Christopher Cantwell

Christopher Charles Cantwell (born November 12, 1980), also known as the Crying Nazi, is an American white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and antisemitic conspiracy theorist.

He received his GED while serving his first jail sentence in 2000.

In 2012, Cantwell moved to Marlborough, New Hampshire, before returning to New York in 2013 and relocating to Keene, New Hampshire in 2014.

Cantwell has worked as a landscaper, an overnight technical support provider, and later started his own computer consulting business.

Cantwell writes essays on his personal blog about topics including white supremacy, alt-right politics, libertarianism, and the men's rights movement.

He has written for and republished essays about the men's rights movement to A Voice for Men, a men's rights and antifeminist website.

In 2013 and 2014, he wrote and republished his anti-police essays as a volunteer for Cop Block, a police accountability organization.

Meanwhile, in December 2013, Cantwell began what he originally called Some Garbage Podcast, disseminated through YouTube and elsewhere, and in April 2015 renamed it Radical Agenda, subtitled "a show about common sense extremism".

Cantwell co-hosted the anarcho-capitalist radio show Free Talk Live but was suspended in 2015 after tweeting a racial slur against an African American person who criticized him.

He later was removed from the position permanently.

A member of the broader alt-right movement, Cantwell earned attention during and immediately after his participation in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Cantwell was featured prominently in a Vice News Tonight documentary about the rally and its participants, in which he is shown threatening to kill protesters, wielding rifles and a handgun, and joining fellow antisemitic conspiracy theorists in marching with tiki torches, chanting "Jews will not replace us!"

Shortly after the rally, Cantwell published a video in which he wept while sharing that he had learned there was a warrant for his arrest.

The video went viral, with some observers noting the discrepancy between the emotional video and the tough persona Cantwell had projected in the Vice documentary.

He has since been widely referred to and ridiculed as "The Crying Nazi".

By calling compatriots who recorded the conversations and posted them on his blog, Cantwell continued to broadcast from jail while he was incarcerated in August–December 2017 on charges related to the Unite the Right rally.

On August 16, 2017, Facebook said it had shut down Cantwell's Facebook and Instagram profiles due to statements he made in connection with the Unite the Right rally.

The following day it was reported that Cantwell had been banned from online dating service OkCupid after a woman reported receiving a message from him after seeing him in the Vice News Tonight segment.

In a blog post published on August 17, 2017, Cantwell wrote, "I have been shut out of nearly every financial and communications system I once had available. PayPal, Venmo, Dwolla, and Stripe all disabled my accounts. I was shut out not only of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and MailChimp, but now even my online dating profiles at OkCupid, Match.com, and Tinder have all been disabled."

A December 2017 episode of the Radical Agenda podcast featured a conversation between Cantwell and Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, a white supremacist, Internet troll, and the webmaster of The Daily Stormer.

In July 2018, Cantwell was convicted after pleading guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault and battery for pepper spraying two people at the rally.

His younger brother has been involved in gang violence and was serving a prison sentence in 2019.

Cantwell attended Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, New York, but left school and did not graduate.

In January 2019, Cantwell created a more toned-down version of Radical Agenda called Outlaw Conservative.

On April 9, 2019, Cantwell published a blog post announcing that he had been "neglecting to deal with some serious personal problems for a very long time", and that he needed to "stop, avoid recording devices, and pull [himself] together."

Cantwell told the Southern Poverty Law Center that he had decided to step away from broadcasting because "Jews" had taken an "emotional toll" on him and that he needed to "[step] away from the microphone to avoid another 'Crying Nazi' moment".

Cantwell returned to broadcasting and writing by June of the same year.

After he was released from prison in December 2022, Cantwell created an online fundraiser on the GiveSendGo crowdfunding website, where he wrote that he was living in a halfway house and had been "left ...impoverished and exhausted" by his legal battles.

On March 18, 2019, the far-right social network Gab tweeted a statement that they had indefinitely banned an unnamed "controversial user" for making two "inflammatory political posts".

Cantwell posted on his blog that he believes he was the one who was banned, after he discovered his profile had been blanked and he was unable to log in, and it was later confirmed the banned user was Cantwell.

On September 28, 2020, Cantwell was found guilty on one felony count of transmitting extortionate communications and one felony count of threatening to injure property or reputation.

Cantwell was sentenced to three years and five months in prison on February 24, 2021.

The charges stemmed from Telegram messages Cantwell sent to a member of a rival neo-Nazi group, in which he threatened to rape the man's wife in front of his children if he did not give Cantwell information about the identity of another member of the group.

In 2021, Cantwell and others were found liable for civil conspiracy and racially motivated harassment or violence in Sines v. Kessler, a federal civil suit against organizers, promoters, and participants in the Unite the Right rally.

Cantwell grew up in Stony Brook, New York.

His father was an air traffic controller, IRS agent and the owner of a landscaping business.

His mother is a homemaker.

His maternal grandmother was opera singer Lillian Trotta, née Ventimiglia, who sang under the stage name Lillian Raymondi.

Cantwell has claimed his mother suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father during her childhood.

He has a younger brother as well as a half-brother and a half-sister, the latter two stemming from a previous relationship of his father.