Patrik Joseph Mathews.
Prosecutors said a Canadian neo-Nazi and his American co-defendant made clear that they wanted to massacre minorities and control women as part of a plot to instigate civil war. A U.S. judge has now sentenced them to both to prison.
The respective defendants Patrik Joseph Mathews, 29, and Brian Mark Lemley Jr., 35, got nine years behind bars. While the defense’s asked for 33 months of prison, the prosecution sought a 25-year punishment.
“Hoping for a civil war that would decimate racial and ethnic minorities and subjugate women, the defendants joined forces with each other and others, studied violence, tested their weapons skills, stockpiled munitions and supplies, and planned to kill on a large scale in pursuit of their goals,” prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum from Sept. 30.
Mathews is the explosives-trained, Canadian army reservist who fled that country after The Winnipeg Free Press outed him as a recruiter for the white supremacist network The Base and local police raided his Beausejour, Manitoba, home. He entered the United States undocumented, prosecutors said.
Lemley and another co-defendant, William Garfield Bilbrough IV, 21, picked Mathews up in southern Michigan. From there, Mathews and Lemley engaged in training and prepared for what they hoped would be a civil war. They worked on the means to accomplish this, collecting guns and ammunition, and they believed that a Jan. 20, 2020 pro-gun rally in Richmond, Virginia, would precipitate the collapse of the United States government, prosecutors said.
“Lemley, Mathews and others in The Base were assembling firearms and collecting thousands of rounds of ammunition with the intent to commit violence in furtherance of white nationalism and the downfall of the American state,” said United States Attorney Erek L. Barron. “Detecting, disrupting, and deterring terrorist threats continues to be a top priority of the Justice Department. The U.S. Attorney’s Office and our law enforcement partners will use all of the tools at our disposal to investigate and prosecute violent extremists.”
From The U.S. Department of Justice:
After the November 2019 state elections both chambers of the Virginia legislature and the Governor were controlled by elected representatives from the Democratic Party. The defendants believed that the Democrats intended to use their power to pass a variety of gun control and other legislation anathema to the white nationalist cause. The defendants believed that at the rally on January 20, they and other like-minded confederates would begin systematically murdering and destroying to force the capitulation and demise of the U.S. government. The evidence showed that the defendants began preparing for the Virginia violence weeks before the scheduled rally.
Mathews minced no words on how much he hated Black people, taking a Dec. 18, 2019 rant to genocidal heights, as clear from the sentencing memo. For example, he advocated hanging white women who had sexual relations with Black men.
“Now why do you have to kill them [Black people]?” he said in court documents. “Because they are a competing racial group. They will fuck your women. They will fuck the ugly and disadvantaged women in your communities that shouldn’t just be given off and you know brought up to have husbands. This brings me to another point. Do not allow race-mixing.”
He said white people started many race riots in the past, and he wanted to “bring that back.” Mathews also advocated killing Black people indiscriminately.
“We need to go back to the days of fucking decimating blacks and getting rid of them wherever they stand,” he wrote. “If you see a bunch of blacks sitting on some corner you fucking shoot them.”
As part of their plot, Mathews and Lemley talked about “disabling power lines, burning electricity transmission towers, and blocking rail lines,” prosecutors wrote. Lemley also made clear what he wanted to accomplish, prosecutors said.
“If we’re not ambushing feds, and we’ve got nothing better to do, we might as well go disable that infrastructure,” Lemley said, according to the sentencing memo. “And especially…if they are like holing up in Richmond, and they’re like ‘We’re gonna, we’re gonna hold Richmond.’ Well, we might as well fucking cut everything off around Richmond, and I’m – basically, fuck them, like en- entirely.”
Lemley had previously reasserted his status as an anti-Semite even when he discovered he was descended from a Jewish woman. From the sentencing memo, which featured a 2017 letter he wrote to the racist, separatist group The Northwest Front:
Its come to my attention there is a jew in my family tree. My great grandmother on my mother’s side was a pole with red hair and blue eyes last name greenberg. I decided to disclose this even though it may harm me. If i was to ever join the movement I’m sure it could be dug up somehow and i don’t want to carry around a secret like that. Ive read the nf [Northwest Front] constitution and the conflict is why im asking about this. I am very woke on the JQ [Jewish Question]. I’ve read mein kampf 3 times and am very aware of current and historical international jewry. I would like to dispute this jewyness in my bloodline or atleast prove that its been diluted enough for me to call myself a white european and be correct in doing so. So im going to attach photos in support of this claim. Im sure you guys are going to be laughing about this email together, but i have to get it off my chest.
Bilbrough has already been sentenced to five years in prison for helping pick up and transport Mathews, who was “an alien” under the law.
Mathews and Lemley had pleaded guilty in June to charges including transporting firearm and ammunition in interstate commerce with intent to commit a felony.
Judge Theodore Chuang dismissed the defense’s assertion that an undercover FBI baited them into making “imaginary plans.”
“The defense argues this was just talk,” Chuang said, according to The Winnipeg Free Press. “These were ideas. But when one listens to the tapes… it’s clear the defendants were serious, specific and calculating in the violence they intended to (commit).”
[Image via Royal Canadian Mounted Police]
