Tim "Treadstone" Gionet, known online as the neo-Nazi Alt-Right personality and wannabe rapper “Baked Alaska,” posted a video this week in which he claims that he is no longer Alt-Right and begs for his former allies among the Alt-Lite and Alt-Right movements to reaccept him and sympathize with his humiliating run-ins with counter-protesters.
Earlier this week, Milo Yiannopoulous posted a video mocking Gionet’s reaction to receiving a face full of pepper spray from counter-protesters at the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month. After the video sparked discussion and further humiliated Gionet among Alt-Right social media users, Gionet took to Periscope last night to issue his plea to reunite with Yiannopoulous—who once employed Gionet as his manager—and other former allies who disowned Gionet earlier this year over explicitly anti-Semitic social media posts.
“Imagine if me, Milo, Mike Cernovich and Bill Mitchell teamed together,” Gionet said. “Imagine what we could do. Imagine the damage we could do to the left. That’s what we did during the election, right? We were all teamed up together and we did a fantastic job.”
When Gionet refers to the election, he pays homage to a time when he and other far-right social media personalities worked in tandem to organize support for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. The honeymoon ended, however, when Alt-Right organizers rescinded invitations to an inauguration party called “The Deploraball” from personalities who organizers thought were too transparent in their allegiance to the Alt-Right’s racist ideologies, including Gionet.
Gionet’s drama over the Deploraball sparked the first of many rifts among the Alt-Right movement, in which political personalities took sides between the white supremacist Alt-Right and a watered-down version dubbed the “Alt-Lite,” which many within the movement also call the “New Right.” After this split, Gionet dove headfirst into his Alt-Right identification and began posting blatantly racist, anti-Semitic, and occasionally pro-Nazi material on his social media accounts.
Since going rogue, Gionet has posted music renditions of the popular white supremacist “14 words” phrase that states: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” He also proclaimed “Hail Victory,” a Nazi call, at the Unite the Right rally and warned that white people have been “too nice.” He has harassed Jewish reporters, tweeting, “If you’re hungry I’ve got an oven,” referring to ovens used to cremate Jews during the Holocaust and claimed allegiance to the Alt-Right again and again and again and again.
But Gionet’s tone quickly shifted after being pepper sprayed in Charlottesville, which required him to visit the hospital and resulted in widespread ridicule online. Shortly after the pepper spray incident, Gionet shifted his tone to beg for unity and understanding among the far-right. Now that Gionet is losing relevance in political media, he is apparently hoping to heal old wounds between him and the figures that helped make him famous.
“You know, we don’t have to agree on everything. But if we agree on the main goal, that we don’t want a communist country, we don’t want cultural Marxism, we don’t want any of that B.S. in our country,” Gionet said. “If we can agree on that, because the left does not agree on that, if we can agree on that let’s find ways we can work together, that we can help each other, that we can lift each other up, and encourage each other.”
As part of his desperate pitch, Gionet went on to attempt to disassociate himself from his blatant and transparent affiliation with white supremacist Alt-Right.
“I don’t want to be called anything. I used to go by different labels. I’m not going by labels anymore. I’m not going by Alt-Right, I’m not going by Alt-Light, I’m not going by New Right, I’m not even going by Beard Right,” Gionet said. “And the reason is because people use these labels—they pigeonhole you.”
“So for me, I’m calling myself an American. I want to focus on making America great again,” Gionet said.
Gionet, like many others before him, is attempting to disassociate and erase his relationships to white supremacist figures like Richard Spencer as leading figures in the Alt-Right movement realize that the Alt-Right label has become politically toxic and that promoting myths about “white genocide” and racial superiority have severe real-life consequences.
