A Fascist Gathering in West Virginia

On March 7-9 of this year, the neo-fascist American Freedom Party (AFP) held what it billed as its “National Convention” at a location that organizers kept secret from the public. Participants later said that it was in West Virginia without specifying where, however they did post photos from the conference online. A close examination of these images reveals that the conference took place at the Berkeley Springs Castle, which is owned by the people who ran the now-defunct white nationalist website VDARE.

The castle, a stone building constructed in the late nineteenth century with a prominent turret and battlements along the top, is formally known as the Samuel Taylor Suit Cottage. It was purchased in 2020 by the VDARE Foundation, led at the time by Peter and Lydia Brimelow. The Brimelows and their children have lived in the castle since then. Peter Brimelow was VDARE’s editor until the site folded last year, and Lydia Brimelow functioned as the site’s publisher.

The Brimelows’ presence has been a source of tension in Berkeley Springs from the start. Peter Brimelow has downplayed residents’ concerns, saying that he wasn’t organizing big rallies in town or doing anything disruptive and that “We just want to be quiet, good neighbors.” Yet the VDARE website also described the castle as a “meeting place” for like-minded people, and Lydia Brimelow stated during a 2022 podcast appearance that “My vision is it becomes a big hub of American patriotism.”

One reason why the recent conference is noteworthy is because it provided exactly the kind of “meeting place” that VDARE promised while breaking any sort of commitment to simply be “quiet, good neighbors,” highlighting the inherent contradiction between the two.

The following is a fairly in-depth look at some of the participants in the AFP conference in March, including members of the neo-nazi “activist” group Patriot Front and leaders in the field of racial and antisemitic “science.” The photographic evidence showing that the conference took place at the Berkeley Springs Castle is mostly in a section near the bottom.

Intellectuals and “Activists”

One thing that events like the AFP conference in Berkeley Springs, WV, make clear is just how closely members of the white nationalist intellectual elite — who often try to present themselves as above the fray — are linked with street-level movement activists. In this case, multiple speakers who have had careers as university professors gave their talks alongside members of at least two currently active neo-nazi “activist” organizations. The AFP itself will be addressed in the next section, but first let’s look at some of the other conference participants.

---

Patriot Front has at most a few hundred members scattered across the country, yet it has an outsized presence on the white nationalist/neo-nazi spectrum due to its high volume of vandalism and splashy, unannounced marches in cities across the US. In 2022, 31 members of the group, including its founder and leader Thomas Rousseau, were arrested in Idaho and charged with conspiracy to riot after they suddenly emerged from the back of rented box trucks outside a pride event. More recent investigations by both antifascist researchers and professional journalists have also shown that Patriot Front members are in the process of building a compound in East Tennessee where they engage in pagan rituals and train for both street demonstrations — complete with Patriot Front-branded riot shields — and hand-to-hand combat. In January, a Boston court ordered the group to pay $2.76 million to a Black musician its members assaulted during a march in 2022.

After the AFP conference in Berkeley Springs, Patriot Front posted on the social media/messaging app Telegram that Rousseau had been the keynote speaker, however AFP would beg to differ: in multiple posts dating back to September, the party named its director Tomislav Sunic as keynote (more on him below). This kind of stolen valor seems to be part of Patriot Front’s Aryan DNA. Back in 2017, a teenage Thomas Rousseau founded the group by hijacking the website of its predecessor organization, American Vanguard (AV). Rousseau was a member of AV at the time and attended the infamous Unite the Right (UTR) rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as a representative from Texas. In fact, he seems to have been one of at least three Unite the Right attendees who were announced as speakers at the AFP conference in Berkeley Springs.

Patriot Front’s channel on Telegram says that Rousseau and a group of other members spent time distributing propaganda and engaging in martial arts training before and during the conference.

The accompanying photos include several shots of shirtless white people in stances that indicate they are fighting.

