Pennsylvania, Chester County and Coatesville is a hotbed for white supremacy and has been since Jim Crow days. Take it from someone who knew 2 people, who as teenagers were at in the lynching of Zach Walker in Coatesville, one watched the other participated.
"The infamous white nationalist Richard Spencer occupied his fair share of the spotlight at the “Unite the Right” gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month. As the far-right rally turned deadly— with 19 injured and 32-year-old Heather Heyer killed when a man rammed a crowd of counterprotesters — Spencer appeared shirtless on a livestream talking about how he was pepper-sprayed. Later, he held a brief press conference. As usual, Spencer had foisted himself into the center of attention.
Quietly attending the rally alongside Spencer, however, was the new executive director of the right-wing leader’s nonprofit, the National Policy Institute. Evan McLaren had seemingly come out of nowhere: a far-right figure of little note, with little more than a history of online postings that espoused his white nationalist beliefs and a trail of older postings revealing the path that brought him to his worldview. In Charlottesville, McLaren didn’t attract the same attention as Spencer, but he was there nonetheless, taunting journalists on social media before the event kicked off, and tweeting out slogans of white pride after its bloody conclusion.
“Brothers and sisters across the alt-right — this is a taste of how it feels to be the tip of the spear entering our civilizational crisis,” McLaren tweeted the day after the Charlottesville bloodshed.
In an interview with The Intercept, McLaren relished the chance to capitalize on the chaos and controversy of the Charlottesville rally. “I’m actually happy to be arriving at somewhat of a crisis moment, because it has given me the opportunity to show that I’m not just here to take a paycheck and play pretend ‘alt-right’ person,” he said.
On July 27, McClaren became executive director at the National Policy Institute, a group that rose to infamy after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election when Spencer led a hall of fellow white supremacists – a title McLaren disputes, at least for himself – in Nazi salutes and chants of “Heil Trump.” McLaren claims the role is largely administrative, but there can be little doubt about his ideological commitments to the white nationalism that underpin it…
“I was very attracted to the writings that were published by Paul Gottfried on LewRockwell.com,” McLaren said. An antiwar and anti-state outlet, LewRockwell.com is grounded in “anarcho-capitalism.” Gottfried, a paleoconservative, is a famed critic of neoconservatives in the Republican Party, but allowed ideologies further to the right to creep into the community he was building with the website. “He wasn’t pointing to anything racial, but he also wasn’t rushing to take race off the table,” McLaren recalled.
In 2008, McLaren drove to Gottfried’s office in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. He arrived as Gottfried was forming the H.L. Mencken Club, named for the early 20th century “free-thinker” and cultural critic who was said to hold racist and anti-Semitic views. It was through his involvement in the club that McLaren met Richard Spencer and other white nationalist leaders, such as Jared Taylor...
McLaren took up a position clerking for the Bureau of Disability Determination in Harrisburg in 2009. He left that clerking position and began pursuing a law degree at Pennsylvania State University’s Dickinson School of Law in 2014. McLaren said he felt a need to “professionalize” himself.
Then he got a job working for the county. According to his LinkedIn profile, McLaren’s employment history shows a yearlong job as a law clerk at the Republican District Attorney David Freed’s office in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, which ended in April. The links between McLaren and the DA’s office were first reported by Injustice Today, a publication of the Fair Punishment Project.
Freed said McLaren held no power at the office. “McLaren assisted with legal research and summary (minor) offenses in traffic court,” Freed told The Intercept. “McLaren had no discretionary role in this office, he simply performed tasks as assigned.”…
Shortly before leaving the district attorney’s office, he took up a short-lived position in local politics, serving as treasurer of Cumberland County’s Young Republicans.
“Evan McLaren is not associated with our Young Republicans,” said Kaytee Moyer, the chair of the GOP group. “We started a chapter, he showed up at a meeting, and volunteered to be the treasurer, but then quickly stepped down.” She said he was only with the organization for a month, beginning in March.
McLaren said he left because he thought he was going to work for another federal judge, so activism in electoral politics would have been inappropriate. But he said that the local GOP had sought him out. While Trump’s candidacy had encouraged him to participate in the GOP, McLaren said he never held Republicans in high regard: “I think they’re failed leaders.”
MORE AT:
The Intercept
Creede Newton
September 7 2017, 1:29 p.m.
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