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The radicalization of James Reardon Jr.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Reporter Graig Graziosi had met and interviewed James Reardon Jr. on multiple occasions. Today, he discusses issues surrounding Reardon’s arrest Saturday.
When I asked James Reardon Jr. if people should be afraid of him during an interview in 2017, he told me no.
But he couldn’t say the same for the other members of Identity Evropa, a white nationalist organization – now called the American Identity Movement – whose flag he proudly flew.
When I saw Reardon’s mugshot next to a headline Sunday stating that he’d been arrested for making a threat against the Jewish Community Center, I was saddened, but not shocked.
I’d met Reardon before, even conducted a lengthy interview regarding his involvement in the Chartlottesville Unite the Right Rally in 2017. He told me he wanted a white ethnostate, and I asked him how that could be accomplished without violence if people of color were unwilling to leave.
He wasn’t sure.
I first met Reardon in 2016, before I worked at The Vindicator. I was a college student at the time making videos for Youngstown State University’s student newspaper, The Jambar.
A colleague and I attended the Canfield Fair that summer to produce a video documenting then-candidate Donald Trump’s visit. As is common at presidential campaign stops, we were corralled into a small pen with other press and left to wait for the candidate’s arrival.
As was expected, local Trump supporters turned out in droves to catch a glimpse of the candidate, and as a result our press area was squeezed by the now-president’s legion of fans. Before long, our roped off little patch of grass was filled with supporters.
By that point in the campaign, most of us in the press had already either experienced or heard stories of Trump’s tendency at rallies to invite his supporters to turn to the media platform – which is often raised above the crowd and positioned opposite whoever is speaking, for obvious reasons – and jeer at the assembled reporters and photographers.
With that freshly on our minds, a few of us were initially uneasy about being pressed on all sides by Trump supporters.
However, no one harassed us or gave us any reason to be afraid, and in fact, we had a few very enjoyable conversations with friendly people asking us questions about our jobs and our thoughts on the campaign.
One of those conversations was with a teenager named James.
I forget precisely what inspired this, but he asked if either of us watched anime. While I was mostly unfamiliar with the Japanese cartoons, my colleague wasn’t and the two had a short conversation that eventually branched off into what he, as a teenager, saw in Trump.
He was well-spoken for a kid his age and gave us a relatively standard response outlining his support - Trump was taking on the establishment, he was something new, he would be good for business and thus the economy.
He said nothing about ethnostates or shooting up Jewish community centers.
When Trump finally did show up, Reardon joined in with the thousands of other supporters in support that uncomfortably reached adoration.
I didn’t see Reardon again until 2017.
By then, Trump had won the election and was making a round of appearances across the country, including his first post-inauguration visit to Youngstown at the Covelli Centre.
I was working for The Vindicator at the time and was covering everything outside the event, which included protests and counter-rallies hosted by local Democrats.
I ran into Reardon near Federal Street, where he and a group of friends were picking battles with Trump critics while listening to a speech by then-Mahoning County Democratic Party chair Dave Betras.
Reardon was carrying a flag bearing the symbol of Identity Evropa. When he saw me in the crowd, he remembered who I was, and we struck up a conversation.
I was caught off guard because Reardon looked totally different. The dorky anime kid I spoke with at the fair had hit his growth spurt and was sporting an undercut, a favorite haircut of the alt-right thanks to its use by popular neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.
Also to my surprise, he was there to criticize Trump.
Reardon’s gripe boiled down to Trump being unwilling to adopt more isolationist policies to protect the U.S.’s interests. In his mind, Trump wasn’t nationalist enough.
Sometime between 2015 and 2017, Reardon’s ideology evolved. It began with Trump and local Republicans – in 2016 his short-lived band, “The Yelling N-Words” posted photos of the teens endorsing Trump and wearing shirts supporting Don Manning’s 2016 run for Ohio Representative against then-State Rep. John Boccieri – and morphed into something darker.
By that point, as people who knew Reardon in high school tell me, he’d already earned the nickname “Little Hitler.”
Later that year, Reardon and I met at a restaurant to discuss his involvement in the Charlottesville, Va., “Unite the Right” rally where he marched alongside a coalition of conservatives, white nationalists and organized racists.
His mother messaged me ahead of the interview to tell me she didn’t want us to speak; he told me it was because ANTIFA members were attempting to use photos from the event to identify and expose participants publicly.
Reardon was happy to talk. I asked him if he was a Nazi, and he said no.
I then asked him why, of all guns he could own, did he choose to purchase an MP-40, a German sub-machine gun used extensively by the Nazis during World War II. The weapon can be seen in the video that landed him in jail.
Reardon just told me that he liked the gun, but we both knew why he picked that gun.
Reardon may be a history buff, I don’t know, but I did know his first encounter with that gun was the same as mine – playing World War II first-person shooter video games.
So I pointed it out – everyone knows the first gun the Nazi’s drop when you kill them in a video game is the MP-40, so why own one?
We spoke about his beliefs and his participation in Charlottesville, and ultimately we decided at The Vindicator not to run the interview because we didn’t want to give his views an additional platform that was playing out in our national coverage.
He’s not special. His views aren’t unique, and he’ll absolutely say that he made the post as a joke. Just like Justin Olsen.
To say that these two are just crazy may give people some comfort that they’re simply anomalies, but they aren’t. They’re a product of online radicalization.
And there are plenty more out there.
The larger danger is the belief there are just two young people in the Valley who hold views that express radical ideology.
Reardon is in the Mahoning County jail and set to appear in Struthers Municipal Court this morning. Judge Dominic Leone set Reardon’s bond at $250,000.