American Freedom Party Chairperson Publishes False Antifa Information

Published on Jan 23, 2014

Originally posted on 01/23/2014

In an attempt to respond to our most recent exposé of the white supremacist American Freedom Party (AFP), on January 18th AFP chairperson William D. Johnson posted several photos he claims were “uploaded from the cell phone used as the Portland Oregon Antifa Hotline.” He also published a street address in Illinois which he claimed to be related to the photos and our organization.
The pictures were taken from a random Flickr account that comes up after a simple internet search of our phone number. The account has nothing to do with our organization. It came up in a search because one of its images was photo number “9715337832”, the same number as our voicemail.

Along with a street address in Illinois which William D. Johnson encouraged his Nazi buddies to look into, Johnson also claimed that our organization is “located at the ‘Red and Black Cafe’” in Portland. (We are not quite sure what Johnson’s
logic was here, that we head back to Illinois in our private jet after our clandestine meetings at a public cafe in Portland?) This is not the first time the Red and Black has been targeted in retaliation for work done by RCA. The Red and Black Cafe is a lightning rod for fascists simply because it is an obvious, radical Left establishment. Clearly our opponents are very lazy researchers; focusing on a well-known, overtly political business is the best they can muster as far as intel goes. The Red and Black is a vital community space that we encourage people to support. It seems particularly important that people rally around them now as they have once again been zeroed in on by white supremacists.

Rose City Antifascists wish to stress how incredibly irresponsible it was for William D. Johnson to publish this information. There are clear ethical problems with publishing information without supporting evidence and confirmation. The white supremacist movement in the United States is willing and able to deploy extreme violence and murder against its perceived enemies. William D. Johnson
arbitrarily put people’s lives in danger in his ham-handed attempt at retaliation. William Daniel Johnson is an attorney practicing in Los Angeles, California. His behavior represents a breach of professional ethics, so we encourage people to report his activities to the California Bar Association .

Our organization was able to locate and contact the individual pictured to let him know that he is being erroneously tied to antifascist organizers and targeted by white supremacists. Rose City Antifa hopes that William D. Johnson and his white supremacist cronies will take down this man’s information and think twice before pulling a similarly haphazard stunt in the future.