NYT Busts Extremist Leader For Stolen Valor [VIDEO]

The New York Times reports:

As a reporter and video producer, I had been following Elliott Kline, a.k.a. Eli Mosley, for almost five months at this point. He played a key role in organizing the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer, was killed and about 20 others were wounded when a white nationalist drove his car through a crowd of counterprotesters.

Eli was in his mid-20s, from a middle-class suburban home, and he had led an unremarkable life, up until the Charlottesville rally launched him forward within the ranks of the loosely organized white-nationalist movement. He rose from a self-described “anonymous Twitter troll” to head of one of the largest groups in the so-called alt-right.

With me, he insisted that the media unfairly applies labels like white supremacist and neo-Nazi to members of the alt-right “to browbeat white people out of identity politics.” But in the podcasts, recorded less than a year ago, he and his friends were unabashedly racist and anti-Semitic. He also spun tales of being embedded with the Iraqi Army, of being on the lookout for Chechen snipers, and of killing “muds,” a racial slur for Arabs.

When I got paperwork back from the Army and the National Guard confirming that he had never deployed, I was not surprised. At the same time, I couldn’t believe he would lie so boldly, first to his fellow members of the alt-right and then to a Times reporter, on camera.

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