Between neo-Nazis and elected Republicans, Kelly Neidert is a bridge-builder

I was standing in line to buy lunch at a Tarrant County College cafeteria when I learned I had been doxxed.

It was a Thursday afternoon in early August. I'd spent the week attending and taking notes on the felony trial of an antifascist happening at the courthouse across the street, and by that point, I had developed a little routine. I would arrive around 8:15am, pay $12 to park in a surface lot a block from the Tim Curry Criminal Justice Center, and then make my way to the 6th floor courtroom. The bailiffs insisted that we turn our phones off before being allowed to enter. I usually forgot to turn mine back on until I was already in line to buy a just-okay burrito, a Coke, and a bag of chips that I inevitably saved to eat during the drive home.

It was a perfectly fine routine—although I was looking forward to it, and the trial, being over—until my phone started pinging with notifications of nasty, hate-filled messages from both overt and covert white supremacists.

I wasn't scared, but I was confused. I had barely been online that week, and when I was, my focus was on the trial. Why had I gotten the neo-Nazis' attention? And why now?

It took me a while to piece together what happened, mostly because I had to shut my phone back off for the conclusion of the trial, which ended later that evening in a "not guilty" verdict. By the time I was able to sift through the social media messages and find the source of the dox, I wasn't just getting hate from neo-Nazis; I was also being harassed by elected officials in Tarrant County.

And it was all because of Kelly Neidert.

Kelly Neidert's trail of destruction

It has taken Neidert, who is only 24, less than 5 years to catapult herself into a kind of Fox News notoriety, a feat she has accomplished while courting both powerful local Republicans and violent white supremacists. In the right-wing ecosystem of "suits and boots," Neidert excels at building bridges between some of the most and least respectable extremists—and leaving a trail of destruction in her wake.

In 2019, while attending the University of North Texas in Denton, Neidert relaunched the school's chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT). The club had previously been banned from campus in 2005. In her role as chair of the newly-reinstated YCT, Neidert set to work redesigning their model of attention-seeking stunts for the late Trump era. Confrontations were now the name of the game, and if Neidert couldn't orchestrate them in person, she used social media to bait and harass anyone on campus she saw as her enemy. This included the college Democrats, the campus LGBT+ alliance, pro-choice activists, students advocating for COVID protections, "antifa," and even undocumented students, who YCT felt were unfairly benefiting from in-state tuition.

Neidert seems to have realized quickly that, if they wanted confrontations, YCT didn't need to wait around for the college Democrats to call a protest. They could draw out their enemies by staging their own events on campus—the more controversial, the better. In October, 2021, she brought Lance Johnston, an influencer linked to Turning Point USA and Nick Fuentes's white nationalist "groyper" movement. Johnston and Neidert both associated themselves with Christian fascism during and after that event, which made Fox News headlines.

Interviewed by the Texas Tribune in April, 2022, Neidert claimed that she was just another conservative with mainstream views. But her connections to the groyper movement aligned her with avowed white nationalists who thought mainstream conservatives needed to be pushed farther right. At the same time, she was making connections all along the "suits and boots" spectrum—from political hopefuls like Jeff Younger to the unstable lawyer who briefly led the Proud Boys, Jason Lee Van Dyke.

And she had launched a series of doxxing and harassment campaigns that would result in three arrests, a slew of criminal charges, and one civil lawsuit, cost at least two people their jobs, and eventually put one of her enemies through a felony trial in Tarrant County—the trial where I was taking notes when she doxxed me.

The story isn't over yet, but this is my attempt to tell part of it.

Structure testing outrage

Aside from the tuition lawsuit, Neidert has never seemed that interested in directly working towards policy change. She really just wants to generate content.