Patriot Front is known to have a large overlap with the “Active Clubs” that have sprouted up in various locations around North America, Western Europe, and elsewhere. Initiated by neo-nazi MMA fighter Rob Rundo, Active Clubs are designed to be training grounds for teaching fighting techniques to young white nationalists. They have also been linked not only to Patriot Front, but also to groups like the white power skinhead network Hammerskin Nation. Bringing Patriot Front members to Berkeley Springs for a buttoned-down conference was not only an intellectual exercise, but it also brought battle-ready, neo-nazi fighters to town.

The conference also drew other leading figures from the white nationalist scene. Besides Rousseau, the roster of speakers included Kevin MacDonald, a retired evolutionary psychology professor from California whose work in the field of “scientific” antisemitism has been an important catalyst for antisemitic conspiracy theories around the world in recent decades. Describing a multi-volume collection of his work on the subject, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report has noted that “Not since Hitler’s Mein Kampf have anti-Semites had such a comprehensive reference guide to what’s wrong with ‘the Jews,’” so it should be unsurprising that no less than former KKK leader David Duke repeatedly cited MacDonald in his autobiography as an authority on the problems Jews allegedly pose for white people.

Michael Hill, co-founder of the neo-Confederate organization League of the South, was also slated to speak at the AFP conference in Berkeley Springs. Hill, an outspoken white supremacist and antisemite, is a former history professor at both the University of Alabama and Stillman College, an historically Black college in Tuscaloosa. Under Hill’s leadership, League of the South was another one of the organized groups that participated in the Unite the Right rally, and Hill, his organization, and fellow League member Michael Tubbs were named as defendants in the Sines v. Kessler civil trial brought by people who were harmed over the course of that weekend; all the defendants were found liable.

Conference organizers named Tomislav Sunic as the keynote speaker for the weekend. In the US, Sunic lacks the infamy of some of the other speakers, but he has a very long resume as a leading white nationalist intellectual on both sides of the North Atlantic. A product of the European “New Right,” he is also a former professor, a regular speaker at white nationalist and neo-nazi conferences, and a contributor to a wide range of “race realist” journals. Much of his work focuses on the alleged perils of non-white immigration to Europe and North America.

On February 20, only about two weeks before the conference, AFP posted on Telegram that Nathan Damigo would also speak at the conference. Damigo is the third known Unite the Right attendee who was slated to speak that weekend, and his history of extreme violence is very well documented. He is best known as the leader of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa (IE) between 2016–17. Damigo is an Iraq war veteran who robbed an Arab taxi driver at gunpoint in 2007 after returning home to California. While in prison, he began reading white nationalist literature, leading him to where he is today. He largely disappeared from the movement after UTR despite the fact that both he and IE were named as defendants in the Sines lawsuit. However, he has reemerged over the past few years and carved out a niche as a kind of fascist elder statesman.

Finally, members of a group founded late last year called the National Organization for Vital Action (NOVA) was also present. NOVA is a rebrand of the short-lived Nationalist Coalition (NC), which in turn emerged to fill the gap left after the dramatic collapse of the ironically named National Justice Party (NJP), a neo-nazi organization (NJP was a registered as a for-profit company and never made any effort to register as a party or to run candidates for office).

The NC had only barely held its inaugural event when its member roster was leaked to the public, rendering its name toxic and prompting the NOVA rebrand. Its leaders included Tennessee neo-nazi Carson Brooks, Jan. 6 insurrectionist Nathan Charles Barker, and Manassas-based neo-nazi Gregory Arthur Klaunberg. Brooks, Barker, and Klaunberg are now the public faces (more on their faces below) of NOVA, which utilizes the same kind of white nativist and lightly modified “Great Replacement” rhetoric as other AFP conference participants, but also openly takes up certain positions that might appeal to leftists, including health care reform and environmental protection. They are a small and obscure organization, but their participation in this conference is one more indication that neither the organizers nor the hosts are by any means unwilling to rub elbows with overt neo-nazis.

What Is the AFP?

