4 California white nationalists arrested in connection with deadly Charlottesville rally
ATLANTA _ Four militant white nationalists from California were arrested by federal authorities Tuesday on charges that they traveled to Virginia with the intent to incite a riot and commit violence at last year's deadly far-right rallies in Charlottesville.
Thomas Cullen, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, announced that charges had been filed against Benjamin Drake Daley, 25, of Redondo Beach; Thomas Walter Gillen, 34, of Redondo Beach; Michael Paul Miselis, 29, of Lawndale; and Cole Evan White, 24, of Clayton.
The four are all members of the so-called Rise Above Movement, a white supremacist group based in Southern California that espouses anti-Semitism, promotes "clean living" and meets regularly in public parks to train in physical fitness, boxing and other street fighting techniques, according to the affidavit.
Last August, the four California men traveled to Charlottesville, the affidavit says, to join hundreds of other white nationalists at a rally organized by Richard Spencer, the leader of a white supremacist think tank, to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The defendants came to the rally prepared to engage in physical violence, having taped their fists "in the manner of boxers or MMA style fighters," the affidavit says. Photographic and video evidence, the affidavit alleges, shows Daley and other white nationalists from California punching, kicking and head-butting counterprotesters, including an African-American man, two females and a minister wearing a clerical collar.
_Los Angeles Times
