[originally published on January 26th, 2024, 11:08AM Eastern via Twitter, 11:09AM via Bluesky]

Vaughn Douglas Schlegel of North Brookfield MA, current candidate for his local Select Board, has been at various turns a member of Patriot Front, the Bay State Active Club, and the Pine Tree Party! A USPS employee, he’s a National Association of Letter Carriers union steward.

He also works for North Brookfield City Hall, in both the Planning Board and Finance Committee, and appears in meeting minutes for both starting in August 2023.

If you’re a MA resident who has concerns about your mail being handled by Vaughn Schlegel, a man involved in several varieties of fascist organizing, the North Brookfield Post Office can be reached at 508-867-8627.

Residents can also contact Richard DiCecca, National Business Agent for Region 14 of the National Association of Letter Carriers, at 617-363-9299, about recently known fascist Vaughn Schlegel.

Before we get into the weeds, I must thank the anonymous tipster & researcher who did most of the heavy lifting with this one. Once again, I am simply the composer of the missive, affirmer of its veracity, and the agent of its delivery.

With deliveries in mind, I’ve also been asked to pass on a message to Schlegel: “YOU’VE GOT MAIL”

For those of us just joining our program, some definitions:

• • Patriot Front is a neo-fascist organization involved in various violent assaults, which spun off from neo-Nazi org Vanguard America in the wake of the violence against leftists and the murder of Heather Heyer at Unite the Right.
  • The Bay State Active Club (or “BSAC” for short) is one of many “active clubs,” a decentralized network of white power/neo-Nazi fight clubs closely tied to the militantly racist Rise Above Movement, Patriot Front, and the neo-Nazi Hammerskins.
  • The Pine Tree Party is an eco-fascist group founded by ex-Breitbart contributor & accelerationist author Mike Mahoney a/k/a “Mike Ma.” Mahoney is a guy who wrote about his fantasies of murdering random civilians at a nightclub and, somehow, made it inane.

Patriot Front spent time in Washington DC and New York City last week. Among them was a cadre of New-England-local Network 7 members, including lifers Brian Harwood and Mark Hayden.

Hayden appears to be the founder of the Bay State Active Club. I went over his history in fascist organizing not long ago, and will be revising his dossier with this ID release.

Schlegel and Hayden appear to be workout buddies, and their gym selfies compose a good amount of BSAC’s propaganda. Schlegel (marked elsewhere as “Secret Jackass No. 1”) dual-carded with Patriot Front, like many local members.

Schlegel likely appeared in Bay State Active Club propaganda materials taken out of Templeton MA in March 2023, which also appeared on Patriot Front channels the next month.

Posts from the Bay State Active Club and Patriot Front Telegram channels, depicting who are likely to be Schlegel and Harwood vandalizing a stone wall with Patriot Front graffiti in Templeton MA, March 2023.

He also likely joined members of the Pine Tree Party for their standout alongside Patriot Front, opposite SatanCon in Boston MA, during April 2023.

The discovery of Schlegel’s membership in Patriot Front is anticlimactic as all purgatory. One day, before or during March 2023, Patriot Front NW7 and Bay State Active Club member Sal Munafo, a/k/a “Phillip MA,” registered a new Facebook account. Munafo didn’t restrict the privacy settings very hard! Two of his earliest friends on it were Catey Hayden (Mark Hayden’s wife) and Schlegel.

Screenshots of Sal Munafo’s Facebook profile. One depicts his banner image, a photograph of Buzzards Bay MA. The other depicts his friends list, which includes Schlegel and Catey Hayden, Mark Haydene’s wife.

Schlegel made some angry posts in Facebook group “North Brookfield Uncensored” about a local “Small Town Pride” event. He’s since deleted them, likely with his attempts toward low-level political office in mind.

Screenshots of Schlegel’s posts to the “North Brookfield Uncensored” Facebook group, circa 2023.

Browsing a Spencer MA sell/trade group, it seemed that Schlegel had helped Munafo offload a truck well before Munafo re-registered on Facebook. Schlegel also used Facebook Marketplace to sell an overshell frequently worn as uniform dress by members of Patriot Front.

Screenshots of a sampling of Schlegel’s posts to the “Spencer (MA) Sell And Trade” Facebook group, during 2022 and 2023.

Last year, I accused Mark Hayden of being an active participant in the assault of Charles Murrell III, during Patriot Front’s July ’22 march through Boston MA. Munafo and Catey Hayden, to no surprise, implicitly responded to my accusation by locking down their Facebook profiles for awhile. However, so did Schlegel! This was a mistake on his part; shame he wasn’t aware he was already being monitored at the time.

