The Guardian has identified a trainee nurse and reported US air force reservist called Bailey Ross as the proprietor of a white nationalist publisher in South Dakota.
Ross was also a paid-up member of a white nationalist organization that marched at Charlottesville while enlisted in the United States Coast Guard.
Ross’s company, Agartha Publishing, is part of a wave of extremist publishers using mainstream e-commerce platforms such as Amazon to sell lavishly repackaged fascist and anti-communist books.
The Guardian contacted Bailey Ross via email and a person who lives at the same address via text message to ask for comment, but received no immediate response.
After the request was sent, however, Agartha’s account on the X platform, formerly Twitter, blocked this reporter’s account and was set to private, meaning only existing followers could see its tweets.
Bailey Ross registered Agartha Publishing LLC on 1 January 2022, according to South Dakota company records. The company’s website first went live a few months earlier on 17 October 2021, according to the site’s WhoIs records and internet archives.
The company’s name is derived from a legendary kingdom located on the inner surface of the Earth, and along with other “hollow earth” myths it was a subject of speculation among early 20th-century occultists, including proto-Nazi groups such as the Thule Society.
The address Ross used to first register the company matches his residence in 2021 and early 2022, according to information sourced from data brokers. A statement of change filed with South Dakota’s secretary of state on 18 August 2022 recorded a new address: the same one Ross has shared with his fiance since July 2022.
Agartha republishes pro-fascist and anti-communist works whose copyright has expired, adding eye-catching cover designs.
They include two books by James Strachey Barnes. Barnes was a British fascist who wrote in praise of Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany in the years before the second world war. During the war, which he spent in Italy, he recorded hundreds of propaganda broadcasts promoting the Axis powers and criticizing the Allies.
Barnes’s book The Universal Aspects of Fascism promoted the adoption of fascism as a political system beyond Germany and Italy; Agartha publishes Half a Life, and Half a Life Left, which encompass pro-fascist accounts of Italy’s invasions of Albania and Ethiopia.
Agartha sells from its own website using Shopify as a payment processor, but also sells books on Amazon outside the US. Its titles were available on country-specific Amazon platforms serving other countries including Australia and the UK, with orders fulfilled using Amazon’s own print-on-demand service.
The Guardian contacted Amazon and Shopify for comment.
In an email, Ashley Vanicek, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote: “As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to written speech and a variety of viewpoints is important, including books that some may find objectionable.” She added: “We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale and promptly investigate any book when a concern is raised.”
Shopify offered no response.
Apart from the website, Agartha uses its X account to promote its books, cross-promote other far-right publishers and interact with white nationalists, including Patrick Casey, the former head of the American Identity Movement (AIM).
It is not known whether Bailey Ross is currently a member of any organized white nationalist groups, but materials obtained by the Guardian indicate he was a member of the now-disbanded AIM as late as 2019, having joined its predecessor organization Identity Evropa (IE) in 2017.
The materials, provided by a source whose identity is being withheld for reasons of personal safety, include a membership list compiled between 2017 and 2019.
Bailey D Ross was listed in the spreadsheet as residing in Portland, Oregon; as using the movement alias Chase Ward; and as being 21, Ross’s age in 2017.
The listing also associated Ross with a Protonmail email address and a user name for the online chat platform, Discord, “nord8910”. Until recently, Discord appended a four-number string to the name the user chose at sign-up, creating a unique identifier that would persist even if users changed their screen name, so the user name indicates Ross chose the user name “nord” at sign-up.
From 2019, the news collective Unicorn Riot published a succession of contemporaneous leaks from internal communication channels used by IE and AIM. They included Discord archives and screenshots following the group’s migration to another platform, Mattermost.
AIM was launched in March 2019 as a rebrand of IE following the initial publication of the group’s leaked chats. IE had been formed three years earlier, and members of the group participated in the deadly Unite the Right (UtR) rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the slogan “You will not replace us”, which demonstrators chanted at the torch rally and daytime march, was coined in IE.
A user in the chats employs a variation on the nord screen name, “nord_or”. IE and AIM required users to identify their state of residence in their screen name in the chats. “OR” is a common abbreviation for Oregon, Ross’s state of residence until October 2020, according to information from data brokers and a current website set up to coordinate his October wedding.
Ross’s wedding site also identifies him as “a third-year nursing student at South Dakota State University”. A September 2021 article in the South Dakota newspaper the Brookings Register identified Ross as one of “six military veterans [who] were gifted with a ‘Quilt of Valor’ from the Brookings chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Auxiliary” in a ceremony at the city’s South Dakota State University campus.
In a paragraph detailing each of the recipients’ service, Ross is identified as a Coast Guard veteran, “now majoring in nursing and serving as an air force reservist in an aeromedical evacuation squadron”.
The Guardian repeatedly attempted to confirm Ross’s service with the air force reserve personnel office, but received no definitive confirmation or denial of Ross’s service before technical sergeant Cory Payne, the office’s public affairs officer, ceased responding to the Guardian’s calls and emails.
The Guardian contacted the US Coast Guard, who confirmed Ross had enlisted in the service in August 2014 and concluded his full-time commitment in August 2018, and was obliged to be available as a reservist until 2022.
Ross’s Coast Guard service thus overlapped with his active involvement in Identity Evropa.
The Guardian left a request for comment with the US Coast Guard public affairs office for the 13th district, which covers the Pacific north-west, but received no immediate response.
Agartha’s model of publishing is common across a wide range of far-right publishers that have launched in recent years, many of which Agartha promotes, and is promoted by, on social media.
Publishers repackaging public-domain fascist “classics” include DVX Publishing, ExpatPress, and publishers with no website or online infrastructure of their own, such as Caribbean Thule and Rogue Scholar Press.
The most established far-right publishers employing this model include Arktos, now based in Budapest, and Antelope Hill, whose principals were identified a year ago as married couple Vincent and Sarah Cucciara, along with Dmitri Loutsik, all based in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh valley.
Hannah Gais, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote that “book publishing can offer white power groups a consistent fundraising stream that they can channel to other activities, such as in-person organizing”, pointing to Antelope Hill’s “close ties to the pro-Hitler National Justice party”.
