It says it right in the article... "A key subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, Hawke was a Jewish-born American who’d legally changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum. For many years, Hawke was a big time purveyor of spam emails hawking pornography and male enhancement supplements, such as herbal Viagra."
The man also posed as a "progressive vegan rockclimber", so I wouldn't be willing to conclude much about his true political beliefs based on what this article tells us. For all we know, he just picked alternate personas as varied as possible in order to not be discovered.
> A key subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, Hawke was a Jewish-born American who’d legally changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum.
so yeah, that's got to be a very messed up psyche, to take on the identity of your enemy.
I think we see sufficient evidence in our current time that self-loathing is a very useful fuel for self-righteous piety and zeal. If you can be persuaded your very identity is evil, you will do horrifying things to fight it.
Sounds like he was maybe just being an opportunistic capitalist.
> Under the pseudonym of "Bo Decker," he began selling Nazi merchandise and offering membership to his internet neo-Nazi group "Knights of Freedom" and later the American Nationalist Party.
Oh dear I seem to have fallen into a rabbit hole here.
Adolf's father, Alois Hitler [0] was born illegitimately and his parentage was never established, meaning that Adolph couldn't establish his own "aryan" descent. Alois Hitler was born as Alois Schicklgruber, but he requested to be legitimized in the name of his stepfather Hiedler, which for some reason was registered as Hitler. In the 1930's, Hitler had his cronies dive into his genealogy and Declare that there was no Jewish ancestry in his family. The rumour went though that Alois' mother (Adolph's grandmother) was working as a servant / cook for a Jewish family, and that the father may have been one of the family members. That's a lot of speculation though.
Adolf's mother, Klara Hitler [1] (nèe Pölzl), was Alois' first cousin once removed (yikes); not sure about any Jewish heritage there.
TL;DR we can't be sure because his paternal grandfather is unknown, but there's rumours abound.
I hesitate to post this (I'm no authority, and lack a handy citation), but IIRC it's widely believed that Hitler was aware that he had a Jewish maternal grandparent. It doesn't surprise me too much that these hateful people have plenty of self-directed hate at the core of their sociopathy.
No known ancestor of Hitler is Jewish. His paternal grandfather is unknown, and that led some people to speculate that he was Jewish.
Hitler had his minions try to clear that up to dispel the rumours, but nobody could find the real father. They concluded of course that he was a pure Aryan.
Same thing was said about Reinhard Heydrich. I don't really understand the appeal of these rumors. Regardless of the origin of their motivations these guys were really messed up.
Secular Jews go more by ethnicity/culture, not so much by religion. I don't know who made you the police of all Jews, but many people don't follow your so-called rules.
To be fair, it was kinda vaguely implying a universal truth of all religions. I was surprised to find such a short comment suggesting something so far-reaching in potentiality with absolutely no evidence. I was like "is this some wild thing about child development I never knew?" I had no idea this was something specific to Judaism.
Reform Judaism asserts that for patrilineal descent, a person needs to affirm his Judaism, before he reaches maturity, by becoming a Bar/Bat Mitzvah, a Brit Milah, and they have their own concept of "confirmation.
That's certainly true, but it's not right to speculate that the subject of this story is "Jewish" when he lacks a Jewish mother (according to Wikipedia at least) and he hasn't affirmed his Judaism.
> My heart goes out to parents who may disagree with their children, but can't help but love them
I don't see anything about a disagreement between father and son.
But I'm disturbed you think it necessary to say a disagreement might affect love. This is not normal. It might happen, but it should not be thought of as ok.
Even if he was violent multiple times against his father and family, which I'm not reading and I don't know why we might think that? I would still think love would be there, depending on the severity. Hurting other family members might destroy that love. But I don't know why we think this might have happened.
> led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999
Correction: He failed at attempting the anti-government march, not that the anti-government march failed. Maybe it was related to Seattle WTO, but the march he tried to create never actually happened. According to CBC https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/father-green...
The whole story is bizarre, but that tidbit was just bonkers. How the hell did they convince a judge that it was ok to go wreck this poor woman's house/yard in hope is digging up some hidden precious metals that her son evidently buried there? I'm speechless.
AOL used to go hard against spammers back in the day and during their peak years. 2005 fits into that for sure. This was during the time Time Warner was merged with them so they basically had huge team of lawyers and unlimited money bank roll to mess with people.
Being "that judge who wouldn't let them go after some nazi's ill gotten gains" is a great way to dead end your career if you're a Massachusetts judge. The Massachusetts judiciary is very politically minded. Other states are different.
I thought this was going to be Adam Guerbuez, another neo-nazi candadian "spam king" that Facebook bankrupted in Canada a few years ago. That's not all, he also murdered someone outside of a bar in 2000, and is responsible for those old "bum fight" videos from back in the day. Now he's a BTC scammer, of all things.
I could understand why a lot of people would want to do something like that to him, he seemed like a real shitbag, but it does make you wonder just who he pissed off bad enough for them to track him down and brutally murder him like that.
I remember back when they first found the body, there was some worry there was a random killer in the area. The squamish highway has a pretty bad reputation for murders as it is. But, this seems like something premeditated.
