The state of Massachusetts has hit the neo-Nazi group NSC-131 with a raft of charges including civil rights violations, trespass, and conspiracy. The 26-page, five-charge complaint is the most aggressive effort yet to blunt the belligerent actions of the hate group, which seeks to turn New England into a whites-only ethnostate.
The charges brought by state attorney general Andrea Joy Campbell are civil, not criminal. But they seek to block NSC-131 and top leaders from engaging in what the state calls “violent and unlawful conduct” — including campaigns to “disrupt and shut down” drag queen story hours, as well harassment of Boston-area hotels that temporarily house asylum seekers. The complaint also seeks significant financial penalties that could hobble the white supremacist organization.
“NSC-131 has engaged in a concerted campaign to target and terrorize people across Massachusetts and interfere with their rights,” the attorney general said Thursday, announcing the action. “Our complaint is the first step in holding this neo-Nazi group and its leaders accountable.” (NSC-131 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Many specifics from the attorney general’s complaint track with a 300-page dossier that the veteran-run, anti-fascist research group Task Force Butler developed as a roadmap for prosecutors earlier this year. “It’s clear that our research was used in this,” founder Kris Goldsmith tells Rolling Stone, with an air of triumph. “We fucking got these guys.”
The NSC-131 acronym stands for “Nationalist Social Club-Anti-Communist Action.” (The digits 1 and 3 map to the positions of A and C in the alphabet.) The Anti-Defamation League classifies NSC-131 as a neo-Nazi group that views itself “at war with a hostile, Jewish-controlled system that is deliberately plotting the extinction of the white race.”
These neo-Nazis intimidate the public by marching, masked, in dark clothing, chanting hateful slogans, sometimes holding up flares or hoisting banners with slogans like “INVADERS: GO HOME.” The marches frequently degenerate into scuffles with members of the public. Goldsmith calls NSC-131 “the most violent neo-Nazi organization operating in the country today.”
In addition to generating fear, the group also seeks to blackbill more-mainstream bigots from the MAGA movement, publishing materials that read, for example: “We remind our people that it is Nazism … to oppose Drag Queen Story Hour and Critical Race Theory.” The group also has a political arm, the People’s Initiative of New England, or PINE, which advocates for New England to separate from the United States to form a whites-only nation.
The Massachusetts complaint alleges that NSC-131 has violated the state’s civil rights act and public accommodations law. It also accuses NSC leaders Chris Hood and Liam McNeil of trespass, conspiracy, and public nuisance. The complaint decries NSC actions that “unlawfully target and disrupt LGBTQ+ events”; “unlawfully target immigrants based on race and national origin”; “unlawfully attack members of the public”; and “disrupt public peace and safety.”
Such exploits are hardly secret. NSC-131 even has a Telegram channel where it posts videos of its hateful, illicit acts. As described in the complaint, NSC social media posts indicate “its members carry dangerous weapons during patrols, including knives and telescoping riot batons.” Despite such evidence, group members have largely skirted successful criminal prosecution.
The attorney general’s complaint details numerous actions in which NSC-131 members disrupted drag story hours, including one in the city of Fall River, where “uniformed NSC members” in front of the library “displayed a banner that read ‘DRAG QUEENS ARE PEDOPHILES,’ and began loudly chanting ‘F*****ts’ and other antiLGBTQ+ slogans.”
More recently, the complaint alleges, NSC-131 members have stormed the parking lots of hotels where recently arrived asylum seekers and other immigrants have been offered temporary housing. The neo-Nazi group, the complaint alleges, has trespassed onto the property of such hotels, blasting the new arrivals as “INVADERS” and conspiratorially denouncing their presence in the country as part of a campaign of “WHITE REPLACEMENT.”
Goldsmith is enthusiastic that Massachusetts authorities have taken action against NSC-131, but he believes stronger legal remedies could be pursued. “We were encouraging them to go further,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Do a RICO investigation. They’ve got a pattern and practice of going after private businesses, these hotels, week after week, with the explicit intent to get these migrants out of the hotel.”
Nonetheless, Goldsmith is confident thatMassachusetts will be able to prove its case and secure injunctions against NSC-131’s favored tactics. “That means the next time that they do it, the punishment is much more severe,” he says. “And that’s when the consequences start to snowball.”