“We The People Rally”: ‘Free speech’, a militia connection, and a community foundation
On November 17, 2018, a group of right-wing activists met for a rally to speak on the Constitution, taxes, and American patriotism. The Philadelphia event was coordinated by a number of right-wing activists, including some new to the public organizing scene. The rally gained a bit of popular attention in the media when the PushBack Campaign boosted info about the event and a planned counter-protest. Ultimately, the event featured some wacky speakers, a small crowd of far-right activists in a pen, and a lot of police violence against counter-protesters.
The November 17 event was hosted on Facebook by three accounts: Holly DeCampo, Zach Rehl, and a sock puppet account made specifically for the event.
A thread on doxxes
The popular antifascist dox account AntiFashGordon got some private info from a rally organization Facebook chat in which Holly confirmed that not only were she and Zach were organizers, but that Jerry Smith and Dino Kay were heading up security.
Jerry Smith has an extremely racist presence both online and in private chat logs. As AntiFashGordon has pointed out, Jerry is affiliated with a militia group, the III% Liberty Defenders (IIILD). The IIILD are a fairly usual right-wing, III%-branded militia that does occasional field trainings and shows up at an assortment of different public events.
For example, this summer IIILD attended a benefit run for a dead police officer in Scranton, PA, claiming they intended to keep antifascist protesters from disrupting the event.The head of IIILD goes by “Spankster Livingston”. In the attached photo, he’s wearing a shirt from Nine Stripes, a reactionary clothing vendor. He and his crew hold up a Gadsden flag and flash a III% hand sign.
The IIILD allows several levels of membership, and promote a public application as well as an application for an “auxiliary” militia force attached to the IIILD. These different levels of commitment are not unique to IIILD and have been used by other militias, too.
The Facebook event was full of numerous known Proud Boys before every comment was deleted from the page. A whole slew of III%er folks also responded to the event, often talking about “standing up to Antifa” and carrying their weapons to Philly.
A mental health practitioner, community foundation leader, and militia founder
One of the people known to be most active in the Facebook event before the comments purge was an account by the name of John Hodish. AntiFashGordon mentioned John’s posts, as have a few media accounts. One of the things that was often cited about John Hodish and the “We The People Rally” was his involvement in a militia group referenced as the “Pennsylvania Lone Wolves” by AntiFashGordon.
This is partially correct. Hodish is involved with a ‘lone wolf’ III% group. There technically isn’t a “Pennsylvania Lone Wolves” militia, Hodish was referring to ‘lone wolf’ III%ers who are in Pennsylvania. The group that Hodish was offering to add people to is a III% organizational format that is often utilized by III% chapters that do not have very many members (examples include a Massachusetts III% lone wolf group and a West Virginia one, both with 7 members).
Hodish and some contacts technically made a Facebook group for “Pennsylvania Lone Wolves” on November 12 and have 5 total members at the time of writing. On the same date, Hodish and another militia partner, Dan Kish, created a larger ‘lone wolf’ organization for their respective networks. Kish refers to himself as the National Commander and Ohio State Commander of this ‘lone wolf’ organization. John Hodish is credited as National Lieutenant Commander and Pennsylvania State Commander. From Kish’s network, three other Ohio militia members are referenced as leadership.
We mayreturn to lone wolves and these lone wolf organizations in a later MilitiaWatch piece, but first some more information on John Hodish. Hodish runs a small Pennsylvania militia in the Pittsburgh area known as the Steel City Threepers (or IIIpers, a nickname of Three-Percenters).
The Steel City Threepers do not have a large online presence. No Twitter account, Facebook page, or YouTube channel is directly attributed to the organization. John Hodish posts a lot on his personal Facebook, has no militia posts on his personal YouTube account, and has a hacked Twitter account that now shares spam.
This post is not to dissect the Steel City Threepers or go through their ideology like has been done about other militias or III% groups. However, some member connections are pretty startling.
First of all, John Hodish is a mental health professional based out of Clairton, Pennsylvania.
He ran a community foundation, the Clairton Community Outreach Program (CCOP).
He also wrote a book titled Inner City Living: Deviant Behavior, as a sort of manifesto for the CCOP. It covers his research on “urban terrorist[s], gang-bangers”, and other ‘inner city’ residents Hodish claims to analyze.