Hwy 99 has a reputation for murder? Are you sure you're not thinking of Hwy 16 between Prince Rupert and Prince George, the so-called Highway of Tears?
To be fair, there's only a few highways in BC and if you're going in one general direction, It's all one big road that kind of connects. We've got few very long roads that stretch out north and east from the coast, that work their way around the communities of BC.
BC's highways and roads remind me of tree roots all leading from Vancouver or the border.
Is there evidence he actually cared about the neo-nazi bit, and it wasn't just another sham identity? The guy sounds absolutely amoral, and neo-nazis seem like they'd be easy marks.
At the danger of going even more off-topic, 'nazism' is a fairly clearly defined far-right ideology. If you are a scam artist preferring to hang out with nazis because they are easy to manipulate, you are pretty scummy, but not automatically a neo-nazi.
When you are leading anti-government march, like actually leading, can we finally admit that you might have something to do with group?
But, if you sport nazi t-shirt while you are hanging out with nazis, if you are confirming their convictions to them and if you talk to undecided/doubting people, you are nazi regardless of what you believe deep down.
> When you are leading anti-government march, like actually leading
Sure, if he did actually lead anti-government marches, we could admit that he did lead anti-government marches. But since he didn't, we shouldn't admit to something that never happened.
I'm not surprised that any of these fringe identities would be lucrative for a scam artist, but where is the line on identity if you can take it off and put on something else with such apartment ease?
If nothing else I really feel for his father (mentioned in the article), who despite everything seems to have deeply cared for his son.
I've actually met this guy in the past, after he moved to BC and reinvented himself. His provided name of "Jesse James" was obviously fake and he was clearly sketchy (he claimed to have a PhD in physics, was the CEO of some AI-related startup, and various other outlandish things, and all that within the first ten minutes of speaking with him) but he seemed friendly enough.
The news of his murder was a pretty big shock locally. Everyone is talking about his youthful neo-Nazi fling but to me the most amazing part of this story is his past as a spammer. I read the book Spam Kings way back when and I clearly remember everyone hating these guys. Then fifteen years later or something, I'm chatting with one of those same guys at some local crag without knowing it. I know it's a cliche, but life is strange.
In hindsight, do you think he was just wearing the identity of a rock climber or do you think he just happened to enjoy climbing? Was he competent? Psyched? I vaguely remember his name, but 2017 was a heads-down work year for me when I didn't climb much—and didn't visit Squamish at all, unfortunately.
He was genuinely psyched on climbing for sure. As for "competent", I mean, he got up stuff but I'd say he was basically a 5.10 climber. He bragged about climbing everything in floppy Mythos and got really worked up about "unnecessary" bolts, so that might tell you what kind of climber he was.
What I mainly remember is that he sort of spewed info about how great he was with ten minutes of meeting him. He clearly had a personality disorder of some sort but I can't really say what it was.
Hmm, I was getting a 403 error trying to access this page, apparently because I was using Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1/WARP service on iOS. When I switched to 1.1.1.1 DNS only, the problem went away. Does Krebs block visitors who appear to be using VPNs?
Reminds me of the movie The Believer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Believer_(film) but in that case the Jewish neo-nazi wasn't a spam king, and really he killed himself in a very round about way.
What is up with jews who become nazis? I remember some years ago there was this jewish kid that played both European nationalists and Australian Islamists. I think his name was Joshua Ryne Goldberg or something like that. He wrote for the dailystormer too... Tried to make both sides commit acts of terrorism.
He basically ran every controversial subreddit at the time under his nick "European88".
I'm sometimes guilty of commenting without thoroughly reading the linked articles but in this case a simple glance at the photo in the article would've answered your question.
A critical point being "... and it was clearly not in jest" because Mel Brooks would be capable of being miscast, in this reading.
There is the concept of the "self-hating jew" which is a bit of a "thing" and it's often thrown by proponents of the state of Israel, and any Jew which questions the legitimacy of actions of the state in current times.
I'm not sure it's "clearly" sincere in this case, since he also had a persona as "a rock climber known to others in the area as a politically progressive vegan named Jesse James." Though I don't see any reason to give him the benefit of the doubt here either.
Odds are he was neither the Nazi of his Hawke persona nor the progressive vegan of his Jesse James persona but a psychopath who enjoyed messing with people and found claiming these identities useful to that end.
Yeah...this just sounds like recurrent antisocial behavior to me. No commitment to anyone or anything, not even his own family or sense of identity.
I doubt he "enjoyed" messing with others; more like he could not fathom what impact his actions had on them. Narcissists and cult leaders are the ones who "enjoy" messing with others-- and tend to stay in place until the bitter end.
This guy was probably just mentally ill but high-functioning. Despite his egregious behavior, I'd bet he never saw this coming.
You're not wrong, it's just that I don't think that any of this is incompatible with actually "being a Nazi", in either the classic Germany 1940s edition, or the modern "alt-right neo" 2020s USA edition. The grift is baked in, and always was.
My heart goes out to parents who may disagree with their children, but can't help but love them.