Immigrants and Democrats made decent targets, but in her years at UNT, Neidert learned that nothing got her enemies and her allies more riled up than attacking queer and trans people and then calling anyone who objected "antifa." Bringing transphobic state House candidate Jeff Younger to UNT in March of 2022 was just the beginning. Not long after that event—which Neidert claimed ended with the cops hiding her in a broom closet while "antifa ran up and down the hallways"—she founded her own anti-trans organization. Under the moniker Protect Texas Kids, Neidert set to work structure testing her ability to generate outrage beyond the bubble of a college campus.

She tried holding signs outside a gender-affirming care clinic in Dallas. She tried linking up with Proud Boys and a PizzaGate conspiracy nut to speak against a Pride Month declaration in front of Frisco's city council, despite not being a resident of that city. She tried crashing church events for children. But nothing came close to the outrage she could stoke at UNT—nor the media attention she could farm—until she started calling for protests outside local drag shows.

Neidert helped organize a protest outside a drag brunch at Mr. Misster in Dallas on June 4, 2022. She was joined by existing allies, like the groypers, and new ones, like members of the Christian nationalist/Catholic fascist New Columbia Movement. The protest was later described as being "uniquely vicious," and it set the template for what was to come.

Around the same time, Neidert was building connections with local GOP power players. First there was Monty Bennett, the publisher of a right-wing propaganda blog masquerading as a news site called the Dallas Express. (Bennett, probably not coincidentally, had been harassing the same gender-affirming care clinic in Dallas since 2019.) Neidert had her first byline on the Dallas Express site in May of 2022. In addition to writing articles, she was (and still is) frequently quoted in other Express stories, especially those having to do with (anti-)LGBTQ issues. Then Neidert started speaking at events put on by True Texas Project, a rebranded Tea Party organization that was designated as an anti-governmental hate group in 2021 but still manages to book elected officials for events. Neidert made inroads with more mainstream Republicans, too, when she ran a booth for Protect Texas Kids at the 2022 Texas GOP convention.

And all that summer—while the Texas GOP was putting out its homophobic and transphobic platform, while Patriot Front was being arrested in Idaho for conspiracy to riot at a Pride parade, while Texas comptroller Glenn Hegar was vowing to investigate drag venues, and while Neidert herself was getting kicked off Twitter for saying that people who attend Pride should be "rounded up"—she kept calling for drag show protests.

Seasons of hate

Between the summer of 2022 and the spring of 2023, Neidert called for, participated in, and/or promoted at least a dozen separate protests outside of drag shows and other queer-friendly events, while continuing to bait her old enemies, "antifa." Along the way, she expanded her network of white nationalist and neo-Nazi allies:

• In Arlington, Roanoke, Katy, and at Tulips in Fort Worth, Neidert was joined by far-right YouTuber Tayler Hansen (whose other claim to fame is watching a protester die inside the Capitol on January 6).
• The Proud Boys were in Arlington, too, as well as Roanoke, Houston, and Plano.
• In Grand Prairie, Houston, Katy, and Pflugerville, neo-Nazis including the Aryan Freedom Network showed up bedecked in swastikas—in some instances appearing to converse directly with Neidert.
• Patriot Front joined Neidert in Katy, and she was spotted chatting with a PF member in Grand Prairie.
• The American Nationalist Initiative was on hand in Grand Prairie and at Buzz Brews in Dallas.
• The New Columbia Movement, who protested at Mr. Misster, also showed up in University Park, Grand Prairie, at Buzz Brews in Dallas, and at Fort Brewery in Fort Worth.

That latter event—the Fort Brewery drag brunch protest of April 23, 2023—will surely go down as Neidert's crowing achievement of this year-long harassment campaign. It was the first (and so far only) time the protests managed to provoke a reaction strong enough for the cops to start making arrests. That paved the way for Neidert's next harassment strategy, which is still playing out in the courtrooms of Tarrant County.

