Extremists React to Neo-Nazi’s Apparent Mass Murder, Suicide

Nativist extremists and white supremacists wasted little time responding with half-cocked conspiracy theories to the news that J.T. Ready, a neo-Nazi border vigilante, had died in an apparent murder-suicide outside Phoenix. For some, the blame lay with Mexican drug cartels. For others, it was the Zionist Occupied Government, or ZOG, once again silencing a critic.

“Until the bullets are extracted and analyzed, the authorities will not know if one person or multiple persons shot the victims! But I know you La Raza Commie Weenies will spin it just as JT did it. I’ll be on this like white on rice. I will make sure the truth comes out,” Layne Lawless, a prominent Arizona nativist, wrote on Facebook.

Others on Stormfront, a largely anonymous white supremacist web forum, took the conspiracy a step further. “They took him out. It’s that simple,” someone named Valkator wrote. As of Thursday, the site had 15 pages of comments related to Ready’s death the night before. (Conspicuously absent from the forum were the posts Ready himself left in recent months. Those appear to have been scrubbed.)

A similar thread appeared on Vanguard News Network, a racist website run by neo-Nazi Alex Linder, with some worrying about Ready’s legacy as a “loose cannon [sic] in the anti-immigration movement.”

“We don’t need another black eye in White Nationalism after we have five convicted pipe bombers in Federal prison,” one post read.

In general, the reaction to Ready’s death seemed to play on a few expected narratives: that Ready was killed by drug smugglers; that Jews running the federal government had come calling; even that Ready was acting in self-defense when he was killed. Whatever the flavor of conspiracy, it’s not surprising that Ready’s death should garner such a response. He was a darling of the movement – a well-spoken and husky presence on the border, almost always armed as if he were going to war.