By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
The neo-Nazi group, NSC-131, is a terrorist organization actively planning and carrying out a campaign of violence and intimidation primarily aimed at the LGBTQ community, according to a new report.
“These hate crime events are conspiracies, they’re not just crimes of opportunity. They are looking for conflict,” said Kristofer Goldsmith, founder of Task Force Butler, a group of U.S. Military veterans that investigates and tracks hate groups.
Task Force Butler recently released a 300-page report on NSC-13, which is based in New England and active throughout New Hampshire.
“NSC-131 remains a violent terrorist gang that primarily functions to plan, train, and obtain weapons for the explicit purpose of engaging in acts of violence and harassment against religious, racial, and ethnic minorities, the LGBTQIA+ community, and others deemed ‘enemies’ by NSC-131’s leader Christopher Hood of Newburyport, MA,” the report, dubbed Project Husky, states.
The Project Husky report lays out what Goldsmith says is evidence of NSC-131’s interstate conspiracies to engage in terror.
“We have enough information to put these guys away,” Goldsmith said.
New Hampshire Deputy Attorney General James Boffetti said the Department of Justice is in possession of the Project Husky report and reviewing the materials. He noted the state’s actions in bringing civil action against Hood and Leo Anthony Cullinan.
Hood and Cullinan are currently facing civil rights violation charges for allegedly taking part in a July demonstration during which NSC-131 members hung a banner off a Route 1 overpass in Portsmouth that read “Keep New England White.”
The Project Husky report, however, ties together several NSC-131 actions throughout New England starting in 2021 that Goldsmith says shows a terror campaign of escalating violence. Those instances include the 2021 threats made against former state Rep. Manny Espitia, D-Nashua, as well as Cullinan’s assault on a protester during a May, 2022 demonstration at Manchester’s Veterans Memorial Park.
Hood reportedly took part in the events leading up to the assault, which was recorded and posted on NSC-131’s social media pages.
The group is also behind dozens of other incidents, including confrontations at Drag Queen story hour-type events in Massachusetts and Rhode Island that led to violence, according to the report.
Members of the groups have faced little by the way legal consequences, partly because Goldsmith said they are not being taken seriously by authorities. That is a serious mistake, he said.
“The reason why NSC-131 looks and acts like they do, they are like what the Proud Boys were a few years ago. People thought (the Proud Boys) were a joke and then all of a sudden they’re involved in a (expletive) violent conspiracy to overthrow our democracy,” Goldsmith said.
The propaganda and rhetoric pushed out by NSC-131 is an example of stochastic terrorism, Goldsmith said. The group espouses hate toward vulnerable groups and minorities, and constantly challenges members to take some kind of action. Eventually, it will happen, he said.
“Their actions and their rhetoric inspire stuff like mass shootings,” Goldsmith said.
The fact that hate rhetoric inspires real life violence should not be news to anyone paying attention in New Hampshire. Keene’s Christopher Cantwell, the white supremacist personality known as the Crying Nazi, reportedly served as inspiration for Robert Bowers, the man who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
The Project Husky report is an effort by Tack Force Butler to end NSC-131’s ability to operate and perpetuate terror. Goldsmith said the aim is to see the group treated like the criminal gang that it is, and to have law enforcement crack down hard.
The Project Husky report states NSC-131 is not deterred when authorities fail to come at them with the full weight of the law.
“The organization is aware of the limitations of local and state level jurisdictions and is emboldened by law enforcement failing to treat NSC-131 as a violent, criminal street gang and racketeering organization.
For example, the state of New Hampshire has moved to hold NSC-131 accountable in civil proceedings for civil rights violations, but NSC-131 has been successful in using these proceedings to fundraise thousands of dollars in donations,” the report states.
Goldsmith said the civil action can do some good by forcing NSC-131 to devote resources to the trial, but the problem is going to get worse, and the violence more extreme, until the real threat gets taken seriously.
“We don’t need new laws for neo-Nazi’s, we just want to see the laws that have upheld our democracy for so long be applied against the neo-Nazis,” Goldsmith said.
