Nathan Damigo

Damigo grew up in San Jose, California, and was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps from 2004 to 2007.

In November 2007, Damigo robbed a La Mesa, California, taxicab driver at gunpoint, believing that the man was Iraqi.

Damigo was convicted of armed robbery and was incarcerated for a year in county jail and four years in state prison.

He said of the event that "it's something that I'm certainly not proud of," attributing his behavior to "major issues" after returning from Iraq.

In prison, Damigo began to read works by far-right figures, including David Duke.

He was also influenced by J. Philippe Rushton and Nicholas Wade.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Identity Evropa was one of several groups which contributed to the growth of white supremacism in the United States during the 2010s, with the organization being designated by it as an influential hate group during its four-year existence.

After being released from prison in 2014, Damigo led the National Youth Front, the youth wing of the American Freedom Party.

The group was classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti-Defamation League, with the SPLC reporting that it was founded by "racist Southern California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule."

The National Youth Front later disbanded.

Identity Evropa was an American neo-Nazi and white supremacist organization established in March 2016.

Damigo founded Identity Evropa in March 2016.

His activities with "racist organizations" has been disavowed by his father.

In the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally, the leadership position passed onto Elliot Kline, aka Eli Mosley.

The collapse was similarly seen in other alt-right groups, and was attributed to a widespread public backlash against white supremacist organizations that occurred after the 2017 Charlottesville rally.

The group participated in the planning for the October 19, 2017 speech by Richard B. Spencer, a white supremacist, at the University of Florida, where Mosley also spoke.

In addition to Spencer and Mosley, the speakers included Mike Enoch, a white nationalist blogger.

The event drew about 2,500 protesters, vastly outnumbering Spencer's supporters.

In March 2018, it was reported that the group was seeing steep declines in membership.

It was rebranded as the American Identity Movement in March 2019.

In March 2019, following a leak of the group's Discord messages published by the non-profit left-wing media collective Unicorn Riot, Patrick Casey, the group's leader, rebranded the group with the new name "American Identity Movement" with an Americana aesthetic, despite initially claiming they were unrelated organizations.

The organization's founder, Nathan Damigo, is a self-described member of the identitarian movement.

In March 2019, the non-profit left-wing media collective Unicorn Riot released more than 770,000 messages leaked from Discord channels related to the group.

The leaks had been published on the "Discord Leaks platform" established by Unicorn Riot.

Within the leaked chat logs, members of the groups are discovered to have laid out plans to "infiltrate" local Republican parties and win public offices, plans to influence local media to garner positive coverage, as well as plans for rebranding the group's racism and antisemitism with the "identitarian" label and innocuous-sounding slogans such as "Make America Beautiful Again".

The Southern Poverty Law Center commented that the group's rebrands "offers further cover to smuggle white nationalist views into mainstream politics", and that its attempts to influence media for spreading propaganda and recruiting were "often successful".

Shortly after the leak, Patrick Casey said that the group "has been retired" and announced the formation a new group, "American Identity Movement".

The SPLC commented that the new group will continue Identity Evropa's efforts at "quietly working to normalize their ideas within the Republican Party."

After the leak, Discord removed Identity Evropa chat channels from the platform.

The group switched to Slack, but was again removed shortly.

Zelle stated that they would investigate and remove associated accounts, after journalists informed the platform that Identity Evropa was using it to raise funds.

Legal documents filed to the Arizona Corporation Commission under the AIM front group "Foundation for American Society" was found to have used Identity Evropa's email address.

The leak of Identity Evropa's Discord messages led to journalists and antifascist activists exposing the identities of many of its members.

Following the leak, an investigation by HuffPost reported that seven Identity Evropa members were also currently serving in the U.S. armed forces and were actively disseminating Identity Evropa materials in their communities.

According to military spokespersons, several of them were being investigated by their military branches.

A Chesterfield County Police officer in Virginia who was working as a school resource officer at a local high school was also identified as a pledge coordinator for Identity Evropa.

In November 2020, the group disbanded.

Leaders and members of Identity Evropa, such as former leader Elliot Kline, praised Nazi Germany and pushed for what they described as the "Nazification of America".

The white supremacist slogan "You will not replace us" originated from the group.

In an attempt to boost its numbers, Identity Evropa allied itself with the broader alt-right and identitarian movements and the group targeted college campuses and students in particular by distributing slogans on fliers, posters, and stickers.