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According to The Guardian, an Alaska assistant attorney general, Matthias Cicotte, is a supporter of the Deseret nationalists, a Mormon-inspired extremist group that has posted racist, antisemitic, and homophobic statements on social media.
The inquiry by the Guardian has prompted an investigation by the Alaska Department of Law, where the attorney general works.
Matthias Cicotte has represented the department of law in several civil rights disputes.
The Guardian investigation confirmed that anti-fascist researchers could identify Cicotte thanks to evidence from his Twitter feed.
“The department of law takes the allegations raised here seriously, and we uphold the dignity and respect of all individuals, and we ask that all of our employees do the same,” Alaska’s deputy attorney general, Cori Mills, wrote in a statement shared with the Guardian.
She added: “Having just learned about this late last week, we are gathering information and conducting a review. Since this involves personnel issues, we are very limited in our ability to comment further.”
Cicotte has advocated extremist views on race, criminal justice, and religion online under the alias J Reuben Clark and the Twitter handle @ JReubenCIark.
Anti-fascists have discovered that he campaigned for several extreme viewpoints, including the summary arrest of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, vigilante violence against leftwing groups, and killing anyone with gender reassignment surgery.
JReubenCIark was also one of the first and most notable accounts to use hashtags like #DeseretNationalism and #DezNat to promote Deseret nationalism on Twitter.
DezNats, or Deseret Nationalists, are a loose group of right-wing Mormons. They’ve previously been accused of bullying perceived adversaries online, including progressive Mormons, LGBTQ Mormons, former Mormons, and political progressives.
Some movement members want to resurrect Deseret, the region that is now much of the western United States‘ interior, which Mormons attempted to bring to the union and essentially administered between 1862 and 1870.
Some DezNats support establishing a theocratic secessionist Mormon state, and some have suggested that it be a white ethnostate, similar to white nationalist ideas for a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest.
Many of the DezNats are flirting with neo-Nazi imagery and passing around visuals and verbal phrases linked to the “alt-right” movement.
The account is an alias, but it has left a trail of proof of the identity of Cicotte, which anti-fascist activists have filed.
For example, the name is in reference to a Mormon leader and attorney from the 20th century, which is also named after the Brigham Young University’s law school, where Cicotte graduated in 2008.
Many clues disclosed a lot of biographical data that fit Cicotte’s, like the length of his marriage to the identity of his criminal law professor to his repeated moves to the dates of his various stints in higher education to his ownership of a Minivan, to the date of his house purchase.
Other hints are based on his life’s events. In August 2020, the account owner stated that he was obese at the time, but he has since shed a significant amount of weight. Photos were obtained from his wife’s Facebook page.
The images shared by the account, which portray the interior of the owner’s home, provide the most compelling proof. One depicts a distinctive brick pattern in the kitchen, while the other depicts a distinctive pattern of wooden panels.
The first clue corresponds to a fireplace in two photographs of Cicotte’s home on realtor.com, and the second corresponds to many photographs of Cicotte’s kitchen on the same site. The kitchen photos also match the layout and counters that are identical to the image on Twitter.
After viewing the pictures shared on Twitter, Ellsworth Warner, who lived in the house until 2014, said, “Yep, it’s the same house,” and identified the cabinets as having been installed by his mother, Renee Warner.
Another report of his house’s location on Twitter corresponds to satellite imagery.
Hundreds of tweets under the name claim that Jews are participating in conspiracies against white people or that they already dominate the commanding heights of the economy, media, or education.
In 2016, the account tweeted about when “real history was taught in school, angry yentas didn’t rule, white men didn’t play the fool.”
The post, which argues that Jewish women’s pernicious influence and the fall of white men are problems in today’s world, was tagged in two famous alt-right accounts when the movement’s impact on social media was at its peak.
JReubenCIark said in February that he supported the Republican Jewish Committee’s attempts “to combat the conspiracy theory that Jews run everything by getting any member of Congress they don’t like expelled from Congress.”
The account also disputed the existence of anti-Black racism daily, targeted Black public figures, and displayed unusual antipathy toward anti-racist protestors linked with the Black Lives Matter movement. He also made snide remarks about other ethnic groups, such as Mexicans and Native Americans.
JReubenCIark said in a March tweet that allegations of racism were “purely a tool to control people on the right” and asking to “try to think of an example of an accusation of racism that helped the right, or Christians, or whites in the last 10 years”.
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its Consequences Have Been a Disaster for the Human Race,” he tweeted on June 15, last year, riffing on a catchphrase of the so-called Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
The account also reinforced white supremacist talking points on race, crime, and intelligence. He said, “Is it ‘white supremacy’ to note that some racial groups have higher IQs than others based on IQ tests? I believe that, and I am only a Deseret supremacist.”
JReubenCIark was likewise disdainful of Latinos. He wrote, “I can’t believe there’s a faithful Latter-day Saint out there who can look at the collapse of birthrates among the Latter-day Saints and say, ‘Well, hey, at least lots of Catholic Mexicans are coming to the US.’”
Then in June, during the time of the George Floyd protest, the user told a Utah BLM supporter on Twitter, “You and all of your lying violent criminal friends belong in prison.” He added: “#BlackLivesMatter is a criminal enterprise that murders people and destroys property. In a sane world, you would all be in prison or worse.”
“No one had a right to block his car. You all belong in jail,” he said on July 2 in response to an incident in Provo, Utah, in which a man appeared to drive his car into a gathering of BLM demonstrators.
During the fall, the account then went on to tweet about violence against Trans people.
“People who encourage a kid to think he’s a different sex than what he is (including parents) go to jail for child abuse,” he tweeted on August 16, 2019, adding that “people who perform or abet sex change operations on kids get the death penalty.”
Accused murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse and James Fields, who have right-wing political tendencies, were given more leeway in the account.
The account was known for advocating vigilante action against political opponents regularly.
JReubenCIark concluded in June 2017 a thread on how best to respond to the left-wing characteristics of Conservatives: “If brute violence is the only way to be free of them, what do they expect us to do?”