The American Freedom Party was officially founded in California in 2009 under the name American Third Position (A3P). “Third position” is a term that has been used to describe historical fascism, which adherents have described as “neither capitalist nor communist.” That framework has allowed fascists, who espouse extreme right-wing, reactionary views, to adopt certain positions traditionally associated with the left as part of a strategy known as “entryism.” It is, in fact, the reason why the Nazi Party added the word “Socialist” to its name in 1920, despite Hitler’s initial objections. Over the past 30 years or so, the “third position” has emerged as a descriptor for a variety of neo-fascist ideology that “seeks to overthrow existing governments and replace them with monocultural nation states built around the idea of supremacist racial nationalism and/or supremacist religious nationalism.”

The AFP was founded by members of the neo-nazi skinhead group Freedom 14 after the collapse of their short-lived Golden State Party; in 2010, the New Jersey-based League of American Patriots merged with the AFP, making the party bi-coastal. 

A registered political party, the AFP remains tiny and obscure, yet its leadership is one indication of why it is able to pull in such heavy hitters for a conference: the party’s website lists Kevin MacDonald as a director, along with James Edwards, host of the prominent, aptly named white nationalist podcast The Political Cesspool. The party’s list of speakers for the conference, published last September, also identifies Tomislav Sunic as a “director.”

The first point in the party’s platform states that, “From its founding, America has been a country for and by European people. This is how our founding fathers intended it, and how many of our succeeding leaders have maintained it.” That sentiment is echoed quite clearly by Patriot Front’s emphatic concern with “the founding stock” of the US and in the text of its manifesto, which states that “To be an American is to be a descendant of conquerors, pioneers, visionaries, and explorers. This unique identity was given to us by our ancestors, and this national spirit remains firmly rooted in our blood.” In case it’s not clear, that would be the blood of “our pre-Columbian forefathers” from Europe [no, it’s not you; this really doesn’t make sense -ed.].

The Rise and Fall of the Brimelow Empire

Peter Brimelow, who is white, was born in England, and is therefore “the right kind” of immigrant, began his career in the late 1970s writing for mainstream business and conservative publications. In 1995, he published Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Coming Immigration Disaster, a book-length tirade that presaged the rhetoric of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. He founded VDARE in 1999, and it quickly became an important and popular hub for pseudo-scientific racial theorists and other far-right cranks. Most notably, these included Steve Sailer, arguably the leading champion of the “human biodiversity” theory, which lends flimsy support to a purported need for racial segregation; J. Philippe Rushton, a former social psychology professor (now deceased) best known for his dubious studies on racial differences in both intelligence and “reproductive strategy,” and whose former colleagues at Western University took the extremely unusual step of issuing a statement repudiating his work in 2020; John Derbyshire, whose extreme racism got him fired from the National Review; and former Nixon speechwriter and perennial presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

In July 2024, Peter Brimelow announced that VDARE would cease operations and that he had resigned as president of the VDARE Foundation, leaving his wife Lydia in charge. The reason he gave for the changes was the financial burden imposed by the New York State Attorney General’s investigation into the website, which was registered as a business in New York. However, the castle is owned by the VDARE Foundation, which is registered in West Virginia and therefore may be beyond the reach of the New York AG, although that office is also investigating whether or not the Brimelows abused their nonprofit status by using the castle as their primary residence.

Evidence That the AFP Conference Was Held at the Berkeley Springs Castle

In the days following the March 7–9 AFP conference, participants posted photos and text on their social media accounts (primarily Telegram) that provided clues as to the conference’s location. Some of those clues are irrefutable. (Note: All the marked images below are also included unmarked at the bottom of this essay, along with other relevant images, for further examination.)

The clearest, most undeniable evidence is the photographs posted by conference participants in comparison with images made publicly available by the owners of the castle itself. On March 14, the NOVA Telegram channel posted a photo of 13 people in suits holding a NOVA banner on a patio with a slate floor in front of a stone wall (the post was also re-posted on the AFP channel). All of the faces are blurred out except for those of organization leaders Brooks, Barker, and Klaunberg. The accompanying text says that “NOVA representatives attended the 2025 American Freedom Party National Convention, where Carson [Brooks] spoke”.

