Share This:

twitter

facebook

Imagine paying money to attend a public university. Now imagine at that university, a teaching assistant, someone who grades your papers and teaches classes and who is paid with your tax dollars – is a literal neo-Nazi. Now imagine that through that same neo-Nazi’s social media account, it encourages his friends and followers to literally “destroy” people that bring to light his racist and white supremacist ideals, leading to a flood of harassment, death, and rape threats. This person would be fired, right?

At Virginia Tech, the opposite has happened.

Over a week ago, IGD ran a short protest roundup article about a demonstration against Mark Daniel Neuhoff, a neo-Nazi working as a teaching assistant at Virginia Tech. In recent months, Neuhoff has been exposed for being a white supremacist, primarily through his posts on social media. In one online rank Mark wrote, “I want white supremacy. Not white nationalism, which is ethnic cleansing by its very nature, but white supremacy. Whites must be in control if we are to preserve western culture. Categorically, no other race can do it. We must be in charge or we will wander aimless in the badlands of aliens.” Mark also railed against “Jews” and glorified the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler.

However, after recent protests on campus, Neuhoff was quoted in the local media and The Washington Post as saying that he would not be returning for the coming semester, due to the demonstrations. Despite this, Neuhoff wrote in email to IGD several days after the publishing of our article to state that he was in fact not leaving the campus, and that he would continue to be employed by the University as a researcher for the chair of the English Department, and according to him, would be researching “free speech.”

Neuhoff also went on at length about his political views, the Nazi party, his associations with other neo-Nazis, and even ironically claimed that he was in fact married to an Asian woman, which he was apprehensive of others in the Alt-Right knowing about.

Several days after Neuhoff emailed IGD, an article appeared on The Tab, detailing how Neuhoff’s Facebook page had encouraged people to harass a student, (stating: “Fuck her up. Destroy her.”), who had exposed his neo-Nazi views. As the student stated in The Tab in a lengthy interview:

The Monday after the protest, Tori was on the bus home from class when she received a call from the woman identifying herself as Mark’s wife. She then proceeded to yell expletives at Tori, calling her a bitch and a coward and claiming that she would have to “protect her family” if Tori didn’t stop. Tori immediately hung up the phone. She then received twelve to fifteen texts from the woman before alsoreceiving calls from numbers she did not know, all sending the same message as the first call. Tori was left in confusion for half an hour before finally discovering that someone had doxxed her. “About 30 minutes later, I was made aware that Mark posted on his Facebook page, ‘my wife found the bitch’s number.’ It listed my cell phone number. Then it said, ‘Fuck her up. Destroy her,’ with a link to the Roanoke Times article, pointing me out in the picture. It was terrifying. It’s still hard to talk about. I started receiving incessant phone calls from blocked numbers. My phone was essentially useless because every time I ignored a call, another one was already coming through. I mean, I must have received 70 calls at minimum that night alone. Honestly, probably more. It was deeply unsettling. It was a death threat. I don’t understand how anyone misconstrues ‘destroy her.’

One of Mark’s numerous social media posts promoting white supremacy and neo-Nazism.

According to Neuhoff, he did not write the call to “destroy” the student, and in fact someone else had posted from his own Facebook account. The student at the receiving end of these threats disputes these claims, however. From The Tab:

“In the comment section of the Facebook post, Mark is encouraging his friends who said that they would go after me. It is the scariest thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life. I was also made aware that night that my number had been posted on an online sex chat website by someone impersonating me and telling people to call me for a good time. I started receiving sexually explicit text messages and phone calls.”

The response from the University?:

“Evidence gathered suggests that the October 2nd, 2017 Facebook post on Neuhoff’s Facebook page was not actually made by Mark Neuhoff.”

However, when IGD reached out to sources at Virginia Tech, we were told that Neuhoff when questioned by police simply blamed his wife for urging his followers, through his own Facebook page, to “destroy” the Virginia Tech student – and the police believed him. Furthermore, when the student went to the police about the threats of rape and violence, the authorities only further backed Neuhoff:

“I went to the Virginia Tech Police Department. They told me there was nothing they could do. I was in the wrong location and had to go to the Blacksburg Police. I went to the Blacksburg Police Department, spent two hours being questioned and was sent home with little recompense. Since then VTPD and BPD have been investigating. They have a warrant for Mark’s Facebook page and are investigating the post as a death threat. The only solace I have in this situation is that I’m not being harassed the way I was that first week, but you can’t undo the fact that my number is out there or that there’s been a call to violence against me. Nothing can undo that. I missed an entire week of classes and couldn’t come on campus.”

A post glorifying Adolf Hitler on Mark Neuhoff’s social media from the website, ‘National Vanguard,’ which is the predecessor to the group, the National Alliance. The leader of the National Alliance, William Piece, is famous for writing The Turner Diaries, the book that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing.

After death threats, the student ended up taking themselves out of classes at Virginia Tech:

“The death threat. I couldn’t go on campus knowing Mark was on campus, knowing that he had posted on Facebook about buying a gun to protect his family, knowing that his wife had said she was going to defend her family. There was no way for me to exist on campus.”

“I Haven’t Been “Driven Out” of Anything”

In Mark’s email exchange with IGD, entitled, “Fake News,” written from his @vt.edu email address, he started off by stating that he was not in fact leaving the university as a paid employee:

Those students did nothing but whine about nonexistent problems. I haven’t been “driven out” of anything, I’m still going to be here next semester, still working for the English department…I’ll still be working for the English department but just doing something else.

