One of the most visible white nationalists at the recent Fort Sanders Confederate monument demonstration was, until until a few years ago, active in communist organizations, the Occupy movement and protests against racism.

Garon Archer, a native of Johnson City, was the protester on Aug. 26 who repeatedly screamed, "The Southern nation is a white nation."

He said he came to last Saturday’s demonstration to represent the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist group that has said it considers mainstream U.S. culture “corrupt” and is rebelling against the “politically correct” and multicultural diversity in the South.

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Two weeks earlier, Archer was visible in "Democracy Now!" footage of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Clad in a baseball helmet and holding a shield, he attacked a counter-protester. At a similar rally in New Orleans, he was recorded screaming racial slurs at a black woman.

But just a few years ago, Archer appeared in a 2012 YouTube video of an Occupy movement demonstration in Florida, protesting for the arrest of George Zimmerman, who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. In the video, Archer – who was himself 17 at the time – chants slogans against racism and burns a Confederate flag bandanna.

A few months later, he appeared in Tampa for a rally against the Republican National Convention.

The Tampa Bay Times described the young activist:

'Garon Archer is in town to protest the Republicans, but he admits he doesn't know the rules. The 17-year-old Happy Valley High School senior from Johnson City, Tenn., carries a red banner attached to a wooden flagpole to the Coalition to March on the RNC gathering Monday morning at Perry Harvey Park. The pole, it turns out, is too long. The police won't let him in. So he breaks the pole himself to make it fit the designated length. "I came from Johnson City, Tenn.," says the teenager, "to say no to the Republican agenda." Someday, he says, he hopes to be a union organizer.'

Then, in early 2014, Archer penned an article for a Communist Party USA newsletter, At the time, he was the Tennessee leader of another communist group, "Party of Communists USA."

"We are duty bound to provide a challenge to the far-right agenda, be it republicans or democrats who are fostering it," he wrote in the newsletter. "We must build a strong and independent communist party. A party capable of leading the working class into a new phase of struggle against the increasingly vicious far-right agenda."

Archer said it was his growing discontent with economic decline that pushed him from one side of the political spectrum to the other beginning in 2015.

"I broke out of that mold and embraced social conservatism and nationalism along with populism," he said.

“The Southern people have a right to be the majority group in their own homeland, and measures must be taken to combat the demographic decline of indigenous Southerners,” he said. “Anything less is genocide.”

Archer added that he doesn't consider Native Americans, whom he's proud whites "conquered," to be "indigenous southerners."

Radicalization

As a teenager in the Tri-Cities, Archer joined Occupy Johnson City with a passion for righting wrongs – but seemed to display a penchant for violence that unnerved some other members of the group.

"He always wanted to talk about need for armed self-defense in a situation that didn't really call for it,” said Dennis Prater, who was then an adjunct instructor at ETSU. He met Archer when whe was still in high school and they were in Occupy Johnson City together. "Around 2014, he started getting kind of obsessed with (Soviet revolutionary Joseph) Stalin and this North Korean ethnic separatist group. He was making a lot of ice-pick jokes,” a reference to Soviet Marxist leader Leon Trotsky, who opposed Stalin and was assassinated with an ice ax at Stalin’s direction.

Another Occupy Johnson City member, Heidi Davis, said Archer ramped up his calls to incite violence shortly after the Trayvon Martin demonstration. It was around that time, she said, he began to pull away from the group.

"We told him we wouldn't feed into it,” she said. "We tried to talk to him about his actions and tried to curb him becoming radicalized, but it didn't work."

Archer eventually stopped coming to group meetings at all.

Occupy Johnson City members later learned Archer was running an Appalachian white nationalist web page. That eventually led him to the white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party and League of the South, which Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a Neo-Confederate hate group.

Archer's cousin Shannon said he’s puzzled by his family member's newfound ideology.

"He's always been really into the government thing,” Shannon Archer said. “But this is erratic, like all of the sudden, so I don't know.”

“The white nationalists seem to be OK with him being violent," Davis said, "and we weren't. I don't think he actually cares about the politics he is spouting."

Nina Fefferman, an associate professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, has studied how social behaviors in grassroots organizations can make members susceptible to radicalization.

"It's not clear how each specific person would make that transition," she said, but studies suggest that when groups of people who support each other in increasingly radical beliefs are also being constantly confronted with an opposing viewpoint, the groups are more likely to become radical.

"You have kind of a perfect storm of escalating radicalization," Fefferman said.

Fefferman said that trying to convince an opposition group that its beliefs are wrong may be counterproductive.

"Theoretically, if both sides actually kind of left each other alone, you'd end up with societies that were utterly incapable of dealing with each other, but not exactly radicalized against each other," she said. "So, instead of arguing to change someone's mind, it is more beneficial to argue to say that the beliefs are not something that your society can tolerate.”