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Activist, attorney keeping an eye on AntifaWatch, a new ‘Wikipedia’ tracking left-wing radicals

BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Like some sort of gonzo mash-up of Wikipedia, Vice magazine and Breitbart News, a new Web site aims to “log and track Antifa and the Far Left.”

Along the way, the site, AntifaWatch.net, is also snarky, rude, crude and homophobic. A sort of catch-all, it casts a wide net, lumping together self-identified anti-fascists along with others on the left — from Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and David “Shaman” Ortiz, the party promoter who threw wild, late-night raves and boxing matches in Washington Square Park last summer, to local leaders of Black Lives Matter.

The site lists the name, state of residence and “approx. age” of each person, followed by “notes,” basically a short bio with highlights of the person’s protest history and arrest record. For some people’s entries, the only thing posted are arrest records.

There are, in fact, a lot of New Yorkers listed on the site, ranging from the likes of Williams and Ortiz, mentioned above, to socialist Councilmember Kristin Richardson Johnson, a Brooklyn math teacher fired for suggesting in an Instagram post that cars plow into a crowd of police as “reciprocity” and even an Arabic guy chucking eggs off a pedestrian bridge at Jews for Trump cars. All the individuals shown in this article live in New York, other than John Penley, who formerly lived there and who tipped off The Village Sun about AntifaWatch.

Penley, a transplanted East Village activist photographer and news junkie now living in Las Vegas, found out about AntifaWatch — and was surprised to find he was listed on it — a few weeks ago while doing his regular weekly search for his name on the Web.

A collage of John Penley protest and arrest photos on his new AntifaWatch page.
Alt-right members held a hate-spewing tiki torch march the night before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. (Photo by John Penley)
Antifa and neo-nazis clashing in Charlottesville in 2017. (Photo by John Penley)

“I’m happy they put me on there,” he declared. “I should be on there. The only thing I don’t like is they put in where I live.”

The site unsettlingly notes he resides in “an apartment in Vegas,” though does not give his exact address.

“I am a nonviolent Antifa activist and I use my photos to do my fighting,” Penley said, proudly.

“A lot of the people on the list are part of Occupy Wall Street,” he noted.

Chivona Newsome, “approx. age 36,” is also listed by AntifaWatch. According to the site, she is “a BLM leader and the sister of notorious BLM leader Hawk Newsome. She co-founded the New York City chapter of BLM with her brother. The siblings appear to have received their radical streak from their mother who was a Black Panther associate.”

AntifaWatch says it uses “arrest records, social media and other legal open resources” to compile its entries on individuals. Entries often have multiple photos of the subjects.

Penley’s entry reads:

First Name : John

Last Name : Penley

Approx. Age : 69

State : NV

Notes

John Rhodes Penley (DOB: 05/03/52) attended the Charlottesville Unite the Right counter-protest. He’s described as a former East Village (NYC) activist and anarcho photo-journalist. He was quoted in an interview as saying, “I got run over by a herd of f—ing Nazis,” he said, “and I got a big cut on my knee. And I got teargassed and pepper-sprayed a bit.” He did admit the violence was encouraged by Antifa members. He previously protested the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland. Penley grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, a hotbed of radicalism, but was a New York resident at the time of Unite the Right. He moved back to Asheville after the rally but his sister evicted him from the family house and he moved to an apartment in Vegas in 2020.

The longtime activist actually is impressed by the new site, in terms of the amount of work that’s clearly being put into it.

“They went to the trouble of putting all the pictures of us up,” he said. “It’s a great collage. I bet it’s funded by Steve Bannon or maybe Alex Jones. Maybe Nazis. It’s got to have some money behind it, it’s so professional. Someone collected all this information. No one on the left is doing any of this.”

AntifaWatch writes of Kyrk Freeman, “approx. age 22,” “He looks like a refugee from a really bad ’80s hair band but he’s a modern day rioter from Brooklyn. Freeman was arrested at a Queens riot over Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal in November 2021. He spray painted a disabled man’s SUV, making sure he covered the Blue Lives Matter bumper sticker. … He was previously arrested last September for vandalizing a subway station.”

