Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: A Euphemistically-Named "The Global Minority Initiative" Actually Supports White Supremacist Inmates
March 16, 2021
Who supports white nationalists in prison? (Molly Haggerty)
By Bill Berkowitz
In the wake of the January 6th Capitol invasion, and as law enforcement agencies, and the federal government turn their attention to domestic terrorism, white nationalist and neo-Nazis may increasingly face prison time. The Global Minority Initiative (GMI) (formerly called the National Socialist Charitable Coalition), a prisoner relief fund set up to support pro-white prisoners, is gearing up for this eventuality.
GMI has an active presence on the far-right friendly social media platforms Gab and Telegram, where it provides profiles of prisoners in need of financial and emotional support. One recent post on both Gab and Telegram featured a photo of the Tiki torch-bearing crowd at the August 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The headline read: “Stand With The Men Who Stood For Us: Support Our Guys Behind The Wire.” “Our enemies mean to destroy and take the heart out of our men,” GMI posted on Telegram in November. “One way you can poke a stick in their eye and frustrate their plans is to encourage our brave men behind the wire.”
Numerous organizations have historically supported the incarcerated: The Action Committee for Women (1), All of Us or None (2), Adopt an Inmate (3), the Center on Wrongful Convictions (4), and others are geared toward providing support for incarcerated people and their families. (See below for more information on these groups.) However, these prisoner support groups have not had an explicit political agenda beyond insuring the rights of prisoners.
In late 2019, Matt Heimbach, a rising star in the neo-Nazi movement of the 2010s, and Matt Parrott, his stepfather-in-law, created a pro-white prisoner support group called the National Socialist Charitable Coalition, according to a recent report by The Daily Beast’s Mark Hay. In February 2020, the group’s name was changed to the less inflammatory Global Minority Initiative. The Initiative’s mission is to “deliver charitable support for a group of inmates who need it the most: pro-whites. ... to ensure that none of them become lost and alone in a profoundly inhumane system.” According to GMI, prisoners who need it the most are “white nationalists, who [GMI] believe[s] are one of America’s few truly oppressed communities,” Hay noted.
GMI’s “main focus is on encouraging people to donate to inmates’ commissary funds, write them letters, and send them gifts like books,” Hay wrote “Its site features a simple yet comprehensive guide on how to do so, and fields donations itself. On social media, the group posts a prisoner’s profile every day, urging people to reach out to them.”
According to Hay, GMI, which refused to speak with the Daily Beast, “claim[s] to be in contact with, dozens of people associated with neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen Division, arrested in association with major racist events like the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, or accused or convicted of individual hate-fueled crimes.”
Included on GMI’s list of prisoners worthy of support are convicted mass murderer Dylann Roof and alleged Tree of Life synagogue mass shooter Robert Bowers.” GMI posted on social media that it would put any one on their list whose “arrest, conviction, and/or sentencing [was] likely biased on account of [their] pro white sentiments.”
Mollie Saltskog, a Senior Intelligence Analyst with the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security think tank which has been monitoring the GMI, spoke to The Daily Beast about how the group “further[s] certain narratives that tend to radicalize people.” ““And that’s not what anyone wants to see come out of the arrests of white nationalists, especially at a moment like this, right after a major assault on American democracy,” Saltskog added.
Carla Hill, extremism researcher with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told The Daily Beast that she does “not know of another group or similar initiative that is currently active at the scale of the GMI.”
Whether GMI is simply another right-wing scheme to wrest money out of supporters of white nationalism or whether GMI actually provides support for white nationalist prisoners is thus far unclear, according to Anat Agron, an analyst with the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) who has been monitoring the group,
Sigrid and Élodie, prison reform activists and creators of prison pen pal program Wire of Hope, told The Daily Beast that while communication with the incarcerated will help with their reintegration, GMI would only “perpetuate habits and ideologies that got people in trouble in the first place.”
Legitimate Inmate Support Groups:
1. The Action Committee for Women (https://www.prisonactivist.org/resources/action-committee-women-prison) “advocates for the humane and compassionate treatment of all incarcerated women everywhere, and works for the release of all women who are unjustly imprisoned, including individual women prisoners who pose no danger to society.”
2. All of Us or None (https://www.facebook.com/AOUON/) “is a group of people with past convictions fighting against the discrimination that prisoners, former prisoners, people convicted of felonies, and our family members face inside and upon release.”
3. Adopt an Inmate (https://adoptaninmate.org) states: “Receiving mail from the outside world has a profound impact on an inmate’s daily life. A name called out at mail call signals to other inmates and staff that there is someone on the outside that cares for them – making them less vulnerable to violence and abuse.”
4. The Center on Wrongful Convictions (https://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvictions/
“is dedicated to identifying and rectifying wrongful convictions and other serious miscarriages of justice.”
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