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No bail for Augustus Invictus

NO BAIL… A judge in South Carolina on Friday ordered white nationalist Augustus Sol Invictus to be held behind bars without bail after a hearing in which his wife, Anna Invictus, read a powerful statement accusing him of years of psychological and physical abuse. Invictus was arrested in late December on charges that he held a gun to his wife’s head and later forced her and their two small children to travel to Florida against her will. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Anna Invictus sent me a copy of the statement that she read in court and asked that it be shared. I’ve uploaded the whole thing to DocumentCloud. But here are a couple excerpts:

To conceal the bruises from the public, he regularly punched me in my stomach and in my head so hard it caused me to see flashes of light. He locked me in a bedroom and wouldn’t let me out for days. He nearly fractured my wrist; to which Kathleen Snyder is a witness. He threw me on the floor, stepped on me, and screamed vile insults I will never forget. He dragged me through the house violently for my teenage daughters to witness. He pulled my hair out by the hand full. He has torn my clothes off, ripping them.

She also read aloud from a chilling journal entry that she said her husband wrote:

“Victims will be sacrificed; politicians will be assassinated; wars will be begun. You know these things will happen, yet you will not stop me. … And yet — though I am quite easy to find — you will not come put a bullet in my head to stop what you find so objectionable from coming to fruition. You act as though this is because of your reverence for the law — but you only hide behind the law to mask your cowardice. … There is no moral reason behind your inaction: you are simply too scared to pull a trigger. And when the day finally comes, and you gloat that you knew it all along, and you say, ‘someone should have stopped him’ — know that their blood is on your hands, too.”

AFTER THE HEARING… Anna Invictus started a GoFundMe to hire a lawyer and help her and her children start a new life.

ALSO WORTH READING… HuffPost’s Jessica Schulberg documented 10 incidents in which Augustus Invictus had been accused of violence or threats of violence. Three of those incidents allegedly involved a gun.

Also on my radar…

— TODAY… Three members of the neo-Nazi group The Base are scheduled to be arraigned on charges involving guns and harboring a fellow member who was in the country illegally. Brian Lemley Jr., Patrik Mathews, and William Bilbrough IV are set to appear at separate times starting at 10 a.m. ET in Greenbelt, Maryland. The trio were arrested last month as part of a nationwide sweep of the group, which believes in using terrorist tactics to bring about a collapse of modern civilization.

RELATED… My interview with a journalist who infiltrated The Base.

ALSO RELATED… The Canadian military is still working on ways to detect hate in its ranks after Mathews, a former army reservist, was outed as a neo-Nazi.

ANIMAL CRUELTY, TOO… Other members of The Base who were arrested in Georgia as part of that nationwide sweep will likely face animal cruelty charges in addition to charges of conspiracy to commit murder, the Rome News-Tribune reported. The reason? They allegedly stole and killed a ram as part of a “Norse pagan ritual sacrifice.”

— THE BEST THING YOU’LL READ TODAY… “Biracial student journalist at Beaver County school stands her ground with KKK leader,” by Abigail Mihaly at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “Trinity said Mr. Robb had no idea she was black. For the first 30 minutes of the interview, he referred to white people as ‘we.’

“Tucked in a soundproof room while talking to one of the nation’s most notorious white supremacists, Trinity said she felt ‘suffocated.’

“She waited for what she thought would be the right moment to reveal her race. Half an hour in, she asked him, ‘So, what’s my role as a black person in the eyes of The Knights Party?’”

— SEVEN YEARS LATER… The Colorado Springs Gazette’s Christopher Osher has unearthed new evidence in the 2013 assassination of the state’s prisons director: “The day before the assassination of Colorado corrections chief Tom Clements, two members of the white supremacist gang the 211 Crew revealed during a prison cell discussion details about how the killing would go down, a prison informant claimed in previously undisclosed interviews with police.”

— GRIM… “Whose job is it to stop the livestreaming of mass murder?”

— THIS IS NOVEL… “Neo-Nazi Terror Group Posted Propaganda to Google Maps”

— ANALYZING SOCIAL NETWORKS… “VKontakte vs. Facebook: From Open White Supremacy To Stealth”

— GOTTA READ IT TO BELIEVE IT… “Neo-Nazi Group Membership May Not Get You Booted from Military, Officials Say”

— NO KIDDING… “The Trump era is a golden age of conspiracy theories — on the right and left”

— UTAH, PART ONE… “Police to request hate crime charges in attack on black missionary”

— UTAH, PART TWO… “Latino shop owner attacked at his Utah tire store testifies against man who yelled, ‘I’m here to kill a Mexican’”

— ODD CASE… “The FBI is now involved in an investigation into an alleged hate crime involving a retired San Luis Obispo firefighter…”

— FIREBOMBING IN MARYLAND… “Woman charged with throwing Molotov cocktail into Glen Burnie Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall”

— ‘HE LIVES BY THE 14 WORDS’ … “Warrant: ‘White supremacist’ accused of choking child”

— LASTLY, A HELPFUL LIFEHACK… “How to Stop the Twitter Trolls and Clean Up Your Feed”

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