This article exposes two of the founders of the American Banderite Network (ABN), a neo-Nazi political project, as a pair of 16-year-old twins who are currently juniors at Century High School in Hillsboro, OR. As they are minors, we will only be identifying them by their initials: AP and BP. However, if they continue to engage in neo-Nazi organizing, their full names and unredacted faces will be released. And to any adults who consider organizing with these kids in the future, know that if you do we will put you on blast.
The full scope of ABN’s activities, and a breakdown of their political ideology, is presented in our companion article. If you’re only interested in learning about AP and BP’s activities without diving deeper into the ideology and bigger picture, it works to just understand that this group is a neo-Nazi political project, and ample evidence of this fact will be provided.
Below we prove AP and BP’s ownership of ABN, link their online accounts to their true identities, summarize their fascist political activities in Hillsboro and how that bleeds into their life at school, document their fetishization of—and unrestricted access to—firearms, and examine how their obsession with commiting politically motivated violence presents a danger to people in their school and community.
While AP and BP engage in neo-Nazi activism together and share the same ideology, AP is clearly the more dominant of the two. He founded the American Banderite Network and personally runs the ABN chat and channel on Telegram.
The above screenshots identify the @based_romanian1933 (aka “Romanian Guy”) Telegram handle as the owner of ABN’s chat. Below we present comparisons between photos of AP and BP from Telegram and photos of them from their family’s Facebook, proving AP’s identity as @based_romanian1933 and BP’s identity as his brother and active participant.
Right: AP wearing the same hat, and holding an ABN banner, in a photo he posted to Telegram.
Note: the banner contains both a sonnenrad and a wolfsangel—both Nazi symbols which are explained below.
Below: Photo of a bedroom at AP’s parents house in Hillsboro, from a real estate listing.
Matching ceiling hooks and outlet location are marked. Additionally, the windows, trim, and flooring all match.
Right: A photo from the neo-Nazi group Active Club Portland’s Telegram channel, showing AP participating in boxing training with them at a local park while wearing his favorite shirt.
AP’s twin brother BP, seen in the above comparison photo, is his activity partner and a fellow member of the American Banderite Network. BP has previously used the handle “nationalist_legionare777” on Telegram, but that account is inactive at the time of writing.
Right: Telegram post from AP, showing his brother BP holding an AR-15 and wearing the same shirt.
BP runs a YouTube account under his @Nationalist_Legionare777 handle, where he makes short video edits that glorify Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and expresses a desire for his enemies to die in a “revolutionary Holocaust”. A sampling of content from his channel is shown below.
Below: Comments from one of BP’s videos, showing AP using his “Romanian Guy” alias.
Below: Some of BP’s comments on his own videos. Note that “Austrian Painter” is a euphamism for Hitler.
AP is a self-proclaimed Nazi as well, and states explicitly that ABN is a neo-Nazi group. He regularly makes antisemitic posts, and the chat he runs is full of racist slurs. AP also promotes The Turner Diaries, a book written by neo-Nazi William Pierce that describes a fictional future race war in which the white population of the US carries out an ethnic cleansing.
Right: AP and BP doing Nazi salutes in their parents’ garage.
AP and BP’s activities are not confined to the hateful and gruesome chat they run and photo ops in their parents’ home. They regularly place fascist and neo-Nazi stickers around their neighborhood in Hillsboro, as seen below.
For readers who are unfamiliar with the symbolism AP and BP use in their stickering, below we show a few examples. The celtic cross is regularly used by active clubs, as seen in the Evergreen Active Club Sticker above (more on them at the end of this article). The sonnenrad is an explicitly neo-Nazi symbol, often used in place of a swastika in modern times. The wolfsangel is commonly used by Ukranian neo-Nazis, and is featured along with a sonnenrad on ABN’s logo seen throughout this article. AP and BP regularly put up stickers promoting Patriot Front, a white nationalist organization, as well as the NSDAP which is the traditional National Socialist (Nazi) Party of Germany.
For more information on recognizing hate symbols and other far-right dog whistles, we encourage you to check out the Recognizing Hate zine.
On 1/1/24, AP and BP felt brave and went beyond stickering. They, along with two friends, showed up in masks at Reedville Creek Park in Hillsboro and displayed banners with fascist imagery, including the sonnenrad and wolfsangel, both described above.
Not content to just terrorize his neighborhood, AP has posted proof that he’s worn a totenkopf patch inside Century High School on his backpack. He says that he doesn’t put up stickers at school though, because he believes everyone will know it’s him. He has also made clear that he has extreme contempt for classmates who are LGBTQ+ or not white.
While we haven’t been able to verify that this event actually occurred, AP does claim to have vandalized a synagogue and expresses a desire to do so again in the future.
As Hope Not Hate discusses at length in their 2021 article on the radicalized youth in the National Partisan Movement, it isn’t “an easy task to accurately judge the severity and risks” of online far-right youth spaces where threats are regularly made. On the one hand, these are kids and it can sometimes be interpreted as misguided youth or bluster. On the other hand, there is the obvious drive to prove themselves to peers who are encouraging bias crimes and worse.
We believe the twins are being radicalized by known extremists who have themselves committed extreme acts of violence. We believe the twins are on that same path, have access to weapons, and are a threat to their community that requires intervention. Two of the photos above show the boys posing with rifles, and below you will find many more.
