INDIANAPOLIS -- The American Guard formally revoked the membership of a prominent far-right activist on Thursday, saying his efforts to unite explicitly racist groups with other right-wing factions do not represent the organization.
The American Guard (AG) was formed in Indiana last year from the state chapter of the Soldiers of Odin – an anti-immigrant group first founded in Finland.
The group has taken pains to draw a line between its brand of nativist politics, which it characterizes as constitutional nationalism, and the explicitly white supremacist and ethnic nationalist views of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups.
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On Thursday, the American Guard drew another line: This time between itself and Austin Mitchell Gillespie, a far-right activist who uses the moniker “Augustus Invictus” and who calls for “insurrection of a national scale” to protect what he sees as the Western way of life.
The move comes one day after Invictus posted a video of him condemning as “cowards and traitors” those on the right who hesitate to work with white nationalists to achieve their goals.
Invictus said the entirety of the right should be willing to work together to combat the real enemy: “the globalists, the leftists, the international financiers.”
According to the American Guard, Invictus had served as the sergeant-at-arms of the group’s Florida chapter and had appeared in recruitment videos on behalf of the group.
When Invictus spoke as part of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, several members of the Indiana chapter of the American Guard went to support him.
MORE | Indiana American Guard among protestors at Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally
But, in a statement Thursday, the group said it can no longer do so, saying Invictus’ “words and actions no longer represent the ideas we are dedicated to preserving and defending.”
“His attempts to merge factions with incongruent ideologies like National Socialism, National Bolshevism, and other forms of tyranny based on ethnicity into the growing right-wing populist movement under the name ‘Unite The Right,’ is now a discredit to himself only, and will no longer discredit our organization, or its membership,” the group wrote on its Facebook page. “We reject his claim that disagreement with Nazis, Socialists, and other totalitarians makes one a coward and traitor.”
As of Thursday evening, Invictus, a former Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida, had not issued a formal response to the American Guard's statement.
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