Know Your Enemy…Hatewatch Identify “White Nationalist Book Publishers”

“I know who you are,” said this man who interacted with Hatewatch staff on June 10 at the Cucchiaras’ address in Green Lane, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Michael Edison Hayden)

Hatewatch’s research and analysis reveals that Vincent Cucchiara, 24, and Sarah Elizabeth Cucchiara (née Nahrgang), 25, a married couple residing in Green Lane, Pennsylvania, are two of the individuals behind Antelope Hill. The pair have appeared as pseudonymous spokespersons for the company on numerous far-right podcasts, with Sarah Cucchiara billed under aliases as the company’s editor-in-chief since mid-2021. Hatewatch’s investigation indicates that a third person, Dmitri Anatolievich Loutsik, 25, has played a less public role in the company’s operations. Loutsik appears to have first relocated to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley in 2021, and in late April he bought a house in nearby Harleysville, Pennsylvania, with Vincent Cucchiara assisting as the buyer’s agent.

Since 2020, Antelope Hill has profited from hate by translating historical works by 20^th-century Nazis and fascists, offering a publishing platform to contemporary white power propagandists and shipping books around the world using selling platforms including Amazon. This year, they achieved wider prominence when one of their authors, the pseudonymous Raw Egg Nationalist, appeared in a preview for an upcoming Tucker Carlson documentary on masculinity, which is set to air on Fox Nation in June.

The Cucchiaras and Loutsik have a long, shared history as far-right activists, stretching back to their time together as students at Penn State University in the late 2010s. The publishing operation is one aspect of their ongoing participation in the white power movement. Specifically, Hatewatch has found considerable evidence of close cooperation between the Antelope Hill principals and a network of far-right actors associated with the white supremacist National Justice Party (NJP) and The Right Stuff (TRS) podcast network.

Reviving Nazi propaganda

From its founding in 2020, Antelope Hill has won fans on the extreme right by publishing both historical and contemporary far-right authors.

Early on, the company sold reprints and new translations of works by 20^th-century Nazis, fascists and nationalists, with an emphasis on works from Nazi Germany and its sympathizers.

Antelope Hill’s translations include works by Adolf Hitler; Belgian fascist, Nazi collaborator, SS commander and convicted war criminal Leon Degrelle; and Wilfrid Bade, whose Conquering Berlin is a laudatory account of the campaign of political violence carried out by the Nazi paramilitary Sturmabteilung, or SA (also known as “brownshirts”), in Weimar Republic-era Germany.

Any Antelope Hill authors who are not explicitly far-right in their politics have historically been appropriated by contemporary extremists. One of their titles is the collected works of Padraic Pearse, an Irish nationalist intellectual who died fighting against British rule in 1916. Pearse is a contested figure: He has been adopted as figurehead by the far right in Ireland and beyond, while some scholars have argued that this represents a misinterpretation of him and his context.

Most of the Antelope Hill translations are credited to pseudonyms, according to Library of Congress copyright records. Hatewatch has yet to conclusively identify all the individuals behind those pseudonyms.

One translation of a Nazi-era Wehrmacht fitness manual is credited to the “Bureau of Memetic Warfare,” a neo-Nazi message board.

More recently, Antelope Hill has published a series of original books authored by active members of current white power groups and propagandists for far-right movements.

These include 2021’s Opioids for the Masses, which is billed as reportage on the opioid crisis. One of the book’s two credited authors, Norman Asa “Trey” Garrison, is a longtime white nationalist propagandist and podcaster with the TRS network. The Library of Congress copyright records list the name of his co-author, “Richard McClure,” as a pseudonym.

Also in 2021, Antelope Hill published Cultured Grugs, an essay collection credited to longtime TRS host John “Borzoi” Chapman. In June 2021 the Anonymous Comrades Collective (ACC) identified Detroit, Michigan, resident Jesse Daniel Ogden as the person behind the “Borzoi Boskovic” persona, which Ogden has reportedly used as a front for his prolific production of white nationalist propaganda. Hatewatch reviewed ACC’s findings and determined that Ogden’s name appeared twice in the metadata for two images on a blog attributed to “Borzoi.”

Hatewatch emailed Ogden a request for comment on ACC’s identification, but there was no immediate response.

Along with these TRS-connected authors, Antelope Hill’s “Originals” include books by a range of contemporary nationalists, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis and far-right extremists from the United States and beyond. In May 2021, Antelope Hill launched the Little Frog Hill imprint for contemporary and out-of-print children’s books aimed at inculcating white supremacist ideology into children.