On ID confirmation: there’s a handful of apparel and accessories that recursively daisy-chain throughout photos of the various groups in which Schlegel’s participated. Note the style of wrist watch and wedding band combo on the left hand, the flask, the Titan Crew baseball hat, the Pit Vipers, the World Gym tank tops (I too purchase my favorite duds in several colors), preferred hat hair styling, and, well, his face.

Series of collages on comparison points between images of Schlegel’s mundane life and his white nationalist/neo-Nazi/ecofascist activism.

Very recently, though, Schlegel decided to throw his hat into the ring for the Vice Chair position on North Brookfield’s Select Board, per his letters to various local publications.

Cellphone photos of Schlegel’s letters to the Quabog Current and Spencer New Leader newspapers, January 2024.

Schlegel, who riffs on Patriot Front’s own color scheme in the banner for his campaign page, is simply the newest addition to a list of New-England-area fascists seeking low-level political office.

 

Cellphone photos of Schlegel’s letters to the Quabog Curren and Spencer New Leader newspapers, January 2024.

To the folks of North Brookfield MA, please don’t vote for this idiot! I’m pretty sure he has VERY specific ideas on what unity and preservation are, and I don’t think he’s being quite honest about being transparent either!

It is, as always, VITAL to resist the infiltration of fascists and neo-Nazis into our communties; this includes our local governments! Vaughn Schlegel of North Brookfield is by far not the first fascist to try, and he will not be the last. There is still much work to be done. ∴

Addendum

[originally published on January 30th, 2024, 12:41PM Eastern via Twitter, 12:43PM via Bluesky]

Many New England fascists and neo-Nazi-adjacent figures have had aspirations toward local-level politics in the wake of Trump’s 2016 electoral win, with Vaughn Schlegel simply being the latest. Time for a brief history lesson!

Winning local offices was the original message of Boston Free Speech co-organizer John Rasmussen, who spoke on his goals during the original Boston Free Speech rally back in 2017. Rasmussen was overshadowed by violent felon Kyle Chapman, who preached knocking heads instead of dismantling government from within. Rasmussen is now a member of the Select Board in Perham ME.

Boston Free Speech, after rebranding to Resist Marxism, has had its share of attempted politicians and political candidates: failures Samson Racioppi, John Hugo, and Rob Burke, the disgraced Sue Ianni, and likely others not important enough to remember.

More recently, there’s been Justin Whynot, a Maine-local Moms 4 Liberty candidate whose life seems to have exploded with allegations he’s the heroin-pushing abuser of his at-the-time underage romantic partner.

Even Chris Hood has vowed that members of NSC-131 will get on local politics, with the whole PINE thing (definitely not a way to keep doing neo-Nazi stuff while getting sued by various attorneys general, nope, absolutely operating in good faith them). I’ll note here that it’s becoming increasingly obvious that NSC-131 engages in armed vigilante patrols when it’s not whining in public about Hood’s pet causes (which includes nicotine product Zyn apparently as shown with Hood Molon-Labe-posting about it).

Screenshots of Telegram channels controlled by NSC-131, depicting members conducting armed vigilante patrols, October 2023 and January 2024.

Whether or not you’re out of New England, it’s important to pay attention to your local races. The local reactionary right, from astroturfed “Moms” to neo-Nazis, see it as a path to political power over their perceived enemies.

If you see something, say something, else someone may slip through. Vaughn Schlegel of North Brookfield MA hopefully won’t get anywhere near elected office.

Update #01

On May 6th, 2024, the town of North Brookfield elected Schlegel for a three-year term on the Select Board. He won by a margin of 30 votes.

Update #02

As of February 19th, 2025, Schlegel has resigned as a member of his Select Board. He served roughly nine months of a three-year term.

Update #03

[originally published on March 10th, 2025, 8:02PM Eastern via Bluesky]

I’ve been informed Vaughn Schlegel of North Brookfield MA has filed papers to run for Constable in his town. Constables in North Brookfield appear to be a lower-level office, operating at the behest of the Select Board.

Screenshots of documents regarding North Brookfield’s 2025 elections & government.

So, let’s talk about why I think Schlegel is a neo-Nazi.

As a reminder, Schlegel resigned from his position on the North Brookfield Select Board, citing pressure from his employer at the United States Postal Service, and a “serial harasser.”

I don’t know about this harasser. I do know that, after I IDed him, I was never subject to a cease-&-desist. Moreoever, virtually all of the social media posts upped by the Bay State Active Club, the specific ones I used to point to Schlegel as a member, disappeared. These two things in concert feel like a tacit admission that Schlegel knew he had been IDed positively, and without error, don’t they?

