Lucas Gage | |
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Born | Angelo John Gage May 18, 1984 |
Nationality | American Italian |
Known for | Antisemitic rhetoric and actions |
Children | 2 |
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Lucas Gage (born Angelo John Gage; May 18, 1984) is an Italian-American neo-Nazi, and former chairman of the National Youth Front, a white nationalist group. He has gained notoriety as an antisemitic influencer, especially on social media platforms, where he has repeatedly issued violent threats against Jewish people, expressing his intent to "remove" them from society. [1]
Lucas Gage was born in Italy on May 18, 1984, and moved to the United States at the age of two. He is the eldest of three siblings, with two younger sisters born in the U.S. Gage grew up in New Jersey in an Italian-American household that emphasized Catholicism. During his school years, Gage focused on socializing and making his peers laugh, earning a reputation as the class clown, which resulted in average academic performance. [2]
After witnessing the 9/11 attacks on television, Gage enlisted in the Marine Corps Delayed Entry Program at 17. He attended boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, and graduated as a United States Marine. He then completed Marine Combat Training and Engineer School, graduating as a Combat Engineer. Gage served with the 8th Engineer Support Battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and was deployed twice to Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 and Operation Enduring Freedom in 2004. He was honorably discharged as a corporal after four years of service. [3] [2]
After leaving the military, Gage struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), [3] which affected his personal relationships and led to depression. He dropped out of college twice and had difficulty maintaining employment. This led him to adopt a hedonistic lifestyle, engaging in self-destructive behaviors, including drugs. [2]
Gage later became an anti-war activist, building a following on social media with his controversial and politically incorrect rants. He also graduated from the Center for Positive Change and Hypnosis in New York. [2]
By 2012, Gage began posting on racist websites, promoting antisemitic narratives and the idea of "white genocide" from "massive uncontrolled 3rd world immigration to white countries only." [3] [4] According to Gage, his path to neo-Nazism began with listening to Alex Jones and later involved reading books by Kevin MacDonald and David Duke. [5] He became an active member of the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront and frequently appeared on their radio show to advocate for white nationalist ideologies. [6] [ non-primary source needed ]
He joined the National Youth Front (NYF), the youth wing of the neo-Nazi American Freedom Party (AFP), and ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in New Jersey with the AFP in 2014. [3] By January 2015, he had become the chairman of NYF, replacing Caleb Shumaker as chairman after Shumaker was forced out of the group because of his interracial marriage. [7] He resigned later that year after encountering several fundraising challenges and undergoing a name change due to a threatened lawsuit. [8]
On Twitter (later called X), according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Gage "posted repeatedly... about Holocaust denial and the dangers of 'Jewish supremacy,' promoting long-standing antisemitic tropes about Jews being deceitful and having a disproportionate amount of global power." [9]
In 2023, Gage rebranded himself as a pro-Palestine activist, amassing over a hundred thousand followers on social media for his strongly anti-Israel rhetoric during the 2023 Israel–Hamas conflict.[ citation needed ] The ADL identified him as one of five key far right influencers on X who had used the conflict to gain an audience, whose combined follower count increased by over 1070% in the period, Gage reaching over 286,000 in late 2023. [9]
Many of his new followers were Palestinians and Muslims[ citation needed ] who were not aware[ citation needed ] of Gage’s previous history of islamophobia, which include his 2018 remarks calling Muhammad a pedophile.
"Muhammad was a war-mongering, genocidal, pedophile, this is irrefutable and not even debatable." [10] [ non-primary source needed ]
In June 2024, according to the ADL, Gage attended a far-right rally in Detroit originally organised as the 2024 America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), organised by white supremacist activst Nick Fuentes, and also attended by Sulaiman Ahmed, an online disinformation influencer, and David Duke, formerly of the Ku Klux Klan. [9]
Gage has been banned from multiple social media platforms, including Twitter (now X) and YouTube, for hate speech and inciting violence. [11] On the platform X, Gage was known for posting racist and antisemitic content, leading to his account being banned in January 2021. He circumvented the ban and returned under the name Lucas Gage in late 2022. On March 6, 2023, Gage posted documents on X showing his legal name change from Angelo John Gage to Lucas Gage, which he filed on August 2, 2022, with the Superior Court of New Jersey in Ocean County. [3]
In October 2023, Gage quoted Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and suggested that Israel was undeserving of sympathy following the Hamas attacks on October 7th. He also claimed to have received $165 from X for high engagement on posts about Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in 1915. [3]
In December 2023, his X account was suspended again for three months due to violations of the platform's rules against inciting violence. [4] [3]
On July 7, 2024, X suspended him for six months after he posted a video of himself cutting through an Israeli flag with a sword, which was hanging from a child's swing set. After a brief struggle with the flag, during which the sword became entangled, Gage pointed the sword towards the camera and proclaimed, "Death to Jewish supremacy" and "Free Palestine." Gage responded with a lengthy rant on Rumble, accusing Jews of targeting him and denying any incitement to violence. Gage seems to have largely attributed the situation to one "ReportGOD GC", a far-right Twitter trolling group, in his Rumble discussion.[ citation needed ]
Following his 2024 social media ban, Gage accused David Lange of the blog IsraellyCool of various falsehoods. Gage alleged that Lange was involved in multiple swatting and prank incidents against him. These accusations were widely debunked, but Lange said they contributed to the ongoing harassment faced by Lange and others targeted by Gage's supporters. [12] [ better source needed ]
Gage's antisemitic rants have been widely circulated, and he has struggled to hide his increasingly extreme views. Prominent pro-Palestinian figures, such as Mohamed Hadid and Briahna Joy Gray, have shared some of his rants, drawing further attention to his hate speech. [13] [ unreliable source? ]
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