Since at least early 2018, Rory F. Handley, Jr. has co-hosted the white supremacist online show Verbo Tempestas under the pseudonym “Rory Reddington.” On Verbo Tempestas, Handley and his co-host “Kaiser Wayne” spew bigoted invective at women and racial minorities. And, like several other white supremacists, Handley’s racist origins can be traced to the Proud Boys, a violent neo-fascist street gang.

Founded in 2016 by Gavin McInnes — a far-right radio host who, last week, was bafflingly profiled by L.A. Magazine — the Proud Boys were billed as a fraternity for “Western chauvinists” whose creed is “refus[al] to apologize for creating the modern world.” Since their inception they have launched a number of violent attacks on anti-fascists — fights they meticulously plan for, according to leaked chat logs.

In 2018 the Proud Boys were declared a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that monitors such groups.

According to Internet archives, West is the Best Magazine — a defunct webzine published by the Texas Proud Boys — listed Handley as the president of the Houston chapter in the summer of 2017. West is the Best Magazine still has a live Facebook page, though the last post on it was made on August 25, 2018. Its “About” section states “This is a battle for free speech, we will not let them ‘Shut it down'” — a possible nod to a racist meme.

Other high ranking members of the Texas Proud Boys included Joe Biggs — an ex-Infowars staffer who was listed as the president of the Austin Proud Boys chapter and who organized a hate rally this August in Portland, OR — and Jason L. Van Dyke. Van Dyke, an attorney with an explosive temper, served as the Texas Proud Boys’ “legal liason,” and once worked side-by-side with white supremacist lawyer Kyle Bristow.

While at Michigan State University, campus police discovered racist and antisemitic literature belonging to Van Dyke, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The Turner Diaries — a race war novel written by the late Neo-Nazi leader William Luther Pierce. Van Dyke was also vocal about his opposition to multiculturalism and what he referred to as the “homosexual deathstyle.”

This year Van Dyke was suspended from practicing law by the State Bar of Texas for threatening to kill a man he was suing.

In 2017, the same year Handley was listed as the president of the Proud Boys’ Houston chapter, he was allegedly denied entry into Canada due to his membership in the group. In a December 3, 2017 episode of The West is Best‘s online show (currently in an unlisted state) Handley made a guest appearance to discuss the matter with host and Texas Proud Boys membership director Andrew Bell-Ramos.

Handley, sporting a “West is the Best” baseball cap, said his vehicle and phone were searched by three Canadian officers who stole his concealed carry permit and ushered him back into the U.S. “So, you were basically discriminated against because you had libertarian or conservative values?” Bell-Ramos asked. “Correct,” Handley replied.

Addressing viewers at the end of the show, Bell-Ramos said “I wouldn’t use the term war, but I think that we’re in very delicate times.”

That same month Handley made an appearance on Gavin McInnes’ online show Get Off My Lawn, hosted on CRTV (now BlazeTV), to repeat his story. McInnes pulled up a tweet from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcoming “those fleeing persecution, terror & war” into their country, and said Trudeau had a “major problem” now that “7,000 Haitians” fled there after the fact.

“Justin Trudeau talks about them and starts crying because he’s so thrilled that he gets to have refugees,” McInnes said. “Yet a patriot — a Western patriot who loves America and Canada — wants to go get a beer with other patriots, and he’s turned away at the border.” McInnes joked that perhaps Handley should dress in blackface and pretend to be a Haitian refugee the next time he tries entering Canada.

“I shoulda just told ’em I didn’t have any ID and my name was Mohammad, and they’d have let me right in and given me free healthcare,” Handley replied.

Not long after this appearance, however, Handley’s rhetoric became more extreme as he gravitated further toward white nationalism. By April 2018 Handley was co-hosting Verbo Tempestas alongside Kaiser Wayne, where the pair glorified Hitler, denied the Holocaust, and compared black people to gorillas.

During the April 20, 2018 episode of Verbo Tempestas, the hosts referenced Hitler’s birthday and mocked a walkout organized by Parkland shooting survivors. Handley told Wayne that gun control activist David Hogg was “a little jealous that the other guy [alleged Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz] beat him too it.”

In an episode from May 18, 2018, Wayne called Muslims and Arabs “just scum,” which Handley said was “very true.” Later that month he justified the theft of Native American land since “a lot of ‘em just sold it for beads and baubles and firewater,” while the rest was justifiably “conquer[ed].”

“But, who cares? The world was full of conquering,” Handley said. “Why be mad at the winners? Where have you ever seen in any time that winners turn around [and say] ‘Oh, I’m sorry, here, lemmie give you half of my winnings back’? That doesn’t happen!”

