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Written by: SoCal Research Club and Sunlight Anti-Fascist Action.

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The Unite the Right participant known as #BlackBristlesUTR has been identified as Sean Spaulding, 33, of Carlsbad, CA.

The former biotechnologist-turned-wannabe holistic health practitioner has a long history of racist activism, a penchant for conspiracy theories and a criminal record that resulted in repeat arrests and a restraining order for stalking.

Despite being featured in cover photos for various news stories about the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, VA, including TIME, PBS, NPR and even Le Journal de Québec, Spaulding has gone unnamed and unshamed for nearly six years – and he’s continued to be involved with various racist, antisemitic and violent hate groups the entire time.

Welcome to the Sunlight, Sean Spaulding

Your exposure is long overdue.

Tracing Sean Spaulding’s history with hate groups was a blast from the alt-right past. What originally started as an effort to document Spaulding’s participation at Unite the Right evolved into unearthing not only his ongoing involvement and support of white supremacist causes, but it also further confirmed that so many of the familiar fashy faces from that era didn’t just fade into obscurity after half-a-decade.

The steady reemergence of known fascist “activists” and some of the groups of which they once belonged became very apparent in 2021 with the rise of “3.0 white nationalism” and the sudden, simultaneous appearance of “active clubs”. While the names and above ground tactics used by these groups have changed, the ideology and goals have not. Neither have many of the people involved.

Spaulding and others appeared to lay low for a brief period after their friends and former associates were indicted. But soon enough, they began to reappear under the banners of rebranded hate campaigns – sometimes literally, as was the case with Nick Taurus. Taurus, who Spaulding supported, is a wildly unpopular former CA congressional candidate who ran on an explicitly white nationalist platform and was notorious for the violence he and his dad regularly provoked at rallies and protests.

Spaulding is also a close compatriot of Culture War Criminal, the Orange County-based live-streaming neo-Nazi, People’s Convoy reject and co-founder of the Nationalist Network whose real name is Ryan Sanchez. 

But long before he started hanging with the SoCal groypers, Spaulding was actively involved in two other (now defunct) hate groups with Sanchez – Identity Evropa (IE) and Rise Above Movement, (RAM). The former mainly consisted of polo-shirt-and-khaki-clad college students posturing as the brains behind a “white-identitarian” movement, and the latter consisted of young men who had formed a white nationalist fight club and acted as the brawn during the Alt-Right era by carrying out violence at political rallies throughout California – and eventually across the country.

From SoCal to Charlottesville: Identity Evropa, Rise Above Movement and The Beach Goys

In August 2017, Sean Spaulding marched alongside the mob white supremacists and neo-Nazis who had descended upon Charlottesville, VA under the guise of “protecting free speech” and “Confederate statues”. He was among the group of angry white men who, the night before the rally, had carried tiki torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us!” before viciously attacking a small, unarmed group of counter protesters.

Spaulding had gone to Unite the Right with other members of Identity Evropa’s Southern California chapter, including Sean Michael Miner and Logan Piercy. At the time Piercy and Miner were exposed as members of IE, confirmation of their participation in Unite the Right hadn’t yet been made. Within days of Piercy being exposed, news broke that his involvement with a white nationalist group and participation in the racist rally had landed him under military investigation as he was an active duty Marine at the time. Miner’s involvement in UTR, however, has only recently been confirmed.

Footage from Unite the Right often shows Spaulding and his white nationalist fraternity brothers alongside members of RAM, including Robert Smithson, Mike Miselis and Thomas Gillen, as well as members of another Southern California-based group, The Beach Goys, which was co-founded by Eric Lyle Atwood, a UTR participant who was exposed last year.

There was a significant overlap between IE, RAM and the Beach Goys in California. Members of each group often participated in cross-group “activism” and appeared in one another’s propaganda. In the months leading up to UTR, they were also seen together at rallies and protests spanning from San Bernardino to Orange County to Berkeley.

Like so many other UTR participants, evidence of Sean Spaulding’s participation in the rally and confirmation of his identity was found in the gift that keeps on giving over half-a-decade later: the Discord leaks.

Spaulding was easily identified as one of the nearly 500 participants in the Charlottesville 2.0 planning Discord server, which was run by Florida-based member and organizer for Identity Evropa, Erica Joy Alduino. Discord chat leaks published by Unicorn Riot show that Spaulding didn’t even attempt to protect his identity on the platform. From mid-2017 through early-2019, as Discord User 1502 he went by a blatantly obvious username: “Sean”.

