Update: We have received final confirmation that Amanda Sproul currently works at the Carl Vinson VA Medical Center in Dublin, Georgia.

Summary: The Right Voice is a white power podcast operating since mid-2015. It continues the efforts of an earlier white nationalist project, The White Voice. Its hosts also operated a web of racist and far-Right propaganda pages on Facebook, some that had over ten thousand followers and reached far more. The Right Voice host Chris Burnham of Loudoun County, Virginia, is originally from the UK and fancies himself as an anti-leftist secret agent. His co-host, Amanda Sproul of Dublin, Georgia, is a longtime employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs who works at a VA Medical Center.

Introduction

Launched in mid-2015, The Right Voice (TRV) podcast is a white nationalist and antisemitic podcast which has lasted for over 160 episodes. During this run, the show has aimed to broadcast once a week, as the lives of hosts “Chris” and “Marie” allow – which in practice means gaps. Casting itself as a voice of unity in the white nationalist scene, TRV has hosted everyone from Klansmen and explicit neo-Nazis to Alt-Right figures and even a few wannabe intellectuals and mainstreamers. Over the years, TRV has hosted such guests as Alt-Right figurehead Richard Spencer; notorious antisemite and neo-Nazi David Duke; National Socialist Movement organizer Harry Hughes; and Susan Yarbrough, the widow of Gary Yarbrough, who was a participant in The Silent Brotherhood terror group in the 1980s. Last year, TRV twice hosted north Georgia racist organizer Chester Doles as a guest, the first time before Doles’ September far-Right rally in Dahlonega, and a second time to recap events afterward. The most recent episode of The Right Voice kicks off with “Chris” shouting for “y*ds” to “get in the oven” and addresses the COVID-19 pandemic through a typical white supremacist lens, using the crisis to advance racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories. For example, “Marie” promotes the idea that Jewish people have been hoarding ventilators in New York City.

Recent The Right Voice episode

TRV’s name is a reference to an earlier white nationalist podcast, The White Voice, which both TRV hosts were involved with. The White Voice ran from its first episode in May 2011 to its hundredth episode in April 2015, with its site shuttering soon after. Marie started helping The White Voice in late 2013, while Chris appears to have first contributed in early 2015, just a couple of months before The White Voice project ended. After the end of The White Voice, TRV established its website in June 2015 and had its first podcast the following month.

The White Voice

While TRV recruits for the white nationalist movement, it is not as successful as some competitors. TRV’s main importance is as a forum for scattered white nationalists and as a force for unity, since its hosts avoid divisive issues within the racist scene such as religion. Much of the podcast discussion revolves around tactics and movement-building. Although they have interviewed many, TRV hosts do not present themselves as leaders of the white nationalist movement. Rather, they view themselves as a small functioning part within the broader white power ecosystem. Regular listeners trade messages in a small online chat during live broadcasts, heightening the sense of racist community.

“White Genocide Subliminals” page removed from Facebook

In addition to the podcast, hosts Chris and Marie had previously been involved in creating and maintaining a web of between twelve to twenty propaganda pages on Facebook, which they have repeatedly mentioned on their podcast. According to Chris, at least one of these Facebook pages had nearly thirty thousand followers – a significant propaganda operation. Several other pages allegedly passed the ten thousand mark. While we have not been able to determine all of these Facebook pages, from online comments we know TRV hosts were involved in “White Genocide Subliminals” as well as “Black Privilege”, which argued that Black people are systematically and unfairly advantaged by US society. “Marie” has been permanently banned from Facebook since mid-2017 for her incessant spreading of white power propaganda.

Chris Burnham (foreground)

Amanda Sproul (as “Mandy Spruill”, Facebook, 2016)

“Chris” and “Marie” are Chris Roland Burnham of Loudoun County, Virginia and Amanda Marie Sproul of Dublin, Georgia respectively. Burnham is originally from Britain but has been living in the United States for decades. Sproul is a longtime employee of the US Department of Veterans Affairs and may continue to work at a VA Medical Center. We discuss each in turn.

