Angelo John Gage | |
|---|---|
 Angelo John Gage | |
| Born | May 18, 1984 |
| Home Base | Brick, NJ |
| Published By | OPP HQ |
| Published On | October 3, 2015 |
Leonard Lance is the Republican Congressperson in heavily Republican District 7 in New Jersey, but being that this is New Jersey you can’t be too conservative without getting into some trouble. Lance put down a few challenges from people who were part of the teabagger crowd, and he has broken with his party to support legislation like environmental protection. So when you are further right than the teabaggers – like say, a neo-Nazi – and you are running for office, you’re pretty much doing a fundraiser since you don’t have a real chance of winning anyway. That’s more than likely the deal with this brand new piece of work (among other things) named Angelo John Gage, a shill for the White supremacist American Freedom Party (AFP) and the chairman of the AFP-sponsored National Youth Front (NYF). In 2014 he ran for Rep. Lance’s seat as a member of the AFP, but he didn’t even show up on the ballot, and the only way anyone knew that he was even running is if someone within his circles or anti-racist groups putting him on blast made note of it. So coming off his defeat in the polls, these days his thing is to be the biggest propagandist for the neo-Nazi scene, and that has lent itself to some of the most craptastic crap that ever been crapped!
To fully appreciate it all, we have to explain how this started. In November 2014, the AFP started the NYF, which it said on its website was a “an elite youth organization dedicated to the preservation of America our Western culture [sic].” It’s basically a propaganda and activism mill, putting out videos and littering random communities with flyers that deal with various issues of their concern, and they have quite a few active members. It’s first chairman was a kid named Caleb C. Shumaker formerly of the Conservative Youth Council, which just like the NYF is a youth activism arm of a fringe third party, the far-right Conservative Party USA. Shumaker didn’t last long, however. He resigned in January 2015 saying in his resignation letter, “Due to recent attacks against me, my family and by those whom I believed would support and appreciate what we are doing, I feel it best to step down from my position as chairman of National Youth Front, and step away entirely from the organization.” Gee, we wonder why. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, AFP Chairman William Johnson told them that those attacks came from within the circles NYF traveled and for a very curious reason. “Caleb Shumaker was forced out because of his interracial marriage,” Johnson said. “I was working with him closely, but there was a lot of backlash [because of his marriage] … from people who were not involved [in NYF].”
So here comes Angelo John Gage to take his place. Born in Italy and moving here when he was two, according to him, he was 17 during Sept. 11, and that is what prompted him to join the Marines leaving as a corporal. He then started to gravitate to some of the conspiracy theories about 9/11 being an inside job and other tin foil hattery, and that led him to head conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But Jones wasn’t enough of a crackpot. Gage was missing something and listening to David Icke he realized what that was – antisemitism. Even though he thought that people like Jones and Icke were what he called “controlled opposition”, Icke’s mentioning of “Rothchild Zionism” led him on a Google search to find out what that was. Then he started to read more on Zionism on apparently all the wrong website and this meathead bought into what he read. “I started Googling, ‘What’s up with Jews?’ ‘Why are they all bankers?’…”Why are they hated?’ I wanted to know where did antisemitism come from,” he explained in one of his videos. “’Why did Hitler hate the Jews?’ I typed that in, and then a whole other reality was shown to me, one that was extremely hard to believe, and I was like, ‘No fuckin’ way is this true. No way! No! All my life I’ve been told this story. World War II was this way.’ And that’s when everything changed to me.”
Gage took from everything he read that Hitler was actually the good guy simply trying to rid the world of Communism and instead he was vanquished by Jewish-controlled interests that have been lying to the world since 1913, so he is putting himself out there to fight it all in the name of White people around the world because he thinks the White population is dying out never to be seen again or something. “(T)he reason why it’s dwindling is because all of the homelands that we founded are being overrun…by these invaders because the Communists have ursurped our country!” he said, speaking of everyone who isn’t white that ended up in places like America and Europe. “These non-White people, that is the main weapon that the Communists are using to destroy us!”
Here is where we get into the effed up thing about this guy. Gage is into something called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), a methodology that has been used by hypnotherapists in the past and who’s most famous practitioner is the controversial motivational speaker Tony Robbins. NLP is largely denounced as brainwashing as well as a cult, so much so that several websites and Facebook pages have been dedicated to warning people about it. Gage is what they call a NLP master practitioner and Conversational Hypnotist, graduating from the International Center for Positive Change and Hypnosis in Manhattan. Even he refers to it in a blog entry that it “is like a mind-hacking program that can be used for good or bad.” And the reason why he says that is because he spends that same entry to accuse his “enemies” of using NLP against him and his people by using words and phrases that would trigger a specific action that is adverse to them in any given situation, saying further that the best way to fight the enemy is to also use this version of NLP. “Remember, NLP is not an offensive strategy,” he writes. “(A)ll you have to do is strategically set them up with questions (like your trying to catch someone lying), sit back and point out flaws in their arguments until they are forced to realize them, and hope they are willing to accept reality.”