Spaulding’s very first post that appears in the chat leaks was a confirmation that he would be attending Unite the Right, and his final post in Charlottesville 2.0 planning server was made the day after the event in which he stated that his travel companions had already bailed by the time event organizers began desperately attempting to pull together a post-event press conference in a failed attempt at damage control.

As the resultant civil cases and recent criminal charges against UTR organizers and participants have shown, no amount of spinning the narrative could undo the damage and absolve the group of angry white supremacists of responsibility for the violence they unleashed that led to the death of Heather Heyer and injured DeAndre Harris, along with countless others.

Sean Spaulding: The “White Identitarian” Who Was Chased Out of Comic-Con

Just a month after the right failed to unite, Identity Evropa launched a new Discord server: Nice Respectable People Group, which Spaulding immediately joined. He was active in the main chat as well as the group’s other servers: MacGuyver – Skills & Academics, Literature Club and Fitness. Beyond the fact that he used his real name while participating in online chats for the racist hate group he was involved with, the bits of personal information he shared across the various other servers made it very easy to determine that “Sean” was Sean Spaulding.

“Sean” shared that he worked in the field of biotechnology and openly discussed having lab access. He shared his age (then 28) and upcoming birthday, which gave researchers an approximate DOB. He specifically mentions San Diego locals and primarily participated in “activism” in that area. Pictures shared in IE’s #activism_photos server and on the (now suspended) Twitter account were also helpful in confirming Spaulding’s identity.

Somehow, despite being featured in multiple photos alongside other members of the hate group he was involved with – and even having his face featured in the doxxes of fellow IE members like Alex Loupe and that of Courtney and Logan Piercy – Spaulding continued to go unnoticed, just as he had when he was featured in news stories after Unite the Right.

Perhaps Sean Spaulding’s uncanny ability to continue flying under the radar despite being so visibly active (and wearing a lot of the same clothing and accessories to various events) is a testament to just how truly unremarkable he is.

There was, however, a time when Spaulding briefly attracted attention – so much so that the Twitter account Nonentity Evropa posted multiple tweets dunking on Spaulding and other members of IE’s San Diego chapter and asking the public to help identify them after they showed up to Comic-Con to spread their fascist propaganda in July 2018. The group was run off by antifascist activists as they confronted the fascists while holding signs that read, “These Guys are Nazi Scum” and “Identity Evropa Are Pipsqueaks in Polos!”

The swift reaction of antifascists to shut the group down at Comic-Con stemmed from the fact that this stunt was just the latest in a long series of incidents in which members of IE targeted areas that were popular among college students. Though IE’s main targets were (by far) school campuses, Comic-Con was viewed as just another opportunity to distribute their white nationalist propaganda in an attempt to recruit college students.

Though Spaulding himself had been out of college since 2016, he repeatedly plastered two of his alma maters, Palomar College and Cal State University San Marcos, with IE propaganda. And despite being older than most of the local Identity Evropa members, he was extremely dedicated to the group. In September 2018, he tagged then IE leader Patrick Casey and wrote the following:

“@Reinhard Wolff IE is the best organization of it’s kind. I am more proud of my membership here than any other type of affiliation…”

Spaulding’s dedication to Identity Evropa went beyond heaping random praise on the group’s much younger leader and engaging in a lot of racist “activism”. He also attended IE’s “Leading Our People Forward” conference in March of 2018, and he very likely attended the group’s conference the following year – after IE “rebranded” as American Identity Movement for PR reasons (a move that fooled nobody). After an extended absence from Discord that spanned from November 2018 through February 2019, one of Spaulding’s final two messages in the Discord leaks was a confirmation that he would be attending the upcoming event.

It’s interesting that Sean Spaulding’s chat posts in the Discord leaks end in the exact same way they began: With a confirmation that he would be attending an event on behalf of his hate group.

From Fascist Fight Clubs to Nationalist Networks – and Back to Fascist Fight Clubs Again

It was during the peak of his involvement with Identity Evropa that evidence of Sean Spaulding’s direct involvement – beyond just an obvious association – with Rise Above Movement first emerged.

In March 2018, Spaulding began appearing in some of RAM’s training videos. The earliest instance of Spaulding appearing in RAM propaganda appears to be a Discord post made by the fascist fight club’s co-founder Robert Rundo in IE’s fitness server (which Spaulding was also active in).