Christopher Roland Burnham

Chris Burnham

“Chris” of The Right Voice was identified last year as “Chris Burnham, a former British soldier and now an American entrepreneur” on the website of antisemite and white nationalist John De Nugent, who has appeared as a TRV podcast guest. Burnham was also mentioned in passing as a host of The Right Voice, on a 2017 post to a now-deleted anti-racist blog. Burnham currently maintains social media accounts on both Facebook and the Russian site VKontakte (VK), under the name “Kristoff Bornholm”. On VK, he is linked to the “Mandy Ross” account for TRV co-host “Marie”. Both Burnham’s Facebook and his VK accounts promote his TRV podcast.

It is easy to confirm Christopher Roland Burnham of Loudoun County, Virginia as the relevant “Chris Burnham”. While Burnham’s address is listed as being in Round Hill, he in fact lives by the unincorporated community village of Unison, VA. There are several ways to confirm this identity. First, the “Kristoff Bornholm” Facebook profile is linked to Burnham’s son. Second, on the TRV broadcast of March 25, 2020, Burnham mentioned having three buildings on his five-acre farm. Burnham’s property is 4.5 acres and has three buildings, plus a barn. On VK, Burnham posted the view from his back deck, which exactly matches the layout of the Furr Road property. Finally, in leaked chat logs published by the Unicorn Riot journalism collective, user “gbchris” appeared in online discussions for the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party, where he identified himself as “Chris from TRV”. The handle “gbchris” was used elsewhere by Chris R. Burnham when listing a motorcycle for sale in 2011.

View from Burnham’s back deck, 2019 from “Kristoff Bornholm” VK account.

The details of Burnham’s move from England to the US are somewhat murky. Born in 1959, Burnham grew up outside of London. On podcast episodes, Burnham has mentioned working as a bouncer in the UK during the late 1970s or early 1980s, as well as being a debt collector. In the podcast episode of May 9, 2018, Burnham stated that he was in the “baby Marines” – possibly meaning cadets – in the UK and at least tried to enter the US Marines. We have not confirmed Burnham’s military experience. Burnham has also discussed working as a dog trainer in the US (TRV episode 6/1/2016). According to the April 1 broadcast of this year, Chris Burnham finally got US citizenship in June 2019 after being a resident for decades.

Chris Burnham as a young biker.

Burnham is currently listed as the Vice President of Hunt Valley Veterinary Service, Inc., an active business registered in Virginia. His wife, Margaret Hood Burnham, is President. On TRV, Chris Burnham has also mentioned installing satellites and doing building work. Internet results show Burnham Communications, a satellite company, as well as the general contractor business Burnham Enterprises linked to Burnham’s Furr Road address.

“Heil Hitler, Sieg Heil”: Burnham/“GBChris” in The Voice of National Socialist Reason chat room, 2019

Burnham lives approximately an hour and fifteen minutes from Washington, DC, but near affluent outside-the-Beltway areas where politicians and officials own homes. On the May 9, 2018 podcast episode, Burnham mentioned former Secretary of State Madeline Albright being a “customer of mine”. Burnham was sure to point out Albright’s Jewish ancestry on the podcast. This year, Burnham mentioned “someone [living] very close to me has got a Homeland Security pass” (April 1, 2020). While it is doubtful that Burnham received sensitive information from this neighbor, Burnham uses his proximity to government and security circles to boost his own importance and to cultivate an impression that he is in-the-know.

On TRV, Burnham has mentioned his earlier involvement with The White Voice. In February 2015 – just a couple of months before that podcast ended – “Chris” was introduced as a new panel member on The White Voice. When the end of The White Voice was announced, Burnham stated that he and Marie would continue with a new podcast.

