Identity Evropa

As one would expect, it is an exceedingly ugly face…

Identity Evropa members insist they’re not racist, but “identitarians” who are interested in preserving Western culture. The group owes its style and ideology to the European identitarian movement.

Founded in 2016 by Iraq war veteran Nathan Damigo, Identity Evropa has always operated with an eye toward branding. The organization has a simplistic and replicable logo — a teal triangle with three lines that join in the middle — and builds name recognition by distributing flyers around college campuses printed with images of classical European statues and phrases like “Our Future Belongs to Us” and “Keep Your Diversity We Want Identity.” It’s self-aware and eminently meme-able aesthetics are meant to lure in young people who are then encouraged to engage in real-world activism on college campuses — the “epicenter of Cultural Marxism in America,” according to Damigo. The organization’s overarching goal — implemented through their #ProjectSiege campus flyering operation, banner drops broadcast over social media, demonstrations and “open dialogue” campaigns — is “taking up space” with their ideas and imagery in the hopes of eventually, through the sheer force of repetition, mainstreaming their ideology.

Identity Evropa members, including Damigo, helped to plan the deadly 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, but have since attempted to publicly distance themselves from events that could both tarnish their image and land them in legal trouble. As a result, they’ve made multiple leadership changes, doubled down on their identitarian label, and become pickier when it comes to the group’s membership and public appearances.

In its own words

“I think one of the major books that got me started was David Duke’s My Awakening, and I think from there the rest was really history.”
—Nathan Damigo on Red Ice Radio, June 16, 2016

“America was founded as a white country — as a country for people of European heritage. And in 1965 they passed the Harts-Cellar Act and the people who passed that said, ‘this is going to change the demographic makeup of the country, this is not going to increase the amount of immigration every year,’ — all of it was bogus … even here in California [not only] are we a minority, but they are actively trying to disenfranchise us from the institutions that our ancestors created.”
—Nathan Damigo on Red Elephants, July 13, 2017

“I work in HR firing niggers and spics all day. Before that, I was in the army and I got to kill Muslims for fun. I’m not sure which one was better: watching niggers and spics cry because they can’t feed their little mud children or watching Muslims brains spray on the wall. Honestly both probably suck compared to listening to a kike’s scream while in the oven.”
—Eli Mosley on The War Room, March 20, 2017

“We don’t believe America needs to be 100.00 percent white, but we do think that America isn’t going to be America if there isn’t a European-America super-majority. So when it comes to policies and so forth we’re concerned with reversing these trends. We want to end immigration for the time being. And in the future we would like to have immigration policies that favor high-skilled immigrants from, you know, Europe, Canada, Australia and so forth. And we also do want to have programs of re-migration wherein people who feel more of a connection to another part of the world, another race, another culture, even another religion in the case of Islam can return to their native homelands essentially.”
—Patrick Casey in an interview with Brittany Pettibone, January 16, 2018

During its first months of existence, IE only had about 15 members, but their membership increased dramatically thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential win in 2016. Damigo, like the rest of the alt-right, was excited about candidate Trump, explaining that he thought electing the Republican nominee “would be very beneficial for people of European heritage.” After the election, he used Periscope to live-stream his reaction. “We as the alt-right are the reason why Trump won,” he told his viewers, before yelling “You have to go back!” to people on the sidewalk that he, presumably, believed to be immigrants. When CBS interviewed two IE members several months after Trump took office, they explained that they were “riding this wave of Donald Trump,” and that the president was “the closest to us that we’ve ever had in recent memory.” When the interviewer noted that most people would see their rhetoric as racist, one of the men loyally repeated one of Damigo’s talking points: “I think those slurs like ‘racist,’ ‘white supremacist,’ ‘Nazi,’ these are anti-white slurs.’”

IE’s membership experienced a boost thanks to Trump , but most recruitment was done through a campus flyering campaign begun in September 2016 called #ProjectSiege. The organization’s flyers feature classical European sculptures and, in a bold white text, phrases like “Protect Your Heritage” and “Serve Your People.” In just the first month of the campaign, IE managed to hit more than two dozen campuses stretching across the country from Evergreen State College in Washington to Bates College in Maine. IE posted pictures of the hanging flyers on their Twitter account so their messages could reach more than those who happened to pass them on campus. The campaign aligned closely with IE’s larger strategic vision, which involved establishing a clear set of talking points and simple phrases and slogans that held, in Damigo’s words, “memetic power.”