OREGON COASTAL COMMUNITIES MENACED BY NEO-NAZI GDL MEMBER

In early June, residents of the tiny coastal town of Garibaldi, Oregon took notice of a strange van that appeared at the local RV park. The late-model Chevy Sport Van was impossible to miss: Plateless, its windows obscured by cardboard and blackout tint, and a message scrawled in black paint across its tan body that read, “APPROACH ME TO TALK ABOUT THE COVID AGENDA”.

Unsurprisingly, residents weren’t eager to approach this strange man in his stranger-danger van to engage him about his conspiratorial beliefs.

Locals didn’t immediately realize this man was known to them. His name is Matthew Dorminy, a longtime on-and-off local resident with a criminal record dating back more than two decades. Dorminy has a troubled past. Previous charges, the earliest dating back to when he was 17 and lived in Florida, include trespassing on school property, criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, burglary, prostitution and attempted first degree assault.

Locals sensed Dorminy’s arrival was a sign that there would soon be trouble in the area. In addition to the crudely written message that adorned the body of his van, two other messages were written across the back windows. One was advertising a website dedicated to Europa, the Last Battle, a neo-nazi propaganda film, and the other which simply read, “GOYIM DEFENSE LEAGUE”.

The antisemitic and conspiratorial messages written on the van, as well as the location in which it was first spotted, made it clear to some Garibaldi locals that the man with the van had come to visit David Allender, a Washington state native who arrived in the area just three months earlier and had spent the prior weeks terrorizing the town.

Like Dorminy, Allender has a history of troubling behavior and criminal cases, with each documented incident more outrageous than the last. Fraud, harassment, cyberstalking, firing off rounds at a family who drove onto his property, illegal possession of firearms, plowing up his neighbors’ driveways and denying them access to their own properties, threats to commit hate crimes, his home mysteriously burning down the day before his most recent sentencing hearing—the list goes on and on.

Clare, a Garibaldi resident who initially reached out to LCRW in mid-June, reported that Allender had recently been posting flyers in the area, inviting other bigots to contact him. For weeks he’d been trying to recruit local residents into a cult-like group based on what he refers to as the “5 Truths’’, a series of bigoted and conspiratorial beliefs he’s promoted online for years.

Clare says they believe this is likely how Dorminy initially came into contact with Allender. Though the two men don’t appear to be working together currently, this meeting seems to mark the beginning of an ongoing series of incidents that have quickly escalated.

Local residents initially began sharing information about run-ins they’d had with Dorminy, some of which involved targeted harassment and what they interpreted to be direct threats of violence toward them.

Then came the incessant flyering and stickering campaign—one that spans a 35-mile stretch of coast between Garibaldi and Pacific City. During that campaign, Dorminy distributed neo-Nazi and antisemitic propaganda—including two flyers that contained claims so outrageous that it kicked off a multi-agency investigation into whether or not the flyers constitute child pornography.

FALSE CLAIMS, REAL CHARGES

On July 13, the Facebook page for the city of Tillamook, Oregon posted a PSA from the local police chief asking residents to report all recent instances of flyers being affixed to car windshields. The announcement was in direct response to reports about the onslaught of antisemitic and neo-Nazi stickers and flyers residents were finding around town.

Aside from the flyering and stickering, some of the most disturbing reports came from Jewish residents who Dorminy repeatedly targeted and harassed. Shockingly, parents also reported Dorminy had directly approached and shared his antisemitic views with their children—some of whom were under ten years old. Some children got stickers directing them to the neo-Nazi film Dorminy was advertising on his van.

What finally forced the police department to publicly address the issue were reports from residents who had either found or directly received shockingly explicit flyers mischaracterizing a rare circumcision practice within some ultra-orthodox communities and falsely framing it as ritualized pedophilia.

Two versions of the flyer were circulated. One text-only flyer was lurid and hateful enough, but another had photos of the practice described in the above side-bar, luridly framed as acts of pedophilia. There is no child sexual abuse actually being committed in the images, but no Nazi ever let the truth get in the way of defaming Jewish people. Since the pictures and accompanying text on the flyers are designed to give the impression that there is, a multi-agency investigation was launched that (at least temporarily) put the neo-Nazis who produced and distributed the flyers into a legal gray area.

According to the Child Pornography Investigator with the Oregon DOJ that the Tillamook Police Department consulted with, the flyers don’t meet the statutory requirements to constitute a crime. An investigator with the DOJ hate crimes division and the Tillamook County District Attorney also concurred that the content of the flyers didn’t meet their requirements for prosecution.

That the police department even had to consult with special investigators to determine whether or not the flyers are considered child pornography makes one thing clear: the antisemitic messages being pushed by the flyers went as far as possible in an effort to maximize their damaging impact on the Jewish community while (so far) posing little to no personal or legal risk to the creators and distributors behind them.

GDL TELEGRAM: INSPIRING IRL ANTISEMITIC ACTIVISM

The flyers Dorminy has been seen plastering around at least three coastal Oregon towns all came from a single source: The Goyim Defense League.

This comes as no surprise considering the GDL was responsible for over 70 antisemitic propaganda incidents in 2021 alone.