2015: In chat for The White Voice, Burnham announces that “Marie and I are carrying on”

Burnham travels to network with other white nationalists and to attend rallies. On April 23, 2016, two white power demonstrations took place in Georgia. The first rally, “Rock Stone Mountain”, was held at Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, the birthplace of the second era Ku Klux Klan. There, a diverse anti-racist mobilization overshadowed and undermined the white power event, which attracted just dozens. In Rome, Georgia, the National Socialist Movement rallied with Klan groups and other allies at an event attracting around eighty. The Rome rally was symbolically protested by residents. Speaking on TRV afterward, Burnham stated that he posed as media at both Stone Mountain and in Rome, wearing a “TRV Network” press pass. Burnham mingled with other media at Stone Mountain and documented anti-racists. In Rome, Burnham moved within the community’s anti-racist protest.

National Socialist Movement rally in Rome, Georgia, April 23, 2016

The next year, when the Nationalist Front (NF) white supremacist coalition protested in Pikeville, Kentucky, Burnham seems to have attended. The month of the rally, Burnham appeared under the name “gbchris” in leaked discussions from the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), a now-defunct neo-Nazi group and leading organization in the NF. Burnham stated that he planned to attend the Pikeville event and, in his last post to the TWP server the day before the rally, asked whether the camping site address was wrong.

Since his experience at Stone Mountain, Burnham has styled himself as an anti-leftist secret agent. At the end of June 2016, he posted to VK: “anybody want to take on Antifa contact me to join AntiComm”. “AntiComm” is a reference to Anti-Communist Action, a far-Right group opposing anti-racists and anti-fascists, leftists, and even liberals who they decide are enemies. Interestingly, Anti-Communist Action did not cohere organizationally until early the next year, 2017, and then used the abbreviation “AntiCom” (with one “m”). We believe Burnham was involved in far-Right networks profiling leftists, but he may not have joined the more visible “Anti-Communist Action” that emerged the following year.

Hannah Zarski

On a TRV podcast episode (8/21/2019) interviewing Hannah Zarski of Virginia, Burnham stated that he and Zarski were involved with “undercover work” in the immediate aftermath of the 2017’s bloody Unite the Right (UTR) rally in Charlottesville. Zarski was a close associate of Jason Kessler, UTR’s main organizer. Chris Burnham claimed that he stayed with Jason Kessler a week or two following UTR, around the same time that he and Zarski “did the James Bond shit”. The exact nature of this clandestine action is unclear. However, when white nationalist, ex-Marine, and friend of Zarski’s, Michael Chesny, appeared on TRV (5/9/2018), Chesny hinted that Burnham and Zarski had used “recording devices” to gather information on opponents.

Amanda Marie Sproul AKA “Marie Ross”

Amanda Sproul

The second host of The Right Voice goes by “Marie” and “Marie Ross”. “Marie Ross” began contributing blog posts to The White Voice – TRV’s forerunner – in late 2013. In January 2014, “Marie” appeared on The White Voice podcast for the first time. She became a regular podcast host. The current Twitter account for The Right Voice – maintained by “Marie” – was also launched in early 2014, presumably under a different name. On the Russian social networking site VKontakte, “Marie” maintains a profile under the name “Mandy Ross”.

Although she took limited measures to protect her real identity, we have identified “Marie” as Amanda Marie Sproul, currently based in Dublin, Georgia. On both the podcast and TRV’s Twitter, “Marie” discussed attending a Macon, Georgia, rally for Trump in late 2015. Macon is approximately one hour west of Dublin.

From the source code for The Right Voice website circa June 2015

TRV’s content is hosted on a SquareSpace account, marie-ross-hy14, with TheRightVoice [dot] net domain name redirecting there. When we searched for archived versions of TheRightVoice [dot] net, we found a version of the site from June 2015, the month before the podcast launched. Examining the source code for this archived version, we realized that the SquareSpace account was not always named marie-ross-hy14 but was initially configured as amanda-sproul-hy14 with the business name “Smash Political Correctness”. (Smash Political Correctness was a now-deleted Facebook page used to promote The Right Voice.) When we began researching the only Georgia resident named Amanda Sproul, we discovered that Sproul had initially registered a different domain name, TheRightVoice [dot] US, with her own name and address in May 2015, soon after the end of The White Voice. The .US domain name does not seem to have ever been used.

