Heidi Beirich is a director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the
Montgomery, Alabama-based advocacy organization focussed on combating
racism and bigotry. Beirich oversees the group’s Hatewatch
blog and its print periodical, the
Intelligence Report,
which, each spring, publishes a comprehensive list of active hate
groups. In April, 2014, Beirich got an e-mail, not the first, from an
eighteen-year-old living in Tallahassee, Florida, named Jordan Jereb. He
was pestering her about his own group, which he called the Republic of
Florida. He included photos of his fellow white supremacists in action.
He wanted to know why Beirich wasn’t paying any attention to them.

“You always ignore me and the ROF!” Jereb wrote, addressing Beirich by
her first name. “You should be covering how extreme we are- I mean look
at all these awesome pics- There simply are not that many out there of
Militia’s that are this useful for your organization.” Jereb argued that
the S.P.L.C. and the R.O.F. needed one another. “I mean honestly, who we
‘Market’ our ideas to and who you market your ideas to are 2 totally
separate groups of people,” he wrote. “Can we just admit this is a
symbiotic relationship in which that you get soccer moms worried for
profit and I get teenagers involved in my political organization?” (The
S.P.L.C. is a nonprofit group.)

But the R.O.F. did not appear to be large or effective enough for
Beirich to worry about, despite Jereb’s marketing efforts. In October,
2013, the group’s YouTube channel had posted a four-minute video called
“Silent Pack – Republic of Florida Special Operations Unit.” Four young
white men in fatigues, helmets, and rebel-flag bandannas trudge down a
residential lane as a white-power tune plays. They pause before a pruned
hedge to pose with a “DON’T TREAD ON ME” flag. They hoist another flag
in front of a Circle K gas station. They peer dramatically into a
thicket of Spanish moss. No one seems to notice them. They stop to drink
water and praise their leader—“That’s one badass guy,” the cameraman
says—who is apparently elsewhere. As a reward for completing the march,
the cameraman continues, the foursome will revisit the Circle K. “I ask
that you keep it low-fat,” he tells the group, of the snacks its members will
buy there. “This is what the new world order fears,” he says. “People
like you. And people like me.”

“We try to avoid adding B.S. to our list,” Beirich told me on Friday.
“They looked more like a militia for a long time than a hate group.” The
Intelligence Report did run an article about Jereb in its Winter, 2014,
issue, published in November of that year. Beirich and one of her
colleagues agreed to meet with Jereb after his pestering e-mails. When
they arrived in Tallahassee at the appointed time, Jereb was in the
county jail, having been picked up on charges of trespassing at his old
high school. The article deemed the R.O.F. “a would-be militia made up
of kids barely old enough to buy
guns.”

Last Wednesday, in Parkland, Florida, more than four hundred miles from Jereb’s home base, in Tallahassee, a nineteen-year-old named
Nikolas Cruz allegedly killed at least seventeen people at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School, injuring at least a dozen more, with an
AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. The next day, the Anti-Defamation League reported that it had spoken with Jereb, and that he had confirmed that Cruz had trained
with the R.O.F. Someone at the A.D.L. had spotted a thread on the
notorious imageboard Web site 4chan, in which posters claimed that Cruz
had associated with the group. It would later become evident that the
purpose of the thread had been to fool members of the media. The idea
for it reportedly originated, earlier that afternoon, on a chat app for
gamers called
Discord,
which is popular with
neo-Nazis.

“Nikolas Cruz was a revolutionary member of the Republic of Florida,”
one post read, “who preached twisted and dark things like terrorism and
attacking innocent people.” Purported pictures of Cruz attending R.O.F.
gatherings also appeared. Jereb soon began receiving calls from
reporters who’d found the R.O.F.’s “hotline” number on its home page. “He
was part of our organization,” Jereb reportedly told the Daily Beast, about Cruz.
“He wasn’t particularly active in it, but at some point he came to
Tallahassee with I believe the Clearwater RoF. I know he didn’t live in
Clearwater, but I think that was the company he clicked up with.” ABC
News reported that three former schoolmates had said “that Cruz
was part of the group. They claimed he marched with the group frequently
and was often seen with Jereb.” These comments went well beyond what
even Jereb had boasted. The sources for the ABC News report appear to
have been some of the same online
trolls who
hatched the plan, on Discord, to trick the press. (ABC News declined
to comment on its reporting; on Friday evening, the story was removed
from its Web site.)

Inadvertently or otherwise, the trolls on 4chan were not entirely wrong:
on Friday, CNN reported that, in a private Instagram group
chat to which CNN had gained access, Cruz had frequently “talked about
killing Mexicans, keeping black people in chains and cutting their
neck.” The Daily Beast, in its story about Cruz’s alleged ties to the
R.O.F., also highlighted anti-Muslim slurs that Cruz posted on a
previously public Instagram account, and quoted actual former
classmates, on the record, who said that Cruz often made racist
comments.
It is not clear what role these beliefs may have played in the Parkland
shooting. But it is increasingly clear that Cruz’s supposed connection
to a tiny hate group in north Florida is almost certainly a fiction.

“You have to be skeptical, like we
are with international terrorists and terrorist groups,” Beirich told me on Friday by phone, as the
story of Cruz’s affiliation with the R.O.F. began to unwind. Until you have
proof, you really shouldn’t write about connections individuals may have
to hate groups. I think Jordan was cynically using this opportunity to
get himself in newspapers across the country.”

Unable to reach Jereb by phone after he’d ceased Thursday’s media blitz,
I sent an e-mail to R.O.F.’s e-mail address, which is posted on its Web site. I
asked Jereb how he’d managed to fool much of the media. Just before ten
o’clock on Friday night, I received a reply. “Technically,” the e-mail
read, “I was tricked too, I just played along once I realized ADL was
helping the 4chan trolls shill the story.” Early Saturday morning, I
got another message, which claimed that the media coverage had attracted
“new potential recruits. We may be able to double, Perhaps almost
tripple our numbers.” The message went on, “There is even a woman trying to join
us based on what she saw on TV. So I guess we have properly ‘exploited’
this tragedy, Or more accurately, Benefited from the medias exploitation
of it.”

Next Wednesday, a week after the Parkland shooting, the S.P.L.C. will
unveil its updated hate-group list. The Republic of Florida is on it.