GDL initially gained notoriety for bringing online trolling antics into the real world, live-streaming themselves driving around and harassing people. The group is a loose collective composed of a few main figureheads, including hate-parade enthusiast Robert Wilson (AKA: Aryan Bacon) and failed rapper-actor-comedian Jon Minadeo (AKA: “Handsome Truth”), and a relatively small but very devoted group of fans spread across the country.

The Goyim Defense Leage created a network of Telegram channels and chats that allow members to find and link up with one another and to share their acts of antisemitic “activism”. This “activism” includes banner drops, trolling to the point of harassment and, of course, distributing flyers.

The GDL provides members with a sort of one-stop-shop where they can download files of pre-designed flyers and graphics to either print at home or have mass-produced and shipped directly to them through third-party online printing services. This helps keep attention on GDL (which is really what attention-seekers like Wilson and Minadeo crave) by ensuring that the predominate antisemitic messages are their messages.

Dorminy is a very active member in at least one of the GDL’s Telegram chats. He’s posted over 1,300 messages, the contents of which show that he an avowed white supremacist who holds some particularly disturbing misogynistic, racist and antisemitic views.

Dorminy is also very religious. On his Facebook page, which appears to have been abandoned in 2016, he described himself as a Christian Fundamentalist. Since then, his religious beliefs have gone from extreme to extremist as he’s is now an adherent of Christian Identity, the white supremacist religious movement linked to terrorist groups like The Order.

He shares emails from a man he refers to as his “adoptive father” who he claims was sentenced to Walla Walla State Penitentiary at the age of 14 for torturing and hanging a Jewish man. Whether or not there is truth to that claim, it shows that Dorminy sees this level of extreme violence as a thing to be honored.

Dorminy enthusiastically posts “WP!!!!” (short for “white power”) and talks about his desire for genocide in crude, explicit terms and corresponds with people like Tucson-area neo-Nazi Sean Gugerty. The majority of Dorminy’s most recent posts in the Telegram chat all pertain to the antisemitic “activism” he has been engaged in over the past few weeks.

He’s posted videos of himself passing out flyers, “pilling” (slang for radicalizing) people on the street and emulating GDL’s Jon Minadeo by doing crude impressions of “The Happy Merchant” while out in public.

In one post, he states that he wants to protest outside of synagogues and the responses are telling. While nobody discouraged him from directly targeting Jewish places of worship (which could potentially lead to hate crime charges), they did make sure to remind him not to bring branded flyers and stickers as that could put the GDL itself at risk. Dorminy responded by saying that he would not bring anything that could be traced back to the group, then followed up by posting a screenshot of search results for “synagogues near me”.

Dorminy even posted about his recent arrest on July 11 for harassment, third-degree theft and third-degree criminal mischief. None of this was disclosed by the Tillamook Police Department when they posted their PSA two days later. They simply stated that he was cited once for placing a flyer under a car windshield.

Four days after Dorminy was arrested he posted a video to the GDL Telegram chat of the events leading up to and including his arrest. A day or two prior, he’d come onto the campus of Tillamook Community College, tearing up flyers and getting physical with a campus employee.

The footage shows Dorminy pacing outside of the college’s library while narrating the situation. He is locked out of the building and extra security measures are in place.

He begins questioning the head of security:

“Is there a reason the doors are locked?”

“Yeah, yeah. We’ve got a safety issue going with the school”. The security guard pauses briefly. “So it’s locked.”

“Oh. Wow. Okay.” Dorminy says dismissively. “Was it something frightening?”

There’s a marked upward inflection on the last word, as if he’s taking pleasure in knowing he’s the reason the building is locked down.

Throughout this interaction, Dorminy’s tone is derisive. He goes back and forth from disingenuous curiosity and surprise at the current situation to outright indignation when the security guard informs him that he is trespassing and that the police have been called. Dorminy then decides to leave the campus, but not before telling the security guard that he’s being immature, absurd and obtuse. He then continues to narrate the situation:

“He’s being a fucking [slur for Jewish people].”

Less than 10 seconds later, Dorminy is taken by genuine surprise when a voice comes seemingly out of nowhere and informs him that he’s under arrest.

“Under arrest?!”

“Yes, you’re under arrest.”

“Why? I didn’t do anything. What did I do?!”

It’s hard to tell if Dorminy’s sudden change in demeanor is genuine. He sounds panicked, but the screen has gone dark. Shortly before the video cuts off, Dorminy is asked if he is still on parole.

“Yes, sir.”

An anonymous source told LCRW that Dorminy has since been banned for a year from at least one public space where he repeatedly targeted and harassed Jewish members of the community. Dorminy was arrested again on July 20th “stemming from his actions…with four victims in front of the Pioneer Museum,” according to the city of Tillamook. He faces charges of second degree Disorderly Conduct and third degree Criminal Mischief (Vandalism). He was still in custody as of July 23rd and on the 25th, additional charges of Harassment, Offensive Physical Contact and Simple Assault were added. His bail was raised to $2,000 and $15,000. As of the 27th, he was released from custody after a pretrial hearing. LCRW will update with the conditions of his release when they become available.

If Dorminy’s Telegram comment in regards to his arrest is any indication, it doesn’t appear that he’s reconsidering his actions.

He thinks it’s hilarious.