League: The American Guard formed in Indiana in 2016 and officially went “national” in February 2017 with the stated goal of “voluntary community protection, activism, and service based around the ideals of American Constitutional Nationalism and the preservation of western culture.” The group would, it claimed, “encourage Americans of any race, class or faith to participate with us in these beliefs.”
Bill the Butcher

Bill the Butcher

Even a cursory examination of the American Guard, however, suggests that its deliberately innocuous self-description may not be accurate. The group’s logo, for example, prominently displays two crossed meat-cleavers, while members frequently use images of actor Daniel Day Lewis in his role as “Bill the Butcher” in the movie The Gangs of New York. “Bill the Butcher” was a fictionalized version of William Pool, the leader of the Bowery Boys, a violent street gang in New York City infamous for its attacks on immigrants.

And, like the Bowery Boys whom they apparently admire, the American Guard has a background with connections to anti-immigrant extremism, hatred, and violence.

Indeed, before the American Guard was the American Guard, it was actually the Indiana chapter of a group called the Soldiers of Odin USA, a branch of an extreme anti-immigrant and anti-refugee group that originated in Finland in 2015 and has spread to many other countries. The Soldiers of Odin conduct vigilante patrols to “protect” citizens from the ostensible depredations of refugees; the Indiana Soldiers of Odin conducted several such patrols in 2016. As a recent ADL report has shown, many Soldiers of Odin USA members are white supremacists or anti-government extremists.