The pattern and mixed colors (oh no!) of the stones in the wall and on the floor, as well as the colors and structures of the door, the window, and the railing all match the upstairs patio in other publicly available photos of the Berkeley Springs Castle. Additionally, there is what looks like a wooden board on the step just outside the door, which is just barely visible in the NOVA portrait; there are a pair of black Adirondack chairs in the bottom image, one of which is still visible in the group photo on top; and if you look closely, you can even see a little bit of the large planter under the window behind the legs of some of the NOVA participants. Finally, even the posts at the end of the bridge in the foreground of the upper photo are the same as the ones in the bottom image.

On March 13, one of Patriot Front’s Telegram channels published a series of photos from the conference itself, as well as some of the group’s “activism” during their trip. Arguably the most revealing element is the group photo of Rousseau and what are implied to be about 20 other Patriot Front members (all with their faces blurred out except for Rousseau) standing on a carpeted staircase holding a US flag and a Patriot Front flag. A comparison with a screenshot from the Berkeley Springs Castle website shows numerous identical characteristics in the architecture and the decor: the same red carpet on the stairs with the same vent in the bottom step; the same stanchions on either side of the stairs, carved wood in the pillars at the bottom of the banisters and the frame around the entryway over the stairs; the same molding at the top as well as what looks like water damage in the plaster on the ceiling. There is even a tapestry on the wall next to the stairs (did they mention this is a castle?), which is partly visible at the edge of the Patriot Front group portrait.

This should all be viewed in conjunction with the previously mentioned text in the Patriot Front post, which states that “Before the conference began, activists spread out on the streets of Cumberland, Maryland and handed out many dozens of flyers across the city’s entire downtown region. During a break in the conference, members took the opportunity to hold a quick training session which included calisthenics and bareknuckle sparring.” So their own words place members of this nationwide organization within about 45 minutes of Berkeley Springs. As a security measure, Patriot Front’s surprise appearances in cities around the country usually involve camping up to an hour or so away from the target location so that no one — not even Patriot Front members — can easily anticipate where exactly they will turn up. It is therefore unsurprising that they would travel 45 minutes away, across state lines, to very thinly mask the conference location. (The trick to getting that right would then be to not announce it to the world afterwards, but then Patriot Front is not known for being good at keeping secrets.)

The last piece of photographic evidence is also from the March 13 Patriot Front post. It includes a photo of Rousseau giving his “keynote” speech in front of a stone fireplace. In comparison with another screenshot from the Berkeley Springs Castle website, perhaps the most convincing visual evidence is the presence of two very unusual sculptures of what appear to be stylized dogs on either side of the fireplace. They are very clearly visible in the screenshot, and can also be seen on either side of Rousseau in the Patriot Front photo. Additionally, the irregular contours of the wood paneling above the windows as well as both the masonry and the wood molding above the fireplace are clearly identical in both photos.

Conclusion

Based on the evidence available, there is no denying that the AFP conference was held at the Berkeley Springs Castle or that it brought in an array of people with extreme racist and antisemitic beliefs, at least some of whom are ready and willing to use interpersonal violence in furtherance of those beliefs. This is in spite of Peter Brimelow’s statement that he wants to remain a quiet and unobtrusive neighbor and that he would not be organizing disruptive events in town. Fascists, obviously, are not known for their honesty, but rather only for their relentless pursuit of power using any tools available to them.

One of the main problems when fascists enter a new space — be it a bar, a music venue, or even an entire town — is that if they aren’t pushed out quickly, they will get comfortable, and they will invite their friends until they are able to claim that territory as their own. At this point, they have shown that they want to do just that in Berkeley Springs.

---

PS:

Two quick notes: AFP has announced that it will put the speeches from its conference online at some point. As of this publication, they have not yet done so. A Las Barricadas will be keeping an eye out for that and may or may not post about the content of those talks in the future. Stay tuned…

And last but not least, in the interest of giving credit where it is due, A Las Barricadas would like to point out that this conference first came to our attention through the work of Antifascist 615. Thank you for your service!

---

Unmarked photos for closer examination: