Martin Christopher Rojas: Professional Racist

“I have a vested interest in keeping blacks (and any other hostile people unlike myself) out of power, for myself and my posterity.”

Martin Rojas (as “Nathan Doyle”) explains his campaigning for Brian Kemp in Georgia, 2018

Introduction

The pseudointellectual white nationalists involved with the American Renaissance (AmRen) website often carefully hide their true identities. Even among this set, Martin Christopher Rojas stands out both for his wariness about being identified and his wordiness in support of the cause. Using seven different pen names over eight years, Rojas spread racist propaganda far and wide. Hiding under the pen name of “Chris Roberts”, Rojas has been employed by the influential “race realist” American Renaissance (AmRen) website from July 2016 to October 2017, and again from November 2019 to present. Of the four employees currently listed on the white nationalist site, “Roberts”/Rojas is the only one who has not yet been publicly identified, a situation which this report now remedies. 

Rojas is responsible for over three hundred pieces on AmRen, mostly as “Chris Roberts” but also under other pseudonyms. His original writing has been featured on other far-Right, anti-immigrant, and white nationalist websites: Counter-Currents, Occidental Observer, VDare, and over a half dozen others. In total, he has published over five hundred pieces with his seven known pseudonyms. As “Linda Preston” writing for AmRen, Rojas advocated compartmentalizing personal information across different pen names to avoid being identified. Evidently, this strategy has failed. In a companion piece, “Martin Rojas’ Pen Names”, we discuss Rojas’ seven known pen names and how they trace back to him. 

At the heart of Rojas’ writing is a commitment to “Identitarian” white nationalism. While Rojas may pose as a sort of intellectual while writing under his pseudonyms, his propaganda serves as a mission statement for violent action. The same narratives promoted by Rojas in his writing for AmRen and other sites have been linked to massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas. The white nationalist movement requires ethnic cleansing to achieve its goals. The career propagandists who spread the movement’s lies are at least as dangerous as its organizers and foot soldiers. 

Here, we discuss Rojas’ background in Minneapolis; the start of his writing; his time in Beltway conservative politics; his travels to Chile and networking with the far-Right there; and his activities in Georgia. 

Background

Martin Rojas was born in 1992 to a US-born mother and a Chilean immigrant father, and grew up in a bilingual household in Minnesota. Rojas would later use his “Benjamin Villaroel” pen name to discuss “white Hispanic” topics as well as race in Chile. Rojas was unhappy in high school, and under his pen name “Chris Roberts” he later claimed that “public schools” helped turn him to racism. A profile of an “extra-institutional learning” book club founded by Rojas in the Twin Cities notes that he “once dropped out of high school for a period”. The article noted that Rojas had assigned his book club the white supremacist race war fantasy The Turner Diaries. However, at that time Rojas may not have been completely immersed in the white nationalist movement. Rojas graduated from Avalon School, a charter school in Saint Paul, in 2011.

Appearing on a podcast under his own name in 2019, Rojas stated that he “studied history at the University of Minnesota”. It is unclear when Rojas was at UMN. Rojas also studied at Shimer College, a “Great Books” college in Chicago—likely earlier, since one of Rojas’ articles suggests his “freshman year” was at Shimer. In April and August 2013, “Gilbert Cavanaugh” wrote bitterly about Shimer, although he did not provide the college’s name at the time. Another Rojas alias, “Albert Emory”, claimed to live in Chicago circa August 2013. The following month, yet another Rojas pen name—“Hubert Collins”—wrote that he was living in Minneapolis. From March to June 2014, Rojas as “Albert Emory” blogged for the paleoconservative Chronicles, with some blog posts discussing the inside-the-Beltway (metro Washington DC) political scene. A fourth Rojas alias, “Nathan Doyle”, announced in September 2014 that he had dropped out with “no intention of finishing my bachelor’s degree”. 

The first article by Rojas we have found is from December 2012, at the paleoconservative Taki’s Magazine. During 2013, Rojas contributed to white nationalist, anti-immigrant, and Alt-Right sites such as AlternativeRight.com, American Renaissance, Amerika, Occidental Observer and VDare. He was by then a committed member of the white nationalist movement, gravitating toward its pseudo-intellectual side. Some racist websites paid Rojas token amounts for his writing. Others received content for free.

Rojas’ travel to the 2013 H.L. Mencken Club conference, held at a hotel near the Baltimore-Washington International Airport over the first weekend of November, deepened his far-Right involvement and grew his contacts. Speakers at the 2013 gathering included Alt-Right leader Richard Spencer; paleoconservative and Spencer mentor Paul Gottfried; and John Derbyshire, a former National Review writer and anti-Black racist whose writing Rojas admires. Rojas later wrote about talking with some attendees about their memories of the late Sam Francis, a paleoconservative turned open white nationalist and a hero to Rojas. In a different article, Rojas mentioned chatting with racist and misogynist gender theorist F. Roger Devlin at the H.L. Mencken Club gathering. In October 2014, AmRen published a lengthy interview with Devlin by Rojas.

Rojas’ networking throughout 2013 meant that by the time he moved to metro DC, he likely already had Alt-Right contacts in the area.

Beltway Politics and the Leadership Institute

In 2014, Rojas wrote a dozen blog posts on the paleoconservative Chronicles website under the name “Albert Emory”. His author’s bio stated: “Albert Emory is a twenty-something hiding out in the Beltway.” We do not know what Rojas’ first job or internship was in metro DC, but his blog posts offer some clues. In the last of the Chronicles posts, published in June 2014, Rojas/“Emory” stated that he was part of the “overlapping circles of Conservatism Inc and Libertarianism Inc—or the ‘Kochtopus,’ if you will.” This refers to the network of right-wing and libertarian organizations funded by the Koch brothers. While seemingly doing an internship or working for pay in the Beltway libertarian world, Rojas continued to write for other far-Right sites. The first articles from Rojas’ widely-used “Hubert Collins” pseudonym date from this time. Rojas also knew the local Alt-Right scene: a March blog post mentioned that “a friend of mine who has been published on a few Dissident Right [another way of expressing ‘Alt-Right’] websites” invited him to a DC demonstration against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The protest was organized by the left-wing CodePink, and the white nationalists were discussing tagging along.

In July 2014, Rojas attended the Leadership Institute’s two-day “Youth Leadership School” in Arlington, Virginia on the recommendation of “a fellow Minnesotan and former Leadership Institute intern”. After finishing the two-day event, Rojas was invited to intern with the Leadership Institute (LI) starting Spring 2015. The Leadership Institute works to train conservative activists and its alumni include politicians such as Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell, plus other right-wing figures such as selectively edited video specialist James O’Keefe of Project Veritas. The Leadership Institute has a history of training and employing white nationalists. For example, Kevin DeAnna (“Gregory Hood”) who currently is employed at AmRen with Rojas, had earlier worked for Leadership Institute. Longtime AmRen employee Devin Saucier (“Henry Wolff”) passed through LI training as well.   

Before returning to metro DC for his Spring 2015 internship at LI, Rojas appears to have spent time in Chile during the second half of 2014. His international travel did not put a halt to his racist propaganda output for far-Right and white nationalist sites. One of Rojas’ announcements for the 2014 H.L. Mencken Club gathering referenced him being over four thousand miles away from the venue, and Rojas was fined for breaking Chilean residency laws at the end of December, perhaps for overstaying his permitted time in the country. When Rojas returned to metro DC for his Spring 2015 internship, he appears to have first stayed at LI’s Sacher Intern House in Arlington, Virginia. 

As “Hubert Collins”, Rojas wrote for AmRen about attending the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February. He suggested that the real reason for attending the annual event was to attend CPAC social events where he would subtly change perceptions of “dissidents”—meaning white nationalists in this context—and to “establish a good reputation for yourself among people whose opinions matter.” Rojas mentioned LI’s happy hours among his recommended CPAC events. He mulled the possibilities of “a job in Conservatism Inc. […] You could learn a lot about fund-raising, activism, lobbying, and how power is exercised in Washington”. “Collins”/Rojas also noted having “dissident” friends who were holding down jobs in the DC political world.

Rojas’ LI internship led to a job, with Rojas hired as a Donor Communications Coordinator for LI. In a 2015 “Special Movement Issue” of the Leadership Institute’s Building Leadership newsletter, Rojas contributed a brief article about his internship and his new position at LI. An accompanying photo caption states: “Using the skills he learned at LI’s Communications Workshop, Martin recorded a segment with the Institute for Humane Studies […] to promote their summer seminars.” The Institute of Humane Studies is a major Koch-funded libertarian organization that holds educational events and offers scholarships. The IHS video featuring Rojas has since been removed from their YouTube channel.

Rojas later described his Donor Communications Coordinator position at Leadership Institute as “a tepid job with Conservatism Inc.”. The job provided income as Rojas continued writing for the white power movement, and it kept him in the DC area at a time when the Alt-Right was starting to gain visibility and numbers. Through his work at LI, Rojas may have picked up some skills and cultivated some goodwill in broader rightwing circles. However, as a new employee at LI, he had limited impact at his workplace.

Rojas’ writing appeared in a few issues of LI’s eight-page Building Leadership newsletter while he worked there. For the Winter 2016 issue, Rojas co-authored a piece about the Leadership Institute’s field representative program, which was portrayed as “fight[ing] back against the leftist campus onslaught.” Rojas wrote half of the Spring 2016 newsletter, contributing two articles praising the work of LI’s CampusReform site, which publishes stories about alleged liberal or leftist excesses at universities. In one article, Rojas characterized the accusation of racism as “a common leftist attack”: a line that would fit in just as well on American Renaissance where he was also contributing. For the most part, though, Rojas’ newsletter contributions were the generic conservative content his employers expected. Rojas’ final newsletter appearance was a lightweight interview in the Summer 2016 issue with US Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who was leading the Freedom Caucus at the time.

Rojas’ employment at the Leadership Institute briefly coincided with that of Alex Witoslawski, a LI regional field coordinator who later provided private media trainings to the white nationalists of Identity Evropa. Witoslawski has also contributed to American Renaissance, publishing an article on the site in October 2017, shortly after Rojas ended his first period of employment there. Both Rojas and Witoslawski were listed on the Leadership Institute staff page in early 2016. 

American Renaissance

In July 2016, Rojas made the leap to full-time professional racism by leaving his job at LI and beginning work at American Renaissance as “Director of Special Projects”. Rojas first published on AmRen almost three years earlier as “Gilbert Cavanaugh” and had also appeared there using other pen names. Now he began his new job with a new persona: “Chris Roberts.” Rojas’ AmRen job required being the “point of contact for supporters and readers”, utilizing the skills Rojas had developed as a Donor Communications Coordinator for LI.

Apart from AmRen founder Jared Taylor, the Oakton, Virginia-based site had only one other employee at the time: Devin Saucier, who writes for AmRen under the pseudonym “Henry Wolff”. Before landing at AmRen, Saucier had founded the Vanderbilt chapter of “Youth for Western Civilization”—an organization that skirted white nationalism—and eventually became the Vice President of that national organization. Later, while working for Jared Taylor and AmRen, Saucier helped then-Breitbart correspondent and rightwing celebrity Milo Yiannopoulos to sanitize and promote the Alt-Right for a mainstream audience. Though it is unclear when the affiliation started, Saucier was also a member of the white nationalist Identity Evropa/American Identity Movement organization, which disbanded last year. 

Despite AmRen’s small size, it is one of the most influential and long-running white nationalist projects in North America, with its “race realist” website providing a pseudointellectual veneer to racism. AmRen’s annual conference is the year’s main event for the “suit-and-tie” portion of the racist movement. The conference often hosts representatives from overseas neofascist movements, facilitating deeper collaboration with their US counterparts.  

Rojas’ first piece for AmRen as “Chris Roberts” was “The Irreplaceable Gregory Hood”: reviewing collected essays by white nationalist Kevin DeAnna, who writes as “Gregory Hood” on white nationalist sites. Kevin DeAnna as “Hood” joined the AmRen staff in February 2018, between Rojas’ two stretches at AmRen. Writings by “Gregory Hood” on AmRen, however, go back to 2011. Now, as of 2021, Rojas, Saucier and DeAnna are all coworkers at AmRen. 

DeAnna is a former Leadership Institute field representative and founded Youth for Western Civilization while working for LI. He went on to write for the conservative WorldNetDaily and, as “James Kirkpatrick”, for the anti-immigrant VDare and the now-defunct Social Contract. One of Rojas’ jobs while away from AmRen was editing an anthology of “James Kirkpatrick” from the home of VDare boss Peter Brimelow.

Much of Rojas’ writing for AmRen as “Chris Roberts” is typical for the site: for example, articles on white “replacement” and portrayals of Black people as violent and criminal. Rojas’ writing sets itself apart, however, with its greater attention to leftist movements. For example, “Chris Roberts” contributed a piece on the “Anti-Anti-White Left” to AmRen in late 2016, arguing that class reductionist leftists who react against “identity politics” could ultimately help the white nationalist cause. The piece demonstrated a greater knowledge of leftist discourse and movements than is usual in white nationalist publications. Rojas even interviewed Benjamin Studebaker, an academic leftist with articles published in The Huffington Post and Current Affairs, in AmRen last year. For more detail on Martin Rojas’ writing, see our companion article about his pen names.

Trump

While employed by AmRen, Rojas took off time to canvass for Trump’s presidential campaign. A bio for Rojas at The American Conservative, where he published an article under his own name, noted: “Martin Rojas was a turf coordinator in Virginia during the 2016 election.” 

Rojas threw himself into the Trump campaign. In one of two articles he wrote for Counter-Currents about his time as a Trump “foot soldier”, “Hubert Collins”/Rojas quoted a letter he composed on the Friday before the election, addressed to his imaginary future white child. Fearing that he had not done enough to help Trump, Rojas explained the attraction of the Trump campaign, then apologized:

Mr. Trump promised me something I had thought out of reach. A President who might keep the rising tide of color at bay […]

I tried my hardest. I donated over and over again. I argued over and over again. Your mother and I lost friends because we supported him. She worried she might lose her job, or be denied a future job. She got terribly anxious and wanted me to make it all better, but all I could do was knock on more doors and donate more money.

The imagined mother appears to be a Beltway libertarian figure who lived with Rojas in Arlington, Virginia during this time. They are not presently in a relationship.

As well as door-to-door canvassing, Rojas encouraged his white supremacist associates to promote Jill Stein in liberal neighborhoods and to leftists online in the hope of splitting votes from Clinton, although this is unlikely to have made much difference. Rojas was elated when Trump won the election despite expectations. His enthusiasm was soon tempered as 2017 “went from hope to rage” for the white nationalist movement. However, even at his most critical, Rojas agreed with fellow AmRen writer “Robert Hampton” (current pen name for Scott Greer) that the alternatives to a second Trump term were “horrifying”.

Rojas’ interest in the Left and his campaigning for Trump may seem contradictory, but racism resolves this apparent contradiction. Rojas’ worldview centers an idealized white “Middle American” society portrayed as threatened from above by elites and from below by an underclass, which Rojas understands in racial terms. Despite Trump’s wealth, Trump’s performance of anti-elitism through his attacks on liberal norms was convincing enough for Rojas and many others. Meanwhile, Rojas views the Left as an adversary so long as it is anti-racist, but a potential ally if it breaks from or deemphasizes those commitments. This position not only misunderstands capitalism and class society, but by allowing racism to divide the multiracial working class, it is poisonous to any real working class movement.

Rojas’ Travels

Rojas began to burn out not long after August 2017’s disastrous “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville, Virginia. Looking back on 2017, “Roberts”/Rojas stated that he was “overwhelmed with disappointment” toward the end of the year and “needed a break.” He worked at AmRen through the end of September, then paused his writing while he returned to Minneapolis.

Before long, Rojas was writing for racist websites again. In a Counter-Currents essay in mid-October, “Hubert Collins” wrote about his hometown friends, who he portrayed as floundering or falling into self-destruction. While the piece expressed skepticism that “writing for White Nationalist websites” could “actually transform the world”, Rojas suggested that something like a white racist revolution was what his friends needed. Rojas recommitted himself to his movement, even making a fundraising appeal for AmRen as “Chris Roberts” by the end of the year.

In a November 2019 interview, “Chris Roberts” summarized how he spent his time before returning to AmRen:

What did I do while I was away? Many things. I traveled a great deal, both nationally and internationally, taught English abroad for a bit, and worked in real estate here in the US for nearly a year. Probably of most interest to American Renaissance readers was that I lived with the Brimelows [the family of Peter Brimelow, VDare publisher] for a short while, during which I put together the James Kirkpatrick [Kevin DeAnna] anthology Conservatism Inc., recently released by [far-Right publisher] Arktos — a project of which I am quite proud.

Rojas/“Roberts” wrote on VDare in May 2018 about being “currently hard at work” on a book project, presumably the Kevin DeAnna/“James Kirkpatrick” title. Martin Rojas’ name appears in internet records of residents at a Litchfield, Connecticut address for Peter Brimelow.

Earlier, Rojas spent some time in Georgia. A “Gilbert Cavanaugh” photo essay on AmRen included photos of the small community of Lakeland in southern Georgia, which he mentioned visiting in April. At some point after work on the DeAnna/“Kirkpatrick” anthology, Rojas may have made a return trip to Minneapolis, since a June 2018 post as “Gilbert Cavanaugh” on VDare discussed public libraries “in the Minneapolis ghetto” (the piece could also have been based on earlier materials).

Atlanta

Rojas was in Atlanta for at least part of 2018. When Rojas stated that he “worked in real estate [..] for nearly a year”, much of this was likely in Atlanta, where racist leader Sam Dickson and a network of his associates are active on the property market. 

Rojas’ address history provides several locations in Atlanta: 

Rojas registered to vote in Georgia in August 2018, although curiously he does not appear to have voted. He is listed on the rolls as “Martiin [sic] Rojas” at Michael Dominy’s address, although that location may have been provided when Rojas’ records were updated in July 2019. 

In articles as “Nathan Doyle” on VDare, Rojas wrote about canvassing in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. He explained his motivation for campaigning for white Republican Brian Kemp against Black Democratic candidate Stacy Abrams: “I know everything I need to know about what happens when blacks are in charge from Detroit, Haiti, South Africa, etc.” Rojas’ articles got noticed, and his pen name eventually received a mention in the New York Times. In turn, Kevin DeAnna/“Gregory Hood” responded to the NY Times on AmRen, using the incident for more racist propaganda. DeAnna did not mention his relationship with “Doyle”, who had been editing the “James Kirkpatrick”/DeAnna anthology earlier in the year.

Chile

Rojas arrived in Chile in January 2019 and began teaching at Dynamic English in Santiago the following month. Appearing on a July 2019 podcast for Dynamic English under his own name, Rojas stated that he had recently got his Chilean citizenship and was “now experimenting with being Chilean”. While Rojas announced his intention was to “stay [in Chile] for two or three years and sort of decide if I want to stay here permanently”, Rojas was back in the US by late 2019.

Although Rojas had written before about Chile using the name “Benjamin Villaroel”, his writing on this topic increased while he was living in the country. Rojas networked with Chilean Identitarians, his political counterparts in that country, and published an interview with two leaders of the National Identitarian Force/Fuerza Nacional-Identitaria on AmRen in August 2019. As “Benjamin Villaroel”, Rojas also appeared in the white nationalist Occidental Quarterly, a pseudo-academic print journal published by the Charles Martel Society, in its Winter 2019 issue, with an article about Chile. That article had earlier appeared in two segments on Occidental Observer. 

Due to Rojas’ new Chilean citizenship, he is well positioned to further build coalitions with the Chilean far-Right. However, Rojas now claims that teaching English long-term is not for him. After returning to the United States, he rejoined AmRen as an employee rather than a freelance contributor.

Back in the US

The end of 2019 saw Rojas back in Atlanta. The return of “Chris Roberts” to the AmRen staff was announced with an interview that November. The same month, “Roberts” tweeted a photo from Sam Dickson’s house and, as “Gilbert Cavanaugh”, included photos from the Buckhead area in a photo essay on “The Demographic Transformation of the South”. 

In February 2020, “Gilbert Cavanaugh” built an entire article around harassing a group of day laborers in Atlanta. Ironically enough, his lead-in—“Most Americans can drive by a Home Depot and spot Hispanic men loitering nearby”—could equally apply to himself. Only one of Rojas’ pen names, Villaroel, reflects his Spanish-language heritage, while the rest of his pen names, like Cavanaugh, are extremely not-Spanish sounding. In Rojas’ worldview, his white racial identity trumps his “Hispanic” identity, but his racist audience in the United States is not necessarily so discerning or charitable, a fact which no doubt contributed to Rojas’ fondness for Anglo-Irish pen names. Rojas represented himself as a journalist to these laborers, spoke to them in Spanish to gain their trust, received confidential information about their backgrounds, and then wrote an article begging ICE to “Detain and Deport These Men”.

Though the “Roberts” return interview on AmRen discussed real estate work as though it was a thing of the past, in February 2020 Martin Rojas appeared in Georgia business filings for Hamilton Avenue Holdings, LLC, a Sam Dickson company.

As mentioned earlier, Rojas’ address history includes a Northwest Atlanta home co-owned by Jared Alexander Huggins, a white nationalist and part of Dickson’s real estate network. The McCallie Boulevard house was purchased by Good Earth Properties—part of Sam Dickson’s property network—in February 2020, then sold on to Huggins and a relative a few months later. Any stay from Rojas would therefore have occurred over the last year.

Since his return to the US, Rojas steadily contributed to AmRen. When rebellion broke out in Minneapolis following the police murder of George Floyd, Rojas as “Cavanaugh” used his knowledge of the East Lake area to comment on events, predictably painting the uprising as the result of multiculturalism and Black stereotypes. However, Rojas relied on old photographs and his memory of the area and does not appear to have witnessed events firsthand. 

Interestingly, Rojas did not cover the Rayshard Brooks uprising in Atlanta that summer for AmRen, except in passing comments.

A recent Twitter comment from Rojas mentions speaking with Jared Taylor, suggesting that Rojas is now living closer to Taylor’s home and AmRen’s headquarters in Oakton, Virginia while he works for the site.

Conclusion

Martin Rojas has, through his various pseudonyms, been a constant presence on Alt-Right, white nationalist and anti-immigrant websites over the past eight years. On American Renaissance he has authored over 300 posts, with almost 250 under his “Chris Roberts” employee name. Rojas was already heavily active in white power circles while working for the conservative Leadership Institute in Washington, DC. 

Rojas has intermittently lived in Georgia and, according to articles under the name “Nathan Doyle”, even helped canvass for Brian Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial race. A Georgia business filing links Rojas to attorney and white power leader Sam Dickson’s network, which is active on the Atlanta property market. Rojas’ address history in Atlanta also shows him to be deeply connected to Dickson’s circles. Rojas may now be living closer to AmRen’s headquarters in Virginia.

Rojas also spends time in Chile, has secured Chilean citizenship, and writes about that country for white nationalist websites such as Occidental Observer and AmRen. Rojas has built ties to and actively promotes the “Identitarian” movement in Chile.

For more detail on the web of pseudonyms used by Rojas when writing for racist and far-Right websites, see our companion article here.

We are exposing Rojas because his propaganda has a body count. He has helped fuel white nationalist and “Identitarian” movements whose conspiracy theories of white replacement predictably lead to attacks and murder. While Rojas may claim that he is merely discussing ideas, these ideas get put into practice with massacres such as in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas. These are all the fruits of his movement’s narratives. Rojas will probably continue to spread his pompous racist propaganda, but at least he will no longer have the cover of anonymity. 

If you have further information on Rojas or his associates, please get in contact.

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