Except it’s not reality. It’s Angelo Gage trying to run a con job on someone, and more to the point, he is calling what he is doing “mind-hacking”.
And this is why he gravitates so much to propaganda. Over the past year alone, he and NYF had been all over the place with their videos, Gage’s podcasts on the White Voice website, NYF memes and NYF flyers. NYF has also been trying since its inception to establish chapters on college campuses across the country, so Gage’s main thing as of late has been to take something that had become a racially-charged right-wing temper tantrum on a campus somewhere and try to make it his own. His go-to source has in particular been the website CampusReform.org, which is a project of the Arlington, Virginia-based Leadership Institute (LI), an organization that works to build up activism on college campuses among conservative students, and as of late been the well that a number of youth-oriented hate groups sprung from, namely Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), which was founded by LI members, and Traditional Youth Network, which was founded by Matthew Heimbach, who was the president of his YWC chapter in Towson University. In fact, one of CampusReform’s regular writers had been YWC member Timothy Dionisopoulous. So it was pretty much par for the course when Fox News interviewed a CampusReform member about Arizona State University Prof. Lee Bebout’s course titled “U.S. Race Theory and the Problem of Whiteness”, Gage and NYF piggybacked off it, which became pretty much the first time anyone noticed they existed.
That’s not due to lack of trying, mind you. The NYF was doing things at Arizona State just prior to this controversy breaking, posting flyers around a few campuses following the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo allegedly by Islamic militants, one being an anti-Islamic screed about immigration that among other things said:
“Millions of illigals (sic) flood our borders. Millions more are brought here illegally, even though we continue to suffer the worst economic crisis since the great depression. Our politicians refuse to protect us and out livelyhood (sic). They have lost complete touch with reality. Our Corporations donate hundreds of millions of dollors (sic) to funding immigration foundations, while laying off their own employees.”
Not wanting to come off too whiny, we suppose they added this to try and be a little inspiring:
“We will not fail, we will not fear, we will not falter. We will not dissapear (sic). This is a declaration of war. America is ours, and we are tomorrow.”
Bebout’s class gave the NYF something to do that got them noticed, and after a few months of rallying against him, they were joined by members of the National Socialist Movement, when they held a protest just outside campus in March of 2015 demanding his firing. But they were met with a lot of opposition and basically told to go to Hell. And how well did the NYF fare? The school stood behind Bebout, then an assistant professor of English but has since received tenure and is a full professor.
But Gage just wanted the face time, so since this worked in that regard it became the template. Again, it was CampusReform who did another article in April 2015, this time about a bulletin board campaign at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. that was aimed to get students to reflect on if they benefited from white, male, class, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual or able-bodied privilege. Again, Fox News pushed the story, and again Gage latched onto it. The NYF tried to hassle the chancellor of Appalachian State, but that went nowhere although Gage likes to pretend that the removal of the bulletin board was his group’s doing. Problem with that line of thinking is that a second board went up, and when NYF responded with flyers around campus, Appalachian State students responded by calling the group out on their Facebook page.
NYF continued to go after other colleges as well. Many, including Rutgers University, the alma mater of a number of One People’s Project founders – not to mention another Leadership Institute alum with white supremacist connections named James O’Keefe, just ignored them. Boston College had other plans for NYF however. Simply put, they didn’t put up with their shit at all. In June Incoming professor Saida Grundy came under fire for a series of tweets on a number of issues from police brutality to income inequality that were seen as attacking Whites in general. She apologized for the manner in she addressed the issues but not for addressing them, so conservatives got a tad upset about that. CampusReform wrote about it early in the month, saying that there had been calls to fire Grundy, but Gage didn’t jump on it until the beginning of July and he went to Boston College to post flyers around campus that basically signaled they were taking over the campaign to fire her. Well, it backfired. Grundy will still be teaching at Boston University, and Gage got a letter from the Boston University Police Dept. that in part read, “Effective immediately, you [are] hereby notified that you are forbidden to enter or remain upon any of the properties of Boston University.” For our purposes, the cherry on top was how the letter was dated July 22, 2015 – Daryle Lamont Jenkins’ birthday!
Levity aside however, we wonder just how much Gage is living in the real world. And if his happy-go-bat-shit-insane fake world ever comes to a head with the real world, he’s going to find himself in a world of hurt, and he has even said so in his videos where he says that guys like him don’t fare well in today’s society. But he has people kissing his ass, and for a guy who is into “mind-hacking” that makes all the difference in the world. So what if he is reportedly associating with James Mazzone (a/k/a James M. McManus), the onetime head of the New Jersey chapter of Aryan Nations, who only recently served a stint in jail for drug dealing? What could possibly go wrong? Watch this space. Folks are going to have fun with this chump.