The CCOP’s primary functions include running a boxing gym, hosting a Gospel choir, and working with other efforts that included a ‘Crime Watch’ organization created by a Democrat state senator.
For verification that this John Hodish Jr is the same John Hodish as the Steel City IIIpers leader, here’s a quick connection I’ve put together:
I’ve mentioned John Hodish’s anti-Muslim posts on Facebook and include a few here. Here are some examples of the militia Hodish’s public posts on Islam and Muslims:
While these are independently pretty concerning, he consistently gets a lot of interaction on these types of posts. This include reactions, comments, and shares. You’ll also notice in the lower middle post a comment from Holly Delcampo, the organizer of the “We The People Rally” Facebook event and the one who claims to have organized the rally in the first place. She is a continuing thread in this story so remember these points.
Hodish’s constant references on his Facebook to “the time” almost assuredly means time to attack against a perceived Muslim enemy. Kish, the contact that is involved with Hodish in creating the ‘lone wolf’ Facebook groups, often comments in support of ‘standing up’ to this perceived threat. Hodish has also made several statements against the “lightfoots”, which is probably a reference to another PA militia, the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia (or PLFM). The PLFM has made statements about their anti-racist and anti-Islamophobia public stances and may have therefore caused Hodish to react negatively towards them.
The Knights Templar and a Christian militia
Hodish didn’t necessarily keep his Islamophobia and militia activities independent of one another. In March 2017, Hodish posted a link to a Knights Templar Order recruitment page. This page is largely just Christian LARPing but is full of sayings like “the battle against Islam continues”. They claim that they fight against “radical Islam, liberalism, political corruption, cultural Marxism and anti-Christian bigotry”. It’s another kind of bald-faced attempt to collect yearly membership fees from bigots and is plastered with donate buttons. It also makes great use of boring far-right language like the aforementioned “cultural Marxism” and other far-right phrases like the “Great Replacement” of white Christians by immigrants.
Joining the Knights Templar Order or promoting their content on his page apparently wasn’t quite enough for Hodish, who in turn created his own Pittsburgh area Christian militia Facebook page, this time called the “Christian Warriors”.
This page includes Crusader macros and was written in a very similar voice as John’s other posts. Incidentally, the page also uses the same numbers as Hodish’s email address and usernames, ‘715’.
Hodish also confirmed in a comment that the page is his, following up on a doozy of a post in which he says we are in “end times” and that “Gods Army” must rise to fight “Satans Army”.
A kind of funky detail is that Hodish says this army must organize “state by state” and “counter-rally the anti-Trump rioters”, centering this hypothetical militant group squarely on the US (this makes sense, I suppose, given that the “Christian Warriors” militia was intended by Hodish’s own admission as forming in the Pittsburgh area).
Rally organizer, constant contact, militia member
At the start of this piece I mentioned that Holly Delcampo claimed to have organized the “We The People Rally”, a Constitutionalist event that organizers publicly said should be nonviolent and nonracist. Delcampo uses images like Tweetie or a duck with a mini-gun instead of her true identity on Facebook.
We’ve also discussed an example of Holly commenting on John Hodish’s Facebook status, which happens fairly often.
So, now we go back to John Hodish’s picture of the Steel City Threepers:
Robert Brandt’s compliment of Holly Delcampo’s shirt, which reads “FUCK ANTIFA” with a skull replacing the “U” has not only provided one of the few physical IDs of the “We The People Rally” organizer available online, but shows her direct involvement in a III% FTX, or field training exercise.
We often like to conceptualize of militia movements, fascist street movements, and Constitutionalist activist movements as either fully separate movements or as simply different faces of the same beast. The reality is incredibly mixed, as group members will often flow between these associations and identities and argue against others within their milieus with great fervor.
In the case of the “We The People Rally” on November 17, militia members from a few different ideological strains showed support, Proud Boys were directly involved, and Constitutionalists spoke to debate the merits of voting Libertarian versus Republican. In some cases, individuals wore different hats in different roles, easily slipping between militia member to rally organizer to liaison for fashy security. This fluidity isn’t entirely uniform or unique to this event, but I am guessing it could be analyzed in many other similar events fairly easily.