Given that all of these photos were taken inside of their parents’ home, it’s fair to question how much AP and BP’s parents know about their organizing in fascist spaces and their proclivity for firearms. The flags with Nazi symbolism shown above, both in the bedroom and garage, do not have fold marks indicative of flags that were stored and put up for a quick photo op. Further, they have been repeatedly shown, over many months, in the same locations in AP’s photos. Unless they never enter the kid’s rooms, or their own garage, then it’s unlikely their parents haven’t seen this paraphernalia.
As 16 year olds, AP and BP would not have been able to legally purchase the rifles they pose with, and given that the three rifle setups we see in the photos cost in the range of $1000 each, they most likely wouldn’t have been able to afford them anyway. The guns presumably belong to their parents, but what’s troubling is that they appear to have unrestricted and unsupervised access to these guns in their home. As you can see in this terrorist-style video that AP and BP created, they glorify firearms and attempt to use them to intimidate others with whom they do not agree.
The person at left has not been publicly identified.
Even more troubling is the fact that AP claims to carry a concealed handgun when he goes out to put up stickers in his neighborhood with BP. In the chat screenshot below, he describes an incident where someone questioned what they were doing while stickering. AP states that he was carrying a 9mm handgun, and that he was “just about to send him to Jesus”.
In Oregon, you can’t obtain a Concealed Handgun License until you are 21 and cannot even possess a handgun legally until you are 18, outside of a couple very specific circumstances which do not include putting up Nazi stickers. It’s unclear whether or not AP actually owns and/or carries the handgun mentioned here—he’s either lying, or he purchased the gun illegally, or was given access to it by his parents. Given that AP and BP already appear to have unrestricted access to firearms at home, all of the above appear to be realistic options.
We would strongly encourage their parents to take heed of the recent court case in which the mother of a mass shooter has been held criminally liable for her son’s actions, and restrict AP and BP’s access to their guns. Unless their parents legally transferred the firearms that AP and BP pose with to them, they would be in violation of both ORS 166.395 (Securing firearms) and ORS 166.403 (Duty to supervise upon transfer of firearm to minor).
The problem of AP and BP’s access to firearms is further compounded by the fact that they explicitly condone violence and actively express a desire to enact it. This was seen in the above screenshot where AP brags about being ready to shoot someone who questioned him, and is present in the numerous examples below. These range from condoning the mass shooter in Buffalo, to wanting to kill both Proud Boys and antifascists, to wanting to literally torture the children of queer people.
The danger AP and BP pose to their community is underscored by adults with whom they are networking in the far-right sphere. This topic is explored in greater detail in our ABN companion article, but here we provide a short summary of some of their known contacts.
Casey Knuteson is a convicted child abuser living in nearby Gaston, OR. He was a member of both Proud Boys and Patriot Front before he began his own explicitly neo-Nazi group called Rose City Nationalists. When he joined the ABN chat, AP blushed and told him he was honored to have him there.
You can read more about Casey and the founding of RCN in this article, and if you’d like to read more about the other members you’ll find an index of articles in the ongoing series on RCN here.
Evergreen Active Club was founded by Daniel Rowe, a career criminal and prison Nazi who was sentenced to four years in 2016 for the unprovoked stabbing of an interracial couple in Olympia, WA after seeing them kiss outside of a bar. Daniel went on to create a regional network of active clubs called the Northwest Nationalist Network, or 3N. Both ABN and Active Club Portland are aligned under Daniel Rowe’s leadership and we know that Daniel is in direct contact with AP.
Daniel Rowe is an associate of the Hammerskins, as are many members of EAC and 3N. The Hammerskins are an extremely violent white supremacist group who have committed numerous racially-motivated beatings and a member of which committed the 2012 mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.
You can read more about Daniel Rowe in this article, and you can find an index of all the articles in our collaborative series on EAC and 3N here.
Finally, Chris Pohlhaus—the leader of Blood Tribe—was made an admin of the ABN chat by AP last summer. Blood Tribe is another neo-Nazi group. They favor overt symbology and regularly carry swastika flags during their hate rallies, which they use to threaten vulnerable people. In recent years Blood Tribe has been doing large demonstrations around the eastern US, including Orlando in September and Nashville a couple weeks ago.
Pohlhaus recently sold a property in Maine that he had intended to use as a neo-Nazi training enclave. The antifascist sentiment in the community appears to have chased him off. He was last seen living in the Bozeman, MT area. This is someone who AP and BP not only welcomed into the group they’ve created, but idolize to such an extent that he was made admin of their chat based solely on his “credentials”.
AP and BP are only 16, and we encourage them to take this opportunity to leave the far-right movement before it’s too late. Their parents, school, church, and friends of the family have been notified of this article and provided with intervention resources. It is our hope that some of these people will talk them out of the dead-end path they have wandered down.
We also encourage any readers who are unfamiliar with the modern fascist movement to learn to recognize it when they see it. A great primer on the symbology used by people like AP and BP can be found in the Recognizing Hate zine, which is available as both an online version and a PDF that’s formatted so you can print and fold it into a booklet for handing out.
From Recognizing Hate:
If you have a close friend or loved one beginning to display these symbols and develop far-right
ideology, try to find common ground between yourself and the other person, encourage other hobbies and areas of interest, and avoid debating or confronting them. Please reach out to the following groups for more information on helping your loved one disengage from far-right extremism:
Parents for Peace: https://www.parents4peace.org and 1-844-49-PEACE
Life After Hate: https://www.lifeafterhate.org/exitusa
Shannon Martinez: https://www.shannonmartinezspeaks.com
If you notice fascist activity in your community and want to do something about it but don’t know where to begin, we suggest starting with 40 Ways to Fight Fascists. And feel free to pass any relevant info along to us via email at stumptownresearchcollective@riseup.net.