During the April 25, 2019 episode, white supremacist Paul Nehlen made an appearance and defended Holocaust denial.

“The only reason to make [Holocaust denial] illegal is so that people can’t find out that in fact it’s horseshit, and that you can’t possibly, even with modern crematorium equipment, cremate that many people in that amount of time,” Nehlen alleged. Handley agreed and said, “If you get into the actual stories from supposed survivors it gets even crazier than that, you know? It gets wild.”

Handley’s opinions of women are equally hateful. In a show from late April 2018, Handley falsely claimed that men were better evolved to be in positions of power. He said that women were historically treated as “basically property,” which only changed within the last century.

“And then all of the sudden within the last hundred years, we’ve seen this massive shift to where we’re all on the same playing field, and I don’t think that women are genetically ready for that necessarily yet,” he said. “I think that it needs time to – I’m not saying all women, obviously, but women as a whole, I think, there’s a good majority of them that are not genetically strong enough yet to take on those responsibilities.”

On Handley’s Facebook page, where he operates under the name “Rory Reddington II,” Handley uses a picture of a buff version of the Honkler meme — alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog in a clown nose. His Facebook banner is a grainy photo of armed Korean shopkeepers defending their stores during the 1992 L.A. riots. “ROOF GANG” reads the overlaid caption.

On December 8, 2018, Handley updated his cover photo to a picture of convicted murderer and white supremacist James Fields, Jr. The picture included a speeding car in the background and the phrase “I JUST WANTED TO GO HOME” — indicating that Handley erroneously believes Fields was attempting to leave Charlottesville after “Unite the Right” and had no intention of killing activist Heather Heyer.

Some of Handley’s Facebook friends responded by gleefully posting photos of Heyer’s body.

A deleted Twitter account registered to Handley, @EvolvePast, reveals that he routinely retweeted white nationalists like Faith Goldy, Stefan Molyneux, and, of course, his co-host Kaiser Wayne. Under his bio, which describes him as an “Activist, Father, all around freedom loving American,” Handley included a link to the YouTube channel for his show, Verbo Tempestas.

One tweet from that account, dated December 4, 2017, advertised his appearance on Get Off My Lawn.

A pinned tweet dated July 1, 2017 includes a photo of a group of grinning Proud Boys in “West is the Best” t-shirts. Many posed with the signature OK hand gesture that was adopted by white supremacists and other far-right extremists. In the tweet, which he labeled the “Texas 1776 march,” he tagged several Twitter accounts including that of goat-sacrificing white supremacist and ex-Proud Boy Augustus Invictus.

In a Facebook photo dated November 24, 2018, Handley can be seen posing next to Invictus while wearing a Fred Perry polo shirt — part of the Proud Boys’ official dress code — and a red “Make America Great Again” cap:

An online résumé indicates that Handley worked at Xirtix Consulting, a Houston-area IT consulting company, from April 2010 until May 2011. It also lists him as the “owner” of Vash, Inc. beginning in 2006. Two email addresses registered to Handley include the domains “xirtix” and “vashinc” respectively.

Handley and Invictus are not the first white supremacists to have been affiliated with the Proud Boys. On the April 20th, 2018 episode of Verbo Tempestas, Handley and Wayne interviewed Salvatore “Sal” Cipolla, a former Proud Boy who was booted from the organization after taking smiling selfies with ex-Klan leader David Duke and white supremacist Mike “Enoch” Peinovich. Cipolla told the hosts that he had gone “full 1488.”

The number 1488 holds significance among Neo-Nazis. “14” is a nod to the “14 Words,” a slogan crafted by the late white supremacist terrorist David Lane. “88,” meanwhile, is code for “HH” or “Heil Hitler,” as “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

Another white supremacist Proud Boy, North Carolina resident Kevin Cormier, was a guest on the January 1, 2019 episode. Cormier once wrote an article for Proud Boy Magazine about a time he spent living at a Marxist commune, and attended the far-right “Mother of All Rallies” last year in Washington, D.C. Cormier told Handley and Wayne that he was now reading The Turner Diaries, and that “everything [William Pierce] wrote about” in it is “on the verge of happening right now or happening right now.”

In fact, an April 2018 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center looked at the websites and figures that led 74 fans of The Right Stuff, a prominent white supremacist website, to join the alt-right movement. Jared Taylor and 4chan’s “politically incorrect” (/pol/) forum tied for first place, followed by Stefan Molyneux. However, tied for third were The Right Stuff’s flagship podcast, The Daily Shoah, and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes.

In 2018, Handley appeared on two shows affiliated with The Right Stuff’s podcast network: Exodus/Americanus and The Rebel Yell.