At the same time, AntifaWatch is often sophomoric, making homophobic wisecracks about some activists, while playing fast and loose in terms of speculating if others might be gay based on scanty “evidence.”

In Penley’s case, in one of the photos AntifaWatch found of him being arrested he was wearing an ACT UP T-shirt, leading the site to insinuate that he might be gay.

Of John A. Watterberg, “approx. age 42,” AntifaWatch writes, “He’s a radical environmentalist who was convicted in 2007 for scaling the Chicago Board of Trade building to protest the destruction of the world’s rain forests. … He traveled to the Beijing Olympics in China with a group of environmentalists in 2008 and was arrested for protesting coal. His fellow commie travelers appear to have let him off easy. … Watterberg and his wife have been working to open a New Mexico style Mexican restaurant named Santa Fe BK in Brooklyn.”

“Penley was active in Occupy Wall Street in the early 2010s and probably in the AIDS movement in the ’80s,” the site says.

“It was an anti-nuclear weapons protest at the Savannah River site in South Carolina not a gay protest,” the activist explained to The Village Sun. “They just assume from that T-shirt. That’s the one that got me really pissed off. They’re homophobic. I just happened to be wearing an ACT UP T-shirt.”

Of Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, AntifaWatch writes, “He’s a Democratic city councilman in New York City and self-described Democratic Socialist who was arrested for blocking Fifth Avenue outside the Trump Tower during New York’s J20 riots but the charges seem to have been dismissed. He also participated in the George Floyd riots in NYC in May 2020. … He’s probably more BLM than hard-core Antifa.”

In addition, Penley, in the article that AntifaWatch quoted (which was written by this writer) about the Charlottesville clash, actually said that both sides — Antifa and the alt-right — came looking to rumble, though AntifaWatch says that Penley only said “the violence was encouraged by Antifa members.”

Although a champion of free speech, Norman Siegel, the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, called AntifaWatch “troubling.”

The AntifaWatch entry for Clare Grady, “approx. age 60,” says, “She’s a radical Roman Catholic pacifist and member of the St. Patrick’s Day Four as well as the Plowshares movement. … In 2003, Grady and three others defaced the military recruiting center in the Ithaca suburb of Lansing, New York by pouring their own blood on recruiting posters and the walls. … Grady also participated in 2018 in the King’s Bay Plowshares action [in] which the group trespassed at a nuclear submarine base in Georgia.”
“The Web site is troubling for a lot of reasons,” Siegel said, “but people have a First Amendment right to create something like this. But they need to be careful about the statements about individuals. If they knew it was inaccurate, it could create possible defamation claims.”

According to AntifaWatch, Glenn Cantave, “approx. age 28,” known as “Chain Man,” “attended the Charlottesville Unite the Right counter protest where he claimed to have been on the front lines. He’s best known for wearing chains at the riot, either to symbolize black ‘enslavement’ or because he was trying to hook up with a gay dude into bondage. … He later ran the New York City marathon wearing chains.”

Siegel said while he’s not a “First Amendment absolutist,” he feels people can use “the N word or the F word for L.G.B.T.,” though added, “I don’t advise it.”

“Speech has to be protected,” he asserted.

However, if statements on AntifaWatch about people can be shown to have caused a “loss or reputation,” then that potentially can be liable, he said, adding that, with Web sites and social media being involved, “things could be amplified.”

The AntifaWatch entry for Ryan Howe says that, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Howe, 27, “posted a message on his Facebook page with details on how to make a Molotov cocktail and how to use it against the police. Prosecutors say he also shared Antifa and anarchy messages and images online.”

Plus, the veteran civil-rights attorney added, “The real standard is not if you’re arrested. It’s if you’re convicted, and not even if you’re indicted. There are many arrests that turn out to be false arrests, especially when you’re talking about political activism.”