The Ballad of Fort Brewery

By the time April 23, 2023 rolled around, Kelly Neidert was telling reporters she had joined the New Columbia Movement after talking to them "extensively." She had also picked up another young ally: Carlos Turcios, then the vice president of UT Arlington's chapter of Turning Point USA, who has made headlines for his transphobic and antisemitic comments. In late 2021, Turcios ran a short-lived anti-trans organization that was linked to several other astroturfed campaigns in Dallas. Neidert helped Turcios bring Jeff Younger to UTA in November, 2022, and Turcios's fellow TPUSA members participated in at least one anti-drag protest alongside New Columbia Movement.

Turcios may have been the first to call for a protest at the Fort Brewery drag brunch, almost a month before the event. Other parts of the local far-right network picked up his call and his willful mischaracterization of the event as "family friendly," including Neidert's Protect Texas Kids and an anonymous Twitter account that asked the Tarrant County District Attorney to investigate an "antifa militia" who planned to counter-protest. The Dallas Express promoted the anti-drag protest, repeating the "family friendly" misinformation, and they sent a reporter/photographer to cover the story on April 23.

Three New Columbia Movement members showed up early that day, as did about 20 antifascists and drag defenders. A small squad of bike cops who were supposed to be protecting any "First Amendment activity" were already inside the brewery, eating pizza.

The stage was set. Homeland Security was watching everything from at least one camera they had installed on a telephone pole specifically for the protest. Most of the cops had on their body-worn cameras. The Dallas Express reporter roamed around with a camera on a stick, ready to capture all the action.

It didn't take long until the far-right extremists were getting great content.

Just before 1pm, while the cops were inside eating their pizza, protesters and counter-protesters got into an altercation that resulted in at least one New Columbia Movement member allegedly being pepper sprayed in the face.

Learning of this from the radio, the cops set their pizza aside and staged with their bikes in front of Fort Brewery. It took them almost 10 minutes to decide to approach the alleged pepper sprayer. Without using the words "arrest" or "detain," they chased after this person, converging and shoving both their suspect and another antifascist to the ground. Cops dogpiled both people and arrested them, while the Dallas Express reporter circled like a vulture just over their shoulders, capturing as much footage as he could. Five minutes after those arrests, a third antifascist was arrested while asking why someone was calling for a medic.

While the arrestees were being booked into the Tarrant County jail and having their mugshots taken, far-right extremists started circulating videos of the arrests and spurious claims about "violent Antifa members."

The next day, the Fort Worth Police Department published a 5-minute video of selective surveillance and body camera clips. The video ended with the arrestees' mugshots, full legal names, and ages. A coordinated harassment campaign, already underway, continued to spread. The governor of Texas reposted the FWPD's deceptively edited video. Far-right agitator Andy Ngo called the arrestees communists, terrorists, and extremists.

It had taken over a year for Neidert to replicate the "success" of her UNT events with groyper Lance Johnston and anti-trans politician Jeff Younger, but now she had surpassed those previous spectacles. She had news coverage galore, along with plenty of unflattering photos and videos of antifascists to circulate. Her enemies, who she had once attacked in paid advertisements on Facebook, had been arrested, unmasked, and hit with criminal charges.

Neidert's "suits and boots" strategy was working. Texas senator Bryan Hughes had just filed SB 12, which sought to classify all drag shows as "sexually explicit," and Kelly Neidert had been to the Texas Capitol to testify in support of the bill. Less than two weeks later after the arrests at Fort Brewery, with SB 12 winding its way through the legislature, Tarrant County Judge Tim O'Hare called on the Texas comptroller to investigate another drag venue, this time Tulips in Fort Worth, where Tayler Hansen had lied about a drag queen exposing herself.

And while the Tarrant County district attorney's office prepared cases against the Fort Brewery arrestees, Neidert started helping the New Columbia Movement fundraise for legal expenses. They were about to sue antifa.

In part two, another Pride month full of hate, the Tarrant County GOP's lawyer gets involved, and antifa conspiracy theories run amok. Subscribe so you don't miss it!

Update 8/31/2024: An earlier version of this story mistakenly asserted that Neidert had tabled at AFPAC. The claim has been removed.