“Mandy Sprowle” Facebook circa April 2017

Going back through our records, we found traces of now-deleted Facebook profiles under the names “Mandy Spruill” and “Mandy Sprowle”. The profile pictures for these accounts clearly resembled Amanda Marie Sproul of Dublin, Georgia. The “Mandy Spruill” account was active on the Facebook page for the “Rock Stone Mountain” white power rally in April 2016. Unlike her co-host who attended, Sproul appears to have just monitored the event online that day. In 2017, both the “Mandy Spruill” and the “Mandy Sprowle” accounts were listed as Facebook friends of white power propagandist Brad Griffin, the publisher of the Occidental Dissent website who has also been a TRV guest.

Hats signed by Trump in Macon, Georgia, 2015, from TRV Twitter account

Sproul lives at an address on Willow Point Drive in Dublin owned by Jimmy Douglas Ross. (Many of Ross’ family members have the surname “Gross”, suggesting a name change at some point.) According to county property records, Sproul and Ross also co-own three parcels of land, two adjoining their home and one across the street. Despite the age difference – Ross was born in 1946, Sproul in 1974 – we assume that Ross is the “husband” Sproul refers to on Twitter and podcasts. (It is unclear whether they formally married.) When Sproul displayed the hats that Trump signed when she and her husband attended Trump’s 2015 rally in Macon, Georgia, one of these hats was for a Vietnam War Purple Heart (combat wounded) medal recipient. On Twitter, Sproul identified her husband as having been with 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment in the 25th Infantry Division. In January 2018, TRV’s blog published a letter written by “one of our contacts” which claimed that there was “anti-White discrimination” at West Point, as evidenced by this person’s grandson not being accepted. The letter specifically mentions having served under Glenn K. Otis, who was the commander of 3-4 Cav, 25th ID during the Tet Offensive. We suspect the letter was written by Jimmy D. Ross, who seems to at least partially share Sproul’s racist ideology. Some of the language in the letter, such as accusations of anti-white “social engineering”, suggest that Sproul helped with edits or rewriting.

Image posted by “Jane Crow” featuring Totenkopf/Death’s Head design used by a Division of the Nazi SS and “Blood & Honour”, the name of a neo-Nazi bonehead network.

In addition to the TRV Twitter account, we have located two other Twitter accounts that were operated by Sproul, one of which has already been deleted. The first, “Jane Crow” – a reference to the segregationist Jim Crow system – refers to “Marie” from TRV in the third person and regularly promotes the TRV podcast. “Jane Crow” uses the same distinctive vocabulary as Sproul, shares the same musical tastes, and references being banned from Facebook at the same time Sproul was banned. “Jane Crow” is the only account on Twitter apart from TRV to use the #sbjtrv hashtag, which marks topics for Sproul to discuss on the podcast. Further, the now deleted “Our People” Twitter account was also Sproul. On TRV’s account, Sproul shared memes with an “Our People” watermark and claimed some as her own original content. “Jane Crow” referred to “Our People” as a “fellow female activist”, who coincidentally was permanently banned from Facebook at just the same time as Sproul.

Amanda Sproul worked and seemingly still works as a federal employee with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Specifically, we have located Sproul as an employee in the Veterans Health Administration, working at the Carl Vinson VA Medical Center in Dublin.



