NIKO HOUSE

Our subject here in this profile once said something very important: “When you start seeing patterns, you’ve got to start asking questions.” Well, the pattern we are seeing, especially after the protests over the past year against police brutality and their killings of innocent people, are how some of the far-right/fascists are reaching out to more left-leaning circles – with some on the left embracing that reach out -in a phony effort to work together which is actually an attempt to remain relevant in a climate that is slowly but surely pulling away from them now that Donald Trump is no longer president. Now even though we say that it particularly has been happening over the past year, this stunt has been going on for generations, really started ratcheting up in the past twenty years or so, first with the anti-war movement then with Occupy, then just went off the rails when Bernie Sanders came onto the national scene. Because Sanders wasn’t an establishment candidate in 2016, your more libertarian circles saw him as their opportunity to co-opt yet another progressive effort that had momentum. Problem is they keep bringing fash along with them and have the nerve to act surprised when people get pissed about that and tell them to go to hell. Alas, as noted before, not all people. So one of many questions we need to start asking is this: if we see someone like vlogger Niko House routinely associating with those who are identified as either having white supremacist ties or being white supremacist themselves, not to mention validating their point, shouldn’t alarm bells be ringing for those who might be supporting him?

And before we go down this never-ending rabbit hole, let’s just make this clear: There is no working with fascists. You might as well be one yourself. You have some leftist views? Well that’s nice. The deal breaker is the one you don’t have – not working with fascists. When you are someone who is cool enough with fascists to be a part of a video to undermine the leftists they hate, that definitely puts you on the shit list. Niko House did that when he appeared in a documentary produced by neo-fascist propagandist Jack Posobiec titled Antifa: Rise of the Black Flags. This craptastic waste of zeros and ones churns out the usual word vomit conservatives say about an-TEE-fa being a terroristic threat and House is on board with that. In particular House tries to make the point that antifa is an organization as opposed to an ideology. Now this is yet another weird contention about antifa that comes from the right, because if antifa was an organization there isn’t a problem saying so, and trying to discount it as an ideology only serves to prevent the right from being called out as thought police – which they are. Niko however, provides an even further WTF on top of all of this in an attempt to…we guess shame antifa for not accepting their organization status. “We’re told constantly that antifa is merely an idea of antifascism and not an organization, however that’s antithetical to what the original antifa actually was,” he said in a segment. “The original antifa was an organization that sparked from an idea, so I feel like when they say that it’s not an organization as if that’s something to, like just celebrate, I feel like that’s disingenuous. It also makes me just question of those who do uplift antifa because as a historian of leftist activism movements from the fifties and the sixties and the seventies, one thing that I do know is that if they were genuinely on the side of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) activists that they sometimes protest beside and other leftists, they would be vehemently attacked by all sides of the mainstream media. They would not necessarily have allies in what I like to refer to as the neoliberal media.”

We are tempted to engage in a refutation of everything that Niko said here, but c’mon. The guy has been roundly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist and hoaxer with nothing to back up the shit he says, so it will be a lesson in futility to do so. Still, this little passage is a good jump-off as to who this guy is before he helps fascists get closer to good people who don’t need that crap.

According to one of his LinkedIn accounts, Niko House was a brigade paralegal for the Army’s 525th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade in Ft. Bragg, NC from 2009-2012. Two years later he went to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, NC where he earned his Bachelor’s Degree, and while he was there he participated in the Young Democrats American Paramilitary Debate Association and started Carolina Students for Bernie Sanders. It seems however he was not all that welcome an addition to the Bernie team, which would make sense given his penchant for conspiracy theories. In a Facebook video done in 2016, House accused others of making “a concerted effort to make sure that I could not talk to Bernie or anyone close to him,” saying further that it was part of a scheme from within concocted by Hillary Clinton and her campaign that took over the Sanders campaign office. From there, he started a production company (that’s mentioned in his other LinkedIn account) and a YouTube channel where he touched on a lot of  things that were progressive, particularly about addressing police brutality, but some of his defenses started to become questionable, such as the one where Bill Cosby rape charges were concocted in order to prevent him from buying NBC and the mass shooting during a concert in Las Vegas was an intelligence operation meant to distract from the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the latter proving to be problematic as he started getting noticed as a supporter of Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, herself a hodge podge of right-wing hate theories. Now to go through all the conspiracy theories House latched onto will take up far too much time, but the important thing to note is how it put him squarely in the orbit of the fash out there, which brings up the one that we do have to address: Pizzagate.

Pizzagate was the fabricated story that came out in 2016 and said several high-ranking Democratic Party officials and U.S. restaurants were connected to a human trafficking and child sex ring that was run out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria (which doesn’t have a basement) in Washington, D.C. Despite the whole thing being a bold-face lie – that incidentally was heavily promoted from the onset by his friend Jack Posobiec  – it was spread around and believed by so many on the right it became a cult thing. It also resulted in a guy from North Carolina named Edgar Maddison Welch trying to shoot up the Comet Pizzeria in an effort to save the children being kept in the basement! He ended up getting four years for that and things concerning Pizzagate died down a bit after that stunt, but that is only because it became part of the even more cultish conspiracy campaign called QAnon. That overall is actually an updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic hoax text first published in Russia in 1903 and touted as proof that Jews are plotting to take over the world, one of its biggest takeaways being repeating the ancient blood libel routine that says Jews are murdering Christian children so they can use their blood in the performance of religious rituals. House jumped in on this one pretty much from the onset, most notably urging people to check out YouTube channels that focused on it, and spreading the canard that the talk of pizza mentioned in Hillary Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta’s emails that are at the center of this hoax was coded language. “I’ve never heard of anyone talking about pizza this much, all the time, ever, not ever, he said in one video. “Maybe Podesta & Hillary & all of her little friends are just really big Papa John fans, okay, granted. And the language just so happens to be code for pedophilia and human trafficking.”

House is getting housed these days. Promoting hoaxes and cavorting around with white supremacists are making him radioactive. But that’s his world and he wants to be in it. People just have to be mindful of that and the fact that there are others like him weaving in and out of leftist circles and ultimately tainting positive things. There is more to say about Niko House and we will as we go along, but let this serve as a primer for now. We are sure he will provide more material for us to work with in the very near future. And yes, we will be asking a shitload of questions.