Indeed, Schlegel didn’t seem terribly bothered by my allegations that he was a fascist doing fascist street crew nonsense. In fact, he was casual enough about it that he went and confirmed two pieces of apparel that I was only able to link to him indirectly. (Thanks, Journogal!)

Two collages on comparison points between images of Schlegel’s mundane life and his white nationalist/neo-Nazi/ecofascist activism.

One interesting detail I noted on Schlegel’s Facebook profile (before he scrubbed it anyway) was the amount of timeline photos he had. I seem to recall that he had somewhere north of 250 images up there? Curiously, his visibility settings only let me view maybe 20, 30 tops. This is not unusual on social media. Some folks share copious amounts of personal photos with friends on social media, and justifiably don’t want strangers looking at it. It makes perfect sense from an infosec perspective.

Except I don’t think that’s the only infosec concern Schlegel had! See, one of the images he had on his Facebook wall, visible to anyone viewing it at the time, was this cover photo update.

A screenshot of an update on Schlegel’s Facebook wall, juxtaposed by the Pepe Silvia meme

Folks, let me TELL YOU ABOUT this image. If you haven’t been paying attention to extremely online neo-Nazis in the past decade, you are going to think I’m out of my mind!

The Kali Yuga is the final epoch in the Yuga Cycle of Hindu cosmology, before cataclysm resets the cycle from the beginning. Purported to be a time of corruption, conflict, and spiritual weakness in Hindu literature, we’re in the early midst of a Kali Yuga: 5 millennia down, 427 to go.

The Kali Yuga was a matter of discussion by fascist spiritualist & Nazi collaborator Savitri Devi. She claimed Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu, and that Hitler’s “sacrifices” (whether that means his own death or the Final Solution I don’t know) would bring about the end of the current Kali Yuga. Devi also believed that Jewish folks as a race induced the current Kali Yuga, as agents of evil. Devi’s synthesis of Hinduism and Nazism has led to the Kali Yuga becoming an enduring fixture in esoteric Nazism.

To the Internet’s best knowledge, the phrase “surf the Kali Yuga” first appeared in 2014 on 4chan, in reference to Gamergate, a harassment campaign against women in the video game industry under the canard of “ethics in gaming journalism.”

Eventually, there was merchandise. The phrase appeared on t-shirts sold by reactionary right-wingers in Europe and North America. One specific design, produced by Counter-Signal Memes circa 2016, featured a death’s head (specifically a Nazi SS totenkopf) wearing a pair of sunglasses.

Screenshots of archival webpages for the INeedMerch.com shop belonging to “Counter Signal Shirts,” available here and here

(For more background on the terribly shit “Counter-Signal Memes for Fashy Goys,” refer here.)

The Counter-Signal Memes shop was plugged at least once by American neo-Nazi blog & “media” company The Right Stuff, during November 2016, likely boosting the shop and its designs considerably among The Right Stuff’s audience of assholes and chumps.

For some additional indication of how thoroughly neo-Nazi The Right Stuff is, they pioneered the usage of the triple parentheses, a typographical dog-whistle meant to mark the names of Jewish folks and people who actively associate with Jewish folks.

Okay, DAMN, looping back, the specific image Schlegel posted hearkens to the Jolly Roger, and the fictional, larger-than-life cliché of naval pirates being real extra and keeping knives or cutlasses between their teeth as they board a ship.

The memetic progression between Schlegel’s “Surfing the Kali Yuga” meme, starting with images of naval totenkopfs not associated with Nazism, to the meme, to the “Ride The Wave Tee,” to images of the Nazi totenkopfs

The abstraction of memes to the point that they become unrecognizable to outsiders, while still maintaining their meaning to insiders who already have that knowledge, is common among modern online communities. It’s a coded language of its own, visual counterparts to dog-whistles and shibboleths.

For an example of HOW abstract we’re talking, here’s the excellent Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios discussing how a color scheme (green, purple, white) became a stealth joke about violent sexual assault among 4channers and Gamergaters.

This is how maddeningly modern fascists operate, think, and talk. Imagine a league of shitty edgelord Riddlers, unable to stop dropping clues about what they actually believe, endlessly telling on themselves, saved only by the obscurity of their language and symbols.

So yeah, I think Schlegel’s a crypto-fascist at best, and a terminally Internet-brained neo-Nazi at worse. How else can you explain him showing up at a Pine Tree Party protest? (Reminder that PTP founder Mike Mahoney wrote about himself fantasizing about shooting up a concert; it was boring.)

Should Schlegel win a seat as constable in 2025, I don’t think he can do a lot to hurt people. He COULD use it as an opportunity to locally normalize & legitimize his politics further. It’s up to the people of North Brookfield on whether or not he can re-attain any measure of power. ∴

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