Antelope Hill’s secrets

A man Hatewatch believes was Vincent Cucchiara, appearing using an alias, described Antelope Hill as a collective effort in an interview on a podcast on the white nationalist TRS network on May 16, 2021, claiming that it involved “a large group of very dedicated people.” In another podcast from April 24, 2021, the Cucchiaras, again under pseudonyms, referred to “Konstantin” as the “esteemed leader” of the company. No one involved with the company uses their real names publicly. Indeed, public records in several states show the efforts company founders appear to have made to conceal their identities and maintain the company’s operational secrecy.

An unidentified individual registered Antelope Hill Publishing LLC on Feb. 18, 2020, in New Mexico through a registration agent. New Mexico law does not require public disclosure of the founders and owners of LLCs.

On March 18, 2020, an unidentified individual used the New Mexico LLC to register Steven and Son Book Publishing LLC in Louisiana.

Hatewatch reviewed company records from the Louisiana Secretary of State and found that Steven and Son Book Publishing listed a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, address as the principal and mailing address for the company. Leaked data from the extremist-friendly web services provider Epik shows that same Baton Rouge address listed for Steven and Son Book Publishing was also used in a website registration transaction between Antelope Hill and Epik.

Later, on Jan. 28, 2021, someone using the name John Miller registered Antelope Hill Publishing LLC in Pennsylvania as a foreign association. Pennsylvania company law requires LLCs formed in other states to register with the Commonwealth’s Department of State in order to do business there. The Department of State document confirms that Antelope Hill was originally registered in New Mexico, and the information within it matches documents obtained from that state.

In the Pennsylvania documents, a person once again using the name John Miller described themselves as Antelope Hill’s “chief publishing officer.” Miller provided an address that matches a Quakertown, Pennsylvania, UPS store. UPS’s services include private mailboxes, and the Quakertown address is shared by dozens of individuals and companies.

Hatewatch has not yet determined whether or not “John Miller” was a pseudonym, although it is of note that John Miller was a longtime alias Donald Trump used to impersonate his own fictional publicist in interactions with the news media. In a telephone conversation, a representative of the Pennsylvania Department of State told Hatewatch that the state did not require photo identification to register a foreign association.

Property

In addition to public records that provided useful information, Hatewatch consulted commercial data providers and other sources for information that pointed to Loutsik and the Cucchiaras as leaders within Antelope Hill.

Commercial credit reporting data on Antelope Hill records a real street address and a telephone number for the company. According to multiple telephone data services, the number is registered to Dmitri Loutsik on the Verizon network. Multiple data services associated the phone number with both a Hotmail address using Loutsik’s first initial and surname, and a Penn State-assigned student email address using Loutsik’s initials and a sequence of numbers.

Hatewatch contacted Penn State to confirm that the email address was Loutsik’s but received no immediate response.

The street address in Antelope Hill’s credit reporting data is in East Greenville, Pennsylvania. A company, Montgomery County Properties LLC, bought the property at that address for $235,000 on May 6, 2021, according to Lehigh County property records. The same records put Montgomery County Properties LLC at a street address in Green Lane, Pennsylvania, just ten minutes’ drive from East Greenville.

Montgomery County property records show that Vincent Cucchiara has owned the same Green Lane property since Aug. 13, 2019. Commercial data providers indicate that Cucchiara has been a resident at the property since the purchase date, and that Sarah Cucchiara has been a resident since July 2020. According to Sarah’s own Facebook post, Vincent and Sarah Cucchiara married on April 18, 2020.

According to these records, the Cucchiaras and Montgomery County Properties LLC shared the Green Lane address at the time the East Greenville property was purchased.

A full-fledged publishing operation

Someone put the East Greenville property owned by Montgomery County Properties LLC back on the market on April 25. Vincent Cucchiara acted as the sales agent, according to advertisements on multiple real estate sales websites.

ACC, the antifascist research collective, provided online evidence to Hatewatch indicating that Vincent Cucchiara is currently working as a realtor. ACC’s findings are reflected in online materials from EXP Realty, based in the township of Limerick, in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, that identify Cucchiara as an employee. Pennsylvania state records indicate that Cucchiara registered as a realtor in February 2022.

Hatewatch called and emailed Cucchiara’s employer to request comment but received no immediate response.

In his work as a real estate agent, Vincent Cucchiara sold properties in East Greenville and other parts of the Lehigh Valley, according to real estate sales websites.