When asked what position he would be employed in during the next semester at Virginia Tech, Neuhoff ironically wrote that he would be paid to research free speech on university campuses:

I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to be doing next semester but it amounts to researching the issue of free speech on college campuses and specifically within the discipline of English, like banning books of literature because they’re offensive.

Neuhoff went on to write that on top of being paid to do research under the chair of the English department, he would also be attending classes and graduating in May:

Yeah, I’ll still be paid, still a graduate assistant, just not a graduate teaching assistant. I will be attending the campus as a student and graduate in May. I’ll be working directly under Dr Hausman herself.

When asked about his relationships to Alt-Right, neo-Nazi, and white supremacist groups he replied:

I’m familiar with Matt Parrott and Matt Heimbach and the TWP. It seems a lot of the people I had mutual friends with on Facebook think highly of that organization. I also learned that I was Facebook friends with what appeared to be an alias of Andrew Anglin…Most of the people I was friends with on Facebook probably consider themselves white nationalists…

This backs up the findings of local antifascists who wrote:

Who is Mark talking to? Well his 1,830 facebook friends. This list is composed of members of the Alt-Right and White Nationalists from around the globe. He is posting his hatred, disguised as speech to members of White Live Matter, Vanguard America, Traditional Workers Party, Neo-Nazis, and European Far-Right extremists.

Mark Neuhoff on social media shares memes denying the Holocaust. The icon image that Mark is using is that of the group, Anti-Communist Action, or AntiCom. Recently, online chat lots of the group have been released showing that the organization planned and shared information about how to carry out bombings, murder, and violence against antiracist activists.

Despite his earlier claims that he advocated white supremacy, Neuhoff in the emails attempted to portray himself as a paleoconservative (think the Alt-Right for your grandfather’s generation), and then claimed he had an Asian-American wife, before launching into a racist rant about non-white immigration:

I consider myself a paleoconservative and look up to Pat Buchanan. My wife is Asian and my children will be mixed. I don’t worship race…I think that America’s a country with a long legacy of having a white majority (a white “supremacy,” in other words) and that when this changes, around 2050, as everyone predicts, that change will be negative. For the most part, everyone who came to this country before, including my family who came here in the 1900s, assimilated. The recent immigrant aren’t assimilating. In 2050, when whites are no longer a majority, it doesn’t seem like the country will be a country anymore, in my opinion. I think there’s just going to be a bunch of diverse groups, proud of their cultures, competing for resources. The country will probably balkanize. That’s lamentable and preventable.

Neuhoff then talked about the Nazi party:

I think that without argument the NSDAP successfully rejuvenated German society: their removal of a private central bank, their replacing an anti-German largely Jewish intelligentsia with German folk, and their printing of state money etc incredibly boosted the German economy. I acknowledge this, but, unlike these people who are trying to recreate the Third Reich in America, I also acknowledge that America is completely different and requires different solutions.

Ironically, Neuhoff also opened up about the fact that he was afraid to share to other people on the Alt-Right that his wife was in fact, not-white. He commented:

To answer your last email, just like my half-Jewish friend cannot share that she is Jewish, I cannot share that my wife is Asian. These [Alt-Right] people are intolerant, closed-minded bigots obsessed with racial purity. They’re right-wing SJWs and they practice “white identity politics.” My wife is the best woman I’ve met. I’m not ashamed that my wife is Asian, it’s just that I wanted to some people that I could talk to, even if I disagree with them on some fundamentals. I think that the “Asian girlfriend” phenomenon is actually a good thing…Since non-white women are often more traditional than white women…

Virginia Tech Confirms that Neuhoff Will Remain

Through email, IGD reached out to Dr. Hausman, the chair of the English Department to verify that Neuhoff would remain on the payroll at Virginia Tech, despite media reports stating otherwise. Instead of responding directly, Mark Owczarski, listed as the Assistant Vice President of University Relations, responded with the following email:

As Mr. Neuhoff states in his public comments, he remains a student at Virginia Tech. As he also states, he will not be serving as a graduate teaching assistant next spring, and given the many issues this past fall involving his position in a classroom, the university supports the mutual decision for him to no longer be in the classroom. To place into context, an assistantship (for teaching or other purpose) is a form of financial aid provided to graduate students. If a student remains in good academic standing and follows all university policies—then the student retains this support. The work performed by a graduate assistant for a faculty member is a matter of one’s educational record, and the university could not comment on

So in short, it has been confirmed by Virginia Tech itself that Mark Neuhoff, a vehement neo-Nazi suspected of and connected to threats of murder and rape against a Virginia Tech student, will not only be allowed to continue to attend the campus as a student, but will be paid as a researcher.

According to The Tab, protests are still being organized on the campus, however media outlets continue to state that Mark will not be returning next semester.

It is also clear that at Virginia Tech, itself the scene of a deadly mass shooting in 2007, the possibility of violence and harassment from Neuhoff and his followers remains a tangible threat to the students, especially as Neuhoff remains protected by both the University and the local police from any sort of accountability. Neuhoff’s continued presence at the university will also signal a green light for further action by neo-Nazi organizers, who have recently blanketed the campus with recruitment posters and dumped swastika flyers outside of the Jewish center.

In one of his last emails to IGD, he wrote this cryptic message:

I’m going to spend every single day next semester knowing that I’ve won against you people. I almost regret my decision not to teach, I should have clung on to it just to spite you idiots.

If Mark Neuhoff has won, it’s because he’s been allowed to by the same State that Neuhoff claims is run by “Jews” and who carrying out “white genocide.” Now more than ever, students and community members must organize to solve their own problems while keeping each other safe, for surely the administrators making 6 figures off their tuition won’t.