While Spaulding was never one of the forward-facing members of RAM, and the extent of his relationship with the group in its early days is unclear, the duration of his involvement and support of its members is not in dispute. And though he’s barely noticeable (if present at all) in RAM’s more recognizable propaganda from their earlier days, he would have the opportunity to make up for that.

Sort of. (Keep reading.)

After laying low for a couple of years, Spaulding once again began rallying on behalf of far-right causes. In the summer of 2020, he staged a five-man “Free RAM” protest in support of 3 members of the white nationalist fighting crew he had previously rallied, marched and trained with.

The “protest” was held a year after Benjamin Daley, Michael Miselis, and Thomas Gillen were indicted, convicted and sentenced on conspiracy to riot charges for the violence they had prepared for and engaged in at rallies across California and at Unite the Right. Naturally, footage from the pathetic public display of support was used as part of a larger propaganda campaign launched by a group with direct ties to Robert Rundo. Additional footage from the campaign shows that known members and close associates of the violent, racist skinhead group the Hammerskins were also among the featured RAM supporters from Southern California, which is no surprise considering the documented history of overlap between the two groups.

In January 2022, after the self-victimized “political prisoners” were finally “free”, Sean Spaulding took up the lost cause of a new “martyr”: Ashli Babbitt.

It was during this period that Spaulding finally stopped flying under the radar.

When he began popping up in images and videos posted on Ryan Sanchez’s Culture War Criminal Telegram channel, local researchers (yours truly) took note of who they initially thought was a middle-aged dude tagging along with a group of much younger Gen Z groypers. Just like he had in the “Free RAM” footage, Spaulding was again seen holding one end of a large banner — which is why researchers initially referred to him as #CreepyUncleBookend.

Spaulding was once again marching and posing alongside a cadre of Southern California extremists. Some of his racist cohort were relative newcomers to the SoCal fascist scene, like Navy veteran and Capitol rioter Adam Smith. Others were some of Spaulding’s old associates from Identity Evropa and RAM, including Sanchez, Reilly Devore, a racist skinhead with a history of violence from San Diego and David Zsutty, a newly licensed attorney from Oceanside who was exposed as a member of Identity Evropa while he was still in law school.

Since then, Spaulding continued to hang out with Sanchez and Smith, as well as the other D-list politicos collectively known as the Nationalist Network. Members of this fascist group include Tomas Morales, a far-right propagandist with a comically oversized mustache from Southern California, Greyson Arnold, a full-time moral panic chaser and Kyle Clifton, a self-described “authoritarian Christian nationalist.” and vice president of the now defunct America First Union. Sanchez recently relocated to Arizona, where Arnold and Clifton both live.

In July 2022, Spaulding accompanied members of the Nationalist Network when they attended a conspiracy theory conference hosted by Project Veritas in Las Vegas.

The same month that Spaulding joined the Nationalist Network in Las Vegas, he also joined Rundo’s right-hand man, Grady Mayfield, and members of Patriot Front, SoCal Active Club (SCAC) and the Hammerskins from Southern California as part of a media campaign that preceded a White-Nationalist MMA Tournament the groups were secretly planning together along with Media2Rise, Rundo’s fascist propaganda outlet.

The theme of the promo propaganda was “RAM 2.0” and an attempt was made to present this new generation of Rundo acolytes as the second coming of RAM – though the end result of recreating some of RAM’s most recognizable propaganda just came off as a desperate attempt at flattery by imitation. It wasn’t until a month later, when news of the neo-Nazi MMA fight was broken, that the photos of the men pretending to read books and videos of them donning boxing gloves and swarming eachother like a hive of angry, racist bees made any sense (though it was still cringe).

Unfortunately for Spaulding, his on-and-off again training with RAM (the original and the low budget sequel) over the years wasn’t enough to prepare him when he stepped inside the ring and traded blows with another neo-Nazi in the “Birth of a New Frontier” fight.

[This video contains raw, completely unedited footage showing Sean Spaulding’s bout against a man who looks suspiciously similar to Sean Michael Miner exactly as it happened. Due to the toxic levels of testosterone displayed, viewer discretion is advised.]

It was recently discovered that Spaulding was one of the participants in the neo-Nazi MMA tournament, and it was very recently discovered that the man he was paired up with appears to be his former fascist fraternity brother Sean Miner.

Though their faces were blurred in the footage used in the post-event “documentary” put out by Media2Rise, there’s a split second where the chest tattoo of the man Spaulding is fighting is visible – and despite the low-resolution, the pattern is an exact match for Miner’s chest tattoo. The unique ink was immediately recognized from a photo that had been posted in the Nice Respectable People Discord chat in 2018 and was used to positively identify Miner a year later.

