White nationalist Damigo may have lived among us, but he sure wasn’t one of us
Oakdale’s Nathan Damigo was positively giddy after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., four years ago.
“This is a huge victory for us. They are uniting us in a way we couldn’t before,” gushed the white nationalist, to our area’s great shame, in a video he posted on his Twitter account just after the violent chaos of Aug. 12, 2017. “We are going to get national attention.”
It wasn’t clear whether Damigo knew that another frenzied bigot had just plowed his car into a crowd of people daring to stand up to Damigo’s chest-pounding ilk, murdering 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. It was quite clear, however, that Damigo was downright overjoyed at the ruckus he helped cause.
I know because I watched his entire 13-minute breathless rant at the time. I wrote about it in a Modesto Bee report, horrified that one of our own could be partly responsible for the mayhem that elated him and astonished the rest of us.
I then invested hours watching other videos Damigo had made and posted on social media to rally his small-minded base and recruit other white supremacists. He blamed high rates of poverty among Blacks on “genetics” and mocked feminism for “promoting body positivity, in which women basically don’t take care of their health. They expect people just to accept them when they’re fat and sloppy and nasty.”
The alt-right movement, Damigo said, is “a rejection of multicultural, multiracial doctrine, globalist doctrine.” He talked about race-based differences in intelligence, saying, “The idea that discrimination is always morally wrong is completely absurd. Anyone saying this is saying, ‘Hey, don’t use your brain; be an idiot.’ ”
I’m writing about this more than four years later because Damigo, now 35, and 16 other extremist idiots and groups last week were ordered by a jury to pay $26 million to several plaintiffs hurt by the riot.
Damigo was cast in the civil trial as a bit player in a larger conspiracy, which is why he owes “only” $500,000. Good luck collecting that; he tried and failed to declare bankruptcy to avoid paying anything, while his bankruptcy papers made it clear he wasn’t worth much.
But a conspiracy there was, and Damigo was in the thick of it.
He had a major role in the April 2017 Battle for Berkeley that served as a warm-up to Charlottesville. A video from Berkeley went viral, showing Damigo flooring a slight woman with a punch to her face. Trial testimony revealed that it brought new recruits in droves to Identity Evropa, a group that Damigo founded proclaiming superiority of European heritage.
Defendant Richard Spencer privately praised Damigo, saying, “The actual video footage is quite beautiful. It’s theatrical, surreal,” RawStory reported. Patrick Casey, who later took over Identity Evropa for Damigo, said in a message, “Nathan should punch women in the face more often,” The Daily Beast reported.
‘I need a small, fake antifa army’
The Daily Progress, Charlottesville’s local newspaper, said Damigo admitted in a 2016 post that he wanted his Identity Evropa members to drum up violence by creating fake accounts and pretending to be aligned with antifa, a movement opposing fascism that the fringe right loves to blame.
“As many people as possible need to create accounts,” Damigo wrote, according to The Daily Progress. “Create multiple if possible, make them as realistic as you can and then post the link to the account here so other people can make them look realistic. I need a small, fake antifa army.” The plan was dropped as a “terrible idea,” Damigo said during cross-examination, the newspaper reported.
Remember that Damigo, an ex-Marine who did two tours in Iraq, is also a felon, having spent time in prison for robbing at gunpoint a cabbie he mistook for an Iraqi.
Pulling a gun on somebody because of their racial features is the essence of racism.
Plotting to blame others for violence you conceive and create is the essence of conspiracy.
The legal system doesn’t always work the way we hope. This time, it did.
This story was originally published December 1, 2021 at 4:00 AM.