Andrew Hurley, “approx. age 41,” as described by AntifaWatch, “is the drummer for the extreme left-wing punk band Racetraitor which performed at the Antifa sponsored Black Flags Over Brooklyn music festival in 2019. … He’s a vegan who self-identifies as an anarcho-primitivist and believes that humans should live as they did 10,000 years ago (I don’t think Mesolithic humans had drum sets or amps!)” The site snarks, “Be sure and down-vote the band’s YT vid.”

In short, Siegel said, “The creators have a right to create this kind of site. But the creators, the workers have a responsbility to get it right.”

AntifaWatch, for its part, claims protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — just like Twitter and Facebook do — claiming that because its content is allegedly “user-generated,” it cannot be held liable simply for publishing what its contributors post.

Of David “Shaman” Ortiz, “approx. age 28,” seen at a Community Board 2 hearing about Washington Square Park last summer, above, the site says, “He’s the organizer and instigator of the politically charged weekend bacchanalias at Washington Square Park in Manhattan. … He may be more BLM than Antifa but the lawlessness he promotes makes it easier for Antifa to operation [sic] in New York City.”
Coincidentally, Penley is currently trying to get a page on Wikipedia about him published and has submitted it for review, but approval takes a while. In the meantime, though, he’d really like to see his AntifaWatch page disappear, along with the entire site.

Penley said that, on top of potentially defaming people, it’s even more concerning that AntifaWatch may be putting people’s lives at risk by publicizing where the individuals live.

“I seriously want to shut ’em down,” he said. “They put a target on my back.”

11 Comments

  1. John Penley John Penley May 17, 2022

    In the aftermath of the tragic mass shooting in Buffalo I am posting this to suggest that both the State and the Federal Government need to set up special hotlines to report possible white supremacist followers and others who people suspect may be planning an attack on the public and then the agencies would be required to investigate and take action if needed. The problem is that now the public is not sure who to call and, in many cases, even if they do call, a law enforcement agency their calls do not get followed up on.
    — John Penley

  2. John Penley John Penley May 8, 2022

    Now that I have had more time to think about who may be behind Antifa Watch website I seriously think it is TIM POOLE. Poole is a former OWS livestreamer who jumped on the MAGA bandwagon and made millions from You Tube views. I suspected a New Yorker was in on it and Poole was a New Yorker around Zuccotti Park every day who was also hip and media savvy enough to do this. Poole now lives on a million-dollar estate outside the state and owns a lot of guns, according to news reports. His ex-gf had to call the local cops to get her cat back from Poole when she left his estate. Poole also has a history with Antifa which could have inspired him to go after people.

  3. John Penley John Penley May 8, 2022

    One important point that Lincoln failed to make about the Wikipedia connection is that Antifa Watch is posting links to Wikipedia articles on people who have one in order to use the Wikipedia info to help people find us easier. I believe that for many reasons Antifa Watch violates Wikipedia policy and Wikipedia should stop them from using and posting the links to Wikipedia articles.

  4. John Penley John Penley May 8, 2022

    One of my friends asked me about the part about the shirt and said Why do you care if they said you are gay. I could care less about that. What I wanted to point out is that they go out of their way to do what Trumpers are doing to people all over the country, which is use homophobia to make people — if anyone actually looks at their site it is really clear why they did what they did — which is make Antifa more acceptable as targets for violence. Anyway, I wanted to clear this up since they focused on that shirt and lied because they want to use homophobia to make their followers more likely to do violence to us.

    • Jay Tubb Jay Tubb May 19, 2022

      I love that song “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” Like you, John, I was at Charlottesville, primarily as a witness and I’m glad I went. I had never heard of Antifa before then and because I posted about the event, they lumped me in with Antifa. I have no problem with being anti-fascist. I was glad to be part of the anti-Trump military parade organizing and I’m happy to be affiliated with the Veterans For Peace along with you and Al Glatnowski.

      • John Penley John Penley May 22, 2022

        Much love and respect to you, Jay.

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