The Right Voice podcast 4/13/2016: “Marie” attacks diversity efforts at the VA

When “Marie”/Sproul discusses the VA on her white nationalist podcast, her comments are framed as being based on information from friends and contacts. On the TRV episode of April 13, 2016, “Marie” read an email from an Equal Employment Opportunity committee to workplace staff, which she stated had been received by “someone I know who actually works at the VA”. The workplace email highlighted the importance of diversity and criticized the harmful effects of “ethnocentrism” on the job. On the April 2016 podcast, “Marie”/Sproul read a draft response to this email by her alleged contact. The draft expressed concern over the use of counselors who “looked” and “sounded” like prior combat enemies; attacked the pro-diversity message as “social engineering” and “political correctness”; claimed that Equal Opportunity efforts took the focus off veteran care; and suggested that white people are harmed by pro-diversity gestures. The podcast episode has now been deleted, but we had earlier obtained a download. It is easy to figure out that Sproul’s alleged contact in the VA was actually herself.

Recent post on The Right Voice’s Twitter account using the “cultural enrichment” meme to attack Black people in the military

Before TRV, “Marie Ross” wrote for The White Voice about her experience as a government employee. In that 2014 The White Voice blog post, Sproul attacked “multiculturalism and DIEversity [sic]”, which she blamed for a situation where “I have to see a muzzie [derogatory term for Muslim] with headdress on, walking around” at work. Sproul also seems to have written about her workplace for the TRV website. A January 2016 rant on the TRV’s blog – unsigned but very likely by Sproul – states that its author “once again proudly shunned the MLK program where I work”. The article bemoaned Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebrations, what she described as the “negroid” President at the time, and the fact “there will likely never be a WHITE history month.” Three years later, Sproul reposted a link to the TRV article on Twitter, adding a note that its author had now become “a successfull [sic] business owner.”

In recent years, “Marie”/Sproul has claimed on the podcast to be self-employed. For example, on the December 5, 2018 episode she discussed her “veteran-owned business” doing well. Though Sproul may have an additional business, in an episode just one month later, “Marie” commented on new protocols at the VA, citing “two VA contacts” as sources.

Amanda M. Sproul employee profile from FederalPay website

A search of federal employment information shows that Sproul was a federal employee from Fiscal Year 2008 through FY 2018, the most recent year covered by searchable online records. Sproul was listed as a “Secretary” at the Veterans Health Administration – part of the Department of Veterans Affairs – in the most recent year’s report.

A call this month to the Carl Vinson VA Medical Center in Dublin confirmed that Amanda Sproul is listed in its staff directory. When our caller asked to contact Sproul, they were provided with the extension number for Primary Care, suggesting that this continues to be Sproul’s department.

Amanda Sproul claims Black people are “Subhuman at most”

Sproul’s past and seemingly present employment with the Veterans Health Administration is troubling for several reasons. First, Sproul may have the ability to influence who gets what healthcare, for example by strategically prioritizing or deprioritizing paperwork processing, or choosing who to advocate for. Second, there is the potential for sensitive medical information to be misused. Third, Sproul wrote on Twitter about many veterans she knows being “Yidpilled” – her term for embracing antisemitism. It is likely that Sproul has used her workplace access to veterans to promote or reinforce racism and antisemitism – a problem because veteran communities are already heavily targeted by white supremacists for recruitment. Finally, Sproul could have helped other white nationalists be placed for similar federal jobs. What makes this all the more disconcerting, is that by her own accounts Sproul made little effort to disguise her white nationalist beliefs within the workplace.

Conclusion

Although it has never had a wide listenership, The Right Voice is nearing five years as a project. Its hosts are successful networkers, knowing many leaders in the white nationalist movement as well as having a clear idea of what’s going on behind the scenes. Their podcast unites neo-Nazis, Klansmen, remnants of the “Alt-Right”, and unaffiliated white supremacists. Although Chris Burnham’s name had been mentioned in passing as a TRV podcast host, nobody had written extensively about him before now. The Georgia co-host, Amanda Sproul, had not been identified until now, despite being active as a hardcore racist propagandist since at least 2013. We hope that by exposing these racist and antisemitic organizers, we impede their organizing. If you have further information on Burnham, Sproul, or other racists discussed here, please get in touch.