The property listing made no reference to Antelope Hill, but photographs of the East Greenville property posted with the advertisements offer a window into a full-fledged publishing and fulfillment operation that appears to have been operating at the property.

Multiple photographs of the interior of the main building and a detached garage show pallets stacked high with shipping boxes and smaller book-shipping envelopes, as well as storage shelves with piles of books sorted by title.

Moreover, the photographs suggest that the operation depicted was Antelope Hill’s. Hatewatch identified what appears to be multiple Antelope Hill titles in photographs of the home office and the hallway, including copies of Garrison and McClure’s Opioids for the Masses; Canadian fascist and antisemite Adrien Arcand’s Serviam; and a compilation of translated Adolf Hitler speeches, entitled In His Own Words.

Antelope Hill representatives made comments in a podcast interview on the TRS network on May 16, 2021, that align with this evidence of a home-based large-scale shipping and receiving operation.

At that time, a guest named “Paul,” whose voice sounds identical to that of Cucchiara’s in recordings made under his own name, told the hosts about one of the strategies they used to lessen the impact of Amazon and other internet sellers deplatforming them.

“We do fulfill, we don’t do ship- or fulfillment-on-demand. We buy our books from book printers, and fulfill them ourselves,” he said. He added, “We made that decision – we are I believe, the only publisher on the right, and probably [one of few] publishers … that actually does do that.”

Ship-on-demand and fulfillment-on-demand publishers are generally online sellers who offload responsibility for printing, fulfilling and shipping books onto third parties. Cucchiara’s claim about Antelope Hill’s model, in contrast, would require significant space for storing and shipping books.

On April 22, just before the East Greenville property was put on the market, Dmitri Loutsik bought a property in nearby Harleysville for $290,000, according to Montgomery County property records, raising questions as to whether the company was moving its base of operations.

Other photographic details of the East Greenville property indicate the current occupants’ far-right affiliations.

In the home office room, someone wrote a slogan from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on a white board, which reads: “Obstacles are placed across our path in life, not to be boggled at but to be SURMOUNTED .”

A bedroom shot includes a lanyard matching those worn by attendees at an NJP event called Fifth State Assembly. The gathering took place at the Jemn View Farm event space in Lancaster, Ohio, in July 2021.

Hatewatch reviewed footage from a documentary about the event from the white nationalist propaganda outlet Media2Rise. The film featured a sequence on Antelope Hill, who tabled and sold books at the event. Two men who were staffing the company’s booth can be seen wearing the lanyards, though Media2Rise concealed their faces.

An image of a bathroom at the East Greenville property shows a small pile of wrapped soap bars on a shelf whose branding matches the Imperium soap that Antelope Hill helped advertise in a Telegram repost on July 18, 2021.

Will2Rise, which is part of a network of organizations founded and led by violent white nationalist Rob Rundo, sells Imperium soap through its online store. Rundo, who currently resides in Serbia, is scheduled to appear in federal court in December in an ongoing trial on riot charges.

‘I know who you are’

Hatewatch knocked at the door of the Green Lane address on the afternoon of Friday, June 10, finding it on a quiet residential block flanked by two neighboring houses promoting LGBTQ equality and racial justice causes with lawn signs. A young man with a pale complexion, light brown hair and a goatee answered. He said the Cucchiaras were not home and, after Hatewatch explained the nature of the inquiry, shut the door.

Hatewatch looped around the property by car and found two cars parked on the premises. One of the cars had a sticker associated with “Blue Lives Matter,” a countermovement to the racial justice Black Lives Matter movement, and another sticker advertising a white nationalist YouTube channel. Hatewatch encountered the young man again, now wearing a camouflage-patterned bucket hat. He expressed a familiarity with Southern Poverty Law Center’s work.

“I know who you are. I know who both of you guys are,” he said to the two Hatewatch reporters in the car. “We’ll see each other again one day.”

On the same day, Hatewatch drove to the property in Harleysville and found it empty, dilapidated and possibly in the nascent stages of renovation, based upon some tools and equipment visible through windows at the front and side of the house. Someone left behind a broken toilet, two broken newspaper delivery boxes, a crushed can of Four Loko hard seltzer, two empty cups of Wawa coffee and a half-filled bottle of Mountain Berry-flavored Powerade on the grassy, overgrown grounds outside of the house.

Read more at 

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/06/13/white-nationalist-book-publishers-revealed