Spaulding doesn’t have any distinct tattoos, but he was still easily recognized as one of the fighters repping SoCal Active Club. Footage shows him in the group’s designated corner, jabbing at the air and conferring with other members of the group, including founder and leader Robert Wheldon and SCAC’s hate drone pilot Patrick Mushaney, as well as former member/half-assed leader Johnny Benitez, who suddenly (and very briefly) “retired” from public life as a Nazi after incessantly complaining about not being featured enough in both the post-event promo videos or the documentary. He now goes by “John” (or at least he did this morning).

During Spaulding’s bout, Ryan Sanchez was seen standing behind the ring, arms crossed and lacking his typical smug grin, as he watched his long-time buddy awkwardly punch and kick and flail about – and get his ass handed to him.

Schoolmate Stalker Turned Biochemist Turned Woo-Science Peddler – The Sad State of Sean Spaulding’s Career

It’s clear that all of the time Sean Spaulding spent training for street brawls with RAM and SoCal Active Club isn’t going to turn him into a professional fighter (or any type of fighter, if we’re being honest). But perhaps his years of yoga classes will help him in his new career as a holistic health consultant and YouTube Yoga instructor (but probably not, if we’re being honest).

As it turns out, Spaulding’s recent career shift isn’t the first time that plans for his future were derailed (even temporarily).

After graduating from Mission Hills High School in 2008, Spaulding went off to college at University of California, Santa Barbara. Records show that he was enrolled at UCSB from 2008-2010 before taking a two-year hiatus. He omits this information on his public resumés, and for good reason.

The gap in his education is very likely due to the fact that in March 2010, Spaulding had a restraining order issued against him after he was arrested twice in two days for trespassing and stalking.

Per the application for an emergency protective order that was filed by a Santa Barbara sheriff deputy, Spaulding was arrested after he had climbed onto a woman’s second story balcony and attempted to enter her home. He did this while he was out on bail after he had been arrested for doing the exact same thing the day before.

Court records from Santa Barbara, Santa Clara and San Diego counties (where the case was transferred in June 2011 and April 2012) show that Spaulding pleaded “no contest” to one count of trespassing and two counts of stalking, and was sentenced to three years of formal supervised probation.

In 2012, Spaulding re-enrolled in college, but this time he stayed close to home. After spending a year at Palomar College, he transferred to Cal State San Marcos and earned his bachelor’s degree in biotechnology in 2016. Post-degree, Spaulding bounced around from laboratory to laboratory until August 2022, when he was laid-off from his short stint as a Research Associate at Genalyte.

Despite reaching out to his LinkedIn contacts in an attempt to network with fellow scientists, it appears that Spaulding struggled to find employment in his chosen field of biotechnology research and development.

It’s unclear if his next move was out of a sense of desperation or a true desire for career autonomy, but Spaulding did what so many other well-educated, hard-core right-wing conspiracy theorists have done: He leveraged his credentials in a legitimate scientific field to boost his bonafides in the marketplace of pseudoscience – and with that, he started his own business.

HBObySean was registered as an anonymous LLC in Delaware in January 2023, but there’s no doubt that the brand belongs to Spaulding. In addition to using his Twitter account to over-confidentiality espouse hot takes, bad science and debunked conspiracy theories, he also uses it to promote his new business.

Taking another page out of the wannabe right-wing influencer playbook, Spaulding also engages in a little shameless self-promotion by making claims based on verifiable bullshit: Like the thread he posted 7 months after being “unexpectedly laid-off” that begins with:

“Confession:

I was a Scientist in the biotech industry. I had a crisis of conscious and couldn’t take the dirty money anymore

Each diagnostic product I helped to optimize provided no value or benefit whatsoever. The lack of truth and false narratives must come to light”

 

Out of “dirty money” and out of options, Spaulding started the second phase of his career when he launched his “holistic health consulting service”. His website lists “Mindset Coaching”, “Inner Child Discovery” and “Body Mind & Spirit Training”, though it’s really not clear what’s actually being offered to prospective clients. What is clear is that Spaulding has relied on exploitative business practices in an attempt to build up his clientele.

But perhaps we shouldn’t judge this budding entrepreneur too harshly – after all, starting a new business is hard work and Spaulding has been hard at work doing things like filming and narrating this painfully awkward and boring yoga video for his HBObySean YouTube Channel.

 

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