February 2, 2019

Northam Yearbook Photo Was Unearthed by Outlet Associated With White Nationalists

Big League Politics was founded by ex-Breitbart staffers who thought the site was too mainstream.

A screenshot of the Big League Politics site.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The yearbook photo that could bring down the Democratic governor of Virginia was first posted online by young web outlet best known for defending white nationalists.

Big League Politics was founded in 2017 by a group of former Breitbart News staffers, who decided that the nationalist media outlet previously run by Steve Bannon had gotten too mainstream. BLP started as the media arm of a pro-Trump, “populist nationalist” political action committee, which bills itself as the “attack dogs” for the American First Agenda. The site is now owned by North Carolina political consultant Reilly O’Neal, who worked for Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate whose run was derailed by child molestation charges, and Corey Stewart, a Republican from Virginia popular with white supremacists for his support of Confederate monuments. Last year, Stewart unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and the site covered his race extensively.

The man who first posted the Northam yearbook photo is BLP editor-in-chief Patrick Howley, a former reporter and provocateur for Breitbart and Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. Howley has made news in the past, but for more ignoble reasons. In 2014, he and Carlson were forced to apologize to reporter Rosie Gray, then at BuzzFeed, after Howley tweeted a pair of gross, sexist comments about her. Breitbart also suspended Howley in 2016 after he publicly questioned whether one of his co-workers had lied when she said she’d been manhandled by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski at a press event. 

Under Howley’s leadership, BLP has published stories attacking anti-fascist activists and trying to downplay the role of neo-Nazi violence in the death of Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. It went so far as to falsely blame an anti-racism activist and professor from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for her death. The site also wrote favorably about the white nationalist Paul Nehlen, who unsuccessfully challenged former House Speaker Paul Ryan in his GOP primary in 2018. The Daily Beast reported that Nehlen was a client of the site owner’s fundraising firm. 

Howley has tried to fashion BLP into an investigative reporting outfit, and the Northam yearbook photo would certainly qualify as a big scoop. But Fox News contributor Dan Bongino said the photo had been kicking around in conservative circles for months before Howley finally posted it Friday, after Northam came under heavy fire from conservatives for his comments supporting a bill in the legislature that would have loosened restrictions on late-term abortions in the state.

Bongino tweeted Friday that he’d been sent a copy of the photo in October 2018 but couldn’t independently verify that Northam was one of the men in the photo. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate